As the adobe brick buildings began to return to the dust they were made from, stories about Oahspe and the colony persisted. After the sale of its land in 1907 Oahspe retained support from a small but enthusiastic audience who kept its text alive. Writer Wing Anderson revived the Faithist’s Kosmon organisation in 1932 and incorporated it in California. Obtaining the copyright to Oahspe he reissued it from plates he purchased, and published several shorter more digestible reads that acted as study guides for full text. , , .
This revival of interest in Oahspe lead to fresh efforts by a group named Essenes of Kosmon to build Faithist colonies from orphan foundations in North Salt Lake, Utah in 19421, and on a 148 acre ranch in Montrose, Colorado, in 1947.2
Anderson’s Seven Years That Change the World 1941-1948, also introduced new readers to John Ballou Newbrough, as “one of the great prophets of the nineteenth century” and included new fantastic claims about him. Among them were that Newbrough’s clairvoyance was so potent that he could hold a sealed letter in his hand and read it word for word; that Oahspe provided the answer to who built the great pyramid of Giza in Egypt, and that it inspired the scientific discoveries of Albert Einstein.
Newspaper clipping showing two students at Texas Western College holding newly donated microfilm of Oahspe from El Paso Herald Post, Texas, 1950
Records of Oahspe’s resurgence appear in newspaper reports, such as that of students at Texas Western College examining newly available microfilm3 copies of it in 1950, the same year the faternum at the Shalam colony burned down and a new faithist colony was about to be established in Arizona.
In addition to Anderson’s books, other retellings of the story of the failed colony emerged – notably The Land of Shalam by Katherine Stoes, published in the New Mexico Historical Review in 1958.
Pioneer of the pulp science-fiction genre Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories (1938-1949) was an avid fan of the new bible and tried to incorporate its themes into the Shaver Mysteries that he was publishing at the time. Palmer also wrote a glownig review of Oahspe claiming “here is a book that has a much claim to greatness as does Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.”4 Palmer even republished his own version of Oahspe nicknamed “the Green Oahspe” in 1960 and today you can buy a Palmer tribute edition on Amazon.com.
While Oahspe and the Shalam colony never broke into the mainstream of popular culture, there were enough newspaper stories and books printed that ensured they remained a curiosity during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the same time period that Margaret Keane was getting her art education in Nashville and then New York.
But, there are more reasons why it is likely that Margaret, a trainee draughtsman and artist, in the mid 1940s would have crossed paths withthis particular occult text and its tragic tale of the Shalam colony.
Oahspe differs from other newly emergent religious texts in the United States, such as TheBook of Mormon (1830) or the gargantuan two-thousand-page Urantia Book (1955) in that alongside its text it contains almost a hundred plates of mysterious illustrations. Symbols, diagrams and paintings, said to have also been created automatically by Newbrough, depict, among other things, celestial vortexes that created galaxies, the composition of the earth, its atmosphere, and its relation to other planets.
Some of the illustrations in Oahspe 1882Three of Wing Anderson’s Oahspe based publications, Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories featuring Richard Shaver’s stories, and the “Green Oahspe” from 1960
Summary
It remained popular across the US years after the Shalam colony failure (by 1955 Margaret had lived on both US coasts and had grown up in Nashville, TN)
Oahspe was appealing to young artists or those interested in occult esotericism because of its drawings, its origin story and its bold prophecy
