International Colloguium on Apocalypticism
Apocalypticism is also called millennialsim.
Social anthropology and comparative religion show that revelatory world-views are regularly actualized in situations of conflict or crisis real or imagined or in the context of fear of such situations.
Resort to prophecy is a universal response of beaten men.
Eddy proposed four basic kinds of resistance: passive militant messianic and proselytic.
These four kinds of resistance are all normal human responses to domination by an alien culture which threatens to end or modify the old.
The fourfold typology of religiopolitical reaction to overbearing cultural seductiveness overpowering military superiority overwhelming economic exploitation and overweening social discrimination is cross-cultural and trans-temporal. [And one could add: environmental destruction and resource depletion cornering people channelling people into dead ends]
Passive resistence appears in all dissenting cultures and involves a return to archaic legends about one’s own most ancient heroes.
Millennialsim always promises social transformation and although always erroneous it none the less creates a new conscious expectation of social change. Sometimes it prompts men to begin to make the millenium. The new age does not come but the effort of work organization and the futuristic (or restorative) ethic has important consequences. A new framework of order is established…a new conception of the social organization of the collectivity occurs: a glimmering sense of a different future is acquired. The idea of social change is grasped. The deities who hitherto have sanctioned custom now – suddenly – become the initiators of change.