3rd Phase Renaissance - Romantic Era 1700-1870

Spirituality is all about emotional connections to the divine and others.

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.’

Where did Modern Paganism start? - Ronald Hutton

The development of the Pagan idea in Europe by Ronald Hutton. Unfortunately, developments from the United States are ignored, including Helena Blavatsky's start in the U.S.

Emotional Resonances with Nature and Associated Freedoms Revived with the Romantic Poets (1800 -1830)

(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:

"I hope you paid your devotions as usual to the old religion and hung up an evergreen." (Leigh Hunt 1818 in a letter to a friend as reported by Ronald Hutton in the video).

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:)
I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,I stand and look at them long and long;They do not sweat and whine about their condition.They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.No one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. (Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”)

References

Hutton, Ronald (1999) The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford University Press
James, William (1902) "Varieties of Religious Experience - Lecture IV The Religion of Healthy Mindedness" in William James Writings 1902-1910 (1987) Penguin Books
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Schiller/Philosophical-studies-and-classical-drama

The above image was made in 2013 to support a Canadian Broadcasting Company weekly show called The Nature of Things which was also broadcast on the U.S on National Public Radio. https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/
The placebo only effects body functions which are also affected by stress hormones so it has a core innate component. It was initially called "Animal Magnetism" after a hypothesis proposed by Anton Mesmer.
The placebo effect is strongly affected by culture and only be changed by emotional conditioning learning which takes time and many repeated examples. It is not changeable due to a strong willful belief (faith). Even if people are told a pill is a placebo it will still have a statistical effect based upon deep emotional conditioning.
How the Placebo effect works is unknown. Just because a phenomena is given a name and can be detected statistically does not mean it is understood.

Emotional Magic Starts to be Rediscovered with Anton Mesmer and the Placebo Effect (Animal Magnetism) (1800 on)

(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.

Typical doctored photo of a séance. This one dates to 1872 and shows a séance conducted by John Beattie, Bristol, England (from the Eugène Rochas Papers held at the American Philosophical Society Library in the public domain). In this sort of séance the table is on a sliding surface and moved in response to questions. It was an early version of the Ouija board. In an elegant experiment, the great physicist Michael Faraday of electric field fame showed that people's hands were applying forces to the table and not vice-versa. This meant people were moving the table and not some spirit.

Spiritism Goes too Far by Claiming Conversational Communication with the Dead (1857-1915)

(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:

Spirits were essentially humans without physical bodies living a spirit realm. They could be "drawn down" with the right rituals which came to be called seances. They were not trapped in heaven.
Spirits were reincarnated and so could be perfected (idea from Buddhism).

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.

Transcendentalist writers Emerson and Thoreau

Emerson viewed nature as inherently spiritual with matter coming out of an interconnected spirituality (Logos, God). He agreed with Descartes in that the only certainty is our own conscious thoughts echoing Descartes "I think therefore I am" because knowledge of physical nature is external and has to be discovered. … the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry.… that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. (Nature, chapter 7)

Transcendentalism - Divine Realm as a Power Developed by Emerson (1863-1880)

(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

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