I was wandering around on the web the other day looking at stuff on that late 17th century mystical sect in Pennsylvania – Society of the women in the wilderness –  led by Kelpius and came across this paper by Jon Butler called “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760.” It was published in 1979 in The American Historical Review.  Essentially what it says is that historians have “always treated America’s earliest colonists as especially religious people” but that they weren’t, or at least not in the pious Christian way history tends to teach. Citizens had to be, more or less, brow beaten into the churches; people preferred their astrological almanacs and what Butler calls “noninstitutional religious practices.”

Butler talks about the relationship between Christianity and occult practices and how the literate English compatriots of the Puritans turned on a regular basis to mystical writings “in the cabala to complement both their Christianity and their astrology.”

While these practices came with immigrants to North America, and certainly occult practices were no stranger to the early Americas, the last portion of the paper seeks to begin an explanation as to why these practices declined in popularity.  He gives two reasons. The first is that the literary tastes in England changed and occult reading materials became harder to get. The second was that the churches were often also the governing authority and they pushed for legal and civic penalties for practices in contravention of their particular doctrine. I mean did you know that “on the eve of the American Revolution only about 15 percent of all of the colonists probably belonged to any church.”

Cool. Too bad it didn’t last.

Anyway, it turns out Butler went into it further and wrote a book called Awash in a Sea of Faith, Christianizing the American People published in 1992. I got it today, so I am looking forward to some happy reading.