In April 1626, Totney was bound as an apprentice in London to a fishmonger but was not taught his trade, instead receiving instruction in his master's adopted profession of goldsmith.
On receiving his freedom, he married a daughter of Richard Kett, a prosperous Norfolk landowner, whose great-uncle had been executed as leader of the 1549 East Anglian rebellion.
He set up in St Katherine Cree, a location favoured by small retailers for its inexpensive rents, his shop marked by an unknown sign near Aldgate.
By December 1644, he had returned to Little Shelford where he resumed his duties as a local tax official, as well as taking up sequestered land and providing quarter for Parliamentarian soldiers and their horses.
Following the outbreak of a second Civil War, Totney rented out his lands and moved with his family to St Clement Danes, Westminster.
In addition, he appropriated a coat of arms; "azure, three bars argent surmounted by the crest a hind's head erased, gules, ducally gorged, or".
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.
Crying vengeance in the streets of London, he declared woe and destruction upon the city, prophesying that the ‘Earth shall burn as an Oven’ and all the proud, the wicked and the ‘ungodly shall be as stubble to this flame’.
[3] Drawing on the potent image of Christ as goldsmith, purging dross and corruption in a furnace, Tany forged his prophetic identity – the messenger foretold by Malachi.
In the manner of the children of Israel before him, he began living in a tent, perhaps modelled upon the tabernacle, which he decorated with a symbol representing the tribe of Judah.
Both demonstrated his earnest desire for social reformation, the latter exhorting the common soldiers to dissolve Parliament and call fresh elections.
The indicters seem to have understood Tany as some type of Ranter, as one of ungodly conduct who allegorised the Bible and internalised hell; as an antiscripturian universalist who repudiated gospel ordinances and averred that men might live as they wished; as one who glorified sin and maintained that the soul is God.
Reeve and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton, a freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, announced themselves to be ‘the two Witnesses of the Spirit’ foretold in the Revelation of Saint John.
On 28 June 1652, they reversed the guilty judgement against Norwood and Tany, resolving that their opinions had been made to rigidly conform to the strictures of the Blasphemy Act.
[10] Within a month of his release, Tany published a pamphlet he had written in Newgate entitled High Priest to the IEVVES, HIS Disputive challenge to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the whole Hirach.
He signed this proclamation "Theauroam Tannijahhh, King of the seven Nations, and Captain General under my Master Jehovah, and High-Priest and Leader of the Peoples unto HIERUSALEM".
It exasperated one reader, who complained ‘truly I skill not the man, nor his spirit; in his writing he offends against all rules of Grammar, Geography, Genealogy, History, Chronology, Theology & c, so far as I understand them’.
A Goldsmith that did live in the Strand, and after in the City, and then at Eltham; who called his name Theaurau John Tany, the High Priest, & c. Published in Print, That all Religion is a lie, a deceit, and a cheat.
[14]Writing from ‘the Tent of Judah’ on the ‘Tenth DAY NISAN’ (probably 16 April 1654), Tany addressed a millenarian epistle ‘Unto his Brethren the QUAKERS scornfully so called, who ARE the Children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; who ARE circumcised in Heart’.
[15] On 8 May 1654, he issued an edict to all ‘earthen men and women’ announcing that he would shortly proclaim the Law and Gospel from his tent standing in the bounds of the Middle Park at Eltham, Kent.
[17]On the morning of Saturday, 30 December 1654, in the week that Cromwell was offered the crown, Tany made a large fire at Lambeth into which he cast his great saddle, sword, musket, pistols, books and bible.
In September 1655, after weeks of heavy rain and widespread floods, Tany ‘in one of his old whimsies’ pitched his tent in the large tract of open ground between Lambeth Marsh and Southwark known as St George's Fields.
Some three years later, now calling himself Ram Johoram, he was reported lost, drowned after taking passage in a ship from Brill bound for London.
Tany's writings embrace currents of magic and mysticism, alchemy and astrology, numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and gnosticism, hermeticism and Christian Cabbala.
His sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular prophecies, and legal treatises, as well as The Testament of the Twelve Patriarches, the Sonnes of Jacob (1647), Jacob Boehme's A Description of the Three Principles of the Divine Essence (English translation, 1648) and Mercurius Teutonicus (1649), Theologica Germanica, or, Mysticall Divinitie (1648), Paracelsus of the Nature of Things (1650), Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1650), and Menasseh ben Israel's The Hope of Israel (1650).