Mitch Horowitz's Occult America

Join host Piers Kaniuka and researcher and author Dr. James Ryan as they discuss Mitch Horowitz's book Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (Bantam, Sept 2009). This episode was recorded on September 23, 2020.

As the Washington Post wrote about author Mitch Horowitz he "treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness". He is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and is a PEN Award-winning historian that has been censored in China. Visit him online at www.MitchHorowitz.com and buy his book here.

About the book:

It touched lives as disparate as those of Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mary Todd Lincoln—who once convinced her husband, Abe, to host a séance in the White House. Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.

Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history. 

From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:

•The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776 

•The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith 

•The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age 

•The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey

•The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression 

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