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In 1693 a twenty-one-year-old mystic named Johannes Kelpius led forty German pilgrims to a creek outside Philadelphia. They built a forty-foot log tabernacle, put a telescope on the roof, and watched the sky for holy signs.

The word occult entered modern use through Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's three-volume De occulta philosophia in 1533. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first instance of the word twelve years after that.

The dime horoscope machine was invented in 1934 by a clothing and securities salesman named Bruce King. He built his trade name Zolar out of zodiac plus solar system and registered it.

Woolworth's agreed in 1935 to stock Zolar's pocket-sized daily horoscopes. Every horoscope booklet at a supermarket checkout line descends from that one deal.

Switzerland sanctioned one of the last witch trials in the Western world in 1782. It ended with a rural housemaid tortured and beheaded.

The Vatican sentenced the occultist Cagliostro to death in 1791 on charges of heresy and Freemasonry. The execution was stayed and he died of disease in an Inquisition dungeon four years later.

Thirty townsmen in Petersham, Massachusetts seized the Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee and made her disrobe, to determine whether she was an English agent in drag. Her answer to the witchcraft charge: “There is no witchcraft but sin.”

The Burned-Over District, the corridor that produced Mormonism and Spiritualism, is twenty-five miles wide and three hundred miles long. It is now U.S. Route 20, the longest continuous road in the United States.

William Miller spent fourteen years cross-referencing Scripture to date the end of the world, and settled on 22 October 1844. His followers became the Seventh-day Adventists.

The Millerites preached under the biggest tent the nation had ever seen, seating three thousand. A squall near Rochester snapped fifteen of its chains and tore it open like a clamshell, and nobody was hurt, which convinced locals the movement was charmed.

The famous image of Millerites in white ascension robes waiting on hilltops has no source in any newspaper of the day. Most of them swept the barns and stoked the fires right up to the last morning.

Jemima Wilkinson caught typhus in October 1776 and lay near-lifeless for thirty-six hours. She rose from the bed and announced she would answer to no name but Publick Universal Friend.

Hauled into a Central New York court on a blasphemy charge, the Publick Universal Friend heard the judge explain that blasphemy was not an indictable offense in the new republic. He then invited her to preach to the court and applauded her good counsel.

Joseph Smith's family owned divining rods, amulets, and a ceremonial dagger cut with the symbols of Scorpio. His mother's memoir calls their interest the faculty of Abrac. Abraxas is the root of abracadabra.

Joseph Smith carried a silver Jupiter amulet to the day he was shot, according to his first wife Emma. Its markings trace back to the Renaissance mage Cornelius Agrippa.

A Batavia man who threatened to print the secrets of Freemasonry was kidnapped in 1826 and never seen again. Fifty-two anti-Masonic newspapers sprang up across the country, and the fraternity never recovered its old prestige.

The widow of William Morgan, the man Freemasons were believed to have murdered, later became one of Joseph Smith's plural wives.

The Marquis de Lafayette wrote to George Washington in 1784 to sell him on Mesmerism. That autumn he walked ten miles from Albany to the Shaker colony to test whether Shaker trances worked the same way.

In that same year of 1784, Benjamin Franklin sat on the French commission that ruled Mesmer's animal magnetism an illusion and ran him out of Paris.

Edgar Allan Poe sat in on the trance sessions of the medium Andrew Jackson Davis, then mocked him in print as the Toughkeepsie Seer. Davis's eight-hundred-page trance book sold nine hundred copies in a single week.

The Swedenborgian church kept its distance from Davis because it already had an American icon. He was John Chapman, the apple-nursery man the world remembers as Johnny Appleseed.

Henry Steel Olcott investigated contractor fraud for the Union Army and made the first arrests after Lincoln was shot. He went on to co-found the Theosophical Society, and Ceylon later put him on a postage stamp.

Within twenty years of Olcott's first visit to Ceylon, the number of Buddhist schools on the island grew from four to more than two hundred.

Thomas Edison and Abner Doubleday were both regulars at Blavatsky and Olcott's Manhattan apartment. Edison described an instrument he had built, one end on his forehead and the other on a pendulum, to test the kinetic power of thought.

In New York City in 1853, nearly half of all reported deaths were children under five years old. That is the grief Spiritualism was speaking to.

Abraham Lincoln hosted a seance in the Crimson Room of the White House in April 1863, with a newspaper reporter present. The medium fainted twice during the evening and had to be revived.

The Equal Rights Party made the trance medium Victoria Woodhull the first woman to run for president in 1872. She named Frederick Douglass as her running mate without asking him, and he later said he had never heard of it.

Senator James Shields rose on the Senate floor in 1854 with a petition signed by fifteen thousand Spiritualists, asking Congress to fund a scientific commission on talking to the dead. A colleague suggested referring it to Foreign Relations.

Caodaism, now the third-largest religion in Vietnam, was assembled in the 1920s partly from French Spiritism, and it took its revelations through the Ouija board.

The patent for the Ouija board was filed in 1890 by a Baltimore patent attorney named Elijah J. Bond. William Fuld, whose name ran across the top of every board for decades, was a teenage varnisher at the shop.

The New York Daily Tribune printed a picture of a homemade talking board in March 1886, four full years before the Ouija patent was filed. An Ohio man told the paper anyone could build one in fifteen minutes with a jack-knife.

William Fuld told a reporter he had no belief in the Ouija board and had been a Presbyterian all his life. In 1927 he fell three stories to his death from the roof of his Ouija factory.

One New York City department store sold fifty thousand Ouija boards in a five-month stretch during 1944.

Parker Brothers is reported to have sold more than two million Ouija boards in 1967, outselling its own Monopoly.

James Merrill won the Pulitzer Prize for a poem built out of nineteen years of Ouija sessions with his partner David Jackson. Their neighbor Truman Capote drifted away and branded the town Creepyville.

Mary Baker Eddy copyrighted the term Christian Science by the early 1890s and sued anyone who used it. Teachers outside her camp had to invent new names: Divine Science, Mental Science, the Science of Right Thinking.

A sociological study of the 1950s found that most inspirational literature published in America between 1875 and 1955 carried some New Thought bent.

Wallace D. Wattles, whose Science of Getting Rich drove The Secret a century later, meant mind power as a tool of wealth redistribution. He ran for Congress and then for mayor of Elwood, Indiana on the Socialist Party ticket.

Elbert Hubbard wrote A Message to Garcia, the motivational essay every business leader loved. He died with nearly 1,200 others when a U-boat sank the Lusitania, sailing to Europe to argue against the war.

Norman Vincent Peale said a Detroit editor handed him Ernest Holmes's Creative Mind and Success when he was a cub reporter. Peale's own biographies and memoirs never mention Holmes at all.

The Law of Attraction was coined by Andrew Jackson Davis in 1855, to describe how a soul is drawn toward its matching sphere of the afterlife.

Frank B. Robinson spent $400 on a single ad in Psychology Magazine reading I TALKED WITH GOD, SO CAN YOU, IT'S EASY. It drew five thousand replies and netted $13,000.

Psychiana, a religion sold by mail from Moscow, Idaho, reached six hundred thousand paying subscribers across sixty-seven nations. Robinson called it the only money-back religion in the world.

Robinson mailed his followers buttons carrying Hitler's image and a vow to repeat hourly that the power of Right would bring his speedy downfall.

In 1939 Robinson cabled Finland's prime minister a plan for the cabinet and army to spend fifteen minutes daily on affirmations against the Axis. The premier replied that he would enact it as soon as practicable.

Before he founded a religion, Frank B. Robinson was thrown out of the British Navy, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy, every time for drunkenness.

Frederick Douglass's 1845 memoir says he was carrying a protective root when he fought off the slave breaker Covey. His 1855 rewrite says he forgot the root and remembered his own pledge to defend himself.

The commercial hoodoo supply houses in Memphis and Chicago were run largely by Jewish pharmacists and cosmetics dealers, among the few white retailers serving Black customers. They remarketed menorahs and mezuzahs as occult supplies.

Cornered by four men with clubs in a cemetery, the magician Black Herman shouted for his missing, drunk assistant to rise from the dead. The man staggered up from behind a tombstone and the muggers ran.

An undercover policewoman posing as a wife with a cheating husband arrested Black Herman in 1927 for fortune-telling and practicing medicine without a license. He served a short sentence at Sing Sing.

The Circle 7 Koran, the secret scripture of the Moorish Science Temple, was lifted almost word for word from Levi Dowling's 1908 Aquarian Gospel, with its moral lessons taken from an eighteenth-century English etiquette book.

Jamaica banned the occult books of the Chicago mail-order dealer L. W. de Laurence. When the government cut its censorship list in 1972, de Laurence survived on it beside Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare.

Robert T. Browne published a treatise on hyperspace with E. P. Dutton in 1919 and hid that he was Black, even from his own publisher. In a Japanese prison camp he taught starving inmates to visualize food.

Manly P. Hall compiled The Secret Teachings of All Ages from the reading room of the New York Public Library, with a bibliography of nearly a thousand entries. He published it at twenty-seven with no university behind him.

Hall's Secret Teachings has never gone out of print since 1928. Copies went to the Crown Prince of Sweden, General John J. Pershing, and Elvis Presley, who owned a signed one.

Manly P. Hall hypnotized Bela Lugosi for a suffocation scene in the 1940 film Black Friday. Universal advertised it as the first scene ever filmed of a player under hypnosis, and Lugosi wrecked the set trying to escape.

Six days before he died, Hall signed his entire estate over to a self-styled shamanic healer. The judge who voided the will said the evidence that the man had stolen from Hall was overwhelming.

Franklin Roosevelt's second vice president cured his headaches by rubbing a Tibetan amulet on his forehead, and signed letters to his guru with the initiate name Galahad.

Henry A. Wallace took credit for putting the eye and pyramid on the dollar bill in 1935. Roosevelt handwrote the instruction to place the pyramid side first, so Americans would read it before the eagle.

Truman Capote went on the Tonight Show in June 1968 and told Johnny Carson that the King and Kennedy assassinations came out of a plan in Madame Blavatsky's writings. No such passage exists anywhere in them.

William Dudley Pelley won the O. Henry Award for short fiction twice and wrote silent films for Lon Chaney. He then founded the Silver Shirts and drew fifteen years for sedition.

Ezra Pound's earliest recorded anti-Semitic remarks came right after a Jewish friend mailed him a Pelley article, hoping the absurdity would cure him of it.

Mein Kampf condemns the mystically inclined theorists by name. Astrology was effectively outlawed under the Reich, Theosophical chapters and Masonic lodges were shut, and their members were harassed or killed.

Gandhi first read the Bhagavad Gita at nineteen, in London, with two English Theosophists who asked him to help them with the Sanskrit. Annie Besant later gave him the title Mahatma.

Baird T. Spalding's books about immortal Masters in the Himalayas sold more than a million copies. He was a broke mining prospector who may never have traveled outside the United States.

On the 1935 tour of India that Spalding led to meet the Masters, he vanished for days, blamed washed-out roads, then cashed in his ticket and sailed home on a freighter.

Spalding died in a Tempe motor inn in 1953 with $15.98 in his pockets and $110.74 in savings. His publisher owned his copyrights outright.

The mail-fraud case against the I AM movement reached the Supreme Court, where Justice Robert Jackson argued the court should have done with the business of judicially examining other people's faiths. His dissent became a landmark defense of new religions.

Modern numerology was invented on the Jersey shore. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett of Atlantic City was the first person to assign numbers to the letters of the English alphabet.

The newspaper horoscope column was born on 24 August 1930, when R. H. Naylor cast a star chart for the newborn Princess Margaret in the Sunday Express.

About 150 American dailies ran an astrology column in 1945. By 1968 it was roughly 1,250 papers out of 1,750.

Ronald Reagan scheduled his first inauguration as governor of California for 12:10 in the morning. His astrologer, Carroll Righter, picked the hour.

The astrologer Sydney Omarr was born Sidney Kimmelman. He took the surname from a character played by Victor Mature and added the extra letters by numerology.

Paul Foster Case was expelled from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1922. He answered by teaching its inner doctrine through the mail to anyone who paid a monthly fee.

Edgar Cayce left more than fourteen thousand documented trance readings. He never got past the eighth grade of a rural Kentucky schoolhouse.

The New York Times covered Cayce on 9 October 1910 under the headline Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.

Cayce charged $20 for a reading and waived it constantly. His reasoning: “If this information is of a divine source it can't be sold, if it isn't then it isn't worth any thing.”

A New York publisher tested Cayce by mailing him a letter about his child's unexplained pain. Cayce named an infection in the jaw behind one specific tooth, the dentist refused to pull a sound tooth, then pulled it, and the infection was there.

At Christmas 1935 a twenty-one-year-old cousin wrote to Cayce, said he was homosexual, and said no person on earth could help him if Cayce could not. The Sunday-school teacher wrote back without a word of condemnation.

Cayce sent a former Klan organizer and Silver Shirts business manager to talk his life reading over with David Kahn, a Jewish friend of thirty years.

Britain repealed its last Witchcraft Act in 1951, after English Spiritualists kept getting charged under a law from the sixteenth century. Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today three years later.

Linda Goodman, a former Miss America contestant, put the first astrology book on the New York Times best-seller list in 1969 with Sun Signs.

Ben Bradlee on why the Washington Post started running horoscopes: “I got tired of Mrs. Graham telling me we should have an astrology column, so I got one.”

Olcott and Blavatsky took formal Buddhist vows in Sri Lanka in 1880, probably the first Westerners on record to do so.

The In Rainbows booklet thanks Johnny Marr for guitars and counsel.

The strings on In Rainbows were played by the Millennia Ensemble, led by Everton Nelson and conducted by Sally Herbert.

In Rainbows was mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering. The catalogue number printed in the booklet for the pay-what-you-want release is DL_X_X001.

Four engineers are credited on In Rainbows: Nigel Godrich, Richard Woodcraft, Hugo Nicolson, and Dan Grech-Marguerat. Preproduction gets its own credit, to Graeme Stewart.

The In Rainbows artwork is credited to Stanley Donwood and Dr Tchock. The booklet never says who Dr Tchock is.

The In Rainbows thanks list includes Kieran Hebden, and Premier, Zildjian, and Cycling '74. The page closes in memory of Allegra 'Lola' Katan and Thea Selway.

Over-Nite Sensation was Frank Zappa's first gold album. AllMusic's Steve Huey treats it as the watershed where the post-sixties Zappa was established.

The growl carrying the storytelling on Over-Nite Sensation is Zappa's post-accident voice. A fan shoved him off the Rainbow Theatre stage in London in 1971 and the fall crushed his larynx.

Tina Turner and the Ikettes sing backing vocals on Montana. Neither one is credited on the sleeve.

Huey lays out Zappa's defense that the misogyny charge misses the satire of male stupidity, then argues the glee in the delivery undercuts him.

Verve insisted on adding of Invention to the Mothers' name when it signed the band in 1966.

Zappa put three albums on the charts in 1968: We're Only in It for the Money, Lumpy Gravy, and Cruising with Ruben and the Jets.

Zappa's formal music schooling topped out at a six-month stint at Chaffey College in Alta Loma. He scored two low-budget films and spent the money on a low-budget recording studio.

The 1988 world tour ended Zappa's live performing, apart from isolated dates like Czechoslovakia at the invitation of its president and Zappa fan, Vaclav Havel.

Ruhlmann puts Zappa's band alongside Miles Davis's as a training ground for the next generation of players.