Pirates of the Epistemology
From the Encyclopedia of Heresies
He soon declared himself the chosen medium, or “general agent on Earth,” of the spirits of John Murray, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and other distinguished departed who had together formed a “Congress of Spirits.” Spear let it be known that the “Congress” would deliver plans, through him, for the remaking of society. Through Spear the spirit of Jefferson discoursed against slavery. Universalist physician Benjamin Rush’s spirit directed him to give lectures on health and medicine. Scientific spirits, like Franklin’s, relayed information to assist with advances in technology, including a perpetual motion machine, an electric thinking machine, an electric ship, an intercontinental telepathic network, and an improved sewing machine. The “Congress” also urged the foundation of spiritualist utopian communities in Kiantone, New York and Patriot, Indiana.
Spear’s new view of the universe led him into communion with Franklin and Rush, or so he claimed (both were friends of Joseph Priestley, and in Rush’s case a co-religionist with the man, who emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1793 to practice his own particular brand of Unitarianism), and the advice of these dead men in their “Congress of Spirits” was to lead Spear to attempt to develop what Spear dubbed “the New Messiah” based on what he called the designs of the “Band of Electricizers,” another name for his congress of spirits, or a subdivision therein. (Other parts of the collective seemed to include the “Healthfulizers,” “Educationalizers,” “Agriculturalizers,” “Elementizers” and “Governmentizers”) In 1853, Spear and a handpicked group of followers of his new beliefs (now much more akin to Spiritualism than even the most imaginative version of Christianity ever developed, as Spear continued work based on the idea that he was in direct contact with the spirits of dead luminaries and scientists) attempted to bring the “New Messiah” into physical existence by building it. Spear’s mission on earth to recreate human society, complete with grandiose plans for vast circular cities (familiar in design to anyone who’s ever read Plato’s Timaeus, I’d suspect) could only be brought to fruition by the construction of this mechanical god, whose new motive power could be used to bring the plans and schemes the “Electricizers” beamed into Spear’s receptive brain into fruition. If this reminds you of Edison’s belief that one could build a telephone that ghosts and spirits could use to communicate with this world via electromagnetic interference, well, maybe there’s a good reason for that. Spear’s machine god was apparently a huge collection of metallic shafts and uprights holding spheres and fixtures containing quite a few magnets, as described in a Fortean Times article. To get an idea of the kind of lunacy surrounding the device’s creation, with Spear done up in a complex apparatus like a 1930’s pulp mad scientist while the Mary of the New Revelation (and to this day no one knows who she was) came to the experiment by spiritual order due to her signs of pregnancy and the assembled believers attempted to pray and shock the mechanical god into life, you should read that article. At any rate, ultimately the machine god didn’t ever display enough new motive force to spin a top, was dismantled and shipped to Randolph, New York, where a mob (possibly of the same mind as those that drove Noyes to Oneida) tore the thing apart as an abomination. Thus died the electrical messiah.
Or perhaps not. Here’s where things get weird, so please bear with me, as I attempt to drag all of the preceding together into a knot: what if Spear was in contact, in a manner of speaking, with the spirits he claimed? Thinking about it from this point of view, we begin to make strange connections. Franklin, like Newton before him, was a man of prodigious self-education and many social connections, intimate with political, social, economic, and scientific power. He was the first to create a public library in the United States, he was instrumental in the development of both electrical study and meteorology (the study of climate and weather), which is one of the fields of study that has so influenced modern chaos theory… he was a member of the Royal Society, was acquainted with Walpole and his Hellfire Club at Strawberry Hill, where one of John Dee’s shewstones was a primary attraction. He was given an honorary doctorate from Oxford, home of Raleigh and his fellow conspirators in the School of Night. Through his diplomatic efforts in France, beginning in 1767, he gained such respect that his presence helped secure French aid during the Revolutionary War, even engaging the services of Giuseppe Balsamo as a physician while he was in France. Yes, Cagliostro himself. Well, they were both freemasons, so it’s not that surprising. (We could go on and on about the obverse side of the great seal of the United States, that all-too-familiar pyramid with the eye, claimed by some to be the eye of Providence… like, say, Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of that state where Samuel Slater first grafted the product of the mind of one of the Lunar Society, Richard Arkwright, onto American soil, and of course that infamous saying novus ordo seclorum, the new order of the ages… an epistemic shift, one could say. But while Franklin was on the committee to design the seal, it’s hardly clear how much he really had to do with it.)
He knew Priestley well, his theories of electricity being published by the man, and had made Lavoisier’s acquaintance as well. He was obsessed with information, with propaganda, with the physical world and its improvement. He never sought high office in the nation he helped found, yet worked tirelessly for its benefit and expansion through alliances and diplomacy… through the persuasive force of his personality and his arguments. He dallied with the self-styled wizards of the libertine Hellfire Club, men like Walpole and the Earl of Sandwich, all the while learning the way their minds work while opposing them in Parliament right up until the eve of rebellion, and he was their better at quickness of mind. He was the Poor Richard of the Almanac, a master of the pithy saying. He re-imagined electricity itself. Furthermore, he was famously eccentric, a deist who flirted with atheism, a sexually liberated man who pursued pleasure where he could attain it (and his natural charm allowed him to attain more than his share) and whose only acknowledged son, former Royal Governor of New Jersey William Franklin, was born a bastard. Herman Melville described Franklin as “everything but a poet” and herein I suggest that he was something else in addition to being a printer, a publisher, a journalist, an essayist, a scientist, a philosopher and an inventor and a diplomat: maybe he was a magician, too.
