Occult America by Mitch Horowitz: How Mysticism Shaped a Nation

By the Thalira Research Team

Last updated: April 2026

What Is Occult America?

Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation was published by Bantam Books in 2009. Its thesis is straightforward and startling: esoteric religious movements were not a fringe curiosity in American history but a founding element of both spiritual and secular American culture.

Horowitz covers an enormous range of material. The book moves from colonial-era Freemasonry and Rosicrucian lodges through the Spiritualist explosion of the mid-nineteenth century, the rise of Theosophy and New Thought, the occult dimensions of Mormonism, the career of Edgar Cayce, the influence of Manly P. Hall, the role of Henry A. Wallace (a mystic who became Vice President), and the emergence of the New Age movement in the late twentieth century.

What holds this diverse material together is Horowitz's central argument: America has always been a laboratory for spiritual experimentation. The country's unique combination of religious freedom, democratic individualism, and distance from European orthodoxies created conditions in which esoteric ideas could flourish as nowhere else. The result is a spiritual culture far stranger and more interesting than the mainstream narrative of "Protestant nation" suggests.

The book's strength lies in Horowitz's ability to take esoteric movements seriously as cultural and intellectual phenomena without becoming an uncritical advocate. He writes as someone who is personally engaged with the material (he has described himself as a practitioner of New Thought) but also as a professional historian and editor trained to evaluate sources critically.

Mitch Horowitz: The Historian of the Esoteric

Mitch Horowitz brings an unusual combination of credentials to his subject. He served as vice president and editor in chief at Tarcher/Penguin, where he was responsible for publishing some of the most important books on alternative spirituality in recent decades. He is also a practitioner: Horowitz has described himself as a believing participant in the New Thought tradition, someone who takes the ideas he writes about seriously enough to practice them.

This dual position, scholar and practitioner, gives Horowitz's writing its distinctive flavour. He is sympathetic without being credulous, historically rigorous without being dismissive. He treats Spiritualist mediums, Theosophical philosophers, and New Thought healers as intelligent people engaged in genuine inquiry, even when their methods or conclusions were flawed. This approach stands in sharp contrast to the usual academic treatment of American esotericism, which tends either to dismiss it as superstition or to study it with clinical detachment.

Horowitz's subsequent books, including One Simple Idea (2014) and The Miracle Club (2018), extended the historical analysis of Occult America into deeper examinations of specific movements. But Occult America remains his most comprehensive work and the one that established his reputation as a serious historian of American esoteric culture.

America's Occult Roots: The Founding Era

Horowitz begins by establishing that esoteric thought was present at the very founding of the American republic. The connection between Freemasonry and the American Revolution has been noted by many historians, but Horowitz goes further, arguing that Masonic principles of religious tolerance, universal brotherhood, and the perfectibility of the individual were not just incidental to the founders' politics but central to them.

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and at least thirteen other signers of the Constitution were Freemasons. The symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States, with its all-seeing eye and unfinished pyramid, draws directly on Masonic and Hermetic imagery. Franklin's famous experiment with the lightning rod was not merely a scientific demonstration but, in the context of his era, a practical expression of the Hermetic idea that the human mind can comprehend and harness the forces of nature.

Horowitz traces a less well-known strand of early American esotericism through the Rosicrucian and mystical communities that established themselves in colonial Pennsylvania. The German Pietist community at Ephrata Cloister, founded in 1732, practiced a form of communal mysticism that combined Rosicrucian ideas with radical Protestant spirituality. These communities were small, but their influence on the broader culture of religious experimentation in America was significant.

The point Horowitz makes is that America was never simply a Protestant nation. From the very beginning, esoteric and mystical traditions operated alongside, and sometimes within, mainstream Protestantism. The country's commitment to religious freedom created space for spiritual experimentation that had no parallel in Europe, where established churches and state censorship limited what could be publicly taught and practiced.

Spiritualism: The Fox Sisters and Beyond

The most dramatic chapter in Horowitz's narrative is the eruption of Spiritualism in 1848, when the young Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, claimed to be communicating with the spirit of a dead peddler through a series of mysterious rapping sounds. Whether the rappings were genuine or (as one of the sisters later confessed) produced by cracking their toe joints, the effect on American culture was enormous.

Within a few years, millions of Americans were participating in seances, table-tipping sessions, and spirit communication circles. Spiritualism became the fastest-growing religious movement in American history, cutting across class, race, and gender lines. By the 1850s, there were an estimated two million Spiritualists in the United States, with their own newspapers, lecture circuits, and camp meeting grounds.

Horowitz pays particular attention to the social dimensions of Spiritualism. The movement was closely tied to abolitionism: many Spiritualist mediums were vocal opponents of slavery, and some, like the trance speaker Cora L.V. Richmond, drew crowds of thousands with lectures on social justice delivered in an apparent trance state. Spiritualism was also one of the first American religious movements to give women prominent public roles. Female mediums were among the first women to address mixed-gender audiences in public, a practice that conventional churches strictly prohibited.

The connection between Spiritualism and women's suffrage was direct and personal. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States (in 1872), was a Spiritualist medium. Many leaders of the suffrage movement attended seances and expressed sympathy with Spiritualist ideas. Horowitz argues that Spiritualism provided a religious framework that validated women's spiritual authority at a time when mainstream Christianity denied it.

Theosophy Takes Root in America

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky arrived in New York in 1873 and, with Henry Steel Olcott, founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Horowitz presents Blavatsky as one of the most important religious innovators in American history, a judgement that would surprise many mainstream historians but that the evidence supports.

Blavatsky's project was breathtakingly ambitious: to synthesize the religious and philosophical traditions of East and West into a universal spiritual science. Her major works, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), drew on Hinduism, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and Western occultism to construct a comprehensive metaphysical system that described the evolution of consciousness through successive stages of cosmic development.

Theosophy never became a mass movement in the way Spiritualism did. At its peak, the Theosophical Society probably had fewer than 100,000 members worldwide. But its cultural influence was vastly disproportionate to its numbers. Theosophy introduced concepts like karma, reincarnation, and the chakra system into Western vocabulary. It helped popularize meditation and yoga as spiritual practices. It provided the intellectual framework for much of what would later be called the New Age movement.

Horowitz notes that Theosophy's influence extended well beyond the spiritual realm. Blavatsky's insistence on the unity of all religions influenced the founding of the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893, which brought Swami Vivekananda to America and began the process of introducing Hinduism and Buddhism to Western audiences. The Theosophical emphasis on universal brotherhood contributed to anti-colonial movements in India and Sri Lanka.

New Thought: America's True Religion

The chapter of Occult America that has the most lasting relevance is Horowitz's treatment of New Thought, the movement built on the idea that thoughts have creative power and that the mind can directly influence health, prosperity, and life circumstances.

Horowitz traces New Thought to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a clockmaker from Belfast, Maine, who became interested in mesmerism and developed a theory that disease is caused by erroneous beliefs and can be cured by correcting those beliefs through mental influence. Quimby never published his ideas systematically, but his patients and students spread his methods widely.

The most famous of Quimby's students was Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science in 1879. Eddy transformed Quimby's informal healing practice into a structured religion with its own church, liturgy, and scriptural text (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures). The relationship between Quimby and Eddy remains one of the most contentious issues in American religious history: Eddy denied Quimby's influence, while Quimby's supporters accused her of plagiarism.

Horowitz argues that New Thought, in its broader form, is "America's true religion," more widely practiced than any formal denomination. The belief that positive thinking can improve your health, attract prosperity, and shape your life circumstances is so deeply embedded in American culture that most people do not recognize it as a specific religious tradition. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937), and Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006) are all expressions of New Thought principles, whether their authors acknowledge the lineage or not.

This argument is one of Horowitz's most original contributions. By tracing the genealogy of positive thinking from Quimby through Eddy, Trine, Peale, and into contemporary self-help culture, he demonstrates that the most popular spiritual philosophy in America has occult roots that most of its practitioners are entirely unaware of. The prosperity gospel preached in megachurches, the law of attraction promoted in bestselling books, and the mindset culture of Silicon Valley all descend, ultimately, from the experiments of a Maine clockmaker in the 1840s.

Key Figures: Hall, Cayce, and Wallace

Horowitz has a gift for biographical portraiture, and several of his character studies in Occult America are particularly compelling.

Manly Palmer Hall (1901-1990) is presented as the quintessential American esotericist: self-taught, ambitious, and deeply sincere. Born in Peterborough, Ontario, Hall moved to Los Angeles as a young man and, at the age of 27, published The Secret Teachings of All Ages, an encyclopedic survey of symbolism, mythology, and esoteric philosophy that runs to nearly 800 pages and includes dozens of colour plates. The book has never gone out of print and remains one of the most widely read esoteric works in the English language.

Horowitz treats Hall with the seriousness he deserves, noting that Hall spent decades building the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles into a major centre for esoteric study. Hall's scholarly output was enormous, including more than 150 books and pamphlets on subjects ranging from alchemy to Zen Buddhism. His approach was synthetic rather than sectarian: he sought to identify the common principles underlying all esoteric traditions, an approach that owes much to Blavatsky's Theosophy but is expressed in Hall's own distinctive, accessible style.

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), the "Sleeping Prophet," receives extended treatment as one of the most perplexing figures in American spiritual history. Cayce would enter trance states and deliver "readings" on medical diagnosis, past lives, and spiritual development. His medical readings were remarkably specific, recommending particular treatments, dietary changes, and remedies, and his supporters claim a high rate of accuracy.

What makes Cayce interesting to Horowitz is the cultural context. Cayce was a devout Christian from rural Kentucky who was deeply uncomfortable with the material that emerged in his readings. His trance discourses introduced concepts from Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient Egyptian religion that Cayce, in his waking state, had never studied and would likely have rejected. The case raises genuine questions about the nature of consciousness and its access to information beyond ordinary awareness.

Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965), Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President from 1941 to 1945, is perhaps Horowitz's most surprising case study. Wallace was deeply involved in Theosophy, corresponded with the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich, and brought esoteric ideas directly into American political life. It was Wallace who persuaded Roosevelt to place the Great Seal (with its all-seeing eye and pyramid) on the dollar bill in 1935, a decision that had profound symbolic resonance and that Wallace understood in explicitly mystical terms.

Freemasonry and American Politics

Horowitz devotes significant attention to the role of Freemasonry in American political life, a subject that has attracted both serious scholarship and wild conspiracy theory. His approach is measured: he acknowledges that Freemasonry has played a significant role in American history without endorsing the conspiracy theories that claim Masons secretly control the government.

The facts are remarkable enough without conspiracy. The number of Freemasons among the founding generation is striking: Washington, Franklin, Paul Revere, John Hancock, and many others were active Masons. Masonic lodges provided a space where men of different religious backgrounds could meet as equals, an experience of pluralistic tolerance that influenced the design of American democratic institutions.

Masonic influence on American symbolism is extensive and well-documented. The layout of Washington, D.C., the design of the Capitol building, the imagery of the Great Seal, and numerous other features of American civic culture bear the imprint of Masonic and Hermetic symbolism. Horowitz presents this not as evidence of conspiracy but as evidence of the depth to which esoteric ideas penetrated the consciousness of America's founders.

The Anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s, which Horowitz covers in detail, is itself revealing. The intense hostility directed at Freemasonry during this period indicates how significant Masonic influence was perceived to be. The Anti-Masonic Party, the first third party in American history, was founded specifically to oppose Masonic influence in politics. Its existence testifies to the reality of that influence, even as it distorted its nature.

Mormonism's Occult Origins

One of the most provocative chapters in Occult America deals with the occult dimensions of Mormonism. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, came from a family deeply involved in folk magic, treasure-seeking, and the use of "seer stones" for divination. Smith himself used a seer stone to locate the golden plates from which he claimed to translate the Book of Mormon.

Horowitz is careful to note that the occult elements of early Mormonism do not invalidate it as a religious movement. He argues that Smith's genius lay in synthesizing folk magical practices with Christian theology and American democratic ideals to create an entirely new religion. The seer stones, the magical parchments, and the treasure-seeking rituals of the Smith family were part of a widespread folk magical culture in early nineteenth-century America, and Smith's use of these practices was not unusual for his time and place.

What was unusual was Smith's ability to transform these practices into the foundation of a major world religion. Horowitz sees this as characteristically American: the willingness to take spiritual experiences seriously on their own terms, regardless of their origins, and to build institutions around them. Mormonism is, in this reading, the most successful product of American occult culture, a religion born from the intersection of folk magic, Christian revelation, and democratic individualism.

When the Fringe Became Mainstream

The final sections of Occult America trace the movement of esoteric ideas from the margins to the mainstream of American culture in the twentieth century. Horowitz shows how ideas that were once considered dangerously heterodox, such as meditation, yoga, vegetarianism, holistic medicine, and belief in the creative power of thought, gradually became part of mainstream American life.

This process accelerated dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, when the counterculture's interest in Eastern religions, psychedelics, and alternative spirituality brought esoteric ideas to a mass audience. But Horowitz argues that the groundwork had been laid much earlier by the movements he documents: Theosophy had introduced Eastern concepts, New Thought had popularized the idea of mental causation, and Spiritualism had established the principle that individuals could access spiritual knowledge directly, without clerical intermediaries.

The contemporary wellness industry, the mindfulness movement, the popularity of yoga, the practice of manifestation, and the prosperity gospel all have roots in the esoteric movements Horowitz describes. His book provides the genealogy that connects today's mainstream spiritual practices to their occult origins, showing that what millions of Americans do every day, from practising affirmations to attending yoga classes, has a hidden history stretching back to the seances and healing circles of the nineteenth century.

Reading Occult America Today

Horowitz's achievement in Occult America is to have demonstrated, persuasively and readably, that the esoteric dimension of American culture is not a historical curiosity but a living tradition with continuing influence. The book changes how you read American history by revealing a dimension that most standard accounts either ignore or marginalize.

Critics have noted, fairly, that the book's scope sometimes works against depth. Horowitz covers so many movements and figures that none receives the sustained treatment that a specialist monograph would provide. His treatment of Theosophy, for example, occupies relatively few pages compared to the complexity and importance of the subject. Similarly, his coverage of African-American occult traditions and Native American spiritual practices is thinner than these subjects deserve.

But these are limitations of scope, not of quality. Within the format of a single popular history, Horowitz achieves something remarkable: he provides a coherent narrative framework for understanding the role of esotericism in American life, supported by solid research and enlivened by vivid biographical portraits. For readers interested in understanding the hidden roots of American spiritual culture, Occult America is the essential starting point.

The Hermetic tradition that runs through the movements Horowitz describes, from Freemasonry through Theosophy to New Thought, provides a unifying thread connecting these diverse expressions of esoteric spirituality. For those who want to engage with this tradition in a systematic way, the Hermetic Synthesis course offers a comprehensive introduction to the principles and practices that underlie all of these movements.

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