[In the following essay, Moore examines the connection between Christian Science and the occult.]

Mary Baker Eddy's first husband happened to be a Mason. Briefly but happily married to George Glover, she remained forever grateful for the help she received from his brother Masons when Glover died. Later, membership in a Masonic lodge was the single organizational affiliation that was not ruled incompatible with membership in the Christian Science mother church. However, Eddy's gratitude toward the Masons never prompted her to imitate their ritual. Although some links to occult sciences were strikingly present in the church she founded, those links had nothing to do with Masonry. Rather, it was the peculiarities of her extreme version of philosophical idealism that allowed Eddy's critics to charge her with occultism.

Mary Baker Eddy must have thought it uncommonly bad luck that Science and Health was published in the same year, 1875, that Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society. Thereafter, she was never able to change the minds of her critics who thought that the two women had a great deal in common. She wanted no association with Blavatsky, who returned the favor by calling Christian Science a form of crude occultism similar to spiritualism. Nonetheless, the fact that some of Eddy's followers became Theosophists (and vice versa) was sufficient evidence to many that a common appeal joined Christian Science not only to Theosophy but also to spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, Mormonism, and the "fantastic and crude dogmas savoring of … the mystic East." The intent in suggesting these connections was not always hostile. To Eddy's dismay, some Hindu swamis, who began to tour America after the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893 (a parliament that accorded a great deal of attention both to Christian Science and to Eastern mysticism), attested to startling similarities "that exist between the fundamental principles of modern Christian Science and those of that ancient system of philosophy known in India as Vedanta."

These were not the only associations that Eddy denied. Throughout her long career as a religious leader, she adamantly refused to acknowledge an intellectual debt to anyone. When she described herself as the "discoverer of Christian Science," she allowed a certain ambiguity to cloud the issue of whether divine inspiration had aided her. Her doctrine, as she put it, was "hopelessly original."

It was not, of course. The most important debt Eddy owed, a debt clear even in her denials, was to her teacher, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Quimby's ideas can in turn be related to the intellectual universe of Andrew Jackson Davis and his version of Harmonial Philosophy. On a more sophisticated intellectual plane, one might even suggest parallels that connect Eddy to the metaphysical assumptions of the transcendentalists and especially to the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg. No scholar has yet adequately examined the impact of the Swedish philosopher upon popular versions of philosophical idealism in nineteenth-century America. But doubtless his American followers helped prepare the way for the reception of Christian Science. Swedenborg's theories about the mystical interconnections of all things and his Doctrine of Correspondence, ideas suggestive of Renaissance magic and alchemy, were related to an idea, found in Davis, Quimby, and Eddy, that physical illnesses are reflections merely of discord in man's spiritual force or principle. A spiritual disturbance causes a corresponding material imbalance to appear as disease, which can be cured by mind. Eddy built a church organization that was distinctly her own. But her version of the idea that sin and evil are illusions cannot be set down as an original contribution to philosophy.

In her teachings Eddy attempted to undermine our usual reliance on ordinary sense perception to receive truth and on ordinary language to communicate it. Eddy followed Quimby, who followed Swedenborg, in teaching that biblical words had a spiritual interpretation differing from their literal meaning. She wrote: "We have learned in Christian Science that when reading the Scriptures if you substitute the spiritual significance of a term for its material definition, or the bare word, it will elucidate the meaning of the inspired writer." "I read the inspired page," she added elsewhere, "through a higher than mortal sense." To make plain the hitherto unknown "inner" sense of the words of the Bible, Eddy added a glossary of spiritual meanings (a Key to the Scripture) to the sixth and subsequent editions of Science and Health. The connection between her glossary and Swedenborg's A Dictionary of Correspondences, Representatives and Significatives Derived from the Word of the Lord (first printed in Boston in 1847) is clear enough.

Unlocking the spiritual significance of a word did not, of course, wholly solve the problem of communicating a nonobvious truth. Whatever care Eddy took in revising and perfecting each edition of Science and Health ("a misplaced preposition would change the sense and misstates the science of the Scriptures"), she believed that the printed word could never seem spiritual to the uninitiated reader. "The English language," Eddy regretted, "or any other language with which we are familiar, is inadequate to fully convey a spiritual meaning with material terms." Seekers who wanted to progress in the wisdom of Christian Science had to pay for a series of lessons taught by an authorized instructor.

All of these points suggest that Eddy's early followers were attracted to a style of thought that Edward Tiryakian has identified with "esoteric culture." According to Tiryakian, such a culture relies on commonly available religious texts—the Bible, the Torah, Science and Health—but insists that the meaning of these is not exhausted by an ordinary reading. Furthermore, the esoteric group advertises itself as possessing a unique understanding of the secret and real meaning in the text and adopts a parlance that to the outside world must necessarily seem obscure. Eddy prided herself in thinking that Christian Science healing could be both logically and practically demonstrated. In contrast, she said, Theosophical mysteries were like the excavated cindered human bodies of Pompeii—they fell into dust the moment that air touched them. But whatever she said, her epistemologica! views were not unlike those of P. D. Ouspensky, a twentieth-century occultist. He said: "The idea of a knowledge which surpasses all ordinary human knowledge, and is inaccessible to ordinary people, but which exists somewhere and belongs to somebody, permeates the whole history of the thought of mankind.… Magical or occult knowledge is knowledge based upon senses which surpass our five senses and upon a capacity for thinking which surpasses ordinary thinking but it is knowledge translated into ordinary logical language, if that is possible or in so far as it is possible."

The parallel between occultism and Eddy's church goes beyond a shared attitude toward the limitations of ordinary sense perception and language. Eddy maintained around herself an inner circle of trusted students who often met in secret. Her enemies insisted that she obtained money for Christian Science lessons "by pretending that she had important secrets relating to healing the sick which she had not theretofore imparted." She in turn replied much like the early Mormon leaders: the early private sessions of the church were necessary to protect her followers from persecution and ridicule. Only "advanced Scientific students" were ready for some of the truths she had to impart. Whatever the justification, the hierarchical nature of Christian Science wisdom set novices apart from adepts. And Eddy not only maintained strict control over who was authorized to teach Christian Science lessons but forbade any of her teachers from trying to convey the contents of those lessons to the general public.

If Eddy had been worried merely about the confusion and misunderstanding that her teaching could arouse in inadequately prepared students, she might have avoided some of the portrayals of herself as a dangerously superstitious woman. But Eddy made the explicit claim that the end result of Christian Science teaching was power—indeed, the shamanistic power to heal, which Mircea Eliade has called "the most archaic and most widely distributed occult tradition." Where there was power to do good, there was power to do evil. "Why we take so few students," Eddy wrote, "is because of the great danger there is in promiscuously teaching metaphysics, or the power of mind to do good, lest it abuse that trust, forsake metaphysics, and this developed mental power becomes the … extracts and essences of evil." To the newspaper editorialists who were hostile to Eddy, this statement clearly implicated her in an attempt to devise a system of black and white magic.

Such criticism grew particularly strong because of Eddy's obsessive concern with what she called "malicious animal magnetism," the use of mental powers to cause disease and illness in others rather than to heal. Eddy always argued that malicious animal magnetism was the opposite of Christian Science and was part of the illusion her philosophy wished to dispel. Nonetheless, the behavior that resulted from her belief in malicious animal magnetism contributed with legitimate reason to her reputation as an occultist. For example, in the spring of 1878 a suit was filed in Salem against Daniel Spofford, a former student of Eddy who was bitterly estranged from her. The charge against him was that he had practiced harmful mesmerism against a Christian Scientist, Lucretia L. S. Brown. The charge was dismissed, but not before the press had branded it an attempt to resurrect the Salem witchcraft trials. Eddy's chapters on "Demonology" in the early editions of Science and Health indeed warned that "the peril of Salem witchcraft is not past, until that error be met by Truth and Science."

The summary dismissal of the case did not discourage Eddy from continuing to make strong public warnings. In 1882, when her third and last husband died, Eddy told a Boston Globe reporter that he had been the victim of mental malpractice. The activators of the fatal poison, which she claimed was applied mentally without any physical contact with Dr. Eddy, were again alleged to be former Eddy students. In Eddy's mind, largely because of the growing popularity of her doctrines, the dangers of mental malpractice never thereafter slackened. Quite the contrary: "The mild forms of animal magnetism are disappearing, and its aggressive features are coming to the front. The looms of crime, hidden in the dark recesses of mortal thought, are every hour weaving webs more complicated and subtile. So secret are its present methods, that they ensnare the age into indolence, and produce the very apathy on this subject which the criminal desires."

Eddy's personal sufferings from malicious animal magnetism became well known. She publicly maintained that her crusade for Truth made her the brunt of mental attacks from those who had vested interests in the continued domination of Error. However, she and her followers tried to keep secret the steps that they took to ward off the effects of malicious mental malpractice. According to one unfriendly reporter, Eddy organized "watches" to turn the effects of evil thoughts back upon particular enemies. She would gather students in a room and have them "treat in thought" someone she suspected of causing harm to herself. "Say to him," she instructed, "your sins have found you out. You are affected as you wish to affect me. Your evil thought reacts upon you. You are bilious, you are consumptive, you have liver trouble, you have been poisoned by arsenic, etc."

Somewhat startling confirmation of these practices was provided in a memoir written by Adam H. Dickey, Eddy's private secretary during the last three years of her life and for a time chairman of the board of directors of the mother church. The memoir was a considerable embarrassment to the church, but for Dickey it fulfilled his promise to Eddy that he would prove after her death that she was "mentally murdered." Her failure to prevent the occurrence was not, by Dickey's account, for want of trying. She turned her household into a mental fortress, dividing die night into four mental watches. Each was assigned to different mental workers, all residents of the house, who had specific instructions about how to counteract the "evil influence of mental mind directed against our Leader and her establishment during their hours." The typewritten instructions designated in numerical order which phases of error they were supposed to combat. Since Eddy had a horror of excessive snowfall, she even directed her watchers one winter to "make a law that there shall be no more snow this season." After Eddy experienced one particularly severe mental attack, Dickey reports that she told her staff: "You don't any of you realize what is going on. This is a dark hour for the Cause and you do not seem to be awake to it … I am now working on a plane that would mean instantaneous death to any of you."

In view of such words and practices, critics of Christian Science understandably doubted whether die movement reduced demonology, as it claimed, to "a record of dreams." In a telling sentence Eddy wrote, "Let the age that sits in judgment on the occult methods of her period sanction only such as are demonstratable on a scientific principle, and productive of the greatest good to the greatest number." Eddy obviously considered the "occult methods" of Christian Science worthy of sanction. Surprisingly, however, in view of her implied distinctions, Eddy's publications often advertised competing "occult memods." When Warren Felt Evans published Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics in 1886, Christian Scientists attacked it. Ignoring its claim to have stripped the veil from the "ancient mystic brotherhoods," they accused Evans of forcing Christianity "into the farcical grooves of Occultism." They reproached him for saying that he gave readers only the principles "which it may be proper openly to promulgate to the world at large in the present state of the mind of man." Yet throughout the 1890s the book was prominently advertised in Christian Science publications as being available from the Christian Science Publishing House. Other recommended titles included J. H. Dewey's Christian Theosophy, Swedenborg's Correspondences, and the Bhagavad-Gita. If the intellectual connection suggested by these advertisements was a mistake, someone within the Christian Science empire was ready to capitalize on it.