New Bible, A.
For the Church of the New-Born.
1866 Monthly
Chicago, IL. Editor: Prof. C.P.G. Washington (i.e., Charles Pinkham George Washington).
1/1, October 1866.
36 pp., 30 cents to believers, 40 cents to non-believers, $3.00 a year.

Charles Pinkham (b. Maine c. 1819) is a good example of the radical, or perhaps lunatic-fringe, side of early spiritualism, taking some premises of the movement to their logical conclusions. He had, as was noted, a "remarkable physiognomy and hair of Absolomic extensiveness," and as a newspaper noted in later years, "his manner was excited and his remarks were wild and disconnected. It soon became manifest that he was insane . . . ." He practiced as a traveling phrenologist in the 1840s and by July 1852, as John Buescher, the man with the most pictured thumb, who has discovered Pinkham's biography, has opined, Pinkham delivered in Stockton, California, the first lectures on "the new system of Spiritual Communications or Mysterious Rappings, so called," as well as on Phrenology, Physiology, Patnheism [Pathetism?], [and] Electro-Psychology." To these employments he added prophecy, with himself as Central Medium Teacher. By 1859 he established the Church of the New-born and by 1860 he was set on establishing the Apostolic Central Circle of the World, "that God may set up His kingdom on earth and govern hereafter," calling himself "Professor of Phrenology, and Agent of Arrangements," "by order of God, through the combined supercelestial angels, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin as direct controller of the body of the Central Medium Teacher." In 1866, in Chicago where he was then practicing as a "progressive physician" who healed by "the LAYING ON OF HANDS and Nazarine remedies," he announced in a prospectus for this journal "a New God and a new Bible," written by "Jesus, formerly of Nazareth," and styled himself as "Prof. C.P. George Washington, celestial, spiritual clairvoyant and psychometrist" and "viceregent of the New God and Jesus Christ upon Earth" The New Bible contained the prophecies Pinkham had received from 1852 to 1859 -- dates the journal stressed in order to avoid a charge of anachronism for the prophecies' detailed description of the coming War Between the States. The future was foretold to witness the imminent invasion of America by Napoleon III, his defeat, the coming of a thousand years of peace and "one universal system of government" built around the apostolic and great central circle begun in California in 1859 and led by the "central teacher" who received light from the "highest source of intelligence." The Spiritual Magazine was shocked at this proclamation of a centralized spiritual power, comparing it to a new Papacy and contrasted Pinkham's ideas to that exemplified by the journal's Chicago contemporary competitor, the Spiritual Republic. In addition to these prophetic utterances, the New Bible included Pinkham's eccentric views on other subjects: "Is man always made through animal congress of opposite sexes? No. After spirits are formed, and have passed into the spiritual sphere, they may act upon and through the most perfected orang-outangs, and impregnate the egg of the mother, if taken just at the right time, when it passes down the fallopian tube, with a fine essence, so that a child will be brought forth without animal congress, and superior to what can be brought forth from opposite sexes in the body, and by the former process was Jesus, formerly of Nazareth, brought forth by the action of a celestial being upon and through Mary his mother. This made Jesus more perfect than he could have been if he had been begotten through animal congress by a father in the body." In the 1870s Pinkham was active in the various progressive Dress and Peace leagues of the period, though dismissed as insane, and thereafter no more is heard of him in the literature. University of Michigan.

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