United States
The oldest moral eschatology of the land and its newest manufactured panic.
Two end-of-the-world families occupy this soil. The older is Indigenous and tied to conduct. The Hopi hold that humanity is in the Fourth World and that a coming Purification will end it unless people choose the good red road, a moral and cyclical account recorded from Hopi speakers by Frank Waters with Oswald White Bear Fredericks. The Lakota expect the return of White Buffalo Calf Woman, James Walker's nineteenth-century accounts preserving the promise of renewal given to the people. Her story is told under The White Buffalo Calf Woman. Neither is a dated final day; both make the end depend on how the nations live.
The newer family is manufactured and dated. The 2012 phenomenon was assembled in late-twentieth-century America from a misreading of the Maya Long Count, fused with New Age and fringe-scientific claims, and carried into popular culture by the 2009 film 2012. Earlier, the Millerite movement set 1844, watched nothing happen, and the Watch Tower organisation built its chronology around 1914, then reinterpreted it when the expected events did not occur. Paul Boyer's survey places the United States as the laboratory of dated, failed expectation in the modern West.
The contrast is the point. One family treats the end as a continual moral consequence of behaviour; the other treats it as a calendar auctioned between publishers and moved when it expires. The Indigenous frame is set out in The Hopi Great Purification, the manufactured cycle in 2012 Phenomenon and Modern Manufactured Apocalypticism, and the disappointed-dates tradition in Millerites. The United States is where the oldest and newest kinds of ending meet on one map, and where the newer kind has learned to reschedule itself.
See also
- The Hopi Great PurificationThe world has been purified before: three worlds ended in corruption, and the fo
- 2012 PhenomenonThe modern panic that the Maya Long Count calendar ending a b'ak'tun on December
- MilleritesThe 1840s American movement that predicted the Second Coming for 1844, and the "
- Modern Manufactured ApocalypticismThe industrial-age apocalypse: failed dates, reinterpreted prophesies, and the m
- North American Indigenous ProphecyThe world as a series of cleansed worlds: the Hopi Purification and the Great Sp
- The Cherokee Earth and the Four CordsThe earth is an island suspended by four cords from the sky — when the cords bre
- The Great DisappointmentThe founding failed date of the American apocalypse industry: the math was bibli
- The White Buffalo Calf WomanThe sacred woman who brought the pipe: she promises to return at a time of great
- The Great Purification: Hopi Prophecy and the American Millenarian MirrorA long-form essay on the Hopi prophecy of the great purification: how a story th
Further reading
- Hopi emergence and prophecy, in Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi · Viking, 1963 (with Oswald White Bear Fredericks) The Fourth World and the coming Purification, as told to Waters.
- Lakota accounts of White Buffalo Calf Woman, in James R. Walker, Lakota Myth · ed. Elaine Jahner, University of Nebraska Press, 1983 Walker recorded these from Lakota informants in the 1890s.
- Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon (1830), the Nephite destruction prophecies · Church History Library A native American eschatological frame in a New World scripture.
- The Millerites and the Great Disappointment, in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More · Harvard University Press, 1992
- Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Studies in the Scriptures (1914 chronology) · Brooklyn, 1886-1904 The 1914 date and its later re-reading.