The example of the Panacea Society’s healing water shows how a healing practice has the capacity to become a personal nucleus around which people can attach religious and spiritual ideas. Indeed, some of the individual stories discussed in this book show that the healing could function not just as an attachment point for religious thinking but as a full form of religious affiliation in itself. For some users of the healing, it was the center of a dynamic and complex religious practice and belief embedded in their lives. Chapter 3 examined the ways that the religious change characteristic of recent times, which was for a long time presented as a form of religious decline by theorists, can instead be understood as a process of developing dynamic forms of individual religiosity. Chapter 3 proposed that this is in fact the essential insight of the secularization thesis. The examples of personal religion show how religion more or less detached from traditional and institutional structures is truly religion in the lives of those who practice it—and not simply a decayed or eviscerated institutional form of it.
The broad terms of the potential for a healing practice to be extended in this way have been discussed by a number of theorists. Marion Bowman discusses how elements of contemporary alternative healing can be seen as a reemergence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of healing. She notes that “healing has often been related to religion and complementary resources used at times of need.”1 Meredith McGuire’s article on “Health and Spirituality as Contemporary Concerns” observes that “to many contemporary Americans, health and healing appear to be salient metaphors for salvation and holiness.”2 Christopher Partridge’s account of the re-enchantment of the West comments on the democratization of “strategies for healing, health, and wellbeing,” and he observes that in the contemporary context, “because the embodied self is understood to be the site of spiritual transformation, central to notions of wellbeing is a growing emphasis on spiritual health.”3 The suggestion of the spiritual salience of healing is strongly proposed in a study by Brian Hughes, who argues that complementary and alternative medicine might be considered to be “filling a ‘mysticism void’ left by the decline of orthodox religion.”4 And Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that “ ‘personal growth’ can be understood as the shape ‘religious salvation’ takes in the New Age movement … therapy and religious ‘salvation’ tend to merge to an extent perhaps unprecedented in other traditions.”5
Hughes raises the conundrum of accounting for the growing popularity of complementary and alternative medicine despite its poor performance in clinical trials, and he suggests that, rather than interpreting the rise “in terms of consumers’ changing levels of regard for science,” there may be a complex dynamic of mysticism and caregiving social roles at play.6 Hughes proposes approaching these kinds of healing as outlets for an inherent human need, previously associated with traditional religion but now expressed in alternative ways, “to explain part of [users’] lives in terms of assumptions for which there is no clear evidence.”7 As he says, “if events in a given society negatively reinforce participation in formal religions (such as might be said to be the case in societies that are becoming more secular), then individuals in that society may turn to other belief systems with which to give expression to their mystical propensities.”8 The letters of the users of the Panacea Society’s healing illustrate this kind of process and demonstrate the personal thinking and experience that can lie behind the accrual of religious meaning to a healing system beyond the administration of physical healing alone. For a number of those users, the healing does not come across as a mere compensation for some inadequacy elsewhere, but it is engaged with as an important and dynamic element of their wider spiritual view.
The Panacea Society’s healing has much in common with theoretical analyses of the defining characteristics of contemporary and New Age spiritual movements; it can be understood as a precocious or nascent version of New Age spirituality. In her discussion of healing as a metaphor for salvation and holiness, McGuire suggests that the emergence of this kind of thinking is a direct response to the larger forces of institutional differentiation identified by sociologists. While “health, healing, and well-being were traditionally interwoven with other institutional domains, especially religion and the family,” modernization has, she suggests, entailed the separation and specialization of the domains: “biomedicine claimed control over the health and curing of physical bodies; a separate science claimed the health and well-being of minds; and religion was relegated to the sphere of the purely spiritual.”9 The process has located disease in the body and “the body can be understood and treated separately from the person inhabiting it”—“these assumptions exclude social, psychological, spiritual, and behavioral dimensions of illness.”10 McGuire argues that the growth of individualized and eclectic forms in recent times is “an expression of dissent from the medicalized conception of health and healing” distinct from what came before.11
Hanegraaff makes a similar point when he discusses the importance of the distinction between the modern biomedical model of healing disease, which refers to “abnormalities in the structure and/or function of organs and organ systems,” and the alternative model, which refers to “a person’s perceptions and experiences of certain socially disvalued states.”12 Hanegraaff suggests that the increasing polarization between the former and the latter has led to a reaction in alternative movements that seeks to reemphasize the traditional function of healing illness. In this respect, he says, “in their implicit criticism of official western medicine, New Age healing practices not surprisingly evince a rather close affinity to those of traditional cultures which western medicine has sought to replace.”13 To the extent that the Panacea Society’s healing performed the function of a dynamic, participatory, and inclusive form of healing beyond mere physicality in the lives of its users—and arguably even among those who inquired but failed to take up the healing in earnest—it is a form of the contemporary search outside conventional biomedicine.
Ellie Hedges and James Beckford suggest (quoting Michael York) that the unifying factor in New Age spirituality is “the vision of ‘a radical mystical transformation on both the personal and collective levels’ ” and “the claim that ‘the New Age is always ultimately directed toward the communal, that is, toward something greater or more inclusive than merely the self.’ ”14 Similarly, McGuire concludes by suggesting that “perhaps the contemporary linkage of religion and health may also be understood as one form of identity work by which the individual pursues the ongoing project of constructing his or her self.”15 So far as the Society understood the meaning of the healing, personal and collective transformation at the physical and spiritual levels was literally what they believed individuals taking the water were engaged in. In the individual lives of the committed users of the healing, there is a consistent sense of a pressing need to change and transform.
The Panacea Society’s healing was a mass-market phenomenon. However, the Panacea Society retained its exclusivity at the center; full membership was restricted to a limited number of proficient correspondents, and core membership at headquarters was limited to a very restricted coterie. Perhaps counterintuitively, this exclusivity was combined with the extraordinarily accessible healing practice. While in many ways the Panacea Society retained or imitated the sectarian and authoritarian tendencies of the hegemonic religious forms it was seeking to supplant—most notably in the highly authoritarian central administration—in the nonprescriptive attitude to doctrine embodied in the healing there are commonalities with the proliferation of eclectic and relatively novel religious forms. In this respect, the Panacea Society’s healing is an aspect of the kind of spirituality characteristic of New Age movements.
Commenting on new positive-thinking movements emerging in the 1980s, Hanegraaff notes that often these presented “the ‘growth’ of spiritual insight as a dialectical rather than a one-way process” to help overcome “deep-seated emotional patterns [that] may simply make it impossible for us to be open to healthy positive beliefs.”16 In its presentation of the water as the medium that took the healing to those who tried it, who were in effect passive recipients, the Panacea Society’s framing of the healing was one-sided. However, the water-takers in fact employed the water as part of their own dynamic process as they worked their way through a spiritual landscape of their own. This latter process exemplifies what Partridge calls “malleable spirituality,” associated with more recent forms of spiritual activity that are “always chosen spirituality, continually constructed and reconstructed.”17 As the example of the Panacea Society’s healing shows, centralized organization and leadership are not incompatible with the absence of binding doctrines; however, the nonbinding nature of those doctrines becomes a doctrine itself. While the Panacea Society may not have epitomized characteristics associated with recent and New Age spiritual movements, the users of its healing did.
James Lewis has commented that the New Age movement
emerged out of a preexisting occult-metaphysical subculture that—especially in such institutional embodiments as the Theosophical Society, New Thought churches, traditional Spiritualist denominations, and so forth—was affected by, but was never completely absorbed into, the New Age.18
He concludes, therefore, that it “makes sense to distinguish the New Age from its predecessor movements.”19 Though there may be theoretical advantages in making the distinction, new religious and spiritual forms arguably never completely absorb their predecessors in any case. And while they may have had important origins in some particular culture (in this case a “preexisting occult-metaphysical subculture”), that is not the entirety of their origin. In individual lives, a great range of mainstream and subcultural elements and themes are collapsed into religious and spiritual feeling and understanding. In the case of a historical study like this one, reifying the theoretical distinction would obscure the practical confusion.
We can recognize dual doctrines in the example of the Panacea Society’s relationship to its healing: centralized authority balanced by decentralized individualism amongst its affiliates, and a pedigree in ancient esoteric belief alongside amenability to individual contexts. The healing can therefore be thought of as a hybrid between more conventional pre–“New Age” forms of spiritual framing and more liberal “New Age” movements. While the Panacea Society retained an authoritarianism and a sectarianism at its headquarters, the permission it gave for users of the healing to have heterodox beliefs (from the Society’s point of view) or even no beliefs, and its radical association of healing with spiritual reform, indicates how the Panacea Society’s healing should be understood as part of the ecosystem of eclectic and “new” religious forms, even though its flowering occurred sometime before that ecosystem is usually understood to have established itself.
Thomas Luckmann describes the shift in contemporary religiosity not simply as the rise of alternative spiritualities that develop to displace mainstream and traditional forms, but rather as a general disarticulation or loosening of systems of the sacred in which traditional religions have taken part (see the previous discussion of chapter 3). While traditional societies contain “well-articulated themes that form a universe of ‘ultimate’ significance that is reasonably consistent in terms of its own logic” in the modern “sacred cosmos,” while it “also contains themes that may be legitimately defined as religious,” these themes “do not form a coherent universe” that is “internalized by potential consumers as a whole.” Instead, “the ‘autonomous’ consumer selects … certain religious themes from the available assortment and builds them into a somewhat precarious private system of ‘ultimate’ significance.”20 Traditional religions, in Luckmann’s account, are not replaced as such; rather, they partake in the process as their own status is changed:
They no longer transmit, as a matter of course, an obligatory model of religion. They are forced to compete, instead, with many other sources of transcendence reconstructions for the attention of “autonomous” individuals who are potential consumers of their “product.”21
In effect, the dominance of the traditional religions is displaced; according to Luckmann, they “no longer represent the socially dominant form of religion” and “become institutions among other institutions.”22 Luckmann’s account of the nature of modern religious change describes a structure of individual relationships to transcendent experiences. This structure is a scale from the smallest transcendences of everyday life (“There is a ‘before’ and ‘after’ and ‘behind’ one’s ongoing actual experience”23) to the largest (“transcendences of life and death”24). As discussed earlier, according to Luckmann, while the traditional religions articulated the great transcendences, the modern shift in religion has been down the scale to the smaller ones. “Modern religious consciousness is characterized by a radically shrunken span of transcendence … away from the ‘great’ other-worldly transcendences to the ‘intermediate’ and, more and more, also to the minimal transcendences of modern solipsism.”25
No doubt the evidence of the majority of the Panacea Society’s healing users, those who only flirted with the healing or showed little proof of employing it in the context of great transcendences, could be understood as evidence supporting that proposition. However, it is clear that a number of users went much further and associated the healing with the widest and deepest perspectives. To the extent that both viewpoints are in play (those who engaged with minimal transcendences, and those who parlayed with the greatest), the evidence of the Panacea Society’s healing users can only indicate the presence of both kinds and makes no assertion about any measurable trajectory of change—though the fact that some healing users associated the healing with great transcendences suggests there is no inherent disconnection between nontraditional, nonmainstream religion and the great transcendences.
While this book questions, then, Luckmann’s claims about diminishing metaphysical range, it endorses his implicit assertion that, whatever is going on, it is about transcendence. Luckmann’s analysis represents a useful reminder that engaging with transcendent experience is not the preserve of the grand institutions of religious history but is in fact the property of ordinary people in their everyday lives. This is perhaps the pressing finding of the contemporary study of spirituality—we no longer suspect the conversation with transcendence to be the property of a particular class of (educated and ordained) individuals. Hanegraaff observes his own use of “the spectacular products of unquestionably gifted individuals” with accessible published writings, but he argues that “when talking of spiritualities” we are “in principle … dealing with a common everyday phenomenon: every person who gives an individual twist to existing religious symbols (be it only in a minimal sense) is already engaged in the practice of creating his or her own spirituality.”26 This insight was encountered in the discussion in chapter 3 of Hugh McLeod’s reference to personal testimony not relying on “celebrities or activists”27 and Jeremy Morris’s observation that “there is no intrinsic reason to believe that the spiritual world of the poor was any less complex … than was that of the rich and educated.”28 While these authors are referring more explicitly to postmodern forms of religious expression, the same idea lies behind Kelly Besecke’s identification of “the noninstitutional-but-public kind of religion” and David Lyon’s everyday “meaning routes.”29 It is plainly and richly demonstrated in the letters of the Panacea Society’s healing users.
In the introduction to Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life, Marion Bowman and Ülo Valk trace the trajectory of the academic study of forms of religion that are not identified with mainstream and authorized forms.30 They emphasize the problem of defining these “non-official” religious forms as if they are in open opposition to “official” religions. Starting with Don Yoder’s contestation of “the tendency to pathologize folk beliefs as primitive superstitions,” Bowman and Valk note his agenda to present such beliefs as “in a dynamic relationship with institutionalized Christianity” in an attempt to overcome the artificial dichotomization of the realms.31 Nonetheless, Yoder’s definition of folk religion, as “the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside with strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion,”32 may provide definition to the subject but does not embed the dynamic interaction of domains. A recent attempt to analyze the complex nature of the religious forms encountered and expressed in individuals’ daily lives, and to overcome the reification of categories, is that offered by Bowman, in a chapter on “Phenomenology, Fieldwork and Folk Religion.”33 Bowman proposes that the field be “viewed in terms of three interacting components”:
official religion (meaning what is accepted orthodoxy at any given time, although this is subject to change), folk religion (meaning that which is generally accepted and transmitted belief and practice, regardless of the official view) and individual religion (the product of the received tradition, plus personal beliefs and interpretations).34
As discussed in chapter 3, the debate is developed further by Leonard Primiano, who proposes a category of “vernacular religion”: “religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it.”35 In a sense, in an attempt to analyze something that is authentically close to religion as people encounter and experience it in an everyday way, Primiano indicates the need for a dissipation of categories of interpretation.
Behind each of these attempts to penetrate the definition or essential category of vernacular religion is the consistent (even if implicit) reference to something that may be, in any case, a phantasm—that is, any kind of official, orthodox, generally recognized, mainstream religion. The subject of study, then, might be thought of as that which is going on outside a church on a Sunday morning (at least in a traditionally Christian context), while those on the inside express something else—official and authorized. However, for all their efforts, no doubt each individual inside the building (consciously or otherwise) interprets, accepts, or rejects what he or she hears moment to moment, and on his or her own intuitive terms. And, though even the authorized officiant may read from sanctioned texts, who is to say that that individual is any less subject to his or her personal processing of each and every sanctioned phrase? The object of the studies discussed here is summarized by Bowman and Valk:
The myths, personal experience narratives and more casual verbal expressions of belief, or material culture and actions related to, arising from or inter-related with beliefs, shed valuable light on religion in everyday life, practical religion, religion as it is lived. In this context, the stress is not on artificial expectations of theological homogeneity or “orthodoxy,” nor is it perpetuating judgements as to what counts as “real” religion at the expense of what people actually do in relation to extra-liturgical praxis. In the tradition of folklore and ethnology, the stress, the overriding interest, is on what people in a variety of cultural, religious and geographical landscapes do, think and say in relation to what they believe about the way the world is constituted.36
This book subscribes to this representation, but not the need to deemphasize “artificial expectations of theological homogeneity or ‘orthodoxy’ ” nor the perpetuation of “judgements as to what counts as ‘real’ religion,” because these kinds of religious inclination (i.e., “religion in everyday life, practical religion, religion as it is lived”) occur in churches, too. The expectations of theological homogeneity (however artificial researchers or practitioners may feel them to be) are simply another valid influence on all forms of religious practice alongside all the others. Indeed, we can even recognize that rejection of “artificial expectations of theological homogeneity” and “judgements as to what counts as ‘real’ religion” are themselves expressions of religious beliefs (or at least of metaphysical commitments), and that the perpetuation of such expectations must be as much a part of “vernacular” religion as its opposite. The subject under inquiry need not be defined by a reference of those who do it (“popular,” “vernacular,” “folk,” etc.), because in truth there is no one outside these categories. Rather, perhaps aside from some special moments when we might for the sake of argument allow that an individual embodies the abstract theology of a defined religious discourse, the kind of religion examined in this book is that which happens every day, whether to a pope, a reiki healer, a worried parent, an unworried secularist, or to someone drinking water into which they have dipped sacred linen sent from Bedford—and all of these are religion.
As a case study of the nature of quotidian religion, the Panacea Society and its healing ministry reflect something that is perhaps not recognized enough in the study of popular religion, that the two-tier model of religion (an authorizing priestly elite and an interpreting participant class) is present in many forms of popular and folk religion. The question is mainly of the degree to which the participants believe they subscribe to what is handed down from the priestly class. The Panacea Society shows that it need not hand down a great deal beyond a model of ritual—so participants do not need to believe to be members.
This book provides striking evidence of how religion is a negotiation. Chapter 4 (in the context of a discussion of people’s spiritual and intellectual trajectories through Christian Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy) and chapter 6 (in a discussion of the heightened awareness of death) bring to the fore the processes by which individuals continuously negotiate with a sensed transcendence, with the reality of death, with moments of personal and social transformation, and with the small failures and triumphs of domestic life. Perceived static points at each end of a spectrum, from pure atheism to monolithic theism, or from religious societies to secular societies, are heuristics generated by theorizing about religion and religious change. In fact, in people’s lives there is a perpetual meditation on the places where the everyday aspects of existence run up against the imponderable and the unfathomable—sometimes large and sometimes small, but always encountered as transcendent to the normal run of events. As chapter 7 shows, that negotiation requires a working theory, more or less articulated—a quotidian metaphysics or a domestic theory of transcendence. This goes beyond Jane Shaw’s observation of the ways the Society’s membership in Bedford “refracted” their religious thinking and experience “through a domestic lens.”37 It is in the immediacy of encounter with transcendence, whether articulated or not.
If we grant the strong model, that religiousness persists because everyone fears death (discussed in chapter 6), one way of “buffering death anxiety”38 is to keep yourself alive. To that extent, especially among the destitute and those living in precarious societies, the mere act of seeking food and shelter to continue life is a response to death anxiety, and it can be thought of as a practical metaphysical statement. Similarly, the basic maintenance of life having been attended to, responding to illness, especially to potentially life-threatening illness, can be considered a response to death anxiety and thus a metaphysical statement—in this case one that can be met in medical or religious ways. When these two threats are adequately managed, if the individual has the resources to do so, the practical metaphysics can be followed by an intellectual metaphysics—that is, a search for existential and metaphysical accounts that adequately assuage anxiety about the great diversity of discomfiting experiences on the edges of control or understanding. Individuals may find these in religious or secular ways, in conventional or unconventional practices, and, while the secular routes are obscured in the evidence of the Panacea Society’s healing letters, the letters open a window onto the ways individuals seek to address the presence of the unknown in their lives.
Steve Bruce has argued that “a chosen religion is weaker than a religion of fate because we are aware that we chose the gods rather than the gods choosing us.” This is countered by Partridge’s claim that chosen spirituality is stronger because people who choose their spirituality “understand the spiritual life to be their choice, their responsibility, their journey towards wholeness and wellbeing.”39 Similarly, Lyon has objected to the early Berger’s assumption that “the spiritual supermarket prefigured a situation of increasing pluralism, which would irreversibly undermine conventional forms of religiosity … and accelerate secularization,” suggesting instead that “today’s religious choices may reflect a seriousness of faith that did not figure in the lives of those involved in organized religion from the cradle.”40 In the case of water-takers like those discussed in chapter 7—such as the Jamaican woman (57683) in straitened circumstances and with worries about a beloved family, or the long and complex spiritual life of another water-taker from Jamaica (32171) who gathered followers, mixed traditional and Panacean healing methods, and founded a balmyard—there is no question of a chosen religiosity or bricolage project. The spirituality and long-range metaphysical thinking come naturally and potently, built out of old and new, personal and consensual.
The purpose of this research has been to access practical lived religion, not as a proposition presumptive of some conceptual homogeneity, but as a vernacular and quotidian expression of people’s basic and individual experience and understanding of the world. As such, the project addresses the growing contemporary shift in the scholarly study of religion “from religion as systematic and coherent doctrine, to its individual meanings, experiential core and expressive forms” to take account of “the perceptions, beliefs and behaviour of those practising it.”41 The book touches on the themes of the increasingly significant study of late modern spirituality and tests the notion that expressions of this kind of spirituality are “manifestation[s]” of an alternative tradition that “flows like an underground river through the Christian centuries.”42 While, to a significant extent, it is in line with accounts like these, we also observe that a shift in the way religion is studied (from a focus on organized systems to a focus on individual experiences) does not imply that a similar shift has taken place in religiosity or spirituality in any structural sense; the varying interests of scholars of religion (be they sociologists, anthropologists, or theologians) may or may not reflect an oscillation in people’s religious lives.
Similarly, the theorized occasional manifestation of a persisting alternative stream, while perhaps not historically inaccurate, may simply reify the occult tradition as much as conventional approaches reify mainstream religious traditions. Both of these (occult and conventional traditions) are really the epiphenomena of personal religious thinking and experience; they are more or less organized expressions of domestic theories of transcendence, or of everyday metaphysics. With an adequately rich and deep source of insight into individual stories and personal metaphysical ideas—such as that provided by the letters of the Panacea Society—we can see that personal religion or spirituality is not the residue of a withering institutional religion; rather, those institutional forms are straitened versions of perennial, dynamic, and personal transcendent thinking.