John Sebastian Marlow Ward (22 December 1885 – 1949) was an English author who published widely on the subject of Freemasonry and esotericism. He was also the leader of a Christian sect, and the founder of the Abbey Folk Park, the earliest example of a folk park in Britain.
He was born in what is now Belize. In 1908 he graduated from the University of Cambridge with honours in history, following in the footsteps of his father, Herbert Ward, who also had studied history before entering the priesthood of the Anglican Church.
John Ward became a prolific and sometimes controversial writer on a wide variety of topics. He made contributions to the history of Freemasonry and other secret societies. He was also a psychic medium or spiritualist, a prominent churchman and is still seen by some as a mystic and modern-day prophet.
Biography
Early life
Born in British Honduras on 22 December 1885, Ward was the son of an Anglican clergyman, Herbert Marlow Ward. In 1888, the family returned to England, where Ward was educated at Colet Court, Merchant Taylors and Charterhouse. Proceeding to study History at Trinity Hall, a part of the University of Cambridge, he subsequently travelled around East Asia for many years, working as the headmaster of a Church of England school in Burma and then as the Principal Officer of Customs in Lower Burma. While working in the country, he spent much of his time studying Chinese secret societies, and with W.G. Stirling co-wrote a definitive book on the subject, The Hung Society: or the Society of Heaven and Earth, published in 1925 by the Baskerville Press.
Interests in history and antiques
It was also in 1908 that he published his first book, a short history of church brasses. His collection of some 1500 brass rubbings is now in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
After the First World War he accumulated a significant private collection of antiques and when from 1927 onwards he began to form the "Confraternity of the Kingdom of Christ", together with his second wife Jessie, he would frequently return from a day in London with their car laden with numerous historical pieces for the collection. A thirteenth-century tithe barn, painstakingly taken down, transported in pieces and re-erected at Park Road, New Barnet, just outside London, was filled with priceless antiques and opened as a church in 1930. On the same property an open-air museum, consisting of replica period buildings, filled with genuine antiquities was also constructed and became a major tourist attraction. This Folk Park, as it was called, was one of the first of its kind in the world. Much of the collection was reluctantly sold but the rest still survives under the custodianship of the present members of his community at the Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology in Caboolture, Queensland, Australia.
Involvement with Freemasonry
Today, Ward is most widely known for his many books about the history and inner meanings of Freemasonry. These date mainly from the 1920s but most are still in print and available in a number of different languages. In them he traces the origins of modern Freemasonry back before its official 18th century beginnings to the far distant past. He believed that the movement had links with spiritual groups and secret societies in the ancient world as well as more recent institutions such as the Chinese Hung Society. His book on the Hung Society remained the source of articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica until long after his death and he remained listed among that encyclopedia's contributors, until late in the 20th century.
He saw Freemasonry as the successor of the ancient traditions of learning, and sought to convince his fellow masons to use that position to promote inter-religious harmony. His views remain controversial within Freemasonry. In 1987 the United Grand Lodge of England informed its members that "J.S.M. Ward's handbooks have no official standing and are not issued by Lodges to candidates. They were personal and very idiosyncratic interpretations of the history and meaning of the Craft rituals".
Involvement with spiritualism
Ward's activities as a medium and spiritualist brought him into conflict with many traditional churchmen. He had been brought up as an Anglican and officially remained a member of that church until 1934. Long before then, however, his wide-ranging spiritual interests had led him to seek for enlightenment in many other areas. According to his spiritualist book, Gone West, published in 1917, his first real link with the "other world" came in a dream early in December 1913 that predicted the death of his uncle H.J. Lancaster who died on 5 January 1914.