TOM POOLEY'S BELIEFS.

  THE CURIOUS BELIEFS OF THOMAS POOLEY:

“The one Almighty Laws must come to light and the Laws and victorey of the Grave must Be Brought to Light.  What is the Grave?  A Thinking wombe of Life.  For this Globe ’as two Powers,  One Power to Give and one Power to take.  Behold the Tides How Grand they Ebb and Flow.  By the Thinking and Living Powers of this Globe.”  T.  Pooley.

    

Tom knew, and other people knew it, that he thought differently.   His wife knew this and so did the children.  His unsophisticated neighbours knew that Tom had ‘odd’ ideas.  Many agreed that there must be something wrong with Tom Pooley but most people liked and tolerated him.   Tom’s thoughts, he said so himself, were born of injustice and tyranny, “for injustice and tyranny will make a thinking man think and ask and seek and find out what is divine and what is not divine.”   These thoughts were always confused and he had difficulty expressing himself but at the root of his otherness was the fact that he lived within a professed Christian society, where the name of Christ was in many mouths, but for whatever reason, he had grown up not loving the Testaments.  He had come to hold no respect for Jesus Christ and he passionately disliked ministers of the Christian churches whether they were Anglicans or Dissenters.   In this last he was hardly unique.  Then as now there were great many working men and women who had little or no respect for the churches and churchmen but Tom was different to most in that he was no sceptic, no atheist, no secularist.  He was an essentially religious person and one who claimed respectability and moral rectitude who just happened, apparently largely from his own limited resources, to have developed a faith of his own.   

Perhaps his religion came to him in the same way as the great religions are believed to have come to others, by revelation.  But if we discount the idea of divine revelation in the streets of Liskeard, or perhaps anywhere else, we must accept that there had been unusual influences early in his life that guided Tom to his strange and wonderful conclusions.  It was suggested at the time of his trial that he must have been reading the much reviled Tom Payne or the ‘publications of the Holyoake school’, George Holyoake, the leader of the London Secularists, clearly being as infamous as the diabolical  Tom Payne with the Liskeard establishment.  One of Tom’s accusers, Mr Gryll, the solicitor who was uncannily involved in Tom’s fate throughout his troubles, was also Tom’s neighbour, for Mr Gryll too lived in Dean Street and Dean Street was home to rich and poor alike.  He attributed Tom’s views to ‘some infidel books which were put in his way when quite a youth’ and concluded that his delusions, like those of Quixote, had come from reading, but it would seem rather that Tom Pooley had read very few books other than his Bible and, now and then, the newspaper. From the style of Tom’s writings it is clear that he had listened to much Christian preaching in his lifetime and perhaps had decided that it was more fun to preach than to be preached at.  He moralised and sermonised without having much clue as to what he was talking about.  To his educated fellow townsmen, the devout and the sceptical alike, he must at times have been infuriating. 

Perhaps there was some wild strain of peasant paganism in Tom’s theism that had survived the centuries.  Cornwall rather prides itself on its paganism and I note that these days successive Cornwall County Councils have toyed with the idea of including it as a subject for study in the School Curriculum, but there is an unhelpful lack of consensus as to what Cornwall’s ancient pagans are supposed to have believed.   I could not help thinking of Tom when I met with this pagan ploughman's charm recorded in the eleventh century:  “Earth, Earth, Earth!  Oh Earth our mother!   May the all-wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing, pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength.”  This sounds much like Tom and the ancient charm expresses sentiments to which Tom could have related but these pagan ploughmen were Anglo-Saxons not Celts.   Certainly Tom shared with the faithful of many ancient religions and with some contemporary pagans a belief in the divine presence in Nature and he, like them, stressed what  now would be generally accepted to be right and proper ecological concerns.  

In much paganism the hidden mysteries lead inevitably down into the darkness and Tom’s ‘Almighty’ lay beneath the grave.  But I have found no suggestion that Tom was expressing the beliefs of other people. What is certain is that, whatever else inspired or influenced him, he had found time to contemplate this world and ask himself the big questions of life and from somewhere he had found answers to his own questions. 

Contemplation was something Tom was quick to recommend to others.  In his writings he was always ready to advise people ‘to pause’, his meaning of ‘pause’ , like Shakespeare’s, being ‘to reflect’ or ‘ponder’. “Then let them pause on this globe and seek what has stood the truth and will stand the truth for ever.”  In 1857 he was still consistently practicing and promulgating his own crude, confused creed and it satisfied him.  He kept faith with himself to the end: “As for my part I will walk in solitude. I will pause and ponder the laws of the grave where kings and queens fall, where the poor man and woman fall the same.”

What, however, is more to the point, Tom was persuaded that his beliefs were actively in opposition to Christianity and he saw himself as a champion of truth combatting an oppressive ‘Bible Tyranny’ that was false and was poisoning his world.  He had an urge to communicate the truths that had been revealed to him and he was brave enough, some would say crazy enough, to speak his troubled mind and, crucially, as we have seen, to write defiant messages in chalk on walls and fences and five-barred gates and, given the chance, to write defiant passages on the endpapers of the Bibles of his friends and acquaintances.  Anywhere that his message might be seen, Tom was ready to write.

In his writings Tom reveals that he has as ardent a sense of wonder in a Creator as any other religious person.   One of his common written injunctions was for a man to “place his finger on his pulse and let him pause on that grand law.  Where was that pulse formed so grand?  And by that One Almighty’s law the pulse ceases to beat,” His sense of wonder embraced the planet.  Somehow Tom Pooley had come to believe that the Earth was a living creature, a body of living and thinking fire,  one that could be harmed, one that might be killed by mankind.  Heaven, on the other hand, was gammon, here meaning humbug or a hoax, for if “the worshipper of a heaven would descend into the centre of this globe he would find a body of lava or liquid matter always in motion, the heart, the key and the main spring of life.”   Like many philosophers before and since, Tom so loved this world that he would accept no better world up in the sky.  “Tyrants may pause of worlds on high.  Grand are those sights.  We see the stars.  Tyrants have no wings to mount, to fly to gammon globes or worlds on high.”  He had heard tell of gravitational force and he knew that: “a feather to this Globe is bound, a law of gravity.  This proves the power of this Globe, that no thing from it can depart.”  Tom had thus observed that “all things and all men fall on this Globe.”  This ‘proved’ his case.  We are all bound to this planet.  No one could possibly ascend to the stars or to heaven.  Tom had settled matters to his own satisfaction.  If there was One Almighty Being, as Tom devoutly believed, that Being must be somewhere beneath his feet and not above his head.  One of the demonstrable errors of Christian teaching, Tom decided, is where it postulates a heaven to which one, like Christ at the Ascension or in some other mystical way, climbs: “O Christians, O  take shame!  So this Christ is but a tool for lazy fools to catch a lot of silly dupes, to gammon globes on high.   Let Christians on this truth but pause:  if they could grasp the sun or moon with ropes or hands to help them from this globe, if the ropes were to break and their hands to slip, to this globe they are sure to fall.  So it is useless for men to try.”

Tom believed that the living and thinking Earth had a skin that protected its vital parts and that he, in his sometime work as a well-sinker, had a responsibility.  He needed to take care, by his digging, not to wound the planet on which he lived.   He moreover believed that the rise and the fall of the tides were wonderful and inspiring evidence that the Earth lived, thought and breathed.   The Earth might die, which would mean the end of the ebb and flow of the tides and because “all men are plants of this Globe” the end of mankind. Central to this gospel was his identification of the Globe with the “One Almighty Being that brought all things into being.”   This one Almighty Being was also synonymous with “One Almighty Law which required mankind to uphold liberty, truth, love, peace, justice and harmony.”  The one Almighty Being, was not the author of “filth, gammon, misery, vice, sin, war, darkness and blasphemy.”    For Tom it was self-evident that the sources of all virtue were ‘laws’ introduced and upheld, one of Tom’s favourite words, by the One Almighty Being while the sources of evil were ‘laws’ introduced and upheld by the Christians. 

Tom Pooley’s thought was essentially anarchist and like many anarchists he did not need to stop to explain how society could function without the agents that ensure law and order.  It was, of course, Christianity that had introduced war and strife and thereby the need for soldiers and policemen. “Christians may place swords in mad men’s hands to cut the honest infidel down.”  In Tom’s idea of a golden age before Christ there was no need for soldiers, sailors or policemen: “it appears that so soon as one man or woman is converted to the Bible or the Christian religion there must be a soldier with musket in hands, a sailor with sword in hands and policeman with his truncheon or staff in hand to keep them in order.” 

Tom believed in the essential virtue and peacefulness of the human family and his message was for all those friends of humanity who recognised the virtues but who, in his opinion, were unable to practise them because of Bible Tyranny.  If Bible Tyranny could be thrown off, the human family would live in peace and happiness.  “When will Christians get sick of shedding human blood?  For it appears to me that they take a pride in murdering one the other.”   This desperate state of the world where Christians and Christianity kept the human family in misery tormented Tom and often kept him from his sleep at night.  He would lie awake trying to think what he might do to set a discordant and dangerous world to rights. The Bible according to Tom was not only tyrannical but was the source of all that was wrong with the world.   What has this poor man done?   Looked for honest labour, honest justice, honest laws in peace, love and harmony with all mankind and done his duty to destroy that book that upholds murder, wars, vice, misery, blasphemy, drunkenness, whoredom and upholds tyranny and drenched this Globe in human blood. 

One of the remedies, already referred to, that Tom recommended was that to burn Christian Bibles and spread the ashes over the fields would bring health to the land.  The potato rot was still a problem in Cornwall in 1857, and Tom submitted that the rot and the other diseases that devastated crops would disappear if so treated.   If all the Bibles in the world were burned, the world would be a far healthier and happier place.  Another of his grand ideas was for the “Christian tyrants, “in this case the parsons, “to give every man in their parishes the same pay, the same laws, the same dress as they give their police men and thereby uphold the standard of truth and justice.”  This totally impractical proposition shows again how naive was Tom’s understanding of the world.  This was nevertheless some kind of cry for the kind of benefits, minimum wages and social securities. that people now take for granted.  It might be thought that Tom devised such wild schemes tongue in cheek and in a mischievous spirit but his writings soon persuade the reader of the total seriousness with which he propounded his views.  His idea that drunkenness was born of Christianity and was the besetting sin of the Christian Clergy as well as the vice of many of his fellow townsmen. was expressed in his writings thus: “the One Almighty is not the Author of drunkenness.  Now drunkenness is the mother of all crime, murder, wars, whoredom, vice, blasphemy, thief, mockery, gammon, brothels and every filthy and disgraceful and filthy deed the human race is suffering from.” Thus Christianity begets drunkenness and in turn begets all manner of vice.

Tom had also arrived at his own particular belief in the regeneration of man and in a form of reincarnation.  He believed that nothing on this Earth could altogether die: “sweet human life they can’t destroy”.  He believed that a dead person was received by the earth, this Globe, from which he had been born.  The grave, being the womb of life, gave as well as received, and, this was the mystery at the centre of his faith, a person could be transmuted into air by the power of this Globe and then reborn from the grave, A dead child, he believed, could reappear at the next birth in the family.  He expressed this comforting belief perhaps in response to the despair that he had felt at the death of his own little boy. In a world where the incidence of infant mortality was high there was a general tendency towards some such superstition.  It was common to baptise a child with the same name as that of a brother or sister who had died.  Tom’s belief, however, was specific and was his alone and respect for the grave was a vital part of his creed.  Tom had observed that death and the grave were all powerful ‘laws’.  “Death and the grave the victory claims.  No Christian tyrant can’t destroy its laws nor yet its powers.”  The all-powerful grave not only received the dead but it produced the living.  it was the womb out of which all living things on the Globe emerged.  Men and beasts were plants of this Globe.    Like the plants that renewed themselves from the soil, all men and things must fall but they could not be destroyed.  It was a ‘law’ of the One Almighty Being that all things on this Globe when they fall must go back to the grave, “as child plucks a flower, so death plucks man back.”  The grave “though it is dug by men is no place of rest.”   Mankind, Tom had concluded, was not aspiring to some better state in a heaven above.  We were continuing on Earth, constantly renewing ourselves, planted here. Mankind could no more escape from this Globe than could the turnip. Good men, although they would not find rest in the grave, had nothing to fear there, but Christian tyrants should fear the grave for there they would be called to account for their wicked ways.  “O grave, o grave, bitter is thy stings to Christian Tyrants!   O death, o death, thy stings is keen and sharp to a Christian tyrant breast!”

The grave for Tom had such tremendous significance as the womb of life that he gave considerable thought to his own.  Later on we find him sending ‘turkey acorns’ to his wife with careful instructions to plant them on his son’s grave, the one which he loved to visit and which he had decorated with bright stones and ‘the one place he could call his own’.  This, he intended, would be his own grave too and he sends to Mary: “... those turkey acorns I wish for you to have planted on Thomas Pooley’s grave and they will come to plant on your husband’s grave a monument of oaks over my grave.  How grand they will appear, far grander than the monument that’s built by man.  Let those words be engraved on my gravestone:  that sword (is) not made nor never will be made by man that will destroy the body or life of man.”

One thing that is remarkable about some of Tom’s homespun ideas is the degree to which they ring like bright harmonics in our world today.  Many of his geocentric beliefs conform to some contemporary Western ideas about the nature of the world.  Not only those of the neo-pagans of the injudicious fringe who, like Tom, worship the Earth but also those of most of us who now accept, in a way that the Victorians generally did not, that the planet can be injured by mankind.   The idea of Gaia, of the Earth being an organism with self-regulatory powers and functions is very close to Tom’s view of the living Globe.  Moreover, what we now know about genetic transmission leads us to believe, if not in reincarnation, at least in continuation.  We accept that children of the same family will unfailingly carry genes in common.  Tom’s idea of our somehow continuing, like plants, by way of the grave in a kind of eternal life-cycle, is as conformable to modern thought as most other interpretations of the human condition.  Even Tom’s evident satisfaction and enthusiasm for turning dust to gold has an air of sustainable policy and there is a distinctly  green ring to his grand vision of his grave sprouting giant turkey oaks. Not least, these days too, we are all more disposed to accept that there has been and can be such a thing as the tyranny of Holy Books.

Tom Pooley was no saint.  He was capable of great anger and brutal and even murderous thoughts and it is certainly a good thing that he never exercised power in the world, but he was what he aspired to be and what he believed himself to be, a thinking man, albeit a poor, solitary, muddled one.