S2 – 1: Seer

the pamphlets made one thing clear. It was going to be a spectacle. The boys could barely sit still. The word passed through Poughkeepsie that the oncoming professor was some sort of wonder worker, a man who would demonstrate mesmeric miracles at the village hall. Every one in town was talking about it. The boys wanted to see for themselves if the stories were true. Ira grumbled something about magnetic buffoonery, but he must not have been too hard a taskmaster.

He gave the boys the afternoon off, and so Andrew bounced off toward Hatch's Hotel with fellow apprentice Edwin in tow when they arrived, though, the pair were led to a quiet room upstairs. This wasn't the miracles in the village hall the advertisements had promised. When Andrew reached the little room, he found a crowd of boys fidgeting in their seats, craning their necks to look around the room. All of them shared that same eagerness. They were there

to witness a mystery. What they got when the professor arrived didn't quite bring the advertisement to life. A man walked to the front of the room and he started to talk. He started to lecture. Sure, his subjects were as promised, phrenology and animal magnetism, but these are sixteen year old boys were talking about They wanted action. His droning went on so long. In fact, Andrew later said it was nearly two hours long that the boy started

to doze. He closed his eyes and his head drooped, But before he could fall asleep, he heard footsteps approach. The lecturing voice took on an eagerness as it came to a stop in front of Andrew. It was time. The man said, we're a demonstration. He started to wave his hand dramatically in front of Andrew's head. Then he declared, you can't open your eyes. Andrew must have frowned. He raised his head and looked up skeptically into the man's face. We can only imagine the look of teenage contempt the

man got for wasting Andrew's afternoon off. It was nothing short of a letdown, so Andrew went back to work. Any of Irish's smugness about his apprentice's gullibility is lost to history. The stranger had been no mesmerist. His voice did have the power to put people to sleep, but where was the miracle in that? It wasn't long, though, before Andrew and Edwins started to hear more stories. They

weren't the only ones to attend the demonstration. The following day and the day after that, rumors started to travel throughout town. Other people who went to the demonstrations, they said, had felt something. Maybe they missed it the first time, or perhaps the visitor needed to warm up like an athlete before a big game. Either way, word around town was beginning to sound very different from what Andrew and Edwin had expected, and the people were doing more than

just whisper. Soon those murmurs would consume a nation. Something supernatural was about to begin this is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mackey. Why did the power of mesmerism pass by the shoemaker's apprentice. Maybe it had something to do with the boy's hard life. Growing up, Andrew moved between tenements and tenant houses in towns along the west bank of the Hudson River. His father did odd jobs to keep them alive. He made shoes, wove cloth, whatever handcrafts could earn something for his family,

a wife and seven children. He never made much, though, with his children to feed, Andrew's father scratched out a living anyway he could. It was a difficult and anxious way to live. Unsurprisingly, much of what he did earn was spent on alcohol. It wasn't just his father's habits that made their life uncertain, though. When they looked at the nation around them, they saw the same thing. Andrew was born in eighteen six, the year the United States

celebrated its jubilee. On July four. It had been fifty years since the Declaration of Independence was signed by the founding fathers, but the celebration was darkened by clouds of uncertainty. On that exact same day, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died in their homes, their coffins slam shut on the founding era. What would come next? One answer was Andrew Jackson's new Democratic Party. It burst into the world with a bold promise that it would bring about something new,

the rule of the common man. Here's Molly McGarry, Associate professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. The most significant change affected by Jackson in democracy was the extension of the franchise of the vote to white man over the age of twenty one who did not own property. The elite power brokers who had shaped the nation saw their numbers shrinking, and the oncoming forces of democratic fervor

posed a major threat to their top down rule. They fought tooth and nail to hold back the political transformation that was swiftly overtaking them. Already contentious and chaotic in eighteen s the presidential campaign assured men like the New York shoemaker that the nation would now be ordered in their favor. In New York, Little Andrew was named in honor of Jackson's vision for the future. In the end, though, it would be the boy's own visions that would define

his life, but he would have to suffer first. Along the way to his sixteenth birthday, Andrew lost his mother, two sisters, and a brother. The grief must have been devastating, but there was no time to rest as the blows kept coming. Because his father struggled to support even his dwindling family. Things were so rough for them that he rented out Andrew to farmers and tradesmen as a hired hand.

Whatever the boy felt, his life came down to work. Eventually, in their wandering search for a way to make a living, Andrew and his father arrived in Poughkeepsie, New York, seventy miles north of New York City, where a local shoemaker, Ira Armstrong, hired Andrew as an apprentice. Ira would later note that Andrew knew how to read and write, but that his knowledge was only rudimentary. Andrew's working life hadn't

allowed him a lot of time for school. He was known as a frank, open and honest boy with a curious attitude, but he wasn't a scholar, a thinker, or a writer. He was known to most folks as friendly and well disposed, and to his boss he was a steady and reliable worker. When it all added up, he was just ordinary. But in eighteen forty three, all of that would change. In the early eighteen hundreds, it wasn't

just the political landscape that was cracking apart. Shock waves in the scientific world were also breaking up old ways of thinking and injecting new ideas into American culture. One of those shock waves was a man by the name of J. Stanley Grimes, and in eighteen forty three he made his way to Poughkeepsie, and with considerable fanfare too. He was a magnetizer and phrenologist, and as arrival was

paved with a burst of announcements and show bills. It was their heading Mesmerism that had captured Andrew's attention, originally developed by the German physician France Anton Mesmer, who taught that everything was permeated by an invisible fluid carrying magnetic energy throughout the universe. Here's Kathy gutierres historian and scholar in residence at the New York Public Library. Why don't stars fall out the sky right? Why our planets predictable? Well,

they're held in some sort of kinetic tension through magnetic attraction. Certainly, Kepler thought this what Mesmer did was he applied that idea to the human body, so not only the planets, but the tides and the sea, and the waning of the moon, and the flow of this energy through the body could be redirected and redistributed. And that's where J. Stanley Grimes stepped in. For some who kept abreast of advances in science, Grimes was already a household name, a Bostonian,

and a medical lawyer by training. Grimes was at the forefront of American sciences of the mind by eighteen thirty two. That was when demonstrators arrived from Germany and led curious Bostonians in a course on the discipline of phrenology. They taught that the shape of the human skull reflected uneven development of the brain, where each part performed a specific function. Grimes believed that he could use phrenology to harness the

power of Mesmer's animal magnetism. If he followed the right contours of the skull to excite certain organs of the brain, he could pick up where Mesmer left off. In particular, he could drop his subjects into a suggestible, trance like state he called mesmeric sleep in honor of the German doctor. And it was this freno magnetism, his personal combination of

cutting edge sciences, that Grimes demonstrated in Poughkeepsie. A few days after Andrew's disappointing encounter with Grimes, a local tailor named William Livingston came by the Shoemaker's shop. He and Andrew struck up a conversation. When they got around to grimes failed attempt to magnetize Andrew well, Livingstone had something to say about that. He told Andrew that Grimes wasn't so special. In fact, Livingstone claimed that he was an

even better magnetizer. He performed many magnetic marvels, both in Poughkeepsie and in his travels elsewhere. And Livingstone believed that he could succeed with Andrew where the celebrity scientist had failed, so he invited both Andrew and Edwin to his house for his own attempt to magnetize Andrew. Later that night, the shoemaker's apprentice sat across from Livingstone, relaxed and curious to see if the tailor could succeed where the traveling

showman had failed. Andrew closed his eyes and felt William's chilly hand pass and repass over his forehead. The effect was sudden. Andrew would later say that ten thousand avenues of sensation were illumed, as with the livid flames of electric fire. Then a sense of intense darkness, a surge of horrible feelings he couldn't put into words, and then

a wave of pain. He tried to protest, but his tongue froze to the roof of his mouth, his cheeks seemed extremely swollen, his lips fused shut, and he could no longer control any part of his body. He was paralyzed, even as he felt himself whirling along a revolving spiral path. He even wondered at that moment if he was dying. And then, as suddenly as the first wave of disorientation had arrived, a cascade of bright, utterly new thoughts gushed

into his mind, and he fell unconscious. When he woke up, Andrew was sitting in the same position, in the very same chair, right across from Livingstone. But now he found that the tailor it was bursting with excitement. He saw the same thing on the faces of everyone else in the room, some of whom had not been there when they began. According to Livingstone. He had called them in

to watch Andrew perform in his trance. Andrew had read from newspapers held against his forehead, told the time on every watch in the room, and one by one described the diseases and wounds of the people around him. Andrew sat stunned while Livingston described the things he'd done. It shook his world to the core, but it also left him feeling confused. It was one thing to have an experience, but it was something altogether different to explain it. For that,

Andrew had nothing to say. But William Livingston, did I know what your power is called? The tailor told him clairvoyance. Clairvoyance comes from the Latin for clear vision, and that's exactly what William Livingston identified in Andrew Jackson Davis on that night in eighteen forty three when he fell into a mesmerized trance and began to speak. But Andrew discovered quickly that the spirit speaking through him. We're looking for

a much wider audience, you see. Andrew and William repeated their mesmeric ex yeraments every night, over and over, with the same dramatic result. Andrew would fall into a trance and while his body was locked in stasis, he would burst out into lectures that amazed visitors with their eloquence and insight. The first small groups grew into crowds, including curious neighbors who came to test Andrew's powers, and here the young, uneducated shoemaker's apprentice expound on mystical theology and

the nature of the universe. Andrew's dramatic performance of trance visions were big news around Poughkeepsie, and the response was equal parts wonder and ridicule, which meant that it didn't take long for the news to travel beyond town. After that first night, Andrew came out of a trance to

find that he was famous. As his trances continued, he described in greater and greater detail the way that his vision opened up to the world within the human body, the luminous atmospheres, as he called it, that he saw in human brains and hearts, and then into the branches and leaves of plants, or in the geologic layers of

the earth under their feet. When Andrew Jackson Davis was in a trance, he said, the fiery light glowing within all life became visible to him like a mesmerists diagnostic tool. He could clearly see the forces that Mesmer had always taught were binding the universe together. Soon enough, in addition to the medical cures that Andrew offered to his visitors,

he also went on journeys into the spirit land. There he began to encounter figures who would speak to him, to teach him and to pass along wisdom through long lectures about the spiritual structure of the universe. Figures who told Andrew that they were the spirits of the dead. It was an astonishing revelation if it could be trusted. That is, like all the Mesmerists who had come before. Andrew knew that people would want to witness his trances

for themselves. So, at the invitation of a Poughkeepsie minister, Andrew and William began to travel. William put Andrew into trances in Albany, New York, and then Danbury, Connecticut, and then Bridgeport as well. His clarivoyant healing and trance lectures

gathered bigger and bigger crowds. For a time, he made a frequent circuit between Connecticut and New York, seeing patients along the way and serving as their medical diagnostician, viewing their wounds like a clairvoyant x ray and offering healing advice from the spirits of the dead. Among those spirits, Andrew began to report that his guides included the ancient Greek physician Galen, who would help him to heal his patients. After that he met the spirit of the Swedish Lutheranistic

Emmanuel Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg, he said, who guided him on journeys through the astral plane and showed him the structure of the universe. Here's Ann Browdie, Senior lecturer on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School. Swedenborg's vision, which Andrew Jackson Davis was inspired by, described a world of spheres.

He understood the world in terms of levels, both levels under the ground and levels spheres above the ground that are through which the soul advances in its journey towards heaven.

Orthodox Calvinism and Protestant faith taught that whatever virtue you had accomplished in your life at the moment of death or lack of virtue, determined your faith for eternity, that you would either be damned or you would be blessed to sit at the right hand of God for eternity and saved thereby from the flames of hell and eternal suffering.

This is a source of huge anxiety. And Andrew Jackson Davis address that anxiety with the idea building on Swedenborg, that the soul can continue to progress in grace following death. As his fame grew, Andrew found better partners than his Poughkeepsie Taylor. In November of eighteen forty five, he began working with a mesmeric doctor who offered him the chance to become his clairvoyant diagnostician in New York City. And

Andrew jumped at the chance. Once they're the pair began working with a universalist minister and publisher who started writing down the things that Andrew would say during his trances. After a year of collecting the lectures from his journeys into the spirit land, Andrew published it all as a book in eighteen forty seven, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. Andrew was just twenty one at the time, making it quite the accomplishment.

He didn't know yet, but his work was about to become the foundation for a coming movement, spurred on, of course, by newspaper reports of the dramatic healings and revelations of his lectures. The book was immediately reviewed throughout the New York press. Some poured praise on the work, while there's mocked it. In the book's defense, a Reverend George Bush stepped in and explained that the teachings found inside were

not that different from the Transcendentalists in Boston. In fact, just a few years earlier, Ralph Waldo Emerson had called together a meeting of the Transcendental Club precisely to discuss the role of mysticism in modern life. For Emerson and the other Transcendentalists, Emmanuel Swedenborg was simply a mystic par excellence. Now Andrew was meeting with that man's spirit and narrating

it for all religiously curious Americans. What Davis started with his first book soon came to be called his harmonial philosophy. At its core, his message was one of universal religion, that there was a truth transcending all religions, and that if we lived by that truth, it would create a world of peace and order. Spirits who embraced that piece well, they would progress into the upper heavens to help spread his harmonial philosophy. Davis and his cohorts Estabil wished a

newspaper that became his mouthpiece. Their goal was, and I quote, the establishment of a universal system of truth, the reform and the reorganization of society. To really make the movement take off, though, the theology and the community would need something else, something tactile and visible and earthier, something powerful for people to experience. Don't fool yourself into thinking that

America wasn't ready for something different. In the early eighteen fifties, the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected back on the state of religion in America and he wrote that the stern old faiths have all pulverized America, he said, was a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions. Tis a flat anarchy in our ecclesiastical realms. Here's Harvard

Divinity schools and Browdie once again. The period of the eighteen twenties and thirties is known as the second grade Awakening, and it's sometimes referred to as the period of the democratization of American religion, when we see religious authority and experience sweeping the country through revivals, and we see a declining emphasis on an educated clergy, on religious hierarchies, on religious education, and an increasing emphasis on religious experience that

is accessible to any individual. It was the perfect environment for men like Aidan Blue. He was born in eighteen oh three into a family that had farmed the same land in Rhode Island for generations. At the age of twelve, his whole family experienced a new kind of religion when they attended a Universalist revival meeting, singing, praying, and weeping at the incredible stories the traveling pre church told them. It was so powerful, in fact, that for the next

three years, Aiden's whole family chased the high. They formed their own church, and Aiden's father served as the deacon. But not long after that, his family experienced their first taste of sorrow. Arnold, one of Aiden's older brothers, became ill and passed away. It was a moment that changed aid into the core. It wouldn't be the last time he experienced loss, but that didn't mean it was any less powerful. In fact, the death of his brother haunted him.

And then there was the vision. One night, long after his brother had passed away, Aiden awoke in the middle of the nights. Feeling disoriented, he sat up and looked around the room to try and find his bearings, and then finally glanced out the window, and that's when he saw it, a human form in a white robe standing outside. Strangely, Aiden didn't feel afraid, but instead examined the figure. As his eyes adjusted to the figure's brightness, he the features

of the face and suddenly recognized it. The shining figure outside his room was his dead brother, and then it moved toward him, passing through the solid wall to arrive at the side of his bed. I have a command from God, the figure said, with a finger pointed at him. Preach to your fellow men. The blood of their souls will be on your hands. Aiden's peace suddenly vanished and

was replaced with panic and fear. He spent the rest of the night trying to convince himself that he wasn't dreaming, that what he had seen was real, because if it was real, then he needed to obey. From that day forward, he was plagued by questions about the afterlife and by the issues of suffering and loss. He would eventually go on to start his own church and to travel around the New England area, preaching and serving the communities he

had countered. He wasn't to train minister, but that wasn't about to stop him. After all, his mission came straight from the other world, from God himself, and he would be a fool to ignore it. He would taste the bitter wine of loss a few more times over the years. His first wife passed away just a few years after they were married, and then both of his sons as well. He remarried. But once you've experienced loss on the scale Aiden had, it's easy to keep glancing over your shoulder.

For a fighter like him, though, that meant looking for answers and building hope. It wasn't long before he and a few of his followers decided to set out on their own and build a community together. In eighteen forty one, he led twenty eight followers from across New York and New England into the woods thirty miles southwest of Boston. There they founded what was to be the model for a perfect society, a city built on hope. Perhaps that's

why he called it Hopedale. Here's Harvard Divinity Schools and Browdie. Once again, Hopedale, which was one of the most important for the spread of spiritualism was considered a community based on what they called practical Christian socialism. And of course, a communitarian ideal and a socialist ideal go hand in hand because of the idea of shared property. Holding property in common is a common element of utopian settlements, and believe me, socialism is a lot easier if you have

a religious motivation. Without a religious motive. Not that many people are willing to share property or to live in harmony to to place their desires as individuals. They weren't the first to experiment with the idea of a utopian society, not by a long shot. Transcendentalist reformers, including a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, bounded a similar commune outside of Boston. Elsewhere, a Scotsman named Robert Owen founded two separate communities, including

one in Indiana called New Harmony. But even he took inspiration from an earlier example, the Shakers. The Shakers ticked all the boxes for a utopian society from the early eighteen hundreds. They held their own property in common, they worked the land, they plied their trades in cooperation, and they practiced true equality by giving leadership roles to both men and women. But ever since they arrived in New York in the seventeen seventies, the Shakers had also begun

to experience something else, ecstatic visitations. In eighteen thirty seven, at their communal home in New York, three girls whose ages ranged from ten to fourteen, fell under some invisible spiritual power, and Goff, the oldest of them, stood before her community and told them that she had seen a female spirit dressed in white. And while that might sound like something pulled right out of the sale in witch trials of sixteen ninety two, the one fifty years that

separated them made a world of difference. Rather than start a witch hunt, their story was received with open arms. Later that same day, as the community danced in enthusiastic worship and mostly friend reappeared and moved among them, kissing them and singing songs to them. The next time she was seeing, she brought others with her, always appearing to Anne. Soon enough, the spirits of the dead were appearing at

their own funerals to comfort their morning families. Even mother Ann Lee, who founded the Shaker order before dying in sev four, appeared with heavenly messages for her followers. Remarkably, spirits from outside the Shaker community began to arrive as well. George Washington, Lafayette, Napoleon, the biblical Queen Esther, and the spirits of Native Americans all appeared with messages and lessons

for them all. And here's the thing. Shaker communities around New York started to believe that some Shakers were born to communicate with these ghostly visitors. They called them instruments of the spirit world, and whatever they received they would share with others, all for the building up of their community. Whatever their power might have been, these instruments offered hope. And whether they were offering divine wisdom, comforting words, or

answers to difficult questions, one thing was absolutely clear. For those with eyes to see the dead that burst from the grave. History hasn't been kind of spiritualism. A recent two volume History of the United States treated spiritualism with a single dismissive sentence, as if it was an insignificant movement making self evidently foolish claims. And honestly, there are a lot of people today who agree with that sentiment.

But just wait, because that view is far from reality and far from the way the world looked to a lot of people in the forties, in a time when the spiritual sciences of mesmerism, animal magnetism, and phrenology were popular and became major new preoccupations. Well, the right way

to see the world became less and less obvious. Before spiritualism became the parlor room seance and the music hall spectacle that's so often mocked today, it was born in the minds of deeply religious teachers, passionate social reformers, and curious scientists who wanted to change the world. Here's Dr John Busher, co director of the International Association for the

Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals. That profound influence that they exerted on the national life was deliberately written out of histories of reform movements like the Women's movement, of labor movement, politics, history of the politics of the period, the intellectual history, history of of the novel and poetry, and on and on. That story has hardly been told

in this season of Unobscured. Well trace the path of the spiritualists who followed the voice of Andrew Jackson Davis over the course of the nineteenth century, spiritualism became a kaleidoscope of novel beliefs, courageous people, and world shaking events. Here's historian Molly McGarry. There were always many spiritualisms, both in the nineteenth century and beyond. So some people came to the science tables seeking answers, wanting deeply to commune

with lost loved ones. Others were curious investigators, looking to see for themselves with this new technology could materialize. But what I found in what I've been most struck by is that many spiritualists took seriously the possibility of channeling the voices of the dead as a means of both connecting with the past and imagining both worldly and otherworldly futures.

The truth is, spiritualists traveled all around the world, started a raft of publications and took up, proclaimed and then rejected, a vast web of ideas about the afterlife, communication with the spirits of the dead and the authority those spirits

had over the living. Their story touches everything from technology to medicine, to the genocide of Native Americans and the murder of a president, and along the way, its values were echoed by social causes like abolition, women's suffrage, and labor rights, helping it grow from a local fad to a global phenomenon. And yes, it's a story about religion, but it's so much more. It's a story of idealism and individualism, of poachers and preachers, and of freedom fighters

and celebrities. And while the Shaker Girls provided an early model for those emerging spiritualists, it was Andrew Jackson Davis, the Seer of Poughkeepsie, who would do something bigger. He would be their first bona fide star. Amy was running from her pain. In the spring of eighteen twenty five, Amy's fiance suddenly became ill and passed away, and then a short while later, she received a letter from her

brother in law that her sister was also sick. Amy rushed to her sister's side, and together with her brother in law, Isaac, they cared for the dying woman as best they could, but eventually the illness won and both of them were left to deal with their loss and grief. The road to healing also turned out to be a road to second chances, and two years later the pair were married. Amy and Isaac Post were Quakers, a religious group that had been in America since the middle of

the sixteen hundreds. Since the beginning, they often found themselves at odds with their Protestant neighbors because of their unique beliefs. In fact, during the Salem witch Trials, of being part of the Quaker movement was a very good way to get yourself accused of witchcraft. But they were also one of the first utopian experiments. Here's an Browdie again from

Harvard Divinity School. To give up the notion that individual property equals happiness, you have to be very deeply committed, and piety, religious fervor go a long way towards making that possible. Of course, the Quakers are the most successful communitarian religious experiment in American history. In eighteen twenty seven,

the Quaker movement split into two pieces. One of their charismatic leaders, who also happened to be Amy's cousin, thought their community had become too worldly, not least because there were so many Quakers comfortable with the institution of slavery, some even holding slaves of their own. Along with Isaac, Amy followed the dissenters, seeking a religion that was more pure.

Here's Molly McGarry once again. She came from a family religious radicals who had thought that the Quaker establishment had grown too orthodox, too comfortable with the material institutions of the world, including slavery. The couple moved to Rochester in eighteen thirty six, where Isaac became a successful pharmacist. Not long after, Amy started holding abolition meetings in their home.

And it wasn't just radical Quakers who were invited. You see, New York State had abolished slavery a decade earlier, and then in eighteen thirty four, a group of black women founded Rochester's first female abolition society, following the examples set by black women in Salem, Massachusetts, who formed the first women's anti slavery society in the United States in eighteen thirty two. That very same year, a school for black children opened in Rochester, two blocks away from a church

on thirty four Sophia Street. When Isaac and Amy Post moved into town in eighteen thirty six, they took the home next door. By the mid eighteen forties, words spread that Isaac and Amy had started participating in worldly groups filled with people who weren't Quakers. This was too much even for many of the Quaker separatists Molly mcgeary. Once again, Isaac and Amy Posts were actually thrown out of their Genesee Quakers group, for, as the story goes, having hosted

a wedding of two African American friends of theirs. The black neighborhoods and black churches in Rochester were growing. As news spread, people began to arrive in town looking for safe harbor. First and foremost they were people who had escaped from slavery, and black churches were the first places in the city to provide shelter for them, sometimes finding ways to hide survivors in plain sight. At one point, local ebolitionists counted that they were helping one fifty people

each year. Soon enough, Amy and Isaac joined in helping their neighbors hide fugitives and also giving them food, blankets, clothing, and money for the journey farther north, where freedom awaited them. In July of eighteen forty three, Isaac Post and a few others put together a three day convention of their friends, and the Posts hosted speakers in their home. In fact, one of them was a young man who had escaped from slavery in Maryland. His name Frederick Douglas, but that

wasn't all. Amy and Isaac also met a young white woman named Leah Fish. She was a single mother who was struggling to make a living as a piano teacher in Rochester, and they felt moved to help her, so they took her into their home. A short while later, Leah's parents, John and Margaret also arrived in town, along with two of Leah's younger sisters. They had recently lost everything in a failed farming experiment farther north and needed a place to rest, recover, and plan their next move.

Amy was only too happy to help. It turned out to be a fateful meeting. What Leah and her sisters brought into Amy's life would shift her horizons, change her place in the world, and etch Rochester's name into the nation's religious history. And they would give Andrew Jackson Davis's harmonial philosophy the thing it was missing. Eight was about to dawn, and the age of Spiritualism was about to begin.

That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured, more and more seekers were making their way into Rochester, all while other religious experiments were falling flat and communities along the canal were folding, looking for guidance, for connection and for the next step to take in their lives. People knew to the city were open to something that could

be seen and heard, something that could be witnessed. After a year of closed sittings, the Spirits spoke up. They were ready for a wider audience in a private seance just for the Posts. The Spirits spoke through Leah, telling Isaac to rent Rochester's Corinthian Hall for a whole three nights for the first time ever. They were going to throw the doors open wide to a paying crowd. It

was time for the Spirits to take the stage. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man, Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at History Unobscured dot com and until next time.

Thanks for listening. Yeah. Unobscured is a production of I heart Radio and Aaron Menkey. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H