13. Romantic Satanism

Lunartiks 

In a note from 1800, Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “The true poetic aesthetic is Kabbalah.”[1] It was precisely during the years of the Haskalah and Wissenschaft des Judentums, according to Christoph Schulte, that Christian Romantics appropriated the Kabbalah. Their interest was in reaction to, as Hegel wrote, “the ‘religious’ aridity of the proponents of rationalism.” Their attraction,  as noted Schulte, “to the philosophy of nature, to magic, to myth and to pantheism, or even to cosmogony and theogony, all of this is attracted and inflamed by Kabbalah.”[2] As explained by the editors of Kabbala und die Literatur der Romantik (“Kabbalah and the literature of Romanticism”):

 

At the transition from the late Enlightenment to early Romanticism, a new interest in the Kabbalah arose: while knowledge of Jewish mysticism was still widespread even among enlightened Jews such as Mendelssohn or Salomon Maimon, elements of the Kabbalah now also fascinated Christian Romantic authors such as Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann.[3]

 

Die Serapionsbrüder was named after a circle of writers who met regularly to discuss the arts in the apartment in Berlin of E.T.A Hoffman (1776 – 1822)—a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. In addition to Hoffmann himself, this circle, called the Serapionsbrüder, after St. Seraphin of Montegranaro (1540 – 1604), included Adelbert von Chamisso, David Ferdinand Koreff, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Karl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and his future biographer, a neighbor and fellow jurist called Julius Eduard Hitzig (1780 – 1849), the grandson of Daniel Itzig. Dark Romanticism, which arguably began in Germany, with writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Fouqué, von Arnim and Chamisso, also developed in England with authors such as Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851), Lord Byron (1788 – 1824), and John William Polidori (1795 – 1821), who are frequently linked to Gothic fiction. Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin (1756 – 1836) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), were part of a circle of radical artists known as Romantic Satanists, around bookseller Joseph Johnson (1738 – 1809).

Along with Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731 – 1802), a Freemason, Johnson was a member of the Lunar Society, with Francis Galton’s grandfather, Samuel Galton Jr. (1753 - 1832). The Lunar Society included a number of men linked to Freemasonry. The society, or Lunartiks as they liked to call themselves, as they so named because the society would meet during the full moon, began with a group of friends that included Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. The nature of the Lunar Society changed significantly with the move to Birmingham in 1765 of the Scottish physician William Small, who had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he had taught and been a major influence over Thomas Jefferson. Small’s arrival with a letter of introduction to Matthew Boulton from Benjamin Franklin had a galvanizing effect on the circle, which then actively started to attract new members.[4] Franklin nominated Johnson as a Fellow of the Royal Society.[5]

Joseph Johnson, who helped shape the thought of his era, held discussions at his famous weekly dinners, whose regular attendees became known as the “Johnson Circle.” Johnson is best known for publishing the works of radical thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, Illuminatus Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), as well as religious dissenters such as Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804), a separatist theologian and chemist credited with the discovery of oxygen, and an ally of Thomas Paine, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.[6] French historian Le Forestier reports that an energetic attack was published in German in 1793 against the Illuminati in two anonymous factums which list Priestley and Paine as members of the order.[7]

The circle of radical artists around Johnson are known as Romantic Satanists, for their having the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a heroic figure who rebelled against “divinely ordained” authority.[8] They were inspired by Milton’s famous line were Satan declares, “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav’n.” This attitude was found in Johnson’s friend, artist Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825), who portrayed the fallen angel as a classical hero. Hanging above Johnson’s dinner guests, along with a portrait of Priestley, was Fuseli’s famous The Nightmare, depicting a woman swooning with a demonic incubus crouched on her chest. One of Fuseli’s schoolmates with whom he became close friends was Johann Kaspar Lavater, who had challenged Moses Mendelssohn to convert Christianity.[9]

Fuseli’s style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake (1757 – 1827), who was employed by Johnson. Blake frequented Swedenborg’s New Jerusalem Society, which was influenced by the Kabbalistic sexual practice of Count Zinzendorf. Johnson introduced Blake to the radical circle of Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Thomas Paine. William Godwin (1756 – 1836), who is regarded as one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the first modern proponent of philosophical anarchism. Godwin was married to Fuseli’s former lover, the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792, where she associated with the Girondins. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, a conservative British political periodical, concluded that “the moral sentiments and moral conduct of Mrs. Wollstonecraft [sic], resulting from their principles and theories, exemplify and illustrate JACOBIN MORALITY” and warns parents against rearing their children according to her advice.[10] Such accusations, explains Chandos Michael Brown, in a time of widespread suspicion of the subversive activities of the Jacobins, would have regarded Wollstonecraft as a female Illuminati.[11]

 

Dark Romanticism

The famous British poet Lord Byron was inducted into the quasi-Masonic secret society of the Carbonari and was actively involved in smuggling guns, planning battles, and commanding his own turba (small regiment) in 1821.[12] Earlier, Byron had left London and frequently visited de Staël in Coppet in 1815, where she headed the Coppet Circle. For Byron, de Staël was Europe’s greatest living writer, but “with her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of ink.”[13] In 1815, Byron published his Hebrew Melodies, a poem considered to is one of the first literary works of Jewish nationalism.[14] Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822), were also closely associated with Byron. Among Percy Shelley’s best-known works were The Rosicrucian, A Romance and Prometheus Unbound, equating the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost with Prometheus, the Greek mythological figure who defies the gods and gives fire to humanity. In 1816, at the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Mary, Percy and Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story, which resulted in Mary’s Frankenstein, inspired by the Kabbalistic legends of the golem. Polidori was an English writer and physician, known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story The Vampyre (1819), produced by the same writing contest, and the first published modern vampire story.

The children of Polidori’s sister Frances and Gabriele Rossetti (1783 – 1854), an Italian poet and a political exile, included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) and William Michael Rossetti (1829 – 1919), who were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English painters, poets, and critics, established in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelites were championed by John Ruskin (1819 – 1900), who was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era. Ruskin knew and respected Darwin personally. Ruskin referred to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) as his “master” to whom he acknowledged that he “owed more than to any other living writer.”[15] Carlyle, who was a leading writer of the Victorian era, strongly influenced nineteenth-century culture. He found initial success promoting German literature through his translations, and his Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825). Carlyle wrote German Romance (1827), a translation of German novellas by Johann Karl August Musäus, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Jean Paul. Ruskin’s gravestone at Coniston betrays his occult beliefs, featuring Celtic triskele symbols, a swastika within a Maltese Cross, and St. George slaying a dragon and a menorah.

Ruskin betrayed pedophile tendencies, showing an unusual interest in young girls.[16] Ruskin was also a close friend of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 – 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, who showed similar tendencies. The character of Alice was inspired by one of his many “child-friends,” Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell. Several biographers have suggested that Dodgson’s interest in children had an erotic element, including Morton N. Cohen in his Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995), Donald Thomas in his Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1995), and Michael Bakewell in his Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1996). Rumors of pedophilia long had been attached to Dodgson, who was, as Cohen notes, “the subject of whispers and wagging tongues.”[17]

Lewis Carroll’s mentor, George MacDonald (1824 – 1905), a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister, was also friends with John Ruskin and served as a go-between in Ruskin’s long courtship with Rose La Touche. Ruskin met La Touche in 1858 when she was only 10 years old and he was about to turn 39. Ruskin cherished La Touche as his “pet,” and ideal on whom he based Sesame and Lilies (1865).[18] MacDonald also wrote a fantasy novel entitled Lilith, first published in 1895, in which the protagonist Mr. Vane travels to a parallel universe the world through a mirror where he meets Lilith, Adam’s first wife and the princess of Bulika. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which developed around 1848,[108] were greatly influenced by Goethe’s work on the theme of Lilith. In 1863, Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began painting what would later be his first rendition of Lady Lilith.

Mary Shelley was on friendly terms with John Howard Payne (1791 – 1852), an American actor and poet who enjoyed nearly two decades of a theatrical career and success in London. Payne is today most remembered as the creator of “Home! Sweet Home!.” After his return to the United States in 1832, Payne spent time with the Cherokee Indians in the Southeast and published a theory that suggested their origin as one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Payne’s belief was shared by other figures of the early American period, including Benjamin Franklin.[19] Payne had become infatuated with Shelley, but lost interest when he realized she hoped only to use him to attract the attention of his friend, American short-story writer Washington Irving (1783 – 1859).[20] Irving was one of the first American writers to earn fame in Europe, and thus encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by number of British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Francis Jeffrey and Walter Scott, who became a lifelong personal friend.

 

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was closely related to Unitarianism, a religious movement in Boston in the early nineteenth century.[21] Unitarianism rejects the trinity and asserts that Jesus Christ was inspired by God but he is not equal to God himself. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Unitarians in Britain often faced significant political persecution, including John Biddle (1615 – 1662), “the Father of English Unitarianism,”[22] and Mary Wollstonecraft and Theophilus Lindsey (1723 – 1808). The movement gained popularity in England in the wake of the Enlightenment and began to become a formal denomination in 1774 when Theophilus Lindsey organized meetings with Joseph Priestley, founding the first avowedly Unitarian congregation in the country.[23] Although Johnson is known for publishing Unitarian works, he also published the works of other Dissenters, Anglicans, and Jews. The controversial nature of Priestley’s publications, combined with his outspoken support of the French Revolution, aroused public and governmental suspicion. He was eventually forced to flee in 1791, first to London and then to the United States, after a mob burned down his Birmingham home and church. Priestley lived in Philadelphia where gave a series of sermons which led to the founding of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. He exchanged letters regarding the proper structure of a university with Thomas Jefferson, who used this advice when founding the University of Virginia.

Beginning in England and America in the 1830s and manifesting itself primarily in Transcendentalist Unitarianism, which emerged from the German liberal theology associated primarily with Friedrich Schleiermacher, the view that that Christ was a mere man increased in popularity.[24] Transcendentalism emerged from “English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of Hume,” and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism.[25] Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism.[26] Notable examples are James Martineau, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge. Famous American Unitarian William Ellery Channing was a believer in the virgin birth until later in his life, after he had begun his association with the Transcendentalists.

Transcendentalism became a coherent movement with the founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1836, by prominent New England intellectuals, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882). In 1926, Emerson went farther south to St. Augustine, Florida, where he met and befriended Achille Murat (1801 – 1847), the eldest son of Joachim Murat, Grand Master of the Order of Saint Joachim, and the brother-in-law of Napoleon, who was appointed King of Naples during the First French Empire.[27] Emerson toured Europe in 1833, spending several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873), who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. Moving north to England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Carlyle, who became a strong influence on him. Emerson would later serve as an unofficial literary agent in the United States for Carlyle, and in March 1835, he tried to persuade him to come to America to lecture. The two maintained a correspondence until Carlyle’s death in 1881.[28] Another important influence on Emerson was Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, a compendium of the German philosophy and literary theory of the time, influenced greatly by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. The notion that nature expresses the One, and that the purpose of poetry is to express that One, is found in de Staël, as well as in the poetry of Wordsworth.[29]

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, “Nature,” which was heavily influenced by Swedenborg’s theory of “correspondences” and the idea that all individual souls were part of a world soul.[30] Afterwards, Emerson was invited to deliver his “ground-breaking” speech to Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard College, entitled “The American Scholar,” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809 – 1894) considered to be America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”[31] The first essay in Representative Men, a collection of seven lectures by Emerson, a book of essays published in 1850, he discusses the role played by "great men" in society, and the remaining six each extol the virtues of one of six men deemed by Emerson to be great:   Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe.

In 1837, Emerson had invited Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810 – 1850), ) an American journalist and women’s rights advocate, to join the Transcendental Club.[32] Fuller, who would become an important figure in Transcendentalism, was also influenced by the work of Swedenborg.[33] Fuller consciously adopted Madame Germaine de Staël as her role model.[34] In addition to Emerson, Fuller was also an inspiration to Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892), considered one of America’s most influential poets. Whitman’s work was very controversial even in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. Oscar Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882 and wrote that there was “no doubt” about Whitman’s sexual orientation: “I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,” he boasted.[35] While in America, George MacDonald was befriended by Whitman.[36]

Emerson was a friend of another leading Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), best known for his book Walden (1854), about the author’s experimentation with simple living and self-reliance, and his essay “Civil Disobedience,” argues that individuals should prioritize their conscience over compliance with unjust laws. The essay was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government in an 1849 anthology by Elizabeth Peabody (1804 –1894) called Æsthetic Papers. Peabody, who also belonged to the Transcendental Club, was a member of one of the upper-class families known as the Boston Brahmins. Elizabeth opened Elizabeth Palmer Peabodys West Street Bookstore, at her home in Boston, where Fuller would hold her “conversations,” and published books from Hawthorne and others in addition to the periodicals The Dial and Æsthetic Papers. Elizabeth had a particular interest in the educational methods of Friedrich Fröbel, particularly after meeting one of his students, Carl Schurz’s Jewish wife Margarethe, in 1859.[37]

A major spokesperson for New England Transcendentalism was Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), an American Congregationalist clergyman, first minister of the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims.[38] Under Beecher’s leadership, the church became the foremost center of anti-slavery sentiment in the mid-nineteenth century.[39] In addition to Lincoln and Mark Twain, many other famous writers and activists spoke at Plymouth, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, John Greenleaf Whittier, Clara Barton, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and William Thackery.[40] Henry was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 – 1896), best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., such that, when Lincoln met with Stowe, he was supposed to have said to her, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”[41]

 

Sleepy Hollow

The Transcendental Club also included Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804 –1894), the sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864), a friend of Fuller.[42] Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, where his ancestors included John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Much of Hawthorne’s fiction, such as The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Salem. In 1851, Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables, a Gothic novel whose setting was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, belonging to Hawthorne’s cousin Susanna Ingersoll, and by his ancestors who played a part in the Salem Witch Trials. In Young Goodman Brown, the main character is led through a forest at night by the Devil, appearing as man who carries a black serpent-shaped staff. Goodman is led to a coven where the townspeople of Salem are assembled, including those who had a reputation for Christian piety, in-mixed with criminals and others of lesser reputations, as well as Indian priests.

Hawthorne became a friend and admirer of Washington Irving.[43] Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent also included the short stories for which he is best known, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), which was especially popular during Halloween because of a character known as the Headless Horseman believed to be a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle. In 1824, Irving published the collection of essays Tales of a Traveller, including the short story “The Devil and Tom Walker,” a story very similar to the German legend of Faust. The story first recounts the legend of the pirate William Kidd, who is rumored to have buried a large treasure in a forest in colonial Massachusetts. Kidd made a deal with the devil, referred to as “Old Scratch” and “the Black Man” in the story, to protect his money.

Irving was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York, while his story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was set in the adjacent burying ground of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow. Also buried there were Forty-Eighter Carl Schurz, Andrew Carnegie, members of the Astor and Rockefeller families, Samuel Gompers, and Paul Warburg. Like Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody and Thoreau, Hawthorne and his wife were buried in the similarly named Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

 

 


[1] Detlef Kremer. “Kabbalistische Signaturen. Sprachmagie als Brennpunkt romantischer Imagination bei E. T. A. Hoffmann und Achim von Arnim,” in Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope, ed. E. Goodman-Thau and G. Mattenklott (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 201.

[2] Goethe. Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Hamburger Ausgabe, t. IX, éd. par E. Trunz, (Hambourg, 1961), 350-353; cited in Christoph Schulte. “Les formes de réception de la kabbale dans le romantisme allemand.” Renue Germanique Internationale, 5 (1996). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.4000/rgi.547

[3] E. Goodman-Thau & G. Mattenklott (ed.). Kabbalah und die Literatur der Romantik: Zwischen Magie und Trope (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. vii.

[4] Robert E. Schofield. “The Lunar Society of Birmingham; A Bicentenary Appraisal.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 21: 2 (December 1966), pp. 146–147.

[5] Robert E. Schofield. The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of his Life and Work from 1733 to 1773 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 143–44

[6] Craig Nelson. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (Penguin, 2007), p. 166.

[7] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 650.

[8] Per Faxneld & Jesper Aa. Petersen. The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 42.

[9] “Fuseli, Henry.” In Hugh Chisholm (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911).

[10] Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (July, 1798), 98–9.

[11] C.M.  Brown.  “Mary  Wollstonecraft,  or  the  Female  Illuminati:  The  Campaignagainst Women and “Modern Philosophy” in the Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic, 15 (1995), pp. 395.

[12] “Byron and the Carbonari.” The Byron Society (November 4, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.thebyronsociety.com/byron-and-the-carbonari/

[13] Joanne Wilkes. Lord Byron and Madame de Stäel: Born for Opposition (London: Ashgate, 1999).

[14] Thomas L. Ashton. Byron’s Hebrew melodies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

[15] E. T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn (eds.). The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. (George Allen, 1903–12), pp. 17, lxx.

[16]  Van Akin Burd. “Ruskin on his sexuality: a lost source.” Philological Quarterly, (Fall, 2007).

[17] Cited in Julia Keller. “Is the Innocence of ‘Alice’ Forever Lost?” Chicago Tribune (February 28, 1999).

[18] John Ruskin. “Introduction.” In: Cook, Wedderburn & Ogilvy (eds.). The works of John Ruskin, Vol. 35 (London: George Allen; New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), pp. lxvi–lxvii.

[19] Steven Conn. History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp.14, 123-124.

[20] See Sanborn, F.B. (ed.) The Romance of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1907).

[21] Ian Frederick Finseth. “The Emergence of Transcendentalism.” “Liquid Fire Within Me”: Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and early Evangelicalism, 1820-1860 (M.A. Thesis in English, University of Virginia, August 1995). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20230725092037/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA95/finseth/thesis.html

[22] Christopher Hill. Milton and the English Revolution (New York : Penguin Books), p. 290.

[23] Robert E. Schofield. The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 (Penn State Press, 2010), p. 26.

[24] Philip F. Gura. American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007),  pp. 7–8.

[25] Russell Goodman. “Transcendentalism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/

[26] Perry Miller (ed.). The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 49; Arthur Versluis. The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 17.

[27] Peter S. Field. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

[28] Barbara L. Packer. The Transcendentalists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), p. 40.

[29] Bryan Hileman. “Transcendental Roots: Emerson and Madame DeStael.” American Transcendental Web. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20140811042620/http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/roots/rwe-destael.html

[30] Sarah M. Pike. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America, Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

[31] Robert D. Jr. Richardson. Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 263.

[32] Ibid., p. 266.

[33] Philip F. Gura. American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), p. 172.

[34] Joel Porte. In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23.

[35] Neil McKenna. The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. (Century, 2003) p. 33.

[36] Rolland Hein & Frederick Buechner. George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014), p. XVII.

[37] “Kindergartens: A History (1886).” Social Welfare History Project (July 15, 2015). Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/education/kindergartens-a-history-1886/

[38] Daniel Ross Chandler. “Henry Ward Beecher: A Nation's Tribune.” Education Resources Information Center. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED236713

[39] “Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims.” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20080223170510/https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/ny6.htm

[40] Susanne Hand & Constance Grieff. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims.” (December 20, 1984).

[41] Charles Edward Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911).

[42] Anthony Splendora. “Psyche and Hester, or Apotheosis and Epitome: Natural Grace, La Sagesse Naturale.” The Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 5: 3 (2014), pp, 2, 5, 18.

[43] Brian Jay Jones. Washington Irving: The Definitive Biography of America's First Bestselling Author (Arcade, 2011).

Divide & Conquer