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During the 1850s, a surprising number of Americans believed that the spirits of the deceased could be contacted through trance mediums and seances. Many of the radical leaders of the anti-slavery movement, women's rights, the temperance movement, prison reform and labor reform were involved in spiritualism. Among the liberal religious denominations, Universalism was the one most affected by this movement. This amazing chapter in American religious history present a vast array of characters -- visionaries; prophets and inventors; pioneers in psychic healing and public lecturers who took to the podium, while in trance, to deliver communications from the spirits and to simultaneously agitate for reforms in society. Drawing from journals, newspapers, manuscripts and the personal papers of spiritualists and their opponents, The Other Side of Salvation is a fascinating read for anyone interested in America's religious history. Book jacket.

A product of the "spiritual hothouse" of the Second Great Awakening, Spiritualism became the fastest growing religion in the nation during the 1850s, and one of the principal responses to the widespread perception that American society was descending into atomistic particularity. In Body and Soul, Robert Cox shows how Spiritualism sought to transform sympathy into social practice, arguing that each individual, living and dead, was poised within a nexus of affect, and through the active propagation of these sympathetic bonds, a new and coherent society would emerge. Phenomena such as spontaneous somnambulism and sympathetic communion with the dead—whether through séance or "spirit photography"—were ways of transcending the barriers dissecting the American body politic, including the ultimate barrier, death. Drawing equally upon social, occult, and physiological registers, Spiritualism created a unique "social physiology" in which mind was integrated into body and body into society, leading Spiritualists into earthly social reforms, such as women’s rights and anti-slavery. From the beginning, however, Spiritualist political and social expression was far more diverse than has previously been recognized, encompassing distinctive proslavery and antiegalitarian strains, and in the wake of racial and political adjustments following the Civil War, the movement began to fracture. Cox traces the eventual dissolution of Spiritualism through the contradictions of its various regional and racial factions and through their increasingly circumscribed responses to a changing world. In the end, he concludes, the history of Spiritualism was written in the limits of sympathy, and not its limitless potential.

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853 edition. Excerpt: ... THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE. CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNING. A subject of vast and majestic proportions is presented to the view of the interior mind. To see the Universe in its grand, original birth--to stand on some lofty mount of spiritual light, and look back through the dim vista of.ages to the period when Chaos began to be resolved into form and order, is the glorious and ennobling gift of the soul in its expanded and illuminated condition. The spirit possesses within its inmost germ the powers of interior perception, which are not dependent on the limited vision of the externa eye; and hence, when these powers have been properly exercised and developed, attaining thus a supremacy over the earth-born ties of flesh and sense, the soul is enabled to penetrate the mantle of mystery which has clothed the shadowed legions of the Past, and disclose the profound realities which embrace the origin and birth of the Universe. In this revealment it will be the design of the author to make a constant appeal to the reasoning and intuitive faculties of the human being, while the truths which may be presented find their only proper basis in the immutable and divine principles of Nature. It is not wise to rear the superstructure of any system on the foundation of human opinions and prejudices; and hence the object to be attained of imparting truth to the world, will not be sought in any compromise with the superstitions of by-gone ages, or the prevailing errors of the present era. The fact is sufficiently evident and can not be denied, that the world has been chiefly dependent on mere traditional and mythological accounts for the knowledge which it claims to possess on the subject of Cosmogony. Therefore, with all the fanciful shapes of thought which have...