TEN years ago, I chanced upon an unusual religious community in Bedford. Behind the neat façades of a road of late-Victorian villas, I met the last members of a predominantly female, millenarian group, the Panacea Society.
The community was founded in 1919 by Mabel Barltrop, a vicar’s widow. She was renamed Octavia by her followers, who believed her to be the Daughter of God, a Messiah who could lead them to immortal life on this earth.
Octavia named 12 of her female followers apostles, and washed their feet, in direct imitation of Jesus. At its height in the 1930s, the Society had about 70 resident members. They worshipped, ate, lived, and worked together in joyful expectation of the Lord’s coming — which they thought would happen in Bedford, because, extraordinarily, they believed that their own garden was the original Garden of Eden.
The community soon expanded globally. There were more than 2000 corresponding members around the UK, and in many other parts of the world: the United States, South Africa, Canada, France, Australia, India, and New Zealand. In 1923, the community formed an international healing ministry, which, to this day, has reached more than 130,000 people.
On my first visit to the community, the surviving members gave me tea and quizzed me on my beliefs about the second coming of Christ. I returned to the Society several times that winter, and the members allowed me to stroll in their gardens, see inside their beautiful Arts and Crafts chapel, visit their printing press, poke my nose in community houses, and, finally, enter Octavia’s house, which is left just the way it was the day she died in October 1934.
Finally, I plucked up courage and asked if I could write about the Society. The members agreed, and then they took me into another world. So far, I had read only some of their printed books and pamphlets. Now they took me into other rooms in their headquarters, and there, in every chest of drawers, bookcase, trunk, and wardrobe there were letters, diaries, papers, minutes of meetings, records of rituals and liturgies, written confessions, home movies, and photographs.
They had never thrown anything out. It was all uncatalogued. It was a perfect archive, such as most historians never see or experience. It was a historian’s dream. One Oxford colleague called it my own Dead Sea Scrolls.
For the past ten years, I have been excavating these archives, with the invaluable help of research assistants, and have written a biography of the community’s shared life.
CENTRAL to Panacea life was the belief that followers could achieve immortality, and their community life was shaped by a practice called “overcoming”. This was an active process: it was about trying to overcome your faults and failings entirely, and reducing the self to “vanishing point”.
Leaving the self behind was a communal practice, worked on in relation to other people in the stresses and strains of daily life. Living together was supposed to enable people to “polish” each other, so that they became easy to live with. All of this communal activity was augmented by exhaustive, individual confessions.
If Jesus taught ethics through his parables, then Octavia taught them through the sensibilities of Edwardian middle-class etiquette books. Panacea life was rule-bound, and there is a staggering attention to detail about how to lay the table, treat servants, entertain visitors, and conduct oneself. There were also injunctions against eating toast noisily, taking butter with your own knife, or calling a napkin a serviette.
These instructions demanded obedience to the centre and uniformity in the communal houses, and were regarded as essential if a person was to leave behind “that creature which has succumbed all the time to the temptations, whims, fancies, peculiarities of the mortal realm”.
Worship in the community chapel was conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer. The main service each day was evening prayer, with one additional reading — the “Script”, which Octavia believed she received daily from the Lord.
Every day, at 5.30 p.m., she sat down to receive and write down this message from God. She then took it to evening prayer, where it was read and discussed in place of a sermon.
One member described the “crowded to overflowing” chapel services, where “like famished creatures, we picked up and fed on the new interpretations of scripture which were flashed before us in the daily Script. Far from being elementary, these meetings might have been compared to an advanced class on theology.”
OCTAVIA celebrated the eucharist for the first time on Whit Monday, 1919. We can only imagine the reaction of her female followers, hungry to see themselves made in the image and likeness of God, when they witnessed Octavia at the altar. One member wrote that Octavia was “wonderfully calm and collected as if born to it”.
Many of these followers, especially the first women who joined, were devout Anglicans — often the sisters, wives, and daughters of Church of England priests — who had found the Church wanting. They were serious about religion, but seriously disillusioned by their churches, where they could neither officiate, preach, or read, nor be on the parish council.
In contrast, at the Panacea Society women did everything. When these women came to visit Octavia, “they felt warmed and comforted to such an extent that a kind of spiritual homesickness would affect them when they had to leave her,” and so, wrote one member, “they gathered around her one by one, just as the early disciples, desiring to be in His immediate vicinity, gathered around Jesus.”
Octavia described her followers as “English churchwomen, who were gentlewomen of mid-Victorian upbringing”. She often had to explain to enthusiastic American visitors that these middle-aged, middle-class women were in charge of ushering in the Kingdom of heaven on earth, and their practical skills were exactly what God needed to usher in the Apocalypse: “The simple facts are, that God requires a few sensible, matter-of fact women to take on the housekeeping on earth, and to begin to give their orders by word of mouth on His behalf, until the defeat of Satan and the Divine Jurisdiction begins.”
THE Panaceans’ theology gave this central position to women — but it was startlingly heterodox. They reconfigured the Godhead so that it was no longer Trinitarian but four-square, with God the Father, God the mother (the Holy Spirit), the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Daughter (Octavia). They believed that because Eve had sinned, the ultimate redeemer of the world had to be a woman: Octavia.
The Panaceans had a paradoxical attitude towards the Church of England. They believed that it was wrong about many things, but they had a traditional respect for it, and believed that it was the true Church. They used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and were deeply opposed to the new Prayer Book in 1927.
While the preparation for Christ’s coming had to take place outside the Church of England, in Bedford — because the clergy and bishops had stubbornly refused to participate — when Christ came, he would nevertheless use the Church of England “as the Home of the new beginnings”.
And the Panaceans needed the bishops — to open the box of prophecies by Joanna Southcott, whose prophetic career spanned the 18th and 19th centuries. They traced their own lineage back to Southcott, believing that Octavia was the messiah figure (made incarnate nearly a century later) to whom Southcott had said she would give birth in 1814.
Southcott had also sealed up a box of prophecies to be opened by 24 bishops of the Church of England in a time of national trial and tribulation. The Panaceans used newspaper advertisements, posters on buses and billboards, and literature targeted at the clergy, to try to get the bishops to take notice of them.
They even prepared a house in Bedford, with 24 bedrooms for the bishops, two bathrooms, and a special room where the box would be opened. Their regular appearances at the annual Church Congress, with their arms full of tracts, were affec-tionately reported in the Church Times.
THE Panaceans failed to get the box opened, but they did attract two clergy members. One was the Revd Lawrence Iggulden, Vicar of Caxton, in Cambridgeshire, about 20 miles from Bedford, who found the Society’s healing ministry especially appealing. His correspondence with Octavia reveals that she acted as his spiritual director, offering him common-sense advice on the pastoral problems he encountered in his rural ministry.
He carefully balanced his Panacea membership and his position as a priest. “I do not mind adventuring,” he said, but he reminded them that he was a “a definite Churchman and true to my Church and my orders”. The other, the Revd Russell Payne, an honorary canon of the cathedral in Calcutta, picked up a Panacea publication in India, and was instantly captivated. Preaching Panacea theology, he got into trouble with Bishop Foss Westcott, and so he and his wife, Mary, came to live in the Bedford community, where he became the community’s chaplain.
Like many of their contempor-aries, the Panaceans sought a solution to the world’s problems. Their answer was very different from, say, the socialists or fascists, but their quest was the same. They addressed society’s anxieties, in the wake of the Great War, by suggesting that the “world” should be bypassed. Only divine solutions should be trusted, and they believed that they had a hotline to God, through Octavia.
THEIR rejection of aspects of modernity — Americanisation, make-up, short skirts, air travel — reflected the ambivalence that many felt about the influence of modern trends. Their appeal to a nostalgic version of Englishness struck a chord in a time of rapid change. The gentle watercolours of villages, with their church steeples and rolling landscapes, that illustrated the Society’s magazine The Panacea, presented a “timeless” version of England.
Octavia presided over this unconventional community. Charismatic, autocratic, witty, testy, opinionated, perceptive, narcissistic, conservative, innovative, faithful — she was all of these. Brought up in a middle-class family, her education and expectations were conventional; she did not pursue higher education, but married a young curate, Arthur Barltrop.
Fiercely intelligent, she read every book that he read, and gave herself a wide-ranging education in the history and theology of Christianity. She took on board whatever she found to be true in her vast reading, and constructed her unusual theology.
By the sheer force of her personality she created her community and spread its beliefs around the world. She drew together a disparate group of women and men, taught them, chided them, encouraged them, and led them to a life of faith.
Whatever we may think of her ideas, and the community’s beliefs, her capacity to dream up new ideas and lead people was extraordinary.
SOME people have asked how I, as an Anglican priest, could be interested in such a group. Certainly I do not share their heterodox beliefs, but as a historian I found them fascinating. In writing about them, I made a deliberate decision not to use the loaded language of “cult” or “sect”, but to write about them as a “religious community”.
I wanted to situate the Panaceans in their context, and to try to understand why they believed the extraordinary claims that Octavia made, and why they found the tough community life appealing. I discovered that the Panaceans shed light on a certain form of conservative modernity that was prevalent in the interwar years, and they were part of a much larger context of heterodox religion and alternative “spiritualities”, and sometimes had surprisingly porous boundaries with the churches.
In excavating the archives, I also found the Panaceans were linked by shared belief and common texts to a series of millennial communities in the 19th century, in Britain, the US and Australia. The Revd Christopher Rowland, my New Testament colleague at Oxford University, and I set up a research project, the Prophecy Project, in which graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers pieced together the history of that broad prophetic and millennial movement. The Panacea Society made a grant to Oxford University to fund that research project.
I arrived to write the society’s history just after the last members had decided not to add any more. As a religious community, it is on the wane, but still exists as a grant- making charity in the areas of education and healing. Eventually, both Professor Rowland and I were asked to be trustees of the Panacea charity. In the past few years, we have been giving historical advice as the Panacea Society turns one of its largest houses into a museum, and renovates its chapel and Octavia’s house. These buildings and the gardens will be open to visitors, by appointment, from the summer of 2012.
The Very Revd Dr Jane Jane Shaw is Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Octavia, Daughter of God: The story of a female Messiah and her followers by Jane Shaw (Jonathan Cape, £18.99. (Church Times Bookshop £17.10); 978-0-22407-500-8). Books.