Ingredients for the metaphysical religiosity that pervaded American culture in the nineteenth century and afterward came from a variety of sources. They had been in place in early America from the seventeenth century in the confluence of European esotericism, European – and especially English – country magic, Native American ceremonial belief and practice, and African American worldviews and ritual behavior. In the contact and encounter between different peoples and cultures, ideas and enactments combined and blended without much attention paid to the process. People did what worked and did not stop to label precisely or count ideological costs. Thus across the panoply of cultures that met in the British North Atlantic colonies – and similarly in the other huge tracts of territory that would later become part of the United States – webs of interrelated assumptions and practices could be identified. Broadly labeled magical, these included such domains as astrology, treasure hunting, water witching, healing lore, love conjuration, divination of signs and omens, malediction making, and the like.

While at first glance the list seems anomalous and the invocation of magic dismissive in religious terms, closer scrutiny reveals that, at least for high culture aficionados, a sophisticated work of world construction underlay these and similar beliefs and practices. Magic existed as a form of religion, and the religion that magic expressed was and is metaphysical.