The most important source of information about people’s personal religious ideas about the Panacea Society’s healing is the letters held in the Society’s archives.1 There are thousands of letters from thousands of correspondents, kept in sometimes irregular bundles wrapped together by Panacea Society healing workers from time to time over many years. While the index cards and register books can be used for systematized analysis, this is less possible for the letters, which offer a less ordered though far richer source of insight. Through a sustained process of sifting and interpretation, three broad categories of correspondence emerge from the letters. Perhaps the largest proportion are those making little or no reference to spiritual matters and remaining focused on the physical ailments the Society’s healing was putatively there to minister to. This is unsurprising; applicants were asked to be brief and to restrict their comments to the matters at hand. Correspondents in this category did not use “religious” language; for example, they referred to the healing as medicine rather than as “spiritual healing” or a “divine cure,” and others only used commonplace religious terms such as “thank God.”
A middle group showed a more involved use of religious language than the first group. For example, a writer (90163) from Jamaica wrote in 1949: “I have heard of the wonderful work that is doing through the mighty hand of God in this work. Thank God for His Love towards mankind.”2 Another example is a writer (71480) from Sussex in England who in 1941 feared being evicted from her home: “So I ask you please when praying to ask ‘The Divine Mother’ to save us from such distress and allow us to stay here.”3 A third group displays more complex and extensive, detailed, or thoughtful use of religious language and phrases. An example is a woman from Finland (66461who applied in 1957; she wrote, “Have prayed that God would help me, but things only get worse. It may well be that God is training me in this way to obey and to be honest, although I believe I am honest.”4 Another writer in this category was a man in India (93861) who initially applied in the 1930s. He wrote in 1938:
I realise that I have done a very wrong thing in breaking away from the “Spirit + Water,” and am very Sorry for doing so.
I want to get rid of this great pest “Satan,” I want our Lord to come down on earth, and turn this earth from unhappiness, to an Earth, so beautiful where there will be no sin, no unhappiness, no death, I want to live for ever under our Lords Rule.5
Most users of the healing water fall into the first category and either did not use religious forms of language, or they did so minimally or in passing and commonplace ways. An example is a farm worker (86153) who submitted an application from northwest England in 1932 and remained in contact until 1952. For this person, the healing was used as a direct alternative to conventional medicine, and he seems never to have talked about the healing in religious terms despite writing seventy-four letters during his period of contact. In 1934 he wrote to say: “I thank you very much for helping me which is very nice to think that there is someone very kind to help one through,” and he observed that “before we knew any thing about it we used to spend many a shilling trying medicine we have given over since we found out about the water.”6
Others in this group made use of some limited religious terms, perhaps using terminology from Panacea Society writings without indications of personal engagement, or using commonplace language that did not suggest association of the healing with a particular spiritual state. An example of this is a female water-taker (72913) from the southeast of England who submitted an application some time prior to October 1950, who said, “you also tell me fear is the devil’s weapon which worry [sic] me very much.” However, she did not concern herself with that point in any detail, remarking “I only hope that the Dear Lord will kindly make me well.”7 A female water-taker (19298) from Bedfordshire found great benefit from using the water but was not drawn to make any overt religious observation when she remarked in 1929, “I must say I have not been too busy to take the Healing Water, as I feel now I could not live without it. It’s wonderful what it has done for me. My trouble all comes back to me at times, but I take the water at once, it certainly gives me great relief.”8
A married couple in Finland (89555 and 47077) introduced to the healing in the 1920s9 seem rarely to have used a religious term beyond the incidental despite using the healing for around forty years.10 Examples of these kinds of applicants in the Jamaican sample include a woman (54542) applying on behalf of her daughter and grandchildren. The daughter was focused on help for physical ailments—“I am still taking the medicine of the healing water I am suffering with my nerves, my head, my belly side hurts me at night my eyes are very bad and a lot of shade over them”—and was seeking a cure.11
Some who wrote to the Panacea Society employed religious language and referred to religious themes in more involved ways than the first category of correspondents. A user of the healing who applied from Yorkshire in 1928 communicated her poor health to the Society (92622; her husband wrote on her behalf): “I am requested to say with much regret that her health is generally worse than it was a month ago … However she intends to keep Hammering for Divine Help until her General Health is restored.”12 And a sufferer from osteoarthritis (94364) presented the Society’s healing as part of her prayer life and associated it with a spiritual progression: “It is a painful complaint & has penetrated some of the joints as well as the muscles, but I pray earnestly for Divine Healing & strive to conquer when I fail in any way—Physically I may not be much better—but I know that, spiritually, I am prospering as some bad faults have utterly conquered.”13
In the late 1950s, a female water-taker (28763) represented the healing as part of a divine power active in her life more generally. “I have received Divine healing and help through the Water. My feet are still painful … Feeling of sickness not so pronounced since I started drinking the Water.” In the 1960s, she reported that “the spots on neck have lightened, the Divine Power is also helping finance.”14 A number of water-takers made use of conventional religious symbols and motifs in their communications. Discussing her headaches, one user (28763) wrote: “Am continuing with Panacea Treatment and am thankful for Christ’s power which is helping me in my troubles.”15 Another user (65168) said, “I am very grateful for all this, and I feel as if protected by an angel.”16 An especially striking example (34035) was a user of the healing who discovered a religious renewal in her sense of the effectiveness of the healing.
All the time I am conscious of the presence of the Almighty, His help and protection. All ills that I or any member of my family have had, have always been healed with the aid of the Divine water and prayer.
It is most remarkable that I have got such a thirst for the Bible, and I read it many times a day.17
She wrote again to thank the Society, saying, “I have received so much through you both spiritually and mentally. I have found God.”18
A Jamaican woman (73405) who applied in May 1954 wrote to the Society 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.”19 Another female water-taker (12608), who applied in February 1936, wrote in September of that year: “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.”20
The most developed forms of religious language are evident in those who go further than the middle category and show greater complexity of language, or a more involved application of their ideas to their experiences. In these correspondents it is common to see some level of conflict or grappling with their framing of the Panacea Society healing. A male furniture maker (35772) from Somerset, England, was among the few to explicitly assert his discontent before leaving the Society.
I must say that as far as this family is concerned the Water and Packets have brought nothing but disaster. Ill luck of every description has beset the home since we sprinkled the water round the house, took the water internally and carried the packets. That financial matter mentioned in my first report has given an impossible amount of trouble. Before we got in touch with you things were going much more smoothly, the health of my wife and children has been worse.21
After the healing water apparently killed the family’s Christmas tree, he withdrew from the Society entirely: “I will also admit that the fault of all this lies with us for substituting superstition in place of Faith, for even momentarily associating ourselves with a claim that has absolutely no Biblical support whatsoever.”22 Pekka Ervast’s comment that “I have had many disappointments in my life, so I only can say as to the Panacea Movement, as long as it helps others I’ll try and be among its helpers” is an example of this kind of standpoint (although he was less restrained in his comments in other places).23
For many, disagreement with the Society was a process of discussion and negotiation that could result in renewed affiliation or separation. All of these correspondents indicate by their skepticism the extent to which they have an active and dynamic personal sense of transcendent and metaphysical realities. As such, their language is often expressive of complex and dynamic attempts to formulate a theological language around their experience of the healing. A Finnish woman (44613) who applied in the 1930s wrote mainly about physical ailments, though she associated these with real spiritual powers.
I would still like to add that lately I have had difficult[y] to breath[e] if I am doing something or even when waking. Being extremely tired, I had yesterday a rather bad spell of nervousness. It seemed as if something of the spirit world would have attacked me. Now I feel calm again.24
She had written to the Society to express some disagreement with its eschatology:
The realisation of the Millennium and Christ’s second coming on earth, I believe, is possible only after the elapse of immeasurable time, when the whole mankind is ready to receive Him. Until then, He comes, but only individually, to every one, who is seeking the Kingdom of God with all his might and will. Christ will be born in each of us if only our hearts are open to receive Him, with other words, we may experience God. But to achieve this we need self-discipline, and the teachings of Christ serve as our guide and form the criteria against which to check our mode of living. Thus our consciousness in God may grow until some day we may say: “I am living, however not I, but God in me.” I do not know whether the above is in agreement with your views.25
When an x-ray discovered a “flaw” on her lung, she had a vision of a figure asking her, “Have you used Panacea as directed?,” and subsequently she agreed to subscribe to the Society’s beliefs on the grounds that the differences between her views and the Society’s were slight.26 And, towards the end of that year, having given the Panacea Society’s water “to a little child who was dying, and had terrible pains” with the effect that “the end was much easier for him then,” she approved her membership of the Society and said: “I join in everything that my innermost soul approves of.”27
One of the earliest applicants to the Panacea Society’s healing (64777) was a woman who applied from Hertfordshire in the south of England before September 1924. Though she came to the Society with concerns that were thoroughly corporeal (“I am getting rather fat! This is most uncomfortable and it upsets my husband”28), the death of her son and brother moved her concerns into highly spiritualized territory. She reported that since their deaths she had “realized a wider conception of the Truth” and that “God’s Great Wisdom cannot be held by one portion of His Great Family. Each has some part of Truth, no one individual or Society can have the whole Truth revealed to them.” Thus, while she expressed gratitude for “all you taught and showed me in the past, and for the help you gave us” and recognized some special color to the work of the Society, she dissolved her formal connection with it (“we no longer meet as often as we used to”) but expressed “may we still be co-workers with Him in bringing His Kingdom.”29 Her language and conceptions in her final letter suggest that she had become much involved in Spiritualism: “All life here on Earth as on ‘the other side’ is all one and therefore death is only an event, a beginning not an end—and therefore nothing to dread and avoid. I have never felt my Son was dead but … I feel he is more vitally living than ever before.”30
Another early applicant (57730) was a woman who applied in July 1924, also from an address in Hertfordshire. Four letters from her have been discovered in the archive. Though she became a sealed member at some point, she wrote in September 1929 to say: “I have been this summer listening to the beautiful and simple teaching of Krishnamurti.” Moreover, she objected to what she saw as the Panacea Society’s negative cosmology: “The longer I think about it, the more am I convinced that I could never accept unconditionally the teaching of the Panacea Society. To me the idea that the world is ‘the Devil’s world’ is horrible”; rather, she wrote, “selfishness is the only Devil [and] when man learns to use his glorious gift of free will rightly and discipline himself then the world will be as God meant it.” Though she was grateful for the kindness of the Society and said she would continue drinking the water (as it was also a part of “God’s life”), she meant to follow Krishnamurti’s teaching (“He who has himself attained to Liberation longs to set all men free from outside Authority”) and gave up her membership in the Society.31
A man (72173) living in Brighton on the south coast of England applied during the buildup to war in 1939 saying, “I have never for a moment doubted the Power of God I only hope in these latter days of many false doctrines, I am applying to the right ones.”32 He found some immediate emotional relief from using the water: “in these momentous days I am imbued with a feeling of great tranquillity knowing instinctively that I am protected.”33 However, in the summer of 1948, after using the healing water for nearly a decade, he queried its efficacy:
In any case this is a tremendous lapse I admit, but as my health has not improved after taking the water for 9 years I fear I have become careless or apathetic in reporting.
I have however been re-reading your literature & case paper + realise that the regular reporting is most essential. … In spite of not meticulously carrying out every detail of the treatment, it does seem not a little strange that after consuming such a quantity of water containing the Divine atom that no apparent benefit is manifest.
I am not an unbeliever else I should never have applied to you, but being a reasoning human being it is difficult to understand why the spirit in the water should fail to operate unless I regularly contact other human beings.
Were I to treat the matter irreverently or superficially I should not expect the spirit to operate but in view of my faith it does seem somewhat perplexing, after-all 9 years is a goodly time.34
In a later letter, he added that “the acceptance of all your teachings, this stands or falls naturally upon my complete cure since in a world full of doctrines and dogmas I accept little that cannot give tangible results” and noting that “of course it depends upon what you consider good health, personally if the healing is from God then I am satisfied with nothing less than perfection and not merely to be in a passable condition.”35 The Society’s answer was apparently satisfactory, because he wrote back at the beginning of 1949 to say that “you were right in saying that my condition would probably have been worse during the last ten years had I not taken the water.”36
A woman (14562) who was a member of an Elim Pentecostal church applied from southeast England in 1928 and had a brief correspondence of two or three letters before becoming disillusioned with the Society when it refused her request to visit in 1932 (“I should have thought that any Religious Society would have been pleased to welcome anyone interested in them, who felt anxious to meet them”37). Her final letter, written in October 1932, presented a systematic critique of the Society’s claims in a leaflet she had been sent. She objected, for example, to a claim that the Society had power to “heal and to protect,” as “only God can do this,” and to the Society’s practice of written confession “because that is contrary to the Bible, which tells us to confess to God, not to a human being.”38 Finally, she suggested the Society might be manifesting the false teaching predicted to occur at the culmination of history.
I am sorry I cannot agree with the teaching of the Society as I have been very interested in it, in the past. But one would think to read this circular that the Panacea Society had been taught by God himself, that consequently all who believed differently although taking the Bible as their guide, were wrong.
In these latter dates when Satan is so powerful, and when false teaching is continually springing up and many are being misled, we must stand firm on the Word of God, and accept nothing else.39
A male applicant from south London (84676), who appears to have applied for the healing in 1939, found a deterioration in his condition and came to reject the Society and its teachings. A longtime Methodist, he “worked in various causes in the Methodist Church” and had a palpable sense of evil powers assailing him. He wrote, “I am convinced that there is a real evil influence everywhere; and an evil spirit that is always waiting to suggest powerfully to me to act the wrong way, then to jeer at my folly. (please don’t think this is fancy, it is a real fact.).”40 Soon after applying to the Society, he expressed skepticism, found that the water “invariably gave me indigestion pains,” and barely survived a ruptured ulcer. Though a neighbor believed “he had seen a miracle. He had seen the Dead brought to life,” the man felt “justified in saying that the water did not heal me, but made me worse.”41 Despite making serious complaint about the Society’s treatment, he still sought guidance from it:
As to my present mental conflict: I cannot fathom it. I am urged to do a great & good work (from my point of view) yet everything hinders & frustrates me. Is it to try me? or, are the forces of evil to prevail? If God wants me to do it, why am I not helped? Can the Oracle tell you what it is? and if I am to do it? also, if the obstacles will [be] removed or, am I to abandon it? Nothing in the abstract, please this is the testing point, & I hope that you piercing the veil. Can give me a definite answer.42
Ultimately, though, he was unsatisfied with the Panacea Society’s response—the Society suggested he keep taking the water and said “there is no compulsion for you to take up our teachings you can take the water for your health, if you persevere you will certainly receive benefit.”43 He broke off contact with the Society: “I must confess I have lost faith. One can’t go on believing in promises in the face of repeated contradictions, & apparently hindered, not helped to do good.”44
A farmer in the south of England (45913) who applied in January 1952 provided a detailed account of his ultimate skepticism about the Society’s healing. There is evidence of military experience in his letters; as he was in his late teens in 1914 and about forty-two in 1939, he may have served in both of the twentieth century’s world wars. When he applied, he described a developing spiritual discontent.
In recent years I have rather lost faith in the purpose of life. I work hard and can, by the Grace of God, keep my wife and 3 children in reasonable comfort and happiness, but the recent war, and its treatment of human life, has upset what I thought might be a gradual drift towards kindness amongst peoples generally, and I brood, (so my wife says,) too much upon these matters.45
He found real benefit from the water, emotionally and physically: “I felt a considerable calm settle over my nerves, and I have found this to be continuing. The change was really quite profound, and has I am sure assisted in the duodenal trouble.”46 Discussing the Panacea Society’s alternative, he showed a creative and insightful theology based on his experience and reading:
From what intuition I have, I deduce that the Linen (Christ’s robe was linen) is blessed and portions provided and I see no reason to suppose that that, and faith, and a mystic emanation from the blessed linen will not have a very fortifying and beneficial effect upon anyone who has, and properly has, a mystic inclination most people who are not completely carnal do possess in varying degree an “inner light.”
Whilst I hope and trust that my life may be extended into infinity, yet with the microscopic effect I have had upon affairs in general, I should feel very presumptuous in declaring that I, for one, have earned everlasting life merely by taking the water regularly and writing once a month to you. …
I have spent many years of study in those things, which, one day when our bodies wear out, will become for us—facts. I think I have a fair expectation of what the future holds for me what I have passed on, and that it is governed by what I am, and not what I do. … Except perhaps involuntary things go very much deeper than the 10 commandments, or putting in appearances at church. I think that to say there is darkness and light (for example) beggars the question. They are indescribable in so much that Darkness is permanent unless light waves, atoms, rays, or what you like to call them, exist. Animal mechanical eyes are all that are necessary to see in the light, without them to the body—all is dark—but the true spirit knows NO darkness, only the lack of life in his or her own soul.47
For the water-takers showing these most developed forms of religious language, an important factor that distinguishes them from those who evidence less complex religious language is that they link the healing to grander spiritual ideas. These correspondents formed links between the spiritual powers they understood themselves to be harnessing and their everyday health and personal needs, and in doing so they expressed a process of formalizing religious accrual to a relatively idiosyncratic spiritual practice.
In the analysis of religious language carried out in the previous section, three main types of correspondents can be identified in the letters: those making little or no reference to spiritual matters, those showing more involved use of religious language, and those evidencing complex and detailed religious language. In a similar way, a review of the ways water-takers linked their use of the healing to spiritual or religious elements beyond their immediate physical or psychological context and needs—and, in that sense, the gradations of metaphysical extension of the healing—suggests that three broad categories of writers can be identified. The first category made no explicit link between the healing and anything greater. This is not to suggest that these people did not have such ideas or instincts; rather, it is an indication of the extent to which there is evidence for this in the letters.
People in the second category expressed an understanding of the healing as a spiritual rather than just a physical practice—they made these kinds of links but still showed signs of preoccupation with their individual circumstances. A Finnish writer (13228) who applied in the 1930s wrote, for example, “I am glad to be a member of your Society and pray that I could be a faithful member and that I could bear all the difficulties of life. … I often think why does God punish me so terribly.”48 And a Jamaican woman (66162) wrote to the Society in 1951: “I could not work I could not do any thing, and now I can do anything now praise and thanks my Heavenly Master.”49 The third category showed evidence of the basic maneuver carried out by the second category in extending the significance of the healing to a somewhat transcendent spiritual context, but went further in terms of the range of that extension into the world and the cosmos. Examples of this latter group include a Finnish woman (18076) who joined in 1958.
I am very grateful to you and to God and may God bless your work to help suffering humanity … Thank you for your help. I also thank God—He is good. I await the time when evil will be overcome on this earth. God is almighty and He can also help me. … God has been kind to give me this remedy and take me from the edge of the precipice … I am happy about the second coming of our Lord and hope I shall be ready. Then this strife would end for ever.50
And a woman (87225) writing from Scotland in 1950 said:
My out look 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.51
As might be expected, there is a significant overlap between the two systems of classification: those with a low rating for their use of religious language would be unlikely to indicate metaphysical understandings in the middle or higher category, and vice versa. Similarly, those using the most developed religious language were more likely to refer to a metaphysical horizon of the middle or higher category. Indeed, of the 450 correspondents examined who withheld the use of religious language, all but five fell within the minimal category for their metaphysical extension of the healing. A striking example of one of these exceptions is a correspondent from New York (81539), for whom there are just four letters in the archive between 1936 and 1951, who shows little extensive use of religious language. He wrote in 1935, “I am feeling at this time like a new man thanks to the water and the Spirit[;] my eye is getting on nicely that is the only thing that is not altogether well but now it is.”52 He clearly became deeply involved in the Society’s teaching, as the same letter also referred to a “second order of books”; however, evidence of his allocation to the middle category for his metaphysical ideas stems from his adaptive use of the water. He reported in 1949: “On February 7th 1935 was the last connection, I had with the Society, the war started [and] everything went out of order with me continuing to correspond with the Society. … I’ve been going without the section from 1937 until now, but still using the water without the section.”53 His use of the water without the linen was in line with recommended practice by the Society; nonetheless, doing so (or even just claiming to do so) over a period of more than a decade suggests a highly metaphysical implicit understanding of the plane of operation of the healing.
Another example of a relatively low categorization for religious language alongside a high category for extension of the healing’s significance is a male correspondent from London (96608). His religious language use was almost casual; however, in two letters in 1952, he wrote: “I desire to be of benefit to humanity in the ways of which I am capable,” and “Is it possible to add to church blessings by using the water—I wish to be of help to humanity as far as I can?”54 So he clearly extended the implications of the healing to a horizon beyond his own.
The other counterintuitive combination is those who used the most developed religious language combined with the most limited evidence of metaphysical range. Of the 129 correspondents showing signs of this level of religious language, forty-nine showed the most highly developed metaphysics and sixty-seven were categorized in the middle group—just thirteen were identified in the minimal metaphysical category. One example of this group of correspondents is a woman (79369) from Bronx in New York (originally from the West Indies) who applied in 1959 and continued to write a total of seventy-seven letters until 1985. She had a highly dynamic religious life, tithed at her church, and would freely quote scripture in her letters.55 She went so far as to apply special divine intervention in her circumstances as the outcome of religious practices.56 However, the evidence from her letters is that her metaphysical horizon did not extend beyond her immediate circumstances and needs—hence, the developed religious language is connected to the minimal metaphysical horizon. Another of those combining the most complex religious language and the least complex metaphysical range was simply too preoccupied by personal difficulties to develop any extended metaphysics. This was a woman in Jamaica (55730), who applied in 1936 and wrote about her husband’s infidelity and her reaction to it.
I do not pay them any mind. I never mention her to my husband I treat the situation with contempt. I have nobody in this world but god. If He is my Creator and will allow human power to harm me, well Amen, so let it be. I try my best not to worry over my condition, because I believe that God will deliver me some day.57
Thus, the overwhelming nature of her personal predicament limited the range of her extension of the healing beyond her own circumstances. (This is not to suggest that any of these writers could not or did not make this kind of suggestion in other contexts.)
For many who used the Society’s healing, it represented a simple and effective physical remedy with an agreeable and malleable spiritual perspective. At the age of seventy-two, a woman (54811) from Swansea in Wales, who had been a member of the Salvation Army since her forties, was convinced by some of the Panacea Society’s writings and left the former in 1940.
After reading your books over twice I am convinced that there is a great opportunity before mankind, to reach a perfection which is essential to live a life which I would cherish as a true Christian and ready for his second coming. … I have been for 26 years a member of the Salvation Army which I do not regret because it have been an instrument to keep me from sin, but your books shows me that there is a higher standard to reach and a different outlook for a Christian to look for, than merely have his sin forgiven. I hope you will lead me into greater knowledge of the love of God, where he leads I will follow.58
There is limited evidence of her developing any complexly articulated metaphysical perspective, but she did find “a new outlook on the spiritual entirely to what I seen on life before,” and “I am letting go the material easier than I used to and clinging more to the spiritual.”59 Against the background of her own expectation of death, and perhaps similar mechanisms to those visible in the context of existential threat discussed in an earlier chapter, she was able to give up a long-held and relatively conventional religion to seek something less authorized but more meaningful to her. In the context of discussions about the dynamic form of religion encountered in contemporary societies, this is no mere bricolage or exercise of choice for its own sake—it is an attempt to reach a personally satisfying metaphysical and spiritual settlement.
Amid the difficulties of poverty and deprivation, a woman (57683) in Kingston, Jamaica, looked to God for help: “I can’t find the doctor bill because we are having it very rough in Jamaica[,] especially we the poorer class[;] no work and business places closing down account of that crime rate is very high we are afraid to walk on the street[;] its only God can undo all these wrongs.”60 Though preoccupied with her own troubles, she invoked a grander vision of creation in her request for intercession.
Please continue to pray with me for all loving people of Panacea Society my husband … [five] children … my [five] sisters … also their children and grand children and the only little grand daughter of mine … and her mother … the world and its people, animals, birds and all the beautiful things in the world the government of every country. God bless you all in the name and through the power of Jesus Christ.61
In this writer, there is an easy transition to transcendent thinking from her own family to the physical things of the world and then to its public social institutions (“the government of every country”) and ultimately to God and Jesus Christ. This is not a parley or negotiation between the things of this world and things beyond it, or a tension between the secular and the spiritual, but a religion and a metaphysics of the everyday.
In Khargapur, India, in the 1920s, a number of British expatriates adopted the Panacea Society and its healing, and they formed a nucleus of highly committed affiliates.62 While precise numbers are hard to estimate, it is clear that there was a sizeable and recognizable community of Panaceans there; one member (96017) reported their preservation during an earthquake in 1934: “Many towns to the North of Bihar have suffered greatly. Muzzafapore [sic] seems (from the papers) to have been demolished and in Jamalpur [sic] only 50 houses were left standing. We felt the shock here and it was fairly severe for about 3 1/2 minutes.”63 However, Panacea Society members were preserved:
It was very remarkable that Panacea Members were not alarmed or panicky, but others were terrified and rushed out of their houses. We thanked the whole Divine Family for the protection we had received, and we realised that if we were not in this wonderful mission how alarmed and anxious we would have been. I pray that right-minded people will be brought to realise that these are warning and that they will cry out to Almighty God for help and seize hold of the priceless gift, which is being offered without money and without price.64
This member worked as a teacher and applied from Khargapur in the late 1920s; she expressed her relief at having found the Society in 1929:
I cannot express the joy I feel in having found “that” which I have sought for, and I cannot thank you sufficiently for having been the means of removing the scales from my eyes.
I was much against the Panacea Society, and took the Water very indifferently, but after reading the 1st volume of the Panacea I felt a different being. Both my husband and I devoured the five volumes and still we thirst for more. …
I am taking the Water regularly and according to the Instructions, + find that constipation is a thing of the past, and my sight is improving.
Ah! how much I regret that I have allowed so many months to have slipped past in indifference and apathy.65
In time, she became something of a leader among the Panaceans in the town, and her husband seems to have led meetings of an active group of water-takers there.66 They integrated the Society and its theology with their understanding of the British Empire, commenting about preparations for the Silver Jubilee of King George V, that “we do humbly pray that King George V may receive power from the Divine Family whereby he may become ruler under God of all his dominions.”67 Another member of the group (81845) suggests that the Khargapur members were interpreting and reinterpreting the Panacea Society’s cosmology in light of their own notions of the Empire:
I cannot tell you what a shock King George’s death was to all of us, especially as I had been told by a member that it was predicted by the Society that the King would never die, but would hand over the reins of government to our Lord, at first I was doubtful, but as I thought of all that had been accomplished in my own family and all that I had read, I thought that there must be some reason for what had happened and my faith in the society was not shaken.68
This is a luminous example of an individual process of continual and dynamic interpretation and reinterpretation. The Panacea Society provided a catalyst for this group’s members to examine the power structures they were part of and to frame them in the context of a complex cosmology involving a personal and intervening God. Understanding the geopolitical and cosmological perspective of the British Empire as a theocracy, these women also wrote of the power of the water in their everyday lives. So the writer shocked at the death of her king (81845) used the water to successfully modify the behavior of her unfaithful and unpleasant husband; similarly, the teacher (96017) gave the water to her son and found “a great difference in his general behavior,”69 and she looked forward to an individual transformation as a result of the water.
I am longing to have an entirely new character. What a joy it will be to have the mind that was in our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, and to be good. As we go further in this wonderful work we are realising what a terrible enemy we have to fight in the Self. How terrible our condition would have been if we had not the mighty Weapons given us to fight with, the power of the spirit in the Blessed Water and the formula.70
In a parallel move to the Jamaican woman (57683) discussed earlier, these correspondents make a transition from worldly events to a transcendent perspective—in this case, from the death of the king to the government of the world by God. Thomas Luckmann referred to the changing nature of articulations of “wild experiences of transcendence,”71 yet these kinds of accounts display the difficulty of separating an experience of transcendence from its interpretation. Although correspondent 96017 recognized a consistent struggle in working towards the transformation, the Panacea Society’s healing provided a powerful support. Commenting on how working in a school provided “opportunities for overcoming faults and failings. Impatience, irritability, temper etc.,” she noted that the “falls are many, but it is very encouraging to know from the Scripts that one falls forward and not backwards and that we can pick ourselves up and struggle on.”72 When she learned of Octavia’s death in 1934, she looked “forward to Her return in Power and Glory.”73 In 1938, the writer and her husband visited the Society in Bedford, and with the war looming they moved to the Society’s headquarters permanently in the summer of 1939; records indicate that she died shortly after the war.
Another woman (20109), who got in touch with the Society after returning from India, showed a very complex attitude towards spiritual matters. She wrote in the first place because her husband was largely absent, working in India, and when he was physically present he was emotionally distant and rather imperious.74 She admitted “I do not understand in the least how you can help me,” but noted that “I see from your pamphlet that that does not matter, and nothing is required of me but a certain obedience, and that I am willing to give.”75 Although she self-identified as a member of the Church of England, she had investigated many other religions and conceded that “my beliefs are not orthodox.”76 And amid the physical trials of rheumatism and malaria contracted while in India and the household work of raising five children, an overriding concern was a complex set of thoughts about sin and guilt.
I do not believe it possible for any human being to be “damned,” in whatever sense each religion takes the word, eventually, God gave us our life, character, and conditions. He sends us our temptations, we have little choice in these matters, so I cannot believe He would allow any one of us, however bad, to “die” spiritually. I have read many books written by Roman Catholics, Protestants, Theosophists & Christian Scientists, but no one seems to reach the root of the matter i.e. how it was that we were ever permitted to become “sinners,” and even leaving that question, is not “sin,” as we call it, part of God’s plan anyhow? For why make us only to “die”? A great many of us certainly would “die” with the weaknesses we have allotted to us at a birth, for which we are not responsible.77
She articulates a profound sense of the complexity of her own outlook and experience of life and its relation to a transcendent power. It was with some relief, one senses, that she discovered the Panacea Society made no doctrinal demand and only asked for “a certain obedience.” The detachment of the Society from doctrinal prescription provided her with something she sought in her spiritual life, and it was part of the offering of contemporary spiritualities—the freedom from constraints on belief, faith healing for the faithless. Her words suggest that we need to reverse the conventional formula for understanding what religion or chosen spirituality does; this is less like a person with personal (perhaps “spiritual”) needs seeking a religion with a cosmological system that helps them to live with those needs, and more like a person confronted by complex and half-articulated metaphysics seeking a working religion to bed down in.
The depth of the spiritual penetration of the Panacea Society’s healing is especially evident in correspondents who expressed their most profound sense of sin. A woman (22807) who would become one of the long-standing users of the healing, writing more than one hundred letters between the 1930s and the 1970s, found remarkable help from the water:
I am very thankful to you and to God that I have received such great help and alleviation in my illness, because I was at absolutely the lowest ebb both mentally and physically, and the doctors did not even know what was wrong with me. The water gave me immediate relief.78
After many years of contact she felt induced to confess what is condemned as a terrible crime in many conventional contexts—and no less in Finland in the interwar period:
You asked me earlier to tell you what was on my mind, though I have not got down to it until now. The worst of my sins has worried me [many] years. Now I feel I must be honest and confess. For a number of reasons I had an abortion. It was only after committing this act that I realized the horror of it. … I do not feel I am fit to live again, because I know the wages of sin—death. I am deeply grateful to you and to God for the help received in spite of being a sinner. I respect you for the time and trouble expended in helping us sinners. I shall continue to use the Water until you tell me not to.79
And the Panacea Society provided her with a doctrinal space—the woman’s letter bundle in the archive includes a note for a draft response from the Society. They thanked her for expressing her fears and urged her to write down her sin and to ask for forgiveness. The Society’s response expressed certainty that she would be forgiven and counseled her to continue with the Water.80
One of the virtuoso water-takers was a woman with an address in western Jamaica who applied in 1936 when she was in her mid-thirties (32171). She was poor and made a little money from sewing, and she wrote to the Society asking “for a special prayer” to help her in a time of difficulty. She understood her life and world in a highly religious and spiritual way, consoling herself “with daily prayer to God, for he alone sees and knows that was never my wish.”81 Indeed, the Society’s intervention provided positive support (“I certainly feel much happier, since I come connected to this society”82; “I try to use water in every way possible, I always use it to wipe my sewing table and a little in the floor water, it has made a wonderful change over the home”83) and met a spiritual need she had felt for a long time.
From my childhood days I wish to have the real true love of Christ Jesus, and often wonder why is it I go to church always take active parts, join the different organisations and yet I always feel that is not enough for till I feel wanting of something, but truly I now feel a different feeling all together, when I read my Bible, I feel that I understand it more, and feel much lighter and happier in mind and body daily, daily when I go in silence to God explaining my life to him, and only he who can assist us in all things. … I certainly feel a new person since I am connected to your society, and no power will get me sever from this, May Gods true blessings rest in this society “the Panacea” always and for ever.84
This culminated in the early 1940s when she felt called to missionary work and set out as a pilgrim to minister in poor and rural parts of Jamaica.85
I must now report that I am now a changed person, I am in the world but not of the world any more, I have been called in the Holy Spirit and is now doing the work of the Lord Jesus sincerely since January, my life is just devoted in the work of the Lord Jesus and every day I find it much happier, in the work, I am doing missionary work in a very poor district a few miles from my home.86
And she felt guided in her work by a transcendent source:
Happy to say the great trouble I had in understanding the Bible is all or nearly passed away from me. I can hear and understand plainly, voices speaking within me all the while since I have had the out pouring of the holy spirit “chapters” are always given to me. Which I find very helpful and just in the times when needed.87
This was a renewal of a lifetime of visions, encounters, and experiences with spirits and devils. She reported, for example, that she had a premonition of an impending death in her family—and had had these since childhood—and a feeling that devils were fighting over her since a neighbor had put evil magic on her.88
In the early 1940s, she wrote to say she was answering a need of her followers and was to begin building a temple, and the following year she collaborated with a male prophet she had met on her travels to hold general prayer meetings.89 From the reports in her letters, and ultimately from the Society’s alarmed reaction (though slow to respond, no doubt in part due to the war), it is clear that her mission met with considerable success. In effect, the woman formed herself into a de facto Tower in Jamaica, and she preached and distributed the Society’s healing water to all comers.90
A severe letter finally arrived from the Society in March 1945 rebuking the woman for her arrogation of spiritual power. Though the Society was limited in its response by the fact that Octavia and the Divine Mother were no longer available to making a ruling (they had died in 1934 and 1943, respectively), it relied on the teachings the two women had left behind to object that the Jamaican woman had usurped the Society’s (and individuals’) role in providing divine succor to people.
When you wrote to us in an earlier letter that you were having prayer meetings we thought you were just having meetings with your friends for Bible reading and prayer, as many people like to do if they are of the same mind. We did not think you were having meetings in connection with our work. Do you not see that in doing so and in giving out the Blessed Water from your own supply, you are making yourself a providence to them in the place of God, who has begun this great work in the world from a Centre—one place only—to which those who seek His help and Word should turn. Those people in Kingston that you speak of are not turning to God, they are turning to you. Can you see that?91
The Society urged her instead to attend to a quiet home life (“A perfect home life is God’s idea for His Kingdom. To live as those who are waiting for the Lord and preparing themselves and their homes according to His Will, takes all one’s time”92). Following her husband’s sudden death, she said that much of the blame for her overreaching rested on him, as he had begun charging people for the healing they provided, and he had even gone so far as to distribute linen squares he took from her sewing box and consecrated himself.93
While the Society’s rebuke had some effect in quieting the woman’s active missionary life, she seems to have continued to attract people seeking healing and to have ministered to them—eventually gathering a more or less settled congregation around her.
It is most wonderful to see the people of the better classes coming in to me daily, and making themselves so very homely here, many say they have spent hundreds of pounds and no deliverance on their bodies and they find great changes in coming, many say they would be glad to live here, through the calm cool feelings of Unity here, I do thank the Supreme Spirit Divine, for The power and gift of explanation, many come burdened in tears, we only go in quiet talks on the obedients of God’s Divine Words.94
Her practice became a mixture of traditional Jamaican healing and the Panacean techniques. One account explains how she treated a sufferer from ringworm under divine guidance:
He was a real stranger to me then, But as I saw him my spirit was led to go in the garden I picked a large green leaf from a creeper vine, I ask him to let me put it on his chest when he opened his shirt I saw on his chest a shape and a size ring worm blotch the very same size and shape of the leaf. he looked at me and tears roaled from his eyes for he knew he told me nothing, my sister and myself went in prayers with him to God, he says he feals he is to be [cured] here by Gods own help I was led to give him some water I bathed the suffering body and tapped it with olive oil well he came several times.95
However, when he asked to have some of the healing water to take home, she told him to write to the Panacea Society in Bedford.96 And, though the process of her association with it is difficult to discern, she came to have charge of a balmyard of her own with a regular group of members to whom she provided healing and forgiveness of sins.97 (She was rebuked again for this, and she apologized.) Her correspondence with the Society carried on for years, and in 1968, after around 175 letters and a relationship with the Society lasting over thirty years, she wrote a final letter reporting a serious and painful illness, closing with the words, “I feel this case belongs to Dr. Divine. I thank you ever so much.”98 She represents, perhaps, the apotheosis of the malleability of the healing offered by the Society as a catalyst of personal religious expression that was articulated in terms of an old and sophisticated culture of spirituality such as that found in Jamaica. We see in this user of the healing the full range of personal and public religious processes taking place, in the conventional grammar of Jamaican spirituality but with the transmitted spiritual power of Panacean healing. This woman carried on a long and complex process of religious and metaphysical interpretation, reinterpretation, and ritual activity that incorporated the fundamental task of a healing ministry and an energetic missionary spirit.
Among those who showed the deepest affiliation with the healing, and who made the most involved adoption of it as a religious practice, were those who did not use complex language and perhaps had little exposure to conventional and mainstream religions. An American woman (72150) was one of the Society’s virtuoso water-takers; she applied from Chicago, Illinois, in November 1958, and remained in contact until May 1985, writing about 140 letters in total. In an early letter, she wrote to ask for help winning a lottery game99 (a practice the Society frowned upon), but though her financial situation hardly improved, she developed a deep and tranquil relationship with the transcendent constellated around the water.
I’m very poor don’t have much of anything but I feel very rich because I have peace with God, in my heart and with my ups and downs I am able to bare my [burden] with ease cause I know God is with me and you have helped me to be a little closer to Christ. I thank God for everything.100
Ultimately, the Panacea Society enabled the correspondent to develop a theodicy of the small and large sufferings of the world. She said in 1961, “I’m more thankful to God, each day for the Blessings he has given me … I thank him for making me able to stand the storms of life because the sunshine is always shining from above.”101 She observed five years later that
I’m glad I am able to have a peaceful heart and a contented mind, as most people of today have forgotten god, fighting with each other, against races and churches and everything, and the reason some may give is no reason at all just full of hate. I pray for all, and in time god, will take care of everything. I’m happy to be alive.102
The full extent of the Panacea Society’s healing in her personal practice and self-understanding is evident in a remark during March 1965: “The water has become a part of me now.”103
As a record of the spiritual and religious lives of people from all walks of life and in a multitude of personal and cultural contexts, the letters of the Panacea Society’s Healing Department provide a deep and possibly unique source. The study of religion outside conventional structures has gradually dropped its reliance on numerical and institutional reference points and is recognizing the need to understand religion not merely as a social object but as something embedded in people’s lives. The focus in this chapter has been on those who offer us considered articulations of this kind of religiosity in their own lives, showing how this doctrinally undemanding religious system could articulate with the most complex and challenging attempts to understand and coexist with the transcendent.
This chapter’s concern has been not so much with the history of the Panacea Society’s healing in people’s lives, but with the light that their articulations of moments in those histories can shed on the dynamic processes they worked with. A number of the theorists examined in chapter 3 engaged with the problem of the nature of a theorized movement or oscillation between secular and sacred, between sacred and profane, in societies. The examples discussed in this chapter indicate that the distinction has had little real significance in the personal context. Secular or profane life is in each case part of an attempt to understand the world, and if that understanding stretches to transcendent horizons, then the secular or profane is part of that arc. In these writers, the religious project that is underway is not the mere search for a pleasing and undemanding form of religious activity but an unavoidable metaphysical task. The formal metaphysics or doctrines of transcendence encountered in churches is not relevant or irrelevant; it is a background reality in some lives and takes a different form in each, but it remains a background for the personal task of working out a theory of the transcendent and its relationship to an individual’s life.