A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion

by Catherine L. Albanese

This path-breaking book tells the story of American metaphysical religion more fully than it has ever been told before, along the way significantly revising the panorama of American religious history. Catherine L. Albanese follows metaphysical traditions from Renaissance Europe to England and then America, where they have flourished from colonial days to the twenty-first century, blending often with African, Native American, and other cultural elements.
The book follows evolving versions of metaphysical religion, including Freemasonry, early Mormonism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism—and such further incarnations as Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, Christian Science, and reinvented versions of Asian ideas and practices. Continuing into the twentieth century and after, the book shows  how the metaphysical mix has broadened to encompass UFO activity, channeling, and chakras in the  New Age movement—and a much broader new spirituality in the present. In its own way, Albanese argues, American metaphysical religion has been as vigorous, persuasive, and influential as the evangelical tradition that is more often the focus of religious scholars’ attention. She makes the case that because of its combinative nature—its ability to incorporate differing beliefs and practices—metaphysical religion offers key insights into the history of all American religions.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Philosophy, Metaphysics, American History

640 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2006

Reviews

[GJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything you thought you knew about American religious cultural history is turned on its head in this book. Well, not exactly. But if you thought American history was either just some boring Jeffersonian secularists, or Bible thumping thick skulls, then I suggest this crazy book on the history of America's "other" religion.

I didn't stop talking about this book for a whole summer.

It's capital A academic literature, but it's real fun as a lay reader. And it has been a consistently good topic of late night conversation.

The title and cover could use some work.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Catherine L. Albanese introduces her book with a discussion of the historiography of American religion. Whereas William McLoughlin’s “evangelical thesis” emphasizes individualistic consensus and Jon Butler’s “state-church/mainstream-denominational tradition” rejects the evangelical emphasis to play up the conflict among occult traditions and Protestant authority, Albanese makes a case for a third form of American religiosity to add to these other two strands. In addition to the evangelical form and liturgical form, Albanese adds the metaphysical form to American religiosity, which stresses the importance of the mind. She defines the slippery term “metaphysics” as “an American religious mentality (thought, belief, emotional commitment, symbolic and moral behavior).” She goes on to emphasize that although the metaphysical goes beyond the physical, it returns to the physical in its aims: physical salvation in the form of healing and therapy. While her attempt at triangulating the three religious forces—evangelical, liturgical, and metaphysical—is compelling in its categorical logic and diverse inclusion of religious people, ideas, and practices, her claim that these three religious strands are nearly equivalent in their abilities to explain political and social history seems to over-reach a bit. In reading her book, one does not come away convinced that metaphysics is as distinct in American religiosity as evangelicalism and mainstream denominationalism necessarily. However, she does succeed in demonstrating the importance of metaphysics and its incarnations in influencing and developing many American religious movements. �

Albanese organizes her book into three chronologically-ordered parts. Part 1, “Beginnings,” traces the pre-seventeenth century Hermetic tradition from Europe to the vernacular magical metaphysical religion of the eighteenth century in America. Part 2, “Transitions,” focuses on the nineteenth century up to the Civil War; it splits Freemasonry, Mormonism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism into a chapter entitled “Revolutions and Enlightenments” from another called “Communion of Spirits” that discusses spiritualism, Shakers, mesmerism, harmonialism, African Americans, and Indians. Part 3, “Arrivals,” covers the postbellum era to the present, with a particular emphasis on Christian Science, Asian influences, and New Age religion. The most interesting part of Albanese’s Coda—most of it explaining the modern “New Age” movement—concerns itself with identifying metaphysical religion as less of a discrete identity or organization and more of a “lingua franca” by which people could share in some of its beliefs without having to fully abandon another religious denomination. Given the fluidity and amorphous nature of metaphysical religion, this explanation of its giving way to syncretism explains a lot about its pervasiveness and legacy in American religion and society. In her introduction, it almost seemed like she was arguing for three distinct and equally important strands of religiosity in America—evangelical, liturgical, and metaphysical—but it turns out that these strands have many intersections and overlaps by which the metaphysical might otherwise disappear if not called out and explored distinctly in this work.

[Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book clearly written by an academic. The introduction spends most of its time defining what is "metaphysics", and why it was chosen over other terms, and what is "religion". The rest of it is filled with why this book is needed in the history of American religion. The answer is because most historians have heavily focused in the mainline denominations, and the evangelical movements. The author points out, then demonstrates, that there are three clear streams running, and mingling together, the latter mentioned, in addition to a mystical current that flows on its own, while often dipping into the other traditions. This confluence of concepts are often bifurcated along regional, class, and racial lines as "material magic" of talismans, spells, and charms of the lower class, or "mental magic" of positive thinking, mind cures, and meditation of the upper class.

In order to present a concise history of American metaphysical religion, she begins in the Renaissance, and the appearance of the Corpus Hermeticum, and its ensuing influence. She slowly builds each element that will eventually become noticeable as the progenitors of what is to become, molded by American culture, and its many cultures, eventually, the present mystical, and metaphysical ideologies often lumped together as "New Age". From the early settlement period of the US, I was intrigued to learn that the four main waves of immigration were from very small areas of the UK which has continued to influence the regions even to today, and thus, which forms of metaphysics are more often encountered. The first wave, Puritans (largely from Essex) to Massachusetts with cunning folk; the second wave, Royalists from southern and western England, with servants, into Virginia for Hermetics and Astrology; the third wave, North Midlands of England and Wales in the Delaware Valley with folk magic and Quaker Inner Light as inheritors of the Familist, and influence of Jacob Boehme leading to spiritualism; the fourth wave, north Britain and northern Ireland in Appalachia are shown to be our cultural fore-bearers. As these groups mingled with the Native population, then interacted with the African groups, the admixture is what we know today.

After inspiration from the Transcendentalists' Hindu-inspired ideas, and exposure to Swedenborgianism, the Spiritualists were motivated by the need for reform which became synonymous with "progress", and all progress linked to "science", making rational what seemed only fanciful. Following on with social progress, most particularly for women, who often found themselves in positions of influence, and leadership within this movement, temperance, health concerns of many types, and abolition. The further development away from a materially-based magic, and moving toward a mentally-based one. Now, a cosmology of many worlds, ever-perfecting through our many lives. This lead to the creation of idealized, intentional communities.

In 1875 comes Theosophy to bring a tidal shift -as co-creators of power like in the Hermetic model rather than the Spiritualists' helpless mediums at the whim of those that came through them, and the Eastern concept of 'masters/brothers' with messages of insight, and introducing more Eastern literature-and its ideas- to the West. All in aid of assisting humans reach their highest potentials, and see their true selves as advancing beings of vast power, and ability. From that milieu, others begin to further combine these elements, and ideas of the past to reach a presentation of "Christ Consciousness" as an entity separate from the historical person rendered as an idealization such as Adam Kadmon, or Plato's Archetypal Man had been. Then Blavatsky's works synthesized, and expanded upon several previous concepts such as the 7 Ages of Man, the ancient, lost lands (Lemuria, Atlantis, Hyperborea, etc.) as part of human evolution.

By the mid-1880's New Thought began to emerge with I AM presence, and positive affirmations -the power of the word-while still emphasizing the progressive thought, especially feminist, and social action causes, often for the poor with a strong socialist bent. Author William Walker Atkinson's turn-of-the-century contributions are still in print. Meanwhile, the influence of Asian concepts continue to trickle through to the masses by means of prana, yoga, and kundalini. The World Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago is a pivotal point for many new thoughts.

Early 20th century scientific developments, and the giving of the language of "energy", and how it relates to matter. Leadbeater's book circulates the concept of "chakras" to the West, in its mutated, and colored form. The spirits that came to visit shifted from the 'ascended' Tibetan, or other mysterious human, to those never material, or aliens sending messages of peace, and lessons of advancement in the late 20th century. As the author concludes the book, she acknowledges that so often, what follows in the realm of metaphysics is so often an amalgam of what has come before with a burst of change to alter it, somehow.

It is a heavy tome of 500 pages, and another 100 pages of notes, and index. This book is a vast collection of information that answers whence comes most popular "New Age" concepts. Several times I felt there could certainly be an abridgment, and still be a worthy academic book while being made more smooth a reading experience.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this was at times an exhaustive and exhausting academic slog, this book gave some surprising historical context to the many practices and beliefs of the New Age, which are less new than I ever imagined (and which have less to do with "ancient" yogic/meditative practices and more with Hermeticism, spiritualism, and mesmerism). The book is better as a research reference than as a fun historical read. It made me never want to read the word "combinative" ever again.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Combinativeness … is so boring. we all combine and select and choose. this book still assumes only white americans are true americans. even when it talke about indian, Chinese, native americans, it still uses the accounts by white observers …
perhaps the more useful questions should be why whiteness is continually produced by past Christian colonizers and today’s “secular” scholars.
how is the normativity of non-combinativeness or purity of religion reproduced again and again?

[Seraphim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should be required reading for anyone naïve enough to cling to the notion of American as a "Christian nation"--and that goes for both secularists who lament this fact, as well as those Christians who see Americanism as compatible with revelation.

From its founding, Albanese depicts America as a proposition nation grounded in a syncretic metaphysical religion spanning such movements as Hermeticism, Freemasonry, Mormonism, Quakerism of the inner light, Shakerism, Fourerism, Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism, Universalism, Spiritualism, and Mesmerism, right up to the present day New Age traditions.

For Albanese, this metaphysical religion centers upon the powers of the mind, a Hermetic understanding of correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm ('as above so below'), an attempt to harness energy flowing between these realms, and an attention to healing.

While she continually downplays the conflict between this metaphysical orientation and Christianity, it hardly takes a theologian to see the numerous and manifold contradictions. While Orthodox Christianity stresses an ascetic and other-worldly quest for deification through obedience, prayer, and repentance, the often bombastic and ecstatic movements chronicled here stress a Gnostic, Marcionite stress on an inner "divine spark" shared by all. For Andrew Jackson Davis, this divinity of the self could be expressed as "the invisible prescence of the Divine in the visible human" which represents "the only and all-sufficient Incarnation" (215). This statement quite clearly reveals the heretical and anti-Christian nature of this religion, one which stresses the self-deification of the immanent and "this worldly" desires of man through Hermetic techniques, while utterly dispending with any need for repentance and a Redeemer.

Not surprisingly, the spirits many of these individuals commune with preached a "new light," a "new age," while almost unanimously upholding the virtues of "social reform" and the much touted brave new era of harmony, unity, and brotherhood. In this infernal anticipation of the "Social Gospel" that has since ravaged Western Christianity, many of these possessed magi deride prayer as a "misguided passion" that must be redirected towards the ever important "law of association" and harmony.

Of course, true to the principle of inversion that permeates the teachings of these metaphysicians, while on one hand calling for a new era of unity and harmony, they simultaneously promote every form of subversion possible, ranging from feminism, communism, socialism, radical reform. That is to say, though the explicit message remains one of unity, the practices inevitably promote a dizzying landscape of spiritual fragmentation, pluralism: the logical end result of the deification of one's fallen desires.

However, just like contemporary ecumenism, these preachers hearken back to the teachings of Marcion, expounding a Gnostic Jesus of the inner divine spark, and upholding a clear distinction between the evil Yaweh of the Old Testament and the New Testament "God of love." Given the numerous warnings that run through the Pauline and Petrine epistles of false prophets and teachers, not too mention the warnings of Jesus Christ himself, it is truly astonishing, perplexing, and disturbing that so many well-intentioned Christians find themselves deceived by these clearly heretical attempts to invent an updated and new Christianity.

For anyone disturbed by the teachings of these new gurus, I would highly recommend reading Fr. Seraphim Rose's prescient and prophetic "Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future": here you will find a sobering account of the infernal forces at work behind this supposedly tolerant, loving, and harmonious new age.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Republic of Mind and Spirit is a historical synthesis in which Albanese draws on primarily American, English, and Continental European primary and secondary sources spanning over five hundred years in order to argue that metaphysical religion is a “major player” in the evolution of American religiosity (4). This is a critical intervention in the historiography in that Albanese is challenging two dominant accounts of American religion: William McLoughlin’s “evangelical thesis” and Jon Butler’s “denominational-establishment anti-thesis.” McLoughlin’s evangelical thesis interprets American religious history as the unfolding of an increasingly secularized Protestant consensus. Butler, responding to McLoughlin’s evangelical thesis, argues that American religious history is better understood as a site for conflict between evangelical Protestant, mainstream Christian denominational, and marginalized “occult” groups, a conflict which mainstream denominational Christianity ultimately wins as the form of religion most compatible with the latent “state-church tradition of Anglo-Protestant America” (3). Albanese agrees that McLoughlin’s evangelical thesis is insufficient for describing American religious history, but wants to respond to what she considers a weakness in Butler’s antithesis: how it overlooks the vitality of what she calls “metaphysical” religiosity, which she defines as forms of religion that privilege the individual’s direct experience of the powers of the mind as a means for achieving wholeness, healing, and well-being.

Albanese theorizes four principal components of metaphysical religion:
1) A focus on the mind’s powers, which are less about the ability to reason abstractly and more about the experience of enhanced consciousness;
2) A view of mystical correspondence between “worlds,” including connections between the physical plane and unseen spiritual realms or energies, or between nature and the human world, which can be manipulated by the human mind through ritual;
3) A belief in the movement or flow of energy between worlds, which can explain illness or, properly harnessed, result in transformation;
4) And a yearning for salvation and/or healing.
She admits that narrating the “complex connections” of these themes is an “enormous” project, but considers it worthwhile because she thinks that recovering the lost history of American metaphysical religion illustrates the relevance of a model for interpreting American religious history that emphasizes contacts and combinations, rather than consensus, conflict, or tolerance (16-17). Ultimately, Albanese argues that metaphysical religion is quintessentially American in how it forges a “republic” of mind and spirit that is very public and offers a religious experience that is open to all people.

Just as America: Religions and Religion opens with pre-colonial indigenous America rather than Plymouth Rock, Republic of Mind and Spirit begins by going back to what Albanese considers the real starting point for American metaphysical religion: not 19th-century American Transcendentalism but 15th-century Continental European “Hermeticism.” Albanese divides the work into three parts. In Part One (“European Legacies”), she explores the literature and practice of the Continental and English metaphysical traditions, whose practitioners combine beliefs about “cunning” women and men and vernacular traditions of ritual magic with the supposedly “Egyptian” Hermetic tradition and the Jewish Kabbalah—an action that is perhaps similar to how later American practitioners will reach toward an imagined Native America and a “metaphysical Asia” to justify their own mystical categories and practices. She also looks at Native American and African American forms of metaphysical religion that would combine with these European legacies in pre-Revolutionary America. In Part Two (“Transitions”), Albanese tracks how the mystical and salvific ideas of Hermeticism—particularly as developed by Emmanuel Swedenborg—continue to emerge in Freemasonry, Mormonism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism, as well as in Shaker spiritualism, mesmerism, harmonialism, and séance spiritualism. Finally, in Part Three, Albanese traces how the appeal of scientific positivism and a “rhetoric of denial” (261) result in later practitioners of metaphysical religion burying their historical connections to esoteric traditions like Hermeticism and focusing on mind cure and the transformation of the body-self. These “reform-minded” practitioners include Christian Science, New Thought, and the Theosophical Society. Notably, the Theosophical Society will play an important early role in mediating Asia to the West, laying the cross-cultural groundwork for further interactions between “East-West and West” (368), including yoga, Transcendental Meditation, and an American metaphysical Buddhism strongly influenced by New Thought. Albanese closes by mapping out how metaphysical religion “diffuses” into a variety of different cultural practices and sites in the mid-to-late 20th century, including Norman Vincent Peale’s popular bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking, the Unity Church, chiropractics, beliefs in chakras, auras, chi, reincarnation, and space visitors, and the (short-lived?) New Age.

[Derek Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth the read, but a slog to get through

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, but brilliant. Albanese is one of the leading historians of religion in America. Here, she gives her attention to metaphysical religions. Such religions are defined by practitioners using their mental faculties to understand evolving transcendent religious truths, which are simultaneously perceived as affecting our world as well as the spirit plane. Albanese argues that America's culture of religious freedom, or at least exchange (given the frequent conflicts between religions!), enabled metaphysical believers to practice their beliefs in public and engage in wild combining of different traditions. This definition causes A LOT of religions to fall into Albanese's net — fans of "Hermetic" literature that claimed to convey ancient Egyptian secrets, the Hermetic-influenced "ancient traditions" (not really ancient) of Freemasonry, Swedenborgianism with its overlapping spirits and planes of existence, Unitarianism, Universalism, West African spirit conjuring, the powwows and other shamans of eastern Native American nations, Spiritualism in many forms, early Mormonism with its Swedenborgian/Masonic/Hermetic blurring, Shakers, Shaker spiritualists, African Americans, mesmerists, Transcendentalists, black Spiritualists, and (recently) UFO worshippers. So much material tests how much weight the format of the narrative history can bear. Still, Albanese's thesis, with its emphasis on invention and debate, holds up, so that the book succeeds mightily as an insightful read. This book reminds the reader that a world of religious thinking beyond Christianity has unfolded in the United States.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important, fascinating, and scholarly history of American metaphysical religion. That said, this book is somewhat overwhelming it its scope, being a synthesis of metaphysical religion from the 1400s through the 20th century. When relevant, Albanese traces the roots of metaphysical thought all the way back to its ancient origins. It is overwhelming not only in scope of time covered, but in the variety of faith movements that are given attention. At times Albanese argues for a specifically Americanized version of metaphysical beliefs rooted in other cultures. Without a conversant knowledge of the foreign manifestations, it can be difficult for the reader to judge how exactly the American version differs, but Albanese always clearly defines what the American version is. This is a very ambition and admirable book, and a transformative work for the field of American religious history.

[Pat Rolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is scholarship second to none as the author documents a wide range of esoteric religious traditions and the key persons founding or propagating them and their ultimate impact on American's spiritual and religious history. I found myself wanting a bit more depth on fewer people rather than the onslaught of names, but this presumes those names are not critical and they indeed represent great research by Ms. Albanese. There is lots to enjoy here and this very rich information from which the reader may examine more deeply any people or traditions beyond the scope of Ms. Albanese effort. Once again highly recommended for anyone wanting to broaden their knowledge in an area largely ignored by the academics or authors with the capability to do such grand work.

[M]

not mine