Baker Eddy was a farm girl from Bow, New Hampshire. Born in 1821, she came from humble circumstances, belying the will and passion that would make her the author of one of the most widely read books in the world, Christian Healing, and the founder of Christian Science. She spent the first part of her life in poverty, and details about her life are obscured by carefully edited authorized biographies. We do know that she was keenly interested in spiritualism and wandered from one boarding house to another, seeking out those run by spiritualists. In the mythology propounded by Christian Science historians, these wanderings are likened to those of Christ. One difference worth noting, however, is that Mary Baker was receiving channeled information from the dead, while the Bible makes no mention that Jesus heard such ghostly voices.
She got married along the way and served as a medium on many occasions, holding active seances where long-dead loved ones appeared and her voice would change to sound like other voices. An affidavit by one Mrs. Richard Hazeltine described Mrs. Eddy’s trances: “These communications [came] through her as a medium, from the spirit of one of the Apostles or of Jesus Christ.” Mrs. Eddy soon began to practice healing and eventually went on to deny that she had ever had anything to do with spiritualism.
Her life story is a confusing series of illnesses and cures of herself and everyone in her acquaintance, seemingly. Her dedication to her beliefs was mightily compelling to others, and her theories include such ideas as the Copernican reversal of the roles of mind and matter, man being “the image and likeness of God” and therefore “not matter.” Mrs. Eddy had, along with her other talents of mediumship, the ability to convince people and to lead them. She was nothing if not charismatic. She and her book have influenced, and perhaps even healed, many hundreds of people.
Change the mind, and the quality changes. Destroy the belief and tranquility disappears.
Mary Baker Eddy
EMILY DICKINSON white witch of Amherst
Emily Dickinson was one of the first female literary “superstars”—a rather unusual fate for a housebound recluse. Her brilliant, intense verse certainly created a legend for the poet, but her eccentricities added to the “glamour” in the original sense of the word, casting a spell that has lasted well over a century. Born in 1830 on December 10 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was the second child of a strict and sober lawyer, Edward Dickinson, and a sweet-natured and shy mother, also named Emily. Emily junior also had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia. By all accounts, the family was happy and prosperous, pillars of the community. Emily also benefited from a good education at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the first women’s colleges in America, located, fortuitously for Emily, right outside Amherst.
It was during her last year at Mount Holyoke that Dickinson showed glimmerings of the qualities that made her so different from her contemporaries. Lavinia, Emily’s sister, relayed an amusing story about Emily bluffing her way through a mathematics test: “When the [geometry] examination came and [she] had never studied it, she went to the blackboard and gave such a glib exposition of imaginary figures that the dazed teacher passed her with the highest mark.” And a classmate reported a shocking instance when the principal of Mount Holyoke, Mary Lyons, asked “all those who wanted to be Christians to rise,” Emily couldn’t “honestly accede” and was the only one of all the women students present who “remained seated.” This independence of will, mind, and imagination would inform her poetry and her life choices from that point on. She left school and returned home. (It is a topic of debate among her biographers as to whether evangelical pressure following this event caused Emily Dickinson to leave, and many believe that to be the reason, although Edward Dickinson also missed his elder daughter.) For the rest of her life, she rarely left the house and is now recognized to have been agoraphobic. She also fell victim to an eye disorder believed to have been exotropia, for which she was treated in Boston; this was nearly the only occasion upon which she would take a trip of any kind, except for a handful of journeys with her sisters to see their father, now a congressman living part of the time in Washington, DC.
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