Spiritual messages telling him of his life work.

Andrew Jackson [“A. J.” or “Jackson”] Davis (1826 – 1910), American Spiritualist, was born at Blooming Grove, New York, the son of Samuel and Elizabeth (Robinson) Davis. The family moved to Poughkeepsie, New York when he was a boy. His father was an alcoholic; his mother died when he was still a boy. While a young man, he became an entranced seer and traveling medium, often psychically diagnosing illnesses of audience members, and publishing, in New York City, the contents of his cosmic revelations.
He had little education, though probably much more than he and his friends pretended. In 1843 he heard lectures in Poughkeepsie on animal magnetism, as the phenomena of hypnotism was then termed, and found that he had remarkable clairvoyant powers. In the following year he had, he said, spiritual messages telling him of his life work.
Davis was much influenced by Swedenborg and by the Shakers, who reprinted his panegyric praising Ann Lee in the official work, Sketch of Shakers and Shakerism (1884).
Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by Davis, whose lectures on mesmerism he had attended, in the writing of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)[1].
Davis in turn directly influenced self-proclaimed psychic Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) who adopted "trance diagnosis" and similar activities with few modifications from Davis's example.
The death experience of New Age and Spiritualist movements seems to have perpetuated from Davis.














Ego or Spirit?

[1]"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. An example of a tale of suspense and horror. Poe uses particularly detailed descriptions and relatively high levels of gore in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar".
Many readers thought the story to be a scientific report. Robert Collyer[2] wrote to Poe saying that he himself had performed a similar act to revive a man who had been pronounced dead (in truth, the man was actually a drunk sailor who was revived by a hot bath).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning[3] wrote to Poe about the story to commend him on his ability of

"making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar"

[2]Robert Collyer (1823–1912) was an English-born American Unitarian clergyman.
[3] Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 –1861) was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era in both England and the United States during her lifetime. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death.