Benjamin Day aka Peletiah Pettengill

Who is this mysterious author, claiming to know all this information? Peletiah Pettengill refers to himself as a “philom,” an abbreviation of the Greek word “philomath,” which means a student of mathematics and philosophy. And in fact, Pettengill is a self-proclaimed, “Professor of Astrology and Geometry, Lecturer on Spiritual Philosophy, and Mysteries of the Spiritual World.” One thing we can be sure of is that Peletiah Pettengill is a pseudonym for another living man at the time, as there are no records of anyone in existence with the name Peletiah Pettengill. But there was a man named Benjamin H. Day. Day entered this manuscript into the Library of Congress in 1860. Day was a well-known American newspaper publisher, best known for founding the New York Sun in 1833, the first penny press newspaper in the United States.