That's a great excerpt. By a funny coincidence I've just been reading Midnight Rising, a book about John Brown and the raid on Harper's Ferry. Brown hung out with William Lloyd Garrison and admired his stance on abolition, but couldn't take all the pacifism. Garrison seems to have met everybody remotely interesting in the nineteenth century.
The excerpt doesn't describe the New Machine--off to look elsewhere...
OH DEAR YOG. He was taking orders from the ascended spirit of Benjamin Franklin to bring God's word to the world via better technology. History, I adore you, don't you ever stop amazing me:
The final stage of the nine-month long experiment took place on June 29th, 1854 and involved a ritual during which Spear encased himself in a suit made of metal, gemstones, plates and copper strips. He was then brought into gradual contact with the machine before slipping into a deep trance. Clairvoyants present at the ritual reported seeing an “umbilical like cord linking Spear to the machine.”
Perhaps I'm strange or something, but I'm over here going "Awwww!" I'm unilaterally declaring John Spear the (ecumenical) saint of hilarious millennial cults.
(It's not fair: the nineteenth century gets the spiritualists and the Shaker revival and John Murray Spear and that woman who decided she was the Messiah and could walk on water and tried and fell through. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have had their cults but they've all been much shorter on delightful silliness, and much longer on death and violence.)
"The Thing Moves!"
The excerpt doesn't describe the New Machine--off to look elsewhere...
http://whofortedblog.com/2010/08/10/the-new-motor-building-the-god-machine/
OH DEAR YOG. He was taking orders from the ascended spirit of Benjamin Franklin to bring God's word to the world via better technology. History, I adore you, don't you ever stop amazing me:
The final stage of the nine-month long experiment took place on June 29th, 1854 and involved a ritual during which Spear encased himself in a suit made of metal, gemstones, plates and copper strips. He was then brought into gradual contact with the machine before slipping into a deep trance. Clairvoyants present at the ritual reported seeing an “umbilical like cord linking Spear to the machine.”
Perhaps I'm strange or something, but I'm over here going "Awwww!" I'm unilaterally declaring John Spear the (ecumenical) saint of hilarious millennial cults.
(It's not fair: the nineteenth century gets the spiritualists and the Shaker revival and John Murray Spear and that woman who decided she was the Messiah and could walk on water and tried and fell through. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have had their cults but they've all been much shorter on delightful silliness, and much longer on death and violence.)