I must now let out a secret. She acquired her studies, performed her work, and lived her life by the help (as she believes) of heavenly spirits. From her childhood till now (having reached her thirty-third year) her anticipation of the other world has been more vivid than her realization of this. She has entertained angels, and not unawares. These gracious guests have been her constant companions. They abide with her night and day. They dictate her life with daily revelation; and like St. Paul, she is "not disobedient to the heavenly vision." She goes and comes at their behest. Her enterprises are not the coinage of her own brain, but of their divine invention. Her writings and speeches are the products, not only of their indwelling in her soul, but of their absolute control of her brain and tongue. Like a good Greek of the olden time, she does nothing without consulting her oracles. Never, as she avers, have they deceived her, nor ever will she neglect their decrees. One-third of human life is passed in sleep; and in her case, a goodly fragment of this third is spent in trance. Seldom a day goes by but she enters into this fairy-land, or rather into this spirit-realm. In pleasant weather, she has a habit of sitting on the roof of her stately mansion on Murray Hill, and there communing hour by hour with the spirits. She as a religious devotee—her simple theology being an absorbing faith in God and the angels.
Moreover, I may as well mention here as later, that every characteristic utterance which she gives to the world is dictated while under spirit-influence, and most often in a totally unconscious state. The words that fall from her lips are garnered by the swift pen of her husband, and published almost verbatim as she gets and gives them. To take an illustration, after her recent nomination to the Presidency by "The Victoria League," she sent to that committee a letter of superior dignity and moral weight. It was a composition which she had dictated while so outwardly oblivious to the dictation, that when she ended and awoke, she had no memory at all of what she had just done. The product of that strange and weird mood was a beautiful piece of English, not unworthy of Macaulay; and to prove what I say, I adduce the following eloquent passage, which (I repeat) was published without change as it fell from her unconscious lips:
"I ought not to pass unnoticed," she says, "your courteous and graceful allusion to what you deem the favoring omen of my name. It is true that a Victoria rules the great rival nation opposite to us on the other shore of the Atlantic, and it might grace the amity just sealed between the two nations, and be a new security of peace, if a twin sisterhood of Victorias were to preside over the two nations. It is true, also, that in its mere etymology the name signifies Victory! and the victory for the right is what we are bent on securing. It is again true, also, that to some minds there is a consonant harmony between the idea and the word, so that its euphonious utterance seems to their imaginations to be itself a genius of success. However this may be, I have sometimes imagined that there is perhaps something providential and prophetic in the fact that my parents were prompted to confer on me a name which forbids the very thought of failure; and, as the great Napoleon believed the star of his destiny, you will at least excuse me, and charge it to the credulity of the woman, if I believe also in fatality of triumph as somehow inhering in my name."
In quoting this passage, I wish to add that its author is a person of no special literary training; indeed, so averse to the pen that, of her own will, she rarely dips it into ink, except to sign her business autograph; nor would she ever write at all except for those spirit-promptings which she dare not disobey; and she could not possibly have produced the above peroration except by some strange intellectual quickening—some over-brooding moral help. This (as she says) she derives from the spirit-world. One of her texts is, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help—my help cometh from the Lord who made Heaven and Earth." She reminds me of the old engraving of St. Gregory dictating his homilies under the outspread wing of the Holy Dove.
It has been so from her childhood. So that her school studies were, literally, a daily miracle. She would glance at a page, and know it by heart. The tough little mysteries which bother the bewildered brains of country-school dullards were always to her as vivid as the sunshine. And when sent on long and weary errands, she believes that she has been lifted over the ground by her angelic helpers—"lest she should dash her feet against a stone." When she had too heavy a basket to carry, an unseen hand would sometimes carry it for her. Digging in the garden as if her back would break, occasionally a strange restfulness would refresh her, and she knew that the spirits were toiling in her stead. All this may seem an illusion to everybody else, but will never be other than a reality to her.
Let me cite some details of these spiritual phenomena, curious in themselves, and illustrating the forces that impel her career.
"My spiritual vision," she says, "dates back as early as my third year." In Victoria's birth place, a young woman named Rachel Scribner, about twenty-five years of age, who had been Victoria's nurse, suddenly died. On the day of her death, Victoria was picked up by her departing spirit, and borne off into the spirit-world. To this day Mrs. Woodhull describes vividly her childish sensations as she felt herself gliding through the air—like St. Catharine winged away by the angels. Her mother testifies that while this scene was enacting to the child's inner consciousness, her little body lay as if dead for three hours.
Two of her sisters, who had died in childhood, were constantly present with her. She would talk to them as a girl tattles to her dolls. They were her most fascinating playmates, and she never cared for any others while she had their invisible society.
In her tenth year, one day while sitting by the side of a cradle rocking a sick babe to sleep, she says that two angels came, and gently pushing her away, began to fan the child with their white hands, until its face grew fresh and rosy. Her mother then suddenly entered the chamber, and beheld in amazement the little nurse lying in a trance on the floor, her face turned upward toward the ceiling, and the pining babe apparently in the bloom of health.
The chief among her spiritual visitants, and one who has been a majestic guardian to her from the earliest years of her remembrance, she describes as a matured man of stately figure, clad in a Greek tunic, solemn and graceful in his aspect, strong in his influence, and altogether dominant over her life. For many years, notwithstanding an almost daily visit to her vision, he withheld his name, nor would her most importunate questionings induce him to utter it. But he always promised that in due time he would reveal his identity. Meanwhile he prophecied to her that she would rise to great distinction; that she would emerge from her poverty and live in a stately house; that she would win great wealth in a city which he pictured as crowded with ships; that she would publish and conduct a journal; and that finally, to crown her career, she would become the ruler of her people. At length, after patiently waiting on this spirit-guide for twenty years, one day in 1868, during a temporary sojourn in Pittsburgh, and while she was sitting at a marble table, he suddenly appeared to her, and wrote on the table in English letters the name "Demosthenes." At first the writing was indistinct, but grew to such a luster that the brightness filled the room. The apparition, familiar as it had been before, now affrighted her to trembling. The stately and commanding spirit told her to journey to New York, where she would find at No. 17 Great Jones street a house in readiness for her, equipped in all things to her use and taste. She unhesitatingly obeyed, although she never before had heard of Great Jones street, nor until that revelatory moment had entertained an intention of taking such a residence. On entering the house, it fulfilled in reality the picture which she saw of it in her vision—the self-same hall, stairways, rooms, and furniture. Entering with some bewilderment into the library, she reached out her hand by chance, and without knowing what she did, took up a book which, on idly looking at its title, she saw (to her blood-chilling astonishment) to be "The Orations of Demosthenes." From that time onward, the Greek statesman has been even more palpably than in her earlier years her prophetic monitor, mapping out the life which she must follow, as a chart for a ship sailing the sea. She believes him to be her familiar spirit—the author of her public policy, and the inspirer of her published words. Without intruding my own opinion as to the authenticity of this inspiration, I have often thought that if Demosthenes could arise and speak English, he could hardly excel the fierce light and heat of some of the sentences which I have heard from this singular woman in her glowing hours.