Word: southcott
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...purports to be a novel of British working-class life, but its overt socialist propaganda and its covert hints of dark doings in sex and some sort of spiritualism make it the queerest mixture of the publishing season-a marriage of those diverse London oddballs, Karl Marx and Joanna Southcott, the hysteric cultist who died in 1814 after announcing that she would give birth to a second Prince of Peace...
...Harbor. For shiftless, Kentucky-born Ben Purnell, the road to Benton Harbor was a circuitous one. After traveling around the U.S. in the 1890s in a carnival wagon, he landed in Detroit and made off with 200 followers of the Israelite faith founded by 18th century English Fanatic Joanna Southcott. Because the Lord was "bent on harboring people," Purnell decided that Benton Harbor was their predestined home...
Convinced that she was the mystic woman of the Apocalypse, "clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars," she voiced and wrote reams of prophecies, some of them in doggerel. At 64 Joanna Southcott announced she was pregnant, by the "Lamb," of a Messiah. Ten days after her child was due, she died, leaving her followers a box of writings which, she declared, should be opened in time of national crisis, in the presence of four-and-twenty bishops...
Most active Southcott group today is the Panacea Society, founded some 20 years ago, which claims to cure "Cancer . . . Consumption . . . Mental Anxiety . . . Faults of Disposition ... the Tribulations and Perplexity that will precede the Coming of the Lord," by means of "Water and the Spirit." The Panacea Society claims that the 156-lb. box in its possession is the only true Joanna Southcott...
...presence of one good-humored bishop, a small box, alleged to be Joanna Southcott's, was opened, found to contain miscellaneous objects. This box, according to the Panacea Society, was spurious. The society is confident that eventually 24 bishops will gather around the real box, and miracles will then pop. But to the society's recent petition the Church of England's bishops made no reply...