Questioning the Millennium

by Stephen Jay Gould

  But nothing can shake the faith of a true believer either. The major group of remaining Millerites argued that Miller had set the right date but had read Daniel incorrectly. God did not wish to end the world on that day, but only to begin his examination of all the names in the Book of Life—a tedious and time-consuming task that would end at some unstated future moment with the appearance of Christ for his millennial reign. Meanwhile, the Millerites held that certain practices—particularly the observance of Saturday, the seventh and last day of the week, rather than Sunday—would hasten this process and speed the Second Coming.

  The modern Seventh Day Adventists, and other smaller adventist groups, trace their origins to Miller’s movement, while not following all his precepts. Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—perhaps the largest contemporary and forthrightly millenarian Christian group—was also strongly influenced by Adventist doctrines. The Witnesses regard Satan as currently in control, with secular powers unwittingly under his domination—hence the refusal of believers to salute the flag or undertake military service, the subject of several Supreme Court decisions in our century. They regard Daniel and Revelation as a hidden timetable for human history and await the coming battle of Armageddon and the inception of Christ’s reign. Russell himself thought that Christ would begin his “invisible return” in 1874 and stage his true Second Coming in 1914—a good year for assassinations of archdukes and inceptions of world wars, but not for the full blast of Armageddon! However, and once again, the failure of a clear expectation did not derail the passion of true believers, who still ring my doorbell nearly every weekend.

  I don’t want to make too strict an equation between millenarian belief and social misery or marginality—for human ingenuity, and our self-serving propensities, cut too wide a swath to allow such a potent argument only one mode of conceivable action. People in power have also been known to invoke an apocalyptic “gotcha” when the unusual occasion arises. Most notably in recent times, James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s unlamented secretary of the interior, a deeply conservative thinker and prominent member of the Pentecostal Assembly of God, stated that we need not worry unduly about environmental deterioration (and should therefore not invest much governmental time, money, or legislation in such questions) because the world will surely end before any deep damage can be done.

  Apocalypse of Saint John: Babylon Falls on the Demons (1363–1400), Nicolas Bataille. Tapestry. (illustration credit 1.3)

  Nonetheless, the general correlation of apocalyptic yearnings with earthly poverty and social disenfranchisement surely holds—and extends far beyond purely conventional and western Christian sources. The fusion of Christian millennialism with traditional beliefs of conquered (and despairing) peoples has often led to particularly incendiary, and tragic, results.* In Africa, for example, several failed revolts and stillborn movements can be traced to an explicitly Christian millenarian inspiration. John Iliffe (Africans, Cambridge University Press, 1995) attributes the major defeat of the South African Xhosa people to a natural disaster enhanced by a millenarian response:

  Xhosa tried to incorporate Christian ideas into their cosmology.… Mission teaching encouraged this, as did the fact that some Christian ideas had radical implications, above all Christian eschatology. Its power was displayed in 1857, at a time of cattle disease and white expansion, when prophets persuaded many Xhosa to kill their cattle and abandon cultivation because their ancestors were to be reborn with finer cattle and drive the Europeans back into the sea. Perhaps one-third of Xhosa died and the Cape Government seized the opportunity to destroy their society, alienating more than half their land and admitting at least 22,150 of them to work in the colony.

  Similarly, the most famous of early twentieth-century African revolts, the ill-fated and brutally suppressed 1915 rebellion of John Chilembwe in Nyasaland (now Malawi), had a millenarian basis. Chilembwe had been the servant of Joseph Booth, a fundamentalist missionary who took him to the United States, where he received a degree from a black theological seminary before returning to Africa. Following Chilembwe’s execution, his aged mentor Booth lamented this common outcome of an all-too-Christian theme (whatever the inconsistency with other threads of Christian teaching):

  Poor kindhearted Chilembwe, who wept with and for the writer’s feverstricken and apparently dying child; nursed and fed the father with a woman’s tenderness during ten weeks of utter prostration; wept, labored with, and soothed the dying hours of my sweet son John Edward (18 years old) … Yes, dear Chilembwe, gladly would I have died by my countryman’s shot, to have kept thee from the false path of slaying. (Quoted in Harry Langworthy’s The Life of Joseph Booth, published by CLAIM, the Christian Literature Association in Malawi, Blantyre, Malawi, 1996)

  One of the most poignant and tragic of all events in American history, the tale of the last major massacre of Indians by white soldiers—the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee—arose as a direct, if unnecessary and clearly avoidable, outcome of a fascinating millenarian episode. As R. A. Smith documents in his Moon of Popping Trees: The Tragedy at Wounded Knee and the End of the Indian Wars (University of Nebraska Press, 1975), millenarian movements had arisen from time to time among Christianized Indians throughout the United States and Canada. Tavibo, a Northern Paiute from Nevada, had assisted the prophet-dreamer Wodziwob in spreading the Ghost Dance ritual to tribes in California and Oregon during the late 1860s and early 1870s, a movement that had faded after Wodziwob’s death in 1872.

  Tavibo’s son Wovoka (1856–1932) was adopted, at about age fourteen, by the family of a white rancher, David Wilson. Wovoka, now renamed Jack Wilson, became interested in Christianity through the family’s nightly Bible readings and general piety. He then studied with Mormon missionaries stationed among the Paiutes and spent some time with the Indian Shaker Church. He developed a potent mixture of Christian apocalyptic beliefs with Ghost Dance lore. Then, during a solar eclipse in early 1889, he experienced a vision of death and had a direct conversation with God, who ordered him to teach the Ghost Dance and its millennial message to his people. Wovoka proclaimed that if the Indians separated themselves from the world, and dutifully performed the Ghost Dance at the appointed intervals, and for the specified time, a millennial renewal would occur: the ghosts of ancestors would return to dwell with the living; the land would be restored to its original cover, richness, and fertility; the white man would disappear; and the buffalo would return.

  Wovoka explicitly preached the Ghost Dance as a movement of separation and pacifism; only strict adherence to the appointed ritual—including avoidance of contact, and especially aggression, with whites—could hasten the apocalypse. But given the realities of tension, incomprehension, racism, and recrimination, we can scarcely be surprised that white settlers became distinctly nervous when they observed large groups of Indians abandoning their usual tasks, gathering in central places, and dancing ecstatically for days at a time. The movement quickly spread in all directions, from Texas to the Canadian border, reaching the Sioux in 1890, who added the nerve-racking belief (to whites) that if dancers wore a certain kind of shirt, the white man’s bullets could not penetrate.

  Many dancers told of their trips to heaven during trances inspired by ecstatic activity. The testimony of Little Wound, chief of the Oglala Sioux, illustrates the fascinating fusion of traditional Christian visions of the millennium with specific Indian themes and grievances, and also with the claim for invulnerability that fanned white fears.

  When I fell in the trance a great and grand eagle came and carried me over a great hill, where there was a village such as we used to have before the whites came into this country. The tipis were all of buffalo skin, and we used the bow and arrow, and there was nothing in that beautiful land that the white men had made. Neither would Wakan Tanka let any whites live there. The land was wide and green and stretched in every direction and made my eyes glad.

  I was taken into the presence of the great Messiah, and He said t
hese words to me, “My child, I am glad to see you. Do you want to see your children and relations who are dead?” … They appeared, riding the finest horses I ever saw, they wore clothes of bright colors that were very fine, and they seemed very happy.… The Great Holy made a prayer for our people upon the earth, and then we smoked together using a fine pipe ornamented with beautiful feathers and porcupine quills. Then we left the village and looked into a great valley where there were thousands of buffalo and deer and elk all feeding.…

  He also told me to go back to my people and say to them that if they would keep on making the dance and pay no attention to the whites that He would shortly come to help them. If the holy men would make for the dancers medicine shirts and pray over them, no harm could come to the wearer; that the bullets of any whites that wanted to stop the Messiah Dance would fall to the ground without hurting anybody, and the person who fired the shots would drop dead.

  Two tragedies arising from white misunderstanding of the Ghost Dance movement—the murder of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee—haunt American history. Sitting Bull, who had played a role of disputed importance in the death of Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876, still led a small group of Sioux, though his importance had been greatly overestimated by local whites. (Sitting Bull had performed in Buffalo Bill’s extravaganzas and had become, for racist Americans, a symbol of the recalcitrant, if noble, savage.) Sitting Bull also strongly supported the Ghost Dance movement. The local government agent became alarmed and wrote to the commissioner:

  I feel it my duty to report the present “craze” and nature of the excitement existing among the Sitting Bull faction of Indians over the expected Indian millennium, the annihilation of the white man and supremacy of the Indian, which is looked for in the near future and promised by the Indian medicine men as not later than next spring.

  The Chicago Tribune then fanned the false flames with a headline for October 28, 1890, based on this agent’s letter:

  TO WIPE OUT THE WHITES

  What the Indians Expect of the Coming Messiah

  Fears of an Outbreak

  Old Sitting Bull Stirring Up the Excited Redskins

  The commissioner decided to arrest Sitting Bull and judged that the Indian Police could do the job most efficiently and diplomatically. But high tension, combined with the usual misinterpretations and avoidable provocations, turned a peaceful mission into a carnage, as gunfire broke out on both sides, leaving six policemen and eight of Sitting Bull’s supporters dead, including the old chief himself.

  White nervousness about the Ghost Dance also led the government to a tragic decision to round up Chief Big Foot’s independent band of Lakota Sioux and bring them into confinement on the reservation. The mission proceeded with great tension. Neither Big Foot nor the army commander sought any trouble, and both tried to calm the rising tempers, fanned primarily by hotheaded young men on both sides—the army recruits filled with stereotypes and fears, the Indians burning with anger and legitimate grievances. If Big Foot had not been too ill to lead, and if the soldiers had been seasoned veterans rather than scared neophytes, the unjust mission, distasteful to both sides, would no doubt have been quietly accomplished as planned. But the usual set of banal, utterly unheroic, small, and avoidable events occurred, and—just as with Sitting Bull but at greater scale—panic and gunfire broke out at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, on the morning of December 29, 1890. Government soldiers fired directly into fleeing groups of Indians. When the panic eased and the smoke cleared, 30 white soldiers had been killed, while 84 Indian men and 62 women and children, also lay dead. The ghost shirts had not worked.

  In summary, Richard Landes, a history professor at Boston University, director of their Center for Millennial Studies, and a specialist on the millennial movements of medieval Europe, offers a powerful argument for the great importance of apocalypticism in history. Two major reasons, common to almost all millenarian episodes, govern the general significance. First, the certainty felt by true believers about an imminent termination to the current order leads them to break social traditions, roles, and boundaries that they would never dream of fracturing in normal times. (Why worry about slave and master, if all good people will soon rise to common glory with Christ? Why kowtow to local lords or obey unjust regional ordinances, if the Son of Man comes quickly, and all will soon serve God alone?)

  Second—and citing the preeminent empirical regularity of this recurring history—millennial expectations always fail, and their movements are left with a host of radical social practices that must now be reconciled with an unexpected and continuing life on the present earth. These novelties, now transferred from designs for the blessed millennium to devices for potential reform of the current order, often become a motor for major disruptions and transformations on the complex pathways of human history. Jesus said that “one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law”—“till all be fulfilled,” and “till heaven and earth pass.” But heaven and earth stayed put, while the energy of unfulfilled millennial expectations dislodged the jots and tittles of every “permanent” holy text, and altered the jobs and titles of every “eternal” social status—with consequences that have often led either to genocide, or to liberation.

  MILLENNIUM AS CALENDRICS

  The Stoicks tell us, When the Sun and the Stars have drunk up the Sea, the Earth shall be burnt. A very fair prophecy: but how long will they be a drinking?

  The Reverend Thomas Burnet

  Telluris theoria sacra (The Sacred Theory of the Earth), 1691

  Detail from The Last Judgement (1432–1435), Fra Angelico. (illustration credit 1.4)

  Why Make the Switch at All?

  Millennial disappointment—from the failure of Jesus’ initial prediction for an apocalypse within his own generation, to the latest slinking away of the faithful from the most recently designated mountaintop—must provoke one anguished question above all others: “If not now, then when?” (to cite a famous Jewish proverb for a different purpose).

  The last section documented the original meaning of the millennium in Christian and Western history—a specific fable about Christ’s future reign for a thousand years on earth, following an apocalyptic destruction of the present order. But as the year 2000 approaches, the primary definition of millennium has shifted to a quite different and primarily calendrical meaning—the completion of a secular period of a thousand years in human history, particularly when packaged between beginning and ending years with nice, clean, “even” designations, like 1000 and 2000.

  Are these two notions—the millennium as apocalypse and the millennium as calendrics—related at all? Or are we only using, albeit with etymological justification, the same word for two different concepts sharing a merely coincidental concern with durations of a thousand years? (After all, if simile tells me to “make way” for a Swahili dignitary, but only recognizes an English figure of speech, then why can’t millennium have two disparate meanings with only an incidental link to the number 1,000?) Fortunately for the goals of this book (which would immediately lose all reason for existence otherwise), and for the sake of a good tale in general, the two usages enjoy a sensible and intimate historical linkage—all proceeding from the cardinal question that opens this section: “If not now, then when?”

  The basic reason for switching from a description of the future to a counting in the present stems from the failure of this expected future to materialize. If you invite ten people to dinner on Saturday and nobody shows up, then you should check your calendar for the most probable explanation. They may all have died on the road, or come down with the flu and forgotten to call. However, I’d be willing to make a substantial bet that you misremembered the appointed date—and that your guests will all show up at the designated hour, but on the following Saturday. Similarly, if you just know that the millennium must come, decide on next Thursday as the due date, and end up that night as a bridesmaid on the stroke of midnight after a long wait, what will you assume?
Either you were in error about the millennium happening at all—a possibility simply too brutal to contemplate for many people—or you got the date wrong (an unhappy circumstance to be sure, but ever so much better than the alternative).

  Your initial concern may have been preparatory: What shall I do on that great gettin’ up morning? Through which of the twelve gates of the city shall I enter? But your new question has to be calendrical: All right, so I was wrong about Thursday. But when will the millennium come?

  This obvious rationale for a switch to calendrical issues provides only a small part of the answer to our primary question: Why change the definition of millennium from an apocalyptic description to a calendrical interval? That is, we can easily grasp the new concern for calendrics, but why in heaven’s name should we have any preference, or any concern at all, for the number 1,000? The millennium will bring us one thousand years of future bliss whenever Christ decides to make his delayed entrance, but why should our revised estimate for the Second Coming invoke any interval of one thousand anythings? The duration of future pleasure bears no intrinsic or necessary relationship to the agony of current waiting.