Oahspe

Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Ambassadors is an 1882 spiritualist text produced by the American dentist John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891), who reported that its roughly 890 pages were transcribed through automatic writing on a then-newly invented typewriter, his hands moving, he said, without his own conscious knowledge of what was being typed. Newbrough said the composition followed ten years of self-purification he undertook so that he might become receptive to a higher power, and that the actual typing sessions ran roughly half an hour each morning over about fifty weeks in 1881, presented publicly for the first time on October 20, 1882, at his home in New York. Under the wiki's tiering for non-physically-mediated communication, Newbrough's own account of the typing sessions is treated identically to a channeled testimony regardless of the "automatic writing" label he used for it.

The book sets out a claimed spiritual history of Earth and other inhabited worlds spanning tens of thousands of years, governed by a deity named Jehovih and administered through a hierarchy of angelic officers, and it describes the sinking, roughly 24,000 years before Newbrough's own time, of a Pacific continent Newbrough calls Pan (also given as Whaga), whose destruction Oahspe presents as the historical kernel later preserved, in garbled form, as the worldwide flood myths of Genesis and of other traditions. Adherents of the teaching Oahspe expounds call themselves Faithists, organized in later decades as the Universal Faithists of Kosmon.

Oahspe was published in 1882, six years before Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888), making it, among the modern channeled-cosmic-history and lost-continent literature, one of the earliest full-length claimed revelations of a sunken prehistoric continent tied to the origin of the flood traditions — a chronological priority this wiki's corpus has otherwise given only a single passing mention.[citation needed] Whether Blavatsky or later Theosophical writers on Lemuria and Atlantis knew Oahspe directly, or arrived at a structurally similar sunken-continent claim independently, has not been settled by any source located for this article.

Genesis and provenance

Newbrough was a practicing spiritualist medium before producing Oahspe, and presented the book's origin not as his own composition but as dictation received while in a receptive trance-like state at the typewriter; some accounts of the process also describe him using pen and paper, with a bright light said to have enveloped his hands during the writing. Oahspe's own text frames itself as revelation given directly by Jehovih and a succession of named angel ambassadors rather than as Newbrough's personal philosophy, a framing consistent with the wider claimed-transmission literature this wiki documents, and one that places Oahspe's evidentiary status on the same footing as a channeled or trance-mediated text even though Newbrough's own preferred description was "automatic writing."

Contents

Oahspe is organized as a set of interlinked "books," moving from an account of the cosmos and the creation of the angelic hierarchy through a history of pre-human and early human epochs, the sinking of Pan, and successive divine dispensations down to Newbrough's own "Kosmon Era." The work incorporates more than a hundred original drawings and diagrams, including its own cosmological and hieroglyphic illustrations, alongside instructions on diet, pacifism, and communal governance that its Faithist readers took as binding practice — most notably a prohibition on eating meat, which the text ties directly to a person's standing in the afterlife.

Publication history and Faithist communities

Oahspe was first published by Newbrough's own Oahspe Publishing Association in 1882 and has remained continuously in print in various editions since, including full public-domain text hosted by the Internet Sacred Text Archive and other online archives. Following publication, several communities organized themselves around Oahspe's teachings, the best documented being the Shalam Colony near Las Cruces, New Mexico (1884–1901), a communal settlement that took in orphaned children and practiced the vegetarian, pacifist lifestyle the text prescribes, alongside smaller Faithist groups that later formed in Britain, the Netherlands, and Australia. A present-day Faithist organization, the Universal Faithists of Kosmon, continues to maintain the text and lists an address in Riverton, Utah.

Reception

Oahspe has drawn both sympathetic and hostile assessment. The surrealist poet David Gascoyne is reported to have called it "the most astonishing book in the English language,"[citation needed] while the skeptic and mathematics writer Martin Gardner, discussing Oahspe alongside other channeled scriptures such as The Urantia Book, dismissed its cosmology as fantastical invention rather than genuine revelation. Reference works cataloguing religious and literary hoaxes have listed Oahspe among texts containing unfulfilled prophecies and demonstrable factual errors, a characterization consistent with the standard mainstream dismissal this wiki treats as one contested reading among others rather than a settled verdict.[citation needed] Independently of the dispute over its authenticity, Newbrough is credited by some etymologists as possibly the first writer in English to use the word "starship."

See also

Open questions

References

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