Jonah Shepherd

With Julian Rowe

"Founded in Dartford in 1947 by Jonah Shepherd, self-styled ‘Euphratean Architect’, the Euphratean Society adopted their name from a prophecy in the Islamic Hadith . They were a millenarian sect, taking their beliefs from a heterogeny of sources, including Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Marxism and the writings of Swedenborg and Blake, as well as Shepherd’s own visions . Shepherd claimed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in 1996, and that mankind was already living through the Last Days. He cited the two world wars, the burgeoning confrontation with the Soviet Union, and various social changes as indicators of this.

However, what made the Euphratean Society distinctive was Shepherd’s prophecy, loosely based on the writings of William Blake, that the Apocalypse and the foundation of the New Jerusalem, as foretold in the Book of Revelation, would take place not in the Middle East, but in Kent. According to the prophecy, a number of locations in the county could be identified with places mentioned in biblical sources. For example the River Medway indicated that Kent was, like the Biblical Israel, a “land flowing with milk and honey” . One of the Medway’s tributaries is the River Eden , and Shepherd made much of the resonance between the original garden and Kent’s ‘Garden of England’ soubriquet. Wormshill was to be the place where the star Wormwood would fall . For more obscure reasons, the River Stour was Shepherd’s Euphrates, Canterbury the city of Babylon, and Pegwell Bay the site of the New Jerusalem.

A second distinctive feature of the Euphratean Society was their pronounced focus on concrete action in anticipation of the Apocalypse. Where other sects might concentrate on prayer, proselytising or withdrawal from worldly affairs, Shepherd and his followers took practical steps to prepare the ground, in a quite literal sense, for the founding of the City of God. In this enterprise they were in part following the visions of St John the Evangelist and the Prophet Ezekiel ; however, Shepherd’s notion was that the City would not, as he put it, “build itself”. Instead, the Euphratean Society set about making drawings and models, marking out terrain, and even beginning construction, as funds permitted.

There are theological uncertainties about the intention of these activities. Taken at face value it seems incredible that the sect believed they were building the actual New Jerusalem. Certainly the vast city described in the Book of Revelation would be physically impossible to construct by human hands, and it would seem more plausible that the various works carried out by the Euphratean Society, though substantial, were sacramental in nature, a way of ritually echoing the creations of the Celestial Architect rather than anticipating them. The prolific output of scale models in the early 1950s, apparently as an end in themselves, would appear to support this view.

The Euphratean Society carried out its last, and most ambitious project in 1956, constructing an enormous concrete platform on the northern shore of Pegwell Bay, near the mouth of the Stour (or Euphrates as they thought of it). Sect members referred to it as ‘The Tabernacle’, though its exact purpose is unknown. It is difficult to understand how so small a sect could have financed such an undertaking, but Shepherd’s group appears to have been well-funded from the very outset. The source of this largesse has never been established, and there are even rumours that the British Government was somehow involved, through a shadowy organisation known simply as K-6 . Whatever the truth of this, ‘The Tabernacle’ proved overambitious and was never completed . The sect disbanded acrimoniously shortly afterwards, perhaps because its covert financial support had been withdrawn , and Shepherd seems to have had no further contact with his disciples."

- From: An Encyclopaedia of Cults, Sects and Deviant Religious Belief, eds. D Spooner and H H Parkestone. London: Mondeo House. 2001.