Direct Spirituality Becomes Respectable 1750-1880

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish mining engineer, astronomer, anatomist, Christian theologian, philosopher, and eventually a mystic. In 1741, at age 53, he entered into a mystic phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions. His experiences culminated in a "spiritual awakening" in which he received a revelation that Jesus Christ had appointed him to write The Heavenly Doctrine to reform Christianity.

His main contribution to history was that the Bible was not to be taken literally as a source for history or nature as it had been in the past. Instead it was solely a spiritual book in which everything was to be interpreted spiritually. This avoided the problems of being consistent with science and other histories.

In 1716 King Charles XII of Sweden (1697-1718) appointed Swedenborg to be an assessor in Swedish Board of Mines which regulated the mining industry and made sure the king got his cut.

Upon the death of Charles XII, Queen Ulrika Eleonora ennobled Swedenborg and his siblings. It was common in Sweden during the 17th and 18th centuries for the children of bishops to receive that honor, as a recognition of the services of their father. The family name was changed from Swedberg to Swedenborg

In 1724, he was offered the chair of mathematics at Uppsala University, but he declined and said that he had dealt mainly with geometry, chemistry and metallurgy during his career.

In the 1730s, Swedenborg became increasingly interested in spiritual matters and was determined to find a theory to explain how matter relates to spirit. This led him to investigate the anatomy of the brain.

In 1735, in Leipzig, he published a three-volume work, Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (Philosophical and Mineralogical Works), in which he tried to conjoin philosophy and metallurgy. The work was mainly appreciated for its chapters on the analysis of the smelting of iron and copper, and it was the work that gave Swedenborg his international reputation. The same year, he also published the small manuscript De Infinito ("On the Infinite") in which he attempted to explain how the finite is related to the infinite and how the soul is connected to the body. It was the first manuscript in which he touched upon such matters. He knew that it might clash with established theologies since he presented the view that the soul is based on material substances.

In 1744, when he was 56, Swedenborg had traveled to the Netherlands. Around the time, he began having strange dreams. Swedenborg carried a travel journal with him on most of his travels and did so on this journey. The whereabouts of the diary were long unknown, but it was discovered in the Royal Library in the 1850s and was published in 1859 as Drömboken, or Journal of Dreams. 

In 1745, aged 57, Swedenborg was dining in a private room at a tavern in London. By the end of the meal, a darkness fell upon his eyes, and the room shifted character. Suddenly, he saw a person sitting at a corner of the room, telling him: "Do not eat too much!". Swedenborg hurried home, greatly frightened. Later that night, the same man appeared in his dreams. The man told Swedenborg that he was the Lord, that he had appointed Swedenborg to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible and would guide Swedenborg in what to write. That same night he claimed that the spiritual world opened to him.

In June 1747, Swedenborg resigned his post as assessor of the board of mines. He explained that he was obliged to complete a work that he had begun and requested to receive half his salary as a pension.[48] He took up afresh his study of Hebrew and began to work on the spiritual interpretation of the Bible with the goal of interpreting the spiritual meaning of every verse. From sometime between 1746 and 1747 and for ten years, he devoted his energy to the task. Usually abbreviated as Arcana Cœlestia (translated as Heavenly Arcana, Heavenly Mysteries, or Secrets of Heaven depending on modern English-language editions), the book became his magnum opus and the basis of his further theological works.

His life from 1747 to his death was spent in Stockholm, the Netherlands, and London. During the 25 years, he wrote another 14 works of a spiritual nature; most were published during his lifetime.

He died in 1772

References

(December 15, 2025) Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was born in Vienna, Austria. He was significant in spiritual history for two reasons. First, he postulated that we existed within some sort of universal energy field, and second, that manipulating that field could be used for healing. 

He named the energy field animal magnetism and that would eventually cause problems. By associating this field with magnetism, a physical energy and not an emotional/spiritual energy, his techniques could easily be shown not to involve electro-magnetism. Consequently he was labeled a fraud despite him discovering the power of the placebo effect and hypnotism. He ceased using magnets and electricity in his healing sessions after 1776 according to his own account (Mesmer 1779) yet he always thought his energy field was a physical energy.

Yet he continued to insist his energy field was not spiritual or conscious making it analogous to the ether field of classical physics first proposed by Isaac Newton in his Third Book of Opticks (1st ed. 1704; 2nd ed. 1718) as a way to explain light waves.  This idea held until the Michelson–Morley experiment in 1887 proved it false (they got the Nobel prize). Why it was false was only revealed by Einstein's special relativity theory of 1905.

Yet he named it as a magnetism because at first he thought it was. He believed healing worked by aligning the locally generated fields of various body centers just like a magnet aligned iron filings. 

Many clients reported recoveries after his energy treatments but the results were inconsistent even after he narrowed down his treatments to just working with nerve ailments. The successes were rarely permanent.

Accused by Viennese physicians of fraud, Mesmer left Austria and settled in Paris in 1778. There he continued to enjoy a highly lucrative practice but again attracted the antagonism of the official medical profession. While his treatment successes were inconsistent, so were the traditional treatments of the official (dark ages) medical profession at the time with their opioid drugs, poisons, and bleedings. So this condemnation was just due to his treatments being mystical and mental instead being material. 

While in Paris one of his rituals was described by a visiting English doctor:

• His patients were received with the air of mystery and studied effect. The apartment, hung with mirrors, was dimly lit. A profound silence was observed, broken only by strains of music, which occasionally floated through the rooms.

The patients were seated around a sort of vat, which contained a heterogeneous mixture of chemical ingredients. With this and with each other, they were placed in relation by means of cords or jointed rods, or by holding hands, and among them slowly and mysteriously moved Mesmer himself affecting one by a touch, another by a look, a third by passes with his hand, a fourth by pointing with a rod.

One person became hysterical, then another one was seized with catalepsy; others with convulsions; some with palpitations of the heart, perspirations, and other bodily disturbances.

The method was supposed to provoke in the sick person exactly the kind of action beneficial to his recovery. To the uninitiated, the scene was full of wonderment.” 

-(Hypnosis in History)

His healing ritual seances ended up being a mystical show which attracted mostly women and set the pattern for future seances.

References

Hypnosis in History. Chapter 3: 1774 (May 26, 2025)– The Birth of Mesmerism. Online at https://hypnosis.edu/history/the-birth-of-mesmerism

Mesmer, Franz (1779), translated by V.R. Myers (2016) English Translation of Mesmer's historic Mémoire sur la découverte du Magnétisme Animal

(December 17, 2025) Does the divine realm consist of magical powers or consist of personified spirits and deities? The modern magic crafter will say both depending on how you want to perceive and work with them. This is perceptheism. After death a person's spirit will go to the divine realm for a time before being reincarnated somewhere. Like any deity they can be perceived as still being an individual or their various personality powers can be perceived as being part of the whole. 

In contrast, official apocalyptic Christianity claims the spirits of the dead could only be perceived as people and will sleep until the end times when they will awaken and rise up. When the end times did not come, Christians started to ignore those parts of the Bible and started to believe good spirits will go to heaven instead and evil spirits will go to hell. This idea reached its climax in the story of Dante's Divine Comedy. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, which were published around 1321. In the book Dante travels through the 9 layers of Hell, 7 levels of purgatory, and 9 levels of Heaven guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil (70 BC-19 BC). In each he sees the spirits or souls of famous people.

The dead spirits started to talk back in 1848, or at least many people thought they did. Two young teen sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox aged 12 and 14 respectively, thought to put one over on their friends so they came up with a way to trick them by rapping on the floor with their shoes in a way undetectable under their long skirts. All they could do is tap to answer yes or no (1 or 2 taps) but that was enough. Their problems began when news of this trick started to spread to the various parents as being real spirit communication. Many adults took these rumors seriously trapping the girls in a cycle of expectations. Remember that this was an area which had taken Christian revivals seriously only a few years before.

Their parents sent them away to some Quaker friends, Amy and Isaac Post, to let the notoriety die down but these friends insisted that the sisters show them the rappings. The girls obliged and that sealed their fate because these friends were an important node in the network of anti-slavery and women's rights reformers. They had an extensive set of contacts with the movers and shakers of New England. They believed what they experienced with the Fox sisters was real spirit communication.

Isaac suggested that these taps could tap out numbers as well and assigned number to each letter of the alphabet. This allowed short messages to be delivered. Eventually a guest, Dr. Chase, would ask about dead relatives with yes and no answers still being the most common and that opened the flood-gates because everyone one wanted to know the state of their dead loved ones.

The Posts being extreme Quakers made believing in spirit communication easy because Quakers believed that direct spirit communication was not only possible but preferable to seeking knowledge out of the Bible. Their church services consisted of quietly sitting until someone was moved by the spirit to say what they felt. Yet this often clashed with keeping the meeting focused on religious topics which was the job of the church elders. This application of authority was starting to clash with the the need to talk about the pressing moral issue of the era which was slavery. This caused a split in Quakerism with the Posts belonging to an anti-slavery splinter group which had very minimal meeting focus control which they called the "Waterloo Congregational Friends."

As their popularity increase the Fox sisters brought in their oldest sister, Leah,  who was by then married with 3 children, perhaps as a way to help them cope with the stress of the developing situation. She suffered from headaches which were relieved when Isaac "magnetized" her putting her into a trance which she learned to maintain to avoid bringing back the headache. She would often start trance speaking during this time which the Posts also interpreted as spirit communication.

The sisters became fully trapped by expectations when Isaac Post and a cousin rented an auditorium on November 14, 1849 to demonstrate the spirit communication. This gave the Fox sisters money for their families and promoted the Quaker ideology. This was reported by the newspapers  which further spread their fame. During the next few year the Fox sisters held demonstrations at New York City, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and a few places in Ohio.

When the youngest sisters stopped appearing regularly in public around 1854, the oldest sister, Leah, went out on her own and began holding seances in New York City. She continued to use tapping but in addition the group held hands, sang hymns, darkened the lights, and started other manifestations like ringing bells indicating trickery was starting to be used. She married Daniel Underhill, a wealthy insurance salesman in 1857 and ceased her seances for profit.

Other mediums started to come forward. Holding spiritualist seances became the latest craze in the northern United States and Britain as people read about them. Isaac Post started producing automatic writings and published supposed communication from Quaker reformers in 1852. Most significant were the trance talkers (channelers).

(December 18, 2025) Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) started out as a Mesmeric healer. His first book, "The Principles of Nature," published in 1847 seems to have been the first channeled book from an American. In this he was copying Swedenborg, although unlike Swedenborg his book really was an example of habitual speaking (channeling) which had to be copied down by someone else. Its style is very verbose, using long words, yet it doesn't really say anything which is a characteristic of that kind of speaking.

In "The Great Harmonia" he now claims he no longer needs to channel but is directly inspired by the divine realm. Most of the book, which he calls an encyclopedia, is a list on how health ailments can be cured.

His first goes into his theory behind spiritual healing and communication.

1. Everything proceeds from God, through Nature, to Man;

2. Man was designed for some higher and nobler purpose than that of living, sleeping, eating, toiling, and dying

3. Infinitude was filled with elements of divine power, ..... And residing in the center yet spreading to the unimaginable circumference was the Holy Artisan—the Divine Architect—the Great Positive Mind! This Almighty Power and Creative Principle, is called God.

4. For there was then but two great coeternal principles in all the wide-spread universe—Mind and Matter,

5. Man shall be a culmination of universal Nature; he shall be so organized in his body as to receive and elaborate the animating elements of nature into an eternal and unchangeable Soul;

6. Man shall be created through the mediums and instrumentalities of countless suns and planets; and also through the regular and harmonious development of minerals, vegetables, and animals."

7. Thus in the planet, in the mineral, in the vegetable, and especially in higher forms of the animal, do we behold unmistakable manifestations of the laws of Association, Progression and Development (Mention of 2 of the 3 nature virtues, Connection and Growth)

8. Thus drawn into the whirlpool of commercial strife, such individuals become lost to the best interests of mankind, and die—perhaps respected—perhaps despised !—is such Man's mission?

9. Now since wrong situations of men will produce discord, and right situations harmony; and since it is seen that man is innately pure, and is the rudiment al concentration of Divine Love, Divine Will, and Divine Wisdom, we should learn henceforth to set a high estimate upon, and love our kind. (This passage introduces the concept of "harmony" which is a combinations of the nature virtues of Connection and Balance)

10. there is a general mission for each individual, viz.: first, to properly beget and perpetuate his kind; secondly, to justly respect, and wisely cultivate and direct the heavenly germ, the spiritual principle deposited in the soul; and thirdly, to live here in reference to another and a higher life.

11. Men will be better when better loved, taught, and directed; to improve the world, love it, not condemn nor despise any person or thing. God made it—made everything —

12. It is good to know that there is an omnipotent, purifying, and fraternizing Principle permeating and pervading the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial departments of God's Universal Temple  —and this Principle is called The Great Harmonic.

References

(December 17, 2025) Spiritualism remained popular for some time for 3 reasons. 

1. Parents wanted to believe their children were in heaven and doing fine. Christianity taught children were born into sin. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, was a big fan after the loss of her child, William, in 1862.

2. It was associated with the women's rights movements because most Christian denominations were against such rights. Women were even supposed to remain silent in church (Corinthians 14:34-35).

3. It was seen as a source of divine inspiration which avoided the problems and conflicts of Bible interpretation. Although in time it was realized that the trance talkers really revealed nothing new despite having long winded speeches.

Spiritualism was eventually discredited as fraudsters seeing money to be made started advertising seances. The great escape artist and magician Harry Houdini even gave his wife a secret code that he would use if he died before her in order to test the possibility of communicating with the dead. He died and she never received that code despite constantly trying to reach him via seances.

In the winter of 1852–53, Spiritualism reached Europe, where the French educator and eventual founder of Spiritism (as it was called in Europe), Allan Kardec claimed that on 10 June 1853 that a séance participant received a spiritual message proposing a more expedient alternative to the laborious processes of alphabet-calling and rapped responses. According to Kardec, the spirit suggested the group secure a pencil to a small upturned basket, allowing multiple participants to cooperatively write out messages from the attending spirits. After some refinements to construct a more sturdy wooden plank, word of the invention spread throughout Paris and into England, where a cottage industry sprang up to produce the devices. (Brown 1970)

References

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(December 18, 2025) Today most people would agree with the Greek philosopher Plato that we live in a cave only dimly seeing the shadows of reality. Our sensory experiences only evolved to allow us to perceive enough of reality to survive. Humans don't see infrared light nor do we see radio waves. Our sensed colors, sounds, smells, and touch all have a certain quality of consciousness best suited for survival. Our very conception of space and time is defined by evolution. Just compare our reality with those which we observed for dogs and cats. More exists to reality than what we can imagine. 

But Emerson went farther. He believed humans not only exist within some external reality but that our spiritual powers created it. He never used the word "magic" but its use as the application of spiritual power is implied throughout his work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) tried to make this the center of a new spirituality which came to be known as transcendentalism. He introduced it to the world In 1863 with his anonymous publication of an essay entitled Nature. 

His father was a Unitarian minister and Emerson was a Harvard trained minister who left Christianity after sensing that Jesus’ teaching about developing heaven on earth was contradictory to the apocalyptic dogmas of Christianity. In Emerson’s view, the kingdom of God could only be manifested on earth if everyone emotionally and spiritually connected with the Divine realm. Emerson was ahead of his time in that he had actually discerned the real teachings of Jesus and linked them with a nature tradition before any objective way existed to do so. Emerson said this in his essay:

• The problem of restoring to the world its original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul...  The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. (Nature, chapter 8)

Emerson believed God created humans and the earth first. But out from them, via God directed spiritual powers, came the rest of the universe.

• Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions eternized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. (Nature, chapter 8)

The various examples of spiritual power represent the remaining power of spirit over matter, that is the power of magic:

• Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, — occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force, — with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. (Nature, chapter 8)

References

 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1836) Nature​