They settled along the wooded banks of the Wissahickon Creek outside town. By late June of 1694, the group reached Philadelphia, then a cluster of about five hundred houses. Fewer than forty in number, they first traveled over land and later endured a five-month sea voyage, which proved less dangerous for the weather than for warring French and British ships crisscrossing Atlantic routes. The twenty-one-year-old Kelpius, a protege of mystical scholars who survived in the Rhine corridor, led his German pilgrims to the New World. It was now a charred land of devastation, crushed by the papal Habsburg Empire during the Thirty Years' War. The region had once been a sanctuary of political independence and esoteric spirituality. In the summer of 1693, the philosopher Johannes Kelpius and a small band of followers fled their Rhine Valley homeland. Religious history, like literary or any cultural history, is made by genius, by the mystery of rare human personalities.
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