Ohaspe

I'm fascinated by "channeled" works of art, that which connects Milton to Howard Finster's spirit paintings. One of the earliest published literary works of this sort was titled "Ohaspe:A New Bible" and it was produced via automatic writing by one John Newbrough in 1882. Newbrough was a New York dentist fascinated with spiritualism and claimed that angels guided his hands as he wrote the book. The volume mixes imaginative cosmology, science fiction worthy beings, and an alternate history of both heaven and earth, all in a florid mock-Elizabethan style of English. Perhaps most notably, Newbrough may have been the first writer to coin the word "star ship", decades before such a term was commonplace in speculative fiction. Added to that are the striking illustrations, a few of which I have placed here. If you can find an old edition of this volume at an antiquarian bookstore I would recommend it. I first became aware of it while reading the Urantia Book and doing research on other works supposedly authored by celestial beings.