Opinion | The Long, Strange History of ‘Manifesting’

To understand today’s manifesting culture and what it means, we need to look deeper into history — beyond the 21st century and back to the 19th, to a little-known but once extraordinarily popular American religious tradition known as New Thought, or the “mind cure.”

New Thought can be traced back to the 1800s and a New England faith healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Quimby wondered why, when given the same treatment, some of his patients got better and others didn’t. The answer, he concluded, had to do not with a fault in his methods but rather with a discrepancy in his patients’ mind-sets. Some people simply wanted to get better more than others did. Those who wanted it badly enough were able to essentially get in touch with and harness the energy of the universe to will themselves to heal. Those who didn’t, well, simply died.

Quimby’s theory — which was embraced early on by his followers, including Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement — soon proliferated wildly. By the turn of the century, it was ubiquitous.

Dozens of self-help books, including William Walker Atkinson’s “Thought-Force in Business and Everyday Life” and James Allen’s “As a Man Thinketh,” emerged, arguing that the universe’s mysterious energies could be mastered by the human will. The idea of the “mind cure” began to merge in popular consciousness with other then-novel discoveries like electricity and Darwinian evolution, all of which seemed to support the theory of the human mind’s dominance over nature. For what was survival of the fittest if not proof that will triumphs all?

By the late 19th century — in that era of staggering inequality known as the Gilded Age — the influence of New Thought had begun to seep into economic theory and became a popular frame through which to make sense not only of sickness but also of poverty. Nobody who truly wanted to be rich, a new wave of books claimed, would ever end up poor.

As one New Thought advocate, Charles Benjamin Newcomb, wrote in his tellingly titled 1897 book “All’s Right With the World,” “none is really shut out of the feast [of life] except the self-exiled.” Those who wanted in on “the banquet” had only to repeat to themselves the following mantra, which frankly sounds a lot like something you might find on TikTok today: “I am well. I am opulent. I have everything. I do right. I know.”

In this way, the capitalist pursuit of profit was swiftly recast as a religion whose only tenet was desire.