Joanna Southcott

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Joanna Southcott (or Southcote) (April, 1750 - December 27, 1814), was a self-described religious prophetess. She was born at Gittisham in Devon, England.

Her father was a farmer and she herself was for a considerable time a domestic servant in Exeter. She was originally a Methodist, but about 1792, becoming persuaded that she possessed supernatural gifts, she wrote and dictated prophecies in rhyme, and then announced herself as the woman spoken of in Revelation — in the King James Version, Revelation 12:1-6:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.
And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

Coming to London at the request of William Sharp (1749-1824), the engraver, she began to seal the 144,000 elect at a charge varying from twelve shillings to a guinea. At the age of sixty four she affirmed that she would be delivered of the new Messiah, the Shiloh of Genesis 49:10. 19 October 1814 was the date fixed for the birth, but Shiloh failed to appear, and it was given out that she was in a trance. She died not long after. The official date of death is given as 27 December 1814; however, it is likely that she died the previous day, 26 December 1814, as her followers retained her body for some time, in the belief that she would be raised from the dead, and only agreed to its burial after it began to decay. Her followers, referred to as Southcottians, are said to have numbered over 100,000 but had declined greatly by the end of the nineteenth century.

Among her sixty publications may be mentioned:

Strange Effects of Faith (1801-1802)
Free Exposition of the Bible (1804)
The Book of Wonders (1813-1814)
Prophecies announcing the Birth of the Prince of Peace (1814)

A lady named Essam left large sums of money for printing and publishing the Sacred Writings of Joanna Southcott. The will was disputed by a niece on the ground that the writings were blasphemous, but the court of chancery sustained it.

The movement did not end with Southcott's death in 1814. She left a sealed wooden box of prophecies, usually known as Joanna Southcott's Box, with the instruction that it be opened only at a time of national crisis, and then only in the presence of all twenty four bishops of the Church of England (there were only 24 at the time), who were to spend a fixed period of time beforehand studying Southcott's prophecies. Attempts were made to persuade the episcopate to open it during the Crimean War and again during the First World War. Eventually in 1927 one reluctant prelate (the Bishop of Grantham) was persuaded to be present at the box's opening, but it was found to contain only a few oddments and unimportant papers, among them a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol.

One of the newspaper advertisements, complete with Flying Roll, by the Jezreelites.

However, the followers of Southcott later claimed that the box opened was not the authentic one. An advertising campaign on billboards and in British national newspapers such as the Sunday Express was run in the 1960s and 1970s by what is viewed as the most prominent group of Southcottians, the Panacea Society in Bedford (formed 1920), to try to persuade the twenty four bishops to have the box opened. Their slogan was: "War, disease, crime and banditry will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box." According to the Panacea Society, this true box is in their possession at a secret location for safekeeping, with its whereabouts only to be disclosed when a meeting with the bishops has been arranged. Southcott prophecied that the Day of Judgement would come in the year 2004, and her followers state that if the contents of the box have not been studied beforehand, the world will have to meet it unprepared.

The efforts of the Society have so far been unsuccessful; Church of England officials, including the Rt. Rev. David Farmbrough, then (Bishop of Bedford) have commented that for them to take part in the opening would be to unnecessarily arouse public interest in the affair. The story of the box has become something of a source of ridicule in Britain - for example, it featured in a sketch by Monty Python's Flying Circus in the 1970s.

External links

[Dedicated to the life and writings of Joanna Southcott.]

[Joanna Southcott's memorial stone.]

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Joanna Southcott

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