20.9: The Poughkeepsie Seer

A few years before the middle of the nineteenth century in Poughkeepsie, New York, a seventeen-year-old boy sat down, closed his eyes, and dictated a book that detailed the formation of the cosmos more than a century before NASA would send out its rovers, laid out a theory of the transmutation of species several years before Darwin would publish his theory of evolution, and advanced a strong and sometimes dismissive criticism of Christianity at a time when Protestantism was a dominant cultural force in America. The book was The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice for Mankind and the young man was Andrew Jackson Davis. Today on Occult Confessions, the mesmeric subject who inspired Edgar Allan Poe and predicted the advent of modern spirit communication, the Poughkeepsie Seer Andrew Jackson Davis.