Mitch Horowitz is an American writer in occult and esoteric themes. He is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin in New York City.
Everybody has different stories about where I came from. Nobody really knows.
Even back in its colonial days, America developed a reputation as a safe harbor for people with unusual or radical religious beliefs.
I think spiritualism, mesmerism, the mental healing movement, provided some people with the most meaningful experiences of their lives.
Once the social and spiritual opening was created for women in the form of spiritualism, suddenly ambitious women who wanted to participate in the culture had a kind of a voice.
Women had no clerical role anywhere in the Western world, period.
America became a special source of attraction to people who were fleeing the aftereffects of the 30 Years War and the religious persecution that began to sweep through Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And when people got here, very often they succeeded.
I think therapeutic spirituality has largely been a help in the modern world. So the fact that people can approach religion with practical needs.
All the quantum physics experiments have occurred chiefly on the atomic scale and we are taught to believe that nature's laws are consistent.
Science, as it reaches the public mind, has both served to discredit and unintentionally reaffirmed mystical ideas.
People need doorways to explore universal religious and ethical ideas.
Americans were in love with mesmerism because it was something that you could do in your own home. You could mesmerize or hypnotize your aunt or your mother or your father and people would go into these trance states and you could introduction autosuggestions tot hem or as some people saw it, you could cure them of illnesses.
When spiritualism dawned, suddenly women who wanted to engage in the civic and religious and political culture were becoming transmediums.
There are some people in occult history who warned against using the Ouija Board, who said: "This is a dangerous door to the unconscious. Don't approach this thing. "