page_title: Oahspe: A New Bible
section_title: Genesis and first presentation
hierarchical_section_title: Oahspe: A New Bible / Genesis and first presentation
caption_attribution_description: English: The "Tablet of Fonece" from Oahspe.
context_page_description: Oahspe: A New Bible 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 produced by an American dentist, John Ballou Newbrough, who reported it to have been written by automatic writing, making it one of a number of 19th-century spiritualist works attributed to that practice. The text defines adherents of the disciplines expounded in Oahspe 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.
context_section_description: Oahspe (the word is defined as "sky, earth (corpor) and spirit. The all; the sum of corporeal and spiritual knowledge as at present") was published in 1882.
  Dr. Newbrough had started writing the book in 1880 and stated that the writing was done automatically; he had been a spiritualist since the early 1870s. On at least two occasions Newbrough wrote publicly about how the Oahspe came about through automatic writing. A letter published in the Banner of Light (a 19th-century Spiritualist newspaper), and an Addendum in the 1882 Edition republished by Raymond A. Palmer in 1972. Both accounts, written in the first person, indicate that Newbrough sat at a (newly invented) typewriter for half an hour each morning at which time his hands would automatically type (without his knowledge of what was being written).) An article in The New York Times had him explain that, feeling the urge to write, he sat down with pen and paper until a bright light enveloped his fingers and they started writing. Moreover, many of the drawings contain symbols resembling hieroglyphs, presumably drawn. A copy of the "Banner of Light" letter accompanied Oahspes published by the Kosmon Press in England (such as it was received in New Zealand in 1895).
  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. According to the New York Times news article, Newbrough said that the book was not a sacred text per se, but rather a history of religions going back 24,000 years, and that the first publication of the book came about with the financial assistance of a number of unnamed contributors.
caption: The "Tablet of Fonece," an illustration from Oahspe
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