Ian Baird, “Anton Wagner, The Spiritualist Prime Minister, vol. 1, Mackenzie King and the New Revelation; vol. 2, Mackenzie King and His Mediums,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 37:2 (September 2025): pp. 248-249.
Patrice Dutil, The Enduring Riddle of Mackenzie King. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2025.
Excerpt: “His association with the spiritual world never ended. He had his last seance, in the company of Joan Patteson, in December 1949, months before his death. Historian Charles P. Stacey notes that there was absolutely no evidence that King’s spiritual pursuits ever had any impact on how he governed or how he prioritized his policies, but Anton Wagner’s deeply researched work showed that while this was true, King’s search for the truth from ‘Beyond’ was sincere and lifelong.”
Dr. Robert Revington, “A Review of The Spiritualist Prime Minister,” Presbyterian Connection, Issue 35, Fall 2025: p. 32.
Excerpt: “The roughly 800 pages of this work offer an exceptionally detailed study of King, but focused on one specific area: his spiritualist beliefs. Parts of this work could even serve as an outline of the history of spiritualism itself… One of this biography’s biggest contributions is to demonstrate that King’s spiritualism did influence his political life – a fact which older works on King (such as those by H. Blair Neatby) have downplayed…this biography is an impressive achievement and is an excellent read for those who want to thoroughly engage with this side of Mackenzie King.”
Patrice Dutil, “Mediums and the Message: The Spiritualism of Mackenzie King,” Literary Review of Canada 91 (May 2025): pp. 33-34.
Excerpt: “We hardly know him. I repeatedly came to this conclusion when reading Anton Wagner’s two-volume study of King as spiritualist… He must have laboured for decades to produce such a work. It is nearly encyclopedic in its documentation of how King approached the “other world”… It was not a double life. In fact, according to Anton Wagner, King’s spiritual side was woven into everything he did… his was not a passing interest, contrary to what many have believed (including me)…As we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century, when polls show that roughly half of adults believe in ghosts and spirits, King’s sincere spirituality should be greeted with sympathy and, perhaps, a bit more understanding.”
J.D.M. Stewart, The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped. Toronto: Sutherland House, 2025.
Excerpt: “William Lyon Mackenzie King is Canada’s longest-serving prime minister. He is also regarded by many as the country’s greatest leader… And yet seventy-five years after his death, he is remembered by the public more for his spiritualism and private eccentricities than for the significance of his leadership… King’s diaries were fully accessible to the public by 1980 and were later digitized by Library and Archives Canada. Historians have been accessing them ever since and speculating about the man and his enduring interest in the occult, in communicating with a world beyond our senses. It was a huge part of his private life. Anton Wagner, a historian of theatre and a writer intensely interested in spiritualism, published a detailed two-volume history of King, spiritualism and the occult in 2024, The Spiritualist Prime Minister.”
Walter Meyer zu Erpen, “Mackenzie King: Canada’s Spiritualist Prime Minister,” Presbyterian Connection, Spring 2025: p. 44.
Excerpt: “Anton Wagner admirably traces this evolution in Mackenzie King’s beliefs and occult practices in The Spiritualist Prime Minister. His detailed examination of King’s diaries and correspondence enables readers to make up their own minds to what degree his combination of Spiritualist and Christian belief systems influenced how he governed Canada for over two decades.”
Graham A. MacDonald, “Anton Wagner, The Spiritualist Prime Minister,” Prairie History, no. 16 (Winter 2025): pp. 69-71.
Excerpt: “One comes away from this study impressed by the extraordinary amount of time King gave to seeking spiritual contacts and in recording the results… Wagner takes exception to C.P. Stacey’s suggestion that these encounters produced no significant influence on King’s political decisions, particularly during the Second World War… Wagner’s documentation is excellent, as is the bibliography.”
Jack Granatstein, “The Spiritualist Prime Minister. Vol. 1, Mackenzie King and the New Revelation. Vol. 2, Mackenzie King and his Mediums by Anton Wagner,” Ontario History 116:2 (Autumn 2024): pp. 249-251.
Excerpt: “King was likely a victim of some form of obsessive compulsive disorder, but as Wagner notes persuasively, he was prone to depression and suffered almost all his life from efforts to repress his sexual urges… Wagner, however, is surely correct in focussing heavily on the powerful influence inflicted on King by his mother, Isabel, the daughter of William Lyon Mackenzie, the leader of the Upper Canadian rebellion of 1837…everyone writing on Mackenzie King’s life will need to push through Anton Wagner’s work.”
Roy Stemman, “Prime Minister Proclaimed His Spiritualism,” Psychic News, no. 4241 (October 2024): p. 39.
Excerpt: “Historian Dr Anton Wagner is to be congratulated. First, for producing a totally engrossing two-volume 770-page biography of William Lyon Mackenzie King who, as well as being Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister, was also a Spiritualist… Spiritualists will be delighted that this meticulously researched two-volume study is almost a who’s-who of early 20th century Spiritualism, with references to most of the leading mediums in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada… What a pity Mackenzie King died before writing his memoir. But one can’t help feeling that Anton Wagner’s impressive research and detailed telling of the life of Canada’s Spiritualist Prime Minister feels uncannily as if his spirit might have played a part in its creation.”
Peter Mulacz, “Buch-Neuerscheinung: ‘The Spiritualist Prime Minister,’” Österreichische Gesellschaft für Parapsychologie [Austrian Society for Parapsychology, Vienna] Newsletter, no. 87 (November 9, 2024): pp. 11-12. English translation.
Excerpt: “Anton Wagner now presents a two-volume monograph (in English) on King and his spiritualist faith, in particular his sessions with well-known (e.g. Geraldine Cummins, Eileen Garrett and Gladys Osborne Leonard) and lesser-known mediums. It is well known that he was a spiritualist, even if he did not articulate it publicly. Wagner’s book revisits the topic and focuses on spirit communication in detail… The work is primarily of interest for Canadian readers (not only Canadian spiritualists), but it is also interesting for the rest of the world that an academic has taken the trouble to investigate this concrete case of politics and spiritism in detail. The question of ‘politics and spiritism’ or, more broadly, ‘politics and occult belief,’ especially to what extent the respective belief system influences decision-making, arises for many political leaders.”