Posted on 27 August 2024, 7:43

Although I had read bits and pieces about William Lyon Mackenzie King, former prime minister of Canada, concerning his interest in spiritualism, I had not realized the extent of that interest until reading Anton Wagner’s comprehensive and intriguing books, The Spiritualist Prime Minister (Volumes I and II), recently released by White Crow Books. King comes across as a highly introspective, principled, honorable, self-effacing, and caring leader, but he has been referred to by historians and journalists as “Weird Willy,” “a spirit-intoxicated eccentric,” “a superstitious lunatic,” and “a certifiable nut.” On the one hand, he was a man of great zeal – a man who bargained with Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Attlee, and even Hitler, Hess, and Goering – but on the other hand those who were aware of his interest in spiritualism saw him as zany. In spite of this “zaniness,” he is considered by many to have been Canada’s greatest prime minister.

King was born in Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario on December 17, 1874, received his Bachelor of Laws from the University of Toronto in 1896, a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1898 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1909. He was appointed Deputy Minister of Labour in Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s liberal government in 1900 and became Minister of Labour in 1909. In 1914, he was appointed as labour consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation. He served as prime minister of Canada from 1921-26, 1926-30, and 1935-48, a total of 21 ½ years, leading the country through industrialization, the Great Depression, and World War II. He never married and died on July 22, 1950.

Author Anton Wagner, Ph.D., was a founding executive member of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research and has edited 10 books on Canadian theatre and drama. He holds doctorates in drama (University of Toronto) and theatre (York University). In his documentary work, he explored the interplay between political, religious, and spiritual beliefs in At the Crossroads: Faith in Cuba.

Philosophically, King, who attended a Presbyterian church, was what might be classified as a Christian Spiritualist, although he sided with Christianity whenever he encountered a conflict between Christianity and Spiritualism. He believed that human conduct would change in the direction of peace once the world accepted the larger life. Nevertheless, even many Spiritualists would judge him as being extremely credulous in his acceptance of certain psychic phenomena, including dreams and visions. He shared his interest in spiritualism only with close friends, and the full extent of his beliefs did not become evident until his extensive diaries, some 30,000 pages, became public 50 years after his death. Clearly, he was a “mama’s boy,” and often sought communication with and advice from his mother and other loved ones already transitioned to the afterlife, through mediums.

Wagner’s book focuses on King’s “zaniness,” rather than his “zealousness” – on his spirituality rather than his political acumen, although they often blended, or at least King made every attempt to blend them.  The reader is challenged in attempting to reconcile his “lunacy,” which extended to astrology and palm reading, with his success in contentious politics. 

“Despite attempts by his executors to obliterate Spiritualism and the occult from his papers, enough evidence survived to allow Dr. Wagner to create a chronology of King’s more than 130 known interactions with mediums, psychics, fortune-tellers, palmists, astrologers, graphologists, phrenologists and psychic investigators,” Walter Meyer zu Erpen, co-founder of the Survival Research Institute of Canada, states in the Foreword of Volume I, adding that they denied that King discussed political matters with mediums or that they influenced his decisions. 

Palm Reading, Tea Leaves, and Crystal Balls

Wagner offers a chronology of events extracted from King’s diary. The psychic matters apparently began in 1893, at age 19, when King started opening his Bible at random for messages from God. In 1894, he experimented with mesmerism at the University of Toronto.  In 1896, a palmist told his fortune. In 1900, he has his head read by a phrenologist. In 1917, he began faith healing through prayer to heal his dying mother, Isabel, who passed 11 months later. In 1918, the spirit of his mother appeared to him in a dream, informing him that “I am alive.” In 1920, he had his palm read by a Syrian fortune-teller.  In 1921, psychic Rachel Bleaney told him of his future political gains. In 1924, he received a horoscope reading from England.  In 1925, he had a reading by the Indian phrenologist and palmist-astrologer Douglas Goray and another reading by Rachel Bleaney. She also interpreted his dreams.  In 1927, he had his handwriting analyzed by a graphologist and had two more sittings with Rachel Bleaney. In 1930, he once more had his palm read.  In 1931, he consulted a numerologist and another palmist. Somewhere in all that he attempted to find out what was ahead in a tea-leaf reading and acquired a crystal ball.  Many of the futuristic readings, but not all, pointed to his success as a great leader, but it is not always clear to what extent the readings were given by mediums or psychics unfamiliar with King’s position and background.  Some definitely were. 

On February 21, 1932, King began a series of many sittings with the renowned American direct-voice medium Etta Wriedt (lower left photo). Wagner provides much background on Wriedt, almost a short book in itself while drawing from the research by British Vice-Admiral Usborne Moore, Dr. John King (no relation to Mackenzie King), William T. Stead, James Coates, and others.  Mackenzie King claimed to have had long conversations with his deceased mother, father, and sister through Wriedt and spent hours recording them in his journal (separate from his diary), but the journals were all burned by his executors in 1977. 

Two days later, he again sat with Wriedt, accompanied by two lady friends, one of them Joan Patteson, who shared many spiritual experiences with him over the years. A third sitting, the following day, was referred to as “quite wonderful” in his diary as his mother, sister, brother, and grandfather all communicated, not only with him but with Joan Patteson.  He also conversed with Senator George Albertus Cox and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the former prime minister, while Patteson talked with her deceased mother and daughter. Wagner states that Wriedt’s seances were transformative experiences for King, Joan, and Godfrey Patteson, Joan’s husband. 

Patteson’s deceased mother asked her about her large gold brooch with the red stone. “No one but myself knew that my mother had possessed this brooch,” Patteson documented her experience for King, adding that her mother chided her for not wearing it.  “She kissed me audibly and put her hand on my knee. I felt it distinctly as if I were with her in life and there is not any tiny remote possibility of any other thing or person touching me.”

No Doubt

In his diary, King wrote: “What impresses me greatly is not only what is said but the apparent judgment & foresight with which subjects are approached or introduced. It would seem as if those we loved knew not only our behaviour, but our spiritual needs, our thoughts, and were seeking mostly to minister to them….” After 10 sittings with Wriedt, King was convinced that Wriedt was a genuine medium.  “There can be no doubt whatever that the persons I have been talking with were the loved ones & others I have known and who have passed away. It was the spirits of the departed. There is no other way on earth of accounting for what we have all experienced this week. Just because it is so self-evident, it seems hard to believe.  It is like those who had Christ with them in His day. Because it is all so simple, so natural, they would not believe & sought to destroy. I know whereof I speak, that nothing but the presence [of] those who have departed this life, but not this world, or vice versa could account for the week’s experience.”

King would have many more sittings with Wriedt before her death in 1942, but he struggled with comments by Dr. Sharpe, Wriedt’s spirit control, who often made comments that conflicted with Christian dogma and doctrine.  He also sat with renowned mediums Gladys Osborne Leonard, Helen Hughes, Eileen Garrett, and Geraldine Cummins (lower right photo).  With Cummins, he supposedly communicated with the spirit of America’s former president Franklin D. Roosevelt. King came to believe that he had clairvoyant abilities to some degree and recognized that there were low-level spirits interfering with the communication while also recognizing that there are many misinterpretations in what the medium is seeing, hearing, or feeling. He was on guard to examine everything with a skeptical eye.

In his diary for August 30, 1934, King summarized his worldview: “Broadly speaking I seem to have come to believe positively in survival after death – of personality continued – of each going to his own place – of spirits continuing to influence our lives, and some to guide and to guard, while others (not intentionally but nevertheless actually) might mislead – but to have the feeling what we get in spiritualism in the lowest plane – the borderland betwixt this world and the next—where earth influences continue to control, and where night and day are intermingled as at twilight.  It is the twilight region and must be so regarded.  The real light – the source of Truth and Justice and Love, cometh from on High – a Higher Source – and finds its way more immediately to us by the conscience in man— ‘the celestial and immortal voice – rather than by what is seen or heard in these glimpses of the unseen – faith remains the true avenue of approach to God – and Christ the way, truth & the life.”

It’s highly unlikely that the story of Mackenzie King will convince non-believers that there is something to mediumship and other psychic phenomena.  The skeptics, whether true skeptics or of the guerilla type, seem to assume that if spirits exist they must be all-knowing and infallible, incapable of error or falsehood.  Many of the phenomena experienced by King suggest tomfoolery and a certain naiveness on King’s part. Still, it is a fascinating read from an historic standpoint and of a very interesting and intriguing person.  Some other renowned figures, such as physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, cosmologist Dr. Richard Bucke, and researcher Dr. T. Glen Hamilton, are also included.   

Keith Parsons has done a very interesting you-tube on PM King.  The link is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yRpQ15JFOg&list=PLLB-82YMhiPFPKSm2Ke69aK0DKTftpvo0&index=54 

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

Dr. Wagner,
I appreciated your additional comments.  I especially liked the last sentence which was a quote either of Joan Patteson or Mackkenzie King.  It is a good motto for me and maybe some of the rest of us.

“One brings to the world only what is in one’s own soul.”

P.S. My grandparents came from Austria in 1908 and they named one of their sons “Anton” which the nuns at St. Patrick’s grade school changed to “Tony.”  I wish they hadn’t done that.  - AOD

Thanks, Michael, for this excellent piece on Mackenzie King’s interest in contacting spirits. And thanks for mentioning my recent you-tube video on him, just published, entitled ‘Why Was Willie Weird?’. The two volumes of Wagner’s book run to a huge 800 pages, so I made a separate assessment of Etta Wriedt in my immediately previous video: ‘The Psychic Phenomena of Henrietta Wriedt.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Id7eP1lqs&list=PLLB-82YMhiPFPKSm2Ke69aK0DKTftpvo0&index=52&t=1128s

Your fine summary concentrates on his spiritualism, and what I find interesting is how different your coverage of Wagner’s work is from my own perspective, which looks at his often naive occult interests as well as his political biography. I think our two approaches complement each other, offering a broader perspective than is gained by reading/viewing just one of them.

KP

Michael,

Alfred Deakin was part of the Dr Motherwell Circle for twenty years. Alfred was 17 and acted as a trance medium to dictate various books. Dr Motherwell is well connected with William Howitt, one of the earliest history writers with his The History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. Howitt was also connected to Spiritualism. History is understood by following the threads.

There was an article Foundation and the Future by Susan Priestley on how Victorian history was saved by an article Vanishing Records by William John Hughson in Melbourne’s Argus 20 March 1909 which used a paragraph from an American supporter:

“The threads of your history, of course, stretch out far beyond the country itself to old England and even… here to America.  We are all bound up in the same web and warp and woof. But the proper way to feel their tug at the heart is to trace them into the immediate past and not allow one strand of them to be lost in oblivion.”

The term warp and woof refer to the fabric of a person. Your blog is important in understanding these important threads of history and not losing them in oblivion. Amos points out that political opponents damage each other and both Deakin and MacKenzie -King knew that their beliefs were each under tight scrutiny. Deakin, when he was Attorney General protected mediums from unjust prosecution, an indicator of his fabric.

Your quote is very important to understanding this fabric:

“The real light – the source of Truth and Justice and Love, cometh from on High – a Higher Source – and finds its way more immediately to us by the conscience in man— ‘the celestial and immortal voice – rather than by what is seen or heard in these glimpses of the unseen – faith remains the true avenue of approach to God – and Christ the way, truth & the life.”

Thanks,
Bruce

Thank you, Michael, for your incisive review. I focused on Mackenzie King’s spiritualism because hundreds of articles and books had been published on his political life. Virtually all of them denied that King’s spiritualist beliefs affected his politics.

His characterizations as “Weird Willy” and “zany” emerged after his death in 1950. These were propelled by sensationalized headlines in the London Sunday Dispatch in 1953 such as “The Queer Story of Mackenzie King: Crystal-Gazing Premier Believed in Supernatural and ‘Read’ Tea-leaves – Believed He Made Contact with His Dead Pet Dog.”

In his lifetime, King discussed spiritualism with Members of the Canadian Parliament, Senators, and members of his Cabinet, with British Governor Generals of Canada, their wives, and Queen Mary.

Winston Churchill asked King for the transcript of his seance with Geraldine Cummins in 1947. The spirit of President Roosevelt had asked him to pass on a message to Churchill. King noted in his diary that Churchill returned the transcript with “a most significant little note.” 

British spiritualists and psychic investigators confirmed King’s personal spiritualist beliefs. Already in 1926, Sir Oliver Lodge congratulated him on having received guidance from the Canadian clairvoyant Rachel Bleaney in the federal election that year. “You are very fortunate to have this great help in your work. Abe Lincoln had very similar experiences, and they were the ones that gave him confidence in his work; that this little woman was able to tell you what she did was due in part to her own powers, but also to your own faith; both are needed.”

The Duchess of Hamilton’s assertion immediately after King’s death that he “always sought spirit guidance in affairs of state” derived from her conviction, expressed just before King met with Hitler in Berlin in a peace mission in June of 1937, that “Leadership must always come from Divine Guidance, and that, I maintain, is just what we Spiritualists have.”

Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby, the former President of the London Spiritualist Alliance, confirmed the Duchess’ assertion that King sought spirit guidance in his statecraft. “The ‘inner man’ of Mr. Mackenzie King was animated by Spiritualism, by the knowledge of survival and communication, by knowledge of the powers of prophecy and – in the innermost part of his ‘inner man’ by his profound and enduring love of his mother,” she stated to the Psychic News in 1952. “It is not possible that a man can go so deeply into Spiritualism as Mackenzie King did, apart from sittings with mediums and receiving messages, without this colouring his actions as a statesman and his judgment of world events.”

Mackenzie King and his spiritual partner, Joan Patteson, expressed a similar thought when he prepared to leave for the Paris Peace Conference in July 1946. In his diary he wrote, Joan “said to me as I came away that she hoped I would fulfill my mission. That in all this, we begin with ourselves which is true. One brings to the world only what is in one’s own soul.”

Michael,

Alfred Deakin was three-time Prime Minister of Australia, He was also a Spiritualist. http://iapsop.com/psypioneer/psypioneer_v1_n2_jun_2004.pdf

I was very interested how a person of high status saw life with a spiritual lens. Sometimes you get advice from spirits which helps but do you get better advice if you are at the top?

I was planning to write a Ph.d on his spiritual life as he was a Spiritualist. He also kept a Spiritual Diary – he received The Grand Prophesy about being a leader of Australia. Not a popular Phd topic.

There is a quote about Alfred by Beckles Willson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beckles_Willson )

“Alfred Deakin was one of the most sympathetic as well as eloquent and picturesque statesmen Australia, or indeed the Empire, has produced. I deeply regretted his untimely death.” P127.

Why do I mention Beckles? Michael mentioned Beckles’s friend William Lyon MacKenzie King.
From Quebec to Piccadilly and other places

By Beckles Willson 1929

Foreword;  “To my distinguished friend and fellow-countryman The Right Honorable Wiliam Lyon MACKENZIE KING whose youthful ideals have not been degraded nor his human sympathies seared by success…”

Beckles also received letters from Alfred Deakin which he partly included in this book. Beckles mixed in the right circles.

“Soon after our removal to that charming suburb we became aware of all sorts of reminders of an unseen world; everybody in London seemed to be discussing psychic phenomena. I especially remember long talks with Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker on the subject. I had gone with all London to see the Zantcigs give an example of alleged telepathy, and one evening at a party at the Northcliffe’s every one seemed full of ‘the Survival of Human Personality after Death.’

Deakin was very much involved in the spiritualist movement in Melbourne and was for a time a leading medium and a later president of the VAPS (Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists). Leading the Sunday services, Deakin would ask, “How do we prove our appreciation [of God]?” to which the congregation - including his future wife the fellow medium, Pattie Browne - would reply, “By protecting, tending and ministering to all helpless living things.”

Deakin withdrew from the spiritualist movement in 1878-79. “It is assumed that he did this in an effort to appear less of a ‘crank’ both to his electorate and to his political colleagues as it coincided with the beginning of his political career. The necessity of this move was made apparent by newspaper critics who denounced him and his novel of “outraging religion, morality and public decency” during his (albeit successful) campaign to become a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly.

Deakin, however, did not actually cease to believe in the spirit world and continued to study and wrote on the subject in private.”

Thanks
Bruce

Mike,

Interesting article.  People with spiritualist beliefs are found everywhere. 

I find it interesting he wrote a book about religion, etc. of Cuba.

Spiritism was well known and practiced, and there are still Spiritist groups there.

Stay safe from the weather!

Take care,
Yvonne

Good one. Keith sent me the video documentary. Very interesting guy.

Mike S

Michael, good article; always the gentleman. 

So, William Lyon Mackenzie King was considered by some to be a nut case, a lunatic, zany and weird as well as other derogatory adjectives.  Why?  Well, simply as an intelligent man he wanted to investigate various means of determining whether or not there was any validity to the idea that there was more to reality than was currently believed at his time.  He was not so different from William James, Frederic Myers, Arthur Conan Doyle, including Tesla and a multitude of scientists and other respected persons, including those who comment here, who do the same thing.  They are all “blind gropers searching for truth.”  It takes a certain amount of intelligence to question mainstream beliefs and search for newer evidence of alternate realities.

However, King was in a position as Prime Minister of Canada to be a target of criticism for his interests and personal lifestyle.  His interests and personal life provided good political fodder for his competitors for government power and position just as they do today.  Politicians will use any way they can to make fun of their opponents.  Just because one visits a medium, or uses a Ouija board, crystal ball, or has their tarot cards read, is that reason to relegate them to the looney bin? I dare say that most people who frequent this blog have such interests and when available would frequent such things.

Why would one with such interests avoid or discount any and all possible methods of proving that there may be more to reality than is currently known. Perhaps some people roll their eyes at those interested in Ouija boards, horoscopes, zodiac signs, Tarot cards, graphology, phrenology, mesmerism and other ways of distracting the conscious mind, thereby allowing the subconscious or subliminal mind to make contact with worlds unseen.  Mediums today, including Tyler Henry, Alison Dubois, and George Anderson are examples of people who use a “scribble board” to distract their conscious mind.  Why not accept crystal balls, Ouija boards, horoscopes, zodiac signs, Tarot cards, tea leaves, grapho-analysis, phrenology and mesmerism as ways to distract the conscious mind; all equally good “scribble boards” to disconnect the conscious mind and refocus the subliminal mind on spirit contact.  – AOD