7
New Ages for All
Ralph Waldo Trine—born in 1866, the same year that Phineas Quimby died
—could count himself a midwesterner by birth and most of his education. He
had come from Mt. Morris, Illinois, and had attended Knox College in his home
state, where, in 1891, he took his bachelor’s degree. After that, came the University
of Wisconsin until he matriculated at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Drawn
to history and political science, he reportedly once won a hundred-dollar essay
prize for a piece on the prevention of crime through a ‘‘humane education.’’
Before the new century, however, Trine had turned to New Thought, although
the circumstances that led to his embrace of metaphysics remain unclear. Still,
we know that most probably they worked in tandem with his social and political
concerns. By 1902, he had become a socialist and was planning a book that
linked socialism as the basis of social organization to New Thought as a religious
system. For society, government, and industry, thought Trine, socialism was the
logical deduction from New Thought teaching on the ‘‘fatherhood’’ of God and
the ‘‘brotherhood’’ of humans.1
By then, however, ﬁve years had passed since he had produced the short book
that would guarantee him perhaps the leading position among metaphysical authors.
Writing in the early 1960s, Charles Braden assessed Trine’s In Tune with the
Inﬁnite as the single most successful New Thought book. By that time, Braden
reported, its English-language sales had ‘‘gone well beyond a million and a half
copies.’’ Translations of the work had appeared in twenty languages ‘‘including
Japanese and Esperanto,’’ and they had sold exceedingly well. A Braille edition
for the blind was available, and with that version included among total sales,
Trine’s book had been distributed in ‘‘well over two million copies.’’ Most important
of all, buyers and readers were not limited to the New Thought community.
Rather, Braden declared, In Tune with the Inﬁnite—along with ‘‘three or four’’
394
New Ages for All 395
other books by Trine—had reached the public at large. People had absorbed its
message without ever knowing anything of its New Thought origins.2
By this time, however, the old New Thought of the nineteenth century was
giving way before a later version, one that—like the message brought by metaphysical
Asia—was at once buttressing and liberating the enlightened bodyselves
of numbers of Americans. Horatio Dresser, New Thought savant and son
of the well-known Dressers, did not like the new version so well as the old, and
he named Trine as one of its protagonists. Trine’s revised message had exalted
‘‘thought’’ in its human form beyond its carrying capacity, he complained. The
causes of disease were spiritual, not purely mental. Trine and others had forgotten
the deeper, truer tidings about divine wisdom and the ‘‘light of the divine idea’’
that Phineas Quimby had announced.3 From the perspective of the twenty-ﬁrst
century, however, what is startling about the Dresser criticism is how much its
statement of diﬀerence misses the larger paradigm shift that Trine represented.
If metaphysical religion encompassed themes of mind, correspondence, and energy,
in its healing/saving endeavors, arguably its earliest New Thought expressions
were modeling mind and correspondence more than energy. Similarly,
across the aisle in metaphysical Asia, leaders like Paul Carus and others were hailing
the abiding stasis they called ‘‘truth’’ with an enthusiasm that was marked.
By contrast, Trine glided smoothly into the twentieth century on a ﬂow of divine
energy.
In one sense, Trine was doing nothing new. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom
New Thought people loved to quote and listed proudly as their ‘‘founder,’’ had
long ago proclaimed that nature was ‘‘not ﬁxed but ﬂuid. Spirit alters, moulds,
makes it.’’ Emanuel Swedenborg had taught the divine inﬂux as one of his cardinal
doctrines. And spiritualism’s A. J. Davis had pronounced on ‘‘fountains’’ and
‘‘jets of new meanings’’ even in 1870.4 Nor is it hard to cross-read even the most
static declarations of the early New Thought metaphysicians for their energy
quotient. For all that, however, stepping into the discourse world of Trine means
entering a diﬀerent kind of verbal territory or, closer to his own usage, stepping
into a diﬀerent kind of linguistic stream. For Trine’s favored theme is just that—
a stream, a fountain, a divine reservoir overﬂowing toward earth dwellers who
gladly expose themselves to its ﬂow. If ‘‘truth’’ had been Paul Carus’s mantra,
‘‘ﬂow’’ was clearly Trine’s.
In Tune with the Inﬁnite from the start proclaimed as the ‘‘Supreme Fact of
the Universe’’ the ‘‘Spirit of Inﬁnite Life and Power . . . from which all is continually
coming.’’ In keeping with the model—and with language anticipated
by the Unity-oriented H. Emilie Cady—Trine invoked a ‘‘reservoir in a valley
which receives its supply from an inexhaustible reservoir on the mountainside.’’
396 Arrivals
He was not slow to make the application. ‘‘The great central fact in human life,’’
he emphatically aﬃrmed, ‘‘is the coming into a conscious, vital realization of our
oneness with this Inﬁnite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine
ﬂow.’’ Here at last is the much-vaunted harmonialism of Sydney Ahlstrom and
others, as Trine exhorted readers on the need for harmonizing their lives with
the ﬂow. Moreover, if mind had power—which it decidedly did—its power came
from its attractive force, as it stimulated energies that corresponded to its own
vibration. The ‘‘drawing power of the mind’’ meant that humans were ‘‘continually
attracting’’ to themselves, ‘‘from both the seen and the unseen side of life,
forces and conditions most akin’’ to their thoughts. With God not only transcendent
but also immanent, openness to the ‘‘inﬂowing tide’’ enabled humans to
become ‘‘channels through which the Inﬁnite Intelligence and Power can work.’’
This happened through the ‘‘inner guiding’’ of intuition, and it worked itself out
in all domains and all ways. Trine’s chapters serially treated of health, love, wisdom,
peace, power, and prosperity—always ﬁnding the key to the maximization
of human life in openness to the divine ﬂow.5
Fear and worry had ‘‘the eﬀect of closing up the channels of the body, so that
the life forces ﬂow[ed] in a slow and sluggish manner.’’ Emotions, passions, and
mental states all had their eﬀects, and the moral of the unhappy report was the
dominance of sickness and disease. That admitted, the solution followed. Health
was ‘‘contagious as well as disease.’’ All readers had to do for the contagion to
spread was to clean out their muddy waters and open their troughs: ‘‘There is a
trough through which a stream of muddy water has been ﬂowing for many days.
The dirt has gradually collected on its sides and bottom, and it continues to collect
as long as the muddy water ﬂows through it. Change this. Open the trough
to a swift-ﬂowing stream of clear, crystal water, and in a very little while even
the very dirt that has collected on its sides and bottom will be carried away. The
trough will be entirely cleansed.’’6
The message was similar in other aspects of life. Debris had to be cleared,
and the streambed kept open so that the divine inﬂow could and would happen.
Or alternately, realization of one’s indwelling divine nature generated magnetic
power—a formulation that, silently and without acknowledgment, subverted
the order of initiative away from divine benevolence and toward personal
will. Still more, when it came to the ‘‘law of prosperity,’’ the person who lived
‘‘in the realization of his oneness with this Inﬁnite Power’’ became ‘‘a magnet to
attract to himself a continual supply’’ of things desired. As for the clearing out,
it came through getting rid of the extraneous and refusing to hoard (these ideas
the ideological support for later metaphysical exhortations to tithing). ‘‘Then not
by hoarding but by wisely using and ridding ourselves of things as they come,’’
New Ages for All 397
taught Trine, ‘‘an ever-renewing supply will be ours.’’ ‘‘In this way we not only
come into possession of the richest treasures of the Inﬁnite Good ourselves, but
we also become open channels through which they can ﬂow to others.’’ Trine
cheerfully cited the ‘‘highly illumined seer, Emanuel Swedenborg’’ on ‘‘divine
inﬂux’’ and ‘‘the inspired one, the seer who when with us lived at Concord [that
is, Emerson]’’ on humans as ‘‘all inlets to the great sea of life.’’ The human task,
Trine counseled, was simply to open the gate for the divine inﬂow. ‘‘It is like opening
the gate of the trough which conducts the water from the reservoir above
into the ﬁeld below. The water, by virtue of its very nature, will rush in and irrigate
the ﬁeld if the gate is but opened.’’7
The reiterative quality of Trine’s prose simpliﬁed theology and practice so that
readers of many persuasions could absorb and enact the message. Meanwhile, in
the midst of the authorial exercise, Trine was enacting a practice of his own that
distinctly separated him from the older metaphysical culture. It is no surprise,
therefore, that Gary Ward Materra sees him as an embodiment of the noetic style
of New Thought.8 While Horatio Dresser dwelled comfortably in the aﬀective
New Thought that had ﬂourished as strongly in the initial years, now the more
instrumentalist version was promising mastery to denizens of a new twentiethcentury
world. In it, ego and Atman (or a New Thought ‘‘Christ presence’’) had
become friends and partners instead of enemies. The instrumentalism guaranteed
that New Thought was not for gazing at immutable truths and contemplating
their beauty unalloyed. New Thought principles were energy formulas that
got the practitioner from one inner place to another and so, often, from one outer
place to another. Still further, it turned out, the most powerful energy formula
was the one that proclaimed that all there was in the ﬁrst place was Energy. God,
in twentieth-century and later metaphysical religion, was Motion.
Two years before Trine’s inﬂuential New Thought book appeared, another
energy formula had begun its trajectory toward scientiﬁc fame and fortune. It
was in 1895 that the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) began his blackbox
experiments that led the way to quantum theory. Earlier nineteenth-century
work had explained light as a wave on the basis of then-accepted experimental
testimony. Now Planck was ﬁnding, from his own experiments, that Newtonian
mechanics could not account for the behavior of light. By 1900 Planck read a
paper to the German Physical Society, telling colleagues his tale of the strange activity
of light, which, he announced, could be emitted and absorbed not continuously
but only in discrete and discontinuous energy bundles, or packets, which
he named ‘‘quanta.’’ Later, in 1905, Albert Einstein pushed the Newtonian gospel
still further away, hypothesizing that the energy of light was composed of
particles, or photons, repeatedly speeding and colliding into one another. Oscil-
398 Arrivals
lating atoms had a secret inner life, and that life—of mysterious particles and
energies—was a life in motion even as it was a life in matter. Einstein, Niels
Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others all would reﬁne the
formula, as the early twentieth century saw the theory rise to an elegance and
persuasive power that signaled the end of the Newtonian world and the dawn of
a new scientiﬁc era.9
The mathematical language of the quantum worked to convince professionals.
Nonscientists, however, had to be content with imagistic eﬃcacy. At the level
of metaphor and imagination, the quantum introduced a world in which, subatomically,
electrons—which were parts of atoms—acted at times like particles
and at times like waves. Matter and energy seemed to play tirelessly with one another,
and—even in science, when the mass-accelerator came along to change
energy back into matter—their connection could be noticed as palpable and
real. While practicing scientists learned to state the behavior of electrons in terms
of mathematical probabilities, metaphysical religionists—who garnered aspects
of the new science from vernacular culture—began a series of ascriptions that
provided them with their own elegant ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ theory to authorize an evolving
spirituality. German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s ‘‘unsharpness principle,’’
or principle of uncertainty, by 1927 authorized the spirituality more. The observer
altered the experiment; by extension, consciousness and its inquiries could
change the path of metaphysics and its experience of spirit. In fact, when matter
and energy played their particle-wave game, in metaphysical terms matter
and spirit played. In the preferred language of metaphysical Asia, Prakriti and
Purusha played, and when the play could not go on—when matter got too stuck
in its guise as ‘‘frozen light’’ (to invoke the language of one twentieth-century
physician-metaphysician)—the energy of spirit suﬀered. Moving out of the community
of professional scientists the quantum took on moral dimensions that
the behavior of light had not previously acquired. Energy was good; matter more
dubious. At the very least, to free up matter, to make enlightened body-selves
respond to spirit’s impulse and message, became the new metaphysical task for
consciousness, since the observer, indeed, could alter the game. There is no evidence
that Ralph Waldo Trine knew about black-box experiments, but he had
set an agenda decidedly congenial to the secret life of light—or better, to a reformed
secret life of light. Meanwhile, light, after all, had always been a cherished
category for mystics and metaphysicians. Now they could mark the speed
or the slowness of its vibrations and measure their success in the world of spirit.10
In one sense, they had simply found a new scientiﬁc language to perpetuate
the rhetorical capital of the old mesmeric world and the now-defunct nineteenth-century
theory of the ether. The ghosts of Blavatsky and company could
New Ages for All 399
rest content as, in the quantum, a replacement scientiﬁc world became available.
Indeed, even scientists seemed to support metaphysical acts of piracy. Werner
Heisenberg himself thought that, when it came to philosophical models, contemporary
physicists were corroborating Plato. The most basic grid of matter was
made not of physical objects in the vernacular sense but of entities that could be
understood and expressed best as ideas—as mathematical variations in an everchanging
ﬁeld. The world and the I could no longer be sharply separated—in
fact, that was ‘‘impossible.’’ Quantum physics functioned within a ‘‘general historical
process’’ that moved toward ‘‘a uniﬁcation and a widening of our present
world.’’11
The overriding news of the twentieth century and after was that metaphysical
light escaped from its own black box. Even as nineteenth-century spiritualists
had created a mass movement in vernacular culture, twentieth-century and later
metaphysicians would do the same, creating an exoteric spirituality and dissolving
it so thoroughly into society at large that it became, in some versions, simply
part of America as usual. We look, ﬁrst, at late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury
versions of the great dissolve at both ends of the matter-spirit spectrum.
Here a closet metaphysics originally grounded continuing practices as varied as
osteopathy and chiropractic, on the one hand, and pragmatic philosophy, with
its legacy of idealism, on the other. In more condensed and consciously religious
form, general New Thought principles shaped the conﬁdent living propounded
by several small New Thought denominations, the largest among them Unity.
By midcentury, still another path of diﬀusion came through the movement for
positive thinking, even as theosophical lineages, then and before, transmuted
into new and persisting forms. Nor did an ethnic presence disappear from metaphysics.
We can ﬁnd it even in the newest incarnation of metaphysical Asia, the
American Daoism of the late twentieth century and after. Besides the New Age
movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst century, there were many
other new ages.
BODY MECHANICS AND SPIRIT PHILOSOPHY
If quantum mechanics detailed the energetic structure of the universe and all
its dwellers for the twentieth century and after, there had been other mechanics—and
of a metaphysical sort—in the late nineteenth. Andrew Taylor Still
(1828–1917), the founder of osteopathy, taught one of them. A Virginian and the
son of a Methodist circuit rider, by 1837 Still was in Missouri with his father, who
was also farming and practicing medicine to supplement his income. When, in
1851, the father set out for the Kansas Territory as a missionary to the Shawnee
400 Arrivals
Indians, the son and his young family eventually joined him at the Wakarusa Mission,
where he began to study medicine with his father. The younger Still’s ﬁrst
patients were Indians. Moving beyond medicine, he became an ardent abolitionist
and a Union soldier in the Civil War thereafter, but subsequently he returned
to Kansas to practice as an orthodox physician. There alternative medicine ﬂourished
all around him, and—a reﬂective man and homespun philosopher—Still
noticed (in the era of ‘‘heroic’’ bleedings, purges, and mercuric calomel) that
alternative practice did less damage than the ‘‘drugging’’ regimen in which he
had been trained. He was drawn to certain aspects of magnetic healing, especially
its notions of health as a free and unhampered ﬂuidic ﬂow.12
By 1874, Still had broken all ties with regular medicine and was advertising
himself as a magnetic healer. As his practice evolved, too, he found himself attracted
to the manipulative therapy known as bone setting, by this time a mostly
folk practice of forcing displaced bones back where they belonged. Next Still
synthesized magnetism with manipulation in a uniﬁed-ﬁeld theory and practice,
and by about 1880, he began to treat patients osteopathically, focusing on
bones and muscles as a way to restore a natural somatic ﬂow. For Still and his
followers, most sickness came from structural disorganization or disarrangement
within the body. Repetitive strains to bones, muscles, and cartilage, small though
the strains might be, could create the misalignments that osteopaths called lesions.
Osteopathic manipulation was intended to correct these conditions and
thus, it followed, liberate the body so that its natural processes could defeat illness.
To advance these goals, Still founded his osteopathic school in Kirksville,
Missouri, in 1892. At ﬁrst it functioned as another alternative to the growing scientiﬁc
medicine of his era, challenging class and gender norms to welcome rural
students from the South and the Midwest, among them an impressive number of
women. But osteopathy over the years changed, as Still’s brand of healing made
its slow social pilgrimage from what Norman Gevitz has called ‘‘deviance’’ to a
more conventional state of ‘‘diﬀerence.’’ Osteopaths gradually won licenses to
practice medicine, including prescribing drugs and performing surgery; they became
available in mainstream hospital settings; and there they functioned simply
as physicians with a diﬀerent history.13
That history does not concern us here. What does concern, however, is the
ideational imprint that Still left on osteopathic philosophy and the vision that it
imparted to practitioners and, to some extent, patients. This is because the philosophy
and the vision attached them to a diﬀuse but unmistakable version of
metaphysical spirituality. For Still, the mechanical habit of manipulating bones
had its complement in an old-fashioned God of Nature who was also an orderly
Great Manipulator. Translated into the language of the vernacular Enlighten-
New Ages for All 401
ment, this meant a God of ‘‘truth,’’ whose works were ‘‘harmonious’’ and whose
law for ‘‘animal life’’ could be called ‘‘absolute.’’ Translated further into the language
of early osteopathy, the cure for every discomfort and inﬁrmity lay within
—‘‘a whole system of drugs in abundance’’ that had been ‘‘deposited’’ in the
body by its ‘‘Maker.’’14 Here was a practical metaphysic to theorize and explain
healing success, a metaphysic that combined the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s
‘‘nature’s God’’ with the immanent deity of the Romantic era whose
law and power worked from the inside out. And signiﬁcantly, through his connections
among practicing spiritualists Still, the former magnetic healer, almost
surely had more than a passing acquaintance with the immanent God. Historian
of osteopathy Norman Gevitz discovered that Still co-signed a letter that
appeared in the spiritualist Banner of Light in 1875, appealing for help with a
grasshopper invasion aﬄicting Kirksville. The letter alluded to ‘‘a few workers
here’’ but complained that they were ‘‘looked upon as ‘crazy’ and ‘worse than
inﬁdels.’’’ Moreover, as late as 1903 Still was in Clinton, Iowa, to attend a spiritualist
meeting, and thereafter he told his osteopathic students that spiritualists’
(negative) assessments of the use of drugs ran parallel to his own.15
Still’s apparent congeniality with spiritualism is itself a clue to what his
own writings thoroughly reﬂect. The God who grounded osteopathy was an embodied
deity, and the implication—as in spiritualism’s received, though obscured,
Hermetic teaching—was that divinity resided in creation as its very life.
More than that, a progressive quality in Still’s formulation (like spiritualism but
more strongly) pushed it toward its twentieth-century future. If ‘‘God had certainly
placed the remedy within the material house in which the spirit of life
dwells,’’ Still’s response invoked a determined agency. ‘‘With this thought I
trimmed my sail and launched my craft as an explorer.’’ The results were bountiful.
‘‘Soon I saw the green islands of health all over the seas of reason. Ever
since then I have watched the driftwood and course of the wind, and I have never
failed to ﬁnd the source whence the drifting came.’’16
By 1897, when Still wrote these words, he could look back on twenty years of
voyaging success. Meanwhile, as Still wrote them, Nature’s God—for all his lawbound
presence—seemed to act in ways remarkably similar to the God of ﬂow
that Trine had modeled in his own 1897 work. In one romanticized characterization,
not untypical of Still, for example, he waxed expansively: ‘‘In close range,
and directly in view of the most ordinary ﬁeld-glass, stands the mountain of Reason,
from which is rolling down in our presence the greatest nuggets of gold that
the human mind ever saw coming down as from the very bosom of God Himself.
All this fertility we believe is intended for the human race and beneﬁt of man.’’
Here was New Thought prosperity wedded to New Thought ﬂow, both of them
402 Arrivals
the eﬄuence of an Enlightenment God who had merged with the God of divine
Supply. More than that, here was conscious rejection of traditional churches
in favor of the ﬂow. Still, son of the Methodist circuit rider and intimately acquainted
with evangelical revivals, was hardly diﬃdent about declaring that he
had ‘‘no use for the churches of the world.’’ ‘‘To be a Methodist’’ meant ‘‘to hate
a Campbellite.’’ ‘‘To be a Campbellite’’ was ‘‘to hate the Baptist, and so on.’’ All,
however, would ‘‘unite as one to ﬁght the Roman Catholic,’’ and he saw ‘‘rivers of
blood running’’ from most of the churches and ‘‘more coming.’’ By contrast, he
aﬃrmed his belief in a ‘‘principle’’ that was ‘‘above all churches’’ and that was ‘‘the
law and gift of God to man.’’ What was it? In his preferred language of agency,
Still testiﬁed for ‘‘bloodless rivers of love given for man to drink in all time and
eternity.’’ Always, the model was clear: God was an Enlightenment mechanic
all right, but this God had created a moving machine and fueled it—impersonally—with
something more than pure reason, for all Still’s plentiful talk of the
same. Beyond that, the something hinted of magnetic laws. The body was ‘‘a machine
run by the unseen force called life’’; for its harmonious operation, there
had to be ‘‘liberty of blood, nerves, and arteries from the generating-point to destination.’’
In contrast to the wasted blood of feuding religious sects, Still taught
that the conserved-but-free ﬂow, especially, of the blood guaranteed health and
prevented disease.17
Still’s model, we know, was overlaid for many later osteopaths by mainstream
medicine. Yet the energetic (and magnetic) template persisted in some osteopathic
quarters. If we fast forward to osteopathy a century after Still, we can catch
a glimpse of what his traditional-yet-transformed vision became in the career of
Robert C. Fulford, D.O., whose near-legendary life spanned the twentieth century
(he ﬂourished well into his nineties). Known for his mentorship of others and
for his own reputed gifts, Fulford found time, in later life, to reﬂect on his nearly
sixty years of osteopathic practice. He told his readers in Dr. Fulford’s Touch of
Life that the human body was ‘‘more complicated’’ than conventional anatomy
suggested. ‘‘Besides the systems and processes well known to everyone,’’ he conﬁded,
‘‘the body is also composed of a complex interﬂowing stream of moving
energy. When these energy streams become blocked or constricted, we lose the
physical, emotional, and mental ﬂuidity potentially available to us. If the blockage
lasts long enough or is great enough, the result is pain, discomfort, illness, and
distress.’’ Fulford confessed autobiographically that he liked to work with children
better than adults because adults emitted ‘‘less energy’’ than children did,
took away his own energy when he treated them, and made him feel ‘‘depleted.’’
By contrast, children, who were ‘‘more radiant,’’ did not absorb his energy so completely.
Fulford was making the same aﬃrmations that founder Still had made—
New Ages for All 403
the universe was ‘‘run by speciﬁc laws,’’ and osteopathy was predicated on a ‘‘philosophy’’
that reﬂected these ‘‘universal laws’’ and applied them to human beings.
What did this mean in concrete terms? Fulford’s answer is instructive, seamlessly
connecting Still’s original vision to late-twentieth-century energetic formulations
that tell of the dominance of the agential model and of the metaphysical
spirituality that promotes it. The body, declared Fulford, was surrounded by
what he called a ‘‘life ﬁeld.’’18
What followed brought not only Still but also Helena Blavatsky up to endof-century
speed. ‘‘This life ﬁeld thoroughly permeates the physical body and
actually reaches beyond it by many inches. To imagine what it might look like,
you might want to think of a colored aura surrounding the body, one that might
appear green or red or yellow, or any other color, depending on the individual.
. . . If you could see the ﬁeld, it would resemble a human shadow: the ﬁeld’s
pattern surrounds the head, spreading out around the shoulders and becoming
narrower by the waist, and then tapering down the legs to the feet. In some ways,
the life ﬁeld could be considered the body’s other half: the spatial part is the
portion we commonly think of as the material human being, while the other
half is this invisible ﬁeld.’’ Fulford cited electromagnetic phenomena associated
with the ‘‘aura,’’ invoking Harold Saxon Burr, a former Yale professor of neuroanatomy,
to make his case. The ‘‘life ﬁeld’’ was ‘‘an electric ﬁeld with a high frequency,’’
and so, for a popular book, it was scientiﬁc, with a highly credentialed
scientiﬁc authority to buttress it. But Fulford’s way of conceptualizing life ﬁeld
and electromagnetic activity reveals, too, a diﬀerent sort of inspiration, hinting
of the older spiritualist world of the ectoplasm, the mysterious substance emanating
from a medium’s body that enabled the spirits to manifest themselves in
perceptible ways. ‘‘In a sense,’’ explained Fulford, ‘‘the electromagnetic pattern
creates a mold, which is eventually ﬁlled by matter, giving rise to a tangible, material
body.’’ If so or not, Fulford’s combinativeness suggests a mental habit that
had begun with osteopathy’s foundation and the evidence of Still’s own comfort
in the spiritualist world. But now there were new dots to connect in the combinative
osteopathic universe, and Fulford turned to Asia to add in the ‘‘vital energy’’
of the East: ‘‘The Chinese call it chi, the Japanese call it ki, and the Hindus
prana.’’19
In the body, the ‘‘life ﬁeld’’ became the ‘‘life force.’’ As a practicing osteopath,
Fulford claimed that he could feel the force with his hand as a prickling sensation
and that it was stronger or weaker in his patients depending on whether and
how much blockage was present. It was signiﬁcant that the human mind played
a pivotal role in the life force’s presence and distribution. Much of its ‘‘ﬂow’’ was
‘‘regulated by the mind.’’ Thoughts had ‘‘physical consequences,’’ changing the
404 Arrivals
life ﬁeld and its color radiations in terms of passing patterns and general spiritual
evolution. This was because thinking caused energy to be emitted from the
body—so much so that humans lived through their minds and not their bodies.
It was mind that created reality, and any ‘‘discord or disharmony’’ harbored in the
mind was ‘‘likely to produce an unfortunate eﬀect in the physical body.’’ As in
other metaphysical systems, too, mind led to spirit and to God. What was ‘‘spiritual
in the world’’ was ‘‘the universal source of this cosmic electrical energy, this
life force that keeps us all alive.’’ Fulford told readers that he suspected that the
‘‘universal life force’’ might be ‘‘another name for God.’’ The conclusion for him
was obvious: ‘‘God, therefore, exists within all of us, embodied in this energy.’’20
The Hermetic gospel was back, and humans, as Fulford estimated them, should
be living as gods.
More than that, as Fulford quoted from Still and clearly agreed with him, he
brought to the fore the early theosophical teaching about the triune nature of
humans. Body, soul, and spirit meant for Still ‘‘ﬁrst, the material body; second
the spiritual being; third, a being of mind which is far superior to all vital motions
and material forms.’’ This material-mental-spiritual being accorded with
other sources of Fulford’s knowledge in Asian thought and, especially, in Daoism.
Even the material body pointed toward spirit; Fulford reiterated that it was
‘‘composed of electric waves of light’’ in what he had called the life ﬁeld. That the
same waves also brought light to houses and pictures and sounds to television sets
suggested the divinized status of all material productions rather than their secularity.
Indeed, Fulford could ﬁnd no evil in the divinized world. Even though evil
could happen, it did not exist—meaning, in eﬀect, that it possessed no substantial
reality. In tandem with the privative doctrine that marked nineteenth-century
metaphysics, he called it the ‘‘absence of the spiritual force’’ and declared that
people became evil by blocking oﬀ ‘‘that purity, that life-giving universal ﬂow of
energy, from their being.’’21
Other late-twentieth-century physicians followed Still’s metaphysical lead toward
energetic constructions of reality, especially in the cranial-sacral systems of
manipulative therapy that arose from osteopathic roots. William Sutherland, for
example, who originated the theory and technique of manipulation of the skull
bones to unblock and regulate the ﬂow of cerebro-spinal ﬂuid between skull and
sacrum, had studied under Still himself.22 Cranial-sacral therapists claimed—
and continue to claim—that freeing blockages and allowing natural ﬂow to proceed
unimpeded has corrected a host of seemingly unrelated maladies. More
important here than details of the therapy, however, the old mesmeric model
—sifted through spiritualist and theosophical registers, still carrying Enlighten-
New Ages for All 405
ment motifs—could be seen as mingling with ideas ranging from quantum theories
about light to metaphysical Asian representations. A comprehensive vernacular
theory had been found, and it had become persuasive.
The process had been aided by another version of body mechanics inherited
from the late nineteenth century. This was chiropractic, with roots in the Hermetic
tradition even more obvious than osteopathy’s. Daniel David (D. D.)
Palmer (1845–1913), who founded chiropractic, immigrated from Canada,
taught school in Iowa and Illinois, and tried his hand at horticulture and beekeeping.
He created a national market for his ‘‘Sweet Home raspberry’’ (a large blackraspberry
variety that bore abundant fruit), and then in What Cheer, Iowa, he
began a grocery business and also sold goldﬁsh. Eventually he settled in Davenport,
Iowa, where his version of body manipulation ﬂourished. Like Still (and
like Phineas Quimby), Palmer’s path to physical manipulation led through spiritualism
and animal magnetism. Indeed, with spiritualist friends and earnest discussions
on spiritualist themes an important part of his world, it was probably
not surprising that—in an evangelically oriented nation—he decided to testify to
spiritualist faith on the front and inside covers of a nursery catalog he produced.
Palmer expressed his commitments to the village Enlightenment when he argued
against fraud within spiritualist ranks, but the spirits did not leave when he
embraced magnetism. As historian of chiropractic J. Stuart Moore has noted, ‘‘assimilating
spirit to science’’ became a persistent theme in Palmer’s professional
life. ‘‘By eventually traveling a path from spiritualism through magnetic healing
to his innovation of chiropractic,’’ Moore summarizes, ‘‘Palmer tapped into the
harmonial tradition . . . an impulse with certain aﬃnities to the centuries-old
hermetic tradition.’’23
Like Still and Quimby, too, Palmer’s appropriation of the vernacular Enlightenment
brought no conﬂict as it mingled with newer Romantic currents that by
the nineteenth century’s end had transmuted mesmerism and spiritualism into
Theosophy and, more, New Thought. The brief aphorisms Palmer inscribed in
his personal journal provide transparent testimony to his mental world. ‘‘Vehemently
and forcibly if necessary awaken your patient from his dream of suﬀering.’’
‘‘Patients suﬀer only as the insane suﬀer, from mere belief.’’ ‘‘Disease, disarrangement,
is disturbed harmony.’’ ‘‘Mind produces all action, conscious or unconscious.’’
Palmer invoked the ‘‘Metaphysician the soul or spirit’’ and thought that
‘‘the mind must be cured as well as body,’’ since ‘‘as the mind so is the body.’’ In
full agreement with Quimby and Christian Science, he declared that disease was
‘‘only the manifestation of error or wrong doing, wrong thots.’’ In fact, thoughts
were ‘‘real substance’’ and modiﬁed all they touched. Still more, Palmer kept
406 Arrivals
company with New Thought practices of aﬃrmation and denial. ‘‘Enquire what
state of mind at time of taking disease or accident,’’ he exhorted himself in his
journal, ‘‘then deny the cause.’’24
Palmer’s small personal pamphlet library tells a similar story. Here titles range
from mesmerism and spiritualism to Theosophy and New Thought. On magnetism,
for example, there was popular healer Edwin Dwight Babbitt’s Vital Magnetism
(1874), which cited a series of maladies that could be addressed through
spinal treatment and spoke the language of auras, health reform, and even
something like prayerful meditation. Here, too, was magnetic doctor C. A. DeGroodt’s
Hygeio-Therapeutic Institute and Magnetic Inﬁrmary (c. 1882–1883),
which blended biblical writ with its invocation of ‘‘the grandest, the most subtile
and reﬁned force operating in human aﬀairs—the vital Aura, the direct interpreter
of life itself—the force called magnetism.’’ Professor J. W. Cadwell’s
How to Mesmerize, bound with Is Spiritualism True? in a revised 1885 edition,
and James Victor Wilson’s How to Magnetize; or, Magnetism and Clairvoyance,
in a new and revised 1886 edition, also provide compelling evidence
about Palmer’s world. Straddling the line into Theosophy was Psychometry and
Thought-Transference, written by an unidentiﬁed medical Theosophist (‘‘N. C.’’)
and introduced by Henry Steel Olcott himself. From the camp of Freethought
and sexual radicalism came the Boston physician Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of
Philosophy, with its advocacy of contraception for population control, ﬁrst published
in England in 1832 by James Watson and now republished by Charles
Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in 1877 to test suppression laws. (Besant would later
succeed Olcott at the helm of the Theosophical Society.) Palmer’s eclectic collection
also contained a second work promoting ‘‘sexual self-government’’ (E. H.
Heywood’s Cupid’s Yokes), and—although there is no evidence that Palmer himself
followed free-love practice—Moore has reviewed the Palmer journal entries
that suggest he was providing contraceptive advice to women.25
In Palmer’s pamphlet collection as well were two published lectures by Juliet
H. Severance, with an ‘‘M.D.’’ duly attached to her name. Severance, from Wisconsin,
was a well-known spiritualist, hydropathic (water-cure) doctor, magnetic
healer, outspoken health reformer, and women’s rights advocate. The presence
of two of her lectures among the short list of Palmer pamphlets—one of them
on spiritualist themes (1882) and one on magnetism (1883)—suggests the radical
mental company he kept. As if to underline that assessment, Palmer’s oldest
pamphlet was Marcenus R. K. Wright’s 1870 Moral Aphorisms and Terseological
Teachings of Confucius, the work itself an early sign that Orientalism was beginning
to cut a path through metaphysical vernacular culture. Moreover, from
Palmer’s Illinois days there was William Denton’s 1872 pamphlet The Deluge in
New Ages for All 407
the Light of Modern Science. This piece sought to make science the arbiter of
the truth or falsehood of the Bible; it concluded that the scriptural account was
a fable and thus assigned the Bible ‘‘its place with all other human fallible productions.’’
‘‘For knowledge,’’ Denton proclaimed, ‘‘we go to Nature, our universal
mother, who gives her Bible to every soul, and preaches her everlasting gospel
to all people.’’26
Palmer would, indeed, go to Nature, like Still combining a metaphysical spirituality
that exalted it with techniques of physical manipulation. He would acknowledge
auras (‘‘all observers realize that we are surrounded with an aura’’),
but also, insofar as he understood it, embrace science. The pamphlet library
represented the furniture of Palmer’s own mind, and its contents bespoke the
mental and physical practice he promoted. That practice crystallized and took
self-conscious shape in 1895, according to Palmer—the same year that, in Germany,
Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered the X-ray and Max Planck began
his black-box experiments. While the Germans looked to energetic forms of light,
in his vernacular world Palmer likewise performed experiments with energy,
conceived and practiced according to his homespun metaphysical formulation.
His near-legendary account of how his spinal adjustment enabled black janitor
Harvey Lillard, deaf for seventeen years, to hear described a dramatically eﬀective
intervention. Like Mary Baker Eddy’s account of her ‘‘discovery’’ of Christian
Science, the Palmer story was most likely a serial ‘‘discovery,’’ with repeated
experiments on Lillard’s back. Sudden or sequential, however, Harvey Lillard’s
cure and the new practice of chiropractic became interventions in search of an
explanation. In the metaphysical world in which he had for many years happily
dwelled, Palmer found it. In fact, the name he chose for his new technique—
chiropractic (reportedly suggested by Presbyterian minister and Greek student
Samuel H. Weed)—no doubt appealed over other choices because of Palmer’s
familiarity with the term cheiromancy or chiromancy (that is, palmistry) from
metaphysical literature.27 Chiropractic was surely ‘‘done with the hands,’’ as the
Greek etymological roots suggest, but it was done with hands that had held theosophical
and New Thought texts.
Moreover, if the hands that played on the spinal vertebrae in Palmer’s chiropractic
were metaphysical ones, the theory Palmer evolved to support his new
technique combined the age-old doctrine of correspondence with magnetic
models of tides and their blockages. These models were now updated in a theosophized
New Thought universe in which, with Trine and others, divine reservoirs
were ﬂowing and human troughs and dams needed to be cleaned and unblocked
to receive the waters. Even here, though, there were remnants of evangelical
theories of sin, original and directly made, for how else to explain the blockages?
408 Arrivals
In Palmer’s version of the discourse, what ﬂowed into human embodied spirits
was the end-century/new-century successor to magnetic tides that he called ‘‘Innate.’’
In its new monism and—in the words of H. Stuart Moore—chiropractic’s
‘‘impulse to reinvest science with spirit,’’ Palmer’s Innate cut a path between the
rationalism of mainstream science and the Christian Science practice that effaced
matter totally for spirit. Innate meant ‘‘born with,’’ explained Palmer, and
it was shorthand for the ‘‘individualized intelligence’’ that ran ‘‘through all the
functions of our bodies during our wakeful and sleeping hours.’’ As such, it was
a ‘‘part or portion of that All Wise, Almighty, Universal Intelligence, the Great
Spirit, the Greek’s Theos, the Christian’s God, the Hebrew’s Helohim, the Mahometan’s
Allah, Hahneman’s [homeopathic] Vital Force, new thot’s Divine Spark,
the Indian’s Great Spirit, the Christian Scientist’s All Goodness, the Allopath’s
Vis Medicatrix Naturae—the healing power of nature.’’ Meanwhile, Palmer’s
theosophical Innate was not unrelated to Still’s osteopathic conceptions. Palmer
had visited Kirksville and learned from what Still was doing there, although later
he denied that he had done so. Yet there were diﬀerences: Still was interested in
the free ﬂow of blood; Palmer, more in the ﬂow of nerve force. Still operated on
bones and muscles and promoted massage; Palmer’s focus was the spine and its
‘‘subluxations,’’ using the spinal and transverse processes as levers to correct slippages
and abnormalities.28 However, it was on the level of theory that Palmer’s
statement reﬁned and elaborated the ﬂuidic model with a sophistication that
marked its greatest diﬀerence from Still’s work—and perhaps contributed to the
nonmedical future of chiropractic.
Palmer’s Innate ran through healthy bodies on the path of freedom, but it
did so in tandem with another energy called Educated. With ‘‘spirit, soul, and
body’’ as an identifying tag to mark the connection of his ideas to Theosophy
and New Thought, Palmer declared that the three composed ‘‘the being, the
source of mentality’’ and that ‘‘Innate and Educated, two mentalities,’’ attended
to ‘‘the welfare of the body physically and its surrounding environments.’’ By
contrast to Innate, Educated was intimately connected to the life history of the
individual, shaped by education and experience. It started out knowing nothing
‘‘except as it [was] acquired.’’ Innate was part of a metaworld; it had ‘‘been thinking
ever since spirit and matter began an existence.’’ Educated began and ended
with a person’s historical existence. But, perhaps surprisingly, Innate took back
to eternity what Educated had learned. In the life trajectory of an individual,
the two worked together, one tending to the body’s inner welfare and the other
to ‘‘outer well-being.’’ Still, the mutual assistance between Innate and Educated
was only ‘‘more or less,’’ and they could be ‘‘antagonistic.’’ A ‘‘displaced portion
of the osseous structure’’ could, for example, press ‘‘against a sensory nerve caus-
New Ages for All 409
ing the information received by Educated, which is transferred to Innate, to be
abnormal.’’ It was no wonder, then, that in a short text that still read as a mission
statement for chiropractic, Palmer legitimated his work by testifying that
‘‘our physical health and intellectual progress of this world and the next depends
largely upon the proper alignment of our skeletal frames.’’29
In Palmer’s expansive vision of the role of chiropractic, ﬁxing a spine and physical
body could mean ﬁxing an eternity. The chiropractor, as Hermetic priest,
released the stuckness and freed the spirit. Not only did the chiropractic intervention
allow Innate to move everywhere in the physical frame, guaranteeing
health and well-being. It also operated as a moral and spiritual practice to affect
the future of the spirit, whose acquired learning during an earthly lifetime
could change spiritual status in the life to come. In fact, oral tradition among Palmerites
had it that D. D. Palmer initially pondered whether he should present
his new system of spinal adjustment as a religion. Still more, discourse on the
spiritual would continue to characterize the tradition. Palmer’s son B. J. (Bartlett
Joshua) Palmer (1882–1961) pointed the way for twentieth-century changes.
The son was clearly a more thoroughgoing materialist than his father, localizing
the operations of Innate to the physical brain and dwelling on the materiality
of the spiritual process. By 1907, he had purchased his father’s struggling school
in Davenport, paid its debts, and incorporated it. Expansive and charismatic, he
drew students and staﬀ to him and promoted loyalty among the devout. He also
had a bitterly contentious relationship with his father, and the two became rivals
in the evolving trajectory of chiropractic.30 All the same, the son built on the
metaphysical religiosity of his father.
We gain perhaps the most succinct statement of these connections and differences
in an essay by Joy M. Loban, D. D. Palmer’s associate and teacher at
his school, later teacher and head of B. J. Palmer’s rival Universal Chiropractic
College, and eventual executor of the father’s estate. Here the ‘‘philosophy’’ expressed
became clearly a philosophy of religion. Chiropractic had ‘‘investigated
and explained that mysterious and elusive thing men call[ed] the Soul,’’ and it
elucidated ‘‘the ‘Nature’ which [had] been used for generations as a name for
the unknowable.’’ The model that Loban unfolded was thoroughly agential. He
wrote expansively that chiropractic had ‘‘taken the forces and energies which
move and wield and reconstruct the elements’’ and had shown how they acted
‘‘in absolute obedience to an Intelligence’’ that was ‘‘all-pervading.’’ It ventured
‘‘into the realm of (so-called) occult phenomena’’ and proved them ‘‘to be simply
action in obedience to easily understood laws.’’ Chiropractic philosophy was, in
Loban’s words, ‘‘the Philosophy of Cause.’’ ‘‘The study of Chiropractic properly
begins with a knowledge or conception of the absolute and proceeds by suc-
410 Arrivals
cessive steps through the various steps that intervene before we arrive at a consideration
of the ultimate expression of Energy in the tissue cells of man.’’31
What followed in Loban’s exposition seems thoroughly Blavatskian. Each
‘‘individualized intelligence, or Entity called Ego, soul, etc.’’ appeared to develop
‘‘only’’ through education, and it was ‘‘only through knowledge’’ that perfection
could be reached. That stated, Loban thought that the ‘‘Entity’’ needed to ‘‘inhabit,
in turn, the various stages of physical development (for the physical body
of man has passed through ages of evolution) in order that it may reach perfection.’’
Why would not one physical body suﬃce? Loban answered sententiously,
invoking the ‘‘law that no portion of matter exists forever without changing from
one state to another’’; the physical, thus, had to ‘‘be dissolved and scattered.’’ In
keeping with D. D. Palmer’s notions of the role of Educated in transforming Innate,
Loban declared that as the mind passed from physical life to the ‘‘void’’ to
physical life again it retained ‘‘all the knowledge it [had] already gained in previous
existences.’’ It used the knowledge ‘‘in the operation of the new medium
for the acquisition of more knowledge.’’ ‘‘Just as matter is dependent upon the
Mind for its existence in organized form, so is the Mind dependent upon Matter
for its development.’’32 In Hermetic and theosophical vein, always, humans
would walk the earth as gods, but the twist on reincarnation was unmistakably
Palmerian. Now they would walk as enlightened body-selves, with perfected ﬂesh
the prerequisite for perfected spirit.
As Loban went on to track the action of Innate Intelligence in ‘‘the creation,
transmission and expression of Power,’’ however, the new physicality and energy
emphasis of B. J. Palmer became apparent. First, purpose had to be present, but
then ‘‘energy,’’ which was ‘‘gathered in the brain’’ and ‘‘akin to electricity’’ but
with ‘‘a higher rate of vibration.’’ ‘‘Mental impulses’’ traveled through the nerves
from brain to body and were there ‘‘expressed as life,’’ impulses that were ‘‘sent
out in a series of vibrations—a current continually ﬂowing from the brain outward.’’
The only thing that could interfere would be an obstacle in the path of
transmission; in other words, a subluxation of the spine that interfered with the
exit of the nerve from the spinal column. Thus the task of the chiropractor was
clear and speciﬁc—to remove the blockage or the slippage. Chiropractic philosophy,
by contrast, was grand and ‘‘all-comprehensive.’’ It encompassed ‘‘all things
created, and back of all the absolute.’’ In it could be found ‘‘the germs of every
truth which is now and always has been.’’ From this perspective, the ‘‘true Chiropractor’’
was ‘‘neither a Mental Scientist nor a Physicist’’; the healing discipline
included ‘‘both Physics and Metaphysics—and the relation between the two.’’33
Loban was not shy about invoking B. J. Palmer, and his words to that eﬀect
were eﬀusive in their overinvestment, astounding in their silence. He had quoted
New Ages for All 411
freely, he said, ‘‘from the utterances of B. J. Palmer,’’ even engaged in ‘‘bold plagiarism’’
of the younger Palmer, whom he acclaimed as the ‘‘originator’’ of chiropractic
philosophy. About D. D. Palmer, Loban had nothing to say, even though
later, as executor of the elder Palmer’s estate, he would ﬁle suit against the son on
grounds that he had maliciously driven his auto into his father during a parade
in 1913. Meanwhile, B. J. Palmer was as caught as Loban between confession
and silence. The father thought the son’s brain theories to be ‘‘anatomical nonsense,’’
according to Moore. These theories, in eﬀect, reduced the role of Innate
and turned the body into a machine run by the brain. From a historical perspective,
however, it is not hard to see that the shift between father and son restated
the shift between the older, more ‘‘spiritualized’’ and aﬀective New Thought that
Horatio Dresser admired and the newer, more mentalistic and noetic version exempliﬁed
by Trine and later New Thought writers. Meanwhile, although B. J.
Palmer’s valorization of the brain was probably not original (Moore pointed to
its sources in a 1906 textbook), the younger man did love machines.34
By 1909, Palmer was promoting the use of the X-ray, and by 1923 a device
called the Neurocalometer, which he claimed could ﬁnd spinal subluxations
by detecting changes in nerve transmission. Mechanical electricity was replacing
the sensitized palm of the chiropractor. Whereas D. D. Palmer had insisted
that no electrical gadgets should be used for adjustments, now a series of new
tools beckoned the enterprising chiropractor. Yet, arguably, the gadgetry fed
seamlessly into a chiropractic worldview premised on metaphysical notions of
energy, and chiropractors operated them to open conduits and generate streams
of power ultimately spiritual. By 1937, for example, chiropractors could employ
the Chromoray, using spectral colors in an instrument developed in keeping
with the Principles of Light and Color, the 1878 work of Edwin Dwight Babbitt,
whose magnetism had inﬂuenced D. D. Palmer. Chromopathy, as the therapy
was called, turned on the metaphysical notion that each color in the spectrum
vibrated according to a signature pattern corresponding to that of a particular
illness. By selecting and mixing appropriate colors, the causes of illnesses—not
just their consequences—could be addressed by employing ‘‘the higher forces of
nature.’’ Similarly, other devices used electricity to provide stimulation to ailing
patients and thus unblock the healing forces of nature.35
Some chiropractors were ‘‘straight,’’ adhering strictly to the protocols of spinal
adjustment advanced from the ﬁrst days of chiropractic. Others were ‘‘mixers,’’
freely combining spinal adjustment with other modalities including instruments,
nutritional supplements, (homeopathic) ﬂower remedies, and the like. Intersecting
these divisions, however, some became mechanics who aspired to membership
in the modern scientiﬁc community. Others, with or without acknowledg-
412 Arrivals
ment, were metaphysicians, continuing to subscribe to notions of blockage and
ﬂow and thus to the spiritual model behind the ideas. The changes that these
twentieth-century chiropractors embraced returned them, again and again, to
their origins. Thus, when the New Age came along and they freely joined, they
did so in touch with their own roots. To cite but one example, California chiropractor
John F. Thie and his ‘‘Touch for Health’’ technique (a kinesiological
approach based on the work of chiropractor George Goodheart) revisited the
Palmer model in New Age dress. Using acupressure (ﬁnger pressure to acupuncture
points) along with chiropractic, Thie taught a practice that combined metaphysical
Asia with metaphysical America. He explained to readers of his textbook/workbook
that the chiropractor believed ‘‘that the innate intelligence that
runs the body is connected to universal intelligence that runs the world, so each
person is plugged into the universal intelligence through the nervous system.’’
Turning to Goodheart’s work that had preceded his own, he read the development
of kinesiology for the restoration of muscular balance as a blend of Western
and Eastern modalities. Goodheart had used ‘‘earlier chiropractic work and the
ancient Oriental practices in the activation of energies in the body.’’ Adopting the
methods that Thie now taught would ‘‘help prevent malfunctions and pains from
developing, as well as correct the reason for the pain and allow the life force to
ﬂow uninterrupted throughout the body.’’ Always, he saw his patient/client holistically—‘‘as
a whole structural, chemical, and psychological or spiritual being.’’36
Spirit philosophy, however, was the property not only of chiropractors, osteopaths,
and other denizens of the vernacular world. At the other end of the cultural
spectrum, among the elite, another brand of metaphysics thrived. As early
as 1872, a group of young intellectuals began meeting in the shadow of Harvard
University at Cambridge, styling themselves, apparently, the Metaphysical
Club. The logician and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce was the only one of
the group who actually used the name—chosen, he said, ‘‘to alienate such as it
would alienate’’—as he recalled the fortnightly meetings of the club many years
later. Still, the name rang historically true. Metaphysics, for the conventional
intellectual society of the era, was a pariah term, and—as Louis Menand has
written—‘‘agnosticism was then riding its high horse, and was frowning superbly
upon all metaphysics.’’ Besides Peirce, members of the ‘‘club’’ included a roster
of later luminaries in American intellectual history—men like lawyer and jurist
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., mathematician and philosopher Chauncey Wright,
historian and philosopher John Fiske, and psychologist and philosopher William
James. The club soon dissolved (in less than a year), and members went their
separate ways, although intersections and friendships continued among them at
various points in their careers. Like the earlier Transcendental Club, the talkers
New Ages for All 413
in this one (as their putative name suggests) had wanted in their own way to rattle
cultural sabers, arming themselves with ideas that challenged the orthodoxies of
the day. In science, religion, and philosophy, the Cambridge metaphysicians had
found the themes of their discourse. They sought to retain the values associated
with traditional religious culture but threw their energies into the confrontation
between religion and science and a martial reconstruction of the relationship
between the two. Looking for a basis for certainty, they could no longer ﬁnd it
in received religious formulas nor in scientiﬁc theories. Rather, it was in scientiﬁc
method that they found the best resource for approaching certainty. They
parried with the Darwinian theory of evolution in the midst of their discussions,
and out of their discourse came the beginnings of pragmatism in philosophy.37
Charles Peirce (1839–1914) had used the term pragmatism in a paper for club
members, operating on a cue he received from reading Immanuel Kant’s classic
Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He had told them that the intellectual signiﬁcance
of belief lay in its impact and eﬀect on their actions. Very much later, in
the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, he would explain that the term pragmatism
was ‘‘invented to express a certain maxim of logic,’’ which would ‘‘furnish a
method for the analysis of concepts.’’ The method involved tracing out imaginatively
‘‘the conceivable practical consequences . . . of the aﬃrmation or denial of
the concept’’ and acknowledging that ‘‘herein lies the whole of the purport of the
word, the entire concept.’’ By that time, Peirce’s reﬂections had been stimulated
by his felt need to distinguish his ideas from those of his longtime friend William
James, who in a lecture in 1898 had used the word pragmatism and credited it to
Peirce.38 It is on James’s reading of pragmatism and, more, on his deployment of
the idea in his encounter with the metaphysical religionists he met that my narrative
dwells. As the Cambridge-trained and then Harvard professor James left
the earlier Metaphysical Club behind and met the vernacular metaphysicians of
his late-century, new-century era, he found that they were worthy enough partners
for parrying and that out of the interaction something good could come.
His philosophical construct of pragmatism, in fact, was an ideational tool that
reﬂected the religious labor in which they and others were engaged.
William James (1842–1910) had been shaped from childhood to be a religious
seeker. His father, Henry James Sr., had been converted in the Second Great
Awakening and then reconverted to Swedenborgianism in 1844. The elder James
was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, knew (the poet) Ellery Channing and
Henry David Thoreau, and could match words with Amos Bronson Alcott. He
was also a Platonist and had read his share of Charles Fourier, whose thinking
probably inﬂuenced him enough to name Plato’s invisible world of ideas the
realm of Divine Love—for a time the elder James was, in fact, an advocate of free
414 Arrivals
love.39 His oldest son spent his life re-answering the questions his father’s seeking
raised. But, ironically, William James’s contrary answers to his father’s world
ended by aﬃrming what they denied.
Years before that, however, Henry James Sr.’s religious questing demonstrated
for his son the authority of a self uninhibited by received convention. In the
educational experience that he gave his son, he replicated the lesson. James Sr.
moved William and his brother Henry James Jr. in and out of a series of schools,
so that the two together had been enrolled in ten diﬀerent institutions by 1855.
After that, William James experienced several versions of Continental schooling
until, in 1861, he matriculated at the Lawrence Scientiﬁc School at Harvard. It
was 1869, however, before he lasted through an entire degree program and received
his M.D. from Harvard (he never practiced as a physician). The eﬀect of
what Louis Menand calls this ‘‘international hopscotch’’ was profound. James
never learned what it was like to think inside a box. He approached intellectual
problems, as Menand argues, ‘‘uninhibited by received academic wisdom.’’40
Indeed, James had been primed, in the midst of elite culture and with the respected
and credentialed status that it gave him, to acknowledge in some ways his
simultaneous participation in vernacular culture. Like the New England Transcendentalists
who played so important a role in the coalescence of American
metaphysical religion, he operated as a professional nonprofessional in religion,
cutting a path identiﬁably separate from received and inherited orthodoxies.
It was at Harvard that James met Peirce and Holmes, with whom he became
close friends and with whom he took the initial steps that led to his later philosophy
of pragmatism. But after he received his medical degree, he was dogged by
depression and illness, both to be chronic visitors in James’s later life. Personal
psychology thus continued to push him to raise existential questions, using the
methods of science to forge a philosophy that could enable him (and others) to
live in a world in which the old order no longer held. By 1872 he had begun his
long career at Harvard (until 1907), joining the Harvard faculty ostensibly as a
lecturer in physiology and anatomy. With an interest in physiological psychology,
however, he transferred into philosophy, there creating the charter psychological
laboratory in the nation. When his Principles of Psychology appeared in
1890, its central concept of a nonseparable link between body and mind, with the
mind functioning (pragmatically) as the body’s tool, enabled him to achieve his
academic reputation. Already the germ of his later philosophy was visible in the
textbook, and his later works—often the written versions of his frequent invited
lectures—established his authority as the leading voice in American philosophy
in his era and perhaps afterward. If so, it was a philosophy that took on the religious
questions his culture was asking. The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of
New Ages for All 415
Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909),
and The Meaning of Truth (1909) all suggest in their titles the spiritual tenor of
his work and ideas.41
Important here, the religious questions that James was asking—questions that
intersected complexly with the spiritual seeking of his own life—reﬂect the
agenda of American metaphysical religion as it turned toward themes of energy
and agency. James had clearly noticed metaphysical religionists before the nineteenth
century’s end, and he was almost a quiet fellow traveler in their world.
Ann Taves notes that James ‘‘shared much with new religious movements, such
as Spiritualism, Theosophy, and, especially New Thought.’’ She assesses, too,
that with ‘‘metaphysically informed eﬀorts at mediation’’ that were ‘‘vastly more
sophisticated than theirs,’’ he gave ‘‘a new legitimacy and prestige to these popular
movements.’’ More speciﬁcally, as Henry Samuel Levinson remarks, James
gleaned his knowledge of the World’s Parliament of Religions through Paul
Carus’s exuberant reports in the Monist, a journal that James read ‘‘thoroughly.’’
Levinson also notes James’s literary acquaintance with Phineas Quimby, about
whom he read ‘‘curiously.’’ James had apparently made his way through Ralph
Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Inﬁnite, and he liked it enough to give the book
to his son Henry as a birthday present. In 1898, when a medical licensing bill
would have prevented mental healers from practicing in the state of Massachusetts,
James testiﬁed in court on their behalf, arguing that the bill would quash
the acquisition of a new kind of medical experience. For all this, he possessed a
certain wariness in the face of the new religious orientation, especially when it
presented itself with an Asian overlay. He never, for example, visited the Young
Men’s Buddhist Association when he was in San Francisco, and he continued to
express a fear that Asia was a cultural threat to the West.42
Yet the metaphysical version of Asia clearly fascinated James. Late in his life, in
a lecture signiﬁcantly titled ‘‘The Energies of Men,’’ he cited his own guardedly
positive rendition of its spirituality. He thought the ‘‘most venerable ascetic system,’’
and the one with ‘‘the most voluminous experimental corroboration’’ for its
results, was ‘‘undoubtedly the Yoga system in Hindustan.’’ He could bandy yogic
terms—Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga (had he read Blavatsky and/or Swami Vivekananda?),
and Karma Yoga—and could declare that the practice of yogic discipline
‘‘for years’’ brought ‘‘strength of character, personal power, unshakability
of soul.’’ Even further, he told readers about a ‘‘very gifted European friend’’
who for several months fasted ‘‘from food and sleep,’’ performed yogic ‘‘exercises
in breathing and thought-concentration, and its fantastic posture-gymnastics.’’
Thereby he ‘‘succeeded in waking up deeper and deeper levels of will and moral
and intellectual power in himself’’ and escaped from a chronic brain condition
416 Arrivals
that had troubled him. But James’s friend was a man of ‘‘very peculiar temperament,’’
and James judged that few would have the will power to begin his kind
of practice.43
Hence James himself backed away from metaphysical Asia and turned to metaphysical
America to mark the role of ideas in unblocking energies: ‘‘We are just
now witnessing a very copious unlocking of energies by ideas in the persons of
those converts to ‘New Thought,’ ‘Christian Science,’ ‘Metaphysical Healing,’
or other forms of spiritual philosophy, who are so numerous among us to-day.
The ideas here are healthy-minded and optimistic; and it is quite obvious that a
wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity,
Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.
The common feature of these optimistic faiths is that they all tend to the suppression
of . . . ‘fearthought.’’’44
By the time he wrote these words, James had already, since 1902 and his Varieties
of Religious Experience, established his deﬁnition of healthy-mindedness
and explored New Thought under that rubric. There, as in ‘‘The Energies of
Men,’’ his inquiry operated on the premise of his pragmatism, and in his philosophical
stance he modeled, in a sharper, clearer formula, what New Thought
people were thinking and doing. James’s achievement in Varieties was such that
the work stood at once as a highly impersonal and highly personal book. As Ann
Taves summarizes, it abstracted the mystical core of Christianity.45 It operated
studiously out of scientiﬁc canons of disciplined inquiry in psychology, and it
used a series of examples to reach its general conclusions. But the intimacies of
its lengthy narratives of religious experience belied its scientism, and James’s forays
into meaning as he assessed his confessional data, especially in his conclusion
and postscript, led him to candid revelations of his own religious quest. For unmistakably,
what James found in the experiential narratives of his subjects spoke
to more than his rationalism.
As a psychologist James had at hand the new category of the subconscious
to take the place of the magnetism of trance states and the mediating world of
spirit visitors as conduits for revelation. He could explain clairvoyance and suggestion
without recourse to supernaturalism or even the blurry naturalism of
earlier intellectualizing theories. But James’s subconscious—his ‘‘transmarginal
or subliminal region’’—was the gateway to a vaster, larger realm, and it functioned
as a container for the kind of material that had formed the substance of
religious and mystical revelation. It was ‘‘the abode of everything that is latent and
the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved.’’ It was ‘‘also
the fountain-head of much that feeds our religion.’’ ‘‘In persons deep in the religious
life,’’ he concluded, ‘‘the door into this region seems unusually wide open;
New Ages for All 417
at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic
inﬂuence in shaping religious history.’’ The language of ‘‘reservoir’’ and
‘‘fountain-head’’ was striking in James’s formulation. These were, as we have seen,
the chosen metaphors of Ralph Waldo Trine and H. Emilie Cady, at least, and
James had used them, in New Thought fashion, to posit a divinizing force and
source of revelation within. As he had declared, ‘‘metaphysical revelation’’ was
the ‘‘farther oﬃce of religion.’’46
James’s general understanding of religion replicated the theory of correspondence
so cherished by metaphysicians. ‘‘Were one asked to characterize the life
of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that
it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme
good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.’’ Moreover, as his conclusions
about the subliminal already reveal, like the New Thought writers whom
he read, James’s God was immanent. In a passage that began with a consideration
of God in nature and the world around, he turned abruptly to a Godhaunted
world within: ‘‘It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense
of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something
there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular
‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally
revealed.’’ When he turned speciﬁcally to New Thought in what he called
the ‘‘religion of healthy-mindedness,’’ he cited and quoted New Thought authors
Horatio Dresser and Henry Wood, quoted Horace Fletcher on ‘‘fearthought,’’
and excerpted several lengthy passages from Ralph Waldo Trine.47
Following Francis W. Newman’s distinction between the ‘‘once-born’’ and the
‘‘twice-born,’’ James identiﬁed the mental healers of his day with the once-born.48
They were optimists, he thought, even in some cases cut oﬀ from sadness by a
‘‘congenital anaesthesia.’’ They experienced ‘‘no element of morbid compunction
or crisis,’’ and hence they did not require another and better world to make
sense of the one in which they lived. Although this summary ignored the way
that metaphysical religion decreed the presence of divine power and plenitude in
situations that were often quite the reverse, it did distinguish a habit of discourse
in the New Thought community. As James noted, the ‘‘advance’’ of liberal Christianity
over a ﬁfty-year period could ‘‘be called a victory of healthy-mindedness
within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-ﬁre theology
was more harmoniously related.’’ But he was clearly drawn to the ‘‘Mind-cure
movement’’ as his case par excellence. Within it, he had noticed ‘‘various sects
of this ‘New Thought’’’ but found their agreements ‘‘so profound’’ that their differences
could be ‘‘neglected.’’ (Although he cited Christian Science only once
—for its radical denial of evil—he missed the Calvinist-leaning exclusionism of
418 Arrivals
Mary Baker Eddy’s church and linked it, generically, with New Thought as a
species of mind-cure.)49
James thought the New Thought movement impressively large—‘‘a genuine
religious power.’’ He added astutely that it had ‘‘reached the stage, for example,
when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuﬀ, mechanically
produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers.’’
More than that, he could begin to trace the process of cultural diﬀusion. ‘‘The
indirect inﬂuence of this has been great. The mind-cure principles are beginning
so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears
of the ‘Gospel of Relaxation,’ of the ‘Don’t Worry Movement,’ of people who repeat
to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their
motto for the day.’’ James could play the intellectual historian, too, and he cited
origins in the Christian Gospels, in ‘‘Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism,’’
in ‘‘Berkeleyan idealism,’’ and in ‘‘spiritism, with its messages of ‘law’
and ‘progress’ and ‘development.’’’ Likewise he pointed to ‘‘optimistic popular
science evolutionism’’ and Hinduism as movement sources. (In a speciﬁc turn to
New Thought teachings of divine immanence, he found within them ‘‘traces of
Christian mysticism, of transcendental idealism, of vedantism, and of the modern
psychology of the subliminal self.’’) But the bottom line, for James, was the
sheer practicality of the movement. Mind-cure had spread because of its results,
its ‘‘practical fruits,’’ which suited the ‘‘extremely practical turn of character of
the American people.’’ So much so that ‘‘their only decidedly original contribution
to the systematic philosophy of life’’ was ‘‘intimately knit up with concrete
therapeutics.’’50
James quoted the aphorisms of the movement to point to New Thought’s message
of agency. ‘‘‘Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.’’’ ‘‘Most
mind-curers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are ‘forces,’ and that, by virtue
of a law that like attracts like, one man’s thoughts draw to themselves as allies all
the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one gets, by
one’s thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization of one’s desires;
and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the heavenly forces on one’s
side by opening one’s own mind to their inﬂux.’’ Yet the paradox of the agency
and the ﬂow was that, at its epicenter, it required stillness, ‘‘passivity.’’ James had
posited a mystical core that implicitly countered the ‘‘Don’t Worry Movement.’’
Success came through surrender and letting go; it meant resigning ‘‘the care of
your destiny to higher powers’’ and ‘‘the passage into nothing of which Jacob
Behmen writes.’’ Mind-curers had, without a conviction of sin, ended in religious
states similar to Lutherans and Wesleyans, demonstrating ‘‘regeneration by relaxing,
by letting go’’; giving their ‘‘little private convulsive self a rest, and ﬁnding
New Ages for All 419
that a greater Self is there.’’ Always, though, thoughts were suggestions; they were
ideas with power, ideas that assumed for individuals ‘‘the force of a revelation.’’
For James, the point was that the revelation worked. ‘‘The mind-cure movement
spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential
results.’’ Totally unscientiﬁc and at war with scientiﬁc positivism, it yet
adopted scientiﬁc method in adhering to rule and expecting concrete eﬀects.51
Was New Thought then true thought? Were the purveyors of metaphysical
Truth, in everyday terms, correct? These questions push the argument into a
Jamesian corner where pragmatism sits waiting. For in his pragmatic theory of
truth, James in eﬀect gave carte blanche to New Thought practitioners and a
host of religionists of other and distinctive stripes. He had told them to keep on
doing what they were doing because it led them somewhere that they experienced
as good. It would be half a decade more before James’s lectures on pragmatism
appeared as a book, but he had clearly been thinking and writing under
the aegis of pragmatism in his Varieties already. When the lectures on pragmatism
did come, they captured succinctly his actional theory of truth, which in its
outline reﬂected the agency-based universe of metaphysical religion. In James’s
theory, as in metaphysical religiosity, energy abounded if a person opened out to
it and allowed it to carry the individual to further regions of the mind and back
again to this-worldly blessing.
Thus, what needs to be noticed most about James’s pragmatic theory of
truth is its moral character. It is, quite simply, a moral theory of truth, and as a
moral theory of truth it carries the implicit quality of agency. In his essay ‘‘What
Pragmatism Means,’’ from the collection he called simply Pragmatism, James
associated his concerns with ‘‘the pragmatic method’’—a way of ‘‘settling metaphysical
[here meaning ‘‘philosophical’’] disputes that otherwise might be interminable.’’
In this context, pragmatic method meant trying to ‘‘interpret each notion
by tracing its respective practical consequences.’’ What diﬀerence would it
make if one thing were true rather than another? Citing the Greek derivation
of the term pragmatism—from the word for ‘‘action’’—and citing, too, his friend
Charles Peirce as the ﬁrst to introduce the term, he said that, for Peirce, beliefs
were ‘‘really rules for action.’’ They led to certain forms of conduct, and conduct
was their ‘‘sole signiﬁcance.’’ James took Peirce’s belief about belief (or at least
his understanding of it) and made his own promotion of it something of a cottage
industry after 1898. Now he was summarizing his position. In a reading of
metaphysics that straddled the worlds of professional philosophy and American
metaphysical religion, he linked historic metaphysics (philosophy) to magic because
of the power of incantatory words to control a situation—a ‘‘spirit, genie,
afrite, or whatever the power may be.’’ In the presence of a mysterious universe,
420 Arrivals
words operated to resolve its enigma and so to control and bind, leading the mind
to rest. Words like ‘‘‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy’’’ were ‘‘so
many solving names.’’52
By contrast, James pushed toward science and away from what he regarded
as magic and its (seductive) restfulness. If a person followed James’s pragmatic
injunctions, there would be no closing of the metaphysical quest. ‘‘You must
bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of
your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more
work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities
may be changed.’’ Theories thus understood became ‘‘instruments not answers
to enigmas, in which we can rest.’’ Here was a resoundingly Protestant reading
of value—associated not with contemplation and quietistic gaze but instead
with forthright action toward a goal. Drawn to mystical acts of mind that fused
far goals with present endeavors, James spoke them in the cultural language of
action and eﬀort. Philosophy, like religion, was hard work. The work appeared
more spacious, however, when James cited the (later often-noted) corridor theory
of truth, borrowed from Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini. Pragmatism, like a
hotel corridor, opened out into numbers of dramatically diﬀerent ‘‘chambers.’’
There could be an atheistic writer in one, a devotee in prayer on his knees in
a second, a chemist in a third, an idealist metaphysician in a fourth, an antimetaphysician
in a ﬁfth. All, however, owned the corridor and had to go through
it to get to their rooms. Hence James wanted to look away from ﬁrst things and
origins to ‘‘last things, fruits, consequences, facts.’’53
That established, he went on to call pragmatism not only a method but also
‘‘a certain theory of truth.’’ Summarizing the position of other logicians as well
as his own stance, James was ready now to deﬁne: ‘‘Ideas (which themselves are
but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into
satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.’’ James was also ready to
carry his view into the bastions of theology. ‘‘If theological ideas prove to have
a value for concrete life,’’ he declared, ‘‘they will be true, for pragmatism, in the
sense of being good for so much. For how much more they are true, will depend
entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have be to acknowledged.’’
Still more, James was bent on conﬂating the age-old Platonic ideas of the good
and the true. Truth, he insisted, was ‘‘one species of good, and not, as is usually
supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the
name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for
deﬁnite, assignable reasons.’’54 It was patently clear that value—the good—was
primary. Psychologist and philosopher James was working as an ethicist.
Read against James’s proﬁle of the New Thought universe in Varieties, it is
New Ages for All 421
likewise clear why James could endorse the New Thought position and run with
it. New Thought people were quintessential pragmatists in method and behavior,
and James had anyway concluded in Varieties that God was ‘‘real’’ because
he produced ‘‘real eﬀects.’’ Moreover, James’s own philosophical method, from
one point of view, had mimed the metaphysical reﬂections of New Thinkers:
His subliminal self was their immanent God; his instrumentalism in method was
their practice of aﬃrmation and denial; his moralism matched theirs; his option
for action resonated with their unblocked energies; his typologizing echoed their
theories of correspondence; his mentalism sat easily beside theirs. In the end,
though, and ironically, the once-born world was not a place in which he personally—with
his life of chronic depression and unease—could reside. His long account
of the religion of the ‘‘sick-soul’’ and ‘‘morbid-mindedness’’ plumbed the
religion of those who had deeply experienced the evil of their worldly plight and
been reborn into a nonnaturalistic realm. Whatever their religious background
(but especially in the American revival tradition), he declared for the greater
completeness of their world. ‘‘The completest religions would therefore seem to
be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed.’’55
Still, at the very least, James had taken a vernacular culture that other professionals
of his time and later were ready to discard, had found it worthy of his curiosity,
and had begun to investigate its categories and to use them as his thinking
tools. The seriousness of that endeavor was revealed in the last two decades of
his life in his connection with the London-based Society for Psychical Research,
founded in 1882 with an Anglo-American following. James, in fact, had helped
to form an American branch of the society in 1884, and by 1890 he was issuing
a call to researchers to study trance comparatively. Impressed by the complexity
of psychic phenomena, he also, by 1909, acknowledged that the study of psychics
themselves was ‘‘tedious, repellent, and undigniﬁed.’’ That, however, did
not stop him from persisting. He was willing to estimate that ‘‘in good mediums
there is a residuum of knowledge displayed that can only be called supernormal.’’
And he thought that there was ‘‘a cosmic environment of other consciousness of
some sort,’’ which was ‘‘able to work upon them.’’ He had, he wrote, arrived at
‘‘one ﬁxed conclusion’’ from his experience with psychic phenomena. Humans
were like ‘‘islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest.’’ Whatever their surface
connections, the trees joined roots ‘‘in the darkness underground,’’ and so did
the islands ‘‘through the ocean’s bottom.’’ ‘‘Just so,’’ there existed ‘‘a continuum
of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental
fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.’’
James had reversed the New Thought metaphor. But he went on to diagnose
the separate selves of his own society and to link his ﬁndings to a wider
422 Arrivals
investigative ﬁeld that reversed his reversal. ‘‘Our ‘normal’ consciousness is circumscribed
for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is
weak in spots, and ﬁtful inﬂuences from beyond leak in, showing the otherwise
unveriﬁable common connection. Not only psychic research, but metaphysical
philosophy, and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favor
on some such ‘panpsychic’ view of the universe as this.’’56
Seven years earlier, in Varieties, James had speculated on the ‘‘farther’’ side of
human consciousness after he had explored its nearer side in the personal aspects
of the subconscious mind. He had spoken of ‘‘over-beliefs’’ and confessed
his own. Invoking the common testimony of the religious people who had been
his subjects and provided his data, he posited the axiom that they had identiﬁed
their ‘‘real being’’ with a ‘‘germinal higher part.’’ In turn, he had linked the
higher part to ‘‘a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside.’’
James wanted to know whether the ‘‘more’’ was ‘‘merely our own notion’’
or if it really existed, and he had rested the case for its reality on his pragmatism.
The ‘‘more’’ produced eﬀects, and his own over-belief in the God of Christian
culture could proceed apace. Strikingly, like Trine and his New Thought deity,
this God was a God of Energy and Action. The ‘‘divine facts’’ that James could
acknowledge concerned ‘‘the actual inﬂow of energy in the faith-state and the
prayer-state.’’ But there was still a beyond. ‘‘The whole drift of my education goes
to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of
many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain
experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the
main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become
continuous at certain points, and higher energies ﬁlter in.’’57
More than that, it followed from the pragmatic rubric that there were plural
worlds of meaning that diﬀerent people tapped and so that there were diﬀerent
truths that could be owned. In his exposition of healthy-mindedness, James had
already pronounced the universe ‘‘a more many-sided aﬀair than any sect, even
the scientiﬁc sect, allows for.’’ He wondered ‘‘why in the name of common sense’’
he and others needed to ‘‘assume that only one such system of ideas can be true.’’
‘‘Truth happens to an idea,’’ he had written in Pragmatism. ‘‘It becomes true, is
made true by events.’’ He had gone on to notice that his narrative was ‘‘an account
of truths in the plural, or processes of leading,’’ with only the common quality
that they paid oﬀ. It was only the drawing out of the obvious, then, when James
published his Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College under the title A Pluralistic
Universe. Countering, on this point, the monisms of metaphysical Asia and
metaphysical America alike, James yet ultimately aﬃrmed metaphysical believers.
His brief for pluralism and distributiveness (‘‘pluralism lets things really exist
New Ages for All 423
in the each-form or distributively’’) was also a brief for the habitual practice of
combinativeness so cherished among religious metaphysicians.58
James was, in one sense, ahead of their game. He was playing aﬃrmatively with
the notion that the ‘‘each-form’’ might be ‘‘the eternal form of reality no less than
it is the form of temporal appearance.’’ And he was ﬁnding his ‘‘multiverse’’ still
a ‘‘coherent world,’’ not a ‘‘block-universe’’ but instead ‘‘a universe only strungalong,
not rounded in and closed.’’59 In so doing, he was, in fact, playing out the
premises of his pragmatism, guaranteeing to each and all an equal place in the
heavenly kingdom. Unlike Andrew Taylor Still and the Palmers, father and son,
who believed that there was only one truth and they had it, James had discovered
a metaphysical manyness at the heart of things. If he also smuggled in another
monism in the monism of his pragmatic method, he had still played his game
memorably. Whatever the philosophical conundrum of circularity with which
he contended, his spirit philosophy, like the spirit philosophy of body mechanics,
bore the mark of encounter with American metaphysical religion and suggested
tellingly its diﬀusion in national culture and society. The twentieth-century-andafter
story was the story of how far the metaphysical ﬂow actually did extend.
CONFIDENT LIVING AND POSITIVE THINKING
‘‘Conﬁdent living rights every wrong; / Dynamic power helps me be strong. /
Conﬁdent living comforts my heart; / From such a blessing I can’t depart.’’ ‘‘Conﬁdent
living fulﬁlls my way, / Opens my channels without delay.’’ So runs the
refrain and part of one verse of a favorite hymn in Unity churches. The practiceoriented
cast of the words, with their references to ‘‘dynamic power,’’ comfort,
and open channels, points to the payoﬀ that James had found in New Thought
metaphysics. That payoﬀ was appropriated by a series of New Thought institutions
in the twentieth century and after. These were small denominations, by any
measure, and by 2004 they had, quite startlingly, neither been acknowledged nor
included in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. (Christian Science
is also nowhere present.) This in itself is blatant testimony to cultural invisibility.
(In recent volumes a ‘‘Directory of Selected Faith Traditions in America’’
lists Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and even Native
American spiritual traditions.)60 Moreover, it is testimony that may speak to the
sociological myopia of the editors or to the apparent unconcern of these groups
about being known—or to both. Yet the strongest among the groups—Divine
Science, Religious Science, and Unity—all thrived through the twentieth century
and into the twenty-ﬁrst, bringing their versions of conﬁdent living to pragmatically
tuned metaphysical believers and practitioners.
424 Arrivals
Divine Science—oﬃcially Divine Science Federation International—is based
in Denver, Colorado, and is the smallest of the three denominations, with, by the
last decade of the twentieth century, only thirty plus congregations in the United
States and some centers in Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.61 A strong
example of the facile networking that characterized New Thought from its beginnings,
Divine Science could boast a series of founders—the three Coloradobased
Brooks sisters, Alethea Brooks Small, Fannie Brooks James, and, foremost,
Nona Lovell Brooks (1862–1945), as well as Malinda Cramer (1844–1906), who
gave the movement its name. In 1885 in San Francisco, Cramer, who had been
an invalid for twenty-ﬁve years, gave up on doctors and determined to get well
on her own. After that, according to her own report, she had a felt experience of
the omnipresence of God and experienced, too, a sense that she herself was in
God. She got well and by 1887 began teaching and also attended a class oﬀered
by Emma Curtis Hopkins in the Bay City. Cramer had likewise formed an association
with a former Mary Baker Eddy student named Miranda Rice, so she
must have been aware of Eddy’s teaching.
The same year that Cramer took the Hopkins class, in Pueblo, Colorado, two
of the Brooks sisters—Nona and Alethea—became students of Kate Bingham,
a teacher who had returned from Chicago, where, she claimed, she had been
healed by Hopkins. Bingham’s classes, too (and not surprisingly in light of the
Hopkins connection), stressed the omnipresence of God. Nona Brooks, who had
a troubling throat condition unresponsive to medical treatment, took the Bingham
classes and in the course of one of them claimed an experience of white light
and sheer presence that left her instantly and completely healed. Meanwhile,
the third sister, Fannie Brooks James, studied under Mabel MacCoy, a former
Chicago Hopkins student who had ﬁrst sent Bingham to her teacher there. Immersed
in Hopkins teaching and teachers, the three at the same time moved away
from the denials of the reality of the material order characteristic of Christian
Science and Hopkins-style New Thought, aﬃrming the creation as an expression
of God that shared in the divine substance. When Cramer traveled to Denver to
teach New Thought classes, Nona Brooks attended, and the two women felt a
connection. The name Divine Science came from Cramer, and the Brooks sisters
received permission to use it for their teaching. The two streams converged.
To the Statement of Being found in one form or another in both Christian Science
and New Thought groups (there is no reality but God), Divine Science
added the Law of Expression—an agency-oriented formula that stressed the act
of the creator as manifested in creation. The shift was subtle, but it suggests once
again the preoccupation with energy that Trine had signaled and that marked
the twentieth-century-and-continuing version of metaphysics so strongly.
New Ages for All 425
In 1892, Nona Brooks formed the International Divine Science Federation,
and in 1898 the Divine Science College was incorporated in Denver. With networking
intrinsic to its style and with Brooks a prominent speaker at New
Thought conventions, by 1922 Divine Science had become part of the International
New Thought Alliance. By then, too, its churches were ﬂourishing in
West Coast cities and also in midwestern locations like Illinois, Kansas, Missouri,
and Ohio, while, in the East, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.,
all became sites for Divine Science churches. The relatively independent congregations
in the movement became more formally organized in 1957 with the
creation of the Divine Science Federation International. Meanwhile, Divine
Science publications kept coming. In former Irish Catholic and Jesuit-trained
Emmet Fox (1886–1951), with his metaphysical readings of the Bible and his
‘‘Golden Key’’ of reﬂecting on God instead of present diﬃculty, the movement
produced one of the most well-known New Thought authors of the Depression
years. Tantalizing hints in earlier Divine Science publications, however, suggest
extrabiblical sources for its aﬃrmations. Although Cramer—a former Quaker—
insisted on personal spiritual experience as the origin of her teachings, J. Stillson
Judah long ago pointed to evidence of her acquaintance with Christian Science,
Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Theosophy, and Indian philosophy. For Nona
Brooks, Hazel Deane’s biography cited her awareness of the writings of Phineas
Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, Helena Blavatsky, H. Emilie Cady, Ralph Waldo
Trine, Henry Wood, and similar authors. But the oﬃcial story, once again, was
that Brooks and her sisters operated with personal experience primary: They
picked and chose what supported their intuitions and their work.62
By contrast to Divine Science, the roots of Religious Science lay in the experience
and teaching of one man. Ernest Holmes (1887–1960), however, in
his combinativeness thoroughly reﬂected the New Thought desire for synthesis
that Divine Science also hinted. Holmes, like a series of metaphysical religious
leaders before him, did not come to his task equipped with professional training.
He never went to college, although his brother Fenwicke Holmes graduated
from Colby College in Maine, went on to Hartford Theological Seminary,
and became a Congregationalist minister on the West Coast. Fenwicke
Holmes, however, would eventually leave the ministry to work with his brother,
and it was Ernest Holmes who took the lead in the movement that became Religious
Science. Important here, from early on he was apparently an insatiable
reader. J. Stillson Judah detailed a series of authors whom Holmes knew, including
Emerson and especially his classic essay ‘‘Self-Reliance.’’ The future Religious
Science founder was familiar with Eddy’s Science and Health, had read
New Thought authors like the aﬀective Hopkins and Cady and the more noetic
426 Arrivals
Christopher D. Larson and Orison Swett Marden, and was drawn as well to the
‘‘Hindu’’ mysticism of Swami Ramacharaka. By 1915, he had turned his attention
to Hermetic materials, the Bhagavad Gita, and even the Persian Zend-Avesta.
He was also seeking to synthesize these widely diﬀerent materials with an AngloAmerican
literary tradition of reﬂection that included Emerson, Walt Whitman,
William Wordsworth, and Robert Browning. Most of all, he found himself
attracted to the English metaphysical writer Thomas Troward (1847–1916),
with his triadic understanding of body, conscious mind, and spirit as the stuﬀ of
human existence. For Troward and for Holmes, spirit represented both the Universal
Mind (God) and the subjective, or unconscious, mind of humans. This
subjective mind mediated God’s creative power, and it responded to suggestions
from the conscious mind to manifest health or illness. Indeed, there was a mechanical
quality to the divine operation in this activity, since Universal Mind produced
a form in the objective world to match each idea—in Troward’s conscious
application of what he saw as the Swedenborgian law of correspondences.63
As the rationalism of this statement already suggests, Holmes—unlike Cramer
and the Brooks sisters—represented a noetic version of New Thought. For him
‘‘science’’ functioned like clockwork and yielded expected results in what Religious
Science practitioners later liked to call ‘‘scientiﬁc prayer.’’ At the same time
Holmes had reportedly experienced what was by then being called—after the
appearance of the work of Richard Maurice Bucke—‘‘cosmic consciousness.’’
Moreover, by 1924 when he moved to New York for a brief period, he began to
visit the elderly Emma Curtis Hopkins and became her last student. Hopkins
had by this time, of course, turned thoroughly toward the mysticism that had attracted
her throughout her long career, and her mysticism conﬁrmed and intensiﬁed
the direction in which Holmes was already headed. Charles Braden wrote,
in fact, that Holmes considered Hopkins, alongside the thirteenth-to-fourteenthcentury
German Meister Eckhart, the ‘‘greatest of the mystics.’’64
Meanwhile, Holmes’s pen had not been idle. He and his brother had early
begun the magazine Uplift, and they also published their share of books. Ernest
Holmes’s ambitious work that would become the textbook of Religious Science,
however, appeared in 1926, after his turn to mysticism; in its revised and expanded
version of 1938 it grew to well over six hundred pages. The work systematically
used Holmes’s synthesis of Troward and a series of other sources in his
own combinative religious declaration. From the start, he had ratcheted up the
degree of abstraction in a mode characteristic of noetic New Thought writers.
Scriptural quotations and text citations, while present, were minimal. (Much
later, in 1957, when J. Stillson Judah asked Holmes if he considered his teaching
to be Christian, Holmes hesitated before replying that he was not sure that
New Ages for All 427
this was the case.) ‘‘There is nothing supernatural about the study of Life from
the metaphysical viewpoint,’’ Holmes announced in his introduction. Hailing
the ‘‘subconscious mind’’ as the ‘‘mental law of our being, and the creative factor
within us,’’ he aﬃrmed to readers that there was ‘‘a mental law, working out
the will and purposes of our conscious thoughts. This can be no other than our
individual use of that Greater subjective mind, which is the seat of all mental
law and action, and is ‘The Servant of the Eternal Spirit throughout the ages.’’’
Holmes had read Sigmund Freud, and that was apparent. But the formulation
was also, in its own way, Jamesian—emphasizing agency, with the subjective, or
subliminal, self opened out to an All (although I am aware of no direct evidence
that Holmes read William James). At the same time, there was a will-power gloss
on the access a person could have to the subliminal, or subjective, and it iterated
the message of the enlightened body-self, the enhanced and divinized ego-self
that an exoteric American Hermeticism was constructing.65
‘‘No mystery’’ obscured the operation of the Subjective Mind and its mental
law, and the ‘‘road to freedom’’ lay ‘‘not through mysteries or occult performances,
but through the intelligent use of Nature’s forces and laws.’’ ‘‘Conscious
intelligence’’ marked the spiritual world, and the Subjective functioned as ‘‘a
world of Law and of mechanical order.’’ It worked in peoples’ lives as ‘‘largely a reaction,
an eﬀect, a way.’’66 It was not a person (there went the biblical God), even
though often it seemed to act personally. Mind, then, could be approached scientiﬁcally
because it worked by (old-style, Newtonian) laws. Learn the law and
how to manipulate it, and you learned a miracle. Distinguishing between the
conscious mind and the subjective mind, Holmes thought that both echoed the
‘‘‘Eternal Thing’ Itself,’’ and he was willing to accord to it the qualities that had
traditionally been associated with a divine Person; indeed, he was quite willing
to call it God. But God was Energy, and Energy existed to be used: ‘‘This Universal
Life and Energy ﬁnds an outlet in and through all that is energized, and
through everything that lives. There is One Energy back of all that is energized.
This Energy is in everything. . . . Our thought and emotion is the use we make—
consciously or unconsciously—of this original creative Thing that is the Cause
of everything.’’ With the ‘‘seed of perfection’’ hidden within, Spirit worked for
people by working through them. Surrounded by Mind or Intelligence, humans
also existed within it and might ‘‘draw from It.’’ However, what was drawn had
to come ‘‘through the channel of our own minds.’’ Holmes added that
Emerson had advised others to get their ‘‘bloated nothingness out of the way of
the divine circuits.’’67
How did people use these seemingly rareﬁed propositions? The answer is that
they gave themselves ‘‘treatments’’—with each treatment a strategy of mental
428 Arrivals
interruption and reversal that was expected to alter the course of external events
and circumstances. (Both Religious Science and Divine Science practitioners—
but not Unity students—spoke of treatments, although people in all three worked
in much the same mode.) Holmes explained that a treatment was ‘‘a spiritual
entity in the mental world’’ and was ‘‘equipped with power and volition.’’ ‘‘Operating
through the Law,’’ it knew ‘‘exactly how to work and what methods to use
and just how to use them.’’ The methods, it turned out, were strenuous denials
(of undesired conditions) and aﬃrmations (of desired ones), but—and this was
the diﬃcult part—experienced not through a clenched determination put into
the word but through the opening that the word produced. ‘‘We do not put the
power into this word, but we do let the power of the Law ﬂow through it, and the
one who most completely believes in this power will produce the best results.’’68
Holmes, for all his abstraction, was willing to provide an example:
One ﬁnds himself impoverished. He wishes to change this condition. He knows
that it is not in accord with Ultimate Reality; that the Spirit imposes no limitations.
. . . First, he realizes that the Law of Life is a Law of Liberty, of Freedom.
He now states that this Law of Liberty is ﬂowing through him and into all his
aﬀairs. But the image of his limitation persists. . . .
Right here, he must stop and declare that these images of limitation are
neither person, place nor thing; that they have no power, personality nor presence
and no real law to support them. He does not believe in them and they
cannot operate through him. He is free from their inﬂuence, forever. He then
begins to ﬁll his thought with the idea of faith, the expectancy of good and the
realization of plenty. He senses, and mentally sees, right action in his life. He
puts his whole trust in the Law of Good, and It becomes very real to him as he
deﬁnitely speaks It into being—into his being and into the being of his aﬀairs.69
What had happened? For Holmes and Religious Science practitioners, science
had triumphed over sense. Looked at from another point of view, though,
mental magic had happened—the manipulation of consciousness (instead of the
maneuvering of material ritual accoutrements) to obtain a desired result in the
material world. At the same time, Holmes was recommending mystics to his followers—calling
a mystic ‘‘one who intuitively perceives Truth and, without mental
process, arrives at Spiritual Realization.’’ For nonmystics, (spiritual) evolution
advanced similar goals in the ‘‘awakening of the soul to a recognition of its unity
with the Whole.’’ Its aim was to produce an individual who might ‘‘completely
manifest the whole idea of life,’’ thus bringing ‘‘Unity to the point of particularization.’’
And like Helena Blavatsky and Theosophists, Holmes saw material evolution
as the eﬀect of this spiritual evolution. ‘‘This reverses the popular belief,
New Ages for All 429
declaring that evolution is the result of intelligence, rather than intelligence being
the result of evolution!’’70 Holmes and his students were having life both ways—
drawing energy from mystical systems and, through the mental transformers of
will and intent, lighting up lives for enhanced ego-selves. On grounds like this,
living could, indeed, be conﬁdent, and Religious Science did grow conﬁdently
through a series of organizational changes.
As early as 1917, Holmes and his brother had begun what they called the Metaphysical
Institute, and Ernest Holmes was ordained to carry on his work by the
Denver Divine Science Church. A year after he published Science of Mind,
however, he established the Institute of Religious Science and Philosophy in
Los Angeles. Aﬃliated institutes sprang up in a loose organizational structure,
and eventually the groups began to call themselves churches and the Religious
Science Church. By 1949, the International Association of Religious Science
Churches was incorporated. However, as the Church of Religious Science took
shape out of the older Los Angeles institute alongside other groups and centers,
divisiveness erupted over issues of democracy versus central control. Should all—
on a Christian Science model—be legal aﬃliates of the Los Angeles Religious
Science Church? Or should a more congregational polity persist? Some—the
larger group—chose the ﬁrst model, and others the second, so that separate organizations
resulted and continued. By the last decade of the twentieth century,
those in the International Association of Religious Science Churches, which had
resisted formal aﬃliation with the Los Angeles Church of Religious Science and
insisted on local control, had become Religious Science International. This organization
included over one hundred churches in the United States and ﬁve in
Canada as members, and it oﬀered enthusiastic support to the International New
Thought Alliance. Meanwhile, the Religious Science Church, organized along
the lines desired by Holmes and now known as the United Church of Religious
Science, had become the majority body. Like Religious Science International
a strong supporter of the International New Thought Alliance, it claimed some
270 churches and related groups not only in the United States and Canada but
also in thirteen other countries from Central and South America and western
Europe (including Britain) to Africa, India, Australia, and the Philippines.71
The Unity School of Christianity, however, was at least twice as large. Moreover,
the size of its formal organization—both as Unity School and, from 1966,
as the Association of Unity Churches—was only a minimal statement of its inﬂuence
by the last decade of the twentieth century. Melton reported that the Association
of Unity Churches could count approximately seventy thousand members,
with nearly 550 congregations and over one hundred aﬃliated study groups
in North America alone, while in other countries there were ﬁfty-ﬁve congrega-
430 Arrivals
tions and ﬁfty study groups. Still, Unity—even in the early twenty-ﬁrst century—
remained uncomfortable thinking of itself as a denomination. Local churches
often pronounced themselves ‘‘nondenominational,’’ and the national leadership
preferred to think of Unity as a movement.72 Such ambivalence toward,
and even rejection of, denominational status only reiterated Unity’s early history.
From the ﬁrst, Unity had invented itself as a broadcast beacon for the printed
word, and with its numerous publications—most notably its Daily Word (from
1924)—it reached a far wider audience than self-conscious metaphysical believers.
Unity’s message of conﬁdent living, innocuously presented, made its way
even into evangelical and fundamentalist households without causing alarm or
concern. As we have seen, Unity was the late-nineteenth-century creation of
Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City, Missouri, and thus—like Divine
Science—considerably older than Holmes’s movement. It also shared with Divine
Science a set of identiﬁcations that continued, throughout the twentieth
century, to place it squarely within the aﬀective, Hopkins-style New Thought
community. Beyond that—unlike Holmes and many Religious Scientists—it
always understood itself as thoroughly Christian. Yet, with Charles Fillmore, it
absorbed teachings from nineteenth-century Theosophy to turn-of-the-century
metaphysical Asia and then, in Fillmore’s style, the late-twentieth-century-andcontinuing
New Age and new spirituality movements.
For all Charles Fillmore’s theological facility later, Myrtle Fillmore (1845–
1931) led in bringing the pair into the Hopkins orbit and, so, into New Thought
(although, like Hopkins, they originally called themselves Christian Scientists).
Born Mary Caroline Page of Methodist parents, a graduate of Oberlin College,
and later a teacher in Clinton, Missouri, she was nine years Charles Fillmore’s
senior. The two met in Texas, married, and settled in Colorado in 1881. They
moved to Kansas City, Missouri, three years later, and Charles Fillmore began
selling real estate there. By 1886, according to her recollection, Myrtle Fillmore
believed that she was dying of an inherited tubercular condition along with intestinal
and related problems. Medical remedies failed, and Fillmore thought
her prospects bleak. Then, however, Eugene B. Weeks, a non-Eddy Christian
Science practitioner, came from Chicago to Kansas City to present a course of
lectures. Both Fillmores attended, but it was Myrtle Fillmore who was riveted by
what she heard. Instead of a familiar tale of family genetics and health weakness,
she listened to a new and diﬀerent account of her ancestry. She was God’s child,
and that was her ‘‘hereditary parentage.’’ ‘‘The truth came to me—a great revelation,
showing me that I am a child of the one whole and perfect mind, created
to express the health that God is.’’ She took the message and, instead of being
healed by Weeks, did with it what later became central to Unity teaching: She
New Ages for All 431
‘‘applied’’ it—in a series of persistent aﬃrmations that straddled a line between
the will-power teaching of noetic New Thought and a warmer, more aﬃliative
brand of Christianity. ‘‘It ﬂashed upon me that I might talk to the life in every
part of my body and have it do just what I wanted. I began to teach my body and
got marvelous results. . . . I told my heart that the pure love of Jesus Christ ﬂowed
in and out through its beatings and that all the world felt its joyous pulsation. I
went to all the life centers in my body and spoke words of Truth to them—words
of strength and power. . . . until the organs responded.’’73
Charles Fillmore was initially more skeptical, but—already a student of Theosophy
and Hermetica—he was impressed by his wife’s improvement and gradually
came to accept the new metaphysics. He began using aﬃrmative-style prayer
for a hip dislocated since a skating accident in his childhood and a stunted leg that
had plagued him afterward. (He was later to point to a slow improvement over the
years in the condition of the leg and the hip, until, he said, both legs were nearly
the same length.) By 1889, he had left his real estate business and begun publishing
the magazine Modern Thought. The next year he invited Emma Curtis
Hopkins to Kansas City to lecture, and then both Fillmores went to Chicago to
study at her Christian Science Theological Seminary. They were ordained by
Hopkins in 1891. By then, Charles Fillmore had renamed his magazine Christian
Science Thought and, soon thereafter, simply Thought, because of Eddy’s
legal objections to generic uses of the Christian Science name. By this time, too,
Myrtle Fillmore, who had been operating as a spiritual-healing practitioner since
her own restoration to health, had thrown herself into the work of prayer ministry,
becoming co-central secretary to the Society of Silent Help, which her husband
had founded as early as 1889. The pair took the name Unity for their work;
a new magazine called Unity was begun (Thought was incorporated into it four
years later); and the prayer ministry became the Society of Silent Unity and later
simply Silent Unity. The Fillmores encouraged the formation of local societies
of Silent Unity (there were some six thousand members by the mid-1890s), and
a message of aﬃrmative prayer and study became the business of Unity. With
a growing list of publications and other experiments (the Fillmores started the
vegetarian Unity Inn, for example, in 1905), the Unity School of Christianity was
incorporated in 1914. By 1922, Unity was on the radio, and two years later it had
purchased its own radio station, which operated for a decade, with Charles Fillmore
devoting considerable time to radio lecturing. (A radio and television program
would be launched again in 1969.) By 1949, Unity headquarters had been
shifted to a fourteen-hundred-acre location outside Kansas City, which was developed
as Unity Village and continued into the twenty-ﬁrst century.74
If Unity people did not think they belonged to a denomination, they thought of
432 Arrivals
themselves as students, and what they thought they studied in their metaphysical
(that is, allegorical) readings of the Bible was practical Christianity. For example,
the Unity churches that sprang up considered themselves to be dedicated not
to Jesus Christ but to the teachings of Jesus Christ. The low Christology of the
Unity movement rendered it diﬃcult, anyway, to focus exclusively on the person
of Jesus. The man from Nazareth was an elder brother and way-shower, and
Unity students believed that the living Christ presence had anointed him and
could take over their lives as well. Still more, the discourse community of the
movement emphasized that practitioners were, indeed, students. Ministers wore
no ministerial robes for Sunday services and provided ‘‘lessons,’’ not sermons, for
their congregants. Church bulletins sometimes conveniently supplied space for
taking notes. Within the churches, organs were out, and pianos and other, lighter
instruments were in.
Unity’s basic textbook came to be—perhaps surprisingly—not the work of one
of the Fillmores but instead the production of the homeopathic physician and
student of Emma Curtis Hopkins, H. Emilie Cady (1848–1941). Cady’s Lessons
in Truth began in an invitation from the Fillmores in 1894 to publish a course
of lectures on ‘‘truth principles’’ in Unity magazine. By 1901, because of a steady
demand for the material, it appeared as a book, and so began a history of enduring
demand and reprinting. According to Russell A. Kemp, by 1975 it had been
translated into eleven languages as well as Braille, and according to Neal Vahle
by 2002 it had sold more than 1.6 million copies, thus outselling every other
Unity book. Through the years, Unity played fast and loose with the text, altering
the order of the chapters and removing material—like a section on ‘‘chemicalization’’
(an Eddy term that signals an agitation and aggravation of old beliefs
on their way to dissolution)—that seemed unsuited to a changed and changing
time. Unity likewise supplied chapter and verse for biblical texts (which left their
King James English for the New Revised Standard Version), whereas Cady did
not, and Unity editors even transformed references like ‘‘man’’ to more politically
correct language in the late twentieth century.75
The somewhat old-fashioned title Lessons in Truth, with its suggestion of a
ﬁxed order of the universe and an absolute reality, substantial and unchanging,
belied to some extent its message of action and energy. Cady, in keeping with
metaphysical idealism, did her share of aﬃrming a divine unchangeability, calling
God ‘‘the underlying substance of all things’’ and a ‘‘principle’’ that was ‘‘unchanging’’
and ‘‘forever uncognizant of and unmoved by the changing things of
time and sense.’’ That acknowledged, the reader needed only to turn to Cady’s
ﬁrst lesson, ‘‘Statement of Being,’’ to ﬁnd another version of the divine. ‘‘God
is Spirit, or the creative energy which is the cause of all visible things,’’ Cady
New Ages for All 433
announced. ‘‘Man,’’ in turn, was ‘‘the last and highest manifestation of divine
energy, the fullest and most complete expression (or pressing out) of God.’’ Meanwhile,
the moving waters Cady had invoked as early as 1891 were there, too. The
‘‘one Source of being’’ was the ‘‘fountainhead’’ and ‘‘the living fountain of all
good.’’ In metaphors and images that had initially preceded Trine’s, God was a
‘‘great reservoir’’—one that led into ‘‘innumerable small rivulets or channels,’’
each of which opened out ‘‘into a small fountain.’’ ‘‘Continually ﬁlled and replenished
from the reservoir,’’ each fountain was ‘‘itself a radiating center.’’ ‘‘The
love, the life, and the power which are God,’’ Cady emphasized, were ‘‘ready
and waiting with longing impulse to ﬂow out through us in unlimited degree.’’
‘‘Stagnation,’’ by contrast, was ‘‘death.’’76
Parallels in Cady’s language to Trine’s images of cleaning out a trough suggest
more than a simple transference from one to the other but instead a metaphysical
discourse community widely congenial to these metaphors. ‘‘A pool cannot be
kept clean and sweet and renewed unless there is an outlet as well as an inlet. It is
our business to keep the outlet open, and God’s business to keep the stream ﬂowing
in and through us.’’ ‘‘Your greatest work,’’ Cady counseled, ‘‘will be done in
your own God-appointed channel.’’ Unity students who pored over these agencyoriented
dimensions of ‘‘Truth’’ had learned from the start Noah Webster’s deﬁnition
for spirit in the contemporary dictionary that Cady was using. ‘‘‘Spirit is
life. . . . It is vital essence, force, energy, as distinct from matter.’’ Studying these
lessons with the aid of ‘‘Question Helps’’ for each of the chapters, they could arrive
at a perception of metaphysical teaching in which the unchanging was yet
the ever-moving.77 They would be primed for the active work of prayer.
For besides studying, Unity students prayed. For them, prayer meant, ﬁrst,
‘‘entering the silence,’’ in which—as in the hymn—they sought to have their
‘‘channels’’ opened and receptive to a divine presence within. Only after they experienced
a felt sense of connection were they instructed to continue to the next
stage of prayer—the denials (of what was undesirable) and aﬃrmations of the
desired outcomes that they considered to be aligned with Truth. Like other mental
healing practitioners, they decreed what they regarded as good and expected
outworkings and manifestations. On these terms, Silent Unity was drawn into a
national prayer ministry, using a developing technology to advance its work. By
the late twentieth century, a twenty-four-hour prayer telephone line was available
(and more recently a website), and people who had no formal relationship
to Unity were often users. A cadre of Silent Unity prayer workers held requests
in prayer for thirty days, sent letters to callers, and encouraged people in general
to engage in prayer, as in the annual World Day of Prayer that by the end of
the century was being promoted. Prayer workers, from the time of the Fillmores,
434 Arrivals
stopped all activity to engage in regular periods of prayer throughout the day.
There were legendary tales about how May Rowland, director of Silent Unity
from 1916 to 1971, refused to leave the Silent Unity prayer tower during a tornado
alert. Prayer, for Rowland and other students of Unity, was the chief vehicle for
harnessing their own divine energy and bringing it to bear on practical situations.
Unity’s Daily Word—a small monthly pamphlet with a daily aﬃrmation, short
related discourse, and scriptural verse—above all promoted aﬃrmative prayer
and practice. From the ﬁrst, it touched a popular core, with a circulation totaling
over 144,000 by 1928, some 182,000 a decade later, and nearly 400,000 in 1948.
By 2002, according to Neal Vahle, it had 1.2 million subscribers and was available
in eight languages and in Braille. These readers, obviously, had to be mostly nonUnity
students, since, as we saw, the membership rolls of Unity churches have
been vastly smaller. English-language editions of the Daily Word, at least, came
in regular and large-type versions, and subscription rates were nominal. Always,
the telephone number for the Silent Unity prayer line was prominently printed
on the inside front cover, along with, in the computer age, the Unity website address.
One recent ‘‘word,’’ for example, begins with the aﬃrmation ‘‘God’s healing
love is ﬂowing through me as forgiveness.’’ Providing the word ‘‘Forgive’’ as a
brief marginal keyword for practice, the short aﬃrmative meditation—written in
the ﬁrst person—ends with the declaration ‘‘My heart is once again a clear, unobstructed
channel for God’s healing love that ﬂows through me and from me.’’
The scriptural verse that follows (Luke 23:34) quotes Jesus asking his father to
forgive his persecutors.78 Clearly, the reader is being asked to emulate Jesus the
teacher, putting the message into practice for the day at hand.
Indeed, a short list of Unity beliefs—ideas about the one presence and power of
God everywhere, about a living Christ presence within, about the creative power
of thought and the demonstrable eﬀects of prayer—always includes an emphasis
on practice. Unity principles work, devotees have insisted. Their insistence has
linked them to the energy metaphors and preferences of twentieth-century New
Thought even if, for most of the century, their oﬃcial organization had no formal
connection with the International New Thought Alliance. Charles Fillmore, for
example, thought the divine energy within to be so powerful that physical immortality
could result, and early Unity students embraced reincarnation beliefs
as a ﬁrst step toward their immortal futures. After the smashing of the atom and
the demonstrated power of the bomb, Fillmore wrote that ‘‘the next achievement
of science will be the understanding of the mental and spiritual abilities latent
in man through which to develop and release these tremendous electrons, protons,
and neutrons secreted in the trillions of cells in the physical organism. . . .
It is through release of these hidden life forces in his organism that man is to
achieve immortal life, and in no other way.’’79
New Ages for All 435
Fillmore read the Gospel accounts of Jesus in analogous terms, using notions
of the atom that he had conceived at least as early as 1912 and interpolating them
with theosophical ideas. For the resurrection, Fillmore could explain the narrative
in natural terms because Jesus had ‘‘simply unloosed the dynamic atoms of
His whole body and released their electrical energy. This threw Him into the
fourth dimension of substance, which He called the ‘kingdom of the heavens.’’’
(The ‘‘fourth dimension,’’ reported Fillmore, was ‘‘a state of existence that popular
material science says must be, in order to account for the eﬀects that are being
expressed on every side.’’) At the same time, in a theosophical gloss on Christian
teaching, Fillmore invoked the ‘‘twelve powers of man’’—what he called
aspects of the ‘‘Subconscious realm’’ that were correlated to twelve centers in
an idealized male body, much on the order of occult renditions of Kabbalistic
charts depicting the power centers of the Sephiroth. Always, Jesus provided the
metaphysical template, and the ‘‘soul development’’ of Jesus demonstrated what
human growth and development should be. The highest center in Fillmore’s
Christian scheme was an ‘‘I Am’’ center at the crown of the head (‘‘where phrenology
locates spirituality,’’ he explained). Humans could look toward the ‘‘second
coming of Christ’’ in ‘‘the awakening and the regeneration of the subconscious
mind through the superconscious or Christ Mind.’’80
The sacred technology for awakening and regeneration, in turn, came through
the power of words. In Fillmore’s ﬁrst book, Christian Healing (1909), he pointed
to the Genesis account of God’s ‘‘original creative Word’’ and declared that humans
could not know ‘‘how the thought, or Word, works’’ except through their
own consciousness. From there he invoked the spoken word, which, he told
readers, ‘‘carries vibrations through the universal ether, and also moves the intelligence
inherent in every form, animate or inanimate.’’ This power of the word,
he said, was given to be used, and humans had the power ‘‘to deny and dissolve
all disintegrating, discordant, and disease-forming words.’’ ‘‘It is your duty as expresser
of the divine law,’’ he enjoined, ‘‘to speak forth the Logos, the very word of
God, and cause the Garden of Eden, the everywhere present Mind-Substance,
to manifest for you and in you in its innate perfection.’’ Always, in circular fashion,
the word led back to prayer. Writing about her long experience as director
of Silent Unity, May Rowland remarked in 1961, ‘‘We feel that our prayers are
eﬀective because we speak the truth about you.’’ Fillmore himself had long before
written that ‘‘the secret of demonstration is to conceive what is true in Being
and to carry out the concept in thought, word, and act.’’ Thus Fillmore’s prayer
became, in the terms of this narrative, the highest form of mental magic: ‘‘If I
can conceive a truth, there must be a way by which I can make that truth apparent.
If I can conceive of an inexhaustible supply existing in the omnipresent
ethers, there is a way by which I can make that supply manifest.’’ Again and again,
436 Arrivals
the path to realization came through the articulated word, the word of prayer:
‘‘Every word is a thought in activity, and when spoken it goes out as a vibratory
force that is registered in the all-providing substance.’’81
Fillmore could have added, by extension, the printed word. Unity’s steady
supply of the same—often, as we have seen, to an audience only peripherally
related to Unity School—became an important factor in the spread of New
Thought belief and practice in society at large. It did so by providing a word with
an identity tag that could not be recognized, a word that consorted amicably with
whatever else resided in peoples’ minds. But in this Unity was not alone. If all
of New Thought was thoroughly inept in producing denominations, in the end
it found a better way to spread its spirituality. It disappeared. It became a part
of general culture, so that by eﬀacing its own logo it successfully shaped American
mentality in marked and continuing ways. This is not to say that, through
some vast conscious or unconscious missionary plot, it benumbed and beguiled
an unsuspecting populace. Rather, New Thought had goods for sale that Americans
wanted. It told them what they were inclined to hear, conﬁrming them in
their already-present suspicion of the divine status of their secret selves. Now New
Thought was inviting them to make the secret public. Thoroughly discounting
the dark recesses of the Freudian unconscious, New Thought’s inner halls of
light only conﬁrmed the exoterics of American identity. Purveyors of democracy
and freedom for all, leaders of the world’s ﬁrst and most successful revolution,
Americans thought well of themselves, and the message of inner divinity and
outer power supported their self-conceptions.
Positive thinking took over where conﬁdent living left oﬀ. Gradually, outside
the denominations especially, the aﬀective side of New Thought began to yield
to an aggressive noetic presence, as New Thought authors and their imitators
did exactly what William James said they were doing: Because of the size of the
demand, they ﬂooded the market with readily available and repetitive instruction
manuals for success, ‘‘mechanically produced’’ and driven by the pecuniary
desires of publishers. Whether or not it was ‘‘insincere stuﬀ,’’ as James alleged,
is more diﬃcult to tell. There was an easy glide from conviction and enthusiasm
into the comfortable company of a cash cow. At the same time, drawing the
line from the perspective of the twenty-ﬁrst century for authors about whose lives
little is known seems perverse and wrongheaded. Still, early-twentieth-century
contemporaries were certainly making their judgments about right and wrong,
with aﬀective and Christian-identiﬁed metaphysical religionists casting critical
glances at their brasher neighbors. Charles Fillmore, for example, warned against
selﬁsh use of his ‘‘electronic ﬁre.’’ Employed for self-serving purposes, it became
‘‘destructive’’ because of the ‘‘crosscurrents’’ that it set up ‘‘in the nervous system.’’
New Ages for All 437
He adamantly opposed encouraging ‘‘those who still have worldly ambitions to
take up the development of the twelve powers of man.’’ Readers would be ‘‘disappointed’’
if they sought ‘‘to use these superpowers to gain money’’ or ‘‘control
others’’ or ‘‘make a display of . . . power.’’82
One of the brasher New Thought neighbors was surely William Walker Atkinson,
whom we have met before with his Anglo-American surname and also as
Swami Ramacharaka. His titles did indeed ﬂood the market of his day as commodities
selling other commodities—success, happiness, and health achieved
through the power of thought and will. Even at this writing Amazon.com advertises
twenty-one works by Atkinson (as Atkinson) readily available in inexpensive
reprints through Kessinger Publishing. A master of combinative discourse,
Atkinson in his agency-oriented titles and their contents straddled lines between
New Thought, Theosophy, magical practice, metaphysical Asia (here as Atkinson
without the Ramacharaka pen name), and what would later emerge as positive
thinking. Consider, for instance, his Thought-Force in Business and Everyday
Life, evidently his ﬁrst published book and suggestive of a background that
included business. Published in both Chicago and London in 1901, it was reprinted
in Chicago and New York in 1903, reprinted again in 1911 and 1913, and
available in Russian by 1910. According to Atkinson’s counting, the New York edition
of 1903 was the eighteenth. Be that as it may, the short work of just over one
hundred pages announced itself to be a ‘‘Series of Lessons in Personal Magnetism,
Psychic Inﬂuence, Thought-Force Concentration, Will Power, and Practical
Mental Science.’’ Its partial contents included the topics of vegetarianism,
celibacy, and deep breathing (suggesting a yogic inﬂuence), but also sections
on the power of the eye and magnetic gaze as well as ‘‘volic force’’ (that is, will
power) and direct and telepathic ‘‘volation.’’ Atkinson wanted to show readers
how ‘‘thought force’’ could aid them, and he was interested in ‘‘character building’’
by the use of ‘‘mental control’’ gained through the ‘‘art and practice of concentering.’’
His notions of gaze and will hinted, too, of an older mesmeric model
transformed for new times and situations.83
Atkinson’s Thought Vibration (1906), subtitled evocatively enough The Law
of Attraction in the Thought World, in another short work (less than 150 pages)
aimed to instruct readers on thought waves and their reproduction, conﬂating
notions of ‘‘mind building’’ and secrets of the ‘‘will.’’84 Using the law of gravity
as model, Atkinson explained thought waves in the context of waves of light,
heat, magnetism, and electricity, ﬁnding the diﬀerence that marked these diverse
waves of energy to be in their vibratory rates. For Atkinson, hidden frequencies
existed in the world of light and sound vibration, and humans had only to wait
the day when better honed scientiﬁc tools could locate them. Against this back-
438 Arrivals
drop, the task became to raise the level of one’s inner mental vibrations through
the exercise of will power. Training was required to attain mastery, and mastery
would mean that the ‘‘I’’ could command the mind with the will as its tool. How
did a person do that? The answer came through the New Thought technique of
aﬃrmation. It all worked by law, and by working in concert with law a person
could become immune to injurious thoughts and negative feelings.
Atkinson’s habit of combination had led him to a remarkable synthesis between
Theosophy and New Thought. The theosophical disdain for control of
trance mediums by spirits had transmuted into an active war against control
of the mind by an undisciplined and destructive internal dialogue. The New
Thought weapon to still the assault was the practical technique of aﬃrmation.
Between the two—Theosophy and New Thought—lay a universe of blended
discourse about magnetism and science and also about the occult and magic.
For Atkinson was headed toward a conscious espousal of mental magic—the
manipulation of (subconscious) mind by the overt control and intention of the
(conscious) mind to attain ego goals and desires. The enlightened body-self of
metaphysical Asia and its erstwhile enthusiasts were being led seductively down
a primrose path of desire, vulnerable to the goals of a self-aggrandizing and lessthan-enlightened
ego even as it understood itself to be building ‘‘character.’’
Atkinson rendered the magical ambience of his work still more explicit in the
title of a book he published the following year. The Secret of Mental Magic provided
seven lessons to teach readers how to become mental magicians, experts at
mental healing and suggestion. He speedily followed up the same year with Mental
Fascination, which declared itself a ‘‘supplement or sequel’’ and purported to
give ‘‘special instruction’’ to ‘‘students’’ of the earlier book. It was in Mind-Power
(1912), however, that Atkinson produced probably the most comprehensive work
(it was nearly 450 pages long) that dealt with his version of mental magic. Here
the energy quotient was raised to new heights as he invoked the ‘‘mental dynamo,’’
explained the nature of mental power and ‘‘mentative induction,’’ and
pursued the issue of ‘‘mental magic’’ in animal and human life. Atkinson was
interested in ‘‘personal magnetism’’ and ‘‘channels of inﬂuence,’’ and he oﬀered
readers four varieties of suggestion to assist them. As in other works, he traveled
with an awareness of danger. The ‘‘malicious animal magnetism’’ of the latenineteenth-century
world had entered a new domain of occultism, and Atkinson
solicitously provided a ‘‘glimpse’’ of the ‘‘occult worlds,’’ even as he taught selfprotection
in dangerous territory and gave instruction on mental healing and
‘‘mind-building.’’85
‘‘Entering the silence’’ did not function as a rhetorical trope in Atkinson’s
world. Nor did lengthy disquisitions on the divine source of all. Instead, he had
New Ages for All 439
discovered divinity at ﬁrst hand, and it was mostly male and pointedly operative
in a world of ego-driven goals and successes. If Hermeticism had gone exoteric
in the mass spiritualism of the nineteenth century, it was becoming thoroughly
secular in Atkinson’s rendition, in which the secrets of revelation had become
aﬃrmations of agency and control. The ego-friendly manipulation of success
would continue as other and later business enthusiasts latched onto his formulas
and those of a small army of similar New Thought authors. Together they provide
one expression, at the margin, of what happened to New Thought. In fact,
the experience of Ralph Waldo Trine when he visited Henry Ford in 1928 already
suggests what could result. Trine, the old socialist, found himself swept into the
orbit of the charismatic capitalist and reported billionaire who had read In Tune
with the Inﬁnite and declared for its eﬃcacious support when he was struggling
to build the Ford Motor Company. Trine’s published account of their meeting
shows that he was transﬁxed—even mesmerized—by the objectiﬁed emblem of
what his book had apparently done.86
We gain some insight into the runaway transformation of the New Thought
gospel if we contrast the Depression-era work of Charles Fillmore called simply
Prosperity (1936) with Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937), which promised
to reveal the (Andrew) Carnegie ‘‘secret’’ of getting rich. Like his teacher
Emma Curtis Hopkins, Fillmore remained essentially unconcerned about acquisition
but expected the divine Supply to provide all that he needed, with some
to spare. In a covenant that he and Myrtle Fillmore had signed as early as 1892,
they had dedicated themselves and their money to the ‘‘spirit of Truth’’ and the
‘‘Society of Silent Unity.’’ They understood and agreed ‘‘that the Said Spirit of
Truth shall render unto us an equivalent for this dedication, in peace of mind,
health of body, wisdom, understanding, love, life and an abundant supply of all
things necessary to meet every want without our making any of these things the
object of our existence.’’ In 1936, Fillmore’s teaching was much the same, if elaborated
considerably more. The lessons in his book Prosperity, he volunteered, were
intended ‘‘to explain man’s lawful appropriation of the supplies spiritually and
electrically provided by God.’’ ‘‘When we understand and adjust our mind to the
realm or kingdom where these rich ideas and their electrical thought forms exist
we shall experience in our temporal aﬀairs what is called ‘prosperity.’’’ It was all
scientiﬁc, and it was all based on vibratory laws, as Fillmore saw it. The ether
existed as an ‘‘emanation of mind,’’ and Jesus had anticipated these discoveries
of modern science, calling the ether the ‘‘kingdom of the heavens,’’ which it was
the divine ‘‘good pleasure’’ to bequeath to humans.87
What did all of this mean in practice? With ‘‘man’’ as ‘‘the inlet and outlet’’ of
the divine mind, humans needed to begin to liquidate their debts ﬁrst mentally.
440 Arrivals
Debts had been ‘‘produced by thoughts of lack, impatient desire, and covetousness.’’
When these thoughts were ‘‘overcome,’’ a new train of events would be set
in motion. Avoiding ‘‘‘easy-payment plans,’’’ a debtor should bless creditors ‘‘with
the thought of abundance,’’ knowing that God was the ‘‘unfailing resource’’ and
‘‘inﬁnite and unfailing supply.’’ Change your thinking, Fillmore instructed, and
you changed your outer situation, since ‘‘outer things’’ conformed ‘‘to the inner
pattern.’’ Still more (and suggesting the evangelical world from which many New
Thought converts no doubt came), one should tithe, providing one tenth of one’s
resources ‘‘for the upkeep of some spiritual work or workers. . . . set apart ﬁrst even
before one’s personal expenses’’ were ‘‘taken out.’’ Far from it being ‘‘unthinkable
to connect the teaching of Jesus with the counting house and the market
place,’’ the ‘‘lofty teachings’’ of the Gospels were ‘‘the most practical rules for daily
living.’’ In that context, an idea had ‘‘the power of building thought structures,
which in turn materialize in the outer environment and aﬀairs and determine
every detail of . . . existence.’’ In Fillmore’s version of the by-now-familiar New
Thought metaphor, he told readers, ‘‘Your consciousness is like a stream of water.
If the stream is in any way dammed up, the water settles in all the low places
and becomes stagnant. The quickest way to purify and reclaim the low, ‘swampy’
places in your consciousness is to let in the ﬂood from above by opening the
dam.’’ Nor, once the waters came, should people try to contain them. In his own
theoretical expression of the socialism of the early Trine and a series of other early
New Thought leaders with aﬀective leanings, Fillmore cast his vote for an economic
order that went considerably beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New
Deal. ‘‘The divine law holds that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.
If this truth were thoroughly understood, men would begin at once to make all
property public, available for the use and enjoyment of all the people.’’88
By contrast to Fillmore’s law of ﬂow and electrical energy with the (tithed)
abundance of the kingdom distributed to all, Napoleon Hill gave his ‘‘Andrew
Carnegie’’ version a year later in Think and Grow Rich, a book that, according to
Donald Meyer, in twenty-one years went through twenty-eight printings. Meyer,
calling the Hill work an example of a drift toward ‘‘magical psycho-science,’’ has
pointed to a ‘‘matching audience’’ of ‘‘men on the fringe’’ for this and similar
eﬀorts.89 If these men were down, author Hill was decidedly upbeat. He had from
early life been drawn to the achievements of Carnegie as well as other icons of
the times such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Hill’s Hermetic
secret had been conﬁded to him over half a century before by Carnegie and had
also been passed to thousands of others.
The secret was a secret for success at accumulation. It concerned the basic idea
behind a series of techniques and strategies that would enable practitioners to
New Ages for All 441
acquire ‘‘vast fortunes through the aid of the Carnegie secret.’’ Like Fillmore and
all of the New Thought metaphysicians, Hill considered thoughts to be ‘‘things’’
and things with agency. They were ‘‘powerful things’’ when they were ‘‘mixed
with deﬁniteness of purpose, persistence, and a burning desire for their translation
into riches, or other material objects.’’ Indeed, desire represented the ‘‘starting
point of all achievement’’ and the ‘‘ﬁrst step toward riches.’’ But the second
step, perhaps surprisingly, was faith, and it was here that the metaphysical overlay
of Hill’s method became apparent. If faith was the ‘‘head chemist of the mind,’’
as he declared, when it was ‘‘blended with thought,’’ the ‘‘subconscious mind’’
got the ‘‘vibration’’ and transmitted it to ‘‘Inﬁnite Intelligence, as in the case of
prayer.’’ More than that, when faith was blended with the emotions of love and
sex, the three together had ‘‘the eﬀect of ‘coloring’ thought’’ so that it immediately
reached ‘‘the subconscious mind, where it [was] changed into its spiritual
equivalent, the only form that induces a response from Inﬁnite Intelligence.’’
The Almighty, or its New Thought equivalent, was, in eﬀect, being programmed
to respond according to (business) plan. How was faith developed in order to
start the action of the Inﬁnite? The answer was familiar: It was accomplished
by ‘‘autosuggestion,’’ and autosuggestion happened through the disciplined use
of aﬃrmations. ‘‘Repetition of aﬃrmation of orders to your subconscious mind is
the only known method of voluntary development of the emotion of faith.’’ When
emotions were mixed with faith or any other feeling, Hill told readers, they got
‘‘magnetized’’ and attracted harmonizing vibrations, an assessment with which
Fillmore could agree.90 Always, however, Hill’s plan was a plan of accumulation.
Hill invited readers to lie in their beds at night envisioning how much money
they wanted to acquire, seeing it already in their possession, and stating, as a
kind of contract with the universe, what service or merchandise they would provide
in return. Meanwhile, what was needed for the successful execution of the
dream was the ‘‘power of the master mind.’’ Here knowledge and eﬀort were to
be coordinated ‘‘in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people’’ for attaining
the ﬁnancial goal. The human mind was ‘‘a form of energy,’’ Hill explained,
and part of it was ‘‘spiritual in nature.’’ Coordinating the ‘‘spiritual units of energy
of each mind’’ formed an ‘‘aﬃnity,’’ and that constituted the ‘‘‘psychic’ phase of
the Master Mind.’’ Why was that important? It brought the power of the many to
the service of the self. In a bow to vernacular Freudianism, even sexuality could
be transmuted to the service of the self’s acquisitive goal, fueling it with a stimulus
and energy that could provide ‘‘a super power for action.’’ In the midst of
this, prayer functioned as a necessary assist for the subconscious mind, provided
that it broadcast, like a well-tuned radio, the right radio waves for Inﬁnite Intelligence.
The brain, as the ‘‘broadcasting and receiving station,’’ could pick up the
442 Arrivals
thought vibrations not only of the Inﬁnite but also of other minds, and Hill endorsed
the principle of telepathy, seeing it at work at successful conference tables.
Even, for all the manipulation, there was a ‘‘sixth sense’’—a ‘‘door to the temple
of wisdom’’—by means of which ‘‘Inﬁnite Intelligence’’ might and would ‘‘communicate
voluntarily, without any eﬀort from, or demands by, the individual.’’91
Basic fears—and especially the fear of poverty—needed to be abolished. Always,
however, the Carnegie secret lay in the idea.92 And the idea, as Hill would
have it, was the idea of having and holding. Arguably, metaphysical ‘‘energy’’ had
been dammed in the Hill preoccupation with acquisition, and—while the Inﬁnite
still supervised the project—for the most part the Inﬁnite was now subject
to ego control. A balance had tilted, and the precarious enlightened body-self,
with its enhanced ego goals, had been nudged toward a more focused mode of
activity and toward less metaphysically oriented ego goals. Hill, in eﬀect, had
ﬂirted with metaphysical religion and in the end kidnapped it for a marginal
enterprise. Metaphysics, however, could travel a less purely acquisitive path in
mid-twentieth-century America, one that looked more broadly to a series of goals
that included material prosperity but also peace and tranquility of mind for millions.
The purveyor par excellence of this brand of metaphysical spirituality was
Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993).
Born in small-town Ohio of Methodist parents (his father was a Methodist circuit
minister), Peale graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and, after a stint
in journalism, went back to school at Boston University School of Theology. In
the middle of his studies, he was ordained to the Methodist ministry in 1922 and
after ﬁve years at a church in Brooklyn, New York, accepted a call to University
Methodist Church in Syracuse. Then, with a growing reputation and oﬀers from
both a Methodist church in Los Angeles and the (Dutch) Reformed Church
in America’s Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, Peale in 1932 chose
Marble. He remained there for a long and distinguished career until he retired in
1984. However, as his biographer Carol George has observed, even though Peale
switched denominations oﬃcially, the traditional Methodist culture in which he
had thrived never really left him. His mature message, as it took shape at Marble,
brought the liberal (Arminianized) Methodist tradition together with Calvinist
language, an evangelical style, and conservative politics. As important, Peale
would gradually bring to the combination a clear orientation to metaphysical
spirituality. As long before as his years at Ohio Wesleyan, he had been drawn to
Emerson and James. Already the mystical theology of the divine presence, mediated
by the personalism of Borden Parker Bowne, was part of Peale’s background;
in his Boston seminary days Bowne was in the ascendant. Later, by 1928 while
he was at the Syracuse church, Peale became acquainted with New Thought lit-
New Ages for All 443
erature, gradually moving, as George explains, ‘‘from a mystical Methodism to a
form of New Thought.’’ It would be 1949, at Marble, however, before he would
publicly come to endorse positive thinking along metaphysical lines.93
Nor was Peale secretive about his sources. In Spirits in Rebellion, for example,
Charles Braden recalled the rumors he had heard from New Thought friends
that Ernest Holmes had once visited Marble Collegiate. According to Braden’s
hearsay evidence, after the service Peale greeted the founder of Religious Science
‘‘as one he knew and deeply respected from the reading of his writings.’’
Braden had also heard of Peale’s ‘‘at least indirect contacts’’ with Unity. With
these pieces of information as background, he wrote Peale a letter querying him
about his New Thought connections, and, to his surprise, he received not a letter
in answer but a telephone call. Peale owned that he had read the New Thought
material and had found much that he felt was valuable but—in the same combinative
fashion preferred by metaphysicians—had worked it into his own system.
He referred Braden to his book The Tough-Minded Optimist, in which one
of the chapters (‘‘Never Be Afraid of Anybody or Anything’’) provides autobiographical
reminiscences on Peale’s formation. Yes, as the account reveals, Peale
had discovered a certain kind of ‘‘‘spiritual literature’ which he found was increasingly
getting into the homes of his people.’’ It was emanating, among other
places, from Unity, Religious Science, Science of Mind, Christian Science, and
a series of metaphysically inclined teachers.94
Marble Collegiate Church, like Peale’s previous two churches, grew spectacularly
during his tenure; he brought a small and declining congregation into a
situation of overﬂow, with crowds coming to hear his preaching. He traveled,
he formed organizations, and he started to write. His Guideposts magazine, a
monthly in the style of The Reader’s Digest, from 1945 gave what has been called
‘‘Pealeism’’ a public face throughout the country. With ‘‘More than a magazine’’
as its motto, by the 1950s it had created a national prayer center with Silent
Unity as its model. Subscriptions grew apace: 200,000 before the publication
of The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952; 500,000 in 1953; a million in 1961;
2 million in 1973. ‘‘Through contacts in religion, politics, business, and industry,
he was creating circles of supporters that collectively formed a vast national
network, essentially the constituent part of the Phenomenon of Pealeism,’’ says
George. ‘‘It was indeed a phenomenal creation: Like an octopus, it gradually developed
tentacles that reached deeper into new areas of popular culture.’’ Peale’s
career was, as George assesses it, a ‘‘bellwether for major cultural realignments
in the twentieth century, his priorities more symptom than cause of great subterranean
shifts at work reconstituting the social landscape.’’ Ironically, the shifts
at work had brought to Peale’s huge, far-ﬂung congregation not the solitary busi-
444 Arrivals
nessmen living out their ‘‘motel theory of existence’’ whom he had hoped to
reach. Instead, after 1952 his audience became predominately middle-class and
middle-aged women, and they mostly counted themselves mainstream evangelical
Protestants.95
In time Peale would author well over forty books. But far and away the most
widely known was his inspirational best seller The Power of Positive Thinking, the
work accorded ﬁrst-place status in Louis Schneider and Sanford Dornbusch’s
classic study of major American inspirational books from 1875 to 1955. (Trine’s
In Tune with the Inﬁnite held second place.) From a set of statistics published in
1956 by Alice Payne Hackett, Schneider and Dornbusch cited 2 million copies
of Peale’s book sold. These mid-1950s statistics on the sales success of The Power
of Positive Thinking, however, would be thoroughly eclipsed by the data of later
years. According to Carol George, by the late 1980s the book had reached sales
of over 15 million copies, and it still could be counted one of the top ten books
on self-improvement on the market.96
What had so moved readers to keep buying the book and to recommend it,
apparently, to others? To note, as J. Stillson Judah did, that—like the books with,
usually, the ‘‘greatest appeal’’ in the Schneider-Dornbusch study—it ‘‘contained
concepts like those of New Thought’’ is perhaps to posit a truism. It is also to miss
the agential and pragmatic nature of what Peale was delivering. He was oﬀering
seekers from mainstream churches a set of simple, practical techniques that,
presumably, they could readily use to change their lives miraculously. He was
claiming not a theological breakthrough but an easy way to eﬃcacy and power.
In a book that he declared was written ‘‘for the plain people of this world’’ and
‘‘with deep concern for the pain, diﬃculty and struggle of human existence,’’
Peale hoped to show them how they could cultivate ‘‘peace of mind’’ not as ‘‘escape’’
but as ‘‘a power center out of which comes driving energy for constructive
personal and social living.’’ Moreover, in a discourse style that made him seem
like a veritable student of Unity, he testiﬁed that the book was conceived and
delivered in a context of prayer. ‘‘This book is written to suggest techniques and
to give examples,’’ Peale had begun in his introduction. He was oﬀering readers
‘‘simply a practical, direct-action, personal-improvement manual.’’ Still further,
the how-to principles he provided were not of his invention but given ‘‘by the
greatest Teacher who ever lived and who still lives.’’97
The principles abounded. So did the examples, and—strikingly for a book that
came to have a largely female audience—the examples betrayed a decidedly
male bias. It did not seem to matter, though. Anecdotes ambled their way through
the pages of the book as just-so stories of good times come out of bad, peace out
of turmoil, success out of failure, self-discipline out of addictive behavior. For-
New Ages for All 445
mulaic and pat, they recommended a tripartite approach to any problem: aﬃrm
the desired good; visualize it; believe it. And it would come. The metaphysical
preference for aﬃrmative prayer—with aﬃrmations repeated many times over
—controlled these pages, and so did New Thought metaphors of God as an instreaming,
activating energy that moved through individuals when they called
on higher power or had it mediated to them by another. In one story of his encounter
in a midwestern city with a depressed and lethargic man in a hotel room,
Peale remembered a remarkable turn of events: ‘‘I sought for guidance and found
myself, quite to my surprise, standing beside him and placing my hand upon his
head. I prayed, asking God to heal the man. I suddenly became aware of what
seemed to be the passing of power through my hand which rested upon his head.
I hasten to add that there is no healing power in my hand, but now and then a
human being is used as a channel, and it was evidently so in this instance, for presently
the man looked up with an expression of the utmost happiness and peace
and he said simply, ‘He was here. He touched me. I feel entirely diﬀerent.’’’98
The Unity prayer practice of entering the silence was here: People who lacked
peace of mind were enjoined to ‘‘practice emptying the mind,’’ and they were
urged to the ‘‘daily practice of silence.’’ ‘‘Everyone should insist upon not less than
a quarter of an hour of absolute quiet every twenty-four hours,’’ Peale insisted.
After the silence, or in it, came prayer and visualization. ‘‘Do not always ask when
you pray, but instead aﬃrm that God’s blessings are being given, and spend most
of your prayers giving thanks.’’ In meditation, ‘‘sit relaxed,’’ and ‘‘think of your
mind as the surface of a lake in a storm’’ until ‘‘now the waves subside.’’ Then
‘‘spend two or three minutes thinking of the most beautiful and peaceful scenes
you have ever beheld,’’ and ‘‘repeat slowly . . . words which express quietness and
peace.’’ After that, he told readers, they should repeat the words of Isaiah 26:3:
‘‘‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.’’’ Meanwhile,
the New Thought habit of denial accompanied the Peale advice: ‘‘Never
mention the worst. Never think of it. Drop it out of your consciousness.’’99
Peale recommended Emerson, James, and Thoreau to his readers, and he
especially noted as Emerson’s ‘‘fundamental doctrine’’ the idea that ‘‘the human
personality can be touched with Divine power and thus greatness can be released
from it.’’ Similarly, James had pointed to the power of belief, and Thoreau had
evoked as the ‘‘secret of achievement’’ holding ‘‘a picture of the successful outcome
in mind.’’ Again and again, Peale repeated to readers his New Thought
message of higher power. ‘‘This power is constantly available. If you open to it,
it will rush in like a mighty tide. . . . This tremendous inﬂow of power is of such
force that in its inrush it drives everything before it, casting out fear, hate, sickness,
weakness, moral defeat, scattering them as though they had never touched
446 Arrivals
you, refreshing and restrengthening your life with health, happiness, and good-
ness.’’100
Yet for all his embrace of metaphysical discourse and his reiteration of what
were essentially Hermetic and mesmeric metaphors, Peale was careful to circumscribe
them to the pragmatics of method. He made no announcement of direct
divine presence within, no testimony to God living within you as you, no aﬃrmation
of the great ‘‘I Am’’ thriving at the crown of the head and within one’s
being. Peale was stealing mystical results, like a latter-day Jason stealing a golden
ﬂeece, but the full mystical union in which humans felt themselves to be God—
the union so precarious and problematic for orthodox Christianity—was evaded
and suppressed. Instead, a doctrinally conventional biblical God came from outside
to oﬀer help and salvation to the ﬂoundering individual who called upon
him. All was, on that score, evangelical and even Calvinist, and Peale could feel
that all was well. The critics, however, could not. Clerical and academic alike,
they issued a hue and cry when Peale’s book appeared seemingly everywhere
and became wildly successful in vernacular culture. What George calls a ‘‘savage
critical attack’’ nearly convinced him to resign from Marble Collegiate: Only his
dying father’s wish persuaded him to stay.101
Like Mary Baker Eddy, whose Christian Science brought her the wrath of
orthodox churchmen and other contemporaries, Peale faced the disdain of the
sophisticated in church and not-so-church contexts for his plebeian eﬀorts,
deemed corrosive to (their) culture and to theological thought. Indeed, Peale’s
hard times raise questions about the easy feminist assumption that Eddy faced
the lash of culture mostly because she was a woman speaking and acting with authority.
Instead, placed beside the experience of Eddy, Peale’s similar problems
suggest that what drove critics was that both authors saw their work as faithfully
within the bounds of a larger orthodoxy. Both hybridized their metaphysics to
older, existing constructions within Christianity—for Eddy her Calvinist heritage,
however much she rejected Calvinist predestination; for Peale his Methodist
warmth and evangelicalism in a traditional Gospel culture. In Peale’s case,
those outraged by the wolf within the sheepfold said that Pealeism did not really
represent religion at all but, instead, a masquerading secularism or, in George’s
words, ‘‘a kind of shadow religion’’ that was a ‘‘distorted and dangerous adaptation.’’
Practical Christianity could be an end in itself rather than a means to
ﬁnal glory. Practice could become the center instead of existing in the service
of basic Christianity.102 Beyond that, both Eddy and Peale, as theologians, had
been distinctly lowbrow, and as lowbrow they had, manifestly and undeniably,
trumped the learned of their respective times. Their success could not go un-
New Ages for All 447
noticed among the cultured despisers of acknowledged vernacular participation.
Finally, for both (and for New Thought, in general), a closet anti-Catholicism
may have played a role in their rejection. Did the metaphysical invitation to
the depths of the self in Protestant America smack of Catholicism, in however
heterodox a variant? Was there a way in which even the invocation of an inner
world, or of metaphysics, or of entering the silence raised subliminal fears of
a nonrational religiosity against which the Reformers of the rational Protestant
world had struggled? Could Protestant exotericism remain safe if ordinary people
looked too long and too comfortably into their private selves?
Quashing Peale, however, would not end the experienced comfort of Americans
with the world within. New Thought had leaked out of its community container
all over American culture. Among evangelical Christians, for example,
clerical leaders like Phineas F. Bresee, who founded the (Holiness) Church of
the Nazarene, preached with conviction the God who was divine Supply and
the source of true abundance. Robert H. Schuller (like Peale of the Reformed
Church in America), built the ﬂamboyant Crystal Cathedral from whence he
televangelized his ‘‘Hour of Power,’’ testifying for a systematic theology of selfesteem
and the secret of successful living. And (Granville) Oral Roberts—the
former pentecostal preacher who subsequently got ordained a Methodist minister,
built the City of Faith, and televangelized to the nation—brought to mainstream
notice healing powers as dramatic as those of early Christian Science and
New Thought practitioners.103 Meanwhile, outside the ranks of the clergy, New
Thought made its way among physicians as notions of the psychosomatic origins
of disease grew and medical professionals came to recognize stress as a factor in
illness. For the holistic among them, the New Thought world became an invitation
to a new kind of magical thinking—in which the power of mind imagined
the body into a restored situation of health, well-being, and even spiritual
transformation. To take but one late-twentieth-century example, there is holistic
medical guru Deepak Chopra’s popular book The Way of the Wizard (1995).
Oﬀering readers, as the work’s subtitle promises, ‘‘twenty spiritual lessons for creating
the life you want,’’ Chopra’s book hails Merlin—the renowned magician
of King Arthur’s legendary court—as the greatest teacher in the civilization of
the West. Chopra, an Indian immigrant with an M.D. and former ties to the
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental Meditation, encourages readers not
to embrace either medicine or Asia but instead the path that Merlin trod. Chopra
would show them, through Western Hermeticism, how to go beyond ordinary
reality by shifting their perception and opening themselves to the spiritual transformation
possible in everyday life. Such transformation, his book testiﬁes, rep-
448 Arrivals
resents the true alchemy that the wizard possesses. Thus, if readers followed the
path of Chopra, who followed Merlin, they would go questing for their wisest
selves. The path to this wise self lay, not surprisingly, within: It entailed entering
the silence (once again), observing the mind, awakening it, and then using
it to transform everyday reality. It was all there—the action, the agency, the ﬂow
of power, the pragmatics, the mysticism, and the magic. ‘‘A wizard,’’ Chopra announced,
‘‘can turn fear to joy, frustration to fulﬁllment. A wizard can turn the
time-bound into the timeless. A wizard can carry you beyond limitations into the
boundless.’’ Always, ‘‘the cave of the heart’’ was ‘‘the home of truth,’’ while, simultaneously,
all humans lived ‘‘as ripples of energy in the vast ocean of energy.’’104
And if the wizard was there and all of metaphysics was there, so—in the background—was
Theosophy.
THEOSOPHICAL LINEAGES AND LEGACIES
Katherine Tingley, the ‘‘Purple Mother’’ (she was fond of the color), stepped
into the vacuum left in the Theosophical Society in America with the death of
William Judge in 1896. Her Raja Yoga School at Point Loma, California (see the
preceding chapter), would be only one of a series of experiments that she carried
forward. Tingley (born Westcott) came from old Massachusetts stock with, on
one side, ‘‘strong members of the Congregational Church, and on the other side
. . . materialists.’’ She would later recall a childhood ‘‘spent largely with nature,’’ in
which she ‘‘realized its mystery’’ even as she felt repelled by the religious conservatism
of New England and its ‘‘revengeful’’ and ‘‘punishing’’ God. Signiﬁcantly,
she had enjoyed the company of a grandfather who was a Mason. She had come
to Theosophy after two failed marriages, with a background already in spiritualism
and Eastern occultism. But she also brought with her the inﬂuence of the
American Protestant social gospel and the utopian expectancy that characterized
parts of late-nineteenth-century American culture. Indeed, after she married
Philo B. Tingley in 1888, she opened—by the 1890s—her Do-Good Mission on
New York’s East Side. ‘‘Crowds used to come there daily for soup and bread,’’ she
recollected, ‘‘and what else I could provide to help them.’’ She felt overwhelmed
by the suﬀering all around her, especially during a strike of the period, remembering
a baby who had died in its mother’s arms at the door of her mission. It was
in this context that William Judge noticed her work and came calling, telling her
that he could oﬀer her something ‘‘that would go much deeper, removing the
causes of misery and not merely relieving the eﬀect.’’ Thus, from the ﬁrst, she was
Judge’s ‘‘convert,’’ and she became a close and trusted ally, even nursing him during
illness in his ﬁnal year. She had come to believe that karmic patterns from the
New Ages for All 449
past explained a person’s present circumstances and that present ignorance could
be corrected by education to alter and prevent what gave rise to suﬀering.105
After Judge’s death and the charismatic Tingley’s assumption of control—not
without political maneuvering and the use of mediumship to claim contact with
Judge’s spirit—she announced her proposal for a ‘‘School for the Revival of the
Lost Mysteries of Antiquity.’’ This was a thoroughly Blavatskian idea, but what
was new was Tingley’s vision of the school as part of a utopian society she would
create. With a world crusade already initiated to win members for the Theosophical
Society, she obtained land at Point Loma on the tip of the peninsula that
forms San Diego Bay. Other Theosophists were already primed to join her. In the
midst of widespread utopian interest, they had read, for example, Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward (1888), the popular utopian novel that argued for a new
cooperative social organization based on the collective power of the state. Theosophists—like
a number of New Thought people (see chapter 5)—had joined
the Nationalist clubs that were spreading the Bellamy vision. Amid their shared
enthusiasm, in 1897 the Point Loma Community’s cornerstone was laid, and
Tingley proclaimed the future. Utopianism and a subtle Masonry blended as she
dedicated ‘‘this stone: a perfect square, a ﬁtting emblem of the perfect work that
will be done in the temple for the beneﬁt of humanity and the glory of the ancient
sages.’’ Tingley’s Theosophy would join a social-reform ideal to the inner
quest, following the impulse of spiritualists and New Thought people but giving
new concreteness to the linked projects of outer and inner work. The Point Loma
Community aimed to become a new American ‘‘city upon a hill,’’ a metaphysical
showcase to advance the earthly and spiritual healing of humanity.106
With a Tingley lodge in Buﬀalo sponsoring a home for ‘‘unfortunate women’’
and California Theosophists holding meetings in prisons, Tingley herself began
an International Brotherhood League that historian Emmett Greenwalt called
‘‘a sort of DoGood Mission on an international scale.’’ As troops returned from
the Spanish-American War in 1898, she involved herself and other Theosophists
in providing medical relief, earning praise from laggard government oﬃcials
who were embarrassed into recognizing theosophical eﬀorts. Thus she was able
to secure transport to Cuba from the government to continue her relief work.
Meanwhile, at a theosophical convention in 1898, she secured her control by reorganizing
the society as the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society
with a new constitution conferring extensive power on her as ‘‘Leader and Oﬃcial
Head’’ for life. Theosophists who supported her and moved to Point Loma
read the convention as a millennial event, inaugurating a new world cycle with
the close of the ﬁrst and most terrible period of the Kali Yuga, which Blavatsky
had predicted would come before the end of the century (see the previous
450 Arrivals
chapter). For them, Tingley had become equal to Blavatsky and Judge, and, as
W. Michael Ashcraft notes, ‘‘one of a great trinity of leaders appointed by the
Masters.’’107
In the next six years, Tingley would close almost all of the lodges to focus
theosophical energies on Point Loma—a move that led to a shrinking membership
base and, in the end, the demise of her colony as it staggered under the
weight of ﬁnancial burdens. Still, in the years in which it ﬂourished in the early
twentieth century, the community became a place to notice. With two public
buildings, the Temple and the Homestead, or Academy (their aquamarine
and amethyst glass domes as dramatic as Tingley), community members themselves
lived in assorted bungalows and tents. But they also boasted a Greek theater
in the open—the ﬁrst in the nation—and impressive orchards and gardens.
The theosophical residents had come from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds,
and at the community’s height they were ﬁve hundred strong (with
three hundred students in the Raja Yoga School). Child rearing practices were
innovative: Children spent their time in a community nursery after the ﬁrst few
months of their lives, and parents were visible only as Sunday visitors. Like the
Brook Farm and Oneida experiments of the nineteenth century, early-twentiethcentury
Point Loma fostered music and the arts with enthusiasm. (Tingley linked
music to a ‘‘science of consciousness’’ and found an ‘‘immense correspondence’’
between music and ‘‘thought and aspiration’’; similarly, she thought that ‘‘true
drama points away from unrealities to the real life of the soul.’’) Residents could
point to their horticultural achievements and the California agriculturalists who
were acknowledging the community’s research. They could also feel satisfactions
about a Woman’s Exchange and Mart and a series of crafts that recalled
the Shakers. The community’s print productions gained notice when Point Lomans
produced the ﬁrst linotype printing of Sanskrit in the United States. And
at an exposition in Leipzig, Germany, in 1914, the community’s exhibit of printing
and graphics earned a gold prize.108
Always, and in the tradition of William Judge, what drove Point Loma Theosophy
was moralism. This, of course, ﬁt hand in glove with the reform commitments
of Tingley, but it also expressed the particular character that the Judge
foundation had already imprinted on the American movement. The moralism
also kept time with Blavatsky’s own ideal construction of the occult world, for
she distinguished it from magic: Occultism, Blavatsky thought, was altruistic,
whereas magic manipulated externals for self-centered aims and goals.109 Tingley’s
own synthesis combined themes of divine transcendence and immanence,
drawing on theosophical and American sources. It invoked nature as the Great
Mother and yet turned clearly to a God within—and this with an outright lan-
New Ages for All 451
guage of the Self that bespoke the changes that metaphysical Asia was bringing.
It taught a Puritan discipline of social behavior even as it commended to other
Theosophists the spiritual discipline of meditation and a contemplative life. In
the midst of this, it pushed Theosophists toward compassionate care for the world
as the fruit of an inner life. It read a commitment to the world in American patriotic
terms that smacked of a civil religion of the left even as it heralded, with
Tingley apparently in charge, the millennial dawning of the new cycle.
As much as the New England Transcendentalists, Tingley had found God in
nature, and her Point Loma existence overseeing the Paciﬁc from the bluﬀ of
the spectacular theosophical property conﬁrmed her in the habit. Nature was
the ‘‘Mighty Mother’’ and the ‘‘Great Mother,’’ and, as such, the place where
divinity resided. ‘‘We lost touch ages ago with the Mighty Mother, Nature,’’ she
wrote, ‘‘and now need to go to her again.’’ She hailed nature’s ‘‘shining silences’’
and thought it the place to go to ‘‘seek aid.’’ ‘‘Look up into the blue sky or the
stars; catch in the air the feeling of her universal life.’’ At the same time, the
universe was ‘‘the outgrowth, the expression, of an inﬁnite scheme proceeding
from an Inmost Source beyond our comprehension.’’ Humans, in turn, ﬂowed
out from it and followed ‘‘evolutionary law, passing through the many lives ordained
for our growth towards perfection—we are here to work out the purposes
of existence.’’ Tingley knew about human suﬀering—her own, especially—and
aﬃrmed that she found in it ‘‘treasures of experience.’’ With a complexity that
belied the seeming glibness of her millennialism, she kept harking back to discipline
and saw ‘‘meeting the trials from without’’ as a form of the same.110 But
unlike William James’s twice-born souls who were sick, Tingley proclaimed a
Hermetic gospel: Humans, in fact, were divine. ‘‘Godlike qualities lie sleeping
within us, the spiritual things that mark us immortal. For here with the heart is
the Kingdom of Heaven, and the only recompense a man needs is to become
aware of his own divinity. It is there, a creative power within us, by whose virtue
he who has patience to endure and work shall behold the fruit of his eﬀorts—
the human family gloriﬁed and brought to the goal his heart tells him may be
reached. An order of life shall yet be established by those who have gone through
the schools of experience, birth after birth, round after round, until they lifted
themselves out of the strain and sorrow.’’111
For Tingley, Theosophy, with its message of inner divinity, gave the ‘‘highest
law of conduct,’’ and it led her, as ever, to the social order and to reﬂections on
criminals, prisons, and capital punishment. Those who committed crimes lacked
‘‘the sovereign knowledge of the god within.’’ ‘‘How then dare we condemn any
man?’’ she asked. ‘‘How do we know what we ourselves might have done if placed
as they had been, in other lives long since forgotten?’’ Prisons were ‘‘monuments
452 Arrivals
of iniquity,’’ since they brought no ‘‘moral correction’’ to their inmates. Still more,
capital punishment was a ‘‘form of murder,’’ because a person’s life did not belong
‘‘only to the community’’ but was ‘‘part of the universal scheme of life.’’ It was
‘‘the crime against the Holy Ghost, the higher law.’’ Nor were matters diﬀerent
in the collective life of nations. ‘‘Separateness,’’ she wrote sententiously, was the
‘‘curse’’ of nations, which should instead be built ‘‘on the rock of that enduring
wisdom which belongs to the divine soul of man.’’ Tingley decried the ‘‘fear and
apprehension of war’’ that she saw as ‘‘becoming a chronic disease’’ and found
war in the ‘‘lower’’ selves of humans gone collective. ‘‘Shame on the people that
so distrusts its higher self and godlike abilities as to feel unable to resist invasion
by any other means than brute force!’’ But war for her could also be righteous.
There was ‘‘one true and legitimate battleﬁeld,’’ she declared, ‘‘the mind of man,
where the duality of our nature keeps us constantly at the only rightful war there
is—the war of the god in us against the lower self.’’112
America, though, had a higher destiny. It was, she believed, ‘‘the chosen spot
for solving some of life’s greatest problems.’’ She could urge young people to
‘‘study the Constitution of the United States; go back to the spirit that actuated
the formation of that Constitution.’’ Yet the future of possibility that she saw at
the end of 1897 when she wrote these words was inextricably bound up with her
Blavatskian expectation of the new cycle dawning. An ‘‘opportunity’’ had been
‘‘given to humanity’’ that it had not experienced ‘‘for thousands of years.’’ The
‘‘cycle’’ had ‘‘reached its point of swiftest momentum.’’ In an invocation that she
gave some time later, she declared that ‘‘the crucial point of the cycle’’ was ‘‘past’’
and the ‘‘ﬁercest ordeal . . . over.’’ ‘‘No powers in heaven or hell can longer stay
the onward progress of humanity,’’ she proclaimed. ‘‘The hosts of Light are already
victorious.’’113
The ‘‘white city’’ of Point Loma, however, unlike the White City at the Columbian
Exposition in Chicago just a few years earlier, was a city in relative isolation.
If it was a city upon a hill, it did not bring millions—or thousands—to its
doors. Despite favorable press coverage and the presence of Cuban children and
orphans from Buﬀalo at its school, it could not sustain itself economically. By
1942, the Point Loma site was abandoned and, under Tingley’s successor Gottfried
de Purucker, the communitarians moved to Covina, east of the city of Los
Angeles. Eventually, they made their way to Altadena, near Pasadena.114 It was
other theosophical voices, however, whose messages made larger impacts on the
metaphysical religion of the twentieth century and continuing. The most signiﬁcant
of these voices, perhaps ironically, was the textual voice of the English
Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater. It was Leadbeater’s promulgation of the
chakras that generated a new, more focused discourse on access to higher ener-
New Ages for All 453
gies among Theosophists and reached out to a vastly larger audience. By the end
of the twentieth century, the language of chakras had become taken-for-granted
discourse among countless Americans who had never heard of Theosophists but
who knowledgeably ﬁled chakras away on their shelf of just-so tools for thinking.
At ﬁrst glance, talk of (Indian) chakras evokes metaphysical Asia. The chakra
system rests on the notion of energy centers in the physical body that function
as sites for energy exchange between inner and outer. According to the lore that
entered the West, there are seven major ones, and—in the context of the blended
Asian-theosophical discourse—they register not merely in the physical body but
in the other subtle bodies that Blavatsky’s metaphysical Asian schema identiﬁed.
In the twentieth century, more and more, these subtle bodies came to be seen
as energy bodies, with Charles Leadbeater’s book The Chakras ﬁrst giving currency
to the energy-body concept.115 What is so surprising about the language
of the chakras, however, is how quickly and easily it spun away from its Asian
roots. Indeed, it became a free-ﬂoating, general discourse on energy—used by
the end of the twentieth century, for example, interchangeably with talk of Chinese
acupuncture points and energy meridians. Far more than the discourse of
yoga—which stayed contained in sets of body-discipline and meditation practices
continually fed by infusions from Asia—the chakras became an independent
enterprise.
Already in 1927, when it ﬁrst appeared, Leadbeater’s book signaled the cultural
detachment and reattachment that transformed the language of chakras into a
Hermetic and metaphysical lingua franca. The publishing history of the short
work (under 150 pages including front matter and index) is instructive. It includes
at least twenty English-language printings with some six Spanish versions and
even a Japanese one. Signiﬁcantly in the case of the English-language reprints,
only six of them (two in 1927 and four thereafter) were available before 1965. Beginning
in 1966, however, The Chakras went through fourteen printings, with
the last—in 2003—not by a theosophical press at all but by Kessinger Publishing
of Whiteﬁsh, Montana, essentially a metaphysical reprint service that photocopies
older works and binds them in softcover format. Meanwhile, by 1980
Quest Books, the imprint of the Theosophical Publishing House in Wheaton,
Illinois, was claiming that ‘‘hundreds of thousands of copies’’ of the theosophical
classic had been sold.116 All of this, of course, suggests that the lingua franca
came into its own particularly when the New Age movement and new spirituality,
in general, began to make their way in American culture.
In that context, Leadbeater’s book, as the virtual ﬁrst word in the new discourse,
pushed it strongly in a direction that encouraged its detachability from
Asia. Leadbeater used Sanskrit terms in identifying each of seven chakras (and,
454 Arrivals
it could be added, like Blavatsky before him thus mystiﬁed readers and added
authority to his own discourse by its exotiﬁcation). In the opening page of his
ﬁrst chapter (titled, tellingly enough, ‘‘The Force-Centres’’), he also squarely situated
chakras in South Asia, citing the Sanskrit meaning of the term chakra as
‘‘wheel’’ and alluding to Buddhist sources and even the Orientalist scholar T. W.
Rhys Davids, so well loved by Theosophists. But South Asia swiftly fell away in
favor of a short tour of the theosophical language of the ‘‘etheric double,’’ summarizing
the work of fellow Theosophist A. E. Powell in his book The Etheric
Double (1925). The etheric double was an ‘‘invisible part of the physical body,’’
and through it ﬂowed the ‘‘streams of vitality’’ that kept the body alive. It also
brought ‘‘undulations of thought and feeling from the astral to the visible denser
physical matter.’’ Then—in a reference that became transparent as the work progressed—Leadbeater
explained that the etheric double was ‘‘clearly visible to the
clairvoyant as a mass of faintly-luminous violet-grey mist, interpenetrating the
denser part of the body, and extending very slightly beyond it.’’ It turned out that
the chakras, too, could be ‘‘easily’’ seen by anyone who possessed ‘‘a slight degree
of clairvoyance,’’ because they appeared ‘‘as saucer-like depressions or vortices’’
in the surface of the etheric double.117
Leadbeater could be counted among the gifted. In a work that contained ten
vivid color reproductions on glossy paper, his plates and textual descriptions presented
not the chakras of any classical Indian text or texts but the psychospiritual
material of his own visionary experience. The circumspection was thin, and the
ﬁg leaf exquisitely transparent: ‘‘These illustrations of ours show the chakras as
seen by clairvoyant sight in a fairly evolved and intelligent person, who has already
brought them to some extent into working order.’’ Leadbeater obligingly
oﬀered a few Asian, but non-Indian, allusions to images and statuary depicting,
for example, the crown chakra (Borobudur in Java; Nara in Japan) and devoted
a ﬁnal chapter (‘‘The Laya Yoga’’) to ‘‘the Hindu books.’’ Along with some name
dropping of Hindu texts, prominently in evidence were Arthur Avalon (Sir John
Woodroﬀe in collaboration with Atul Behari Ghosh)—a theosophically favored
author—along with the ubiquitous Rama Prasad (Nature’s Finer Forces), Helena
Blavatsky, and even Mabel Collins. Meanwhile, Leadbeater’s comparativist inclinations
in a Hermetic mode surfaced from the ﬁrst. He nodded to ‘‘frequent’’
descriptions of the chakras ‘‘in Sanskrit literature, in some of the minor Upanishads,
in the Puranas and in Tantric works’’ and to the use of the chakra system
‘‘today by many Indian yogis.’’ Then he quickly turned to Europe, conﬁding to
readers that ‘‘certain European mystics were acquainted with the chakras.’’118
Leadbeater spent ten paragraphs on one of them—Jacob Boehme’s student
Johann Georg Gichtel, whom he associated with the ‘‘secret society of the Rosi-
New Ages for All 455
crucians.’’ Gichtel’s Theosophia Practica (1696), with—by the 1720s—the reproduction
of clairvoyantly perceived ‘‘chakra’’ images, proved conclusively for
Leadbeater that ‘‘at least some of the mystics of the seventeenth century knew
of the existence and position of the seven centres in the human body.’’ Just to
be sure that readers understood, he reproduced one of Gichtel’s plates, and it,
indeed, looks strikingly similar to contemporary twenty-ﬁrst-century representations
of the energy centers. It was not a far stretch from there for Leadbeater
to go to Freemasonry, claiming chakra knowledge among Freemasonic ‘‘secrets’’
and arguing that, in ritual, Freemasons ‘‘by utilizing them [the secrets] actually
stimulate certain of these centres for the occasion and purpose of their work.’’
Leadbeater added authoritatively that Freemasons generally knew ‘‘little or nothing’’
of what was occurring ‘‘beyond the range of normal sight’’ and alluded to
his own book The Hidden Life in Freemasonry (1926), in which he had ‘‘mentioned
as much of the matter’’ as was ‘‘permissible.’’119
In one sense, Leadbeater had only done as much as other Theosophists, beginning
from Blavatsky and A. P. Sinnett, in oﬀering a thoroughly metaphysical
Asia to English-language readers. But by introducing the experimental data
of his own subjective experience, arguably, he had gone further. He had shown
more clearly how portable and culturally detachable the South Asian concepts
actually were. Indeed, if we move quickly to late-century times, by 1987 in the
midst of now-periodic reprintings of Leadbeater’s book, at least three inﬂuential
works in New Age and new spirituality circles were also trumpeting the good
news of the chakras. They did so in largely, if not entirely, universalist terms that
read chakras as synonyms for energy centers on the human body. Signiﬁcantly,
all three books arose out of personal experience, with chakras used to authorize
the subjective impressions of the authors as a kind of metalanguage. For a ﬁrst,
Anodea Judith’s Wheels of Life (with Judith’s ‘‘Ph.D.’’ designation prominently
tagged to her name) went through seventeen printings of its initial edition in
1987 and appeared in a second, expanded version in 1999 claiming over 100,000
copies sold. It announced itself the work of a ‘‘somatic therapist, counselor, yoga
teacher, and workshop leader.’’ The preface to the ﬁrst edition began with a description
of how Judith came to chakras. ‘‘Once upon a time, while sitting on
my sheepskin rug in deep meditation, I had a strange experience. I was quietly
and consciously counting my breaths when suddenly I found myself outside of
my body—looking at another me sitting here in full lotus. No sooner did I realize
who I was looking at . . . than I saw a book fall into her lap. As it landed, it
jarred me back into my body and I looked down and read the title: The Chakra
System by A. Judith Mull (my name at the time).’’120
Mull/Judith went for conﬁrmation not to Leadbeater’s work but to a remem-
456 Arrivals
bered passage in a book by well-known New Age guru Ram Dass (the former
Richard Alpert associated with Harvard University’s Psychology Department).
But she was later to discover Leadbeater’s book and understand its signiﬁcance,
calling it ‘‘the standard Western classic on chakras’’ and ‘‘for a long time . . . the
only Western book on the subject.’’ Because information was so scarce, she explained,
she had needed to develop her own theories ‘‘through self-experimentation
and the scrutiny of others’’ in her yoga teaching and bodywork practices.
‘‘Before long, everything I saw seemed to fall into this neat little pattern of ‘sevenness’:
colors, events, behaviors, days.’’ She had continued to develop her theories
from the ‘‘hundreds of clients’’ whom she had seen, and she had also ‘‘delved
into Sanskrit literature, quantum physics, theosophy, magic, physiology, psychology,
and personal experience to patch together a coherent system.’’ Judith gave
each of her seven chakras English names (which became quasi-canonical in the
late-century, new-century metaphysical world): ‘‘survival, sex, power, love, communication,
clairvoyance, and wisdom.’’ She had forged through all of this a
user-friendly tool to think energy patterns in physical, emotional, and spiritual
registers. Chakras, wrote Judith, were ‘‘organizing centers for the reception, assimilation,
and transmission of life energies.’’121
Judith, moreover, had decidedly rationalized the older model of chakras
provided by Leadbeater’s trance productions. The body, she explained, was a
‘‘vehicle of consciousness.’’ Chakras were the ‘‘wheels of life’’ that enabled the
vehicle to move ‘‘through its trials, tribulations, and transformations.’’ For the
vehicle to run ‘‘smoothly,’’ what was needed was ‘‘an owner’s manual as well as
a map that tells us how to navigate the territory our vehicle can explore.’’ With
each chakra being ‘‘a step on the continuum between matter and consciousness,’’
bridging ‘‘the gulf between matter and spirit’’ meant accepting one’s identity as
‘‘the Rainbow Bridge that connects Earth and Heaven once again.’’ Judith did
keep Sanskrit language and terminology, made a few references to Asian sources,
resurrected the much-favored Arthur Avalon, and—by the second edition, especially—dwelled
to some extent on Tantrism and the kundalini experience. All
of this, however, had become a convenient rhetorical instrument for a Western
metaphysical spirituality that, by now, was preaching and teaching the enlightened
body-self. In fact, so much was this the case that Judith included physical
exercises to develop and regulate each of the chakras. She wanted open chakras
if they were closed and cleared chakras if they were blocked so that they could
work better, and she wanted to integrate their activity. Even further, she devoted
a chapter to the interactions among chakras in dyadic relationships and in relationships
with the culture as a whole. In keeping with the New Age community,
she read the future in millennialist terms, invoking the ‘‘new evolutionary order’’
New Ages for All 457
that ‘‘must encompass and combine the planes and stages of all levels of consciousness.’’
The present age, she said, was a time of ‘‘tumultuous changes and
limitless possibilities.’’122
By contrast to the ambitious Judith book, Rosalyn L. Bruyere’s Wheels of Light
was briefer and more limited. First published in a homegrown version by her
Healing Light Center Church in Glendale, California, in 1987, by 1989 it was
picked up for mass-market publishing by Simon and Schuster. It was Bruyere,
and then Barbara Ann Brennan, who introduced a focus on the human aura into
the discourse of the chakra system. With a background in spiritualism, Bruyere
said that she remembered seeing auras as a young child, suppressed the seeing,
and then resurrected it as an adult when her children began to talk about the
‘‘colored fuzz’’ surrounding people. Encouraged by a medium at the (spiritualist)
Universal Church of the Master in West Hollywood and then by spiritualists
in the Church of Antioch in Santa Ana, she began ‘‘reading’’ auras and, by 1971,
was also ordained a spiritualist minister. In the end, however, it was energies and
not ghosts that won her. According to her own report, ‘‘I would scan the aura, ﬁnd
holes, put my hands there and pump them up.’’ Even before she spoke of chakras,
she claimed to see colors, to sense ‘‘congestion,’’ and to ‘‘run energy’’ to clear it.123
Enter, at this point, science—in the person of Valerie Hunt, a tenured professor
at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was metaphysically inclined.
With a grant to study a series of ‘‘energy’’ phenomena generated through ‘‘structural
integration,’’ or rolﬁng (the deep-manipulation bodywork systematized by
Ida Rolf), Hunt employed Bruyere as an aura reader. Bruyere, by this time,
had acquired a reputation for such work in Los Angeles, and Hunt wanted to
use her for experiments to ascertain the frequencies produced by the human
energy ﬁeld. With electrical equipment and Bruyere working simultaneously,
Hunt sought to correlate human energy frequencies with those of visible light.
‘‘From that, we concluded,’’ wrote Bruyere, ‘‘that what science had been calling
the human energy ﬁeld, or the mind ﬁeld, and what religious traditions had
been calling the auric ﬁeld were one and the same.’’ Thereafter Bruyere began
to think increasingly in terms of the chakra system. From the ﬁrst her reﬂections
were expansively comparative. India was but one port of call in a series of cultures
and peoples who knew about chakras—Hopis, Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese
among them—and the fact that a Sanskrit term deﬁned tiny energy vortices on
the body was, for Bruyere, more or less irrelevant. (She casually cited ‘‘the Reverend
Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant’’ in a somewhat confused historical
account that also named Alice Bailey.) Bruyere was much more interested in
identifying the colors of chakras; in characterizing, sometimes, entire cultures
in terms of chakras that predominated (as deﬁned by color); and in correlating
458 Arrivals
what she was ﬁnding with New Age science. ‘‘When we refer to ‘color of energy’
(or, sometimes, frequency),’’ she declared authoritatively, ‘‘we mean the color of
the energy or chakra, as deﬁned by the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation
being emitted at that location, as perceived by those who have second sight.’’124
Bruyere’s chakras, experientially based and scientiﬁcally ‘‘proven,’’ had departed
far indeed from their Asian context. At the Healing Light Center Church
that she founded after the spiritualists indicated their displeasure with her direction,
she began to teach her healing techniques, using aura reading and the
laying on of hands. One of the people who sat in her classes was Barbara Ann
Brennan, an erstwhile employee of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Brennan, who
styled herself a former ‘‘NASA physicist’’ (she had earned an M.S. in atmospheric
physics at the University of Wisconsin and at NASA had studied the reﬂection
of solar light from the earth), came to Bruyere as part of a professional and personal
quest. Like a series of metaphysical leaders who have been cited in this narrative,
she arrived as a self-made and entrepreneurial spiritual seeker. She went
on to shape personal and professional answers that made a noticeable mark on
the new metaphysical culture of the late twentieth century. Raised on a Wisconsin
farm without books (except the Bible), central heating, or indoor plumbing,
she, like Bruyere, spoke of seeing auras in childhood around ‘‘trees and the small
animals,’’ and, like Bruyere, as an adult she sought to reclaim her remembered
experience.125
After she left NASA, Brennan pursued mind-body studies, worked in ‘‘bioenergetics’’
(predicated on the work of Freud’s one-time disciple Wilhelm Reich),
then ‘‘core energetics’’ with John Pierrakos, and later ‘‘Pathwork Helpership
Training.’’ Along the way, she gained knowledge of a variety of alternative therapies.
As her own counseling work continued in this and later contexts, she became
convinced that, as in childhood, she was seeing auras again—now around
the bodies of her clients. Brennan went on to identify layer upon layer of energy
ﬁelds in a theosophized account that ended with nine (instead of seven) energy
bodies. Her Hands of Light (1987)—a textbook to teach the form of energy healing
that she was practicing—provides a succinct account of her nonconventional
scientiﬁc sources as well as her theosophically oriented spiritual ones. In its Bantam
popular format of 1988, the book became a best seller and, by early 1996,
with Brennan’s later Light Emerging (1993), had sold 750,000 copies worldwide.
According to the Brennan website in 2004, Hands of Light by then had more
than a million copies in print and had been published in twenty-two languages.
Moreover, alongside the books, Brennan produced audiotapes, lectured nationally,
maintained the website, and had established a school—by then in South
New Ages for All 459
Florida—to train other healers in her work. Nonaccredited but licensed by the
State of Florida’s Commission for Independent Education, the Barbara Brennan
School of Healing boasted of more than one thousand graduates by June
2000, with the 2004 student body ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-ﬁve,
two-thirds of them from various states throughout the United States and the remaining
third from twenty-nine foreign nations. According to the website, over
15 percent of students worked in the health-care profession as physicians, registered
nurses, physical therapists, psychotherapists, and nutritionists. Still more
ambitiously, a Barbara Brennan School of Healing europe existed in Mondsee,
Austria.126
Given this background and the Brennan focus on auras, what is especially
interesting about chakras in the Brennan account—in which they function
prominently—is how much they are taken for granted. They are, as tellingly,
almost completely detached from South Asia. Indeed, Brennan’s ﬁrst two references
to chakras in her text glided over the term without any attempt at deﬁnition—as
if speaking a language that readers used and understood. It was only
on the third use, in a discussion of the ‘‘seven layers of the auric ﬁeld,’’ that she
told readers how in the structured layers of the ﬁeld (the odd-numbered layers)
a ‘‘vertical ﬂow of energy’’ pulsated ‘‘up and down the ﬁeld in the spinal cord.’’
She added that there were ‘‘swirling cone-shaped vortexes called chakras in the
ﬁeld’’ and that their ‘‘tips’’ pointed into ‘‘the main vertical power current’’ while
their ‘‘open ends’’ extended ‘‘to the edge of each layer of the ﬁeld’’ in which they
were located. Brennan’s explanation included a ‘‘Universal Energy Field,’’ with
‘‘each swirling vortex of energy’’ (that is, chakra) sucking or entraining energy
from the ﬁeld, and thus engaging in processes of exchange. Exposing the combinative
habit that had, by now, lost all touch with national cultures, she added
that ‘‘all the major chakras, minor chakras, lesser chakras and acupuncture points
are openings for energy to ﬂow into and out of the aura.’’127
Brennan cited Leadbeater on the chakras in her bibliography (in a 1974 printing),
but her text itself was innocent of references to him. Still more, nothing
she had written located chakras in South Asia or in Sanskrit textual sources. At
the same time, Brennan did—however brieﬂy—give a passing nod to ancient
spiritual traditions with which she felt her own work to be connected. Mystics
throughout the world, she declared, had practiced ‘‘traditions’’ that were ‘‘consistent
with the observations scientists have recently begun to make.’’ She pointed
to ‘‘ancient Indian spiritual tradition’’ with its discourse on ‘‘a universal energy
called Prana.’’ And although her rare references to kundalini were devoid of cultural
context, Brennan alluded vaguely, in one place, to ‘‘Tantric tradition.’’ She
noticed Chinese ‘‘chi’’ (qi) and observed that the ‘‘ancient art of acupuncture
460 Arrivals
focuses on balancing the yin and the yang.’’ Moreover, she (as vaguely) acknowledged
the Jewish Kabbalah (dating it, without explanation, to ‘‘538 b.c.’’), connected
it to the language of energies as ‘‘astral light,’’ and pointed, too, to auras in
religious paintings depicting Jesus and ‘‘other spiritual ﬁgures.’’ ‘‘Many esoteric
teachings—the ancient Hindu Vedic texts, the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians,
the Native American Medicine People, the Tibetan and Indian Buddhists, the
Japanese Zen Buddhists, Madame Blavatsky, and Rudolph Steiner, to mention a
few—describe the Human Energy Field in detail,’’ she aﬃrmed. Brennan went
on to cite representatives of the Hermetic energy tradition, naming Pythagoreans
and other ﬁgures familiar to this account, including Paracelsus, Jan Baptista
van Helmont, Franz Anton Mesmer, and Count Wilhelm von Reichenbach.128
She argued that diseases (her concern) for the most part originated in the
body’s energy system, and she sought to teach students how to identify problems
in the subtle bodies and to repair and restructure them, thus preventing
or reversing disease in the physical body. Brennan thus had been brought to the
language of chakras to elaborate her rather elegant model—a spirit anatomy of
energy bodies transferring energy from the individual to the Universal Energy
Field and taking it back again, with chakras as the vehicles of transfer. If there
were structured layers to these auric energy ﬁelds or bodies, there were also ﬂuidic
ones (the even layers) characterized by color and motion. Still more, Brennan
instructed students on the role of chakras at birth and death, oﬀering metaphysical
glosses on reincarnation. ‘‘If the metaphysics disturbs you, please take it
as a metaphor,’’ she counseled students tolerantly. She told them, anyway, how at
death people left their bodies through their crown chakra (an observation with
which Andrew Jackson Davis would have agreed) and how she had ‘‘often seen
them resting, surrounded by white light for some period of time after death. They
appear to be taken care of in some kind of hospital on the other side.’’129
On the earthly side, energy blocks (now long familiar) closed the chakras and
created illness. Healing thus meant opening the chakras. With psychology a
strong suit in light of Brennan’s counseling background, it was not surprising
when she identiﬁed the sources of energy blocks as emotional. However, for her
the emotional ultimately pointed the way to the spiritual, and problems on one
register corresponded to problems on the other. The therapist functioned, in
reality, as a spiritual healer, doing a work of love with a theology that smacked of
Theosophy and New Thought. ‘‘The healer reaches into . . . painful areas of the
soul and gently reawakens hope. S/he gently reawakens the ancient memory of
who the soul is. S/he touches the spark of God in each cell of the body and gently
reminds it that it is already God and, already being God, it inexorably ﬂows with
the Universal Will towards health and wholeness.’’ Still more, the emotional work
New Ages for All 461
that would bring the rewards of spirit was predicated on the healing of self in
human relationships. In the post-Freudian discourse community in which Brennan
functioned, failed relationships pointed toward the chronic malady of ‘‘selfhatred’’
and led back again to more failure between self and other. If the Brennan
logic is extended, unblocking and healing the self meant, in the end, building
eﬀective community—even if Brennan herself never took her ideas very far in a
social direction. What is clear, though, is that, for Brennan, people failed themselves
and others for a reason that was ﬁnally spiritual. They could not extend
their unconditional love to the ‘‘Godself within.’’130
With chakras as channels and conduits in the free ﬂow of energy to and
from the ‘‘Godself,’’ Brennan had arrived where Theosophists always arrived—
at the divinity within themselves. Outside the discourse on chakras, other Theosophists
in the early twentieth century—spin-oﬀs from the Blavatskian tradition—created
lineages that carried forward theosophical ideas in the decades
that followed. Closest among them to Theosophy was Alice Bailey (1880–1949),
a former Theosophist who came late to Leadbeater’s language of chakras but
who, in her preoccupation with ‘‘centres’’ and divine rays of energy, eﬀectively
demonstrated similar concerns before the appearance of his book. Born Alice La
Trobe-Bateman in an upper-class British family, she went to school under private
tutors and went to church in the Church of England. Her mother died when she
was a child, and with a troubled adolescence and suicidal tendencies (she tried
to commit suicide at least three times), she was drawn to religion and spirituality.
She was also educated to a social conscience, remembering that ‘‘from the
earliest possible time we were taught to care about the poor and the sick and to
realise that fortunate circumstances entailed responsibility.’’ Still more, according
to her later recollections from at least 1895 the teenage La Trobe-Bateman
began to experience the uncanny. On a Sunday morning that year, while she
was seated in the drawing-room of her aunt’s house instead of going to church,
a ‘‘tall man,’’ dressed in well-cut European clothes ‘‘with a turban on his head,’’
visited her. She was, as she later wrote, ‘‘scared stiﬀ,’’ but he sat beside her and
told her that work had been planned for her in the world. To do it, she needed
to change her ‘‘disposition considerably.’’ She needed to ‘‘give up being such an
unpleasant little girl’’ and ‘‘try and get some measure of self-control.’’ He would
visit her again at intervals. Later she felt that he had done so and eventually that
she knew who he was. The visitor, for whom she claimed to work in the years that
followed, was ‘‘the Master K.H., the Master Koot Hoomi.’’ He was ‘‘very close to
the Christ.’’131
To be sure, Theosophists would know that Koot Hoomi counted as a theosophical
mahatma with solid Blavatskian connections, but his closeness to the
462 Arrivals
‘‘Christ’’ pointed toward—and prognostically resolved—another world of experience.
Drawn to the high-church ritual of the Anglican part of her family, Bailey
had also experienced the narrower low-church version of the Church of England,
with its foreboding visions of hellﬁre for the damned. She grew into something
of a fundamentalist, working, in conjunction with the Young Women’s
Christian Association, as a missionary to British army soldiers in places ranging
from Ireland to India. Eventually, the fundamentalism dropped away, but the
ﬁgure of the Christ remained.132 Even in the midst of the fundamentalism, in
the Himalayan Mountains and at the Wesek commemoration of the birthday
of the Buddha, she claimed a vision of the Christ standing at the apex of a ‘‘triangle’’
formed with two other ﬁgures. The crowd below, she recalled, seemed
in ‘‘constant movement,’’ modeling the symbols of world spirituality with their
bodies—various forms of the cross, the circle, the ﬁve-pointed star, triangles. But
the ecumenical Christian focus of the vision gave way before something else:
As the three ﬁgures stretched out their arms, another and diﬀerent one came toward
the rock. She ‘‘knew in some subjective and certain fashion that it was the
Buddha,’’ but she ‘‘knew at the same time that in no way was our Christ belittled.’’
There was a ‘‘Plan,’’ and ‘‘all the Masters’’ were ‘‘eternally dedicated’’ to it.133
More conventional events were happening in La Trobe-Bateman’s life. She
met her future husband, Walter Evans, in India, and after their marriage in 1907
moved with him to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then—after he completed his studies
at Lane Theological Seminary and was ordained an Episcopal priest—to California.
Evans was physically abusive and emotionally troubled, and he left her
in 1915. But around this time she was introduced by friends in Paciﬁc Grove to
Theosophy and eventually drawn to the American headquarters of the Theosophical
Society in Krotona, California (this a branch of the Adyar-based original
Theosophical Society, not the Judge-Tingley Theosophical Society in America).
At Krotona, she became editor of the journal of the society, The Messenger, met
her future husband Foster Bailey (national secretary), and claimed still another
mysterious visitation in 1919. Djwhal Khul, ‘‘the Tibetan,’’ she later conﬁded,
had asked her to be the human conduit for his books. Initially reluctant, she
agreed when she came to believe that Koot Hoomi was supporting the project.
So began her involvement in the production of a series of metaphysical books
(some twenty of them), heavily drenched in theosophical terminology and lore
but increasingly distinctive in their thrust. The ﬁrst, Initiation, Human and Solar
(1922), saw a few of its chapters published in The Theosophist, but tensions were
growing and Bailey’s claim to revelation was setting other theosophical nerves
on edge. Bailey, in turn, was becoming more critical of the Esoteric Section of
the society, which she had joined. In the midst of highly politicized dissension,
New Ages for All 463
both she and Foster Bailey were dismissed from the Theosophical Society. They
married in New York and, in 1923, organized the Arcane School there. Yet Bailey
was still a Blavatskian devotee, teaching classes on The Secret Doctrine, even as
she worked, as she believed, as the amanuensis for the Tibetan.134
Initially, three aspects of theosophical teaching attracted Bailey. First, the belief
that there was ‘‘a great and divine plan’’ for ‘‘return to God’’ drew her. Second,
she ‘‘discovered’’ that there were ‘‘Masters’’ who were ‘‘responsible for the
working out of that Plan and Who, step by step and stage by stage’’ had ‘‘led mankind
on down the centuries.’’ Signiﬁcant for her future work, she ‘‘found that the
Head of this Hierarchy of spiritual Leaders was the Christ’’ and so ‘‘felt that He
had been given back’’ to her ‘‘in a nearer and more intimate way.’’ Third, she encountered
the teaching that ‘‘pulled’’ her ‘‘up short for a long time’’—the ‘‘dual
belief in the law of re-birth and the law of cause and eﬀect, called Karma and
Reincarnation.’’135 She did not like the Sanskrit term karma, favored by ‘‘Theosophists
who, so often, like[d] to sound learned.’’ But she came to accept the
idea. As her teaching evolved through the Tibetan’s books, however, it became
clear that a sense of the ultimacy of energy and its entry into the human world—
the hallmark of twentieth-century and later metaphysical religion—shaped her
vision as much. The Plan was a plan about charging the world, inundating it with
divine radiance. The Masters worked fervidly to accomplish the goal, and the
laws of karma and reincarnation guaranteed that there would be enough time
for humanity to be saturated with the sacred and so brought back to God.
As Bailey wrote through these ideas (and with her disdain for Sanskrit namedropping),
she used the language of ‘‘centres’’ to refer to what Leadbeater, in
1927, called chakras, although after 1927 the term chakras became more frequent
in her writings. As early as 1922, in her ﬁrst book, she thought of these ‘‘centres’’
as the stuﬀ of ordinary occult knowledge: ‘‘It has been said that in the head of
every man are seven centres of force, which are linked to the other centres in
the body and through which the force of the Ego is spread and circulated, thus
working out the plan.’’ She made at least one passing reference to the ‘‘utilisation
of the chakras (or centres) in the palms of the hands’’ and, employing the language
of ‘‘centres,’’ oﬀered readers a detailed description of their awakening in
‘‘initiation.’’ In her later and often-cited Treatise on Cosmic Fire (1925), Bailey’s
text underlined the energy dimensions of the centers. They were ‘‘formed entirely
of streams of force.’’ ‘‘When functioning properly,’’ they themselves formed
the ‘‘body of ﬁre,’’ which she identiﬁed as ‘‘‘the body incorruptible’ or indestructible,
spoken of by St. Paul’’ (1 Cor. 15:53). Decades before Barbara Brennan, she
was aﬃrming, too, the presence of the ‘‘centres’’ on subtle bodies. In humans, she
testiﬁed, centers were ‘‘found on the mental plane’’ and could be traced from
464 Arrivals
there ‘‘to the astral level, and eventually to the etheric levels, to the fourth ether.’’
On the physical body, Bailey placed the centers in the traditional major chakra
locations. She also provided readers, in her Treatise on White Magic (1934), with
a close analysis of their working. ‘‘Each centre or chakra is composed of three
concentric interblending whorls or wheels which in the spiritual man upon the
probationary path move slowly in one direction, but gradually quicken their activity
as he nears the portal of the Path of Initiation. On initiation, the centre of
the chakra (a point of latent ﬁre) is touched, and the rotation becomes intensiﬁed,
and the activity, fourth dimensional.’’136
Beyond the centres or chakras, though, what drew Bailey—and distinguished
her reading—was her attention to ‘‘rays.’’ Blavatsky had introduced the discourse
on rays from her own occult sources in The Secret Doctrine; the twentiethcentury
comprehensive and separately published Index to the mammoth work
lists close to twenty-ﬁve citations. Thus the germ of Bailey’s work as, she believed,
the amanuensis of the Tibetan lay in Blavatsky’s volumes. But Bailey and her
Tibetan surely ran with what she had learned. Bailey’s Treatise on the Seven Rays
appeared in ﬁve volumes over a series of years (1936, 1942, 1951, 1953, 1960), with
the last three published posthumously. The ﬁrst two dealt with esoteric psychology,
the third with esoteric astrology, the fourth with esoteric healing, and the
ﬁfth with the rays themselves and initiations.137
A ray, Bailey explained in the glossary to Initiation, Human and Solar, was
‘‘one of the seven streams of force of the Logos,’’ one of the ‘‘seven great lights.’’
Divided into three ‘‘Rays of Aspect’’ and four ‘‘Rays of Attribute,’’ the rays included,
for the former, ‘‘Will, or Power,’’ ‘‘Love-Wisdom,’’ and ‘‘Activity, or Adaptability.’’
For the latter, they encompassed ‘‘Harmony, Beauty, Art, or Unity’’ (as
one ray), ‘‘Concrete Knowledge or Science,’’ ‘‘Abstract Idealism or Devotion,’’
and ‘‘Ceremonial Magic, or Law.’’ Bailey thought that there were ‘‘seven major
types of people’’ and that they were related to the ‘‘seven great Rays or Energies,’’
which she also identiﬁed as the book of Revelation’s ‘‘‘seven spirits before the
throne of God’’’ (Rev. 1:4). With each ray expressing ‘‘a peculiar and specialised
type of force,’’ for Bailey ‘‘all people’’ were ‘‘units of consciousness breathed forth
on one of the seven emanations from God.’’ Hence ‘‘even their monads or spiritual
aspects’’ were ‘‘inherently diﬀerent just as in the prism (which is one) there
are the seven diﬀerentiated colours.’’138 In prose that was often well nigh impenetrable
and dense with occult terminology (despite Bailey’s own castigation
of theosophical linguistic habits), she probed the dimensions and distinctions
of spiritual energy that the rays represented. Her language would continue into
the late twentieth century and on, as New Age and new spirituality aﬁcionados
spoke of what rays they had ‘‘come in’’ (to the planet) on and how that distin-
New Ages for All 465
guished them as persons. Whatever the ray, though, Bailey had taught them—as
had twentieth-century metaphysicians across the board—that they were energy
beings.
Energy, moreover, was moving toward one great goal, and Bailey advanced the
theosophical message of the millennium and speciﬁed it further. Blavatsky and
other Theosophists—among them, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater—had
declared for a ‘‘new age’’ to come, with Besant promoting her young Brahmin
protégé Jiddu Krishnamurti as that age’s ‘‘World Teacher’’ and Leadbeater calling
him the vehicle of the Lord Maitreya and of the Christ. Before Krishnamurti
eventually disavowed the role in 1929, Bailey remembered that ‘‘Mrs. Besant’s
pronouncements about Krishnamurti were splitting the society wide open.’’139
Still, Bailey’s own new-age pronouncements were even more emphatic, if more
ideal. More than Leadbeater, she conﬂated the identities of the Buddha of the
endtime—the Lord Maitreya—and the eschatological Christ of Christianity, fusing
the ﬁgures in ways that her early vision in the Himalayan Mountains had
already preﬁgured. Always, though, it was the Christ who was central in Bailey’s
account.
Indeed, one of her volumes with the Tibetan, The Reappearance of the Christ
(1948), drew together an occultized South Asian discourse on the coming of avatars
with the Christic focus that was Bailey’s own.140 Still more, it inserted both
of these into a cosmology of the stars and planets in the linguistic terms of Western
astrology and the action-oriented language of world service. Here Bailey bequeathed
to the later New Age movement the expectation of the coming age of
Aquarius. She announced the end of the age of Pisces and the dawning of the
Aquarian era, with the coming Christ providing Aquarian service to all of humanity.
In concert with the reappearance of the Christ, predicted Bailey, would
come a major evolutionary event in the development of consciousness as humanity
would be drawn away from individual needs and toward the needs of the
whole. Anxiety over personal salvation would yield before the drive to world service,
even as materialistic concerns would fall away before a new spiritual order.
The Christ who would come, for Bailey, would arrive not only as the ﬁrst Son
of God but also as a kind of world executive, head of a spiritual hierarchy that
represented the inner government of the earth. The example of the Christ would
provide the model for a united world in which interdependence and interaction
would bring a new material and spiritual order for the culture and civilization
to be.
In this meeting between West and East, Bailey thought, humans had a signiﬁcant
role to play: It was their responsibility to advance the coming age. By
1935, the Arcane School was promoting the use of the so-named Great Invoca-
466 Arrivals
tion, a prayer believed to have potencies that were, in eﬀect, sacramental and, as
J. Stillson Judah wrote, ‘‘almost magic and divine.’’ The Great Invocation called
for the Christ who would return to earth, prayed that the ‘‘purpose’’ of the Masters
would ‘‘guide the little wills of men,’’ aﬃrmed the working out of the ‘‘Plan
of Love and Light’’ that could ‘‘seal the door where evil dwells,’’ and prayed
that ‘‘Light and Love and Power’’ would ‘‘restore the Plan on Earth.’’ Later, Arcane
School teachings announced that Christ himself had given humanity the
Great Invocation on the full moon in June 1945, in the context of the ending
of World War II. Full-moon meditations, culminating in the solemn recitation
of the Great Invocation, have continued to be a practice of the Arcane School
and other Bailey devotees. Meant to raise spiritual energies and to set up conditions
that will bring the coming once more of the Christ, the meditations employ
various ritual techniques—music, dance, speech, and gesture. They turn on the
Bailey invocation, recited while visualizing the descent of the power (energy) of
the hierarchy of masters.141
Other social-oriented programs created by Bailey’s Arcane School promoted
the notion of world service. As early as 1932, World Goodwill was established as
the ‘‘New Group of World Servers’’ to bring right human relations to the world
and to use the constructive power of goodwill to prepare for the return of the
Christ anticipated by Bailey followers. Its work has been, in the large sense, educational,
and it has functioned as an ‘‘accredited non-governmental organisation’’
with the Department of Public Information of the United Nations. By 1937, Triangles
joined World Goodwill to carry on the work of the Bailey-aﬃrmed ‘‘hierarchy.’’
Considered a ‘‘service activity’’ for those who ‘‘believe in the power of
thought,’’ Triangles has linked groups of three individuals who each day unite
mentally in ‘‘creative meditation’’ to radiate the light energy of goodwill to the
world. At the center of the meditative action of each group stands the Great Invocation.142
Bailey’s theosophical tilt toward the ﬁgure of the Christ has thus
been accompanied by a Western-style organized commitment to service, however
mental the form it takes. More than that, Bailey—perhaps more than any
other single teacher from the theosophical world—set the stage for the New
Age movement. Her Great Invocation, her expectation of the astrological Age
of Aquarius with its profound spiritual shift, her full-moon meditations, her preoccupation
with continuing revelation through Masters, her incoming rays with
distinctive divine energies for humans and society all have found their presence
in New Age belief and practice.
Alice Bailey—or her Tibetan—however, seemed doubtful about other theosophical
innovations. ‘‘The Masters portrayed in the many theosophical movements
(since the time of H. P. B.) are not distinguished by intelligence and show
New Ages for All 467
little judgment in the choice of those whom the organisations claim are initiates
or important members of the Hierarchy,’’ the Tibetan deplored in an appendix
to Bailey’s autobiography. In this, the Bailey-Tibetan view accorded with that of
older theosophical organizations. But like New Thought, Theosophy had spun
out of (organized) control. As Bailey’s words hinted, a plethora of small groups
appeared and disappeared. They announced through one ﬁgure or another their
corner on continuing revelation, and—with assured access to a world of spirit and
ascended mastership—taught their message to whoever would listen for as long
as they would listen. J. Gordon Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions,
with its seemingly endless catalog of groups in the ‘‘Ancient Wisdom Family,’’
suggests the extent and diﬀusion of these theosophical oﬀshoots and lineages in
American general culture. To cite but one inﬂuential case, consider the i am
movement. With a name that in itself points to the presence of New Thought in
the theosophical world (even as we have seen the reverse), i am hailed its masters
as enthusiastically as older Theosophists had done. By contrast, Bailey’s Tibetan
condemned the masters who had been ‘‘brought before the general public by
such movements as the i am movement’’ as a ‘‘travesty of the reality.’’143
Perhaps what Bailey and the Tibetan found so objectionable in the i am Ascended
Master Religious Activity was its easy conﬂation of New Thought with
these theosophical masters. The i am account of its origins, Unveiled Mysteries,
from the ﬁrst signaled hybridism. According to Guy W. Ballard (1878–1939), the
author and mining ‘‘engineer’’ who established i am, he had encountered the
‘‘ascended master’’ Saint-Germain on the slopes of Mount Shasta, in northern
California, while hiking there in 1930. (The ﬁgure was identiﬁed with the Comte
de Saint-Germain, an eighteenth-century French necromancer, alchemist, and
mystic claiming to be several centuries old. He had been hailed by Blavatsky as
‘‘the greatest Oriental Adept Europe has seen during the last centuries’’ and was
likewise highly esteemed by Henry Steel Olcott.) Ballard, with a background in
spiritualism and mediumship and a history of poverty, was already heavily invested
in occult and metaphysical lore, studying it in the ‘‘occult’’ library in Los
Angeles in a milieu saturated with Hopkins-style New Thought. Here Annie Rix
Militz, a Hopkins student, had established her Home of Truth center before the
end of the nineteenth century and had used it as a base to establish other Homes
of Truth on the West Coast until her death six years before Ballard’s hike. Meanwhile,
in Atascadero, in central California, by the 1930s William Dudley Pelley
was elucidating his Liberation-Soulcraft philosophy after a claimed out-of-body
experience in the Sierra Madre Mountains. He had received messages from masters,
or ‘‘mentors,’’ who taught that all humans participated in the Godhead and
so were bound and connected to one another. Pelley became still more well-
468 Arrivals
known, as the decade progressed, through the right-wing Silver Shirts that he
founded—anti-Communist, anti-New Deal, and anti-Semitic. Ballard and his
wife, Edna Ballard—a student of metaphysics and the occult, too—would maintain
close contact with Pelley. It was no doubt through his inﬂuence that an exaltation
of the American nation and a right-wing superpatriotism emerged in their
teaching.144
Guy Ballard had climbed the mountain because he had heard rumors that
the Great White Brotherhood—the theosophical masters—maintained a branch
lodge there. So it was that Ballard’s account of what transpired on a day in 1930
combined remnants of Theosophy with other remnants of New Thought in a
new synthesis of his own. He had knelt to scoop some water, felt something like
electricity rush through his body from head to foot, and turned to see the mysterious
hiker who later revealed himself to be Saint-Germain. Signiﬁcantly, the
young man oﬀered Ballard a creamy liquid that repeated the electrical eﬀect
on Ballard’s mind and body. He told Ballard that the drink had come from
‘‘Universal Supply,’’ which was everywhere available to those who loved suﬃciently.
Themes of poverty and prosperity intertwined in this essentially New
Thought message that came in tow with the Ballard autobiography. Moreover,
New Thought teaching was as generously supplied as the Universal Supply of the
drink. In eﬀect, Saint-Germain instructed Ballard in leaving behind the outer
busyness of mind and body and entering the silence. In this and later reported
visitations, too, after reviewing some of Ballard’s previous lives, Saint-Germain
began to teach that reincarnation could be avoided. (Belief in reincarnation had
been taught not only by Theosophists but also by many—like Charles Fillmore
and Unity students—in New Thought.) Saint-Germain himself was an ascended
master, and the i am Religious Activity came to teach that ascension was possible—and,
indeed, the true goal of humans, instead of reincarnation. Here,
again, there were New Thought connections. The Saint-Germain teaching accorded
strikingly with the radical view advanced by Annie Rix Militz in her late
Los Angeles years, when Militz moved away from Fillmore and began to teach
‘‘ascension,’’ or ‘‘translation.’’ ‘‘Like Jesus,’’ she had written, ‘‘this can be your last
incarnation, that is, the last one which has had its beginning in a ﬂesh-birth.’’
‘‘The God-Self’’ was ‘‘never incarnated and therefore cannot be reincarnated.’’
‘‘Truth undeceives the ego when it gives itself up to the great Ego,’’ Militz afﬁrmed,
‘‘and then it begins its journey back to the Path which it left so long ago,
and its arrival is the realization of Being-what-it-is, called the Ascension.’’145
Still more, the silence of a stilled body and mind—a spiritual strategy toward
the growth that would bring ascension—led on into a distinctly New Thought
terrain. Saint-Germain taught the use of aﬃrmations. He also taught the use
New Ages for All 469
of decreeing, a practice that, according to J. Gordon Melton, had begun with
Emma Curtis Hopkins during her New York years. Here a decree was a statement
distinguished by its energy and focus, its concerted investment of will, in
commanding—or demanding—certain outcomes for good. It was spoken from
the stance of the high Self that was God within. In the i am context, a decree
came to be used for destructive as well as constructive ends, in acts of ‘‘warfare’’
against what believer-practitioners deemed as evil. Since decrees were, in eﬀect,
especially forceful aﬃrmations, it followed that the denials (of negative conditions)
that were also part of New Thought prayer practice could be tweaked.
They could become, in the emphatic form of the decree, what looked like oldfashioned
curses. Ballard’s ascended masters—Saint-Germain and Jesus the leading
ones, but there were others—had supplied a continuing revelation that put
Ballard himself in charge. He was Saint-Germain’s ‘‘Accredited Messenger,’’ and
Edna and Donald Ballard (his son) were soon added, so that the trio became the
only ‘‘Accredited Messengers’’ of the ascended masters. As they began to teach
and develop their revelation, abundance replaced their former poverty. Edna
Ballard, particularly, became a commanding presence. Charles Braden wrote of
the movement’s appeal to ‘‘enormous numbers of people in all the great cities’’
with claims of ‘‘more than a million followers’’ (even three million in the estimate
of some members). ‘‘It is a fact,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that in the late thirties they gathered
huge crowds, ﬁlling the great auditoriums of the larger cities of America, night
after night, for a week or more each.’’146
With continuing revelation from ascended masters and the practice of aﬃrmation
and, especially, decreeing, the i am Religious Activity ﬂourished. Meanwhile,
the name by which it was known—i am—also signaled New Thought
presence in the midst of Theosophy. With hints of the ‘‘I Am’’ language in midnineteenth-century
spiritualism, Warren Felt Evans later promoted its use, bequeathing
the verbal formula to early New Thought, as we have seen. For the
Ballards, the name did not come at once. Charles Braden remarked that he had
‘‘found no single reference to the I Am in Unveiled Mysteries, the original text,
the ﬁrst revelation made by St. Germain to Guy Ballard.’’ However, as they grew
into use of the name, what the Ballards evoked in the ‘‘I Am’’ or the ‘‘Mighty
I Am Presence’’ straddled the line between personal and impersonal: I Am was
an ‘‘It’’ but also displayed personal qualities like love, wisdom, and knowledge.
More than that, I Am also straddled a line between supreme source and individualized
God-Self within. Again, it was Emma Curtis Hopkins—who had hybridized
Christian Science with the teaching of Warren Felt Evans—who taught her
students, like Annie Rix Militz in Los Angeles, to think in terms of the ‘‘radiant
I Am.’’ As Melton has summarized, ‘‘In connection with her decreeing, Hopkins
470 Arrivals
and her students also used the term ‘i am’ in the peculiar manner later to be
identiﬁed with the ‘i am’ movement.’’ She had written a pamphlet The Radiant
‘‘i am,’’ and one of her students—Thomas J. Shelton—developed her ideas even
further in his book of I Am Sermons. In Los Angeles, by 1904 Militz’s Primary
Lessons in Christian Living and Healing carried a similar ‘‘radiant’’ message.147
If the radiant I Am Presence pointed toward New Thought discourse, the i am
movement’s developing language of light told of abiding connections to Theosophy
and, notably, to twentieth-century Theosophy, with its themes of powerful
light and energy. The Ballards’ Saint-Germain had taught the visualization and
cultivation of a sense of the body’s envelopment in a ‘‘Dazzling White Light,’’
this as part of the process of uniting self with God. The ‘‘threefold truth’’ he and
other ascended masters revealed included use of a violet consuming ﬂame of
divine love (the other two truths were the ‘‘Mighty I Am Presence’’ within and
invocation of the ‘‘I Am’’ name for God). This violet ﬂame was seen as a light
cylinder surrounding a person as a mark of the divine presence. When a believer
called forth the personal ‘‘I Am Presence’’ from within, taught the Ballards, they
released the ﬂame to burn up impurity and discord in the world—an activity
intimately bound up with the practice of decreeing. In a declaration reminiscent
of, especially, Alice Bailey’s rays, i am promoted the belief that each one of
the ascended masters radiated a speciﬁc color representing a particular aspect of
the divine. According to Edna Ballard, ‘‘clean, clear, bright colors’’ were ‘‘rivers
of blessing from the realms of light, the source of all perfection.’’ By contrast,
some colors were deeply problematic: the color red ‘‘cut oﬀ the White Light,’’
Saint-Germain warned, and black reﬂected hate as well as destruction and death.
Members of i am neither wore them nor kept objects in these colors close to
them.148
In this blended Theosophy–New Thought world, lineages and lines of connection
were everywhere. One formulation led to the next and on to the next; it
was hard to tell when and where the line would be crossed that would lead some
to object—and object strenuously—to the religious thought and practice of believers.
i am clearly crossed the line and became controversial. It experienced a
prolonged period of litigation leading to two Supreme Court rulings (1944 and
1946)—in an often-cited case that raised issues regarding sincerity in religious
belief and the dissemination of materials deemed fraudulent through the mails.
The Court overturned lower-court convictions of Edna and Donald Ballard
(Guy Ballard had died in 1939), but it was 1954 before the group could use the
mails again and 1957 before its tax-exempt status returned. i am’s troubles, however,
were not over. As it rebuilt—with an oﬃce building in the Chicago Loop
and a retreat center near Mount Shasta—it also faced signiﬁcant internal discord.
New Ages for All 471
Continuing revelation meant that ascended masters could talk freely to whom
they chose, and new groups and lineages could be created. Out of the splintering
came, for instance, Mark L. Prophet’s Summit Lighthouse, and—after his sudden
death in 1973—the creation the following year of the Church Universal and
Triumphant by his widow, Elizabeth Clare Prophet (the designated ‘‘Messenger’’
of the ascended masters), and the Summit Lighthouse’s board of directors.
Both i am and spin-oﬀ groups like the now fairly well-known Church Universal
and Triumphant contributed to the discourse community that became the New
Age movement.149 As we will see in this narrative’s conclusion, ascended masters,
once they started visiting, kept coming and—in the space age—came under
new guises and assumed new roles.
ETHNIC SCRIPTS AND SUBSCRIBERS
There were, however, other new ages in which the white majority culture stood
on the sidelines or entered only ﬁtfully. We have already encountered the presence
of ‘‘others’’ in Anglo-American spiritualist culture. Native Americans, for
example, had haunted white minds from the earliest days of contact, and from
the time of the Shaker manifestations of the late 1830s Indians had taken their
place among the spirits who showed up for spiritualist seekers. By the heyday of
séance spiritualism, their appearances had become organized, and by the end of
the century the protocols for native visitors had been set. But they also visited
more informally. We gain a brief glimpse in Clara Whitmore’s ﬁctionalized account
of her childhood in the South in the late nineteenth century. Whitmore
remembered that when she was six or seven, small and sensitive Nellie Reynolds
came as a live-in helper for her mother. Reynolds, not herself well-liked, in the
evenings turned medium for Indian Jo, who was large, strong, and much-liked.
He brought news of relatives when snowstorms blocked communication, entertained
family members who were there, and healed them. Jo was a ‘‘Christian
Indian’’ and ‘‘friend of the Pale Faces,’’ at a time when all the other Indians were
gone. Indeed, ‘‘he seemed like a neighbor who dropped in, often three or four
evenings a week.’’ In the twentieth century, in the old and established spiritualist
community Indians continued to come and go, almost like old friends and like
Indian Jo. In the resident spiritualist camp at Cassadaga, Florida, for example
(the oldest such religious community in the Southeast), some of the residents
in the 1990s clearly favored Native American images and artifacts, while Indian
guides still came by to assist mediums.150
Outside white minds, however, Native American metaphysicians thrived. Living
Indians, in a mingled context of traditionalism and hybridism, pursued ana-
472 Arrivals
logs to white activity on their own or with whites. Oblivious or indiﬀerent to the
blanket condemnation of Indian-white spiritual enterprises by Native American
academics, some Indians accepted white clients and acted as spiritual mediums
on their behalf, in eﬀect playing the role of counselor. After she was ordained a
spiritualist minister, for example, Rosalyn Bruyere’s second teacher had been a
Hopi elder named Grandfather David Monongya, who conﬁded Hopi prophecy
to her. Later, as a New Age healer, she regularly visited reservations for healing
work, assisted clearly by her former spiritualism and the aﬃnity it gave her to
Native Americans, whose practices she sometimes adopted. However, such instances
(and there were many) existed as the surface manifestation of a pervasive
reality. Whether traditional or mingled with New Age beliefs and practices,
Native American religiosity in the twentieth century and beyond clearly tilted
toward metaphysics. Even in the strong Christian communities that ﬂourished
on the reservations and in cities with sizable American Indian populations, inherited
structures of belief and practice altered the character of native Christianity.
Sometimes these habitual patterns and practices existed alongside Christian
practice, as in the much-reported case of the Oglala Sioux Black Elk, who
was both a Catholic catechist and a Sioux traditionalist (and, later, a leader in
the pan-Indian Ghost Dance). In a cultural world of combination, Indians subtly
or not so subtly reinvented Christianity to accommodate their own sensibilities.
Traditional ritual and ceremony had always been strongly marked by symbolism—in
object, gesture, and sound—whether esoteric or transparent. Synthetic
and blended ceremony operated similarly.151
Among African Americans, the tradition of continuing revelation, alive and
well from colonial times, did not depart and leave blacks spiritless. Habits of practice
ﬂourished in the rural South, in northern and southern cities, and elsewhere
throughout the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst.
Anthropologists, sociologists, litterateurs, and religious studies scholars have provided
windows into this dense culture of haunts and spirits and into the belief
and practice systems that arose, paralleling white metaphysical endeavors and
sometimes crossing over into them. After the Civil War, older black traditions of
conjure (that is, hoodoo or root doctoring) were attacked by preachers and educators
who sought to improve the lot of the freed slaves in the South. But as Yvonne
Chireau has observed, anthropologists and ethnologists by the end of the century
began to look again at these inherited beliefs, seeing their ‘‘mystical traits,’’ their
‘‘unreﬁned spirituality,’’ and their ‘‘racial and religious sensibility.’’ For the twentieth
century, the prominence of metaphysical religion among blacks is clear in
the typology developed by Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer to characterize all
black religion in the United States. Alongside mainstream denominations and
New Ages for All 473
established sects, messianic-nationalist groups, and conversionist ones (like holiness
and pentecostal practitioners), Baer and Singer identify ‘‘thaumaturgical
sects.’’ For them, thaumaturgy means ‘‘magico-religious’’ ceremonies and rituals,
or the acquisition of ‘‘ecstatic knowledge’’ that promises seekers who come to
these groups ‘‘spiritual power over themselves and others.’’ Baer and Singer consider
thaumaturgical activity expressive only, but in the terms of this narrative it
is easy to see a magical instrumentalism in the quest for spiritual power.152
Important for the instrumentalism, rural and southern magical beliefs traveled
to urban and northern areas. In his study of the survival of hoodoo beliefs
and tales in northern Indiana, for example, Gilbert E. Cooley found that former
southern root doctors, as northern and urban professionals, now called themselves
‘‘psychics,’’ or ‘‘spiritualistic readers,’’ or ‘‘prophets.’’ ‘‘Most urban root doctors
work under the guise of another name,’’ Cooley reported. ‘‘Furthermore,
they associate themselves with a particular church or at least assume the title of
minister.’’ To accommodate their practice, candles, oils, incense, roots, and other
paraphernalia appeared in ‘‘religious candle shops,’’ creating an economy predicated
on magical and metaphysical work. Not only in Gary, Indiana, but also in
cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, and St. Louis,
black storefront churches and, especially, spiritualist churches supported a small
army of mediums, psychic readers, and spiritual healers. As Chireau has summarized,
‘‘techniques such as numerology, palmistry, hypnotism, and astrology
gave a veneer of legitimacy to these supernatural professionals, as did their titles:
‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor.’’’ Metaphysical Asia surfaced, too, as some newspaper advertisements
acquainted the public with exotic specialists who knew ‘‘Hindu’’ or
‘‘Oriental’’ secret lore. Even Christian ministers could function as entrepreneurial
dispensers of magic and the occult. By the 1920s, too, blues songs sometimes
carried conjure references in their titles, as in Ma Rainey’s ‘‘Louisiana Hoodoo
Blues,’’ Bessie Brown’s ‘‘Hoodoo Blues,’’ and Blind Lemon Jeﬀerson’s ‘‘Low
Down Mojo Blues.’’153
Nor had matters changed by the late twentieth century. Based on extensive
ﬁeldwork beginning from 1983 as she traveled the country by bus, Joyce E. Noll’s
Company of Prophets uncovered what she called ‘‘substantial and deﬁnitive psychic
abilities’’ in a broad range of native-born blacks. Prophets came not only
from the ranks of the poor but from a variety of socioeconomic classes and educational
backgrounds. The range of claims and practices that Noll identiﬁed
is extraordinary—mediums, spiritual healers, exorcists, ceremonial performers
skilled in tarot and the use of crystals as well as in astrology and numerology,
out-of-body travelers, recounters of past lives. Many of the ‘‘prophets’’ were still
content to practice traditional Western religions, even as others turned to Asia
474 Arrivals
and still others joined ‘‘New Age religions and groups.’’ All, however, ‘‘believed in
a Supreme Spirit consciousness,’’ and their practice showed the same pragmatic
and agency-oriented stance that could be found in mainstream metaphysical
culture. Here was Mother Susie Booth, who lived to be 106 years old and who
talked to powerful spirit guides and gave messages from the pulpit of the Upper
Room, her church in Chicago. And here was Eddie Cabral, who aligned himself
with three ‘‘entities’’ in order to create what he called a ‘‘triangular energy.’’
More in keeping with New Thought categories and with what he knew of the
East, here, too, was Chicago’s Walter Nathaniel Thomas Jr., who established the
Divine Light Temple and taught meditation in person and through his books
Divine Light Meditation and Spiritual Meditation. In the midst of a ﬁnancial
struggle over a barely proﬁtable building with a mortgage on it, he felt himself
lifted into the air while meditating and decreed that he would sell the building
that very day. He got a long distance phone call about two hours later with an
oﬀer to buy.154
In this plethora of individualized and small-group expressions, spiritualism
clearly stood out. Like white spiritualists in the twentieth century, blacks found
themselves in congregational settings. As early as 1913 Mother Leafy Anderson
had organized the Eternal Life Spiritualist Church in Chicago, and Spiritual
churches—complexly combinative groups based largely in spiritualism—began
in earnest in the 1920s. Leafy Anderson herself apparently came to New Orleans
around 1920, where Spiritual churches especially grew with female leadership,
not unlike Christian Science and New Thought. New Orleans, however, was
not alone as a spiritualist mecca, and in various cities in the nation—Chicago,
Detroit, New York’s Harlem, Houston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia among them
—a network of congregations sprang up. Although most of them maintained a
connection with a parent church if they had one, they were also highly decentralized.
Beginnings often seemed informal and haphazard—typically as private
businesses to advise people seeking jobs, heal them, help in their love aﬀairs,
or protect. Spiritualist advisors would eventually form congregations with their
clients as members and then pastor them in storefront churches. In the Depression
era, spiritualists became the fastest growing among the small and intense religious
groups that arose throughout the black population. On Chicago’s Southside,
in ‘‘Bronxville,’’ for example, in 1928 one church in twenty—or seventeen
churches—was a Spiritual congregation; by 1938, one in ten—a total of ﬁftyone—could
claim the same. As high as the numbers stood, they excluded a large
group of unchurched spiritualists who kept home altars or worked as spiritualist
advisors (thought to be over one hundred just before World War II). Meanwhile,
New Ages for All 475
in Harlem during the 1920s 15 percent of black churches were likewise Spiri-
tual.155
Joseph Washington has described the combinative and agency-based religious
culture of groups such as these as he identiﬁes what drew people to them. Their
‘‘straightforward utilitarian use of religion’’ clearly appealed with its ready access
to magical tools to protect from evil and attract desired good. ‘‘Spiritualists,’’
Washington says, ‘‘combined the instinct of voodooism with Roman Catholic
holy objects; Baptist and Methodist hymns were borrowed but not their feverpitched
preaching; their spiritual healing was taken over from the Holiness, Pentecostal
groups, as well as their ritual of jubilant worship through swinging gospel
tunes driven by the beat of secular rhythm and blues.’’ In New Orleans, where
Spiritual churches achieved special prominence and where scholars beginning
with Zora Neale Hurston have paid more attention, prophecy and healing—as
elsewhere—have functioned as hallmarks. Understood as biblical ‘‘gifts of the
spirit,’’ they have also conformed to major themes in metaphysical religion, and
they have appeared not only in public worship but also in private client-centered
therapy situations. As anthropologists Claude Jacobs and Andrew Kaslow have
summarized, rituals range from conventional Christian ones like communion,
baptism, and ordination to more distinctive practices like a ‘‘helping hand service,’’
a ‘‘candle drill,’’ and saint-day feasts. Jacobs and Kaslow point especially to
the complexity of spirit possession in these churches, describing how ‘‘members
may be ﬁlled by the Holy Spirit, as in Pentecostal churches, or ‘entertain’ spirits
or spirit guides, as in Voodoo and Spiritualism.’’156
It is signiﬁcant that the chief spirit guide in the New Orleans churches was—
and continues to be—the Indian Black Hawk. Jacobs and Kaslow have noted
the frequency of services dedicated to him as well as the number of altars and
the many people who call him their spirit guide. They have also pointed to the
prominent presence of representations of Black Hawk and Native Americans in
the churches. Mother Leafy Anderson had begun the Black Hawk tradition, and
report had it that she herself was half Mohawk and had called Black Hawk a ‘‘saint
for the South.’’ The historical Black Hawk had been a leader among the Sauk and
Fox peoples of the upper Mississippi Valley in the early nineteenth century. He
supported the British in the War of 1812 and later, in 1832—soured by Indian Removal
west of the Mississippi and by poor land and shortages of food—led some
one thousand men, women, and children to the east bank of the river. His rebellion
failed, he ended up in a U.S. jail, and he was subsequently returned to Fox
and Sauk loyal to the federal government. After that, he purportedly dictated his
autobiography, although the authenticity of the document that claimed to be
476 Arrivals
his work has been questioned. That, however, has not stopped him from occupying
a ritual place of honor in Spiritual churches.157
Jacobs and Kaslow probe the meaning of the elaborate ritual and preeminent
place accorded Black Hawk, suggesting that he has functioned as a complex
symbol identiﬁed with Saint Michael (the Archangel) and also with Martin
Luther King Jr. Indeed, they conclude that he was ‘‘more than an Indian spirit
or powerful guide’’ but instead a ‘‘master symbol’’ like the Virgin of Guadalupe
for Mexico. ‘‘As the symbol of the Virgin integrates a diverse nation,’’ they write,
‘‘we suggest that the symbol of Black Hawk does the same for the assorted membership
of the New Orleans Spiritual churches.’’ Even, it seems, blacks had their
own African American Black Hawk because, at the dawn of the twentieth century,
a black bandit named Black Hawk harassed people in the Mississippi delta.
Still, Jacobs and Kaslow point back again to the Indian identity of Black Hawk.
For blacks separated from Africa and its ancient gods, Black Hawk, as a Native
American, oﬀered a non-European model of identity. More than that, in the
Louisiana and New Orleans area the history of the two races was clearly intertwined,
and mixed-race oﬀspring were ubiquitous.158 If blacks, like whites, experienced
Indian hauntings, the haunts functioned diﬀerently and for diﬀerent
reasons. Blended lives were not the creations of fantasy but lived situations, and
they could be celebrated.
This kind of unity between peoples—so much a part of the theoretical expression
of American metaphysical religion—became a historical reality, too,
in the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine (1879–1965). In a formation
that, for Baer and Singer, deﬁes easy categorization into any one of the major
types of black religion they propose, Divine’s Peace Mission—like the Spiritual
churches—displayed its fair share of metaphysical presence. Divine himself
had been born as George Baker Jr., and he experienced the religiosity of Baltimore’s
storefront churches even as he grew to know something of Methodism
and Catholicism there. His synthesizing habit led him to the pentecost of Los
Angeles’s famed Azusa Street Revival in 1906. But as Ronald White has shown,
he was also strongly attracted to New Thought. Divine took the message of the
God within seriously and literally, so that—in his ﬁrst exploration of religious
leadership—he took his place as the ‘‘Messenger,’’ God in the degree of Sonship,
in a spiritual triumvirate. Besides the mild-mannered Father Jehovia (Samuel
Morris), the trio included Reverend Bishop Saint John the Vine (John A. Hickerson)
whose homegrown theology displayed his familiarity with aspects of New
Thought. In this, he was supported by Father Divine, who as the organizing
power of the group taught the others the metaphysics he already knew.159
Familiarity with metaphysics existed identiﬁably in the black community, but
New Ages for All 477
George Baker, who loved books, probably ﬁrst absorbed New Thought through
some of its extensive literary productions. He was especially inﬂuenced by the
Unity teachings of the Fillmores and in his later life publicly expressed his admiration
for Charles Fillmore and for Unity. Later, in Los Angeles in 1906, the
twenty-seven-year-old Baker had still more opportunities to read metaphysical
literature and to interact with whites in the movement. The message of oneness
with God, of the power of mind, of God as inﬁnite Supply, and poverty as the result
of wrong thinking proved powerful, and he took it and reshaped it to his own
evolving and eminently practical theology. As Jill Watts has written of blacks in
general, from a New Thought perspective ‘‘blacks possessed just as much divinity
as whites and, by applying mind-power, could overcome oppression and reap the
beneﬁts of American enterprise. Positive thinking allowed African Americans to
assert control over their destiny and to combat their feelings of powerlessness in
white America.’’160
As for Father Divine, he not only read New Thought books but he also turned
to metaphysical Asia. He absorbed Jiddu Krishnamurti’s The Kingdom of Happiness
and also Baird T. Spalding’s Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East,
a work that had strongly inﬂuenced Guy Ballard and the i am movement.161 It
was Charles Fillmore who aﬀected him most deeply, but it was distinctly Fillmore
in combination. Divine fused the mind-cure and prosperity teachings of
Fillmore and New Thought, the reinforcements that came from the intuitionism
of Krishnamurti, and the purported mind-power thinking that Spalding found
among isolated Indian masters in the Himalayas. He wove them seamlessly into
his own combinative religion that—like the Spiritual churches—brought together
the perfectionism of holiness religion and the exuberance of the revival
tradition with what New Thought had given him. Armed with his new religious
synthesis, the Messenger broke from his Baltimore ministry, traveled in the South
as a preacher and religious teacher, and then made his way to New York. There,
in Sayville, Long Island, in 1919, he began a religious community. He had become
convinced of the presence of God within each person, and he believed that
spiritual and material wholeness went together. So began a long era in which he
led enthusiastic devotees in a Depression-era haven of prosperity supported by
his near-legendary generosity and hospitality. In a ritual that became central to
the community’s practice, he presided over a laden banquet table supplied with
course after course and hours in which to consume them, and he even weighed
his followers to be sure that they were growing fat. In the implicit theological message
of the daily banquet occasions, he was the Messiah present for the messianic
banquet. When his followers took the message of his divinity literally, Father
Divine—whose adopted name said it all—did not deny that he was God. Accord-
478 Arrivals
ing to some (and like Charles Fillmore), he claimed that he would not die, and he
held that the same good news could apply to the devout among his followers.162
Divine’s enthusiastic banquets and mystical claims to divine identity, however,
stood side by side with a pragmatism that also smacked of New Thought.
His followers should know peace—and heaven—on earth, and he would guarantee
that. He supplied food and shelter to followers at a nominal price, found
employment for those who had no work, and often encouraged the formation of
cooperative businesses. Nor would he abide racial segregation and disharmony.
After the death of his ﬁrst wife, in 1946 he married the Canadian-born Edna
Rose Ritchings, who was white, and so he modeled black-white unity for devotees.
God, though, was clearly black, since Father Divine was God present in the
community. Blacks and whites could live in harmony, but the message was one
of black priority and power in an African American liberation theology predicated
on New Thought. Indeed, if we juxtapose the Father Divine message of the
black empowered Self with the culture of spirit dependency embodied in Spiritual
churches and a plethora of independent spiritualists, the central paradox
of American metaphysical religion emerges clearly—a paradox that would be
brought home sharply by the later New Age movement. On the one hand, metaphysics
has spread the good news that humans are gods or gods-in-the-making.
On the other, it has provided dramatic and performative scripts to ensure salvation
by turning to Higher Powers—spirits, masters, mediums, and seers.
Even as Father Divine combined New Thought with other elements and reﬂected
metaphysical paradox, in the American West and Southwest, Latinos
were habitually practicing their own combinative versions of the faith. In a culture
that, before recent inroads by pentecostalism and general Protestant evangelicalism,
was at least nominally Catholic, several versions of vernacular metaphysics
ﬂourished throughout the twentieth century and on. In individualized
forms of curanderismo (healing) and in organized ones as spiritualism and spiritism
that emphasized curanderismo, Latinas and Latinos revealed metaphysical
assumptions and enacted metaphysical scripts. They combined indigenous elements
with European-derived ones to create authentic and independent versions
of Mexican American metaphysics. Curanderismo—the religious folk healing
system of Mexico and the American borderlands—depends on charismatic and
prophetic ﬁgures who can channel more-than-natural energy into a series of
corresponding registers—material, mental, and spiritual. Based on the claimed
possession by the healer of a special gift for the work (el don), it functions in
a universe of symbolic material discourse. Here the markers are such elements
as the use of herbs and teas, midwifery and massage therapy, forms of divination
such as card reading, and numerous spiritual cleansings, or sweepings—with
New Ages for All 479
food items like lemon, garlic, purple onions, and eggs. Studying its south Texas
expression in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, anthropologists Robert T. Trotter
and Juan Antonio Chavira have traced its historical sources to a panoply of ideas
and practices. In various and ﬂuid formations these can also be tracked in curanderismo
elsewhere, and so the Trotter-Chavira statement of sources is broadly
instructive: ‘‘Judeo-Christian religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals, early Arabic
medicine and health practices (combined with Greek humoral medicine, revived
during the Spanish Renaissance); medieval and later European witchcraft;
Native American herbal lore and health practices; modern beliefs about spiritualism
and psychic phenomena; and scientiﬁc medicine.’’ ‘‘None of these inﬂuences
dominates curanderismo,’’ they report, ‘‘but each has had some impact on
its historical development.’’163
The Spanish-Moorish engraftment on native tradition meant, already, the
blending of two cultures with strong metaphysical components: We explored the
metaphysical substrate in Greek theories of the four humors in the ﬁrst chapter,
and certainly Arab-Moorish medicine was predicated on notions of correspondence
in which balance was primary and disharmony with the environment
(social, spiritual, and physical) caused disease. Similarly, a native metaphysic,
expressed in symbolic action, formed the basis of Mesoamerican culture. Bernard
Ortiz de Montellano, who has pointed to the culture’s homogeneity and
paid special attention to the Aztecs, notes its strong shamanic elements and
cites themes—and temple architectures—that represent connections between
the human body and the universe. As in Spanish-Moorish medicine, good health
reﬂects states of balance and equilibrium understood in the widest context and
including the gods. In both systems and also in biblical ideas of healing that came
through Christianity, material substances—largely botanical—provide strong assists.
In curanderismo, their metaphysical properties supply a poetry of alliance
with bodies in pain, as when—in the many limpias, or puriﬁcations, that a healer
prescribes—eggs are passed over the body to absorb negative vibrations and ener-
gies.164
The explicitly magical universe of witchcraft also came into curanderismo
through the contact culture that brought Europeans to Mesoamerican terrain.
Rafaela Castro has called brujería (witchcraft) ‘‘an integral part of the culture
of Mexico and the Southwest’’ and has pointed to the role of sixteenth-century
conquerors and colonists in imparting European witchcraft beliefs. Here, missionary
friars played a signiﬁcant part with their denunciations of witches in a
universe of sin, evil, and the devil. In the case of curanderismo, Trotter and Chavira
cite the strong support for correct incantatory formulas, prayers, and rituals
that medieval and later witchcraft bequeathed across the Atlantic—magic that
480 Arrivals
the two say dated ‘‘back to Egypt, India, and pre-Christian Europe.’’ They also
note its encouragement of human attempts to control the spirits. In this regard, a
curandero or curandera could acquire a reputation for power. In many cases, too,
the negative reading of witchcraft that came as part of the baggage of Christian
culture meant that healing power was seen as emanating from the devil. Healers
would help, but healers were also to be feared. Not themselves witches (that is,
brujos or brujas)—who are understood to function independently from healers
and stand as ‘‘accepted facts of life’’ in Chicano culture—healers could still be
confused with witches. Conversely, people often sought them to undo the harm
that they believed a witch had caused.165
Combination, though, did not simply fuse multiple pasts. Emergent discourses
from Europe continued to move westward and to enter Mexican and
Mexican American cultural conversations. They modiﬁed the healing scripts of
curanderismo and also came to function more separately in spiritualist contexts.
In a Mexican American culture that Romantic glosses typically depict as isolated
from Europe and Anglo-America, ideas and writings supporting ‘‘modern’’
spiritualism and psychic research ﬂourished. Especially notable were the works
of Allan Kardec (Leon Denizarth Hippolyte Rivail), the nineteenth-century
Frenchman whom we have met brieﬂy before. Kardec, who for semantic reasons
called his beliefs about contact with spirits ‘‘spiritism’’ (he thought that the term
spiritualism might be applied to any antimaterialist or extramaterialist belief),
published seven works on spiritist themes as midcareer productions. Son of an
old and distinguished family, he had been educated in Switzerland and returned
to France to dabble in various semi-learned pursuits, translating books into German
for young people, lecturing on various sciences, and participating—signiﬁcantly—in
the Phrenological Society of Paris and the Society of Magnetism. Like
others in the evolving metaphysical community of the era, he was drawn to investigations
of clairvoyance and trance, sleep walking, and similar mesmeric phenomena.
When, after 1848, news of the Hydesville happenings across the Atlantic
brought new excitement and interest to these and related themes, Rivail (he
was not yet Kardec) engaged in a series of séance sessions. Through two young
female mediums, he believed, he contacted the spirits who gave him his pen
name and dictated the contents of his spiritist books.166
Especially, these spirits countered the anti-reincarnationist version of spiritualism
that Andrew Jackson Davis and others had advanced in America earlier.
For Kardec, in fact, as Frank Podmore summarized, the ‘‘leading tenet’’ of the
‘‘new gospel’’ was reincarnation, with multiple incarnations allowing the soul to
progress from life to life. (This turn toward reincarnation, it should be noted, already
signaled—or perhaps helped to create—the climate for the appearance of
New Ages for All 481
Theosophy.) Although its English-language translation had to wait until 1875,
Kardec’s ground-breaking Le Livre de Esprits (The Spirits’ Book) had appeared
in French as early as 1853, and it was published again in a revised French version
in 1857. As a textbook for Kardec’s brand of reincarnational spiritualism, it went
through at least ﬁfty-two editions, and Kardec himself created the monopolistic
journal La Revue Spirite to support the work. Kardec’s books, in general, were
popular; Podmore noted that they ‘‘sold by tens of thousands, and were translated
into nearly every European language.’’ By the later twentieth century, they
were surely being translated into Spanish, as even a cursory review of the Internet
WorldCat database shows. Meanwhile, June Macklin has noted that by this
time simpliﬁed digests of Kardec’s teachings appeared in paperback throughout
Latin America.167
In the United States, Kardecist spiritism and a more generalized spiritualism
could be found in places as varied as south Texas, California, and Indiana, where
migrant laborers came. There is confusion in the anthropological literature about
what counts as spiritism and what as spiritualism, but generally the acceptance
or rejection of the theological tenet of reincarnation locates a spirit-believer in
the spiritist or spiritualist camp respectively. More than that, as Luis D. León has
observed, based on the work of Silvia Ortíz Echániz, spiritists may have come
from higher social classes than spiritualists. In Mexico, Kardec’s work—which
turned on the creation of spiritual healing centers and explicit ritual directions
for prayer and incantation in temple ceremonies—led to the organization of
spiritual temples. These grew rapidly in the late twentieth century, some explicitly
spiritist and others more broadly spiritualist. They also spread across the border,
as León’s representative account of one such (spiritualist) temple in East Los
Angeles—with its ﬁfty mediums at various levels of training—shows.168
At the same time, charismatic healers came to take their places as the saints of
Mexican American curanderismo, among them El Niño Fidencio, Don Pedrito
Jaramillo, and Teresa Urrea. Tellingly, they are ﬁgures who in devotional following—and
for Jaramillo and Urrea in their lives as well—have straddled the
Mexico–United States border. In doing so, they embody the individual and collective
histories of Latino immigrants and the ritual ‘‘dramas of salvation’’ that
Macklin found in the work of curanderas and curanderos. Moreover, as León insists,
the ‘‘truly charismatic’’ healing gift (el don) was ‘‘revealed, not conferred.’’ In
the case of José Fidencio de Jesús Constantino Síntora, popularly called El Niño
Fidencio (1898–1938), the famed healer became so strong an object of cultus
that, after his death, temples sprang up in Mexico and the United States, including
Chicago. Here trance mediums brought his spirit back to consult, cure, and
even predict the future. According to El Niño lore, the future healer—like Alice
482 Arrivals
Bailey—received his own version of a visit from a master: Once, when he was
caring for his sick younger brother, the door of his shack opened and a stranger
(Jesus, he later thought, standing in the Sacred Heart position of Catholic devotionalism)
handed him a book that detailed the plant and herb remedies that
would cure his brother. In a second, separate incident, another calling came
when he saw in vision a ‘‘tall, bearded man with a luminous halo around his venerable
head’’ who told him of his ‘‘high destiny’’ as a healer. Later, from 1925 to
1927, El Niño was employed in Mexico by a German from whom he learned
European spiritism. A controversial ﬁgure who alternately was accused of unwittingly
creating harm and hailed as an eﬀective healer, he kept up his healing
work from his bed in 1935 when his own health declined. After his death, two
annual three-day festivals sprang up to honor him, and according to an anthropological
team who ﬁlmed the El Niño devotionalism in 1972, as many as ﬁfty
thousand people participated. Most of the devotees were women.169
With regard to the more general spiritualist movement, in the United States
Luis León has pointed to the existence of ‘‘at least three highly public espiritualista
[that is, spiritualist] temples—each with several hundred members and
many more ‘visitors’—in East Los Angeles alone.’’ Numbers of temples also appeared
in Southern California and in the American Southwest, where in 1981
Trotter and Chavira reported that spiritualism was growing in south Texas. They
reported, too, that for the healing work of curanderismo the concept of energy
functioned as the central unifying idea. Indeed, if the material, mental, and spiritual
levels of healing that they detailed are scrutinized, the metaphysics of energy
becomes clearly apparent. At the material level, the numerous limpias that they
recorded (they themselves were subject to nine) absorbed the vibrations of negative
energy, as we saw in the use of the egg. According to the larger theory—
Trotter and Chavira call it ‘‘one prevailing theory’’—all persons and animals as
well as some objects could give out or take in ‘‘vibrating energy.’’ This energy assumed
either positive or negative form and led to positive or negative outcomes.
The counter energy of incantation and sound could disrupt negative patterns
that were concentrated in an individual’s body, there to cause illness. Meanwhile,
substances like water and oil could be prepared with ‘‘mental vibrations’’ giving
them ‘‘magnetic properties’’ that supplied strength on contact.170 Thus, in a real
sense, healing became a process of energy balancing, using ritual accoutrements
in order to perform new scripts of equilibrium for the client-patient.
At the mental level, which Trotter and Chavira reported as the least prevalent
and in fact rare, the curandero or curandera worked to channel mental energy to
the speciﬁc somatic site where illness existed. Healers thought that the power of
their own minds could transform, at the cellular level, what was wrong—discour-
New Ages for All 483
aging the spread of diseased cells and accelerating the growth of healthy ones.
Finally, at the spiritual level—less common than material healing but more pervasive
than mental energy channeling—healers entered trance states, in which
they felt that they were projecting their own souls outward to make room for the
entry of benevolent spirits. Especially, for the spiritual level, Trotter and Chavira
noted beliefs that sickness and disease could be ‘‘caused, diagnosed, and cured
by spiritual forces called corrientes espirituales (spiritual currents).’’ What constituted
healing, then, was the manipulation of spiritual currents.171
Mexican American curanderismo and spiritism have shown no sign of abating
in recent years. Quite the contrary, in the politicized climate of Chicano consciousness
of la raza (the ‘‘race’’), traditional practices and beliefs have provided
scripts to perform not only the Chicano and Chicana body but also the spiritualized
body politic. In the words that León applies to one healer—Don Pedrito
Jaramillo—but that, arguably, may be extended to all, ‘‘healing the body . . .
served as a microcosm for repairing the nation that was dismembered in colonization.’’
There were, however, other ethnic scripts and dramas being enacted
on American soil, and to notice what is perhaps obvious, some of them came
as the property of diﬀerent European immigrant groups. Throughout the twentieth
century, for example, the Pennsylvania Dutch (that is, Germans) kept on
marking their barns with hex signs to ward oﬀ evil, and pow-wowing has continued
to thrive among them. Later immigrants, like Italian Americans, passed
on their fear of the ‘‘evil eye’’ and, as late as the mid-twentieth century, some in
the ﬁrst generation still used garlic and various assigned objects as talismans for
protection. When the garlic was abandoned, plastic evil-eye protectors and similar
devices remained.172
Other performances, however, came from new twentieth-century embodiments
of metaphysical Asia, this time metaphysical East Asia. Unlike African
Americans, Mexican Americans, and to a considerable extent Continental EuroAmericans—and
somewhat like Native Americans but much more than they—
ethnic East Asians shared their dramas of salvation with non-Asians. Still more,
East Asians not only shared: They missionized. In acts of religion that also functioned
as acts of entrepreneurship, they sold a reconstituted and even newly invented
Daoism (Taoism) to mainstream American buyers. The performances
that resulted point unmistakably to the twentieth-century metaphysical themes
we have been exploring. They exhibited high energy concerns—so that energy,
in fact, became a mantric term. They promoted experiences of personal power
in a context that exalted an enlightened body-self. They taught, if you will, a
Vedanta of East Asian provenance, in which yin and yang were resolved in the
harmony of the unifying principle, the Dao. All things were one thing, but the
484 Arrivals
one thing lay at the service of individual need and desire. And if there were
exalted teachers (the other side of the equation), the teachers never became ascended
masters, and the teachers were, in some cases, subject to criticism.
Daoist practitioners did not become a noticeable presence in the United States
until after the change in the immigration law in 1965 brought a visible increase
in the numbers of Chinese immigrants and especially of the well-educated and
privileged classes. Perhaps ironically, though, one of the ﬁrst conspicuous expressions
of American Daoist themes came not from China at all but arrived
secondhand from Japan as part of the cultural baggage that shaped (Japanese)
American macrobiotics. To complicate matters further, from almost the ﬁrst
macrobiotics was intimately connected to the New Age movement. Indeed,
J. Gordon Melton has argued that in 1971 the Boston macrobiotic community’s
East West Journal became the ﬁrst national periodical to explore the issues and
themes that were being identiﬁed with the New Age.173 Michio Kushi (1926– ), a
Japanese immigrant and the foremost teacher of macrobiotics in America, however,
had a diﬀerent, more Asian self-understanding. So, too, did the early macrobiotic
community. In a metaphysical context that extended from food ways to
a general religious philosophy of life, the macrobiotic movement embodied for
them a distinctive spirituality with roots not of the New Age.
Kushi himself had not originated macrobiotics (literally, ‘‘great’’—or ‘‘long’’—
life). Its creator was Yukikazu Sakurazawa (1893–1966), who adopted the Westernized
name Georges (and later George) Ohsawa. He had shaped macrobiotics
from the ideas of a lineage of Japanese food philosophers, the most immediate
being his own teacher, Sagen Ishizuka. The founder of the Shoku-Yo movement
in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ishizuka taught a selfconscious
and systematized restoration of traditional dietary habits. Still further,
from at least the time of Shoku-Yo, the food philosophy functioned, too, as a
sociopolitical philosophy with distinctive spiritual overtones. On the inside cover
of Ishizuka’s second book, for example, an inscription announced the foundation
of the world to be the nation, the foundation of the nation to be the home,
of the home to be the body, of the body the spirit, and, ﬁnally, the foundation
of the spirit to be food.174 The metaphysical reversal that Ishizuka’s inscription
signaled continued to mark macrobiotics. Now the body was not so much in the
mind (that is, controlled by it) as the mind was in the body, being shaped by it
and what it was fed. Still, there would be enough inconsistency in macrobiotic
circles to support the classic metaphysical position, so that even as the macrobiotic
body fed the mind the metaphysical mind enjoyed its share of macrobiotic
notice and privilege.
Ohsawa had become the central ﬁgure in the Shoku-Yo, and he spent years
New Ages for All 485
as an indefatigable lecturer and writer, organizing a Western network of macrobiotic
centers. After World War II, he maintained a study house—his Student
World Government Association—and it was here that Michio Kushi, a student
in politics and law at Tokyo Imperial University, found him. ‘‘Have you ever considered
the dialectical application of dietary principles to the problem of world
peace?’’ Ohsawa asked Kushi when they met. Kushi was persuaded and then, encouraged
by Ohsawa and endorsed by Norman Cousins, he immigrated to the
United States and continued his graduate work at Columbia University in New
York City. Absorbed in his experiential studies of macrobiotics, he never obtained
a degree but instead moved to Boston and began a center. He had married a
Japanese macrobiotic student (Tomoko Yokoyama, who became Aveline Kushi).
With help from her, from the Japanese immigrant pair Herman and Cornellia
Aihara on the West Coast, and from other Ohsawa students like Shizuko Yamamoto
in New York City, he worked to make a movement grow. The East West
Journal, begun in 1970, reached a circulation of near 80,000 by 1985, and by the
late 1980s, conservatively, there were close to 100,000 adult macrobiotic adherents
in the nation.175
What had these subscribers obtained through the new scripts they read and
were now performing? Ohsawa had already bequeathed to his ﬂedgling movement
a religious philosophy. He taught the ‘‘order of the universe’’ and the
‘‘unique principle’’ that grounded it. He began to invoke the ‘‘Tao’’ (read as ‘‘way,’’
or ‘‘spiritual path,’’ or ‘‘practice,’’ or ‘‘cosmic absolute’’ that was both transcendent
and within the self), identifying his ideas with the Chinese Daoist philosopher
Lao-Tsu (Laozi). But he also identiﬁed them with a world catalog of sages and
seers. And as they stood, his teachings were remarkably poised to enter American
metaphysical discourse. In his Zen Macrobiotics, Ohsawa oﬀered readers ‘‘twelve
theorems of the unique principle.’’ He aﬃrmed that yin and yang were the ‘‘two
poles of the inﬁnite pure expansion,’’ that they were ‘‘produced inﬁnitely, continuously,
and forever,’’ and that everything was ‘‘restless’’ because ‘‘things and
phenomena’’ were ‘‘constantly changing their Yin and Yang components.’’ He
also propounded his ‘‘seven stages of judgment’’ with the ‘‘supreme’’ (highest)
stage one of ‘‘absolute and universal love that embraces everything and turns
every antagonism into complementarism.’’ More concretely, yin and yang became
a taxonomy for the classiﬁcation of food, because the beginnings of spirituality
lay, for Ohsawa and his movement, in human biology and its transformation
through food. In a variation of conventional representations of Chinese teaching,
Ohsawa had identiﬁed yin as a centrifugal, expanding energy. It was earth’s
force and associated with rising seeds and plant growth; it was also female, cold,
(paradoxically?) passive, and spiritual (all—it should be noted in the context
486 Arrivals
here—associated with mediumistic activity). By contrast, yang represented centripetal,
contracting power. As heaven’s force and the energy of the contained,
sheathed seed, it carried the germ of potential life within; it was—like the familiar
gendered understandings—male, hot, active, and physical. In keeping with
the order of the universe, foods should be locally grown and used in season; in the
late-twentieth-century American community, the teaching soon incorporated
the notion that they should be organically grown, free from chemical fertilizers
or pesticides. Grains and vegetables, as the most balanced foods (with equal proportions
of yin and yang) got preferential treatment, and not surprisingly, brown
rice—the staple of traditional Japan—was acknowledged as the most balanced
food of all. It was these substances that could create good health and lead on and
beyond to supreme judgment and spiritual wholeness.176
Eating macrobiotically became a delicate balancing act. It took account of an
individual’s constitution (given genetically and present from birth), condition
(what eating habits and other stresses had done to the basic constitution), location
and climate, and even ‘‘dream’’ or purpose (a monk should eat diﬀerently
from a day laborer or business executive). More than that, macrobiotic dietary
choices were only the beginnings of a life journey predicated on a metaphysical
superstructure that, as Ohsawa’s ‘‘twelve theorems’’ and ‘‘seven stages’’ already
suggest, ambitiously explained all aspects of the cosmic and human worlds. After
Ohsawa’s death, Michio Kushi expanded and embellished his teaching, oﬀering
theosophical readings of his own from his Japanese past and, it seems virtually
certain, from contact with American New Age students and American metaphysical
culture in general. The combinative product of past and present, Kushi’s
teachings proclaimed a new-old spirituality, reinvented and reconstructed
in patterns supportive of American projects of its time. Whereas Ohsawa had
only touched on themes such as Chinese traditional thought and its practical
application in a macrobiotic way of life, Kushi taught more. He was interested,
for example, in Chinese ‘‘ﬁve-element’’ or ‘‘ﬁve-transformation’’ theory, and he
used it to intersect the canonical teachings of yin and yang. With ideas based
on The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (dating probably from
around 500 b.c.e.), which—not without help from the macrobiotic community
—would become a popular text in American vernacular ‘‘Taoism,’’ Kushi taught
ﬁve changes of the primal energy of life. Fire, earth, metal, water, and wood all
stood as elements, or ‘‘phases,’’ to which seasons of the year, times of the day,
physical organs, food, and even tastes (salty, sour, and so forth) corresponded.
Under Kushi’s tutelage, practitioners ate for constitution and condition, taking
note not only of yin and yang but also of the phases of energy transformation.177
In other words, someone in whose basic constitution one element or transforma-
New Ages for All 487
tion was weak or who, through a current condition, presented a weakened proﬁle
in one element or transformation would eat to heal the problem. Someone with
a weak liver or gall bladder, either because of genetics or personal history, for example,
would eat foods said to strengthen and support the liver or gall bladder.
Whatever it did for diseased livers and gall bladders, the American Daoist rhetoric
of Kushi’s teaching—easily available because of the plethora of inexpensive
books that Kushi, with the aid of his students, published—brought familiarity
with Daoist language to America. (For a time, macrobiotic literature was even
sold and distributed under the imprint of Tao Books.) It also taught a combinative
mixture that Ronald E. Kotzsch, the leading historian of the movement, has
called the ‘‘gospel according to Kushi.’’ As one example, using the concepts of yin
and yang as arbiters, Kushi taught a traditional sexuality that brought the unique
principle in touch with family values. Sexual pleasure was greatly to be desired,
but only in marriage. More than that, children were to be desired, and artiﬁcial
restraints on childbearing carried not only moral but also and especially physical
consequences. These caveats, from one perspective, could keep company with
even a Roman Catholic natural-law ethic. From another—with its celebration of
sensuality as an assist to and result of optimum health, and with its preoccupation
with the physical consequences of obstructing the natural order—the Kushi way
parted practical company with Catholicism and similar orientations quickly.178
In terms of metaphysical religiosity, though, the theosophizing speculations
of Kushi deserve notice. Kushi himself was attracted to Gnosticism, as his growing
endorsement of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas shows. Kushi knew, too, about
such staples of the American metaphysical discourse community as auras and
chakras. In his Gentle Art of Making Love, for example, he advised on ‘‘stimulating’’
the chakras and activating them during sexual play. Far and above all
of this, however, he theorized on a grand scale about cosmogony and anthropology,
building on Ohsawa’s synthesis but going well beyond it. For instance,
he took Ohsawa’s gnostic diagrammatic statement of the order of the universe
depicting its evolution as a logarithmic spiral and—in the shadow of the New
Age appropriation of quantum physics—elaborated it further. Now Kushi invoked
everything from DNA helices, star formations, and seashell construction,
to hair-growth patterns and the direction of water down the kitchen sink. ‘‘The
substance of the Great Life / completely follows Tao,’’ he quoted from Lao-Tzu
(Laozi), and he declared for ‘‘spirals of everlasting change.’’179
Kushi’s expansive narrative of cosmic, earthly (that is, natural), and human history
emerged as a gnostic tale of grand proportions, intricately thought through
and thought out, with myriad correspondences between material, historical, and
spiritual stages of development. It included attention, for example, to a prehis-
488 Arrivals
toric period in which extraterrestrials bolstered the level of cultural achievement,
both technological and spiritual, and in which, as Venus moved closer to the
sun, emigrants from that planet were forced to make their way to our earth. In a
variation of the master theme that linked earth to space beings (as we shall see
later, a characteristic New Age marker), he also thought that intelligent visitors
had come to our planet to teach and intermarry with earthlings. (He has continued
to be interested in unidentiﬁed ﬂying objects—UFOs—to the present.)
Kushi’s extraterrestrials knew the laws of yin and yang and so could control natural
energies and use mind powers like clairvoyance and telepathic communication.
Meanwhile, in the Kushi account ancient architectural remains, like the
pyramids and other megaliths, had been designed to attract and control the energies
of the cosmos. Kushi knew about Blavatsky’s lost continents of Atlantis and
Lemuria and pronounced them destroyed by the ﬂooding that attended a shifting
earth axis. Moreover, he taught that humans had manifested themselves through
stages, coming from the ‘‘one inﬁnity,’’ or ‘‘universal spirit,’’ through a world of
‘‘radiation,’’ where spirits dwelled, and then a world of ‘‘vibration,’’ or ‘‘energy,’’
inhabited by souls, ghosts, and astral bodies. From there, soon-to-be humans
entered the atmosphere, the waters of embryonic life, and ﬁnally the earth. ‘‘Our
roots as human beings are in heaven,’’ Kushi wrote, ‘‘and the ki or electromagnetic
energy that animates us comes primarily from above through the chakras
before branching out to the [acupuncture] meridians and then to trillions of
cells. Each cell has spirit, nourished constantly by energy and vibration from
heaven and earth. We are fully spiritualized when these cells are activated.’’180
What did humans come for? In Kushi’s optimistic reading (not far from New
Thought formulations), they came to live out a dream and to be ‘‘trained’’ on
the ‘‘playground’’ of earth. Those who ate macrobiotically and shared the ‘‘same
blood quality’’ could ‘‘act and play together to realize humanity’s common dream
of building One Peaceful World’’ and continue their ‘‘endless journey through
the stars.’’ ‘‘We play in this universe, living our eternal life, transforming ourselves
constantly, manifesting ourselves into various forms,’’ he summarized. If the element
of tragedy seems missing, those who know Kushi can point to his often dire
prognostications for the future and his warnings of peril in the ﬁrst decade of the
twenty-ﬁrst century. He has counseled personal transformation through ‘‘meditation,
self-reﬂection, and prayer,’’ but the more elementary—and collective—
message was to work to transform the planet by beginning with its biological base,
missionizing for food in order to missionize for spirit.181
Spirit, though, always seemed to register as energy in American Daoist circles,
as in twentieth-century and later metaphysical religiosity in general. If Kushi and
the macrobiotic movement had provided early introductions to what American
New Ages for All 489
and metaphysical Daoist themes could be, it remained for a series of Chinese
immigrants to supply their own performances. They did so on diﬀerent stage
sets and with a diﬀerent, albeit sometimes overlapping, cast of characters. Elijah
Siegler, who has studied American Daoism, has called it a ‘‘new religious movement
that may have some connection to the Daoist tradition in China, but has
less connection than claimed from within the movement itself.’’ His evidence
for the assessment has come largely from examining self-conscious statements of
Daoist identity as expressed through a series of practices. These include reading
and study of ancient texts believed to constitute the foundations of Daoism—
the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) and the Yijing (I Ching). They also encompass
performance of the physical movements taught in taijiquan (t’ai-chi ch’uan) and
qigong (ch’i-kung), and use of traditional Chinese medicine with its acupuncture
and herbalism. And, it could be added, they extend to the cultivation of
distinctive types of meditation practice that aim, like the physical movements
and the medicine, to augment and direct the ﬂow of qi. (The mysterious and
much-sought qi signals something like South Asian prana and something like
Western ‘‘breath’’ that opens out toward spirit—suggesting, again, the enlightened
body-self.) For Siegler, American Daoism originated from a conﬂuence of
Western intellectual and East Asian immigrant histories, from a ‘‘collaboration
between progressive elements in American society, and elite, lettered Chinese
immigrants, nostalgic for their own displaced childhoods.’’ (The ‘‘Tao,’’ in popular
parlance, was mother of us all.) As in the case of metaphysical South Asia,
the metaphysical East Asia of American Daoism arose in a world in which the
West was hardly absent from the East. Like a series of reﬂecting mirrors, each
culture replayed again and again what the other had constructed it to be—in a
combining of images that endlessly reproduced themselves to create the ﬂuid set
of practices deemed in America to be Daoist. American Daoism, says Siegler,
was ‘‘not merely inﬂuenced by moments of contact but constituted by them.’’182
With Daoism for the West, in the words of intellectual historian J. J. Clarke,
‘‘not so much a living tradition as a collection of writings,’’ it was the vernacular
entry of culturally facile and educated ethnic Chinese that brought Daoism
into the territory of the body and, so, the enlightened body-self. What Siegler
calls a ‘‘statistically miniscule’’ but ‘‘culturally signiﬁcant’’ number of American
spiritual seekers found in a Daoist vocabulary of correspondence a discourse that
satisﬁed. It conformed for them to long-held American metaphysical notions
of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. Especially, in concert
with the twentieth-century and later emphasis of American metaphysical religion,
they could read it in terms of energy, for qi was but another term for the
ubiquitously desired metaphysical ‘‘energy.’’ Here their views of Daoism derived
490 Arrivals
from older, romanticized Western representations of Daoism in an Orientalist
mode—work unsupported by current critical scholarship. Uninformed by that
knowledge, their new American Daoism became a nonexclusive religion recognizing
Lao Tzu (Laozi) as its founder and promoting few written texts. Unspeciﬁc
geographically (no central shrines; portable sacred space in nature and
the self), it remained historically indiﬀerent and uninvolved in politics or social
ethics. Its only divisions arose from traditionalist or more free-ﬂoating readings
of what constituted Daoism.183
The Daoism in the minds of American seekers had been shaped not only by
an older cohort of Western scholars and their popularizers but also by enthusiasm
for the ‘‘perennial philosophy’’ and the human potential movement. As in
the case of American yoga, Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, played a signiﬁcant
role. So did the idealized ﬁgure of the Oriental monk, part of American
vernacular culture through such images as that of the Dalai Lama and ﬁctive portrayals
of martial arts mastership and of inscrutable Daoist masters with magical
powers. In this climate of expectation, the new ethnic Chinese Daoist masters
of America, sometimes with bona ﬁde acting backgrounds, simply performed
themselves. Teachers claimed lineages (a Chinese requirement for authenticity)
or invented them. They cultivated personal followings but did not create institutions.
Curricula could not be replicated because the master, in eﬀect, was the
curriculum. The Chinese masters thus cultivated mystiﬁcation, and their students
cultivated practice—in a discourse community in which the ‘‘energy’’ of
qi became both the desired good and the ﬂuid and ever-changing absolute.184
American Daoists in the late twentieth century and after have been welleducated,
middle class, white, and about equally divided between genders. Their
introduction to Daoism usually comes through taiji or qigong or similar disciplines,
through contact with acupuncturists or Chinese herbalists because of
health problems, or through ‘‘Daoist’’ texts, often read in college or even high
school. Age has varied widely, with no particular bias toward youth. (This last
is unsurprising, since taiji and qigong are particularly well-adapted to seniors
and alternative medicine is often favored for the chronic diseases that especially
plague older people.) Figures for the number of Daoists in the late-century
United States and Canada range from a low of just over 11,000 to more ambitious
estimates of 30,000 and even 45,000. Still these are small numbers, even
if a huge traﬃc in Daoist websites exists on the Internet (Siegler cites ‘‘hundreds
if not thousands’’). If scholars could not link this American Daoism to a Chinese
counterpart, U.S. practitioners remained oblivious. They were innocent of an
evolving scholarship that painted Daoism as exclusivist and intolerant, distinct
from the vulgarities of ordinary culture, and related to a speciﬁc Chinese geog-
New Ages for All 491
raphy of sacred mountains. Nor did they seek to recover and periodize a history
of Daoism, going beyond the time of Laozi and Zuangzi (Chuang Tzu) to explore
a later saga during a series of Chinese dynasties. They were unaware that
Daoism was a religion of books, which in its ﬁrst (ﬁfth-century) canon numbered
more than 1,400 titles in some 5,305 volumes—larger than the canon of any religion
save Buddhism. And they had no idea of the political role that Daoist sects
played in China as revolutionaries who succeeded in creating a theocracy for at
least several decades during the Han dynasty. They did not know that for a large
part of Chinese history Daoism had been state-sponsored. Nor did they know
anything of the rigor of its conventional moral precepts and the elaborateness of
its ritual life. Americans drawn to Daoism have dwelled instead in a Daoism of
their minds and imaginations.185
The Daoism of their imagining, though, like the New Thought universe of
a century earlier, has been inherently unstable. Its nonsectarian universalism
pushed it toward a larger metaphysical community, in which Daoism became a
Daoism of language and the Daoism of language blurred into the general rhetoric
of spiritual ‘‘energy’’ in contemporary American metaphysics and especially
the New Age. Taiji, qigong, and traditional Chinese medicine had other takers
besides self-conscious Daoists. Moreover, even the writings of charismatic Daoist
teachers were read widely by sympathizers who never assumed Daoist identities
but instead maintained more hybrid and combinative ones. Take, for example,
the work of Mantak Chia (1944– ), a Thai businessman in Hong Kong and China
with a diverse educational background, much of it in meditative and martial arts
techniques. Chia has pitched his teaching to Americans with a national seminar
circuit since 1981. He has also advertised widely in New Age publications, developed
an international organization, created a network of healers working under
him, and—with American Michael Winn directing—oﬀered instruction regularly
at a summer camp/retreat in upstate New York.
In 1981, Chia’s book Awaken Healing Energy through the Tao appeared in its
ﬁrst edition. Billed as ‘‘Taoist Esoteric Yoga,’’ it succeeded so well that it appeared
only two years later in a more widely marketed imprint. With direct and textbook
style, Chia immediately positioned what he oﬀered as a third alternative to
Zen silent sitting and Hindu mantric meditation. Instead, he presented a ‘‘system
stressing the circulation of energy called ‘chi’ along certain pathways inside
the body.’’ ‘‘These pathways,’’ he informed readers, ‘‘help direct the ‘chi’—also
known as prana, sperm or ovarian power, the warm current, or kundalini power
—to successively higher power centers (chakras) of the body.’’ Secret knowledge
of this system had been ‘‘transmitted for thousands of years in China,’’ and there
it had brought ‘‘extraordinary improvements in health and life.’’ ‘‘Chi’’ was the
492 Arrivals
‘‘primordial life force itself,’’ and its ﬂow proceeded in ideal order in the human
fetus, with its navel point the starting place for the movement of energy and ‘‘the
point of strongest energy storage and circulation in the adult.’’ Age, however,
brought blockage, and the ‘‘perfect energy circulation we enjoyed as babies’’ was
disrupted. What could adults do? They could turn to the speciﬁc type of meditation
that Chia taught, which would bring reawakening so that the ‘‘healing
power of the Tao—the life energy in its original, pure, undivided form’’—would
ﬂow unimpeded once again.186
Chia had evoked a combinative catalog of buzz words and ideas from American
metaphysical religion, and he had announced a meditative form that involved
the mind in the (mysticized) physicality of the body in order to heal and
enliven it. With theosophical acumen, he pointed to the ‘‘etheric body.’’ Still
more, he introduced the language of the body’s ‘‘microcosmic orbit’’—its route
for the ﬂow of energy that seemed like a vastly simpliﬁed acupuncture meridian
(Chia, in fact, acknowledged the same in the subtitle to the ﬁrst edition of his
book and in the text of his second edition). The microcosmic orbit began at
the perineum and moved up the back of the spine to the tongue, with its tip
on the roof of the mouth acting like a ‘‘switch’’ to send energy back down the
front of the body. This seems like a decidedly esoteric technique—except that
it was being mass-marketed to a sizable audience of American readers. (In fact,
Michael Winn, who wrote an introduction to the second edition, reported that
‘‘students of various Chinese arts’’ were ‘‘shocked to see his book sold in a store.’’
The ‘‘circulation of the microcosmic orbit was the ‘highest secret’ to gaining internal
power in the mind and body.’’)187
With all of this preparatory cultivation of the sophisticated would-be Daoist,
what Chia taught next was a seemingly childlike instruction in the ‘‘inner
smile.’’ After creating a calm and quiet environment in which to begin the practice
of meditation, after relaxing mentally and taking thirty-six (a multiple of nine
and a favored Chinese number) deep abdominal breaths, the meditator needed
to relax the internal organs. So the ‘‘ancient Taoist masters’’ recommended the
exercise of smiling ‘‘love’’ into the vital organs. With closed eyes, the meditator
smiled ‘‘sincerely’’ into them and proceeded from there to smile down a ‘‘front,’’
‘‘middle,’’ and ‘‘back’’ line, thus reaching all major organs and even the inside of
the vertebrae of the spine. What the meditator smiled was ‘‘chi energy,’’ and when
the task was about to be ﬁnished he or she collected the energy at the navel—so
that there would be no excess energy to cause trouble in the head. How could
a person be sure? ‘‘To collect the energy simply concentrate your mind on your
navel and imagine your energy spinning like a slow top inside, spiralling outward
movement.’’ Men should spiral ﬁrst in a clockwise direction; women counter
New Ages for All 493
clockwise.188 In eﬀect, Chia was recommending putting the mind in the body.
He was selling acts of disciplined imagination that came from a mentalist perspective,
and he was teaching metaphysics, using breath and sensation as magical
tools halfway between the mental and the material.
With already its open ‘‘secrecy’’ in a popular book, Chia’s inner smile meditation
gained a decidedly exoteric following. It became a friendly New Age practice
that crept into settings as varied as acupuncture oﬃces, Unity churches, and
secular-seeming relaxation workshops. It smiled beckoningly, and people bought
it. Inner smiles were so easy to perform and, at the very least, so nondenominational
and so harmless. They did not seem occult or esoteric at all. Like Norman
Vincent Peale’s positive thinking, inner smiles and other energy practices spilled
out of their cultural containers to become anybody’s property who wanted them.
If there were ‘‘nightstand Buddhists’’—people who kept a Buddhist book beside
their bed and sometimes dipped into it—there were also numbers of nightstand
or workshop Daoists. Still, the message of the power of mind in a set of ostensibly
physical practices bears scrutiny for its metaphysical content. Chia’s performative
strategy was hardly isolated. It came with a long prehistory, and throughout
the cultural world that touched a self-conscious American Daoism, the message
of the mind in the body was seemingly everywhere.
To take an example from the practice of taiji, we need only look at a canonical
text for the Yang-style taiji that has become the most practiced style in the United
States. The classic Tai-Chi Ch’uan (1947) was putatively the work of Chen Yenlin,
a wealthy Chinese merchant—known in the West as Yearning K. Chen—
who had studied under the transmitter of the Yang family’s style. Indeed, in the
climate of exalted regard for lineage claims, the report was that he had, in eﬀect,
stolen Yang family secrets by borrowing transcripts one evening, hiring seven
transcribers to copy them all night long, and then in 1932 publishing the results
in Chinese. But Chen’s text contained entire sections, not present in the original
Chinese, that were probably the work of his translator Cheng Man-ch’ing. Moreover,
the solo form instructions and explanations did not match up identically
with the Chinese, and the work had probably been reshaped to tell Western students
what the translator thought would appeal. Still, with its intricately precise
directions and ﬁgures for the performance of the long-form (108-posture) ‘‘right
side’’ movements, the text began with a crisp and slightly quaint introduction
to orient readers and about-to-be doers. ‘‘T’ai-chi Ch’üan,’’ the translated Chen
told readers, would rebuild their ‘‘spirit and body,’’ and it was ‘‘closely related to
Meditation.’’ In fact, it was better, because the long practice of meditation could
‘‘hinder blood circulation,’’ but the ‘‘t’ai-chi’’ movements helped to ‘‘quicken it.’’
‘‘T’ai-chi’’ was predicated on a ‘‘subtle system of Chinese philosophy’’ called the
494 Arrivals
‘‘Grand Terminus.’’ ‘‘From the Negative Terminus to the Grand Terminus,’’ the
text explained, were ‘‘comprehended the theories of all created things in the universe,
and the principles of the formation of Yin and Yang.’’ Since all things in
the universe were composed of yin and yang elements and since science itself
agreed (Chen cited the ‘‘electron theory’’ of ‘‘positive and negative electricity’’),
the practitioner enacted the ‘‘theories of the Grand Terminus.’’ In so doing, he or
she entered upon a moving meditation: ‘‘Give up all thoughts. Set your eyes forward,
directed to the spot just in front of the outgoing hand. Close your mouth
and breathe through your nose. Press your tongue against your palate. . . . Raise
your spirit and breathe down from the navel psychic-centre, so that you may feel
at ease in every part of your body and the blood may circulate smoothly.’’189
Even more explicit for metaphysically inclined Americans was the taiji instruction
on mind-intent ascribed, once more problematically, to Chen—this time
under his pseudonym Chen Kung. Published originally in Chinese in 1932, according
to compiler and translator Stuart Alve Olson, the text in which this instruction
formed a part had mostly emanated from Wu Ho-ching, a student of
the founder of the Yang family style. Here discourse on ‘‘ch’i’’ mingled with discourse
on mind and ‘‘mind intent.’’ The ‘‘eﬃcacy of the T’ai Chi Ch’uan exercise’’
was ‘‘very great.’’ The movements nourished the ‘‘ch’i,’’ which puriﬁed the
blood. Puriﬁed blood made the body strong, and the strength of the body brought
strength to the mind. But the mind likewise had its master, and that was ‘‘mindintent.’’
In fact, the mind acted ‘‘as only an assistant to the mind-intent,’’ and—in
a reversal—the quality of the mind governed the quality of the ‘‘ch’i.’’ All three
were ‘‘interconnected’’ and worked ‘‘in a rotational manner,’’ Chen Kung told
readers. ‘‘When the mind is confused the mind-intent will disperse. When the
mind-intent is dispersed the ch’i will become insubstantial (weak).’’190 The message
was one of constant circulation, constant changing—all points responsible,
all points creating. It beckoned with a promise of late-breaking metaphysics with
an East Asian veneer.
Clearly, the Chen-ascribed texts were telling some Americans what they
wanted to hear and know. If American Daoism and its attendant practices were
growing and thriving in late-twentieth-century America and after, success had
come in large part because the energy discourse of East Asian teachers and their
followers replicated a longstanding, and now especially emphasized, discourse
habit of American metaphysicians. In exotic (for non-Asian Americans) dress—
a dress performatively enhanced by ethnic masters who had newly discovered
and/or invented themselves—American Daoism replayed American metaphysical
religion with substance and style. In so doing, American Daoism was part of
an explosion of variants of old-style American metaphysics. A large number of
New Ages for All 495
these variants came to be recognized, however loosely, as part of what the media
began calling the New Age movement by the 1970s. But even the New Age movement
could not contain the spiritual eﬄorescence and overﬂow of American
metaphysical religion—an eﬄorescence and overﬂow that kept Pealeism company
and that went even further in colonizing American minds and hearts. Still,
the New Age movement became a phenomenon to be noticed, and in itself it
provided useful instruction on the dimensions and dilemmas of American metaphysical
religion in the late twentieth century and on. Like all of American metaphysical
religion, it rested on combinative notions of the power of mind and
the pervasiveness of correspondences, both in quests to heal and save. Like all
twentieth- and twenty-ﬁrst-century American metaphysical religion, it discovered
that the no-longer-secret name of God was Energy.