Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Susan B. Martinez

From the publisher:
In dreams, he foresaw his sudden death. He consulted oracles, and at age 22 was told by a seer that he would become President of the United States.

Obscurantists and historians have dismissed Abraham Lincoln's psychic involvements which, in his own time, were profound state secrets. But Lincoln's rise to power coincided with the Great Age of Spiritualism and, as a Mystical Unionist, he felt he was controlled by "some other power."

Trauma and heartbreak opened the psychic door for this otherworldly President, whose precognitive dreams, evil omens, and trancelike states are carefully documented here in this bold yet poignant chronicle of tragic beginnings, White House seances, and paranormal eruptions of the Civil War era.

Aided by the deathbed memoir of his favorite medium, Lincoln's remarkable psychic experiences come to life with communications from beyond, ESP, true and false prophecies, as well as thumbnail sketches of the most influential spiritualists in Lincoln's orbit. Surveying clairvoyant incidents in Lincoln's life from cradle to grave, the book also examines the Emancipation Proclamation and the unseen powers that moved pen to hand for its historic signing into law.

SUSAN B. MARTINEZ, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, journalist, and activist who received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in the 1970s. Raised by agnostic/intellectual parents in Brooklyn, New York, she found her way to Spiritualism in the early 1980s and has since researched and wrote on psychic phenomena, specializing in modern spiritualism in the Victorian era. Currently Book Review Editor at the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, she lives in the north Georgia mountains.