RonPrice

:notworthy TESTING THE BEST

The Book of Daniel was composed about the year 165 BC. Chapter VII was one of the earliest visions or dreams of an apocalyptic nature, composed during the Maccabean revolt of the Jews against the Greeks. There are four beasts in the vision, symbolic of four world powers who would rule in Israel until the time of the end: Seleucid-Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Western.-With thanks to Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Granada Publishing Co., 1970(1957), London, for a helpful overview of millennarianism over two millennia.


All these biblical verses are so arguable,
aren’t they Norman? The four beasts
have been given such different names
as men have sought/thought the millenium,
the time of the end, a golden age,
a messianic kingdom, the last days.

He would come, it said in Daniel,
with the clouds of heaven,
and to the Ancient of Days...
And there was given him
dominion, and glory,
a kingdom, that all peoples,
nations and languages
should serve him.*

This is no phantasy, some obscure
revolutionary eschatology-although
it has been since 165 BC-
this is the New Jerusalem,
the kingdom of the saints,
the beginning of the kingdom,
millennarianism’s true home,
after such a tortured road,
most people got lost by the wayside.
Absorbed in some tradition or
heresy, cult, sect, ism or wasm:
egalitarian, communistic,
self-immolating, peasant revolt,
urban insurrection, all elaborating,
interpreting, vulgarizing
the apocalyptic lore to transform
and save history, in cataclysm,
in quasi-religious salvationism,
deviant medieval mysticism,
self-divinization and anarchism
in secular dress: it is not surprising
you missed it since it grew up quietly
in an orgy of violence and complexity
that would test the best as it still is doing.

Ron Price
26 September 1995


*The Bible, Book of Daniel, Chapter VII, verses 2 to 14.

Vorkosigan

RonPrice, can you clarify your purpose in posting this here? Otherwise, this looks like serious ~E~ material.

Vorkosigan