During one of these experiments in 1869, wherein Dr. Cyrus Teed was reportedly accidentally electrocuted, he claims to have seen a vision of a “beautiful woman” who allegedly revealed to him the secrets of the universe, along with allegedly giving him a special mission detailed below.
After this purported vision, he changed his first name to “Koresh” (the Hebrew word for his first name “Cyrus”) and after a number of years of travelling in New York, Chicago and other parts of the USA proclaiming his new religious and temporal theories, he eventually established the Koreshan Unity Settlement or “New Jerusalem”, a Utopian community in Estero, Florida, which was based on his purported private revelations and beliefs, which later came to be called “Koreshanity”.
Over the years, the number of people living in his community swelled to about 250, though quite a few followers reportedly lived outside the community. Some of the key Koreshan tenets were immortality through reincarnation, celibacy, that God was both male and female, and most particularly the “hollow earth” theory, wherein it was believed that the universe is a rotating sphere inside the earth, with the earth as a shell essentially wrapped around the universe (see photo below), thus proposing that humanity actually lives inside the earth, and not on the outside.
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| Koreshan model of the universe depicting his “hollow earth” theory of the earth surrounding the universe (Source Wikipedia) |
As for Cyrus Teed’s explanation of God being both Male and Female, he cited the Fourth commandment of
‘ Honor thy Father and Mother‘ as evidence, stating
“The father and mother in this passage denotes the Father-Mother God”.
Cyrus Teed the “Messiah”? The failed utopia
However the most extraordinary claim of Dr. Cyrus Teed (or “Koresh” as he was to be called) was that he claimed to be the ‘seventh’ messianic leader, and that Jesus was the sixth, a revelation that reportedly given to him by the ‘beautiful woman’ in a vision in 1869.
However the belief that Koresh was the “seventh messiah” ended rather abruptly when Teed unexpectedly died on December 22, 1908. His followers, who believed that he would resurrect and that afterwards both he, and his faithful, would be taken up to heaven, as he had predicted in his book
“The Immortal Manhood” and also in a book published by the Koreshian Community itself entitled
“Reincarnation or the Resurrection of the Dead.”
Therefore, immediately after his death they kept him in a bathtub and accompanied him in a constant vigil, awaiting his resurrection or second coming, which they deduced would happen three days later on Christmas day. When no resurrection/reincarnation occurred, the local authorities forced them to bury his corpse on December 27, and this event essentially marked the beginning of the end of the Koreshan Unity Settlement, though it would continue to survive through some of its members for more than 50 years after Teed’s death. In 1910, a hurricane destroyed his tomb which was on the southern end of Estero island, and washed his coffin out to sea.
In 1961, when there were just four community members left, their leader, Hedwig Michel, deeded the 300 acre “utopia” to the State of Florida, where it is now the 135 acre Koreshan State Historic site.
![B4INREMOTE-aHR0cHM6Ly80LmJwLmJsb2dzcG90LmNvbS8tMklxcExINGhUSkUvV0pfRlJ2TXZGcEkvQUFBQUFBQUFNcTgvMkt3MlBDbll5Ym96MnFTSy1LUHhpek9KZ25ISFFmekd3Q0xjQi9zNDAwL09jdGF2aWElMkJEYXVnaHRlciUyQm9mJTJCR29kLmpwZw==]() |
| “Octavia, Daughter of God”, by Jane Shaw |
Case Summary #2:
Octavia, the “Daughter of God”? The story of a purported Woman Messiah of Great Britain
This story begins in 1919 and takes place in Bedford, England where a group comprised of primarily middle-aged women came together to study the life of an alleged 19th century visionary named Joanna Southcott (1750–1814). To summarize this early part of the story, our subject, Mabel Barltrop (1866-1941) eventually became the person that the group believed was Shiloh incarnate, a female Messiah whose coming Joanna Southcott foretold in her prophecies back in the early 1800′s.
This Mabel Barltrop, who became known to her followers as “Octavia”, (because she was believed to be the eighth prophet in the Southcottian line) was the mother of four (now grown) children and the widow of a Anglican priest in the Church of England named Arthur Henry Barltrop (1856–1906),–a priest whom she later said was actually “Jesus”
Four Persons in God? The “Quaternity”?
Beginning in 1919 when she was 53 years old, Mabel Barltrop–now known as Octavia–began announcing a new theology:
There was God the Father, God the Mother (the Holy Spirit), Jesus the Son, and Octavia the Daughter. Thus for the believers in the group, the Trinitarian God of traditional Christianity was now reconfigured to become a “Quaternity” of four Divine “Persons” in one God.
Numerous single and widowed woman throughout England soon joined her, forming a Community called the “Panacea Society”, that grew to include seventy residents, thousands of followers, along with an international healing ministry reaching some 130,000 people.
Along with her belief of four Persons in God “Quaternity”, and that her husband (the now deceased Anglican priest) was actually Jesus, some of Mabel’s most outlandish additional teachings were that:
-Her back garden was the actual physical site of the original Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve had lived, and the town where she lived (Bedford, England) was to one day become the “New Jerusalem”, which is one of the many parallel’s to Dr. Teed’s story above.
