Totney, Thomas [TheaurauJohn Tany, Theauroam Tannijahhh, Ram Johoram]

Writing under the prophetic names TheaurauJohn Tany and Theauroam

Tannijahhh, Thomas Totney (1608–1659) was the author of a number of remarkable

but elusive works that are unlike anything else in the English language. He was

baptized on 21 January 1608 in the parish of South Hykeham, Lincolnshire. Nothing

is known of his education, though he was bound as an apprentice at London in April

1626, learning the trade of a goldsmith. Between 1634 and 1638 Totney lived near

Aldgate in St. Katherine Creechurch, a location favoured by small retailers for its

inexpensive rents. Upon his father’s death in 1638 he went to Little Shelford,

Cambridgeshire to manage the family farm. In the summer of 1640, probably while

serving as one of the parish’s petty constables, he played an important part in resisting

the collection of ship money. A series of payments in 1642 show his support for

those opposed to Charles I. Moreover, he claims to have witnessed one of Captain

Oliver Cromwell’s orations delivered at Huntingdon to newly mustered volunteers.

Evidence suggests that Totney served as a harquebusier during the first English Civil

War, before resuming his duties in December 1644 as a dedicated if insignificant local

tax official at the bottom of the administrative pyramid erected by the Long

Parliament.

In the spring of 1648, following the outbreak of a second Civil War, Totney

uprooted. He rented out his lands and moved with his family to St. Clement Danes,

Westminster, where he resumed working as a goldsmith at ‘The Three Golden Lions’

in the Strand. Then on Friday, 23 November 1649 after fourteen weeks of self-

abasement, fasting and prayer, he had a profound religious experience from which he

1
emerged believing himself to be God’s servant and prophet, a Jew of the tribe of

Reuben, and the High Priest and Recorder of the thirteen Tribes of the Jews. Totney

also had a new name: TheaurauJohn Tany. TheaurauJohn he understood to mean

‘God his declarer of the morning, the peaceful tidings of good things’. Tany linked

him to Sir John de Tany of Essex (d. 1315), whose coat of arms he appropriated. He

justified his claims by inventing a fantastic genealogy. He also circumcised himself.

Thereafter, believing he had been given the gift of tongues with which to preach the

everlasting gospel of God’s light and love to all nations, he went forth armed with

sword and word. All the same, because of a speech impediment he sometimes

preached from a prepared text rather than extemporizing.

As TheaurauJohn Tany and his subsequent prophetic incarnations he published an

assortment of broadsides, tracts, epistles and edicts with titles such as I Proclaime

From the Lord of Hosts The returne of the Jewes From their Captivity (25 April

1650); Whereas TheaurauJohn Taiiiiijour My servant (15 November 1650); THE

NATIONS RIGHT in Magna Charta (28 December 1650); Aurora in Tranlagorum in

Salem Gloria (25 February 1651); THEOUS ORI APOKOLIPIKAL: Or, Gods Light

declared in Mysteries (1651); High Priest to the IEVVES, HIS Disputive challenge to

the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the whole Hirach. of Roms Clargical

Priests (March 1652); Second Part OF HIS Theous-Ori APOKOLIPIKAL (1653);

HIGH NEWS FOR HIERUSALEM (no date = 1653?); THARAM TANIAH, Leader of

the LORDS Hosts, Unto his Brethren the QUAKERS scornfully so called (1654);

ThauRam Tanjah his Speech in his Claim, verbatim (1654); My EDICT Royal (no date

= 1655?); ThauRam Taniah His Royal memento’s Unto all Sects here comprised

(1655); and THE LAVV READ June the 10. 1656. unto the people ISRAEL, belonging

2
to the returning from Captivity (1656). Some included striking engravings of

millenarian and occult symbols, as well as heraldic devices.

These texts were predominantly written in English prose, though there are

occasional examples of mystical verse and rhyme. Developing a linguistic system

derived from philologists’ division of the letters that made up Hebrew words into root

and functional letters – the root being the essential and permanent part of the word

form – and drawing on a meagre knowledge of Hebrew, Latin and Greek, Tany

expressed his glossolalia through a combination of neologisms, idiosyncratic spellings

and invented characters intended to depict a pristine Hebrew. He took exception to

five letters in the English alphabet – W, X, Y, Q and F – replacing them fairly

consistently with VV (W), K (X), I (Y), G (Y), and PH (F). In addition, he

considered the Greek New Testament problematic, prompting an aversion to

supposedly forged diphthongs such as ae, ei, oa, au, el and uieii. Inspired by the

language of the King James Bible, particularly the New Testament, which he seems to

have memorized, Tany’s vocabulary also incorporated a lexicon of commonplace

alchemical terms and astrological jargon, as well as unacknowledged borrowings

from recently published English translations of the writings of the German mystic

Jacob Boehme.

His sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular

prophecies and legal treatises, as well as scriptural and extra-canonical texts – notably

The Testament of the Twelve Patriarches, the Sonnes of Jacob (1647) – and,

importantly, Boehme. Indeed, Tany’s writings embrace currents of magic and

mysticism, alchemy and astrology, numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and

3
Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah – a ferment of ideas that fused in a

millenarian yearning for the return of Christ on earth.

The English Revolution freed men and women both self-taught and formally

educated to speak their minds and challenge their times. Though Tany had few

followers and failed to found a sect, his vision was like molten gold, untouchable,

malleable, redolent of possibility; his words as worthy of preservation as the solemn

and weighty pronouncements of better-known contemporaries.

Tany died at sea about December 1659, reportedly drowned after taking passage

in a ship from Brielle bound for London. It is fair to say that only by contextualizing

and then unravelling the mind of this exceptional person can we truly appreciate what

it meant to be living in a world turned upside down.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS:

Hessayon, Ariel ‘Totney, Thomas (bap. 1608, d. 1659?)’, Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008

Hessayon, Ariel, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’. The prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the

English Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Hessayon, Ariel (ed.), The Refiner’s Fire. The Collected Works of TheaurauJohn

Tany (Breviary Stuff Publications, 2018)