#millenarians

[tshidar]

glowy eyes practice 👁️

[dust-it-off-uwu]

[setnet]

thinking about... walking back from mordor. this is a personal shorthand for a lot of things, but it mainly relates to the question of what comes after. so the dark lord is defeated, so the war is won, what now?

In a literal sense, sam and frodo don't walk back from mordor. They're rescued and airlifted to safety and healing. they don't have to do the whole ugly slog across the polluted lands in reverse. the eagles are deux ex machina in that sense, but it doesn't feel unearned after frodo and sam have gone to the brink of their own destruction in destroying the ring.

but in a more psychological sense, frodo and sam spend the rest of their lives walking back from mordor, where mordor is the shadow of the ring and the wounds they experienced from their journey and from carrying it.

the scouring of the shire is about walking back from mordor, when the shadow of mordor comes to your door. it's about undoing the pointless and cruel rules imposed by sharkey-saruman and frodo keeping the hobbits from killing surrendered enemies.

I'm fascinated by the after. maybe it comes of reading history, I don't know. few of the sff books I read seem to be similarly fascinated. authors don't seem to be so keen on the hard slog of rebuilding as they are on the revolution.

[agentfascinateur]

"Allies for Armageddon"...

Israel first became central to evangelical eschatology four centuries ago, when Protestant theologians, especially those of a millenarian bent, seized upon very specific passages about the end times.

...

And then, if the prophets were right, some pretty unpleasant things would happen: A false messiah known as the Antichrist would take over Jerusalem and install himself as the savior before inaugurating the Tribulation, a seven-year period of death and destruction, with most Jews perishing. Finally, Jesus would return to Earth, overthrowing the pretender and inaugurating a thousand-year reign of peace on Earth. By the 1970s and '80s, a growing number of prominent evangelicals, including Falwell, made trips to Israel, eager to get in on the ground floor of the coming apocalypse. At first, the Israelis paid them little mind, but Prime Minister Menachem Begin quickly realized that the religious right had become increasingly influential in Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.

So to arrive at a biblical moment, these lunatics meanwhile sacrifice the blood of tens of thousands at the altar of religion.

It all rather sounds very pagan to me.

[recursive-rupture]

Nuclear Apocalypse (millenarianism destroyed)

"The atomic menace has completely overturned our sensible horizons by casting us into a world susceptible to being annihilated at any moment. [...] the eventuality of nuclear destruction has struck out imaginations, damaging the unreality that animates it and with it our thirst for freedom. The nuclear has succeeded in seizing the desire for the end of the world, which, in a certain sense, embodies the fascination and terror that is felt in front of a freedom without limits and which from time immemorial has given imagination its excess, and reducing it to a mere technical possibility at the disposal of power. How can we forget that up until the middle of the last century, this very desire for the end of the world had fueled the thoughts of most radicals, forming the sensible source of an unlimited critical energy? And how can we not see that the very possibility of nuclear annihilation deprives the imagination of this infinite perspective?"

The End of the World, Mare Almani

[mikhalsarah]

Possibly the best thing, along with its companion piece Reality Honks Back, that I have read in some time. And just as I'm reading about all the millennials sterilizing themselves at the behest of the modern-day Malthusians, this pops up on my browser newsfeed

[gynoidgearhead]

[Image caption: reply by OP reading "@landcrowe This is how you know the Rapture is a Protestant idea bc no Catholic would ever argue that they'll go through /less/ suffering." End caption.]

Pointing out that the Rapture as a concept is a little less than two hundred years old - it's originally from the 1833 - that really buries the lede on how recent it is. Bc the modern evangelical take on the Rapture is from a book published in 1970. That predicted the Rapture would happen no later than 1988.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

We will draw our lesson from lost battles. Since the victory, the spirit of pleasure has won out over the spirit of sacrifice. People claimed more than they served. We wanted to spare the effort; today we ate facing misfortune.

"In this period of profound crisis, Marshal Pétain might appear to be a prophet as defined by Max Weber: opposed to the sacerdotal body like the extraordinary to the ordinary and deriving his authority from the correspondence between the offer of religious service and the public’s religious demand, the prophet derives his charismatic legitimacy from the fact that “he brings to the level of discourse representations, feelings and aspirations that existed before him but in a implicit, semiconscious, or unconscious state.” Such prophetic discourse encourages “reinterpretive perceptions that import all the expectations of the receivers into the message.” Women’s return to motherhood and to the home as home-makers belong to these semiconscious aspirations that would find in the Marshal’s words a continuous return to the sources tailor-made to fit their expectations. The relationship between the Marshal and his predestined public is a relationship of believing expectation, an effective force that, according to Freud, is at work in miraculous cures. The opposition between the spirit of pleasure and the spirit of sacrifice is one of these prophetic enunciations in which each believer can recognize his or her rancor and invest his or her ethical-political hopes.

The Marshal’s prophecies inscribe the analysis of the defeat in the contrition/redemption scheme and deliver the country over to a veritable “hypnosis of punishment,” to use Marc Bloch’s expression. The founding period of the National Revolution is thus placed under the sign of expiation and redemption. For Yves Durand, “This abusive extension of the Christian notion of individual conversion to the profane fate of a collectivity stems from an apocalyptic millennialism that gives the catastrophe redemptive value.”’ Indeed, in this representation of disorder and the return to order, of social decadence and regeneration, it was the return to the “real,” to “natural” communities and to “millennial” balances that organized the social philosophy of the regime. Women occupied a strategic place in this representation: the declining birthrate was seen as the symptom and the cause of the national “decadence,” the family as the basic “social cell,” the division of masculine and feminine “duties” as the guarantor of “organic” solidarity, the recognition of “natural” male and female aptitudes as the basis of “legitimate” social hierarchies, women’s return to the home as a return to cyclical time, the time of seasons, of nature, of what is biological in opposition to the chaos engendered by “egotistic” individualism, the artificial, and the democratic “lie.” The “eternal feminine” is made to serve contrition and redemption.

Perceived through its attempts to reconstruct femininity, the National Revolution seems to possess numerous characteristics that make it similar to a millenary movement. A collective quest for salvation against the backdrop of catastrophe under the guidance of an inspired prophet, millenarianism combines a representation of time that is both historical (impending denouement) and mythic: cyclical and eternally repetitive time. The return to a golden age is accompanied by a process of inclusion and exclusion that designates the elect and the damned. In these types of movements, the world’s return to order may be based on a return to a rigid sexual division of aptitudes, of “natural” duties and places specific to each sex.” The hypnotic power of punishment, the anchoring in collective guilt, the messianic hope for a new order built on trial, remorse and sacrifice are all elements of this historical situation that encouraged the return of archaic mythic conceptions.

These millenary traits did not spring forth from nothing in the French society of 1940; they were embodied and borne by social agents that had a common interest in the production of the goods of salvation. Men of letters, men of the Church, and men of science found in the eschatology of the National Revolution a fertile terrain for developing and systematizing a radicalized expression of their vision of the return to order and of the foundations of this order that included the sexual division of the social world on the basis of “natural” inequalities that are eternally established and biologically founded and not culturally or historically constructed. One of the major political impacts of the ideology of the “eternal feminine” was its rallying effect. By proposing that the country return to a sexual division of the social world founded on the idea of an eternal “natural” difference between the sexes, the National Revolution launched a request for proposals answered without delay by all those who, for ideological or strategic reasons, had long produced the “eternal feminine.”

The conflagration of the National Revolution, its character as successful prophetism, was due to the preexistence of multiple dispersed centers that, with the help of the crisis, joined forces. Silencing the adversaries of the past through the establishment of the authoritarian state that immediately broke with democracy permitted the harsh and unanimous expression of a vision of the social world in which feminine destiny was placed under the sign of submission and resignation. The unanimity of the National Revolution in this regard itself needs to be examined, as it is the sign of a political phenomenon of immediate, prereflective adherence, a consequence of a monopolistic situation in which the safeguards have given way and which, as a result, is ripe for any raised stakes and induration. But this unanimity must not make us forget that the processes of adherence are the product of a long history."

- Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. Durham: Duke University Press, 3-5.

[cultural-christianity]

A theodicy may, at first, be established by projecting compensation for the anomic phenomena into a future understood in this-worldly terms.

When the proper time comes (typically, as a result of some divine intervention), the sufferers will be consoled and the unjust will be punished. In other words, the suffering and the injustice of the present are explained with reference to their future nomization. Under this category, of course, must be placed the different manifestations of religious messianism, millenarianism, and eschatology.

These manifestations, as one would expect, are historically associated with times of crisis and disaster, naturally or socially caused. For example, the sufferings of the Black Death gave birth to a number of violent millenarian movements, but so did the social displacements brought on by the Industrial Revolution. “The Lord is coming!”—this has been a rallying cry in times of acute affliction over and over again.

— Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy

[tshidar]

[dust-it-off-uwu]

she's so young and a scientist already! :0

[russia-libertaire]

Revolutionary apocalypse

"All these [populist] thinkers share one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once the reign of evil - autocracy, exploitation, inequality - is consumed in the fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its proper perfection. This great Utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated human nature, was a vision which the populists shared with Godwin and Bakunin, Marx and Lenin. Its heart is the pattern of sin and death and resurrection - of the road to the earthly paradise, the gates of which will open only if men find the one true way and follow it. Its roots lie deep in the religious imagination of mankind [...] it had strong affinities with the faith of the Russian Old Believers."

'A Remarkable Decade', in Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin

[fem-lit]

Most cults in the United States are millenarian, revolving around a struggle between saint and sinner. Activity in the cults focuses on purifying preparations for Judgment Day. Common behaviors are trance, paranoia, hysteria, and possession.

Millenarianism is attractive to marginal people, who “have no political voice, who lack effective organization, and who do not have at their disposal regular, institutionalized means of redress.” The cults offer “rites of passage in a society where traditional institutions seem to be failing.”

Millenarian cults depict a dangerous, wicked outer world. The Saved, like beauties, tend to be generic, faceless. A sense of loss of control leads the faithful into purification rituals while they await the Great Day.

The postmillenarian world is a paradise that is equally vague—“When I lose this weight…” “It is assumed,” writes [Willa] Appel of millenarian cultists, “that merely having the power that has been so long denied will bring happiness.”

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth, Ch. 3: Religion - The Cult of the Fear of Fat

[tenth-sentence]

Shaw's positive eugenics distilled Galton's chiliastic goal – the elimination of original sin by getting rid biologically of the original sinner – to a socially imperative essence.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[lieux-de-memoire]

Darwin, John. "Orientations" in After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall if Global Empires, 1400-2000. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.