THE FIRE THAT WILL CLEANSE
Millennial Meanings and the End of the World
We, while the stars from heaven shall fall,
And mountains are on mountains hurled,
Shall stand unmoved amidst them all,
And smile to see a burning world.
—Millerite hymn, 1843
On Monday, October 27, 1997, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed a record 554.24 points, the biggest one-day drop in history. By the time Ted Koppel’s expert guests on Nightline reflected on the day’s disaster, eastern hemisphere markets were opening to record losses: Korea down 7 percent, Hong Kong down 16 percent, Australia down 10 percent. As Americans scrambled to place their sell orders the next day, the news from Europe was grim: Germany down 5 percent, Belgium down 8 percent, Great Britain down 8 percent. The collapse quickly spread westward: Mexico down 13 percent, Brazil down 15 percent, Venezuela down 12 percent. It looked like the end of the world.
Like all apocalyptic doomsday predictions in history, however, it was not the end. By the close of the next trading day the Dow was up 337 points and investors who bought low that morning were born again. Within five months the Dow was up over 9000, and by the spring of 1998 it summited the Everestian 10,000 with no end in sight. It would appear that reports of the world’s death were greatly exaggerated.
Actually, they always are, but for those whose apocalyptic tendencies are measured by biblical benchmarks instead of stock tickers, the stakes are much higher. For example, on a brisk April 29 morning in 1980, Dr. Leland Jensen, a chiropractor and leader of a small religious sect called the Baha‘i Under the Provisions of the Covenant, led his devoted followers into fallout shelters in Missoula, Montana, to await the end of the world. Within the first hour, Jensen believed, a full third of the Earth’s population would be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust of fire and fallout. Over the course of the next twenty years most of the remaining population would be ravaged by conquest, war, famine, and pestilence. In the year 2000, the Baha’i Universal House of Justice would arise out of the ashes like a phoenix to help establish the thousand-year reign of God’s kingdom on Earth. How did Jensen know all this? He had a revelation in the Montana State Prison, while serving a sentence for sexually molesting a fifteen-year-old patient: “I felt a presence only. It talked to me—not in a physical voice but very vividly expressing to me that I was the promised Joshua (prophesied in Zechariah 3).”
This is classic end-times imagery—an apocalyptic revelation, the demise of the world at a millennial marker, the survival of a small chosen group of true believers, the return of the Messiah and peace after massive death and destruction, and even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and pestilence). The iconography and poetry of the apocalypse is at once beautiful and terrifying, from the horrors wrought on sinners in countless “Last judgment” paintings (with swirling mixtures of awe-invoking black and red colors) by such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Michelangelo, to the haunting vision in William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Today’s words and images are more vivid than those of a thousand years ago, with both religious and secular end-times scenarios competing for our attention. Recall The Doors’ disquieting vision in their 1967 rock song “The End,” visually enhanced a decade later by Francis Ford Coppola in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, as army helicopters torch a Vietnam village the moment Jim Morrison lets loose with a throaty pronouncement “This is the end … .” Or Hal Lindsey’s 1977 “rapture” scene in the film version of The Late Great Planet Earth (narrated by the foreboding baritone voice of Orson Wells), showing Christians snatched from their moving automobiles by a returning Christ. Or more recently in Kevin Costner’s apocalyptic films Waterworld and The Postman. The iconographic theme even finds its way into editorial cartoons, as in a 1996 New Yorker contribution featuring a doomsayer with his placard: “THE END IS NEAR http://www.endnear.com.”
What are millennial phenomena, how did they develop in the year 1000 and how will they play themselves out in the year 2000, and why do we find them so compelling? Even those who have no particular bent toward ecclesiastical millennialism may find in its secular twin reason enough for legitimate concern. Is the end near? If not, what does the fear of it tell us about ourselves?
The millennium (literally in Latin mille thousand, annus year) is a thousand-year block of time that commands our attention because we like to hew the world into tidy categories. Given the average human life span of less than a century, triple-zero increments in a chronology especially stand out. In A.D. 248, for example, Romans celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the mythical founding of the empire by Romulus and Remus with considerable pageantry and fanfare, singing hymns to Apollo and Diana, dancing in the streets and in the hills, and looking forward to being freed from the Barbarian peril. But the millennium takes on deep meaning, and becomes a phenomenon, when associated with the apocalypse (from the Greek apo un, kalypsis veiling, or revelation)—the catastrophic destruction of evil forces in the world followed by the resurrection of the righteous. And this, in turn, is a form of the larger genre of eschatology, or the study of final events and the end of history.
There are two types of apocalyptic scenarios: religious, where God destroys Satan and sinners and resurrects the virtuous; and secular, where the destruction of evil comes about by natural or historical forces, and good triumphs over evil. Either way it plays out the same: destruction followed by redemption, with the fatalistic twist that The End, or some major break in human history, is inevitable. This apocalyptic millennium is a variation on the destruction-redemption and messiah myths considered in the previous chapter, as well as the still broader categories of renewal and eschatology myths reviewed in Chapter 7. These stories of the end resonate deeply in the human breast for the simple reason that we are all aware of the passing of time, that we are locked into that chronology, and that the end of our personal time must come. This is true whether one is religious or not: Everyone who ever lived has died, and so will we, and so will our descendants. Even if all the religious end-times scenarios prove hollow, the Earth itself will be engulfed by the Red Giant the sun will become in another 4.5 billion years. Even if our descendants colonize the galaxy, or other galaxies, the universe will either collapse into a giant black hole, destroying everything in it, or continue expanding until every star in every galaxy runs out of nuclear fuel and is snuffed out like the candles at the end of a liturgical ceremony. Either way, the end is coming. It is literally only a matter of time.
Three traditional representations of Judgment Day. Albrecht Dürer’s 1498
The Opening of the Fifth and Sixth Seals, the Distribution of White Garments Among the Martyrs and the Fall of Stars, is a depiction of St. John the Divine’s vision in Revelation, 6:12
17: “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand.”
The Last Judgment
by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Below: Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
17: “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand.”
The Last Judgment
by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Below: Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
The connection between the millennium and the apocalypse was made most poignantly by St. John the Divine in a vision recounted in Revelation 20:110, where he “saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit,” where he threw Satan “and bound him for a thousand years.” According to Revelation, this post-Armageddon event is to be followed by the judgment of sinners and resurrection of the saved, who then “reigned with Christ a thousand years.” After this millennium, “Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations,” join forces with Gog and Magog in one final epic battle—Armageddon—but will be defeated and “thrown into the lake of fire” where he and all of his servants, including all false prophets, “will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
10, where he “saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit,” where he threw Satan “and bound him for a thousand years.” According to Revelation, this post-Armageddon event is to be followed by the judgment of sinners and resurrection of the saved, who then “reigned with Christ a thousand years.” After this millennium, “Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations,” join forces with Gog and Magog in one final epic battle—Armageddon—but will be defeated and “thrown into the lake of fire” where he and all of his servants, including all false prophets, “will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”To some doomsday prophets, this fatidic vision will be played out at the end of human history. But how will we know when we are nearing it? Jesus told his disciples (Luke 21:1011): “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.” Herein lies the problem of interpretation, and one reason why millennial phenomena are so widespread. Since nations and kingdoms have always risen against one another; and great earthquakes, famines, and pestilences are common throughout history; and heavenly signs like comets and eclipses abound in every age, whoever is doing the interpreting sees themselves as the chosen generation. For some, the end is always nigh, from Jesus’ first-century disciples who took him literally when he said “there shall be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28), to Carlulaire de Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes’ warning in 964 that “as the century passes, the end of the world approaches,” to Ronald Reagan’s 1971 admonition that “for the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.” Whether it is Satan who brings about the final clash that leads to the terminus of history, or human stupidity through nuclear war, or a chance encounter with an asteroid, the mythic theme of the apocalypse has become a staple of both popular and high culture.
11): “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.” Herein lies the problem of interpretation, and one reason why millennial phenomena are so widespread. Since nations and kingdoms have always risen against one another; and great earthquakes, famines, and pestilences are common throughout history; and heavenly signs like comets and eclipses abound in every age, whoever is doing the interpreting sees themselves as the chosen generation. For some, the end is always nigh, from Jesus’ first-century disciples who took him literally when he said “there shall be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28), to Carlulaire de Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes’ warning in 964 that “as the century passes, the end of the world approaches,” to Ronald Reagan’s 1971 admonition that “for the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.” Whether it is Satan who brings about the final clash that leads to the terminus of history, or human stupidity through nuclear war, or a chance encounter with an asteroid, the mythic theme of the apocalypse has become a staple of both popular and high culture.To complicate matters, there are a number of widely divergent beliefs concerning the end-times, especially within Christianity. Premillennial Christians, for example, believe that Christ must first return to usher in the millennium. Postmillennial Christians, however, believe that Christ will return after humans have already set up God’s kingdom on earth. Of course, some individuals have chosen a more moderate middle ground by worrying very little about the precise timing of eschatological events, concentrating simply on the foundational hope of their faith, that is, that someday (who knows when?) Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.
For secular millennialists a similar typology can be constructed. Premillennial secularists tend to be pessimistic in their view of humanity and history, where change can only come about after a catastrophe. Postmillennial secularists tend to be optimistic and try to work toward a better world before disaster strikes. Folklorist Daniel Wojcik, in his compelling history of The End of the World as We Know It, makes a similar distinction between unconditional apocalypticism, where the end of the world is “imminent and unalterable” and “irredeemable by human effort,” and conditional apocalypticism, where “within the broad constraints of history’s inevitable progression, human beings may forestall worldly catastrophes if they act in accordance with divine will or a superhuman plan.” Hal Lindsey offered a prime example of unconditional apocalypticism in There’s a New World Coming, when he addressed skeptics directly: “To the skeptic who says that Christ is not coming soon, I would ask him to put the book of Revelation in one hand, and the daily newspaper in the other, and then sincerely ask God to show him where we are on His prophetic time-clock.” The Montana-based Church Universal and Triumphant, headed by Elizabeth Claire Prophet, is an example of conditional apocalypticism, where they prepare for the worst by stockpiling foodstuffs and constructing bomb shelters, but pray for the best (so far so good).
Calculating precisely when the end will come has generated a mini-publishing industry at the end of this millennium, but it has a long and honored history. Numerous thinkers over the last 2,000 years—from Church Fathers of early Christendom, to theologians of the Middle Ages, to philosophers of Early Modern Europe—concluded that the universe would end exactly 6,000 years after its six-day creation. They based this conclusion on the passage in II Peter 3:8, where “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years.” Since God rested on the seventh day, the seventh millennium would begin following the battle of Armageddon. It was a cosmic millennial week.
Jewish tradition, for example, held that there were 2,000 years before the Law (Torah), 2,000 years under the Law, and 2,000 years under the Messiah. The fifth-century Church Father Augustine, in his theological epic, The City of God, outlined the six ages of history (plus one still to come) that included: (1) Adam to the Flood, (2) the Flood to Abraham, (3) Abraham to David, (4) David to the Exile, (5) the Exile to Jesus, (6) the (present) Gospel Age, and (7) the (final) Millennium. In a 1525 sermon, the Protestant revolutionary Martin Luther preached that the end would come exactly 6,000 years after Creation, which he dated at 3961 B.C. (pushing the end off until A.D. 2039, leaving plenty of time for his reforms to take effect). Even Christopher Columbus, in his unfinished Book of Prophecies, saw himself “predestined to fulfill a number of prophecies in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world.” It is entirely possible, in fact, that one of the major motivations for Columbus’s voyages of exploration was to fulfill his perceived destiny. The world, he calculated, began in 5343 B.C. and would last 7,000 years (including the final millennium), making the end only a century and a half away, just enough time to save the souls of the newly discovered godless savages of the Indies.
The various dates for the creation computed by countless observers in this scholarly tradition were derived by calculating the ages of the patriarchs, kings, and other biblical peoples, and generally fell in the range between 5500 B.C. (in the Septuagint) and 3761 B.C. (in the still-used Jewish calendar). In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher, in his Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced from the First Origin of the World, produced the most comprehensive creation history of his time. In addition to applying Old Testament genealogies, Ussher used astronomical and secular historical data on other societies (especially Babylon), Roman history and the New Testament, and calibrated Hebrew chronology with the Christian calendar. The 6,000-year history of the Earth, he figured, would end precisely 2,000 years after Christ’s birth. But when was that? The B.C.A.D. chronological system was not introduced until the sixth century A.D. According to biblical accounts Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod (recall, Herod talked to the Magi and ordered the slaying of the innocents). Since Herod died in 4 B.C., this is the date often used by theologians for the latest possible birth date of Jesus. Steeped in tradition, Ussher then assumed the creation would have occurred on the first Sunday following the autumnal equinox, which under the old Julian (Roman) calendar would have been Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. With a final confident flare, he even deduced the time: high noon! (Ussher figured that since God created the heavens and the Earth and light all on Day One, it must have taken at least half a day to accomplish the feat, so, he concluded, “In the middle of the first day, light was created.”)
A.D. chronological system was not introduced until the sixth century A.D. According to biblical accounts Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod (recall, Herod talked to the Magi and ordered the slaying of the innocents). Since Herod died in 4 B.C., this is the date often used by theologians for the latest possible birth date of Jesus. Steeped in tradition, Ussher then assumed the creation would have occurred on the first Sunday following the autumnal equinox, which under the old Julian (Roman) calendar would have been Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. With a final confident flare, he even deduced the time: high noon! (Ussher figured that since God created the heavens and the Earth and light all on Day One, it must have taken at least half a day to accomplish the feat, so, he concluded, “In the middle of the first day, light was created.”)Since Ussher’s book became the most widely read and frequently quoted source for the creation of the world, it was believed by many that the end would come 6,000 years later on October 23, 1996. Since you are reading this book it would appear the end has once again been postponed. But as Stephen Jay Gould points out in Questioning the Millennium, something of near-miraculous proportions did happen on that date. Down two games to one in the World Series against the mighty Atlanta Braves, and hopelessly behind 6 to 3 in the eighth inning of the critical fourth game (no one ever comes back from a three-to-one deficit), the New York Yankees pulled off a preternatural comeback to win the game and eventually the series. “So,” Gould concludes with a twinkle in his eye, “on the eminently reasonable assumption that God is a Yankee fan (and both a kindly and inscrutable figure as well), He may have used 6000 Annus Mundi to send a signal and solicit our earnest preparation before He runs out of reasons for delay and must ring down the truly final curtain on earthly business as usual.”
Actually, the date gets pushed off another year because, as Gould notes, there was no year zero in Western mathematics when the B.C.–A.D. system was introduced, so the first year of the first century was 1, not 0. So 6,000 years from 4004 B.C. is actually 1997, not 1996. Did anything of note happen on October 23, 1997? Yes, actually, something did. On that date the United States Energy Department released a statement disclosing that as many as 30,000 nuclear bombs cannot be accounted for in the disassembly process that is part of the latest arms control agreement. According to official records, approximately 70,000 nuclear bombs have been produced since World War II. Of these, 26,735 have been destroyed, 1,741 are awaiting destruction, and 11,000 remain active in the Pentagon’s strategic stockpile. Apparently no one knows what happened to the remaining 30,000 bombs. To make matters worse, the Energy Department also admitted that of the 95.5 tons of bomb-grade plutonium produced in the United States since the Second World War, 2.8 tons of it remain unaccounted for—not the end of the world, though perhaps the necessary ingredients for it.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the missing zero at the B.C.–A.D. marker solves the problem of when the next millennium really begins. Since the first century had no zero, it began with the year 1 and did not end until the end of the year 100. This is true for every century since, including ours. Therefore, the twentieth century, and the second millennium, end on December 31, 2000, and the new century and millennium begin the next day, January 1, 2001.
Since myths tend to recur as enduring features of our cultural landscape (primarily due to the fact that there are only so many plot themes in stories, so they are bound to repeat in general outline), we should not be surprised that apocalyptic visions of the end have been reiterated throughout the past two thousand years. The most interesting year, for obvious reasons, is A.D. 1000. Did people then believe the end was nigh? Surprisingly, the matter of what happened at the last triple-zero cleavage in history is not at all clear, primarily owing to the historical black hole known as the Dark Ages. There just is not that much data from which to piece together an adequate picture. We do not know if this absence of evidence is evidence of an absence (of terror), or if the hysteria was expressed in some other fashion not clearly recorded for history. Chroniclers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in the finest mode of progressivist history (with a little anti-Catholicism thrown in for good measure), portrayed their ancestors in the year 1000 as irrationally hysterical. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet, for example, saw evidence of the terror in statues of the period: “See how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired but dreaded moment … which is to redeem them from their unspeakable sorrows.” In his 1841 classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay recorded that “during the thousandth year the number of pilgrims increased. Most of them were smitten with terror as with a plague. Every phenomenon of nature filled them with alarm. It was the opinion that thunder was the voice of God, announcing the day of judgment. Fanatic preachers kept up the flame of terror.”
The only problem with this account is that there is almost no evidence for it. This apparent nonevent led to an “anti-terror” movement among historians, who pointed out that nothing special happened in 1000 because other dates, such as 909, 950, 1010, and especially 1033 (a thousand years after the crucifixion) were equally apocalyptic. Hillel Schwartz’s classic survey of fins de siécle from the 990s to the 1990s, Century’s End, turned up far less panic than the author anticipated. Admitting that he was “feeding on coincidence,” Schwartz concluded that any sense of doom at century’s ends is a figment of modern historians. Christopher Hitchens amusingly calls this PMS—Pre-Millennial Syndrome. Like its biological counterpart, PMS is cyclical and predictable, but the actual malaise is rarely as bad as what was anticipated. Carnegie-Mellon historian Peter Stearns goes so far as to declare that “the apocalyptic history of the year 1000 turns out to be one of the most successful, large-scale frauds in modern treatments of the past.” Well, which is it, fear, feign, or fraud? Is there evidence that demands a verdict?
The latest scholarship on the subject, generated primarily by Richard Landes and Stephen O’Leary from the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, is that the dates surrounding and marking the thousand-year anniversary of Christ’s nativity and crucifixion (1000 and 1033) “reflect not a variety of equally plausible dates in circulation, but a series of efforts either to speed up the millennium’s arrival, to postdate it, or to salvage a coming millennium after its passage.” In fact, an eclipse in 968 and the arrival of Halley’s comet in 989 were seen by many as signs of the apocalypse. The Europeanwide famine of 1005–1006 was interpreted as fulfilling one of Jesus’ admonitions to his disciples that this would be a sign of the end. In 1033 a mass pilgrimage was made to Jerusalem in preparation for the final judgment. And, especially, the “Peace of God” movements in the 990s and 1030s saw massive throngs of believers gather in open fields to venerate holy relics in the hopes of being healed before the end. So, while the year 1000 did not see mass hysteria, says Landes, “the end is not merely paralyzing terrors; it is also extravagant hope: hope to see an end to the injustice of suffering in this world, hope for a life of ease and delight, hope for the victory of truth and peace.” What do we see following the years 1000 and 1033? Landes quotes medieval chronicler Radulfus Glaber’s famous passage: “It was as if the whole world had shaken off the dust of the ages and covered itself in a white mantle of churches.” Destruction-redemption.
Not all is lost when the end does not come. Hope springs eternal, even for apocalyptic doomsayers. From the Millerites awaiting the end on October 22, 1843 (and again a year later), to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who proclaimed that the generation who saw the Great War (World War I) would not pass before the second coming, to the Heaven’s Gate followers trip to The Evolutionary Level Above Humans, millennial scenarios do not just mean The End. They also mean The Beginning.
What will happen in the year 2000 and after no one knows, but we can make some predictions based on what people have done in the past when the predicted collapse does not come. It is an interesting study that teaches us a lot about human nature. It turns out we are a remarkably resilient species.
Psychologists who studied Leland Jensen and his Baha’i sect, for example, discovered that when the end of the world came and went, they did not quietly disband and go home. Psychologist Leon Festinger applied his theory of cognitive dissonance to failed prophecy, and argued that the stronger one’s commitment to a failing cause, the greater the rationalizations to reduce the dissonance produced by the disappointment. Thus, paradoxically, after the 1980 debacle in the bomb shelters, not only did Jensen and his followers not abandon the cause, they ratcheted up the intensity of future predictions, making no less than twenty between 1979 and 1995! Jensen and his flock employed one or all of the following rationalizations: (1) the prophecy was fulfilled—spiritually; (2) the prophecy was fulfilled physically, but not as expected; (3) the date was miscalculated; (4) the date was a loose prediction, not a specific prophecy; (5) the date was a warning, not a prophecy; (6) God changed his mind in order to be merciful; (7) predictions were just a test of members’ faith.
The classic case study in millennial resiliency is the 1843 Millerite fiasco, also known as the “Great Disappointment.” A one-time deist and farmer from upstate New York, William Miller accepted the 6,000-year theory of creation but rejected Bishop Ussher’s specific calculations for the beginning and end. Miller believed he had found errors in Ussher’s chronology, concluding that the archbishop was off by 153 years. The end would not come in 1996, but in 1843. Miller published his theory in 1832 and began preaching and acquiring followers in the Boston and New York areas who were impressed that he was even able to pinpoint the date of the end. Using the Jewish year that runs from one vernal equinox to the next, Miller became “fully convinced that sometime between March 21st, 1843, and March 21st, 1844 … Christ will come and bring all his saints with him.” But when March 21, 1844, came and went without note, a great disappointment set in among many followers. Instead of abandoning the movement, however, the true believers set to task recalculating the Second Coming. It would be the “tenth day of the seventh month of the Jewish sacred year,” October 22, 1844. Miller announced at the beginning of the month that “if he does not come within 20 or 25 days, I shall feel twice the disappointment I did this spring.” When the new date passed without note, one disciple announced that “our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. We wept and wept until the day dawned.” That disciple was Hiram Edson who, after recovering from the great disappointment, concluded that Miller had misread the Book of Daniel. This was not the end, he said, but only the beginning of God’s examination of the names in the Book of Life. To hasten the process, Edson explained, the sabbath should be observed on Saturday, the seventh and last day of the Jewish week, instead of Sunday, and he went on to become a leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses must hold the record for the most failed dates of doom, including 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925, and others all the way up to 1975. One of the more novel and audacious rationalizations for failed prophecy came after Armageddon’s nonarrival in 1975. In a 1966 book published by the Watchtower Society, Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, the Witnesses established the date of creation at 4026 B.C., declaring that “six thousand years from man’s creation will end in 1975, and the seventh period of a thousand years of human history will begin in the fall of 1975.” The Watchtower Society’s president, Frederick Franz, at a Toronto, Ontario, rally, blamed the members themselves. Because Jesus had stated that no man will know the “day or the hour” of his coming, the Witnesses jinxed the Second Coming: “Do you know why nothing happened in 1975? It was because you expected something to happen.” Undaunted, they recalibrated again, citing October 2, 1984. as doomsday. Finally, in 1996, the leaders of the church learned the Millerite lesson. In the November 1996 issue of Awake!, members discovered that “the generation that saw the events of 1914” would not, after all, be seeing the end of the world. Instead, this oft-quoted line was replaced by a much vaguer “is about to” clause, reducing dissonance indefinitely.
A more recent example occurred on March 31, 1998. This time around it was the prophecy of one Heng-ming Chen, leader of God’s Salvation Church presently based in Garland, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), but originating from Taiwan. Chen’s original prophecy, published in his guidebook entitled God’s Descending in Clouds (Flying Saucers) on Earth to Save People, stated: “At 10 A.M. on March 31, 1998, God shall make His appearance in the Holy Land of the Kingdom of God: 3513 Ridgedale Dr., Garland, TX 75041 U.S.A. I guarantee this on my life.” What would God look like? Not surprisingly, he would look like Chen, only he would be able to walk through walls, speak numerous languages, and clone himself into as many copies as necessary to greet anyone who came into the home that day. Exactly one year later—March 31, 1999—the chosen few were to travel to a rendezvous point on the shores of Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana, from where they would board flying saucers to take them to heaven, with a brief stopover at Mars. Chen and several followers went so far as to go to Gary, Indiana, in January 1998 to perform a “purification ceremony” involving rice, fruit, and ceramic dragons, all in the bone-chilling thirty-seven-degree waters of Lake Michigan. In 1997 they traveled through British Columbia and into Alaska, in a quest to find a six-foot-tall, twenty-eight-year old man who looked like Abraham Lincoln, but whom Chen described as the “Jesus of the West.” But there was no available account of what they did on the March 31, 1999, date.
Like so many other New Age religions, God’s Salvation Church grew out of a cultural milieu fascinated by UFOs. They moved to Texas from Taiwan in the summer of 1997, purchasing over thirty homes for about $500,000 in cash, and moved in about 150 of the faithful. They dressed completely in white, including white cowboy hats and white tennis shoes. Members were told by their leader that he talks to God through a diamond ring on his hand and receives divine messages through golden balls floating in the sky. Why Garland, Texas? Because, the forty-two-year-old “Teacher Chen” (as he is known) explained, it sounds like “God’s Land.” The other reason, Chen continued, is that in 1999 Asia will succumb to a nuclear holocaust he calls the “Great Tribulation.” Proof of the coming disaster, he says, can be seen in the recent storms, fires, and economic problems experienced in Asia. Galactic goings on, not El Nin
o, are the cause of the severe storms in Asia and America, he explained.
o, are the cause of the severe storms in Asia and America, he explained.As doomsday grew closer, Chen predicted that God would appear on Channel 18 at 12:01 A.M. on Wednesday, March 25, 1997. When God was a no-show, Chen recanted his prophecy and said that his prediction that God would appear in Garland was “nonsense.” With that the media hype was over and the more than one hundred reporters went their separate ways, assuming that a Heaven’s Gate replay was unlikely. But Chen’s followers remain undaunted. Chin-Hung Chiang, for example, explained that the world actually did end, spiritually: “The world of the spiritual is invisible. It’s very difficult to explain what is going on.”
Even those who help bring about their own apocalyptic end—Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, and Waco come to mind—there is often a positive spin put on the ultimate outcome. Jim Jones told his flock on November 18, 1978 (as can be heard in the shocking audiotape with screams in the background): “I’m glad it’s over. Hurry, hurry my children … . No more pain … . Death is a million times preferable to ten more days of this life. If you knew what was ahead of you you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight … . This is a revolutionary suicide. It’s not a self-destructive suicide.” Marshall Applewhite and his Heaven’s Gate group were the epitome of this brand of apocalyptic spin doctoring. As we all saw in the videotaped final interviews with the suicidal members, they were gleefully looking forward to their passage on a UFO to The Evolutionary Level Above Humans, where there would be no gender, no need for food or sustenance, and “an eternal body—an everlasting body.” Heaven’s Gate is the passageway to this next level, “a transitional training ground—a proving ground for potential new members of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Destruction-redemption.
The most apocalyptic guru of them all was David Koresh, who believed he was God’s representative on Earth and as such he would lead his people to the promised land—but only after a great conflagration. As cult expert Richard Abanes concluded from his study of the Branch Davidians: “Koresh would loose fire upon his faithful followers, thereby killing off their old nature and transforming them into flaming entities of divine judgment who would smite the enemy.” Whether they set the fire themselves, or the FBI triggered the blaze, or some combination of bureaucratic bumbling and self-fulfilling prophecy caused it, we may never know. But in the Bible of one of Koresh’s many wives, Abanes discovered highlighted passages indicating that the Branch Davidians believed the end would come by fire (recall, they named their compound Mt. Carmel). In the margin of the book of Amos 1:27, which states “The Lord will roar from Zion … and the top of Carmel shall wither … I will send fire,” Koresh’s wife scribbled “The fire that will cleanse.”
7, which states “The Lord will roar from Zion … and the top of Carmel shall wither … I will send fire,” Koresh’s wife scribbled “The fire that will cleanse.”In this phrase—the fire that will cleanse—is the essence of the millennium. But what is the lure?
Most of us would never be taken in by the likes of Jones, Applewhite, or Koresh, but the attraction of the millennium is not restricted to a handful of religious fanatics and survivalists holed up in compounds and bomb shelters in rural America. In fact, a U.S. News and World Report poll conducted November 14 to 16, 1997, found that “66 percent of Americans, including a third of those who admit they never attend church, say they believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth some day—an increase from the 61 percent who expressed belief in the Second Coming three years ago.” Linking the Second Coming to the millennium, an April 1993 poll conducted by Yankelovich Partners for Time/CNN found that 20 percent of the respondents answered “yes” to the question, “Do you think that the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur sometime around the year 2000?” One in five is not a trivial figure. And this is only those who hold to a religious millennialism. There is a new brand of secular millennial conceptions that envision the end of the world coming by global warming or nuclear war, by genetically engineered viruses or chemical bombs, by overpopulation or mass starvation, or by cosmic collisions or alien encounters. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride again. Why? What makes the story of the millennium, the apocalypse, the end, so compelling? What is the appeal of these chiliastic movements? To begin to construct an answer, let’s step back and look at the larger picture of: (1) humans as pattern-seeking animals; (2) humans as storytelling animals.
1.We evolved to be pattern-seekers—we are the descendants of the most successful pattern finders. But as we have seen, this does not guarantee we will not make errors in our thinking. In fact, it guarantees that we will make errors in our thinking, because magical thinking is a spandrel of clear thinking. Recall the two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: Believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: Rejecting a truth. The belief that the millennium harbors an apocalyptic end of humanity is a Type 1 Error in thinking. It is an error because it is more likely that the apocalyptic images in Revelation were not portents of things to come in the distant future, but commentary on their own times. The Antichrist figure, for example, is believed to allude to the Roman emperor Nero, who killed himself by falling on his sword. The battle of Armageddon described in Ezekiel probably refers to the Scythian invasion of Israel in pre-Christian times. The Bible was written for the people of that time as history, social commentary, and political analysis, not unlike what Nostradamus did in his quatrains written as social and political exegesis on the sixteenth century, rather than prophecy for the twentieth.2.We tell stories about the patterns we find in nature. For thousands of years before the advent of writing, myths and religions were sustained by the oral tradition of stories with meaningful patterns—gods and God, supernatural beings and mystical forces, and our place in history, in the world, and in the cosmos. We may live in an enlightenment culture of science and rationality, but we hold on to and cherish our stories nonetheless because it is in our nature to do so. Science does not come naturally. Storytelling does. And our most popular stories are in the forms of myths—stories about life and death, growing up and growing old, rites of passage and marriage, and especially the creation and destruction of the world.
The millennium combines the best in pattern-seeking and storytelling. What could be more dramatic than the pattern of a round number ending in three zeros with a story about the end of time and our redemption to follow? Damian Thompson expressed this nicely in his work on The End of Time: “It seems to represent a deep-seated human urge to escape from time, which in the earliest societies was usually met by dreams of a return to a golden past. Apocalypticism offered a radical change of direction, a move forward into a world ruled by the saints in which the enemy had been vanquished.” Even for those with no particular religious inclinations toward a millennial holocaust, there are plenty of secular versions to go around, starting with what I call the beautiful people myth.
Long, long ago, in a century far, far away, there lived beautiful people coexisting with nature in balanced eco-harmony, taking only what they needed, and giving back to Mother Earth what was left. Women and men lived in egalitarian accord and there were no wars and few conflicts. The people were happy, living long and prosperous lives. The men were handsome and muscular. well-coordinated in their hunting expeditions as they successfully brought home the main meals for the family. The tanned, bare-breasted women carried a child in one arm and picked nuts and berries to supplement the hunt. Children frolicked in the nearby stream, dreaming of the day when they too would grow up to fulfill their destiny as beautiful people.
But then came the evil empire—European White Males carrying the disease of imperialism, industrialism, capitalism, scientism, and the other “isms” brought about by human greed, carelessness, and short-term thinking. The environment was exploited, the rivers soiled, the air polluted, and the beautiful people were driven from their land, forced to become slaves, or simply killed.
This tragedy, however, can be reversed if we just go back to living off the land where everyone would grow just enough food for themselves and use only enough to survive. We would then all love one another, as well as our caretaker Mother Earth, just as they did long, long ago, in a century far, far away.
There are actually several myths packed into the beautiful people myth, proffered by no one in particular but compiled from many sources as mythmaking (in the literary sense) for our time. This genre of storytelling, in fact, tucks nicely into the larger framework of golden-age fantasies and has a long and honorable history. The Greeks believed they lived in the Age of Iron, but before them there was the Age of Gold. Jews and Christians, of course, both believe in the golden age before the fall in the Garden. Medieval scholars looked back longingly to the biblical days of Moses and the prophets, while Renaissance scholars pursued a rebirth of classical learning, coming around full circle to the Greeks. Even Newt Gingriclu had his own version of the myth when he told the Boston Globe on May 20, 1995, that there were “long periods of American history where people didn’t get raped, people didn’t get murdered, people weren’t mugged routinely.”
The concept of Heaven on Earth is part of the larger mythic theme represented in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: “The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.” Sometimes that future state of bliss is to be found in another place entirely, as in “the firmament”—an overarching vault resting on pillars at the end of the Earth with windows to view God and the angels above, and from whence the rains come. But as often as not Heaven is a state on Earth, or sometimes even a state of mind. The most famous Heaven on Earth metaphors, of course, come from the Bible in numerous books. In Isaiah 65:17–18, for example, following God’s creation of “new heavens and a new earth,” after which “the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying,” the people are to “rejoice” (Isaiah 65:20–23, 25) because:
There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die a hundred years old; but the sinner being a hundred years old shall be accursed.And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.
According to The Interpreter’s Bible, in these Isaiah passages “the meaning is not that the present world will be completely destroyed and a new world created, but rather that the present world will be completely transformed … there is no cosmological speculation here.” Indeed, in the Hebrew Bible it is not until the book of Daniel—the latest addition to the canon—that one can find reference to humans ascending to heaven. For mortals, heaven generally meant a new Kingdom on Earth, not a place to go where God resides. The shift from earthly paradise to cosmological firmament began in Daniel and was reinforced especially by Jesus who portrayed to his oppressed peoples that redemption was just around the chronological corner. Yet even Jesus made intriguing references to the Kingdom that “has come upon you” (Luke 11:20), that has suffered violence since the time of John the Baptist (Matthew 11:12), and especially in Luke 17:20–21, where he seems to infer that heaven is a state of mind: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
In a biocultural model of religious thought and spirituality, the idea of a Heaven on Earth or a Kingdom of God within should not be restricted to Judaeo-Christian theology, or even to religious traditions of the West and East. Indeed, it is not. The myth of the golden-age past or future can also be secularized, and it has been by modern environmentalists who construct mythical epochs like the one above, where beautiful people have lived or will live in eco-harmony with their environment, which resembles, for all intents and purposes, the heavenly states of world religions.
I first encountered the beautiful people myth as a graduate student in a course co-taught by an anthropologist and a historian in the late 1980s, when both fields were being “deconstructed” by literary critics and social theorists. Anticipating the study of customs, rituals, and beliefs of indigenous preindustrial peoples around the world, I was instead bogged down in books such as Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, which explicates “Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction” or “The Devil and the Cosmogenesis of Capitalism.” The anthropologist soon announced that his was a Marxist interpretation of history, seeing the past in terms of class conflict and economic exploitation. The beautiful people lived before capitalism.
Old-line Marxists see communism as the liberating climax of a six-stage evolutionary process that requires the collapse of capitalism. Capitalism is The End. Communism is The New Beginning. Liberal democrats, meanwhile, have their bard in Francis Fukuyama, whose book, The End of History and the Last Man. pronounced that the cold war was won by democracy and capitalism. Libertarians’ messiah is John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, who leads a massive worldwide strike by the men of the mind, forcing civilization to collapse into chaos and anarchy, out of the ashes from which the heroes resurrect the Kingdom of Galt on earth. In the book’s final apocalyptic scene, in fact, the heroine, Dagny Taggert, turns to Galt and pronounces: “It’s the end.” He corrects her: “It’s the beginning.” The fire that will cleanse.
Radical feminists foresee a day when patriarchy will collapse and men and women will live in egalitarian harmony—the Second Coming is actually a return to an imagined golden age before there were wars, violence, rape, slavery, and the subjugating “isms” that go with male domination. In Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, for example, the author goes back 13,000 years to find history’s bogeyman. Before patriarchy there was “a long period of peace and prosperity when our social, technological, and cultural evolution moved upward: many thousands of years when all the basic technologies on which civilization is built were developed in societies that were not male dominant, violent, and hierarchic.” As Paleolithic hunting, gathering, and fishing gave way to Neolithic farming, this “partnership model” of equality between the sexes gave way to the “dominator model,” and with it came wars, exploitation, slavery, and the like. The solution, says Eisler, is to return to the equalitarian partnership model where “not only will material wealth be shared more equitably, but this will also be an economic order in which amassing more and more property as a means of protecting oneself from, as well as controlling others will be seen for what it is: a form of sickness or aberration.”
Environmentalist, Marxist, libertarian, and feminist Armageddons are being fought with the belief that the survival of the species is at stake. Either men will lead us into nuclear obliteration, or corporations will sink our environmental lifeboat, or capitalists will spend us into oblivion, or the state will destroy us. But in the end the Antichrist will be defeated, replaced by the Kingdom of Bliss. The fire that will cleanse.
The fact that such diverse apocalyptic visions can proliferate on the cultural landscape tells us that they are deeply rooted in the human mind. There is something going on here that cries out for an explanation. We saw in the last chapter that sometimes apocalypticism is prevalent among the oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized—the Jews oppressed by Romans at the time of Jesus’ evangelism and promise of the Kingdom of God on Earth that was soon to come; the 1890 Ghost Dance among the Native Americans who were on the brink of extinction when the prophet Wovoka preached that the Great Spirit would come to destroy the whites and return the buffalo; or the belief among some members of the Nation of Islam (including Farrakhan himself) that a messianic mothership is in orbit around earth that will soon bring deliverance. Hold a people down long enough and learned helplessness arises, leading to feelings of utter futility, which gives rise to fatalism, and that end in apocalypticism, with a hoped-for paradisiacal state to come.
But this is not true for all millennial groups. As the Time/CNN poll showed, millions of white, middle class, American Christians believe that the world is soon coming to an end. It would be a long stretch to classify these folks as oppressed, disenfranchised, or marginalized. Likewise, the people who purchased over thirty million copies of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth are anything but in a state of learned helplessness or cognitive dissonance. Indeed, some recent polls and studies indicate that religious people, on average, may be both physically and psychologically happier and healthier than nonbelievers. Apocalypticism requires a different explanation here.
Perhaps it has something to do with the need for justice, where the evils of events like the Holocaust are lessened by the fact that the Lord will mete out retribution in the end. Bad things do happen to good people, but in the end the good will triumph (the fire that will cleanse). This is an ancient theme that even predates the Bible. In the third millennium B.C., for example, the prologue of the Hammurabi law code explains its purpose:
to cause justice to prevail in the land,
to destroy the wicked and the evil,
that the strong might not oppress the weak
to rise like the sun over the black-headed [people]
and to light up the land.
The normal ups and downs of life may be more tolerable if you believe that Someone Up There is keeping score and that the tally will be presented to all participants when the game is over (with appropriate rewards and punishments doled out).
More than making things right with the world, millennial visions also help us make sense of the world. Recall that the literal meaning of apocalypse is “unveiling,” or “revelation.” For some people, a millennial apocalyptic vision, like that of St. John the Divine in the book of Revelation, unveils the secret pattern of life that must lie behind the confusing array of history’s events. These visions reveal to us the secret pattern set up by God or destiny. Texts like Revelation reveal the hidden scheme of life, thoughtfully and purposefully set up by a God who cares about us and who, perhaps more importantly, is in control. There is a beginning and an end to history, and the events in between fit a larger cosmic design. How much easier it is to suffer the slings and arrows of fate when you know that it is all really part of a deeper, unfolding plan. We may feel like flotsam and jetsam on the vast rivers of history, but the currents are directed toward a final destination in which we play a meaningful role.
Here we see a striking difference between 1000 and 2000. A thousand years ago the world was a relatively simple place where the church was the dominant social structure that provided an inchoate but comprehensive model of the world. Today we face a confusing panoply of competing power structures and explanations virtually impossible to wrap our minds around. If we do not experience an apocalyptic terror, there will at least be some millennial angst, from both religious and secular conceptions of the end. We need restitution and restoration. We want to feel that no matter how chaotic, oppressive, or evil the world is, all will be made right in the end. The millennium as history’s end is only acceptable with the proviso that there will be a new beginning. The people in 1000 were given it, and with it they created the Middle Ages. What will we do?
Will the fire cleanse? Will Yeats’s anarchy be loosed upon the world and innocence drowned, or will we see ourselves through this historical fissure and arise to create the next epoch, whatever it may be? Perhaps this time the falcon will hear the falconer, the centre will hold back the blood-dimmed tide, the best, and even sometimes the worst will retain conviction. And may we all be full of passionate intensity in anticipation of our future, whatever it holds.