Great Britain
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the numbers of applications for the healing from the British Isles1 show some significant rises and falls, but they stabilized after the war. A careful search of the register books retained in the Society’s archives shows British Isles applications for healing reached in excess of twenty thousand overall between 1924 and 2012.2 In the first year of the official availability of the healing (1924), about 2,700 people applied, and this jumped to about 4,000 in 1925. After the early peak, applications declined steadily to about 320 in 1936.3 From there, and perhaps associated with global instability and the buildup of pressure towards war (discussed in chapter 6), applications increased substantially to about 2,000 in 1939, though this number declined precipitously to 550 in 1940 and then to 101 by 1945. After 1945 until 1978, the annual number of applications averaged 141, with lows in 1959 and 1960 (71 and 81, respectively) and highs of 221 and 215 (in 1978 and 1976, respectively).4 After 1978 recordkeeping at the Society seems to have been more disordered, so it is difficult to identify clear numbers. Applications continued to come in from the 1980s to the 2000s, and in the last ten years of the healing up to 2012, about forty British healing users contacted the Society, though most of those had applied for the healing in earlier decades.
Analysis of the index card sample5 indicates that 38 percent of individuals who applied for the healing from Great Britain did not write again after applying. About 14 percent wrote one additional letter and so can be surmised to have experimented with the healing, albeit to a limited extent.6 The remainder (48 percent) wrote two or more letters to the Society after applying, so they can be seen as having had a more sustained relationship with the healing. On average, water-takers in this latter group wrote slightly more than thirteen letters during the time they were in communication with the Society, and they kept in contact on average for about four and a half years (1,678 days). It is evident in the index card sample that women made up 72 percent of applicants from Great Britain. The sample of index cards for Great Britain indicates that about 96 percent made their applications from England.
For the purposes of this research, the letters of 187 water-takers who were filed as applicants from Great Britain were subjected to detailed analysis.7 The Panacea Society did not collect age data from applicants on a consistent basis, and only limited information about the ages of water-takers can be gleaned from letters. For forty-six of the British water-takers analyzed in this study, the average age at the time of the writing of their first known letter appears to have been fifty-six years.8 One applicant as young as nineteen at application (94199) can be identified (though children also applied through their parents), and the oldest applicant was aged seventy-six (84676). The oldest correspondent was a man who wrote his final letter in 1957 when he was ninety-six; his application had been received in 1928 (73698). The oldest female correspondent identified maintained contact until 1977, when she was aged eighty-eight; she had applied some time before November 1950 (35296).
The majority of users of the healing do not refer to their working lives in their letters, though occupations can be identified for some of them. Where this is possible, healing users can normally be identified in working and middle socioeconomic categories, including teachers (14562, 54577, and 53601) and farmers (24684, 45913); domestic and care personnel and factory workers (43635, 15974, 75084, 35123, and 65762); and laborers and their wives (86153, 94199, and 71480). It is also possible to identify an electrician (55485) and a furniture maker (35772), as well as a dental surgeon (98356), a civil servant (59407), and a dress designer (60957).9 It should be noted that a great many users of the healing were married women, many of whom may not have had work outside their support of their families. Many are likely to have been retired or wealthy, so perhaps without definitive occupations.
The Panacea Society as an institution, and the water-takers as individuals, were interlaced with a wide range of the religious innovations prevalent in Britain at the time of the Society’s formation in the 1920s and earlier. Octavia and other founding members had practiced spiritualism and automatic writing, and they were conversant with a number of the new, nonmainstream, and occult forms of spiritual practice prevalent at the time. And the letters from the water-takers include regular references to a wide range of growing nonmainstream spiritual and religious movements and practices—with mentions of Christian Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, with other varieties of spiritual healing peppering the letters, especially during the interwar period. Though the Panacea Society did not have the profile of many of these types of movements, it inhabited the same ecosystem, had a membership that overlapped, and was tied to similar intellectual and doctrinal leitmotifs.
The main spiritual and religious organizations discussed in this chapter are part of the “vast spectrum of beliefs and practices” providing the sources of ideas and practices making up what Christopher Partridge calls western “occulture”—the broad and diverse variety of spiritual ideas embedded in nontraditional spiritual thought in the West.10 Jane Shaw discusses how the earliest members of the Panacea Society “were attracted to the vogue-ish movements of the early twentieth century—vegetarianism … Theosophy, Higher Thought and spiritualism”—and the same might be said of many of the users of the healing.11 Perhaps the most significant movement in this respect is Theosophy. Joy Dixon has commented that an important impact of the Theosophical Society was to “produce a kind of generic ‘eastern mysticism,’ one that has had a significant impact on modern New Age movements, many of which have borrowed their terminology and basic concepts from theosophical teachings.”12 Wouter Hanegraaff makes a similar case for the importance of Theosophy (and Anthroposophy), especially in England, as the seedbed for a distinctive strand of the later flourishing of New Age ideas that are widely evident in nontraditional popular metaphysical thinking today.13 Similarly, James R. Lewis has drawn attention to the difficulty of making any theoretical distinction between predecessor movements (such as Theosophy) and the later New Age movement.14
Theosophy had come to Britain in 1878, when its Russian–American founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), and some of her associates stopped in Britain for a few days (and founded the British Theosophical Society) on their way to India to establish a new headquarters for the movement in what they regarded as its spiritual homeland.15 Blavatsky and her followers had formed the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 with the purpose of bringing about “a Universal Brotherhood based upon the essential divinity of man.”16 They believed themselves to be in communication with “superhuman spiritual realities,” a “group of Superhuman Men, Teachers, Masters, [and] Adepts” from whom guidance and spiritual knowledge could be obtained in the journey of the human species to “Universal Brotherhood; the realisation of the Unity of the Eternal Self in all things; and the unfolding of the divine qualities in human nature.”17 At the end of the nineteenth century, Annie Besant (1847–1933), a spiritual seeker who had taken up Theosophy in the late 1880s, was appointed president of the London Blavatsky Lodge.18 Membership grew steadily in the British Isles, to a peak of around 5,000 members in the 1920s, before a period of steady decline to the 1960s.19
In her preface to a leaflet of extracts from the works of Jane Lead, Octavia quotes Blavatsky in some detail and recognizes a parallelism between aspects of Blavatsky’s ideas and some Panacean doctrines.20 Although she makes clear that “Theosophy is wrong,”21 Octavia does concede that the movement has greater awareness of bodily salvation than the Christian churches (though poorer in its understanding of salvation of the soul).22 Although the “results” of Theosophy “are nil,” she acknowledges the movement has the benefit of providing “much data useful to those who are ‘the wise’ and understand the old mysteries.”23 At one time, Octavia wrote to the Theosophical Society’s leader, Annie Besant, proposing a distribution agreement for the Panacea Society’s healing through the Theosophical Society.24 In 1924, the extent of affiliation with the Theosophical Society among Panacea Society members was perceived to be so large that Octavia attempted to define the relationship between the societies, and the Panacean antithesis to Theosophy. At the same time, she recognized the importance of Theosophy as a way into the Panacea Society for many, but she also asked rhetorically “need you cling to the ladder by which you climbed up.”25
The form of Spiritualism that flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had its origins in New York State in the 1840s, when a farming family began to communicate with spirits. The incident garnered much interest, and “Spiritualist Circles” quickly spread across the United States, reaching the British Isles about five years later.26 As in Theosophy, an important theoretical element of Spiritualism was the capacity of people to communicate with disembodied spirits. However, while embodied individuals such as Blavatsky and her cohort who had the capacity to communicate with the disembodied spirits were a privileged band in contact with a community of wise and spiritually superior masters, Spiritualism had a more democratic ethos. Theirs was a multitude of otherwise ordinary individuals able to mediate between living inquirers and a host of deceased spirits who retained their interest in the everyday concerns of the living. In its developed form, Spiritualism associated the idea of continued existence after death with the idea of moral and spiritual progression. The physicist Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), who was president of the Society for Psychical Research, was Spiritualism’s chief advocate in Britain. His “Spiritualist’s Creed,” published in 1925, proposed that after release from the physical body, an individual spirit would live a “more unhampered, more real, more wakeful, more intelligent, more hopeful existence” on the other side of death.27 The Creed asserts that after death, individuals “enter on the state for which [they] are fit, whether it be higher or lower,” and might one day rise beyond to “regions far above our ken.”28
There was a spiritualist undercurrent to much of the early beliefs and practices of the Panacea Society’s founding members. Of all the spiritual and religious alternatives, Spiritualism, though ultimately regarded as useless in the doctrine of the Society, was perhaps rejected by the Society less fulsomely than the others. To the extent that it represents an interaction with another plane of existence, Spiritualism was recognized as authentic by the Society. However, as a transaction between living people with bodies (who therefore have the potential to achieve the highest human state and to attain an immortal body) and those who have died and lost their physical aspects (so would be unable to reach the highest level of physical immortality), Spiritualism represented a resort to a lower metaphysical class by a higher in the view of the Society.29
Christian Science was another vital and dynamic contributor to the interwar ferment in Britain in which the Panacea Society’s healing emerged, and many of the letters from users of the Society’s healing testify to the writers’ affiliations with Christian Science as well as other movements. Octavia had made an extensive study of Christian Science—a process which had been valuable, she claimed, so that she was in a position to refute it.30 Christian Science was initiated by the New Hampshire Congregationalist Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) in 1866, after she injured herself in a fall and became convinced that she had managed to heal herself when she read miracle healing stories in the Bible. A report on “Mental Healing in Boston, U.S.A.,” published in The Times (London) on May 26, 1885, gave an account of a “religio-metaphysical furore” in New England that was “almost sure to spread beyond American limits.”31 The article reported the practice’s core notion, that “there is no such thing as sickness. Disease … is an error of the mind.” About ten years later, recognized members of the Christian Science movement in the British Isles are recorded.32 Membership records for Christian Science in the British Isles are not available. The number of practitioners recorded in the Christian Science Journal give some indication of changing rates of popularity: from 50 full practitioners in 1902 there was a steady increase to 1,104 in 1940, after which there was a fall to 581 in 1969.33
The Panacea Society was prepared to “recognize the success” of Christian Science insofar as it implemented the “common knowledge” that “thinking wisely and healthily and usefully will help both health and circumstances.” The Society’s observations on the methods of Christian Science (and other “Thought Cults”) went so far as to note that “when people do things under the aegis of a society they do them with greater interest and perseverance, and consequently do them with more effect”—and perhaps the insight informed their own approach to their healing ministry.34 However, the mark of the success of Christian Science (and similar forms of healing) was precisely the mark of its limitation: it operated on the level of thought’s interaction with matter, and not at the level of the mind’s interaction with the Divine.35 Again, the Panacea Society perceived itself to have special knowledge of the cosmological constitution of humanity and of the physical process of the spiritual remediation of the weaknesses of the physical body.
Theosophy was a key source of applicants to the Society’s healing. The Herald of the Star, an important Theosophy magazine in the early decades of the twentieth century, seems to have generated a number of applications after people read about the Society there. Jane Shaw’s account of the healing highlights the importance of Theosophists as a source of membership for the Panacea Society and shows how factionalism within the Theosophical Society was a driver of membership of the Panacea Society.36 This reached a crisis point for the Theosophical Society in 1924, the same year that the Panacea Society launched its healing.37 An early user of the Panacea Society’s healing (30941), who first applied from Birmingham in February 1924 after hearing of it reported in The Herald of the Star,38 saw the healing as the fulfilment of a personal and spiritual journey. Later on, she wrote to the Society in the middle of the Second World War saying the healing was a “pearl of great price” she had been promised in a séance.39 When she discovered the Panacea Society’s teaching, she disengaged herself from other new forms of spiritual practice, having given up receiving “teachings from the Editor of The Pathway of the New Age” and restricted herself “from now on to the Panacea Teachings.” She said the magazine sent by the Society and the inspired scripts left her “enraptured.”40
The flexible attitude of many who engaged with these practices is evident in a letter from another reader of The Herald of the Star, who wrote from Brighton in 1924 (27312) that she was “not at all psychic” but “should like to hear from you about the cures which you say are taking place through spiritual agency. I am a Theosophist [and] very really interested in all such matters.”41 Another applicant (16377) wrote about plans to attend one of the Society’s meetings after she “read with great interest in the Herald of the Star that the Joanna Southcott Movement is effecting cures by Faith Healing in cases of deafness.”42 Another user, a woman from Hertfordshire who applied in 1924 (57730), wrote to the Society to tell it she had “been listening to the beautiful and simple teaching of Krishnamurti,” though in time she moved away from the Panacea Society and engaged instead with the Krishnamurti school of Theosophy.43
As the Panacea Society’s healing was specifically geared to the resolution of ailments, it is perhaps unsurprising that the letters seem to refer to faith and spiritual healing, including Christian Science, more often than they do other categories of alternative religious practices. A number of applicants had engaged in a variety of alternative healing practices; for example, one woman (38978) wrote in 1934:
I am still very deaf, I have been having Spiritual Healing from a Church near by but altho I feel better in myself for the treatment, my hearing does not improve, I am now fully resigned to being deaf. I accept it as being God’s will, and altho I do not know the reason I am leaving it in God’s hand.44
A man from Lincolnshire (19077) wrote seeking help with epilepsy, having been through various conventional and unconventional treatments: “I have suffered since childhood with this complaint. I might say that I have [studied] Christian Science, also Science of Thought, and have also had Medical treatment. But have not found healing yet.”45 For some, resort to the Panacea Society represented a step in an anxious search: “I have had Spiritual healing also Christian Science but to no avail. / Can you please help me obtain Healing [and] deliverance … Shall anxiously wait your reply.”46 A man in the northeast of England (41680) came to the Panacea Society after developing his own method of spiritual healing to help his young son who was blind.
My care is for my boy, he had an accident when playing football which necessitated a serious operation to the head which left him blind. Since the operation I have treated him myself, and, thanks be to God he is making wonderful progress, and his eyes are strengthening daily, but he is not able to attend school yet.47
He additionally wrote:
My treatment of [son’s name] is not magnetism but with the laying on of my hand virtue passes from me, but when you realize he was discharged from one of the best known hospitals in England and also by another private expert declared as permanently totally blind in the left eye and now there is such wonderful progress to be seen. I fully understand that by myself and of myself I can do nothing, and it gives me great joy to know that Christ is working through me.48
A mother of five who had lived in India and who approached the Society for a cure for rheumatism and malaria applied from London in 1929 (20109). She also sought help for the challenges of her demanding family life, including a difficult relationship with her husband. Amid all of her everyday concerns, however, her letters suggest that her preoccupation was with matters of religion. In her first letter, she said she wanted to learn more about the Society, as “I have read many books written by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Theosophists & Christian Scientists, but no one seems to reach the root of the matter.”49
A woman (54577) in her late thirties who worked in an elementary school and applied in October 1930 was among those showing the most complex engagement with the healing. She said in her application that she was a Theosophist and “though I recognize Divine working in your movement, and Divine power, I am not in sympathy with some of the ideas expressed in ‘The Panacea.’ ”50 When her letters seemed to peter out, the Society made contact with her by letter to inquire about her progress with the water. She replied in June 1932 offering a carefully thought out and sophisticated assessment of her engagement with the healing.
I am better mentally since I first wrote, and for that I am really grateful. Yet I cannot continue the treatment, I am not in sympathy with the beliefs + outlook of the movement. I do believe in the Divine Power behind the Healing, and this belief is not inconsistent with an utter disbelief in the teachings of the society upon many things, because it seems evident that the Divine Healing Power like water, penetrates every channel which offers a course more or less unobstructed, Faith healing, mental healing, psychotherapy, spiritual healing, Christian science, New Thought, Coué, Unity, Nature Cure, Magnetic Healing, all these + others claim their cures, + also have their failures. When the cure is real, is it not the Divine Power? So I can believe in the Healing, + also that it is a convenient means, But the mistake I made, was in trying to be loyal to the movement + take the “Panacea” I tried hard to learn from the latter, but could not. And I felt “mean” at receiving benefits from people with whom I had so little sympathy. … I determined at any cost to health, to be true to the faith which means everything to me—Theosophy. + to trust to God the Father who allows pain to affect us only so long as there are lessons to be learned from it.
I am glad that there is a Panacea Movement, and that many people are helped by it. I testify willingly to the serenity and nobility of the one Panacea member I know. But that way is not for me. … I look upon you as a worker for God in another field, + send you greetings, but I am afraid you will reckon me as a failure.51
A man who applied for the healing from Birmingham in the mid-1930s (51835) became a committed believer in Spiritualism and linked it to the activity of Jesus Christ: “I have studied it well and came to the conclusion that Christ Himself preached Spiritualism.”52 In a subsequent letter, he said more about his views.
I think that most people have a wrong idea about it and seem to think that it consists of solely speaking with the dead. But they are not dead only the Body has died and the Spirit never dies. Also I believe that there are evil Spirits as well as good ones and I don’t think that God would allow the evil ones to have sway over us without some means of protecting ourselves, hence the good Spirits. The Reason I think the Lord preached, what for want of a better word I call Spiritualism, is that He preached of most things Spiritual and not so much earthly.53
In fact, his interest in the Panacea Society was just the latest step on a spiritual journey from the Plymouth Brethren where he had been baptized “and was very sincere but of late years I am what I suppose would be called a backslider” to Spiritualism, though “of course that is against the [Plymouth Brethren] principles.”54
The Society believed the Anglican Church to be founded on an essential truth, namely the fact of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, a doctrine necessary for salvation of “those who die.”55 As time had gone by, the Society believed, the churches had misunderstood and misapplied the implications of this religious teaching. While Christianity is the religion for the salvation of the soul, they argued, Panaceaism “is merely an advance” on Christianity; it is the religion for the salvation of the body—a more complete salvation.56 The Society had a long-standing poor relationship with the institutional churches, and the Society’s writings are peppered with criticisms of the Church of England (the only conventional “Church” in any sense meaningful to a Panacean, despite its imperfections—though the criticisms could equally apply to other Christian denominations mutatis mutandis).57 The Panacea Society saw the primary error of the Church to be its ignorance of the Panacean anthropology, which the Society felt to be self-evident in the Bible. Primarily, the Society believed that although the Church recognized that animals might not have immortal souls, it failed to subscribe to the Panacea Society’s doctrine that this was also true of some humans. Furthermore, the Church did not understand that there are “immortals” with incorruptible souls and bodies, and instead it ministered to the “incorruptibles” with mortal bodies and mortal souls, but also an additional immortal soul that would persist beyond the demise of the mortal aspects.58
Indeed, early on the Society had hoped that its healing method would be embraced by the Church of England; the Church’s rejection of its offer served to entrench its alienation from the Church and gave the Society a renewed purpose.59 Shaw comments that most of the early members of the Society were members of the Church of England, and indeed that many of them were related to clergy in some way,60 but were frustrated with it because it “gave them so few opportunities to express their spirituality.”61 However, Shaw notes a certain paradox in the Society’s attitude toward the Church of England: they were “like other contemporary heterodox groups … in their scepticism” but the Church held a special place for them simply because “it was the state Church, headed by the monarch, and they were royalists and patriots.”62
Recent studies of popular religious beliefs after the Great War have suggested that the Church of England was involved in a process of accommodation of people’s new spiritual needs resulting from the conflict. Georgina Byrne, for example, has proposed that the Church of England before the Second World War was “essentially syncretistic.”63 And although Rene Kollar argues that “a number of its [the Church of England’s] leaders and theologians began to address the issues brought into relief by the war,” he argues that traditional Anglicanism was losing its appeal to many.64 The growing realization of the significance of heterodox and alternative spiritual and healing movements is evident among the Anglican bishops as early as the Lambeth Conference of 1908. There, the American bishops had requested a special discussion of spiritual healing to help them organize their reaction to the emergence of Christian Science,65 and the topic arose again at the 1920 conference.66 Excitement surrounding the start of James Moore Hickson’s international healing tour in 1919 also contributed to making spiritual healing a topic for discussion at the 1920 Lambeth Conference.67 The result of the bishops’ deliberations in 1908 was two resolutions that referred to healing: Resolution 33 called for greater emphasis on spiritual ways to “gain a fuller control over temptation, pain, and disease,” and Resolution 35 recommended “some additional prayers for the restoration of health more hopeful and direct” than those existing at the time for pastoral use.
These resolutions can be understood as the Church’s attempt to incorporate the burgeoning interest in spiritual healing into its practices, and thus to channel the subjective instinct for personal healing into the external and institutional channels of the Church. The deliberations of the 252 Anglican bishops attending the Lambeth Conference of 1920 included extensive consideration of Christian Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. Formal resolutions included one recording the conference’s finding that each movement “ignores or explains away or contradicts the unique and central fact of human history, namely, the Incarnation of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”68 Nonetheless, elsewhere it was noted that each movement provided something thought to be neglected in the Anglican Church, and that the Church had ground to make up if it were to regain the members it was losing. The Church’s interpretation is thus in line with the notion that an apparent decline in affiliation to the Church of England is associated with a burgeoning of nontraditional forms of religion.
The conference’s remedy is a diagnosis of the distinctive offering of each movement. Responding to Spiritualism, the bishops said that “a larger place should be given in the teaching of the Church to the explanation of the true grounds of Christian belief in eternal life, and in immortality.”69 They further stated that greater “regard should be given to the mystical elements of faith and life which underlie the historic belief of Christendom” in the Church’s teaching, in order to respond to the perceived attractiveness of Theosophy’s “presentation of Christian faith as a quest for knowledge.”70 In response to Christian Science, the bishops called for greater use of prayer so that “the power of Christ to heal may be released.”71 Furthermore, another resolution instigated the formation of a committee to investigate “the use with prayer of the laying on of hands, of the unction of the sick and other spiritual means of healing.”72 The committee’s findings were skeptical; it found “no evidence of any cases of healing which cannot be paralleled by similar cures wrought by psychotherapy without religion, and by instances of spontaneous healing which often occur … in ordinary medical practice.”73
A few letters to the Society give some detail about how users of the healing felt connected to the Anglican Church and their perception of the relationship between the Church and the Panacea Society. For example, a water-taker from Bristol who had applied in 1929 (99009) wrote with an inquiry.
As you no doubt know, I am a member of the Church of England, but since joining your Society & knowing it to be better, I certainly do not take the same amount of interest in Church, but I have been in the habit of making my communion at least once a month, now I am taking the water ought I still continue?74
Another example is a water-taker who had applied some time before 1940 (58019); she wrote about how she had “lost faith in medicine + Drs [sic] I only believe in Christ. … I am of the Church of England—my one quarrel with them is—that they have not the healing.”75
The number of users of the healing commenting on the nature of their relationship with the Anglican Church is not great; nonetheless, those who did make these kinds of observations were in line with the perception that they were in search of something the Church was failing to provide. They also indicated their personal and spiritual trajectories through various forms of alternative religious systems—including Anglicanism—and the well-known innovative and spiritual practices discussed here. As we have seen, association with the Church of England is rarely expressed unambiguously in the letters. Nonetheless, some level of familiarity with or exposure to mainstream forms of Christian faith is not unlikely for every applicant from the British Isles. The letters from the Society’s membership support the impression held by the bishops at the Lambeth Conference in 1920 that many in their flocks were interested in and moving into rival and alternative movements.
These letters evidence, then, the ways that people were flexible and mobile in a diverse religious economy in which the Anglican Church competed alongside arrivals such as Christian Science, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Panacea Society. What is especially clear from the letters is the earnestness and authenticity of the search for a suitable religious form of affiliation for many. Though we may grant that some who applied for the healing and never made contact again presumably applied for frivolous reasons—out of curiosity, or under some misapprehension—equally, those that discussed religion and the Panacea Society’s place in their broader spiritual trajectory did so with heartfelt and theological intent. In this light, the marketplace metaphor that has become something of a standard analogy for contemporary religion appears progressively less useful. The browsers in the market are not merely seeking some spiritual tidbit to consume but a theological and practical truth that works for them. Presumably those who remain affiliated to old and conventional churches such as the Church of England do so out of a realization that the formula meets a deep-felt spiritual need, or out of habit, convenience, or convention. Granting that neither criteria continue to hold for those who seek within the plethora of spiritual alternatives and outside the established Church, then their search is at least a genuine one.