Chapter Two. Sources of the Healing

At 10-15 p.m. my Aunt asked me to sing “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult.” I did so and I said to her new Nurse … “This hymn mostly means a fresh call for me.” When I went to my room, I got some tabloids which I was taking at the time, poured out the water and said as usual, “O Lord bless this medicine to me,” when the tabloid was as it were, flicked out of my hand. I was exceedingly surprised and said to myself “I am not to take it.” Then I recalled the words “Cease from every means,” and I took the water only, saying “O Thou who didst make water wine at Cana of Galilee, cause this water to be made effectual in the place of medicine.” In the night I have been thinking that this was a call to overcome sickness by relying on the Lord alone, and I have remembered that yesterday I had seen the blue St. Andrew’s Cross of the Scottish Command, which was sent to me one Christmas. I can only say “Give me strength to obey, if it be a fresh call and may it be shewn me plainly.” God grant that it may mean that sin has been overcome here and sickness is to be the second step to be overcome.²

Shortly afterwards, on 23 March 1921, Barltrop received what she believed was a divine communication on the matter.

I will encourage you, My children, to put forth your hands unto the Healing Leaves, yet will I be very patient, dealing with you as the Mother deals with the child who is full of fears in the darkness of the night. Ye shall strengthen yourselves with the Scriptures upon My Healings of old time and with My Word … ye shall gradually expect healing at My hands without any medicine of healing and ye shall cease to voice accounts of illness and of fatigue all that is possible.3

When a medical doctor became a full member of the Society, the leadership seemed to have felt they had reached an important turning point, as his involvement symbolized medicine submitting to the divine healing. The doctor was affected by “blood pressure and memory loss” and reportedly quickly improved after treatment.⁴

While Barltrop derived her special position from recognition by her peers of her status as the incarnation of something divine linked to Joanna Southcott and by her capacity to receive and pass on communications from the godhead, she was also thought to be heir to an older esoteric and prophetic tradition that was unrecognized by the more mainstream and traditional religious institutions. The origins of that esoteric strand were traced by the Society to the sixteenth-century philosopher Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), and especially an English stream of Behmenist thought found in the seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead (1624–1704).

Julie Hirst has identified Lead as “probably the most important female religious leader and prolific woman author in late seventeenth-century England.”⁵ Lead’s writings had some important links to groups of followers of Joanna Southcott in Britain and America that persisted for a considerable period and continue to some extent today,⁶ and the Panacea Society was amongst those detecting resonances between their beliefs and Lead’s mystical vision. One of the Panacea Society’s books, from 1927, gives an account of Jane Lead.

We must explain here that Jane Lead arose as a Prophetess in England at a very critical moment (1666 to 1704,) when men’s minds had been profoundly exercised by the Plague and the Great Fire of London. She undoubtedly received from the hand of the Lord … “a cosmic ball of truth” upon what was to come. That ball of truth has been either overlooked completely, or has been too battered about by [theologians;] they reduced it to a mere mystical rhapsody.⁷

While Lead was claimed as an important source for the Society, their links to her and their activation of her theology were limited. More important in practical terms was the English prophet Joanna Southcott (1750–1814). Southcott was born into a working-class family in the southwest of England and labored for most of her life in domestic service of one form or another.¹⁰ From around 1792, she began to experience voices and visions, and in that year “the whole Bible broke in upon” her as if “Angels that were ministering Spirits were sounding” in her ears.¹¹ She became known as a prophet locally and was launched to a national profile when she published The Strange Effects of Faith in 1801.¹² In 1802, with her publications continuing to appear (Southcott would publish sixty-five pamphlets and generate an enormous amount of unpublished material in her lifetime¹³), she moved to London.¹⁴ Southcott quickly attracted a significant following, and the movement showed “spectacular growth in the first months and years of its existence as her following climbed from a handful of supporters to thousands.”¹⁵ Although numbers fell away between about 1805 and 1813, the year 1814 saw another surge in membership when “the movement regained and, indeed, surpassed the extraordinary recruitment of the first years.”¹⁶ James Hopkins suggests there were more than seven thousand members in total, though this is based on incomplete data.¹⁷

Southcott’s prophecies have been summarily dismissed by some writers; Susan Juster summarizes “contemporary and historical verdicts on Joanna Southcott” as “converg[ing] on one score: that her writings are tedious, and maddeningly opaque.”¹⁸ E. P. Thompson called The Strange Effects of Faith “mystic doggerel” and said it was Southcott’s “first cranky prophetic book.”¹⁹ Hopkins refers to Southcott’s theology as “an unexceptional restatement of usual millenarian beliefs” and comments on the fact that she made “little significant alteration in liturgy” and “offered virtually no doctrinal innovation.”²⁰ Others have been less abjuring. Gordon Allan notes that Southcott’s “well-developed theology”—which he suggests might qualify her as “an early biblical feminist”—“is sometimes overlooked.”21 Matthew Niblett comments that “we need to take her seriously as a theological figure if we are to comprehend her mission and extraordinary appeal,” concluding that “she had a more coherent and developed theological outlook than is commonly believed.”²²

Amid the great breadth of Southcott’s writings, there are two fundamental tenets that stand out and that were of vital importance to the Panacea Society: (1) that the Millennium foretold in Revelation was imminent, and (2) that the “female” had a special role to play in its advent. The first tenet had been laid out from the beginning; Southcott’s 1801 pamphlet included the message that:

By types, shadows, dreams and visions, I have been led on from 1792 to the present day; whereby the mysteries of the Bible, with the future destinies of nations have been revealed to me, which will all terminate in the Second Coming of Christ, and the Day of Judgement, when the seven thousand years are ended.²³

The second tenet emerged more slowly. J. F. C. Harrison dates the “doctrine of the woman” to 1796, when it was revealed to Southcott that “I’ll tell thee what thou art—The true and faithful Bride.”²⁴ Southcott identified herself with the “woman clothed with the sun” of Revelation 12 and the “Bride of the Lamb” of Revelation 19. The eschatological significance of Southcott’s theological feminism is perhaps best summed up in a verse of a Southcottian hymn quoted by Harrison:

A woman Satan chose at first, to bring on man the fall;
A woman God has chose at last, for to restore us all.
As by a woman death did come, so life must come the same,
And they that eat the fruit she gives, may bless God’s holy name.²⁵

The denouement of Southcott’s career as a prophet came at the end of her life, in 1814, when she was in her mid-sixties. As Hopkins expresses it, “everything became prologue to the moment in 1814 when Joanna stunned her following by announcing that she was pregnant by her divine spouse.”²⁶ The announcement generated a new notoriety for the prophet, as well as a surge in members.²⁷ In time, she did indeed show signs of pregnancy, and a number of medical practitioners confirmed that this was the case.²⁸ Given the verse following the mention of “a woman clothed with the sun” in Revelation 12:1, (“And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered”), the pregnancy was the culmination of Southcott’s identity and mission. She identified the unborn child with the “Shiloh” of Genesis 49:10 (“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be”29) and awaited the arrival of the baby and the eschaton.

Despite the opinions of the doctors, a child was not delivered. Southcott died on December 27, 1814, and the autopsy found no fetus and no “disease sufficient to have occasioned death.”³⁰ The disappointment surrounding the pregnancy did not lead to the complete collapse of the movement, and many retained the hope that the eschatological promise would be fulfilled in some way. Some believed, for example, that Shiloh had been born (physically or spiritually) but that the infant had been taken up to heaven until it would return, or that Southcott would in due course return to life, or that the birth was “spiritual, not temporal,” and that a follower would emerge to take on the mantle of leadership.³¹ For members of the Panacea Society, the problem of what had happened to Southcott’s child was resolved in the person of their leader, Mabel Barltrop: they came to see Barltrop as Shiloh.

Although Southcott was the primary prophet of the Panacea Society, seven further prophets (known as the Visitation) were recognized as providing true witness of the eschaton. These were Richard Brothers, George Turner, William Shaw, John Wroe, James White, Helen Exeter, and finally, of course, the Panacea Society’s leader, Mabel Barltrop. The Society believed that each of the subsequent prophets elucidated “a salient feature of Jane Lead’s prophecies, as that feature began to take shape and form. These persons knew nothing of Jane Lead, yet her work and their work make a perfect whole.”³²

Born in Newfoundland, and at one time a naval lieutenant (though biographical information is scarce), Brothers (1757–1824) was contemporary with Southcott (and active in prophecy before she was), and his main period of activity occurred in the early 1790s—after which he was confined to an asylum.³³ J. F. C. Harrison links Brothers’s interest in millennial and prophetical religion to his wife’s infidelity and notes his interest in mystical writings, including Jane Lead’s A Fountain of Gardens (1696–1701).³⁴ As they have for Southcott, scholars have commented on the lack of originality in Brothers’s writings. Harrison says that Brothers offers “the usual millennial mixture from the scriptures … Nor was the interpretation out of line with the accepted Protestant teachings of the day.”³⁵ The distinctive aspect of Brothers’s teaching was his revelation of

the secret that Britain is part of Israel … that the ten tribes—who, unlike Judah and Benjamin, never returned to Palestine—found their way from the cities of the Medes to Northern Europe, and, under the names of Saxons (Isaacsons), Danes and Normans, arrived in these Isles, which had been prepared for their advent by the Romans.³⁶

With Southcott standing as the second prophet in the chronology of the tradition, another of her contemporaries, and indeed one of her followers (as well as an erstwhile follower of Brothers), George Turner (d. 1821) was recognized as the third prophet of the lineage and, by many, as Southcott’s successor as head of the movement.³⁸ Turner’s pronouncements became increasingly contentious as time went by, and he subscribed to Brothers’s notion of British Israelism.³⁹ Nonetheless, his importance for the Society stemmed from his succession to Southcott and his theology of the child of Southcott; that Shiloh had been removed from Southcott’s womb and taken to heaven in readiness to return incarnate to earth.⁴⁰ About the fourth prophet, William Shaw (d. 1822), there is little extant information.⁴¹ He was contemporary with Southcott and was “recognized as a true Southcottian prophet”; however, his writings were never published and were circulated only in manuscript form (including correspondence with Turner).⁴² The elements of his pronouncements that seem to have been of interest to the Panacea Society were associated with an emphasis on the significance of Britain and London in the Millennium.⁴³

John Wroe (1782–1863), the fifth prophet, was the first of the Southcottian prophets who did not know Southcott in person, though he was a follower of Turner. Wroe had visions rivalling Turner’s; when Turner died, Wroe found himself inspired to lead the movement, and, in time, he was recognized as the leader by a significant number of Southcottians.⁴⁴ At the center of Wroe’s teaching was Christian Israelism, of “the observance of the whole of the Mosaic law together with additional rules commanded by the Lord through Wroe.”⁴⁵ He imposed heavy demands on his followers in the form of a code controlling diet, sexual and family relationships, dress, Sabbath observance, and the treatment of animals.⁴⁶ Ultimately, Wroe lost his standing among the Southcottians following a community trial for sexual impropriety.⁴⁷ Despite the range of the Mosaic regulations in Wroe’s teaching, it was the detail of one aspect of his theology that gave him importance to the Society, and in one place they identified his Visitation as “of the greatest moment to the world” “next to Joanna’s.”⁴⁸ Of particular importance for the Society was Wroe’s doctrine of woman, including the idea that “Woman has the cleansing period, being purified every fourteen days, and remaining so for fourteen or sixteen days … but unhappily man, who was inoculated with evil after the Fall has no means of purification. Therefore, as things are at present, no perfect child can be born.”49 With the Millennium, the Panacea Society believed humanity would be purified and a physical redemption would take place; thus, the redemption that the Society believed it carried to the world was a “redemption of soul and body.”⁵⁰ Fundamental to the importance of Wroe was that, according to the Society, he foresaw the incarnation of Southcott’s spiritual child in Mabel Barltrop and in the healing.⁵¹

James White (c. 1848–1885) used the name James Jezreel in his prophetic career and took over the leadership of a group of Wroe followers in the 1870s.⁵² His Flying Roll was regarded by the Panacea Society as “an epitome of the whole of the works of the foregoing prophets for the public.”⁵³ White was an effective proselytizer and found recruits around the world, eventually setting up a community base in Gillingham in southeast England.⁵⁴ Among White’s teachings was the idea, shared by Wroe, that believers would be saved not only in their souls (as everyone could ultimately be) but also in their bodies.⁵⁵ The Panacea Society subscribed to an understanding, taken from White, that a human person is composed of a body and a soul, both of which are constituted by an individual’s parents’ nature—so a soul is compounded of parents’ souls just as the body is widely understood to be. To this is added the spirit, which is derived from God: “When the body dies the spirit returns to God who gave it, the body turns to dust, and the soul sleeps in the dust of the body, in the chambers of the grave, until the resurrection.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, White developed the feminine theology adopted by the Panacea Society, urging that “the Deity, Jehovah Elohim, is of both masculine and feminine essence, and humanity, bi-sexual, is made in this image and likeness.” He suggested that, though Jesus healed, his healing was only intermediate: “those whom he healed at his first coming … again sickened and died” and a greater healing would come with the second coming.⁵⁷

The final prophet recognized by the Panacea Society was Helen Exeter, the name the inner membership of the Society gave to Helen Shepstone (c. 1853–1918), an associate of Rachel Fox and Mabel Barltrop. Before her death in 1918, Shepstone had been instrumental in the elevation of Barltrop. Shepstone’s importance stemmed from her role in supporting Barltrop in the period before Barltrop realized her own significance. “Helen’s messages sustained Mabel and gave her directions: that she should go home, that she would be healed and sheltered, and that she herself should listen for God.”⁵⁸ After Helen’s early death, she was identified as the seventh prophet by Barltrop and Fox.⁵⁹

Octavia

The Child was born in 1866 [the year of Barltrop’s birth], but all was secret. She lived an ordinary life, but one full of the needed and varied experiences which enabled her to deal with every side of human life. In 1914, exactly 100 years after the soul-birth, she was introduced to Joanna’s Writings and in a moment realised and accepted them as the Message the world is waiting for. Little by little persons gathered around her, but it was not until 1923 that a prophecy was fulfilled that 77 years would be taken off Satan’s power over Believers in the Visitation and that the method of healing by Water and the Spirit was revealed.⁶¹

Barltrop’s eschatological significance was confirmed in a communication the Society believed it had received from God in March 1919.

Behold I am with thee always, I am knit unto thee, My child. Dost thou know who thou art, even My Child sown in the womb of thy Mother Joanna, and caught away unto the heavenly places until I found a body likely to suffer, into which, after sufferings great and terrible, My child Shiloh should enter and dwell there.⁶²

Barltrop came therefore to be recognized by her associates as the instantiation of Southcott’s promised child—and she became known as Octavia (derived from her position as the eighth prophet recognized by the group).⁶³ With this identification, Octavia emerged as the leader of the group, and her home in Bedford became the physical center of the emerging religious society.⁶⁴

Key among the beliefs of the Society was the notion, derived from Southcott’s teachings, that the Millennium of Christ foretold in the Book of Revelation was imminent, and that a Church on earth must prepare the way for it. The Society campaigned assiduously for the bishops of the Church of England to take up this role and to open a box said to contain further writings by Southcott.⁶⁵ (Southcott had left instructions that the box could only be opened by twenty-four bishops of the Church of England.66)

Between April 1915 and October 1916, Octavia had been a resident at a psychiatric hospital, where she began to develop a skill in automatic writing.⁶⁷ By the middle of 1919, she was taking daily messages from God, and these writings formed the basis of worship services that she led in the Society’s chapel.⁶⁸ Over time, various followers joined the Society and bought houses in Bedford to be near Octavia, so that her home and other houses nearby came to form a campus headquarters for the sect.⁶⁹ The group in Bedford had sixty-six resident members at its peak in 1939.⁷⁰ Along with the members in Bedford, followers were allowed to join the Society as “sealed” members once they had achieved certain spiritual and ritual tasks;⁷¹ sealed members numbered almost thirteen hundred in 1934 and reached a high of nearly two thousand by 1943.⁷²

The end of the nineteenth century and the transition into the twentieth has been identified as a phase in which the perceived role of women in society was modernized and developed. Alex Owen has commented on the concept of “New Woman” as “a journalistic and literary invention that nevertheless spoke to the social realities of a changing climate for women at the end of the century,” despite the controversial nature of the idea from more conventional vantage points.⁷³ Although the idea of the New Woman was somewhat restricted in its extent and an essentially middle-class phenomenon, the period did see new opportunities in work and education for women.⁷⁴ This nineteenth- and twentieth-century development has been identified as part of a much older tradition, dating back to the medieval period, in which religious literature served as an outlet and means of empowerment for those outside traditional and institutional structures “who did not identify as ‘male’ or ‘heterosexual’ in their relationship to a divine.”⁷⁵ New movements in religion and spirituality at the end of the nineteenth century were intrinsically linked to the changing conception and social role of women. “Feminists were attracted to groups like the Theosophical Society because the occult offered a ‘Transcendental View of Social Life’ that spoke directly to feminist aspirations for change.”⁷⁶ Indeed, and more than that, spiritual and occult learning and activities represented a distinct outlet for women who did not otherwise have access to modes and roles for intellectual and group activity like those that were available to men.⁷⁷ Speaking about “the occult,” Alex Owen says:

It permitted women the exercise of a “masculine temperament” and provided an intellectual and spiritual outreach that were difficult to find elsewhere. Occultism appealed to an aspiring, questing nature regardless of sex, and additionally presented a viable context in which women could explore that nature while enjoying the felicities of like-minded companionship.78

Owen says that women found occult organizations to be “unique sociospiritual environment[s] offering personal validation and an intellectual rapport that was not easily duplicated” and that they “were attracted by the prospect of the kind of dedicated advanced study that practical magic required” at a time when women’s access to higher education was restricted.⁷⁹

As middle-class women coming of age in Britain at the close of the nineteenth century, the founders of the Panacea Society can be understood as a late flowering of the long tradition of nonofficial spirituality encountered as a counterweight to the hegemonic and mainstream institutional forms consistently led and interpreted by men. Jane Shaw’s discussion of the ways the Panacea Society membership in Bedford “refracted [their theology] through a domestic lens” and “took up household and domestic images” links their theology to their fulfilment of “the domestic expectations of middle-class spinsterhood and widowhood.”⁸⁰ While Shaw associates this with the Society’s instinct for “carefully preserved hierarchies” and a rather nostalgic patriotism,⁸¹ she also links it to women’s suffrage, suggesting a parallel between the impact of legislation granting property rights to married women and the ways the Society invested domestic objects with significance.⁸²

A number of theorists have commented on the long and ancient pedigree of an alternative stream of spiritual thought and practice in western culture, and they consistently recognize a dynamic relationship between the old persisting strand and personal individualized innovation. Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman have suggested that, aside from some exceptions (flying saucers and Wicca), “there is in fact very little in contemporary spirituality that was not already present and available in the 1920s and 1930s, in the Edwardian era, at the fin-de-siècle or even earlier.”⁸³ Robert Ellwood goes somewhat further and suggests that New Age religion or “what may be called the alternative spirituality of the West” is a “contemporary manifestation of a western alternative spirituality tradition going back at least to the Greco-Roman world.”⁸⁴ Ellwood represents the process as “like an underground river through the Christian centuries, breaking into high visibility in the Renaissance occultism of the so-called ‘Rosicrucian Enlightenment,’ eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and nineteenth-century Spiritualism and Theosophy.”⁸⁵

THE THEOLOGY OF THE HEALING

New Salvation

At the center of the theology of the Panacea Society was the observation that the fundamental condition of humanity is a wretched one. In the preface to a 1922 pamphlet, Octavia described “the insecurity and the misery of human life.”

Strong and healthy to-day, one may find oneself prey to an insidious disease, or the victim of some accident tomorrow, and even if well oneself, are not thousands wretchedly ill? If one is well off at the moment, the wheel of circumstance may easily turn us and our families into abject poverty, and even if we are permitted to be in affluence, are not millions barely able to keep body and soul together?⁸⁹

The Panacea Society, however, believed that, thanks to its prophetic knowledge derived from Lead and those who came after her, it proclaimed a new priesthood and a new salvation.⁹² There is, Octavia argued, a fundamental error in Christian teaching that directs people towards the salvation of the soul and accepts the concomitant destruction of the body—because this is “the very body … which the Lord came to redeem from the power of death.”⁹³

A man is no longer a man when he is dead, the Bible says plainly, “the spirit returns to God who gave it.” A life in Heaven lived in spirit, has nothing to do with the Hope of the ages—all who go to Heaven have missed the Hope of the ages, which is the Restoration of MAN, body and soul to his primeval condition of health, of sinlessness and of immunity to death. “These all died not having received the promise,” what could be plainer.⁹⁴

The Panacea Society, on the other hand, promised “the ‘so great salvation’ of body, soul and spirit”⁹⁵ and offered “LIFE ON EARTH in a redeemed restored body.”⁹⁶

The Society believed that, despite appearances, humanity had been in continuous decline since the time of Adam and Eve. “Progress in learning, in inventions, in multiplying of goods and chattels, is not progress in the race! To prove that MAN has progressed, you must show a steady decline in disease and a growth in longevity.”⁹⁷ Yet “Adam and his immediate successors” lived longer than modern humans: “Compare their 900 odd years with our three-score years and ten.”⁹⁸ The decline in human vitality would continue until ultimate dissolution, but for the dawn of a “new age” ordained by God.⁹⁹ The Church’s error, the Society believed, had been such that not all could now be saved; those who did not realize the Church’s error and failed to accept the truth of the Panacea Society’s teaching would continue to bodily death and the grave (though their souls might go on). Only an elect and predestined few, the “remnant” of the human race, would achieve full bodily salvation.¹⁰⁰ The process of the new salvation is obscure; Octavia said it involves a “grafting” or a “cross-breeding” between humans and God: “God would impregnate man with His Own Life and thus would make his body Immortal.”101 Humans, who have been “grafted into Christ” by Christ’s act of redemption,¹⁰² must graft Christ into themselves to become, as Jesus Christ became, “a God-man.”¹⁰³

The mechanism of the new salvation was indicated, in an incomplete way, in the experiences of the mystics of the past. Octavia taught that “the joyful experiences of a saved soul, leads persons to suppose that the spirit which is upon them, is in them, and Jacob Böhme, Jane Lead, William Law and hundreds of mystics, mistook the ‘overshadowing’ for an ‘In-dwelling.’ ”¹⁰⁴ According to the Society, this was the fundamental error of all mystics up to the prophecy tradition appropriated by the Panacea Society: “Jacob Boehme can be as wrong as anyone else if his primary thesis or point of departure be wrong.”¹⁰⁵ Others may have declared it earlier;¹⁰⁶ however, after a six-thousand-year process beginning with Adam, Octavia could announce in 1922 that “the time is come for the ‘In-dwelling’ and such as receive the graft must come under the immediate tutelage of the Great Husbandman, in a prepared place, where they will be saved from the general cataclysm, in order to be ‘changed.’ ”¹⁰⁷ The secret of how to achieve the new salvation was transmitted by the string of seven prophets “of whom Jane Lead is the forerunner or precursor”¹⁰⁸ and of which Octavia, the eighth, was the culmination.

The error of in-dwelling was to think that the divine perfection was in some sense already ensconced in each individual and that it was only necessary to release it. By the Panacea Society’s account, the divine element needed to be introduced to the body—a physical process mediated by water. So there was no psychospiritual process to undergo, and those who practiced the healing were not expected to subscribe to any particular doctrines for the healing to be effective.¹⁰⁹ The point was emphasized in the instructions sent out to applicants:

Remember that you need not “have faith in,” nor “understanding of,” nor “be in harmony with,” the treatment, nor “demonstrate,” nor do anything at all, except what you are told. You are sure to gain advantage if you obey and persevere.¹¹⁰

Faith in the prophecies is not demanded, the Will is not worked upon, Psychology and Auto-Suggestion, Higher and New Thought are useless, while Spiritualism plays no part in our work. The only acts required are those of drinking and of using the Water, and of reporting obediently.¹¹¹

The capacity for a “female” divine element to carry out the salvation was regarded by the Panacea Society as more than a new phase in cosmological history; it represented a repair of the initial cosmological disruption of creation contained in the Fall. Within Joanna Southcott’s theology, because of Eve’s part in the Fall of humanity, a healing of the “fall of the woman” is necessary as the preliminary step before a general “Redemption of Mankind” can take place.¹¹⁵ The individual healing offered by the Society was seen as an outworking of the eschatological healing necessary to repair the Fall, for “as the woman innocently brought about the Fall, the woman shall be given the power to bring in the Redemption.”¹¹⁶ Thus, the Society’s May 1923 proclamation of the healing identified Octavia as the one with “healing in her wings” and associated this healing with physical and spiritual repair.117

The Society believed that in order to prepare for an immortal soul, a spiritual cleansing must first take place.¹¹⁸ That cleansing was initiated by the healing water, and the Society was explicit that the instructions had to be scrupulously followed.¹¹⁹ The Society regarded healing as an effect of the elimination of mortality from the body—a side effect, as it were, of physical salvation. Under this scheme, obedience to the instructions was not just a practical matter; it reflected a vital link to the world before the Fall. In the view of the Panacea Society, obeying the instructions of the Society in taking the healing water was engaging in a restoration of the human state before the Fall; it was thus counterpart to Adam and Eve’s disobeying of God’s injunctions in the Fall.¹²⁰ The instruction papers received by applicants with their pieces of linen were explicit about this:

The 6,000 years of the misery caused by the Fall, which was brought about by disobedience to the Laws of Lev. 15, are just ending. During the shortening of the days, the Lord, as the Good Physician, will heal as the Physician heals, namely, by Treatment; and all who are willing to reverse the Disobedience of the Fall by obedience to this Treatment by Water and the Spirit will obtain health, or deliverance, or cure.¹²¹

In offering the healing water, the Society was offering the world something that went far beyond mere physical healing: it was offering to reverse the Fall.¹²²

Sources of the Healing

THE PANACEA SOCIETY AND THE PROPHETS

The English Prophets

Octavia

THE THEOLOGY OF THE HEALING

New Salvation

The Female and the Fall