Toward a Spiritualist Theology: The Counter-Esotericism of Frederick Willis, 1830–1914

This paper extends from my PhD dissertation on the Christian Spiritualist Frederick L. H. Willis (1830–1914). An orphan, Willis was raised by his Calvinist grandparents in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was expelled from the family church at age 12 for questioning predestination and preferring a kind God who allowed for free will. At 14, Willis met the Alcott family of Concord, MA. His grandparents allowed him to spend the next four summers with the Alcotts. Bronson Alcott introduced Willis to Transcendentalism, explaining that God’s divine spirit pervaded nature. Due to these youthful experiences, Willis became committed to liberal religion—per Leigh Eric Schmidt’s formulation, the pursuit of personal spirituality beyond denominations, emphasizing mysticism, creativity, and cosmopolitanism.

            Willis became a clerk for Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King and decided to study for the Unitarian ministry at Harvard Divinity School. Beginning in 1854, however, Willis gained the powers of a Spiritualist medium, experiencing spirit noises, manifestations, and levitation. He befriended and led séances for Massachusetts Spiritualists while simultaneously studying at Harvard. Willis could allegedly diagnose and cure people with spirit aid. Letters from his friend (and Thoreau acolyte) Harrison Blake suggest that Willis and Blake explored telepathy. Unnerved by his metaphysical powers, Willis fully accepted them after a vision of his late mother appeared and told him that Christianity was compatible with Spiritualism. Willis identified as a Christian Spiritualist for the rest of his life, combining liberal Unitarianism with occult Spiritualist ideas. His séance activities got him permanently suspended from Harvard, but he stayed loyal to Spiritualism. His new Spiritualist friends gave him a community where liberal principles and the mind-expanding potential of metaphysical religion (to use Catherine L. Albanese’s term) were celebrated.

Willis’s story challenges the notion that modern Spiritualism was an esoteric religion. Encyclopedia Britannica defines esoteric as “the quality of having an inner or secret meaning,” specifically “the distinction supposedly drawn by certain philosophers between the teaching given to the whole circle of their pupils and that containing a higher and secret philosophy which was reserved for a select number of privileged disciples” (source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/esotericism). One can see why some scholars have called Spiritualism esoteric. Spiritualism hinged on the séance, a session in which mediums channeled spirits and supernatural forces. Through the medium, spirits told the audience about the secrets of the universe. The image of a medium regaling a closed session of listeners has an air of secrecy and exclusivity to it. Yet the ministries of Willis and other mediums largely unfolded in public view. Mediums advertised their séances and lectures in the press; they did not advertise exclusively through Spiritualist word of mouth. Séances could be small gatherings or lectures held in large theaters. While séances were private events in that you needed an invitation or ticket, they were not secret.

Furthermore, mediums like Willis shared their ideas through lectures, books, and newspaper articles. There was no attempt to restrict Spiritualist knowledge to a circle of adepts; indeed, Spiritualists shared their faith with anyone who would listen. When Willis was suspended from Harvard in 1857, his Spiritualist allies defended him publicly. Thomas Wentworth Higginson signed an affidavit in court testifying to Willis’s powers. Boston newspapers ran the letters of Spiritualists who praised Willis’s character. By protecting Willis, these Spiritualists also protected their religion and tried to convert readers to the cause.

Willis himself never presented Spiritualism as a religion that belonged to a restricted or elite audience. Instead, he described Spiritualism as the true form of Christianity, open to anyone who was curious. His Spiritualism concerned the improvement of society, so it needed to be accessible. To that end, Willis ran a hybrid Christian Spiritualist church in Michigan for several years. One part of Willis’s ministry does seem esoteric: His lectures in Buffalo in the early 1900s were held in the homes of sympathetic patrons. Yet the esoteric label falls apart under scrutiny. The Buffalo lectures were advertised in mainstream Buffalo newspapers.

Ultimately, although his beliefs veered toward the abstract, Willis never argued that Spiritualism was a hidden tradition of religious knowledge. For that reason, I argue that Willis was a counter-esoteric figure. His story reveals that Spiritualism, despite its out-there ideas, was not esoteric in practice. With its appeals to scientific as well as religious truth, religious fellowship, and (in some cases) social progress, Spiritualism was a religion centered on society and public life.