CERCHIO DRUIDICO ITALIANO (ITALIAN DRUIDIC CIRCLE) TIMELINE

1970:  Luigi “Ossian” D’Ambrosio was born in Nordhorn, Germany.

1980:  D’Ambrosio moved to Biella, Italy, with his family.

1994:  The Branco dell’Antica Quercia (The Ancient Oak Pack) was established and the website launched.

1996:  The group celebrated its first Beltane Festival at Zumaglia Castle (Biella, Italy).

1998:   The Branco dell’Antica Quercia became the Antica Quercia (The Ancient Oak).

2001:  D’Ambrosio married and received his first initiation.

2002-2003:  The festival location moved to Magnano (Biella, Italy) and then to Mottalciata (Biella, Italy).

2003:  Antica Quercia joined the Circolo dei Trivi (the Wiccan group set in Milan) for the organization of the second National Convention on Wicca that took the name of “The Council of Druids and Witches.” The partnership between Antica Quercia and Circolo dei Trivi became one of the most durable in the Italian neopagan landscape.

2005:  The festival took place at Arcobaleno Park in Masserano (Biella, Italy).

2008 (May):  The Cerchio Druidico Italiano (Italian Druidic Circle) was established up during the Beltane Festival in Masserano.

2008 (June):  During the midsummer solstice celebration, D’Ambrosio created guidelines for the Cerchio Druidico.

2008 (October):  Philip Carr Gomm, president of The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, conducted a seminar for the first time in Italy.

2009:  D’Ambrosio was invited to celebrate the Summer Solstice in Stonehenge.

2015:  Antica Quercia, Circolo dei Trivi and several pagan associations created Unione delle Comunità Neopagane (UCN Italia – Union of Neopagan Communities).

2016:  The twentieth Beltane Festival was celebrated in Masserano (Biella, Italy).

2018 (May):  Caroline Wise, president of the Fellowship of Isis, came to the Beltane Festival to celebrate the Cerchio Druidico’s tenth anniversary.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

The Cerchio Druidico Italiano is a spiritual movement based on the ancient spirituality of the Celts, rediscovered for the first time in the eighteenth century on the British Isles. The movement changed and adapted to sociocultural circumstances and to other movements, such as occultism. Cerchio Druidico spread throughout Europe and arrived in Italy during the 1990s, intertwining re-enactment and spirituality. That is, some associations are born as reminiscent and later face spirituality, while others are born as explicitly spiritual but then face the historical discourse to discover the ancient Celtic past. Historical studies cause these cultural associations to face the break with the pagan past in two different ways: on the one hand, there are those who call themselves reconstructors; on the other hand, there are those who admit the reinvention of tradition.

Elaborating a chronology of Italian groups is a complicated operation since many have lifespans that do not exceed twenty years, and they often alter their names multiple time and/or change leaders. The first appearances that can be documented date back to 1996 with the birth of the Festival of Beltane in Biella, organized by the Cultural Association Antica Quercia (initially established in 1992) and Celtica (organized in the Aosta Valley by the Mor Arth Association). Also in 1996, the Cultural Association Terra Insubre was established in Varese, where it deals with historical and archaeological research on Alpine, Celtic and Germanic peoples. Unlike other groups claiming to be apolitical, this one has a more explicit political mission. In 1998, the first Trigallia International Celtic Festival was held; it then took place every two years until 2005, when its last event occurred. This event was replaced by the Trigallia Celtic Cultural Association, founded again in 1998 following the success of the festival.

It was a few years later that openly spiritual groups began to appear. The first, the Reformed Spiritual Movement of Insubria Natives, dates to 2003, but it survived for only a few years. In 2008, the Cerchio Druidico Italiano was created during the Beltane festival of that year. There were two other relevant but transitory groups, the Italian Bardica and Druidic Academy (OLNO, Oltre la Nona Onda) and the Grand Druidic Lodge of Italy (GralDrui). In Italy, there is also a national section of the OBOD that offers an online course.

The founder and leader of Cerchio Druidico Italiano is Luigi “Ossian” D’Ambrosio. [Image at right] Ossian was born in Nordhorn, Germany in 1970. During his childhood, his family moved to Biella, Italy, where he has continued to live. He is an artisan jeweler and a journalist on esotericism. He is also a musician. In 1988, he founded the Opera IX, a black metal band that is among the most long-running in Italy. This bond with music is very important to him, because it is through this musical genre that he approached paganism for the first time during his adolescence, thanks to the lyrics of various foreign bands.

His spiritual path has been multifaceted. He initially approached the first forms of organized Italian neopaganism, associations connected to modern witchcraft. He appreciated their structure and activities, but he didn’t recognize himself in that spirituality. Consequently, he began to research neopaganism and met Emanuele Pauletti, who became his mentor. Pauletti was associated with the Breton Druidic tradition and lead Ossian to seek more direct links with the northern Italian territory. Then, he studied shamanism at the Michael Harner Shamanic Studies Foundation and discovered Celtic shamanism. During his research, he founded his first association in 1994, Branco of the Antica Quercia (Ancient Oak Pack), which later became the Anticaquercia Association, through which he organized the first Beltane Festival in 1998. The main objective of the Association was research and profile-raising.

The Beltane Festival is one of the longest-running Celtic Italian festivals; it was established at Arcobaleno Park in Masserano, Biella. During the 2008 Beltane Festival, the Cerchio Druidico Italiano (Italian Druidic Circle) was founded. As Ossian recounts in his book, La via delle querce (2013), the birth of the Cerchio Druidico allowed a division of interests between the two different associations, leaving them free to better focus on certain features: the Antica Quercia Association  (Antica Quercia Association website n.d.) deals with the most artistic and cultural side, while the Cerchio engages itself in the spiritual path, allowing the creation of a more neo-druidic space within the group.

In October of the same year, Philip Carr Gomm (The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids’ president) was invited by D’Ambrosio and Davide “Cronos” Marré (the Circolo dei Trivi’s president (the first Italian Wiccan coven, in Milan) to give a seminar. That seminar was one of the most important events for the Cerchio Druidico Italiano as it served as an educational moment for the entire membership.

In 2009, D’Ambrosio became the first Italian Druid invited to the celebration of the Summer Solstice in Stonehenge, which is celebrated by The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD).

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Neo-druidism is one of the movements in the broader category of Neopaganism; movements in this category share in common the project of revitalizing or reconstructing the traditions of pre-Christian polytheistic cults (Harvey 2016). There are two different and antipodal ways to live neo-druidism in Italy: some interpret spirituality as a lifestyle potentially applicable to any religion while others live it as a religion. Cerchio Druidico Italiano follows this second path and is the only group in northern Italy that offers such an explicit spiritual path.

The group puts into practice a process of reinvention of tradition. Their leader is aware of the rift with the ancient tradition caused by the advent of Christianity. He has not sought to reclaim the earlier Celtic spirituality, given the difficulties of accurate historical reconstruction (D’Ambrosio 2013). Rather, the Cerchio Druidico offers a contemporary spiritual path in order to create a deep link between humans and nature. They envision a connection with the land, a sort of rediscovery of the history and the peculiarity of the territory where people have lived. The goal is to create a neopagan community based on mutual support and self-responsibility. The aim is clearly ecological and is consistent with neopagan movements as nature-based religions (Harvey 2016).

Indeed, Cerchio Druidico Italiano puts ecopaganism at the centre of its spirituality and practice. Its ecological activism is entrusted to the sensitivity of the individual, but what the group proposes is a practical and constant action in order to establish positive relations between the human being and other living creatures. The objective is to restore humanity back to its place in nature in order to allow peaceful coexistence. The ethical mission of neopaganism is revealed by the choice of the place where Cerchio Druidico Italiano holds its meeting. The group chose Arcobaleno Park, a private park in a protected area that is in environmental recovery, as it is an abandoned quarry.

This link with nature is also expressed in the representation of divinities. Neopaganism shares with neodruidism placing bi-theism at the centre of its beliefs; The God and The Goddess thus represent two aspects of the universe. This allows them to propose that every deity humanity has ever conceived over the centuries is no more than the manifestation of a specific aspect of these two entities.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Cerchio Druidico Italiano shares with broader Neopaganism the Wheel of the Year, a cyclic annual calendar with eight seasonal festivities.[Image at right] Half of these festivals are solar and the other half are lunar; the most recent are defined as fire festivals. This is a canon common to every contemporary Paganism, with names having been reconstructed by different traditions (Hutton 2008). Only the celebrations of Samhain and Beltane are public; the others are all private for the members of Cerchio Druidico.

Solar festivities are agro-pastoral celebrations. Cerchio Druidico uses the names proposed by the Bard Iolo Morgangaw rather than the more traditional titles (Yule, Ostara, Litha and Imbolc):

The Spring Equinox, Alban Eiler (Earth’s Light), falls between March 21 and 22.
The Winter Solstice, Alban Arthuan (Arthur’s Light), falls between December 20 and 23.
The Summer Solstice, Alban Hefin (Shore’s Light), falls between June 20 and 23.
The Autumn Equinox, Alban Elfed (Water’s Light), falls between September 20 and 21.

Fire festivities are:

Samonios, celebrated between October and November, is the Celtic New Year’s Day.
Brigantia/Imbolc, celebrated in the first days of February.
Beltane, celebrated in the first days of May.
Lugnasa, celebrated in the first days of August.

For these ceremonies, members of Cerchio Druidico Italiano meet in an open space in nature, usually Arcobaleno Park. They gather in a circle and follow a ritual on a script the group has developed. These ceremonies all have the same primary structure: the circle opens; there is a greeting and calling for the four cardinal points and the respective divinities; specific ritual gestures of the holiday are performed; the circle then closes, dismissing the forces previously called. Each ceremony draws on folkloristic elements from different traditions. An integral part of the ceremony is the following meal shared by the group. In this way, sacred and profane aspects merge, blurring the boundaries between the two and allowing the creation of a space of conviviality among the members.

In addition to these festivities linked to the Wheel of the Year, there are many other ritual moments, mainly connected with group members’ life cycles. The Welcome Rite and the New-born Presentation to the community happens when parents give the child his/her name in front of the whole group. Other ritual moments follow the most important events in the child’s life (e.g. losing the first tooth or the first day at school). The second and third rituals are the Sacred Union and Separation. The Sacred Union is a marriage where a couple presents itself as a family; Separation is the ritual redefining the relationship with the whole group in case the former fails. Sacred marriages are offered both during the year and during the Feast of Beltane and are celebrated not only by Ossian but by each member of Cerchio Druidico who has achieved initiation. Finally, there is the Transition Rite, the funerals or memorials to honour the elders. Other ritual moments are dedicated to the initiation of group members. These rites are the first and last steps of a specific spiritual path.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Cerchio Druidico celebrated its first ten years of life in May 2018, and during this decade so many participants joined the group that an independent “grove” had to be created: the Triplice Cinta Druidica. [Image at right]

The structure of Cerchio Drudico Italiano is peculiar: Ossian is its centre and engine, but the group denies any form of pyramidal power in favour of a circular assembly. The group’s position is that a leader is needed to coordinate the actions of the different members who, like pieces of a gear, must take care of each one of their tasks (D’Ambrosio 2013).

The spiritual path in Cerchio Druidico consists of three steps: bard, ovate and druid. During the bard stage, neophytes must work on their creativity and their emotional sphere. Neophytes become Bards after attending the Cerchio Druidico for a year and a day. At that point they are “dedicated.” The Ovate is a doctor and a fortune-teller. Ovates are now identified with shamans because they are the ones who can move between both worlds. Again, after a year and a day the person is initiated into Cerchio Druidico.

Bards are preservers of the historical memory of the people. They are the artists who preserve and transmit tradition through their work. They are the ones who make ideas tangible, thus manifesting the will of the divinity. The symbolism linked to this figure is varied. Bards are assigned the colour blue, the water element and the West direction; the season is spring and the tree is the birch (“beith”), both symbols of the beginning (D’ambrosio 2013).

What inspires the Bard is the Awen, one of the main elements of modern Druidism. It is the name and symbol that Iolo Morgangw assigns to inspiration, which enables the Goddess to speak through the Bard. In many bardic ceremonies there is a moment when songs are dedicated to the invocation of the Awen that must descend over the participating Bards to inspire them for the performance (Harvey 1997). Cerchio Druidico in this is no exception; in all ceremonies there is a moment at the beginning during which the Awen is invoked in chorus to inspire and connect the divinity with the participants.

Ovates are shamans and healers. They are the ones who travel between worlds, being able to speak with what is more than human. Thanks to this ability, they can also perform the function of seers and interpret messages from the gods. This connection with the divine allows a profound connection with nature to be taken care of by the modern Ovate. The colour associated with the Ovate is green, the seasons are autumn and winter, the night is its moment, and the associated Ogham tree is the yew (Harvey 1997; D’ambrosio 2013).

Modern Druid functions are carried out in nature and in the recovery of rituals set in the woods that serve to recreate the link with the environment. Associated with the druid are the colour white, the oghamic trees of the oak and the mistletoe, the East direction, where the sun rises, and the summer season.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Cerchio Druidico has faced both internal and external issues. Internally, the group has attempted to create a network with other Italian druidic groups. However, that effort has not yet been successful as the various groups have been unable to agree on spiritual guidelines

Externally, Cerchio Druidico is located outside the Catholic cultural mainstream in Italy and therefore has been vulnerable to being labelled a “cult” (Wallis 1976). Although members are in fact well integrated into Italian society, they sometimes conceal group membership to avoid a negative label. The group is seeking to counter negative attribution by joining in the “Article 8 Project.” This project is supported by the Unione delle Comunità Neopagane (UCN), a coalition of associations, groups and individual pagans (Unione delle Comunità Neopagane website n.d.). The goal of UCN is the recognition of a neopagan religion by the Italian government or, alternatively, the recognition of different individual neopagan groups. Government recognition would be a significant step in gaining public acceptance.

IMAGES

Image #1: Luigi “Ossian” D’Ambrosio.
Image #2: A Cherchio Druidico ritual gathering.
Image #3: The Cherchio Druidico logo.

REFERENCES

AnticaQuercia. n.d. Antica Quercia website. Accessed from http://www.anticaquercia.com on 10 June 2018.

Cerchio Druidico Italiano. 2016. Il Druidismo Moderno del Cerchio Drudico Italiano: Testo Introduttivo.

Cerchio Druidico Italiano. 2012. Cerchio Druidico Italiano website. Accessed from http://www.cerchiodruidico.it on 10 June 2018.

D’Ambrosio, Ossian. 2013. La via delle querce. Introduzione al druidismo moderno, Psiche 2.

Harvey, Graham. 2016. “Paganism.” Pp. 345-67 in Religions in the Modern World, edited by Linda Woodhead, Christopher Partridge and  Hiroko Kawanami, London: Routledge.

Harvey, Graham. 1997. Listening People, Speaking Earth, Contemporary Paganism, New York: New York University Press.

Hutton, Ronald. 2008. Modern Pagan Festival: A Study in the Nature of Tradition, Folklore 119:251-73.

Wallis, Roy. 1977. The Road to Total Freedom. A Sociological analysis of Scientology, New York: Columbia University Press.

Unione delle Comunità Neopagane website. n.d. Accessed from http://www.neopaganesimo.it/ on 20 March 2019.

SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES
Harvey, Graham. 2011. Contemporary Paganism: Religions of the Earth from Druids and Witches to Heathens and Ecofeminists, Second Edition. New York: New York University Press.

Post Date:
12 November 2019

JOAQUIM SILVA VILELA TIMELINE

1950 (April 20):  Joaquim Silva Vilela was born in Pocrane in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

1960:  Vilela moved to the federal district surrounding Brasília with his family, the year of the new capital city’s inauguration.

1977:  Vilela participated in his first juried artist salon. The following year (1978) he received a prize in the 1º Salão de Artes Plásticas das Cidades Satélites.

1977 or 1978:  Vilela visited the Valley of the Dawn for the first time.

1990s:  Vilela abandoned painting and began producing spirit portraits on his computer using Photoshop.

BIOGRAPHY

Joaquim Vilela (b. 1950) is a self-taught painter and illustrator responsible for much of the iconography of the Valley of the Dawn (Vale do Amanhecer), one of Brazil’s largest alternative religions. [Image at right] Founded in the early 1960s by an itinerant truck driver and clairvoyant affectionately referred to as Aunt Neiva (1925-1985), the Valley of the Dawn has affiliated temples in every Brazilian state as well as Portugal, England, the United States and other international locales. Its headquarters, the Mother Temple, is located in the town of Planaltina in the federal district outside the Brazilian capital of Brasília. Vilela’s artwork is an integral part of the movement, whose Space Age cosmology synthesizes elements drawn from Christianity, Spiritism, and Afro-Brazilian religions, as well as Theosophy and other esoteric traditions.

According to Valley doctrine, all human beings are inherently mediums and Vilela asserts that his particular faculty of mediumship allows him to visualize spiritual dimensions far beyond the physical world. This process is central to his artistic production. “The artist is a visionary, an intermediary,” he said in an interview, “registering on the physical plane that which he brings from the spiritual” (Hayes 2019). The imagery that Vilela has produced over the years has influenced profoundly how Valley members imagine an alternative universe to which they orient not only their ritual practices but their lives. In making otherwise invisible spiritual realities visible, Joaquim Vilela’s work brings the Valley’s imaginary world and its complex theology to life for adherents. His renderings of the highly evolved spirit mentors central to the Valley of the Dawn’s are prominently displayed in public and private settings and are a focal point for individual prayer and petitions for spiritual intercession. [Image at right]

Vilela was born in 1950, one of nine children in a devoutly evangelical Christian family in Pocrane, a small town in the interior state of Minas Gerais. From an early age he displayed an aptitude for art and wrote and illustrated his own comic books inspired by his love of science-fiction adventure tales. He was captivated especially by the futuristic technology depicted in Flash Gordon comic strips and considers its creator Alex Raymond a visionary who foresaw things that would only be invented generations later. Vilela’s early artwork often featured fantastic creatures, beings glimpsed in dreams or conjured by the restless mind of a child obsessed with stories of superheroes and interstellar space travel. Even as a small boy Vilela knew that his fantasy world was better kept private since such fanciful creations had no place within the rigidly conservative faith of his parents, for whom there was only God and the devil.

Although it was only later that he fully understood this, Vilela reported that his art “always had a spiritual influence” (Hayes 2019). Images of “inferior beings, suffering spirits, other dimensions and planes of existence” frequently appeared in his early works. Vilela attributes this to a precocious mediumship, which manifested as “extremely strange and terrifying visions.” These experiences were distressing in and of themselves, but even more so because he felt that he could not tell his parents: “I suffered greatly because I was alone and I couldn’t talk about it with anyone because my parents’ religious beliefs did not permit them to even speak of such a thing. Because if I said anything I was excommunicated.” He was particularly afraid of angering his father, who “would give me beating and say that I was inventing things” (Hayes 2019). Drawing and painting offered the young Vilela a way to objectify and assimilate these experiences.

In 1960, Vilela’s family moved to the new federal district where the Brazilian government was constructing the new capital city of Brasília. Like thousands of other Brazilians, they were inspired by President Juscelino Kubitschek’s vision for a new, modern Brazil. And, like many of these new migrants, the family settled in one of the nondescript satellite cities ringing the capital.

As a young man Vilela got a job at a local print shop and practiced his own art on the side. He says that when a customer offered him a lot of money for one of his paintings, he was emboldened to quit the print shop in order to pursue his dream of being an artist. He vowed to never work again for someone else’s gain, although it would be some time before he was able to fully realize that goal. In 1977, Vilela began to enter his work in local juried artist exhibitions and won multiple prizes over the years.

Around the same time that he participated in his first exhibition, Vilela was approached by a friend about doing some illustrations for Aunt Neiva, a well-known spirit healer in the area. Like many others at that time, he had an unfavorable impression of the Valley. “We thought it was just a pack of crazies,” he explained, “that whole thing about the spirits was seen very negatively.” But he needed the money so he agreed to meet Aunt Neiva.

And it was very interesting because she said ‘do you think you can paint these entities for me?’ And I said ‘yes I can.’ I had no idea what she was talking about at that time. But I said, ‘sure, I can do it.’ I hoped I could do it. Because I’ve never shied away from a challenge, I like a challenge. So then she told me to prepare a large canvas, two meters long by one meter wide, because I needed to paint the spiritual planes. And I had absolutely no notion of what she was talking about, I had never heard of the spiritual planes. But I told her that I could paint them. I prepared the canvas and brought it with me and we started the painting. Seventeen days later the painting, which she named ‘Os Mundinhos’ [the Beloved Worlds], was finished” (Hayes 2019). [Image at right]

She called it Os Mundinhos because the painting encapsulates all of the fundamentals of our Doctrine,” Vilela explained. “You have all of the dimensions of existence, the spiritual planes, the origins of everything represented in the painting. It is remarkable. And I was able to paint this painting in seventeen days. When I finished it she was very excited and called everyone over to see it and told them ‘finally, the person whom Father White Arrow [Aunt Neiva’s spirit guide] has promised me for 2,000 years has arrived.’ It was me. She had been waiting for 2,000 years for me to help her complete her work. (Hayes 2019).

It was Aunt Neiva’s great dream to have this painting,” Vilela affirmed. “Because it’s one thing for her to say to someone, ‘look, the spiritual world is like this or like that.’ It’s another thing for her to show them. Because by experiencing something visually the human being can understand with much more facility, a person can enter into the image and travel there directly in their mind. (Hayes 2019).

Os Mundinhos was the beginning of a synergistic collaboration between the Vilela and Aunt Neiva that lasted until the latter’s death in 1985.

As the official illustrator of the Doctrine, Vilela worked to transform Aunt Neiva’s on-going spiritual visions into a body of religious artwork that today comprises hundreds of works in various formats and media. Most of the iconographic representation in the Mother Temple and its surroundings are by Vilela’s hand and include paintings of  highly evolved mentor spirits, as well as large (up to nine-meter high), two-dimensional images of figures important within the movement like Jesus Christ and Yemanjá, the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea. [Image at right] Vilela’s illustrations also adorn doctrinal literature and badges worn on the uniforms worn by members working in the temple. Vilela reproduces and sells his artwork in the form of stickers, post cards, prints, and t-shirts, which can be found in homes, hotels, restaurants, and public places throughout the small town that encircles the Mother Temple.

Since Aunt Neiva’s death, Vilela’s artistic production mostly has been devoted to creating commissioned portraits of Valley members’ individual spirit guides, using a form of mediumship he calls psycho-pictography. “Psycho-pictography is a grand fusion of psychic structure, or mediumship ability, with the knowledge of drawing,” he explained. “You have to have the technical ability to transcribe what you are visualizing and you have to have equilibrium so that you don’t lose yourself in the process of registering it.” The process begins when a client tells Vilela the name of their spirit mentor. “Once I have the entity’s name,” he explained, “I become a psychic antenna,” able to open a channel into otherwise invisible realities beyond the physical plane (Hayes 2019). [Image at right]

According to the Doctrine, innumerable “entities of light” work with Valley members as spiritual guides and mentors. Together they form the Indian Space Current, a collective of beings who are so evolutionarily ahead of humans that they have advanced beyond the material plane and exist as pure energy or spirit. “They inhabit dimensions that we cannot even fathom,” Vilela said. “They are voyagers from the stars, creatures who come from another intergalactic system” (Hayes 2015). Because they exist outside of the physical realities of the terrestrial world, these cosmic beings must take on a particular “roupagem,” or material form, in order to interact with humans. These material forms are the subject of Vilela’s portraits. Vilela sees this work as a vital part of his mission and keeps his prices affordable so that his spirit portraits are accessible to all Valley members.

For many years his preferred medium was oil, but in the late 1990s Vilela abandoned oil painting all together and embraced digital technology, developing ways of using Photoshop to create his portraits. The computer, according to Vilela, gives him “the opportunity to express myself through the utilization of an absolutely innovative and futuristic technology, which offers me tools like: paintbrushes, rulers, masks, erasers, line removers, airbrushes, sixty-two million colors of light, along with textures and much more” (Vilela 2002). Vilela initially encountered resistance among some Valley members, who felt that the digital portraits tended to look alike and suspected that the artist was using a computer program to create them. He scoffs at this notion. “It’s a lack of knowledge, including of the technique, which is a whole thing by itself. You have to know the technique….The machine offers you all of the basic elements to work, but it’s not alive, it doesn’t have a soul, it doesn’t have the faculty of mediumship to materialize an entity on the screen” (Hayes 2019). [Image at right]

Since going digital, all of Vilela’s work is created using Photoshop on a desktop computer and printed at his studio steps away from the Mother Temple. There he does a brisk business selling imagery in various formats as well as his commissioned portraits. [Image at right]  Also for sale are numerous books that Vilela has authored on spiritual and other topics.

Although the computer was “an amazing advance” for Vilela’s artwork, he is now thinking about the next step: “I dream of the time that I will have holography in my hands, working with holography. So I am thinking in 3-D: the idea that you can create an image that can be projected as an electro-magnetic field. Can you imagine arriving at a temple and encountering an image that is three meters in height, made of light, color or energy? Projected as an electro-magnetic field? It will be an enormous advance and I believe that it will be a new era for us….Do you see what I am saying? Suddenly I can create a holographic image and, who knows, maybe even provide a portal, a concrete manifestation of an entity. Which is amazing…today this is fictional for us but it is very important for our evolution.” He concluded: “I believe that I’ve always been a little ahead of my time and I still have a lot to explore” (Hayes 2019).

Vilela’s view of reality, while affirming Valley doctrine, also goes beyond it in certain ways. He has explored his convictions about energy and the extraterrestrial dimensions of existence in a series of self-published books with titles like Spirituality: The Riddle that Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience Can’t Unravel (Espiritualidade: O Enigma que a Psicanálise e a Neurociência não Conseguem Decifrar) (Vilela 2012) and From the First Atom to Eternity (Do Primeiro Átomo à Eternidade) (Vilela, n.d.). He illustrated important events and figures in Brazilian history in a book of digital artworks called Brasil: 502 Anos de Vida, Formas e Cores (Vilela 2002).

With their saturated colors, simple lines, static poses, and frontal perspective, Vilela’s images recall traditions of naïve or folk art and express a style more influenced by science fiction and superheroes than movements in mainstream or contemporary art. [Image at right] Like the Valley of the Dawn itself, Vilela’s work draws freely from esoteric and mass-media sources, mixing elements from Theosophy, Spiritualism and various other religions present in Brazil with ideas and images prevalent in adventure fiction, popular Spiritualist literature, comic books, and television serials. The end result is a kaleidoscopic, yet cohesive universe that blends a contemporary discourse centred on science and technology with an esoteric metaphysics.

IMAGES**
** Clickable enlargements are available for all of the images in this profile.

Image #1: Joaquim Vilela. Copyright Márcia Alves.
Image #2: Quadro. Copyright Márcia Alves.
Image #3: Os Mundinhos. Courtesy of Joaquim Vilela.
Image #4: Yemanjá. Copyright Márcia Alves.
Image #5: João Nunes. Copyright Márcia Alves.
Image #6: Vilela at Work. Copyright Márcia Alves.
Image #7: Loja. Copyright Kelly E. Hayes.
Image #8: Guides. Copyright Márcia Alves.

REFERENCES 

Hayes, Kelly E. 2015. Interview with Joaquim Vilela, July 15. Vale do Amanhecer, Brazil.

Hayes, Kelly E. 2019. “I am a Psychic Antenna: The Art of Joaquim Vilela.” Black Mirror, Elsewhere 2:144-77.

Vilela, Joaquim. n.d. Do Primeiro Átomo à Eternidade. Brasília: Self-published.

Vilela, Joaquim. 2002. Brasil: 502 Anos de Vida, Formas e Cores. Brasília: Self-published.

Vilela, Joaquim. 2012. Espiritualidade: O Enigma que a Psicanálise e a Neurociência não Conseguem Decifrar. Brasília: Self-published.

Post Date:
4 November 2019

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN TIMELINE

1098:  Hildegard of Bingen was born at Bermersheim, 45 km south of Mainz, Germany.

1106 (?):  At the age of eight, Hildegard was put in the care of Jutta of Sponheim, a pious noblewoman.

1112 (November 1):  With Jutta, Hildegard entered an enclosure belonging to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, 60 km southwest of Mainz, Germany. At an unknown date, Hildegard took formal vows to become a nun.

1136:  Jutta died, and Hildegard was appointed leader of the women’s convent at Disibodenberg. The convent was part of a double monastery, housing both men and women in separate quarters, under the direction of Abbot Burchard.

1141:  Having undergone a major mystical experience, and encouraged by the monastery schoolmaster Volmar, Hildegard began writing her first book, Scivias, in which she revealed the visions she had received since childhood.

1147–1148:  At the Synod of Trier, Hildegard presented Scivias for papal approval with support from the Disibodenberg Abbot Kuno.

1150:  Hildegard established a women’s monastery at Rupertsberg in Bingen, 29 km west of Mainz, Germany. She and eighteen nuns moved to the new location. Abbot Kuno refused to transfer the nuns’ dowries from the convent at Disibodenberg to the new convent at Rupertsberg .

1152:  The archbishop of Mainz consecrated the main altar of the church at the Rupertsberg convent.

1155:  Kuno, Abbot of Disibodenberg, died after agreeing to provide the nuns at Rupertsberg what was owed them, in a deal brokered by Hildegard. His successor, however, repudiated the agreement.

1158:  Arnold, Archbishop of Mainz, granted a charter to secure the nuns’ property from Disibodenberg, and arranged for pastoral and priestly visits to the community of women in the Rupertsberg convent.

1165:  Due to the growth of the Rupertsberg convent, Hildegard founded another monastery for women in Eibingen, near Bingen, and became the abbess of two women’s monasteries.

1179 (September 17):  Hildegard died at Rupertsberg.

1226:  Petition for her canonization was begun by Hildegard’s followers.

1227 (January 27):  Pope Gregory IX began the official canonization process for Hildegard.

2012 (May 10):  Pope Benedict XVI canonized Hildegard of Bingen, and declared her to be a “Doctor of the Church,” one of only four Catholic women so designated.

BIOGRAPHY

Hildegard of Bingen was born in the diocese of Mainz in the Rhineland of Germany. The oldest record, from Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, gives Böckelheim as her birthplace, while scholars tend to prefer Bermersheim (Esser 2015). The youngest of seven children, Hildegard began having mystical experiences at an early age. Her wealthy and noble parents, Hildebert and Mechtilde, were faithful Christians, and supported her piety. They sent their devout young daughter, aged eight, to live under the care of a female hermit named Jutta of Disibodenberg (1092–1136), the daughter of Count Stephan of Sponheim. Only six years older than Hildegard, Jutta was an anchoress who lived in an enclosure next to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg. Here, Hildegard had a chance to study religion, receiving basic knowledge about Christianity. Under Jutta’s guidance, she learned how to read and write in Latin and how to interpret Scripture, especially the Psalms (on Hildegard’s literacy, see Bynum 1990:5). Although her prose required corrections and elaborations, she was one of the few medieval women who could write (Newman 1987:22–25). As her fame grew, Hildegard of Bingen increasingly came into contact with scholars who could teach her, as she reported in her books and letters, although she frequently called herself “uneducated” in her writings, claiming that her knowledge came from God. “Thus the things I write are those that I see and hear in my vision, with no words of my own added. And these are expressed in unpolished Latin, for that is the way I hear them in my vision, since I am not taught in the vision to write the way philosophers do” (Letter to the Monk Guibert 103r, in Hildegard 1998:23).

Alongside her formal education, Hildegard stated that she was continuously having visions and receiving messages from God. She claimed to have started experiencing visions at the age of five, and even maintained that God had given her a vision before she was born, while she was in her mother’s womb. Sometime between 1112 and 1115 the teenager made formal vows to pursue the virginal life in accordance with the Rule of Saint Benedict. Nevertheless, Hildegard kept her visions secret until she went through a major mystical experience in 1141, which led to her conviction that she was God’s messenger as she claimed in the “Declaration” of the Scivias (Hildegard 1990:59–61). She described the vision:

Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch. And immediately I knew the meaning of the exposition of the Scriptures, namely the Psalter, the Gospel and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and the New Testaments, though I did not have the interpretation of the words of their texts or the division of the syllables or the knowledge of cases or tences (“Declaration” in Scivias, 1990:59).

Finally, Hildegard disclosed her holy communications with God to Jutta. After hearing that her protégé was receiving visions, Jutta introduced Hildegard to a monk, Volmar of Disibodenberg (d. 1173), who became her teacher, spiritual guide, and scribe until his death in 1173. [Image at right]

After Jutta’s death in 1136, Hildegard succeeded her as a magistra (spiritual teacher) and as the abbess of the convent at Disibodenberg. At that time double monasteries existed, which maintained separate quarters for men and women under the same roof. Disbodenberg was one such religious house. As the abbess overseeing her female charges, Hildegard moved the convent to Rupertsberg in 1150, seeking more independence from the male community in her administration and spiritual leadership. When the abbot of Disibodenberg opposed Hildegard’s plans for a separate convent, she pursued the request anyway, saying that it was God’s command. She then fell ill, and insisted that her sickness had religious significance since it was caused by “male priests’ and leaders’” disobedience to God’s will (Newman 1987:27–29). Eventually the abbot had to withdraw his objection and accept Hildegard’s decision.

After the convent was successfully relocated to Rupertsberg, Hildegard established the rules and secured financial resources. She adapted the architectural space and liturgical elements to benefit her leadership and her nuns’ autonomy in religious life. This granted more independence than sharing the same place with male monks, which resulted in being ruled by male authorities. In this new monastery, Hildegard successfully ran the women’s religious community by establishing monastic disciplines as well as financial security with her teaching, preaching, and writing on God’s words. Therefore, her relocation of the women’s monastery was “for the sake of the salvation of our souls and our concern for the strict observance of the Rule” (Letter to the Congregation of Nuns 195r, in Hildegard 1994:170).

Furthermore, Hildegard wished to find a place where her nuns could practice devotion with proper rules and liturgies. She wanted the nuns to have their independence in a new monastery so they could better observe the Benedictine Rule (Petty 2014:140). Hildegard composed songs for liturgies and developed dramas, probably as a way of inviting, and even encouraging, the nuns to share her transcendent experiences by acting in her mystical plays (Newman 1990:13).

This was just one of the many ways in which Hildegard was able to use her spiritual experiences of pain and her visions from God. Other instances in which she utilized mystical insights were when she raised her voice against church authorities (including the pope, secular leaders, and the German emperor) when she felt that their claims went against God’s wishes (Flanagan 1998:6). She believed that her frequent sickness had given her a “propensity for visions,” and so took her pain for a blessing (Newman 1990:11–12).

Despite her illnesses, Hildegard enjoyed a long and active life until she died at the age of eighty-one. When she was about sixty years-old, she even undertook a preaching tour near the Main River, the largest tributary into the Rhine. Hildegard of Bingen died on September 17, 1179, and she was first buried in the graveyard of the Disbodenberg convent. In 1642, her remains were moved and buried in the Eibingen parish church. Despite her popularity and authority, she was not canonized until 2012, although she had already begun to be treated like a saint in her own lifetime.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Hildegard of Bingen believed she received direct interpretations and hidden knowledge of scripture from God. Her major trilogy of religious knowledge, which she believed originated from God, included: the Scivias (Knowing the Ways of God, 1141–1151) and the Liber vitae meritorum (Book of Life’s Merits, 1158–1163). In the Liber vitae meritorum, Hildegard introduced thirty-five pairs of the virtues and vices of human beings, ending with a chapter on purgatory and hell. People were to be judged by how they behaved. The last volume of the trilogy was the Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works, 1163–1173/74). [Image at right] In this work, Hildegard presented herself as a prophet, offering ten visions in three parts. This final volume contains her understanding of cosmology, rooted in her treatment of the close relationships between the worldly elements, human bodies, human souls, and God’s intentions. In analyzing them, Hildegard argued that everything was created by God’s will with proper reason. Even when people make mistakes and commit sins, their nature knows what is right and wrong, and God’s will has the power to bring people back to goodness. These books all present Hildegard’s optimistic views on the world and human beings.

The Scivias is considered Hildegard’s most important book, which shows her theology and visions. In it she revealed her conviction that she was God’s messenger: “The person [Hildegard] whom I [God] have chosen and whom I have miraculously stricken as I willed, I have placed among great wonders, beyond the measure of the ancient people who say in Me many secrets” (Hildegard 1990:59–61). Although she claimed that she had been receiving visions and having mystical experiences from before her birth, it was in 1141 that she had a life-changing mystical event. In this vision, God called Hildegard his messenger and ordered her to write down the holy secrets he revealed to her. It took ten years for her to finish this book with the help of Volmar, the school master at Disibodenberg, and later her friend and companion Richardis von Stade (d. 1152). Volmar and the Cistercian mystic Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) helped Hildegard to obtain an approval and blessing from Pope Eugenius III (p. 1145–1153) to continue her writing. Scivias is the product of her transformative vision that made Hildegard identify herself as a speaker of God.

The Scivias consists of a sequence of Hildegard’s visions and their interpretations, which are often voiced as if God were speaking. Addressed to a clerical and monastic audience, the Scivias consists of three books in which Hildegard’s visionary witness is accompanied by God’s explanatory voice. Each chapter is arranged to begin with a description of what Hildegard saw in her vision, followed by the exegetical explanation of it that she reported she had received directly from God. The first book discusses God’s creation of the world; the second book the redemption of the world through Christ with sacraments such as baptism and the Eucharist; and the third the “sanctification” of the world, by which she meant how God’s dispensation will be fulfilled through history and morality. Together, these three books can be seen as representing the past, present, and future of God’s works, and the role of the church in them, reminding readers of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Each book contains between six and thirteen visions, and each vision starts with Hildegard’s description of what she saw or heard from heaven. First, Hildegard described each part of her vision in detail. Then, speaking in God’s voice, she drew out the details of the vision with frequent references to Scripture, morality, the priesthood, humanity, and various other topics. She often alternated between her own voice and that of God, which sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish whether Hildegard or God is speaking at any given moment.

An analysis of Hildegard’s exegesis, visions, letters, and other writing reveals a pro-female (though not proto-feminist) anthropology, ecclesiology, and biology. An optimistic and even up-beat theology emerges in her thought. For example, when Hildegard analyzed the fall of Adam and Eve in her medical book Causae et curae (Causes and Cures, an abbreviation of Liber compositae medicinae aegritudinum causis, signis atque curis, 1150s?), she maintained that human beings did not lose God’s power and knowledge (Causae et curae Lib. II, in Hildegard 2008). Human beings retained this sacred knowing, which eventually will enable women and men to return to a pristine state to be saved by God. Hildegard agreed with many other medieval theologians that the body of the first human beings, Eve and Adam, became degraded and began to require reproduction as a result of original sin and losing eternal life (Causae et curae Lib. II, Hildegard 2008). However, Hildegard saw that God’s power, which created Adam, still remains in the bodies of women and is at work when they give birth to babies. In this way, even after human beings sinned against God, they still could benefit from God’s creative power present in women’s bodies (she does not mention men’s bodies). At the same time, human beings have simply forgotten that they have God’s knowing in them; it will flourish again when they have salvation through the Savior.

And thus Man, having been delivered, shines in God, and God in Man; Man, having community in God, has in Heaven more radiant brightness than he had before. This would not have been so if the Son of God had not put on flesh, for if Man had remained in Paradise, the Son of God would not have suffered on the cross. But when Man was deceived by the wily serpent, God was touched by true mercy and ordained that His Only-Begotten would become incarnate in the most pure Virgin. And thus after Man’s ruin many shining virtues were lifted up in Heaven, like humility, the queen of virtues, which flowered in the virgin birth, and other virtues, which lead God’s elect to the heavenly places (Scivias 1.2.31, in Hildegard 1990:87–88).

Human beings will then be reestablished as they once were in paradise. Nothing is ever lost in people. Salvation is not something alien or extremely difficult to achieve. Even when people sin, they can come back to Ecclesia (that is, the church) to do penance, thereby cleansing sin from their bodies and souls.

In Vision Three in Book Two of the Scivias, Hildegard mystically saw Ecclesia as a woman wearing white clothes. Whereas it is very common in traditional exegesis to depict the church as a female and the church’s redemptive role as motherly, Hildegard vividly described the vivid image of Ecclesia giving birth.[Image at right]

And this I saw the image of a woman as large as a great city, with a wonderful crown on her head and arms from which a splendor hung like sleeves, shining from Heaven to earth. Her womb was pierced like a net with many openings, with a huge multitude of people running in and out. She had no legs or feet, but stood balanced on her womb in front of the altar that stands before the eyes of God, embracing it with her outstretched hands and gazing sharply with her eyes throughout all of Heaven.

And that image spreads out its splendor like a garment, saying, “I must conceive and give birth!”

Then I saw black children moving in the air near the ground like fishes in water, and they entered the womb of the image through the openings that pierced it. But she groaned, drawing them upward to her head, and they went out by her mouth, while she remained untouched. And behold, that serene light with her figure of a man in it, blazing with a glowing fire, which I had seen in my previous vision, again appeared to me, and stripped the black skin off each of them and threw it away; and it clothed each of them in a pure white garment and opened to them the serene light (Scivias II.3, in Hildegard 1990:169).

According to this vision, Ecclesia is having an inverted version of childbirth to give new life to sinful souls that enter the lower part of Ecclesia through her womb. They are cleaned in the body of Ecclesia, and then go out from the Ecclesia’s mouth as purified. In this passage, Hildegard clearly juxtaposes women’s childbirth and Ecclesia’s redemption as well as women’s reproduction and Ecclesia’s re-creation of human beings.

Hildegard’s writings show relatively more compassion to women in general than do texts by either female or male contemporaries. She presents the woman’s body as less contaminated by original sin, which is unusual in medieval theology and medicine. For example, Thomas Aquinas devalued the woman’s reproductive process so much that he argued that in the moment of Jesus’ conception, the Holy Spirit was entirely separated from the Virgin Mary’s reproductive parts and blood. In other words, the blood used in the conception of Christ never visited Mary’s lower regions. “For then the blood was brought together in the Virgin’s womb and fashioned into a child by the operation of the Holy Spirit. And so Christ’s body is said to be formed of the most chaste and purest blood of the Virgin” (Summa Theologiae IIIa. a.31 q.6: 29, in Thomas Aquinas 2006).

Hildegard appreciated women’s bodies as more purifying and more able to be purified. According to the creation narrative in Genesis 2, Adam was made from dirt whereas Eve was produced from Adam’s rib by God; therefore Hildegard concluded that Adam and male descendants are harder, more rigid, and difficult to change compared to women, both physically and psychologically. Because of this hardness in Adam, his body deteriorated so much that it became polluted, while Eve’s body began to have flows, in other words, menstruation. Hildegard further insisted that it was better that Eve, the woman, committed the first sin because humankind might have a better chance to recover her pure body and mind. If Adam had brought the sin first, his hardness would have made it difficult for his descendants to repent and return to God.

At the same time, Hildegard argued that the female body has the power to nullify the man’s deadly nature, which inevitably originated from God’s power to make Adam; women, however, could overcome men’s noxious semen and create children. In Causae et curae Hildegard explained that during intercourse and conception the woman’s foam tempers the polluted nature of semen, kindling it and converting it into an appropriate state so it can be generated as a fetus.

And her blood is stirred by the man’s love and she emits something like foam, but more bloody than white, toward the man’s semen; the foam conjoins itself to it (i.e. the semen), and strengthens it and makes it warm and bloody; for after it falls into its place and lies there, it becomes cool. And for a long time it is just like venomous foam until fire, namely heat, warms it up and until air, namely breath, dries it out, and until water, namely flow, sends pure moisture to it, and until earth, namely skin, constrains it. And thus it will be bloody—i.e. it is not entirely blood, but just mixed with a little blood. And the four humors, which a human being draws from the four elements, remain around the same semen moderately and temperately until the flesh is kind of coagulated and firmed up, so that the form of a human being can be figured in it (Causae et Curae, Lib. II in Hildegard 2008:51–52).

Hildegard thus asserted that all four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) and all four humors generated from them (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, as identified in Greek medicine) of the female body work together to generate a fetus by giving semen appropriate qualities. Again, the interesting point is that in Hildegard’s understanding the woman’s body neutralizes the poisonous character of the man’s semen, emphasizing the positive power of the woman’s body. This contrasts with the majority of folk and Christian medicine that regarded the woman’s body as fatally polluting due to blood from menstruation and childbirth.

Hildegard also emphasized the abiding potency of God present and working in women during the process of childbirth. During childbirth, the eternal power of God is awakened and stirring the mother’s body so that a baby can be born out of her body, just as Adam was produced by God.

With childbirth imminent, the vessel in which the infant had been enclosed, is split. The power of eternity, which brought forth Eve from Adam’s side, arriving soon, is present and overturns every corner of the dwelling place of the woman’s body. All the joints of the woman’s body become involved with that force and they assist it and open themselves. They hold themselves while the infant emerges, and then resume their former arrangement. While the infant emerges, his soul feels the power of eternity, and is happy (Causes and Cures, Lib. II, in Hildegard 2008:56).

These descriptions from Hildegard of Bingen’s medical and theological writings show her appreciation of the beneficial power in the woman’s body.

Of course, Hildegard was not arguing for women’s equality. She continued to believe that women were weaker than men and that women could not become priests. She kept insisting that she was nothing but an uneducated woman. She nevertheless transformed these medieval gender stereotypes into views more favorable to women. Because the woman’s body was weaker, it made it easier to be corrected and to make human salvation less difficult. Woman could not become priests, because their reproductive duties were strongly tied them but since men were not fulfilling their duties of priesthood, Hildegard had to become a messenger of God instead of men. She argued that if women have the virginal life, they could be like priests in giving people new life as a spiritual reproduction although she was still against women taking priestly office (Clark 2002:14–15). Even when Hildegard did not support women’s equality, she still suggested that the woman’s body could be represented and understood as positive, purifying, and re-creative. She expressed this in numerous spiritual and medical writings.

As we have seen, Hildegard’s Scivias presents Ecclesia’s salvific process replicated in the woman’s reproductive process. In her vision, Ecclesia, having the female body, draws the souls through her womb and gives birth to them after cleansing their sins. This power in the woman’s reproductive body is also related to Hildegard’s cosmological view that the power of giving a life (originated from God is present in every creature of God, and makes the whole universe move.

This power of making life was named viriditas by Hildegard of Bingen through her various writings. Although there is no exact equivalent word in English, Hildegard called it “greening power.” Viriditas is the capacity within plants to absorb natural elements and generate them into green leaves. She described this greening power as dominating in summer, in contrast with the dryness prevailing in winter (Book of Divine Works in Hildegard 2018:169). Viriditas could actually be present in any creation of God. For example, according to Hildegard’s Physica (Natural Science, ca. 1150), the gem emerald possesses such viriditas that it can heal people by being placed upon their bodies (Hildegard 1998:138). 

Viriditas is not only present in plants, but also in all creatures of God. Thus, Hildegard’s theology contributed to a creation-centered spirituality. If a person is full of viriditas, it means she or he judges what is right and wrong and follows the good will of God. If the person lacks viriditas, they do not follow the soul’s right discernment between good and evil. Just as a plant could bear fruits only by having this greening power, people cannot have good outcome without viriditas (Book of Divine Works in Hildegard 2018:196).

By relating viriditas to menstruation, Hildegard established herself as a kind of medieval medical expert knowledgeable about women’s health and reproduction.

The stream of a woman’s menstrual period is her life-giving vital force and her exuberant vigor. This sprouts into offspring, as a tree with its vital force [viriditas] sprouts and flowers, producing leaves and fruits. So a woman, from the vital force [viriditas] of the menstrual blood, produces flowers and leaves in the fruit of her womb (Causae et curae Liber II, in Hildegard 2008:87).

Hildegard’s concept of viriditas is not only a natural scientific idea but also a theological construct because she described it as the power given to humankind by God. God used this greening power to create the whole world. “In the beginning, all creation was verdant, / in the middle, flowers blossomed; / later, the viriditas came down” (Ordo Virtutum 481vb, in Hildegard 2007:253–54). After Adam and Eve committed the original sin, this greening power seemed to be repressed in their bodies (Marder 2019:138), but the Virgin Mary revivified viriditas by becoming viridissima virga, “the very green branch,” by herself, bringing back salvation and revitalization to human beings (“Song to the Virgin 19.1” in Symphonia, in Hildegard 1998:127). Viriditas is the vital power of greening in Hildegard’s natural science; at the same time, it is her understanding of salvation and the restoration of humanity in her theology.

Viriditas, the greening power enlivening creatures of God, expressed in her visionary writings, also appears in Hildegard’s music, revealing how important Hildegard considered this idea. The following was the responsory sung by her nuns, which originated from her book Scivias III.13.7b.

O. nobilissima viriditas Responsory for Virgins

R. noblest green viridity,
you’re rooted in the sun
and in the clear
bright calm
you shine within a wheel
no earthly excellence
can comprehend:

R. You are surrounded by
the embraces of the service,
the ministries divine.

V. As morning’s dawn you blush,
as sunny flame you burn (Responsory for Virgins).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Hildegard of Bingen encouraged women’s participation in religious services and dramas. Although her religious life was restricted to the convent, her influence extended outwards to both women and men in many ways. By composing liturgical songs and mystery plays that featured women performers, she especially encouraged women’s involvement in church liturgy. In this way, Hildegard shared what she learned from others (and God’s direct instruction to her) with the nuns and other female colleagues. For example, her play, the Ordo virtutum (Order of the Virtues), the first surviving morality play, which was written in 1151, depicts a soul’s struggle between sin and virtue and presents Hildegard’s style of exegesis.

At the same time, Hildegard used homilies to deliver her understanding of scripture to the women in her care as abbess. Using these means, and supported by her theological knowledge and experience as a woman, Hildegard created gateways for religious women’s more active participation in liturgy. In particular, her music and plays were more accessible to her nuns once she moved her abbey to Rupertsberg and separated from the double monastery at Disibodenberg.

Although Hildegard of Bingen did not think of herself as a composer, she composed seventy-seven songs, mainly for practical use by the nuns in her convent. Hildegard treated music and singing as an essential part of the monastic life following the rule of Saint Benedict. Many of her songs were antiphons, accompanying the psalm reading or liturgies. Others are responsory, sequences, and hymns, which could be used for various liturgies. Although her music is highly religious, it seems that Hildegard must have been exposed to non-religious musical components as she mentioned “a lyre” in the Liber vitae meritorum (White 1998:14).

Hildegard’s music concretely conveys her theological views. In fact, her visions were mostly sung to musical accompaniment. She frequently emphasized what she saw and heard. Often, Hildegard reported that she heard music in her visions, demonstrating the significance of the musical component in her religious life. In the last vision in the Scivias, Hildegard says, “Then I saw the lucent sky, in which I heard different kinds of music, marvelously embodying all the meanings I had heard before” (Scivias, in Hildegard 1990:525). Then, she wrote down nine songs recording what she claimed to have heard in her visions. Furthermore, they embodied her mystical experiences, providing meaning through music. In other words, music was the ultimate medium of her visions.

LEADERSHIP

Hildegard of Bingen was an unusual woman in that she was a strong and able leader who enjoyed fame in her own lifetime. She not only supervised nuns in two convents, but she also influenced male authorities. Living in a time when women were forbidden to teach or preach, Hildegard was able to use holy visions and spiritual illness as sources of spiritual and secular influence. She corresponded with many people, men as well as women, to deliver her message. At the same time, Hildegard cared for her charges through her teaching, writing, and administration.

Hildegard might have been considered a threat to male authorities in the church due to her direct visions from God; she certainly made broad claims to authority as God’s messenger. In fact, she explicitly criticized male authorities by saying that these men with power did not do what God asked them to do; and that was why she called her contemporary time an “effeminate age” (Newman 1985:174). When men were not accomplishing their duties, in her opinion, it was time for women to do the job. Thus, Hildegard claimed to be the proper messenger of God since men were not fulfilling God’s orders; she advocated for her works of preaching and teaching, which were strongly prohibited by the church for women (Newman 1985:175).

Hildegard’s theology and belief in her God-given visionary authority challenged the medieval view that women, as the weaker sex, were susceptible to evil and the devil (Caciola, 2015:27–28).

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Like other medieval female saints, Hildegard faced a number of issues both in the Catholic Church and in secular society. Even after she was publicly accepted as a God’s messenger by Pope Eugenius III when he approved her Scivias in 1148, she was sometimes involved with theological or political conflicts with other theologians or the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa (1122–1190). For example, Hildegard was not afraid to rebuke Frederick Barbarossa regarding the German papal schism although he was the imperial protector of her Rupertsberg monastery. She called him an infant and a madman, threatening him with God’s voices although he kept his promise to protect her monastery (Newman 1987:13).

Hildegard faced serious objections from the monks of Disibodenberg when she wanted to move the monastery for women. Although Abbott Kuno tried to interfere with her plan by refusing to transfer the nuns’ dowries, she persisted, declaring that her intention was God’s intention, and insisting that her physical illness was caused by the monks’ hard hearts as a punishment of God until they yielded and changed their opinion (Newman 1985:175). Hildegard was not afraid to hold firm to her opinion in the face of church authorities’ opposition or displeasure, because she was convinced that she was a vessel to deliver God’s words. Hildegard and her women’s monastery at Rupertsberg even received an interdict (that is, a prohibition on participating in church rites) from prelates in Mainz because the nuns did not obey an order from church officials in the Mainz diocese, although it was quickly removed. This case shows that Hildegard of Bingen was not afraid to raise her voice against male church authorities in the Middle Ages when women were subjected to men and mystics were also subjected to ecclesiastical censure. She strongly pursued her goals while holding to her conviction that she was doing the right thing.

These struggles show that Hildegard of Bingen asserted what she believed was her divinely given spiritual authority to meet challenges to her actions on the part of male authorities in political and religious conflicts.

SIGNIFICANCE TO THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN RELIGIONS

Hildegard of Bingen’s life and productivity have been extensively studied and researched. Like other women of her era, she began to attract scholarly attention due to the emergence of feminist studies in history in the twentieth century. Afterwards, her works on theology as well as secular topics were translated and analyzed in many books and articles. To gain a complete understanding of this medieval mystic, it would be necessary to read her works in a holistic way that encompasses her religious, physiological, cosmological, medical, astronomical, and musical theories.

Although Hildegard of Bingen was widely welcomed by modern feminist scholars as a woman who was intelligent and powerful in the Middle Ages, it is also true that she accepted and perpetuated the gender stereotypes of her peers. Although she stated that women’s bodies purified men’s semen and contained God’s power in childbirth, in her medical and theological writings, she insisted that women were weaker than men and they were subject to men. She also argued that women should not become priests, although she believed that some of women’s roles were similar to priestly duties. While she said that women should not approach an altar, she also wrote that women had a more direct relation to the Holy Spirit because they could have Jesus as their husband. Is Hildegard of Bingen’s theology woman-repressing or woman-empowering? It shows how important it is for modern readers to understand her theology within its medieval context.

Hildegard was not the only case in which a woman was called “teacher” in the Middle Ages, but she was exceptionally famous and respected for her spiritual knowledge during her lifetime. She was unusual among medieval religious women, because she could read and write by herself, even if she still needed to accept male guidance. Having joined her mentor Jutta in the religious life during her childhood, Hildegard began her studies quite early. Even when she did not mention other theologians by name in her books, her writings show that she must have been trained in theology by Jutta, by Volmar, and through her independent study of books in the monastery library. Moreover, her correspondence with contemporary theologians and male elites indicates that she was sufficiently educated to make effective theological arguments. Equipped with physical and visionary forms of religious experience, and an education, Hildegard was able to live up to her renowned status, which she had created by presenting herself as a prophet with an authoritative voice in her spiritual writings, and by comparing herself to the biblical prophets such as Moses and John the Evangelist (Newman 1999:19–24). Her own followers compared her to female prophets in the Bible, such as Deborah, Huldah, Hannah the mother of Samuel, and Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist (Letter to Hildegard 75, Newman 1987:27).

The fact that Hildegard wrote about medicine and the natural sciences, as well as described her religious visions and spiritual understanding, also makes her different from many women of her time. In her books, she brought the spiritual knowledge that she claimed to have received from God to bear on secular subjects in addition to religious ones. She wrote on medicine, mineralogy, musicology, and natural science, among other topics. For her, these “secular” disciplines could belong to theology because they explained God’s order in a micro-macro cosmology. Her vivid illustrations of the human as the micro version of the macro cosmos penetrate all her writings.

Her writings assert that she was a legitimate messenger of God, even though a woman. Granted, she was not totally free from the patriarchal culture of the Catholic Church and medicine; but using femininity to signify weakness (Newman 1987:88), as a teacher, she eventually turned her weaker sex into an advantage. When women were not allowed to preach or to teach theology, Hildegard articulated a justification appropriate for her time about why she could teach: men abandoned their privileged duty to teach God’s words to people and they had lost viriditas, so now women should become “manly” and take over their job (Liber divinorum operum 3.8.5, in Hildegard 2018:430–31). In her medical writings, Hildegard argued that women’s weaker, softer body, which lacked semen, kept women safe from the poisonous degradation of semen, whereas Adam, with the stronger body, had semen, which was degrading and polluting (Cause et curae, Hildegard 2009:140). This view is quite different from that of her contemporaries, who claimed that women should be subjected to men in the Church because of their weaker bodies, their lack of semen, and their monthly pollution through menstruation. Hildegard made women’s weaknesses into strengths, and wrote that women were more flexible because they did not have polluted semen and thus were not stubborn in either mind or body. She claimed to receive all religious and secular knowledge from God, pointing out that she was such a simple and unlearnt woman that she could not possibly have made up or fabricated these ideas on her own (Scivias “Declaration,” Hildegard 1990:56).

Relying, then, on the legitimacy of divinely given visions, Hildegard of Bingen advocated for women in the monasteries, and developed a female-centered science to explain gender differences. Her concept of viriditas and creation-centered spirituality has greatly influenced both Christian ecofeminists and other feminist theologians. For example, Mary Judith Ress appreciated Hildegard’s viriditas as a bio-spirituality to remind readers that all creations are closely linked to God in this greening power (2008:385). Although Hildegard’s cosmology can be seen as anthropocentric (that human beings represent the center of God’s creation) her micro/macro-cosmism that emphasizes human beings’ links and responsibilities to all of God’s creations is appreciated by feminist theologians (Maskulak 2010:46–47). Along with Hildegard’s concept of viriditas, Jane Duran argues that Hildegard’s ontology is also highly gynocentric. She uses very feminine conceptions, such as connectedness and relatedness, as opposed to men’s normative and distanced qualities. In doing so, she presents personified individual virtues that exist in women as well as men (Duran 2014:158–59, 165).

IMAGES

Image #1: “Frontispiece of Scivias, showing Hildegard receiving a vision, dictating to Volmar, and sketching on a wax tablet” from a miniature of Rupertsberg Codex of des Liver Scivias Facsimile, Fol. 1r.
Image #2: “Hildegard receives a vision in the presence of her secretary Volmar and her confidante Richardis.” Liber divinorum operum, sec. XIII in., ms. 1942, c.1v from Biblioteca Statale di Lucca.
Image #3: “Ecclesia, the Mother of the Faithful and Baptism.” Rupertsberg Codex of des Liber Scivias II.3, Facsimile, Fol. 51r.

REFERENCES

Aquinas, Thomas. 2006. Summa Theologiae: Volume 52, The Childhood of Christ: 3a. 31-37. Translated by Roland Potter. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1990. “Preface.” Scivias. Translation by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. 1–8. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Caciola, Nancy. 2015. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Clark, Anne. 2002. “The Priesthood of the Virgin Mary: Gender Trouble in the Twelfth Century.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18:5–24.

Duran, Jane. 2014. “Hildegard of Bingen: A Feminist Ontology.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6:155–67.

Esser, Annette. 2015. “The Life of Hildegard.” Pp. 15-66 in Die Kirchenlehrerin Hildegard von Bingen, edited by Hildegund Keul, Hyun Kyung Chung, Barbara Newman, Susan Roll, and Annette Esser. Bad Kreuznach: Scivias-Institut für Kunst und Spiritualität.

Flanagan, Sabina. 2002. Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life. New York: Routledge.

Hildegard of Bingen. 2018. The Book of Divine Works. Translated by Nathaniel M. Campbell. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 2010. Two Hagiographies. Translated by Hugh Feiss. Paris: Peeters.

Hildegard of Bingen. 2009. On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from Cause et Cure. Translated by Margret Berger. New York: Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Hildegard of Bingen. 2008. Causes and Cures. Translated by Priscilla Throop. Charlotte, VT: MedievalMS.

Hildegard of Bingen. 2007. Ordo Virtutum, ed. Peter Dronke. In H. Feiss et al. ed., Hildegardis Bingensis Opera minora: Corpus Christianorum continuation mediaevalis, ed. H. Feiss, C. Evans, B. M. Kienzle, C. Muessig, B. Newman, P. Dronke, 503–21. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishing: 503–21.

Hildegard of Bingen. 2001. Selected Writings. Translated byMark Atherton. New York: Penguin Books.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1998. Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum. Translated by Barbara Newman. New York: Cornell University Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1998. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, Volume 2. Translated by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1998. Physica. Translated by Priscilla Throop. Rochester, VT: Healing Art Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1994. The Book of the Rewards of Life. Translated by Bruce W. Hozeski. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1994. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, Volume 1. Translated by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1990. Scivias. Translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Hildegard of Bingen. 1987. Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs, edited by Matthew Fox. Santa Fe: Bear & Company.

Hildegard of Bingen. n.d. “Responsory for Virgins.” International Society of Hildegard von Vingen Studies. Accessed from http://www.hildegard-society.org/2017/04/o-nobilissima-viriditas-responsory.html on 11 October 2019.

Marder, Michael. 2019. “On the Vegetal Verge (With Saint Hildegard).” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 11:137–46.

Maskulak, Marian. 2010. “Balancing some Tensions in the Work of Hildegard of Bingen.” Magistra 16: 38–59.

Newman, Barbara. 1999. “Hildegard and Her Hagiographers.” Pp. 16-34 in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, edited by Catherine M. Mooney. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Newman, Barbara. 1990. “Introduction to Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias.” Pp. 9-54 in Scivias. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Newman, Barbara. 1987. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Newman, Barbara. 1985. “Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation.” Church History 54:163–75.

Petty, Iris R. 2014. “Hildegard’s Historical Memory: The Lives of Saint Disibod and Saint Rupert as Models of Local Salvation History.” Comitatus 45:133–48.

Ress, Mary Judith. 2008. “Remembering Who We Are: Reflections on Latin American Ecofeminist Theology.” Feminist Theology 16:383–96.

White, John D. 1998. “The Musical World of Hildegard of Bingen.” College Music Symposium 38: 6–16.

Supplementary Resources

Bowie, Fiona, and Oliver Davies, eds. 1990. Hildegard of Bingen: An Anthology. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Cadden, Joan. 1984. “It Takes All Kinds: Sexuality and Gender Differences in Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘Book of Compound Medicine.’” Traditio 40:149–74.

“Hildegard of Bingen: A Chronology of her Life and the History of her Canonization.” Abbey of Saint Hildegard. Accessed from https://www.abtei-st-hildegard.de/hildegard-of-bingen-a-chronology-of-her-life-and-the-history-of-her-canonization/ on 11 October 2019.

International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies. Accessed from http://www.hildegard-society.org on 14 October 2019.

Kienzle, Beverly Mayne. 2001. “Hildegard of Bingen’s Teaching in Her Expositiones evangeliorum and Ordo virtutum.” Pp. 72-86 in Medieval Monastic Education, edited by George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig. London: Leicester University Press.

Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, Debra L. Stoudt, and George Ferzoco, eds. 2013. A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen. Leiden: Brill.

McInerney, Maud Burnett, ed. 2014. Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays. New York: Routledge.

Newman, Barbara. 2003. “Commentary on the Johannine Prologue: Hildegard of Bingen.” Theology Today 60:16–33.

Newman, Barbara, ed. 1998. Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Newman, Barbara. 1995. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sweet, Victoria. 2006. Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine. New York: Routledge.

Post Date:
31 October 2019

MOTHER DIVINE TIMELINE

1925 (April 4):  Edna Rose Ritchings was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

1931:  Ritchings first heard of Father Divine and began a correspondence with the Peace Mission movement.

1941:  Ritchings relocated from Vancouver, British Columbia to Montreal, Canada where she worked as a stenographer in a jewelry store. She joined the local Peace Mission extension.

1941–1945:  Ritchings served in several leadership positions in the Montreal, Canada Peace Mission extension, up to and including Vice-President and President.

1946:  Ritchings moved from Canada to the world headquarters of the International Peace Mission movement, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She joined headquarters staff as a secretary to Father Divine (George Baker Jr.) and was renamed Sweet Angel.

1946 (April 29):  In a secret ceremony Sweet Angel was married to Father Divine.

1946 (August 7) : Father Divine announced his marriage to Sweet Angel, declaring that she was the reincarnation of his first wife Peninnah, and that their marriage would be chaste.

1947:  Father Divine instituted a special commemorative anniversary to celebrate his marriage to Sweet Angel, now known as Mother Divine, to be observed annually in all Peace Mission extensions.

1953:  Following Father Divine, Mother Divine moved from the Divine Lorraine Hotel in Philadelphia to the Woodmont estate in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.

1961–1965:  Mother Divine took on the primary role as officiator of rituals as well as of spokesperson for the Peace Mission in the face of the physical decline of Father Divine.

1965 (September 10):  Father Divine died, leaving the Peace Mission under the official leadership of Mother Divine.

1968:  Mother Divine built a commemorative crypt for the physical remains of Father Divine on the premises of the Woodmont estate.

1972:  Mother Divine fended off a takeover attempt on the International Peace Mission movement by Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple.

1982 (February):  Mother Divine authored the book, The Peace Mission Movement, as an authoritative summation of the movement’s history, practices and beliefs.

1985:  Due to declining Peace Mission membership, Mother Divine authorized the final sale of the movement’s major properties in rural upstate New York, collectively known as the Promised Land.

1989:  Due to declining readership, Mother Divine authorized the discontinuation of the regular publication of the International Peace Mission movement newspaper, the New Day, first published in 1936.

1996 (April):  The Peace Mission celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of Sweet Angel’s marriage to Father Divine.

2000–2006:  Due to declining Peace Mission membership, Mother Divine authorized the closure and sale of the movement’s signature hotels, the Divine Lorraine (2000) and the Divine Tracy (2006).

2008 (August 12):  Mother Divine presided over the groundbreaking celebration for the Father Divine Library and Museum on the Woodmont property.

2012–2013:  Increasingly displaying the signs of advanced age, Mother Divine retreated from public life.

2017 (March 4):  Mother Divine died at the Woodmont estate at age ninety-one. She is interred alongside her husband inside the Father Divine crypt.

2017 (October):  The Father Divine Library and Museum were inaugurated and opened to the public.

BIOGRAPHY

Edna Rose Ritchings [Image at right] was born April 4, 1925, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was the eldest of five children, three girls and two boys, born to Charles and Mabel Farr Ritchings. Mr. Ritchings was a successful local businessman who ran the Strathcona Floral Company, a nursery and flower shop (Harris 1953).

Edna Rose Ritchings’ interest in the International Peace Mission movement was singular in her family. By her own account, Edna’s fascination with the movement began very early when she overheard a group of Divinites talking about the “little Negro” who claimed to be God and was feeding thousands (Black 2013). She began a correspondence with Father Divine (or, more likely, with the numerous secretaries who handled his mail) and began subscribing to New Day, the Peace Mission’s weekly newspaper. By the age of fifteen, Edna Rose was dedicated to the high intensity religious group, embracing its messages of racial equality and universal brotherhood (Harris 1953; Weisbrot 1983; Watts 1995). She moved to Montreal, where she became involved in the Peace Mission center there, rising in the ranks to become vice-president and president of the extension. In spring 1946, Ritchings moved to the international Peace Mission headquarters in Pennsylvania.

Father Divine was the religious title and name used by George Baker, Jr. (1877–1965), the founder and the head of the movement. Peninnah (Sister Penny, then Mother Penny), who died, presumably in 1943 (Morris 1995:264), was his first wife and the first Mother Divine. “Peninnah was Divine’s rock, a trusted and stalwart follower without whom he might not have managed” (Morris 2019:209). [Image at right] She played an instrumental role in the Peace Mission’s development in the 1920s and 1930s, establishing the group’s “Promised Land” in Ulster County in upstate New York. She lived there fulltime for a while and unsuccessfully attempted to open an orphanage (Morris 2019:245). Although Mother Penny had various health problems, she continued to assist Father Divine at the weekly community dinners; her last known appearance was at a banquet in New York in 1942 (Morris 2019:261).

It was the practice in the Peace Mission to adopt a name to reflect one’s new angelic identity, since Father Divine insisted upon a sharp break between “the old life and the newness of rebirth” (Parker 1937:157): Edna Rose became Sweet Angel. The day after her move to Philadelphia, Sweet Angel and Father Divine, almost fifty years her senior, were married. Because one of the teachings of the Peace Mission was celibacy inside and outside of marriage (spiritually because one was living the angelic life, but practically because interracial marriage at that time was illegal) the marriage was kept secret. [Image at right] Thus, Peace Mission members were shocked when Father Divine presented Sweet Angel as his “spotless virgin bride” in August 1946 (Weisbrot 1995:288). He said that she had assumed the spirit of the first Mother Divine, and that their marriage would be chaste (Weisbrot 1983:215). Because Father Divine publicly shared his authority with Ritchings, investing her with his mystique, he gave her the ability to administer the Peace Mission in his absence. As a result, “Mother Divine became a nearly coequal partner in guiding the Peace Mission” (Weisbrot 1995:288).

Father and Mother Divine presided over the Peace Mission from its headquarters in the Divine Lorraine Hotel in Philadelphia from the late 1940s onwards, with Sweet Angel becoming the new face of the aging and increasingly diminishing black religion. The black press played up this novelty, and stories about the Peace Mission always displayed pictures of the second Mrs. Divine alone or alongside her elderly husband, as if to underscore her youth and vitality (“Divine Years” 1958). In 1953, the couple moved from the Divine Lorraine Hotel in Philadelphia to the newly acquired seventy-two-acre Woodmont estate in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Father Divine declared throughout their marriage that they lived in separate quarters.

The new Mother Divine’s regency in the declining Peace Mission movement portended change. [Image at right] Whereas most petitions in the movement had been made to God (that is, Father Divine) after her arrival, and with Father’s full blessing and encouragement, they were now made to God, Father and Mother Divine. Along with her elevation within the movement, her presence as the reincarnated first Mother Divine inaugurated the teaching of reincarnation in Peace Mission theology (Guinn 2017:87). The first Mother Divine (Peninnah) was believed to have died a willful death and then been reincarnated in the second Mother Divine (Edna Rose Ritchings).

In the face of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and a new militancy among African Americans, the Peace Mission saw a corresponding contraction of membership. In ill health at this time, including falling into a diabetic coma in 1960 (Weisbrot 1983:220, 223n29), Father Divine carefully crafted a bureaucracy designed to survive his death, with Mother Divine at the helm. Between 1961 and 1965, when Father Divine died on September 10, Mother Divine took on the primary roles as spokesperson for the Peace Mission (a public presence) and the officiator at Peace Mission rituals (a private presence). She continued to lead the organization as resources and membership dwindled, successfully fending off an attempt by Jim Jones (1931–1978), head of the Peoples Temple, to assume leadership in the absence of a male head in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As the Peace Mission sustained membership losses, Mother Divine raised funds through the sale of real estate and personal property. In 1985, she sold the “Promised Land” in upstate New York. This was followed by the sale of the Peace Mission’s signature hotels in Philadelphia, the Divine Lorraine in 2000 and the Divine Tracy in 2006. Meanwhile, Mother Divine continued to cultivate the persona of Father Divine, authorizing construction of an elaborate commemorative crypt for the leader in 1968, called a Shrine to Life (Watts 1995:177). [Image at right] Forty years later, she presided over the ground-breaking ceremony for the Father Divine Library and Museum, which opened seven months after her death (Melamed 2017).

Edna Rose Ritchings/Sweet Angel/Mother Divine led the International Peace Mission movement as Father Divine’s widow from 1965 until her death from natural causes at age ninety-one on March 4, 2017.

TEACHINGS/DOCTRINES

The Peace Mission faith was built on the certainty of followers in the biblical interpretations as well as in the social, economic, and spiritual ideas preached and taught by Father Divine. The Peace Mission proclaimed that there was no God in the sky, and that Father Divine was God Almighty in a human body on earth as the fulfillment of the coming of the Jewish messiah and the return of Jesus the Christ (Mother Divine 1982:44–46). Relying upon New Thought ideas, Father Divine proclaimed that heaven and hell were states of mind and that perfect happiness or “heaven” was available in the here and now, not something to achieve or go to after death. “The Essence of [Father Divine’s] message to the World,” published November 17, 1934, purports to reveal his true nature:

The coming of my body into expression was to bring to humanity the consciousness of God’s presence. . . . I made my body a target to bring to your conscious realization the presence of God on the material plane. . . . The very words that I speak unto you are Spirit and they are Life. . . . (Parker 1937:200–01).

The International Peace Mission movement proclaimed a gospel of self-help, sexual abstinence, economic independence, communal social equality, and international brotherhood that was to be lived as well as believed. Father Divine taught, and his followers accepted, that his teachings presented Christianity in practice and were based on universal principles compatible with all positive spiritual traditions. A unique element of Divine’s teachings, especially given the racial segregation that dominated American life in the 1920s and 1930s, was his emphasis on interracial love and harmony. While he emphasized black entrepreneurship as the means to self-help and survival (Lincoln and Mamiya 2004), he also promoted interracial gatherings in a communal setting, such as the weekly heavenly banquets (Watts 1995:75-76). [Image at right]

Another distinctive practice of the Peace Mission (one which flowed from Father Divine’s interpretation and implementation of Mark 12:25 and Luke 28:34–36) was the promotion of non-sexual, opposite-race and same-sex social pairings called “twins” (Mother Divine 1982:24–26). All Peace Mission members, from Father Divine on down, who lived in movement properties were paired in this way. Thus, from her time as a member of Father Divine’s secretarial staff and throughout her long tenure first as God’s wife, and then as God’s widow and Peace Mission leader, Mother Divine was paired with Miss Peaceful, “a petite African featured” woman as her twin and communal roommate (Harris 1953:257–58). The two women were to be each other’s primary social companion, friend, and confidant; their primary task was to encourage the other to always keep “Father’s teachings.” This also helped ensure that the practice of celibacy would be followed.

Peace Mission members believed that eternal life in the physical body was possible and desirable, and that heaven on earth could be achieved by individuals in community in strict adherence to Father Divine’s teachings. Whereas before 1965 the Peace Mission often proclaimed, and members expressed belief in, the physical immortality of Father Divine, after 1965 under the leadership of Mother Divine, members believed that Father Divine’s death, called “laying down the body,” was a willful and sacrificial decision made by him. While still teaching the possibility of eternal life in the physical body for perfected followers of Father Divine, Mother Divine emphasized the reincarnation of the faithful after a willful death, including the expected and anticipated reincarnation of Father Divine in a physical body.

While Edna Rose Ritchings was still a child living with her parents, the Peace Mission allied with radical political movements outside of the mainstream that were opposed to war and that expounded a belief in racial equality. For a time this included the Communist Party in the United States (Weisbrot 1983:148–52), Later on, under Mother Divine’s leadership, the Peace Mission supported reparations for descendants of enslaved persons (Father Divine 1951) and advocated for the efficacy of communal economics and living (Mother Divine 1982:23, 24, 40; Mabee 2008:155–58). In the 1990s, however, members supported the Reform Party of presidential candidate Ross Perot, a turn from radical communalism to radical individualism (Sitton 1993).

Finally, in addition to believing in the possibility of individual perfection by imitating the life of Father Divine and embodying his teachings, Peace Mission members were convinced that America could be and would be transformed into the Kingdom of God on earth, once their teachings and practices were fully implemented (Mother Divine 1982:20, 31–32, 110–11, and passim). In the meantime, the lives of faithful Peace Mission members were to present examples of the perfect life of happiness available to all.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The Peace Mission meetings of the 1940s that Edna Rose Ritchings joined were essentially gatherings of followers to extol Father Divine, his teachings, and his movement. Such assemblies, honed over two decades, consisted of opening with the singing of Peace Mission hymns as well as singing songs from popular culture that reflected aspects of Father Divine’s message (Fauset 1944:64, 65; Harris 298–306). Often the tunes of popular songs were used with lyrics composed extempore by followers, while others were entirely original compositions. These singing sessions would often provide members with ecstatic emotional release, wherein glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and other spiritual expressions were common (Watts 1995:75).

Outside of Philadelphia, the home base, the singing and emotional manifestations were usually followed by the reading of sermons by Father Divine printed in the New Day, by Peace Mission extension leaders. Talks by visiting speakers, if present, followed. Such communications, either as sermons by Father Divine or talks by local Peace Mission leaders, or visiting speakers, would often center on contemporary social, economic, and political topics as often as on esoteric, spiritual ones. Services usually concluded with member testimonials about the power of Father Divine to forecast the future, heal, and provide salvation. Such testimonials also took place in conjunction with the Peace Mission’s weekly holy communion service, which was essentially a free banquet open to all comers. “The banquet table serves as the central place both of worship and fellowship for Peace Mission disciples,” according to historian Robert Weisbrot, writing about what he observed in the 1980s.

Heaping dishes of food, of great variety and in seemingly endless succession, recall the free Sunday feasts that helped propel this movement to national fame during the Great Depression (Weisbrot 1995:285).

At first the weekly meals were held in people’s homes, which angered neighbors upset about the interracial congregation. [Image at right] But as the numbers grew, the banquets outgrew domestic spaces and moved to more institutional or congregational settings. The heavenly banquet became the primary way the Peace Mission attracted followers in the 1930s, in which thousands of individuals were fed during the Great Depression. Continuous “sittings” would be held on Saturday and Sunday to accommodate the crowds (Watts 1995:75). After Ritchings married Father Divine, the heavenly banquet acquired a new significance on their anniversary, with Father Divine designating the interracial marriage as the fulfillment of Revelation 19:7, 9, celebrating the wedding of the lamb and his bride (Weisbrot 1983:215).

As the Peace Mission became more institutionalized in the 1950s, new orders of membership were created. “Rosebuds” were younger women; “Lily-buds” were somewhat older women; and “Crusaders” were men of any age. These orders each had their own code of conduct, liturgical practice, brightly-colored uniforms (Weisbrot 1995:288).

LEADERSHIP

Edna Rose Ritchings demonstrated her leadership aspirations and abilities in the International Peace Mission movement early on, rising to the positions of vice-president and then president of the Montreal, Canada Peace Mission extension before the age of twenty-one.

In early 1945, Ritchings traveled to the world headquarters of the International Peace Mission movement in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in 1946 she returned to marry Father Divine the day after her arrival (Weisbrot 1983:214). She was quickly catapulted to a senior leadership position. Both the marriage and Ritchings’ meteoric rise in the organization caused critical external scrutiny and internal division. According to Weisbrot, however, the marriage “served a vital purpose in aiding the Peace Mission’s transition from cult to church: it provided a successor to Father Divine” (1984:215). Although this purpose was not immediately disclosed to followers, Father Divine’s declaration that Sweet Angel represented his church on earth (as the church is married spiritually to the lamb in Revelation 19:7, 9) she was invested with authority to rule in his stead.

Mother Divine used her “Divinely-given” authority throughout Father Divine’s decline in the 1950s and after his death in 1965. [Image at right] The Peace Mission faced disparagement by civil rights activists who saw the movement as out-of-date and irrelevant. Internal threats to her position arose by those who were uncomfortable with her increasing assertion of real authority while Father Divine was still alive. These internal and external challenges to her leadership continued after Father Divine’s death; they included a takeover attempt by Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, which was supported by a tiny fraction of highly placed and disaffected Divinites in the early 1970s (Guinn 2017:207–11).

By 1980, internal and external threats to her position as the paramount Peace Mission leader were resolved in her favor. Mother Divine had to manage the rapidly advancing physical decline and global contraction of the International Peace Mission movement. Now secure and uncontested in her leadership role, she was able to take controversial but pragmatic executive actions, such as selling off Father Divine’s one-of-a-kind Duesenberg “throne car.” She halted the fifty-year run of the movement’s weekly, New Day. She effectively ended the dream of the International Peace Mission movement to sustain and maintain a rural upstate New York agricultural paradise community, called “the Promised Land,” without any repercussions from staff or the remaining followers (Mabee 2008:25, 214–23). She oversaw care and management of the influx of increasingly elderly and infirm Divinites from the United States and abroad. Yet, even with radical consolidation efforts, the number of followers continued to drop precipitously. Mother Divine therefore authorized the closure and sale of the Peace Mission’s signature hotel properties in Philadelphia, the Divine Lorraine Hotel in 2000 and the Divine Tracy Hotel in 2006.

In tandem with the assertion of her executive authority, Mother Divine moved to institutionalize her understanding of Peace Mission practice and faith. Using her position as the Peace Mission’s caretaker in the physical absence, but spiritual presence, of Father Divine, she seized the Peace Mission narrative to promote a type of ideological orthodoxy (Watts 1995:167–78). This was done to distance the movement from events like the 1978 Jonestown mass murder-suicides in Guyana, and from the subjective sentiments of internal movement detractors. She also sought to counter anticult and other literature that she felt misrepresented the Peace Mission by writing her own analysis, The Peace Mission Movement, in 1982.

A special commemorative issue of New Day was issued in April 1996 in honor of the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Mother and Father Divine, and despite a few ups and downs, Mother Divine’s leadership remained unquestioned and uncontested. Looking to the future, the eighty-three-year-old Peace Mission leader presided over the groundbreaking celebration for the Father Divine Library and Museum at the Woodmont estate in 2008. Mother Divine continued to host tours of Woodmont. She also gave special talks at the Sayville, New York, property and appeared at Holy Communion services, increasingly assisted by aides and secretaries. She effectively disappeared from the public view between 2012 and 2013.

Mother Divine remained leader of the Peace Mission until her death at the Woodmont estate on March 4, 2017, at age ninety one. “Although not an innovator or social crusader as Father Divine had been in his prime, Mother Divine . . . proved an effective unifying symbol for a movement seeking to maintain organizational stability amid waning numbers” (Weisbrot 1995:289). Seven months later, the Father Divine Library and Museum were opened to the public for research and reflection.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

The primary challenge for Edna Rose Ritchings was to lead a working-class black religion in the United States as a young, white female from Canada’s urban middle class. Her task was to display and prove her solidarity as an exemplary follower of Father Divine: to be a role model for his teachings on interracial, international, universal brotherhood, and sexual abstinence.

At its practical and ontological core, the Peace Mission was essentially a black women’s movement led by a black man who was worshipped as God. As such, the Peace Mission served as a safe space wherein former rural, working-class black females, often newly urbanized, could find consistent employment, regular meals, and a guaranteed roof over their heads without submitting to societal pressures. This security freed them from expectations of marriage and child-bearing with former rural working-class black men, who were often not able to financially and/or emotionally support either them or the children that resulted from their unions.

For a white woman to head a predominantly African American group, comprised largely of black females, therefore, was a daunting task; this was true especially in the era of legalized segregation. Mother Divine had to navigate widespread external suspicion that she was either a victim of, or a willing accomplice to, a maniacal, mind-controlling black cult leader who ran an underground white sex slavery ring (Wilson 1937). Moreover, suspicions raged internally that she had used her youth and feminine charms, as well as her “whiteness,” to seduce the aging Father Divine into marriage. Ritchings’ rapid rise to become co-leader was seen as undeserved in a movement run by women who “were highly visible in the upper and middle echelons of the Peace Mission organization” (Weisbrot 1983:61). Furthermore, the interracial marriage was, in fact, illegal in some thirty states in the America of 1946.

Inimitable teachings about race and racism in the Peace Mission seemed to ameliorate, and even justify, this extraordinary situation. Father Divine rejected any notion of black and white. “There was but one race, Father Divine insisted, and that was the human race” (Weisbrot 1983:100). He objected to all racial designations, especially the word “Negro,” and refused to attend any celebrations or awards given to distinguished Negroes. But Father Divine opposed racial shame as well, encouraging his “angels” not to use skin lightening or whitening products. Moreover, “Father Divine was no more willing to accept whites as moral tutors than as aesthetic models” (Weisbrot 1983:103). Father Divine’s rejection of all racial distinctions required members not to identify each other by race.

In his opinion, race did not really exist and was a damaging artificial construct of the mind” (Watts 1995:89). To get around obvious color differences, members might use euphemisms such as “light-complected” or “dark-complected” (Weisbrot 1995:286).

Thus, the ascension of a white woman to a position of great power over African Americans could be rationalized as the ultimate goal of an explicitly color-blind movement.

A related challenge concerned the marriage between Ritchings and Father Divine. While the couple repeatedly avowed that they were chaste, apostates told a different story. Some high-level Peace Mission leaders quietly left the movement once the secret marriage became public knowledge while others, like Carol Sweet and John West Hunt, left in a vocal and well-publicized huff (Harris 1953:259–76). Sweet and Hunt were long-time white followers who alleged that they had either participated in, or covered up, Father Divine’s sexual indiscretions. They were incensed, and appeared to be jealous, that the young outsider had been catapulted over them into Father Divine’s graces. The black press was also less than sanguine about Edna Rose Ritchings as the new Mother Divine, and there is anecdotal evidence that Father Divine lost standing in the black community because of it (Harris 1953:253–56).

Other observers doubted that Edna Rose Ritchings could be an effective Peace Mission leader. One historian of the Peace Mission in the 1950s went as far as to opine that in the event of the death of Father Divine, his followers would rather opt for a mass suicide than submit to the “nothing” leadership of Mother Divine (Harris 1953:312, 319–20).

Coming into sole leadership of the declining Peace Mission in 1965 in the midst of the rising civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Mother Divine’s response was not to offer anything new or innovative. [Image at right] Instead, she reprinted and replayed Father Divine’s commentaries and sermons on social justice issues from the previous decades as the Peace Mission’s answer to the swirling changes affecting the society around it. Although this course of action was a logical way to approach the matter, it was also fraught with controversy from those who remembered and revered Father Divine’s personal dynamism and social activism of the 1930s. They found Mother Divine’s approach less than inspiring (Mabee 2008:217–18).

Adopting a dismissive approach to the question of Mother Divine’s leadership, the Reverend Jim Jones of Peoples Temple mounted a frontal assault to take over the Peace Mission and its vast assets in 1971 and 1972. Jones, a long-time Peace Mission contact, cultivated the discontent of some members inside the Peace Mission who were disgruntled under the leadership of Mother Divine. They included those who explicitly criticized her for failing to emulate Father Divine’s record as a miracle worker, faith healer, and activist. Other women asserted that they had been Father Divine’s sexual partners during his marriage to Sweet Angel, and claimed they had faced retribution from Mother Divine after her husband’s death.

In his campaign to discredit Mother Divine as leader, Jim Jones attempted to confirm the suspicion that her authority was based not on celibacy and fulfillment of scripture, as the Peace Mission claimed, but on her successful, private sexual dominance over the late Peace Mission leader. Jones, who was married to Marceline Baldwin Jones (1927–1978), declared that he had rebuffed Mother Divine while the two were alone in a private meeting during a visit to Woodmont. In an attempt to acquire personal, intimate proof of Jones’ claim to leadership of the movement, she allegedly made an overt sexual advance.

Although unsuccessful in his overall goal of becoming the leader of the International Peace Mission movement, Jones succeeded in peeling off a number of Divinites. These included a former Peace Mission extension president and a member of Mother Divine’s secretarial staff, who accepted Jones’ claim to be Father Divine reincarnated. Jones modeled Peoples Temple after the Peace Mission, demanding that members of Peoples Temple call him Father or Dad, and incorporated a number of Father Divine’s theological principles. Just as her late husband had done in 1932 (declaring “He hated to do it,” when a judge who had ruled against him died suddenly) (Weisbrot 1983:53), Mother Divine turned the deaths in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 into a cautionary tale of divine retribution, now employed on her behalf, against recalcitrant followers and critics (Mother Divine 1982:137–41).

Despite consolidating her leadership of the International Peace Mission movement by 1980, Mother Divine faced further challenges as the caretaker of a rapidly contracting global empire of properties that housed an increasingly infirm, aging, and celibate clientele. In order to repatriate the far-flung followers into the remaining hubs of the movement, and to maintain them in the communes that they were both guaranteed and accustomed to, Mother Divine began a twenty-five-year process to cut expenses and repurpose movement monies by selling off Peace Mission properties and real estate.

Mother Divine also sought to address the sticky subject of Divinite theology, a subjective space in which followers and non-followers alike were encouraged to see and seek “Father” in their own way. Mother Divine sought to institute an understanding of Peace Mission practice and faith that strengthened her position as the Peace Mission’s leader. Her response to challenges in which Father Divine’s own teachings were used against her was to author The Peace Mission Movement in 1982. This became the authoritative book for understanding the group’s theology and practice.

In order to keep the Peace Mission Movement message available in perpetuity for future generations, Mother Divine oversaw the groundbreaking celebration for the Father Divine Library and Museum in 2013. They would be completed seven months after her death in 2017.

SIGNIFICANCE TO THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN RELIGIONS

Although never the leader of a mainstream organization or in a mainstream religion, Edna Rose Ritchings had enormous significance. [Image at right] As a young white Canadian, Mother Divine became the unquestioned leader of a working-class black women’s socio-religious movement. Her life’s work is a study in how she and the movement together navigated and challenged normative, socially enforced gender roles and racial identities during the period of Jim Crow racism. This occurred both before and during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. In an attempt to create and express a model of interracial sisterhood and utopian social justice to the dominant society, members of the International Peace Mission worked to build a parallel society.

As Mother Divine in the International Peace Mission movement, Ritchings both used and subverted the socially-given role of wife and widow who gains authority by proximity to a powerful husband. She embraced the oxymoronic role of childless mother and challenged those gender customs, rejecting the prerogatives of normative marriage, and denying the concept of race. She accomplished this within a radical group that expressed black female anguish and utopian hope (under the initial leadership of a black man) in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The gender and racial composition of the Peace Mission underscores the importance of the role of women in the International Peace Mission movement generally; Mother Divine’s leadership highlights the phenomenon of a white woman in a largely black group in particular. Although perceived by some sectors of the public as a bizarre all-black cult led by a self-aggrandizing and delusional madman, the all-white, largely female Montreal extension of the Peace Mission shows that Father Divine’s movement provided a unique experience for females of various ages and different races. They could participate in all levels of activity in an international organization, even assuming leadership roles often frustrated or denied women outside of the Peace Mission. The experience also allowed white women (and white men) the opportunity to shed the image and reality of white racism that pervaded the United States at that time. By committing themselves to a black religion, with a black god as leader, they were able to detach themselves from whiteness and its alleged, perceived, and actual privileges. At the same time, the self-help and entrepreneurial programs promoted by the International Peace Mission movement advanced the cause and economic well-being of African American women and men.

Thus, the study of Mother Divine and her leadership of, and participation in, the International Peace Mission movement reveals a little-known aspect of the history of race relations in the United States. It also advances what sociologist David Feltmate calls a “social possibilities” rather than “social problems” approach to new religions like the Peace Mission; that is, it demonstrates how a group addresses existential problems and issues in its current moment (Feltmate 2016). By considering Edna Rose Ritchings, along with the women who made up the movement she led, we see how one group attempted to live an alternative life in a deeply segregated and racist society.

IMAGES
Image #1: Edna Rose Ritchings, renamed Sweet Angel in the Peace Mission.
Image #2: Peninnah (Sister Penny), the first Mother Divine with a young Father Divine.
Image #3: Father Divine, Sweet Angel, and other secretaries in the Peace Mission Movement.
Image #4: Sweet Angel secretly married Father Divine on April 29, 1946, and became the second Mother Divine “in the body.”
Image #5: Crypt erected for Father Divine and consecrated in 1968.
Image #6 Passing food around the table at one of the weekly heavenly banquets held by the Peace Mission.
Image #7: Father Divine and Mother Divine at a large heavenly banquet.
Image #8: Mother Divine and an aging Father Divine.
Image #9: Mother Divine and Father Divine.
Image #10: An aging Mother Divine.

REFERENCES

Black, E. 2013. “Wives of God, Mothers of the Faithful: Edna Rose Baker and Marceline Jones as Mothers Divine.” the jonestown report, October 15. Accessed from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=40226 on 20 October 2019.

Black. E. 2014. “Addendum 1: The Changing Politics of Assessing Father Divine and Jim Jones.” jtr bulletin. Accessed from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=61374 on 20 October 2019.

“Divine Years.” 1958. Jet 14(May):49.

Faithful Mary [Viola Wilson]. 1937. “God”: He’s Just a Natural Man. Philadelphia: Universal Light.

Feltmate, David. 2016. “Rethinking New Religious Movements Beyond a Social Problems Paradigm.” Nova Religio 20:82–96.

Guinn, Jeff. 2017. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Harris, Sara. 1953. Father Divine: Holy Husband. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. 2004. “Daddy Jones and Father Divine: The Cult as Political Religion.” Pp. 28–46 in Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America, edited by Rebecca Moore, Anthony B. Pinn, and Mary R. Sawyer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mabee, Carleton. 2008. Promised Land: Father Divine’s Interracial Communities in Ulster County, New York. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press.

Melamed, Samantha. 2017. “Father Divine Intervention: Can a Documentary and a Museum Save the Dying Peace Mission?” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 6:7.

Morris, Adam. 2019. American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. New York: Liveright.

Mother Divine [Edna Rose Ritchings]. 1982. The Peace Mission Movement. New York: Anno Domini Father Divine Publications.

Father Divine. 1951. “Restitution and Retroactive Compensation to the Oppressed of the Earth.” Peace Mission, August 8. Accessed from http://peacemission.info/sermons-by-father-divine/restitution-retroactive-compensation-to-the-oppressed-of-the-earth/ on 20 October 2019.

Fauset, Arthur Huff. 1944. Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Parker, Robert Allerton. 1937. The Incredible Messiah: The Deification of Father Divine. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. (Available online through the Hathi Trust Digital Library).

Sitton, Lea. 1993. “Perot Takes Campaign to Valley Forge; He’s Blasting Washington; It Was His 60th Rally This Year; He Drew 2000 People, including Mother Divine.” Philadelphia Inquirer (August 23): A1.

Watts, Jill. 1995. God, Harlem, U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weisbrot, Robert. 1995. “Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement.” Pp. 285–90 in America’s Alternative Religions, edited by Timothy Miller. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Weisbrot, Robert. 1983. Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Boston: Beacon Press.

SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES

Black, E. 2013. “Jonestown and Woodmont: Jim Jones, Mother Divine and the Fulfillment of Father Divine’s Intention of a Vanishing Divine City.” the jonestown report, October 15. Accessed from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=40227 on 20 October 2019.

Black, E. 2012. “Laying The Body Down: Total Commitment and Sacrifice to the Cause in the Peace Mission and Peoples Temple.” the jonestown report, October 14. Accessed from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=34229.

Black, E. 2010. “‘Ever Faithful’: The Contest between Mother Divine, Jim Jones and their Followers for Supremacy in Faithfulness to the Cause.” the jonestown report, October 12. Accessed from https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=30222 on 20 October 2019.

Boaz, Ruth. 1965. “My Thirty Years with Father Divine.” Ebony 20:89–98.

Boccella, Kathy. 2011. “Gladwyne Mansion, Memories of Father Divine Live On.” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 17.

Boccella, Kathy. 2011. “Only a Handful of Followers Left to Carry on Father Divine’s Mission.” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 26.

Burnham, Kenneth E. 1979. God Comes to America. Boston: Lambeth Press.

Erickson, Keith V. 1977. “Black Messiah: the Father Divine Peace Mission Movement.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63:428–38.

“Father Divine.” 2003. African-American Religious Leaders: A to Z of African Americans, edited by. Nathan Aasang. Revised Edition. New York: Facts on File.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Cornel West. 2000. “Father Divine.” In The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped our Country, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, 122–25. New York: The Free Press.

Grimes, William. 2017. “Mother Divine, 91, Dies; Took Over Husband’s Cult.” New York Times, March 15:B.14.

Hoshor, John. 1936. God in a Rolls Royce: The Rise of Father Divine—Madman, Menace, or Messiah. New York: Hillman-Curl.

Primiano, Leonard Norman. 2019. “International Peace Mission Movement and Father Divine.” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Accessed from https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/international-peace-mission-movement-and-father-divine/.

Satter, Beryl. 1996. “Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality.” American Quarterly 48:43–76.

Seely, Katharine. 1986. “Mother Divine: Keeping the Flame Alive.” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 31.

DIGITAL RESOURCES

Dixon, Vince. 2018. “Heaven Was a Place in Harlem.” Vox Video. Accessed from https://www.eater.com/a/father-divine on October 2019. [Includes newsreel footage of Father Divine and many photographs].

“Father Divine.” 2019. International Peace Mission Movement. Accessed from http://peacemission.info/ on 14 October 2019.

“Father Divine.” 1930s. “The March of Time” [newsreel]. Accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNLNrNxPmDA on 2 October 2019.

“Father Divine and the Peace Mission.” n.d. America and the Utopian Dream. Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven: Yale University. Accessed from http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/utopia/uc18.html on 20 October 2019.

“Father Divine in Tarrytown, New York. 1946 (?). Accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HveytJSnlEc on 2 October 2019. [Images of Mother Divine].

“Father Divine’s Peace Mission: Hope for the Impoverished.” This Far By Faith. PBS Television Series. Accessed from http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/journey_3/p_10.html on 20 October 2019.

Garcia, Tom, Jr. 2019. tommygarcia.com. Accessed on 13 October. [Website of adopted son of Father Divine and Mother Divine, has articles and photographs.]

Kaluza, Wanda. 2011. “An American Castle: The Alan Wood Jr. Estate.” Accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRefPu32xHo. [Video of exterior of Woodmont Estate].

Luers, Will. 2012. “The Father Divine Project on Vimeo.” Accessed from https://vimeo.com/channels/326983 on 20 October 2019.

Post Date:
26 October 2019

CHAPEL CARS TIMELINE

1880s:  The Russian Orthodox Church supported a number of chapel cars along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

1890 (April 28):  Bishop William David Walker contracted with the Pullman Palace Car Company to build America’s first cathedral car.

1890 (November):  Bishop Walker left Chicago in “Church of the Advent,” the Cathedral Car of North Dakota, headed for Fargo, North Dakota.

1891:  The first chapel car of Northern Michigan was likely in use with the Episcopal bishop, G. Mott Williams.

1891 (May 23): “Evangel,” the first Baptist chapel car, was dedicated in Cincinnati, Ohio.

1893 (May 24): “Emmanuel,” the second car built by the Baptists, was dedicated in Denver, Colorado.

1894 (May 25):  The Baptist chapel car, “Glad Tidings,” was dedicated in Saratoga Springs, New York.

1895:  The second chapel car of Northern Michigan was in operation, serving the Episcopal Church.

1895 (June 1):  “Good Will,” the Baptist car sent to serve the people of Texas, was dedicated in Saratoga Springs, New York.

1898 (May 21):  “Messenger of Peace,” the fifth Baptist chapel car to be built, was dedicated in New York. Messenger of Peace was referred to as “the Ladies’ Car” because Baptist women from across the country raised the funds necessary for its construction.

1900 (May 27):  “Herald of Hope” was dedicated in Detroit, Michigan. This car was also known as “The Young Men’s Car” because the young Baptist men of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue Church raised the first thousand dollars for its construction.

1904 (April 30 – 1904 (December 1):  Messenger of Peace was on display at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Father Francis Clement Kelley visited the chapel car and subsequently took the idea to the Catholic Extension Society.

1907 (June 16):  “St. Anthony, the first Catholic chapel car, was officially blessed in Chicago, Illinois.

1912 (June 30):  “St. Peter”, the second of the Catholic chapel cars, was dedicated in Dayton, Ohio. This chapel car, unlike its predecessor, St. Anthony, was constructed of steel.

1915 (March 14):  The last of the Catholic chapel cars, “St. Paul,” was dedicated in New Orleans, Louisiana.

1915 (May 21): “Grace,” donated to the Baptists by the Conway family in their daughter’s memory, was dedicated in Los Angeles, California. Grace was the last Baptist chapel car to be built, as well as the only Baptist chapel car to be constructed of steel.

1962:  St. Paul, the last chapel car to remain mobile, ended its service in Montana.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

During the last half of the nineteenth century, established religious traditions in several nations developed innovative means of reaching new settlement populations. Beginning a century earlier, religious missionaries in America who came to be called “circuit riders” had sought out dispersed and isolated frontier populations on horseback to spread the gospel. Methodists were particularly noted as circuit riders. The advent of railroads offered a new means of accomplishing this missionizing goal, chapel cars. Particularly for nations with vast geographic areas being settled, such as the United States, Australia, and Russia, chapel cars proved to be a viable option for a number of years. The Russian Orthodox Church operated five train cars in the 1880s along the Trans-Caspian and Trans-Siberian railroads. [Image at right] These cars carried two priests per car who would administer the sacraments each day as the trains traveled the rail lines (Walker 1896:577; bmberry 2019; Miklós 2014).

Elsewhere, It is has been reported that Pope Pius IX used a specially fitted railway car that allowed him to administer sacraments when traveling through the Papal States (Kelley 1922:69). Additionally, chapel cars were said to have been used for missionary service in some areas of Africa, although information on these chapel cars does not go further than their mention in mission publications (Walker 1896:577). The best documented history of chapel cars is in the United States.

The beginnings of a national railroad system began in the 1860s with the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad, and as the railroad network expanded, new communities developed. These frontier communities were often small, with few inhabitants and limited initial infrastructure. When people moved to the frontier, they had to decide what organizational investments to make. The inhabitants of these towns tended to prioritize investing in the economy, rather than religion or culture (Lacitis 2012). However, as towns became more established and their populations rose, markers of settled life, such as businesses and schoolhouses, began to appear with more frequency. By the 1890s, the majority of the United States’ West was deemed “settled,” but remained “frontier region” for the Episcopal, Baptist, and Catholic Churches (Taylor and Taylor 1999:18). These different churches were involved in missionary work across the frontier, but the dispersion of the population made this work difficult and time-consuming. Chapel cars offered a new means of reaching distant and diverse population settlements.

David Walker, [Image at right] who was the first to produce a chapel car and introduce it into service. As bishop of North Dakota, Walker oversaw an expansive territory with few established churches or congregations, despite the prevalence of small towns which had sprung up along the rail lines. On a trip to Russia, Walker saw the Orthodox chapel cars and brought the idea to other Episcopalians as a solution to the unique situation of missionizing in the North Dakota territory. A church on wheels would allow religious leaders to provide services to those in the newly settled towns without having to invest the capital needed to establish physical churches (Taylor and Taylor 1999:13-14, 18).

In 1890, after raising the necessary funds, Walker contracted with the Pullman Palace Car Company to build the first American chapel car. This car, “Church of the Advent,”  the Cathedral Car of North Dakota, was sixty feet long with an area for religious services to be held and a small living apartment for Bishop Walker. The car was equipped with portable chairs and the features that Bishop Walker would need to conduct religious services, such as an altar, a lectern, a font, and an organ. Many of the car’s items and furnishings were given by Episcopalians across the county (Taylor and Taylor 1999:18-20). [Image at right]

Bishop Walker’s plan was to travel the rail lines, sending news of his upcoming visit days before he arrived at a town. Upon arriving at a destination, the cathedral car would be moved to a sidetrack where it would stay for a period of time, allowing Bishop Walker to offer religious services to the population in the area. When Walker was ready to move on to another town, the cathedral car would be picked up by another train, and the process would continue. Walker’s chapel car plan proved to be a success. In the first three months that the car was in service, thirteen stops were made, with the car often filling to capacity during services (Taylor and Taylor 1999:20-21).

Walker continued his success as he traveled across the North Dakota territory. Along with providing religious services, distributing literature, confirming members to the Church, and establishing missions, Walker was responsible for caring for the cathedral car. He discovered  that the cathedral car appealed not only to Episcopalians but also to those of other faiths and those without religious affiliations. The cathedral car sparked curiosity and drew in visitors when it arrived at a town, with people traveling from neighboring areas to attend services (Taylor and Taylor 1999:21). With the cathedral car, Walker had found a solution to reaching those in the expanse of the North Dakota frontier and getting them involved in Episcopal services.

Not long after Church of the Advent began its travels across the North Dakota frontier, the first Baptist chapel car, Evangel, [Image at right] entered service. The Baptist chapel car had come about after two brothers, Wayland and Colgate Hoyt, traveled via train across the Western frontier. Wayland Hoyt, a pastor, was surprised by the paucity of churches he saw as the train passed by the numerous small communities that had emerged alongside the rail lines. Wayland felt that the railroad companies could build a missionary car that would serve the people of these churchless communities. At the time, Colgate Hoyt was vice president of the Northern Pacific Railroad and had made a name for himself in the railroad business. After his brother pitched the idea of a chapel car, Colgate Hoyt organized a chapel car syndicate that included John D. Rockefeller, Charles L. Colby, and James B. Colgate. The men who comprised the syndicate saw the potential benefits of a chapel car, both as businessmen with desire to see railroad communities gain stability and as Baptists who felt moral good could come from this new approach to missionary service. Wayland Hoyt called on a Minnesota Sunday school missionary, Boston Smith, to sketch a plan for a chapel car that would include living quarters for a missionary and a place to conduct services. This sketch was turned into reality by the Barney & Smith Car Company (Taylor and Taylor 1999:29-34).

This first Baptist chapel car, Evangel, was dedicated in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 23, 1891. The car was equipped with pews (featuring built-in hymnal racks), a pump organ, a brass lectern, and other features common in Baptist churches. A number of items aboard the chapel car had been donated by Baptists across the country. The living apartment, similar to that of the Church of the Advent, contained a sink, stove, desk, shelving for books, and an upper and lower bed (Taylor and Taylor 1999:37-38).

Boston Smith was the first missionary to serve on Evangel, and because an assistant had not been found for the start of Evangel’s journey, Smith’s twelve-year-old daughter accompanied him and served as the car’s organist. As Smith traveled on Evangel, flyers were posted announcing the chapel car’s arrival and Christian literature was handed out along the route. Circulars were also printed with a picture of the chapel car and information about the mission goals during the chapel car’s stops. These techniques worked to draw in crowds. For instance, on Sunday at Evangel’s first stop in Brainerd, Minnesota, six meetings were held, each one with overflowing crowds. Smith reported an average of two meetings each day, and from five to seven services every Sunday. Speaking to the success of Smith and Evangel, within a month aboard the chapel car, Smith had received invitations that would have kept the car booked for two years. In December 1891, Smith turned Evangel over to the first appointed missionaries, the Wheelers. The Wheelers would continue Evangel’s success in Oregon and Washington until 1894 when the Evangel began service in the Southeast (Smith 1896:5-8; Taylor and Taylor 1999:39-47).

In the period from 1891 to 1900, seven more chapel cars were introduced into service. Two of these were Episcopal cars; five were Baptist cars. The two Episcopal cars were converted under the plan of Bishop G. Mott Williams and served Northern Michigan. Bishop Mott felt that a chapel car could aid him in reaching the unchurched in the isolated territory of Northern Michigan. Some of the challenges faced by Williams in his missionary work included: communities that became difficult to reach when the waterways used for transportation became impassable during cold months, substantial populations of non-English speaking immigrants, and mining schedules that interfered with morning church services (Taylor and Taylor 1999:64-65).

The first chapel car of Northern Michigan may have been in use as early as 1891 and served in small towns and villages, as well as mining and lumber camps. However, this car was old and borrowed, and due to its inconvenience was retired around 1894. Unlike other chapel car proponents, Williams did not receive the donations or funding that would have enabled him to build a new chapel car. This did not stop him from believing in the benefits of a chapel on wheels. By 1895, Williams had another converted car operating as a chapel car in Michigan. Along with typical travel in towns along the rail line, this car served, for a time, as the temporary church in a town which had lost its church to a fire. After falling into disuse, the second chapel car of Northern Michigan was sold around 1903. Williams appears to have tried other means of mobile chapels after both chapel cars were retired from service. These other means included a boat which served a number of island communities, a portable chapel which could be transported by wagon or train, and an automobile chapel (Taylor and Taylor 1999:65-71).

Emmanuel, the second Baptist chapel car to be built, was dedicated in Denver on May 24, 1893. [Image at right] This car was ten feet longer than its predecessor, Evangel, and could seat 115 people. Emmanuel was constructed during the financial panic of 1893 and the cost quoted for the car by the Barney & Smith Car Company did not include any interior features. Therefore, items needed for the car from airbrakes to furnishings were donated by both businesses and churches. The first missionaries to travel with Emmanuel were the Wheelers, the same husband and wife who were the first missionaries on Evangel. While traveling on Emmanuel, the Wheelers held revival services in towns they had visited when aboard Evangel, administered baptisms, organized Sunday schools and churches, and established missions. In 1895, the Wheelers took the chapel car in for repairs and headed home for a stay in Minnesota. While traveling, their train was involved in a wreck and Mr. Wheeler was tragically killed. After the death of Mr. Wheeler, a stained glass image of him was installed in the door leading into the living apartment of the Emmanuel. Under a number of other missionaries, Emmanuel continued its service in the West and Northwest until its official retirement in 1942 (Taylor and Taylor 1999:75-100).

Glad Tidings, dedicated on May 25, 1894, was the third Baptist chapel car to enter into service. The car was a gift of William Hills, a New York businessman, who had been one of the donors for Evangel. Hills paid for the cost of Glad Tidings in honor of his wife. His gift was given upon the condition that the money for a fourth chapel car be raised by the close of 1894 (Taylor and Taylor 1999:105). The first missionaries to serve aboard Glad Tidings were Reverend Charles Herbert Rust and his wife, Mrs. Bertha Rust. Along with the typical inclusions for a chapel car, Glad Tidings housed a library of approximately sixty volumes of Christian literature that were loaned out to the townspeople during stops. These small towns rarely included libraries or book stores, and without the presence of a church, religious literature was hard to obtain. For the chapel car missionaries like the Rusts, the loaning of literature and distribution of tracts became a vital part of their service (Rust 1905:8-9, 73).

It is important to note that while the idea for a chapel car was conceived with the purpose of helping those who had settled in frontier towns, rail workers were also served by this unique form of missionary service [Image at right]. Many of the men who worked for the railroads were frequently away from their homes and unable to attend traditional religious services. The chapel car offered them a church that welcomed them as they were and was understanding of their scheduling constraints. Reverend Rust was known to hand out cards to these rail workers that stated, “Come just as you are” (Rust 1905:103). Men would arrive for service in their work clothes and leave when they needed to attend to their duties, even if this meant they were unable to attend the entire service (Rust 1905:103-04).

The Rusts served on Glad Tidings for a number of years, part of this time with their daughter Ruth. When their second daughter was born, the Rusts set up a home near St. Paul, Minnesota. Mrs. Rust and the children spent most of their time at this location, while Reverend Rust continued to serve on Glad Tidings with an assistant (Rust 1905:24-25). Rust eventually left chapel car service to spend more time with his family. His book, A Church on Wheels, which was published in 1905, recounted his experience on Glad Tidings and was a considerable contribution to chapel car ministry. After Reverend Rust left chapel car work, Glad Tidings continued its travels in the hands of other missionaries before being removed from service in 1926 (Taylor and Taylor 1999:127-28).

The fourth Baptist chapel car, Good Will, was built after the agreement with William Hills was fulfilled. Dedicated in 1895, Good Will began its service in Texas. In 1900, the car was damaged during the Galveston hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in modern American history. Fortunately, the missionaries who were assigned to the car were not aboard at the time of the hurricane and were thus unharmed. Boston Smith travelled to Texas in November of 1900 to speak to churches on the importance of chapel car work and encourage donations for Good Will’s repairs. Texas Baptist congregations raised money and the Texas Baptist General Convention granted funds to cover the costs of repairs (Taylor and Taylor 1999:140-41). During its subsequent years in service, Good Will served areas in the Midwest, West, and Pacific Northwest before being parked in California in 1938.

Messenger of Peace was the fifth Baptist chapel car to be built. Dedicated in 1898, this car was also referred to as “the Ladies’ Car” due to the fact that all of the funds necessary for constructing the car were collected by Baptist women across the country. This car began its service in the Midwest, and later served in the West and Pacific Northwest. In 1904, the American Baptist Publication Society displayed Messenger of Peace at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. It is reported that during one day alone, the car had more than 10,000 visitors. A marriage was also performed on the car, with the wedding reception provided by the Pullman Company. It was also during the World’s Fair that Father Francis Kelley visited the Messenger of Peace. The car left an impression on Kelley and he later constructed three Catholic chapel cars with the Catholic Church Extension Society (Taylor and Taylor 1999:163-67).

In 1910, Messenger of Peace and its missionaries were chosen to work with the Railroad YMCA. This work lasted about a year. Along with typical chapel car activities, such as offering religious services and distributing literature, missionaries were tasked with promoting area Railroad YMCAs. These YMCA locations offered rail workers a safe environment with beds, food, spiritual guidance, and chance for physical recreation. After its contracted service with the railroad YMCA ended, Messenger of Peace continued its travels (Taylor and Taylor 1999:169-70). During wartime, the missionaries aboard Messenger of Peace found themselves ministering to an additional population, soldiers who were stationed near the railroad stops. The missionaries encouraged soldiers to attend chapel car meetings by providing cakes and games along with their religious services. After almost fifty years of serving diverse groups across the United States, Messenger of Peace was officially retired in 1949 (Taylor and Taylor 1999:179-80).

Herald of Hope, the sixth Baptist chapel car, was nicknamed “the Young Men’s Car,” after the young men of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue Church who contributed the first thousand dollars for the cost of the car. Dedicated in 1900, Herald of Hope was furnished by Baptists of Detroit and elsewhere. After more than a decade of service in the Midwest, Herald of Hope underwent repairs and was rededicated, continuing its service primarily in West Virginia. Much of the work undertaken in West Virginia focused on miners and loggers. Many of the mining and logging centers did not have churches within a reasonable distance. The chapel car was able to provide religious services in a simple and direct manner that encouraged attendance among men in these communities (Taylor and Taylor 1999:185-207). In 1931, the decision was made to retire Herald of Hope and place the car on a foundation to be used as a permanent church in West Virginia.

The promise and proven success of chapel car ministry caught the attention of Father Francis Clement Kelley, who subsequently brought this new form of reaching the masses to the Catholic Church. Kelley attended the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis where the Baptist chapel car Messenger of Peace was on display. Kelley was impressed by what he learned about chapel cars. In 1906, after becoming the first president of the Catholic Church Extension Society, Kelley wrote about the potential benefits of chapel cars in a publication for the society in hopes of raising support for a Catholic car. Kelley’s piece on chapel cars caught the attention of Ambrose Petry, who was in street car advertising. Petry saw the benefits of a chapel car in terms of “advertising” for the Catholic Church. He donated the money to buy a used sleeper car and Richmond Dean, a vice president of the Pullman Company, had the interior of the car redone to fit the needs of a chapel car [Image at right]. The car was designed to hold sixty-five people during services and had two small rooms for the priest and attendant. This car, which was officially blessed in 1907, was named St. Anthony (Kelley 1922:71; Taylor and Taylor 1999:213-16).

St. Anthony began its travels in Kansas and would later continue its service across the country, including stops along the East Coast. When St. Anthony set out, the normal routine was to stay in a town approximately a week. Each day there would be a sermon and Mass in the morning, instruction in the afternoon for children, and a sermon and benediction in the evening (Kelley 1922:90). The priest and attendant also distributed literature during stops, which proved to be a successful missionary strategy (Kelley 1922:70). Crowds were large and baptisms were common during chapel car stays. As Kelley had hoped, St. Anthony proved to be a positive addition to the Catholic missionary cause. He later wrote about chapel cars in The Story of Extension, saying:

The most wonderful thing about the Chapel Cars is their ‘pulling power.’ They discover their own congregations. When a Chapel Car comes to town everyone knows about it and Catholics begin to spring up all around it. People who had never before been known as Catholics suddenly show interest in the Church, and come to the services…The beauty and the up-to-dateness of the Chapel Car give [fallen away members] a sense of sharing in its glory; and they begin to boast, amongst their surprised neighbors, of the Church they had never before claimed as their own (Kelley 1922:97).

Despite its success, St. Anthony was upstaged when a new chapel car, St. Peter, was constructed. During one of St. Anthony’s stops in Ohio, a businessman named Peter Kuntz visited the chapel car. After viewing this wooden, repurposed car, Kuntz suggested that a new chapel car should be built for use by the Catholic Church, and he donated the necessary funds. This new car, St. Peter, was dedicated in 1912 (Kelley 1922:91-92). Constructed of steel, St. Peter was eighty-four feet long with modern designs and a mahogany-finished interior (Taylor and Taylor 1999:242). Before being given to the Diocese of North Carolina in 1939, St. Peter served areas including the Midwest, West, and Pacific Northwest.

The third and final Catholic chapel car to be constructed was St. Paul, which was also donated by Peter Kuntz. Dedicated in 1915 in New Orleans, St. Paul featured a number of improvements over its predecessor to make life on the chapel car more convenient and comfortable for the priest and attendants. St. Paul served primarily in the Southeast, fulfilling a request by Peter Kuntz that the car work in this area. After a short stint traveling in the Midwest, St. Paul was put into storage, where it sat until being included as an exhibit in the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. St. Paul then went through another period of disuse before its donation to the Catholic Diocese of Great Falls, Montana in 1936. Although the Catholic Church was the last to begin building chapel cars, it was also the Church to have the last chapel car mobile (Taylor and Taylor 1999:268-79). While St. Paul holds the claim to being the last mobile chapel car, the Baptist chapel car Grace is the car which has remained “in service” for the longest period of time.

Grace was the last of the Baptist chapel cars to be constructed. The only Baptist chapel car to be made of steel, it was dedicated in California in 1915. The funds needed to build this chapel car were donated by the Conway family in memory of their daughter, Grace. [Image at right]  As early as 1913, the American Baptist Publication Society began working on raising the funds for a new chapel car. Although more than a decade had passed since the last chapel car had been dedicated and new modes of missionary transport (such as chapel boats and chapel automobiles) had entered service, the American Baptist Publication Society still felt that there was a distinct need for chapel cars. Grace was built to have more of a “church look” with arch designs and stained glass touches. One of the first places Grace made a stop was San Francisco to attend the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which was also attended by the Catholic chapel car St. Peter. During the exposition, services were conducted, tours were given of the chapel car, and Baptist tracts were distributed (Taylor and Taylor 1999:283-85). Grace went on to serve in the West and Midwest before being moved to Green Lake, Wisconsin, where it has remained on public display (Taylor and Taylor 1999:298-302).

For a variety of reasons (See, Issues/Challenges), the chapel car era drew to a close in the United States around the time of World War I, although some chapel cars have continued to operate elsewhere, most notably Russia.

There were some attempts to replace railroad chapel cars with automotive chapel cars, [Image at right] but this innovation never achieved the same level of popularity and did not possess the same geographic reach of their railway counterparts.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

While particular religious beliefs varied among the different Churches who owned and operated chapel cars, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Catholics shared the belief that chapel cars were valuable instruments of missionary service. As the settlement boundaries of the United States were expanded, religious organizations and their missionaries adopted new methods of missionary work to meet the needs of frontier communities and settlers. Religious organizations believed that it was their duty to spread Christian morals to these communities and help direct inhabitants away from lives of sin.  Missionaries assigned to frontier locations found that homes were scattered across great distances and communities often lacked any sort of religious activity. Frontier missionaries often traveled by foot or horseback to reach settlers and had difficulty finding lodging. Chapel cars offered a solution to these challenges while appealing to both those who were religiously affiliated and those who were not (Kelley 1922:97; Rust 1905:72; Taylor and Taylor 1999:63-65).

Religious leaders and supporters of chapel cars believed that there was a need for the influence of religion in the American frontier and that the presence of chapel cars could help positively influence frontier communities. Hoping to garner support and raise funds for the first Catholic chapel car, Father Kelley outlined the benefits of chapel cars in an editorial for the Catholic Extension publication:

Railroads pull Chapel Cars free of charge. They cost little to maintain. They house both pastor and congregation; the last for the period of the religious service; the first all the time, for the car is a fairly comfortable living room. Chapel Cars solve the problem of poor hotels and dugout quarters in pioneer states. Chapel cars insure neglected places being visited regularly. The very novelty of the visit draws non-Catholics to hear the missionary. Literature can be carried in quantities in a Chapel Car, and Mass said daily—not a slight consideration for a spiritually hungry priest. A Chapel Car could supply scattered families with all they need of ‘mission goods,’ for there is room to keep them in stock. The missionary priest could have a place in which to instruct children where only few families are to be found, and stay contented as long as necessary, without worry or lonesomeness (Kelley 1922:69-70).

Father Kelley’s editorial highlights the importance that was placed on providing religious experiences to those in “neglected” places, as well as the hope that chapel cars were the novel approach needed for this new type of mission environment. He was not alone in his beliefs about the potential of chapel cars, as Episcopal and Baptist proponents of chapel cars before him had expressed similar thoughts. Charles Rust, a Baptist missionary, believed that chapel cars could help revive Christianity in the American frontier and show that “Christianity [was] not dying, but [was] on the move” (Rust 1905:121).

RITUALS/PRACTICES

Religious rituals and practices varied among chapel cars of different denominations, with missionaries carrying out the expected practices for their particular type of religious service. The articles aboard chapel cars allowed the missionaries to carry out practices just as they would in a physical church building. For instance, the Catholic chapel car, St. Anthony, was equipped with a communion railing which could be moved and converted into a confessional, an altar with storage drawers for sacred vessels and vestments, and a holy water font (Kelley 1922:89; Taylor and Taylor 1999:216).

Despite their differences, there were some practices shared in common by the Episcopal, Baptist, and Catholic cars. One example of shared practice was music, which played an important role in the services of chapel cars. It was common for chapel cars to have an organ on board that was played by the missionary or attendant. Additionally, hymns were sung by the congregation in attendance, and musically gifted attendants or missionary wives would perform solos (Kelley 1922:88; Rust 1905:81-95). Reverend Charles Rust remarked on the powerful role of his wife’s singing, stating that, “her message in song is as important as the preacher’s message in word” (Rust 1905:88). It was also common for missionaries to supplement services by distributing religious literature, holding meetings for children, and visiting homes in the surrounding area. These additional activities helped the missionaries attract people to their services and helped ensure continued attendance throughout the chapel car’s stay.

Reverend Charles Rust detailed the method for a week’s meetings with townsfolk aboard the Baptist chapel car, Glad Tidings. Rust would begin the week by discussing the “value of their lives in God’s sight,” the harm which could be caused by sin, and how the “Saviour…can cleanse and beautify them” (Rust 1905:64). By the fourth or fifth meeting, Rust would ask attendees to yield their hearts to Christ and to let Rust know if they had chosen to do so. By Sunday, those who had decided to yield their hearts to Christ would feel comfortable discussing their decision with their friends and neighbors. According to Rust, this would often result in others wanting to yield their hearts to Christ as well. If the chapel car stayed in a town for more than a week, subsequent meetings would focus on the Church and how to live the Christian life (Rust 1905:64-65).

One week was the typical length of a chapel car’s stay, although lengthier visits were not uncommon when there was a particular need in the town, such as the construction of a church. For Baptists, a successful stop in a town often resulted in scheduled prayer meetings, the creation of a young people’s or woman’s aid society, or the organization of Sunday school. [Image at right] During a chapel car’s stop, it was not uncommon for funds to be raised to construct a church building and/or to hire a preacher. While chapel car missionaries often extended their stays to help in the construction of new churches, an established church was not the immediate goal for all communities. Chapel car missionaries had to be cognizant of the funds required to start and maintain a church. For some communities, missionaries encouraged starting prayer groups, establishing Sunday schools, or hiring itinerant preachers as steps toward establishing churches (Rust 1905:125, 141-42, 150, 168).

Not all towns that chapel cars visited were churchless. Chapel car missionaries frequently encountered towns (especially after frontier areas became more populated) with established churches, but waning participation. Chapel cars were able to revitalize religious participation by sparking interest in both “fallen away” members and those who were not yet religiously affiliated. Additionally, chapel car missionaries could help reorganize activities like Sunday school and could help the existing church raise funds needed for repairs or securing a pastor (Kelley 1922:97-98, Rust 1905:104).

LEADERSHIP/ORGANIZATION

Chapel cars and their missionaries fell under the leadership of the religious institution to which they belonged. For instance, the first chapel car, Church of the Advent, was constructed and operated under the care of William David Walker, who was Episcopal Bishop of North Dakota. Part of Bishop Walker’s duties included overseeing missionary work in that area. After developing the idea for a chapel car, he turned to the Mission Board of the Protestant Episcopal Church to help him raise the funds necessary for the car’s construction. After Bishop Walker was called to serve in New York in 1897, use of Church of the Advent stopped. Walker’s successor did not share the same opinion about the effectiveness of chapel cars and felt that funds would be put to better use elsewhere (Taylor and Taylor 1999:18, 23-24).

In the case of the Baptist denomination, chapel cars fell under the care of the American Baptist Publication Society, which was just one of many Baptist organizations. In the early years of chapel car service, chapel car missionaries were expected to only partake in activities that fell under the authority of the American Baptist Publication Society, such as organizing Sunday schools or distributing Baptist literature. However, as chapel cars and their missionaries began to establish a record of success in the field, they began to take on activities, such as establishing churches, which had previously only been the domain of other Baptist organizations (Rust 1905:155-61).

The three chapel cars of the Catholic Church fell directly under the watch of the Catholic Church Extension Society. Father Francis Kelley served as the first president of this society, which was founded in 1905. The main goal of this society was to raise money that would enable the Catholic faith to be brought to isolated, underserved communities. Given his position in this society, Bishop Walker easily made the case for the usefulness of chapel cars (Taylor and Taylor 1999:214-15).

Individual missionaries had quite a bit of autonomy in terms of determining needs within a particular community, deciding on the length of stays in towns, and organizing activities during their stops. The missionary often had a role in deciding what towns were visited, with communities often putting in requests for chapel car service. However, these decisions were ultimately overseen by the missionary’s religious organizations, which could schedule stops and events that were thought to be the best use of the chapel car. Additionally, the religious organizations ultimately determined who served where and missionaries could be transferred to another area of the country or separated from chapel car service.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Chapel cars, of course, were never a complete answer to reaching unchurched populations. Ultimately they were relatively few in number, and there were many locations they simply could not reach. Another similar form during this same era was chapel boats. These floating chapels serviced residents and seafaring workers populations in coastal areas and inland rivers (Kyriakodis 2014). For example, the Seamen’s Church Institute was founded by Episcopalians in New York to serve sailors passing through New York Harbor and constructed the Church of Our Savior floating chapel to support this mission (“Floating Chapels” 2018). [Image at right] Floating churches of various kinds have also been identified in Australia, Cambodia, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Most recently, the Russian Orthodox Church constructed the Prince Saint Vladamir in 2004, which serves populations along the Volga River (Bishop 2011).

Chapel cars faced a number of challenges through their brief history and were gradually retired from service. One of the most substantial challenges for chapel car proponents was securing funding and support. Most chapel cars were funded by wealthy donors, denominational supporters, and railway car construction companies. While supporters were willing to underwrite chapel car construction, there was considerably less enthusiasm for paying for ongoing maintenance and repair costs. At best, chapel cars were viable only so long as railway companies agreed to transport the cars free of charge and to give the accompanying clergy and assistants free travel passes. Railroad companies faced another problem as well as chapel cars required sidetracks if they were to remain in any location for more than a brief period. Tying up sidetracks limited other transportation needs and created scheduling problems.

Chapel cars also created arduous work for the missionaries responsible for operating them. Reverend Rust, who served on Glad Tidings, described the long list of duties facing the chapel car missionary in the following way:

The missionary on the chapel car [was] expected to be preacher at four hundreds meetings a year; to be able to call at every home in a large parish in a few weeks; to help in the cooking department of his parsonage and the janitor work in the chapel; to train and organize the new material into all forms of Christian service; to prepare them for baptism and church-membership; to lead in raising money for a new church building; to personally go over the country to secure this money, and to help actually in the hauling of stone, laying the foundation, putting up the building, and paying the bills. All of this to be done in two or three months, and sometimes in six or seven weeks” (Rust 1905:79).

All of these functions had to be carried out with very little space and very few amenities.

One of the most important factors in the decline of chapel cars was changes in railway regulations. New U.S. American Railway Association (ARA) regulations prohibited operating wooden cars (too dangerous) on mainline railroads after 1910 and U.S. ICC regulations barred the railroads from transporting the cars for free. The combination of moving from wood to steel construction and elimination of cost-free transportation dramatically reduced the viability of chapel cars. Another factor was World War I era regulations requiring that train tracks be kept clear for troop and war materials transportation (“The Movement Ends” 2017). In 1917 the government took over control and operation of the railroads, which meant that missionaries could no longer rely on their relationships with railroad officials to assist in the transportation of chapel cars. While rail lines were restored to private operation in 1920, railway companies faced rising costs and financial hardships that reduced their inclination for financial largesse. Finally, much of what had once been considered “frontier” religious territory had been touched by the missionary efforts of various religious groups, and so there simply was less “unclaimed” religious territory.

As cars became too costly or inconvenient to operate, they were simply retired from service. Some of these retired chapel cars were moved to towns where they served as stationary churches, some were dismantled with items being given to churches for their use, and some were abandoned and forgotten (Taylor and Taylor 1999:320-63). In recent decades, a number of chapel cars have undergone restoration projects by those interested in religious or rail history (“Chapel Car Emmanuel” n.d.; Deseret News 2010; Emerson and HistoryLink.org Staff 2011; Lacitis 2012).

The legacy of chapel cars has lived on in other forms of mobile churches. Perhaps the most comparable successors to chapel cars have been trucker churches, which provide mobile chapels at truck stops across the United States. They resemble chapel cars in that they emerged in response to the construction of Interstate Highway System and the corresponding rise of long-distance truck transportation. Like railway chapel cars, trucker churches primarily serve a group that has limited access to religious services, in this case due to demanding work schedules and considerable time spent away from home. Organizations like TFC (Transport for Christ) Global found success in offering religious services to truckers in converted truck trailers, and because of this success, began to establish permanent chapels at some truck stops (Hott and Bromley 2014).

Although no rail chapel cars currently operate in the United States, they do continue elsewhere with a somewhat different purpose. For example, Russian Railway Tours, a company started in 2005, offers a fourteen night Trans-Siberian trip. In order to meet the needs of passengers during this extended travel, a temple car was constructed. This car is designed to “conduct Orthodox worships on both passage and at the stops” and contains common elements of a church including an altar and iconostasis (Burger 2019). Perhaps the latest and most innovative chapel car also is Russian. [Image at right] This car is parachute dropped into remote areas by the Orthodox Church. Priests also arrive by parachute Wainright 2013).

IMAGES
Image #1: Russian Orthodox chapel car on the Manchurian Railway.
Image #2: Episcopal Bishop, William David Walker.
Image #3: The first American chapel car, Church of the Advent, the Cathedral Car of North Dakota.
Image #4: The first Baptist chapel car, Evangel.
Image #5: The second Baptist chapel car, Emmanuel.
Image #6: Railroad workers inside the chapel car Glad Tidings.
Image #7: Interior of the St. Anthony chapel car.
Image #8: Grace chapel car with a “church look.”
Image #9: Automotive chapel car.
Image #10: A Young People’s meeting at the Glad Tidings chapel car.
Image #11: Church of Our Savior floating chapel.
Image #12: Russian paradrop church.

EVERQUEST TIMELINE

1996:  John Smedley at Sony Interactive Studios America developed the main concepts for EverQuest.

1999:  EverQuest launched online and quickly became more successful than anticipated, setting high standards for the developing culture of massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

2002:  The fourth expansion of EverQuest, “Planes of Power,” stressed its simulated religion, offering access to the Plane of Time, but only for avatars that vanquish minions of four elemental deities.

2004:  EverQuest II launched online.

2006:  After a period of effective exile, the gods returned to Norrath in the original EverQuest.

2009:  A special issue of the journal Game Studies was devoted to EverQuest on its tenth anniversary.

2015:  EverQuest and EverQuest II were transferred from Sony to Daybreak Game Company.

2016:  Plans to release a third version, EverQuest Next, were abandoned.

2018:  The fifteenth expansion of EverQuest II, “Chaos Descending,” returned to the supernatural theme of “Planes of Power” and requiree avatars to restore zones representing earth, air, fire and water.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

At the risk of only slight exaggeration, we can translate EverQuest (EQ) as the endless human search for transcendence, either through religion or science, that never ends because it never succeeds. Launching in 1999, it is widely recognized as the standard-setter for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, not only with its 3D graphics and huge virtual geography, but also in its complex socio-cultural structure and its constant expansion as new territory and story were added over the years. In 2004, a very different adaptation of the same concepts launched, EverQuest II (EQ-II), but the original version continued to be popular and receive updates. The setting is a world named Norrath, and its moon, so there are science fiction elements, but the fundamental lore concerns deities, supernatural forces, and their interactions with the avatars of the players.

Wikipedia suggests that the EverQuest project began in 1996 when John Smedley, an executive of Sony Interactive Studios America, was encouraged by the 1995 launch of Meridian 59, the pioneer multiplayer online game which was based on a fantasy mythos. Sony is a vast international corporation that originated in Japan and had launched the PlayStation videogame system in 1994. Designed to run on Windows personal computers rather than on PlayStation, and connecting to Internet servers that would combine data from thousands of players, EverQuest was intended to open a new market for Sony. Wikipedia reports:

To implement the design, Smedley hired programmers Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover, who had come to Smedley’s attention through their work on the single player RPG Warwizard. McQuaid soon rose through the ranks to become executive producer for the EverQuest franchise and emerged during development of EverQuest as a popular figure among the fan community through his in-game avatar, Aradune. Other key members of the development team included Bill Trost, who created the history, lore and major characters of Norrath (including EverQuest protagonist Firiona Vie), Geoffrey ‘GZ’ Zatkin, who implemented the spell system, and artist Milo D. Cooper, who did the original character modeling in the game.

By 2004, the original graphics were rather dated, and both computers and Internet could handle much quicker and more substantial information transfers, so an advanced version was launched, EverQuest II, without however terminating the original one. This required a justification within the mythos, setting EQ and EQ-II at different points in the history of Norrath and explaining how this world could change so radically. A study of religion in computer games reports:

This pair of gameworlds constituted major steps in the development of the genre and in the consolidation of a widely shared collection of traditional mythic elements, such as elves, orcs, goblins, and ogres. Norrath clearly is not our own world, but it mirrors a key concept from real history. When the Roman Empire fell, a Dark Age covered the western half of its territory, setting the basis for the medieval society that followed the Dark Age hundreds of years later. A dark age also occurred between EverQuest and EverQuest II, when the gods abandoned Norrath and parts of its physical geography were shattered (Bainbridge 2013:292).

In 2015, Sony also abandoned EverQuest, indeed selling off its division for PC-based online games, which became Daybreak Game Company, and plans to create a third version called EverQuest Next were soon abandoned. However, both EQ and EQ-II remained sufficiently popular to continue and occasionally receive upgrades. Given their socio-cultural depth and influence on ludic online media, they been studied by numerous social scientists (Bainbridge 2010; Huh and Williams 2010; Williams, Kennedy and Moore 2011; Burt 2012).

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Norrath is geographically and culturally vast, with multiple deities relating in various ways to ethnic groups and classes of avatar. Originally, an avatar belonged from its birth to one of twelve races and one of fourteen classes, but twenty years later the original EverQuest has sixteen of both. Thus, the theology is a complex structure, quite unlike monotheism, connecting natural and supernatural phenomena in many different ways. A good introduction is to consider the three kinds of priests, as described in the part of EQ where a player creates a new avatar:

Clerics dedicate their lives to the gods of Norrath, gaining magical powers in exchange for their faith and service.” “Druids are disciples of the wilds, following the teachings of the Norrathian gods of nature.” “Shamans serve as priests to the tribal races of Norrath, able to draw upon the power of the spirits and focus it for their own purposes.

Note that there is no pretense that priests must be altruistic, but their primary role in teams of avatars is to provide healing to fellow team members of different classes, both during and immediately after battles against enemies.

Humans are one of the sixteen races, and they can be clerics or druids, but not shamans because that form of priest belongs only to primitive tribal races. Human clerics belong to the equivalent of six different denominations, each worshipping a different deity. The gods and the races are organized in a kind of trinity, labeled good, neutral or evil. However, these adjectives describe aesthetic style not morality, as good avatars are just as likely as bad ones to kill innocent simulated animals or even non-player characters to loot their resources. Information about each deity can be found at independent wikis devoted to EQ (EverQuest website n.d.), EQ-II (eq2.zam.com), and the lore of both (EverQuest Lore website n.d.). A Human priest in EQ has a choice with which of three good deities to affiliate: Good: Erolissi Marr (The Queen of Love), Mithaniel Marr (The Lightbearer or The Truthbringer) or Rodcet Nife (The Prime Healer). One neutral deity is also available: Karana (The Rainkeeper). Two evil deities a Human priest may worship are Bertoxxulous (The Plaguebringer) or Innoruuk (The Prince of Hate). Initial text from articles describing three of these deities at the EQ wiki outline the complex theological structure:

Erollisi Marr teaches her followers that love conquers all. She, along with her twin brother Mithaniel, created the Barbarians during The Age of Monuments. It is believed that the evolution of Barbarians to Humans was sparked by the divine touch of Erollisi. While love is a beautiful thing, Erollisi’s devotees are not so obtuse to believe a Norrath without war is possible. They are willing to enter battle themselves if it means defending the principles, people, and places they love.

Karana’s followers invest all of their faith in the life-giving and destructive force of storms of all types. Typical followers of Karana are farmers, Druids, and Rangers. While they respect the power of the Storm Lord, They often provide shelter to travelers, for they are mostly good-natured people who value honesty. Much like the followers of Quellious, a great deal of Karana’s devotees live a life of a nomad. The plains of western Antonica are named after Karana due to the frequent rain in the region that provides excellent farming for Qeynos. Karana is one of two nature deities, and the most accepting. As such, all Human and Halfling Druids and Rangers worship him, as well as many of the Half Elves.

Followers of Bertoxxulous believe the only truth on Norrath is that everything dies. They view the decay of flesh as a thing of ultimate beauty. The subtle purples of a fresh bruise, the almost iridescent yellow green of an infested pustule, are but a few of the things that His followers relish. It is not surprising that many of His followers pursue the dark art of Necromancy, for to them nothing is more desirable than to be surrounded by beings who, even in unlife, continue to rot and decay. Do not take this to mean that His followers are suicidal or seek a quick death. To the contrary, they wish to live long, painful lives, spreading their dark, diseased stain across all of Norrath. Most other gods, even the evil ones, regard him as an abomination, but Rodcet Nife is his most hated adversary.

The description of Erollisi Marr reports that her twin brother, Mithaniel Marr, is a co-equal deity. The description of Karana suggests some similarity with the good deity Quellious, whom the EQ-II wiki describes thus:

This peaceful child-goddess is allied with Rodcet Nife and Erollisi Marr, and an enemy to Rallos Zek and Innoruuk. Quellious rules over the Plane of Tranquility. Followers of Quellious the Tranquil seek peace. They are not strict pacifists, though, and will fight to defend themselves and their loved ones. The peace they seek is an inner one. They wish to know all there is to know about themselves and the world around them.

The EQ-II wiki explains why the peaceful child deity, Quellious, abhors the evil Rallos Zek: “The followers of Rallos Zek, the Warlord, believe in survival of the strong and death to the weak. The heart of a true follower of Zek yearns for strength, courage, but above all, victory.” So, the deities are like personalities that an avatar may adopt. They also have geographic implications; for example, the Karana description refers to how this Storm God helps the farmers of Antonica support their capital city, Qeynos.

Deity selection is also conditioned upon the race and class of the avatar, and we see that both Halflings and Half Elves may also worship Karana. Halflings, following the tradition of the earlier table-top game Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax 1979), are really J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbits, renamed to avoid copyright or trademark issues, and Half Elves are like hybrids of Humans and pure Elves. The EQ wiki’s description of Karana speaks of two nature deities, and the other one is Tunare (The Mother of All), who created the Elves. Human druids may follow either Karana or Tunare, both of which are neutral. In a different sense of the term, there are four nature deities, personifying the four natural elements: Karana (air), Brell Serilis (earth), Prexus (water), and Solusek Ro (fire). Any member of the Dwarf race who is a priest must be a cleric sworn to Brell Serilis (The Duke of Below, Duke of Underfoot), because as throughout the wider tradition including Tolkien and the Ring operas of Richard Warner, Dwarves are engineers who dig underground for metals, and in EverQuest they were created by Brell Serilis, who rules that realm. Clerics in the obscure Erudite race follow Prexus (The Oceanlord).

Among the primitive tribes, the Barbarians apparently did not get the help of Erollisi Marr to evolve into civilized Humans, and their shamans worship their own pantheon, The Tribunal (The Six Hammers). At the opposite extreme, Vah Shir shamans are agnostic, but this makes sense because they are not inhabitants of Norrath, but feline creatures native to Norrath’s moon, Luclin. Troll shamans have two choices, Innoruuk or Cazic-Thule (The Faceless, Lord of Fear). Shamans of the Iksar reptilian race connect only to Cazic-Thule who created them. Shamans of two other ethnicities also worship single deities, Rallos Zek among the Ogres and Mithaniel Marr among the Frogloks.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

A standard assumption of mundane monotheism is that “God is Great and God is Good,” but both secularization and paganization raise doubts about that assumption. If gods exist in the plural, then each of them has particular desires, must be served in a way that satisfies those desires, and may not have humanity’s best interests at heart. One way researchers can study online religions is through role-playing ethnography, creating an avatar that represents a specific issue related to the topic of the research, essentially following the psychodrama methodology developed by Jacob Moreno (1944), who also was the pioneer of social networks research. One such study done inside EQ-II created an avatar named Cleora, virtually resurrecting a girl who had died at the age of one in 1870 and imagining that she might have been resentful that God stole her life (Bainbridge 2018). She was the daughter of a prominent social scientist who studied overseas Protestant missions around 1879-1882 and wrote a novel imaging Cleora had lived to become a missionary in an exotic land, then gave her life voluntarily in Christian martyrdom (Bainbridge 1883). In EQ-II, Cleora was an ambiguous half elf, resentful of how badly the gods behaved, who remained agnostic until she had advanced to level thirty, wanted to learn how to craft valuable artifacts, and realized that manufacturing was more successful if she could earn favor with Brell Serilis. Serilis is the one of the deities representing a natural element, in his case earth, who rules the Underfoot where metals can be mined. Like the physical elements themselves (earth, air, fire, water) the elemental deities are neither good nor evil, but ethically neutral.

To gain any deity’s favor in EQ-II, an avatar must complete a series of difficult quests, and the first one for Brell Serilis was to enter four dangerous labyrinths deep underground, collecting a different sacred ore in each, which will be assembled to make a Foundation of Devotion. Avatars needed to have reached experience level twenty before they could complete this mission, and probably would need a team of friendly avatars to help them. At level thirty, Cleora could complete it herself, but she found the next mission more difficult:

The second quest for Brell, ‘Prospector of Lost Faith,’ first required Cleora to announce Brell’s return to seven groups of enemies across Butcherblock Mountains, which was actually quite easy at the beginning, given Cleora’s ability to sneak carefully around obstacles. But then she was required to complete a series of extremely difficult steps to retrieve the Chalice of Hope from deep within the Orc stronghold, Crushbone Keep. Supposedly, this could be accomplished at level thirty-five, but as a solo quester Cleora failed at level 45, plunging her first into hopelessness, then into disgust at Brell’s excessive demands. After gaining a degree of enlightenment from religious monks of the Ashen Order, at level sixty-five she returned to Crushbone Keep, retrieved the Chalice of Hope, and received as her prize a jewel that would have been valuable to an avatar at level 35 but was quite valueless to her at level 65. When next in New Halas, she gave the jewel back to Brell at his altar, and contemplated whether she should pray for him to give her something in return. Thinking he had treated her badly by assigning quests that were far too difficult to her, she concluded that bowing before him would be a humiliation she did not deserve” (Bainbridge 2013:61-62).

For many avatars, the gods are not only involved in an avatar’s adventures, but also in their daily life and economic trade or production. Avatars may have homes, essentially an apartment in a specific location, where furniture, works of art, and religious artifacts may be kept. Given appropriate experience level and production skills, an avatar in EQ-II may build an altar to one of the gods, place it at home, give to a friend, or even sell it through an auction system. Altars can also be purchased from non-player characters called “deity historians.” Here we see Cleora using an altar to Brell Serilis, easily identified by the digging tools depicted on it. Altars are complex devices where an avatar stores “favor” with the god by making offerings or by completing “devotion quests” that are missions in the wider world related to the character of the particular deity. This favor can be spent to obtain valuable resources, comparable to repeatable magic spells. For example, the avatar in the picture [Image at right] currently has 8,890 favor points and is contemplating investing 1,125 in Rift from Below, a spell that can be used only once an hour. The interface for using the altar describes it thus:

‘Only the dead take their footing for granted. Any true friend of the earth knows Brell’s realm can shake you to your core.’ Effects: Throws target back; Inflicts 2164-5050 crushing damage on targets in Area of Effect; Inflicts 340-794 crushing damage on targets in Area of Effect every 3 seconds; Must have completed the Quest ‘Building a Foundation of Devotion.’

That is to say, investing deity favor in this magical ability would allow the avatar to cause an earthquake as often as once an hour.

Much information about the relations between deities and their followers can be found on a special EverQuest Lore wiki (EverQuest Lore website n.d.), often explaining how worship of a particular deity can increase the avatar’s powers even without the use of an altar. For example:

The god of the sun and flames, Solusek Ro rules the Plane of Sun, and is the son of Fennin Ro, the elemental god of fire… Solusek Ro is arguably the most widely-worshipped deity among wizards and other arcane spellcasters, with a significant number of worshippers from almost every race that utilizes arcane magic, and even a few from races that don’t, traditionally. His teachings, much like the Burning Prince himself, are chaotic and based around power. His followers are taught to respect flame as both a giver and taker of life, that arcane magic is a fundamental component of the natural order, and that the acquisition of personal power is of paramount importance (with magic and knowledge being the greatest means of gaining this power).

While avatars cannot serve as clerics, druids, or shamans for Solusek Ro, they can be his wizards, and he has a temple in the Lavastorm Mountains of EQ where many quests can be accepted from non-player characters who are situated there. To be assigned some of the best quests, an avatar must first complete others, gaining what is often called “faction” but also “faction reputation.” A trick that players often discover too late is that a weird character named Tazgar the Efreeti is roaming the temple, and hailing him will erase all the faction points that had been earned. One may infer that Tazgar the Efreeti is an Islamic demon, but that is not explicit in EQ.

An early-level mission that typically takes four hours earns the Staff of Temperate Flux, which is a valuable weapon for wizards. To obtain the staff, an avatar needs to speak to Gardern, a non-player character who stands upon a balcony in the temple, and then travel widely to obtain four components he can combine to create the staff: Heart of Fire (from Inferno Goblin Wizard in Solusek’s Eye); Heart of Frost (from Goblin Wizard in Permafrost); Rod of Bone (from Stone Skeleton by the shores of Lake Rathetear); Darkwood Staff (obtained from Romar Sunto through a side quest). A picture here [Image at right] shows an avatar visiting the Temple of Solusek Ro at its entrance, flanked by two non-player temple personnel, all three of them holding magical staves.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Given the theological and ethnic complexity of Norrath, many competing organizations and organizational principle exist. Over the years, there were many changes to the division of labor among the avatars, notably the revision of classes, from twelve to sixteen in EQ and then up to twenty-five in EQ-II. Part of that proliferation was the division of each priestly class into two sub-classes, as outlined in the EQ-II website (EverQuest2 website n.d.):

Clerics:

“Templars use divine power to mend the wounded and cure the suffering of the afflicted.”

“Capable of serving as the cornerstone of any adventuring party, the Inquisitor can heal wounds and purge ailments such as disease and poison.”

Druids:

“Embodying the primal forces of nature, the Fury is equally capable of both defense and destruction.”

“Wardens invoke their druidic powers to mend wounds and purge disease and poison from their allies.”

Shamans:

“The Mystic is a shaman of spiritual preservation and enlightenment.”

“The Defiler is a shaman of corruption and spiritual enslavement.”

Within each class and ethnicity, an avatar may decide how much emphasis, if any at all, to give to conflict against avatars of competing factions. Direct violence between players is called PvP or Player-versus-Player, the chief alternative being PvE or Player-versus-Environment in which avatars perform non-violent tasks or hunt virtual animals and non-player characters. Normally, avatars are protected from being attacked by the avatar of another player, but it is possible to switch to PvP mode, becoming vulnerable to attack but also being able to attack other avatars that are also in PvP mode. At several locations in EQ stands a Priest of Discord, as shown in the picture, who when asked will give the avatar a Tome of Order and Discord, that switches PvP on. There does exist a Priest of Order who can rescind the tome, at one location that is not widely known, and many players have begged for help online when they realized how frightening PvP can be. The staff held by the Priest of Discord has a human skull on the end. [Image at right]

Conflict between players in EQ and EQ-II is primarily organized on a large social scale around the three factions represented by good, neutral, and evil gods. Collaboration is primarily on the smaller scale of voluntary guilds assembled by the players themselves, persistent groups with formal leaders but not very complex defined structure that may endure for years. Early in the history of EQ, Robert B. Marks (2003:102-04) studied them and suggested that several types had naturally developed, serving different purposes for players having somewhat different values:

Casual guilds: Groups of people who are happy playing together, who share common interests, and chiefly seek virtual friendships.

Raiding guilds: Very goal-oriented, these are teams who seek status and a sense of accomplishment by defeating hordes of monsters and completing quests together.

Role-playing guilds: These focus on character-to-character interaction instead of player-to-player, some of them even being somewhat theatrical in style.

Killer guilds: In the PvP context, players who play the roles of brigands and murderers, or more simply seek a sense of power by killing the avatars of other players.

In April 2009, the online open journal Game Studies published an anthology of scholarly articles about EverQuest. Considering the normative context from an abstract perspective, Greg Lastowka (2009) identified three separate legal regimes. First, the company that created it owns the intellectual property, thus governing some kinds behavior outside the virtual world, such as commercial exploitation, and giving the company the right to establish rules for in-game behavior. Second, many rules are built into the software of the game, which the company programmed and may modify, such as a procedure governing the function of the Tome of Order and Discord. Third, the players themselves may establish norms, for example governing the behavior of members of a particular guild, who may be expelled by the leadership if they violate the norms.

In his contribution to the journal, Nick Yee (2009) explained how the design of the software was intended to encourage the building of friendships and durable teams: “So a warrior will team up with a cleric, avatars of other classes will join them, and after a few successful quests they will found a guild.”

The exact characteristics of a class of avatar may change, usually during an expansion update, having implications for social relations that may be small or large. For example, when EverQuest II launched in 2004, it contained a few druid rings, resembling Stonehenge [Image at right] but distributed at great distances apart. An avatar of the druid class could use one to travel instantly to one of the others, a significant advantage considering the social, economic, and mission critical significance of great distances. In 2010, the rules were changed to allow any other class to use druid rings as a medium of travel.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

When the late Greg Lastowka titled his 2009 article about the EverQuest rule structure “Planes of Power,” he reinterpreted a classic phrase in the EQ subculture. The planes in EQ are virtual regions separate from Norrath and thus following different rules, including the Plane of Knowledge that has the equivalent of many druid rings, depicted as modest stone monuments, that provide access to other planes and the regions of Norrath and Luclin. This system was introduced in the 2002 EQ expansion titled literally “Planes of Power,” and demanded heroic player action in observance of a new set of quests and rule offered or imposed by the powerful game designers. As Wikipedia explains:

The primary goal, or end-quest, of The Planes of Power is access to the Plane of Time. Access to this plane can only be obtained through vanquishing the four elemental deities or avatars of such: Fennin Ro, The Rathe Council, Coirnav and Xegony. To gain access to all of the zones of the expansion and successfully enter the Plane of Time, the players needed to complete 28 flag events of all sorts, involving the death of planar deities and deific creatures. These encounters can only be completed with the organized effort of up to 72 players working together simultaneously.

Many other expansions emulated this revolutionary transformation, requiring coordinated efforts of large number of players, including the 2018 EverQuest II expansion, “Chaos Descending.”

The primary challenge for the EverQuest mythos has symbolically erupted as evil gods enter the world, good gods exit, and religion loses its coherence and validity. A February 21, 2006 press release from Sony promoted an expansion in words that can take on greater meaning today:

The gods have returned and the mortal realm shifts with their influence. But a new presence walks among the gods, a malevolent force released into godhood by the follies of mortals. Unbound by the laws of the pantheon, it leaves corruption in its wake and threatens to bring the entire pantheon crumbling down. The only hope for Norrath hangs on the very mortals who have unleashed this upheaval.”

But those mortals – namely Sony executives – decided like the fickle gods to abandon Norrath. They spun off EQ, EQ-II and a couple of others as Daybreak Game Company in 2015, and ever since then their survival has been quite uncertain. In an apparently vicious circle, the lack of funds to invest in EverQuest Next placed the survival burden on two now rather antiquated but vastly complex virtual worlds that attract too few new players to support a significant revival.

IMAGES

Image #1: An EverQuest II avatar preparing to use an altar to the god Brell Serilis, making an offering and using the god’s favor to gain a magical spell.
Image #2: An avatar visiting the Temple of Solusek Ro in the original EverQuest, flanked by two non-player temple personnel.
Image #3: A Priest of Discord in the Plane of Knowledge of EverQuest, the central location for gaining wisdom.
Image #4: An EverQuest II druid ring, in the Enchanted Lands region, used for magical long-distance travel.

REFERENCES

Bainbridge, William Folwell. 1883. Self-Giving: A Story of Christian Missions. Boston: D. Lothrup.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2018. “Surreal Impersonation.” Pp. 65-80 in Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion, edited by Vit Sisler, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler. New York: Routledge.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2013. eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bainbridge, William Sims. 2010. Online Multiplayer Games. San Rafael, CA: Morgan and Claypool.

Burt, Ronald S. 2012. “Network-Related Personality and the Agency Question: Multirole Evidence from a Virtual World.” American Journal of Sociology 118:543-91.

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Huh, Searle, and Dmitri Williams. 2010. “Dude Looks Like a Lady: Gender Swapping in an Online Game.” Pp. 161-74 in Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual, edited by William Sims Bainbridge. Guildford, Surrey, England: Springer.

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Williams, Dmitri, Tracy L. M. Kennedy and Robert J. Moore. 2011. “Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices, and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs.” Games and Culture 6:171-200.

Yee, Nick. 2009. “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath.” Game Studies 9. Accessed from http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/yee on 30 September 2019.

Publication Date:
5 October 2019