In the year 1845, in the town of Poughkeepsie in the state of New York, a young man named Andrew Jackson Davis began to see things others could not see.
He was twenty years old. He had little education — his family was poor, and he had worked from childhood as a farm laborer, then as a cobbler's apprentice. He knew almost nothing of philosophy, theology, or science.
Yet when mesmerists put him into trance, he spoke with the authority of a sage. He described the structure of the universe, the history of humanity, the nature of life after death. He dictated, in a single sitting of many hours, a work called "The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind."
Those who heard him were astonished. How could this uneducated boy speak with such knowledge? Davis himself did not know. He said only that in the trance state, he had access to what he called the "Superior Condition" — a state of consciousness in which all knowledge was available.
"I did not study to learn these things," he wrote afterward. "They were shown to me. I was taken up — I cannot say in the body or out of the body — and I saw what I saw. I can only report what I was given."
He spoke of the universe as a great organism, alive in every part. He spoke of death as transformation, not ending. He spoke of spirits who continued after bodily death and could communicate with the living.
The Beginning
This was the beginning of what would become the Spiritualist movement. But Andrew Jackson Davis was not interested in séances and spectacle. He was interested in the underlying truth: that consciousness continues, that the dead are not lost, that the universe is suffused with intelligence and love.