Abstract
Johann Christoph Müller, a physician who served George Rapp’s Harmony Society as “doctor, music director, schoolteacher, printer, archivist, [and] museum curator,” was both a member of Rapp’s elite inner circle and a dissenting voice within the Society. Documentary evidence reveals flares of conflict between Müller and Rapp predating their immigration and culminating in Müller’s departure in the Schism of 1832, yet Müller was also a trusted Harmonist leader and one of an advance party of five men who came to the United States to prepare the way for the mass immigration of Rapp’s Separatists. Although some scholars have defined Müller as a man of science whose rationalism was at odds with Rapp’s mysticism, investigation of Müller’s hymn texts—and his involvement with the Society’s mystic-scientific alchemical experiments—paint a more complex portrait.
Date
July 2012
Volume
6
Number
3
First Page
179
Last Page
189
Journal Title
American Communal Societies Quarterly
ISSN
1939-473X
