Imagining the End: Visions of

zeitgeist 

and the 

endgeist. 

As in other

nature-orientated cosmologies, the eschatological narrative of  the final events

commemorates a seasonal cycle. Despite much variation, this powerful motif

relies on celestial and agricultural imagery to convey a sense of  continuity in

the cycle of  life and death, an essential feature of  any enduring socio-religious

cosmology. In the salvation religions of  the Middle East the binary of  the

Beginning and the End paradigms is particularly powerful since it generally

functions as a strategy to resolve the tension engendered by the problem of

theodicy. The struggle between good and evil, which has endured since the

dawn of  creation, will culminate in a destructive final battle in which the

victory of  the forces of  good over evil will be followed by divine judgment

and the reward of  a timeless bliss.

1

Unravelling the mysteries of  the End paradigm has long been the pre-

occupation of  believers whether as commentators of  the encoded messages

of  the scriptures or, more often, as human agents called upon to realize the

scenario of  the End. In any given situation, the millennialists tend to engage

in some form of  temporalizing the past prophecies and demonstrate the

imminence, or near imminence, of  the End at their own time and place.

Applying prophecies to contemporary settings, needless to say, is distinct as

much from the modern critical reading of  the scriptures as it is from the

ahistorical timelessness usually attached to the prophecies by the ‘authoritat-

ive’ exegeses, be it the Augustinian Church dogma, the Talmudic halakha,

or the consensus of  the Muslim 'ulama. By denying altogether the apoca-

lyptic meaning of  the prophecies (or what is considered by millenarians as

prophecies), the authoritative readings often relegate these prophecies to an

unspecified distant future far from this-worldly access and safely curtailed

by implausible preconditions. This is indeed the rationale behind the prohibi-

tion shared by all ‘orthodox’ traditions to ‘set the time’ of  the End, an

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3

Introduction

obvious precaution against the millenarian textual subversion and urge for

temporality.

To temporalize the prophecies and other scriptural evidence, whether literal

or allegorical, the millennialists have employed various strategies to make their

evidence announce the anticipated End and the events preceding it. The act

of  prognosticating the End necessitates a preoccupation with time reckoning

and calendaric. Equally common is the wide usage of  the occult sciences,

especially numerology and esoteric knowledge of  the letters. To the chiliastic

adept, sacred dates and deadlines encoded in the verses of  any given scripture,

and in the sayings of  prophets and saints (as well as in non-textual evidence),

were mysteries urgently awaiting decipherment. Indeed, the whole material

world, with its seasonal changes and natural and human calamities, was seen

as a text which is to be read with esoteric methods mastered by millennialists

through rigorous study, mortification, intuition, dreams and mystical ex-

periences.

The alternative reality which emerged out of  the temporalizing endeavours,

beneath the apparent reality accepted and enshrined by authoritative exegeses,

was particularly apt for cyclical reckoning. Both centennial and millennial,

these cyclical courses were based on conventional calendaric and its variants.

More often they were calculated from primal dates in a sacred text. Sacred

chronology, especially in creation narratives, was favoured or even more

specific dates such as those present in the Book of  Daniel, the assumed date

for the birth of  Jesus, the 

Hijra

 of  the Islamic Prophet, or the assumed

Occultation of  the Twelfth Imam in Shi'ism. In particular the notion of

millennium, and its correlation to the events of  the End, held a firm grip

over the apocalyptic calendaric in all Western religions. As a unit of  time

reckoning, a millennium is a Babylonian invention. But it was probably in the

Zoroastrian tradition of  Iran that the millennium (

hazarag

) first earned an

apocalyptic significance. It connoted the duration of  a 



,



-year cycle in the

finite battle between the forces of  good and evil, a cyclical struggle which

shapes the entire human history and will eventually end in the triumph of  the

Lord Wisdom and his associates over Ahriman. The events of  the End

therefore came to be linked in Zoroastrianism, as in the Hebrew tradition,

and later in other apocalyptic literature of  the Middle East, with 



,



-year

periods, which were either explicitly or implicitly cyclical or, as in the

conventional Christian apocalyptics, a one-time occurrence leading to an

irrevocable End. Respectively, the centennial turns, as decimal denominations

of  the millennium, were often associated with temporary lapses of  order. The

spirit of  decadence that had fallen upon humanity was to be rejuvenated with

the turn of  a new century. The Islamic notion of  the ‘renovator of  the

beginning of  the century’ (i.e. of  the 

Hijra

 calendar) and perhaps even the

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4

Imagining the End

idea of