Nuggets from Occult Invasion

Peale was worse than a liberal. He openly acknowledged that many of his ideas came from two leading occultists, Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes and Unity cult co-founder Charles Fillmore. Two ministers (one a former Peale protégé) have recently traced some of Peale’s teachings to a further occult source, Florence Scovel Shinn. After comparing Peale’s books to hers, they—“cite sources of specific instances in which Peale and Shinn not only think alike, but use similar or identical phrases…. Shinn, who died in 1940, drew on mystical sources dating to the ancient Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus and the secrets of Freemasonry as delineated in The Kybalion…. Shinn’s…works, reissued by both Simon & Schuster and the Church of Religious Science, are available in New Age bookstores. Peale penned the introduction to the Simon & Schuster edition, indicating he had ‘long used’ Shinn’s teachings.”