1/1, August 26, 1865-April 22, 1905. Newspaper sized, 8 pp. With the issue of May 31, 1890 (called 1/1 n.s.), the page size was reduced.
The journal was started by Jones and an association of dozens of the leading spiritualists of the day and bought Moses Hull's Progressive Age, presumably for its subscription list.
The journal run until the latter part of 1866, when a revolution among the more radical shareholders of the Religio-Philosophical Association led to the ouster of the association's initial president, S.S. Jones. The faction that replaced Jones elected H.C. Child as its president and changed the name of the association to Central Publishing House. It stopped the Religio-Philosophical Journal at the end of 1866, and started the Spiritual Republic in its stead at the beginning of 1867. Jones's faction regained control of the group in August 1867, terminated the Spiritual Republic in September, and announced the re-appearance of the Religio-Philosophical Journal for January 1868.
After that, the journal was taken over by Jones in his own name until his murder in 1877, at which time Col. Bundy, S. S. Jones' son-in-law, became editor for the journal's golden age.
On Bundy's death in August 1892, his wife, Mary Elizabeth Jones Bundy (the daughter of S.S.
Jones, the founder of the journal) took over the editorship, handing it over in 1893 to the old freethinker B.F. Underwood (1839-1914), who was editing his own The New Time: A Magazine of Social Progress in Chicago at the same time. In 1895 Thomas Gabriel Newman (1833-1903) assumed the editorship and eventually ownership of the journal, renaming it The Philosophical Journal (April 13, 1895-June 20, 1898), and then The Religio-Philosophical Journal and Weekly Occult News (July 7, 1898-November 10, 1898), returning to The Religio-Philosophical Journal (November 17, 1898-July 14, 1900), and then ending with The Philosophical Journal (July 21, 1900-April 22, 1905). In 1895, Newman moved the journal to San Francisco, California,, where it became the official organ of the California State Spiritualist Association in 1898.
The Religio-Philosophical Journal was never as popular as its larger competitor, the Banner of Light, but it was far more representative of the progressive side of spiritualism and is a better source of information on the controversies that roiled the movement in the period. Its masthead was a graphic depiction of the progressive, free-religious views of Jones and Bundy, showing Harmonial Philosophy shedding its light on the Bible, Koran, Zend-Avesta and Shaster, surrounded by scenes of nineteenth-century progress (steamships, balloons, telescopes, factories, etc.). While the Banner of Light would only reluctantly notice the exposure of fraudulent and free-love mediums, and then usually in an effort to exonerate them, the journal under Col. Bundy believed in letting the chips fall where they might, and carried on vendettas with the more outrageous mediums of the period - and with H.P.
Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. Like the Banner of Light, practically everyone involved in spiritualism and reform in the last quarter of the nineteenth century wrote for or to the Religio-Philosophical journal. Complementary microfilms at NYPL and Newberry Library; LOC.
Also included in this collection are the 1865 circular announcing the formation of the Religio-Philosophical Publishing Association and the RPJ's appeal to subscribers (in V11 N5 Oct 9 1871) in the wake of the 1871 Chicago fire. Both of these items are made available through the generosity of the St. Charles History Museum in St. Charles, Illinois.
Substantial portions of this run of the RPJ were captured by an IAPSOP volunteer, who wishes to remain anonymous.
