INTRODUCTION:
Repent, for the End is Near. The pacing street person
with this admonition on a sandwich board is an increasing phenomenon
as we approach the end of this millennium. This used to be a standing
cartoon in the New Yorker Magazine, but is no joke today. As Harold
Bloom sourly reminds us in his Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of
Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), TV angels, near-death experiences
of tunnels and light, and an increase in hell-fire and brimstone
religions--not to mention the increasing clamor of personal interviews
with extraterrestrials are dogging our heels for the next few years.
Where does all this come from? How can a society connected by the
Internet, that is breaking the genetic code, and is contemplating
a journey to Mars still manage to have its feet mired in this ancient
apocalyptic tarpit?
The answer, of course, is that man does not live by reason alone.
We are also creatures of wondering, visions, and archetypal imagery
that surfaces in our art and in our dreams. But we are also people
who are capable of change--but for whom ancient patterns of thought
and feeling break through in times when the old seems to be dying
and the new is not yet in sight.
The concepts of the Millennium, Armageddon, the struggle between
good and evil, the one God of the Universe, Satan, devils, angels,
paradise and hell, ecological reverence, and human responsibility
all derive from the most shadowy of the worlds great prophets:
Zoroaster, who lived at the end of the bronze age, somewhere between
1200 and 1000 BCE. (Music lovers will know him in a very polemicized
form as Zarathustra in Richard Strauss tone poem, Thus
Spake Zarathustra, based on the work of Nietzsche.)
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