Imagining the End: Visions of

fin de siècle 

in modern Western cultures, acknowledge such a centennial

renewal. On a smaller scale, celebrating the beginning of  a new year in most

cultures conveys a sense of  cyclical renewal. The Persian celebration of  the

Nowruz at the vernal equinox, for instance, commemorates seasonal renewal

as a token of  the millennial turn.

Millennialism and other forms of  apocalyptic calendaric hence appear to

be inherent to all Middle Eastern religions. It may be argued that they are far

more essential for the continuity of  the sacred and its perpetual renewal than

our modern utilitarian notion of  linear time and the concept of  progress.

Time cycles thus may be seen as regulatory means of  placing utopian and

eschatological aspirations, and whatever is associated with the Beginning and

the End, within a humanly conceivable time-frame. Those who sifted through

the sacred text for evidence of  the End, laboured over the esoteric methods

of  discovering the encoded message, and subjected themselves and their

followers to a rigorous course of  abstinence, penitence and social exclusion,

viewed the certainty of  such calendaric calculations as indispensable and

indisputable. For them the millennial turn (and other forms of  calendaric

cycles) had a momentary urgency, and the potential to actualize apocalyptic

aspirations. These individuals and communities, by taking upon themselves

the divine charge of  bringing closer the hour of  the End, attempt to fulfil the

conditions scripted in the text. In an impregnated millennial momentum,

common to all apocalyptic trends, a crucial shift occurs from dormant aspira-

tions to vigilant ambitions. This turning point invariably pertains to crossing

a psychological barrier – one which divides adherence to the established belief

system from an experience of  rebirth – and in turn discovering a communal

identity with like-minded individuals.

Playing an active part in temporalizing the apocalyptic scenario, the par-

ticipants view their role, and that of  their opponents, as divinely ordained

though not entirely devoid of  human initiatives and strategies. This curious

mix of  the scripted and the improvised, the providential design and its human

deciphering, is germane to most apocalyptic currents. It stands to determine

the nature of  their unravelling, whether peaceful and ‘optimistic’, radical and

destructive, or more often a combination of  the two. Yet in all instances an

urgency for arriving at the divine judgment, salvation and millennial bliss

remains the ultimate goal. In the visions of  the End we observe the ideals of

generations, utopian dreams and nightmares, fanatical obsessions with provid-

ential plan, and prospect for a regressive or a progressive future; a mirror to

societies’ innate fears and aspirations.

Predictably, millennial visions frequently contrasted with prevailing legal,

theological and even pietistic norms of  their time. Even more so, they were

in conflict with the authorities, religious and temporal, who represented these

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5

Introduction

norms or served as their guardians. The history of  millenarianism in all

Western religions is suffused with, using a Weberian concept, clashes between

priests and prophets. Yet precisely this antinomian quality of  the apocalyptic

experience, even in its speculative and tangential manifestation, brings to bear

an imaginative alternative to the sanctified dogma. Whether crude and naïve

at their inception or fully developed and articulated, these trends sought

creative directions untenable to prevailing theology, if  not altogether pro-

hibited by it. Yet not all millennial trends were forward-looking in their

doctrinal disposition or inclusive in their social message. Moreover, some

mystics and theologians, even philosophers, who were not overtly millenarian

in their recognized thinking, at times subscribed to millennial paradigms to

put across their most speculative, controversial and utopian thoughts. Covert

millennialism, for the greater part, still remains unexplored. Engagements of

these speculative millennialists, overt or covert, did not, however, exclude a

vast array of  those individuals labelled as crackpots, eccentrics and fanatics,

those who crowded the history of  popular apocalypticism. Nor can one fail

to notice at times in the same millennial environment, contrasts and com-

promises of  glaring magnitude. A not so subtle coexistence of  the mundane

and the sublime defined many apocalyptic quests. An uneasy marriage of

anger, violence and intolerance with peace and acumen, of  naïveté and

demagogy with sophistication and creativity, and of  folk beliefs with venerable

erudition, characterizes the visionary ground upon which millennial edifices

were often built.

Contradictions aside, in their morally sharpened worldview, millenarians

reject the legalistic and ritualistic strategies for salvation as offered by religious

authorities (though they often do incorporate the mystical and the ascetic

ways). In their effort to save the world from evil, millennialists often demand

total justice, material plenty and, at times, liberation from the yoke of  religious

or secular law by seeking an end to the prevailing order. In their estimation,

such an order equates with absolute evil for its presumed corruption, injustice

and the decadence that it has brought upon God’s community.

Cycles and the Advent of the Messiah

A unifying motif  in speculative millennialism, and a converging point of  the

absolute and the relative in this mode of  thinking, is the concept of  cyclical

renovation. Imagining the End, whether a literal or allegorical annihilation of

the physical world, necessitates a chaotic jolt to facilitate a new Beginning.

Millennial currents, except perhaps for the most ‘pessimistic’ and/or doc-

trinally inarticulate, subscribe to one form or another of  cyclical rebirth so as

to place the convulsions of  the End in a broader, and humanly more tolerable,

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6

Imagining the End

scheme. Such apocalyptic deconstruction is not an entirely aimless or nihilistic

process. Though it often reflects the violent aspirations of  the persecuted and

the deprived, it also guarantees the continuity of  the human race in celestial

or terrestrial forms, be it the timeless bliss of  an otherworldly paradise or in

the post-apocalyptic reality. Such reality adheres to postponed prophecies

and anticipation but also may attempt to build a earthly community on the

perceived celestial model.

Inevitably, all apocalyptic currents subscribe to some form of  symbolism,

for it is difficult, even for strict literalists, not to read some level of  allegory

into the admonishing prophecies of  the Hebrew Bible, the terrifying imagery

of  the Book of  Revelation, or the warnings of  the Qur'an and the 

hadith

 (the

words and deeds of  the Prophet). At least in early Christianity, even St

Augustine’s post-millennial doctrine, which denied the possible occurrence

of  an earthly apocalypse, could not be argued without resorting to some

metaphorical device. Yet literal interpretations of  the End are more likely to

adhere narrowly to a sequence of  prophesied events and to identify all heroes

and villains in an apocalyptic scenario. Symbolic interpretations of  the End,

in contrast, are more likely to acquire a historical perspective, reading a hidden

moral drama behind the textual description and seeking an imaginative, and

even progressive, view of  the future. Here the End paradigm is consciously

employed to justify a doctrinal break with the existing ‘orthodoxy’. The

divinely consecrated orthodoxies, whether the church, the 

shari'a

, or the

Talmudic law, are considered timeless and eternal and cannot be perceived as

terminable except with the occurrence of  an apocalyptic End.

The theme of  progression (or regression), associated with symbolic in-

terpretation of  the apocalyptic, views cyclical phases of  human history as

purposeful movements in time in either forwards or backwards directions.

The metaphor commonly employed in the apocalyptic literature, such as in

Zoroastrianism, is that of  a tree, reflecting both a seasonal cycle and a gradual

growth at the turn of  a each cycle, hence spiral turns. The effectiveness of

the tree metaphor lies in the fact that movement in time could be seen either

as a process of  maturation and strength or, alternatively, as regression towards

eventual, though distant, demise. In either case, this spiral movement in time

was distinct from the notion of  immutable cycles upheld by some ancient

Mesopotamian, or Egyptian, cosmologies whereby the eternal renewal of  the

time-cycle does not result in any progression or regression. The myth of

the four-branched tree in the Book of  Daniel, as discussed by John J. Collins

(Chapter 



), and its Zoroastrian and Greek versions, mourns the eclipse of

a golden age, symbolized by the golden branch, to be followed in later cycles

by depreciated ages of  silver, bronze (or iron) and clay. Such conception of

time, presumably representing metallurgical revolutions of  the ancient times,

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7

Introduction

denotes nostalgia for a golden past, contempt for the degenerate present, and

a gloomy future. This regressive view of  history, however, is not entirely

devoid of  potential for a dynamic, and even forward-looking, future. The end

to the age of  clay eventually comes with conflagration of  the entire material

world and reconstruction of  the golden age. As late as in the Bab’s 

Bayan 

in

nineteenth-century Iran, we encounter the ‘tree of  the truth’ conceptualizing

his progressive revelation within the context of  past and future prophetic

cycles.

The act of  cosmic reconstruction revolves around the figure of  a human

saviour. The rebirth (