People sometimes talk about manifestation as though it appeared out of nowhere around 2006, when The Secret became a publishing phenomenon. The real story is a lot longer than that, closer to a century and a half, and it runs through a specific, traceable line of American religious and philosophical history rather than starting from nothing. This article covers that fuller arc, from the earliest mental-healing experiments in the mid-1800s through to the manifestation content circulating on social media today. For a closer look at the movement most of this history runs through, its beliefs, its organizations and the full roster of teachers associated with it, see The New Thought Movement.
Before any of this had a name
Ideas that resemble pieces of manifestation teaching show up much earlier and in very different settings. Hindu and Buddhist philosophy have long treated the mind’s relationship to experience and suffering as a central question, in ways covered on their own elsewhere on this site. Western esoteric traditions going back to Hermeticism made claims about correspondence between inner and outer reality centuries before any American New Thought writer picked up a pen. None of that is the direct lineage of today’s specific vocabulary, though. What most people mean by “manifestation” now traces to a narrower, more recent thread: a mental-healing movement that began in New England in the mid-1800s.
The starting point: Phineas Quimby’s mental healing
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802 to 1866) started out as a clockmaker in Belfast, Maine, with no formal medical training at all. Through experiments with mesmerism and hypnosis in the 1830s and 1840s, he became convinced that illness was largely rooted in mistaken belief rather than purely physical causes, and that correcting the belief could cure the patient. He’s generally regarded as the founder of what became the New Thought movement, though that’s a somewhat contested title worth holding loosely rather than treating as settled fact.
Quimby never organized a church or wrote much for publication during his lifetime. His influence spread through the people he treated instead. Mary Baker Eddy sought him out as a patient in 1862 and, for a period, considered herself his student, before going on to found Christian Science, a related but distinct tradition covered below. Warren Felt Evans, a former Methodist minister who turned to Swedenborgian mysticism, was another of Quimby’s patients, and he did what Quimby largely didn’t: he wrote it down. Evans’s books through the 1870s and 1880s were the first real published statements of what would become New Thought philosophy.
Christian Science and New Thought are not the same thing
Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and the New Thought movement share the same starting point in Quimby’s work, but they became separate, doctrinally different traditions. Eddy organized Christian Science into a single, centrally governed church built around one authoritative text, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), with the first Church of Christ, Scientist organized in Boston in 1879. New Thought never centralized that way. It stayed a loose collection of independent churches, authors and teachers who agreed on some general principles but answered to no single organization or text. Quimby’s own former students, Julius and Annetta Dresser, publicly accused Eddy of distorting his original teaching, a dispute historians still discuss and never fully resolved.
New Thought organizes: 1880s to 1910s
By the 1880s, the ideas Quimby started with were spreading fast and taking organized shape. Emma Curtis Hopkins, sometimes called the movement’s teacher of teachers, ran a ministry and teaching school in Chicago that trained a remarkable number of people who went on to found their own branches, including Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who started Unity in Kansas City in 1889 after Myrtle recovered from tuberculosis through a practice of affirmative prayer. Unity grew into one of the largest and longest-lived New Thought organizations, publishing its own magazine from 1891 onward.
This period is also when the specific phrase “law of attraction” enters the written record. Prentice Mulford, a former sailor turned journalist, wrote about it in a series of essays starting in 1886, later collected as Your Forces and How to Use Them. Two decades on, William Walker Atkinson published an entire book titled Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906). Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich followed in 1910, explicitly built on New Thought principles and citing both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hegel as influences. Across the Atlantic, James Allen published As a Man Thinketh in 1903, a short book that became one of the most widely reprinted texts to come out of this entire tradition. None of it was centrally coordinated. It was a genre finding its voice through a lot of independent writers working at roughly the same time.
The movement gained a formal umbrella organization in 1914, when a set of regional groups, with roots back to a Boston Metaphysical Club founded in 1895, reorganized as the International New Thought Alliance at a convention in London. The Alliance still operates today, though as a loose federation of independent groups rather than a body with real authority over any of them.
Mid-century: a second generation
The 1920s through the 1960s produced the figures most people would actually recognize by name today. Florence Scovel Shinn, a former illustrator, published The Game of Life and How to Play It in 1925, built around the idea that spoken words carry a kind of creative force. Ernest Holmes founded what became Religious Science with his 1926 book The Science of Mind, building an organization in Los Angeles that still operates today under the name Centers for Spiritual Living. Neville Goddard began lecturing in New York in 1938 and continued for over three decades, developing what he called the Law of Assumption, a distinct and more specifically imagination-centered framework than the broader New Thought current he emerged from. His full story is covered on his teacher profile.
Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) sits slightly apart from the rest of this list. It draws on some of the same mental-cause thinking but frames it mostly around business success and persistence, and it’s arguably better described as the founding text of modern success literature than as a New Thought book in the strict sense. Joseph Murphy, an Irish immigrant ordained as a Divine Science minister, built one of the largest New Thought congregations in the country from his Los Angeles pulpit starting in 1949, and his book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963) has sold millions of copies since. Outside the New Thought tradition proper, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) brought a related, more explicitly Christian-framed version of positive-thinking teaching to a genuinely mass audience, reportedly selling more than twenty million copies over the following decades.
The modern Law of Attraction wave
From the 1980s onward, this material reached a wider, more secular audience, often stripped of its churchier trappings. Esther Hicks began presenting material she describes as channeled from a consciousness she calls Abraham starting in the mid-1980s, building the modern Abraham-Hicks teaching specifically around the law of attraction. Louise Hay, who trained at Ernest Holmes’s Religious Science church in the 1970s, published You Can Heal Your Life in 1984 and went on to build Hay House into a major publisher of this kind of material. Wayne Dyer started out writing secular, psychology-based self-help in the 1970s and moved toward more explicitly spiritual territory over the following two decades.
Then, in 2006, Rhonda Byrne released The Secret, first as a film and then as a book later that year. Byrne has said she was inspired directly by reading Wattles’s Science of Getting Rich, nearly a century after it was written. With heavy promotion from Oprah Winfrey, the book spent close to four years on the New York Times bestseller list and has reportedly sold more than 30 million copies. It’s the single biggest reason the word “manifestation” means what it means to most people today, even though almost everything in it descends from material that predates it by decades, in some cases by a full century.
Since then, manifestation content has become a fixture of social media, spread through the same short-form video platforms as everything else and often compressed further into single tips or trends. The underlying claims, that belief and attention shape what a person notices and pursues, and that assuming an outcome differs from simply wanting one, are the same claims Quimby’s patients were arguing about in Maine parlors in the 1860s.
What actually stayed constant
Look across the full 150-plus years and a few convictions show up again and again, dressed in different vocabulary each generation: that mind and circumstance are connected in some real, causal way, that belief tends to precede rather than follow experience, and that deliberately directed attention changes what a person notices and does. What’s changed a lot more than the core claims is the packaging, from religious sermon to self-help paperback to a fifteen-second video. Whether any version of it holds up as more than psychology dressed in spiritual language is a genuinely open question, one this site returns to throughout rather than one this history by itself can settle.
For the deeper look at the movement most of this article’s middle section runs through, The New Thought Movement covers its core beliefs and organizations in more detail. For how the specific term “Law of Attraction” fits into this story, What Is the Law of Attraction? picks up that thread on its own.
