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I'm the very first to admit my two passionate interests are Abraham Lincoln and the paranormal so it shouldn't come as much of a shock that I found this book to be extremely interesting. I don't know that I buy the whole "Lincoln as psychic medium" slant but the book does shed a lot of light on a neglected aspect of Lincoln's personality, that is his interest in the paranormal, ghosts and the like. It discusses his interest in seances...in and out of the White House and makes the argument that Lincoln's interest was far deeper than has been admitted. Overall the evidence presented holds up.
I did take exception to the author taking aim at Dr. Wayne Temple's research. I don't always agree with Dr. Temple but know him to be a fine researcher, the author here would disagree and uses Temple's book "From Skeptic to Prophet" against him repeatedly throughout.
That aside, I really enjoyed this book and would argue that it's a fine addition to any Lincoln library, don't let the subject matter scare you away.
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Dr. Martinez is to be applauded for the very first time threading together all the anecdotal and documented yet neglected references to the Lincoln's attraction and participation in the budding Spiritualist religious movement. Mrs. Lincoln had sensitized herself to the possibility of afterdeath communication by the tragic loss of two young sons.
This work draws connections to primary documents not incorporated into mainstream Lincoln studies. The only disconcerting note is the authors apparent belief in the 19th century alternative bible "Oahspe" channeled through the mediumship of John B. Newbrough. Oahspe is certainly a fringe document with few organized students devoted to its psuedo-old testament language and cosmic operating manual. Oahspe is a more quaint, Victorian "Urantia" type body of work. The one endeavor at establishing an intentional community based on Oahspe's teachings was the failed Shalam colony in New Mexico. I understand that Newbrough's body is buried in the Las Cruces Masonic cemetary.
Dr. Martinez's scattered quotes gleaned from Oahspe do not serve to strengthen the premise of her book. The Oahspe derived Lincoln quotes merely serve to embarass the reader for Dr. Martinez if she thinks this dated piece of spiritual literature supports any case for a stronger sympathy of spiritualism by the Lincoln's than may previously been accepted by mainstream historians. Nor are the Lincoln's dyed in the wool spiritualists, but rather inquisitive progressive minded 19th century Americans looking for more than exoteric answers to the questions surrounding life and death.
In the author's biography in this book, it mentions a biography she has written on J.B. Newbrough, this is worth noting for a major study of his life is needed for students of 19th century alternative religious movements.
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Impressive. The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln, while it is an apologia of Spiritualism past and present, is also a very intimate look at one of the most complex and iconic personalities short of Jesus of Nazareth. While the doubter will have much to criticize I suspect, if ones feelings with regard to the topic of Spiritualism itself can be set aside for the moment, a much clearer portrait of the man can be obtained by the exercise.
The book is, however, very anecdotal and while it puts data into chapters with logical headings, the bulk of each is largely "loose association" and quotes from various sources, many of them having little to do with the Civil War president, and many having to do with the character of Spiritualism in the 19th Century. To the extent that this material places the man solidly within the venue of his own time, this is very helpful. Certainly anyone who has no clue as to the topic of Spiritualism and its history will find it illuminating and helpful to the understanding of the 19th century culture of which it was a part.
Quantities of literature have been written about Lincoln (I Googled his name and came up with 8,510,000 entries), yet it still leaves the reader very confused about him. Perhaps more confused about him. Like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, much of the man's personality lay beneath the "water" line for most of his peers. Furthermore and for this very reason, every writer about the man had/has his own "Lincoln" version in mind.
As Susan Martinez herself notes, more than Lincoln the man, one receives a distorted image filtered through the perspective of his biographers; through cultural lenses, personal biases, personal agendas, etc. Maybe it's unavoidable. Dr. Martinez quotes from a roughly contemporary source which stated that a mind of such genius as Lincoln's, viewed through the filter of lesser minds, always appears "unrecognizable (p. 133)." She also notes the addendum to this statement made by author Victor Searcher (1965) that this fact is the source of the "many different Lincolns (p. 133)." Certainly the man's contemporaries were every bit as confused about the Real Lincoln as modern day authors.
I think that the ultimate cause of this is the fact that Lincoln, by dying as he did and at the time he did, assumed almost deified status for the average person of his time, not to mention for us. He left his work incomplete, he was not allowed to undergo the effects of time which often dims recollections of past deeds or buries them under later concerns and preoccupations. Instead he became an icon of martyrdom, righteousness, freedom, courage in the face of adversity to almost all of his contemporaries and even more so to those generations that followed.
This larger than life iconic status was a very tempting thing to manipulate in the interests of individuals whose own agendas were not quite as altruistic. Furthermore, the endeavor to cultivate and manipulate his persona for private interests began almost immediately as the power brokers of the time grappled with one another for control.
Much of our confusion over the man is due to the fact that private family papers were destroyed by Lincoln's only surviving son Robert in an endeavor to control what was written and believed about his esteemed father. Robert's efforts at what he obviously considered "damage control" even extended to having his mother committed for "insanity" some years later. Whether this was out of a misguided fear that his father's great reputation would be besmirched by his mother's behavior or that the value of his own reputation as a Lincoln might lose its value is anyone's guess.
Some of our confusion over the person of Lincoln is based in Robert's activities and in the biases about women. Just the basis for the diagnosis of Mary Lincoln's "insanity" would put most modern women in an institution: spending too much money on clothing, having a political opinion, having an educated mind, expressing "excessive" grief (ie. over the loss of almost all of her children except the controlling Robert and of her husband who was assassinated in her presence while she was actually speaking with him; over the fact that while she had a northern husband and loyalty, her natal family was primarily located in the south; and over the fact that her outspokenness caused most people to dislike her because she was "unfeminine," leaving her lonely and isolated, etc.--for which see: Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography .)
In fact, if one looks at the material on Abraham and Mary Lincoln, one comes up with a very dichotomized view of the two of them, an almost Biblical duality of "good" and "evil." Abraham is everything good, noble, and male, while Mary is everything uncontrolled, selfish and female. They are for their contemporaries, from whose descriptions we gain our only view of them, the antithesis of one another. Part of this was due to the fact that Mary, despite her loyalty and support of her husband's position, was still viewed as Southern, ie "bad," while Abraham was viewed as Northern, ie "good." It should be noted, however, that this latter assessment accrued to the man by virtue of his conveniently dying almost on the eve of the end of the war. During the war, he was often vilified by the same people who paid lip service to his greatness after his death. Life was not easy for the Lincolns during the White House years (for which see: The Lincolns in the White House: Four Years That Shattered a Family .
Because of this duality of persona between the Lincoln pair, much of what was considered "unacceptable" for the icon Lincoln is offloaded onto Mary, "the bad influence." Unfortunately some of this goes on in modern biographies of Lincoln and it paints a distorted portrait of the man. In short it supports the icon, not the man. This is a sad state of affairs. It robs the man of his humanness and denies the incredible burden that he undertook and which, at its end, took his life. It is my firm conviction that even had the man not been assassinated, he would not have lived out his second term. I think he would have died of the effects of the stress under which he lived for over four years, those same effects already visible in the succession of photos of the man over the time of his administration.
So what new does this author actually present to us with her Spiritualistic view of Lincoln? A very good one, I think. For one thing, she reflects on the cover-ups and the manipulation of the Lincoln persona--both that of Abraham and of Mary--by others. She sees and presents Abraham, warts and all, and Mary Lincoln, strong points and all, and she refuses to commit the modern error of removing the two from their own 19th Century milieu.
This is an important point. No person is outside of the influences of his or her own time. If Abraham was a spiritualist at heart and if he chose not to declare it, he was not alone, as Dr. Martinez makes plain. It could be political, professional, and social suicide to make beliefs of this kind known, and she provides examples of it.
But if he and his wife chose to seek comfort in beliefs in an afterlife and a continued interest by the deceased in their living family, why would that be particularly strange? Why when almost every person living at the time had also sustained great family losses in a war that seemed to be without end and who probably also looked to their personal philosophy or religious beliefs for comfort, is the Lincolns' search for a balm for their grief unacceptable and unbelievable?
Why, taken within the reference point of his time and place, would Lincoln's personal beliefs be something to leave out of the picture? Whatever they may have been, and despite the fear that superstition might have made important decisions--given the complexity of any urgent time, tossing a coin might be the only other option!--he obviously had the wherewithal to get through the stressful time and to make good decisions, and that despite his detractors' protests. Anyone who can make considered decisions, by whatever means, in the maelstrom of chaotic and stressful times is a treasure.
Probably better than any of the Lincoln portraits I've read before, this one really, really, really illuminates the staggering stress and emotional burden that this presidency represented to its occupant, and more than any other biography, it shows the incredible good fortune that having this particular man in this particular place at this particular time really was for the destiny of the country. I doubt there were any others who could have withstood the pressure or undertaken the mission so successfully as Lincoln did. If he chose spiritual resources available to him at the time to support his own emotional well being, good for him!
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Lincoln saw his death in dreams, consulted oracles, and knew at age 22 that he'd become President of the U.S.: despite the evidence historians have dismissed his psychic involvements. But his rose to power coincided with a rise in interest in spiritualism, and this chronicle of his psychic side, which includes precognitive dreams, trance-like states, and even White House seances, is enhanced by the deathbed memoir of his favorite medium and charts his many clairvoyant incidents and psychic interests. New age libraries will consider it a 'must have' acquisition.
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Historians have not been able to agree as to President Lincoln's religious beliefs. He has been characterized as everything from a God-fearing Christian to an atheistic humanist. It seems clear that Lincoln did not often attend church services and took issue with some of the dogma, doctrine, and methods of orthodox Christianity. And, yet, he emerges as one of our most spiritual presidents.
Dr. Susan Martinez, the author of this book, points out that more than 6,000 books have been written about Lincoln and that it has been said that "there are no important new facts to disclose." She takes issue with that comment as the stories about Lincoln's association with several credible mediums, especially one Nettie Colburn Maynard, while not new, have been pretty much ignored, forgotten, denied, or swept under the rug.
Many of Lincoln's biographers have taken note of claims that the 16th President received guidance from spirits who communicated through mediums. However, the claims are usually derided as beneath the dignity of such a great man. Not long before reading this book, I read a very lengthy magazine article dealing with Lincoln's religious and spiritual views. It mentioned that Spiritualists had made claims to having influenced Lincoln's thinking, but the author seems to have smirked at this claim and did not elaborate.
Martinez digs deeply into the documented records of Lincoln's involvement with mediums and sets forth a preponderance of evidence suggesting that he was indeed guided by benevolent spirits communicating through credible mediums in his most crucial decisions and creative works, including the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln was seen by many who knew him as a somber man with a gloomy disposition. Martinez examines his "peculiar melancholy" and the events in his life that shaped it, including his mother's death at age nine, a strict and distant father, the death of a sister at age 10, and the death of his beloved Ann Rutledge when he was 26. She examines Lincoln's inner turmoil and his attempts to reconcile all of his hardships and the vindictive God of the Old Testament with his evolving ideas of justice, mercy, and goodness, concluding that these experiences molded Lincoln's psyche in a way that made him more sensitive to the unseen principle.
Martinez recounts the paranormal events of 1848 giving rise to belief in spirit communication, pointing out that many celebrated names, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Carlyle, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Horace Greeley, Sir William Crookes, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Russel Wallace, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Queen Victoria, and W. B. Yeats, became investigators and proponents of the new "Spiritual Science." And yet, the evidence was suppressed by the religious fundamentalists, who saw the phenomena as a threat to established dogma and doctrine, as well as by scientific fundamentalists, who viewed it with "intellectual" arrogance.
The president's wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, began exploring "spiritualism," as it came to be called, by visiting mediums and sitting in circles after the death of their 11-year-old son, "Willie." The president took a passing interest in the phenomena and then joined in on a more regular basis. At one sitting, after Nettie Colburn went into a trance, it is said that the spirits speaking through her lectured the president about his duty to emancipate the slaves.
A number of people who knew Lincoln or came in contact with him are quoted attesting to his association with "spiritualists" and the influence they had on him and his important decisions during the Civil War. Others who knew him denied such an association. Martinez dissects the testimony and leaves the reader with evidence strongly favoring spirit communication and influence. She says that Lincoln moved from being an agnostic to a believer. But a believer in what? "No earthly power, no organized religion, no man-made God," she concludes, "but faith - a new faith - in the outworkings of the Unseen world of intelligent design."
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