PAXIMUS
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Pretty close. I go to Namibia ( Southwest Africa ) and buy crystals from the local diggers. I'll be out your way in tucson in 2 weeks to sell them. Passing right thru 505 on my way.
Stop and say hello to our girl Razzy for us...
An interesting article I just finished reading, some of you may enjoy it:
The Weird World of Occult America -- How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
By Alexander Zaitchik, Killing the Buddha
Posted on January 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145468/
If witch-burning Puritans are the original jocks of American history, then the mystics surrounding Johannes Kelpius are the first goths. While the rest of the British colonies were still dutifully worshipping their angry Christian god, Kelpius and his followerswho fled Austria to settle in Philadelphia during the late seventeenth-centurybusied themselves with astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and other dark arts with tangled roots in the Italian Renaissance, the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and various (often fabricated) antiquities. We meet Kelpius early in Mitch Horowitzs Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, an uneven but always interesting account of 400 years of New World Strange. Among the several misconceptions Horowitz seeks to dispel, the most foundational is the idea that Colonial America provided shelter only for persecuted Christian sects. Almost from the beginning, North America was also home to a fair number of those who, like Kelpius, had more arcane spiritual interests.
Horowitz never claims that these beliefs were as formative an influence as Christianity in the making of America, but after finishing his book, one cant help but wonder if maybe Ouija boards dont belong next to King James in every motel room. Horowitz ably chronicles how occult traditions have, over the centuries, deeply and consistently influenced the American mainstreamsometimes entering the mainstream themselves in the process. Many of the figures that populate Horowitzs narrative will be unknown to the uninitiated, but their impact is illustrated by the frequent appearance of more familiar names. Mormonisms founder Joseph Smith, after a childhood in the Hudson Valleys famously heterodox Burnt-over District, was at the time of his death studying Hebrew and Kabbalah. Henry Ford was a fan of the New Thought leader Ralph Waldo Trine, and he often gave visitors copies of Trines In Tune With the Infinite. Frederick Douglass left open the possibility that a magic hoodoo root (not to be confused with voodoo) helped him secure victory against a cruel slave master.
More at link:
http://www.alternet.org/story/145468/