Walter DeVoe

Walter DeVoe (born 1874; death date not established) was an American New Thought writer and spiritual healer active in Chicago in the early twentieth century.

By his own account he was drawn into the movement after the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair. He taught through the College of Freedom in Chicago, the publisher of his best-known book, and later founded the Elohist Ministry, continuing his work as a teacher of mental and spiritual healing.

His signature work, Mystic Words of Mighty Power (College of Freedom, Chicago, 1905), is organised around what DeVoe called the fourfold nature of man — physical, mental, spiritual, and divine — with sections on “Health Culture,” “Mind Culture,” and “Soul Culture.” The book is a compendium of affirmations, “potent truths,” and poems intended to be spoken and dwelt upon until they reshape the speaker’s condition.

Its healing teaching turns on the idea that charged, repeated words radiate a constructive force — “health rays” — outward to the body and to others, an early form of the radiated-affirmation healing later common in New Thought.