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Medium, channel, and one of the founders of modern Spiritualism. He was born August 11, 1826, at Blooming Grove, Orange County, New York. Young Davis had gifts of clairvoyance and heard voices at an early age. On advice so obtained he pursuaded his father in 1838 to move to Poughkeepsie, New York Seer and Clairvoyant of the 19th Century, was be able to enter into a higher sphere of consciousness and obtain higher spiritual and physical knowledge. He could, by entering this state, obtain future information about the sciences, including astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine, and psychology. Many of his scientific predictions have only recently come true. Unlike other prophets, Davis was very specific in his predictions and his accuracy is much higher than any other known seer or prophet. Davis could actually see and observe the death process and the way in which the spirit leaves the body and forms a new spiritual being. He even describes the hereafter in detail, which he was able to enter at will.
In 1844 Davis had a strange experience that was to have an enduring effect on his life. In a state of semitrance he wandered away from home and awoke the next morning 40 miles away in the mountains. There he claimed to have met two venerable men - whom he later identified as the ancient physician Galen and the Swedish seer Emanuel Swedenborg - and experienced a state of mental illumination. He began teaching and published a small pamphlet, Lectures on Clairmativeness, about the mysteries of human magnetism and electricity. He did not include this pamphlet among his later works but explained in his Autobiography that the title was meant to be Clairlativeness.
The statements concerning astronomy in the divine revelations section of The Principles of Nature are revealing. In March 1846, when the existence of an eighth planet was yet an astronomical supposition (the discovery of Neptune, verifying Leverrier's calculations, did not take place until September 1846), the book spoke of nine planets. The density of the eighth planet as given by Davis agreed with later findings. (The ninth planet, Pluto, was discovered in 1933.) On the other hand, Davis spoke of four planetoids--Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta--whereas there are now believed to be hundreds. He also said that the solar system revolves around a great center together with all the other stars. Davis further believed Saturn to be inhabited by a more advanced humanity than ours, Jupiter and Mars were also inhabited, and on Venus and Mercury the development of humanity was less advanced than on Earth. The three outer planets he declared lifeless.
Andrew Jackson Davis prediction of the coming of Spiritualism was often quoted:
"It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres - and this, too, when the person in the body is unconscious of the influx, and hence cannot be convinced of the fact; and this truth will here long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And the world will hail with delight the ushering - in that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established such as is now being enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn."
Davis's teachings left a deep impression on his age. The Great Harmonia passed through 40 editions. His autobiography The Magic Staff extended only to the year 1857, but was later supplemented with a sequel, Beyond the Valley (1885). In 1860 he started the Herald of Progress, a weekly that absorbed the Spiritual Telegraph. In the late years of his life he had a small bookshop in Boston. There he sold books and, having earned a degree in natural medicine, prescribed herbal remedies for his patients.
Davis died January 13, 1910. He was an important influence in the early development of Spiritualism, particularly in his association of mediumistic revelations with religious principles. His concepts of after-death spheres for departed spirits, which he named "Summerland,'' are still part of the beliefs of many modern Spiritualists. He influenced most subsequent Spiritualist movements, including those of Thomas Lake Harris. It even seems possible that Edgar Allan Poe's "Eureka'' owes its inception to Davis's Principles of Nature. |
