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Patience Worth - Proof of Reincarnation?
'Patience Worth' was the pen name used by St. Louis
housewife Pearl Lenore Curran to author a perplexing variety of novels, poems
and prose during the early part of the 20th century. What is different about
Patience Worth is that Mrs. Curren claimed that she was the spirit of a 17th
century English girl who channelled her thoughts and ideas through her. If so,
could Patience Worth be proof of reincarnation?
Mrs. Curran was born Pearl Lenore Pollard in Mound City,
Illinois, on 15 February, 1883. The family later moved to Texas and then
to St. Louis when Pearl was 14. Academically below average the young girl did
possess a talent for music, taking lessons and training in piano and voice as the family moved yet again, this time to Palmer, Missouri.
From the age of 18 to
24 Pearl worked at various jobs in Chicago during the winter, returning home to
Missouri during the
summer months to teach music. When Pearl was 24 she married John Howard Curran, living a
comfortable and uneventful middle-class existence in St. Louis. The Currans did
not own books, were not well-travelled or particularly well-educated, and spent
their time playing cards with friends, attending the theatre or going out to
restaurants.
Patience Worth comes through the Oiuja Board
In August 1912 one of Pearl's neighbours showed her a Ouija board, and
persuaded her
to place her hands on it,
despite Pearl's reservations and complete disbelief in anything connected with
spiritualism.
Although the results were as negative as Pearl had
suspected the ladies continued their experiments, occasionally receiving vague 'communications' through the board, but nothing intelligible.
Then on 8 July 1913, a message began to come through, it read - 'Many moons ago I lived. Again I come.
Patience Worth my name. If thou shalt live, so shall I.'
This message was to be the beginning of a 25 year
period during which the 'entity' Patience Worth communicated to the world
ostensibly through Pearl Lenore Curran. As Pearl became more and more interested
in the numerous messages the women were
receiving from Patience, she began spending more time on the Ouija board.
However, it soon became clear that the Oiuja Board method
was far too slow and cumbersome to deal with the sheer amount of material being
received, so Pearl turned to direct automatic writing.
Automatic Writing
Automatic
writing, the process of recording material that does not originate in the
conscious mind of the writer, had previously been used by the notable English medium and
Church of England Minister William Stainton Moses, who experimented with the
technique in the 1870s and early 1880s. Much more recently, in the early 1970s,
psychic healer Matthew Manning made use of
automatic writing to record messages which apparently came from a 17th century
man named Robert Webbe. In common with William Stainton Moses, Pearl Curran never
went into a trance to record the messages. Tthe
method she used was simply to sit in a brightly-lit room and wait for the
sentences to form in her mind while in a conscious state, and then write or type them
out. While the words poured into her head, Pearl would feel pressure and then scenes and images would
present themselves before her and she was able to note the details of each
scene, the road, trees, landscape and people. Occasionally she would see herself
in the scenes.
One problem Mrs. Curran experienced was that the messages were received in
a dialect which was often difficult to understand. This was partly explained
when Pearl learned from her communications that Patience Worth was a young
girl who had lived on a farm in the county of Dorset, on the south coast of
England, in the 1600s. Patience's family had subsequently emigrated to America and she had
been murdered
by Indians there. In all the years of communicating with Patience Worth, this is
all that Pearl ever found out about her. However, it was noted by most of
the visitors that sat with Pearl during her communications that the character
and temperament of Patience Worth, with her biting, satirical wit, was very
different to that of Mrs. Curran.
In 1916, Casper Yost's book Patience Worth A Psychic
Mystery, was published by Henry Holt.
Yost was editor of
the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and had promoted Mrs. Curran's claims
of contact with Patience Worth in a series of articles in the paper beginning in
February 1915. William Marion Reedy, the editor of the weekly St. Louis-based
journal Reedy's Mirror, also became a convert and published glowing
articles about Pearl Curran / Patience Worth's literary creations. The result of all this publicity was that the name of
Patience Worth soon became known throughout the world.
The Works of Patience Worth
In the 25 years she was 'communicating' Patience Worth dictated a vast amount of literary work to
Mrs. Curran, including six novels, hundreds
of pages of poetry, proverbs, prayers, and conversation. Many of her
works were published under the name Patience Worth, including the novels The Sorry Tale, a
story of the time of Christ, Telka, an 'Idyl of Medieval England', and Hope
Trueblood, a nineteenth-century tale. Many critics,
including those from The New
York Times and The Bookman, praised her literary efforts, impressed
not only by the beauty of some of the imagery, but also by her use of archaic
languages and words, descriptions of objects that had been out of use for hundreds of years,
and her knowledge of foreign lands. How, they wondered, could a modest St Louis
housewife have acquired such precise historical details and such sophisticated literary skill? Others were
not so kind, noting that the appearance of Patience Worth coincided with a
revival of Spiritualism in Europe and America, creating an environment where
much of the public were only too willing to believe in the reality of the
reincarnation of a 17th century English girl in 20th century St. Louis. The
sceptics also wondered how Patience, supposedly a resident of 17th century
England, managed to
dictate a novel set in the Victorian era (Hope
Trueblood).
After 1922, communications from Patience became fewer and
fewer and eventually ceased altogether. Interest in the phenomenon of Patience
Worth soon faded as well, and when Pearl Curran died in 1939, both her and her
communicator were virtually unknown. Perhaps because there was never a solution
to the mystery and no proof was ever produced that a girl named Patience Worth actually
lived in 17th century Dorset, the case is regarded with scepticism by most
people today, if they have heard of it at all.
Proof of Reincarnation?
So was there a spirit from the beyond speaking through
Pearl Curran? Was Pearl the reincarnation of a 17th century English girl called
Patience Worth? Or, as seems more likely, was it all a product of Pearl's unconscious mind? The case
was meticulously investigated
at the time by the sceptical Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, research officer
of the American Society for Psychical Research from 1920-24, and founder and
research officer of the Boston Society
for Psychical Research. Although Prince had previously investigated the multiple
personality case of a disturbed girl called Doris Fischer, he was inclined to
believe that Patience Worth did not fit into this category, as the 'entity' did not
replace Mrs. Curran's normal consciousness, it co-existed with it. In Prince's
thorough summing up of the evidence The Case of Patience Worth he states
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'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.'
Perhaps
the progress currently being made by scientists and psychologists in
studies of the human personality and its various idiosyncrasies will one day
shed more light on the strange appearance of Patience Worth. As Patience herself
said, when questioned on her own existence -
'A
phantom? We'el enough,
Prove thee, thyself to me;
I say, behold, here I be
Buskins, kirtle, cap and pettiskirts,
And much tongue!
We'el what has thou to prove thee?'
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