How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Searching the globe La Barre finds another example from a Siberian village in July 1904, when an Altai Turk named Chot Chelpan had a vision of a spirit who told him that the land of his people would be returned. Russian Orthodox Church missionaries had discovered that Altai grazing lands were better for farming (for the missionaries, that is!), so they confiscated them from the native peoples. Chot’s prayer to the spirits was the Ghost Dance revisited: “Thou art my Burkhan dwelling on high, thou my Oirot descending below, deliver me from the Russians, preserve me from their bullets.” Chot instructed his people in an elaborate ceremony that included killing pets, sprinkling milk to the four cardinal compass points, and a number of other rituals, then told the Altains: “Soon their end will come, the land will not accept them, the earth will open up and they will be cast under the earth.” Chot’s end came in 1905 when he was captured, terminating the Siberian Ghost Dance.

  THE CARGO CULT GHOST DANCE

  One of the more curious versions of the Ghost Dance can be found in the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. According to anthropologist Marvin Harris, Cargo Cults began centuries ago with Pacific islanders scanning the horizon for phantom canoes delivering goods. As the times changed so did the ersatz delivery mechanisms. In the eighteenth century they watched for the sails of sailing vessels, in the nineteenth century they searched for smoke from steamships, and in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, they scouted for airplanes. The phantom cargo has evolved along with the delivery mechanisms. First it was matches and steel tools, then shoes, sacks of rice, canned meat, knives, rifles, ammunition, and tobacco, and finally it became automobiles, radios, and modern appliances. To the Pacific islanders who only ever saw, heard, or fantasized about the end product of a manufacturing process in some far-off land, the origin of the cargo was a great mystery. With no apparent cause, the airplane arrived with finished products. “The great wealth and power of the whites is a mystery to Melanesians,” La Barre concludes. “As far as they could see, whites did no work at all and made no artifacts, and yet got great stores of goods merely by sending out bits of paper, though meanwhile blacks must labor to produce gold and copra. The cargo ships were their link to that mysterious country and the obvious secret of their power.”

  The Ghost Dance leitmotif intertwined with the Cargo Cults in places like New Guinea where the natives built a thatch-roofed hanger, a bamboo beacon tower, an airstrip manned twenty-four-hours a day by natives wearing simulated uniforms, and even an airplane made out of sticks and leaves. Long dominated by whites who seemed to possess the mysterious powers of the cargo, the natives envisioned the day when their ancestors would return with cargo for them. When that day comes, Harris notes, the natives believed there would be “the downfall of the wicked, justice for the poor, the end of misery and suffering, reunion with the dead, and a whole new divine kingdom.”

  A wooden representation of a cargo plane sits next to a cross and a messianic John Frum, said to be a pidgin shortening of the phrase “John from America”—the carrier of cargo goods according to the Melanesian cargo cult.

  Sociologist Peter Worsley, in his classic 1958 study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia, The Trumpet Shall Sound, points out that such movements are “by no means peculiar to that part of the world” and that there is in fact evidence that similar phenomena have developed “in most parts of the globe, even in some of the earliest records of civilization.” The reason this is important, Worsley adds, is that “the history of apocalyptic religions and of messianism is of special interest to people whose culture has included a central belief in One whom they believed to be the Messiah, who died for mankind and with whom they hoped to be reunited in Paradise.” He is speaking of Jesus, of course, pointing out that “this messiah, however, has not been the only messiah,” and that in addition to multiple Melanesian culture-heroes, spirits, and messiahs, “similar cults have occurred to a greater or lesser extent in other major regions of Oceania,” and that “Africa, North and South America, China, Burma, Indonesia and Siberia have also had their share of cults, and the history of Europe provides numerous examples.” Does the story of Jesus as the savior fit into this genre of messiah myths?

  JESUS AS MESSIAH MYTH

  Cargo Cults are not unlike Messiah Cults, including a first-century one that arose in an eastern province of the Mediterranean surrounding a man who was said to have the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, and preached love, forgiveness, and the worship of the one true God. Roman authorities, fearing that his expanding fellowship might pose a social or political threat, arrested him and had him put to death. Following his execution, his disciples said he rose from the dead, appeared to them to deliver a message, and then ascended to heaven. The messiah was Apollonius of Tyana, who was killed in A.D. 98, six decades after his more famous predecessor, Jesus of Nazareth. As Randel Helms notes: “Readers … may be forgiven their error [confusing Apollonius and Jesus] if they will reflect how readily the human imagination embroiders the careers of notable figures of the past with common mythical and fictional embellishments.”

  The common mythical embellishment of the Jesus legend, like that of the Ghost Dance and Cargo Cults, is the now-familiar oppression-redemption or messiah myth. By the first century A.D. the Jews were engulfed within the Roman empire and feared for their very existence as a people. The regions around and including Nazareth were ruled by King Herod, who endured and responded with violence to numerous Jewish revolts against the Romans. By A.D. 6 Judea was under direct Roman rule. A youthful Jesus, who was now ten years old (probably born in 4 B.C.), must have been painfully aware of the tensions between his people and their oppressors, as well as the biblical promise of a Messiah who would drive out the Romans and reestablish the kingdom of God on Earth. By the time of his three-year ministry from A.D. 27 to 30, Jesus had codified a new theology and an ethical system to sustain his followers until the Second Coming. It was a unique theology, as theologian Burton Mack has noted in his identification of three interconnected ideas that arose in the 30s and 40s following Jesus’ death:

  1. One was the vague notion of a perfect society conceptualized as a kingdom. The Jesus people latched onto this idea and acted as if the kingdom they imagined was a real possibility despite the Romans. They called it the kingdom of God.

  2. A second idea was that any individual, no matter of what extraction, status, or innate capacity, was fit for this kingdom and could act accordingly if only one would.

  3 … . the novel notion that a mixture of people was exactly what the kingdom of God should look like.

  Mack also observes that belief in a Messiah that would redeem an oppressed people was certainly not unique to first-century Jews: “This was a notion that many groups had used to imagine a better way to live than suffering under the Romans.” Peter Worsley points out that “Christianity itself, of course, as recent interpretations of the Dead Sea scrolls emphasize, originally derived its élan from the millenarist traditions of the Essenes and similar sectaries at the beginning of the Christian era. These people looked for the establishment of an actual earthly Kingdom of the Lord which would free the Jews from Roman oppression. Later this doctrine commended itself as a message of hope to the downtrodden of the Roman Empire.”

  Did Jesus and his followers think he was the Messiah? When Jesus asked his disciples “Who do men say that I am?” he was given the answer: “Thou art the Christ” (Matthew 16:15, 16; christos, Greek for messias, from masiah, Hebrew for Messiah). To many early Christians, the Hebrew Bible spoke to them of a returning Messiah: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.” “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots … . But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he sl
ay the wicked” (Isaiah 11:1, 4). “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). (See The Oxford Companion to the Bible, The Interpreter’s Bible, and The New Oxford Annotated Bible for additional messianic passages and their meanings.)

  Such prophecies must have been especially reassuring to a people under the yoke. Indeed, Christianity’s founding father, Paul, told the Colossians: “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (1:14). To the Hebrews, Paul said: “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered at once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (9:12). Redemption was not only for individuals, but for all of Israel, as Luke (24:19–21) notes: “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people. And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” Here we see the foundation of the Christian oppression–redemption myth.

  Jesus himself made it clear that ultimate redemption would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). Two thousand years later over one billion people profess Jesus to be the Messiah who not only redeemed Jews from their Roman oppressors, but who will deliver us from ours. (Such is the power of belief systems to rationalize all discrepancies—one being that this is the Kingdom of God on Earth.) A particularly striking example comes from the Los Angeles Times on the morning of October 8, 1997. In the Sports section, no less, appeared a six-inch by ten-inch advertisement placed by a Bloomington, Indiana–based group called Christ’s Soon Return, announcing:

  8 COMPELLING REASONS WHY:

  CHRIST IS COMING “VERY, VERY SOON”

  HOW TO BE PREPARED FOR HISTORY’S GREATEST EVENT

  The evidence for the return of the Messiah, we are told, “is overwhelming. It could be any moment.” Citing a single “scholar” (who goes unnamed) the advertisement explains that there are no less than 167 “converging clues” that the end is nigh. The ad offers eight: 1. Israel’s rebirth. 2. Plummeting morality. 3. Famines, violence and wars. 4. Increasing earthquakes. 5. Explosion of travel and education. 6. Explosion of cults and the occult. 7. The New World Order. 8. Increase in both apostasy and faith. A bonus “clue” is the “Angel Factor,” where “As an angel announced Christ’s First Coming, there have been recently reported visits from angels saying, ‘He is coming very, very soon.’” Why is Christ coming? “Christ will soon come and rescue His people from the approaching ‘Great Tribulation’. He will later rule and bring peace on earth—after he judges the world and every person.” To avoid our fate and “escape God’s judgment, we each must receive His free gift of forgiveness and love.” There is no Ghost Dance involved in the redemption (in this case the tyrants from whom we are to be rescued are ourselves, our sinful nature, and a morally moribund world), but one must pray for forgiveness and accept Christ as the Messiah: “Lord Jesus, I believe you are the Son of God and that you died on the cross for my sins to save me from eternal death. I open the door of my life and receive you as my Savior and Lord. I give you my life. Help me to be what you want me to be. Amen.”

  The ultimate extreme expression of such modern millennial beliefs was the Heaven’s Gate calamity of March 27, 1997, when thirty-nine (now forty) members of an end-times cult committed suicide. Instead of the spirit world coming to life and the oppressors disappearing, the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult (also called the “Higher Source”) would escape the tyranny of their bodies and the immorality of the world by becoming spirits in the next stage of history. Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles convinced their followers that they were going to TELAH—The Evolutionary Level Above Humans.

  Just as Wovoka mixed Native American and Christian motifs into a single Ghost Dance myth, the Heaven’s Gate belief system was a peculiar mixture of evolution, creationism, reincarnation, and UFO-logy (recall the “spaceship” accompanying comet Hale-Bopp). Before they could attain a spiritual state, members had to enter a gender-free stage—no sexual identity and no sex. In preparation they cropped their hair, abstained from sex, and wore androgynous clothing. According to Applewhite (from his Web page): “They are perfectly beautiful bodies—neither male nor female. They don’t have hair that needs to be cut, they don’t need to have curlers. They don’t need to use makeup. It’s a body that exists for the most part, in a nondestructive environment, except when it has to go to a place like planet Earth. So it’s potentially an eternal body—an everlasting body.” Oppression on Earth, redemption in TELAH

  WHY THE MESSIAH MYTH RETURNS

  Why, it seems reasonable to ask, would these similar myths recycle through dissimilar cultures and distinct ages? Cultural diffusion may explain some thematic similarities, but a broader hypothesis is that there are a limited number of responses to perceived oppression and the general hardships of the human condition, and the belief in a returning Messiah who will deliver redemption is one of the most common. The specifics vary with varying cultures, but the general theme returns again and again. Why?

  History is an exquisite blend of the specific and the general, the unique and the universal. The past is neither one damn thing after another (Heraclitus’ river), nor is it the same damn thing over and over (Spengler’s life cycles). Rather, it is a series of generally repeating patterns, each one of which retains a unique structure and set of circumstances. History is uniquely cyclical. Wars and battles, witch crazes and social movements, holocausts and genocides, all recycle through history with remarkable periodicity. The reason is that while there are an infinite number of combinations of specific details, there are a limited number of general rules that channel those details into similar grooves. Every historical event is unique, but not randomly so. They are all restricted by the parameters of the system. Such events recycle because the conditions of these parameters periodically come together in parallel fashion.

  When social conditions include oppression of a people, there is a good chance that the response will be the belief in a rescuing messiah delivering redemption. The messiah myth, like all myths, may be a fictitious narrative, but it represents something deeply nonfictional about human nature and human history. To this extent it is an important component in answer to the question of how we believe.

  Chapter 9

  THE FIRE THAT WILL CLEANSE

  Millennial Meanings and the End of the World

  We, while the stars from heaven shall fall,

  And mountains are on mountains hurled,

  Shall stand unmoved amidst them all,

  And smile to see a burning world.

  —Millerite hymn, 1843

  On Monday, October 27, 1997, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed a record 554.24 points, the biggest one-day drop in history. By the time Ted Koppel’s expert guests on Nightline reflected on the day’s disaster, eastern hemisphere markets were opening to record losses: Korea down 7 percent, Hong Kong down 16 percent, Australia down 10 percent. As Americans scrambled to place their sell orders the next day, the news from Europe was grim: Germany down 5 percent, Belgium down 8 percent, Great Britain down 8 percent. The collapse quickly spread westward: Mexico down 13 percent, Brazil down 15 percent, Venezuela down 12 percent. It looked like the end of the world.

  Like all apocalyptic doomsday predictions in history, however, it was not the end. By the close of the next trading day the Dow was up 337 points and investors who bought low that morning were born again. Within five months the Dow was up over 9000, and by the spring of 1998 it summited the Everestian 10,000 with no end in sight. It would appear that reports of the world’s death were greatly exaggerated.

  Actually, t
hey always are, but for those whose apocalyptic tendencies are measured by biblical benchmarks instead of stock tickers, the stakes are much higher. For example, on a brisk April 29 morning in 1980, Dr. Leland Jensen, a chiropractor and leader of a small religious sect called the Baha‘i Under the Provisions of the Covenant, led his devoted followers into fallout shelters in Missoula, Montana, to await the end of the world. Within the first hour, Jensen believed, a full third of the Earth’s population would be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust of fire and fallout. Over the course of the next twenty years most of the remaining population would be ravaged by conquest, war, famine, and pestilence. In the year 2000, the Baha’i Universal House of Justice would arise out of the ashes like a phoenix to help establish the thousand-year reign of God’s kingdom on Earth. How did Jensen know all this? He had a revelation in the Montana State Prison, while serving a sentence for sexually molesting a fifteen-year-old patient: “I felt a presence only. It talked to me—not in a physical voice but very vividly expressing to me that I was the promised Joshua (prophesied in Zechariah 3).”

  This is classic end-times imagery—an apocalyptic revelation, the demise of the world at a millennial marker, the survival of a small chosen group of true believers, the return of the Messiah and peace after massive death and destruction, and even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and pestilence). The iconography and poetry of the apocalypse is at once beautiful and terrifying, from the horrors wrought on sinners in countless “Last judgment” paintings (with swirling mixtures of awe-invoking black and red colors) by such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Michelangelo, to the haunting vision in William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: