(July 28, 2025) With the rise of equality coming out of the Enlightenment the history of the common people also started to gain attention. Prior to this, histories and historians were only concerned with presenting a narrative history of church and state which kept official records. These new common people historians came to be called antiquarians. Anything old was of value and together they eventually, maybe be used to write some history. This also led to their ridicule as this collecting was thought by some to be a useless waste of time.
The first antiquarian society called the College (or Society) of Antiquaries was founded in London in around 1586 to debate matters of antiquarian interest. It's papers and collections, known as the Cotton's collection after member Sir Robert Cotton, became one of the founding set of artifacts for the British Museum. It was disbanded in 1604 by King James I for becoming a center of resistance against him. It was reformed in 1717 and even received a charter from King George II in 1751.
I will quote an expert in Baltic and Slavic studies, Francis Young who referred to a book chapter by Gajda now out of print in English:
(July 28, 2025) The Romanticizing of the Pagan past led to various national/cultural revival attempts based upon assuming a people's mostly lost Pagan past represented the original genius of a people. This nationalist and racial appropriation of historical Paganism with its attendant frauds has sputtered off and on to the present day
Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg (March 10, 1747 – December 18, 1826) was a Welsh antiquarian and poet who was overly creative in writing his history of Wales. He was seen as an expert collector of Medieval Welsh literature, but it emerged after his death that he had forged several manuscripts, notably some of the Third Series of Welsh Triads. Even so, he had a lasting impact on Welsh culture, notably in founding the secret society known as the Gorsedd, through which Iolo Morganwg successfully co-opted the 18th-century Bardic Eisteddfod revival.
His main concern was not with writing an accurate history but with creating a nationalist cultural revival. When history was lacking he created new cultural icons.
Iolo's philosophy represented a fusion of Christian and Arthurian influences, a romanticism comparable to that of William Blake and the Scottish poet and forger James MacPherson, the revived antiquarian enthusiasm for all things "Celtic", and such elements of bardic heritage as had genuinely survived among Welsh-language poets. Part of his aim was to assert the Welshness of South Wales, particularly his home region of Glamorgan, against the prevalent idea that North Wales represented the purest survival of Welsh traditions. The metaphysics elucidated in his forgeries and other works proposed a theory of concentric "rings of existence", proceeding outward from Annwn (the Otherworld) through Abred and Ceugant to Gwynfyd (purity or Heaven).
Iolo Morganwg developed his own runic system based on an ancient druid alphabet system, in Welsh Coelbren y Beirdd ("the Bardic Alphabet"). It was said to be the alphabetic system of the ancient druids. It consisted of 20 main letters, and 20 others "to represent elongated vowels and mutations."[9] These symbols were to be represented in a wooden frame, known as peithynen.
Ronald Hutton made this analysis of the British romantic era poets and notices the addition of nature themes starting around 1830. (p 33):
The impact on English letters is spectacularly clear. …. Between 1800 and 1940 Venus (or Aphrodite) retains her numerical superiority in appearance, with Diana (or Artemis) coming second. Juno, however, almost vanishes, and so does Minerva after 1830. The third place is now taken by Proserpine, as goddess of the changing seasons or of the dead, and the fourth by Ceres or Demeter, lady of the harvest. A reading of the texts listed discloses a much more striking alternative. Venus now appears not merely as patroness of love but related to the woodland or the sea. Diana is no longer primarily a symbol of chastity or of hunting, but of the moon, the greenwood, and wild animals. Furthermore, when a goddess is made the major figure in a poem, instead of the subject of an incidental reference, the supremacy of Venus is overturned. Diana now leads, or else a generalized female deity of moonlight or the natural world, most commonly called ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘Mother Nature.’(July 6, 2022, updated January 26, 2025) The romantic poets made the spiritual/emotional responses to nature respectable again. Prior to this time the only proper spiritual expression was within church defined mental frameworks. This is why the rituals of Freemasons are emotionless and based upon recitations of memorized passages.
The romantic movement began in Germany (perhaps inspired by the French and American revolutions) with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) who was a poet, playwright, philosopher, and historian. His adolescence under the abusive rule of a petty tyrant caused Schiller to address such abuses in most of his plays and early poems. His first play, Die Räuber, was a stirring protest against stifling convention and corruption in high places and this got him arrested. Its first performance (Jan. 13, 1782) at the National Theatre at Mannheim created a sensation; it was a milestone in the history of the German theatre. Schiller travelled to Mannheim without the Duke’s permission in order to be present on the first night. When the Duke heard of this visit, he sentenced the poet to a fortnight’s detention and forbade him to write any more plays. He managed to escape to a neighboring barony to avoid arrest.
“The idea of freedom,” Goethe said, “assumed a different form as Schiller advanced in his own development and became a different man. In his youth it was physical freedom that preoccupied him and found its way into his works; in later life it was spiritual freedom.” Schiller’s early tragedies are attacks upon political oppression and the tyranny of social convention; his later plays are concerned with the inward freedom of the soul. Schiller believed an “aesthetic education” of the individual citizen, made a happier, more humane social order.
The freedom of the soul romanticism reached Britain about 1800 and reached the United States about 40 years later. The British romantic movement was shepherded by Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) who was an editor some of the most influential journals of poetry of the era. He looked to Italy for a “freer spirit of versification” and translated a great deal of Italian poetry, and in The Story of Rimini (1816), published in the year of his meeting with Keats, he reintroduced a freedom of movement in English couplet verse lost in the 18th century. From him Keats became acquainted with Italian poetry. Much of Hunt’s best verse was published in Foliage (1818) and Hero and Leander, and Bacchus and Ariadne (1819). That he was serious about these new nature ideas is shown by this quote from one of his letters to a friend apparently around Christmas:
In 1808 Leigh Hunt and his brother John had launched the weekly Examiner, which advocated abolition of the slave trade, Catholic emancipation, and reform of Parliament and the criminal law. For their attacks on the unpopular prince regent, the brothers were imprisoned in 1813. Leigh Hunt, who continued to write The Examiner in prison, was regarded as a martyr in the cause of liberty. After his release (1815) he moved to Hampstead, home of Keats, whom he introduced in 1817 to Shelley, a friend since 1811.
The British Romantic era poets are represented by William Blake (1757- 1827), John Keats (1795-1821), Lord Byron (1788–1824), and Percy Shelley (1792–1822). In the U.S. the movement was represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and Walt Whitman (1819–1892). They all saw Nature as a source emotional/spiritual strength and insight. For example:
To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.(William Blake in Auguries of Innocence )The word “pagan” started to become something more than a derogatory insult as shown in this passage about the poet Walt Whitman made by William James in his lecture “The Varieties of Religious Experiences” written in 1901. (James, 1987):
Whitman is often spoken of as a ‘pagan.’ The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show. (James then goes on to quote Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” as follows:)References
(July 6, 2022) The revival of the emotional magic began with the discovery of two of its components, the placebo effect and perceptual confirmation bias (we perceive what we want to perceive) by Anton Mesmer (1734 - 1815) of Vienna, Austria. He was granted a doctor of medicine from the University of Vienna at age 33 after studying theology and philosophy.
Mesmer’s doctoral dissertation proposed that the gravitational attraction of the planets affected human health by influencing an invisible fluid found in the human body and throughout nature. In 1775 Mesmer revised his theory of “animal gravitation” to one of “animal magnetism,” wherein the invisible fluid in the body acted according to the laws of magnetism. This meant magnets could be used to redistribute certain body fluids and and so restore people's health by bringing them into balance.
Many clients reported amazing recoveries after his magnetic treatments but the results were inconsistent. Accused by Viennese physicians of fraud, Mesmer left Austria and settled in Paris in 1778. There he continued to enjoy a highly lucrative practice but again attracted the antagonism of the medical profession because of inconsistent results.
Later investigations of his successes led to the discovery of the placebo effect and confirmation bias (that is, we perceive what we want to perceive). Mesmer also seems to have been the discoverer of hypnotism which was called Mesmerism until about 1840.
(July 6, 2022) The means in which physical matter can interact with the realm of consciousness (the spirit realm) and vice-versa turns out to be quite limited. No where was this shown more conclusively than in the failure of Spiritism to communicate via words with dead spirits. This invalidates word based prayers and only leaves the possibility of interaction via more indirect means like feelings, visions, and perceptual biases (emotional magic).
In 1857 "The Spirits Book" was published by Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail of France under the codename Allan Kardec. He combined the animal magnetism of Anton Mesmer with the new eastern ideas emerging out of western contact with India. He coined the term "Spiritism." Its two main points were:
The possibility that dead relatives could be contacted during a ritual caused Spiritism to become popular during the mid to late 1800's. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, was a big fan after the loss of her child, William, in 1862.
Spiritism was eventually discredited as people realized that most of these effects were due to fraud or human self-delusion. The great escape artist and magician Harry Houdini even gave his wife a secret code that he would use if he died before her in order to test the possibility of communicating with the dead. He died and she never received that code despite constantly trying to reach him via seances.
(July 6, 2022) Today most people view the realms of consciousness and matter as co-equal each having their own purpose in the scheme of existence. In contrast materialists view matter as the only realm which exists or, at least, is superior to the conscious spiritual realm. In contrast Monists think only spirit realm exists while Transcendentalists simply think the spirit realm is superior. Transcendentalism was an important stage on the way to the equality of matter and spirit.
In the United States the romantic era poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) took Mesmerism in a different direction when he started the movement known as transcendentalism in 1863 with his anonymous publication of an essay entitled Nature.
His father was a Unitarian minister and Emerson was a Harvard trained minister who left Christianity after sensing that Jesus’ teaching about developing heaven on earth was contradictory to the apocalyptic dogmas of Christianity. In Emerson’s view, the kingdom of God (more properly translated as "Divine space" ) could only be manifested on earth if everyone emotionally and spiritually connected with the Divine realm. Emerson was ahead of his time in that he had actually discerned the real teachings of Jesus and linked them with a nature tradition before any objective way existed to do so. Emerson said this in his essay:
The problem of restoring to the world its original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul... The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. (Nature, chapter 8)God, according to Emerson, was a cosmic consciousness network, an interconnection of spirits (Logos) which existed prior to physical humanity. Emerson knew his classical Greek! Out of this eternal spiritual network came the universe:
Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions eternized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. (Nature, chapter 8)The various examples of spiritual power represent the remaining power of spirit over matter, that is the power of magic:
Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, — occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force, — with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. (Nature, chapter 8)References
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1836) Nature
