Critical Enchanted Materialism: The Harmonian Spiritualist Vision of Social and Cosmic Harmony By: Mitchell K. Jones

Andrew Jackson Davis drawing of spirit communication at High Rock, Lynn, Mass.

The Harmonian Spiritualists—led by visionaries like Andrew Jackson Davis and John Murray Spear—embodied a radical fusion of spiritual idealism and materialist praxis, a synthesis that Joerg Rieger might term practical spiritual materialism. Spear described himself as a practical Spiritualist, emphasizing that his engagement with spirit guides was not merely interpretive but transformative.

The spirits informed him that the time had come for a "comprehensive and eminently practical plan of exchanges" to be unveiled to humanity. His follower, Simon C. Hewitt, argued that while séance phenomena like table-tipping had their place, Spiritualists should aspire to something higher. Material problems—tyranny, inequality, violence, and ignorance—were understood as symptoms of Earth's disharmony with the divine order. To remedy this, benevolent spirits formed an "Association of Beneficents" and appointed Spear as their earthly representative. These spirits, described as "grand pivotal minds," saw themselves in a "parental or advisory relation" to humanity, guiding select individuals toward a reconstructed social order based on equality, justice, and harmony. Alonzo E. Newton, another follower, reported that the Beneficents sought to work through a "divine marriage and holy association of persons" to secure these ideals. Though skeptics might dismiss their vision, the Beneficents predicted that an emerging "divine Socialism" would ultimately realize it.

Far from retreating into esoteric escapism, they sought to rewire society through technology, cooperative economics, and spirit-guided labor, anticipating contemporary critiques of capitalism’s disenchantment of the world. Their project was not merely theological but infrastructural: an attempt to clone heaven on earth, as François Laruelle might say, by forcing the divine into material form.

Harmonial Spiritualism emerged as a critical enchanted materialism in response to the crises of the market revolution and the failures of clerical religion, uniting spiritual vision with materialist praxis. It critiqued capitalism’s contradictions—exploitation, inequality, and alienation—while seeking to collapse the boundary between spirit and matter through spirit communication, cooperative economics, and the appropriation of emerging technologies like the telegraph as models for divine-human collaboration. By fusing socialist critique with metaphysical innovation, the Harmonians envisioned a world where sacred harmony was not merely transcendent but materially enacted, offering a radical alternative to the disenchantments of industrial modernity.

Today, their synthesis of spiritual solidarity and anti-capitalist material practice offers a model for confronting late capitalism’s crises—from algorithmic alienation to climate collapse—by re-enchanting politics as a site of collective liberation rather than passive despair. The rise of AI mysticism, pseudo-religious online conspiratorial movements like QAnon, and the neoliberal co-optation of New Age spirituality, evinced by the myriad of spiritual self help social-media influencers, demonstrate that the left must engage seriously with enchantment—not as superstition, but as contested terrain where the future of solidarity, reason, and revolutionary hope will be decided.

Spiritual Telegraphs and Digital Ghosts: The Politics of Enchanted Technology

Spear and his followers saw the telegraph not as a tool of alienation but as a metaphor for cosmic connection—a "spiritual wire" transmitting divine blueprints. Far from rejecting modernity, they embraced technological advancements—such as the telegraph—as evidence of progress that mirrored the rapidity of spiritual thought. For them, spirit communication was akin to an ethereal telegraph system, with celestial beings transmitting plans for human happiness and societal improvement. Any organizational model that failed to align with the divine blueprint was, in their view, inherently defective. Spear and his followers thus saw themselves as divine mechanics, fine-tuning the engine of society with spiritually informed technology.

Today, their vision resonates uncannily with the digital age. Machine learning programs like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini function as modern-day spirit telegraphs, conjuring language from algorithmic ether. When Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed in 2022 that LaMDA had a soul, he echoed Spear’s conviction that intelligence transcends its material housing. Both moments reveal a persistent cultural longing to re-enchant technology—to dissolve the boundary between the mystical and the computational.

Yet this longing is politicized. The Harmonians’ techno-spiritualism was explicitly anti-capitalist: their "New Motor" was meant to liberate labor from exploitation, not to consolidate corporate power. In contrast, today’s AI is deployed by Silicon Valley oligarchs, its "miracles" harnessed for profit extraction. The difference underscores Rieger’s warning: enchantment without collective ownership risks becoming another tool of domination.

Communitarian Socialism and the Dialectics of Harmony

The Harmonians emerged from a broader 19th-century zeitgeist where Spiritualism, Fourierist socialism, and labor activism converged. While scholars have examined Spiritualism’s cultural politics—particularly its ties to abolitionism and women’s rights—less attention has been paid to its economic dimensions. The early nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation, marked by capitalist expansion, technological innovation, and social upheaval. Against this backdrop, Andrew Jackson Davis’s Harmonial Philosophy emerged as a synthesis of spiritual materialism and scientistic positivism, offering experiential proof of metaphysical truths while addressing the era’s material anxieties. The fact that Davis devoted an entire section of his *Principles of Nature* to socialism underscores its centrality to Spiritualist thought. His system, blending Swedenborgian cosmology, Mesmerist biology, and Fourierist socialism, reflected broader cultural and political-economic currents in the Northern states, where the dislocations of the Market Revolution fueled interest in alternative social and spiritual movements.

Harmonian Spiritualism was part of a long tradition of enchanted radicalism. Many American reformers were deeply religious because they perceived the temporal world as disharmonious, while the spirit world offered a radical alternative that could be materially realized through spirit communications. My approach aligns with new materialist theories that emphasize matter’s enchanting power but combines this with a critical economic perspective. For Davis and his followers, enchantment signified a unity of spiritual and material realms capable of achieving a harmonial future. His non-dualistic spiritual materialism viewed the temporal and spiritual as different frequencies of the same substance, reflecting a Swedenborgian macrocosm-microcosm philosophy.

​As Thomas Nichols observed, “Spiritualism everywhere tends to Socialism.” Communities like Brook Farm and Hopedale—where many Harmonians, including Spear, circulated—experimented with cooperative economics as both a material necessity and a spiritual imperative. The market revolution and the economic panic of 1837 had spurred an explosion of utopian socialist communities in the 1840s, with Brook Farm transitioning into a Fourierist "Phalanx" in 1844. Many of the same individuals involved in Fourierist experiments also participated in Spiritualism, including Spear, who had ties to Adin Ballou’s Hopedale Community and Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands. This tradition of spiritual communalism provided the foundation for Harmonial Spiritualism. The spirits themselves organized as an "Association of Beneficents," advocating for what they called "divine socialism": a world where, as Alonzo Newton proclaimed, “Equality, Justice, and Social Harmony” were systematized through sacred collectivism.

This was no utopian abstraction. As Jan Rehmann emphasizes, effective resistance requires both structural critique and transformative agency. The Harmonians’ séances were not passive rituals but strategic planning sessions—what Rieger might call spiritual labor organizing. Their belief in correspondence—the idea that spiritual harmony must manifest in material redistribution—mirrors contemporary movements like the eco-neo-paganism, which treats environmental justice as both ecological and economic rebalancing.

Mystic Materialism: Laruelle, Bennett, and the Vibrant World

​The Harmonians’ metaphysics rejected dualisms. Like Jane Bennett’s enchanted materialism, they saw matter as “vibrant”—charged with divine energy. Magnetic springs and telegraph wires were not dead objects but sympathetic conduits, akin to Bennett’s “far-from-equilibrium systems.” Their spatial designs—circular layouts, feasting grounds—mirrored Shaker celestial maps, materializing cosmology as praxis.
The Harmonian Spiritualists' worldview can be illuminated by three key concepts: Emanuel Swedenborg’s *usus* (use), François Laruelle’s immanent spirit, and Jane Bennett’s enchanted materialism.
Swedenborg taught that all creation exists to serve a purpose, and that society coheres through mutual service. The Kiantone Harmonians thus saw séances not as ends in themselves but as means to make spiritual knowledge materially useful.

Laruelle’s concept of immanent spirit aligns with their belief that mystical knowledge must be practically applied rather than confined to transcendent abstraction. Laruelle’s non-philosophy sharpens this analysis. Spear’s work was a series of clones: penal reform → spirit mediumship → Harmonian socialism. Each iteration was not a copy but a fresh, immanent rupture, “a knowledge full of ignorance” emerging from lived struggle. His machines (and their legendary 2010 reappearance in a Greeley attic) symbolize this unresolved tension: Can the switch still be flipped? Is the "New Era" merely dormant?

Bennett’s notion of enchanted materialism—a state of wonder where matter vibrates with transcendent potential—resonates with the Harmonians’ view of their community as a site of "everyday enchantment," where magnetic mineral waters served as both physical remedy and spiritual conduit. Jane Bennett defines enchanted materialism as a worldview in which matter is animate, endlessly flowing, and capable of producing wonder. David Morgan’s concept of material religion complements this, arguing that enchantment arises from recognizing power within things. Both perspectives help explain why the Harmonians saw technology and spirit communication as intertwined. James Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic—where like produces like, and contact transmits spiritual power—further elucidates their belief in the material efficacy of spiritual practices.

Douglas Winiarski’s analysis of Shaker feasting grounds provides a useful parallel: just as celestial maps guided the Shakers’ material practices, Kiantone’s circular spatial organization reflected its spiritual cosmology. The Harmonians’ approach exemplifies Bennett’s argument that modernity did not eradicate enchantment but reconfigured it, with physical systems at "far-from-equilibrium states" exhibiting a "strange agency" that blurred the boundaries between matter and spirit.

Where traditional materialism focuses on labor and exchange value, my approach introduces a metaphysical dimension: the capacity of objects to enchant and accumulate spiritual capital. Marx’s critique of Feuerbach—that human activity itself must be understood as objective—points toward a non-dualistic view of agency. The Harmonians’ spiritual materialism went further, insisting that spirit was material and that collective consciousness shaped historical change.

I reject the liberal Enlightenment bias that privileges individual agency over collective movements. The Harmonians’ vision emerged from a dialectical tension between material inequality and spiritual harmony, culminating in a zeitgeist conducive to radical transformation. Their efforts were not individualistic but collective, responding to the failures of the market system by drawing on communal traditions. This counter-hegemonic impulse, antithetical to both Northern capitalism and Southern slavery, contributed to the broader currents that led to the Civil War and emancipation.

Conclusion: The Unfinished Project of Enchanted Revolution

The Harmonians’ legacy is a provocation. They exemplify a critical enchanted materialism that refuses to separate spirit from matter or individual from collective agency—a philosophy as vital today as in their era of telegraphs and utopian communes. Their synthesis of Fourierist socialism and Spiritualist practice reveals a persistent American tradition of seeking harmony through radical re-enchantment, one that directly confronted capitalism’s disenchantments by uniting spiritual communion with cooperative economics and technological innovation. By grounding their vision in both scientific discourse and utopian socialism, they modeled an alternative to modernity’s fractures—one that speaks directly to our crises of algorithmic alienation, ecological collapse, and the spiritual void of late capitalism.

Their failures (Spear’s defunct machines) and folklore (the Greeley hoarder’s attic) testify to an unfulfilled desire: to make the world vibrate with sacred possibility again. Today, as AI mysticism and conspiratorial movements like QAnon colonize the spiritual imagination, and as neoliberal self-help gurus privatize transcendence, the left faces a stark choice: cede enchantment to reactionaries and tech oligarchs, or reclaim it as terrain for collective liberation. The Harmonians remind us that disenchantment is not inevitable but engineered—a political project that serves capital by severing spirit from labor, ethics from economics.

Yet the wires remain live. From unions adopting spiritual rhetoric (“blessed are the organized”) to eco-socialists invoking planetary solidarity, Harmonian impulses persist. The task is not to revive séances but to clone their radical core: a politics where solidarity is sacramental, technology is democratized, and revolution is a realignment of cosmic and material orders. As Spear’s spirits declared, “The hour has fully come”—not as nostalgia, but as a challenge. In an age where Silicon Valley peddles digital animism and the right weaponizes spiritual anxiety, the left must forge an enchanted materialism capable of answering the deepest human longings: for connection, for justice, for a world remade.

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Originally published on Christian Metaphysics with MKJ

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Author
Mitchell K. Jones is a writer, historian and PhD student from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on communitarian socialism and communal religious movements in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His current research explores the intersection between modern spiritualism and the American socialist movement from the 1840s through the Civil War.

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