the history of health, wellness and spirituality...with tips for the 21st C
Though before my time, the teenager standing in a used bookstore laughing over an antique 19th-century advice book in 1968 could have been me. Only 50 cents, Jan Todd, now a historian and professor of physical culture and sport studies at UT Austin, bought the …
Americans are fascinated by the idea of polygamy, in the Orientalism of the harem (which only the wealthy can and could afford to practice), or the former practices of American Mormonism. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Mormon Harvard historian, presents a complicated picture of Mormonism in …
Popular religious life in New England, unlike Europe, had no Christmas, cathedrals, abbeys, liturgies, wedding ales, or anything done away with by the Protestant Reformation of 1517. Yet the settlers did come with “folk” beliefs, sometimes older than Christianity, that had not been specifically targeted by the Reformation or local clergy.
In this history of popular religious belief in 17th-century New England, David D. Hall explores the “cluster of meanings” of what we call religious, such as the symbolism of the church, rituals, and the supernatural. Protestant religion was embedded in the daily life of early New Englanders, who used their belief in God’s Providence to help them navigate dangerous threats to their existence. Their Puritanism (a word Hall avoids) was not rigid but fluid and sometimes contradictory. While Hall states this is a history of lay religion, it also examines the relationships between the laity and clergy, whose authority was sometimes questioned.
Unlike in Europe, these “folk” were middle class yeoman, housewives, merchants, and craftsmen who knew well the “superstitions” they must reject from Catholicism. They did, however, enjoy astrological information printed in almanacs written by clergy, anti-witchcraft magic, and fortune tellers. There was an “accommodation” between such wonders and religion. Hall sees magic not as separate from religion but working in tandem with it, though belief in magic declined by the 1700s.
This was not a matter of the illiterate believing in magic, as most New Englanders could read. Literacy was central to Protestantism and Bible reading. Direct access to the word of God through reading the Bible fundamentally separated them from Catholics. It inadvertently opened up the space for lay people to disagree with ministers’ readings of the Bible. Literacy also gave readers access to less Godly books, as Bibles were printed and sold by businessmen who marketed other materials, both religious and decidedly not religious.
TIME PERIOD: 1620-1700
Chapter 1: The Uses of Literacy
Broadsides, ballads, self-help, Bibles, and religious readers were read by early New Englanders, who prided themselves on literacy. Clergy faced a problem—they claimed the Word was not mediated, yet these often Harvard-educated ministers mediated the Word. While clergy wrote many of the books printed, booksellers and printers operated in a competitive marketplace, which got going in Boston after 1660.
Hall isolates three types of reading: Godly books (“godlies”), romances, and the “country” reader who preferred stories of adventure and wonder. Yet even these godlies might feature sensationally entertaining accounts of sinful pleasures, emotionality and torturous pains such as a doomsday sermon, which printers embellished to drive sales. These began to take on less godly forms.
Almanacs were a place where popular religion and culture changed. Ministers attempted to censor almanacs that included Valentine’s Day, Michaelmas, and Christmas, named instead of numbered months, and inappropriate humor. The marketplace won and such almanacs continued their bawdry ways.
Learning (i.e. clergy) was important due to contradictions in the Bible, yet clergy was increasingly challenged in a colony where readers sometimes stepped out of bounds in interpreting these contradictions. Both the marketplace and the increase in popular participation in civic life threatened the power of clergy.
Chapter Two: A World of Wonders
Theirs was an enchanted world full of ghosts and voices. But enchantments fell back not simply on the imaginations of a superstitious people, but on the Bible, with its “visions, voices, witches, and strange deaths,” and other classics. Popular books of the day drew on the time-worn greats such as Vergil, Pliny, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, and Josephus.
Hall argues that these wonders built on four old systems of ideas: Greek meteorology, astrology, apocalypticism, and natural history. But the most important doctrine was the Providence of an angry God, wrapped up in folklore, all of which revealed a pattern. Wonders revealed the underlying order of God.
Fact: Harvard postponed commencement in 1684 because it fell too close to an eclipse (94).
Dissenters like Anne Hutchinson, fortune tellers, and clergy all exploited the ambiguities of Wonder, though clergy most vigorously expounded the wonders as God’s punishment and evidence of Divine Providence, which was increasingly questioned by the people. Hutchinson’s followers, Quakers, and Baptists as well as others differed from the orthodox clergy’s views.
Chapter 3: The Meetinghouse
Lay settlers learned about the language of spiritual experience in part through Sunday sermons, catechisms, reading the Bible, and Godlies. They occasionally found that what they read differed from the sermon, but for the most part they took their self-understanding and that of Christianity from preachers. Nevertheless, seeing differences they came to through their own understanding gave them the confidence to question ministers on important matters such as baptism and grace. By the 1640s, ministers complained about “declension,” an increasing lack of dedication to the Puritan cause.
Testifying to the experience of grace usually involved experiencing oneself as a terrible, unworthy sinner and feeling terrified by that realization, shortly followed by hope for grace through Christ’s promise of forgiveness. Yet only half, if not fewer, of lay people ever testified and so never achieved full membership. Everyone, though, understood the demand their religion made on them: the struggle to work free of sin.
Chapter 4: The Uses of Ritual
Though early New Englanders rejected Catholic ritual, they developed their own to ground them in meaning and help them deal with dangers. Hall highlights the witch-hunt, criminal confession, the spectacle of public executions, covenant renewal, prayer notes, and most especially prayer and fasting. Criminals were killed as well as religious dissenters, including Quakers and Baptists.
Confession was a key point of all of these rituals, which were as stark as possible. “Ritual was a means of checking the disorder of the natural world, of limiting the danger of God’s judgment.” It also kept the social order in check. Community fasts were the most common form of ritual, which bonded the people as a group against danger, centered around the belief that God favored New England and gave it to the righteous to own and make prosperous.
Chapter 5: The Mental World of Samuel Sewall
The diaries of Samuel Sewall, a Bostonian mechant and magistrate, demonstrate Hall’s theories in practice. He struggled with sin while working to keep his family and community safe, “yearning for protection.” Prayer and generosity helped with sin, and books became ritual for this well-educated intellectual.
The old enchanted world began, in the 17th century, to be dislodged by new sciences. The book marketplace increasingly shifted from fantastic wonders explained by god’s providence to less godly entertainment. Because much of early New England’s population was not thoroughly engaged in these stark rituals, the laity began to consider other forms of Christianity and philosophy to explain their world.
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Ann Braude. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 2001. Anne Braude’s 1989 Religious Studies classic Radical Spirits was one of the first texts to discuss how religion empowered women politically through the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of Spiritualism, a …
April R. Haynes. Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. When Sylvester Graham offered the same sex advice to women as men—no masturbation, which would cause insanity, disease, and death, and no sexual excess …
Robert C. Fuller. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Robert Fuller writes a history of 19th-century mental healing traditions that connects European Mesmerism to the development of distinctly American religious-psychological traditions such as Christian Science and New Thought.
Fuller positions Mesmer’s healing practice in the Enlightenment rationality of its time. His contemporary and rival, the Swiss priest Johann Gassner, healed through a traditional method, the Cure of Souls—exorcism. Fuller finds the two rituals very like one another, with Mesmer’s based on the science and rationality of the day. As such, it became popular among the “idle elites” in the 1770s.
Mesmer’s new scientific healing ritual replaced the religious tradition for a time. He claimed that there was only one illness and only one healing, a grand claim not unlike those of Catholicism, directed toward human ailments from a sore throat to depression. Because, Fuller argues, Europe had institutions in place that “ordered personal and social life” (or perhaps controlled them), Mesmerism died out once it was debunked, though his pupil Puységur would develop methods of working with the subconscious mind, which developed into hypnotism and exploration of the subconscious and unconscious (see Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet), ultimately developing into modern psychology and psychiatry.
It was Puységur’s method (still called mesmerism) that entered the United States through the work of his student Charles Poyen, who lectured on mesmerism in the Northeast (see Ogden), putting his subjects in trances and promising remarkable healing. This, as we have learned from Cayleff, Reynolds, Braude, and Modern, was an era of spectacular searching and reform in the young United States (though Fuller does not discuss the social reforms of the era).
Poyen landed in the United States at the time of the second great evangelical revivals, where spiritual searching met communitarian ideas and extensive social reform. Most scholars have more recently agreed that Protestants (who dominated the U.S. scene) reconciled their religion with science, rather than abandoned it. Fuller is the old guard, who argued that this mesmerism allowed Americans to abandon religion for a new psychology—or to hold both in tandem, as a slow shift toward a godless religion of self help gradually emerged by the 20th century. Out of subliminal trance came theories of psychology that met the intellectual and spiritual needs of seeking Americans.
It was, of course, a time of chaotic change (isn’t it always?), and the zeitgeist was heavily individualistic and anti-authoritarian. The evangelical thrust moved away from orthodox doctrines of the Puritans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalist toward more emotive expositions of Christianity. Religious rituals gave way in some circles to the mind rituals of mesmeric trance and healing, and with it, a new psychological approach to understanding health and life. Fuller suggests that the carnival atmosphere of 1840s America led to a mesmerism that “straddled a fine line between religious myth and scientific psychology…. Mesmerism’s explanation of human health and happiness held that personal wholeness was not reducible to mechanistic analysis but rather entered into the finite personality from some transpersonal source” (68). The individual could be in harmony with a divine, vital force if they were willing and able to open themselves to it. This created a space for Americans to eventually move from religious to secular.
A key figure in that move was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who took up mesmerism in the early 1840s. By the 1850s, progressive Christians such as the Swedenborgians, Universalists, and spiritualists found that mesmerism allowed an evidence-based connection with god which offered an individualistic seeking. By the 1860s, Mary Baker Eddy was following Quimby, now an established healer, hypnotist and teacher of the power of mind. Eddy later founded Christian Science.
Fuller argues that Quimby’s teachings were superficial and self-serving. Though Christian Science and New Thought developed from them, which scholars such as Braden and Satter argue had socialist and communitarian leanings early on, Fuller sees only the development of a self-help spirituality that turned into catchy aphorism marketed to self-help seekers who, self-absorbed and narcissistic, could not manage healthy social relationships and community. Instead, they leaned on a positive sound-byte philosophy which allowed them to manage uncertainty and never-ending change in the modern world.
Fuller preaches that without religion, there is no ethical anchor that teaches us to mind our communities as well as ourselves. He connects these 19th century movements to spiritual movements of the 1970s such as EST and transcendental meditation. Though he does point out the introspection of Quimby, he believes it devolved with the mind cure into finding one’s “true self” (150).
Fuller is a religion scholar but offers a history of a 19th-century American slide from religion to secular psychology. New Thought, however, was never entirely secular, and there are far more expansive histories than this, which we’ll cover in the next few weeks.
CATEGORIES: Mesmerism, Hypnosis, Mind Cure, New Thought, 19th-Century U.S. History, Cultural History, Religious Studies, 19th-Century Social Change, Spirituality, Psychology, Psychiatry, Religious Life & Customs
PLACE: United States
TIME PERIOD: 1775-1890 (focus on 1836-1890)
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Another! And finally we are moving into health books. Susan E. Cayleff. Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Washed and Be Healed is a fantastic look at the history of women’s experiences of the mid-nineteenth century …
Like last time, because it’s relevant to this Gymnosophist project, I’m sharing a review I wrote that relates to our lineage here (or one of them)—a piece of the history of spirituality in the U.S., this time from a scholar of English. It is something …
Hello, everyone. I abandoned you to my books and teaching for awhile, and for that apologies. I’m studying for exams and it’s just been impossible to post regularly even about fun stuff because frankly, I cannot bear to look at a screen any more than I must. I do promise I’ll get back to the masculine/feminine thing soon enough.
Because it’s relevant to this Gymnosophist project, I’m sharing a review I wrote that relates to our lineage here (or one of them)—a piece of the history of spirituality in the U.S. It’s heavily post-modern so it won’t be for everyone, but I do recommend the book. Modern has a new one out, too: Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain, University of Chicago Press, 2021. I have not read this yet, but it looks good. Enjoy!
John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
PLACE: United States
TIME PERIOD: 1840s
SUMMARY:
When the Honorable Judge Edmonds felt a repeated, warm pulsing touch on his upper left thigh, he felt that something had an overwhelming desire to communicate with him. He consulted a spirit medium, who gently passed on reassuring personal messages from the dead. This “touch of secularism” arose from Edmonds’ involvement with evangelical reform in the women’s ward at Sing Sing State Penitentiary in the 1840s. A haunted, technicolor tale, it is typical of Religious Studies scholar John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America. Modern challenges the prevailing historiography of religion, secularism and agency in nineteenth-century antebellum America. Secularism, in his eyes, was not a conscious disenchantment via Enlightenment reason and science but was instead deeply entangled with the enchanted world and included its own metaphysics.[1]
Modern posits that secularism in the U.S. emerged within the evangelical Protestant tradition when the move away from sectarian, authority-oriented evangelical piety toward personal, reasoned, science-embracing and individually-governed Christian belief was transmitted through various new “technics” (e.g. machines and media such as religious pamphlets) embedded in the conditionality of a modernizing America. Modern questions Mark Noll’s celebration of religious agency and individuality in this period and suggests instead that personal agency is tricky and questionable.[2]
This analysis engages the theoretical maneuverings of Foucault: “Agency is not an either/or prospect. It is circuitous. It happens, but always in and through ‘instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets, and concepts.” Instead of the conscious self-realization of a disenchanted “True Religion,” Americans instead made choices from a dizzying new array of options, not in essence, but through “a mood or sensibility in and through which choices are made and made to feel decisive.” (Were they, though, made to feel decisive? Or is that just a nice touch?) In other words, they were socially conditioned, and agency was and is “an open question” (7, 16-17). Modern’s rhetoric is sometimes spirited and sometimes unnecessarily dense. It is bold and impressive. Fonder of ideas than historical materiality, his argument imbibes the same fantastic and circular feel that he claims was characteristic of religion in antebellum America.
Modern first interrogates the media practices that increased in popularity in the nineteenth century. These strove for a “systematic common good” through tracts published by the American Bible Society (one of the many New York institutions recently lost to lux real estate) and the American Tract Society, both institutions initiated by Lyman Beecher (recall Reynolds). This system was not one of direct control through the local church but though a calculated, rational education of “individuals” each reading in their homes. These evangelicals sought to create an imagined public whose individual moral concern and well-being was at the heart of the imagined good. Modern highlights evangelical media practices’ effects on “conceptions of the self and the social” (51). These media practices ordered both “true religion” and “expectations of mundane life,” and he analyzes how this impacted the individual and her relationship to the commons, piety, politics, and epistemology.
Secularism here was not without god. In fact, it was ordered by a reasoned, epistemic belief in Protestantism as a moral force for good inflected with Scottish Common Sense and American republicanism, both essential to a new American individual, communal, and political life. Here, the religious citizen is no longer an authoritarian Calvinist, but an enlightened, open individual in touch with the true essence of religion and a moral common good who was not necessarily involved in the local church, but was certainly reading evangelical tracts and participating in public life. This evangelicalism was not direct or heavy handed, but a “metaphysical solvent rather than a substantive ideology” which “did not even exist at the level of empirical reality” (55). These widely dispersed evangelical tracts also drew on the republican tropes of liberty and freedom according to and awarded by Christian moral law which allowed Christian individuals an “unmediated” self and connection to God.
Modern finds these themes in Robert Baird’s 1844 tome Religion in the United States. For Baird, evangelicalism was inevitable due to its “natural” advancement of liberty, virtue, and knowledge all while providing a direct, individual relationship to god. He provides the history of a Protestant “evolution” from “religionism” to “true religion” and contradicts Tocqueville’s critique of American religion as unexamined. Baird saw evangelicalism as a thoughtful, republican effort toward liberty and unity defined by the American’s freedom to practice it. To illustrate its secularism, Modern quotes Reverend Barnes, “Christian piety was the index of intellectual advancement” and essential to “modern science.” Piety called “forth the active powers of the mind,” and created, “true independence of thinking and investigation” (recall Howe’s emphasis on a nineteenth-century Protestantism that actively engaged emerging scientific theories). Modern surmises that religion in the United States was written in the spirit, if not the name, of secularism, “a medium through which the ‘gigantic’ synthesis of personal piety and civic order would unfold” (79, 83). Secularism in the U.S. was born within evangelical Protestantism, not against it. To demonstrate its enchantment, Modern turns to “spirituality.”
Protestants of all sects began to use this term more frequently in the early 1800s, usually to address the “immateriality of God.” Modern reports that liberals began to link the term with a human capacity for religion rather than an exclusive providence of the divine, reflected in the increased use of cognates such as “spirit-filled, spiritual religion, spiritual discernment, spiritual activity, spiritual perception.”
Rather than an apolitical project of self, Modern investigates the “complex game of truth” at play. The concepts of spirituality such as reasoned objectivity, transcendental communion, solitary transformation, anti-institutionalism, etc., have political meaning in time and place. What is being transcended? What “forms of self” are being transformed and who is involved in these transformations?
To find the answer, see Emily Ogden’s Credulity.
If you want to know more about Judge Edmonds, read the book.
[1] Disenchantment (“Entzauberung,” literally “de-magication,” a broken spell) was the term used by Max Weber to describe the modern, scientific consciousness he argued would inevitably replace religion and superstition. Because science must explain everything in such a world, a loss of wonder and delight result.
2 Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Wim Hof: “I am into mental healthcare. But we will shoot right straight in. Change the world. Cause, you know, I’m reaching about a hundred million people already [AnnaLynne: “Gasp”] but it’s going to be billions [AnnaLynne: clapping, yells “YES!“] and when we change billions of …
