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of the moral life to the “godlikeness” of the spiritual life. As such reading possibilities suggest, Transcendentalists and liberal Christians had many elements at their disposal to perform their alchemy of transforming mysticism from a sectarian affectation into a universal piety. Just as today's inquirers can do much of their seeking at Barnes and Noble or through Amazon.com, the nineteenth century's “New Spirituality” had a distinctly bookish feel, a communion of restless souls shaped as much through eclectic reading as through regular churchgoing.²²

      Beyond amassing an impressive library on the subject, Alcott long continued to be an arch-dreamer of mysticism. “Mysticism,” he sweepingly concluded in Concord Days in 1872, “is the sacred spark that has lighted the piety and illuminated the philosophy of all places and times.” In 1878, he enthused about the idea of starting a “Journal of Mysticism and Idealism,” proposed to him in a letter from a young partisan in Osceola, Missouri. Alcott thought it would be a perfect outlet for anthologizing an array of mystical writings for the American public. His short-lived Mystic Club, essentially a reading group for corporate study and reflection organized in 1882, was an appropriate capstone to his proclamation of mysticism's global significance. Fittingly enough, Franklin Sanborn (1831–1917), as dedicated as anyone to the Transcendentalist movement and its memorialization, was also a founding member of this latest club of rapidly aging New England radicals. A biographer of Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson, Sanborn would weave the connecting threads from the first-generation Transcendentalists through the third-generation progressives. A disciple of Theodore Parker and an abolitionist supporter of John Brown in the 1850s, Sanborn played a leading role in the Concord School of Philosophy in the 1880s and became a primary chronicler of Sarah Farmer's Greenacre community to which Bjerregaard devoted himself. ²³

      If Alcott's wide-ranging enthusiasm for the subject suggested the incorporation of a hodgepodge of materials into Transcendentalist aspirations, one source still stood above the rest: namely, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), mining expert turned mystic par excellence. In the mid-1740s, after long years of scientific inquiry, Swedenborg experienced a religious awakening that transformed him from natural philosopher to seer. Out of his newly opened spiritual sight came a vast array of writings: visionary commentaries opening up the spiritual sense of biblical texts as well as detailed reports on his grand tours of heaven and hell. Swedenborg took the Christian and occultist fascination with hidden correspondences to a new level of empirical exactness; everywhere Swedenborg turned he discovered mystical signs of the invisible world beyond the visible. The human ear, for example, corresponded to obedience to God; an odorous mouse to avarice; cats to inattentiveness to sermons. Even more mysterious was his self-reported ability to “converse with angels and spirits in the same manner as I speak with men,” and it was his memorable relations of things seen and heard in the celestial world that especially garnered him a significant readership. By the 1840s, his posthumous fame had made him the most influential “mystic” in the United States, both a popular best seller and an intellectual with literary cachet. When the Encyclopaedia Britannica finally got around in 1858 to updating its entry on the subject, shifting from mystics and mystical theology to the increasingly universal mysticism, the essay paid Swedenborg an impossibly large tribute: “Nothing really new in the way of mysticism has been produced since the days of the northern seer.”²⁴

      Almost as a matter of course Emerson chose Swedenborg, the “largest of all modern souls,” to stand for his mystic of the ages in his Representative Men (1850). The appeal that Swedenborg held for Emerson and company was complex. As a symbolist of nature and Scripture, his elaborate view of spiritual correspondences had resonance for Transcendentalists who held similarly arcane views of reality. Swedenborg was also a thorough anti-Calvinist, critiquing a variety of doctrines from predestination to infant damnation to the Trinity. (His rejection of John Calvin went deep: in one vision, the seer discovered that the spiritual shade of the Genevan divine was fond of frequenting otherworldly brothels.) A cosmopolitan universalist, Swedenborg saw heaven as open to all those, inside or outside the church, who sustained their love of God and active benevolence toward their neighbors. His dismissal of external miracles, while preserving room for direct internal experiences of the divine, jibed with Transcendentalist intuitions. Such theological convictions meshed well with the propensities of New England liberalism.²⁵

      For all those affinities, this was not a match made in heaven. In his essay enshrining Swedenborg as the representative mystic, Emerson often took away with one hand what he gave with the other. Swedenborg gained credit in Emerson's eyes for his versatility in prying into so many subjects, but there remained something strangely “scholastic” and “passionless” about him. The seer denoted whole “classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex,” Emerson acidly remarked. Swedenborg's vast writings were without poetry; they lacked tremulous emotions and lustrous landscapes. Insufficient in his self-reliance, not ultimately rising to the level of creative genius, Swedenborg remained all too subservient to the Bible and Christian symbolism. For Emerson, the great mystic remained at last the faithful son of a Lutheran bishop, while the Concord sage was charting (so he believed) a more independent course far freer of such baggage. Swedenborg's angels, Emerson sniffed at one point, were “all country-parsons” on “an evangelical picnic.” Differences aside, the larger Transcendentalist estimate of Swedenborg as mystical summit took the better measure of American fascinations with the seer. Whether for Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, or Henry James Sr., no one surpassed Swedenborg as the archetype of mysticism's new possibilities in mid-nineteenth-century America. He exemplified the potential for spiritual perception in everyday life and the renewed accessibility of angels.²⁶

      What mattered more than influences, even when as large and contradictory as Swedenborg's, were the distinct spiritual journeys that the growing love of mysticism made possible. Alcott and Emerson had numerous fellow travelers. Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), though not at the natal meeting for the new mysticism, joined enthusiastically in this dimension of the Transcendental Club's vision. Close to both Emerson and Alcott (she actually taught for a time with Alcott at the Temple School), Fuller served as editor of the movement's celebrated periodical, The Dial. Best known as a foundational thinker for the women's rights movement, she was also a self-confessed mystic. In October 1838, for example, she wrote a friend about a “heavenliest day of communion” in which “free to be alone” in “the meditative woods…all the films seemed to drop from my existence.” That evening, standing by herself outside a church and looking up at the crescent moon beyond the pointed spire, “a vision came upon my soul.” In that moment Fuller made clear the extra-ecclesial character of her intensifying experience: “May my life be a church, full of devout thoughts.” The real church was the inward life of solitary spiritual illumination, not the building, a relic of the external, whose very steeple pointed beyond itself.

      Margaret Fuller, a premier New England intellectual and a staunch advocate of women's rights, was also a self-avowed teacher of mysticism. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)

      Two years later Fuller was still immersed in these religious aspirations. She declared herself “more and more what they will call a mystic,” even announcing that she was ready now to preach “mysticism.” In her formidable work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller imagined such religious exaltation as an essential vehicle for the progress and elevation of women, a primal source of “spiritual dignity.” “Mysticism, which may be defined as the brooding soul of the world, cannot fail,” she insisted, “of its oracular promise as to Woman.” Fuller, like most of her compatriots, distanced mysticism from both its Catholic and its Enlightenment incarnations. It was neither an ancient form of Christian theology nor a predictable way of criticizing sectarian enthusiasm; instead, it was becoming part of an intuitive spiritual quest for originality, transcendence, and emancipation. For Fuller, laying claim to the democratic individuality at the heart of this romantic spirituality was especially important for women, so long defined in terms of their subordination to male relations. From Fuller's Transcendentalism through Annie Besant's Theosophy, “mysticism” and “spirituality,” twinned nineteenth-century constructs pitting individual autonomy against

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