Andrew Jackson Davis
Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910), often referred to as the Poughkeepsie Seer, was an influential figure in the early spiritualist movement in the United States. Born in Blooming Grove, New York, he faced a challenging upbringing with an uneducated and alcoholic father and a chronically ill mother. Davis found his true calling after experiencing mesmerism, which led him to believe he possessed clairvoyant abilities. He gained notoriety for his trance-induced diagnoses and healing, and in 1846, he published his first major work, "Principles of Nature," which explored a variety of subjects including philosophy and mythology.
Davis developed a philosophy he termed "Harmonial Philosophy," advocating for a society based on organic liberty, moral values, and the elimination of social distinctions. His ideas resonated with movements focused on temperance, abolition, and women's rights. Throughout his life, Davis wrote extensively, producing around twenty-seven books that further elaborated on his beliefs. Eventually, he distanced himself from mainstream spiritualism, emphasizing reform over occult practices. Davis’s legacy includes founding various spiritualist communities and contributing significantly to the discourse around social justice and personal responsibility. He spent his later years in Boston, where he operated a bookstore, and passed away at the age of eighty-three.
Andrew Jackson Davis
- Andrew Jackson Davis
- Born: August 11, 1826
- Died: January 13, 1910
Known as the Poughkeepsie Seer, a founder of the spiritualist movement, was born in Blooming Grove, New York. His father, Samuel Davis, a shoemaker, was poor, uneducated, and an alcoholic, and his mother was a chronically ill woman who claimed to see frequent visions. After numerous moves they finally settled in Poughkeepsie, New York. Andrew Davis received a sketchy education in various local schools. After an unsuccessful apprenticeship with a shoemaker when he was fifteen, he made an ill-fated attempt to learn the dry-goods business. He discovered his true vocation in 1843, when he saw a performance by a traveling mesmerist at the Poughkeepsie city hall. (Mesmerism, an early form of hypnosis based on the transference of so-called animal magnetism, was much in vogue in the mid-nineteenth century.) A few weeks later he was “magnetized” by William Levingston, a Poughkeepsie tailor and amateur philosopher.
Believing that Davis possessed clairvoyant powers, Levingston abandoned his business to direct Davis’s psychic development, sending him into trances during which he was reported to diagnose and cure diseases. In 1844 Davis had an out-of-body experience that took him into the Catskill mountains, where, he said, he received instruction from two spirits he later identified as the second-century Greek physician Galen and the Swedish religious philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. He spent the year 1846 in New York City, dictating from a trance state a series of orations that were collected as Principles of Nature; Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (1847). Despite Davis’s lack of education, the book ranged over history, philosophy, archeology, geology, and mythology, convincing some observers that he was in fact a conduit for a higher intelligence. His visions of the afterlife had much in common with those of Swedenborg. From 1850 to 1885 Davis wrote, some-times with the aid of self-induced trances, some twenty-seven books that expounded his “Harmonial Philosophy,” including The Great Harmonia (1850-52), The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse (1856); The Penetralia (1856);A Stellar Key to the Summer Land (1867); and Views of our Heavenly Home (1878).
Although many adherents of spiritualism sought no more from it than the thrill of communication with the dead, Davis believed that it opened the way to the restoration of the perfect order that nature intended for the world. The role of the spirits—human beings who had undergone further development in the afterlife— was to assist earthbound souls to effect this transformation. In The Harmonial Man (1853) Davis outlined a plan for a “harmonial republic” based on “organic liberty,” where citizens would enjoy the rights of free speech, free thought, and free education; industriousness and morality would be prized; government and private property would both be restricted; social, political, sectarian, and class distinctions would be eliminated; and organized religion would give way to “Nature’s own religion.” To promote discussion of his ideas, he founded “harmonial brotherhoods,” spiritualist Sunday schools, and, in 1863, the Moral Police Fraternity, a New York group that aimed to develop a spiritualist approach to poverty and crime. Davis’s message— that people must take responsibility for their own destinies, and that the knowledge required for this effort should be sought from all possible sources, including the sciences and the spiritworld—found a receptive audience among the members of the temperance, abolitionist, and feminist movements, to which Davis gave his spport.
By 1878 Davis had parted company with mainstream spiritualism because of its emphasis on the occult instead of on reform. He continued to write, and in his old age he was the proprietor of a bookstore in Boston. He was married twice, the first time to a woman who died in 1853, the econd time, in 1855, to Mary Robinson Love. He died at the age of eighty-three.
For autobiographical material, see Davis’s The Magic Staff (1857) and Beyond the Valley (1885). R. G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (1978), contains a discussion of Davis’s role in reform. See also E. C. Hartmann, Who’s Who in Occultism (1927); A. C. Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (1926; reprinted 1975); and The Dictionary of American Biography (1930).