Cyrus Reed Teed

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Cyrus Reed Teed

Cyrus Reed Teed (born October 18, 1839 in Trout Creek , New York , † December 22, 1908 ) was an American doctor and founder of a religious community. He called himself Koresh Teed and was of the opinion that people lived on the inside of a hollow sphere ( inner world cosmos ). Teed's teachings found about 4,000 followers.

Life

education

Cyrus Teed was the second son in a row of eight children. His father was Jesse Sears Teed (1814-1899), his mother Sarah Ann Tuttle (1815-1885). At the age of eleven, Cyrus left school to work on the towpath along the Erie Canal . While his family wanted him to serve in the Baptist Church like his grandfather , Cyrus chose to begin medical studies with his uncle, Samuel F. Teed, a medic from Utica , New York.

Teed was interested in healing methods that are now counted as alternative medicine , homeopathy , Indian herbal medicine and forms of therapy that use magnetic fields or electric shocks .

Cyrus Teed married Fidelia M. Rowe in 1859, and the couple had a son, Douglas Arthur Teed, in 1860. In 1862 the family moved to New York City , where Cyrus initially continued his studies. That same year he volunteered with the New York Infantry . In August 1863 he suffered a sunstroke , which led to a lengthy stay in the hospital and ultimately to his discharge from the army. Teed was able to continue his medical studies at Eclectic Medical College in New York, graduated in 1868 and then began to work in his uncle's practice in Utica.

"Enlightenment"

In the fall of 1869, Teed claims to have made gold out of lead ( alchemy ) and found the philosopher's stone during experiments in his laboratory . Reed was electrocuted during one of his experiments. Then it should in an " enlightenment " (Illumination) have appeared to God in the form of a beautiful woman who gave him the order to interpret the symbols of the Bible scientifically. She also showed him the essence of the universe: the earth was a hollow sphere and people lived on the concave side, while the sky and celestial bodies were near the center of the sphere and it only appeared as if it were because of a curvature of the light Earth a sphere on the surface of which people lived.

Troubled years

The following years were troubled for Teed. The income from his practice fell because he was believed to be "crazy" locally. Eventually the practice could no longer support the family. Teed moved to Binghamton , New York, and opened a practice there. He received help from Dr. A. W. K. Andrews and his wife, who were also among the first members of the new religious movement, the Koreshans . In 1873 Teed and Andrews visited the Harmony Society commune in Economy , Pennsylvania. There they saw applied forms of celibacy and communism . Between 1874 and 1876, Teed practiced as a doctor in Equinunk , Pennsylvania before moving back to his parents in Moravia , New York. The daily newspaper Herald of the Messenger of the New Covenant of the New Jerusalem , which he edited, had to discontinue its publication. Some articles from it appeared in the Flaming Sword in 1901 . Teed became a member of the North Family of Shakers , a commune in Lebanon , New York. This stay also had an impact on his later, own community. At the same time he practiced as a doctor in a number of neighboring villages. At the end of 1880 he founded a commune in Moravia, which included his parents, three siblings, a brother-in-law and five other people. His wife, who had tuberculosis , went with their son to their sister in Binghamton.

After two years, the mop production, which was supposed to secure the maintenance of the municipality, failed. The community also came under fire when a woman left her husband to join the group. Teed had to leave Moravia for Syracuse , New York, where his brother Oliver, who graduated from the Philadelphia National Eclectic Medical Association in 1868 , and sister Emma worked in Cyrus' practice. The practice was initially very successful until Teed was sued for stealing money by pretending to be the second Christ. Teed paid back the $ 25 and the matter was dropped. Teed gave a public lecture in 1884 entitled The Science of Immortal Life . Even so, the practice no longer went well and Teed moved to New York , where he lived with four women, including one of his sisters and a cousin. In 1886 this small community also had to give up.

Ascent

Cyrus Koresh Reed Teed

Teed was invited to a six-day meeting of the National Association of Mental Science in Chicago in September 1886 . On the last day of the meeting, Teed gave a lecture entitled The Brain, followed by a demonstration in spiritual healing . He is said to have healed a paralyzed woman. His community, organized a few days earlier in Chicago, quickly founded the Guiding Star Publishing House , the Assembly of the Covenant (Church Triumphant) and the World College of Life , a school for metaphysics . Most of the members came from the mental science group. Annie G. Ordway took over the management of the Society Arch Triumphant , which in the following years mainly attracted well-educated middle-class women.

From 1890 the community expanded. The offshoot founded in Los Angeles had to be dissolved again in 1892, but 25 members moved to Chicago. Teed kept in touch with various other communities including the Harmony Society in Economy, Pennsylvania, the Brotherhood of the New Life in Fountain Grove , California, and the North Family of Shakers in Lebanon, New York. Teed's dream was to unite the various utopian communities in a Confederation of Celibate Societies .

Teed was 5'6 "(1.70 meters) tall, weighed just under 75 kilograms (165 lbs.) And had never shaved until 1891. From then on he was always clean-shaven and wore glasses. He had a deep voice and one Teed spoke insistently and his lectures and sermons rarely lasted less than two hours.From 1891 he called himself Koresh , the Hebrew form of his first name Cyrus , which is itself the Latin form of the old Persian name Cyrus .

In May 1892, the community rented an estate in Washington Heights , Illinois, near Chicago. The property consisted of a manor house, seven farmhouses and a good four hectares (11½ acres ). A printing press was set up in a barn. At that time the group had 110 members, 83 of whom were women. Teed has been sued several times, some of which related to Teed's views on women's rights . All charges were eventually dropped. But Teed was happy to take the opportunity when the group was offered an estate of approximately 320 acres in Florida. In 1894 the first 25 members of the group moved to Estero , Florida.

Bloom of the Commune and Teed's death

The Florida colony grew rapidly and soon became more important than the Chicago group. In 1903, Koreshan Unity was founded as a holding company based on the model of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil ) with registered capital of 1,000 dollars. While Teed was initially a minority shareholder, he acquired the majority of the shares when the share capital was later increased to $ 200,000. In November 1903, the last Koreshans left Chicago and brought 15 carloads of goods and equipment to Florida. At the beginning of 1904, 200 people lived in Estero, so that a separate community could be founded in the sense of an administrative unit . The new community of Estero covered 110 square miles , or about 285 square kilometers, of which 8 square miles were water (20 km²).

Between 1894 and 1908, the Koreshans acquired around 23 square kilometers of land (over 5,700 acres). The municipality operated a large number of its own handicrafts, including toolmaking, electricians, cement work, sheet metal work, mattress making, hat making, basket making, shoemaking, blacksmithing, printing and laundry. There was also a restaurant, a sawmill and a shipyard. A furniture factory in Bristol , Tennessee was bought for $ 75,000 . Negotiations have been held with the government of Honduras to acquire approximately 800 square kilometers (200,000 acres) of land to build another settlement. The San Carlos Hotel in St. James City , Florida, was acquired as the home of the World College of Life , but burned down during renovation. Land was also acquired on Mound Key Island in Estero Bay .

In 1897 Teed carried out together with Ulysses Grant Morrow (1864-1950) on the beach in Naples , Florida, a large-scale experiment to prove the concavity of the world. The results, which seemed to confirm Teed's hollow earth theory, were published in Teed's book The Cellular Cosmology .

In 1906 the American Eagle newspaper was founded. The community got into political trouble when the Koreshans demanded a higher share of the road tax and drew up their own list of candidates in the 1906 elections. Because they had voted for Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 , they were refused entry in the Democratic Party primary . What began as a fun affair with its own band and attacks against the other candidates in its own newspaper changed character on October 13, 1906, when a group of Koreshans got involved in a fight in Fort Myers . Teed tried to divide the fighting, but was attacked and injured by the Town Marshal . Teed and two of his supporters were arrested and released on $ 10 bail . Although the three did not show up for the trial, the matter was put down.

After this brawl, Teed's health gradually deteriorated and he died on December 22, 1908, the day of the winter solstice . Many of his followers expected his resurrection on Christmas Day. Teed was buried on December 27, 1908 at the southern end of Estero Island .

Aftermath

After Teed's death, the community fell apart. The last surviving supporters transferred the community's land to the US state of Florida in 1961 , which operates two of its state parks there , the Koreshan State Historic Site and the Mound Key Archeological State Park .

Teed's theories have never been scientifically recognized.

The filmmaker Michael Busch used motifs from the biography of Cyrus Teed in his experimental film The Electric Paradise (2010). The singer GUZ from the Swiss rock band Die Aeronauten sang Cyrus Teed and his theory in 2000 in the song Koresh Teed from the album We Do Wie Du .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Pete Smith. Do people live in a hollow sphere? Doctors newspaper of March 31, 2010.
  2. ↑ Turning the Universe Inside-Out. In: lockhaven.edu. Retrieved April 5, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Cyrus R. Teed. The Cellular Cosmogony or The Earth a Concave Sphere. The Guiding Star Publishing House, Chicago, 1898, 1905.
  4. ^ The electrical paradise , website by Michael Busch.
  5. ↑ aeronauten.ch .
personal data
SURNAME Teed, Cyrus Reed
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Teed, Cyrus; Teed, Koresh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American doctor and re-evangelist
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1839
PLACE OF BIRTH Trout Creek , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1908