A collector and a religious community
John Sebastian Marlow Ward lived from 1885 to 1949. He wrote on Freemasonry and esoteric subjects and gathered objects that could illustrate the history of human belief and daily life. At New Barnet he established a religious community and an open-air museum, the Abbey Folk Park, which opened in 1934.
Ward’s collecting included paintings acquired through London dealers, along with historical buildings reassembled at the park. The community later moved to Cyprus, where he died. Part of the collection eventually reached Australia and became the basis of the Abbey Museum at Caboolture. His interest in preserving the material past existed alongside the accounts of an unseen world that he published earlier in his life.
Books written in the shadow of war
Gone West is dedicated to Ward’s brother Reginald and to others who died in the First World War. Its three narratives present survival after death through encounters Ward said he had experienced. A Subaltern in Spirit Land followed in 1920. In its introduction he explains a change from automatic writing to a method he describes as entering another plane in trance. The books make his search for contact with the dead personal through their dedications and remembered relationships. Lumitheca’s Gone West reproduces a 1920 third impression within a later digital transcription that also includes subsequent introductory material.
