Quick Answer
A New York dentist bought one of the first typewriters, sat at it before dawn in the dark for a year, and said angels moved his hands. The result is nine hundred pages of cosmology, invented alphabets and a history of the world in which the founders of the major religions are spirits who set themselves up as gods. He then spent the rest of his life and a follower's fortune trying to live by it, in New Mexico, with orphans.
Key Takeaways
- One of the earliest books written on a typewriter, and that machine is part of the story rather than a detail.
- The founders of the world religions are demoted to ambitious spirits, which is why almost nobody has heard of it.
- The three-level cosmology is genuinely influential, and a great deal of later esoteric writing runs on the same architecture.
- The racial typology is ugly and real. This review states it rather than working around it.
- He acted on it. Shalam Colony was a real place with real children and it consumed a real fortune before it failed.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors was published in 1882. It runs to roughly nine hundred pages, is divided into books in imitation of scripture, and is written in a deliberate King James pastiche.
It contains a cosmology, a history of the earth running back tens of thousands of years, an account of the organisation of the heavens, a great deal of prophecy and instruction, an ethical programme, and around ninety plates: diagrams of the heavens, star charts, and several invented alphabets.
It also contains a very large invented vocabulary. Names of heavens, of spirit administrators, of vessels, of periods, of peoples, most of them unexplained where they first appear.
Almost nobody has read it through. It is one of those books whose reputation is carried entirely by people describing it.
On availability: Oahspe is in the public domain and freely available in full online, in several transcriptions and in facsimile. Anyone curious can verify anything in this article directly, which is not true of most texts in this genre.
The Dentist
John Ballou Newbrough was born in Ohio in 1828 and worked as a dentist in New York. He was physically imposing, reportedly of considerable strength, and by the 1870s he was deeply involved in spiritualist circles at the height of the movement's American popularity.
This is important context and it is often skipped. Newbrough did not arrive at automatic writing from nowhere. He was a participant in a movement in which mediumship, spirit communication, table-rapping and trance production of text were widespread practices with an infrastructure of periodicals, lecture circuits and circles. Spirit-dictated books were being produced in quantity.
What made Oahspe different was scale and ambition. Most spiritualist productions were messages from a deceased relative. This was a replacement bible with a complete cosmology.
By his own account, Newbrough was instructed by the beings communicating with him to prepare himself first: to give up meat, to abstain from alcohol and tobacco, to bathe daily, to do good where he could, and to wait. He said this preparation ran for years before anything was produced.
The Machine
Then he was told to buy a typewriter.
The commercial typewriter was new in 1880. The first Remington machines had been sold only a few years earlier, they were expensive, and almost nobody had one. That Newbrough acquired one specifically to receive a revelation places Oahspe among the earliest book-length works ever produced on the device.
His account of the procedure is specific. He rose before dawn. He sat at the machine in the dark, placed his hands on the keys, and waited. His hands, he said, moved without his volition and at speed, and he did not know what was being written. He read the pages afterwards.
This went on through 1880 and 1881, and produced the manuscript.
The detail worth sitting with is the machine. Automatic writing by hand was an established spiritualist practice; the hand holds a pen and moves. A typewriter is a different proposition. It requires the fingers to find specific keys in the dark, at speed, producing legible output. Whether that makes the account more or less credible is for the reader, and it is at minimum an unusual thing to claim.
Three Levels
The architecture of the book is a three-level universe and it is the most durable thing in it.
Corporea is the material world: planets, stars, physical bodies.
Atmospherea is the region immediately around a material world, invisible to physical senses, where the dead go. This is where the great majority of human spirits are, and it is not a place of rest. It contains kingdoms, hierarchies, wars, deceptions and enormous populations of the confused. Spirits who died attached to a doctrine continue to hold it there, and organised heavens exist devoted to particular religions, run by their founders.
Etherea is the highest region, lying beyond the atmosphere of any world, inhabited by beings who have progressed past attachment to any particular planet. Etherean beings descend at long intervals to reorganise the lower heavens, dissolve corrupted kingdoms and release the spirits held in them.
This structure does real work. It explains why spirit communication produces so much contradictory and misleading material: the accessible spirits are the ones in atmospherea, and they are neither wise nor necessarily honest. It also gives a mechanism for religious change that is neither divine intervention nor human development.
Anyone familiar with Theosophical planes or with later esoteric cosmologies will recognise the shape. Oahspe is not the source of all of it, and it is an early and unusually detailed American statement of it.
The Cycles
Time in Oahspe is organised into periods of roughly three thousand years, with longer and shorter divisions around them.
At the end of each period, the arrangements governing the lower heavens are dissolved. Etherean beings arrive, the administrators of the previous era are removed, the spirit kingdoms are broken up, and a new dispensation begins with new appointments.
The scheme accounts for the appearance of new religions at intervals, for the decay of old ones, and for the periodic sense that something has changed. It also, conveniently, positions the moment of writing at the opening of a new cycle, which is a standard feature of texts of this kind and should be noticed as such.
The False Gods
Here is the claim that determined the book's reception.
Oahspe holds that the beings worshipped as gods by the world's religions are not the creator. They are spirits within atmospherea, some of them once human, who acquired power, established kingdoms in the lower heavens, and set themselves up as deities in order to receive worship. They fought each other over human populations. They founded religions to secure followers, and the followers arrive after death in the kingdoms of their gods and are held there.
The figures named include the being the book associates with Christ, along with counterparts drawn from Egyptian, Hindu, Persian and Near Eastern religion.
The claim is applied even-handedly, which is worth saying: this is not a book attacking Christianity in favour of something else. It demotes everyone.
The consequence was predictable. A text that identifies Christ as an ambitious spirit was not going to be read in nineteenth-century America outside a very small circle, and it was not. Even the Theosophists, who were doing comparably radical things with religious history, did not go this far.
Notice the logic underneath. If spirits exist, if some of them are powerful, if they are not automatically good, and if human beings after death go where their expectations take them, then a self-appointed god running a heaven is a perfectly coherent proposition. Oahspe takes the spiritualist premises of its era and follows them somewhere almost nobody else was willing to go. Whatever the source, that is an unusual piece of consistency.
The Faithists
Against all this the book sets the Faithists: those who worship the creator directly, without intermediary, without a saviour, without images and without a god who has a name and a personality and a throne.
They appear throughout the book's history as a persecuted minority, driven out repeatedly, and the ethical programme attached to them is specific and demanding.
No taking of animal life and no eating of flesh. No participation in war under any circumstance, and no resistance by force. Community of property. The care of orphaned and abandoned children as a primary religious duty. Plain living. No swearing of oaths.
This is a recognisable radical American religious ethic, close in several respects to Quaker and Shaker positions, and Newbrough took it entirely seriously.
The Sunken Continent
The historical narrative includes a submerged Pacific continent, called Pan or Whaga, destroyed in a catastrophe from which a remnant escaped by ship to seed the peoples of the world.
This belongs to a nineteenth-century vogue. Lemuria had been proposed by zoologists to explain species distribution and then adopted by occult writers. Atlantis had been in circulation since Plato and was being revived. Oahspe's Pan appears in 1882, decades before the more famous Mu of the 1920s, and the lost-continent motif was already common property when it did.
There is no geological support for any of it. The Pacific has no submerged continent. What the motif does, in this book as in others, is provide a common origin for scattered peoples and a reason why the oldest and purest teaching is not available in any surviving tradition. It is a structural device, and its recurrence across otherwise unrelated systems is more interesting than its content. Compare Steiner's treatment of the same territory, arrived at independently and reaching different conclusions.
The Plates and the Alphabets
The illustrations are the strangest thing in the book and they are the reason it is worth handling physically.
There are diagrams of the heavens, showing regions, roads and currents. There are charts of cycles laid out as spirals and wheels. There are star maps. There are drawings of etherean vessels. And there are alphabets: complete invented writing systems, presented as the scripts of ancient peoples, with characters given meanings.
They are competently executed and they are genuinely eerie. A great deal of the book's continuing appeal rests on them, because a page of diagrams communicates more immediately than forty pages of pseudo-scriptural prose.
Whether Newbrough drew them under the same conditions as the text is not clear from his account.
The Part That Is Indefensible
An honest review has to say this plainly.
Oahspe contains an elaborate typology of human types, given names, described in terms of physical appearance and colour, and assigned moral and spiritual qualities accordingly. There are the small and pale, presented as the pure and the bearers of the light. There are the dark and brutish. There are intermediate populations produced by their mixture, with characters assigned to match.
This is racial pseudo-anthropology of a kind that was extremely common in nineteenth-century writing, and it is repugnant, and it is not a stray passage. It is woven into the historical narrative.
Three things should be said about it and none of them cancels the others. It reflects the assumptions of its period, which were near-universal in white American and European writing of 1880 and which we can see clearly precisely because they are now visible as assumptions. It is used within the book to explain the descent and mixture of peoples rather than to justify a contemporary political programme. And it is still exactly what it looks like, and readers encountering it should not be told in advance that it is symbolic or that they have misunderstood it.
What this means for reading it. Oahspe is a historical document of American religious invention and it carries the racial assumptions of the world that produced it. It is not a source for history, anthropology or the origins of any human population, and material of this kind has been and still is put to use by people whose purposes are not scholarly. If you encounter the racial typology being quoted approvingly rather than historically, that is a signal about the source you are reading, not about the book.
Shalam
What separates Newbrough from most producers of revealed texts is that he tried to live by his.
In 1884, two years after publication, he founded a colony in the Mesilla Valley in New Mexico, called Shalam. It was funded largely by Andrew Howland, a wealthy follower who committed his fortune to it.
Its central work was the care of orphaned and abandoned infants. Children were brought from cities in the east, some of them foundlings, and raised at the colony under the Faithist ethic: vegetarian, communal, non-violent, with an emphasis on education and on the dignity of the children.
Newbrough died there in 1891, of influenza, aged sixty-three.
The colony continued for about another decade. It was not agriculturally viable, the buildings and the programme were expensive, and Howland's money ran out. Shalam closed around the turn of the century, effectively bankrupt, and the children were placed elsewhere.
The episode is not a triumph and it is not a fraud. A man received or produced a text telling him to give up meat, refuse violence, hold property in common and care for abandoned children, and he went to a valley in New Mexico and did those things until he died, and a follower spent a fortune on it, and it failed. Any assessment of Oahspe that does not include this is missing the most human part of the story.
Can the Claim Be Tested
No, and this needs stating clearly in both directions.
Nothing about a page of text reveals how it was produced. Automatic writing, trance dictation and ordinary composition all deliver the same object. There is no test, and there was none in 1882 either.
What can be examined is content, and there the picture is consistent. The material in Oahspe draws recognisably on what was available to a well-read American spiritualist around 1880: comparative mythology as popularised in that period, Egyptology as it then stood, biblical scholarship, Indian and Persian religion as filtered through Victorian sources, and the spiritualist literature itself. Where those sources were wrong, Oahspe tends to be wrong in the same way, which is the single most informative observation anyone can make about a text of this kind.
That does not settle the question of what Newbrough experienced. Dissociated production of complex material is a real phenomenon, well documented, and a person can genuinely not recognise what their own hands have produced. The honest statement is that the experience may well have been as described and that the content came from where content usually comes from.
Where It Sits
Three American books present themselves as new scripture and are long enough to be taken seriously as such: the Book of Mormon of 1830, Oahspe of 1882, and the Urantia Book of 1955.
Oahspe is the least read of the three by a wide margin. It never acquired an institution capable of sustaining it: the Book of Mormon founded a church, Urantia acquired a foundation and a devoted readership, and Oahspe produced small Faithist groups and a failed colony.
Its content is more cosmological than the Book of Mormon and less systematic than Urantia. It is alone among the three in explicitly demoting the founders of the existing religions, which is both its most striking feature and the reason it had nowhere to go.
It sits alongside the Theosophical material of the same decade, and the parallels are considerable: graded planes, spiritual hierarchies, cycles, lost continents, and a claim to supersede the existing religions by explaining them. The two did not need to influence each other. They were drawing on the same pool.
How to Read It, and Who Should
Do not attempt it front to back. It defeats nearly everyone and there is no shame in it.
Read the sections on the organisation of the heavens, which is where the thinking is. Read the plates, which are the fastest route into the imaginative world of the book. Read the Book of Jehovih's Kingdom on Earth for the ethical programme, since that is the part Newbrough acted on.
Read it if you are interested in nineteenth-century American religious invention, which was extraordinarily productive and which produced institutions that still exist.
Read it if you work with channelled material or automatic writing and want to see the most ambitious thing the practice has produced.
Read it if you are tracing where later esoteric cosmology came from, because the architecture recurs everywhere afterwards.
Do not read it as history. Do not quote its anthropology. Do not treat its account of the world religions as information about them. And do not let anybody tell you it is a lost masterpiece, because it is a long, difficult, unedited and frequently tedious book that happens to be a remarkable artefact.
The most useful idea in Oahspe is one it shares with almost nothing else in its genre, and it is a warning about its own genre. The book insists that the spirits most easily contacted are the least reliable, that they are numerous and confused and sometimes ambitious, and that a being appearing in glory and claiming authority is exactly what a spirit running a kingdom in the lower heavens would look like. A book received by automatic writing that tells you to distrust what comes through automatic writing is doing something unusual, and the caution it recommends applies to it as much as to anything else. Newbrough seems to have understood that.
A typewriter, an hour before dawn, and nine hundred pages nobody asked for.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak. Oahspe is in the public domain and freely readable online, so buy a print edition only if you want the plates on paper.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Oahspe?
A book of about nine hundred pages published in 1882, presenting itself as a new bible given by the creator and by angelic messengers. It contains a cosmology of graded heavens, a history of the earth over tens of thousands of years, an ethical programme, and around ninety plates including diagrams and invented alphabets.
Who was John Ballou Newbrough?
An American dentist, born in Ohio in 1828, who practised in New York and was involved in spiritualist circles. He said he was instructed to purify himself for years and then to obtain a typewriter, and that the book was produced through his hands without his knowledge of the content. He died in 1891.
How was it written?
By automatic typing, on Newbrough's account. He said he rose before dawn, sat at the machine in the dark with his hands on the keys, and that they were moved without his volition, and that he read what had been produced only afterwards. The work took about a year, in 1880 and 1881.
What is the cosmology?
Three levels. Corporea is the material world of planets. Atmospherea is the lower heaven surrounding a world, where most of the dead remain and where organised spirit kingdoms exist. Etherea is the highest region, beyond the atmosphere of any world, from which advanced beings descend at long intervals.
What are the cycles?
The book divides history into periods, generally of about three thousand years, at the end of which a new dispensation begins, new administrators of the heavens are appointed and the previous arrangements are dissolved. Newbrough presented his own era as the opening of such a period.
Does it really say Christ was a false god?
Yes. Oahspe presents a number of figures worshipped as gods, including the being it associates with Christ, as spirits within the lower heavens who set themselves up as deities and warred over human worship. This claim, applied also to figures from other traditions, is the reason it was never going to find a wide readership.
What are Faithists?
Those who, in the book's account, worship the creator directly without any intermediary god, saviour or idol, and who have formed a persecuted line running through history. The ethical programme attached to this includes vegetarianism, pacifism, community of property and the care of abandoned children.
What was the Shalam Colony?
A Faithist community Newbrough founded in the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico in 1884, funded largely by a wealthy follower, which took in orphaned and abandoned infants. Newbrough died there in 1891. The colony continued for another decade before collapsing, having consumed its backer's fortune.
Is the racial material a problem?
Yes, and it should not be glossed over. The book contains an elaborate typology of human races with moral and spiritual qualities attached, of the kind common in nineteenth-century writing. Modern readers will find parts of it repugnant, and any account of the book that omits this is not describing it accurately.
How does it compare with other channelled scriptures?
It belongs with the Book of Mormon and the Urantia Book as one of the major American revealed texts, and it is the least read of the three. It is more cosmological than the first and less systematic than the second, and it is alone in explicitly demoting the founders of the world religions.
Can the automatic writing claim be tested?
No. Nothing distinguishes automatically produced text from composed text once it is on the page. What can be observed is that the content draws recognisably on the comparative religion, popular Egyptology and spiritualist literature available to a well-read American in 1880, including its errors.
Is it worth reading?
As a document of American religious invention, yes, in selections. As continuous reading it defeats almost everyone: it is long, repetitive, written in deliberate King James pastiche, and thick with invented vocabulary. It is freely available in the public domain, so it costs nothing to find out.
Look at the plates
If you give this book twenty minutes rather than twenty hours, spend them on the illustrations. Ninety plates of heavens laid out as roads and currents, cycles drawn as spirals, complete alphabets for languages that never existed, all produced by a dentist in New York who said he did not know what he was making. Whatever you conclude about the source, somebody sat down and drew all of that, and then went to New Mexico to raise orphans according to it. The pictures tell you more about what happened to that man than the nine hundred pages do.
Sources & References
- Newbrough, J. B. (1882). Oahspe: A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Embassadors.
- Newbrough's own published accounts of the circumstances of the writing.
- Records and histories of the Shalam Colony, Mesilla Valley, New Mexico, 1884 to about 1901.
- Histories of nineteenth-century American spiritualism and of automatic writing as a practice.
- The Book of Mormon and the Urantia Book, for comparison as American revealed scriptures.
- Theosophical literature of the 1880s, drawing on the same pool of sources and assumptions.
- Scholarship on the lost-continent motif in nineteenth-century occult and scientific writing.