From Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism, Volume 1 By Frank Podmore
Of all the popular enthusiasms of the time, that which was most intimately bound up with Spiritualism was the Fourierite movement, which had shortly before swept in a great wave over the United States. There appears to be some natural affinity between Socialism of a certain type and Spiritualism. The vision of a new heaven will perhaps be most gladly received by those whose eyes have been opened to the vision of a new earth, the dwelling-place of righteousness. It is certain that many Socialists have been Spiritualists. The veteran Robert Owen was converted to the new faith a few years before his death. ["His successor, Robert Dale Owen, has not carried forward the communistic schemes of his father, but has been the busy patron of Spiritualism." ~ John Humphrey Noyes] The Shakers claimed to have had spiritual communications as early as 1837, and to have received at that time predictions of the advent in a few years of fuller revelations: and many of the older American communities were founded by leaders who claimed direct inspiration from spiritual sources. But the connection between the Socialist revival of 1840-50 and the gospel of 1848 was more intimate still. There were those who traced a definite resemblance between the ideas of Fourier [François Marie Charles Fourier was an influential early socialist thinker, and one of the founders of utopian socialism] and Swedenborg [a Christian mystic], especially in the doctrine of Universal Analogy taught by Fourier and the well-known "Correspondences" of the Swedish seer. It is certain that there were many disciples of the one prophet who joined in the cult of the other. The list of writers in the Phalanx and the Harbinger, given by Noyes in his History of American Socialisms contains many names—such as Horace Greeley, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Henry James, and J. Garth Wilkinson—which were afterwards well known in connection with Swedenborgianism or Spiritualism. Of the two leading Socialist communities founded under religious impulses in the early forties, before the main crop of "Phalanxes," Brook Farm, as is well known, cultivated Swedenborgianism; whilst Hopedale, in the person of its founder, the Rev. Adin Ballou, helped towards the propaganda of Spiritualism. Of the two most successful secular communities of the day, the Wisconsin Phalanx was founded by a Spiritualist, Warren Chase, and the North American Phalanx had Horace Greeley as a Vice-President. Nor did the connection between the two movements cease with the revelations of 1848. Two or three years later the Auburn Spiritualists, headed by Thomas Lake Harris and James D. Scott, founded the Mountain Cove Community; while Harris himself later inaugurated a new Spiritualist society at Brocton, N.Y., and afterwards at Santa Rosa, California. Another communist society of the same type was the Harmonial Society, founded under angelic direction by one Spencer, an ex-Methodist minister, and his wife in 1855. Again, T. L. Nichols and other Spiritualists were members of the Socialist community of Modern Times, founded on Long Island in 1851. And many of the "inspired" writings of the time sketched out plans for an ideal society to be founded on communist or phalansterian lines. Andrew Jackson Davis and the other writers in the Univercoelum, as already pointed out, preached social reconstruction as the concomitant of spiritual regeneration.
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