How it “leads” is not clear. Students of mysticism have established Harris’ debt to Swedenborg in his emphasis on a non-physical breathing. Boehme is possibly the source of his idea of the bisexuality of the natural man. On this point, Harris is much clearer: “God manifested in the Flesh is not Male merely nor Female merely, but the two in one . . . in whose spiritual and physical likeness we seek to be reborn.” Counterpartal marriage was, of course, a spiritual union, the ordinary union of the sexes being considered “a terrible thing,” a hindrance to spiritual regeneration. Harris expected children to be born of these spiritual unions and declared with satisfaction that “propagation of the species (by ordinary unions) and physical death” were decreasing “among my people.” He promised that, eventually, “physical transubstantiation” would take the place of death.
In many of these theories, Harris seems to be the immediate predecessor of Mary Baker Eddy. In Christian Science, bisexuality is often implied, and propagation without physical union is on record. But the actual forerunner of the new cult is a prophet who seemed indifferent to Harris’ ideas, and who concentrated on one thing alone, healing. His name is Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.
There are dozens of pamphlets in existence affirming and denying the debt of Mrs. Eddy to Quimby. Except to the Christian Scientist, the question must be slightly academic, for Mrs. Eddy’s teachings are not only like Quimby’s, they are like a great many others; but their peculiar quality—which has erected her doctrine into a Church—is entirely her own. If Quimby had no influence on Christian Science, he had a great deal on New Thought; and New Thought and Christian Science are of the same blood.
In 1838, Quimby heard a lecture by Charles Poyen, the most brilliant of the mesmerists in America. The idea of inducing hypnotic trances enchanted him, and he began to experiment with a certain Lucius Burkman as his subject. In the manuscripts which Quimby left (and which Mrs. Eddy is accused of having transcribed and elaborated into Science and Health) he says that Burkman could look into the bodies of patients and disclose their maladies. What is more startling, “He can go from point to point without passing through intermediate space. He passes from Belfast to Washington or from the earth to the moon . . . swifter than light, by a single act of volition.” One would fancy such a power worth controlling, but magnetism did not come instinctively to Quimby. It was common property when he began his practice, and he learned a great deal about it from a book called The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology. Quimby’s method of magnetic cure was to pass a current of magnetism from his body through the body of the patient, positive and negative contact being established when Quimby held his left hand on the abdomen of the patient and with the other hand rubbed the top of the head. This method was effective for diseases located in the torso. For the lower limbs, the rubbing was transferred to the legs, but the left hand sacredly maintained contact. The heat produced by these manipulations was considered proof of the electro-magnetic power of the healer.
Possibly Quimby was dissatisfied with this mummery because he knew that the power within him was of a finer grain. He felt, as he performed his cures, that he was giving something much more important than electrical fluid or animal heat to his patients. He knew that, if anything coursed through their bodies, it was the power of his mind. After a few years, he began to rely on this mental power without any physical interposition. In Portland, in 1859, he addressed a circular to the sick in which he says:
“My practice is unlike all medical practice. . . . I give no medicines and make no outward applications, but simply sit by the patient, tell him what he thinks is his disease, and my explanation is the cure. . . . If I succeed in correcting his errors, I change the fluids of his system, and establish the truth or health. The truth is the cure. This mode of treatment applies to all cases.” (It may be noted that one of his first patients was Mrs. Julius Dresser who, with her husband, became a leader of New Thought.)
Truth is of course right belief and is not only the cure but is health itself; wrong belief, or error, is sickness. Although Quimby called his system a science and tried very hard to discover its laws— looking for a parallel to the miracles of Christ’s healing and considering Christ the founder of his system—he never formulated it in such a way as to make himself the head of a school. He was persuading his patients that they were not ill, that there was no such thing as illness in the world, since God, who was All-Good, could not deliberately create evil and, being at the same time all-powerful, could not allow any other force to bring evil into the world. At first, he exercised the patient’s mind by making him transfer his pains from where they were (erroneously) supposed to be to some other part of the body. Thus a rheumatic pain in the knee could be moved to the base of the thumb and its reality discredited; a few rubs, or passes, over the new location of the supposed pain made it disappear. Quimby insisted particularly on his patients being receptive to the thought of the All-Powerful God, being consciously in contact with the infinite of health and happiness which came from God, and letting the divine force flow through them. This required a surrender of the Will, much as a cure by psychoanalysis now requires it. The patient was instructed to banish his fears and to gain the pure benefit of floating fearlessly on the healing waters.
At this single point, the connection between mind healing and spiritualism becomes clear. For it is not an easy thing to persuade even a willing sufferer, even a pathological victim of imaginary ills, that disease and evil do not exist. There is an obstinate human habit of clinging to, exaggerating, exploiting, and taking pride in ills, real or fancied, which was known in the time of Molière and probably in the time of Aristophanes. Moreover, the recognized deficiency of certain orthodox Christian sects is that they fail adequately to account for evil, just as it is the supremely attractive quality of evangelical Christianity that it redeems men from evil and promises, in the future, redemption from the greatest indignity of all, the evil of death. Quimby held fast to the Christian miracle; but something new, something more easily demonstrable, was required, and spiritualism supplied it. For the essence of all spiritualism was, and is, that there is no death. By the time Quimby left manipulations and mesmerism behind and soared unencumbered into the high realm of the soul, spiritualism had passed far beyond communications and rappings: it had successfully materialized the spirits of those erroneously called dead. Death, the greatest of all evils, was at last shown to be an illusion. The spirit lived on and only belief on the part of the earthly spirit was needed to see, to hear, perhaps to touch, the spirit which had passed beyond. If this could be believed, and a cloud of witnesses gave testimony to its truth, how could one fail to believe that sickness, so much feebler than death, was also an illusion and could be thought out of existence?
We can judge from the nature of the reported cures that vapid, idle, and hysterical women were among Quimby’s best patients and precisely these were most susceptible to the current of supernaturalism then flowing so freely through the American air. Without the annihilation of death which spiritualism had accomplished, Quimby and the other mind healers might have succeeded; but the way would have been harder. Once death was denied it was a simple thing to affirm health, and it is on the general basis of spiritualism that Quimby founded the early religion of mental healing and the early religion of commercial optimism.
† The best-known phrenologists, Fowler and Wells, also published The Water Cure Journal and Herald of Reforms. † A Boston paper noted that “the New York auctioneers treat the crowd to champagne and oysters” and that the Japanese “are delighted with us Yankees.” † There were supposed to be 200,000 believers in spirit-rapping, and Fanny Fern and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth were the most popular women writers. † Forrest refused $50,000 for fifty performances in California, and Christy and Woods combined their minstrel shows. The favorite operas included Norma, Lucia, Ernani, and Don Giovanni. † Men used Boyles Celebrated Hyperion Fluid for their hair and mustaches. † New Orleans was famous for its food. † The pre
cocity of children was encouraged and moralists protested against a morbid taste for light reading in the country at large, although Goethe’s Correspondence With a Child was influential among girls. † By 1853 the insecurity of life in New York had become proverbial, and a newspaper complained that “with few exceptions our police are the worst in the world.” † A “ragged school” with soup kitchen was opened for children too poor to go to the public schools. † The rooms of the Astor House were an “Elysium of princely drawing rooms and boudoirs, in which velvet, lace, satin, gilding, rich carpets, and mirrors contribute to form a scene of indescribable luxury.” † Women traveled alone and Americans addressed no conversation to strangers in public conveyances. † The citizens of Boston gave a splendid ball to the Prince de Join-ville. † There were 111,000 Germans in Ohio, 51,000 Irish and 25,000 English; in New York one out of every five persons was foreign born. † A device by which cattle water themselves was patented.
† The United States consumed more silk than any other country on the globe. † At an auction the pews in the Brooklyn church of Henry Ward Beecher were rented for as much as $175. † A life-preserving jacket was perfected and, in one year, camphene and burning fluid caused fifty-nine deaths. † Bryant heard Negroes sing a singularly wild and plaintive air which he thought musicians would do well to reduce to notation. It was Johnny, Come Down de Hollow. He also heard, John, John Crow. † A traveler in the United States says, “Americans are always in a hurrry.” † After marriage young people preferred to go to a hotel to live.
XXI. The Good News from Rochester.
IF messages from beyond the grave had not existed in 1848, it would have been necessary to invent them. The mental chaos of the time required a catalytic agent, a power which would give all ideas coherence and order. Liberal theology had quarreled with the ancient specifications of life after death, and had failed to provide new ones. Liberal science—animal magnetism, cures by visions—having rejected the support of official science, lacked background. Social experiments were trying to diminish the significance of death. Trances produced masterpieces—but where did the trances come from? The age needed a revelation. It was left to two little girls in a tiny village called Hydesville, in Wayne County, New York, to supply what was needed.
In the family of John D. Fox and his wife Margaret there were two daughters, Maggie and Katie, born of the second union of this pair, which had rejoiced in three children, not destined to an equal fame, in the first years of their marriage.[1] The first way in which the Fox sisters made themselves a nuisance was innocent enough. They used to tie strings to the stems of apples and, after they had gone to bed, bounce them on the floor in the dark to frighten a little niece who slept with them. These and other noises disturbed Mrs. Fox who said that “sometimes it seemed as if the furniture was moved; but on examination we found everything in order. The children had become so alarmed that I thought best to have them sleep in the room with us. . . . On the night of the first disturbance, we all got up and lighted a candle and searched the house, the noises continuing during the time, and being heard near the same place.”
Mrs. Fox’s deposition is Exhibit A in the early story of spiritualism. It has since been duplicated a thousand times in other words, but another excerpt may be given to show just what it was that took in the whole country. For some reason, which no one understood at the time, the children used to call on Mr. Splitfoot to make noises. “Katie exclaimed: ‘Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do’; clapping her hands. The sound instantly followed her with the same number of raps; when she stopped, the sound ceased for a short time. Then Margaret said in sport: ‘Now, do just as I do; count one, two, three, four,’ striking one hand against the other at the same time, and the raps came as before. . . . I then thought I could put a test that no one in the place could answer. I asked the noises to rap my children’s ages, successively. Instantly, each one of my children’s ages was given correctly pausing between them sufficiently long to individualize them until the seventh, at which a longer pause was made, then three more emphatic raps were given, corresponding to the age of the little one that died, which was my youngest child. I then asked: ‘Is this a human being that answers my questions so correctly?’ There was no rap. I asked: ‘Is it a spirit? If so make two raps,’ which were instantly given as soon as the request was made. I then said: ‘If it is an injured spirit, make two raps,’ which were instantly made, causing the house to tremble. I asked: ‘Were you injured in this house?’ The answer was given as before. ‘Is the person living that injured you?’ Answer by raps in the same manner. I ascertained by the same method that it was a man, aged thirty-one years; that he had been murdered in this house, and his remains were buried in the cellar; that his family consisted of a wife and five children, two sons and three daughters, all living at the time of his death, but that his wife had since died.
“Then the supposed spirit was asked if it would continue to ‘rap’ if the neighbors were called in to listen. The answer was affirmative.”
All this sounds to us like a weak version of the exploits of Tom Sawyer, but actually these noises, and the blood-curdling melodrama offered in explanation, were the beginnings of the Rochester Rappings. The mother of the little children—the oldest was nine— encouraged them and, by skillful questions, the rappings were made to demand a public exhibition for which the largest hall in Rochester was hired. Margaret and Catherine Fox appeared on the platform in long trailing gowns, the dresses of grown women in those days, expressly made for them by their oldest sister Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Fish. This eldest sister was eventually to be accused of being the evil genius of the younger ones. She claimed that, before Maggie and Katie were born, she had received messages promising great things for them and, when the young children became the medium for the first communications with the other world, Mrs. Fish formed the rather grand project of founding a new religion. According to the young women, however, they refused to carry their work so far. She did, however, promote the Fox sisters quite in the modern manner, coaching them, protecting their finances and, to a large extent, arranging their séances and publicity. There was of course no possible probable shadow of doubt of the genuineness of the manifestations. No one questioned the obvious conclusion that the rappings proved the persistence of the individual soul after death. The result was the spiritualistic movement in America, which alternately supported and drew support from European mediums until it became a world-wide religion. On that religion no one who has not entirely mastered all the documents can pass judgment, but the career of the Fox sisters is in itself a verdict on their part in it. The Fox sisters became the rage in literary circles and they, and a hundred other rappers, flourished throughout the decade. Although communication with the dead was the essence of their business, they managed to combine healing with it by transmitting to sufferers cures from great doctors of the past or aiding them by suggesting the names of living physicians.
It is not necessary to mark the progress of spiritualism in its early days. From one circumstance we may gather that it followed the usual course of superstitions, hysterias, and mass movements; namely, that it enlisted the support of a sufficient number of superior people to give it authority over the multitude. When spiritualism was only six years old, 15,000 signatures, most of them the names of educated and informed people, were appended to a petition to Congress asking for a federal investigation of the claims of the new movement, the intention being to wrest from the government its official approval. Whether Senator Shields of Illinois, who laid the petition before Congress, was in earnest is problematical. He himself brought in the name of Cagliostro, with his beds that guaranteed painless child-birth and, according to a contemporary report, the other senators were not more serious.
“A pleasant debate followed. Mr. Petit proposed to refer the petition of the Spiritualists to three thousand clergymen. Mr. Weller proposed to refer it to the Committee on Foreign Relations, as it might be necessary to inquire whether or not when Americans leave this worl
d they lose their citizenship. Mr. Mason proposed that it should be left to the Committee on Military Affairs. General Shields himself said he had thought of proposing to refer the petition to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, because there may be a possibility of establishing a spiritual telegraph between the material and spiritual worlds. The petition was finally, by a decisive vote, laid upon the table. The table did not, as we learn, tip in indignation at this summary disposal of Spiritualism in the Senate, by which we infer that the ‘spirits,’ if there were any in the Senate at the time, endorsed its action and considered the same all right.”
“Mr. Sludge, the medium,” was meanwhile having a great success in Europe. The New Orleans Picayune of November 14, 1857, has the following intelligence:
“Mr. Douglas Hume, the great American medium, is the lion of the season at Baden. Nobody else is talked about, nobody else is so stared at, nobody else is so courted. Whenever he goes to the gaming table and stakes money on a color, there is an avalanche of napoleons on that color; for the crowd thinks he can read the future course of chance, and vaticinate the color which is certain to win. He has received a fortune in presents from the Russian and German nobles, who have showered on him rings, breast-pins, watch-chains, rubies, diamonds, opals; the Princess Bubera gave him three pearl shirt-buttons, worth $600, for an evening’s exhibition at her house; the Prince of Prussia offered him five thousand florins for a single evening’s display of his powers—he refused it.”
Amelia Bloomer went to a soirée at the home of Horace Greeley when a notable gathering discussed spiritualism, but Mrs. Bloomer does not express any opinion on the discussions which she reports:
The Stammering Century Page 41
