Occult America
The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
Chapter one
THE PSYCHIC HIGHWAY
Yet who knows but the institution of a new order of labourers in the great Spiritual vineyard, is to prove the signal for the outpouring of such blessings as have been hitherto unparalleled in the history of our American Israel.
—Western Recorder, 1825
The Age of Reason could seem anything but reasonable for people with unusual religious beliefs—or those accused of them. In 1782, Switzerland sanctioned one of the Western world’s last witch trials, which ended in the torture and beheading of a rural housemaid. In 1791, the Vatican sentenced the legendary Italian occultist called Cagliostro to death on charges of heresy and Freemasonry. Although his execution was stayed, the self-styled “High Priest of the Egyptian Mysteries” died of disease four years later in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
In eighteenth-century England, a young woman with the simple name of Ann Lee, living in the industrial town of Manchester on Toad Lane (where she was born in a leap year), told of ...
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