Item #22634 Messages from the Superior State; Communicated by John Murray through John M. Spear, in the Summer of 1852. Containing Important Instruction to the Inhabitants of the Earth. Carefully Prepared for Publication, with a Sketch of the Author’s Earthly Life, and a Brief Description of the Spiritual Experience of the Medium. Spiritualism, S. C. Hewitt, Simon Crosby.
Messages from the Superior State; Communicated by John Murray through John M. Spear, in the Summer of 1852. Containing Important Instruction to the Inhabitants of the Earth. Carefully Prepared for Publication, with a Sketch of the Author’s Earthly Life, and a Brief Description of the Spiritual Experience of the Medium.
Messages from the Superior State; Communicated by John Murray through John M. Spear, in the Summer of 1852. Containing Important Instruction to the Inhabitants of the Earth. Carefully Prepared for Publication, with a Sketch of the Author’s Earthly Life, and a Brief Description of the Spiritual Experience of the Medium.
Messages from the Superior State; Communicated by John Murray through John M. Spear, in the Summer of 1852. Containing Important Instruction to the Inhabitants of the Earth. Carefully Prepared for Publication, with a Sketch of the Author’s Earthly Life, and a Brief Description of the Spiritual Experience of the Medium.

Messages from the Superior State; Communicated by John Murray through John M. Spear, in the Summer of 1852. Containing Important Instruction to the Inhabitants of the Earth. Carefully Prepared for Publication, with a Sketch of the Author’s Earthly Life, and a Brief Description of the Spiritual Experience of the Medium.

Boston: Bela Marsh, 25 Cornhill, 1852. First edition. 12mo (7.13 x 4.75 inches), original blind-stamped black cloth, gilt lettering, 167, [1] pages. Mezzotint frontis portrait of John Murray. Cloth chipped at the head of the spine, corners rubbed, cloth a trifle spotted; some foxing and offset from the frontispiece and title; a good to very good copy. Item #22634

The impetus for a curious chapter in American utopian thought and technology, Spiritualist messages from the founder of Universalism delivered through the mediumship of the Universalist abolitionist spirit medium John Murray Spear (1804-1887), then on the cusp of becoming leader of Kiantone, a free love utopian summer colony in Western New York. Spear is no doubt the star behind this account, though S. C. Hewitt (b. 1816), who often seems relegated to the shadow of Spear when it comes to breathless accounts of mid-century radical religious practice, was himself no mean seeker—Hewitt had himself started life as a textile mill mechanic and an early labor organizer in New England, and he soon became an abolitionist, a temperance man, a Fourierist (and Hopedale fellow traveler), Universalist clergyman, and subsequently an enthusiastic Spiritualist and editor of the New Era. Given Hewitt’s own experience as a mechanic, it seems little wonder he might have played a role assisting Spear in the construction of his famed mechanical-electrical God machine in Lynn, Mass., over the course of 1853 and 1854, this machine consisting of a series of divinely electrified plates of copper and zinc to charge as a divine battery under the spiritual guidance of Benjamin Franklin. Shades of a Joanna Southcott for the industrial age, the forces of the machine evidently impregnated “the Mary of the New Dispensation”—who may well have been spiritual medium Semantha Mettler—and this Spiritualist reportedly experienced labor pains in June, 1854 when, in the presence of the machine, she reportedly gave birth to an electrical spirit that was said to have infused the machine and subsequently launched a new spiritual age. The locals in Kiantone soon destroyed the battery after it was moved to New York.

Price: $2,000.00

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