|
Summary:
|
From Pat Deveney's journal database:
The Sacred Circle. Devoted to the Elucidation and Defense of the Spiritual Faith.
The Truth against the World
1854-1857? Monthly
New York, NY. Language: English.
Publisher: Partridge & Brittan, with the Misses S.A. and H. Hoyt, contributing and aiding in the publication; by December 1856 it is S.A. & H. Hoyt, Publishers.
Editor: Judge John W. Edmunds, George W. Dexter, and Owen G. Warren.
1/1, May 1854-1857(?) $2.00 a year, 25 cents a copy. Illustrated. U. Clark's Spiritualist Register for 1858 lists the journal as still existing at that time, and notes the "contributions of the Misses and Mr. Hoyt." The journal grew out of the spiritualist circle that began to meet in April 1853 at the New York home of George T. Dexter, a physician whose wife acted as medium. The "Sacred Circle," as it was known, included Judge John W. Edmonds, the Dexters, Owen G. Warren, and the mediums Elizabeth Sweet, Laura Keyes and her niece Jane. The communications of the seances were summarized by Edmonds and Dexter in Spiritualism (Partridge & Brittan, 1853 ) and the journal was begun to spread its teachings. For the history of the enterprise, see Emma Hardinge [Britten], Modern American Spiritualism, 100; Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Indiana University Press, 1997), 120-121. The notice for The Sacred Circle in the Spiritual Telegraph for December 6, 1856, reads: "The contents are: Spiritual Lectures; Dialogue between a Spiritualist and a Skeptic; The Spirit-hand, by Prof. Hare; Ruhama, an Indian Poem, by the spirit of Sir Walter Scott; Our Spirit Soiree; Reminiscenses of the Devil-written by Himself; Electe-A Tale, by the Author of 'Prairie Rambles,' etc.; Enthusiasm; Christmas Carol, by Spirits; Our Spirit Correspondents; Death of Mrs. Dexter." The Spiritual Telegraph 5/45 (March 7, 1857): 356, notes editorially in "Gospel of the Harmonies" that: "The Circle is now mainly conducted by Misses S.A. and H. Hoyt . . . . The names of Judge Edmunds and Mr. O.G. Warren still appear in the editorial relation. The fact is worthy of notice and of lasting remembrance that the young Ladies referred to, beside contributing a portion of its contents, actually set the type, print and bind the Magazine with their own hands. The knowledge of this fact alone ought to secure for them three thousand subscribers in one year." It exhorts the "golden butterflies of Fifth Avenue" to emulate them-or at least send $2.00 for a subscription. They did not, and the journal soon ceased to exist.
|
| Claude-Generated Themes:
|
The Sacred Circle was published in New York from 1854 to 1856 by a group including Judge John Worth Edmonds of the New York Supreme Court, whose public avowal of Spiritualism had been among the movement's most consequential conversions, and Samuel Byron Brittan. It belongs to the first generation, appearing while the Rochester rappings were still recent and the movement's central questions still open. Its pages are full of mediums, spirit controls, rappings and manifestations, but its characteristic register is argument rather than report: whether the intelligences that communicate are truly the returning human dead or something else assuming their form, whether the manifestations constitute a revelation and how they stand to previous ones, and — in its most technical vein — why physical phenomena occur more readily with some mediums than others, explained by the varying tension of a spirit force. Beneath that runs the mesmeric and odic substrate the movement grew from, with Karl von Reichenbach's od treated as continuous with spirit action. It is a clean specimen of Spiritualism's earliest and most philosophically anxious phase.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
|
