Overview:
Metaphysical religions have had a long history in the West. Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, astrology, Hermeticism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah numbered among its earlier forms. As religious systems, these movements and their successors, in occult versions, offered secret and, by the nineteenth century, rejected knowledge to educated elites among Western peoples. During colonial times, among a broader segment of the population in North America a traditional occultism thrived in astrology and witchcraft. Even later, traditional occultism continued to flourish among various cultural groups. Then in the nineteenth century new and self-conscious forms of occultism sprang up. In this context, Transcendentalism provided a combinative theoretical expression of concerns that were apparent among metaphysical believers. Spiritualism, theosophy, and New Thought gave popular expression to metaphysical religion, while by the turn of the century William James was exploring mystical and psychic frontiers with a psychological frame of reference. In the late twentieth century, a variety of small and intense movements perpetuated the metaphysical legacy, among them witchcraft covens and scientific-technological groups. The dangerous quality of borders and boundaries to an extraordinary world were as apparent in metaphysical belief and practice as it was elsewhere. So were its positive results -- often, especially and sometimes paradoxically, in material terms. In general, metaphysical religion was popular among all classes of people. Both occult and more generally mind-oriented metaphysical forms based their theories on the idea of correspondence, held also by American Indians and, to some extent, by Roman Catholics. Like Indians and Catholics, metaphysical devotees mingled ordinary and extraordinary religion. Yet they did more to use the extraordinary to achieve pragmatic and thisworldly results. Even further, without a strong sense of peoplehood, metaphysical practitioners tended to be persons without fixed social boundaries. For them, universalism was a condition of living as well as a condition of mind. Metaphysical believers often reflected the upheavals of traditional community in modem urban and industrial society. Frequently, they created mental homesteads to replace the human communities they could not find.
But even as some dislocated Americans found homesteads of the mind, others
still felt estranged. For no groups did this observation seem more true
than for those who found themselves in the West either as inheritors of
a non-Western religion or as converts to one. We turn now to the religions
of these cultural strangers in the land. Curiously, as we will see, they
were closer to home than they knew.
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