They knew those were the last days because it had all happened before. After Jesus was taken up into heaven, his disciples gathered together in one room. “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” A large crowd assembled, and in that crowd were Jews out of every nation under heaven, and every one of them heard the sound of his own language, and some of them asked if the apostles were drunk. Then Peter stood up and said that they were not drunk, and quoted the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”68
Every disappointment was followed by an awakening. The greater the disappointment, the greater the awakening.
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Millenarianism is the vengeful fantasy of the dispossessed, the hope for a great awakening in the midst of a great disappointment. Nowhere was Christianity-inspired apocalyptic millenarianism more common or more desperate than in the non-Christian societies that Christians had damaged or destroyed. As livelihoods were ruined, gods and ancestors humiliated, and symbolic worlds overturned or shattered, some of the explanations and solutions were provided by the people who had ushered in the calamity (and proved the power of their gods). Combined with local beliefs in the return of a Promethean hero or the journey to a land without evil, the biblical idea of cosmic retribution produced powerful social movements, many of them violent and self-sacrificial.69
The collapse of the Inca Empire was followed by an epidemic of “dancing sickness” (Taqui Onqoy), in the course of which the temporarily defeated local spirits moved from the rocks and trees into the bodies of the dancing humans in preparation for a flood that would obliterate the Spaniards and all memory of their existence. In North America, several Plains Indian groups (some of them familiar with Mormon and Shaker teachings) performed a special ghost dance in the expectation that the world of injustice would collapse, death and the whites would disappear, and the eternally young ancestors would return, driving before them thick herds of buffalo. The Lakota (Sioux), the last big group to have been defeated and confined to a reservation, danced the last dance before being massacred by the US Army at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. In northeastern Brazil, amidst the massive migrations and dislocations triggered by the abolition of slavery, the fall of the monarchy, and a series of severe droughts, several followers of an itinerant preacher known as “the Counselor” settled in the village of Canudos, renamed it “Belo Monte” (Beautiful Hill), renounced the republic, refused to pay taxes, rejected civil marriage, collectivized their animals, divided most of their possessions, and set about waiting for the End. Four years later, on the eve of being burned to the ground by the Brazilian army in October 1897, Belo Monte had thirty thousand inhabitants and 5,200 dwellings.70
In Latin America, most European settlers and their descendants became involved in various nation-building efforts. In Africa, where they almost never did, millenarianism became a permanent feature of political life. In southern Africa, the Xhosa were defeated in eight “Kaffir wars,” driven from much of their land, and plagued by persistent droughts and cattle epidemics. In 1856, a teenage girl, whose uncle had been the first Xhosa to be confirmed as an Anglican, had a vision, in which the Xhosa ancestors ordered their people to destroy any remaining cattle, corn, tools, and other unclean possessions. In return, they were going to bring limitless supplies of everything, including health and youth, and drive the British beyond the seas. Helping them would be the “new people” known as “Russians.” The Xhosa had recently heard that the much-hated former Cape governor, George Cathcart, had been killed in the Crimean War, and concluded that the people who had killed him were strong, black, and—since they were fighting the British—Xhosa ancestors, too. After two dates set for the resurrection passed without consequence, the believers blamed those who had refused to slaughter their cattle and embarked on a massive campaign of killing and destruction. About four hundred thousand cattle were slaughtered and about forty thousand Xhosa starved to death. The British authorities provided famine relief in exchange for contract labor in the colony with no right of return. Xhosaland ceased to exist.71
More than half a century later, after more alienation of land and a great deal of missionary activity in what had become the eastern Cape, a former Methodist preacher by the name of Enoch Mgijima began prophesying an imminent Armageddon that would result in the annihilation of white people. His followers called themselves “Israelites,” kept the Sabbath, celebrated the Passover, believed that the New Testament was a forgery written by whites, and considered the exodus an allegorical foretelling of their own deliverance. In 1920, Mgijima’s annual Passover celebration attracted more than a thousand converts who sold their possessions, built a communal settlement, and refused to pay taxes or register births or deaths. They founded their own Bible school and nursing station, maintained a security force, disciplined those who lapsed in their faith, and did a lot of praying and military drilling in the expectation of the apocalypse. “The whole world is going to sink in blood,” wrote Mgijima to a local official, “the time of Jehovah has now arrived.” On May 24, 1921, when a large police force surrounded the compound, the Israelites, armed with clubs and spears and protected by magic white robes, hurled themselves at machine guns. One hundred eighty-three of them were killed and about a hundred wounded. The tombstone erected by the survivors bears the inscription: “Because they chose the plan of God, the world did not have a place for them.”72
A much larger and more successful millenarian sect that identified Africans with the biblical Israelites were the Jamaican Rastafarians, who believed that they were the true Hebrews exiled for their sins (long since forgiven), and that the coronation of Ras Tafari as Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, had ushered in the era of final liberation and the gathering of Israel. The Bible, originally written about the Africans, had been falsified by the whites in order to trick and enslave the chosen people. Haile Selassie was “the Ancient of Days” from Daniel and the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” from the Book of Revelation. His mission was to remake the world, punish the whites, and deliver his people from Babylon to the promised land of Zion in Ethiopia. “One bright morning when my work is over, Man will fly away home.” In the meantime, “Rasta Man” was to withdraw from society, organize for immediate repatriation, or “get up, stand up, and fight.” As the intensity of the expectation waned, “liberation before repatriation” became an increasingly common option.73
One of the starkest expressions of millenarian yearning were the so-called cargo cults, which arose in Melanesia after the arrival of the European missionaries and spread widely after the massive invasions and dislocations of World War II. In a society apparently overcome with self-doubt and a sense of the world’s injustice, there appeared many men who, in Celsus’s formula, “with the greatest facility and on the slightest occasion, assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons.” They disagreed on the particulars but agreed on the main claim—that the Europeans’ wealth, known as “cargo” (after the term used by the newcomers to refer to the manufactured goods that kept arriving by sea or air) had been meant for the local communities but hijacked en route, and that very soon, and certainly in this generation, the ancestors were going to come back amid thunder and lightning and deliver the cargo—chocolates, radios, watches, mirrors, flashlights, bicycles, and countless other things, including eternal idleness and youth—to its rightful owners. The Book of Revelation brought by the newcomers revealed the source of their excessive luxuries: “cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; c
argoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies and souls of men.”74
All millenarianisms are cargo cults at heart. What the Melanesians lacked in metaphoric complexity they gained in the clarity of exposition. “We have nothing,” said one group of believers to their prophet, “no aircraft, no ships, no jeeps, nothing at all. The Europeans steal our cargo. You will be sorry for us and see that we get something.”75
There were many ways of getting something. Different sects—and sometimes the same sect at different times—tried out different approaches: going back to the old ways or adopting new ones; mandating sexual promiscuity or abstaining from sex altogether; destroying property (to realize the metaphor of having “nothing at all”) or stockpiling provisions (to welcome the returning ancestors); organizing elaborate dancing rituals or asking for cargo directly (praying); speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth or goose-stepping with wooden rifles and straw insignia; learning from the rich so as to discover their secrets or trying to take the cargo by getting up, standing up, and fighting. Some prophets claimed that the goods had already arrived; others blamed the failure of the prophecy on sinful individuals and staged public confessions and exemplary punishments. One of the doomsday prophecies in New Guinea came true when the Japanese bombed the area on the day of the predicted Second Coming (in 1942).76
The most successful doomsday movement inspired by Christianity took place in an area where biblical eschatology merged with the only powerful millenarian tradition born outside of Mediterranean monotheism. Chinese millenarianism had been mostly Taoist and Buddhist in inspiration. New challenges brought new prophets. Effective prophets are men or women whose personal madness resonates with the social turmoil around them and whose spiritual rebirth is equally convincing to the prophets themselves and those who believe they have “nothing at all.” In 1837, a man by the name of Hong Xiuquan failed in his second attempt to pass the second-level Confucian examination, collapsed, went into a delirium, and had a vision about establishing the heavenly kingdom on earth. Another look at the Christian missionary tract that may or may not have inspired the vision in the first place convinced Hong that he was God’s Chinese son and Jesus’s younger brother. Having failed two more examinations, he followed his older brother’s example by telling his parents that they were not his real parents and becoming an itinerant preacher of repentance and deliverance. Unlike his brother, however, he succeeded in attracting hundreds, later thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of converts and proceeded to battle Babylon on his own terms. His followers were the beleaguered Hakkas of southern China, and his ideologues were failed examination candidates, hired-out examination candidates, pharmacists’ apprentices, and other marginal intellectuals. In March 1853, Hong’s army of more than a million heavenly warriors captured Nanjing and declared it the heavenly capital of the heavenly kingdom (Taiping). As Hong, the heavenly king, wrote in a commentary on the Book of Revelation, “God’s Heaven now exists among men. It is fulfilled. Respect this.”77
Hong’s solution to the sectarian problem—of having a complex society imitate thirteen or so unencumbered men—was to admit women but to keep the sexes strictly segregated and ban all “exchanges of personal affection,” including “the casting of amorous glances and the harboring of lustful thoughts about others.” Another way of maintaining equality among “brothers and sisters” was to abolish trade and private property. Taiping officials at various levels were to determine optimal subsistence levels and requisition the rest for communal needs. The same officials were to stage regular public recitations of Hong’s commandments, enforce bans on selfishness and lustful thoughts, preside over a mutual surveillance network, lead troops into battle, burn false books (especially those by Confucius), and promote the reading of true ones. “The stupid, by reading these books, become intelligent; the disobedient, by reading these books, become good.”78
Because those who would not become good and intelligent were “like men contaminated by sickness,” Taiping’s task was to cure them by all means necessary. “Wherever we pass we will concentrate on killing all civil and military officials, and soldiers and militiamen. People will not be harmed …, but if you assist the devils in the defense of a city and engage in fighting, you will definitely be completely annihilated.” Within the heavenly kingdom, the same logic applied: “If we want you to perish, you will die, for no one’s punishment will be postponed more than three days. Every one of you should sincerely follow the path of truth, and train yourselves in goodness, which will lead to happiness.”79
In 1864, after about twenty million people had died in the war, the heavenly capital was besieged by government forces. When its residents began to starve, Hong ordered them to “eat manna,” then picked some weeds in the palace courtyard, chewed on them by way of example, and died shortly thereafter. After the fall of the city, Hong’s sixteen-year-old son told the interrogators that he had managed to read “thirty or more volumes” of ancient books forbidden by his father and that his only wish was to pass the Confucian examination that his father had failed. The government officials were not amused by the irony and had the “Young Monarch” executed.80
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Jesus’s Chinese brother was not destined for a Second Coming. But was Jesus? Back in the Christian world, Christianity was steadily losing its hold on human life. The retreat was slow and mostly dignified, with solid rearguard action on the American front, but the overall trend, especially among the elite, appeared irreversible. Fewer and fewer people referred to biblical precedents, interpreted life’s events in terms of the Christian doctrine, or believed in the literal veracity of the scriptural accounts of creation, resurrection, and original sin, among many other things. The Christian solution to the Axial predicament was showing signs of age.81
But the predicament itself—the sense of standing back and looking beyond—was not going anywhere. God was not dead. Most lax, lapsed, and iconoclastic Christians seemed to assume that the hope for salvation would outlive the failure of the prophecy. The Second Temple Jews had rejected their would-be Messiahs (Theudas, John, and Jesus, among many others) and continued to wait—and wait, and wait. Those few who had accepted Jesus as the son of God did not lose hope even after he died without any of his predictions coming to pass. Millions of their followers, unmoved by the repeated postponement of the prophecy, had continued to wait for his return and the millennium of his rule. In the seventeenth, and especially in the eighteenth century, some of them had concluded that the millennium would happen by itself and that Jesus would not need to come except at the very end, to sum things up. In the late eighteenth, and especially in the nineteenth century, a new breed of prophets and lawgivers left Jesus out altogether without feeling compelled to change the plot. Providence had become history, progress, evolution, revolution, transcendence, laws of nature, or positive change, but the outcome remained the same. As the speculative geologist and William III’s chaplain Thomas Burnet wrote in 1681, “If we would have a fair view and right apprehensions of Natural Providence, we must not cut the chains of it too short, by having recourse, without necessity, either to the First Cause, in explaining the origins of things, or to Miracles, in explaining particular effects.” Through their own efforts, humans would find “the Scheme of all humane affairs lying before them: from the Chaos to the last period…. And this being the last Act and close of all humane affairs, it ought to be the more exquisite and elaborate: that it may crown the work, satisfie the Spectators, and end in a general applause.”82
The Enlightenment (descended, like Burnet, from the marriage of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution), produced several exquisite and elaborate drafts of the last act. Turgot proved the inevitability of human progress toward total perfection by demonstrating the historical consistency of technological and moral improvement, its obvious acceleration in recent years, its stead
y spread outside Europe, and its codification in the unimpeachable language of mathematics. The Christian theodicy problem was solved not so much by God’s retirement from active duty as through the discovery of history’s invisible hand: “The ambitious ones themselves in forming the great nations have contributed to the design of Providence, the progress of enlightenment, and consequently to the increase of the happiness of the human species, a thing which did not at all interest them. Their passions, their very rages, have led them without their knowing where they were going.”83
Providence, like the wealth of nations, was the wondrous sum total of countless blind egoisms. Just as the apocalypse required the presence of the Antichrist and his demonic army, the “progress of enlightenment” required the passions and rages of ambitious humans. Once reason had triumphed, however, the passions and rages would become not only unnecessary but, by definition, impossible. Reason would reign supreme as the self-perpetuating cycle of self-understanding and self-improvement. Condorcet, Turgot’s pupil and biographer, developed the scheme further by equating Providence with history, calling history a science, converting a godless theodicy into a historical dialectic (according to which every retrograde undertaking objectively produces its opposite), and arguing that the scientific inevitability of perfection did nothing to diminish the pleasure and duty of accelerating its approach.84
The Jacobins, who arrested Condorcet as he tried to flee Paris in 1794, believed that they could accelerate its approach all by themselves and that the present generation would not pass away until all these things had happened. The much abbreviated road to perfection lay through virtue, which, in Robespierre’s formulation, stood for “the love of the fatherland and the high-minded devotion that resolves all private interests into the general interest.” To attain virtue was “to tread underfoot vanity, envy, ambition, and all the weaknesses of petty souls,” so that the only passions left would be “the horror of tyranny and the love of humanity” (fatherland and humanity being, in the final analysis, one and the same thing). “We wish, in a word, to fulfill the intentions of nature and the destiny of man, realize the promises of philosophy, and acquit providence of a long reign of crime and tyranny.”85
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