attained unity with the God whose thought was the universe, a Hermeticist was presumably empowered to work magic by commanding his thoughts. As a rationalization of already existing Hermetic practices of conjuring, Hermetic rebirth may, as Nock suggested, have been “a curious sacrament of auto-suggestion.”23 The Corpus Hermeticum I concludes: “This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.” We become the God-mind once we align ourselves to its thoughts.
Quimby and the Founding of Christian Science
The effectiveness of the mind cure could not be denied. People were being cured of many diseases across the country by these ancient methods. Quimby successfully treated nearly 12,000 people in the last eight years of his life, and subsequently died from exhaustion. Among the many students and patients who joined Quimby and helped him commit his teachings to writing were Warren Felt Evans, Annetta Seabury Dresser and Julius Dresser (the founders of New Thought as a named movement) and Mary Baker Eddy (founder of the Christian Science movement).
The less we know or think about hygiene, the less we are predisposed to sickness.
—Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
Christian Science is a system of mental healing marketed by Mary Baker Eddy, probably the most famous (and infamous) of all Quimby’s students. The Christian Science movement, which grew quickly, advocated no treatments by doctors of any kind. All illnesses could be healed by faith in Jesus Christ as a consciousness, according to the tenets of the church.
Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), born Mary Morse Baker, founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. Her most noteworthy published work was Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and it was subjected to a still-ongoing controversy involving Quimby supporters. Eddy was chronically sick with many ailments, including paralysis, hysteria, seizures and convulsions. At twenty-two, she married her first of three husbands, George Glover (an avid Freemason), who died within six months from yellow fever. This led her to explore types of healing that were outside of the realm of traditional doctors, such as homeopathy and Mesmerism. After Glover’s death, she became an active Mesmerist24 and involved herself in the Spiritualist community. It was her studies in Mesmerism that drew her to the office of Dr. Quimby in 1862. In the beginning of her studies of animal magnetism, Mrs. Eddy hailed its treatments. After Quimby passed away, however, she changed her tune regarding this practice. She began to refer to it as “malicious animal magnetism” or M.A.M. She wrote of it in her Church manual as mental malpractice. According to Mrs. Eddy, the M.A.M.s would send evil suggestions to her, sickening her.
It was said by Quimby supporters that Mary Baker Eddy came into possession of her healer’s manuscripts, and borrowed their ideas and vilified their author after his death, despite relying on him exclusively for her treatments while he was alive.
Mrs. Eddy has for many years persistently denied her indebtedness to Quimby and asserted the latter was only a Mesmerist, or that he healed by electricity. She has even claimed that, so far from being indebted [to him] for her own writings, it was she who corrected his random scribblings . . . . When Julius Dresser published some of the letters and articles in which Mrs. Eddy had lavished praise upon Quimby as her teacher, she invoked her serviceable fiend, Malicious Animal Magnetism: “Did I write those articles purporting to be mine? . . . For I was under the mesmeric treatment of Dr. Quimby from 1862 till his death . . . my head was so turned by Animal Magnetism and will-power, under treatment, that I might have written something as hopelessly incorrect as the articles now published in the Dresser Pamphlet.”25
Later she would even deny that she had ever been Quimby’s student, though it was Quimby himself who coined the phrase “Christian Science.” When her third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy (a noted spiritualist and clairvoyant) died of heart disease, she claimed that he had been mentally poisoned with arsenic by a Malicious Animal Mesmerist. The autopsy returned no trace of arsenic in his system, but Mrs. Eddy maintained that there would be none, since the poisoning had been mental. Mrs. Eddy eventually went so far as to hire a team of virgins to stand vigil over her twenty-four hours a day, in order to protect herself from these malicious influences.26 It is interesting to note that one of Mrs. Eddy’s main ailments upon her first visits to Quimby was “hysteria.” When asked why she had to wear glasses, Mrs. Eddy’s reply: the M.A.M.s. When asked why she was addicted to morphine, her reply: the M.A.M.s. When asked why she visited a dentists, her reply: M.A.M.s.
In 1879, the Church of Christian Scientists was assembled, and Eddy was ordained as the pastor. By this time, the controversy surrounding the split between New Thought and Christian Science was characterized by the dispute between Mary Baker Eddy and Annetta and Julius Dresser, who continued to attack Eddy throughout the rest of their lives.
Some of the shenanigans of the Christian Science movement have attracted quite a bit of attention over the years. Mark Twain relates several stories in his book Christian Science, along with his passionate opinions on the subject, some of which are included here:
Among other witnesses there is one who had a “jumping toothache,” which several times tempted her to “believe that there was sensation in matter, but each time it was overcome by the power of Truth.” She would not allow the dentist to use cocaine, but sat there and let him punch and drill and split and crush the tooth, and tear and slash its ulcerations, and pull out the nerve, and dig out fragments of bone; and she wouldn’t once confess that it hurt. And to this day she thinks it didn’t, and I have not a doubt that she is nine-tenths right, and that her Christian Science faith did her better service than she could have gotten out of cocaine. . .
No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client’s imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient’s confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective.
Faith in the doctor. Perhaps that is the entire thing . . . . Genuine and remarkable cures have been achieved through contact with the relics of a saint. Is it not likely that any other bones would have done as well if the substitution had been concealed from the patient? When I was a boy a farmer’s wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a faith-doctor—that was what she called herself. Sufferers came to her from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, “Have faith—it is all that is necessary,” and they went away well of their ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers. She said that the patient’s faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. [Once] my mother was the patient . . . . Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines. There are the Mind Cure, the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental Science Cure, and the Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles with the same old, powerful instrument—the patient’s imagination.
From the very start, the New Thought movement was unique among religious movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for having women play a prominent role in its leadership. The first graduation ceremony of the New Thought movement’s Emma Hopkins College of Metaphysical Science in 1889 had twenty-two graduates, twenty of whom were women.
Conspicuous among the many women involved New Thought and Prosperity Consciousness movements were two: Emma Curtis Hopkins, who edited the Mind Cure Journal after being
