Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [188]
The underlying hostility and fear separating the Indian and white communities is clearly the reason that the whites made the judgment and took the action about the Ghost Dance religion that they did. This case reveals how ambiguous the character and effects of different millennial movements can be. Sometimes they can be seen and treated as pure symbol manipulation-that is, changing the language but not changing the material situation of the deprived. Other times they may be seen as the precursors to political action and violence. The reasons that one movement remains quietistic, in the realm of hope and fantasy, while another takes an activistic path to political action and violence, can only be discerned in the individual histories of each movement. Those reasons are complicated, involving the reactions not only of the sectarians, but also the reactions of colonial powers.
Melanesian Millennialism
KENELM BURRIDGE and Peter Worsley have studied the various revitalization movements that came into being in Melanesia after the Second World War.36 Millennialism has been largely ignored in studies of Biblical religion and Christian origins, though the titles of both anthropological works are quotations from the Bible.37 Few if any scholars of religion have successfully put their work to use in understanding Islamic apocalypticism. But there are important common elements uniting Hellenistic Jews with Native Americans in the nineteenth century, contemporary Melanesia and even militant Islam. All had to deal with problems of acculturation and disorganization brought on by the domination of an imperial colonial power. The two modern sets of revitalization movements-native American and recent Islamic-attempted to restore meaning and integrity to the society in the same ways that ancient Jewish society dealt with Greek culture and Roman domination: by following a prophet announcing that God or the Great Spirit would restore their society, if only they would follow special rules of moral order and religious belief.
If the causes of such movements are similar, often the movements exhibit similar characteristics. The most important similarity, perhaps, between ancient and modern apocalypticism is that both characterize time as a linear process which leads to the destruction of the evil world order that has made them suffer. For both, also, there will be an “end of days,” a decisive consummation of history. As opposed to holding an optimistic view of social and cultural progress, members of apocalyptic communities are impatient with the corrupt present, seeing it as a series of unprecedented calamities. The “end of days” is seen as a sudden, revolutionary leap into an idealized future state, when believers will finally be rewarded for their years of suffering and believing, while their oppressors and other evil infidels will be duly and justly punished.38 Consequently, these movements tend to be brief episodes in religious history. Normally the end does not occur as predicted or the hostility of the surrounding society is so great that the movements are relatively short-lived.
Deprivation
SOCIAL AND cultural “deprivation” is a common source of Messianic movements.39 But deprivation is not a simple phenomenon. Nor does deprivation itself “cause” millennialism. Severely deprived people may themselves react in different ways. And very severe crises may actually inhibit or prevent a society from producing any new ideological reaction. In seventeenth-century Jewry, when Shabbatai Zevi’s Messianic cult became so popular, it did not originate in the lands terrorized by pogroms but in lands nearby where Jews were not personally affected by the slaughters. On the other hand, they were deeply worried about the tragedies happening to Jews elsewhere, which were viewed as imperiling their security. It is not only the actual victims