Oahspe
Oahspe is a book published in 1882, purporting to contain "new revelations" from "...the Embassadors of the angel hosts of heaven prepared and revealed unto man in the name of Jehovih..." It was written by an American dentist, John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891), who reported it to have been produced by automatic writing, making it one of a number of 19th-century neo-revelationist works attributed to that practice. Adherents of the revelation expounded in Oahspe are referred to as "Faithists".
Oahspe comprises a series of related interior books chronicling earth and its heavenly administrations, as well as setting forth teachings for modern times. Included are over 100 drawings. The title page of Oahspe describes its contents with these words:
A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Ambassadors. A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens on the Earth for the Past Twenty-Four Thousand Years together with a Synopsis of the Cosmogony of the Universe; the Creation of Planets; the Creation of Man; the Unseen Worlds; the Labor and Glory of Gods and Goddesses in the Etherean Heavens; with the New Commandments of Jehovih to Man of the Present Day.
"Jehovih" is used in Oahspe as the name of the Creator.
According to Oahspe: Jehovih (father) and Om (mother) are the two names of the Creator. Other references are "The Great Spirit", "The All Person", the unseen and ever-present. God is a title for once mortal or in corporeal form (spirit within a body). The Creator is all and was all and forever will be all; He/She was never born and was never a God. The Creator is our father and mother, and all that are and were born are our brothers and sisters.
The Oahspe has been stated as being the first known reference to the term "starship".
The first presentation of the book took place on 20 October 1882 in Newbrough's house, at 128 West 34th Street in New York City, where he presented the "new bible," "a large quarto volume of over 900 pages," to a group of people. Newbrough claimed that the book was not a sacred text per se, but rather a history of religions going back 24,000 years; Newbrough did not claim any knowledge of ancient religions. He published the book with the financial assistance, he claims, of a number of unnamed contributors.
The manuscript, as it was originally presented in 1882, contained hieroglyphs, whose resemblance to real Egyptian hieroglyphs was attested to by Prof. Thomas A.M. Ward, who claimed to have deciphered the hieroglyphics on the Cleopatra's Needle obelisk in Central Park. Ward was present at Oahspe's first presentation, as was Dr. Cetliniski, an Oriental scholar, who affirmed that mere mortals could not have produced such a book and that "supernatural agents" must have been responsible.
The first reporter on the book, writing for The New York Times, compared the book's content to a revised fusion of Indian and Semitic religions, and said its style was "in one place modern, and in another ancient, and the English of the King James version of the Christian bible is mixed in with the English of today's."[1]
