Introduction

Civilization As We Know It

“The last day of the Lord is near,” cried William Miller, self-proclaimed prophet of the American sect of Millerites (Second Aventists) in May 1844. Issuing the “midnight cry,” Miller felt the crowning crisis of the ages at hand. He even gave “the last day” a date: October 23 of that year. But when that dreaded day arrived, and the next and the next and the Millerites bewailed--still in the cold world!

Oh well, end times, if nothing else, are good box office and grist for the mill among cults of despair, perhaps represented today by such groups as Aum Shirin Kyo, the terrorist Buddhist sect that released the lethal chemical sarin on the Tokyo subways in 1995. Those fanatics embraced the apocalyptic notion that the world would end sometime between 1997 and 2000.

But it didn’t. It just kept on spinning, spinning. . . . Actually our world is not scheduled to expire for quite some time (see chapter 4). And there is considerable difference between the end of a civilization and the end of the world (i.e., the planet). If we can move on from attention-grabbing hysterics, paranoia, and the misguided calculations of overwrought end-time soothsayers, the only remaining danger is the end of civilization as we know it.

A Book of Prophecy: Oahspe

The stage is being set for the next cosmological revolution in our way of thinking . . . reawakening interest in the relation of man to the Universe as a whole . . . the new Cosmology may come to affect the whole organization of society.
--Astronomer Fred Hoyle

Give ear, O earth, and be attentive to the words of your God. . . . The time shall surely come when all things shall be revealed to the inhabitants of the earth. . . . The multitude of my Kingdoms shall be opened up to your understanding.
--Oahspe

Of course, Hoyle’s prediction will come to pass! But first we need to come to terms with who we are and what we are.

In search of prophecy for the third millennium, I began to see two different meanings for the word prophet. On the one hand, the term signifies someone who is able to divine the shape of things to come, like a soothsayer of old or today’s clairvoyant who unexpectedly “sees” what has not yet come to pass, but will.

Yet we have also long used the word prophet simply to denote the wise men or sages of their time, whose genius is not necessarily in predicting anything but merely in interpreting (correctly) the currents of their day. They are, in a word, the mouthpieces of the times. The enlightened ones. Examples from our modern era include President Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In these pages, we will dip in to both kinds of prophecy: the future kind and the wisdom kind. In a way, they are inseparable. Trekking across this howling wilderness called prophecy, exhausted and discouraged by the number of detours set up by false teachings, I often lean on the staff of knowledge embodied in the Oahspe bible.

Oahspe offers a new source of information that we can work with deeply embedded in its copious verses, for it reveals the lost science of numbers and how to become a prophet oneself. Breaking the silence of the taciturn Faithist community (“Faithist” being the group name for those, past and present, who worship the Great Spirit and practice His commands), I now present the Tables of Prophecy, used in antiquity by priests and mathematicians for the benefit of the commonwealth and revealed for modern times within the pages of Oahspe. This system is mathematical, numerical, and historical. Based on the primary unit of eleven years (an “ode”), these Winter Tables, as they were called, contained all the “prophetic numbers” needed to see--and head off--coming events and disasters. What impresses me most is that this kind of prophecy is a method. It is not psychic foreseeing; it is not any of the “psychomancies” that seek the future in the random toss of pieces or parts; it is not random at all. It is a method, based simply on a science of numbers and cycles.

Indeed, all of this is a lost science, yet much of it can be recovered. For the interested reader who would like to become a prophet, this book teaches you how to prophesy by applying the prophetic number 11 and its key multiples: 22, 33, 66, 99, 121, and 363. But it is not just prophetic numbers that we are putting to work. This is the only system of prophecy (besides that of the Mayas) that uses history, that uses the past to foretell that which has yet to unfold.

The late Wing Anderson, publisher of the Oahspe bible from 1935 to 1955, grappled with the prophetic numbers and predicted various outcomes for our war-torn world. Wing once described Oahspe as giving not only a “history of the rise and fall of races from the beginning of the world to the present, but [also] predicting the final outcome of things in general and of many lesser situations in particular. . . . It is in this miraculous book that we find the explanation of what is occurring throughout the world . . . when the institutions of the old 3,000 year cycle, which ended in 1848, are destroyed to make way for those of the Kosmon Age.” To the alarmist who thinks that prophecy must state we will end in a blazing apocalypse, Anderson, always gallant, did say, “This is not the end. It is only the beginning.” The facts are straightforward, he said. “A new world is in the making. The institutions that grew up in the three thousand year cycle that ended in 1848 have played their parts in the evolution of mankind. It is now time for their exit.”