December 11, 1915
The ouija board is coming back into favor and has been taken up quite extensively by society woman in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and various parts of the country.
Perhaps the most remarkable recent experiences with it are those of Mrs. John Curran of St. Louis. She has been in communication, she says, with the spirit of Patience Worth, a woman believed to have existed in the Colonial days and who not only has sent philosophical axioms that are characteristic of the Puritans but even has gone to the extent of sending outlines of plays and essays and has gone extensively into the dictation of poetry. More than 300,000 words have been received from this supposed spirit in three years.
Perhaps the most remarkable recent experiences with it are those of Mrs. John Curran of St. Louis. She has been in communication, she says, with the spirit of Patience Worth, a woman believed to have existed in the Colonial days and who not only has sent philosophical axioms that are characteristic of the Puritans but even has gone to the extent of sending outlines of plays and essays and has gone extensively into the dictation of poetry. More than 300,000 words have been received from this supposed spirit in three years.
Patience Worth talks in a strange English that is archaic and not found in the best authors and yet may have at one time been the tongue of inhabitants of this country.
Long condemned by religious as the direct agency of satan and by skeptics as the toy of the superstitious, the ouija board is being restored to its own former popularity through the curiosity of society woman.
In many parts of the country society women are devoting their time to "communicating" with spirits in the other world.
Many strange results of such communications are reported and a society woman is unhappy indeed if she hasn't at least one good spirit in the world of mystery who is always ready to send a message at her control's pleasure.
Even is staid St. Louis where society women are supposed to be very conservative, the ouija board has been restored to favor while in New York and in various cities of the east it is quite the "rage."
In St. Louis Mrs. John H. Curran has gotten into touch with one Patience Worth of Spiritland and has transcribed more than 300,000 words through the ouija board, all of which will be published at some future date.
Patience Worth is believed from her peculiar choice of words and phraseology to be a Colonial dame, who has been wandering about in space for a long time, burning to send her messages back to the mundane sphere yet finding no source of communication until Mrs. Curran bought a ouija board and commenced taking messages.
THROUGH
CURIOSITY.
The board was purchased through curiosity. There is something fascinating about the tales told of the board, whether they be true or false. It is known that a number of people have asked the board to tell them in what land their dead relatives lingered and were shocked considerably when the naughty little board spelled out a word starting in H and ending with an L. Many have thought that the words written by the board were the result of the mental influences of the person operating it while others have credited it with supernatural powers.
In the use of the board at the Curran home, Mrs. Curran always is one of the two whose hands are on the board. The latter is arranged on two wheels and has a pencil at the end. As the vibration of the fingers of the holders develops the pencil moves over a sheet of paper and prints numerals or letters of the alphabet.
While Mrs. Curran operated the board her husband transcribes the message as she reads it to him.
The "Patience Worth" matter began to be transcribed in June, 1913. Since that time Mrs. Curran has made public as the products of Patience Worth a six-act play entitled "Red Wing," a novel called "Telka" and numerous verses, essays and bits of philosiphy. [sic]
The quaint language of these writing has probably attracted more attention than their literary merit, the latter being a matter of some discussion. They are in an antique language, not the English of Chaucer, Spenser or any other well-known classic English writer, but possibly more like the common speech of English people of an early day.
It is known to travelers that an antique, almost archaic, form of English still is spoken in remote communities of England. There are districts in England whose inhabitants have great difficulty in understanding or in making themselves understood by the coster-cockney class.
Mrs. Curran, however, says she has no personal acquaintance with such speech and that she has not gone farther in her study of classic English than other well read persons. The language used by Patience Worth, she explains, is as strange to her as it is to others.
Mrs. Curran recently gave to the Papyrus Club of St. Louis some of her messages from Patience Worth, one of the, being a special message that Patience had sent the club. It read:
PATIENCE WORTH'S
MESSAGE.
Good Dames and Sirrahs - At the board thou hast sat and eat of earth's grow. Aye, and now do ye eat o' the grow thou knowest no the rooting place of. Yea, thou shalt hark unto the word o' MEN, and yet they do to prate o' DAME. Ayea, and methinks 'tis a word aspoke amany that be not the word that hid 'pon the tung, lest the Dame be offended!
Aye, then come thou and sit 'bout the board, and thine ears shall hark unto the words o' me, and thou shalt see the cloth o' me the hands o' the loves o' me did to fashion out for me. Ayea, I then shall sit me meek, and thread me up a bobbins full for the next o' put.
Ayea, and 'tis frocked that I shall to be, and nay dame shall see! Awoe! Nay, this be a piddle-putting, good folk!
Athin (within) thy heart shall set the me o' me at the go ahance. And 'tis ahope I be 'tis a loving wampth 'twill find. And so dost thou to smile, 'tis sweets and love I cast thee. And doth thy heart to shut it up, lo, then shall I knock till thou dost leave me in.
A night o' cheer. A heart o' love! A God's wish o' loving 'pon thy day. Anight! Anight!
HOW IT
BEGAN.
Mrs. Curran told her audience of her first experiences with the ouija board and of the puzzling messages received. Later she used the board together with Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings and bagan to receive sentences which formed maxims and philosphical paragraphs. Then came the announcement:
"Many moons ago I lived. Patience Worth, my name. If thou shalt live then so shall I. I make my bread by thy hearth."
The word "bread," Mrs. Curran later learned, referred to the literary products embodied in the messages. Mrs. Curran said she would not attempt to say whether Patience Worth was a spirit, but spoke of her as a beautiful personality, which had come to seem not a mystery but a fellowship.
She said the messages came to her in daylight as well as at night and that there is no trance connected with them.
"The words come in sort of a rhythm," Mrs. Curran explained, "and I record just what comes whether I understand it or not." Patience has been tested by more than 200 persons and her messages have never varied. A professor from the University of Indian visited Mrs. Curran to investigate her communication with Patience Worth.
William Marion Reedy, editor of the Mirror, and Caspar Yost, editor of a St. Louis newspaper, became acquainted with Patience Worth and both declare her genuine. Yost has described her as a "spinster of uncertain age; a writer, but a poet by preference. While the average spirit stalks dismal and wailing lugubriously through the finite world, Patience comes with a laugh, Yost said. She remarks, "I be no sorry singer," and proves it by many witticisms.
EDITOR
DESCRIBES HER.
Reedy calls Patience's doctrines Panteistic.
He describes her as follows: "She is a little woman, dressed in gray; with a little bonnet, ribbons coming down and tied under her chin. There are lines in her face, not the rewritten wrinkles of smiles or her youth, but the results of experience. Her eyes are brown like autumn leaves after a rain. She is between 45 and 50 years old, sprightly, dainty, delicate.
"She has stood beside the stockade helping a good man load a gun, while he defends the settlement against the savage horde of Indians."
Reedy said the theory was advanced that she was killed in an Indian massacre and this question was asked of her. She intimated that something of this sort had happened to her and she was asked if she had not been taken captive by the Indians.
"Nay, something worse," was her reply.
"She speaks an English almost pure and undefiled," Reedy said of her. "There is an absence from it of all the derivatives of France and Rome, and she rarely uses a word of more than two syllables. Her answers are direct and almost invariably in parables. She has respect for her interlocutor's intelligence."
Reedy said she is not another Sappho, or George Elliot, or Mrs. Humphrey ward nor a Sara Teasdale, but rather echoes of all of the poets. He said there runs a consistent character through her works and in two years she has not gotten "out of character." She never has used a modern word or expression and he illustrated the seeming significance of this by pointing out how difficult it would be for a man trained in Irish or negro dialect to make a 30-minute talk without breaking out of the character.
"She has nothing to tell, in my opinion," Reedy said, "but she commands my admiration and reverence. She tells nothing that we have not heard from the old masters and bards."
"What of the divinity of Christ?" Reedy at one time asked her through the ouija board. She answered, "He bought thee of his loving."
"What of love?" he asked. "The love there is but the o'er drip of love here" came the response of the board.
"Describe the place where you are?" She was asked, "Think you there is a bottom or top; this is a walless country."
"Can you do anything you want over there?" The answer was: "When you put the will you put the limit."
"Put" in Patience's vocabulary responds to the modern verb "to do."
"Patience may be a second personality of Mrs. Curran," Reedy said, "but she teaches a love that is greater than we can conceive and that death is the keeper of unknown redemption."
LITTLE COLONIAL
DAME.
Mrs. Emily Hutchings, who was one of the first to receive with Mrs. Curran the messages from Patience Worth, said the first glimmering of the quaint personality of the little Colonial dame came in the maxim: "A busy saw gathered no rust."
One of the sentiments expressed by Patience Worth is: "A blighted bud may hold a sweeter message than the lovliest flower; for God hath kissed her wounded heart and left a promise there."
Of the seances, Mrs. Curran says:
"I sit with a friend, our hands upon the board, which I have come to believe is nothing more than a concentrator. There is no trance. Everything is quiet with the exception of Patience Worth. The only definite part is that while I put my thoughts awither, as Patience would say, and immediately the stories, poems, plays, parables, or whatever her work for the sitting may be, is shown to me in tiny pictures, beautiful and distinct as though my eyes saw them.
"The characters move and speak and my hands fly over the letters much too fast for me to anticipate even one word.
"I cannot account for the language. The words seem to be spoken to me, though I cannot say I hear them in the sense that we hear the voice that speaks aloud to us. The words come in sort of a rhythm. I am not familiar with old English and yet even the conversations are in this archaic tongue."
Psychologists recently have taken up a study of Mrs. Curran and the Mysterious Patience Worth. Some believe that Patience Worth is Mrs. Curran's sub-conscious self. Others have departed in doubt and without expressing an opinion.
The ouija board has been condemned by various religious bodies, but society is taking it up besides the prohibitions. The Catholic church has condemned it as a superstitious practice.
Other religious bodies have declared that the devil is in the board and employs it to send his messages.
Whatever the truth may be, society has gone into the mystery of the board, not so much with the object of definitely deciding if it really is the medium of communication with the other world but to gratify society's chief attribute - Curiosity.
Visit patienceworth.org to read some of her poems and such, and smithsonianmag.com to read more about her.
