The Man Who Gave Us the ‘Law of Attraction’

While thickly worded and torturously long, The Principles of Nature sold a remarkable 900 copies in its first week of release. Davis’s references to the “Great Positive Mind,” or “Great Positive Power,” established the idea, at least for enthusiastic Americans, that all of creation was a mental act, emanating from a higher intelligence and concretizing all forms of reality. Not everyone was impressed with Davis’s cosmology. Edgar Allan Poe, then a struggling journalist and short-story writer, sat in on some of Davis’s New York trance sittings. Poe came to regard Davis with a mixture of intrigue and contempt. In 1849 one of Poe’s last short stories, Mellonta Tauta, he poked fun at Davis by mangling his high-sounding name as “Martin Van Buren Mavis (sometimes called the ‘Tougkeepsie Seer’).” At the same time, Poe contributed to the popularity of Mesmerism by using themes from Davis’s trance sittings in one of his most popular stories, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. It told of a Mesmerist who keeps an ill man from slipping into death by holding him in a magnetic trance. Poe completed the story in New York the year he met Davis. For his part, Davis also harbored mixed feelings toward Poe.

via https://medium.com/galleys/the-man-who-gave-us-the-law-of-attraction-f832c6a48054