Brewing up a storm
The Burned-Over District, a hotbed of new religious and spiritualist movements, was so much stranger than we thought
Here in the United States, we’re familiar with the areas that serve as our loci for bizarre and inexplicable events: Area 51, the Winchester Mystery House, Roswell and, increasingly, Congress. We thought we were familiar with the Burned-Over District, that part of central and western New York State that, beginning two decades before the Civil War, was a hotbed of raging religious fervour. (Its nickname came later, when an observer declared that the fiery evangelical movements had been so fierce that no spiritual fuel was left.)
The region served as cradle to new socio-religious movements including the Shakers, Millerism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons and modern spiritualism. But in Upstate Cauldron, Joscelyn Godwin reveals a landscape and a people whose philosophical horizons were broader, deeper and, well… goofier. Again and again, from 1776 to 1914, selfdeclared prophets on the edge of the American wilderness received tokens of their deliverance, and set out to create newer, truer New Testaments – or alternatively started from scratch with revelations delivered straight from ghosts, God, intellect or libido; ‘free sex’ – especially with the leaders – was a common theme. A few found hypnotism and ‘magnetism’ helpful, as well. It is fascinating that many founders so often found willing investors and enthusiastic followers while sometimes preaching both earthly utopia and Armageddon.
Upstate Cauldron is both academically solid and wildly entertaining. Much of its story has been told before, but in rare, separate documents. Besides being a dogged researcher, Godwin has the true fortean’s appreciation of what the believers thought were each invented religion’s ‘logic’, its rewards and nuances. Followers’ desires are shown to be universal; besides Theosophy, Godwin sometimes contrasts them with Platonism, Neo-Platanism and more. The author provides a sympathetic view while maintaining a delicately wry voice, and provides so much context that the BurnedOver District’s creation becomes not only explicable but inevitable.
It’s difficult for us today to appreciate early Americans’ mindset. As Godwin points out, “Those with the gumption to set out for virgin territory and carve a livelihood out of its natural riches were unbound by authority or creation [..] They were building a civilisation from the ground up, and along with that endeavour came a freedom in the construction of their mental worlds.” This wasn’t just a macho frontier myth that colonists and their descendents told themselves. “We heirs to the Enlightenment [..] can only imagine the terror of spending eternity in physical and mental agony, whether through deficiency of faith or through God’s all-powerful whim.” And what about loved ones? “Were they already roasting in hell?”
Many of the self-styled prophets will be unfamiliar even to American forteans. Jemima Wilkinson, ‘the Universal Friend’, believed herself reborn – literally; her corpse was reanimated by an hermaphroditic being, courtesy of visiting archangels. Handsome Lake, a Native American, was visited by Jesus. They compared notes, and Christ gave his work a thumbs-up. Long before Edgar Cayce, New York State seers were relating prophecy and other visions while asleep; those blessed with such talent sometimes damned the attention and sought medical help. Rachel Baker was apparently cured by dashes of cold water and doses of camphor. Also opium. Joseph Smith, Sr, had a seeing-stone (see page 8) that helped him translate lost languages and find buried treasures long before his son, Joseph, Jr, dug up, ‘hefted’ and read the golden plates that led to the creation of the Mormons. The Fox Sisters are only touched upon, but the founders of modern Spiritualism are placed within a sequence of wider social movements that included antislavery activism and the rising women’s suffrage movement.
These are only a few in the gallery of remarkable and remarkably charismatic characters given the spotlight by the suitably named author, Godwin. Upstate Cauldron is a charming account of a strange period in America’s past. Unfortunately, though its subjects sometimes appear whimsical, and even laughable, the book may also be viewed as cautionary. Many of the movements and their founding leaders had darker strains, and much of the Burned-Over District’s impetus is still with us, wearing different garments, still ignorant of the Enlightenment.
But most of all, this book is just plain fun. Godwin has the poet’s pen which, as Shakespeare observed, turns “the forms of things unknown” into “shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habituation and a name.”