Occult America by Mitch Horowitz: Complete Guide to America's Secret Mystical History

What Is Occult America About?

Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, published in 2009 by Bantam Books, is one of the most important works of esoteric history written in the twenty-first century. In it, Mitch Horowitz makes a case that would have seemed outlandish to most mainstream historians a generation ago: that occult, esoteric, and mystical movements were not marginal aberrations in American history but were woven into the fabric of the nation's culture, politics, and identity from the very beginning.

The book traces a continuous tradition of spiritual experimentation that begins with the colonial era's encounter with Freemasonry and folk magic, accelerates through the explosive religious creativity of the early nineteenth century, and continues into the present day through the New Age movement, self-help culture, and contemporary manifestation teachings. Along the way, Horowitz introduces readers to an extraordinary cast of characters: visionary healers, trance mediums, occult scholars, political mystics, and ordinary Americans who found in esoteric ideas a spiritual freedom that conventional religion could not provide.

What sets Occult America apart from other books on this subject is Horowitz's refusal to treat his material with either the sneering condescension of the academic debunker or the uncritical enthusiasm of the true believer. He approaches the American occult tradition with the respect due to any significant cultural movement, acknowledging both its genuine insights and its genuine problems. The result is a book that reads like the best kind of history: a narrative that changes the way you see the past and, through the past, the present.

Occult America won the 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence, confirming what readers already knew: that Horowitz had produced a work of real literary and historical significance, a book that belongs on the shelf next to the standard histories of American religion and culture.

Mitch Horowitz: Historian of the Esoteric

Mitch Horowitz occupies a unique position in American intellectual life. A writer, lecturer, and publisher who has served as editor-in-chief at Tarcher/Penguin, one of the foremost publishers of esoteric and spiritual literature, Horowitz combines deep personal commitment to the esoteric traditions he studies with the scholarly discipline of a trained historian. He is neither a detached academic studying occultism from a safe distance nor an uncritical devotee promoting a particular tradition. He is something rarer: a participant-observer who brings genuine intellectual rigour to subjects that most serious thinkers have been content to ignore.

Horowitz's background in publishing gave him access to a vast range of esoteric literature and introduced him to the living communities that carry on the traditions he describes. His work at Tarcher/Penguin, which has published titles ranging from Rudolf Steiner's lectures to contemporary consciousness research, gave him an overview of the field that few other writers possess. This breadth of knowledge is evident throughout Occult America, where connections between apparently unrelated movements are traced with an ease that reflects deep familiarity with the material.

Beyond Occult America, Horowitz has written several other significant works on esoteric history and philosophy, including One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (2014), which traces the history of the New Thought movement in greater detail, and The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality (2018), which examines the practical and ethical dimensions of mind-power philosophy. Together with Occult America, these books form a trilogy that provides the most comprehensive account of American esoteric spirituality currently available.

The Burned-Over District: Cradle of American Mysticism

Horowitz begins his story in the place where American occultism effectively began: the Burned-Over District of upstate New York. The name, coined by historian Whitney Cross in 1950, refers to a region stretching from Albany to Buffalo that was so thoroughly swept by religious revival fires in the early nineteenth century that there was no more "fuel" left to burn. Between roughly 1800 and 1850, this relatively small geographical area produced an astonishing number of new religious movements, including Mormonism, Spiritualism, Seventh-Day Adventism, the Shakers, and the Oneida Community.

Horowitz sees the Burned-Over District not as an anomaly but as the purest expression of something distinctively American: a democratic approach to spiritual authority that refuses to accept that truth comes only through established churches and credentialed clergy. In the Burned-Over District, ordinary farmers, craftspeople, and labourers felt empowered to receive direct spiritual revelation, to communicate with the dead, to heal through the power of mind, and to establish new communities based on their own spiritual insights. This radical spiritual democracy, the conviction that every individual has direct access to higher truth, is what Horowitz identifies as the defining characteristic of the American occult tradition.

The connections between the various movements that emerged from this region are more extensive than most histories acknowledge. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, grew up in the same milieu of folk magic, treasure-hunting, and visionary experience that produced the Fox sisters, whose communications with a "spirit rapper" in 1848 launched the Spiritualist movement. The Shakers, who practised ecstatic trance and spirit communication decades before Spiritualism had a name, established communities that demonstrated the practical application of mystical principles to daily life. Each of these movements drew on the same cultural reservoir of esoteric ideas, and each contributed to a distinctively American approach to the spiritual life.

Horowitz's treatment of the Burned-Over District sets the tone for the entire book. He takes these movements seriously without idealising them. He acknowledges the frauds, the power struggles, the occasional absurdities, while insisting that something genuine was happening beneath the surface: ordinary Americans were attempting to develop a spiritual life that was free from institutional control, responsive to individual experience, and oriented toward practical results. This combination of spiritual freedom and practical application would characterise American occultism for the next two centuries.

Spiritualism and the Seance Parlour

Spiritualism, the movement centred on communication with the dead, receives some of the book's most vivid and historically detailed treatment. Horowitz traces the movement from its origins with the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 through its explosive growth during and after the Civil War to its gradual decline in the early twentieth century and its continuing influence on American spiritual culture.

The Fox sisters, Margaret and Kate, reported hearing mysterious rapping sounds in their family home and developed a method of communicating with the apparent source through a code of knocks. News of the "Rochester Rappings" spread rapidly, and within a few years, mediums claiming the ability to communicate with the dead had appeared in cities and towns across the United States. By the 1850s, Spiritualism had become a mass movement with millions of adherents, its own newspapers and lecture circuits, and a growing body of philosophical literature.

Horowitz is particularly astute in connecting Spiritualism to the social justice movements of the nineteenth century. The seance parlour was one of the few spaces in Victorian America where women could exercise public authority, and many of the most prominent Spiritualist mediums were women who used their spiritual platform to advocate for women's suffrage, abolitionism, and other progressive causes. Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to run for president of the United States, was a Spiritualist medium. The connection between occultism and social radicalism, which might seem surprising from a twenty-first-century perspective, was natural and pervasive in nineteenth-century America.

The Civil War dramatically accelerated Spiritualism's growth. The staggering death toll, over 600,000 soldiers killed, created an unprecedented demand for contact with the dead. Bereaved families who might never have attended a seance in peacetime found themselves desperately seeking communication with fallen sons, brothers, and husbands. Mary Todd Lincoln held seances in the White House itself, and Abraham Lincoln is reported to have attended at least one. Horowitz handles this sensitive material with characteristic care, neither debunking the grief-driven search for contact nor endorsing any particular claims about spirit communication.

The Ouija board, Spiritualism's most enduring contribution to popular culture, receives its own detailed treatment. Horowitz traces its origins from the talking boards used by early Spiritualists through its commercialisation by businessman William Fuld and its eventual acquisition by Parker Brothers (now Hasbro). The Ouija board's progression from sacred tool to parlour game to pop-culture icon encapsulates a pattern that Horowitz identifies throughout American occult history: esoteric ideas that begin as serious spiritual practices gradually percolate into mainstream culture, losing some of their original depth but gaining enormous reach.

Theosophy Comes to America

The Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and William Quan Judge, represents a turning point in Horowitz's narrative. While Spiritualism had been largely a popular movement with little systematic philosophy, Theosophy offered a comprehensive cosmological system that drew on Hindu, Buddhist, Kabbalistic, and Neoplatonic sources to create what Blavatsky called the "synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy."

Horowitz's treatment of Blavatsky is notably balanced. He acknowledges the well-documented instances of fraud in Blavatsky's career, including the fabricated letters from supposed Tibetan Mahatmas and the various tricks exposed by the Society for Psychical Research. But he also argues that Blavatsky's fraud does not invalidate her genuine contribution: the introduction of Eastern philosophical concepts to the Western world at a time when they were virtually unknown outside specialist academic circles. Before Blavatsky, most Americans had never heard of karma, reincarnation, or meditation. After Blavatsky, these concepts began their long migration into mainstream Western culture.

Horowitz is particularly interested in Theosophy's American dimension. While Blavatsky eventually relocated to India and then London, the Society's American branch developed its own distinctive character, emphasising individual spiritual development over hierarchical authority and practical application over theoretical speculation. This American Theosophy influenced a remarkable range of cultural developments, from the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian (both Theosophists) to the founding of the liberal Catholic movement and the development of the Waldorf education system by Rudolf Steiner, who was originally a Theosophist before developing his own Anthroposophical philosophy.

The connections Horowitz draws between Theosophy and broader American culture are among the book's most illuminating contributions. He shows how Theosophical ideas about spiritual evolution and human perfectibility resonated with America's existing traditions of self-improvement and progress. The Theosophical concept of the "Masters," advanced spiritual beings who guide humanity's evolution, echoed America's democratic optimism about the possibility of individual and collective advancement. Theosophy did not succeed in America despite being foreign; it succeeded because its core ideas were deeply compatible with American values.

New Thought: America's Homegrown Philosophy

If Theosophy was America's most important spiritual import, New Thought is what Horowitz presents as its most important spiritual export. The idea that human thought has creative power over physical reality, that we can change our circumstances by changing our mental states, originated in America in the mid-nineteenth century and has since spread throughout the world, influencing everything from self-help literature to prosperity theology to the modern manifestation movement.

Horowitz traces New Thought's origins to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a Maine clockmaker who became interested in mesmerism and developed his own system of mental healing. Quimby concluded that disease was caused by false beliefs and that health could be restored by correcting those beliefs through the power of mind. His ideas influenced Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science, and Warren Felt Evans, whose books on mental healing helped establish New Thought as a distinct movement.

The genius of New Thought, in Horowitz's telling, was its combination of spiritual aspiration with practical application. Unlike traditional religion, which often demanded acceptance of suffering as divine will, New Thought insisted that spiritual power could and should be used to improve one's material circumstances. Health, wealth, and happiness were not distractions from spiritual life but legitimate expressions of it. This fusion of the spiritual and the practical struck a deep chord in American culture, where the pursuit of material success has always been intertwined with religious aspiration.

Horowitz traces the movement through its major figures: Emma Curtis Hopkins, the "teacher of teachers" who trained many of New Thought's most influential leaders; Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of Unity; Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science; and Neville Goddard, the Barbadian-American mystic whose teachings on creative visualisation continue to influence millions today. Each of these figures developed distinctive approaches to the central New Thought insight, creating a tradition that is more diverse and intellectually rich than its critics typically acknowledge.

The book also traces New Thought's influence on mainstream culture through figures like Norman Vincent Peale, whose The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) brought mind-power ideas to millions of readers, and Napoleon Hill, whose Think and Grow Rich (1937) became one of the best-selling self-help books of all time. Horowitz argues that the modern self-help industry, with its emphasis on visualisation, affirmation, and positive thinking, is essentially a secularised version of New Thought philosophy, stripped of its original spiritual framework but retaining its core conviction that thought shapes reality.

Manly P. Hall and the Secret Teachings

Horowitz devotes an entire chapter to Manly Palmer Hall (1901-1990), and it is one of the book's highlights. Hall's story is extraordinary by any standard. Born in Peterborough, Ontario, raised by his grandmother in South Dakota, Hall moved to Los Angeles as a young man and began lecturing on esoteric philosophy in the early 1920s. By age twenty-seven, he had published The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), an encyclopedic work covering symbolism, mythology, alchemy, Kabbalah, Freemasonry, and esoteric philosophy from every major tradition.

The Secret Teachings was, and remains, an astonishing achievement. A massive folio-sized volume with full-colour illustrations, it was produced at enormous expense and represented the most comprehensive survey of esoteric knowledge ever assembled in a single work. That it was written by a man in his mid-twenties with no formal academic training makes it all the more remarkable. Horowitz presents Hall as the embodiment of the American occult tradition's democratic character: a self-educated seeker who believed that esoteric knowledge should be available to everyone, not hoarded by elites or hidden behind initiatory barriers.

Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los Angeles in 1934, creating a library, lecture hall, and study centre dedicated to the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science. For the next fifty-six years, until his death in 1990, Hall lectured, wrote, and collected rare books and manuscripts, building the PRS into one of the most important centres of esoteric study in the Western world. Horowitz sees Hall as a peculiarly American phenomenon: a figure who combined genuine scholarship with popular accessibility, making the most profound ideas of the esoteric tradition available to anyone willing to seek them out.

Hall's influence extended far beyond his immediate circle. His writings on Freemasonry, symbolism, and the esoteric foundations of American democracy have been cited by scholars, referenced by filmmakers, and used as source material by countless other writers on esoteric subjects. Horowitz argues that Hall deserves recognition as one of the most significant American philosophers of the twentieth century, a claim that would have seemed absurd to academic philosophers but that Horowitz supports with considerable evidence.

Occultism in American Politics

One of Occult America's most surprising and well-documented chapters concerns the relationship between esoteric movements and American political life. Horowitz demonstrates that this relationship is far more extensive and significant than most historians have acknowledged, beginning with the Masonic affiliations of the founding generation and continuing through the twentieth century.

The Masonic dimension of American founding is well known but rarely examined in depth. Horowitz shows that Freemasonry was not merely a social club for the founding fathers but a philosophical framework that shaped their understanding of liberty, equality, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The Masonic emphasis on individual moral development, rational inquiry, and religious tolerance is reflected directly in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Great Seal of the United States, with its all-seeing eye and unfinished pyramid, contains Masonic symbolism that has been the subject of endless speculation but that Horowitz traces to specific esoteric traditions with care and precision.

The political connections become even more interesting in the twentieth century. Horowitz's treatment of Henry A. Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's vice president from 1941 to 1945, is one of the book's most original contributions. Wallace was a high-ranking Freemason, a student of Theosophy, and a devotee of the Russian mystic-painter Nicholas Roerich. Wallace's Theosophical beliefs influenced his vision of a "Century of the Common Man," a post-war world order based on spiritual principles of human brotherhood and cosmic evolution. It was Wallace who persuaded Roosevelt to put the Great Seal, with its Masonic symbolism, on the back of the one-dollar bill in 1935.

Horowitz handles this material with the same balance he brings to everything else. He does not claim that America was founded as an occult republic or that secret societies control the government. Instead, he shows that esoteric ideas about human potential, spiritual evolution, and the sacred nature of individual liberty have been part of the American political conversation from the beginning, influencing leaders and movements across the political spectrum. The connection between occultism and politics is not a conspiracy but a cultural reality.

Edgar Cayce and the Modern Occult

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), "The Sleeping Prophet," bridges the gap between the older occult movements that Horowitz has been tracing and the contemporary spiritual landscape. A devout Christian from rural Kentucky, Cayce discovered in his early twenties that he could enter a trance state in which he would deliver detailed readings on health, past lives, and spiritual development. Over the course of his career, he gave more than 14,000 documented readings, making him the most thoroughly recorded psychic in American history.

Horowitz presents Cayce as a figure who made occult ideas accessible to mainstream America precisely because he was so obviously not an occultist in the traditional sense. Cayce was a Sunday school teacher, a family man, and a lifelong member of the Disciples of Christ church. He did not seek out his abilities, did not understand them intellectually, and was sometimes troubled by the unorthodox content of his own readings, particularly when they discussed reincarnation, a concept foreign to his Christian upbringing. This very ordinariness made Cayce credible to millions of Americans who would never have attended a seance or read a Theosophical text.

The Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), founded by Cayce in 1931 and still active today, became one of the most important institutions in twentieth-century American spirituality. Through its publications, study groups, and conferences, the ARE disseminated ideas about holistic health, meditation, dream interpretation, and spiritual development to a mainstream audience. Horowitz argues that much of what we now call the "New Age" movement can be traced directly to Cayce's influence, channelled through the ARE and the countless books written about his readings.

Horowitz also examines the more controversial aspects of Cayce's legacy, including his readings about Atlantis, the Akashic Records, and future earth changes. He does not attempt to validate these claims but places them in the context of a tradition that valued direct spiritual experience over institutional authority. Whether or not Cayce's specific claims were accurate, his fundamental method of seeking knowledge through altered states of consciousness continued a tradition that stretches back through American Spiritualism to the shamanic practices that Horowitz sees as humanity's oldest form of spiritual inquiry.

The Legacy of Occult America Today

Horowitz's concluding argument is that the American occult tradition is not a historical curiosity but a living force that continues to shape contemporary culture in ways that most people do not recognise. The self-help industry, the wellness movement, the mindfulness revolution, the popularity of yoga and meditation, the growing interest in crystals and energy healing, the manifestation teachings that fill social media: all of these contemporary phenomena have roots in the occult movements Horowitz has traced.

The Law of Attraction, popularised by The Secret (2006), is New Thought philosophy repackaged for the twenty-first century. The practice of affirmations descends directly from the mental healing techniques developed by Quimby and his successors. The emphasis on personal empowerment and self-directed spiritual growth that characterises contemporary spirituality is the legacy of the Burned-Over District's radical spiritual democracy. Even the language of contemporary self-help, with its talk of "vibrations," "energy," and "manifesting," echoes the terminology of nineteenth-century mesmerism and Spiritualism.

Horowitz's point is not that contemporary practitioners should abandon their practices because of their occult origins. It is the opposite: that understanding these historical roots deepens appreciation of practices that are often treated as rootless novelties. When a modern seeker practices visualisation, they are participating in a tradition that stretches back through Neville Goddard to New Thought to Mesmerism to the ancient art of active imagination. When a yoga practitioner meditates, they are benefiting from a transmission that came to the West through the Theosophical Society's encounter with Indian philosophy. This historical awareness does not diminish the practices; it enriches them.

The book also serves as a corrective to the academic tendency to dismiss esoteric movements as irrational aberrations. Horowitz shows that these movements addressed genuine human needs that mainstream religion and science left unfilled: the need for direct spiritual experience, the need for a philosophy that connects spiritual development to material life, and the need for a spiritual practice that respects individual autonomy. These needs have not disappeared, and the traditions that arose to meet them continue to evolve.

For contemporary seekers, Occult America offers something rare: historical perspective on practices and beliefs that are often presented as if they appeared out of nowhere. Understanding that your meditation practice has roots in Theosophy, that your affirmation practice descends from New Thought, or that your interest in crystal healing connects to a tradition older than the American republic does not reduce these practices to mere historical artefacts. It reveals them as part of a living tradition of human spiritual experimentation that is as old as consciousness itself and as new as this morning's meditation.

Frequently Asked Questions