Former Buchanite Meeting House in Glasgow Vennel, Irvine. Photo: wikipedia.org
Sometimes one comes across a tale so improbable and strange that you feel sure the teller of the tale is making it up—something so bizarre, you feel, it simply cannot be true. Such is the tale of “Friend Mother” Buchan and the few dozens of people she collected around her who regarded her as the Woman Clothed with the Sun from Revelation 12, as the very embodiment of Deity, immortal and untouchable by death. (The story is told in History of the Buchanite Delusion, 1783-1846 by researcher John Cameron.)
Elspeth Buchan. Photo: oddscotland.com She was born Elspeth Simpson in 1738, the daughter of an innkeeper in Scotland. Her mother died when she was three and she was sent to live among strangers where she grew up hard and poor. She had an independent mind with a tendency to hysteria and religion. Eventually she married a potter named Buchan in Glasgow by whom she had several children. The quiet domestic life, however, was not for Elspeth and she could not be restrained from what was then called “loose living”. This, combined with a dramatic flair for public speaking and strange interpretations of the Bible made her a very interesting person.
Eventually she contacted the Minister of the Church in Ayrshire, the Reverend Mr. Hugh White whom she made her disciple by a combination of flattery and high-flown rhetoric. She declared that she was the Woman Clothed with the Sun and that he was her spiritual Man Child (see Revelation 12:1-6). The world was due to end very soon in a violent and fiery conflagration but those who followed her would be spared. Indeed, they would be taken alive to heaven without tasting death.
Mr. White bought and preached this nonsense and so was eventually tried for heresy by his Presbytery and deposed, but this only added fuel to Mrs. Buchan’s fire. She declared that true believers were bound by no law (including the law of marriage) and no church authority. Moreover, they could not sin. Buchan was given to bestowing the Holy Spirit by blowing on her disciples with a maximum of arm-waving and drama. She collected about 48 people around her as a “Society”—a group which not unnaturally in the south of Presbyterian Scotland proved not very welcome to their respectable neighbours. They were therefore driven out of town by a mob. A compassionate farmer gave them a home on his land, possibly out of kindness and compassion, but also possibly because they all worked his land for free. There they set up camp and waited enthusiastically for the end of the world and their imminent translation to heaven. Since they all lived and slept together in one large room and said they nothing they did was sinful, rumours of sexual immorality began to abound, along with rumours of infanticide, since no newborns could be found among their number.
Buchanites. Photo: scotsman.com
Among their number was Andrew Innes, a mason by trade and an early disciple who joined her in 1783 shortly after the Reverend White did. He was entirely devoted to “Friend Mother in the Lord” as she called herself (along with other titles such as “Light” and “Mercy”) and when others left her Society, he remained true.
For example, in 1786 Mother Buchan proposed that all the Society should fast—i.e. eat nothing—for forty days to prepare themselves for their translation to heaven which would occur after the forty days. Instead of food they would be nourished by the words of her teaching and constant sermonizing. She and her Man Child the Rev. White were however exempt from the fast. All others kept the fast, becoming gaunt and ill in the process. At the end of the forty days at daybreak they struggled up to a hill where they had raised a staging on which to stand. This they mounted, standing on the waving structure with upraised hands as they sang and prepared to fly. However, they did not fly. A gust of wind took down the staging so that they all went down, not up, including Friend Mother Buchan.
As a result of this absurd debacle, many of her followers became disillusioned and angrily left the Society, realizing at last that she was an imposter. But not Andrew Innes. The failure to launch which made them the laughingstock of the town was attributed to their lack of faith and personally unworthiness. Mr. Innes’ faith in Friend Mother remained unshaken.
And it would remain so. Though she gave out that, being Deity incarnate and the light of the world, she could not die, in fact she did. She began to sicken so that even her devoted followers who believed in her superiority over death became alarmed. She died on March 29, 1791—but not without declaring a final prophecy.
An unrepentant imposter to the end, she told her sorrowing and gathered devotees that if their faith remained firm her spirit would return and re-animate her body at the end of six days; then they would all fly to heaven together. If they proved faithless, this would not happen for ten years; if they were still unprepared, she would not re-appear on earth until the end of fifty years, at which time she would surely descend to reprove and destroy the world in a fire of judgment. Presumably those dates were chosen by her to place her beyond the reach of criticism: she doubtless assumed that in ten years’ time all her followers would be scattered and would have forgotten her and that after fifty years’ time they would certainly all be dead. Either way, she could end her life in a blaze of pretended glory, uncontradicted and unrefuted, adored by her dupes until the very end.
Andrew Innes. Photo: oddscotland.com The story then becomes even more bizarre: when she did not return in six days’ time after she died, her body was hidden away in the house (though the neighbours were told it had been decently buried in a churchyard). Andrew Innes was its final custodian: every day he would heat a blanket and cover the coffin containing her mummified skeleton. Eventually all the Buchanites died off—all but Andrew. When ten years had passed and she had not returned, his faith remained firm and he blamed himself for the failure of re-animation and translation to heaven.
Even after all had died he still kept faith, waiting the full fifty years for the promised miracle. Then, when the fifty years were finally up, trusting in the infallible word of Friend Mother about her return and their flying up to heaven together, he kept vigil beside the coffin all day, every moment expecting her re-animation.
It was not to be. Her bones of course remained in its coffin, its brown skin stretched over the skeleton. But even then, Andrew’s faith did not waver. He kept faith with Mother Buchan and arranged for his own corpse to be buried with hers (finally interred in the ground near the house) with her corpse buried beneath his so that the movement of her corpse underneath his would awaken him and assure that they flew up to heaven together. In this way Andrew Innes died in 1846, living longer than even Friend Mother foresaw, still trusting in the lying imposter.
Innes is hardly alone in the history of religious fanaticism. Some may remember the claims and crimes of Warren Jeffs, undisputed leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (not to be confused with the Mormons). For his sexual crimes he was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison. Even then some of his followers kept faith with him, believing him to be God’s prophet and innocent of all wrongdoing. He still runs his church (i.e. his cult) from prison.
Sadly, religion does not have a monopoly on such religious fanaticism. It is enough to remember the devotion of the Hitler Jugend to their Fuhrer in the final days of Berlin as they kept faith with their infallible leader, never doubting that miracle weapons would soon turn the tide and secure the final triumph of Nazi Germany over its foes. Their faith was such that no amount of heart-rending reality could shake it. Even after Germany surrendered unconditionally among reports that the Fuhrer had killed himself in his bunker lair, many refused to believe it. The Fuhrer could not fail: he had miraculously escaped the country and would gather an army and return, finally leading the Fatherland to victory.
What can we learn from such fearful fanaticism? In a word: that idols cannot save.
The essence of idolatry is not physical prostration before a stone statue; it is giving one’s heart and life unreservedly to anyone or anything other than the true and living God. That which we desire most desperately and to which we devote all our service is our God—and if we serve anything other than the Holy Trinity, we serve an idol. It can be Mammon (i.e. money; see Matthew 6:24) or it can be fame or it can be a political leader or it can be a religious leader, but if we set upon the interior throne of our life anything other than Christ, we set an idol upon the throne and we are idolaters.
This was the problem with poor Andrew Innes: he made a flamboyant and charismatic liar from Banffshire the unrivalled and unfading focus of his life and devotion. Such was his captivity to the spellbinding woman that he closed his eyes and stopped his ears to all criticism, including the evidence of his senses. Even death which proved her claims to immortality to have been a lie could not remove her from the throne on which Andrew had placed her. He guarded her place on that throne fiercely from all comers, including loudly driving away clergymen called to console some of his fellow Society members as they lay dying. He was not merely an unsuspecting dupe, but an idolater who had deliberately fled from the light.
What can save us from a like fate? For though there are (happily) not many false prophets shouting online with religious messages as bizarre as that of Elspeth Simpson, false Messiahs with political messages can still be found—as the boys of the Hitler Jugend found to their cost.
Our only safety is in Christ. We must enthrone Him in our hearts and lives so securely and so completely that no place remains for other claimants. Neither Friend Mother nor Warren Jeffs nor Adolf Hitler can find a place in our hearts so as to become an idol. Jesus Christ alone sits on the throne of our heart. And He has said that His glory He will not share with another (Isaiah 42:8).
