Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction
https://www.academia.edu/38866158/Dada_and_Surrealism_A_Very_Short_Introduction
Friday, May 15, 2020
Cats with no symptoms spread virus to other cats in lab test
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE May 13, 2020
In this Friday, May 8, 2020 file photo, the owner of a cat cafe checks the temperature of one of her cats in Bangkok, Thailand. According to a study published on Wednesday, May 13, 2020, cats can spread the new coronavirus to each other without any of them ever having any symptoms. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)
Cats can spread the new coronavirus to other cats without any of them ever having symptoms, a lab experiment suggests.
Scientists who led the work, reported on Wednesday, say it shows the need for more research into whether the virus can spread from people to cats to people again.
Health experts have downplayed that possibility. The American Veterinary Medical Association said in a new statement that just because an animal can be deliberately infected in a lab “does not mean that it will easily be infected with that same virus under natural conditions.”
Anyone concerned about that risk should use “common sense hygiene,” said virus expert Peter Halfmann. Don’t kiss your pets and keep surfaces clean to cut the chances of picking up any virus an animal might shed, he said.
He and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine led the lab experiment and published results Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Federal grants paid for the work.
Researchers took coronavirus from a human patient and infected three cats with it. Each cat then was housed with another cat that was free of infection. Within five days, coronavirus was found in all three of the newly exposed animals.
None of the six cats ever showed any symptoms.
“There was no sneezing, no coughing, they never had a high body temperature or lost any weight,” Halfmann said. “If a pet owner looked at them ... they wouldn’t have noticed anything.”
Last month, two domestic cats in different parts of New York state tested positive for the coronavirus after mild respiratory illnesses. They were thought to have picked it up from people in their homes or neighborhoods.
Some tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo also have tested positive for the virus, as have a small number of other animals around the world.
Those cases and the new lab experiment show “there is a public health need to recognize and further investigate the potential chain of human-cat-human transmission,” the authors wrote.
Guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that based on the limited information available so far, the risk of pets spreading coronavirus to people “is considered to be low.”
The veterinary medicine group says “there is no evidence to suggest that animals, including pets, that may be incidentally infected by humans are playing a role in the spread of COVID-19.” It stressed that person-to-person transmission was driving the global pandemic.
However, the group noted that many diseases spread between pets and people, so hygiene is always important: Wash your hands before and after touching pets, and keep your pet and its food and water bowls clean.
Halfmann, whose two cats sleep near him, said the worry may be greater for animal shelters, where one infected animal could pass the virus to many others.
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
In this Friday, May 8, 2020 file photo, the owner of a cat cafe checks the temperature of one of her cats in Bangkok, Thailand. According to a study published on Wednesday, May 13, 2020, cats can spread the new coronavirus to each other without any of them ever having any symptoms. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)
Cats can spread the new coronavirus to other cats without any of them ever having symptoms, a lab experiment suggests.
Scientists who led the work, reported on Wednesday, say it shows the need for more research into whether the virus can spread from people to cats to people again.
Health experts have downplayed that possibility. The American Veterinary Medical Association said in a new statement that just because an animal can be deliberately infected in a lab “does not mean that it will easily be infected with that same virus under natural conditions.”
Anyone concerned about that risk should use “common sense hygiene,” said virus expert Peter Halfmann. Don’t kiss your pets and keep surfaces clean to cut the chances of picking up any virus an animal might shed, he said.
He and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine led the lab experiment and published results Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Federal grants paid for the work.
Researchers took coronavirus from a human patient and infected three cats with it. Each cat then was housed with another cat that was free of infection. Within five days, coronavirus was found in all three of the newly exposed animals.
None of the six cats ever showed any symptoms.
“There was no sneezing, no coughing, they never had a high body temperature or lost any weight,” Halfmann said. “If a pet owner looked at them ... they wouldn’t have noticed anything.”
Last month, two domestic cats in different parts of New York state tested positive for the coronavirus after mild respiratory illnesses. They were thought to have picked it up from people in their homes or neighborhoods.
Some tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo also have tested positive for the virus, as have a small number of other animals around the world.
Those cases and the new lab experiment show “there is a public health need to recognize and further investigate the potential chain of human-cat-human transmission,” the authors wrote.
Guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that based on the limited information available so far, the risk of pets spreading coronavirus to people “is considered to be low.”
The veterinary medicine group says “there is no evidence to suggest that animals, including pets, that may be incidentally infected by humans are playing a role in the spread of COVID-19.” It stressed that person-to-person transmission was driving the global pandemic.
However, the group noted that many diseases spread between pets and people, so hygiene is always important: Wash your hands before and after touching pets, and keep your pet and its food and water bowls clean.
Halfmann, whose two cats sleep near him, said the worry may be greater for animal shelters, where one infected animal could pass the virus to many others.
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
ORISHA OBATALA
DEFEATER OF PLAGUES, EPIDEMICS AND PANDEMICS
OBATALA'S NUMBER IS EIGHT
OR
Obatalá, Owner of All Heads
Obatalá
Obatalá (Obbatalá) is called the creator of earth and the sculptor of mankind because he was given this job by his father Olodumare, the supreme God in the Lucumí pantheon. According to a patakí (sacred story), Olodumare sent Obalatá to earth at the beginning of time, when there was nothing there but water. Olodumare gave his son a little bit of dirt and a chicken, and he told him to create the earth with it. Obatalá put the dirt in a pile in the middle of the sea and put the chicken on top of it. Soon, the chicken started scratching the dirt, spreading it around, and that's how the earth took shape. Once the continents had been formed, Olofi, another manifestation of the supreme God, told Obatalá to form human beings. Obatalá obeyed, adding the final touch by putting heads on the bodies of the humans he created. That's why Obatalá is said to be the owner of all heads.
Another patakí says that Obatalá saved humans from destruction. On one occasion, the Orichas were having a party and they forgot to invite Yemayá. She was so angry that she whipped up the oceans and flooded the world. Humans were terrified and didn't know what to do, so they ran to Obatalá and asked him to intervene. He ordered Yemayá to retreat, and she did out of respect to him. Obatalá, as the creator of earth, can be the only one to end it.
Obatalá is the owner of all things that are white, as well as the human head and all of its thoughts and dreams. He also owns silver and white metals, and the ceiba tree. Obatalá likes cotton, cocoa butter, cascarilla (powder made of egg shells), marble eggs, and snails. As tribute, he likes merengues, white rice, white custard, rice pudding, black eyed peas, fruits with a grainy texture like pomegranates, pears and custard apples, roasted ñamé (sweet potato) and malanga (taro root). Obatalá's food can never be salted. He's an Oricha who came directly to earth from heaven as the son of God, specifically Olodumare and Olofi. He was sent to earth to do good and govern as the king of the planet. Obatalá is calm, wise, understanding, and he loves peace and harmony. He demands proper behavior from his children and, out of respect, they obey him. No one can swear or blaspheme in front of Obatalá, and no one should appear naked in his presence. He hates alcohol and prohibits his children from drinking it. He always dresses in white, and his eleke (beaded necklace) is also white. He lives in a white porcelain sopera (soup tureen) kept on the altar of the home. Obatalá protects against blindness, paralysis and dementia.
Obatalá
Obatalá Takes Many Forms
Obatalá can be male or female
Orichas have different caminos or paths, meaning that the same Oricha can be manifested through different avatars.
DEFEATER OF PLAGUES, EPIDEMICS AND PANDEMICS
OBATALA'S NUMBER IS EIGHT
OR
INFINITY UPRIGHT
Obatalá, Owner of All Heads
Obatalá
Obatalá (Obbatalá) is called the creator of earth and the sculptor of mankind because he was given this job by his father Olodumare, the supreme God in the Lucumí pantheon. According to a patakí (sacred story), Olodumare sent Obalatá to earth at the beginning of time, when there was nothing there but water. Olodumare gave his son a little bit of dirt and a chicken, and he told him to create the earth with it. Obatalá put the dirt in a pile in the middle of the sea and put the chicken on top of it. Soon, the chicken started scratching the dirt, spreading it around, and that's how the earth took shape. Once the continents had been formed, Olofi, another manifestation of the supreme God, told Obatalá to form human beings. Obatalá obeyed, adding the final touch by putting heads on the bodies of the humans he created. That's why Obatalá is said to be the owner of all heads.
Another patakí says that Obatalá saved humans from destruction. On one occasion, the Orichas were having a party and they forgot to invite Yemayá. She was so angry that she whipped up the oceans and flooded the world. Humans were terrified and didn't know what to do, so they ran to Obatalá and asked him to intervene. He ordered Yemayá to retreat, and she did out of respect to him. Obatalá, as the creator of earth, can be the only one to end it.
Obatalá is the owner of all things that are white, as well as the human head and all of its thoughts and dreams. He also owns silver and white metals, and the ceiba tree. Obatalá likes cotton, cocoa butter, cascarilla (powder made of egg shells), marble eggs, and snails. As tribute, he likes merengues, white rice, white custard, rice pudding, black eyed peas, fruits with a grainy texture like pomegranates, pears and custard apples, roasted ñamé (sweet potato) and malanga (taro root). Obatalá's food can never be salted. He's an Oricha who came directly to earth from heaven as the son of God, specifically Olodumare and Olofi. He was sent to earth to do good and govern as the king of the planet. Obatalá is calm, wise, understanding, and he loves peace and harmony. He demands proper behavior from his children and, out of respect, they obey him. No one can swear or blaspheme in front of Obatalá, and no one should appear naked in his presence. He hates alcohol and prohibits his children from drinking it. He always dresses in white, and his eleke (beaded necklace) is also white. He lives in a white porcelain sopera (soup tureen) kept on the altar of the home. Obatalá protects against blindness, paralysis and dementia.
Obatalá
Obatalá Takes Many Forms
Obatalá can be male or female
Orichas have different caminos or paths, meaning that the same Oricha can be manifested through different avatars.
Obatalá can be either male or female, depending on his camino.
For example, Obatalá Ocha Griñán, Obatalá Obu Moró, and Obatalá Ayáguna are male;
Obatalá Obanlá, Obatalá Ochanlá, and Obatalá Alaguema are female.
In all, Obatalá has 24 caminos.
Some Santeros will know Obatalá as mother and others will know him as father.
The sons and daughters of Obatalá are strong willed but they're peaceful, calm and trustworthy people.
They're a bit reserved, and don't complain much.
Because Obatalá is the owner of human heads, his children are usually very intelligent and fond of studying.
Obatalá likes order and cleanliness.
He likes to have a calm environment.
He's patient with his children and very loving toward them, but he must be respected and obeyed.
Obatalá's number is 8, and his Catholic counterpart is the Virgin of Mercy.
His feast day is September 24.
Some lineages say his day of the week is Thursday, and others say Sunday.
In nature, tall majestic mountains are his symbol.
Because Obatalá is considered the creator of human beings, everyone can ask him to intervene and help in times of need. Obatalá will intercede when other Orichas are turning a deaf ear.
The prayer to Obbatala is
Obbatala, the king of Orishas.
- Submitted by: admin
- Editorial Articles
- Culture and Traditions
- 05 / 25 / 2007
Obbatala is the Orisha of highest level, because he was the first to descend to the earth materializing Olofi, therefore he gave life to others. The etymology of his name is "king of all saints". His main mandate is the good for all and he mediates among the Orishas since his word is law and he is respected as such. He represents all that is true, wise and fair.
He is the God of the houses. In addition, he controls head and educates based on our thinking. He is seen as a veteran in the snow-covered mountains.
Generally, his sons are albinos as well as the disabled people.
The half-light attracts him, that is why his altar should be far from light.
His syncretic symbol is the Virgen de la Merced. His color is white and the celebration date is on September 24.
His sons must be respectful because Obbatala does not accept lack of respect or insults.
Among the parts of the body that influences the most are : the flee flowing, the head and bones. The plants used are Alacrancillo, Almond, Cotton, Campana, Peregun and Canutillo.
The animals to sacrifice are the white hen, Guinea fowl, pigeon and goat. His devotes are not allowed to drink alcohol and eat crabs and navy bean.
The prayer to Obbatala is
"Gemu Obatala Obatala Birivigua Aligua Ligua Lano Yakuto Kabo Kabo Ke Dedere laboru Dedere la boshishe Doba lori meridilogun".
Tarot: Knowing the Self, Others, and Nature
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More Info: paper published in ALITER, 2012, journal of Ассоциации исследователей эзотеризма и мистицизма, Russia
Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine
John L Crow
Theosophical Society,
Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
H. P. Blavatsky,
Science Fiction and Religion,
The Coming Race, Vril-Gesellschaft
Location: University of California-Davis
More Info: ASE Fourth International Conference
Organization: Association for the Study of Esotericism
Conference End Date: Jul 22, 2012
Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism, and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine
John L. Crow,
John L Crow
Theosophical Society,
Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
H. P. Blavatsky,
Science Fiction and Religion,
The Coming Race, Vril-Gesellschaft
Location: University of California-Davis
More Info: ASE Fourth International Conference
Organization: Association for the Study of Esotericism
Conference End Date: Jul 22, 2012
Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism, and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine
John L. Crow,
Florida State University
In 1888, the American section of the Theosophical Society began holding an annual convention, bringing together the nation’s Theosophists to organize their efforts, and celebrate their achievements. Society co-founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, sent a letter to each annual convention, and in them, she frequently mentioned the unique role America played in the advancement of the human race. According to her two-volume magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, America would be the home of the next sub-race of the fifth root-race.That is, in her scheme of human evolution, America would be home to the next sub-group of the current levelof human spiritual and physical evolution.
By her 1891 letter, which was also her last, she mentions, like in many of her previous letters, the unique position of Americans, and warns that their developing powers needed to be controlled. “Your position as the forerunners of the sixth sub-race of the fifth root-race has its own special perils as well as its special advantages.”
In this letter Blavatsky connects American nationalism directly to her theories of human race development. These theories were also influenced by, not only established nineteenth-century racial categories, but the occult fiction of the English novelist, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in particular, his last novel, The Coming Race. Building on texts she encountered in India,nineteenth-century theories of race, her American patriotism, and Bulwer-Lytton’s novel,Blavatsky developed a theory of human evolution that simultaneously separated humanity intodistinct races while, at the same time, celebrated the mixing of races in the United States. As aresult, American Theosophists, and later offshoots, combined American nationalism and occultism in the development of their occult doctrines which still persist today
By her 1891 letter, which was also her last, she mentions, like in many of her previous letters, the unique position of Americans, and warns that their developing powers needed to be controlled. “Your position as the forerunners of the sixth sub-race of the fifth root-race has its own special perils as well as its special advantages.”
In this letter Blavatsky connects American nationalism directly to her theories of human race development. These theories were also influenced by, not only established nineteenth-century racial categories, but the occult fiction of the English novelist, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in particular, his last novel, The Coming Race. Building on texts she encountered in India,nineteenth-century theories of race, her American patriotism, and Bulwer-Lytton’s novel,Blavatsky developed a theory of human evolution that simultaneously separated humanity intodistinct races while, at the same time, celebrated the mixing of races in the United States. As aresult, American Theosophists, and later offshoots, combined American nationalism and occultism in the development of their occult doctrines which still persist today
Occult America
The Secret History Of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
by MITCH HOROWITZ
Hardcover, 290 pages, Random House Inc,
https://www.npr.org/books/titles/138139755/occult-america-the-secret-history-of-how-mysticism-shaped-our-nation#excerpt
Book Summary
Traces America's unique relationship with occult movements and thinkers, providing meticulously researched coverage of such topics as the Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and transcendentalism movements; the origins of the Ouija board; and the practices of famous historical figures.
The Secret History Of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
by MITCH HOROWITZ
Hardcover, 290 pages, Random House Inc,
https://www.npr.org/books/titles/138139755/occult-america-the-secret-history-of-how-mysticism-shaped-our-nation#excerpt
Book Summary
Traces America's unique relationship with occult movements and thinkers, providing meticulously researched coverage of such topics as the Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and transcendentalism movements; the origins of the Ouija board; and the practices of famous historical figures.
Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive.
Excerpt: Occult America
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 magical visions and spoke of prophecies. The girl—who belonged to a radical Christian sect that would become known as the Shaking Quakers, or the Shakers—was hounded, beaten, and jailed on charges of sorcery and public disruption. Local authorities were aghast at the otherworldly possession that seemed to grip her and the other Shakers when they gyrated and shook in spirit trances. But she was not destined to become another casualty. Ann Lee escaped.
In 1774, the woman now called Mother Ann sailed from Liverpool to New York with eight followers and hangers-on. They included an unfaithful husband with whom she had already suffered through the birth and death of four infants. As the legend goes, the ship almost capsized in a storm. But Ann, in a state of eerie calm as waves crashed over the bow, told the captain that no harm would befall them. She reported seeing “two bright angels of God” on the mast. The ship survived.
After toiling at menial labor in New York City, the pilgrims—now twelve, minus Ann’s husband—scraped together enough resources in 1776 to form a tiny colony in the knotty, marshy fields of Niskayuna, near Albany in New York’s Hudson Valley. The twelve apostles, as they saw themselves, anointed the place Wisdom’s Valley. It was a punishing, swampy stretch of two hundred acres swept barren by icy winds in the winter and transformed into muddy, mosquito-infested fields in the summer. Their neighbors were no friendlier than the landscape. Angry rumors painted Mother Ann and the Shakers—all sworn pacifists—as British sympathizers or spies. Revolutionary authorities briefly jailed the religious leader in Albany on charges of sedition. During a Shaker missionary trip to Petersham, Massachusetts, a band of thirty townsmen seized Mother Ann and subjected the celibate woman to the humiliation of disrobing, ostensibly to determine whether she was an English agent in drag. Some accused her of witchcraft or heresy. (“There is no witchcraft but sin,” Mother Ann evenly countered.) But, oddly, the little sect—celibate, poor, steeped in a life of hard labor and little rest—began to grow.
Following a brutal upstate New York winter in 1780, two men from across the Hudson River in the farming community of New Lebanon took advantage of an early spring thaw to visit the Shaker settlement. The men were disappointed followers of one of the many Baptist revivals that had been sweeping the region, and they longed to see the woman whom followers called Christ returned in female form. When they located Mother Ann and her colony in the wilderness, they were astonished at the small group’s survival. They began asking Mother Ann about her mystical teachings and rumors of the sect’s practices, in which members spoke in prophecies, saw visions of the dead, and danced, jumped, and shouted in the thrall of the Holy Spirit. “We are the people who turn the world upside down,” Mother Ann enigmatically told them.
The men returned to New Lebanon to spread word of the people in the woods—and more curiosity seekers trekked to Niskayuna. Strange natural events drove newcomers into Mother Ann’s little world. On May 19, 1780, many parts of New England experienced “The Dark Day”—a period when the daytime skies mysteriously blackened and the sun’s rays were blotted out. The cause may have been a rash of local fires to clear fields, but the effect was panic over the coming of Armageddon. Mother Ann’s warnings about the debased nature of the world suddenly seemed prophetic—and new converts came to her. To the Shakers, it was all expected. The previous year, Mother Ann had told her followers to store up extra provisions: “We shall have company enough, before another year comes about, to consume it all.” Soon New Lebanon itself sprouted a much bigger colony, eventually sporting the immaculate whitewashed buildings, tidy yards, and brick meetinghouses for which the Shakers became famous.
Though Mother Ann died in 1784, her influence extended further in death than in life. The late 1830s saw the dawn of a feverish and profoundly influential period of Shaker activity called “Mother Ann’s Work.” The departed leader appeared as an otherworldly spirit guide directing a vast range of supernatural activity and instruction. Shaker villages—now spread as far south as Kentucky—recorded visits from spirits of historical figures and vanquished Indian tribes. The devout reported receiving ghostly visions and songs, which they turned into strangely beautiful paintings and haunting hymns (many of which still survive). Villagers spoke in foreign tongues, writhing and rolling on the floors in meetings that lasted all night—some even getting drunk on “spirit gifts” of unseen wine or Indian tobacco. In an America that had not yet experienced the Spiritualist wave of séances, table tilting, or conversing with the dead, the Shakers foretold that beings from the afterlife would soon “visit every city and hamlet, every palace and cottage in the land.” And events unfolding outside the manicured grounds of Shaker villages were already bringing that prophecy to life.
The Burned-Over District
The Shakers had laid down their roots in an area that would prove pivotal in American culture, its influence vastly surpassing its size. The region’s role is as central to the development of mystical religions in America as the sands of the Sinai are to Judaism, and no account of American religion is possible without taking stock of it. The twentieth-century historian Carl Carmer called this area “a broad psychic highway, a thoroughfare of the occult.” A snaking stretch of land in central New York State, it was a place of pristine lakes and rolling green hills, about twenty-five miles wide and three hundred miles long, extending from Albany in the east to Buffalo in the west. It became one of the main passages through which Americans flowed west. It remains so today as U.S. Route 20, an east–west highway that begins in New England, gently traversing the bends and slopes of Central New York’s farmland before heading across the expanse of the nation to the Pacific Northwest. It is the longest continuous road in the United States. As fate and geography would have it, this great corridor cuts directly across a part of Central New York that in the nineteenth century became so caught up in the fires of religious revival movements—the fires of the spirit—that it became known as the Burned-Over District.
Before the Revolutionary War, the Burned-Over District was home to the Iroquois nation, whose remnants the new American government pushed out, partly in retaliation for the tribe’s alliance with the British and partly to satisfy the land hunger of early settlers and speculators. And when settlers did arrive after the war, most of them unaware of the Indian lives that had been extinguished or hounded from the rich soil, the place seemed like an Eden of bountiful open land and vast lakes.
Throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century, itinerant ministers continually traveled the newly settled region, crisscrossing its hills and valleys with news of the Holy Spirit. The circuit-riding preachers and their tent revival meetings often left the area in a torrent of religious passion. For days afterward, without the prompting of ministers or revivalists, men and women would speak in tongues and writhe in religious ecstasy. Many would report visitations from angels or spirits.
Folklore told of the area once being home to a mysterious tribe—older than the oldest of Indian tribes, maybe even a lost tribe of Israel. These ancient beings, so the story went, had been wiped out in a confrontation with the Native Americans. Some believed their ghosts and messengers still walked, composing a world within a world amid the daily ?goings-?on of Burned-Over District life.
The Burned-Over District’s early religious communities thrived on a steady pool of migrants drawn to the region’s abundant land. This new breed of Yankee, streaming westward from New England, was spiritually curious, ready to listen and believe. In the starlit nights of pioneer life, many minds and hearts turned to the whispers of the cosmos and the mysteries of what-might-be.
Apocalypse Postponed
If the Burned-Over District became a staging ground for a young nation’s foray into unconventional and alternative religious ideas, it was in the mood and mind-set of its residents that the journey took flight. The mental habits of the Burned-Over District can best be understood by looking at one of the great schisms of American religious history. It concerns an early-nineteenth-century sect called the Millerites, later known as the Seventh-day Adventists. This group of believers, which numbered in the thousands by the 1840s, followed the utopian–millenarian ideas of a Freemason and Baptist clergyman named William Miller. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Miller grew up estranged from his strict Baptist upbringing, more or less indifferent to religion. But after fighting in the War of 1812, he took up a common view among returning soldiers that his survival had somehow been divinely ordained. The former secularist came home with a deep interest in questions of immortality.
Convinced that the Bible was a record of literal truths, Miller undertook a comprehensive study to determine the time of Christ’s return—and the millennium of peace he believed it would bring. Though only moderately educated, Miller spent fourteen years poring over Scripture, organizing and cross-referencing all that he found, and endeavoring—in true Yankee fashion—to find an orderly blueprint to God’s plan. Miller’s data pointed to the end as falling somewhere between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. He later recast the final call to October 22, 1844. By the early 1830s, he had begun to gain a serious audience, first as one of the Burned-Over District’s legion of itinerant religious speakers and later as a Baptist minister.
As Miller’s portentous dates neared, hundreds and then thousands of followers gathered at tent revival meetings throughout Central New York. They filled—and sometimes overflowed—the biggest tent the nation had ever seen, one that could seat three thousand people. Once, near Rochester, a wind squall snapped fifteen of its chains and several inch-thick ropes, violently ripping the tent from its moorings like the opening of a gigantic clamshell. Amazingly, no one was hurt—which deepened local belief that Miller’s movement was charmed. When an economic depression swept the Burned-Over District in the late 1830s and early 1840s, it served only to heighten the yearning for deliverance and the feeling that familiar institutions were slipping away.
A widely promulgated myth tells that as 1843 approached, the man the press called “Mad Miller” and his followers shed their last possessions, donned white “ascension robes,” and waited on hilltops for the new advent. Stories abound in popular histories and local tales that some ran amok, engaging in “free love” and throwing money to the wind in anticipation of a world without wants or demands. Not only is this portrait historically inaccurate—without any viable source material in newspapers of the day—but it misunderstands the unusual blend of magical beliefs and practical habits that marked so many lives in the Burned-Over District.
In fact, Miller’s followers never sold their belongings en masse, retreated to hilltops, or—except for rare cases—threw responsibility to the winds as they awaited their Savior. What few such episodes did occur were seized upon and exaggerated by those neighbors who mocked, and in some cases even physically attacked, the Millerites as they congregated in meeting halls and homes. Most evidence shows that these Yankee acolytes toiled right up to the point of Miller’s end-times, working at their jobs, maintaining their farms, and attending school. Barns were swept, haylofts loaded, and fireplaces stoked before the arrival of the “last days.” While followers believed in—and were passionate for—progress and perfection, they never abandoned the worldly. And this was the distinct habit of thought in the Burned-Over District: the ability to believe so deeply in the otherworld that it could be felt as a palpable presence but also to possess the soundness of mind and instinct to, in the Shaker formulation, keep hands to work even as hearts soared to God. It was a key facet of the occult and metaphysical mind-set being born in America.
The Universal Friend
The dreamers and planners who flourished along the Psychic Highway seemed to relish splitting apart orthodoxies, remaking Christianity as a new source of mystery and magic. One woman, in particular, today long forgotten, created in the mind of her followers a dramatically new idea of what a divine messenger could be. A New Englander by birth, she became the first American-born woman to found a spiritual order. Unlike Ann Lee, she wasn’t seen as a female return of Christ but rather as a medium or channel possessed of the Divine Spirit. Her name was Jemima Wilkinson.
Wilkinson was born in 1752 to a moderately prosperous farming household of Quakers in Cumberland, Rhode Island. She lost her mother at age twelve and grew up under the care of older sisters, riding horses, gardening, and reading the basics of Quaker theology. The girl grew into a young woman of “personal beauty” who “took pleasure in adding to her good appearance the graceful drapery of elegant apparel,” historian Stafford C. Cleveland wrote in his 1873 History and Directory of Yates County, which became the earliest biographical narrative of any repute of Wilkinson. Later in Wilkinson’s life, onlookers commented on her fresh complexion and gently tanned skin, the ringlets of chestnut-brown hair that draped her neck, and her flashing black eyes. The attractive young woman presented a strikingly different figure than Mother Ann Lee—that is, if testimony from the spirit world can be relied upon.
Although no images survive of Mother Ann, some of her nineteenth-century followers doted on a “psychometric portrait” of their founder. The portrait was created by a New York artist who, when handed an object, claimed to clairvoyantly summon the vision of its owner. Whatever his abilities, the “psychometrist” was not attempting flattery. The supernatural image of Ann Lee revealed a dark, straight-haired woman with an unusually large forehead, dull eyes, and thick masculine lips. To her followers, it accurately captured a degree of world-weariness in Ann Lee far different from anything that would have been known by Jemima Wilkinson, raised amid the relative comforts of a successful New England farm.
FROM GOOGLE MORE EXCERPTS
Contents
What Is the Occult? 1
Mystic Americans 42
Ouija and the Selling 66
The Science of Right Thinking 80
Excerpt: Occult America
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 magical visions and spoke of prophecies. The girl—who belonged to a radical Christian sect that would become known as the Shaking Quakers, or the Shakers—was hounded, beaten, and jailed on charges of sorcery and public disruption. Local authorities were aghast at the otherworldly possession that seemed to grip her and the other Shakers when they gyrated and shook in spirit trances. But she was not destined to become another casualty. Ann Lee escaped.
In 1774, the woman now called Mother Ann sailed from Liverpool to New York with eight followers and hangers-on. They included an unfaithful husband with whom she had already suffered through the birth and death of four infants. As the legend goes, the ship almost capsized in a storm. But Ann, in a state of eerie calm as waves crashed over the bow, told the captain that no harm would befall them. She reported seeing “two bright angels of God” on the mast. The ship survived.
After toiling at menial labor in New York City, the pilgrims—now twelve, minus Ann’s husband—scraped together enough resources in 1776 to form a tiny colony in the knotty, marshy fields of Niskayuna, near Albany in New York’s Hudson Valley. The twelve apostles, as they saw themselves, anointed the place Wisdom’s Valley. It was a punishing, swampy stretch of two hundred acres swept barren by icy winds in the winter and transformed into muddy, mosquito-infested fields in the summer. Their neighbors were no friendlier than the landscape. Angry rumors painted Mother Ann and the Shakers—all sworn pacifists—as British sympathizers or spies. Revolutionary authorities briefly jailed the religious leader in Albany on charges of sedition. During a Shaker missionary trip to Petersham, Massachusetts, a band of thirty townsmen seized Mother Ann and subjected the celibate woman to the humiliation of disrobing, ostensibly to determine whether she was an English agent in drag. Some accused her of witchcraft or heresy. (“There is no witchcraft but sin,” Mother Ann evenly countered.) But, oddly, the little sect—celibate, poor, steeped in a life of hard labor and little rest—began to grow.
Following a brutal upstate New York winter in 1780, two men from across the Hudson River in the farming community of New Lebanon took advantage of an early spring thaw to visit the Shaker settlement. The men were disappointed followers of one of the many Baptist revivals that had been sweeping the region, and they longed to see the woman whom followers called Christ returned in female form. When they located Mother Ann and her colony in the wilderness, they were astonished at the small group’s survival. They began asking Mother Ann about her mystical teachings and rumors of the sect’s practices, in which members spoke in prophecies, saw visions of the dead, and danced, jumped, and shouted in the thrall of the Holy Spirit. “We are the people who turn the world upside down,” Mother Ann enigmatically told them.
The men returned to New Lebanon to spread word of the people in the woods—and more curiosity seekers trekked to Niskayuna. Strange natural events drove newcomers into Mother Ann’s little world. On May 19, 1780, many parts of New England experienced “The Dark Day”—a period when the daytime skies mysteriously blackened and the sun’s rays were blotted out. The cause may have been a rash of local fires to clear fields, but the effect was panic over the coming of Armageddon. Mother Ann’s warnings about the debased nature of the world suddenly seemed prophetic—and new converts came to her. To the Shakers, it was all expected. The previous year, Mother Ann had told her followers to store up extra provisions: “We shall have company enough, before another year comes about, to consume it all.” Soon New Lebanon itself sprouted a much bigger colony, eventually sporting the immaculate whitewashed buildings, tidy yards, and brick meetinghouses for which the Shakers became famous.
Though Mother Ann died in 1784, her influence extended further in death than in life. The late 1830s saw the dawn of a feverish and profoundly influential period of Shaker activity called “Mother Ann’s Work.” The departed leader appeared as an otherworldly spirit guide directing a vast range of supernatural activity and instruction. Shaker villages—now spread as far south as Kentucky—recorded visits from spirits of historical figures and vanquished Indian tribes. The devout reported receiving ghostly visions and songs, which they turned into strangely beautiful paintings and haunting hymns (many of which still survive). Villagers spoke in foreign tongues, writhing and rolling on the floors in meetings that lasted all night—some even getting drunk on “spirit gifts” of unseen wine or Indian tobacco. In an America that had not yet experienced the Spiritualist wave of séances, table tilting, or conversing with the dead, the Shakers foretold that beings from the afterlife would soon “visit every city and hamlet, every palace and cottage in the land.” And events unfolding outside the manicured grounds of Shaker villages were already bringing that prophecy to life.
The Burned-Over District
The Shakers had laid down their roots in an area that would prove pivotal in American culture, its influence vastly surpassing its size. The region’s role is as central to the development of mystical religions in America as the sands of the Sinai are to Judaism, and no account of American religion is possible without taking stock of it. The twentieth-century historian Carl Carmer called this area “a broad psychic highway, a thoroughfare of the occult.” A snaking stretch of land in central New York State, it was a place of pristine lakes and rolling green hills, about twenty-five miles wide and three hundred miles long, extending from Albany in the east to Buffalo in the west. It became one of the main passages through which Americans flowed west. It remains so today as U.S. Route 20, an east–west highway that begins in New England, gently traversing the bends and slopes of Central New York’s farmland before heading across the expanse of the nation to the Pacific Northwest. It is the longest continuous road in the United States. As fate and geography would have it, this great corridor cuts directly across a part of Central New York that in the nineteenth century became so caught up in the fires of religious revival movements—the fires of the spirit—that it became known as the Burned-Over District.
Before the Revolutionary War, the Burned-Over District was home to the Iroquois nation, whose remnants the new American government pushed out, partly in retaliation for the tribe’s alliance with the British and partly to satisfy the land hunger of early settlers and speculators. And when settlers did arrive after the war, most of them unaware of the Indian lives that had been extinguished or hounded from the rich soil, the place seemed like an Eden of bountiful open land and vast lakes.
Throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century, itinerant ministers continually traveled the newly settled region, crisscrossing its hills and valleys with news of the Holy Spirit. The circuit-riding preachers and their tent revival meetings often left the area in a torrent of religious passion. For days afterward, without the prompting of ministers or revivalists, men and women would speak in tongues and writhe in religious ecstasy. Many would report visitations from angels or spirits.
Folklore told of the area once being home to a mysterious tribe—older than the oldest of Indian tribes, maybe even a lost tribe of Israel. These ancient beings, so the story went, had been wiped out in a confrontation with the Native Americans. Some believed their ghosts and messengers still walked, composing a world within a world amid the daily ?goings-?on of Burned-Over District life.
The Burned-Over District’s early religious communities thrived on a steady pool of migrants drawn to the region’s abundant land. This new breed of Yankee, streaming westward from New England, was spiritually curious, ready to listen and believe. In the starlit nights of pioneer life, many minds and hearts turned to the whispers of the cosmos and the mysteries of what-might-be.
Apocalypse Postponed
If the Burned-Over District became a staging ground for a young nation’s foray into unconventional and alternative religious ideas, it was in the mood and mind-set of its residents that the journey took flight. The mental habits of the Burned-Over District can best be understood by looking at one of the great schisms of American religious history. It concerns an early-nineteenth-century sect called the Millerites, later known as the Seventh-day Adventists. This group of believers, which numbered in the thousands by the 1840s, followed the utopian–millenarian ideas of a Freemason and Baptist clergyman named William Miller. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Miller grew up estranged from his strict Baptist upbringing, more or less indifferent to religion. But after fighting in the War of 1812, he took up a common view among returning soldiers that his survival had somehow been divinely ordained. The former secularist came home with a deep interest in questions of immortality.
Convinced that the Bible was a record of literal truths, Miller undertook a comprehensive study to determine the time of Christ’s return—and the millennium of peace he believed it would bring. Though only moderately educated, Miller spent fourteen years poring over Scripture, organizing and cross-referencing all that he found, and endeavoring—in true Yankee fashion—to find an orderly blueprint to God’s plan. Miller’s data pointed to the end as falling somewhere between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. He later recast the final call to October 22, 1844. By the early 1830s, he had begun to gain a serious audience, first as one of the Burned-Over District’s legion of itinerant religious speakers and later as a Baptist minister.
As Miller’s portentous dates neared, hundreds and then thousands of followers gathered at tent revival meetings throughout Central New York. They filled—and sometimes overflowed—the biggest tent the nation had ever seen, one that could seat three thousand people. Once, near Rochester, a wind squall snapped fifteen of its chains and several inch-thick ropes, violently ripping the tent from its moorings like the opening of a gigantic clamshell. Amazingly, no one was hurt—which deepened local belief that Miller’s movement was charmed. When an economic depression swept the Burned-Over District in the late 1830s and early 1840s, it served only to heighten the yearning for deliverance and the feeling that familiar institutions were slipping away.
A widely promulgated myth tells that as 1843 approached, the man the press called “Mad Miller” and his followers shed their last possessions, donned white “ascension robes,” and waited on hilltops for the new advent. Stories abound in popular histories and local tales that some ran amok, engaging in “free love” and throwing money to the wind in anticipation of a world without wants or demands. Not only is this portrait historically inaccurate—without any viable source material in newspapers of the day—but it misunderstands the unusual blend of magical beliefs and practical habits that marked so many lives in the Burned-Over District.
In fact, Miller’s followers never sold their belongings en masse, retreated to hilltops, or—except for rare cases—threw responsibility to the winds as they awaited their Savior. What few such episodes did occur were seized upon and exaggerated by those neighbors who mocked, and in some cases even physically attacked, the Millerites as they congregated in meeting halls and homes. Most evidence shows that these Yankee acolytes toiled right up to the point of Miller’s end-times, working at their jobs, maintaining their farms, and attending school. Barns were swept, haylofts loaded, and fireplaces stoked before the arrival of the “last days.” While followers believed in—and were passionate for—progress and perfection, they never abandoned the worldly. And this was the distinct habit of thought in the Burned-Over District: the ability to believe so deeply in the otherworld that it could be felt as a palpable presence but also to possess the soundness of mind and instinct to, in the Shaker formulation, keep hands to work even as hearts soared to God. It was a key facet of the occult and metaphysical mind-set being born in America.
The Universal Friend
The dreamers and planners who flourished along the Psychic Highway seemed to relish splitting apart orthodoxies, remaking Christianity as a new source of mystery and magic. One woman, in particular, today long forgotten, created in the mind of her followers a dramatically new idea of what a divine messenger could be. A New Englander by birth, she became the first American-born woman to found a spiritual order. Unlike Ann Lee, she wasn’t seen as a female return of Christ but rather as a medium or channel possessed of the Divine Spirit. Her name was Jemima Wilkinson.
Wilkinson was born in 1752 to a moderately prosperous farming household of Quakers in Cumberland, Rhode Island. She lost her mother at age twelve and grew up under the care of older sisters, riding horses, gardening, and reading the basics of Quaker theology. The girl grew into a young woman of “personal beauty” who “took pleasure in adding to her good appearance the graceful drapery of elegant apparel,” historian Stafford C. Cleveland wrote in his 1873 History and Directory of Yates County, which became the earliest biographical narrative of any repute of Wilkinson. Later in Wilkinson’s life, onlookers commented on her fresh complexion and gently tanned skin, the ringlets of chestnut-brown hair that draped her neck, and her flashing black eyes. The attractive young woman presented a strikingly different figure than Mother Ann Lee—that is, if testimony from the spirit world can be relied upon.
Although no images survive of Mother Ann, some of her nineteenth-century followers doted on a “psychometric portrait” of their founder. The portrait was created by a New York artist who, when handed an object, claimed to clairvoyantly summon the vision of its owner. Whatever his abilities, the “psychometrist” was not attempting flattery. The supernatural image of Ann Lee revealed a dark, straight-haired woman with an unusually large forehead, dull eyes, and thick masculine lips. To her followers, it accurately captured a degree of world-weariness in Ann Lee far different from anything that would have been known by Jemima Wilkinson, raised amid the relative comforts of a successful New England farm.
FROM GOOGLE MORE EXCERPTS
Contents
What Is the Occult? 1
Mystic Americans 42
Ouija and the Selling 66
The Science of Right Thinking 80
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