SOURCE: "Vivekananda and American Occultism," in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow, University of Illinois Press, 1983, pp. 162-76.

In the following essay, Walker discusses—within the context of American attitudes toward occultism in general, and toward Indian mysticism in particular—the reception Vivekananda received on his trip to America in 1893.

"By 1880," writes Donald Meyer, "the divisive sectarianism of an earlier generation had given way to a spirit of cooperation and good will. . . . Americans had successfully compensated for their religious diversity by cultivating a kind of generalized religious consciousness in both their institutional and their personal lives." One consequence of this shift away from dogmatic sectarianism was the liberal and intellectually tolerant interest in what Thomas Wentworth Higginson called "The Sympathy of Religions," and the most notable "institutional" event of this new frame of mind must now be seen as...