Chapter Five. The Healing and Other Movements II: The United States, Jamaica, and Finland

American applicants have been found in every decade of adult life up to the eighties. Among the oldest correspondents were a man (81008) from Michigan State who was eighty-five when he applied in 1925 (and did not make contact again, though there are signs he may have been in touch with the Society before that date), and a woman who applied from Ohio aged 80, also in 1925, who went on to correspond with the Society for about a year (17684).

From Jamaica, there were more than thirty thousand applicants for the healing. Applications from Jamaica were very few until the mid-1930s, when in 1935 more than 800 were recorded—and this rose to more than 3,000 in the following year and nearly 4,000 in 1937. While applications quickly dropped to a low of fewer than 100 in 1943 (no doubt due in part to wartime disruption to postal services), they steadily rose to about 750 in 1949 and averaged about 575 a year up to 1978. Around 130 individuals are known to have made contact with the Society from Jamaica in the Society’s last decade of operation—about a third of those had initially applied for the healing during that time.

The index card sample of Jamaican applications shows that about 38.5 percent did not write again after their application letter (the British Isles showed a similar figure), about 24 percent wrote just one letter (higher than the British Isles’s 15 percent), and about 37.5 percent entered a more developed relationship with the Society and wrote two or more letters during their period of contact (the equivalent for the British Isles was nearer to 45 percent).² Jamaican applicants in this latter group (those who wrote two or more letters) each wrote just under six on average and were in contact for an average of four years and four months (1,585 days).

In the Jamaican index card sample, 68 percent of applicants were women (similar to the 70 percent in the British Isles sample). The addresses contained in the records suggest that Surrey county, at the eastern end of the island, was the largest source of applications from Jamaica, with the great majority (about 35 percent) coming from Kingston and the Saint Andrew parish area—and possibly two-thirds of all from Jamaica applying from addresses in Surrey.

A report on the Healing Department for 1937–1938 for the Society’s internal consumption noted very high levels of illiteracy in American correspondents.3 And in 1948 it was found that “our [American] patients are drawn from amongst the very poorest classes and the standard of education amongst a large section seems to be very low indeed.”⁴ The few correspondents from the United States who wrote about their work backgrounds tended to refer to low-paying jobs or unemployment. Correspondents reported working as a blacksmith (45518), a beauty salon “shampoo girl” (15826), a cleaner (58050), and in a “common auxiliary job in a hospital” (11441); some said they were simply unemployed (66519), “very poor” (72150), or “poor negro” (79712). In Jamaica, the job profiles in evidence are a closer match to those of the British water-takers (and many from Jamaica went on to migrate to the British Isles): a number of applicants worked in nursing or care settings (95159, 77835, 54383, 90243, 66380, 77567); as shopkeepers and dressmakers (73405, 67987, 83880, 64757); and a fisherman (15694), a laborer (57961), and unemployed people (21994, 75262).

Finnish applications came in at a slower rate than the other countries discussed. The numbers of applicants were low but continuous, with a first phase of interest in the mid-1920s and a second in the late 1950s. There was a rise from two applications in 1924 to nearly nine hundred applications in 1926, followed by a steady decline to zero during 1942–1944 (postal services to Britain were cut off during the occupation of Finland; nonetheless, applications had been dropping steadily after 1926). Following a low and fluctuating rate of applications after the war, a revival occurred in the mid-1950s, with highs of 106 applications in 1956 and 152 in 1959, which then tailed off to single digits each year in the 1970s. Indications are that people from Finland continued to use the healing as late as the 1990s.⁵ Analysis of Finnish index cards in the sample used in the discussion of the British Isles and Jamaica, which includes records of 43 individuals, shows that around 44 percent of applicants did not make contact again, just five percent made contact once after submitting an initial request for healing, and the remainder (51 percent) wrote an average of just over eight letters after applying.⁶

THE UNITED STATES⁸

Many of the varieties of new and nontraditional religious systems (such as Christian Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy) discussed in the previous chapter, in connection with the diversity and fluidity of religious affiliation in Great Britain, had their origins or recent invigorations in the United States. While they are relatively prominent in the letters of the British Isles users of the healing (and no doubt the explicit references cited in this book are a small proportion of those who had some experience with these movements but failed to mention it), the same prominence is not evident in the American and Jamaican users of the healing. However, in the case of both, letters illuminate the ways that the healing entered into a dynamic and mobile religious environment. Indeed, they show us how, in individual practice and understanding, there was a continuous and energetic process of re-understanding.

While there are references in American letters to new movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy that are prevalent in the British Isles letters, these have not been found to any great extent in the archive. A rare example is a woman from a city in western Pennsylvania (64297) who wrote of reading of the Panacea Society’s healing in The Herald of the Star and applied in March 1924.⁹ A very early American applicant from Missouri (61458), who applied before October 1924 and may have had a British reference number before a separate American numbering system was introduced, observed that some of the Panacea Society’s writings “sounds like Christian Science” and that she had given up Christian Science before joining the Panacea Society.¹⁰ And another female water-taker (86317, who wrote from Canada, though she was allocated a U.S. identifier) wrote of a relation’s interest in “occult science … [but] I will have none of it.”¹¹

Perhaps equally evident in the American letters are less structured ideas about and experiences with spirits and dangerous unseen forces. A woman who applied in February 1940 from Mississippi (98027) saw a “faith doctor” to treat “snakes in side of me some one taking my hair out my head and put snakes in me by my hair” and went on to subscribe to the Society’s healing.¹⁵ A woman who applied from Arkansas in 1964 (53443) wrote of “visible and invisible spirits about the place inside and out,” and another woman (25630) wrote from California, saying “I am tormented by evil spirits.”¹⁶

They do it through people and cats + dogs every thang the Devil can enter in to torment he do it they are tormenting me this very minute I hear them hitting the side of the and it feal like fire sometime and I burn and I have hot spells and people watch me all time and one will influence another one to do the same thing I am yet buy evil [spirits] I fast and pray pray all time rebuke evil spirits plead the blood of Jesus that is the only way I [can] get peace they put old poison on walk way porches in my clothes if I try to live with some one I an’t live with eny one they will kill me with poison witch craft they put something on me that will cause other that is evil to do the same thing to me and pretend to be my friends I cut … ropes last fall and they put poison in my jar that I keep coffee in and it made me sick [illegible] my livers They have try to kill [me] so many days but God is keeping me alive it is witchcraft miss can you help me and said me of this evil vexing of spirits. I please let me know soon I can’t walk on no job I do a little farm work people don’t want me around that don’t do me evil. I am as the 22 psalm David prayed in great distress will you read it to see what I mean read to the 22 verse and tell me if I have sin is because the Lord want heal me I [try] to live the best I can.¹⁷

More prevalent, however, in the American letters, are references to the two conventional religious poles so far as the Panacea Society perceived them. These were forms of Christianity—often in evangelical and charismatic Protestant variants—and groups subscribing to variants of the persisting Southcottian tradition. A number of applicants for the Panacea Society’s healing wrote from the Southcottian House of David community at Benton Harbor in Michigan. The House of David community was founded in the first decade of the 1900s by Benjamin Purnell (1861–1927) and his wife Mary (d. 1953), followers of James Jezreel in the Midwest.¹⁹ Benjamin was an effective preacher and orator, and his writings offered a synthesis of Southcottian prophecy, especially by Wroe and Jezreel, and biblical teaching.²⁰ Like the Panacea Society and other Southcottian groups, the Purnells focused on physical salvation, and they preached giving up all material possessions.²¹ Benjamin described four levels of progression for his members: (1) the initial fallen state of Adam, (2) recognizing the chain of prophets and gradual purification through abstinence, (3) accepting the spirit of God, which “produced a cleansing and purification of the blood,” ultimately so they would be “without blood,” before (4) a personal, communal, and physical Millennium.²² The community lived, therefore, by abstinence; they followed vegetarianism, teetotalism, and celibacy.²³

The Purnells sent out missionaries and the community grew rapidly at the same time as it developed a successful range of business interests, including an amusement park, a lumber operation, a canning plant, and other entrepreneurial projects.²⁴ However, a series of scandals, complaints, and legal challenges dogged the couple in the 1920s,²⁵ and the community’s assets were effectively broken up after a legal ruling in 1927.²⁶ Benjamin Purnell died a month later.²⁷ With Benjamin’s death the colony became divided, and by 1930 the assets were formally split to form two religious communities, the “Israelite House of David,” led by Harry Dewhirst, which retained the original buildings and farms, and the “City of David,” led by Mary Purnell, which took control of smaller buildings and a large amount of cash.²⁸

Those who wrote to the Panacea Society for healing from Benton Harbor generally expressed dissatisfaction with their situation. A woman (76110) applied from the colony in December 1934 expressing frustration with her community, which frowned upon her developing relationship with an outsider: “I am condemned for associating with a man of highest character just because he doesn’t belong to the organization, still it’d be alrite if a member even if he was of low standing, thats what gets me!”29 Her letters roundly condemn others in the community for unkindness and lacking Christian feeling for her and the man she was forming a connection with. She expressed her desire to leave the community in her first and only letter to the Panacea Society, though it is unclear whether she did so or whether the Society’s response was intercepted and her communications cut off. An older couple (99276 and 43594) managed to arrange for a friend who was not a member of the colony to post their letters for them to evade the surveillance of the colony’s authorities: “she is most anxious to take the water but could not send direct to you as they are members of Mary & Benjamin’s Colony [and] all letters have to be sent to Headquarters where they are examined.”³⁰ Having become disillusioned with the colony, the couple found the fulfilment of their expectations in the Panacea Society—though they kept their interest secret until they could make arrangements to escape. An undated letter (probably from the 1920s) said:

I do not know how to express my thanks for seal and for all your Love in sending such bounty every day do I thank God for such benefits. It has quite lifted me up from the gloom … lovely to read the Blessed words of The Book of Healing for all also I have read some Scripts, oh The joy it gave me to know that Loving Spirit is once more talking to His people as he did to Joanna and so much more at Home with these calling them His Little Children oh how grand to know God has found some worthy to come to fulfil his promises too.³¹

A later letter spoke of the female correspondent’s conviction that Octavia was the authentic fulfilment of the millennial promise:

I accepted our Beloved Octavia Before I had half read its [Healing for All] contents and I knew it and was certain she was The Chosen Bride of Jesus and my prayers for her has always been that He would be with her continually working in her to will and to do his holy will that he may be glorified in his Bride.³²

Eventually, the female correspondent escaped the colony (her husband had by then died) and went to live with her son. She identified the close of more than twenty years with the colony with the realization brought on by Healing for All:

I have been in The House of David over 20 years and kept faithful until I received The Book Healing for all, last September then I lost all faith in them, But kept it secret until I came away knowing how hard it would be for me if they found it out. But for a long time I felt The Spirit had left them.33

One British-born male applicant (81193), who applied in 1925 from Seattle, Washington, when he was in his sixties, said he had joined Benjamin and Mary Purnell’s group at Benton Harbor, and indeed that he had been part of the predecessor community in Detroit led by Michael Mills in 1892. He said that he became disillusioned after staying with them for about two years, “so left and started life in the world again.” He was a believer in the seven prophets that followed Joanna Southcott, and when he found a picture of Southcott discarded in some woods he was led back to the Panacea Society.³⁴ Another male correspondent (45518) was a blacksmith in Benton Harbor. When he discovered the Society, he saw it as a divine resolution to his discontent with the House of David:

I came to America about four years ago from New Zealand in connection with the House of David, Mary & Benjamin but did not go in on account of not seeing eye to eye as regards Benjamin being the younger brother. So I prayed for more light and thanks be to God I have been led to the Writings of the Holy Ghost which is indeed Divine Writing.³⁵

Living in Benton Harbor, he came into contact with members of the colony, and he wrote later observing that “The Divine Healing is now known to a lot of People in Benton Harbor.”³⁶

JAMAICA

Jamaica was a constant source of interest to the Society, and the Healing Department continued to be impressed and sometimes amazed by the growth of interest in the healing from Jamaicans. A report for 1937–1938 makes observations on some difficulties facing Jamaicans:

Certainly they do not all report but considering the fact that many cannot write for themselves and have sometimes to pay a small sum to get their letters written for them, and that these same patients cannot read our case-paper and letters when they get them … but have to wait until someone is found who can read them—the proportion of reporters is good.

Another difficulty for patients in Jamaica is that in the country parts water is often far to seek. Many of the poor folk having to fetch all their supply in petrol tins carried on their head—sometimes a distance of a mile or more. In rainy seasons they fill tins from the water that runs off the cocoa-nut trees. One can see that under such conditions, hot-dry-spongings take on the nature of a luxury.37

The Society’s work developed at such a rate in Jamaica that for a period around 1937–1938 a regular meeting took place on Sundays at Yallahs Bay, led by local fisherman. The Society sent meeting members some useful items including a Bible, a prayer book, a form of service, Laws Out of Zion, a special linen section, a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, copies of the Lord’s Prayer, and literature on Panacea beliefs.³⁸ In early 1945, however, the Society was disturbed by reports of meetings at which the water was dispensed and “the Writings of the Holy Ghost were made use of to excite a form of occult frenzy.” Following this, the Society decided to restrict sales of Writings in the West Indies.³⁹

It was noted in 1947 that there was a consistent problem with people “who try to make money by charging for giving the Water, or the address of The Society, and in other ways not always easy to trace.”⁴⁰ One outcome of this was that in 1952 the Society—concerned about the misuse of the spiritual aspects of its theology and the levels of illiteracy among applicants from the United States, the West Indies, and West Africa—formulated a new shortened case paper “embodying the essential treatments … [and] omitting references to the spiritual side of the work of which mis-use is often made; these references are printed separately for use where desirable.”⁴¹ While in Britain and Finland the fact was made known that adherence to doctrine was not required for the healing to be effective, it was tempered in effect by some clear metaphysical and theological statements about the cosmic anthropology of humans. In Jamaica and the United States the absence of required doctrine was enacted in full by withholding information about the theology of the Panacea Society.

A consistent theme in the historical and ethnographic study of religion in Jamaica has been the leitmotif that “enslaved Africans, transported to Jamaica to labor on the sugar plantations, brought with them a meaningful set of beliefs and cultural practices,” but these were “profoundly modified by the experience of Jamaican slavery and by the cultural domination inherent in British colonialism, but was sufficiently vibrant to present a challenge to the Christian missionary movement.”⁴² Thus, the distinctive story of the island’s colonial past, from “neglected outpost of the Spanish Empire” followed by three hundred years of British rule as a sugar plantation colony after its capture in 1655,⁴³ sets the terms of religious and spiritual negotiation in the country. Throughout its colonial history, the island had a majority black population made up of slaves transported from West Africa with a minority white population of slaveowners. Slavery was abolished in the 1830s and political rights were formally extended to the wider population from that period.44

The religious culture of the island has reflected the origins of its population, with British forms of Christianity practiced by the minority white population and forms of African traditional religion and (from the nineteenth century) nonconformist Christianity practiced by the black population.⁴⁵ As population groups gradually became mixed over time, religious beliefs and practices also became mixed and dynamic. Claire Taylor describes a trajectory from Spanish Catholic missionizing among the indigenous Arawaks and incoming African slaves, followed by the arrival of Protestantism with the British and the establishment of the Church of England in the country in 1662—to serve the British population. It was, instead, American Baptist, Moravian, and Wesleyan traditions that disseminated Protestant Christianity on the island in the eighteenth century.⁴⁶

Inherent in the idea of a remnant of African religion developing in relation to European Christianity in Jamaica is the notion that the two are in some sense in opposition to each other: an African ethic of eudemonism and magical rite on the one hand, and pietistic Protestantism of individualism and sin on the other.⁴⁷ As Raymond Smith summarizes Diane Austin-Broos’ argument in Jamaica Genesis, “a Jamaican creole religious discourse was created out of the confrontation of radically distinct cosmologies through practices intimately related to the circumstances, the ecology, of the practitioners.”⁴⁸ The emphasis in Austin-Broos’ account is notably not on the engagement of European and African but on the engagement of something distinctive and Caribbean with those two.⁴⁹ Robert Stewart discusses how the failure of European churches to implant a religious system was an expression of a distinct Jamaican negotiation. “The other side of the coin of missionary frustration was the triumph of Afro-creole religious practices and social and personal norms,” which

constituted not a total rejection of missionary Christianity but an adaptation of it on the basis of customs, values, and perceptions that began in Africa and were modified in the blacks’ experience of slavery and emancipation that largely preserved a system of class and color relationships forged during the nearly two hundred years of Jamaica’s status as a British slave colony.⁵⁰

In essence, there is a tension between interpreting the Jamaican religious matrix as a mixing of African and European and interpreting it as a distinct and self-sufficient redefinition of the two.

Perhaps the most notable expression of this was in manifestations of Myalism, “a Jamaican syncretism of African spirit belief and apocalyptic Christianity.”51 An example is given by Austin-Broos, who discusses water baptism, particularly complete immersion. “Rendered as a form of healing in early Jamaican Christianity, this rite had meanings more akin to an African tradition than to the intent of missionaries.”⁵² Indeed, the Jamaican religious matrix was infused with notions of healing. There was a long-standing conjunction of pastor and healer.⁵³ And the special circumstances of abolition led to a conjunction of healing with Myalism. One nineteenth-century account published in London expressed it thus:

The Myalman, having most of them been employed in attendance on the sick in the hospitals of estates, and thereby acquired some knowledge of medicine, have, since the abolition of slavery, set up as medical men; and, in order to increase their influence, and consequently their gains, have called to their aid the mysteries of this abominable superstition. … The more effectually to delude the multitude, the priests of this deadly art, now that religion has become general, have incorporated with it a religious phraseology, together with some of the religious observances of the most popular denominations.⁵⁴

One of the most striking Jamaican coinings, emerging from and articulated with these various strands of religious activity, is the healing institution of the curingyard or balmyard. Austin-Broos refers to the example of “Leader Wally” (reported by Joseph Long), who maintained a church and a balmyard outside Kingston. “His balm yard had one large deep pool with four changing booths close to it” and “his practice specialized in herbal libations for anyone prepared to wait and pay the fee,” though he “constantly observed to his clients that a ‘finish cure rest on repentance.’ ”⁵⁵ Another example is the Watt Town Revival seal church, which had pools next to the church where “believers could avail themselves of ‘holy’ baths in consecrated water” to cure major physical and psychological ailments. Herbal baths and other forms of spiritual cure were also offered there.⁵⁶ Leonard Barrett describes “one of the oldest balmyards in Jamaica” at Blakes Pen—the example indicates the deep continuity and spiritual fecundity of the site.

The Blakes Pen balmyard is of special significance in this area because it has been in continuous operation for over one hundred years under the leadership of two women: Mammie Forbes and her daughter, Mother Rita. … The mother of Mammie Forbes was an African slave who is said to have been an expert in bush remedies, but seems to have given up her practice when she was converted to Christianity in the 1860 Revival.57

Barrett goes on to describe Mammie Forbes’s call to healing in 1871 after she had grown “dissatisfied with the coldness of its ritual” when “an angel appeared to her holding a bunch of herbs and commanded her to ‘rise up and heal the people.’ ” In time, the angel instructed her in the digging of a pool in the balmyard “from which a healing fountain would rise.” The water had not appeared when Barrett was writing a hundred years later—though Mother Rita had explained this was due to “the breaking of a taboo by her mother.” Barrett reported in 1973 that Mammie Forbes had performed healing for fifty-nine years and had died in 1930; she had been succeeded by her daughter, Mother Rita Adams, who was continuing the healing.⁵⁸

While, generally speaking, modern “gnostic movements” such as Christian Science have “found very little response at any level of Jamaican society,”⁵⁹ the Panacea Society’s healing offering—thanks to distinctive attachment points for long-standing elements of Jamaican religion—found a developed and widespread audience. Barrett’s summary of “some aspects of African retentions in Jamaica” is suggestive of the natural fit for the Panacea Society’s healing—shorn to some extent of its theological shroud (deliberately, by the Society)—in the Jamaican religious context. The first three items are:

As in Africa, the people in Jamaica believe that sickness is caused by spiritual forces, and they speak of sickness as the “thing.” Many see sickness as the intrusion of outside forces brought on either by the breaking of God’s will or the evil work of enemies. Except in the case of death by old age, every human tragedy is suspect.

As in Africa, healing to be effective, must be both herbal and ritual. That is why the peasant is more interested in what the doctor does with his stethoscope than he is in the prescribed medicine. The balmyard is the place where herbs and rites are wed in the traditional African pattern.

As in many areas of West Africa, water has important healing values. The balm in herbal juices and the promised fountain in the balmyard are examples of the power of water. In Jamaica, revelation of healing streams form a common part of the folk culture.⁶⁰

Stewart also comments on the significance of water rites in West African religion (which have a natural fit with Christian baptismal practices) and on “the Asante belief in the divine origin of water”61—both of which have a natural fit with the prominence given to water rituals in the Panacea Society’s healing.

The Jamaican form of Pentecostal theology indicates the distinctive features of the Jamaican version, which links “human malaise” with heritable sin and, Austin-Broos says, transforms West African notions of affliction and suffering.

No accidental outcome of life’s events, the evil that brings malaise is the product of a person’s very being, as is every history of suffering. Benign and malign spiritual forces no longer reside beyond the person as inherent aspects of ambivalent life. Rather, they are stretched between the poles of God’s transcendence and the immanence of man. In this Christian scheme, it is man’s fallen state that confirms the inherent humanness of suffering. This “morality of being,” as John Mbiti calls it, was first introduced to Jamaica by the missionaries of the slavery period. It has been brought to fruition through a politics of moral order that has shaped a creole religious discourse. This discourse now includes Jamaica’s Pentecostalism.⁶²

This is reflected in an interesting account of a blending process for the use of the Society’s healing water in Jamaica, which appears in the Society’s annual report for 1947.

There exists a firm belief in devils and evil spirits. One patient complained that demons threw away her bottle and took the Section. Further enquiry elicited the information that there were in that district two sorts of “Spiritualists”—“Preaching Balmers” who profess to heal by ointments, and “Duppy Divers” who drive out evil spirits which their own spirit shows them. One of these lived next door to our patient and decided that there was a bad spirit in the Panacea Water. “But now,” writes our patient, “we shun them all, for we say it must be demons that tell them such lies. And they don’t get well like we do.”⁶³

For many of the Jamaican users of the healing, the Panacea Society’s offering was integrated into their usual Christian perspective. A woman who applied in May 1954 (73405) wrote to the Society from Saint Andrew parish, near Kingston, in 1956, saying: “At times the way seems dark but there is always something however small provided for me. So I am asking you all to continue to pray for me that the Lord will continue to bless me & that I will continue to derive benefits from the Blessed Water.”⁶⁴ Another female water-taker (12608), who applied in February 1936, wrote in September 1936 to say: “Please from I start my Divine Healing I can say thank God. I can say little by little I am [coming] on very well. because I believe that what my Healing has dones unto me no man on earth could … do that unto me Praise God.”65 A man (47040) wrote from Spanish Town in 1935, saying “as a Christian man, I believe in the prophecies on Divine Healing,” and he sought treatment for failing eyesight.⁶⁶ (He remained in contact until 1947 and was reported as having died in 1949.)

The letters of those who wrote about the details of their spiritual and religious experience regularly expressed an awareness of a visionary spiritual power redolent of the long tradition of Jamaican spirituality here expressed. For example, one woman (16880) reported dreaming of her sister telling her she was ill, and she experienced fits the next day; a man (98286) was compelled to continue using the Panacea healing when he was ordered to continue doing so in a dream; another woman (56842) wrote to say that her daughter “was growing [into] a lovely little girl” but “she keeps seeing visions, people who are not there”; and another woman (91921, writing from an address in north London) felt her daughter was “under the influence of evil and she is acting very strange.”⁶⁷ A man (84805) writing from Saint Catherine parish found that the Panacea Society’s instructions wonderfully fulfilled a prophetic vision experienced by his wife. He wrote that she

got a vision one night that she is to consecrate water by prayers [and] used it daily [and] sprinkle some at her gates [and] doors [and] in the yard [and] drink a glass of same daily [and] bathe in it [and] read the 90 psalm [and] we carried on daily until your letter received with pamphlet that teaches us the very same lesson: with the exception of the Linen Section.⁶⁸

He remained in contact until at least the early 1960s. Others referred to realistically conceived evil spirits and powers, in the forms of a “black bat which visit the home very often,” and odd smells in various rooms of the house (53777)⁶⁹—which one user identified with a demon (52353)⁷⁰—or just “strange sounds” in the house (97655);⁷¹ others (39408) experienced bats associated with haunting spirits that would choke them in the night.⁷² One of the more troubling references of this type was to an “evil tenant” in the home who “is the devil he flaunt his self,” which persisted over several years. The writer (56673) heard sounds in the house and felt a burning sensation when she walked in the yard.⁷³ “They is evil spirit,” she wrote, and she felt only the Panacea Society’s water kept her alive; “they can’t overthrow me I am using the water after day [and] night.”⁷⁴ Another woman (79154) reported that she was not superstitious but that she wanted help in dealing with a sister who “lives at the grave” of her son and was performing evil against her.75

Despite the great cultural differences separating the overseers of the Panacea Society in Bedford and the thousands of individuals who applied for the healing in Jamaica, the healing seems to have found a natural fit with the Jamaican religious and spiritual matrix. In some respects, the Jamaican example is most instructive about the reality of the negotiation and complex dynamism of people’s religious lives and views, for it represents in effect a strikingly decentralized religious culture capable of being highly hospitable to new forms of religious expression and practice. Again, while there were many who applied to the healing from Jamaica who never made contact again, those who did evidenced a serious interest in the Panacea Society’s healing offer. While the reference points are somewhat different, the dynamism in the Jamaican water-takers is not dissimilar to those apparent in their British counterparts.

FINLAND⁷⁶

In Finland, a theosophical network had a significant part to play in the dissemination of the healing and its practical distribution. A branch of the Theosophical Society was opened in Finland in 1907, although Finnish people had been joining the Swedish branch of the Theosophical Society by 1892.⁷⁷ Tore Ahlbäck has observed that “the importance of the theosophical movement, as compared for example to the Lutheran state church, was purely marginal, quantitatively speaking”; nonetheless, as in England, Theosophy was significant in facilitating the introduction of novel religious ideas.⁷⁸ Maarit Leskelä-Kärki’s refers to Theosophy as the “fundamental foundation” for occult alternatives to mainstream religion.⁷⁹ In Finland, the Panacea Society’s healing was taken up by Pekka Ervast (1875–1934), a leading advocate for Theosophy and still recognized as a promoter of alternative religion in Finnish history.⁸⁰ Ervast established a spiritual society of his own, called Ruusu-Risti, when he left the Theosophical Society in 1920. His new group became enormously influential in Theosophy and broader alternative religious affiliation in Finland.⁸¹ Ervast would manage the Panacea Society’s activities in Finland from 1925 until his death in 1934. Thereafter, the Society used various translators as they managed the Finnish healing work directly from Bedford.⁸²

There are frequent references to Ervast in letters from Finnish users of the healing in the Society’s archive. It is evident from these that Ervast was important in sustaining and promoting the healing in Finland. He included an article he had written in February 1925 about the Panacea Society in Ruusu-Risti, the journal of the group he led, and shortly after that he submitted an application for the healing for himself.83 Ervast continued to promote the healing in Ruusu-Risti and was himself a keen advocate.⁸⁴ Ervast wrote to the Society’s leadership in October 1925 and offered to arrange translation and printing of the instruction leaflet for the healing. He said he would finance the cost of printing by raising funds “among the patients who have already been helped.”⁸⁵ He printed one thousand copies of the leaflet by December and was appointed the Society’s agent (Tower) in Finland.⁸⁶ After that, he was given a supply of blessed linen pieces to send out to the Finnish water-takers, and he reported regularly to the Society on applicants and their progression.⁸⁷ Ervast regarded the healing as successful in his homeland, reporting “wonderful cures here in Finland already” and that “we have reached the first thousand [Finnish members] now” in August 1926.⁸⁸

The Society seems to have seen the Finns as having a special place in its understanding of Richard Brothers’s doctrine that “the Lost Tribes of Israel settled in Britain” and that Anglo-Saxons were “the blood descendants of the Israelists.”⁸⁹ An editorial note appended to an article by Ervast in The Panacea observed: “that the people of Finland are so wonderfully attracted to the Healing seems to point to some ethnological correspondence between our respective nations.”⁹⁰ It was suggested in another article referring to Finland, published a few years later, that “we have a theory that a large number of the Lost Ten Tribes stayed in that far-off land and are now answering the Call.”⁹¹

Ervast also made an association between an ancient magical and healing tradition in Finnish culture, the national foundation myth, the Kalevala,⁹² and the apparent Finnish propensity to use the Society’s healing. The text of the Kalevala, the “Finnish national epic,” was compiled in the mid-nineteenth century.⁹³ Jeffrey Kaplan has discussed Ervast’s use of the Kalevala and its interpretation as a parallel Christian text linked to “Finnish nationhood and the incarnation of the uniquely Finnish ‘national genius.’ ”⁹⁴ Ervast wrote about the Finns and Lapps as having a special propensity to be “powerful magicians and sorcerers” and noted that “no other Christian nation has preserved as many magic formulas and incantations than our nation.”⁹⁵ In 1925, Ervast linked the Society’s healing to this element in Finnish culture in an article where he said:

Our folk-healers and shamans have been curing people with their own remedies for centuries but their performance and procedures have always remained more or less esoteric, secret, so to speak. Their reputation has never spread great distances; if it has ever spread outside their home boroughs, this has happened by itself with the aid of friends and thankful patients; never has it been intentionally spread. It seems to be a different case with the Southcottians [the Panacea Society] and their cure. Information on it is distributed as widely as possible and those suffering from illness are even invited to try it.96

Ervast referred to “conjurings … to drive away bears, diseases and other evil from [adherents] and their friends” in an account he wrote of the types of ancient magic in Finland.⁹⁷ Ervast’s observation that the Panacea Society’s healing is equivalent to an intentionally spread version of local folk or shamanic practices in Finland suggests that he regarded the Society’s healing as similar to those ancient practices from his own country.

THE PANACEA SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES, JAMAICA, AND FINLAND

In the American context, the Panacea Society’s healing interacted with a range of diverse strands of religion and spirituality prevalent in that country. As might be expected, references to and echoes of well-known and well-studied forms of Christianity, and especially its various Protestant denominations, pepper letters of the water-takers from that country. In common with Jamaica and other countries, individual experiences of startling and somewhat confrontational encounters with spiritual forces are a presence for a number of writers. While the Panacea Society is little known in wider scholarship, the penetration of its offering into the House of David commune at Benton Harbor is not surprising. The House of David, like the Panacea Society and other groups, was one among a wide range of products of Joanna Southcott’s work and the work of her successor prophets; that there was an easy interchange between these groups (despite the controls on communication at Benton Harbor) is a logical consequence of their shared ideological background.

The Healing and Other Movements II

THE UNITED STATES8

JAMAICA

FINLAND76

THE PANACEA SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES, JAMAICA, AND FINLAND

THE UNITED STATES⁸

FINLAND⁷⁶