The vicar's wife who was sure she was God's daughter

BIOGRAPHY: Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers,By Jane Shaw, Jonathan Cape, 398pp. £18.99

CHRISTIAN BELIEF is customarily based on biblical orthodoxy, but wishful thinking can create a more immediate, extravagant fantasy. Mabel Barltrop, the middle-aged, middle-class widow of a Church of England vicar, was inspired to believe she was the daughter of God, ordained to prepare for the Second Coming of her male counterpart, Jesus. With selected passages from 19th-century prophecy and the Bible, especially Genesis, Revelation and the Gospels, she convinced a surprisingly large number of acolytes that only she could make up for original sin and achieve immortality on Earth.

At the age of 53, in 1919, she founded the Panacea Society, a new Jerusalem and a new Garden of Eden at home in Bedford, a market town in southern England. A woman had got her mate and herself expelled from the original garden; therefore, Mabel reasoned, it was up to a woman to take humankind back to the blessed state of innocence before the Fall. If successful, redemption would compensate for the chronic melancholia that had compelled her to stay twice in mental hospitals, the second time for 18 months. By saving the world, she could cure her depression.

Jane Shaw, an Anglican priest, the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and former dean of divinity and fellow of New College, Oxford, where she taught history and theology for 16 years, has written about the preposterous narcissistic obsession of Mabel with scholarly thoroughness and compassionate tolerance. After all, considered objectively, the claims and promises of every self-appointed messiah are preposterous, but irrational faith can transcend rational doubts. Anyway, the surviving Panaceans, in spite of all setbacks, gave Shaw access to their archives, and she went to Bedford to give them her serious attention. She expresses scepticism gently: “After nearly a decade of working with the community,” she writes, “I have become enormously fond of the Panaceans, though I still have the capacity to be astounded by their beliefs, and a clear line stands between my own and theirs.”

On St Valentine’s Day in 1919, Mabel established her society in her own house with just a few devoted followers. This number was increased by evangelical recruiting until there were 70 resident members, the extra ones accommodated in newly acquired adjoining properties. Almost all the members were women: widows, spinsters and wives who had apparently found that married life was spiritually insufficiently fulfilling.

Mabel recommended celibacy for all. The suffragette movement encouraged many women at that time to assert independence from the church. The Panaceans were feminist pioneers – conservative pioneers, for they still cherished many Victorian values.

Mabel was acclaimed as the leader to fit Joanna Southcott’s prophecies 100 years earlier. She had said that Jesus and she would beget a spiritual being who would eventually be incorporated as the new Messiah. Mabel would be Shiloh, Joanna’s eighth successor, called Octavia. Every evening thereafter, at 5.30pm, she automatically took down dictation direct from God and passed on his words during the evening service. Yes, the faithful believed.

Shaw describes Octavia as “a keen autodidact” who read and wrote profusely, extending in books and articles her influence far beyond Bedford. She was so busy spreading the word that she found she needed administrative help, so, in Shaw’s words, she “refigured the doctrine of God”.

“The community now came to believe in a fourfold or foursquare (rather than threefold or Trinitarian) Godhead. In orthodox Christianity, God is Father, Son (Christ) and the Holy Spirit (of indeterminate gender). In the community’s new theology, the Godhead was now Divine Mother (the Holy Spirit) and Father (God the creator), Divine Daughter (Octavia) and Son (Jesus).” Octavia raised an associate, Emily Goodwin, to the role of Divine Mother, responsible for day-to-day enforcement of the Panacea rules.

Octavia’s next brainwave was offering believers blessed small squares of cardboard, then squares of cloth. Pouring ordinary tap water over them changed it into holy water that believers could use to achieve miraculous healing. Or not. About 130,000 people world-wide accepted Octavia’s offer, almost the 140,000 promised immortality in the Book of Revelation.

When Octavia died, her apostles kept her body unburied for three and a half days, until they realised she was not being resurrected. They were disappointed but reasoned that the world was not yet quite ready for her.

Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and the author of books for children