Failure of prophecy

 The other day the national emergency system was tested, with sirens and alerts sent to people's phones.  The announcement that it was coming was greeted with a whole panoply of wild conspiracy theories, primarily that the sound would trigger the microchip (or perhaps the evil virus) that the Covid-19 vaccine had supposedly planted in our bodies, thus either giving us all some dread disease or even (best yet!) turning us all into zombies.

Now of course hardly anyone was turned into a zombie, or not that you'd notice.  But the incident does raise an interesting issue:  What are the prophets supposed to do when prophecy fails?  This was a problem in the Middle Ages too, although then it was more likely based on some prophecy out of the Bible than on vaccines and zombies.

The failure of the zombie apocalypse the other day was met with extended discussions of why this wasn't actually a failure of prophecy.  The social media gurus who started the idea began by denying they had actually said it would happen right away (even though that was of course what they'd suggested, even if the words "right away" had not passed their lips -- or the keyboard on their phones). This was met with appropriate derision.

 Struggling to find respect, today's conspiracy prophets insisted that things really had turned out just as they said, except that the dread disease (or microchip) was going to take a few days, even a few weeks, for its effects to be felt.  Or perhaps the sirens had been set to a different frequency than that required to activate the microchip.  Maybe Homeland Security had been warned of the dangers of a zombie apocalypse and changed the sirens at the last moment!  yes, that's the answer!  We're heroes!  (More derision.)

Those predicting the end of the world in the Middle Ages (an issue that came up frequently, though curiously enough not in the year 1000, the year modern textbooks like to talk about) had to deal with similar concerns.  If you predict the world is about to end, and yet sure enough there it is the next day, hanging in there, you have to come up with some rational explanation.

One of the best responses was that God had seen all the faithful people who believed in the end of the world praying away, been touched by their faith, and changed His mind, figuring to give us another chance.  This meant the prophets could call themselves heroes, even if it did make God seem rather unsure of Himself, and it always failed to persuade those who hadn't believed in the end of the world originally.

Alternately prophets could claim the end really was coming, but their calculations had been a tiny bit off, they'd forgotten to carry the 2, next summer for sure!  This only works once.  The next time the prophecy fails people start getting suspicious of the prophets.

The strongest response was to say that the apocalypse really had happened, but only the select few were capable of noticing.  This actually works well for a small, core group of believers, who essentially have given up on recruiting anyone else to their cause.  (Though even they may become suspicious after a while.)

In the Middle Ages failed prophecies quickly became heresies.  Groups like the Cathars of twelfth-thirteenth-century southern France, heretics already, had numerous prophecies, often based around ideas of three ages of the world, with things changing mightily in the third.  (It could become complicated, some Cathar theologians had each age have three divisions of its own, so the beginning of the Third Age was also the beginning of the seventh smaller age, allowing more room for different signs and events.)  Being the only ones who believed the prophecies could draw a group labeled as heretical closer together.

But for most of the medieval population, including those who at least temporarily believed in the coming end of the world, the most common response was to go home and pretend they'd never believed in anything so silly.  One assumes that those who were preparing for the zombie apocalypse this week took a similar approach.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval religious and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

End of the World

Every time there's a great disaster, like a hurricane or a massive drought or the current COVID-19 pandemic, many people interpret it as a sign of the coming end of the world.  Since the early days of Christianity, people have been looking for signs of the end.  When John of Patmos wrote the book we now know as Revelations (maybe around the year 100), it provided a partial list of signs to look for.

(John was responding to a persistent issue in the first couple generations of Christianity:  why, when Jesus had said He was coming back, hadn't He done so yet? Wasn't the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70, accompanied by destruction of the Temple, enough to get the Second Coming underway?  By the year 100 the Second Coming was moved well into the future and was moving into the spiritual rather than material realm.)

In the Merovingian era (fifth through eighth centuries), the standard template-book on how to write a good letter suggested starting with something like, "We who live in the final days of the world...."  The disasters of the sixth century, the outbreak of the Black Death coupled with "years without a summer" (caused by volcanic dust blocking the sun), certainly had an end-of-the-world look to them.

But the world kept stubbornly on.  Interestingly, in spite of what they might have told you back in the year 2000, no one worried about the end of the world in 1000.  The "millennium" anniversary that got mentioned a lot instead was 1033, the anniversary of the Crucifixion, and here the hope was for a spiritual awakening, not the world ending.

The Albigensian heretics of southern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were expecting the end of the world.  They got a Crusade preached against them and were thoroughly beaten by the northern French, but the world overall kept right on.

The big "world ending" moment for the Middle Ages was 1260, as I have discussed previously.  The theologian Joachim of Fiore (who died before 1260) had added up the generations in the Old Testament and had come up with the number 1260 as years from Creation to Christ's birth.  This was the "age of the Father," to be succeeded for the next 1260 years by the "age of the Son" and then by the "age of the Holy Spirit."  People became very upset, and bands of penitents wandered across Europe, whipping themselves and waiting for the end.  You can probably guess that they were mistaken.

Medieval Europe's second big outbreak of the Black Death, in 1346-48, was another apocalyptic event.  The world didn't end, but it sure got messed up, with maybe a third of the population dead, cities deserted, trade routes abandoned, and society (unsurprisingly) becoming much more morbid.

Fears of the world ending did not stop with the end of the Middle Ages.  The year 1666 was approached with trepidation, as it included the number 666, which the book of Revelations called "the number of the Beast."  When England experienced first another outbreak of the Black Death and then the great London fire that year, it sure looked apocalyptic.  Nonetheless, the world stubbornly persisted.

Apocalyptic predictions continue.  Remember how supposedly the ancient Mayans predicted the world would end in 2012?  A psychic now getting a lot of attention predicted the outbreak of a pandemic in 2020 (though when she predicted her own death she was off by 11 years).

The response to a failed apocalypse varies.  The most common reaction is to laugh it off and say one never believed it in the first place.  For true believers, disappointed not to have been caught up in the Rapture or whatever (note: the idea of a Rapture first appeared in the nineteenth century and has nothing to do with John of Patmos), the response is trickier.  One can say that the prophecy was right but the date was off (Who forgot to carry the 2?), but then it's hard to be believed next time.  One can argue that the prayers of the faithful averted the disaster that would have taken place without them.

Or, best of all, one can assert the world really did end, but only those in the Select Group are spiritual and insightful enough to have noticed.  This works within the Select Group but not outside it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.