Occult Science Library Magazine.
Other titles: Occult Science Library
1896—1900 Monthly
Chicago, IL. Publisher: E. Loomis & Co.. Editor: Ernest Yates Loomis. Succeeded by: Heart-Culture
1/1, October 1896-7/5, January 1900(?) 24 pp., $1.50 a year.

The journal announced itself as a "publication which deals with the powers latent in man and shows ways to bring them into manifestation in all business and art." Loomis (1863-1929) called his version of New Thought "Vibraology," which he defined as "a philosophy of life and of force, or a science which explains the cause of life and every essential law of force pertaining to life, growth, happiness, pain, disease, death, and existence beyond this life." Fundamental to this philosophy was the affirmation that "'Thoughts are things,' and your body seems to be a solid, but in reality is only a rate of vibration, a mode of motion." Vibration, in turn, could be controlled and directed and directed by the mind. "Thought is a very high rate of vibration which is capable of dissolving or changing all lower rates. Every solid in the universe being only a rate of vibration is ready to become fluid to any higher vibration. Your body . . . is easily ready to become one complete little ocean of harmony, if properly acted upon by your thought vibrations. A little knowledge of Occult Science will show you how to so act upon it." (So convinced was Loomis of his vibratory theory and his ability to control it that in 1898 he publicly defended John Ernst Worrel Keely's "Motor" and offered to prove its worth scientifically, though, in the event, he seems not to have done so.) Loomis envisioned his ideas as a coherent, interconnected whole: "Why is it that 'The Power of Co-operative Thought to Produce Results in All Business and Art,' is so dependent on the occult principle that 'Love is Power;' that, by studying 'Woman's Occult Forces,' you learn 'How to Rule Your Kingdom;' that, by observing certain 'Useful Occult Practices,' which are given in this publication, you get in harmony with 'The Esoteric Laws of Happiness,' and, thus, obtain 'Occult Helps' which it would be difficult to gain in any other way?" Loomis began (and ended) his life in the real-estate business, and before turning to New Thought he, among other things, run a fraudulent book-buying business in which avid readers for a $10.00 fee were promised that they could buy books at wholesale prices for a period. When he was arrested for his role in the scheme he decamped for Chicago where for a time he graced the pages of The Progressive Thinker with his "astral predictions" and his claims to diagnose disease from a lock of the sick person's hair before starting this journal. The journal functioned as an extended advertisement for Loomis's Home Silent Thought Brotherhood that taught the practical side of development, and for its companion "Free Correspondence Lessons"—free, that is, after paying $21.00, $17.00 of which was for the books needed and the rest for character delineations and the like—which led neophytes through the seven lower degrees of Loomis's H.S.T. Brotherhood. The final five "esoteric degrees" of the H.S.T. Brotherhood required the compete devotion of one's life to the service of mankind and their price was, presumably, extra and negotiable. Loomis lectured weekly in Chicago on his ideas (attendance 50 cents), offered private lessons ($1.00), and republished individual issues of his journal as pamphlets and compiled them in volumes of lessons. Loomis wrote most of the content of the journal himself (except the initial offering on "Powers of Silent Thought," said to have been written by "Simoolye," and for the testimonial letters from delighted students) and devoted each issue to a separate theme: "Power of Thought," "Love is Power," "Woman's Occult Forces," "Esoteric Laws of Happiness," Marriage," "Occultism in a Nutshell," "Methods of Using Occult Powers," etc. Most of these were professedly "practical" in their approach (which ran Loomis afoul of the Theosophical Society at the time), but it is impossible now to tell what that practice might have consisted of beyond elevated sentiments and words. His lessons professed to teach how to kindle the fires under the "boiler of thought"; he wrote of "regeneration," "sex magnetism," "Occult Science Cure," "Woman's Occult Forces," but in the final analysis what Loomis was offering seems to have been some form of sexual abstinence: "Sex wastes [are] like tapping blood vessels for pleasure." Or was that all? He also offered promising lessons on "Where and how to increase" the sex energy and on how to awaken the Love Principle," but these have not survived. Perhaps this unknown sexual practice is related to the story that the New Thought preacher and poet Anita Trueman Pickett chose Loomis to be the father of her child. (He refused.) The journal contained extensive advertisements (probably exchanges) for most of the other practical New Thought journals of the era. In the summer of 1900 Loomis moved to New York where he guised his teachings (or rather his publishing venture) as The Inwood School of Philosophy, and when this petered out he returned to real estate and reinvented himself in the 1920s as a scientific phrenologist and the president of the American Institute of Phrenology. Coincident with his departure some of his disciples published Heart-Culture in Chicago to continue his teachings. Loomis's also published an edition of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic which he had bought from Willis F. Whitehead, and of William A. Redding's Mysteries Unveiled and Our Near Future (an excursion through the "ages" set out in the Bible, culminating in Redding's version of the House of David and the imminent coming of the millennium). Harvard University; National Library of Israel; LOC microfilm.

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