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From Pat Deveney's database:
Light from the Spirit World.
Devoted to the Dissemination of Light on Spiritual Intercourse.
Thrice Armed Is He Who Has His Quarrel Just
1852--1853
Weekly
St. Louis, MO.
Language: English.
Editor: W.H. Mantz, proprietor; Peter Bland.
Publisher: W.H. Mantz, publisher and editor.
1/1, October 10, 1852, "and was continued about one year."
$2.00 a year, $1.25 a volume, 4 pp. The publisher's intention was to bind the journal and sell it in two volumes a year, as were the Shekinah and other journals. Publication was "guaranteed" for six months whether paid for by subscriptions or not. The advertisement in the Spiritual Telegraph of May 28, 1853, tells us that the spirits had "induced the friends of these wonderful phenomena" to publish a journal that "will be devoted to the dissemination and elucidation of the facts as they transpire in Circles of Spiritual Investigation, so far as authentic information of them may be obtained." The Prospectus for the journal promised that "[i]t is designed to be a reservoir, into which may flow, from all parts of the valley of the Mississippi, information touching Spiritual Manifestations, and thence be distributed in all directions. It will be devoted to the dissemination and elucidation of the facts as they transpire in Circles of Spiritual Investigations, so far as authentic information of them may be obtained." The scope of the journal was to be "Man, physical and spiritual--here and hereafter--as the great theme of this age" and thus it was to include developments in Psychology, Magnetism, Phrenology and kindred sciences. The original content of the journal was almost entirely written by Spirits, some from the "Members of the Sixth Circle" of Ambler, excerpts from whose Spirit Messenger were also included. The journal regularly noted other new spiritualist journals, often including their prospectuses, and included contributions by A.J. Davis ("On the Philosophy of producing and controlling the fall of Rain"), J.R. Buchanan, notes on the lectures of T.L. Harris, and poetry by Charles Mackay.
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| Claude-Generated Themes:
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Light from the Spirit World is a mid-nineteenth-century American spiritualist paper of the harmonial era, full of spirit communications, rappings and mediumship and tied to the New England and mid-Atlantic spiritualist circuit around figures like S. B. Brittan. What sets it apart from later spiritualist journals is that its mesmeric and phrenological content is real rather than incidental: it carries the Reichenbach odic force and animal-magnetism alongside genuine Fowler-and-Gall phrenology, embodying the phreno-magnetic-spiritualist synthesis of the 1850s. It belongs to the founding stratum of American spiritualism, before Theosophy and New Thought, where mediumship, mesmerism and the science of the cranial organs were still read as one continuous truth.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
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