Emerson and demonology: In the 'shadow of theology' (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Since the publication of “Emerson and Science” in 1931, scholars have addressed the importance of Emerson's interest in a Romantic science. In evolutionary biology, geology, astronomy, and electromagnetic physics, Emerson glimpses fundamental principles of nature and, correspondentially, the moral laws that govern their moral use. My dissertation argues that Emerson also turns to the demonology, or “Dreams, Omens, Coincidences, Luck, Sortilege, Magic, [which] are supposed to indicate the presence of some foreign, unacknowledged element in nature that produces exceptions to, if not violation of the ordinary laws” (EL, 3:151). The first chapter, “The Miracle of Life,” details Emerson's doctrine of miraculous power, the ground of his Romantic science. The second chapter, “Natural Magic” investigates Emerson's interest in natural magic, which for him includes magic, astrology, alchemy, metempsychosis, the gaze, mesmerism, and spiritualism. The third and fourth chapters on “Daemonic Power” and “Sleep and Dreams” explore Emerson's idea of daemonic power, an exponential force of character that charges rare individuals with charismatic or crippling energies and announces their destinies in coincidences, omens, prophecies, and dreams.; With an a priori conviction that the universe follows inviolable laws, Emerson investigates demonology as a clue to unfathomed natural laws and as a testimonial to the power of the poetic intuition (and, thus, a Romantic science) to perceive rationally unexplained laws. Emerson confronts its extravagance, however, with a mingled fascination and revulsion borne of his debilitating fear of chaos. As a naturalist, he despises superstitions of a “lurking gypsy principle” that violates physical laws, insisting that demonological forces derive from unsounded material and unconscious intellectual energies (EL, 3:165). Yet, as a moral philosopher, he struggles to accommodate the extravagant facts of demonology to the idea of nature as a moral force benevolently disciplining people in the pursuit of self-culture. Privately as early as the mid-1830s and publicly as early as the late-1830s, he broaches demonological facts as fatal limitations of nature and mind, chimerically inspiring or conspiring against individuals in their cultivation of ethical character. Thus, he develops crucial, previously overlooked ideas in his natural history of intellect and, more broadly, his doctrine of fate.