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  • Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing: The Panacea Society in the Twentieth Century by Alastair Lockhart
  • Donald A. Westbrook
Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing: The Panacea Society in the Twentieth Century. By Alastair Lockhart. State University of New York Press, 2019. 212 pages. $85.00 cloth; $22.95 paper; ebook available.

Alastair Lockhart's volume on the Panacea Society, based on postdoctoral research funded by the Panacea Charitable Trust, is the latest contribution to the State University of New York Press series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Lockhart's book is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship in Southcottian studies and stands on the shoulders of other works about this group and its founder Mabel Barltrop (1866–1934, "Octavia"), including Jane Shaw's Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers (2011), Philip Lockley's Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism (2013), and Shaw and Lockley's edited The History of a Modern Millennial Movement: The Southcottians (2017).

Lockhart's work is distinguished by its in-depth analysis of archival materials found at the Panacea Society. The group's last member, Ruth Klein, died in 2012, but "the Society continues to exist as a secular institution with charitable and educational purposes" (xv). This access to the society's "healing letters" (xi) from the last one hundred years allowed for a unique glimpse into the lived religion of the Panaceans, who, by and large, maintained membership in the group via correspondence with the headquarters based in Bedford, England. Lockhart therefore moves beyond other treatments of the Panacea Society, which have tended to emphasize the leaders, basic history, the group's millennialist, apocalyptic, and esoteric theology, and, especially in the popular literature, the sealed prophecies contained within a box belonging to Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), which can only be revealed in the presence of twenty-four Anglican bishops. To be sure, Lockhart goes into these (and many other fascinating) areas by way of historical introduction, but makes clear that the primary focus is on the thousands of wellcataloged letters and other materials that showcase the healing practices of the group and "provide insight into the spiritual and metaphysical thinking of people whose ideas about such things are almost invisible in the historical study of religion" (xv).

True to form, the first chapter dives right into personal stories about the mechanics and claimed benefits of "the healing," as it was called by the Panacea Society. At its core, the healing method involved the ritualistic drinking (and bathing) of water after it had come into contact [End Page 111] with a holy piece of linen mailed to an approved new member (i.e., "water-taker"), who was instructed to maintain a regular correspondence with the society and report back on the results. The linen, taken from rolls of cloth breathed upon by Octavia, was believed to have curative properties. The Panacea Society advertised to members that "there really is no trial or trouble to which the help of the Water cannot be applied" (5), and it came to be seen as a cure-all for problems at any level of society, both temporal and spiritual.

The second chapter provides helpful details about Southcottian history before focusing on the sophisticated and feminized "theology of the healing" (25) put forward by Octavia and her mostly female followers (47–49). The third chapter takes a more theoretical turn, examining religious change in light of the secularization thesis and persuasively makes the case that classical accounts of secularization leave room for the persistence of religion, in particular "flexible and individual forms in dynamic and noninstitutional contexts" (31). Lockhart argues that letters and applications to the Panacea Society—which steadily declined in the second half of the twentieth century—offer a case study of religious decline in society, but also point to the persistence of its most committed members who continued to correspond with the Bedford leadership on their spiritual and physical progress for years and, in some cases, decades.

With this sociological and historical foundation in place, chapters 4 and 5 survey letters from members around the world, with the former chapter focused on Great Britain...

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