Publications
The Mental Mechanism of Dr. Sivartha
By John B. Buescher
July 1, 2024
Tags American Communal Societies Series
American Communal Societies Series, no. 17. 260 pages, 2024
ISBN: 978-1937370411 ($30)
Who was Dr. Alesha Sivartha, the visionary artist whose strange inscribed mind maps, occult diagrams, and painstaking anatomical drawings were printed in a variety of obscure books and pamphlets in the late nineteenth century?
Religious historian John Buescher here draws Dr. Sivartha out of mysterious obscurity and traces the story of his wild life, from his birth as Elisha Holmes Dodge in upstate New York in 1834, to his transformation, under the name of Arthur E. Merton, into a phrenologist, free-lover, utopian socialist, and cult leader. At the time of his death in 1915, he had assumed the name of Alesha Sivartha, and transformed himself into an occult documentarian who sought to map the structures of the “New Jerusalem” onto the biological and chemical world. This richly illustrated volume includes an extensive album of Sivartha’s drawings.
Dr. John B. Buescher is the author of books and articles on the history of nineteenth-century American Spiritualism. He is a co-director of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP).
