If you’re reading this, then you’re probably very
scared. The world is about to end - on December 21st to be exact. No
Christmas Turkey for you. Sorry, but it’s a fact: the Mayans said so. How did they know? Oh, something about calendars.
On the other hand, perhaps the world won’t end. I
mean, it’s had so many opportunities already and-nothing doing. Why should the Mayans
know more about the End Times than David Koresh anyway? Experts on Mesoamerica pour
scorn on the apocalypse of 2012, just as St. Augustine rejected the claims of prophets
1500 years ago.
No, the truly interesting thing about 2012 is the
fact that other cultures, radically alien from our own, have their own prophecies
of The End. Apocalyptic is usually
associated with the Abrahamic religions: the Jews have the Book of Daniel,
Christians add Revelation while everybody knows how mushy Mahmoud Ahmadinejead feels
when he contemplates the Mahdi. But eschatological anticipation is much more
widespread.
For instance, the Aztecs had a precise timetable for world-annihilation. Every 52
years the world completed a cycle after which the destruction of the universe
was expected to follow. Terrifying, no? That’s why on the eve of Doomsday
priests would cut open a human being and rip the still beating heart out of his
chest, as an offering to the gods. If morning arrived, then the gods had
accepted the sacrifice and the world would continue to exist for another 52
years. If it did not, well… fortunately they had not yet been forced to face
that situation.
The Aztecs also awaited return of the white bearded Quetzalcoatl, who, it was prophesied,
would return at the End of Time to usher in a second Golden Age. When
Hernan Cortes arrived in
1519 he was catastrophically misidentified as the god, with well-known
consequences.
Apocalypses were common in North America too. Many
of the Indian wars had an End Times aspect.
In 1762 the ‘Delaware Prophet’ appeared in Ohio with an
apocalyptic vision of a continent cleansed of white men and subsequent regeneration.
The legendary Chief Pontiac formed a grand confederacy of the north-western
tribes, intent on fulfilling the prophecy. He failed.
In 1805 another
Ohio prophet, Tenskwatawa, explained that the White Man ‘grew from the scum of
the great water, when it was troubled by an evil spirit’. He recommended dance
as a means of causing a Euro-holocaust. The prophet’s brother, Chief Tecumseh preferred
fighting, and formed a great union of tribes, even allying with the British in
1812 to fight a last war against the forces of evil. You know the rest.
The last Indian
prophet, Wovoka, emerged in the late 1880s. He too predicted an apocalypse for
the White Man but insisted on sacred dances not violence. The ‘Ghost Dance’
religion spread far and wide, but when the warlike Sioux converted the Federal
authorities became anxious. In December 1890 the Sioux convened for a mass
dance at Wounded Knee, wearing magic ghost shirts to protect them from the
white man’s bullets. Soon 200 men, women and children were dead, many shot in
the back as they fled the government’s Hotchkiss guns.
Some speculate that these apocalyptic scenarios were
spawned by a fusion of indigenous beliefs with Christian doctrines derived from
missionaries. Perhaps that’s true sometimes, but it’s obviously false in the
case of Aztec apocalyptic, while messianic Maitreya Buddhism likewise developed
independently of the Abrahamic faiths.
Early prophesies indicated that Buddhism would fall
into oblivion 500 years after Siddartha. When it didn’t, Doomsday was postponed
another 500 years. The faith survived. After this second disappointment, there
was no consensus on how long Buddhism would last. The good news was that when Buddhism did die, this catastrophe would
be reversed. For in a few billion years’ time a future Buddha known as Maitreya
would bring enlightenment to the world.
Maitreya Buddhism took deepest root in China. In the
late 13th century, when China was governed by a Mongol dynasty known
as the Yuan, a secret society known as The White Lotus assumed leadership of the
resistance to foreign tyranny. The White Lotus believed in the imminent arrival
of the Maitreya and a coming heavenly kingdom of peace and global unity.
In 1352 the apocalyptic warriors led an uprising
that began in the city of Guangzhou. A former beggar monk named Zhu Yuanzhang
took control of the unrest, successfully spreading revolution to all of China.
Peasants flocked to the White Lotus banner thanks to Zhu’s integrity- he
enforced the sect’s religious precepts even during the worst of the fighting,
forbidding his soldiers the usual perks of war- raping virgins, stealing, that
sort of thing.
In 1356 the White Lotus captured Nanking, and the
city became the centre of a revolution which raged for thirty years until the
Yuan were defeated. Zhu then founded the Ming dynasty that would rule China for
the next three centuries. Even the name ‘Ming’ has its roots in Zhu’s apocalyptic
beliefs as it is derived from Big and Little Ming Wang, the two ‘brilliant
kings’ dispatched by the holy Maitreya to restore justice and peace to the
earth.
The White Lotus society reemerged in the late 18th
century to fight the Manchurian Qing dynasty. This uprising was crushed in 1804, but a few decades later a
startling fusion of Eastern and Western apocalyptic would spawn a truly
catastrophic vision of the End. In 1837 a provincial schoolteacher named Hong Renkin
failed his civil service exams and had a vivid dream during which he learned
that he was Jesus’ younger brother. He took the name Hong Xiuquan and raised an
apocalyptic army to fight the Qing and bring heaven to earth. Xiuquan’s forces
were only defeated after some 20 million people had died.
And so it goes: the Mayan prophecy by contrast is
pretty toothless. It has spawned a few bad movies, and lots of New Age
gibberish. And given the history of apocalyptic movements, that’s probably for
the best.