During its infancy, the American religious landscape was populated by figures who readily juxtaposed hermetic philosophy, apocalyptic rhetoric, and ascetic solitude. One such man, Johannes Kelpius (1667–1707), was an elusive but highly influential hermit from the Pietist community, and Timothy Grieve-Carlson demonstrates this enigmatic figure’s role in shaping the terrain of early modern religious practice. American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius highlights how previous scholarship has underplayed Kelpius’s influence upon American occultism and its relationship to the understanding of the environment. Along the Wissahickon River in eastern Pennsylvania, Kelpius and his followers communed with nature, treating it as a space populated by occult presences and, consequently, as the book of Nature that God created for devout contemplation by His followers. Indeed, central to American Aurora’s reading is the luminous landscape in early modern thought – its superabundance of forces and powers that shaped how individuals understood their place in a shifting environment. These changes were often interpreted as signs of impending doom.

Beginning with sidereal movements and observers’ commentary in the period’s almanacs, Grieve-Carlson argues that Kelpius moved amid a world that readily accepted and adapted heavenly and earthly signs in religious readings. Importantly, Kelpius inherited a hermetic tradition that enfolded astrology alongside other forms of environmental study, in which the “radical Protestantism of the seventeenth century was directly connected to the wider environmental crisis of the period” (9). American Aurora makes a powerful case for taking Kelpius and his influence seriously, and Grieve-Carlson persuasively and carefully reads the extant writings from this circle of Wissahickon to show how this underappreciated hermit was a key mover in the development of American religious and literary writings.

Grieve-Carlson also moves beyond Kelpius to trace how the literature of both hermetic Protestantism and American literature took up what the author refers to as “environmental knowledge” (13), or “these early modern practices of Hermetically inflected contemplation and interpretation of the cosmos” (13). In six chapters and three shorter interludes on Kelpius’s life, Grieve-Carlson maps out the forms of environmental knowledge and hermetic thought that shaped individuals in Kelpius’s immediate circles, in Kelpius’s own writing, and much further beyond. Early Pietism adopted strands of alchemical and hermetic texts from the likes of Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme, among others. Kelpius himself, initially from the Transylvanian mountains in today’s Romania before emigrating to America, would cultivate a sensibility that Grieve-Carlson characterizes as one in which “the cosmos encloses and discloses real hermeneutic content, [and] contemplation of the environment can yield moral and metaphysical meaning for the human subject, that the world is actually communicating right now” (21). These frames are carried throughout the narrative of Kelpius’s life in what is ultimately a provocative and rich portrait of an idiosyncratic thinker in early American religious life.

Chapter 1 uncovers how German Pietism developed in the seventeenth century and was deeply indebted to the hermetic philosophy of the time. Such occult perspectives on the environment then crossed the Atlantic as Kelpius and his community emigrated to Pennsylvania. It was there, in Penn’s Woods, that vernacular literature conveying these environmental and hermetic ideas took root in texts, such as almanacs and devout tracts. In Chapter 3, Grieve-Carlson takes an extended look at the materials that survive from Kelpius and others along the Wissahickon, and here we find that Kelpius was deeply moved by the local knowledge of the Indigenous Lenape Peoples. Additionally, in Chapter 4, Grieve-Carlson studies Kelpius’s theology, known as the “Threefold Wilderness State.”

After these close readings of Kelpius’s works in the first two-thirds of the book, Grieve-Carlson turns to later readings of Kelpius’s ideas in the following centuries. First is an analysis of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland (1798), in which Grieve-Carlson situates the many visions and discussions of the environment in the philosophical underpinnings of Kelpius’s work. Chapter 6 is more expansive, capturing how Kelpius was transformed into a legend of mythic proportions throughout popular culture, becoming a multitude of things – witch or wizard, a model of extreme piety, and even an “ambient, spectral presence” (192) in modern historiography.

Ultimately, Grieve-Carlson’s book is a moving portrait of an early America populated by figures who experimented with the limits of religious expression. The shorter vitae between several chapters provide an intimate glimpse into a figure that has been misunderstood in both popular myth and serious historical accounts. However, as Grieve-Carlson contends, Kelpius has much to teach us about the transmission of ideas about the environment, the end of the world, and the occult influences that can drastically shape religious experience.