Pearl Curran and Spiritualism

Here is Pearl Curran, one of the most famous mediums from the great age of American Spiritualism. From 1913 to 1937, Pearl channeled not just a spirit — one Patience Worth, who declared herself to be an American immigrant from 17th-century England — but also an author. In the decades of Patience’s communication with Pearl, she wrote seven books along with numerous plays, short stories, and reams of poems. She came through in sort of a Scots dialect with a lot of King James-ian grammar. The _New York Times_ declared her first novel to be a “feat of literary composition.” A premier literary anthology of the day (_Braithwaite_) announced five of her poems from 1917 to be among the best American poetry for that year. Here’s a sample from one of our ghost’s poems, called “A Message”:

“Be there aught sae wondrous
As a cup of communion? as a cup of fellowship?
Be there aught sae wondrous to a wench
As a right to wield her tongue, and good listeners?
Be there aught sae wondrous as the fact
That we may never, never, in the days to come, be separate?
For I have become a part of thee, and thou hast become a part of me!
This is an holy sacrament!

Patience Worth’s activities especially intrigued audiences who knew Pearl Curran. Pearl had done poorly in school, wasn’t much of a reader, and professed disinterest in ouiji boards. But, at age 30, the childless stay-home wife made a visit to a friend who talked her into using the ouiji board, and Patience made herself known.

Much has been written about how Pearl Curran was able to act on behalf of such a different personality — Spiritualists believed Pearl’s story, other psychologists have called the situation a product of a dissociative disorder, even as they marveled at Pearl’s functionality. I don’t believe Patience was a ghost, but I have a great deal of sympathy for women of the day who lead the Spiritualist movement. It was one clear avenue for their voices to be heard, which is one of “the Message”‘s main points.