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Spiritual Wives
There is no end to surprises. Mr. T. Lake Harris, who has caused a good many in his time, has added yet another of an amazing character, for Col. Olcott informs us through The Spiritualist of December 31st, that Mr. Harris, the founder of a Socialist community in Lake Erie, gives out that he is duly married to a female spirit. That this is not merely a figurative mode of speech, the Colonel hastens to assure us by a further disclosure which we hardly like to repeat, but which, it suffices to say, gives ample testimony that the alleged marriage has nothing factitious about it, but 18 set forth as altogether a complete thing.
I cannot but regret that a medium who has been used for poetry of a very high character should have come to this. It is, however, far more appropriate and satisfactory to contemplate such a revelation as this last, as emanating from the Mr. T. Lake Harris, who at Auburn, New York, in 1850, gave himself out as the mouth-piece of St. Paul, “directed by the Lord himself;” and who, in 1852, called his subsequent establishment at Mountain Cave, Virginia, “The Gate of Heaven.” It was there that Mr. Harris gave himself out to be one of the two witnesses of whom we read in the eleventh chapter of the Revelations, and as dowered with all their power to plague humanity, and it was in that chapter that Mr. Harris finding certain of his followers recalcitrant, is said to have uttered the following ejaculation, at once so prayerful and so reticent: “O Lord, thou knowest we do not wish to destroy man with fire from our mouths.” The second witness, we are told, was a Rev. Mr. Scott.
We cannot surely wonder that Col. Olcott should class this last assumption of Mr. Harris, I mean his alleged marriage, in the category of absurdities. But is this sort of thing—we need not call it marriage—this “absurdity,” repulsive as it is, without precedent? We think
Editor's notes
- ↑ Spiritual Wives by Scrutator, London Spiritualist, No. 438, January 14, 1881, pp. 17-8
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< Spiritual Wives (continued from page 11-6) >
not. We have read that “The Sons of God” came down to the daughters of men in very early records. We have it in Pagan lore that so-called “Goddesses’’ fell in love with, materialised themselves, and came down to heroes and warriors, and handsome shepherd: lads or hunters. All this the traditional school-boy knows; but really, even Pagans needed some noble accessories, some spark of romance, or something fresh, and beautiful, and bucolic to make such histories go down without a rising in the gorge. Be this as it may, are there not, I ask again, precedents elsewhere also, and of later date than those already alluded to? We fear there are. Our business is not to write at this time of what is pleasant or even pure, but to protest, and to confine ourselves to fact.
Do not the temptations of St. Anthony remain a proverb to this day? Was he not tempted, at least so tradition tells, by materialised female? spirits? And did he not withstand the temptation? Do not many of thus think he was right s in so doing? But what are we to say of the nuns, Marguerite Alacoque and Saint Theresa with her sister nuns, whose extraordinary materialistic confessions tell a very different tale to that of Saint Anthony? Have we not, too, a strange story of our own in England, concerning one Joanna Southcote?
Well, this we have also seriously to affirm, that the advent of Spiritualism has shewn us a good deal of light; and if it has its own occasional drawbacks, it has likewise had a marked effect in making some ashamed who were formerly not ashamed, so that pilgrimages to the shrines of the above nuns, so-called saints, have been gradually, since Spiritualism appeared, going out of fashion, and “the faithful” are not now so easily persuaded to make pilgrimages to the above named shrines, although railroads have turned weary journeys into pleasant pic-nics, so useful an eye-opener has modern Spiritualism become. Spirit materialisation has assured us that truth sometimes dwells in fiction, that what has been foisted off as high and holy may be very impure; and that poetry occasionally borrows from the most revolting possibilities of nature, glossing them over 'with a false glamour that would, if such things could be, make the foul seem fair and the licentious pure and holy.
I have taken these antecedents of Mr. Thomas Lake Harris from Mr. Home’s Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, p. 197, and following pages.
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 438, January 14, 1881, pp. 17-8