The 1916 Classic! Clairvoyance and Occult Powers by William Walker Atkinson

Let’s talk about William Walker Atkinson!

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1862, he was a lawyer and a writer and one of the pioneers of New Thought, a late 19th-century spiritual and philosophical movement that promoted the idea that positive thinking and faith and mental discipline could improve one’s prosperity.

Dude also wrote a lot of books. Like a hundred of them! But we may be getting a little too ahead of ourselves here when discussing Mr. Atkinson. He started his professional career as a grocer when he was just 15 years old and started pursuing business when he was around 20 years old. He married Margaret Foster Black and by 1894, he was admitted to the Bar of Pennsylvania and seemed to have been a pretty good lawyer for a while, or at least worked hard enough to the point of exhaustion that led to physical and mental health issues.

In fact, this episode of exhaustion actually led to him disappearing from Philadelphia altogether in 1900. No one knew where he was or where he went, including his wife and kid, and Atkinson somehow found himself in Illinois at the Chicago School of Psychology that was run by his future mentor, Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn, where he stayed for six weeks. So impressed with how Dr. Parkyn’s treatment reinvigorated him, William packed up and moved to Chicago, with his wife and kid in tow.

Parkyn thought Atkinson’s lawyer background would be pretty useful to the movement, and sure enough, William’s strong writing skills made him an excellent ghostwriter for the doctor. Dr. Parkyn had a magazine called Suggestion that ran from 1898 to 1906 and tried to bring New Thought thoughts to the mainstream, and William started writing editorial pieces for the publication, but without his name.

William’s first piece was published in December 1900, and it was titled “The Law of Mental Control.” It ended up being a series of four articles that presented a foundational concepts for Parkyn’s ideas on “suggestive therapeutics,” and they would also ended up being foundational to the methods William would incorporate for the rest of his life.

In 1901, Dr. Parkyn appointed William as an instructor at the University of Psychic Science, which was established by Parkyn himself, and he was also officially made associate editor of Suggestion. The doctor seemed pretty invested in Atkinson, and even branded him as a key player in the New Thought movement by talking up “Atkinsonia.” By December 1901, William was the editor of New Thought magazine.

Atkinson also had a bunch of pseudonyms! The publishing ventures Dr. Parkyn owned had a bunch of contributors that were named as authors of the articles, but they were often all written and edited by Atkinson. In fact, he was so prolific ghostwriting for invented personalities that there are probably writings he did that aren’t even identified as his. The personas border on cultural appropriation at best, particularly when he got into Hinduism and yoga and the occult and used names like Yogi Ramacharaka and Swami Bhakta Vishita and Swami Panchadasi, which was the name used for this book you’re holding.

All told, William Walker Atkinson wrote around a hundred books in his life, and we’re happy to present his 1916 should-be classic Clairvoyance and Occult Powers. We will let you be the judge of its quality and veracity.

Interested in other New Thought thought leaders or similar? Check out As a Man Thinketh by James Allen or The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles or Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell.

Click to buy Clairvoyance and Occult Powers!

Cover Image Credit: Background image by Gunnshots (Don) and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license per Wikimedia Commons. The original cover image of William Walker Atkinson is circa 1901 and is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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