Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [194]
The apocalyptic element (revealing the “end of time”) in Messianic movements is not explicitly political. But its vision of a future ideal state of societal affairs always implicitly involves the destruction of the current evil political order. The promised, new social order is always an idealization, a utopia, often an imagined and recaptured past state of perfection (“paradise,” as the Western term often figures it) that will be recreated in the future.46
Deprivation is what fuels these movements. But the source of the deprivation is inherent in the colonial situation itself. The colonial or imperial power evinces a great many superiorities to the native culture, despite the imperium’s distinct moral deficiencies from the native point of view. Yet, at the same time, the most religiously pious in the society, those who ought to be most favored by God, are materially and culturally disadvantaged in the imperial system. This creates cognitive dissonance, another kind of deprivation. In a way, though it is usually seen as a threatened disconfirmation of the native religion. When the goal cannot be achieved in this life, the rewards can be transferred to the next.
The Destiny of the Dead Sea Scroll Community
THE ESSENES had a mysterious ending. We do not know whether they remained quiescent or took an active, revolutionary role. The settlement at Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, as their arrowheads and the distinct evidence of catastrophic burning amply show. Was this because they fought the Romans after welcoming the revolt of 66 CE as the end they were expecting? We do not know. Certainly, their documents were warlike, though they themselves had no active role in the final battle, except to maintain their ritual purity. We have found Qumran writings including “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness” at Masada, the last stronghold of the zealots. This certainly argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a goad to revolt. Or did they remain in their passive, ascetic mode of resistance to Roman rule right to end? Were they just in the wrong place at the wrong time? At this moment, we do not know. We do know, however, that they were tortured and martyred by the Romans during the revolt against Rome, who must have thought them a threat. Josephus tells us as much.
One thing is not puzzling, though. The metaphor of resurrection as arising from sleep came from Isaiah 26:19 and the way it was instantiated came from the visions in Daniel. Not only does resurrection itself seem to be like arising from the sleep of death, but the knowledge that resurrection will take place also comes from sleep, from dream visions. That is, it comes from religiously interpreted states of consciousness. This raises the issue of how Scripture and altered states of consciousness interact in these sectarians. To find out how Scripture could effect later visions, we must investigate the nature of ecstatic experience itself.
Religiously Interpreted States of Consciousness
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Religiously Interpreted States of Consciousness
Prophecy, Self-Consciousness, and Life After Death
Prophecy as Justification for Religious Innovation
THERE ARE hints of ancient Israelite popular views of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. But a detailed notion of a hereafter was banished for so long from Biblical literature that when it appeared for the first time, in the prophecy of Daniel, its belated presence required special revelatory authority:
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to