Cummins, Geraldine Dorothy (1890-1969)

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Cummins, Geraldine Dorothy (1890-1969)

Medium, channel, and Spiritualist author. Cummins was born January 24, 1890 in Cork, Ireland, the daughter of Prof. Ashley Cummins. She had a modest education yet was well traveled. The development of her mediumship began in December 1923 in sittings with Miss E. B. Gibbes. Ordinarily her work of composition was very slow, but her automatic writing speed was remarkable. On March 16, 1926, for example, she channeled 1,750 words in one hour and five minutes.

Her first books, beginning with The Spirits of Cleophas (1928), claimed to supplement the biblical books of the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of St. Paul. It was a historic narrative of the early church and the work of the apostles from immediately after the death of Jesus to St. Paul's departure from Berea for Athens.

In the production of the first two sections of the book, Cummins was associated with F. Bligh Bond, but she received the scripts independently afterward. In her second volume, Paul in Athens (1930), the narrative is taken up and continued. The third, The Great Days of Ephesus (1933), followed the same line of thought.

The production of these automatic scripts was witnessed by several theologians, and the scholars who edited her books endorsed their intrinsic merit. They offered new interpretations of several obscure passages in the Acts of the Apostles, apparently showing close acquaintance with the early church and that age. For example, it was claimed that only a profound student could have given the head of the Jewish community in Antioch the title "Archon," because the usual title was "ethnarch" not long before the time referred to in the chronicle of Cleophas. Cleophas was not the immediate agent in the production of the scripts. They came through "the messenger." A total of seven scribes were said to be guided by Cleophas. The chronicle stated that it had been used in the early church but the existing few copies had perished. A more skeptical approach was adopted by Rodger I. Anderson, who examined Cummins's work in an article for Theta in 1983.

Cummins's fourth book, The Road to Immortality (1932), a series of communications purportedly from F. W. H. Myers, gives a stupendous vision of the progression of the human spirit through eternity. Sir Oliver Lodge offered his observations of Cummins's genuineness in the book's preface: "I believe this to be a genuine attempt to convey approximately true ideas, through an amanuensis of reasonable education, characterized by ready willingness for devoted service, and of transparent honesty."

Cummins wrote a detailed study of her automatic scripts received from the deceased "Mrs. Willett" (pseudonym of Winifred Coombe-Tennant ) in the Swan on a Black Sea; a Study in Automatic Writing; the Cummins-Willett Scripts (1970). This highly regarded work contains a foreword by parapsychologist Professor C. D. Broad. Cummins also wrote The Fate of Colonel Fawcett (1955), dealing with psychically acquired information about the fate of the famous missing explorer, and worked with doctors on a project to heal neurotic patients through extrasensory exploration of the subconscious mind. Her book Unseen Adventures (1951) contains autobiographical material. Cummins died on August 24, 1969.