Kersey Graves was born in 1813 in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, the son of Quakers who were members of the Redstone Monthly Meeting. Ten years after his birth, a split occurred in the Quaker community across the country. One faction followed Elias Hicks, who denied the divinity of Jesus and the authority of the Scriptures. The Graves family stayed with the traditional Orthodox followers, but Kersey would eventually move away from Christian orthodoxy all together.
After receiving a traditional one-room schoolhouse education, Graves studied Latin and Greek. He began teaching school in Richmond, Indiana at the age of nineteen and continued in that career for more than two decades in Indiana and Ohio. He was also an abolitionist and lectured on the subject as well as other topics such as phrenology.
In 1844, he joined a group of utopian settlers in Wayne County, Indiana, under the Quaker reformer John Otis Wattles. By that time, Graves was following the most radical Freethought community within Quakerism. When the settlement disbanded in less than a year, Graves continued to work with Wattles and their attention turned to mesmerism.
Graves married Lydia Michener in 1845 and became dedicated to antislavery, woman’s rights, socialistic utopianism, health reform, Temperance, and Peace. After five of their children were born, they settle on a farm in Richmond. During this time, he separated first from Christianity, and then from any belief in a Biblical God. He thought that truth required a belief in the material world or science, and that religion corrupted the truth. Spiritualism on the other hand was a way to investigate the truth about the existence of the soul.
Graves published The Biography of Satan in 1865, stating that Satan was deliberately constructed to be a harmful myth. At that time, he said he was not just a skeptical infidel and atheist, but also a Spiritualist. He lectured on Harmonial or Spiritual Philosophy and theological reform. He became a well-known activist for Spiritualism and an organizer and proselytizer on its behalf. Graves was not a spirit medium himself but believed, like most Spiritualists of the time, that spiritual phenomena were not supernatural miracles, but natural occurrences yet to be explained by science.
The spiritualist newspaper, The Banner of Light, published Graves’ The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors and Bible of Bibles which he wrote to expose Christianity as a lie. He saw Jesus as a spirit medium and a psychic adept. Unfortunately, many of Graves’ facts turned out to be not based on their original literary or historical contexts.
Graves spent most of his later years lecturing on Freethought, atheism and spiritualism. He died at his home just north of Richmond in 1883.
Additional reading:
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