Joanna Southcott – English Prophetess

Joanna Southcott

The fourth daughter of a Devon farmer, Joanna Southcott was born in Gittisham in 1750.

She attended church and read the Bible daily.  She was sincere and hardworking, whether on the farm, in domestic service, or at the crafts of upholstery and needlework.

Sensible, pretty, and humorous, in early life like most ordinary girls and she showed no signs of becoming a seer.

in 1792, She believed that the Spirit of Truth visited her in great power warning her of what was coming upon the whole earth. She was commanded to write as the Spirit dictated, much like the Biblical prophets of old. She was compelled to record and publish the remarkable word she was receiving.

She forewarned the nation of the coming Napoleonic wars and of crop failures and disturbances at a time when there was as yet no hint of danger to this country.

In her day she had a following of many thousands, but little joy, since the church to which she was devoted and to whom she often appealed to judge her word, whether it be true or false declined to do so.

Southcott is famous for leaving 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 the First World War.

In 1927, the psychical researcher Harry Price claimed that he had come into possession of the box and arranged to have it opened in the presence of one reluctant prelate (the Bishop of Grantham, not a diocesan bishop but a suffragan of the diocese of Lincoln): it was found to contain only a few oddments and unimportant papers, among them a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol.

Price’s claims to have had the true box have been disputed by historians and by followers of Southcott later to be incorporated in the Panacea Society.

Southcottians claimed that the box opened in 1927 was not the authentic one and continued to press for the true box to be opened.

An advertising campaign on billboards and in British national newspapers such as the Sunday Express was run in the 1960s and 1970s by one prominent group of Southcottians, the Society in Bedford (formed 1920), to try to persuade the twenty four bishops to have the box opened.

Their slogan was: “War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity 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 prophesied that the Day of Judgement would come in the year 2004, and her followers stated that if the contents of the box had not been studied beforehand, the world would have had to meet it unprepared.

The efforts of the Society have so far been unsuccessful; Church of England officials state that for them to take part in the opening would be to unnecessarily arouse public interest in the affair.