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Christianity and the Revolutionary Origins of the Jesus Movement

Lydia Apolinar, Alexander Gallus, and Ryan Tool pay tribute to the revolutionary and plebeian origins of Christianity. 

A total of 2 billion people will celebrate the holiday of Christmas this year, including over 90% of Americans. Two thousand and twenty years, according to the now universal Gregorian calendar, have passed since the birth of Jesus Christ in the Roman-occupied Kingdom of Judea. For Marxists, matters of religion have never been trivial, not least because many of the workers that must be reached with the ‘good news’ of communism retain religious faith. The doctrine of Christianity has been distorted throughout history by the ruling classes, and a fight to clarify its true revolutionary origins should be seen as important in the struggle for the popularization of scientific socialism. 

One thing that is clear about the Bible is that it is full of contradictions. From Paul’s initial rendering to its modern interpretations, which often completely ignore the more radical biblical concepts, there has been an extended drift away from the working-class origins of the Jesus movement. Less focused on relaying accurate historical accounts, the Church’s own historians’ main focus was on effectiveness and not truth. Peter Wollen’s interesting 1971 article,  republished yesterday in Sidecar, Was Christ a Collaborator, argues that Jesus was no revolutionary but rather a collaborator with the Romans and a supporter of slavery; this seems not only contradictory with the many original scriptures, but the makeup of the early followers of Christ themselves, many of whom were former slaves, guerrilla fighters, and of the poor. Wollen bases this view on the “numerous [recorded] parables” handed down over time. For as many scriptures as you can find of Jesus and the early Jesus cult promoting a life lived in the communist fashion, you can find just as many telling people to be good slaves to their masters and subjects of their ruling state. Build the communist community but “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”1 and make peace with the Roman oppressors. 

So many contradictions, interpolations, and cherry-picked quotes from a vast body of work can make one see in the holy texts whatever is convenient to one’s own class position or worldview. Much like the many different sects of communists and socialists today, the dissident Jewish religious sects in Ancient Rome would spend much of their time arguing about very small theoretical minutia, such as: What is the essence of the Holy Trinity? Are they all separate but equal parts of God, like the U.S. branches of government, or are they all just one thing? One wins the argument by how many Biblical scriptures can be shouted at the opposition, while in the end coming to everything and nothing at the same time. 

To really understand the Jesus movement one needs to look closely at the historical period surrounding the events. As far away in time as it was, the first century AD is more similar to the world today than one might initially think: a vast empire ruled by the propertied classes, wantonly dominating other peoples, faced with the resistance of the plebeian classes, and particularly of colonized people. Rome was an empire that stretched from Portugal in the West to Turkey in the East. The Germanic hordes lay across the Danube, Roman units fought against the rebellious Scots and Northern tribesmen of Britain, while more storms were brewing in Jerusalem. Roman society was in a constant battle to expand its territories and further exploit their conquered peoples, mainly through enslavement and taxation. Jerusalem was at the center of the Jewish people’s struggles, although many Jews lived abroad in places like Alexandria (where about 25% of the population was Jewish) where there were also Jewish rebellions. Much like the modern left, Jewish religious organizations were marked by their countless splits and sectism. In the Talmud one can even find a quip that resembles a joke about the modern left: “Israel did not go into captivity until there had come into existence 24 varieties of sectaries”.2 

Of course, the sects’ differences in philosophies masked the real differences in the social relations between people. Take as an example the differences between the zealots, Pharisees, Essenes, and Sadducees. While the lower classes were centered around the former three, the minority upper class was centered around the powerful Sadducees. The poorest sects around the zealots and Essenes had a philosophy that the will of the people was unfree. Being alienated and downtrodden by society, they felt whatever happened to them, bad or good, was predetermined by God and felt as if they had no control over their lives. 

The Pharisees, who comprised a mixture of plebeian/peasant base and what could be considered a middle class, had the view that the will was free but followed a predetermined path. Sadducees, who made up almost exclusively a rich, powerful clerical ruling class based around the Temple in Jerusalem, thought the will was free and blamed the lower classes under their feet for being in their position because of some moral failing. Using the same foundational texts, different ideological groups coinciding with different social classes come to very different conclusions. 

The problem only gets bigger when faced with the fact that the New Testament is a collection of prophecies, parables, fables, speeches, etc., that were written decades after the supposed events happened. Due to the proletarian nature of the original community, nothing would be written down for years and would only travel by word of mouth until those with upper-class backgrounds started to join the Jesus religion. Even then, the later versions of the earlier stories written down started to have upper-class ideology seep into them. For instance, Karl Kautsky in his Foundations of Christianity calls the book of Matthew the “Book of contradictions”, and contrasts it with the earlier more revolutionary scriptures. Any sense of class hatred towards the rich was revised and stamped out. In the earlier book of Luke, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount reads: 

“Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh … But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.” 

The Sermon on the Mount according to the later book of Matthew, however, says: 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven … Blessed are they, which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” 

Blessed are the poor turns into the poor in spirit, and blessed are the hungry turns into blessed are those that hunger for righteousness. And all of that woeing unto those that are rich? Matthew seems to have conveniently forgotten about that part of Jesus’s speech. Revisions such as these thoroughly corrupted and in fact inverted the message of the original community. The concept of “morality” itself thereby morphed from a gospel of social revolutionary critique and struggle against palpable and earthly conditions, into a critique of the virtue or sin of the individual.  

Whereas some atheist, agnostic, and deist thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, have questioned the existence of Jesus as a historical personage, Jack Conrad maintains that there were many “saviors, or messiahs (i.e. ‘christs’ in the Greek tongue) in 1st century Palestine”. Considering the tumultuous circumstances of the century, which featured a tremendous Jewish revolution in AD 66, this makes sense. Jesus likely was one among many– and perhaps an amalgamation of several such leaders. The important thing is that Jesus was not an isolated individual with unprecedented claims of being the Messiah; the kind of apocalyptic revolutionary movement he led was one of many that emerged amidst increasingly volatile social conditions. 

In fact, as the English historian Edward Gibbon writes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pagan and Jewish sources contemporary to the time of Jesus found him unworthy of mention. Gibbon writes that “at Jesus’s death, according to the Christian tradition, the whole earth, or at least all Palestine, was in darkness for three hours. This took place in the days of the elder Pliny, who devoted a special chapter of his Natural History to eclipses; but of this eclipse he says nothing”.3 Instead, historians like the pro-Roman Jewish aristocrat Flavius Josephus lumped Jesus and his followers, the Nazoreans, in with countless other left-wing Jewish sects he referred to as “bandits” and “brigands”.4 

Jerusalem was the center of Jewish life because of Solomon’s Temple. Jews from across the Roman Empire sent caravans of gold, silver, animals to be sacrificed, and whatever else they could as an offering to the Temple. The Temple was ruled by the high priests who were almost exclusively of the Sadducee mindset. They were mostly puppets in bed with the Romans. Although they were strongly attached to their identity as Jews, and in an abstract sense opposed to Roman rule, the threat from below of popular rebellion of the apocalyptic, communistic sects of the Jewish poor were more threatening to the aristocratic Sadduccees than the Romans were. In practice, this aristocratic priestly class was rightly regarded as complicit with the Roman oppressors by the zealots/Sicarii and what would later become the Nazoreans, the revolutionary grouping around Jesus. While a common laborer might not see much to lose in a rebellion against Rome, the high priests had their lives along with their wealth and influence to consider. According to Jack Conrad’s 2013 book Fantastic Reality, around 1500 priests received the tithes, with a smaller portion receiving the lion’s share of them.5  Collaboration with the Romans was an evil that they readily accepted in the face of popular rebellion from the lower classes. 

The Essenes were an ascetic sect that lived in highly organized communities in which they shared all property in common. Widely regarded as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, they observed strict Jewish law and a monastic and withdrawn existence. However, this does not mean that they were politically neutral. They did not practice the kind of quietism often associated with asceticism, and instead played an active role in resistance to the Romans and took part in the revolution of AD 66. Though also strictly religious Jews, the zealots differed from the Essenes in that rather than taking part in a monastic lifestyle, they resembled a guerrilla movement dedicated to combatting the Romans and their aristocratic collaborators. They were also distinct in that they espoused a form of republicanism. 

The Sicarii were a splinter group of zealots particularly feared by the Romans and Roman collaborators. They are often referred to as ‘dagger men’, as their preferred tactic in their resistance to Roman rule was to approach a Roman official or a collaborator in a crowded place, such as a market or festival, and quickly stab them before retreating into the crowd. The group that surrounded Jesus, the Nazoreans, was an apocalyptic revolutionary sect distinct from the zealots/Sicarii and the Essenes– they were not monastic like the Essenes, and they were not republican guerilla fighters like the zealots. But they were part of the same general political/religious movement, and as Conrad notes, “at least five of Jesus’s so-called twelve disciples were associated with, or came from, the ranks of the freedom fighters [zealots] and retained guerilla nicknames”.6

These religious sects were concerned first and foremost with the real world circumstances, which actually lent credence to the mysticism they surrounded themselves in. The mysticism of each group acted as a moral justification for its resistance to the much larger and more powerful forces of the Roman occupation. The Romans were more powerful, but they lacked moral righteousness, and the Jewish sects believed that their moral righteousness would eventually lead the Jewish lower classes to victory in spite of all odds. In this context it makes sense that so many of these sects took on a messianic aspect, in which a leader claims to be the predicted Jewish messiah. Jesus, for example, in addition to referring to himself as the messiah, considered himself and was considered by his followers as “king of the Jews,” a title which was then rewritten out of the New Testament as it was considered far too earthly and political. The New Testament writers/rewriters focus on the supposedly otherworldly titles of messiah and “christ,” although these too are tied inextricably to the political climate and the moral justification they gave to leaders of the revolutionary movement.7 

Christianity, essentially a creation of Paul, was watered down to make itself more palatable to the Roman rulers. The Jesus movement, however, were not Christians but Jewish revolutionaries oppressed by the Romans. They followed strict Jewish law and customs, while a figure such as Paul promoted the violation of basic dietary laws and instructed converts to feel free to “eat any meat from the market” and enrich themselves in a way that was entirely contrary to the principles of the left-wing Jewish sects of the lower classes, from which the Jesus movement emerged. Completely antithetical to a Christian like Paul was the figure of James the Just, Jesus’s brother. 

 James’s existence is covered up and minimized throughout the New Testament for several reasons; that Jesus would have a biological brother grounded him in an earthly existence, and contradicted the cult of Mary as a perpetual virgin– “the more ethereal Jesus is made, the more James sticks out like a sore thumb”.8 But James was also suppressed because of his adherence to the class struggle ideology of the Nazoreans, promising retribution for the wealthy and the oppressors, leading early Christian theologians like Eusebius to question the authenticity of the only document evidencing James’s existence in the New Testament. The rhetoric of class struggle and retribution was alien to this third-century historian, as the image of Christ as the docile spiritual figure who recommended that his followers ”resist not evil” was already firmly entrenched in the Christian imagination.9

Like the Jewish revolutionary movement of the first century AD, the left today is splintered into countless factions, sects, and groups which at first glance stand little chance against the Empire or upper classes. Like them, while we might consider ourselves part of the same ‘broad movement’, many of us still insist on being part of separate organizations as a result of factional disputes, minute theoretical disagreements, and dedication to numerous little messiahs. Of course, not all lessons from the Jewish revolutionaries against Rome should be purely negative. We need the kind of moral passion and righteousness that guided these groups and which directly inspired the socialist party-movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A large part of the struggle to build a socialist mass party is building up that kind of strength, dedication, and confidence among the proletariat. The struggle for class leadership, however, is not one of a single messiah that will guide us out of the darkness and into the light, but of countless proletarian leaders who embody this messianic spirit. When the proletariat is aware of its collective power, no divine intervention is needed for us to win. 

From the Book of James 5:1-7:

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves on the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you. Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming.”

 

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Marx Beyond the Mystics

Continuing our theme of exploring the relationship between religion and socialism, Peter Claassen argues that the influence of Christian Mysticism on Hegel impacted the thought of Karl Marx.

“The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Karl Marx – Capital Volume 1

One of the most misunderstood parts of Marxism is its relationship and debt to Christianity. Much has been said about Marx and Hegel’s relationship, what it means for the dialectic to be mystifying, his relationship to Hegel’s understanding of history, and so forth. However, worse than this is the sheer lack of discussion around Marx, utopian socialism, and Christianity. While some have commented upon Marxism as a form of millenarian Christianity, including members of the far-right like Mircea Eliade, there has been little discussion within the far-left, save for a few like Ernst Bloch and Roland Boer. In this essay, we will go through the ways in which Marx through Hegel and others owes a significant debt to various forms of Christian mysticism, and the ways in which his work parallels those works. Specifically, we will look at his early works like the Paris Manuscripts and the critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy, where we find these ideas very clearly expressed, as well as in Engels’ later work on Utopian Socialism. This will be coupled with an explanation of why Marx thinks that Hegel is a mystic, and what that means for his demystification of the dialectic. What we will discover is that Marx has a deep and ongoing debt to mystical currents in Christianity, as mediated both by Hegel and by the utopian socialists, and that this seems to be understood in part by figures such as Lenin.  

We must start by asking what it means for something to be the rational kernel of something else, i.e., what does it mean for the dialectic to be the rational kernel of Hegelian mysticism? To understand this, we must come to understand what Hegel’s mysticism is, and his relationship to mysticism in general. Glenn Alexander Magee has written a brilliant exposition of what Hegel’s mysticism is, in relation to the Hermetic Tradition. To condense 200+ pages into a short space, Hegel believed in extra-sensory perception, conversed with friends over the nature of magic,1 publicly aligned himself with German mystic reactionary Franz von Baader,2 was accused by Schelling of stealing his entire philosophy from Jakob Boehme,3 a Lutheran peasant mystic,4 and, most outlandishly, believed in a kind of Earth Spirit.5 This, however, is less interesting than Magee’s exposition of Hegel’s relationship to these prior mystics, namely that Hegel’s speculative philosophy, that is to say his dialectical method, is most comparable to mythopoetic thinking, stripped of its sensuous quality,6 as Hegel himself argues is the failing of Boehme.7 Most tellingly of all however is Hegel’s belief that magic is a lower form of philosophy.8 What all this leads us to conclude is that Hegel understands his philosophy to be higher elevation, or more accurately articulation, of what the mystics had already grasped. If we use the language of Marx, Hegel understands that he is recovering the speculative kernel of sensuous mysticism. However, it is important here to note that Hegel’s dialectic is understood as holding up a mirror to the Absolute, God, by which he/it can comprehend itself as Hegel says “it is the exposition, and in fact the self-exposition, of the absolute and only a display of what it is.”9 Further, the actual motor off which Hegel’s dialectic runs is not “the grasping of opposites” or even “immanent critique” but what can only be described as the logic of supersession, with the two prior ideas being mere subsections of this. The logic of supersession is, namely, that two seeming opposites can be grasped together internal to their own movement and reveal themselves to subsist in a third, for example, Being and Nothing are in fact moments of Becoming, as coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.10 This concept is thoroughly mystical; while Magee points out we do find it in Judaism,11 the most obvious example of this is the Christian notion of how Christianity supersedes prior religions, namely Judaism and paganism. As Christ says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”12 This logic itself is found in God, where God gives rise to his other, the world, but through Christ reconciles himself to the world giving rise to the Holy Spirit, which is the inner bond of love between Christ, God and the Spirit itself. As such the very core of Hegel’s system, the logic of supersession, the thing off which the whole machine runs, is thoroughly mystical in origin. 

Naturally, we must now ask what is Marx doing to Hegel, if Hegel himself is demystifying the mystics? In short, Marx understands himself as taking Hegel’s system further than Hegel himself could. The most obvious rejection would be the belief in extrasensory perception, world spirits and similar “entities”; however, even here we find a pronounced Hegelianism. Specifically, the only way “the rational kernel” can be interpreted is the concept of speculative philosophy as such. Therefore,  what Marx supersedes is the sensuous mystical elements of Hegel’s philosophy, in favor of the rational kernel, namely speculation as applied to matter. 

“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”13

Here precisely Marx betrays his consummate Hegelianism, for as Magee points out the very term speculative philosophy, qua Hegel, is about the reflection of God back into himself, through the activity of the philosopher, hence why Hegel considers himself to be writing an autobiography of the Absolute, the Unconditioned. As Cyril Smith has correctly noted, the purpose here of Marx is not to form another theory, but to strike down all theories, and do nothing other than translate the material world into the forms of personal thought.14

It should however be noted that within Hegel scholarship there exists a significant debate over whether Hegel can be counted as “metaphysical”.15 This seemingly arcane debate however has serious importance for the interpretation of Marx. The key relevance here is that the opposition in Hegelianism between metaphysical and non-metaphysical Hegels is the question of if Hegel is arguing for a new super-being. Non-metaphysical Hegelians attack their opposition as positing that Hegel is arguing for wondrous new entities with bizarre properties, a demiurge. By comparison, the metaphysical Hegelians argue that what he is discussing in concepts like the Idea, or the Absolute, is reality in itself. As such his Absolute is not God as understood in popular culture, a kind of impish Superman.16 Rather the Absolute is the Unconditioned. This of course is where the description of pantheism comes from, as if God is the Unconditioned then all reality must in some sense be a manifestation of he/she/it. 

The importance of this discussion, however, comes when we realize that Engels specifically distinguishes Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy from “metaphysics”, saying that Aristotle, “the most encyclopaedic of [the Greek philosophers]), had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought”, and that further Hegel is not a metaphysician.17 As Hegel clearly says, “In both (Philosophy and Religion) the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.”18 However this God can no longer be understood as a God simply beyond us, a demiurge beyond, but rather as the unconditioned truth of reality.19 Marx strangely seems to have almost stumbled into Hegel’s position by attacking a crude metaphysical reading of Hegel, wherein the Idea is simply a demiurge, a superman. As such in opposing the Idea as demiurge he has bizarrely actually hit upon Hegel’s true position. Whether this is a mere rhetorical flourish is unclear. 

As such, I agree then with Smith that Marx is not interested in then proposing simply another ideology, rather he is proposing the dissolution of all ideology, all theory as such, and rather simply attempting to tie himself to reality as such. His “dialectical materialism” would then be more dialectical than materialist, for the very reason that the interest is in the method, which as Engels clearly indicates Aristotle more readily grasps than the metaphysicians and materialists, ala Locke. 20 It is the method that Lenin clearly is drawn to, in his Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, and he again clearly understands this point of dialectics as a form of speculation, that is to say reflection of the objective social fact, sans distortion or interpretation. 21 However, if Marx is then maintaining the rational kernel, it must be noted that this rational kernel is still speculative philosophy, a doctrine that ultimately emerges from European mysticism. The important part here to note then is that this doctrine of the mystics, if taken up within the dialectical process, and taking Hegel further than he could take himself, would necessarily render Marx more mystical and more Hegelian than Hegel himself, in the same fashion that Hegel’s de-sensualizing of the mystics made him more mystical than the mystics. Precisely, in superseding Hegel with respect to Hegel’s mysticism, extra-sensory perception, and so forth, Marx preserves the essential core of Hegel’s mysticism, speculative philosophy, and thus is more Hegelian than Hegel, more mystical than the mystics. 

The issue for any would-be interpreter of Marx is where this leaves him in relation to God. He clearly understands the Idea/Absolute and so forth as a kind of demiurge, which they are not, and he is proclaiming his loyalty to a philosophical system which requires God, because it is nothing other than God’s self-exposition. If this system is to make sense we are forced basically to fall back to Marx’s Spinozism,22 and accept that what dialectics is reflecting back into itself is the material world as such, so in essence Marx can only be distinct from Hegel in so far as his Absolute is Spinoza’s substance, or matter as one might put it. This itself is ironically betrayed in the name “dialectical materialism”, which one might better call “speculative materialism” in contrast to Hegel’s “speculative idealism” (though this is separate from Quentin Meillassoux’s use of the same term). What dialectical materialism as a term reveals, specifically, is that this is dialectics as applied to matter, that is to say speculative philosophy applied to the material world as such, or as Marx says “the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”. 

Having come to understand that Marx sees himself as doing to Hegel what Hegel did to prior mystics, there then comes the question of the relationship between scientific socialism and utopian socialism. Immediately we must grasp that the type of science here cannot mean a kind of natural science, as Engels says in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: 

“The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.”23

Thus the “real basis” from which we make “a science of Socialism”24 cannot simply be the kind of positivist social science of the modern-day, as a system of division and breaking down. Rather, as Engels makes clear the basis is dialectics; however, having gone through Hegel, Magee, and Engels it should at this point be explicit that dialectics is the “operating system” of European mysticism, which emerges from ancient Greek philosophy. One might almost imagine it better to translate Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus as ‘Hermetic Socialism’ to convey the necessity of this point.  The scientific method of scientific socialism is dialectics, and dialectics is nothing other than the method of the mystics. 

Having been brought now to this point, we must then ask: if the dialectical method taken from Hegel is mysticism stripped of its extraneous elements, what then is the distinction between scientific socialism and utopian socialism? Engels again provides the answer: 

“Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age.”25

“And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Müntzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.”26

“One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once.”27 

In short, the failure of the utopian socialists is the failure to center themselves upon the proletariat. This is of course the same failure that Marx places at the feet of Hegel. Hegel in his alienation cannot see the possibility of communism, and thus imagines the highest order as being the Prussian state.28 For their part the utopian socialists fail not because of their vision, but because they do not see the means of delivering the emancipation of all of humanity, namely that this is only possible through the proletariat, and so want all of society to rise. It is important here now to note that these utopians were also explicitly mystics, and that the visions they presented of communist society were explicitly mystical. However, this is not what Engels criticizes them for, and thinks that this mysticism is a mere epiphenomenon of the failure to center themselves upon the proletariat. Further, Engels recognizes in Fourier a “masterly” use of the dialectical method.29 

Further, the mysticism of the utopians was extreme. Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon were all deeply mystical. All of them believed in one form of extra-sensory perception or another,30 and Saint-Simon openly called for a new hierarchical and mystical Christianity, as Engels notes.31 Fourier famously believed that the seas would turn into lemonade, but more interestingly he has a vision of the reconciliation of man and beast, or with the emergence of species like Anti-Lions, pacifistic animals that would emerge with the development of human civilization. This vision however is not abandoned by Marx, rather as he discusses in the Paris Manuscripts, communism as such is the reconciliation of men with nature, where nature is understood to be the inorganic body of man.32 This is the core of what Fourier is proposing, the exterior mystical form of Fourier’s position, namely that animals and humans, now in conflict, would with the coming of communism be reconciled, is still contained within the notion that nature is the inorganic body of man, which in class society we are alienated from. 

Apocalypse 42. A new heaven and new earth. Revelation 21 v 29. Borcht. Phillip Medhurst Collection

However, it is necessary to elaborate on the specific connections between communism and the kind of mystical Christianity from which utopian socialism openly emerges. First, we have the mystical understanding of the New Earth and soteriology. Marx and Fourier’s visions of communism clearly parallel the vision of the New Earth, that is the earth after the second coming, as seen in  Eastern Orthodox Christianity, wherein man shall serve as the cosmic priesthood for a totally recreated world, in which a new covenant between man and beast is created and all shall be with God.33 Fourier’s vision wherein society is reorganized into a series of pseudo-monasteries34 further parallels the famous vision of Joachim de Fiore, who envisaged the world to come as a contemplative one, in which all would be monks.35 This vision parallels the vision of communism as presented in the Paris Manuscripts, wherein nature is man’s inorganic body, and the coming of communism is the overcoming of alienation, man from man and man from nature: 

“Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body.  Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die.  That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”36

Further Marx writes that:

“Communism  as  the  positive  transcendence  of  private  property  as  human  self-estrangement, and  therefore  as  the  real  appropriation  of  the  human  essence  by  and  for  man;  communism  therefore  as  the  complete  return  of  man  to  himself  as  a  social  (i.e.,  human)  being  –  a  return  accomplished  consciously  and  embracing  the  entire  wealth  of  previous  development.  This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals  naturalism;  it  is  the  genuine  resolution  of  the  conflict  between  man  and  nature  and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”37

This again betrays the relationship between communism and Christian eschatology, where, as we find in Eastern Orthodoxy, the coming of the New Earth is in a certain sense a return, in the same way that higher stage communism is a return to primitive communism, and so too is the New Jerusalem a return to the Garden of Eden. The difference between Man in the Garden and Man in the New Jerusalem is that the new Man will have knowledge of good and evil. The process of alienation was necessary precisely because it is through alienation Man has come to know himself.38 As such the return to communism as at the same time an advance. The analogy that we find is that for Marx, alienation is functionally identical to sin, or to use the Greek hamartia, to miss the mark. However, sin should not be understood as simply a violation of God’s law; rather, sin properly understood is separation from God, which ultimately is separation from one’s own nature39 as made in the image of God, and from our fellow man, through transgression of his person. This again is identical to Marx’s understanding of alienation, wherein alienated existence is not simply alienation from yourself, but alienation from your fellow man, and alienation from the world.40 Further, the insistence upon man’s nature as socially creative labor, must be understood as an attack upon Hegel’s Lutheranism. Here Marx disagrees with the doctrine of Sola Fide, i.e. that we can come to reconcile ourselves with God through belief alone, but rather it is necessary that we must act to reconcile ourselves to God. This is almost identical to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis, that reconciliation with God must be a process of activity and purgation.41 

What however is more telling is Marx’s remark that Communism is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence”. For most western Theists God is an ontologically simple being, in that He has no distinction between his existence and his essence, following from Aristotle and Aquinas.42 The only being in whom the strife between existence and essence is resolved is God. Marx’s position then that communism is the resolution of the distinction between existence and essence is tantamount to the belief that communism is the state of sainthood, wherein the saint has subsumed themselves into God, ceasing to exist as a self-sufficient entity in their unity with God.43 It should then be clear that the only way to interpret Marx’s understanding of communism is as a demystified or stripped away account of salvation and eschatology within Christianity, as mediated by utopian socialism. Now one could argue that this is to be found in other religious traditions, which it is. However, it is unclear that Marx or Engels had much contact with those traditions, while they had extensive contact with Christianity. 

The linkage however does not cease there. The basic Augustinian thesis, that the Church is the City of God on Earth, already present in this world,44 prior to the end of the world, is preserved in Marx. The specific attack that Marx has upon the utopians should be understood first and foremost as an Augustinian attack upon them. As Camatte correctly points out the essential characteristic of the proletariat is that it is revolutionary; what it means to be revolutionary however is participation in the Gemeinwesen, the material human community, that is organized through the Party.45 As Marx says, “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat”.46 So too must we understand that the issue of the utopians was their imagining of communism as a beyond, to which all society must be raised,47 rather than the true position, namely that communism is nothing other than unalienated life as such. Communism precisely cannot be defeated because communism as such is nothing other than the inner truth of all class society. However, it is only under capitalism that communism can be achieved because it is under capitalism that class struggle, that is the struggle against alienation and oppression, is at its purest. Augustine’s attack upon the pagans was against their belief that the sack of Rome showed the failure of the Church; rather he correctly pointed out that the Church quite simply cannot be destroyed.48 The Church as such is imperishable, and cannot be overcome or corrupted or destroyed. Thus we observe that in Marx’s attack upon the Utopians, namely in their imagining of Communism as a beyond, he charges them with failing to see the tool by which communism will be achieved, or in other words, that the path to the City of God is through the Church.49 It is only through the triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is in its core truth already communism, and as Camatte correctly reads, is also the party, that we can be delivered to communism. 

Finally, it is necessary to consider the nature, purpose, and role of the militant. The rejection of the cult of personality by Marx must be understood as nothing other than the assertion of the ultimately clerical nature of the militant. This is found consistently within the works of the great revolutionary leaders. As Trotsky says, “the Bolsheviks appear in relation to the democrats and social-democrats of all hues as did the Jesuits in relation to the peaceful ecclesiastical hierarchy”,50 and as Marx says, “such was my aversion to the personality cult … I never allowed one of these [honors] to enter the domain of publicity”.51 The basic assertion here is nothing other than that of Saint Gregory the Great in naming himself Servus Servorum Dei, slave of the slaves of God,52 or when Christ asserts, “And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant”.53 The essential point here is that the militant does not seek to speak for themselves. As Camatte points out, scientific socialism is not the work of an individual, but rather it is the work of the species.54 So too are the priests properly conceived, no longer living for themselves but for the group. This is the essential characteristic of the militant, as well as the theoretician, who at the end of the day must also himself be a militant. The militant does not seek to act for themselves but for humanity as such, and it is in this way that he becomes reconciled with his nature, and ultimately with reality. By understanding that the nature that is within himself is the species-being of man, as socially creative labor, he comes to understand that to overcome alienation is submission to the species as such. However, as has been pointed out before, the goal by which the liberation of the species, that is, the ending of alienation, is achieved is through the proletariat. The proletariat in its revolutionary nature harnesses the species-being of man, and the role of the militant is to sacrifice himself for this purpose. As such the task of the militant is nothing other than the organization of the proletariat; they are in this sense nothing but a conduit through which the proletariat, and thus humanity as such, acts. In the same fashion, the priest is nothing other than the conduit by which the Holy Spirit acts. The militant is against the cult of personality precisely because the cult fails to understand the proper function of the militant, that the militant does not live for themselves but for the species and the proletariat; they have no honor in themselves apart from their function. 

This brings us finally to what Marx sees as the issue with religion. The famous quotation of the opium of the masses does us well here. The very fault with religion is the same as was identified with social democracy, that in being an easing of pain it distracts from the ultimate necessity of class struggle, from the struggle to overcome alienation. It as a vehicle is unable to achieve its ultimate end, i.e. communism, that is the end of alienation, both of man from man and man from nature. This, however, is not atheism, for as Marx himself notes, socialism is at once the overcoming of religion and atheism.55 In the same way, Christianity understands itself as being the overcoming of both Judaism and paganism. Where the pagans insisted on the plurality of Gods, the Jews insisted upon the singularity of existence, and thus the singularity of God; Christianity understood itself as overcoming both of these and recognizing the diversity in unity that is the triune God. The same is true of socialism. Socialism stands in relation to atheism as atheism to religion and has overcome both, precisely because it recognizes that the relation is no longer man to God, as with religion, nor man to himself, as with atheism, but with man to his nature and to nature itself. Thus, even in Marx’s anti-religious moments, he reveals the ways in which he is deeply influenced by utopian socialism and its origins in Christianity. However, what further complicates the idea that Marx should simply be read as an atheist is his declaration that communism is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence”. As has been discussed prior this seriously threatens the idea that Marx is an atheist in the same fashion that even Feuerbach is an atheist, rather, in a Hegelian fashion, he seeks to overcome the failures of both atheism and religion. In the same way that a Christian is more Platonic than the Platonists, and more Jewish than the Jews, since Christianity has overcome both, scientific socialism is then more religious than the religious, and more atheist than the atheists. 

A Russian icon from the Novgorod school The Raising of Lazarus, 15th century. 72 x 60 cm. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

To conclude, I would draw attention to the examples of the Biblical prophets, and their attitude towards God. As Isaiah says “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”.56 Here we see the basic characteristic of Marx, namely the desire not to speak for one’s self, but rather to simply become the mouthpiece by which the species, or God, speaks. Smeared with coal, Marx and Isaiah’s lips are united precisely in their collective proclamation of man’s unity with man and nature. Having gone through these sources it should be clear that what Marx is aiming to do is to correctly formulate the doctrines that religion at its most religious holds to, namely when it is aiming to overcome the alienation of man from man and man from nature. However, this must be understood within the context of Marx’s debt to Hegel and utopian socialism, for separate from this connection the very structure of Marx’s overcoming fails to make sense and loses all coherence.

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The Invisible Landscape: Tracing the Spiritualist Utopianism of Nineteenth-Century America

Edmund Berger explores the hidden history of Utopian Socialism and its close relationship with cultures of esoteric spirituality in the nineteenth-century United States. 

Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana

Take the highway east from Cincinnati, Ohio, and in no time the city with its lights and skyscrapers will fade in the rearview mirror, the dense concrete world giving way to the sporadic outcroppings of suburban life and then the wide openness of the American rural landscape. Lanes will be subtracted one by one until only two remain, one going in each direction, and to the north will be small rolling hills and to the south, snaking along the road, the waters of the Ohio River. Around forty miles or so and one will pass through a small town – an “unincorporated community”, as the US census puts it – with the curious name of ‘Utopia’. Blink and you’ll miss it: a few houses, a gas station, a historical marker. Get out and walk around and you might come across a hole in the group lined with ancient cut rocks; it’s the entrance to an underground church, one of the last traces indicating that Utopia was a major crossroads in what we might describe as America’s invisible landscape.

I have to confess to having pilfered this term from elsewhere. It’s actually the name of a book, published in 1975, by famed psychonauts Terence and Dennis McKenna. They use it to describe “an alien dimension all around us” that we can obtain glimpses of, if only obliquely, through tools such as mystical practices and the use of hallucinogenic drugs.1 This seems like a far cry from somewhere like Utopia, Ohio – but it seems appropriate to me on several levels. On one level, it’s because the history that produced Utopia is utterly alien to the experience of American life as we know it today, and actively challenges many of the core presuppositions that are currently baked into the construct of American identity. On another level, this alien world comes far closer to the turbulent slipspace that the McKenna brothers moved in: interweaving zones of fantastical possibilities encounters with spirits and an active eschatological element.

Something that becomes quickly recognizable about the invisible landscape is the elusiveness of a starting point. Unfolding across time and space in a way that denies a clear historical shape, it remains impervious to a fixed narrative. It is instead a bewildering strand of minor histories and counter-histories, unexpected slippages and surprising convergences – but if one is to pick a spot to act as an anchor, and for us here Utopia is just such a spot, then certain lines become clearer. From this forgotten location in Ohio, we unwind, as one is oft to do in tracking American history, back to the mythologized Old World – and in this case, France, and in particular, to the figure of Charles Fourier.

Fourier wore many paradoxical hats: he was a revolutionary who disdained the French revolution, a mystic committed to secularism, and a perverse sociologist who offered a utopian vision of socialism based on the idea of harmonic balance, liberated libidos, and the transvaluation of the toil of labor into play. According to Herbert Marcuse, Fourier’s labyrinthine output was a prefiguration of the unruly imagination of the surrealists – and it was this unruly imagination, he suggested, that in turn anticipated a communistic world to come.2 But whereas Marcuse was writing right at the transition from the 1950s to the 60s, seeing this Fourierist future coming into view in the collision of a then-embryonic counterculture and rampant industrial automation, Fourier himself organized his socialism from a complex cosmology. This entailed the existence of a dozen passions that ruled across several scales, ranging from the planets themselves down to individual humans. From the passions, a varied typology emerged based on the various attractions and repulsions of these passions.

A truly harmonious society, one in line with the agenda of a designer-God, could emerge in the proper balancing of the passions – and to this end, Fourier proposed what he called associations. Each association would have a limited number of people which he determined via his kabbalistic grid of typologies and were to be organized in large mansion-houses that he dubbed phalansteries (a combination of the French words for ‘phalanx’ and ‘monastery’). The phalanstery was to be self-operating, but only partially autonomous. At the summit of this grand social order existed a World Congress of Phalanxes, capable of coordinating between the various communities.

Fourierism arrived in America by way of a young writer and socialist by the name of Albert Brisbane. A New Yorker by birth, he had traveled to Europe to study philosophy, and through a circuitous route found himself under the direct tutelage of Fourier. At the end of the 1830s he was back in the States, where he promoted Fourierist thought via several organs: through the New York Tribune (whose founder, Horace Greenley, he had converted to Fourierism), with the creation of a Fourierist Society, authorship several books such as 1840s The Social Destiny of Man, and a periodical called The Phalanx. Fourierist thought was on the move, soon spreading outwards from New York and towards the west, where it set in motion a series of experiments in communal living organized around the principle of the phalansteries. Over thirty such experiments occurred during the movement’s peak in the 1840s, and a series of ‘Industrial Congresses’ were held to coordinate efforts between the nascent associations. This was not, however, the only outlet for the Fourierist wave. As Carl Guarneri charts in his masterful The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America, there was a deeper-rooted integration of independent Fourierists, “[n]ondenominational utopian socialist churches”, “cooperative stores and urban communes” and the rising labor movement.3

Utopia’s origins lay precisely in the momentous push of the America Fourierist movement. In 1844, a group of citizens from Cincinnati arrived in this isolated spot of land to construct the Clermont Phalanx (named for the county that Utopia is located within). With the purchasing of 1140 acres of land, the great – and short-lived – experiment began:

Agriculture was to be the principle occupation of the association, although the various trades – blacksmithing, shoemaking, carpentry, brushmaking, and some of the lighter trades – were encouraged, and shops provided for those who were so engaged. Each member was assigned some congenial occupation by the council, and was expected to labor cheerfully to increase the common wealth.4

The mansion-house that Fourier envisioned was built, realized as a large two-story building sporting some thirty rooms. The efforts were, however, unrealized; like so many of the experiments in associationism that took place in that decade, the Clermont Phalanx would crumble within a few years. With mounting debt, a series of interpersonal disputes that erupted into lawsuits, and crops ruined by the Ohio River’s floods, the Phalanx closed up shop in 1846, and the land was split among three different parties. A small portion went to a local farmer, a portion that would eventually become Utopia proper went to another group of socialist, and a third, closer to the banks of the Ohio, to a group of spiritualists.

The people who founded Utopia have an interesting history in their own right. Among their ranks was an individual by the name of Josiah Warren, who earlier had been a member of a commune in Indiana called New Harmony. This was an experiment in collective living staged by the British socialist reformer Robert Owen, whose ideas were making a similar transit across the American landscape, though having predated the Fouriests by some years. Following his stint in New Harmony, Warren had gone to Cincinnati and opened the ‘Time Store’ – a general store that only dealt in a new form of money, a kind of labor note attached to the time that it took to produce the good in question. At some point, he returned to New Harmony to open a second Time Store, while also developing a philosophy of “equitable commerce” and “individual sovereignty”.5 Utopia, assembled not only from the ruins of the Clermont Phalanx but also from some of its members, was intended to be a prolonged experiment in these principles.

Not all of the individuals turned up in Utopia. Others shuffled to the south to join up with the spiritualist commune, which was led by a rather nomadic character by the name of John O. Wattles. Wattles was no stranger to communal efforts: he had previously been involved in establishing a collective in Logan County, Ohio, known as the Prairie Home Community. Like the Clermont Phalanx, it was an attempt at establishing a Fourierist association – but it was also a hotbed for a whole host of odd beliefs and esoteric sciences, with one visitor later recounting that he was “surprised to hear rude-looking men, almost ragged, plowing, fence-making, and in like employments, converse so freely upon Phrenology, Physiology, Magnetism, Hydropathy…”.6 Given the spiritualist-inclinations of the new group in Clermont County, we can assume that a similarly heady cocktail was swirling in the air.

The Clermont Phalanx had collapsed from internal problems, the spiritualist commune ending in tragedy. For reasons unknown, the group decided to move the Fourierist’s mansion, stone by stone, closer to the river’s edge. Their work was carried out throughout December in the year 1847, as an immense winter storm bore down upon them. The events that followed are recounted in detail in The History of Clermont County:

The rain and snow had been falling for several days, and on the 12th of December the banks of the river were full to overflowing, while the area of the building was steadily filling with water. Notwithstanding these dangerous appearances the moving continued (as the temporary buildings were uncomfortable), even after boats were necessary to reach the new house; but late in the afternoon of December 13th this work was suspended, and as far as is known 34 persons were at time sheltered under the roof of the new building. Among these were a number of new young people, not members of the community, who had been attracted by the moving, and it was proposed to while away the evening with a dance. While this was in progress, about eight o’clock, the walls of the building fell, crushing many to death, and others in the confusion were drowned. Seventeen lives were lost, many being strangers in the neighborhood, having but recently joined the community… This disaster, occurring at night in a terrible storm, struck terror to the hearts of the people, and the history of the community from its inception to its calamitous close is the most tragic event that has even occurred in the county.7

Regardless of the ultimate failure of the Fourierists, or the tragic events that befell the spiritualists, this entire episode illustrates the various threads that weave the fabric of the invisible landscape – namely, this intermingling of, on the one side, a radical sense of politics geared towards the transfiguration of lived experience, and on the other, things that we today would identify as being under the rubric of the ‘occult’. While it might seem like only a coincidence in location, this episode emerges from a wider web of connections and convergences. We’ve already seen that Wattle was involved in the Prairie Home Community, a Fourierist association that blended communal living with the esoteric. He was also involved, however, in a mysterious group in Cincinnati called the Spiritual Brotherhood, and it was from here that the plans to start the doomed community were born. As one writer from the period describes them:

There is a Society in this City [Cincinnati] which goes by the name of Spiritual Brotherhood. It is small, but made up of respectable and intelligent persons, so far as we know. They have held meetings about two years, and they are chiefly distinguished by teaching that man can hold communion with the spirits of another world, if he conform to all the physical and moral laws.8

This Spiritual Brotherhood remains little-known, and documentation surrounding their activities is scarce, but from what can be gleamed it becomes clear that they were quite active in not only local but national politics. One associate of the Brotherhood happened to be Warren Chase, a leading Fourierist, and president of a phalanx in Ceresco, Wisconsin. He certainly had an eye towards the spiritual and the occult. Even before arriving in Ceresco he undertook studies into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and examined Mesmerism, the therapeutic art of ‘animal magnetism’ that was believed to open conduits that allowed communication with the dead. These activities prompted him to organize a spiritualist study group at Ceresco that was in direct contact with the Brotherhood.9

This wasn’t the extent of Chase’s activities: he was a delegate to the conventions of the National Reform Association (NRA), an early advocate of land reform (based on the principle of “Equal Right to Land”), women’s suffrage and abolitionism, and later appears as having been involved the series of National Industrial Congresses that the NRA organized across the 1840s and 50s. In 1849, when the Congress began to organize its annual gathering, it was determined that Cincinnati would serve as an excellent location – and the Spiritual Brotherhood stepped up to act as the organizer.10

Grasping the odd nature of this series sort of convergences requires broadening our view of this invisible landscape a bit and look at spiritualism more directly. Popular histories tend to trace spiritualism to the revolutionary year of 1848, although the location was not a tumultuous European landscape haunted by the specter of communism, but the quiet town of Hydesville, New York. This is where two young sisters by the name of Maggie and Kate Fox allegedly made contact with a spirit that they nicknamed “Mr. Splitfoot”. They communicated with Mr. Splitfoot – later ‘identified’ as a murdered peddler named Charles B. Rosna – by interpreting ‘rappings’ or knocks on the wooden walls and floorboards as responses to questions posed by curious onlookers. The Fox sisters were soon veritable celebrities and could be found hosting public séances and the like to demonstrate their powers as mediums.

There’s a direct line between the Fox sisters and the uptake of spiritualism by communitarian socialists and radical reformers.11 Amy and Isaac Post were close friends of the Fox family, and as radical Quakers, were actively involved in early abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements. The Quakers already had a deep history of Christian mysticism.  Stretching back to the late 1700s, there was a consistent involvement in various forms of folk magic and divination, much to the dismay of the society’s leadership. Through the Posts, belief in and practice of spiritualism spread rapidly through the Quakers, and beyond them, to the various radical reformist movements with which they were intertwined.

This is one path that spiritualism took, but there are others. In the volume of his History of Spiritualism, Arthur Conan Doyle suggests an earlier genesis of spiritualism, having tracked it back to the writings and experiences of Emanuel Swedenborg in the mid-1700s. A scientist, theologian and mystic, Swedenborg professed the ability to not only speak to the spirits of the departed but also to have actually traveled to their world beyond ours, which “consisted of a number of different spheres representing the various shades of luminosity and happiness, each of us going to that which our spiritual condition has fitted for us”.12 There’s a clear correspondence between these proto-spiritualist practices and ‘theory of correspondences’ that marked Swedenborg’s overarching theological cosmology, where there exist a series of planes, ranging from the spiritual to the material, through which God’s love flows. But what’s more is the existence of direct parallels between objects and forces in these planes: “…the sun in our natural world is a reflection of the sun in the spiritual world. By observing the way the heat and light of our sun interact with nature as we experience it through our senses, we can start to understand how love and wisdom work in the world of our inner spirit”.13

Swedenborgianism became an active force in America, with a church dedicated to his doctrines opening in Baltimore in 1793. The influence of this doctrine, however, spread further than just distinctly Swedenborgian churches, with ripples being felt in Quaker communities, in the writings of the Transcendentalists, and in the Mormon theology of Joseph Smith. The Rappites, an eschatologically-minded religious group that organized a communal society in Pennsylvania called Harmony, was influenced in no small part by Swedenborg, with founder Johann Georg Rapp having been influenced by the seer (as Swedenborg was often called) and other Christian mystics such as Jakob Bohme. The Rappites, in turn, helped form the very infrastructure of American communitarian socialism: it was the land and buildings of their second community in the state of Indiana, named New Harmony, that was sold to Robert Owen to carry out his own communistic experiment (as we’ve already seen, this is where the journey of Josiah Warren, the ostensible founder of Utopia, Ohio, began). To add extra dimensions to this already complicated web, when Owen arrived in Cincinnati in 1824, he found that a local community of Swedenborgians were “the only ones prepared to understand and put into practice his socialistic theories, many of which seemed closely akin to the ‘Heavenly Teachings’”.

Swedenborg’s theology, with its hermetic architecture and movement towards spiritualism, also mingled freely with the inner-workings of the American Fourierists. Ralph Waldo Emerson – who, while not a Fourierist, was familiar with them (and eventually came to regard them critically) – once wrote that “[o]ne could not but be struck with strange coincidence betwist Fourier and Swedenborg”; according to Carl Guarneri, this observation planted the seeds of the idea of compatibility between the two in the minds of Christian Fourierists.14 Several works on this topic soon followed, bearing meandering titles and even more meandering prose. One such work was Charles Hempel’s The True Organization of the New Church, as Indicated in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Demonstrated by Charles Fourier, published in 1848. For Hempel, Fourier and Swedenborg were but two sides of the same coin. “The doctrine of these two great men cannot remain separated”, he wrote. “Their union constitutes the union of Science and Religion”.15

A practitioner of mesmerism using animal magnetism on a woman who responds with convulsions. Wood engraving. Mesmer, Franz Anton 1734-1815.

One final strand leading into spiritualism that is worth baring mention of is that of Mesmerism, a therapeutic practice based on the principles of “animal magnetism” that, whilst having its origins in an attempt at Enlightenment science, quickly became integrated into occult and religious tendencies. Mesmerism takes us back to France, to 1778, when “Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris and proclaimed his discovery of a superfine fluid that penetrated and surrounded all bodies”.16 Operating from the basis of Newtonian physics – but smuggling in through the backdoor the “doctrine of cosmic fluid” that can be tracked across the Hermetic continuum running Paracelsus down through Robert Fludd – Mesmer determined that this fluid was, in fact, the force that explained gravity.17 As gravity works across all spheres of existence, from the motion of the planets to those of individual bodies, he soon drew a connection between the movements of this supposed fluid and physical and psychic ailments.

“Mesmerism”, as it came to be called, involved the use of magnets to manipulate the superfine fluid within the body to cure it. Using a wand, a practitioner would ‘direct’ the fluid. Confirmation came, for Mesmer, not in the proof of the fluid’s existence, but in the trances, fits, and convulsions that his patients often underwent. Nonetheless, the scientific community of Paris regarded Mesmer’s work as fraudulent pseudoscience, and he remained consistently barred to the margins. It was here, however, that Mesmerism was taken up by a variety of cultural movements, many of them mystical in nature. According to Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke, a large Swedenborgian institution in Stockholm took a deep interest in Mesmerism and viewed the odd babblings that the patients often engaged in during their trance states as communication with the dead.18 Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, a figure immersed in the world of Masonry, Rosicrucianism, and alchemy, went further and experimented with Mesmerism in hopes that it would unveil the divine, pure condition that marked human life before the Fall. Others still utilized Mesmerism as a means to induce automatic writing, which was often regarded, particularly by figures like Willermoz, as the communication with the souls of the dead or with angels.

Curiously, Mesmerism seems to have borne some influence on Fourier. Both worked off the assumption that they were continuing Newton’s work, and each posed some sort of cosmological force: the ‘superfine fluid’ for Mesmer and the twelve passions for Fourier. Both alluded to notions of ‘universal harmony’ – and it was in the pages of a journal led by Pierre Ballanche, a mystic and counterrevolutionary figure who was actively engaged in Mesmerism, that Fourier first debuted his system.19

Mesmerism arrived in America during the early 1830s by way of one Charles Poyen, who right from the start was integrating the practices of animal magnetism with reformist movements like abolitionism.20 He was, in some sense, laying the direct groundwork for the spiritualism that would explode in the wake of the Fox sister’s supposed communication with the dead; as Emma Britten, writing in 1870, described,

In all principle cities of the Union, gentlemen distinguished for their literary abilities, progressive opinions, or prominence in public affairs, have graduated from the study of the study of magnetism and clairvoyance to become adherents to the cause of Spiritualism, whilst many of the best mediums – especially the trance speakers and magnetic operators – have taken their first degree in Spiritualism, president in 1825 as experimentalists in the phenomena of mesmerism.21

A particularly poignant convergence of various threads takes place in the experience of Anna Parsons, a practitioner of what was known as ‘psychometrics’ or ‘soul measuring’. It was a direct outgrowth from spiritualism: the psychometrist worked on the magnetic and electrical impulses that were seen as flowing through the individual, but whereas mesmerism was initially intended (but by no means limited to) therapeutic practices, psychometry’s goal was “the development and exercise of the divine faculties in man”.22 Parsons, as it happened, practiced psychometry from her station in Brook Farm – a communal experiment that was located just outside of Boston, Massachusetts that had come to be organized as a Fourierist association.23 There, her psychometric practices slid directly into spiritualism. In one notable experience, she encountered the spirit of Fourier himself and reportedly carried out a conversation with him.24

Other leading Fourierists who were engaged with mesmerism, psychometry, and spiritualism were Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols. Thomas Nichols himself had been the student of Charles Poyen and had demonstrated aptitude in the mesmeric art by healing his mentor, while his wife, Mary, was an active medium and involved in hydropathy, or as it is more commonly known today, ‘water-cures’ (it is worth pointing out that the two were married in a Swedenborgian ceremony).25 The two had lived for a time in an experimental community in New York called Modern Times, which had been founded by Josiah and his friend Stephen Pearl Andrews26, before relocating to Cincinnati, where they became immersed in the circles linking together spiritualism and radical reformism – namely, women’s suffrage. Between 1856 and 1857 they moved north to a small town in Ohio called Yellow Springs and set up a community of their own dedicated to hydropathy called the Memnonia Institute. Memnonia was cast in a millenarian shade; the Nichols held that the project of their Institute would aid in the realization of a “Harmonic Society on Earth”.27 This is a clue to profoundly Fouriest orientation of the Memnonia Institute, and indeed, the two chose April 7th, 1857 – Fourier’s birthday – as the date for the project’s formal opening.

What cuts across this different threads – communal experimentation, (mystical) Christianity, radical reformist politics, and spiritualism – is, at the base, the belief that a new epoch was dawning, and that these elements and their interweaving made up the fabric of this emergent world. Joseph Rodes Buchanan, an ardent promoter of spiritualism and psychometry, described mesmeric practices as a component in the emergence of a  ‘new civilization’. Many of the Christian sects that took up spiritualist beliefs in this period descended from the Radical Reformation in Europe, which saw the parallel emergence of a host of eschatological expectations. Flowing across to the Atlantic to the Americas, this seeded the activities of groups like the Rappites, and before them the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness (a quasi-monastic communitarian experiment that portended the Second Coming in the year 1694) and the Ephrata Cloister (somewhat of a split from the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness that integrated itself with the Seventh-Day Adventists, producing a mystical heralding of an imminent ‘Eternal Sabbath’ that would see the “whole Restauration of all things”).28 Even the secular Robert Owen readily adopted a millenarian tone. In an 1825 speech to American politicians – including President John Quincy Adams – he described how the emerging communal experiments were “commenc[ing] a new empire of peace and goodwill to men… the state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness which has been foretold by the sages of the past would at some point become the lot of the human race”.29

As we saw above, Fourierists like the Nichols also slotted into this continuum via their rhetoric of a new ‘harmonic age’, but this tendency was overt even decades before the founding of the Memnomia Institute. Consider the following from the minutes of the 1844 General of the Friends of Association in the United, recorded and published in an issue of The Phalanx:

It would be doing injustice to this occasion, not to open our discussion of the Principles of Social Reorganization, by an expression of feelings with which we have come up, from far and near, to this assembly. It is but giving voice to to what is working in the hearts of those now present, and thousands whose sympathies are at this moment with us over our whole land, to say, this is a Religious Meeting. Our end is to God’s will, not our own; to obey the command of Providence, not to follow the leadings of human fancies. We stand today as we believe amid the dawn of a New Era of Humanity…30

In many respects, the slow creep of millenarianist thought reverberates across the whole of the American experiment. The New World has always been understood not only in terms of space, but in terms of time, and especially in a New Time that breaks with everything that came before. Around the time of his third voyage, Christopher Columbus penned his Book of Prophecies, which foretold a series of events that set in motion the Second Coming. He readily adopted the classic idea of the ‘world-emperor’ or the ‘last king’ whose reign would immediately presage Christ’s return, and in his monarchist backers he thought he had identified exactly who would play this role. Moving in similar waters was John Dee and his eschatological vision of a world empire that came before the Biblical apocalypse. The New World was central to this vision: believing that the mythological King Arthur and the Welsh prince Madoc had visited the Americas, Dee held that Britain maintained a spiritual right to the land. As Jason Louv points out, the similarities between Columbus and Dee are not mere coincidences – Dee’s schemes for the future were but a Protestantization of the Catholic traditions that Columbus was drawing upon.31 But while many of the utopian socialist and associationist currents sketched above drew from similar sources, they lacked the distinct monarchist and even aristocratic character that a Columbus or a Dee posited. Their millenarianism was often what we might today describe as exhibiting a populist orientation.

Millenarianism is a concept that is regarded with considerable disrepute. Besides the common images that it brings to mind – doomsday cultists, survivalist fringe, the specter of violence and dire prophecies of imminent catastrophe – there are the arguments put forward by people like Norman Cohn. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn argues that millenarian groups, particularly those that made up the actively revolutionary side of the Radical Reformation, are the direct antecedents to the slew of totalitarians that shaped the course of the twentieth century. From Thomas Muntzer, whose oft-cited declaration of omnia sunt communia! has been identified by some as the prefiguration of communism, we arrive at the Stalins and the Hitlers.32

It was the Situationists, who can be regarded as something like second or third cousins of our American utopians – they were resolutely Marxist, but remained perpetually haunted by the ghost of Fourier – who took measures to flip Cohn’s script. In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Movement of the Free Spirit (a work that, it must be said, was penned after his expulsion from the Situationist International, yet remains continuous with his earlier concerns), the revolutionary dimensions of millenarian thought is re-affirmed. For Debord, the inversion of Cohn took place through the classic Marxist analysis of Christianity that originated with Engels and Kautsky which held that the revolutionary strains of religion were expressions of class struggle in a period in which ‘class consciousness’ as such could not be articulated.33 Vaneigem, on the other hand, slips more towards the surrealist debt that Debord hoped to hold at bay. “The most radical element of the movement of the Free Spirit”, he wrote, “had to do with an alchemy of individual fulfillment, in which the creation of a superior state (the all-important ‘perfection’) was achieved by a gradual relinquishment of the economy’s hold over individuals”.34

There is a remarkable correspondence between the Situationists and the line coursing through Marcuse’s work that we cited out the outset, and it makes sense: the constellation of Fourier, surrealism, and Marx is common to each. “Imagination is about to reclaim its rights”, wrote Marcuse, filtering the great discovery of the surrealists through Freud.35 This is the same as what Vaneigem called the poetry of revolution, an alchemical art that transforms the “basest metals of daily life into gold”.36 It too, therefore, shares the suppressed millenarian position, being a politics that aims above all else at a profound and sweeping transfiguration. But while there is a future orientation, it also appears, ever so uncannily, as a strange echo of a succession of moments in the past, not in Europe, but in nineteenth-century America, where imagination did indeed strain to reclaim its rights in the form of strange sciences, mystical religion, and a struggle to live a utopian life. Sometimes it ended in tragedy, like the spirituals who fell to the Ohio River’s currents, and most of the time is simply crumbled away. Yet the imprint still remains.

All that is left of these moments now are just echoes, the ghostly sound of this other, alien landscape whispering across time and space. Echoes reverberating out from scattered traces tucked away in the cracks and crevices of an America now consolidated and fixed in its aimless spiral – and yet, at the same time, they are cracks and crevices, obscured by-ways and old roads, that sit plainly in sight if one only knows where to look.