Partner
Susanne Rouvier Day, Edith
Somerville, Beatrice Gibbs
Queer Places:
17 St Patrick's Pl, Cork, Ireland
9 Knaresborough Place, Kensington and Chelsea, London
St. Lappans
Little Island Roads, County Cork, Ireland
Geraldine
Dorothy Cummins (January 24, 1890 – August 24, 1969) was an Irish
spiritualist medium, novelist and playwright.[1] She
began her career as a creative writer, but increasingly concentrated on
mediumship and "channelled" writings, mostly about the lives of Jesus and
Saint Paul, though she also published on a range of other topics. Her novels
and plays typically documented Irish life in a naturalist manner, often
exploring the pathos of everyday life. Her friendship with fellow Corkwoman
Susanne Rouvier Day proved significant. Both women played an active role in the Cork suffrage movement as founder members – with Edith Somerville – of the non-party, non-sectarian, and non-militant Munster Women's Franchise League (MWFL), and regularly spoke at open-air rallies and MWFL meetings throughout the south-west of Ireland.
Lillian Faderman argues that
Edith Somerville and Violet
Martin's partnership is unlikely to have been a sexual relationship,
citing Geraldine Cummins, Somerville's biographer and companion from 1827, who
claimed that Somerville had definitive views on the evils of sexual immorality
and considered the Irish Roman Catholic Church wise in its condemnation of
misdemeanours of this kind.
She was born at 17 St Patrick's Place, Cork city, the daughter of William Edward Ashley Cummins, MD, later professor of medicine at UCC, and Jane Constable Hall, also of Cork. The family subsequently moved to Woodville, Glanmire, Co. Cork, where she spent her early years. In her youth she was an athlete,
becoming a member of the Irish Women's International Hockey Team. She was also
active as a suffragette. Her desire to follow her father in a medical career
was vetoed by her mother, so she began a literary career as a journalist and
creative writer. From 1913 to 1917 she wrote three plays for the Abbey
Theatre in collaboration with Suzanne R. Day, the most successful of which was
the comedy Fox and Geese (1917).[2] She
published the novel The Land they Loved in 1919, a naturalistic study of
working class Irish life. As she concentrated on mediumship, her literary work
tailed off. However, she continued to publish creative literature in her later
years. Her solo-written play, Till Yesterday Comes Again was produced by the
Chanticleer Theatre, London, in 1938. She also published another novel, Fires
of Beltane (1936) and a short-story collection Variety Show (1959).[2]
Literary critic Alexander G. Gonzalez says that her work tries to encompass
the full range of Irish social life, from the aristocracy to the lower
classes. In this respect she was influenced by Somerville and Ross. Gonzalez
considers her short story "The Tragedy of Eight Pence" to be the "finest" of
her writings, the tale of a "happily married woman trying to shield her ill
husband from the knowledge that his death will leave her penniless."[2]
She began to work as a medium following prompting from Hester Dowden and E.
B. Gibbes. She received alleged messages from her spirit-guide "Astor" and was
an exponent of automatic writing. Her books were based on these
communications. In 1928 she published The Scripts of Cleophas, which provided
channelled material on early Christian history complementing Acts of the
Apostles and St. Paul's writings, supposed to have been communicated by the
spirit of Cleophas, one of Paul's followers. This was later supplemented
by Paul in Athens (1930) and The Great Days of Ephesus (1933).[3]
Cummins' next work described human progress through spiritual
enlightenment. The Road to Immortality (1932) provided a glowing vision of the
afterlife. Its contents were purportedly communicated from the 'other side' by
the psychologist and psychic researcher Frederic W. H. Myers. Unseen
Adventures (1951) was a spiritual autobiography. She also published several
books of spiritually-derived knowledge about details of the life of Jesus.
During World War II she allegedly worked as a British agent, using her
personal contacts to identify pro-Nazi factions within the Irish Republican
movement.[4] She
also employed her psychic activities to support the allied cause, sending
channelled messages from sympathetic spirits to Allied leaders to support the
war effort. This included information from Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur
Balfour and Sara Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt's mother.[4]
In the 1940s and 50s she worked with psychiatrists to develop a model for
using spiritualism to treat mental illness, ideas she explored in Perceptive
Healing (1945) and Healing the Mind (1957). She collaborated with a
psychiatrist who used the pseudonym R. Connell on both books.[5] Their
method was for Cummins to "read" an object associated with the patient and
thus identify either childhood traumas or experiences of ancestors (preserved
as "race memory") which have created the problem. This included treating a
patient who was concerned about his homosexual desires by discovering that
this derived from the fact that his Huguenot ancestors were humiliated by
Catholics in the 18th century.[6]
Her biography of writer and spiritualist Edith Somerville was published in
1952. She also wrote The Fate of Colonel Fawcett (1955) which offered her
psychic insights into the disappearance of the explorer Percy Fawcett in
Brazil in 1925. Cummins claimed she had received psychic messages from Fawcett
in 1936. He was still alive at that time, informing her that he had found
relics of Atlantis in the jungle, but was ill. In 1948 she had a message from
Fawcett's spirit reporting his death.[7] Her
last book was an account of her conversations with the spirit of Mrs Willett
(the spiritualist name of Winifred Coombe Tennant): Swan on a Black Sea; a
Study in Automatic Writing; the Cummins-Willett Scripts (1965).
The automatic writing and alleged channeled material from Cummins have been
examined and have been described by some psychical researchers to be the
product of her own subconscious. For example, Harry Price who studied various
mental mediums including Cummins wrote that "there is no question that most of
the automatic writing which has been published is the product of the
subconscious."[8] Paranormal
researcher Hilary Evans noted that unlike most spiritualists, Cummins did not
accept the phenomena at face value and questioned the source of the material.[9]
According to the psychical researcher Eric Dingwall information published in
Cummins' scripts allegedly from Mrs Willet were discovered to be erroneous.[10] Biographer
Rodger Anderson wrote that although spiritualists considered Cummins
completely honest "some suspected that she occasionally augmented her store of
knowledge about deceased persons by normal means if by doing so she could
bring comfort to the bereaved."[11]
Cummins' book The Fate of Colonel Fawcett published in 1955, contains her
automatist scripts allegedly from the spirit of Colonel Fawcett. Spiritualists
have claimed the scripts are evidence for survival. However, the psychical
researcher Simeon Edmunds noted that Fawcett before his disappearance had
written articles for the Occult Review. Cummins also contributed articles to
the same review and Edmunds suggested it is likely she had read the work of
Fawcett. Edmunds concluded the scripts were a case of subliminal memory and
unconscious dramatization.[12]
Other researchers such as Mary Rose Barrington have suspected fraud as Cummins
had long standing connections with friends and families of the deceased that
she claimed to have contacted and could have easily obtained information by
natural means.[13] The
classical scholar E. R. Dodds wrote that Cummins worked as a cataloguer at
the National Library of Ireland and could have taken information from various
books that would appear in her automatic writings about ancient history. Her
writings were heavily influenced by literature and religious texts. Dodds also
studied her book Swan on a Black Sea which was supposed to be an account of spirit conversation
but wrote there was evidence suggestive of fraud as Cummins had received some
of the information by natural means.[14]
It was through Dowden that she later (1923) met fellow psychical enthusiast
Beatrice Gibbs, who invited her to share her west London home to collaborate on psychical research. A regular contributor to Better Business, the Occult Review, and Yorkshire Post, she is said to have worked as an intelligence agent for the British during the second world war. She remained in London after Gibbs's death, inheriting her Chelsea home, and only returning to Cork during her last illness. She died there 25 August 1969 and was buried in St Lappan's churchyard, Little Island.
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