The most influential trance medium of the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson Davis—called the “Poughkeepsie Seer” after his Hudson Valley, New York, home—enthralled thousands with visions ...

In the latter part of the 19th century, a range of powerful new visual technologies were developed that used the intrinsic mechanics of light-sensitive media to achieve spiritual allusions and ...

He also leads "Occult New York Walking Tours," which visits sites of the spiritual avant-garde movement that ultimately swept the nation in the early 19th century.

In the 19th century, spiritualism, in particular, belonged to a constellation of interests that included abolition, women’s rights, socialism, temperance, and other social reforms.

In the 19th century, when science and the occult were closely linked, the new medium of photography was seen as a kind of border patrol, a way of establishing the boundaries between the two. That i… ...

When my book “Occult America,” a history of ... This marriage extends back to the late 19th century when globetrotting occultist and Russian noblewoman Madame H.P. Blavatsky depicted ...

An excerpt from the book Occult America, by Mitch Horowitz. WHAT IS THE OCCULT? (And What Is It Doing in America?) Religious history, like literary or any cultural history, is made by genius, by ...

This approach was a basis of much experimental science in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it brought with it other ideas which appalled the 19th century, including atheism, positivism, and nihilism.

High society circles in St. Petersburg in the late 19th century were fascinated ... The first seances in Moscow and St. Petersburg were held in 1853 and these occult sessions quickly became ...

This makeover suggests nothing so much as a Bonnaroo spin on the late-nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century phenomenon known as “spirit photography,” for which cameramen in cahoots with ...