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A nineteenth-century medium who was able to detail the creation and spiritual evolution of the world through trance revelations, Andrew Jackson Davis was born in Blooming Grove, Orange County, New York on 11 August 1826. Davis’s family was poor and he had little formal schooling, drifting from job to job. In 1843 he began work as a clairvoyant after discovering that under trance he could see through the body as if it were transparent and make astonishing medical diagnosis.

In March 1844 Davis went into a trance and wandered about 40 miles from his home into the Catskill Mountains, where he had a series of mystical visions of Galen, the Greek physician, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Repeated visions convinced Davis that he was to serve as an oracle of divine truth, and he moved to New York City with S Silas Lyon, a botanic doctor who was to act as his mesmerist. Within a few months Davis selected Rev William Fishbough, a Universalist minister, to be his scribe and in November 1845 the three men began their work.

In their New York apartment Lyon would hypnotize Davis. After a few minutes Davis would go into shock and become rigid and cold, hardly breathing. Then Davis would begin talking and Fishbough would write everything down. Typically there would be three witnesses watching the dictation. Edgar Allan Poe was frequently present. The most influential visitor was a professor of Hebrew at New York University, George Bush, and he endorsed the accuracy of Davis’s trance pronouncements, calling Davis the greatest prodigy since Swedenborg.

It took around 157 sessions for The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind, By and Through Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie Seer and Clairvoyant to be written down and published in 1847. It was an overnight success and the 21-year-old Davis became an instant celebrity. He did not get instantly wealthy though, as he assigned all copyright of the book in trance to Lyon and Fishbough.

The book seems rambling and dense to the modern reader but in the mid-nineteenth century people were fascinated by complicated creation, philosophy and religious theories. Covering a huge range of topics, from the evolution of the solar system and the biological history of earth to the life of Jesus and the precepts of Swedenborg, Davis defined God as the great positive mind that is by its nature progressive. According to Davis, after death man progresses through the celestial spheres to the seventh sphere, where he becomes one with God’s infinite mind, wisdom and love; throughout the book he gives hope to readers for future regeneration, both in the secular and the spiritual world:

It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body, and the other in the higher spheres, and this, to when the person in the body is unconscious of the influx, and hence cannot be convinced of the fact: and this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established.

Davis claimed to have had little or no formal schooling and critics, recognizing creation theories and spiritual concepts of the likes of Robert Chambers and Swedenborg, accused him of fraud. It is unlikely that Davis could have recited from all these texts under trance but some believe that Davis simply had a remarkable memory.

On 31 March 1848, Davis predicted the birth of spiritualism when he wrote in his diary that he felt a warm breath on his face and a voice telling him that the good work had been done and a living demonstration was born. It was on that day – 31 March 1848 – that the Fox sisters allegedly first made contact with a spirit from the afterlife.

Davis continued to lecture and write about divine philosophy and healing for the next 30 years, until he became a legitimate physician at the age of 60 with a medical degree. In addition to healing, another subject that interested him was the discovery of electrical vibrations, as early evidence of psi. Despite being hailed by the spiritualist movement as their John the Baptist, Davis faded into obscurity in his later years. He ran a bookshop in Boston until his death in 1910, where he sold occult literature and prescribed herbal cures to patients.