Mysteries of Mediumship

by Archie E Roy

It is often claimed by those ignorant of the history of mediumship that mediumistic communications are all trite and banal , along the lines of "Your mother is very glad you have just redecorated her bedroom; it badly needed doing." Many thousands of messages are indeed like that but to a person who has lost by death a much-loved mother and who, for the first time, has entered a spiritualist church and had this message from a medium who could not possibly have known that the person had indeed recently redecorated the bedroom in which her mother died, such a message is far from being trite and banal.

But in addition to such meaningful messages there are others that greatly deepen the mystery of mediumship making us stand in awe before this gift , attempting to understand its relevance to the question of human personality and its survival of bodily death. A wonderful example of this, lasting a full quarter of a century, was the mediumship of Pearl Curran, through whom the entity, Patience Worth, manifested. Hardly anyone nowadays has heard of Patience Worth except those who have a reasonably wide acquaintance with psychic matters. And yet her identity was, and still remains one of the most intriguing mysteries in the history of psychical research. On another level she produced one of the greatest literary puzzles of the twentieth century, the solution of which would cast light on the age-old problem of the source of human inspiration.

She appeared in the following manner.

In l913, in St Louis, Missouri, some ladies amused themselves by taking part in sessions with a ouija board. One of them was Mrs John H Curran. At first, as often is the case, nothing much was spelled out by the board and no doubt the ladies were getting a bit bored but on July 8th, the board, seemingly more energetic than usual, spelled out the following message:

"Many moons ago I lived. Again I come - Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I . I make my bread at thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog."

From then on the messages from Patience came fast and furious. It became clear that the medium in the group of ladies was Pearl Curran and she graduated to the production of automatic writing so that Patience ' spoke' through Mrs Curran's hand. Among Patience's output, over three million words, were novels, plays, poems, prayers, proverbs and her conversations with those who came to talk with her. Many of the novels and poems were published. The poems were superb ,not only for their beauty but also for their thought-provoking quality. The novels, historical in character, showed a deep knowledge of the periods they were placed in, a knowledge such that months, perhaps years of sustained research should have been required before the 'author' could write them. And yet Mrs Curran, whose education had been little more than average, had not done any of the necessary research. All who studied her, including Dr Walter Franklin Prince, had to conclude that Mrs Curran was simply incapable of this literary output on a conscious level. But even if it was from her subconscious, where did she get all the historical data?

Patience's poems of love and friendship reveal her rich character; they display her warm, loving, mature spirit. There is a sublime quality about her poetry, its simple yet strange language, its evident sincerity and concern for humanity.

Who was Patience Worth? Why was Mrs Curran the choice of host? In his book, The Case of Patience Worth, Dr Prince describes his years of study of this strange case and ends by saying: "Either our concept of what we call the subconscious must be radically altered, so as to include potencies of which we hitherto have had no knowledge, or else some cause operating through but not originating in the subconscious of Mrs Curran must be acknowledged."