Odd this day

Ah it’s the 209th anniversary of the day the new Messiah was born. Or it would have been if Joanna Southcott had been the Woman of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation, as she claimed, and not an “incoherent … religious fanatic”

Joanna was born and raised in Devon, the daughter of a farmer, and went into domestic service, but started writing rhyming prophecies in her 40s, and announced that she was the figure from Revelation also known as The Woman Clothed with the Sun.

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, she spurned a man’s romantic advances, and he (well, of course) said she was “growing mad”, so she lost her job. The whole prophecies/“I’m in the Bible, you know” business can’t have helped, mind.

Thankfully, she found another source of income. Engraver William Sharp “maintained [her] at his own expense”, and she started selling “seals of the Lord” for up to a guinea. These were bits of paper which entitled the bearer to eternal life. Obviously.

But the really exciting stuff happened as she got older and (a) sold a lot of copies of her 1801 ravings The Strange Effects of Faith, and (b) a decade or so later became pregnant with the new Messiah, due on 19 October 1814

As with so many dates of Rapture, nothing happened, and Joanna died two months later, probably of dropsy (oedema). Not that her followers buried her immediately. They had to wait in case she was resurrected. Obviously.

She was not. Death, however, is no bar to influence. There are still obscure sects following her teachings, even though the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica says

her sixty publications [are] all equally incoherent in thought and grammar.

The most important thing about Joanna Southcott, though, is her legendary box. Stop sniggering. This is an actual box, containing her prophecies and other papers, and now in the possession of the Panacea Charitable Trust in Bedford.

This was founded as the Panacea Society in 1920, to look after the box and persuade 24 bishops to gather so it could be opened in order to avert national crisis. They took out billboards in the 1930s:

See billboard to the right of the image, above the bus

One Harry Price, a psychical researcher, claimed to have opened the box in 1927 (or possibly x-rayed it), only to find it contained

a horse pistol, a dice box, purse, several books, a lottery ticket and a night cap

…but that — WELL, OF COURSE — was not the One True Box, which is still held by the Panacea People, and looks like this.

You can read more about it on Atlas Obscura:

The Panacea Museum

Except even that’s not the real thing. The photo caption refers to this as “The replica of Joanna Southcott’s box”. The real box is with the Trust, but at A SECRET LOCATION(!), still awaiting the requisite number of bishops.

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to persuade 24 bishops to gather in one place for the opening of a box which contains nothing to do with the mainstream church, because few people in any church take this seriously.

BUT… let’s look again at those 1930s billboards. The contents of the box are supposed to protect against “Distress and Perplexity … in England”, and if 2023 doesn’t qualify, well: blimey. Come along, Welby. It’s time. Gather your forces. Open the box!

Follow any of the links above for more about Southcott and her box, or try:

Delving Into The Mystery Of Joanna Southcott's Box

Mind you, there is a web-design-is-my-passion Joanna Southcott fan site, too. Because of course there is:

Joanna Southcott