Lead began life as Jane Ward in about February or March 1624, the twelfth and youngest child of Hamond Ward, a rich landed gentleman, of Letheringsett Hall, and his wife Mary Calthorpe, a daughter of Sir James Calthorpe of Cockthorpe. She was christened on 9 March 1624 at St Andrew‘s Church, Letheringsett, Norfolk. She had a comfortable upbringing in a prosperous family. At the age of fifteen, during a family Christmas party she was gripped by a “sudden grievous sorrow” claimed to have heard an angelic whisper urging her “Cease from this, I have another Dance to lead thee in; for this is Vanity”. Although she vowed to do so, the next phase of her life was outwardly conventional. On a date unknown but between 15 June and 14 July 1644, Jane Ward married William Lead, a merchant and distant cousin, with a marriage portion from her father of £240. From 1647 to 1657, and perhaps longer, the couple lived together in Kings Lynn, where William was a freeman of the borough. The marriage was happy, lasted 27 years, and they had four daughters. The marriage was extremely stable, but when William died in 1671 she was left utterly bereft and penniless in the City of London. It was at this time, however, that she had her first vision of the "Virgin Sophia", the Feminine Aspect of God which is described in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, who promised to unfold the secrets of the universe to her. Lead declared herself a 'Bride of Christ' and proceeded to transcribe her subsequent visions in much the same way as her predecessor, Hildegard of Bingen. Her final output amounted to many volumes of visionarymysticism.
In 1663 Jane Lead met John Pordage. In 1668, Jane Lead joined a small English Behmenist group led by John Pordage, an Anglican priest who had been ejected from his parish in 1655 because of differing views, but then reinstated in 1660 during the English Restoration. Lead remained in this group after her husband's death in 1670, and this was also when she began keeping her spiritual diary, which would later be published as A Fountain of Gardens. Left nearly destitute after the death of her husband, Leade joined the Pordage household in 1674 and remained there until his death in 1681. Lead assumed leadership of this group after Pordage's death, and in 1694, the group became known as the Philadelphian Society For The Advancement Of Piety And Divine Philosophy. Lead's writings and visions formed the core of the group's spiritual goals and ideas. They rejected the idea of being a church, preferring the term society, and none of the members ceased their memberships in existing churches. Together, the group held views that were somewhat similar to Pantheism, regarding the belief in the presence of God in all things, and with a Nondualist component, in that they also believed the presence of the Holy Spirit exists in each and everyone's soul, and that one can become enlightened and illuminated by living a virtuous life and seeking truth through the wisdom of God. The movement flourished until the early 18th century when, with Lead's death in 1704, its membership began to dwindle. It was briefly revived in 1706 when they held meetings with the French Camisards, and then faded into obscurity. Nevertheless, it had converts in Europe and America. Lead's spiritual and literary legacy can be found in Radical German Pietism, particularly in the Moravians under Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, in German Romanticism, and in the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, William Law and William Blake. Although no longer officially a functioning group, many of the Philadelphian Society's views and writings, particularly those by Jane Lead, remained influential among certain groups of Behmenists, Pietists, Radical Pietists, Christian mystics, and Esoteric Christians, such as the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, the Ephrata Cloister, and the Harmony Society, among others.
The vision
Lead's spiritual vision, although very much her own, was similar to that of Jakob Böhme, whose writings influenced John Pordage, the founder of the group which would become the Philadelphian Society under Lead's leadership. Like other female Christian mystics, for example Julian of Norwich, Margery Kemp and Hildegard von Bingen, Lead's spirituality has a strong feminine element, the Sophia, or Wisdom of God, being a recurring subject in her writing. Her writings cover many of the Christian mysteries: the nature of Christ, the redemption of Man through a return to the Godhead, the existence of the Sophia, the Apocalypse and the possibility of Ascension. The scope of her work has drawn comparisons with the Kabbalists, the Gnostics, the Alchemists, and even the Rosicrucians in her belief in the presence of God in all things and the existence of the Holy Spirit in each soul. Around 1694, she became a Christian Universalist, rejecting the "Doctrine that hath been preached of an endless Misery and Torment" which had "wrought little effect in frightening or terrifying 'em from their evil Courses." She believed that punishment after death was purgative, not punitive.
