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davlucies · 2 years

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"Davenport, I have a specific question for you. What does Davenport regret most, across the entire arc?"

"I think, and he would never admit-- he's never admitted this to anyone, but during the very end of their century abroad, they were deciding what to do with this incredible power that they had discovered. And there were, you know, two dissenting opinions. Most folks wanted to make these Grand Relics and hide them, and Lucretia wanted to put this shield up over the world.

"Even after everything that happened, I think Davenport regretted not giving Lucretia's suggestion the weight that it deserved and truly considering it, because if he had, he doesn't know if things could have turned out very, very, very differently. So there is no regret even close to that, in his life."

i've always thought how that cycle 92 conversation went down was depressing and kind of... awful in general, especially for lucretia. and it always really stuck out to me that davenport didn't vote and barely voiced his thoughts. plus, the fact that they made the relics and let them stay out in the world with a crew member so opposed to them and even as her predictions came true was horrifying. they were all miserable and going against their own morals and promises to each other. so that davenport would most want to give her opinion more weight and try to change the suffering and pain they all went through (plus the loss of life planetside) is heartbreaking.

under the cut i linked a few old fics of mine relating to this, though not what davenport literally does in imbalance e3. i've written some canon divergence relating to the crew considering aspects of lucretia's plan and averting the relic wars though, so i will probably be posting things along those lines, and other stories relating to cycle 92, soonish :3

supervivere (18+): this is set during the relic wars, focusing on their grief and poor communication. it is not meant to be erotic, but i do not want minors to read it due to sexual content. i wanted to focus on their heartbreak and pain, him pushing his down and her drowning in hers as the crew's misery and the loss of life below weighs on them both

blurb summary: “We’re okay,” she told him, like a promise.

He nodded, and he pressed his face to her skin. He was still and focused. He wasn’t a praying man, but his touch and intensity in the dim light felt sacred.

broken (drabble, wc 100): also set during the wars, a glimpse into davenport's frustration, grief, and the state of their communication. his awareness of her feelings and motivations at this point in canon is very important to me.

blurb summary: That was all them.

guilty (drabble, wc 100): yet another fic exploring their feelings during the relic wars, their grief and poor communication. this is one of my favorite things i've written for taz.

blurb summary: “Why do you have so many journals out?”

empty as a promise (see tags for cws): if you guessed that this might be a story about the relic wars again, you'd be right. there's some stuff in this i cringe about, but it's the strongest articulation i've had of "hey, what they were doing was wrong, and lucretia's intentions were always quakerly at worst." she's also quite upset here, which upsets dav too

blurb summary: “This is all because of the Hunger, you know that.”

She frowns, and she turns back to Faerun below. “We could say that we were pushed to evil. But evil is still evil.”

will it be a bang, or a whimper? (no pairing): this is a short dav character study set during the century. i liked exploring the idea that he's never considered an end or way of defeating the hunger even several decades into their journey, because i think it helps explain how the 92 convo went and his unwillingness to intervene during the relic wars, as well as his potential sense of hurt/betrayal that lucretia didn't bring her plan up with him in the decades she was working on it. his love of his crew and lack of optimism about their situation is compelling to me, to say the least

blurb summary: Their journey will end with their permanent death, the ship’s destruction, the snuffing out of his bond engine. In the meantime, Davenport flies his crew away, year after year, and he doesn’t allow for foolish dreams.

take this waltz, it's been dying for years (18+): this is smut with a cracky premise, as it's set on story and song, after... everything. their dynamic is a little different from usual, because everything is so fresh. and he tops her. anyway, their angst and deep unconditional love for each other is really what matters here. the premise is a stretch, but not wholly implausible with past/century-era davenport/lucretia (which is often my angle lol) this touches on the hopelessness and angst of the century, particularly during cycle 92 after their awful argument about the plans. i have written quite a bit set during 92 and exploring fallout from the argument, but i think this is the closest i've gotten to actually posting fic that touches on that point of canon. it just totally breaks my heart to think about

blurb summary: She looks up at him, only slightly. Even below him, she makes him feel small. Even on her knees and repentant as she’ll ever be, she leaves him powerless. But loving her was never about power. He handed everything to her, and she always took it with caution and grace.

He trusted her.

#imbalance #taz balance #davenport #lucretia #post-canon #also um... griffin oh my god... this was so much more than i've ever let myself imagine... i cried so much when dav said this #this is uh... yeah... very targeted fanservice. it was really amazing to see and i'm in shock it even happened. really wonderful #ilu dav #i love how much depth there is to him and to their story #as always i'd really prefer people not hateread or interact with me/my fanworks in any way other than in good faith. thank you #:-)#word of jeffandrew

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tinyroseperson · 4 years

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i have made the executive decision to only address people by “friend” now, since gender is a social construct and i am all quakerly and stuff. my mutuals? friend. the bigass accounts i watch from afar? also friend. that person i interacted with briefly through a short reblog exchange? you, too, are friend.

you can’t escape it, you are friend now :)

#friend #friends #gender neutral ways to address people #gender is a social construct #gender is an illusion #no gender #only friend #lgbtq #lgbtq+#quakers #quakerism #PostByMe

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liberationtheology · 4 years

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i feel like harassing a random tumblr blogger who has no impact on your life for having a differing opinion on religion to you isn’t quakerly either but hey that’s just me!

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mikhalsarah · 3 years

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RIP Open Orthodoxy, eaten alive by parasitic “Wokeness”...

There are already three streams of Judaism where women can be rabbis (Conservative/Masorti, Reform, and Reconstructionist), I should know, I belong to one of them. I’ve never entirely understood the Orthodox commitment to sidelining women in this day and age, but the simple fact is, people who are unhappy with Orthodox halakhah in this area have other places to pray, and the stubborn refusal to pray in any of “those places”, yet fighting tooth and nail to make their own shuls become just like them, smack of a weird sort of snobbish attachment to the word “orthodoxy”....even though the rest of Orthodox is but a hair’s breadth from considering them a treif liberal “fake” Judaism like the rest of us already.

As difficult, but possible, as the issue of female rabbis would be to bring about, (seeing as it is a rabbinic prohibition based largely on cultural attitudes no longer in play in western society), the issue of getting the Orthodox to accept gay couples is another matter. Again, not an insurmountable issue, Centrist Orthodox Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has written quite openly about the need to find a place in Orthodox shuls for gay and lesbian Jews. However Orthodox culture is never going to let them hold hands during service or kiddush, for the simple reason that public displays of sexual/romantic affection, even between heterosexual married couples, are frowned upon everywhere from the sanctuary to the grocery store, due to the strong feeling that sexuality should be put aside, or sublimated, when encountering certain kinds of holiness (engaging in prayer etc). Of course, that does not mean that in Judaism sex is the opposite of holiness in some way, or else it would be forbidden to have sex on Shabbat. Since marital sex is a mitzvah (commandment, meritorious act) on Shabbat, better to understand it as a different kind of holiness, one that is not compatible with some other mitzvot (like prayer) or with public life in general. Sexuality itself is a sort of holiness surrounded by taboos and necessitating the utmost privacy in Judaism, so this is ironically probably the hill Orthodoxy would die on, not figuring out how to tolerate the gays.

I heartily agree that it’s time to stop being racist to the Palestinians. Strange though that a “Woke” rabbi still can’t bring himself to call them what they call themselves, and in typical Israeli/Zionist fashion emphasizes their Arab otheness, rather than their indigenousness...thus making it seem rather like a favour being granted to them out of the goodness of his Woke heart, rather than an acknowledgement of their intrinsic belongingness. (This kind of stuff is typical for Woke social justice, which consistently cares far more about virtue-signalling and screaming at “white people”, or whomever else is deemed an Oppressor in the situation, than listening and paying attention to those who are actually oppressed.)

I spent decades of my life as a vegetarian, years of that as a vegan. Even though for medical reasons I had to adopt a diet which relies on meat for sufficient protein, I still try to limit my meat consumption. I am very pleased that so many people are seeing the value of vegetarian and vegan diets, and that even regular omnivore folk are adopting “meatless Mondays” and so forth. I’d be even better pleased with governments helping to encourage it by working to make it less expensive if/where possible. I’d nod my head approvingly if rabbis suggested meat-eating be reserved for Shabbat, if one didn’t feel able to give it up entirely. However, even when I didn’t practice (Judaism) and was secular it would never have occurred to me to ban it wholesale. I’m just not Puritan enough for banning things, I prefer the Quakerly ways of “convincement”. The Woke, on the other hand, are full-bore Puritan, convert-the-heathen-masses.

This is perhaps the strangest part of entire essay. This newly minted “rabbi” is publicly expressing the desire to not just overhaul a big chunk of halakhah in order to make Judaism less restrictive and bring it further into line with the mores of the gentile world... a process that has been going on forever, whether excessively quickly (Reform) or excruciatingly slowly (Haredi)... but is calling to make Judaism more restrictive in other ways, by banning things permitted by halakhah which happens never or so infrequently that I can’t recall an instance offhand. And he’s willing to use secular governments to achieve it by force.

I recall hearing conservatives decades ago saying “Inside the heart of every liberal is a fascist screaming to get out” and laughing derisively at how they could think that. I laugh no more, though I contend that it is a particular species of illiberal liberal, known as the progressive activist, that is to blame rather than liberals in general. Still...there it is, and the regular liberals are generally no help opposing their own extremists because deep down they harbour that intrinsic liberal guilt that they are never doing enough or being enough to be truly authentic and useful. For authenticity and “real change” they look ever to the fringes, on the assumption that the more wildly opposed to society in general an ideology is, the better it is, if only they weren’t too cowardly and comfortable to join up and suffer like the “real” activists.

I have to add here, how nice it is despite not having set foot in any shul in over a year, to still have something of the religious Jewish mindset, which makes impressive demands on your time, money, and moral fastidiousness, but at the same time reminds you constantly that you’ll never be perfect and will never accomplish everything you want or that God asks of you and God already accepts that as a given. “It is not yours to complete the task (of repairing the world), but neither are you free to desist from it.” -Pirkei Avot 2:21. Despite the reputation Judaism has for being guilt-inducing, at least we are free from the overwhelming and psychologically destructive levels of guilt induced by secular liberalism, which now has decided, via Wokeness, that merely existing in a society that is imperfect is a damnable offense, even if it is, on balance, one of the least imperfect societies around. This is how Jews like me know that Wokeness is not just a new religion, it’s an offshoot of Christianity, where just being born damns you to a state of perpetual sin.

This authenticity-of-the-extremists mindset blinds them to the fact that while the fringes are the birthplace of some excellent critiques and paradigm-changing ideas that have been of great benefit, those benefits most often only come when those ideas are tempered by counter-critiques and more pragmatic people who can tolerate the loss of ideological purity required to make them work in practice. Also invisible to the liberal mind are those historical moments when progressives have backed ideas that were...well, the term “clusterfucks” springs to mind.

Progressives less than a century ago were enamoured with ideas ranging from Eugenics to Italian Fascism (less so with Naziism, but even that had its adherents until the war and the atrocities of the camps coming home to roost). They backed Communism to such a degree that it took Kronstadt to shake most of them loose, and they still idolize Che Guevara, the gay-hating, probably racist, illiberal who put people to death without trial and “really liked killing” (his words) and can’t hear a word against Communist China (”That’s racist to the Chinese!”) or Islamic extremists (”That’s Islamophobic!), despite the fact that Communist China is “re-indoctrinating” the Muslim Uighers and using them as slave labour (in part for the profits and in part because keeping the men and women separated prevents them breeding more Muslim Uighers), and despite the fact that the Islamists throw gay men off roofs in public executions. When you do get a left-liberal to admit something on the Left has gone wrong at all, they immediately shift to rationalizing it as somehow really being the fault of conservatives all along...even in a case like Eugenics where religious and other conservatives were fighting it tooth and nail.

(NB: This is not an endorsement of conservatives, who have their own sets of problems but who, when they finally do change their mind on an issue, don’t try to rationalize their former wrongheadedness by claiming it was really the fault of left-liberals that they ever believed such things in the first place)

And that brings us back to Zionism and the Woke. The Woke cannot for the life of them admit that it was secular, and often quite far left, Jews that birthed Zionism directly out of the leftist “liberation” traditions of the day (albeit with a healthy side of pro-Western colonialism-admiring fervour for being “an outpost of the West” shining the light of rationality on the barbaric, backward, religiosity of the Middle East). They don’t want to see it. It disturbs their comfortably simple narrative, which prefers to maintain that it was the “whiteness” of the original Zionist Jews and their early followers that was the problem, not their politics.

But Zionism is merely the predictable result of what happens when you take an oppressed people and tell them that their oppression entitles them to do whatever they need to in order to end their oppression and that violence is not violence when perpetrated by the oppressed. That the world owes them, and their descendants, something in perpetuity for having oppressed them, some sort of special treatment, and that it must never withdraw that special dispensation because that itself would be oppressing them again. The fact that what the Jews would feel like they needed to do was ethnically-cleanse their former homeland of people who had once shared it with them (both Jews and Palestinians can be traced to a shared ancestry in the region going back about 50,000 years) and necessitating a whole new liberation movement to free them was an unintended consequence of th\e liberation movement, but a consequence nonetheless.

The Woke cannot admit that Zionism is, in large part, a direct consequence of the leftist liberation project, and Woke Jews (who are almost invariably “white”) can’t admit that the rest of the Woke movement hates them. They truly deserve each other.

Ah, well, at least this “woke” rabbi isn’t trying to qualify for the cognitive dissonance finals by being Woke and a Zionist at the same time like the current rabbi of my (rapidly sinking) former synagogue. We’ve had rabbis that horrified the congregation by being too right-wing (mostly on halakhic issues rather than politics), and we’ve had rabbis that horrified (the older portion of) the congregation by being too left-wing and running off to march in Selma. Thanks to this rabbi haranguing the congregation daily about LGBTQ issues to the point that even the LGBTQ Jews got tired of hearing him (our sexuality is NOT our whole fucking existence...no pun intended) and marching around the Sanctuary with the Israeli flag on Shabbat (an honour reserved for the Torah even by the most fervently Zionist among us, none of whom are yours truly) we now have the dubious distinction of being a congregation horrified by a rabbi being both too left-wing and too right-wing simultaneously.

Apropos of nothing, there is now a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn of my former synagogue and the membership at the Orthodox synagogue has grown with astonishing rapidity. We can extrapolate from this that in 4 years time, should the U.S. Republicans run any candidate remotely sane, they will sweep the election.

#judaism #woke #wokeism #zionism #sjw nonsense #sjws ruin everything #open orthodoxy #militant vegans #woke is a religion #puritan #vs #quaker

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trans-cuchulainn · 5 years

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the trouble with my brand of heresy is that I occasionally find religious people on Tumblr who might have ideas in common with me but then their blogs are just... impossible to relate to bc they're so very caught up in specific doctrines and approaches (usually high anglican or catholic), and/or even when we have similar ideas they're expressed in terms that don't mesh with my theology, so I'm not comfortable following them

but then I sometimes wanna post about stuff I'm thinking about and I feel weird being quaker on main but I don't feel like it would be a very quakerly thing to do to relegate it to a sideblog anyway but there are like... three entire quakers on tumblr that I've found so far lmao

anyway idk it's like I'm constantly stuck between being too religious for secular folks and too heretical for religious folks. I'm like... the greenbelt festival of people

#personal #gone quaking #i have so many thoughts about god but they are not very christian ones #they're just too christian to not be #i enjoy my heresies but they are lonely sometimes

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cowthropologist · 6 years

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Quaker?

The Religious Society of Friends. It's a Protestant sect. The central tenet is that there is "that of God in everyone", so all people are equal and violence against other people is violence against God. Quakers don't have pastors, and have Meeting, not church. Worship is silent, and anyone can stand up and share a message "when the Spirit moves them", as they say. Lots of Quakers just have '''''''Quaker church'''' (lol) and do programmed worship with a sermon and stuff, but orthodox Quakers don't and think that's kind of un-Quakerly. I was raised orthodox Quaker by my mom, but I'm not a pacifist anymore.

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monstrousproductions · 2 years

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I have realised that when I see a cute animal, I now say "Hello friend!" in the same intonation and tone as Hero tends to say "Thanks friend(s)!" when crediting submissions. Which means that when I greet cute dogs, cats, bugs etc, I think of Monstrous Agonies. I thought you might like to know this.

i DO want to know this!! thats also how i talk to animals, and also babies, and also grown ups 😂 it started as a nicely quakerly, non-gendered way of addressing people and has absolutely become a staple of my vocabulary. love it!!

#monstrous askbox

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dcjokerhs · 5 years

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So I was reading a few things, and TERFs popped up in My Good Quakerly Reading Material, so now, because I’m 93% DONE with them by this point, I want to point out One, Solid Factor to TERFs that they keep on trying to use to justify hating Trans Women.

WHO PEOPLE ARE ATTRACTED TO SEXUALLY IS SEXUALITY, NOT GENDER!!!

And I know that opens up a Whole New Can of Worms, but when I hear them saying “It’s men in Skirts wanting to Invade Women’s Spaces to r*pe women”-

HONEY! THEY ARE AS FEMALE AND VALID AS YOU ARE! JUST BECAUSE THE CONTENT OF THEIR UNDERWEAR MIGHT BE DIFFERENT, DOES NOT JUSTIFY YOU BEING CRUEL AND EXCLUSIONARY! THEY WILL NOT JUST WALK IN AND GRAB YOU! YOU AREN’T THAT IMPORTANT YA IDIOTS! THE ONLY REASON YOU COME FORWARDS IS BECAUSE YOU ARE FEAR-MONGERING, PREJUDICED IDIOTS WHO USE AN UNEDUCATED AND THEREFORE INVALID JUSTICE SYSTEM TO ADVANCE YOUR CLAIMS!

When there was that big controversy about a guy Taking Advantage Of the Trans part of the justice system to get into a female jail, That was on Him and The Legal System’s Lack of Care for Rape and Abuse in Jails, coming AFTER YEARS of JOKES about SAME-SEX RAPE!? Just because it’s suddenly Heterosexual, do you think that Justifies it against All the Other Times people have been treated like that in jails?! Because, if not, might as well break out that “drop the soap” joke because YOUR A BUNCH OF UNEDUCATED, UNCARING, HOLIER-THAN-THOU IDIOTS!

#i got angry #might delete this later #im genderfluid #im sick of this #anti terf #terfs are disgusting #terfs are the worst #im mad #probably wont delete this #this is my opinion #i will stand by this #wrath shalt bringeth the truth of man

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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This essay is excerpted from Adam Morris’s American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation, which offers the first comprehensive account of the long chain of messianic movements to emerge throughout the first 200 years of US history, beginning with Jemima Wilkinson and the Universal Friends. American Messiahs will be published on March 26, 2019.

MERE MONTHS AFTER the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a strange figure on horseback began to circulate throughout the New England colonies. The body atop the horse responded to the name of Public Universal Friend, and the double column of riders who followed behind their leader all believed that the Friend’s body housed the Spirit of God, sent to Earth to deliver an urgent message. Paying little heed to worldly skirmishes between Revolutionaries and Redcoats, the Friend galloped across the countryside announcing that the Apocalypse was drawing nigh. The Public Universal Friend exhorted audiences to heed heaven-sent warnings meant to save those who would listen, believe, and endeavor to live righteously — that is, according to the Friend’s advice.

God had selected a handsome female body for the Universal Friend to inhabit, one that had recently belonged to Jemima Wilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island. Jemima was known as an intelligent and attractive 23-year-old woman when she was struck by fever on October 5, 1776. Her family summoned a doctor when her condition worsened, but there was little to be done; the patient seemed doomed by the 10th, when her illness climaxed in babbling delirium.

Miraculously, the fever broke and the body calmed. According to family lore, Jemima’s body had chilled in death before it warmed and revived. The other Wilkinsons were astonished when her body arose from the bed on October 11. But if the family at first rejoiced that Jemima had been spared, they were mistaken: the newly risen patient announced that Jemima had died and that her body had been requisitioned by God for no less holy a purpose than the salvation of humankind.

Unusually, Jemima Wilkinson was unwed at the time of her illness: most of her peers were married mothers by their early 20s. She was born November 29, 1752, the eighth child of Jeremiah and Amey Whipple Wilkinson, and was named after one of Job’s daughters. Amey would go on to have four more children, the last of these deliveries killing her in 1764. Jemima was only about 12 years old when this occurred but would later understand that her mother had spent her entire adult life pregnant and nursing.

Jeremiah Wilkinson did not remarry, carrying on with the family by himself. Like any young woman of farmer’s stock, Jemima was expected to help with chores and raise her younger siblings. Formal education was out of the question; at the time, women bore much of the responsibility of instructing their children, their daughters in particular. Lacking a mother, and expected to labor in the home, Jemima turned to books, proving herself a prodigious autodidact. Aside from the Bible, she read deeply from the work of esteemed Quakers, including George Fox, William Penn, and the martyr Marmaduke Stephenson, one of three Quakers executed in Boston in 1659.

Although they were a simple farming family, the Wilkinsons were not the poor bumpkins that many of the Friend’s critics would later make them out to be. Jemima and her siblings were fourth-generation Americans who traced their origins to the first Wilkinson’s arrival in New England in 1650. They were connected to prominent families in Rhode Island, including Jeremiah’s first cousin Stephen Hopkins, a colonial governor and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Jeremiah Wilkinson had inherited his farm in Cumberland, but his family more or less resembled the modest but self-sufficient sort of yeoman farmers so adored by Thomas Jefferson. His principal crop was cherries, and he was fondly called “Cherry Wilkinson” by the villagers in Cumberland.

Although Jeremiah was a successful farmer with aristocratic relations, there was nothing extravagant about the Wilkinson family before the autumn of 1776. However, reports of Jemima’s alleged death and resurrection caused her to become infamous across New England and the Middle Colonies, leading to considerable embellishment of the Universal Friend’s words and deeds, and to the invention of numerous apocryphal childhood anecdotes meant to demonstrate that the Friend’s public ministry had resulted from the inherently corrupt character of a girl who had always been headstrong, lazy, arrogant, and manipulative. The folktale of Jemima’s girlhood was concocted largely by adversaries, including her first biographer, David Hudson, whose unflattering 1821 biography was meant to influence the outcome of a lawsuit that would determine the ownership of valuable lands belonging to the communal society the Friend had founded in upstate New York — a suit from which Hudson stood to gain.

Although Hudson’s biography was obviously a work of character assassination, his accurate claim to be personally acquainted with the Friend allowed the stories he invented and the tall tales he repeated to pass into the historical record unchallenged for more than a century. Hudson and other detractors portrayed Jemima as an exceptional young woman, though not in any ways becoming to a Quakeress. She was called “a fine blooming girl” who was “spritely in her manners,” but possessed of “an unconquerable aversion to labor, an unusual cunning in shifting upon others the tasks assigned to her, an imperious will, and a strong propensity to dictate and rule, together with a love for idleness, finery, pomposity, and superiority” — all supposedly well in evidence by her 17th birthday. Even more fantastic lies adhered to the Friend’s decades-long career as an itinerant prophet.

The truth is that little is known about Jemima’s youth and young adulthood beyond what might be surmised from her later activities. She was, for example, a skilled horsewoman by the time the Friend occupied her body. Her robust physique, often described as masculine by those who went to hear the Friend preach, suggested that Jemima did her fair share of chores on the family farm. Jemima’s command of the Bible and knowledge of Quaker theology were likewise in evidence by the time of her illness, and they indicate that, far from being an indolent girl who was scornful of work, she was industrious and even excelled in the few activities available to an unmarried woman.

The Friend’s assumption of Jemima’s body transpired at a time of great confusion and turmoil in Rhode Island generally, and in the Wilkinson family in particular. The months preceding Jemima’s illness had been far from calm in Cumberland: hostilities with the British, begun the preceding year, had transformed New England into one of the principal battlegrounds in the fight for independence. British forces were besieged in Boston and then evacuated in March 1776, but they loomed off the coast in naval vessels, which were used to launch surprise attacks on coastal villages. Members of the Society of Friends, to which the Wilkinson family belonged, found themselves in a quandary when they were forced to choose between faith and country: patriotic Quakers who wished to be involved in the independence movement faced excommunication from the Society if they dared to take part in defense-training exercises with the local militia. This was the case for three of the Wilkinson brothers: Benjamin, Stephen, and Jeptha were all expelled from the monthly meeting of the Smithfield Friends for the un-Quakerly act of taking up arms. To these dismissals, another was added in 1776, when Jemima’s sister Patience was disciplined for the disgrace of having a child out of wedlock. All of them were disowned by the time of their sister’s metamorphosis.

Jemima had likewise been booted from the Smithfield Friends meeting in the summer of 1776, mere weeks before her illness. The cause in her case was not sex or guns but religious unorthodoxy: Jemima was disciplined when it became known among the Smithfield Friends that she was attending the revival meetings of New Light Baptists in the region.

The New Light revivals in New England resulted from religious enthusiasm that had spread across the colonies in the preceding decades in reaction to declining satisfaction with the Puritan interpretation of Calvinist doctrine. Collectively known as the Great Awakening, the revivals of 1730–1770 gathered up disaffected Christians from the several Reformed churches that had already established themselves in the colonies. The New Light stir of the 1770s saw a resurgence of this activity in rural New England communities distressed by the tumult of war. New Lights believed that individual inspiration and personal enlightenment from God held priority over the worldly authorities in the established churches. They accepted the Puritan teaching that conscience reigned in matters of the spirit but rejected the belief that abiding by church traditions and hierarchies while awaiting the final judgment was the way to steer clear of error and vouchsafe salvation. Saving grace, the New Lights believed, was a prize to be sought and gained. This democratic attitude struck an unmistakable contrast to the elitism that had become entrenched within the Congregational churches, as the Puritan assemblies became known.

Like the other Protestant sects that placed an emphasis on individual conscience, Quakerism found itself on the defensive when the New Light ignited in its vicinity. The Quakers already taught a relatively liberal doctrine, one that affirmed the existence of a God-given “inner light” universally present in all humankind; this was one of the principal reasons why the Quakers opposed slavery. A crucial difference between New Light and Quaker orientations, however, was the Quaker belief that God’s will becomes apparent only through dialogue among the enlightened. Members rise to speak in meetings when the Spirit moves them to do so, and the opinion of the congregation is forged by arriving at consensus.

New Light theology was more unruly than this, holding that God’s truth was available to anyone at any time — there need be no consensus. Similar views on individual inspiration and spiritual authority later became commonplace in 20th-century American evangelical communities, whose members believe they can literally speak to God through prayer and receive his responses through signs, intuition, or biblical passages that God brings to their personal attention. At the close of the 18th century, however, such beliefs invited the censure of traditional Calvinist clergy, who rightly understood the evangelical movements as a challenge to their authority. New Light flirtation with antinomianism threatened to overturn the doctrines that distinguished the established denominations from one another, and to divide them from within along this new cleavage of individualism.

If the young Jemima Wilkinson was half as rebellious as her detractors claimed, then it is easy to see why antinomian currents in the New Light evangelical movements would have drawn her to investigate them for herself. It is just as likely that she merely sought a new religious community, one that was not already in the process of expelling her family. With several siblings already disowned by the Quakers, and with revolutionary fervor upending political and religious orders in New England, Jemima had little to lose and much to gain by associating with the New Lights.

But Jemima did not stop with association. After being seized by the New Light, she stood before the Smithfield Friends to hold forth her opinions and refused to take her seat when consensus demanded it be so. The Friends regarded her outbursts as disrespectful and uncouth. Quakers were used to being censured for speaking their minds in public, particularly when it came to their pacifist convictions in a time of war. But Jemima’s garrulousness extended to political concerns in ways that went beyond the pale of accepted opinion among the Quakers when she spoke at length about the growing conflict. Her views were not recorded, but she likely spoke in defense of her brothers and against their punishment.

Following Quaker custom, the Friends’ disciplinary committee first requested that Jemima reform her conduct and cease attending New Light meetings. This she would not do. By August, Jemima remained insubordinate, becoming the fifth of her siblings to be expelled from the Smithfield Quaker meeting. She spent the next weeks brooding at home, avoiding the company of others by spending long hours reading the Bible and praying. Her fever followed this interval of solitude.

Although no one ever doubted that Jemima’s religious conversion was sincere, her illness was the subject of malicious conjecture. The Friend’s later account of Jemima’s sickness and death described it as the result of the “Columbus fever,” an outbreak of typhus named for a colonial warship that had inadvertently contaminated Providence by transferring contagious British sailors to shore as prisoners. In the Friend’s retelling, the malady struck on “the seventh day of the week” and worsened for several days until “[s]he appear’d to meet the Shock of Death.”

In her hour of mortal anguish, Jemima experienced a vision. Although not yet embodied, the Public Universal Friend was already present in spirit, and later transcribed the vision for posterity:

The heavens were open’d And She saw too Archangels descending from the east, with golden crowns upon there heads, clothed in long white Robes, down to the feet; Bringing a sealed Pardon from the living God; and putting their trumpets to their mouth, proclaimed saying, Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone …

The angels explained to the expiring young woman that “[t]he time is at hand, when God will lift up his hand, a second time, to recover the remnant of his People.” The “Spirit of Life from God,” the angels continued, had returned once more to Earth “to warn a lost and guilty, perishing dying World, to flee from the wrath which is to come.” The Spirit was “waiting to assume the Body which God had prepared, for the Spirit to dwell in.” This, of course, was the body of Jemima Wilkinson.

Thenceforth, Jemima’s body ceased recognizing her father and siblings as relatives, began to prefer male pronouns, and responded only to the names of “Public Universal Friend,” “the All-Friend,” “Friend of Sinners,” and “the Comforter.” The transformation was later complemented by the Friend’s preference for wearing men’s clothing when he began his public ministry, a quirk that became one of his most remarked-upon characteristics.

By Sunday the illness had retreated. Finding himself comfortably accommodated in Jemima’s body, the Friend of Sinners decided to attend services at the Elder Miller Baptist meetinghouse that Jemima had been rebuked for attending. The other congregants soon learned that, although Jemima Wilkinson’s body had returned to their midst, it was the Public Universal Friend who replied to their greetings. Those who were not repelled by this sudden transformation gathered after the service to hear the Friend deliver his first public sermon under a shade tree near the meetinghouse. Thereafter, the Friend began to hold meetings in the Wilkinson family home. The four Wilkinson sisters and Jemima’s brother Stephen became the Friend’s first followers. Patience and Stephen had already been ejected from the Smithfield Friends; the other three girls were forced out by 1779 for indulging their sister’s delusions.

Meanwhile, tongues began to wag. In 18th-century New England, proclaiming oneself a vessel for the Spirit of God was both risky and ridiculous. But the countryside rumbled with troubles deadlier than any heresy, offering a distraction that supplied considerable latitude for religious idiosyncrasies that might have been unthinkable in calmer days. Even so, the Friend’s declarations horrified those who believed Jemima Wilkinson’s transformation to be a grandiose stunt carried off by a woman who considered herself too clever to end up an old maid. Biographer David Hudson later disseminated the belief that Jemima was a fake prophet but a natural actress, a view that was no doubt shared by some of the Wilkinsons’ neighbors. But if Jemima’s transformation was only an act, it was one she kept up until the end of her life: the “actress” never publicly broke from her character. Rather, the next 43 years of the Friend’s career provide satisfying evidence that his belief in his holy mission was sincere.

By springtime, the Friend was ready to begin his itinerant ministry, having spent the winter practicing his sermons on the Wilkinson siblings. Villagers who had already been converted during visits to the Wilkinson home began to open their doors to the Friend’s meetings, as did other New Lights and errant Quakers who had been dismissed from the Society of Friends for one or another transgression. To this ragtag set of mostly ex-Quakers, the Friend thundered his opposition to the inquisitorial and punitive meetings in which Quakers were censured, and demanded an end to the practice. He continued to insist on the right of every person to preach his or her conscience.

When moving between the homes of his new followers, the Friend usually traveled with a retinue numbering between 12 and 20 adherents, and relied on the hospitality of converts and friendly listeners for victuals and lodging. Jeremiah escorted the Friend on his travels abroad. For this he received a stern warning from the Smithfield Friends, instructing him to cease “going about” with his heretic daughter. He disobeyed, prompting the Friends to initiate disciplinary proceedings that concluded with yet another expulsion from the Smithfield meeting.

Over the next two years, the Public Universal Friend’s celebrity spread across lower New England, as a wave of rumor followed by visitations in the flesh. Opponents greatly aggrandized the Friend’s reputation by spreading lies about his blasphemous assertions to be Jesus Christ in a female body — a claim the All-Friend was careful to avoid making directly — and by inventing stories about his attempts to raise the dead and walk on water. Fantastic tales of the Friend thus preceded his ministrations throughout New England, not least due to his singular appearance. Nearly every contemporary account remarks upon the dark beauty of the Comforter’s androgynous countenance: a well-apportioned female body cloaked in black robes and a white or purple cravat, topped by a wide-brimmed hat made of gray beaver fur.

Although some regarded the Friend as demented, others were curious enough to hear him preach. The All-Friend’s dramatic predictions of impending apocalypse impressed his listeners; they seemed to square with the chaos raging in New England and slowly enlarged his following. During this early phase of his ministry, the Comforter also went out of his way to attend funerals as a way to attract new adherents: those who came to pay their respects to the departed included members of rival meetings and churches who were unlikely to seek him voluntarily. Another tactic of recruitment was to follow Christ’s advice to comfort soldiers taken as prisoners of war. When describing this aspect of his mission, the Friend cited Isaiah 61:1-2, in which the prophet writes of his duty “to bind up the broken hearted; to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” The All-Friend’s ministry to the sick, poor, imprisoned, and wounded continued to yield converts while the war lasted, including several former soldiers.

The Comforter appeared to have little concern for the hazards of gallivanting across occupied Rhode Island. Regarding this period, one of the Friend’s secretaries later wrote:

The Friend of Sinners began to speak in the Year 1777. When this Nation was all in arms; and America had imbru’d her hands in human blood. […] The Friend was not stayed by guards of armed men, but went through; to visit the poor and condem’nd prisoners in their Chains: naked swords shook over The Friend’s head, was no terror because of the mighty Power of the Lord.

As he moved among the ranks of soldiers, the Comforter loudly denounced all war, except for the holy battle he was waging for humankind’s salvation. Although some Patriots regarded this as a tacit rebuke of their cause, the Friend was generally considered unthreatening and was permitted to preach to British captives.

The All-Friend became known for his solemn and admonishing sermons, and for the spectacles of religious enthusiasm that sometimes burst forth during the meetings over which he presided. When seized by enthusiasm, the Universal Friends would sometimes shake and convulse. In keeping with Quaker tradition, the Friend allowed anyone moved to speak to stand and deliver, but amplified this practice by teaching his followers that the message he had come to share might be transmitted through the visions, dreams, and intuitions of any who obeyed his instructions. Thus to the Quaker inner light was added the kerosene of New Light evangelism blended with folk Christian mysticism.

During the New England phase of his ministry, the Friend would predict stunning events across the globe, such as earthquakes, and demonstrated powers of clairvoyance that allowed him to see directly into the hearts and minds of his audience. This, critics alleged, was a talent the Friend maintained only by relying on a network of informants who brought him information useful for putting on a show of divine omnipotence. According to accusations made by Abner Brownell, a follower excommunicated for the disloyalty of publishing his own prophecies against the Friend’s wishes, the Comforter’s spies would disclose transgressions perpetrated by his followers, so that the Friend could inspire wonder in his omniscience when he confronted wrongdoers and traitors with their sins. These were techniques later adopted by Jim Jones.

Although Brownell hoped to destroy the Friend’s ministry, he refuted assertions that the Comforter claimed to be Jesus returned, explaining that the All-Friend considered his ministry a continuation of Jesus Christ’s. As subsequent American messiahs would do, the Friend relied on a distinction between the Christ spirit, which is immortal, and Jesus of Nazareth, its temporary mortal host. During sermons, the Friend told his listeners that the Christ spirit had returned to lift Jemima’s body in the same way that he had lifted Jesus’s body many centuries before, and that his dwelling within a woman’s body represented the fulfillment of the prophecies of Jeremiah 31:22, which ambiguously states that “the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man.” Because it reinforced his claim to be a divine male spirit inhabiting a female human body, this verse was one of the Friend’s favorite scriptural passages. Similarly, Brownell asserts that the Friend was often inclined to read

a Description that she has, that the Turks gave antiently concerning our Lord Jesus Christ’s outward Appearance, his Shapes, Stature, Features and Complexion, and Hair, with a long loose Gown, and his Hair being black, and curled in his Neck, or upon his Shoulders, and parted upon the Top, after the Manner of the Nazarenes, and then that they may look upon her and see how near she resembles those Descriptions.

Such heavy-handed insinuations, Brownell attests, were followed by recitation of additional biblical passages meant to bolster listeners’ belief that they beheld the Second Coming of Christ. These included Revelation 21:2-3, which describes “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The Friend wished for his listeners to associate this adorned bride with Jemima’s body, raised up and anointed by the Spirit of God.

Although Universal Friends took care to avoid gendered pronouns when referring to the Comforter, critics and apostates like Brownell insistently referred to Jemima Wilkinson rather than the Public Universal Friend. Because it was highly uncommon and regarded as unseemly for a woman to speak in public in these years, “her” preaching was considered an act of insuperable arrogance. As Brownell writes:

She exhorts in a pathetic Manner, with great Confidence and Boldness, and Confirmation of her being right, and all others to be wrong; says, that she has an immediate Revelation for all she delivers; that she is the greatest Minister that God has sent to the People this seventeen Hundred and odd Years, and advancing herself to live as she exhorts others to, fully in a State of Perfection, and no Liability of Error, or Possibility of Defect in any Respect; and thus with many great and exalted Expressions in Allusion to herself, (though in a mystical Way) she utters and holds forth, which to many serious, sincere, seeking people, it seems to have great effect, for no Person would rationally think, that any Person in their right Senses, would dare to hold forth and affirm such great and exalted Things concerning themselves, and to have such a great and marvelous Mission.

Although many besides Brownell assailed the Friend’s arrogance, it was only through the strength of tremendous conviction and righteousness that the Comforter was able to stand before audiences that sometimes contained as many leering cynics as repenting sinners. Many who heard him were convinced by the display. Even Brownell admitted that, as a result of the Friend’s somber sermons, he was “awaken’d at Times to a serious Concern of my immortal State” and encouraged to “seek some Way of Redress and Recovery” for the sake of his salvation. He was not the only one so deeply affected: Brownell asserts “many awakened ones” among the Friend’s listeners were “much taken in with her.”

Brownell believed the Friend’s followers were mostly “ignorant and illiterate People.” He reported that women in particular were moved to join the Comforter. This came as no surprise, considering the Friend’s assertions that both men and women should stand to testify their faith and speak the prophecies they received in meetings. The All-Friend’s incipient feminism, which continued to develop, staked out another important characteristic of his messianic movement, one that marked those of his successors: each subsequent American messiah would attract a predominantly female following, often through promises of equal rights among the faithful.

Adam Morris is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.

The post The Person Formerly Known as Jemima Wilkinson appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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