During the period when the healing began to be made available to a wider public, the use of lucky charms and mascots, and some types of superstitious practice, was prevalent in Britain.1 Geoffrey Gorer’s somewhat anecdotal exploration of “English character” comments on the wide distribution of the “habit” of carrying lucky mascots and suggests that during the war “one serving man or woman in three had his or her private piece of solid magic.”2 Richard Sykes has observed the prevalence of popular superstition amid popular religion before and during the war.3 With the public launch of the Panacea Society’s healing in February 1924, the Society began a program of poster advertisements, leafleting, and newspaper advertisements. In the early days, the Society organized meetings open to the public and commissioned billboard advertisements.4 An early advertisement in August 1924 proclaimed at an open meeting in the West End of London “Free healing of all diseases,”5 and the publication of Octavia’s Healing for All (1925) saw advertisements announcing “ ‘Healing for All’ sufferers from all diseases should read ‘Healing for All’ Just published by the Panacea Society.”6
The standard form of the early advertisement offered “slow but sure deliverance not miraculous, but by treatment, without money and without the price of accepting any particular belief” and listed a wide range of ailments (including cancer, consumption, and paralysis) but indicated that any could be treated. Applicants were asked to write to the Society with a list of their ailments and then to send updates on their health.7 About the middle of the 1930s, there was a change of presentation in the advertisements: they took on a more religious tone compared to earlier emphasis on the medical and physical. Quoting from relevant biblical texts (for example, “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely”8), the new advertisement offered “Water and the spirit the new sacrament for the new dispensation” and advised people to write to the Society in Bedford “for healing and deliverance in the tribulations preceding the coming of the Lord.” The wording closed by noting that “there is nothing to pay.” This last form of the advertisement was used in numerous newspapers and periodicals until the 1980s.9
To contemporary eyes, the large claims and the striking language in these advertisements are perhaps arresting. However, from the late Victorian period until the Second World War and beyond, advertisements for patent medicines making equally bold claims and using equally audacious language were not uncommon in Britain.10 Thomas Richards’s account of The Commodity Culture of Victorian England describes the openness of the British population to patent medicines that were widely believed to be of little curative value. He says that in the early years of the twentieth century “by any reckoning the English public bought more potions that it did legitimate drugs, and more pills per capita than any other nation in Europe. The makers of Beecham’s Pills sold a million pills a day. Only alcohol was more popular and widely available.”11 T. R. Nevett’s history of Advertising in Britain observes that many patent medicines “did not perform what was claimed for them” and notes that in the interwar period publications seeking the revenue that could be generated from advertising such medicines were often prepared to publish.12 Of course, the nature of the cure offered by the Panacea Society was different in significant ways from its more medicinal rivals; not least, from a skeptical point of view, even if the blessed linen turned out to have no effect on health, it was also less likely to have any harmful effects compared to some of the patent remedies. And in many respects the claims of the Society were framed in more conventional and less hyperbolic language than those of the patent remedies. Indeed, the language of the patent remedy advertising could invoke supernatural or magical effects just as easily.
Thus, a Panacea Society advert like the one described earlier appeared in an issue of the Daily Herald in July 1939, which also carried advertising for a treatment for “summer catarrh” by quoting one purported user:
Feeling stuffed up and getting prematurely old. I tried all kinds of so-called cures without any benefit. I decided to give Milton a trial. I have completely banished the catarrh. Now I can hear better, see better, and feel better in every way, and I feel life is worth while.13
The promotional text for another remedy for breathing difficulties said the product would “bring blessed relief and ease in a few seconds (this is so noticeable in some cases that it amounts almost to a miracle of healing) and ends the attack in a few minutes.”14 The previous day’s Daily Herald had offered Beechams Powders, which “sounds like ‘Magic’—and it IS!,” and Hall’s Wine, which “acts directly on your blood-stream … At once you feel a new life thrilling through you to every nerve, cell and tissue of your body. And this is no temporary fillip. Hall’s Wine builds up all your vital forces.”15 A Panacea Society advert in the Daily Mail on the same day appeared in an issue with advertising that promoted a slimming aid with a testimonial:
I am a continual source of amazement to my friends. As well as losing weight I seem to have lost years. I am told I look 10 years younger and my photographs seem to prove it. I feel wonderfully fit, I only take “SILF” 3 times a week now as I find it a splendid tonic.16
With the launch of the healing into public awareness in 1924, the Panacea Society entered a lively, thriving, and inventive marketplace for healing and spirituality that was of long standing and had a familiar vocabulary for the British public.
As we have seen, the Panacea Society had been advertising its healing widely in Britain from February 1924. The tone of the advertising remained fairly consistent over time, aside from an adjustment in the language in the mid-1930s. While the change at that point was immediately linked to changes at the head of the Society (Octavia died in 1934, and her deputy, Emily Goodwin, took over as senior Panacean in Bedford), it also coincided with a growing public awareness of an unstable geopolitical situation linked to the rise of fascism in Germany. The new advertisements included biblical quotes, and frequently these were on the theme of troubles and war: for example, “And the God of Peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly” (Rom. 16:20) and “Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that ye be not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet” (Matt. 24:6). As Panacean doctrine, in common with many millenarian religious movements, expected war and disorder as a sign of the dawn of the Millennium, it is likely that the change in the advertising was not an unconscious or an unsystematic attempt to market the Society in the light of prophecies about the end of the world that it believed were now coming to fruition. It made sense under those conditions that people’s thoughts would turn more to matters religious and ultimate—and in that context the placement of advertising alongside news reports of war preparations at home and conflict overseas would have heightened its effect (and the Society’s press cuttings books indicate a dramatic increase in the number of press advertisements for the healing published from June 1939).
Amid reports about the full mobilization of the Army and Air Force, the evacuation of children from cities, the introduction of conscription, and the German attacks launched against Poland on multiple fronts, the Daily Mail for September 2, 1939, carried a large advertisement from the Panacea Society, a “NOTICE TO SEALED MEMBERS AND WATER TAKERS,” advising that “Should a State of Emergency arise whereby communication with Head Quarters is interrupted or becomes difficult, continue to fill your bottle with Water as required and repeat the Blessing.” It went on to enjoin them to “Sprinkle your Houses.”17 The same advertisement ran in the Daily Telegraph two days later, amid stories about fighting on various fronts, promises by allies to aid Britain, the first air raid warning in London, and “wild buying on Wall Street.”18 In fact, the Society ran a major newspaper advertising campaign during July, August, and September 1939, when more than two hundred of its advertisements for the healing appeared in national and local British newspapers and magazines.19
Again, it is instructive to note that the Panacea Society was not alone in detecting the need to adjust its message and exposure to respond to perceived existential threat. As early as July 1939, advertising for new homes on the south coast of England used anxiety about war to promote their products (“BUY A HOUSE ON THE COAST FOR HEALTH AND SAFETY”20). The Daily Mail advertisement advising water-takers of what to do “should a state of emergency arise” appeared in the same issue as an advertisement for Pontings department store that intoned: “If circumstances make it impossible to come to Pontings, remember that you can always keep in touch with Britain’s best values through the post” (and promoted a special offer on waterproof blackout material).21 Another page had an advert for British Cellophane Ltd recommending its products for protection of windows “against shattering by blast.”22
Contemporary research in social psychology has given support to the idea that the existence of religion is linked to the anxiety and discomfort caused by the human awareness of death. Studies comparing groups of people who have spent time contemplating death and those contemplating neutral subjects under controlled conditions suggest that experimentally heightened awareness of death can make people more likely to agree with statements suggesting the existence of supernatural agents and other transcendent religious entities (God, heaven, hell, etc.).23 The causal chain is summarized by Robb Willer:
Fear of death creates significant anxiety in individuals. Individuals are motivated to come to conclusions that avoid negative arousal states. Therefore, greater fear of death should lead to greater belief in ideas that offer an escape from death anxiety, such as belief in an afterlife.24
With the Panacea Society’s professed theology of relief from ailments and ultimately immortality, the offer of healing would have served as a natural inducement for those in fear of their own mortality—and, with the approach of war in the 1930s, the resonance of the association between existential anxiety and spiritual preservation was enhanced.
Rather contradicting the idea that war may be linked to enhanced religious belief, the classic historical understanding of the impact of the Second World War on religion and religiosity in general in Britain suggests that the disruption was a significant contributor to overall religious decline in the twentieth century. The first viewpoint is prevalent, for example, in the Mass Observation report Puzzled People, which is often cited for its account of “the explosion, or disintegration, of orthodox beliefs.”25 Edward Wickham’s formative analysis of the decline of religion in Sheffield remarks on the disruptive effects of the Second World War; and Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley’s seminal statistical analysis of church affiliation after 1700 finds that “the two world wars had a most adverse effect on church growth.”26
On the other hand, more recent work, often with a more inclusive definition of religion taking in wider folk (and less authorized) beliefs and practices, suggests that the Second World War was relatively insignificant in the trajectory of twentieth-century religion in Britain (i.e., reporting no special link between war and religious devotion). For example, Clive Field’s overview of quantitative data about people’s religious affiliation during 1939–1945 finds that “Christian membership fell during the war but not spectacularly.”27 Field finds support for his conclusions in more qualitatively framed studies such as Stephen Parker’s Faith on the Home Front,28 which observes that “in reality, the contours of wartime popular religion were similar to those of peacetime; ‘diffusive Christianity’ as such remained intact” and that “in the main the Christian religion … remained critical to the cultural life of the people in the mid-twentieth century and oral testimony underscores that it was a rich source of meaning and purpose in wartime.”29
Furthermore, in studies suggesting a link between war and enhanced religious activity, the link is somewhat oblique and arguably value laden. Mass Observation’s Puzzled People identifies an opportunistic and superstitious religion connected with the decline of traditional and institutional religion that found expression in astrology as much as in prayer.30 And Field’s assessment of the evidence related to Second World War religion, which makes significant reference to Mass Observation’s research in this area (and Puzzled People in particular), comments that subjects treated Christian beliefs like “theological sweets to be tasted in almost any combination and rejected if found too bitter.”31
Analysis of the sample of index cards discussed in the introduction and used earlier in much of the analysis of applications—but focused only on those who applied from addresses in Great Britain in the five years eight months of war as well as during the five years eight months before and after the war (i.e., a total period of seventeen years, from January 1934 to December 1950)—suggests that those who applied during the war years were more likely to make a committed attempt with the healing.32 While the percentage of those who wrote just one letter after their initial application (indicating they made some kind of experiment with the healing) remained at 17 percent before and during the war, the proportion of applications who went on to write two or more letters increased by 7 percentage points (with a concomitant fall in those who applied and made no further contact). In the postwar years, the proportion of applicants who went on to write two or more letters returned to its prewar level. While the number in the postwar sample is perhaps too low for useful comparison (though the return to prewar figures is suggestive), the prewar and wartime samples are a good size and provide some support for the argument that war conditions elevated people’s commitment to spiritual practice. While a theologian might consider the Panacea Society’s belief system to have strayed some distance from conventional Christianity, mutatis mutandis this pattern of increased wartime commitment among users of the healing supports Parker’s assessment of the continued value of religious commitment during war. On the other hand, there were significant drops in the average duration of contact, average number of letters written, and average intensity of contact (letters written per year) with the Society for those who applied during the war. While intensity was restored after the war (which is in line with the earlier finding that intensity remained fairly stable over the century), there was a small recovery in duration and none in the number of letters.
TABLE 6.1. Percentage of applicants writing no letters, one letter, or two or more letters for a sample of Panacea Society Healing users after applying from British addresses, analysed by period (pre-war, wartime, and post-war) of initial application.
| Number of Letters | ||||
| 0 | 1 | 2+ | Number in sample |
|
| Jan 1934 to Aug 1939 | 33 | 17 | 49 | 207 |
| Sep 1939 to Apr 1945 | 27 | 17 | 56 | 109 |
| May 1945 to Dec 1950 | 32 | 18 | 50 | 34 |
The Panacea Society’s annual report for 1938–1939 noted that the Healing Department had “developed enormously” during the year—and it linked the growth to an increase in advertising, leafleting, and press articles, especially a large (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) article in the Daily Mail in February.33 In particular, the report records that the Society detected “many new applications, as well as letters from old patients asking for help and guidance” in response to the Sudeten Crisis and the Munich Agreement.34 The annual report for the following year (covering July 1939 to June 1940) noted that the “outbreak of War has curtailed communications from European countries as they fell to the Nazis” but was linked to “a renewal of activity in the USA and UK.”35 The pattern is evident in the collated numbers of applications; worldwide, there was a very rapid increase from around one thousand applications in 1933 to more than eight thousand in 1939. During the buildup to war, there was a striking increase and then a peak in applications to the healing in the three countries that supplied the largest number of applicants overall during the twentieth century—the United States, Jamaica, and the British Isles.36 However, the Jamaican peak was a little before the 1939 peak for the United States and the British Isles, and it was probably less linked to the growth of advertising than it was to local factors. (The causes of the boost in Jamaica over that period remain nonetheless unclear.)
TABLE 6.2. Average duration of contact, number of letters written, and letters per year for a sample of Panacea Society Healing users applying from British addresses, analysed by period (pre-war, wartime, and post-war) of initial application. (Excludes applicants writing no letters after initial contact.)
| Duration (days) |
Number of letters |
Letters per year |
Number in sample |
|
| Jan 1934 to Aug 1939 | 1,462 | 13.4 | 6.2 | 138 |
| Sep 1939 to Apr 1945 | 969 | 9.3 | 5.2 | 80 |
| May 1945 to Dec 1950 | 1,109 | 8.7 | 7.4 | 23 |
The Society seems to have carried out very little international advertising37; thus, a direct link between war coverage, advertising, and the healing is only likely for water-takers in Britain. Nonetheless, take-up of the healing in other countries can only have come through personal recommendations between friends and family if advertising was not the main driver; as such, we would expect an indirect correlation at least between advertising in Britain and international take-up.
For some water-takers who otherwise expressed little everyday extension of the water and their use or understanding of the water into more metaphysical or transcendent territory, the outbreak of war, or fear of its outbreak, drew out their capacity to engage with the water in more complex ways and on more metaphysical terms. For example, an early applicant to the healing (30941), a woman who applied from Birmingham in the Midlands of England in 1924, later wrote letters that evidence the deep impact of the Second World War on her spiritual state. Her initial application had been based on deafness, and by 1940 difficulties with her legs also meant she relied on neighbors for help and errands. She retained faith in the Society and the healing, refusing to go to a bomb shelter because “the knowledge that your directions in my case-paper were carried out assures me of divine protection.”38 After ten days of continuous nighttime bombing, she wrote that though she could not hear the bombs, she felt the vibrations and her bed shaking, and “I feel no panic, just a tenseness and horror.”39 She prayed regularly for deliverance and understood the war in the context of the Society’s apocalyptic vision: “How very thankful I am for the Knowledge the Panacea Teachings have brought me as to why it has come to pass, and what the future holds in store for Great Britain.”40 However, the start of the bombing activated spirits that troubled her.
CHART 6.1. Annual number of British Isles, Jamaica, and USA Panacea Society Healing applications, 1924–78
The room seemed full of presences, with umbrellas whirling them over one. Then night and early morning this phenomena would start with two presences. One would make passes over me and the other seemed to help in handing something that was whirled over my head. Then would follow much noise. Crowds of spirit people [were] passing through … I have been powerless to stop it and at times feel that it is diabolical interference.41
After the death of Octavia in 1934, and while Emily Goodwin was the de facto leader of the Society, the Divine Mother (speaking through Goodwin) had advised the water-taker on these kinds of troubles. However, when Goodwin died in 1943 the Society no longer felt able to advise on such matters—though a note for a reply in the archives suggests that the Society assured the water-taker that the Divine Mother would still know the contents of her letters.42 And the water-taker was reassured by the Society’s report of the implications of Goodwin’s passing in The Panacea:
That the passing over of Mrs. Goodwin is part of the great work of the Divine Family for us in the setting up of the Kingdom and that all taking the water and following instructions already received will continue to gain the physical and spiritual benefits through the spirit in the water.43
Ultimately, the circumstances of the war and the death of Goodwin served to secure and fully validate this water-taker’s faith in the water and the Society.
This early water-taker had applied to the Society after hearing of it in the theosophical journal The Herald of the Star in 1924, and in 1941 she reported that she had stopped reading other spiritual literature and would only accept the teachings of the Panacea Society.44 Six months before she died in 1944, she wrote of the assurance she had found in the Society:
I have tried theosophy two years, Christian Science many years ago (been under two different healers), Spiritualism longer. At a private seance I was told after some advice that I would find the pearl of great price! I have in the Blessed Water. Without it I could not have held on and endured the agony of suffering. As it is I have … kept a grip on life, and hope for ultimate deliverance.45
A female nurse (19885) who applied from Cleveland, Ohio, sometime before 1932, and who had a daughter and a nephew who also took the water, relied on the water in great and small domestic matters for several years. Only with the beginning of the war in 1939 did she invoke the “Divine Mother and Father,” asking them to “watch over our Dear body of Believers, through the awful Crisis in Europe. Also help and comfort all the rest.”46 And in 1942 she reflected on the distance between the American and European experiences of the war:
Am feeling lots better and praying hard for God to come on this earth, to establish his Kingdom, and end this terrible War. Would not want to live, had I not hopes of something better.
So far in America, we do not know the horrors our brothers across the water are going through, but some times I get thinking and the 91st psalm comes into my mind, and I know we who trust are safe.47
Though in time she would drift away from the Society, being baptized a Baptist in the early 1950s (against the specific instructions of the Society) after she married a member of that denomination, she kept in contact until 1971 and resorted to the water from time to time throughout her life.48
Another water-taker from Cleveland (33706), who appears to have initially applied in the 1930s, wrote mainly about physical and emotional preoccupations. It was with her unease about geopolitical instability in the 1960s that she began to discuss deeper cosmological concerns. She wrote in 1962 (perhaps overshadowed by the Cuban Missile Crisis) that “the world crisis gets worse all the time and we of the Panacea Society pray that it is at last signs of the end of evil rule and the return of our Lord God and King.”49 She returned to the theme in June 1967. As her physical complaints were improving, her geopolitical fears grew (perhaps the Six-Day War, which occurred during the weeks before she wrote, had affected her outlook), and she looked to an eschatological outcome.
I am happy to report that my arthritis is considerably better am able to move around much easier and the pain has diminished thanks to the Divine Healing Water. Otherwise my general health is good and I thank God again that I am able to work.
World conditions continue to worsen and now this middle East crisis could result in the finish of the end and then the return of the Divine Son to at last rule over this kingdom.
I am very grateful for the Visitation, Healing Water and Divine protection.50
The letters in the archive from a Finnish woman (77067), who seems to have first come to the water in the 1930s, are marked as sent from British Columbia—though there may be unidentified or lost early letters from addresses in Finland. She wrote mainly about physical and emotional concerns during the 1930s, and she began to contemplate the healing in the context of larger cosmological concerns as the situation in Europe became unstable later that decade. In 1938, she linked the water to God’s intercession in her prayers for peace: “I must express my pleasure about the European peace for which I thank and honour God. In drinking the Water I beg for His help and He has heard, thanks to you.”51 Later, in July 1939, she again linked her physical use of the water with her hopes for peace.
I have used both waters, externally and internally, and I thank you for your help. God bless your work, in trying to alleviate the sufferings of the humanity. I am really in very good health, and I hope for the sake of every one, that their suffering will come to an end, so that they will be able to enjoy peace and happiness.52
Similarly, in 1952, perhaps amid reports of British and American developments in atomic weapons technology, she feared war and again linked the healing water to its avoidance: “I hope we shall be able to prevent war by using Panacea. These are very important days and let’s hope He will be merciful to the human race.”53
Others found a certain relief in the buildup to war, as they saw it as the culmination of their expectations and as the sign of God’s impending return. A woman (87225) who applied from a town near Glasgow in Scotland, probably in 1934 or 1935, began to expect special messages from the Divine in 1937. “Please keep me informed. if you have got any special orders from The Lord my God and Saviour. He’s a Friend indeed! Have you had any messages since Octavia died! Let me know when He sends out any special message to His Flock. (I’m one of His!!).”54 Commenting a year later that “the World is Awful To-day. We have ‘The Signs’ so Redemption must be drawing nigh,” she again expected messages, saying: “We are living in evil times and require a reliable guiding Hand.”55 By summer 1940, she felt the final fulfilment of her eschatological prophecies becoming a reality: “Spiritually I see things all in a different light. The Bible is certainly standing out. A living book. Christ is here with healing in his wings.”56
Similarly, one of the more skeptical water-takers (72173) but no less committed (see chapter 7) who applied from Brighton on the south coast of England in March 1939, wrote in August of that year that he felt “perfectly confident to meet any crisis into which the world may be shortly plunged,” and that “I am sure that the sands are fast running through now and that we are about to witness marvellous and terrible happenings.”57 And despite the absence of any physical benefits (he would later complain that he had taken the water for nearly a decade without benefit58), in 1940 he wrote that “spiritually I feel a great calm. / So confident am I of the nearness of the end of our troubles that the daily increasing gloom around has the reverse effect upon me. / I feel sure it is the power of the Almighty working through the water within me.”59
Another woman (32463), who was married to a German and had been a pianist in Germany before the war, wrote from New York in November 1939 after a desperate departure from Nazi Germany—she was an American citizen but had been compelled to leave her Jewish husband and thirteen-year-old daughter behind.60 The ailments she reported in January 1940 were “a broken heart, caused by my separation from my loved ones” and “having had to give up my Music.”61 Indications are that she had originally applied for the healing in the 1920s, and in one letter she linked her desperate plight to her neglect of the healing water: “Everything seemed to go right with me as long as I did so take the water. Whatever made me discontinue, I do not know. At any rate, ever since I stopped, I seem to have had bad luck.”62 She never saw her husband and child again, and her letters in the archive relate how she scraped a living in New York until the 1960s. Her preoccupations after the war were with her financial worries, difficulties in her rented accommodation, and small ailments; however, the Society provided a touchstone for a relieving metaphysical vision. When a dear friend died in the 1960s, she observed that “if it is true, that there is a Heaven, where perfect, + pure human beings from Earth go after death, that is where [he] is right now! This is my only consolation. – / I feel better now thanks to the prayer and to the water.”63
In later years, it was a more personal and immediate expectation of death that induced an active use of the healing water and a developing spiritual state more generally in the Glasgow woman (87225). She seems to have been suffering with a heart complaint in 1949 and wrote to the Society that “I pray to be made a new creature. My out-look is the Coming of Christ to make all things new. I take the Water everyday and wash and bathe myself twice daily. … Pray the Lord to give me strength to endure. I’m so desirous of Life, hating the thought of death.” She said in another letter: “I don’t want to die, but I feel I need more Divine Help.”64 Though the archival indications are that she died a year later, she looked forward to the speedy coming of God before she passed away.
I do get depressed at times with all these feelings and am inclined to cry. My outlook is Life I so much desire it. Not the grave. Hence my struggle.
I get great comfort in reading The Scripts and its comforting to know that the Bible is being fulfilled.
I pray for The Lord to come quickly and take This world under his immediate governance. I elect Him! man has failed.
Please pray for me. That the Lord may add to my strength daily. / It’s comforting to look to the Centre where The Power of The Lord is. / We are living in marvellous times—the passing of the old and The coming of The New.65
Similarly, the Finnish woman (77067) who wrote from British Columbia and who had linked the Panacea Society’s healing to geopolitical anxieties began to reflect on her eschatological hopes as she aged and was diagnosed with heart trouble. Though she would live for many more years, she wrote in 1952, by then in her seventies:
I think perhaps I am nearing my end … and as I am not perfect enough to live in this body on the arrival of our God. Perhaps I will be re-born. May His will be done. In any case I wish to thank Panacea for all the help I have received and may God bless your work in helping humanity.66
An archival draft response from the Panacea Society indicates the comforting vision it offered her—even though she might not live to see the perfect transformation and bodily preservation with the beginning of the Millennium.
God knows all those who are hoping to live in His Kingdom on Earth—and all who have tried to serve Him will be perfectly satisfied whether they live in the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom on Earth—We hope indeed it will not be long before The Lord comes to reign on Earth for the devil’s rule is very evil and causes much sin and suffering. [You] are in God’s care.67
War, anxiety, and the anticipation of death were important impellers for some people to take up the Panacea Society’s healing—and to that extent participation in nontraditional healing and spiritual practices, even without articulating a spiritual or metaphysical scheme, can be understood as a spiritual or metaphysical statement. Furthermore, as we have seen in the writings of a number of the healing users discussed in this chapter, fear of war and existential threat can provide a background against which to think about and articulate spiritual and metaphysical concerns. A study by Ryan Williams and Fraser Watts of the balance of people’s religious and nonreligious explanations of meaningful events in their lives using the material in the Panacea Society’s archive (from the 1920s, in particular) found that people were more likely to attribute positive events than negative events to religious causes (in line with earlier research in other contexts).68 The authors of that article also report the unexpected finding that
correspondents did not always make attributions to events when they occurred. … Despite people’s natural inclination to explain events, sometimes the initial response is an emotive one, and we often found descriptions of feelings in the letters rather than causal inferences.69
In line with the qualitative impression suggested by the analysis of this chapter, Williams and Watts suggest that “when faced with a personal life crisis or serious physical or mental illness, often the initial response is an emotive one, and sometimes the suspension of judgment forms an ethical or religious response to suffering.”70 Theorists such as William Swatos and Kevin Christiano have argued that “existential questions” require “religious answers” because their “solutions lie beyond rational determination,”71 and Peter Berger paints a picture of religion as “banners … in the hands of men as they stand before death.”72 A number of social scientific studies also illuminate a link between contemplation of death and openness to the notion of transcendent realities. Thus, for example, Jonathan Jong, Jamin Halberstadt, and Matthias Bluemke discovered that while death priming (asking subjects to imagine and write about the experience of death) caused believers and nonbelievers to be more confident in their preexisting beliefs, implicit measures found it to cause increased belief in religious supernatural entities.73
Ara Norenzayan and Ian Hansen investigated the impact of awareness of mortality (by asking subjects to write about their own death) on belief in supernatural agents and found that it did indeed lead to “more religiosity, stronger belief in God, and in divine intervention.”74 Aaron Kay, Danielle Gaucher, Ian McGregor, and Kyle Nash’s review of assessments of the relationship between religious belief and subjects’ sense of control includes studies finding that asking subjects to remember a “positive event over which one had no control” is associated with “higher beliefs in the existence of a controlling God” compared to “remembering a positive event over which one does have control.”75 It must be observed that while arguably the difference is merely one of degree, there is a considerable difference between the insistent incomprehensibility of death (proposed by Swatos, Christiano, Berger, and others) and the gentle reflection on death engendered by studies such as that by Jong, Norenzayan, and their colleagues.
While the association between the increasing volume of applicants to the Panacea Society’s healing and the escalating tension leading to global war in 1939 provides support for the findings of the empirical studies and the theorizing of the sociologists, the significant increase in the Society’s advertising in the period clouds the value of that assessment. More telling is the complex picture painted in the case studies of Panacea Society healing users reflecting on war and geopolitical instability. What is evident in these letters is the way this kind of threat provides the context and premise for individuals to articulate ideas about transcendent or spiritual matters. And, though some of their experiences are no doubt of a highly emotional kind, these writers engage with ideas neither as individuals grasping at an alternative to rational answers nor as a baffled band of mortals holding secondhand banners in the face of death—but as calculating and rational individuals seeking personally satisfying religious solutions.