Jane Lead (; March 1624 – 19 August 1704) was a Christian mystic born in Norfolk, England, whose spiritual visions, recorded in a series of publications, were central in the founding and philosophy of the Philadelphian Society in London at the time. Early life Jane Ward was born 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 visionary mysticism. The Philadelphian Society In 1663 Jane Lead met John Pordage, a Church of England priest who had been ejected from his parish in 1655 but reinstated in 1660 during the English Restoration. In 1668, Lead joined a small English Behmenist group led by Pordage Lead remained in this group after her husband's death in 1670, and this was when she began keeping her spiritual diary, which would later be published as A