What do you think?
Rate this book
Octavia, Daughter of God
In 1919, in the wake of the upheaval of World War I, a remarkable group of English women came up with their own solution to the world's grief:a new religion. At the heart of the Panacea Society was a charismatic and autocratic leader, a vicar's widow named Mabel Barltrop. Her followers called her Octavia, and believed that she was the daughter of God, sent to build the New Jerusalem in Bedford.
Proclaiming the female aspects of God, Octavia attracted former suffragettes, middle-class Christian women and passionate spiritual seekers to Bedford, where they followed her in rigorous religious practices. She appointed twelve women as her apostles, and put the rest to work to spread her Word: that human beings, through Panacea, could achieve immortal life on earth.
Acclaimed historian Jane Shaw found the last living members of the Panacea Society, who revealed to her their immense, painstakingly-preserved archives. She discovered a utopian community that once had seventy residents, thousands of followers, and an international healing ministry that reached 130,000 people around the globe.
Octavia, Daughter of God is a fascinating group biography and a revelatory work of cultural and narrative history. Vividly told, by turns funny and tragic, it reveals in intimate detail the complex, out-sized personality of Octavia; the faith of her devoted followers, who believed they would never die; and the intricacies and intrigues of her close-knit community.
But Octavia, Daughter of God is also about a moment at the advent of modernity, when a generation of newly empowered women tried to re-make Christianity in their own image. Startlingly modern in their resolve and curiously reactionary in their social views and politics, their story is a portrait of an age. It offers a window into the anxieties and hopes of the interwar years through the lives of ordinary people who believed extraordinary things about God, this world and the next.
Proclaiming the female aspects of God, Octavia attracted former suffragettes, middle-class Christian women and passionate spiritual seekers to Bedford, where they followed her in rigorous religious practices. She appointed twelve women as her apostles, and put the rest to work to spread her Word: that human beings, through Panacea, could achieve immortal life on earth.
Acclaimed historian Jane Shaw found the last living members of the Panacea Society, who revealed to her their immense, painstakingly-preserved archives. She discovered a utopian community that once had seventy residents, thousands of followers, and an international healing ministry that reached 130,000 people around the globe.
Octavia, Daughter of God is a fascinating group biography and a revelatory work of cultural and narrative history. Vividly told, by turns funny and tragic, it reveals in intimate detail the complex, out-sized personality of Octavia; the faith of her devoted followers, who believed they would never die; and the intricacies and intrigues of her close-knit community.
But Octavia, Daughter of God is also about a moment at the advent of modernity, when a generation of newly empowered women tried to re-make Christianity in their own image. Startlingly modern in their resolve and curiously reactionary in their social views and politics, their story is a portrait of an age. It offers a window into the anxieties and hopes of the interwar years through the lives of ordinary people who believed extraordinary things about God, this world and the next.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2011
7 people are currently reading
133 people want to read
About the author
Jane Shaw
10 books2 followersThe Very Rev. Dr. Jane Shaw was installed as the eighth Dean of Grace Cathedral on November 6, 2010. She is responsible for the overall vision and mission of the Cathedral, overseeing the spiritual life of the Cathedral and giving leadership to the Cathedral community. She runs the Cathedral in collaboration with the Chapter (the Senior Management Team) and Trustees (the Cathedral Board).
Dr. Shaw joined Grace Cathedral from the University of Oxford where she was Dean of Divinity and Fellow of New College, Oxford, and taught history and theology at the university for sixteen years. She is also Canon Theologian of Salisbury Cathedral and an honorary canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and has served as Theological Consultant to the Church of England House of Bishops.
Dr. Shaw was educated as an undergraduate at Oxford, has an M.Div. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Episcopal Divinity School. She is a Fellow of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Anglican monastic community in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 9, 2019
I am so, so happy about this book. Can you believe that there was an English cult that thought the daughter of God lived in Bedford? And they kept a house for Christ to return to? And the daughter of God issued directives about HOW TO BAKE CAKES? It's everything I love most in the world, it's perfect, and it's all TRUE. (13+)
*Please note: this review is meant as a recommendation only. If you use it in any marketing material, online or anywhere on a published book without asking permission from me first, I will ask you to remove that use immediately. Thank you!*
*Please note: this review is meant as a recommendation only. If you use it in any marketing material, online or anywhere on a published book without asking permission from me first, I will ask you to remove that use immediately. Thank you!*
April 28, 2022
Absolutely fascinating. How a vicar's widow in Bedford came to the conclusion that she was both a prophet and the messiah and gathered a community of believers around her. I am not a person of faith but I find the things that people can make themselves believe so interesting. And I think there are worse things to hang your beliefs on than the idea that heaven is going to be like an Edwardian garden party.
May 14, 2019
There are two main rules to follow when setting up a religion; first, never make a claim for the end of the world and second, never claim immortality for your leader. While the Panacea Society did not make the first mistake, they fell full prey to the second. Not only did they claim immortality of their leader, Octavia but also for each of them. Now the religion is no more but they had a good run of it, over ninety years of faith carried out in the Holy Town of Bedford.
Last year I visited the Holy Town, to The Campus, home of the Panacea Society. I even had tea and lemon drizzle cake in the garden, believed by the Society to be the Garden of Eden itself. It was a beautiful July day and as I sat there with my refreshment, watching a blackbird singing on a bush, I could see how the Panaceans felt as they did.
It was in Bedford that I bought a copy of ‘Octavia: Daughter of God’ by Ruth Hall at a price I began to think may have been an accident. The book was written in 2011, when there were still a couple of Panaceans left alive. She was given full access to the archives and free rein with all the secrets and hidden doctrines. This is partly due to the fact that the book and the project that the book was part of was funded by the Panacean Society after urging from the charity commission to liquidate their wealth and do more with it. This may mean that the book is too kind to the Octavia and the society but I don’t think this became an issue.
First we learnt about Octavia herself. What sort of person becomes ‘the daughter of God’? What sort of people confirm her in this notion? How does a religious community spontaneously come together in the first place? These were all fascinating questions and were well explored.
Octavia, originally Mabel Andrews, was a London-born member of a family with literary connections. She was intelligent and a voracious reader but did not receive an education more extensive then any other girl in her time or place. She married Arthur Barltrop, a curate whose career was hampered by ill-health. A keen reader of his theological library and a vigorous worker for charities, she took an interest in the church and religious matters. When he died, she lived in a respectable house in Bedford with her children.
Always prone to nerves, she was (at least once) committed to a mental hospital, where she was dismayed to be treated like a crazy person. There she discussed religion as well as the many other new spiritual categories like spiritualism and theosophy. Having read works on Joanna Southcott, she wrote letters to bishops to get her mystical box of prophecy opened.
Coming back home, she carried on her interest in Southcott, taking part in letters and later meetings with other Southcottians. She was linked into a whole network of people who felt that the Anglican church was in some ways dead, cutting itself off from new ideas that could inject new life into it. Many of these people were women, cut off from careers in the church, they began to cohere into a religious community of their own where women did all the main jobs. Although many of these early members were suffragists and even suffragettes (one had gone on hunger strike in Holloway Prison), Mabel Barltrop herself felt that women were essentially different from men and it was this difference that made them vital to reviving true religion.
Many of these people were involved in currently popular practices like automatic writing and Mabel became one of them. The community began to regard themselves as the real church, connecting themselves with Joanna Southcott and the prophets that came after her, a line called ‘The Visitation’. A recently deceased member, Helen Shepstone, was declared the seventh prophet of this lineage, then the idea grew that Mabel was the eighth. As a result she took the name Octavia. Soon after, it was revealed to a member that Octavia was not only the eighth prophet but Schiloh, the spiritual child of Joanna Southcott and the direct daughter of God. In the letter where Octavia recognised the call and took the responsibility, she also thanked a friend for knitting her a lovely pair of bed socks - so the spiritual and the mundane mixed for this group.
With the belief that God’s daughter was among them, the new ‘Community of the Holy Ghost’ formed the notion of a four-square trinity with Father, Son, Holy Ghost and Daughter, this developed into the notion that the Holy Ghost was also the voice of the Divine Mother, creating something of a nuclear family. Octavia’s own mental sufferings became a subject for belief, as Jesus had suffered bodily for the soul of humanity, so Octavia had to suffer mentally to save the humanity’s bodies - for if a follower managed to live the tenants of the new faith, they would be bodily immortal. When 144,000 people had achieved this, then there was a foothold on Earth for Jesus to return and establish the New Jerusalem in Bedford. The town was initially favoured for it’s good shops and new Selfridge’s department store, but as beliefs grew, the notion that Bedford was a holy place and the garden of ‘The Campus’, the houses around Albany Road the members bought up, was the Garden of Eden. Octavia believed that if she walked 77 paces away from the centre of it then the Devil would kill her, so was essentially imprisoned into her base of operations.
The key to bodily immortality was a process known as ‘Overcoming’. The idea was to become ‘comfortable to live with’, to overcome all the irritations and annoyances of normal life and become something better. One of the ways to do this was to write a large, permanent confession, not only because confession was regarded as good for the soul but because the Panaceans believed that each confession was an accusation with which to imprison Satan. On the more mundane level, there were strictures to not eat toast noisily, to put plenty of cherries in a cherry cake and a two page instruction manual of how to make tea. It was important to do these small activities perfectly to promote all around perfection.
As the society ‘regarded as true, anything that was interesting and meaningful,’ coincidences often helped form their beliefs. One day Octavia’s medication jumped out of her hand so she prayed on water and drank it. Drinking this blessed water was spread over the community until they developed a system where Octavia breathed over rolls and rolls of cloth which were cut up and put in water. This turned into a worldwide healing ministry, with thousands of people writing in for the cloth (and reporting their progress) up until the 1990s. This water was the ‘panacea’ that the society later took its name from and was one of its main activities other than putting up posters in London demanding Bishops open Southcott’s Box.
Where the early society was a community of believers centred around a charismatic leader, the functions in the community became stricter. When an American seeker of knowledge entered the community and started preaching that gay sex was spiritually neutral in a way straight sex wasn’t, he was ‘tried’ and expelled under the ordinances of the ‘Voice of the Divine Mother’. Emily Goodwin was originally the nurse to Octavia’s Aunt Fanny but quickly became the enforcement arm of the Panaceans. Although Octavia was regarded as the Holy Daughter herself and Emily was only the conduit of the voice of the Divine Mother, anything said in that voice was regarded as absolute.
In its prime, the community had been a thriving place with garden parties that were regarded as rehearsals for Heaven on Earth but as everyone grew older and many died it became a place for ‘old people, cripples and the feeble-minded.’ If the book is accurate, the joy of the thing withered as it became tighter.
You can imagine the surprise when Octavia died in 1934. The members stuffed her bed with hot-water bottles and waited, just as Southcott’s followers had done, and much with the same effect. Octavia started to rot and leak fluid from her nose. She was buried under a quiet and unassuming gravestone.
The Society kept going though, buying a house for Jesus’ return, expanding the healing squares and taking adverts in papers about the Box. Even as this book was written, there were still two believers who kept things ticking over. They were in the process of doing up the building kitted out for the Bishops and creating a museum. By the time the museum was opened, the followers had died at the society turned into a museum trust. It’s a museum well worth visiting and this is a book well worth reading - there was loads of interesting stuff I missed out.
Incidentally, as I chatted with the man at the front desk, he told me that although the Panacea Society did not exist, there were still dedicated Southcottians and some of them in Bedford.
Last year I visited the Holy Town, to The Campus, home of the Panacea Society. I even had tea and lemon drizzle cake in the garden, believed by the Society to be the Garden of Eden itself. It was a beautiful July day and as I sat there with my refreshment, watching a blackbird singing on a bush, I could see how the Panaceans felt as they did.
It was in Bedford that I bought a copy of ‘Octavia: Daughter of God’ by Ruth Hall at a price I began to think may have been an accident. The book was written in 2011, when there were still a couple of Panaceans left alive. She was given full access to the archives and free rein with all the secrets and hidden doctrines. This is partly due to the fact that the book and the project that the book was part of was funded by the Panacean Society after urging from the charity commission to liquidate their wealth and do more with it. This may mean that the book is too kind to the Octavia and the society but I don’t think this became an issue.
First we learnt about Octavia herself. What sort of person becomes ‘the daughter of God’? What sort of people confirm her in this notion? How does a religious community spontaneously come together in the first place? These were all fascinating questions and were well explored.
Octavia, originally Mabel Andrews, was a London-born member of a family with literary connections. She was intelligent and a voracious reader but did not receive an education more extensive then any other girl in her time or place. She married Arthur Barltrop, a curate whose career was hampered by ill-health. A keen reader of his theological library and a vigorous worker for charities, she took an interest in the church and religious matters. When he died, she lived in a respectable house in Bedford with her children.
Always prone to nerves, she was (at least once) committed to a mental hospital, where she was dismayed to be treated like a crazy person. There she discussed religion as well as the many other new spiritual categories like spiritualism and theosophy. Having read works on Joanna Southcott, she wrote letters to bishops to get her mystical box of prophecy opened.
Coming back home, she carried on her interest in Southcott, taking part in letters and later meetings with other Southcottians. She was linked into a whole network of people who felt that the Anglican church was in some ways dead, cutting itself off from new ideas that could inject new life into it. Many of these people were women, cut off from careers in the church, they began to cohere into a religious community of their own where women did all the main jobs. Although many of these early members were suffragists and even suffragettes (one had gone on hunger strike in Holloway Prison), Mabel Barltrop herself felt that women were essentially different from men and it was this difference that made them vital to reviving true religion.
Many of these people were involved in currently popular practices like automatic writing and Mabel became one of them. The community began to regard themselves as the real church, connecting themselves with Joanna Southcott and the prophets that came after her, a line called ‘The Visitation’. A recently deceased member, Helen Shepstone, was declared the seventh prophet of this lineage, then the idea grew that Mabel was the eighth. As a result she took the name Octavia. Soon after, it was revealed to a member that Octavia was not only the eighth prophet but Schiloh, the spiritual child of Joanna Southcott and the direct daughter of God. In the letter where Octavia recognised the call and took the responsibility, she also thanked a friend for knitting her a lovely pair of bed socks - so the spiritual and the mundane mixed for this group.
With the belief that God’s daughter was among them, the new ‘Community of the Holy Ghost’ formed the notion of a four-square trinity with Father, Son, Holy Ghost and Daughter, this developed into the notion that the Holy Ghost was also the voice of the Divine Mother, creating something of a nuclear family. Octavia’s own mental sufferings became a subject for belief, as Jesus had suffered bodily for the soul of humanity, so Octavia had to suffer mentally to save the humanity’s bodies - for if a follower managed to live the tenants of the new faith, they would be bodily immortal. When 144,000 people had achieved this, then there was a foothold on Earth for Jesus to return and establish the New Jerusalem in Bedford. The town was initially favoured for it’s good shops and new Selfridge’s department store, but as beliefs grew, the notion that Bedford was a holy place and the garden of ‘The Campus’, the houses around Albany Road the members bought up, was the Garden of Eden. Octavia believed that if she walked 77 paces away from the centre of it then the Devil would kill her, so was essentially imprisoned into her base of operations.
The key to bodily immortality was a process known as ‘Overcoming’. The idea was to become ‘comfortable to live with’, to overcome all the irritations and annoyances of normal life and become something better. One of the ways to do this was to write a large, permanent confession, not only because confession was regarded as good for the soul but because the Panaceans believed that each confession was an accusation with which to imprison Satan. On the more mundane level, there were strictures to not eat toast noisily, to put plenty of cherries in a cherry cake and a two page instruction manual of how to make tea. It was important to do these small activities perfectly to promote all around perfection.
As the society ‘regarded as true, anything that was interesting and meaningful,’ coincidences often helped form their beliefs. One day Octavia’s medication jumped out of her hand so she prayed on water and drank it. Drinking this blessed water was spread over the community until they developed a system where Octavia breathed over rolls and rolls of cloth which were cut up and put in water. This turned into a worldwide healing ministry, with thousands of people writing in for the cloth (and reporting their progress) up until the 1990s. This water was the ‘panacea’ that the society later took its name from and was one of its main activities other than putting up posters in London demanding Bishops open Southcott’s Box.
Where the early society was a community of believers centred around a charismatic leader, the functions in the community became stricter. When an American seeker of knowledge entered the community and started preaching that gay sex was spiritually neutral in a way straight sex wasn’t, he was ‘tried’ and expelled under the ordinances of the ‘Voice of the Divine Mother’. Emily Goodwin was originally the nurse to Octavia’s Aunt Fanny but quickly became the enforcement arm of the Panaceans. Although Octavia was regarded as the Holy Daughter herself and Emily was only the conduit of the voice of the Divine Mother, anything said in that voice was regarded as absolute.
In its prime, the community had been a thriving place with garden parties that were regarded as rehearsals for Heaven on Earth but as everyone grew older and many died it became a place for ‘old people, cripples and the feeble-minded.’ If the book is accurate, the joy of the thing withered as it became tighter.
You can imagine the surprise when Octavia died in 1934. The members stuffed her bed with hot-water bottles and waited, just as Southcott’s followers had done, and much with the same effect. Octavia started to rot and leak fluid from her nose. She was buried under a quiet and unassuming gravestone.
The Society kept going though, buying a house for Jesus’ return, expanding the healing squares and taking adverts in papers about the Box. Even as this book was written, there were still two believers who kept things ticking over. They were in the process of doing up the building kitted out for the Bishops and creating a museum. By the time the museum was opened, the followers had died at the society turned into a museum trust. It’s a museum well worth visiting and this is a book well worth reading - there was loads of interesting stuff I missed out.
Incidentally, as I chatted with the man at the front desk, he told me that although the Panacea Society did not exist, there were still dedicated Southcottians and some of them in Bedford.
July 7, 2021
Comprehensive and revelatory. Makes living in Bedford (aka Paradise) incredibly exciting. And we need a good carpenter.
September 25, 2024
Interesting account of what was effectively an eccentric cult of middle class English ladies with elements of coercive control.
January 2, 2013
I'm slowly developing an interest in early 20th century British history. This book combines all the things I normally love about Chinese religion, millenarianism, women in leading roles, apocalyptic visions, spirit writing, immortality etc but transfers them to a very middle class setting in Bedford with old English ladies creating their own heterodox cult. It is a fascinating piece of history. A group of women who came to contact each other over the writings of Joanna Southcott came to believe that one of them was the daughter of god, a female messiah who had come to give immortal life in this world and they set up their own religious community in Bedford. Some of the women were ex-suffreagettes, there was a vicar's widow and women who didn't marry. To me the first section of this book was the most interesting. It looked at the way the women started getting in touch with each other, formed their relationships and started to form the ideas behind their new religion/cult. (Which they saw as just another part of the C of E and not at all heterodox). The community that they built through letter writing reminded me a lot of the online communities of women that exist now. People from all different places that communicate ideas by writing that they'd not be able to express with the people around them. It was interesting to see how their ideas were shaped and how they seemed to grow out of the lack of place for women in the Church of England at that time. (The book was written by a female Anglican priest who twice wrote how in another time Mabel/Octavia might have just become a priest). But their beliefs seemed to grow out of the horror from the first world war, with a belief that the prophecies of Joanna Southcott would be able to change the horror, and the very restricted place of women in the Church. Their idea was that as women had caused the fall only women would be able to save the human race and thus there was a need for a female saviour to complete the work that Jesus began.
One of the things that was most interesting about the women and their community (for eventually men did join them). Was that apart from their quite radicall beliefs they were painfully normal and very conservative in most other ways. They held tea parties, and in her instructions Octavia would give strict instructions on decorations, cakes (not skimping on the sugar!) and clothing that was appropriate. Even the right kind of table manners were very important. The people who joined the community had to be independently wealthy, be able to support themselves without working and be able to buy a house to live in within the community. Members who wanted to join but couldn't affoard this became servants. They weren't allowed to worship with the rich members, would have to serve them 6 days a week and were treated pretty terribly. The women also supported fascists and didn't believe in any kind of social care at all.
After a few years they started a healing ministry (selling little pieces of cloth that Octavia had breathed on). These were used to heal and sent out to people, it was requested that everyone write back and let them know how they were progressing with their healing, the healing process was meant to gradual. Shaw explained how Octavia discovered her healing gift, but not how they decided to start a whole new healing ministry, which I thought was a little disappointing. Most of the book was very much concerned with the day to day living of the community. The sexual problems, the problems of Octavia's children, but for me I would have enjoyed a bit more analysis of how they got to their beliefs and practices. Rather the author focused on the way they lived. For me the fact that they were so ordinary and conservative in almost every respect, except for the very strange religious beliefs was fascinating. It made me wonder why this one aspect was so different? Which of course made me question whether they really were so very ordinary in every other aspect. It seemed like at times the author was trying to portray them as very typical examples of women of their class and age, but of course the fact that they were part of this community and had their beliefs and practices meant that they really weren't. I would have liked to have seen more exploration of this difference and perhaps some theories as to why.
Overall though I really enjoyed this book and thought it was a very interesting community. At times it sounded like it was very damaging to its members, but they also seemed quite likeable in many ways. Because it as so recent and the author had so much material to draw from you really got a sense of the personalities involved which made it very interesting indeed.
One of the things that was most interesting about the women and their community (for eventually men did join them). Was that apart from their quite radicall beliefs they were painfully normal and very conservative in most other ways. They held tea parties, and in her instructions Octavia would give strict instructions on decorations, cakes (not skimping on the sugar!) and clothing that was appropriate. Even the right kind of table manners were very important. The people who joined the community had to be independently wealthy, be able to support themselves without working and be able to buy a house to live in within the community. Members who wanted to join but couldn't affoard this became servants. They weren't allowed to worship with the rich members, would have to serve them 6 days a week and were treated pretty terribly. The women also supported fascists and didn't believe in any kind of social care at all.
After a few years they started a healing ministry (selling little pieces of cloth that Octavia had breathed on). These were used to heal and sent out to people, it was requested that everyone write back and let them know how they were progressing with their healing, the healing process was meant to gradual. Shaw explained how Octavia discovered her healing gift, but not how they decided to start a whole new healing ministry, which I thought was a little disappointing. Most of the book was very much concerned with the day to day living of the community. The sexual problems, the problems of Octavia's children, but for me I would have enjoyed a bit more analysis of how they got to their beliefs and practices. Rather the author focused on the way they lived. For me the fact that they were so ordinary and conservative in almost every respect, except for the very strange religious beliefs was fascinating. It made me wonder why this one aspect was so different? Which of course made me question whether they really were so very ordinary in every other aspect. It seemed like at times the author was trying to portray them as very typical examples of women of their class and age, but of course the fact that they were part of this community and had their beliefs and practices meant that they really weren't. I would have liked to have seen more exploration of this difference and perhaps some theories as to why.
Overall though I really enjoyed this book and thought it was a very interesting community. At times it sounded like it was very damaging to its members, but they also seemed quite likeable in many ways. Because it as so recent and the author had so much material to draw from you really got a sense of the personalities involved which made it very interesting indeed.
February 13, 2024
After years of living in Bedford and hearing the stories of the Panacea Society as we wandered past the intriguing and occasionally ominous names emblazoned over the thresholds of houses up and down Albany Road on the way to The Embankment or up Castle Road and into town, I finally opened this book.
My intention was to use it as inspiration for a writing project, perhaps even a novel that would lay the past, present, and future of this quaint little town bare for all to see.
Alas, the true story of Octavia and the Panacea Society is just too utterly bonkers for fiction. Every page features a detail that would just never play. Fact is stranger than fiction, people are madder than you could imagine, and nothing makes sense or hangs together, ever.
A testament to this book and it’s author, then, that it’s so clear-eyed, empathetic, and ultimately sad as a portrait of a place and a people at a loss in the inter-war years and beyond (though, sadly, not as long as they hoped).
My intention was to use it as inspiration for a writing project, perhaps even a novel that would lay the past, present, and future of this quaint little town bare for all to see.
Alas, the true story of Octavia and the Panacea Society is just too utterly bonkers for fiction. Every page features a detail that would just never play. Fact is stranger than fiction, people are madder than you could imagine, and nothing makes sense or hangs together, ever.
A testament to this book and it’s author, then, that it’s so clear-eyed, empathetic, and ultimately sad as a portrait of a place and a people at a loss in the inter-war years and beyond (though, sadly, not as long as they hoped).
October 8, 2015
The Panacean movement was wonderfully bizarre in the way a certain kind of comedy sketch achieves a bemused audience -- by multiple half-steps to the side, each step in itself not terribly radical, until the moment you realize you're all the way across the room facing a corner with your coat on backwards and a flowerpot on your head.
October 14, 2011
"She believed that because Christ's death on the Cross, his atoning for sin, had saved only people's souls, another redeemer was required, one who would redeem the body, and this redeemer was to be female." (40)
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews