The Panacea Museum: Religion and the End of the World?

The main galleries of the Panacea Museum in Bedford are located in a grand, Victorian house near the historic centre of the town. The building is part of a large site formed by combining surrounding gardens and houses which was, for much of the 20^thcentury and into the 21^st, the headquarters of a distinctive British millenarian religious group. In fact, they came to see the idyllic garden they created – and which is largely preserved as part of the museum – as the Garden of Eden.

Fig 1. A view of the Panacea Society’s garden – thought of as the Garden of Eden by the group – as it is today. (Looking towards the rear of the Founder’s House.) With permission of the Panacea Charitable Trust.

The properties were owned by the Panacea Society, which was established after World War One by a group of women who believed that the prophecies of the 19^th century prophet Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) were coming to fulfilment, and that a female messiah – the leader of the group, Mabel Barltrop (1866-1934, called “Octavia” by her followers) – would usher in the end of history and the benign rule of the British Empire all over the world.

Fig 2. Mabel Barltrop, known as “Octavia” by the Panacea Society’s members, in the Society’s     garden. Probably taken in the early-1930s. With permission of the Panacea Charitable Trust. 

The Panacea Society came to an end as a religious organization in 2012, when the last member in Bedford passed away. Since then, the Panacea Charitable Trust has taken over the management of the artefacts, houses, gardens and archives of the Society, supporting the museum and promoting public understanding of and academic research into movements like the Panacea Society which believed the end of the world as we know it was imminent.

The museum displays relate to two main aspects of the Panacea Society’s story: their religious history, that is the Society’s beliefs and the long prophetic tradition it was a part of, and their social history, the everyday life and work of the Panacea Society’s members as they set about their mission to prepare for the return of divine rule.

Fig 3. A replica of “Joanna Southcott’s Box” on display in the Panacea Museum. The original, which is not on display but is kept securely by the Panacea Charitable Trust, is believed to contain prophetic writings by Southcott and was left by her with instructions that it should only be opened by 24 bishops of the Church of England at a time of dire national emergency. With permission of the Panacea Charitable Trust.

So, there are displays and objects related to the prophets of their tradition from the late-18^th century to the 20^th century, and preserved or reconstructed rooms and buildings used by the Society either in expectation of a visiting delegation of bishops when the end of the world was nigh (though they never came) or for their everyday work: a preserved kitchen, scullery, chapel and “wireless room”. The highlight of the social history is perhaps the “Founder’s House”, an otherwise unremarkable Victorian terraced house where Mabel Barltrop lived and died and which has been preserved to the present day.

Fig 4. The sitting room of the “Founder’s House”, Mabel Barltrop’s family home at 12 Albany Road, Bedford, as it is preserved today. With permission of the Panacea Charitable Trust.

Millenarianism – the belief that a “Golden Age” of divine peace and order will descend on the earth – has been a powerful element of the Abrahamic religions from early Christian ideas about the imminent rule of Christ, related to earlier Jewish ideas about the peaceful rule of Israel as a divinely chosen nation, and with roots more ancient still. Forms of the idea are present across traditions and geographies from, for example, Muslim teaching about an expected messianic Mahdi, and Hindu Vaishnava traditions, to UFO religions and some political movements in recent times.

All of these can be understood as aspects of apocalyptic thinking; an idea increasingly associated with the catastrophic destruction of the world, but part of a very long tradition about prophetic insight into the deep meaning of the cosmos and the eventual upheaval and reversal of the world order amid judgement by a transcendent divine power – whatever form that divinity might take. In the Panacea Museum, we can see processes of overlap and interaction between everyday life for one particular group of otherwise conventional women, and the formation of a set of dramatic religious expectations and beliefs that were significantly different from the mainstream and conventional beliefs of the Church of England many of them had once been part of. While the Panacea Museum is centred on the beliefs and activities of a group that was in many respects unusual, it provides a rare vantage point onto part of a broad landscape of prophetic and millenarian expectation that is often overlooked in conventional histories of religion but which has nonetheless been important as a dynamic and creative force in both popular and elite religion for many hundreds of years.

Alastair Lockhart

Further reading:

Alastair Lockhart. 2019. Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing: The Panacea Society in the Twentieth Century. Albany NY: State University of New York Press.

Alastair Lockhart. 2021. “Panacea Society.” In James Crossley and Alastair Lockhart (eds.) Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements. 15 January 2021. Retrieved from www.cdamm.org/articles/panacea-society.

Jane Shaw. 2011. Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers. London: Jonathan Cape.

Jane Shaw and Philip Lockley, eds. 2017. The History of a Modern Millennial Movement: The Southcottians. London: I. B. Tauris.