Happiness Quote by Joanna Southcott

Mysticism, here, reads less like private reverie than like a performance optimized for attention. Southcott’s dream scene is deliberately sensorial: “heavenly music sounding in my ears” doesn’t just report revelation, it locates it in the body, as if faith were an audible broadcast. Then she cuts to an almost comic pastoral tableau - sheep clustering around the sound, leaping when it stops, shaking their heads in a contagious frenzy. The vision is cute until it turns uncanny: one sheep “shook his head almost off, and seemed to have nothing but ears.” That grotesque punchline is doing real work.

On its face, sheep are a ready-made symbol of the faithful, but Southcott weaponizes the metaphor. The flock responds to the music, not to a doctrine; they move as a unit, not as discerners. The “nothing but ears” sheep is the nightmare version of devotional receptivity: pure listening, zero judgment, a creature reduced to intake. It’s satire without admitting to satire, a warning disguised as revelation. If you’re all ears, you’re also easily led.

The context matters: Southcott was a working-class English prophet-figure who built a mass following in an era thick with millenarian panic, political upheaval, and expanding print culture. A “celebrity” before modern celebrity, she competed in an attention economy powered by pamphlets, gossip, and religious hunger. This dream reads like a self-authenticating advertisement: heaven is speaking, the crowd gathers, ecstasy spreads. It also sneaks in a critique of the crowd that made her famous - the faithful as consumers of spiritual sound, susceptible to any voice that can pass as “heavenly.”