Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith
- ISBN-10
- 0300090889
- ISBN-13
- 9780300090888
- Category
- Social Science
- Pages
- 298
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2001-01-01
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Authors
- Norman Cohn, Professor Norman Cohn
Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith
By Norman CohnIn this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish ...
-
The Fatal Flaw – Nazism, Communism and the Apocalyptic Nature of Radical Ecological History
Cohn Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come p 140. 12.Cohn Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come p 147. 13.Cohn Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come pp 150-151. 14.Cohn Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come pp 151-157. 15.Cohn Cosmos, Chaos and ...
-
Eden and the Fall – the Fallacies of Radical Ecological History
By Matthew ButtsworthCohn Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come pp 3-76 38. Cohn Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come p 200. The idea of the coming revolution helping the nations of the Third World occurs in many radical ecological texts including Capra The ...
-
A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation
By Ted DanielsNorman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 7. Some scholars think these ideas are later Pahlavi accretions to the original doctrine contained in Zoroaster's own hymns (Gathas).
-
End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity
By Michael A. Ryan, Karolyn KinaneHall, John R. Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe andJapan. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Hobsbawm, Eric. Primitive Rebels. Manchester, 1959. James, Edward.
-
Worlds Apart: Selected Essays on Ancient Egyptian and Early Christian Thought
By Ihab Khalil64 Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith., 5. 65 te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion : A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion, 59-60. 66 C.J. Bleeker, “Features of the Ancient ...
-
A Dream of the Judgment Day: American Millennialism and Apocalypticism, 1620-1890
By John Howard SmithO'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 102; Rowe, God's Strange Work, 123–128; William Miller to William S. Miller, May 17, ... See David L. Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800–1850 (Chico, ...
-
Persepolis and Jerusalem: Iranian Influence on the Apocalyptic Hermeneutic
By Jason M. SilvermanThis would imply that this reinterpretation was based on a text which mentioned Alexander as part of the fourth empire. If these objections can be dispensed with, then. 175. Ibid., 32–33. 176. Objections are in ibid., 32, 34, and 41 n.
-
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
By Karen Armstrong... 10-11, 13,416 lmrr priests,Aryan, 6, 21 Huan. prince 0FQi, 183 Huang-Di. king ofQin, 399 Huang-Di, the Yellow Emperor. 31 , 85- I39. 449. 441 Huang L0. 442 hubris,166,169, 171 . 179, 270, 313 Hui, king ofLiang, 358, 359 Huizi.
-
Persian Influence on Daniel and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature
By Vicente DobrorukaDuring the making of the Restoration, fifteen men and fifteen maidens – those righteous people about whom it is ... choice available to scholars and is available informally in its original, typewriter set, and this is the edition of the ...