Brother, the Good Work Has Begun

Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer”

The classic crime film The French Connection opens with Gene Hackman playing an undercover cop dressed as Santa Claus. After a foot chase, he tells a drug dealer, “I'm gonna nail you for pickin' your feet in Poughkeepsie.” I didn't get the meaning of this line when the movie came out in 1971. I still don't.

Nonetheless, I live quite close to Poughkeepsie, a down-at-the-heels Hudson River city that's the site of Vassar College. And, by an eerie coincidence, I grew up near a tiny town along the Erie Canal that was the home of the Fox sisters. Those young ladies, by skillfully cracking their toes and engineering strange phenomena under dim lighting, kicked off the nineteenth century fad of Spiritualism — communication with the dead.

The coincidence is that Poughkeepsie was the home base of Andrew Jackson Davis, known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” a major figure in the movement the Fox girls started. Born in 1826 to a poverty-stricken family in the nearby hinterlands, Davis received scant education and failed as a cobbler. At the age of 17, he developed an interest in hypnotism.

Davis found that while in a trance he could diagnose and heal disease. He teamed up with a hypnotist and opened a clinic in Poughkeepsie. He could read newspapers blindfolded. By staring into the human body with X-ray-like vision, he could identify the disorders of ailing organs.

In 1844, the Poughkeepsie Seer took off on a “psychic flight through space.” Landing in the Catskill Mountains, he communed with an ancient Greek physician and an eighteenth-century spiritual philosopher named Emanuel Swedenborg. A year later, still only nineteen, Davis switched from healing to writing. In 1847 he published a tome entitled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. The 800-page book, which he dictated in a trance, dealt with inhabitants of other planets, reincarnation, and communication with spirits.

Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox

Davis declared that just before the Fox sisters’ revelations exploded in 1848, a voice had told him, “Brother, the good work has begun!” He gave up on hypnotism, embraced the new movement, and was seen as the “John the Baptist of Modern Spiritualism.” His writings established the principles and much of the terminology of the discipline, which was seen as a remarkable breakthrough into a realm previously locked in mystery.

All of this fit with a great wave of optimism and spiritual ferment that surged through America in the middle of the 1800s. Besides promoting communication with the dead, Davis constructed a rich philosophy that envisioned six spheres of perfection through which humans could progress, arriving finally in “Summerland,” a version of paradise.

While these ideas have a fanciful ring, Davis, like other Spiritualists, insisted that they were not based on supernatural speculation but were the result of a deeper understanding of the natural world. He wished to purge the spiritual of elements of magic and superstition and to reveal the world as it really was.

Davis believed passionately in improving society, and he actively promoted progressive reforms. He urged his followers to work toward eliminating slavery, raising the status of women, educating children more effectively, and advancing science.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Spiritualism grew even more popular. So many families had lost loved ones that survivors turned eagerly to a “science” proclaiming that spirits lived on and that contact with them was possible. Even Abraham Lincoln, after losing two of his sons to illness, attended séances arranged by his bereaved wife. There are rumors that he consulted with the Andrew Jackson Davis in the White House.

In later decades, a split developed in the Spiritualist movement. Davis was put off by the hundreds of mediums practicing their trade, many of them preying on the loneliness and grief of those who had lost relatives. Spiritualist feats were displayed on the stages of music halls; photographs with images of hovering phantoms were sold to the unsophisticated.

The Seer of Poughkeepsie took a more philosophical view, denying that spirits could be “called up” on demand. He said believers would profit more from time “devoted to some needful friend, or spent with a wise book,” than by attending a séance.

Davis published more than thirty books on philosophy, health, and the afterlife. He went on to gain a degree in “eclectic” medicine, settled in Boston, and spent his later years as a physician specializing in herbal cures. When he died in 1910, at the age of eighty-three, the Boston Globe noted that “millions of Spiritualists in various countries almost worshipped him.”

The craft of the seer is a strange confluence of show-business and religion, belief and sorrow, profundity and verbal sleight of hand. It goes on even today, with noted psychics regularly performing their shticks on popular television shows. An observer doesn't know whether to laugh at the gullibility or to weep at the tragedy of it all. Such is the ache every one of us feels for loved ones who have died. Such is the mystery of human existence.

Gene Hackman, a genius of his own craft, is ninety-four now. I wonder if he’s figured it out.

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