Imagining the End: Visions of

fin de siècle 

at

the turn of  the twentieth century was viewed by Western intellectual and

artistic communities with a mix of  despair and optimism. Their fears, more

than their hopes, were soon to be realized through the horrors of  the new

century. As it turned out, the twentieth century was better equipped than any

other time in human history to simulate a catastrophic End. The artistic and

literary sensibilities, as reflected in the 

decadence

 mood of  the time

,

 were

highly prophetic of  the imminent calamities. The two highly destructive world

wars were followed by the fearsome anxieties of the nuclear age, the ideological

revolutions with poignant utopian programmes, and with authoritarian regimes

to brutally implement them. They all resuscitated apocalyptic paradigms.

The victims of  many acts of  genocide and mass violence in the twentieth

century perceived their own experiences in apocalyptic terms. Most notably,

the European Jewry and other victims of  the Holocaust, placed in apocalyptic

terms their experiences of  rounding ups, killings, concentration camps, gas

chambers, dislocation and exile. And ironically, so did the Nazi perpetrators

of  the Holocaust. They, too, pursued an apocalyptic End to their crimes of

the Final Solution, a necessity to arrive at the pure and mighty utopia of  the

‘thousand-year Reich’. It was as though this most harrowing episode in

contemporary history epitomized for generations to come an ultimate

apocalyptic encounter between the vulnerable, the weak and the defenceless

on the one hand, and the diabolic might of  political ideologies on the other.

Whether secular or otherwise in its origins, the anti-Semitism of  the Nazi era

took root in a long tradition of  such sentiments in millenarian Europe of  the

Middle Ages and early modern times.

Desire for the absolute and the final through the sacrifice of  expendable

minorities, a programme of  chiliastic scale, was shared by other ideologically-

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17

Introduction

driven leaders of  the twentieth century. Stalin’s classless paradise of  the

collective communes, Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward aiming rapidly to

transform rural China into an industrial utopia, the Cambodian genocide

perpetrated by Pol Pot and his associates to restore the state of  peasant

purity, and Khomeini’s fierce imagining of  pristine Islam through revolution

and an atrocious war, all qualify as modern apocalyptic interludes. Mao

capitalized on the Chinese rich millennial tradition to present himself  as a

messianic prophet whose launching of  a Marxist revolution, the Great Leap

and the Cultural Revolution were necessary stages on the way to a millennial

utopia. Khomeini relied on a long Shi'i Iranian millennial legacy to portray

himself  as the Imam, only a precious step away from the Mahdi, to demonize

the Shah as a pharaonic power, the old elite as idol-worshippers, and his

greatest ideological enemy, the United States, as the Great Satan.

As a revolutionary ideology Marxism fully accommodated millennial aspira-

tions. The doctrine of  historical determinism offered a certain inevitability

parallel to apocalyptic prophecies in any religious traditions. It promised an

egalitarian paradise of  plenty and of  freedom of  choice in which the divine

will has been substituted with dialectical materialism and its progressive course

in history. In articulating a utopian future, Marxism relied as much on

German philosophical idealism with its roots in Protestant millennialism as

on the socialist idealism of  Saint-Simon and other nineteenth-century utopian

prophets conscious of  their Christian millennial past. Particularly in the

writings of  the young Marx, and before the days of  ‘scientific’ socialism, a

passionate tone of  millennial utopianism is audible even though he sharply

dismissed most other socialist trends of  his time as philistine.

If  anything in the Western bloc, and especially in the United States, could

have matched the millenarian zeal of  the communist revolutionaries, it was

the anti-communist apocalyptic rhetoric of  the Cold War and its corollary,

the fear of  nuclear exchange. The imagery of  Doomsday, Armageddon and

other biblical allusions readily available in the hellfire rhetoric of  American

evangelical preachers was grafted on to science-fiction imagery of  the Evil

Empire by popular writers, film-makers, military analysts, political com-

mentators, conservative politicians, and ideologically-bent nuclear scientists.

Ironically they shared their anxieties about the impending End of  human

civilization with the advocates of  peace and coexistence. They, too, viewed the

arms race and the proliferation of  nuclear weapons as the road to an inevitable

doomsday. The fact that ancient fears and hopes could be transported so

placidly and effectively into a new setting and exploited for political and

ideological ends, or for greater coexistence, testifies to the potency of  apoca-

lyptic motifs and their endurance in the face of  a seemingly secularizing age.

In the post-Cold War era and eclipse of  ideologies (or a lull perhaps), what

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18

Imagining the End

may be called apocalyptic anxieties subsided, though they hardly dissipated

altogether. The field of  future studies surely offers a variety of  scenarios to

bring out our worst apocalyptic fears but also our precious millennial hopes.

Above all, a genuine fear of  environmental catastrophes looms large. Global

warming and depletion of  the ozone layer, deforestation, desertification and

erosion of  the topsoil, scarcity of  water resources, toxic pollution, and other

ecological hazards are possibilities as grim as a nuclear exchange and as

horrifying as the images of  the Book of  the Apocalypse. The growing eco-

nomic gap between the rich and the poor, the ‘technomania’ that reigns

supreme in the age of  electronic communication and cyberspace, and recurring

ethnic and religious conflicts, surely create an imbalance in, if  not entirely

spoiling, the vista of  new millennial hopes.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, if  the prospect of  a new millennial

discourse is on the horizon. And if  so, whether the issues addressed in an

academic context are likely to have any bearing on it. The answer is by no

means unambiguous. It is possible to suggest that the same intrinsic fears of

the unknown that in the past engendered comparable apocalyptic imagining

in Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions are still in effect, and are likely to

remain so as long as the future poses unsettling questions. Often, though,

these anxieties are less reliant, explicitly at least, on a divine agency to

intervene vengefully against evil or compassionately on the side of  the

vulnerable and the good. The responsibility for a felicitous or a disastrous

future seems to be resting more than ever on human shoulders rather than

on the dictates of  heaven. This gives a whole new meaning to the verse by

the Persian poet, Hafiz:

Heaven could carry not the entrusted pain,

My lot was the burden, me, the insane.

The experiences of  at least the past hundred years have taken the con-

fidence, and the passion, out of  the modern rationalism of  the Enlightenment

which once sneered at Christian millennialism but pursued its own millennial

happiness. Even in the prosperous and powerful West, where globalism has

become a reassuring politico-economic currency, voices of  deconstruction and

a post-modernist critique of  reason are questioning the validity of  what was

once considered sacred and definite. At least in the realm of  the humanities,

attention to new cultural discourses, of  imagining, unreason and uncertainty,

the unaccounted and the subversive, of  textual ambiguities, and of  the per-

suasiveness of  rhetorical arguments have become more prominent. A call for

an end to the conventional study of  venerable disciplines, the way they were

categorized by positivist philosophies of  the nineteenth century, may be seen

as a revolutionary discourse of  the End.

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19

Introduction

In thinking about the End, we may ask in conclusion, is apocalypticism

tied to the very basic rhetoric of  salvation religions? And if  so, as this book

attempts to demonstrate, does it hold a lasting sway over our cultural memory?

It is fair to assume that perhaps the age of  literal interpretation of  the

apocalypse, of  the horrors and hopes of  the Book of  Revelation and of  similar

texts, is at its ebb. For all but the most fervent enthusiasts and fundamentalists

on the fringe, such prophecies no longer inculcate a ‘realistic’ vision of  the

End. This is parting with a tradition of  literal imagining which endured

surprisingly long. Increasingly, however, believers have found in the allegorical

reading of  the biblical and Qur'anic prophecies, keys to the understanding of

the troubling questions of  their own times. Yet even symbolic readings of  the

apocalypse are unlikely to inspire prophetic impulses for new millenarian

movements. Beyond the religious domain, though not necessarily detached

from its memory, the paradigm of  the End and the rhetoric of  renewal seem

likely to endure for as long as there are anxieties about the moral and material

troubles ahead.

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I

Origins

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23

1

Mesopotamia and the End of Time

Benjamin R. Foster

By the mid-nineteenth century, rediscovery of  the ancient Near East had

brought to light lost cities and a wealth of  museum objects, as well as ancient

written documents. These stretched back in date long before the Bible or the

earliest known sources of  classical antiquity. The ancient languages of  Meso-

potamia and Egypt could be read with some confidence by 



.

1

 Because

events and personalities already known to European scholarship from classical

texts and the Bible were referred to in some of  these newly discovered, earlier

documents, there was a vigorous reaction, taking at first two contrary di-

rections.

Some scholars attached overweening importance to the Mesopotamian

materials in particular because they seemed older and were much more

voluminous than the Bible and came from roughly the same region of  the

world. In its fully developed form at the beginning of  the twentieth century,

the ‘Babel und Bibel’ argument held that biblical traditions, mythology,

personalities and expression essentially derived from an assumed Mesopot-

amian astral religious tradition. Even John the Baptist became a Mesopotamian

astral deity in disguise and the New Testament a late version of  the Gilgamesh

epic. Being thus secondary, biblical tradition lacked the religious authority

that Christianity and Judaism had for centuries accorded it. The extremist

forms of  this position died a deserved death by the Second World War and

are today of  only antiquarian interest.

2

A more moderate view held that the Hebrews or Israelites formed part of

a larger cultural complex known in the nineteenth century as ‘Semitic civiliza-

tions’, sharing what were then considered ‘Semitic’ traits. These included an

undeveloped thought pattern, owing to the supposed limitations of  the Semitic

languages; an intense personal approach to religion so that it dominated life

to excess, a lack of  reflective capacity, and no art.

3

 The ‘Semitic’ traits were

commonly contrasted to the Greeks’ putative excellence in all these areas, and

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24

Origins

the fashion grew of  analysing the ‘Hebraic’ and the ‘Hellenic’ elements in

European thought and belief.

4

 The Semitic hypothesis was in many respects

an updating and ostensibly scientific reworking of  a more intuitive, some

would say ‘Romantic’ approach of  the latter half  of  the eighteenth century,

exemplified, for instance, by the lucubrations of  von Herder. To him, the

Hebrew Bible was a document portraying the ‘childhood’ of  the human race;

his Semites were rather like Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses disporting

themselves at the dawn of  humanity in a sort of  Eden-like innocence.

5

 But

by the 



s the early Israelites had been converted into something like gruff

but expressive Bedouin.

6

 In short, the early Jews turned into modern Arab

nomads. The Babylonians, with their urban civilization, did not fit this picture

well; the Semitist William Wright compared the Babylonian language con-

temptuously to colloquial Arabic and may have viewed Mesopotamian culture

in somewhat the same way, as true Semites had to be nomads.

7

The consequence of  both these approaches was that ancient Mesopotamia

was viewed in the early twentieth-century academy as the earliest phase of  a

historical continuum that included the Bible, passed through Greece and

Rome and thence into the Middle Ages of  the Latin-speaking world. This

bypassed both Islam, which was considered derivative and Semitic and thus

of  no interest, and Byzantium, which was considered a kind of  perpetual

decadent imitation of  the classical world overlaid with barbarous oriental

Christianity – the true classical world lay dormant until rediscovered by Latin

Europe. Pride of  place in promoting Mesopotamia to a significant role in the

English-speaking historical world goes to James Breasted, whose ‘great white

race’ that created civilization included Europeans, the Mediterranean peoples,

and the Semites, but excluded, specifically and on what he considered good

authority, the Far East and sub-Saharan Africa.

8

 In Breasted’s time, inclusion

of  Mesopotamia in history, along with Greece and Rome, was seen as a

dramatic step forward and he was justly proud of  it, though we squirm when

we read his book today. Syria was still considered an illiterate cultural cross-

roads without much originality.

This explains why it has become normative in any inquiry to have an

ancient Near Eastern proemium, however sketchy or far-fetched the connec-

tions may seem. Even Karl Marx felt the necessity to begin his study of

human economy with the ancient Near East.

9

 More recently, Norman Cohn

has produced a couple of  chapters on ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in a

study of  the origins of  millennial thought, concluding that the Mesopo-

tamians, like the Egyptians, were incapable of  ‘imagining that the world could

ever be made perfect, and immutable in its perfection. Fantasies of  cosmos

without chaos were not for them.’

10

 Perhaps one could phrase the matter

differently; as the Assyriologist von Soden wrote about Babylonian ideas of

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25

Mesopotamia and the End of Time

divine justice, they are ‘still impressive today for their lack of  illusion and

their dispensing with facile self-deceit’.

11

The evidence for eschatology in Mesopotamia is late by the standards of

a culture that could write by the end of  the fourth millennium, for it dates

to the periods of  Achaemenid and Macedonian domination, that is, after the

last quarter of  the sixth century 



. This makes it tempting to associate

eschatological thought in Mesopotamia with discontent and protest at a new

order imposed by a seemingly invincible foreign power, as has often been

alleged for Jewish and Christian eschatology.

12

 A narrow definition of  eschato-

logical thought would concentrate on a notion of  a fixed period of  time for

human history, with a clear and identifiable end, to which was added, especially

in later Christianity, a calendrical dimension, using dates according to the

Christian era instead of  certain periods of  time (hence ‘millennialism’).

13

Another aspect of  eschatological thought, narrowly defined, is a message of

hope that good will be rewarded and evil punished, or, at least, the world will

be remade so as to justify a specific religious belief  in the face of  greater,

non-believing political and military power. In the light of  these definitions,

the Mesopotamian evidence is scanty but suggestive.

A