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4
A Urim Spiritual
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...[the French Avignon Society] had influences that reached into the English-speaking world,
attracting several English Swedenborgian millenarians who afew years later became followers of
the prophet Richard Brothers. In the
midst of threats of war in 1794, Brothers, a former naval officer living in London,
pronounced himself the
"Prince and Prophet of the Hebrews" and predicted the coming of the kingdom of God and the return
ofvisible and "invisible" Hebrews to a New Jerusalem to be rebuilt in the Holy Land. Confined as
insane, Brothers would lose some of his followersto Joanna Southcott, "the woman clothed with the
sun," who carried the renewed English tradition of the restoration of the Kingdom of God, dormant
since the 1650s, into the nineteenth century [14 Clark Garrett, Respectable Folly:
Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England -- Baltimore, 1975, 97-120, 171-223;
John F. C. Harrison. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850, -- New Brunswick,
1978, 57-85; Schuchard, Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuities of Occult Traditions,
402-17]...
These ideas did ultimately contriibute to the framing of the Mormon dispensation in the 1840s, but their
impact on the world of the diving cults of the 1780s and 1790s is more difficult to access. When they
did begin to circulate along the coast and into the backcountry of revolutionary America, it was
probably in spite of -- rather than necessarily because of -- the spread of lodge Freemasonry.
American Freemasonry was initially established under warrants from the London Grand Lodge, and its
culture and ritual reflected the Enlightenment thinking of its English founders.... Occasionally
suggestions of spiritualism and the occult emerge from the culture of lodge Freemasonry, such as a
Massachusetts woman's "Masonic Vision," a Saint John's Day sermon on the jewels of the biblical
Urim and Thummim, or the publications in Philadelphia of the "Rites and Mysteries of the Oriental
Freemasons." [15]...
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... Other, more ephemeral writings drawing upon Masonic and millennial themes appealed to a much
broader audience. The rise of revolutionary France, its dramatic confrontation with the British-led
alliance, and its ramifications in American politics inspired a wave of militantly pro-French
sentiment and shaped an audience eager for premillennial predictions and prophicies Among these,
the prophecies of London's "Prince and Prophet of the Hebrews," Richard Brothers,
were widely read in at least eleven American editions published from 1795 to 1797 in Philadelphia, New
London, Worcester, West Springfield, and Albany, where it was put out by a Freemason, Thomas Webb. In
Connecticut, the Reverend David Austin translated visions and a growing mental instability into a series
of published sermons and treatises on millennial and Masonic themes during the 1790s, literally obsessed
with the notion that the "Millennial Door" was opening. [22 In general, for these themes, see Ruth
Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 -- New York, 1985,
150-68; David Austin, Masonry in Its Glory, or Solomon's Temple Illuminated (East Windsor, Conn.,
1799)]
Many of these prophecies focused on legendary artifacts. Brothers' followers from the Masonic Avignon
Society had accepted him as a true prophet, based on prophecies popularly ascribed to Christopher Love,
an English Presbyterian executed for conspiring against Cromwell in 1651. Love's "Prophecies," which
included references to an engraved pillar of brass erected by patriarch Seth and the prophet Enoch before
the Flood, were printed in at least twenty editions at presses throughout New England and other northeastern
states from 1791 to 1800....
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... For those so inclined, such descriptions would have provided fertile ground for efforts to realize the
restoration of ancient mysteries. Such apparently were the aspirations of a millenarian church located in
or near Cincinnati at the turn of the century. Calling itself the "Halcyon Church of
Christ," this church announced in two publications in 1801 that it held the key to "the deep mysteries
of the ancient theology;" the "Urim or Halcyon Cabala." In their definition, the Cabala was the "secret" and
"holy science" once known to "the most ancient Jewish divines;" the church's "Urim spiritual" contained
"the true divine science by which truth shall again be restored to the world and error be defeated."
The millennium would bring the "ushering in of the pure Halcyon church and divine government,"
[34 The Voice of the Midnight Cry. The Little Book The Arcanum Opened, containing the Fundamentals
of the Most Pure and Ancient Theology (Cincinnati, 1801), 2, 3, 5, 24. The text includes an internal
date of September 1799 and is dedicated to a John Baily of Kentucky. See also The Urim or Halcyon
Cabala; Containing the Fundamental Principles of the Halcyon Church of Christ in Columbia; Otherwise
known as the Columbian Church, in Defense of Genuine Christianity and in Opposition to "Lo Here and
Lo There;" consisting of one Supreme Object and Seven Leading Topics (Cincinnati, 1801.) I am grateful
to Jon Butler for these references. Drew Cayton has suggested to me that a Christian minister named
Abel M. Sargent,
who published The Halcyon Itinerary and True Millenium in Marietta
in 1807, was probably
the leader of the Cincinnati Halcyon church. On Sargent, see Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of
American Christianity (New Haven, 1989), 75-6.]
Similar language would reappear among the Mormons at Nauvoo in the 1840s.
In the light of the occult millenarianism of the 1790s, the
New Israelite cult in Middleton, Vermont,
an exact contemporary of the Halcyon church, takes on a different coloration.
Certainly the Woods, the leaders of this cult, had roots in eastern Connecticut's perfectionist culture, but
their claims to Israelite descent and to powers of hermetic transmutation and divining rods also suggest the
influence of the millenarian-prophetic culture of the 1790s. According to one account, at the climax of the
New Israelite drama, when destroying angels were supposed to bring on the apocalypse, there were two skirmishes
between the town militia and "six
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Rodsmen, fantastically dressed, and equipped" with swords -- a suggestion of the elaborate costuming that
was beginning to take hold in Masonic ritual. [35 Vermont American,
May 7, 1828, p. 2.]
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