the American occult really became established in the firmament of this country probably between the 1690s and the late 1840s and there were several very definite personalities and groups and events that made that possible um as I mentioned earlier uh by the 1680s 1690s mystical groups began to flee Central Europe and come to America if you flash forward to 1776 you not only have the Shakers organizing their first Village outside of Albany New York but in the state of Rhode Island there was a young woman named jamaa Wilkinson who had been caught up in the Baptist
Revival that we call the Great Awakening and uh in Fall of 1776 uh jamaa who had grown up on a prosperous Quaker Farm took to her bed with a terrible fever and she was slipping in and out of a coma and her family was sure that she was going to die and then one day uh without any antecedent whatsoever she leaped up from the bed all red and Ruddy and filled with this Renewed Energy and announced to her shocked Quaker family that she would no longer be known as jamaa that woman had died and that
the being standing before them would be known as the public Universal friend and she became in a certain sense the nation's first Spirit Channeler by the early 1800s that area of Central New York State uh became known as the burnover district it was a place that was considered burned over with the fires of religious passion and that's where you start to see the first alternative religious culture developing in America and and really in the modern world um the iroy Indians had occupied Central New York state but they were pushed off that Land by the colonial
government just after the war of independence so Central New York was opened to land settlement and speculation and a whole wave of relatively liberal new englanders began to flood into Central New York State and for about a generation or two in the early to mid 1800s uh the place produced most of the new religions that grew out of America Mormonism 7th day adventism it's where the Shakers spread you had the first experiments large experiments in American utopianism the Onida Community was located there uh the place was a hotbed of political reform the first women's rights
Conference was held in senica Falls New York it was also the birthplace of a movement that we call spiritualism which involves sances and spirit ws and talking to the dead and spiritualism just became the driving engine behind everything because as spiritualism grew in central New York State and it started essentially in a little village called Hydesville outside the city of Rochester where two teenage girls in 1848 told their Methodist household that the bangs and wraps and noises that were being heard in their cabin were actually Spirit wraps and the girls said we can reach to
the Beyond and people believed them they were hungry to believe them because Americans saw themselves as a people who were entitled to a kind of new dispens Sensation from God they used to refer to the country sometimes as the new Israel or the American Israel they were um they were expressing the most radical impulses of the Reformation in which people believed that you could reach the Beyond you could reach the Divine with no intermediary you didn't need the man in robes you could do it yourself and as soon as people began to organize into Seance
circles and uh people began to identify themselves as trans mediums who could reach the Beyond it opened up a door for women to assume their first roles of religious leadership in the modern world this really can't be overstated women had no clerical role uh anywhere in the Western World period when spiritualism dawned suddenly women who wanted to engage in the Civic and religious and political culture were becoming transm mediums it is no accident that in this burned over District of Upstate New York you had the birth of spiritualism coinciding with the first conference for women's
voting rights um the two were were branches coming out of the same tree uh for about a generation in the 19th century you could not find a voting rights activist a suffragist activist who hadn't spent some time at the Seance table and vice versa the movements just absolutely grew out of one another once that social and spiritual opening was created for women in the form of spiritualism suddenly um ambitious women who wanted to participate in the culture had a kind of a voice so this began a marriage between uh occult spirituality and reformist or radical
politics that just roared through the country and really has never gone away so the 1840s some historians call that decade the Mad 40s the 1840s was the pivotal moment in American life where an avanguard spiritual culture began to grow and where a radical and reformist political culture began to grow this was also bound up with ideologies that were coming over to America from Europe um Chief among them uh was the method called mesmerism which we today call hypnotism Americans were in love with mesmerism because it was something that you could do in your own home
you could you could Mesmerize or hypnotize your your your aunt or your mother or your father and people would go into these trans States and you could introduce Auto suggestion to them or as some people saw it you could cure them of illnesses and sometimes people would emerge would reemerge from a Trans State and report that they had some kind of outof Body Experience they had traveled to other Realms or to other planets or to the heavens cult ideologies all these Supernatural ideologies where people said they were in touch with the world Beyond they could
see either into other Realms or into the future or they could serve as a spirit Channel they were confirming a very very deep-seated hope that Americans had about themselves and they served as a conduit for radical radically liberal religious and and political ideas
