Joanna Southcott

Joanna Southcott ( or Southcote) (1750 - October 29, 1814), was a self described religious prophetess. Others described her as a fanatic. She was born at Gittisham in Devonshire, 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 clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars", spoken of in Rev. xii.

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 64 she affirmed that she would be delivered of the new Messiah, the Shiloh of Gen. xlix, 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 of brain disease on the 29th of the same month. Her followers, referred to as Southcottians, are said to have numbered over 100,000 but had declined greatly by the end of the 19th century.

Among her sixty publications, all equally incoherent in thought and grammar, 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 24 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 World War I. 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.

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 24 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 (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.

Further reading

• D Roberts, Observations on the Divine Mission of Joanna Southcott (1807)
• R Reece, Correct Statement of the Circumstances attending the Death of Joanna Southcott (1815)