lareviewofbooks:

LINDSAY RECKSON

on Joanna Southcott, the messiah.

Collage of advertisement from 1939 The Telegraph, UK
and Wikimedia Commons image of Joanna Southcott

Jane Shaw
Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers
Yale University Press, October 2011. 398 pp.

In style it took the shape of any other garden party, that signal diversion of the interwar years. Tea and jellies, dancing and croquet, “lemon-ade” and clock golf:

Octavia gave a Garden Party to all at the Centre, in the Garden of The Haven, on the 18th — a most perfect day. Tea was served under the big weeping ash-tree named Yggdrasil. After the Meeting, twelve of the party danced country-dances, dressed as country people in smocks and panier dresses.

The only difference being that the dancers thought they were cavorting in the Garden of Eden, reestablished in the market town of Bedford, about 50 miles north of London. And they believed their host was the daughter of God.

Let’s back up a bit. More than a hundred years earlier, in the second decade of the 19th century, a domestic-servant-turned-prophet from Devon named Joanna Southcott declared herself the expectant mother of a new female messiah. As Southcott and her followers believed, this child (the half-sister of Jesus) would complete the unfinished project of redeeming mankind from original sin. Southcott died in 1814 without having given birth, but her writings and prophecies — some of which were sealed in a large wooden box, with instructions to be opened by 24 bishops of the Church of England in an unspecified time of “grave national danger” — became the sacred texts of a small but determined 20th-century community that tended garden, as it were, religiously.

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)