Patience Worth; Legitimate Literary Legend or Mythical Ghost?
Imagine being invited to a posh Upper East Side apartment to hear the latest writings of a new literary sensation. The energy in the room buzzing as new poetry is presented with a high degree of wit, skill, and lyricism. Now imagine if that poetry was being channeled through an ordinary housewife from St. Louis, Missouri. That is the legend of Patience Worth, a 17th century literary “spirit,” whose rise to fame catapulted both she and her channeler into overnight sensations.
Patience Worth The Sorry Tale
To understand the mystery surrounding Patience Worth, one must first know about Pearl Curran. Born in 1883, Pearl Lenore Pollard was the only child of an often unemployed railroad worker and an ambitious mother who suffered from nervous ailments.
Curran was a talkative child and an average student. She loved music and aspired to be a singer, but her family’s meager finances were stretched thin to make her dream a reality. Like her mother, Curran struggled with anxiety, to the point of dropping out of school at 13 years old. In 1908, Curran met and married John Curran and moved to St. Louis, a city exploding with opportunities.
As a lonely newlywed, unable to have children (although she and Curran adopted a child and eventually had a child of their own), Curran’s constant companion was Emily Hutchinson, a charismatic writer and devoted practitioner of spiritualism, a popular belief in communication with the dead. After Curran’s father died in 1912, her friend suggested they try to communicate with him through a Ouija board.
Curran found these first attempts at communicating with her dead father silly, however one summer evening in 1913, the first of many communications with the spirit known as Patience Worth began to come forth:
“[The board] raced to the letters M, A, N and Y. Within minutes the women had this message: ‘Many moons ago I lived. Again I come—Patience Worth my name.’
Emily Hutchison tried to take control of the communication with this spirit, but it was clear that Worth had chosen Curran as her medium. Soon, word of Curran’s new talent spread and she began to open her home to the public, supported by her husband John, who took careful notes of Worth’s communications, that were delivered rapidly and without interruption: “The pointer would fly around the board and Pearl would call out words at the rate of 1,500 or so an hour.”
Worth told Curran that she was born in Dorsetshire, England in 1649, the daughter of John and Anne Worth, a seamstress to a nobleman. She communicated that she never married and lived her entire life in the small village. Curran channeled that Worth died at the age of 30-years-old in New England, after a long sea voyage from England to America. While mostly sparse with her life’s details, Worth did reveal certain vivid memories:
“I remember a certain church,” she once dictated, “with its wee windows and its prim walls, with its sanctity and meekness, with its aloofness and chilling godliness…[a]ye, well I remember the heat that foretold the wrath of God, making the Good Man [the parson] sweat. Aye, and Heaven seemed far, far.”
Before becoming the medium through which Worth expressed herself, Pearl Curran’s life was quiet and ordinary. But after making contact with Worth and the otherworld, Curran became almost as much of a curiosity as her subject; a curiosity that expanded to psychologists, who wondered if Curran suffered from multiple personality disorder, or who attributed Worth’s writings to Curran’s own unexpressed subconscious. Despite many attempts, Curran refused to cooperate with those who wanted to study her and her “gift.”
Curran did receive a sense of retribution when in 1927 parapsychologist and founder of the Boston Society for Psychical Research, Walter Franklin Pierce published The Case of Patience Worth, a 500-page book that declared “ordinary” Pearl Curran was merely the conduit for transmitting Worth’s copious literary production.
PATIENCE WORTH’S BOOKS AND POEMS: A LITERARY MYSTERY COMES TO LIFE
As word of Curran’s medium ability grew, so did the demand to know more about the spirit who was channeling through her. In 1915, the religious editorial page editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote a series of articles that became the book, Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery published by Henry Holt, (also a spiritualist). The book included Worth’s poems, and resulted in turning Worth into a literary sensation. Even The New York Times took notice, writing that “Patience Worth[’s] messages out of the darkness never sink to the commonplace level, but always show high intelligence and sometimes are even tipped with the flame of genius.”
The country and the literary world were so entranced by Worth’s literary mystery that her work began to appear in print almost as quickly as Curran could channel them.
A PROLIFIC WRITER: WORTH HER WEIGHT IN POEMS
To say that Worth was a prolific writer would be an understatement, as proven hundreds of poems to a number of plays, short stories and seven novels. Her most well known novel, The Sorry Tale: A Story in the Time of Christ, was published in 1917 to wide public and critical acclaim. In addition to these works, she was much loved and often quoted for her proverbs, such as “the owl is silent, and credited with much wisdom.”
Worth was so well-respected in literary circles that the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York recognized her as one of the country’s most extraordinary writers. But, her literary esteem was short-lived, as writing styles and readers tastes changed to voices such as Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Her follow-up novel, Hope Trueblood, received mixed reviews, with the Atlantic Monthly calling the author and her “otherworldly” followers “silly as they are dull.”
FLEETING FAME FOR WORTH AND CURRAN
By the 1920s, Curran and her husband experienced financial troubles, having not benefited from the publication of Worth’s books. John Curran died in 1922, leaving Curran with two children to support. To earn money, Curran began traveling with a gilded Ouija board, offering readings to celebrities include Ethel Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. After two brief and unsuccessful marriages, Curran moved to Los Angeles where her finances remained meager, but she was in demand as a medium in artistic circles.
Throughout all the ups and downs of fame and celebrity, Worth remained a constant for Curran, who reportedly continued to communicate to her one week before Curran died on December 3, 1937 from pneumonia. There have never been any other recorded or verified communications from Worth after Curran’s death.
For believers in the paranormal and in communicating with the great beyond, Patience Worth represents the power of the human spirit that is not bound by death. To skeptics, Worth is nothing more than the subconscious iterations of an unlikely and ordinary person named Pearl Curran. Whatever one believes, we can agree that the power to create, connect, and communicate is universal across physical and psychic boundaries.
About the Author
Contacting the Dead Through Psychomanteum Mirror Gazing
Is it possible to connect with loved ones after they’ve moved on from this lifetime? Sure, it may be common to have seen a ghost or felt the presence of an otherworldly spirit at some point in life, but those experiences are often spontaneous or fleeting.
Through séances and psychic sessions, some claim to have had initiated intentional connections with the departed, but there is another way that one might be able to make contact, drawing on a method originally developed in ancient Greece. It turns out that many people have reported successful contact through the use of a simplified psychomanteum. This modernized practice of mirror gazing has been developed by Dr. Raymond Moody, a man who has devoted his life to studying near-death experiences and, through this process, has had some profound results.
The Ancient Greek Psychomanteum
In ancient Greece, people would go to a Necromanteion, a ziggurat-like temple that was devoted to Hades, Persephone, and the dead, in order to contact the spirits of their departed relatives. Necromanteion translates to “oracle of the dead,” with the Temple of Ephyra being the most recognized.
During a ceremony, subjects would take part in a ceremonial meal, undergo a series of rituals, and perform animal sacrifices. Inside the Necromanteion there would be a long hallway in which a bronze cauldron full of water and was polished often, to be as reflective as possible. The hallways would be dimly lit by lamps that cast flickering light and diffuse reflections on the water, creating a reflective surface like a mirror, in which the Greeks believed they could see the spirits of the dead.
Dr. Raymond Moody’s Mirror Gazing
Within more recent history, Dr. Raymond Moody has brought the concept of the psychomanteum back as a medium for contacting the dead through the simple use of a mirror and without animal sacrifice. Moody, who coined the term near-death experience, is a famous philosopher, physician, and psychologist who has dedicated his life to exploring NDEs and contact with the spirit world.
Mirror gazing with a psychomanteum is similar to the practice of scrying and is sometimes referred to as catoptromancy, or the use of a reflective psychic medium, much like the stereotypical fortune teller looking into a crystal ball. It is used for divination or to uncover messages related to personal development, epiphanies, and prophecies.
How to Contact the Dead & Communicate with Spirits by Mirror Gazing
Moody has developed a technique for easily recreating a personal psychomanteum at home, or wherever one may desire, with the necessary tools. The following are his recommended steps for a successful mirror-gazing session to contact the dead:
- Food – Get into a serene state of mind by eliminating caffeine and dairy the day before. Eat simple meals leading up to your session, such as fruits and vegetables.
- Location – Go to the quietest part of the house, where you can truly relax. Unplug all clocks and phones in that room.
- Clothing – Take off all jewelry including watches; wear loose, comfortable clothing.
- Mirror – Place large mirror in front of a comfy chair, and place it so you can gaze at it comfortably. It’s best if you cannot see your own reflection.
- Chair – Sit in your chair with your head supported.
- Awareness – Ease into your transition to an altered state of awareness.
- Posture – Relax your posture.
- Mood – Soothe yourself with aesthetically pleasing material for about 15 minutes by looking at works of art or listening to soft music, in order to stimulate awareness.
- Memories – Gather photographs and personal items of the loved one you wish to contact. Touch them and remember your loved one. Imprint your loved one firmly in your mind. Family films and videos can help, or anything else that you associate with them.
- Light – At twilight, light a candle and place it behind you. A dim light from behind you is ideal but experiment with the light for proper adjustment. Twilight is best because it typically stimulates altered states, especially for first-timers.
