Esoteric Pastimes in New York

Superstition was a ubiquitous distraction in the Victorian era. Efforts to communicate with the dead were well-practiced before and after the Civil War, but esoteric pastimes, in a departure from old-fashioned magical beliefs, became elevated by pseudoscientific experimentation. The new wandering herds that got off at the various stops of the Erie Canal were looking to craft their own folklores. The Burned-over District of western New York isolated its Second Awakening visions and ideas before sending them out like freight, back along the Erie Canal to New York City and beyond: Mormonism, Millerism (which culminated in a momentous nonevent called the Great Disappointment, called so because William Miller’s prediction that the Second Coming would appear on October 22, 1844, was incorrect) and the rapping medium Fox Sisters (the shared headstone of Margaretta and Catherine Fox at Cypress Hills Cemetery labels their respective death dates as a “transition”). Transcendentalism and mesmerism from New England and Europe blended with the magic lantern mysteries of daguerreotype photographs and electrical telegraphy. Shifts in social class empowered women to immerse themselves in spiritualism. A more inquisitive, personal relationship with religion emerged from the middle and upper classes, who found comfort and excitement in clairvoyance and met in private homes for séances and at venues and summer camps for spiritualist lectures and demonstrations.

One of the most significant of the camp meeting locations was Lily Dale, a tiny hamlet in western New York founded in 1879 by members of the spiritualist movement. Lily Dale spiritualism, as exemplified by wellness industry endorsements and an HBO documentary, has become big business. Similarly, in New York City, psychics have woven themselves into the five boroughs with the brashness of twenty-four-hour pharmacies. Since 1967, the act of fortune-telling has been effectively banned. New York State’s penal law definition of fortune-telling is a “class B misdemeanor” that pertains to

“claimed or pretended use of occult powers, to answer questions or give advice on personal matters or to exorcise, influence or affect evil spirits or curses; except that this section does not apply to a person who engages in the aforedescribed conduct as part of a show or exhibition solely for the purpose of entertainment or amusement.”

Michael Wilson of the New York Times addressed this conundrum in 2011: “A law that protects evil spirits: only in New York.”

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