Contents
The World and Paradise
Millennial Strangeness
The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Poetry
Millenarian Studies
Millennial Salvation
The Prophet's Vision and the Formation of Movements
Prophecy and Conversion
Structure and Anti-Structure in the Millennium
Apocalypse Politics
The Sociology of Movements
Millennium and Utopia
The Millennium in Context
Performing Prophecy
Charisma and its Problems
Millenarian Drama
The Logic of Belief
"Failure" of Prophecy
Theories of the Millennium
Believers and Seekers
The Millennium and the millennium
Notes
It is easy to imagine paradise. Anyone can do it, and no matter who imagines it or where or when they live, it looks much the same. No one works; everyone is equal. There is no hierarchy, no oppression, no one's a victim. There is no sickness, no pain or death. The gods are close like the kind big brothers and sisters we never had. They hear us, and answer us directly. Anyone can see them. Joyous sex is free for everyone, or else no one wants it any more, which amounts to the same thing and is probably easier to manage. Rules are absent. Since this is perfection, there's no need for them. Greed and injustice no longer exist. Death is abolished. Since there's plenty for everyone, there's no need for it either. Everyone has a place in paradise, and everyone matters to everyone else. This is inherent in the Edenic system of equality.
The world is not like this. This is religion's great problem: how to make sense of the huge difference between paradise, the way anyone can see the world ought to be, and the way it actually is. This problem that theologians call theodicy is specially acute in systems where the uniqueness of God necessarily implies that It is both all-powerful and good. After all, there at least has to be hope. If no one invented paradise it would have to exist. A source of ultimate power that is either evil or indifferent is humanly intolerable. At the very least benevolent intercessors with this source are essential.
A great many religions account for the discrepancy in strikingly similar terms. At the beginning the world was paradise, but something happened to change it. Either people broke some simple rule or an opposing force intervened to change things, or both. Sometimes the fall results from mere happenstance, a meaningless accident. As a result, change entered the world, and it has degenerated ever since. Change is, by definition, the enemy of paradise, for if perfection changes it becomes something else and less. A dweller in paradise lives like a person at the North Pole: every direction is down. Time apportions change, and in paradise it does not exist. The whole system of afterlife is built upon this contradiction: despite the fact that God recognizes and could eliminate evil, It doesn't. Paradise then becomes remote and contingent. You can get there if you follow God's rules.
It is important that the world as it is begins in conflict and stays that way. Two principles in direct opposition to each other are at work, and the outcome is always in doubt. Satan (or his equivalent - odd that no one questions that personage's gender) might actually win. Or so it must seem. Accounts of the world always contain this element of drama, because the world itself is dramatic. The whole problem with it is the need to struggle.
Theodicy is closely related to eschatology, the study of last things, because it is only at The End that the grand climax of creation is reached. Then and only then can the evil effects of Satan's empire be washed away in a final wrenching and colossal upheaval in which the very fabric of the planet and the stars themselves assume moral roles. They become participants in the ultimate resolution of the Manichean conflict of ultimate good and ultimate evil.
In Christianity this final battle - Armageddon - will usher in the reappearence of Christ on earth as God's commander in the final and total defeat of Antichrist, his satanic counterpart, and his armies. This glorious victory will herald the dawn of the millennium, which in theology refers to the Christ's final thousand-year reign of perfect peace and justice: a restoration of Paradise.
There is a good deal of confusion about this word, for a great many people take it to refer also to the imminent arrival of a new triple zero on the calendar. There is no relationship between the real event and the mythic Second Coming, not even in timing, which is always and for excellent reason not specified in the prophecies.[1]
The millennium fascinates everyone. Whether we respond with horror, ridicule, delight, disgust or any combination of these or other emotions, it is almost impossible not to feel some thrill at the idea of the ultimate revolution, when God will finally roll up history's scroll and cleanse the wicked earth. These events call for language like that; cosmic drama demands exalted poetry.
People who expect the world as it is to end soon do a lot of very strange things. They reject and even contradict the rules of common sense that keep the rest of us sane and feed our lives. They destroy the things they need to survive. They may abandon their families to run after strangers. They provoke fights they can't possibly win, and they talk about things that obviously won't happen: some savior is coming, they say, who will save them and bless them in a new golden age, while the rest of us will all die in horror and torment, in some global last battle or catastrophe that will destroy everything the rest of us know.
How do we account for this? It's easy to decide that they are all mad or deluded, but why do these ideas crop up over and over? Why do people never seem to learn from the string of failures that is the millennium? This book is a listing and discussion of important attempts to answer these and other questions. Its scope is a great deal broader than apocalyptic literature; it is not only ideas that have interested the writers I discuss but actions: the major focus of this book is analysis of movements based on the millennial drama, on the performance of these ideas in the real world.
The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Poetry
John of Patmos's Book of Revelation is not the archetype of all millennial thought that many thinkers have taken it to be, but it is as good an example of the genre as any and has the advantage of being familiar, at least by hearsay, to a great many people. It is in most respects typical of prophecies of world renewal and of the returning hero and has influenced a huge number of similar visions and movements based on them in the years since it was written. The apocalypse was repudiated by the Roman Catholic church about 400 years after John wrote, and millennial speculation is heresy for Jews and Muslims as well as Catholics. Protestants accept the millennium more easily, but condemnation and persecution have never seriously impeded it.
Like all prophecies, in fact like all predictions, it is a story, a product of poetic imagination, before it is anything else, even holy writ. But it is absolutely not unique. Cosmologies everywhere imagine a return of culture heroes and a restoration of a golden age when gods talked with and looked after people, who lived at their ease as equals, without work or injustice or poverty or conflict.
It is, of course, quite possible to entertain the idea of an ultimate or imminent end of the world order, if not of the physical cosmos, without either getting ready for it or actively trying to bring it about. But the simple idea of the end of the world is not my main concern here. This book is chiefly about movements, about more or less organized groups of people who actively prepare for Armageddon, however they locally suppose it will take place.
The millennium is riddled with paradox, irony, and ambiguity. It is not the least of the paradoxes of its study that a product of the imagination should engage so little of that commodity from those who try to understand it. Most of the writing I discuss hereafter is more or less seriously flawed, at least in its theoretical phase. There are excellent and even enthralling descriptions of movements and the ideas that inspire them and of the difficulties the movements invariably encounter, trying to translate poetry into performance. The literary scholars leave less imagination to be desired than the social scientists, but they fatally lack the social perspective that would permit them to contribute to understanding the millennium in and as action. Millennial movements, like all movements, are social facts, as are the ideas that inform them.
The topic is immense. Beliefs in the imminent end of the world and its replacement by a better one and movements based on that belief have occurred and continue to occur everywhere and at all times. There is no single source for this belief, though some have argued passionately that it is always based on the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. Every society contains in its culture some account of how the world came to be as it is. This nearly always includes some parallel to the Fall narrative in Genesis.[2] Paradise used to be close and communication with spirits and gods used to be easy. Some event, not necessarily involving sin, changed this order and made the gods inaccessible. While not every society specifically imagines a conclusion to its world order, the simple fact of an account of world origins seems to imply at least the possibility of there coming to be an account of its finish and a return to this state of original paradise.
The Book of Revelation is the best-known example of this kind of rhetoric, for it appears almost everywhere at some time or other. Very often it appears over and over in the same place, for, by the peculiar logic of religious ideas, this one is indestructible. The world doesn't end as predicted but continues in its ordinary damnable, boring, uncaring way, frustrating every hope for a perfection that seems so clear but is always out of reach. Paradise is always imaginable, if only ... if only they could be shown, but they can't. If only God would save us, but It won't. History has to mean something more than transitory power grabs, a miserable record of greed and hate, but it never does. Justice and freedom are so easy to imagine and so hard to get. Just the same, the poetry of perfection is always with us.
The millennium promises nothing more than religion always promises: salvation. It is in some ways no different from ordinary religious ideas that undertake to show us how to live in ordinary times, how to endure inequality and injustice and poverty and boredom and hate. It is only when these things become intolerable and every other recourse is closed that people imagine the millennium. It is the last resort when there is nothing else to hope in. Hope, the proverb says, is a fine breakfast but a poor supper. We hunger for the millennium's banquet when hope is a cold and moldy midnight snack. It is a truism in the study of these movements that they appeal to society's "relatively deprived."
The millennium is, before it is anything else, a drama of cosmic scope. It begins in the hard fact of the world's imperfection. For some people this state of affairs is unacceptable all the time. In certain circumstances numbers of people come to share their view. The world becomes nothing less than irredeemable wickedness, and it must be changed. Divine intervention on a cosmic scale is required to restore justice and a proper order to the world.
These visions of catastrophe seem never to be absolutely conclusive. Apocalypse, except perhaps in modern imagination, is not only cataclysm but return. Some long-gone hero is to come back to save us in our last extremity, and he will restore to us a new pure earth, a return to paradise, as it was in the beginning but is not now. The world does not finally end in a blank cinder. Somewhere, somehow, a select few survive — perhaps only in heaven but often on a regenerated earth. Contemporary survivalists imagine themselves living past nuclear holocaust, just as certain dedicated Christians suppose that they will outlast Armageddon. This regenerated earth is to be finally perfect, paradise on earth. Immortality may be promised; the climate will be forever balmy; the earth will bring forth of itself.
The Prophet's Vision and the Formation of Movements
The story begins with a death. Someone dies, revives, and tells of his (or her — the place of women in these movements needs much more attention) experience. Commonly this experience includes receiving instruction about the true meaning of life and about the future course of events. The world is to change drastically, particularly with regard to its social, economic and political arrangements. Along with this vision there comes a message that the prophet is obliged to spread to as many people as possible. The world is to be reversed in a global cataclysm, literally turned upside down. Its very geophysical structure is to be remade. There may be a great and final battle in which the forces of evil will finally be destroyed. If there are any neutrals in this battle, they are to be killed, and, in fact, only a selected few will survive to inhabit the new paradise to follow.
Visions as they survive in literature make up a genre that scholars have divided into two broad categories, of which this type is called the "historical."[3] These visions generally take in all of time, from creation to eschaton, and generally foretell a blessed time at the End, a golden age following global catastrophe. While the details of these visions vary widely across cultures, they usually take a vividly dramatic form. There is often to be either a cataclysm or a huge battle involving the forces of Good on one side and those of Evil on the other. In the latter case the forces of good are led by a divine savior or culture-hero returned from the dead, while the evil army is led by, if not Satan himself, at least his chief lieutenant, some variant of the figure of Antichrist. In Christian visions this battle is Armageddon. In every case the savior ultimately wins, of course.
But each story begins with a revelation experienced by a particular person. If this person then undertakes to proclaim his vision as a uniquely revealed truth, he is a prophet. It takes a special person to be a prophet. Simply having a vision and the urge to tell it is not enough qualification. It is, from one point of view, paradoxical that the prophet is nearly always a marginal person. We find repeatedly that the prophet before he begins his career is an outcast among his own people. He comes from some despised minority; very often he has spent most of his life in another culture or at least traveled widely. He will have experienced a series of more or less devastating personal crises. "He" may be a woman or a child. The paradox here is that ordinarily we turn to well-established authority for guidance through the ordinary crises of life but when it is a question of ultimate truth, surprising people have the answers.
The experience of getting a unique message from a divine source has remarkable and radical effects on the visionary who becomes a prophet. While the marginal outcast is a person ravaged with guilt and despair the prophet is a person with absolute confidence in herself and her message: this is the way it's going to be. There is no doubt about it, and we disbelieve it at our own peril. The prophet, in a word, undergoes conversion in the truest sense of that word, a total change of heart. Before she was aimless, a drifter, perhaps a solitary. Now she is utterly dedicated to one task alone. Literally nothing else can intervene, and no sacrifice is too great for the cause. My own limited experience with people who have gone on to make history suggests that this quality is perhaps definitive of genius: nothing else but the goal matters.
The "conversion" of St. Paul is often held up as an archetype of the process, but it seems to me deficient as a model of the real thing. Paul switched his allegiance on the road to Damascus, but he remained afterwards as he had been before: a zealous fighter for what he believed in. His heart and his nature did not change. But this prophetic conversion is total. The very nature of the person is reversed, just as the nature of the world is to be reversed at the End.
It is a commonplace that conversion has therapeutic effects. This is supposed to result from something in the nature of the "dream" itself, but there may be an unobserved intervening variable here. It may not be the vision that is therapeutic but the absolute conviction that it conveys, so that the prophet, who frequently was something of a drifter before, is galvanized with a new purpose and self-confidence that serves to resolve his old problems. He must himself be a testimonial to the efficacy of his vision, though this is a structural, not a cynical, observation.
Provided with a message, the prophet begins to attract followers and a movement is being born. She demands of her followers, first, a conversion, a change of heart like her own and very often in a symbolically similar form. Their experience must parallel her own in order to be valid. But there is a difference. Followers must share the prophet's conviction and may even have their own visions but may not claim a similar authority. Here another paradox arises, for, as Burridge (1985: see item 144) points out, the prophet is a supreme individualist demanding an ultimate community of her followers. Their own individuality is to be swallowed up in the radical equality and commonality of the millennium.
The prophet's story seems most often to be barking madness to outsiders. People give up everything - their homes, their work, their families, the rules of living, life itself - to pursue what looks to observers like the obvious chimera of a perfected world. They make these sacrifices based on nothing more than the ethereal say-so of a person they ordinarily would ignore, whose word otherwise is less than useless and whose message now is, on the face of it, utterly incredible.
Commitment is required of converts. This is a corollary, perhaps, to the prophet's own commitment, but it also follows naturally from the logic of the situation. Since nothing less than everything is to be changed, it is scarcely possible to continue a quotidian life. Converts must be prepared to sacrifice literally everything for the cause; in fact, they generally must do so in order to join the movement at all. It is structurally necessary that they irrevocably renounce all outside connections, "forsaking all others," for only in this way can their dedication be assured. "Bridge-burning" assures that defection will not be easy or tempting. And here relative deprivation theory makes its self-evident sense: those who will make these sacrifices are nearly always those with the least to lose. Do we imagine that people who are content with their lot are likely to invest much of their energy in imagining and bringing about a world without privilege? Yet this does occasionally occur and has not commanded much study that I know of. The commitment demanded by the millennium is never less than total. No wonder Jesus preached to the poor in spirit.
The movement's process is rarely rapid. Many prophets have spent years in proselytizing with little or no success, and many have no success at all until they manage to attract a disciple with significant gifts of his own. This is the common figure referred to as the salesman, the person whose energy, devotion and skill attracts wide attention to the program and enables its message to begin to draw a following. The presence of this person is already a problem or will become one, because very often it is this person who organizes the movement and organization violates the very principles of equality on which the millennium rests.
Once a group of people is assembled around a prophet and his ideas, some form of action may be taken. This may consist only of the members of this group working towards self-improvement, as is presently the case with the human potential "movement" and its new-age offshoots. Such groups are called "audience" or "client" cults by the sociologists. A movement is a distinctly different kind of group, in that it has a purpose to negotiate change with regard to some larger group. This necessitates that the movement become organized: specific responsibilities must be assigned to specific people. It is a crucial fact about charismatic leadership that it stands in direct opposition to any form of organization. Since the prophet's message comes from the gods, it is taken for granted that they will provide. Certain forms of human action are nevertheless necessary to bring the millennium to fruition. People must at the very least prepare themselves to live in this new golden age.
Structure and Anti-Structure in the Millennium
Since this epoch will be one of unprecedented freedom and justice, it follows that all social distinctions must be eradicated. The prophet aside, every member of his following must be precisely equivalent to all the others. Equality in community is to be total, and ordinary structures of social life must be dispensed with. Property, position, ability, even kinship and marriage are to become non-distinctions.
This radical situation of anti-structure is called "communitas" in Victor Turner's term. He derived the idea from study of certain ritual situations in which ordinary social structures are abolished for a time and precisely this millennial equality prevails, albeit on a much smaller scale than what the prophet imagines. In the situations Turner studied it is not the world that is to be changed but the social position of some members of a community.
The millennium lives squarely in this period: the old world is already rejected, but the new has not yet come to pass. People must prepare themselves for the new rules, which may not be spelled out with any clarity, but in any case they must radically renounce the old, corrupt ones. Thus it is a very common, though often questionable, assertion that these movements are radically antinomian in nature.[4] They systematically violate all the taboos of the established order.
Along with its flexibility and paradox the millennium is ambiguous. For example, it is implicit in these beliefs that the divine will intervene only when the world is at its last gasp, but the world is so rotten that the gods should have stepped in already. It is inherent in this logic that the world must be made even worse before it can be made better.
Thus, those who aim to purify the world frequently commit the most heinous sins; they degrade themselves utterly, behaving like animals in order to achieve a final purification. No one but Eliade seems to have observed this animalism: the Naked Cult on Espiritu Santo made this explicit in its public orgies. But Eliade points out that animals have special access to the gods. They are invoked in shamanist ritual for just this purpose, and the idea persists, attenuated, in Christian tales of talking animals that can be heard on Christmas Eve: no creche is complete without at least an ass, which figures in the Passion story as well.
Whatever course of action movements may ultimately take, recruitment of new members is nearly always a first necessity. It is never enough for the prophet to proclaim the message, it must also be accepted. It must be seen to be valid by at least a few other people, by definition. A prophet with no following is not a prophet at all but some other creature, usually a madman.
Movements that attract the most attention are those that set about to convert as much of the world as possible before the climax of history. These activist strains of the millennial idea vigorously oppose the established order and not infrequently take violent action against it, amounting to political or "prepolitical" revolts. Less militant groups may propose to convert only some limited number; if they are Christian groups, they frequently aim at the canonical 144,000 souls for their saved remnant.
Withdrawal is another option. Movements may choose less to oppose the world than to reject it. These frequently retreat into a closed community where they exercise their rules or no rules of special purity, avoiding the world's contamination and waiting for the gods to intervene.
Migration is at least a central metaphor of the millennium, especially when salvation comes to depend crucially on finding some place of refuge in which to gather the remnant to survive the cataclysm and await their final salvation.
At some point in this process opposition emerges. It takes one of two forms, depending on the movement's strategies and the society in which it works. In any case opposition is certain to arise, in the nature of things. No establishment can fail to respond to conspicuous bands of people calling its authenticity into question.
Anathema and polemic are always used. Heresies are attacked eternally on the same grounds: they subvert society, they violate sexual norms and encourage deception, and they use evil and mysterious "brainwashing" techniques.
Opposition may also take the form of oppression: prophets and leaders are frequently jailed or killed, which only serves to provide the movement with a martyr (and, in fact, it is often helpful if the founder is dead or otherwise inaccessible for any reason, since increased charisma can then be attributed to him with no inconvenient checking of the facts). It is another paradox of these movements that they crucially depend on vigorous opposition. It is not enough to call the world evil; the world must prove it by attacking the very source of its own salvation. This is a necessary step in the legitimization of the prophecy.
Opposition creates problems of its own, of course. It must not be too severe, for it may escalate into the ultimate extermination of the entire movement, perhaps in a "religious suicide" like that at Jonestown. At some point a degree of accommodation may become necessary. But even extermination can be put to use, for no slaughter ever killed an idea. The millennium will always recur, no matter how severely it may be suppressed.
It may require more wisdom than any government can possess to adopt a policy of benign neglect towards these movements, for ultimately they are, again on the face of it, doomed: the world will not end in the ways nor at the times they predict. Every prophecy of this kind must eventually fail. But here paradox erupts again. No failure of prophecy to work out as proclaimed has finally scotched the basic idea: paradise here and now is imaginable; therefore, it must be potential. Certain movements will fall apart when their predictions don't come true, but by no means all. Many do not even suffer significant losses of membership when this happens. They may retrench their expectations or even take an entirely different tack, but the fact remains: disconfirmation is not discredit.
Most attention has been paid to the revolutionary forms of millennialism, for the simple reason that those movements are most problematic to the establishment, the patron of most scholars. Quietist movements are to a great extent unknown, since they do not cause much, if any, problem for ruling elites. It is always social problems of this kind that academics feel most urgently called upon to address. Movements "become" problematic when they affect the middle class. There was a boom in the sociology of religion during the seventies, when college students were particularly prone to be drawn into these movements. Studies of conversion were endemic, many of them taking a reassuring tone: these commitments were likely to be transitory, and these students would eventually return chastened to the careers they had been preparing for. Sociologists owe a certain debt to their constituency, which is their students and the parents of their students.
According to Weber and other fathers of sociology, movements like these were simply not supposed to occur. Their wisdom predicted a death of religion, a final victory for the Enlightenment's humanism and rationality. But the founders were wrong. God is far from dead. Perhaps the contradiction these groups present goes some way to account for the sometimes badly concealed polemical tone of much theory about new religious movements in general and the millennium in particular. Many sociologists have taken some pains to show that the re-emergence of religion, especially in these "deviant" forms, is not really significant. These groups can be dismissed as part of the lunatic fringe, since they don't attract great numbers of people or exert much influence on elites.
Both of these assertions seem to be accurate, with significant exceptions like Aum Shinri Kyo in Japan and the Euro-Canadian Order of the Solar Temple, but the conclusion remains dubious. Demographics are, I suggest, not the best test of the influence of ideas, which may lead long and obscure underground lives before they suddenly appear in unexpected places. Feminism doesn't trace its roots to Mother Ann Lee and the Shakers so far as I know, but they were practicing a truly radical form of that idea, including belief in a female savior, in the late eighteenth century and continued doing so up to the present. This notion, that only beliefs held by a lot of people or by "important" people matter, is fundamentally misleading, in the same way the notion that modern apocalypticism is pessimistic is inaccurate. This last conclusion is based on close readings of novelists like Thomas Pynchon that academics enjoy; but if these scholars had troubled to glance beyond their own preoccupations into the rhetoric of the near-death experience, for instance, they might have reached a different and probably more accurate conclusion.
Definition of the field is a problem. All movements negotiate change at some level, but they do not necessarily promote it. The National Rifle Association, for example, appears completely dedicated to preventing it: they devote most of their income to forestalling restriction on the promiscuous ownership of murderer's tools. Most movements intend to foster change in a particular direction that seems beneficial to their members. This may occur at any level. The Human Potential movement, for example, aims explicitly at changing individuals and ignores social injustice altogether. Other movements may be social but entirely local or specialized in character. Movements like those intended for prison reform or civic betterment come to mind here. The Sierra Club has a global agenda, like millennialism, but its aims, though large, are not all-encompassing. It holds at most a secondary brief in economics and politics, for instance. But millenarianism takes in the whole world and all its categories.
Certain movements are thus clearly outside the pale of this book, but it does not do to assume too much in this respect, for movements are fluid, and their aims and means may change radically in the course of their careers. This fluidity causes great problems for those sociologists who try to arrange them in classifications, for the ultimate placement of any such group can apparently only be done with accuracy after it has run its course, if at all. It would be extremely helpful, of course, to be able to neatly type the phenomenon, but no one has proposed a completely workable scheme for the purpose. The difficulty with typologies of these movements stems from the fact that they are inherently and necessarily interactive, both internally and with regard to the rest of the society in which they find an uneasy home: their properties are emergent, that is, inherently unpredictable. Everything about them is subject to change with their circumstances. It is true that they share certain properties that serve to constrain the directions in which they can change without becoming something else altogether, but constraints are not determinant.
The millennium ruthlessly confuses categories, not only internally but in the minds of those who try to place them in their scientific common-sense schemes. The millennium is omnivorous. These movements, though primarily religious in tone, resolutely refuse to stay in that arena, at least the activist ones. They invariably become political, in their insistence on a new, more just order. This may occur less by the movement's initiative than by the force of the society it rejects, but happen it does.
Millennium and utopia are blood brothers, and though most utopias are more "rational" than millennialisms, both share an ideology of human and social perfection. It is pretty well established that utopias feed off millennial ideas, though the reverse influence has yet to be shown. It seems to be taken for granted that millennialism is a prerational form of utopianism, so that the influence will be all one way: millenarians become utopians, not the other way around. Whether this is accurate I'm not in a position to say. There certainly have been millennial movements that arose after utopias had run their course, so we might reasonably expect to find influences of the former on the latter; I don't know whether anyone has looked for them.
The millennium swallows not only politics but economics. Money as a measure of value is a worldwide and fundamentally anti-human idea that destroys all other criteria of human worth, and this, particularly in societies where this idea is novel, urgently calls for salvation. Poverty is the significant "relative deprivation"; it is the only problem for almost everyone who ever lived. The promise of abundance is not the least of the millennium's allures.
Despite its damnable ambiguity and elusiveness, the millennium has certain components that are nearly invariant. The first of these is certainly the "right" context. Ultimate salvation demands an ultimate crisis. In general terms this arises in circumstances where old myths about the meaning of humanity do not meet changing circumstances: they are no longer relevant, and the rules of common sense derived from this old cosmology do not work anymore. The real place for "cognitive dissonance" is not in the failure of prophecy but in its origin. It is a truism that we have recourse to religion when nothing else works, and the millennium is no different. A new myth is needed to account for new circumstances.
A social context need not be undergoing crisis for millennialism to emerge, however. The Millerite movement arose in nineteenth-century America at a time when change was rapid and widespread but does not appear to have threatened the basis of social life. What the context did offer was a guiding myth that made the movement possible and, indeed, likely: belief in biblical inerrancy was general, and it needed only Miller's closely reasoned calculations to call forth the movement.
The classic example of this situation is acculturation, where a culture of unimagined power (usually in the technological and economic spheres; a culture that offers only more affecting songs or better paintings does not pose many problems for most people) impinges on one significantly weaker. This occurs most obviously in situations of colonialism, especially where the intruding culture imposes control on the home one, but it does not do to suppose that this is its only context. I think a case can be made that our own western culture is undergoing something like this same experience. Both our technology and our economy are managed by exclusive elites with which the rest of us have little or no contact and on which we have no visible effect. They function outside our awareness and have effects on our lives that we cannot control; they change our common definition of humanity and effect events in ways we cannot predict. When significant areas of our lives are outside our control, I suggest we are in an acculturative situation: we have to learn new rules to live by and have no obvious say in their shape. A good many of the paradoxes and contradictions and ambiguities of the millennium seem to me to flow naturally from the nature of this context and can be resolved, or at least understood, in its light.
In this situation we hope for a prophet who will help us come to terms with the situation and find a new meaning for our lives. When no obvious candidate appears, we may create one. It seems to me that the marginality of the prophet can be accounted for in the logic of the situation. People turn to the divine, the final source of authority, when nothing else will solve their problems. By definition the ordinary intermediaries with the divine have already failed when it's a question of ultimate salvation from an ultimate problem. A new intermediary is required to bring a new message, and it follows that recourse to their structural opposites must be had.
The millennium promises to turn the world upside down, to reverse everything about it. The margins will move to the center, and that is exactly what the marginality of the prophet and his conversion typify. It is a commonplace, not to say tautological, observation that the prophet's message will be heard only when it is relevant. It must make sense to its hearers; it must address and promise to correct the problems that they actually face. Who is better placed to articulate what everyone knows but no one has said than an inspired person who has himself faced these problems?
Tradition is a crucial element in this phase of the problem. The prophet may not say anything he likes, nor may he appeal to unknown gods. The sources of his message must be at least familiar. Even though the millennium may be in itself a novelty in a given culture, it still must appeal to known sources if it is to get a hearing. The known gods have supported us through everything else; it is unthinkable that they abandon us now. That they don't do so now is shown by the fact that they offer us a radically new form of hope, demanding radically new actions, like public orgies and destroying our means of livelihood.
This observation causes a good many analysts of new religious movements to say that they are "not really" creative because they are "syncretistic": that is, they cobble together a new society out of borrowed bits from their own tradition and others. It is obvious, at least since Barnett (1953: item 63), that nothing, with the possible exception of the cosmos itself, can be created ex nihilo. Lévi-Strauss is wrong: every innovator is a bricoleur. Every innovation depends on previous knowledge, in fact, consists of inspired play with it, or are prophets supposed not only to hear but be God?
Innovation as well as tradition is demanded, again in the logic of the situation, which by definition is one where all known remedies fail. Something that believers can suppose is totally new is needed, and nothing less than totality is again required from the movement: after all, the whole world is rotten.
If the prophet is to succeed in forming a movement, she must have charisma. It is clear, at least from the scientific point of view, that the term does not actually refer to the possession of divine favor but to the perception of these gifts. Charisma is an inherently interpersonal quality that is negotiated, nearly always, face to face. (This principle, like nearly every other I have set forth here, is subject to conspicuous contradiction.) People will attribute gifts to the prophet because of the relevance of her message to their own condition as sinners or as victims of injustice or frequently both, and this relevance reflects ideas that they will say they had all along but had not put into words.
Even this is not enough. The prophet must perform miracles. This is not as difficult as it sounds as long as a loose definition of the term is accepted. It is tempting to suppose that if people want miracles badly enough, and if the message makes important personal sense to them and speaks to their condition in the world, then they will find them somewhere. A common form of these miracles is healing, and in this respect as in many others, such as communication with the supernatural, the prophet is very close to the shaman, that figure who is given special access to occult knowledge and who, as a type, is prevalent in new-age groups.
Charisma is a highly variable quality, by nature, and may fail at any time. Even when it remains robust and the prophet is able to hold his following through the bad times that inevitably strike these movements, charisma is by nature unstable and the prophet may reverse direction for himself and his movement. In some instances he will flagrantly violate his own rules. This makes life difficult for his followers but does not necessarily diminish his charismatic power. In fact, it may enhance it. Since the gods are not social, access to their gifts is inherently unpredictable. Consequently, the charismatic leader is subject to constant testing of his gifts.
The perception of charisma is never static. It must constantly be refreshed by new miracles, if the fervor of the movement is to be sustained, and it is fair to assume that the demands will escalate; yesterday's miracle is today's old news. Charisma demands total devotion and subjection, especially in the leader's gemeinde, his household. This is a lot to ask, and the authority on which it rests stems from an experience that is by definition private. Thus, the question of the legitimacy of divine gifts is never answered once and for all. Devotees must always inquire "what have you done for me lately?" to justify their total devotion.
Charisma is in any event short-lived. Even if the prophet is not successfully challenged on other grounds and his movement thrives, there arrives some point at which it becomes necessary to institutionalize the movement, that is, to make its functioning predictable so that its work is reliably done. Another paradox: this routine is supposed to be charisma's poison by nature. God is not constrained by the demands of bureaucracy to which enthusiasm is anathema. The heady sense that anything is possible cannot survive routine, yet some degree of routine is necessary. There are a variety of ways prophets can deal with this necessary attack on their power, but deal with it they must.
On the face of it, this drama is a very great mystery. Oceans of ink have gone into attempts to resolve it, though no one seems to have taken seriously the observation that it is, in fact, a drama, though I am not the first to notice it. No one seems to have attended to this notion as anything more than a metaphor. However, it seems to me to be a perfectly accurate description of the workings of these movements.
Perhaps especially in literate societies whose records make possible the observation of change and the idea of history as a process, it is essential that history make sense. Eliade observes the intolerable terror of a meaningless history, though perhaps he exaggerates the generality of this idea; it is difficult to see how it might apply to cosmologies like the African or the Melanesian, where history is a cycle, not a line.[5] But if we are in a position to notice historical change, it seems psychologically plausible that we should want it to make sense in human terms. History then becomes a sacred mystery and we are actors in this cosmic drama, which necessarily involves conflict. Thus God comes to have an opponent devoted to thwarting his plans and destroying us, his creatures. Eschatology is a necessary climax.
The fact that this drama is played out in the real world of politics, churches and economic systems does not make it any less a performance, with all the attributes of theater. Performance theory insists on several minimal components of this type of action. The first of these is a script, some body of traditional material that is to be presented to an audience, the second major component. The script is clearly the prophet's vision. The audience is, of course, potential recruits to his movement. The action of performance is definitely undertaken responsibly, that is, with the purpose of arousing a particular response in the audience: conversion. However, performance is definitively supposed to occur in the subjunctive mood: it is as if the conditions suggested by the script are actual. In the case of prophecy this attribute is lacking. There is no pretense, no "as if" about it. The vision describes, on the highest possible authority, what is and what is to happen. In most such visions, the only question is who will be saved. Yet to some degree salvation is always in doubt. So many people must be converted, and they must behave in just the right ways. A wise prophet will also hedge his bets to some degree. The precise time may not be clearly known, and there's always the opponent to be reckoned with: he can't forestall the inevitable End, but he can postpone it. The subjunctive enters here, perhaps. The proper outcome can occur, but only if God's message is closely attended to.
So far as I have been able to discover, no one seems to have explicitly studied prophetic performance in this light, though there are several sources that acknowledge this aspect of shamanism. Here is an avenue for further study.
A reason for the durability of the hope in a new world is the logical nature of properly constructed systems of belief. All of these are impermeable to discredit to the extent that they provide internal explanations for their own disconfirmation. Duality is a prime requirement, together with a feeling of being at the focus of world history, which is already implicit in the millennial idea. So long as the world contains a supernatural opponent whose power is nearly but ultimately not quite equal to God's, the idea is protected and failure is impossible, in yet another paradox.
Lofland's study of the early days of the Unification Church provides a clear example. [6] The movement suffered constant failure. Nearly no one joined it despite earnest full-time proselytization by its core membership. But none of them were discouraged. Their failures were the work of Satan. If the opponent was working so hard to thwart their efforts, he must be threatened. If Satan was seriously threatened, this meant that the Unification Church was actually teetering on the edge of success. Thus failure becomes attainment.
"Failure" of Prophecy
Prophets risk disconfirmation chiefly when they are too specific about timing. William Miller's movement was based entirely on his close prediction of the End and fell apart when it failed to materialize. Others, Joseph Smith for example, predicted not the time but the place of the coming (Independence, MO), and his movement continues to thrive. [7] But even the dating problem can to some extent be avoided if the gods are not specific. They usually proclaim the End soon, but do not name a date, so that choices of the moment are left to human calculation, which can be allowed to fail in these systems. In this event prophecy is usually revised so that eventually the millennium is postponed indefinitely, and the movement's initial fervor is lost in an accommodation to the world.
The earliest theorizing on these movements was united in its diagnosis: millenarians are all insane. This has since been shown not to be the case. Of course some prophets and their followers may be psychologically disturbed, but it appears that a good many of them are as sane as anyone. This diagnosis was methodologically unacceptable. It was in nearly every case made by unqualified people of persons they had never met. It was based on the merest supposition and fatally failed to take context into account: reductionism does not and can never suffice to explain social phenomena. Perhaps more to the point, the madness hypothesis explains nothing. It says only that unconventional and doomed beliefs belong to those who are maladjusted. This does not explain but explains away these movements. They become negligible, hence convenient.
The idea of brainwashing is corollary to the madness theory. This amounts to a renovation of beliefs in the evil eye: people in these groups, specifically their leaders, control occult persuasive powers such that they can make people do things against their own interest, like join distasteful religions. This argument says that members of groups are not mad when they first make contact but become mad because of this influence.
The idea entered contemporary American thought after the Korean War, when it was supposed that the evil Communists had persuaded a few Americans to defect by the use of these techniques. That this is suppositious can be seen from a study that showed about the same percentage of POWs defected in the Korean War as during the American Civil War. [8]
The fact remains that believers in an imminent millennium look to outsiders as though they were mad. What is required to correct this view is an engagement of the imagination in an empathic perception of their position in the world. If we can come to share their perception of the world as radically failing to make human sense, then the "paranoid ideation" that these believers show is the only logical response. Madness is crucially dependent on context. Another contextual point psychological analysis overlooks is that belief in the millennium is supported by myths. These myths do not correspond to those the analysts subscribe to, but that does not make them invalid. Being an account of the unknowable, no myth can be finally invalidated.
At least in Western societies these believers frequently belong to a type known to sociologists as "seekers": people whose lives are chiefly devoted to a career of self-improvement. They have been insightfully described as "spiritual shoppers," who move from one promise of a more or less ultimate fulfillment to another, searching for an undefinable goal. [9] They frequently are educated in terms familiar from the "occult milieu," in which mysterious forces are seen to be at work on human affairs, guiding and thwarting them. Knowledge of, if not intimate acquaintance with, the sources of these powers is useful in asserting control over one's destiny and making improvement to it. This quest is incapable of success in these terms, but it is a striking fact that it is also incapable of failure. In the seeker's world view, everything that happens contributes to the goal. There is literally no failure: no idea pursued, no matter how crack-brained, no spiritual exercise, no matter how humiliating, can fail to add to spiritual growth.
Relative deprivation is the second wave of the madness hypothesis and, in fact, amounts to little more than a refinement and elaboration on it. In this theory people who subscribe to millennialism and to unconventional religious ideas generally are frustrated. Their "legitimate expectations" of the world are not fulfilled, in some area at least, and, all other recourse failing, they turn to religion for salvation from this situation. Among the many difficulties with this theory are that it fails to predict. Everyone feels himself deprived in some area at some time and has difficulty remedying the situation yet far from everyone turns to religion or the millennium for redress, even when that is a popular course to take.
The theory of compensators is an attempt to refine this unsupportable notion: where tangible "rewards" fail to materialize, people turn to remote religious "compensators" instead. These are indefinitely postponed rewards, like IOUs that come due after death. The problem with all these compensation theories is that they are generally tested only by common sense: cults and movements in their creeds offer X, so it follows that people join in order to get some. Since this is the case, it follows that they necessarily lack it. In fact, people join for any numbers of reasons, not the least of which is not to make up for a lack but to make an abundance more lavish. Motivation theory is ultimately based on the tautology that people do what they think is good, and it can be no surprise to find that this is true.
Network theory suggests another truism, though one that is slightly more sophisticated. It proposes that people join a movement because others they know are doing so. We tend to trust those who are most familiar; if taking a particular action benefits them, it follows that it likely will benefit us, too.
Process theories add sophistication to explanation. Where motivation theories tend to assume that people behave in more or less programmed ways as Freudian or Skinnerian puppets, process theories take into account the fact that conversion is a communicative process that is problematic for everyone involved and some who are not directly involved. People evaluate situations and make decisions about them, and their actions affect the situations themselves. The course of any career in a movement and of the movement as a whole is interactive, and influence can by no means be taken as one way.
Disaster theory is a corollary to the compensation theory, holding disaster to be the context in which millennialism arises. While this is accurate in some instances - disaster is indeed a prime context for some instances of millennialism - it requires a very loose definition of the term to see it in every case.
The most successful current theory relies on myth to account for the millennium. Where the context is one of widespread distress and there is a prevalent belief that an end of the world and a return to paradise is at least possible, then it is likely that the myth will be revived and revised to make the new world imminent. In such a situation some people at least will be attracted to the idea.
The Millennium and the millennium
This book was assembled in the belief that the coming decade is highly likely to see increased interest in the millennium and new movements devoted to it. The first reason to suppose this is the imminence of the calendrical millennium: the impending arrival of 000 on time's odometer is almost certain to spark fresh interest in the idea. Added to that are the common scientific predictions and computer models (is there higher secular authority than these?) promising all manner of catastrophes, if steps are not taken: greenhouse effects, nuclear winter and less specific forms of ecocide, nuclear war itself, black holes and "nemesis stars" are all current topics. Religious symbolism can be and is found in events in the Middle East, the European Economic Community and computers that will replace checks and cash with invisible marks of Antichrist. It is my hope that this book will be of use to those who want to understand these movements.
[1] The Second Coming is an article of faith not only for Christians but for Muslims. Calling it a "myth" is certain to offend some of them. It is not my purpose to engage in polemics. I hope the following explanation will alleviate their outrage. In common usage the word is used to refer to what can be called with most charity sub-standard truth, but that is not the sense in which I intend it. For my purposes, and in general, the word is better understood to mean a story that explains a mystery and that must be taken on faith or not at all. This implies no judgment as to the story's truth. It is only descriptive.
[2] Mircea Eliade, "The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition" in Murray, H.A., ed., Myth and Mythmaking. New York: Braziller, 1960: 61-75
[3] John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity. New York: Crossroads, 1984.
[4] Few events demonstrate so clearly as millennialism that history belongs to the winners. Nearly every report of these movements prior to the present century is a polemic. Followers' own accounts have largely been destroyed and even where they have survived are no more reliable than polemics. Accusations of antinomianism may be no more than polemical fabrications.
[5] On the terror of history see James V. Downton, "An Evolutionary Theory of Spiritual Conversion and Commitment: The Case of the Divine Light Mission." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11, 1980: 319-21. I.C. Jarvie, "On the Explanation of Cargo Cults" Archives Européennes de Sociologie 7 (2), 1966: 299-312, and John S. Mbiti, "The Concept of Time" in African Religion and Philosophy, John S. Mbiti, ed., London, Ibadan, Nairobi: Heinemann 1969 feature discussion tribal cosmologies.
[6] John Lofland, Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Prosetylization, and Maintenance of Faith New York: Irvington, 1977.
[7] John Bracht, "The Americanization of Adam" In Cargo Cults and Millenarain Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements. Gary Trompf, ed., Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990.
[8]. Alan Scheflin and Edward Upton, The Mind Manipulators. New York: Paddington, 1978.
[9] Robert Balch and David Taylor, "Seekers and Saucers: The Role of the Cultic Milieu in Joining a UFO cult." American Behavioral Scientist 20 (6) 1977: 839-60.