Magic in the United States, a new podcast by Heather Freeman of U. of North Carolina-Charlotte, has just launched. As one of her panel of advisors, I have had the opportunity to listen to several episodes. They are well-organized and not t00 long (usually under 30 minutes). So far I have heard about the famous murder of a Pennsylvania Dutch pow-wow doctor and the beginnings of Spiritualism — it’s a wide-reaching show.

Here is the 3-minute trailer, if you need more convincing..

The local alt-weekly, Queen City Nerve, interviewed her about the project:

Magic can mean different things to different people. For many, it’s reserved for those fantastical worlds seen on screen, but for others, it’s not so far removed. For Heather Freeman, its proximity to our world is something she seeks to explore in her podcast Magic in the United States: 400 Years of Magical Beliefs, Practices, and Cultural Conflicts.

The podcast, which explores spiritual and mysterious concepts throughout the country starting from the 1600s to the present day, launched on Oct. 24, with a new episode airing every Tuesday

“It really spans the gamut. So I started putting together a proposal for a podcast series to do this project looking at magic in the United States,” she recalled. “There’s tons of podcasts about witchcraft

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, about ceremonial magic, and then also about religious practices that get called magic. But historically, calling these practices magic is a racist pejorative.” . . . .

Freeman said exploring why certain practices get called magic while the word “religion” is reserved for more mainstream practices is at the heart of her podcast.

“This question of ‘What is religion?’ is really challenging,” she said. “If most people understand religion as one of these major monotheisms, they’re missing a lot.”

You can find and subscribe to the podcast at its home page or at the usual podcast places.

Spirits, Photography, and the Burned-Over District

Why was the Eastman Kodak Company founded in Rochester, New York, not far from the town of Hydesville (now part of Arcadia Township), where the Fox sisters birthed the American Spiritualist movement? Is there a connection between photography and spirits?

Esoteric photographer Rik Garret tof Chicago says yes, and he has launched a YouTube video series, of which this is the first episode.

He briefly mentions the Burned-Over District, which is a religion-scholar’s term for the part of northern New York (and in adjacent Vermont), where numerous new religious movements and personages started or flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” was just one — Shakers, Mormons, and other movements either started or began to grow there. “Burned over” refers to the “fires” of revival movements that swept the area in the Second Great Awakening, which “reflected Romanticism characterized by enthusiasm, emotion, and an appeal to the super-natural. It rejected the skeptical rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment.”

You could say that we are still feeling it.

 

El Niño Fidencio

I first heard about El Niño Fidencio (“Kid Fidencio”) from Davíd Carrasco, my thesis advisor at Colorado, who grew up partly in El Paso.

A 1920s folk healer from the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, he continues to be channeled by present-day psychic healers.

That was the connection for me: the mediumship, which fit with some research in Afro-Brazilian religion that I was doing at the time.

Among the many Web sites relating to him are a Fidencio blog (in Spanish) and a bilingual Yahoo group.