(This is also in Mystical but will get buried there by dream requests, so am also blogging it)

This is from a book called Occult America

The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

by Mitch Horowitz

(Regarding New Thought)

Even the movement's central concept - the Law of Attraction - could appear jerry-rigged. This spiritual "law" had its origins in the work of andrew Jackson Davis, although he never quite intended for how it came to be used. In 1855, writing in Volume IV of another of his massive treatsies, The Great Harmonia, Davis coned the trm Law of Attraction to describe the human soul's affinity for different spheres of the afterlife. Remade by New Thoughters - and later resurfacing as the catch phrase of The Secret and numerous motivational best sellers - the Law of Attraction meant that whatever a person or group of people dwelled upon in their thoughts would manifest in events good or bad, joyous, or catastrophic, in their eartly lives, presumably whether one was a slave or wealthy slaveholder, a person of robust health or a sickly child. Coming from a movement based in hope and limitless potential, such thinking could seem like a naively cruel calculus. While outcroppings of New Thought would appear in other nations, including South Africa and Japan (The Secret was made in Australia), this way of reasoning confined the philosophy largely to an American middle class, where the security of life was a relative given.

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So many think that the Law of Attraction came from The Secret I just thought it was interesting that it came from an 1855 book.