Geraldine Cummins

[Karyn]

 

Geraldine Cummins was born in Cork, Ireland to Professor Ashley Cummins, M.D.    As a young woman, she was an accomplished athlete and member of the Irish Women’s International Hockey Team.    She was also an active suffragette. After receiving a private education that focused on the arts, she began a career as a journalist and creative writer. By 1919, she had published three plays for the Abbey Theater and a novel on working-class Irish, The Land They Loved.   Cummins began working as a medium specializing in automatic writing after being encouraged by E.B. Gibbes, and Hester Dowden, a spiritualist who was known for having contacted the spirits of Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare and other writers.   Cummins would sit at a table and cover her eyes with her left hand, leaving her right hand free to write. She said she would concentrate on the stillness.   “Soon I am in a condition of half-sleep, a kind of dream-state that yet, in its peculiar way, has more illumination than ones waking state.”   According to Gibbes, Cummins received messages through two spirit guides. Astor, who identified himself as Greek, was self-confident, arrogant, and anti-Christian.    His handwriting was “bold, firm and round.”   The other guide, Silenio, emerged several years later. He was a meek and mild individual who identified as a Christian.   His handwriting was finer and more slanted that that of Astor.   Cummins and Gibbes wrote several books based on her communications.      Her books included: The Scripts of Cleophas, an early Christian history, and Acts of the Apostles, communicated by the spirit of Cleophas, one of Paul’s followers. Gibbes books included: Evidence of Life from Beyond the Grave, based on her recorded seances and The Road to Immortality, which included messages from Frederick W.H. Myers after his death.     She allegedly worked as a British agent during WWII and used her psychic abilities to support the allied cause. In the 1940s and 50s she helped psychiatrists develop a model for using spiritualism to treat mental illness. Cummins “read” an object that belonged to the patient to identify childhood traumas or ancestor experiences that may have created the problem.       Cummins continued to write, publishing a biography of spiritualist Edith Somerville and The Fate of Colonel Fawcett in 1955.     Her last book was an account of her conversations with the spirit of Mrs. Willett (Winifred Coombe Tennant).      Cummins died in August of 1969.Additional Reading:Anderson, R. I. (1983) “The Mediumship of Geraldine Cummins.” Theta 11, 3, 1983.     Gibbes, E.B. (1933) The Road to Immortality,    F.W.H. Myers through Geraldine Cummins, London.Gibbes, E.B. (1936)    “The ‘Controls’ of Geraldine Cummins.”     Psychic Science, October 1936, Vol XV, No. 3, London.Gibbes, E.B. (1946) Evidence of Life Beyond the Grave from Scripts of Geraldine Cummins. Psychic Book Club, London.