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On Owls, Roosters, and Apocalyptic Time:
AHistorical Method for Reading
a Refractory Documentation
RICHARD LANDES
APOCALYPTIC TIME, SOCIAL BEHAVIOR,
AND HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Historians have generally had great difficulty absorbing the extensive lit-
erature on eschatology [the belief that the world will come to an abrupt,
divinely ordained End] and its various manifestations-visionary litera-
ture, apocalypticism, messianism, chiliasm, sects, antinomianism, etc.
Although historians of these phenomena have identified a number of
times and places where eschatological beliefs played a central role in a
culture's imagination (e.g., first-century Palestine, fifth-century Mediter-
ranean, thirteenth-century Europe, seventeenth-century England, eigh-
teenth-century America, nineteenth-century China), it has been
extremely difficult to move from such an observation to productive his-
torical analysis. Rarely do such activities receive more than a passing
mention in "mainstream" analyses, and even fuller discussions tend to
"fence off" the phenomenon from the analysis of the truly consequential
deeds of the age. Given that, in favorable circumstances, apocalyptic
beliefs can launch mass movements capable of overthrowing (and form-
ing) imperial dynasties and creating new religions, such an approach
seems rather inadequate.
This essay proposes an exegetical approach which can help remedy
the situation, bridging the gap between the encyclopedic and too-often
self-contained study of eschatological phenomena and the larger, histori-
cal developments within a culture, by focusing on what we shall call
"apocalyptic time." This can be quite functionally defined as that percep-
tion of time in which the End of the World (variously imagined) is so
50 RICHARD LANDES
close that its anticipation changes the behavior of the believer. Such per-
ceptions of time operate on several levels of cognition, of individual,
group, and mass psychology, and have been closely studied by anthro-
pologists, sociologists, and psychologists for decades.I The historian,
however, has been largely removed from the subject because his docu-
ments almost always reflect the perspectives or the editorial blade of
post-apocalyptic, normal time, with its retrospective knowledge that the
end did not come. A purely document-based approach to apocalyptic
phenomena, then, will find almost no direct evidence on the experience
of apocalyptic time, only traces, like the residue of subatomic particles
whose wake alone we can observe. We need a historiographical approach
that can examine the role of apocalyptic time and the social phenomena it
inspires-apocalyptic communities, movements, sects, and their post-
apocalyptic generations-in the shaping of larger societies and civiliza-
tions.
(1) The various manifestations of apocalyptic time: Above all, historians
need to become more familiar with the patterns of apocalyptic time as
studied by sociologists and anthropologists working on current groups
(i.e., ones whose expectations have not yet failed)- its impact on person-
ality change, on group formation, on attitudes towards non-believers.
This will help clarify, among other things, the enormous attraction of
apocalyptic time, hence the power of apocalyptic rhetoric. In addition, by
looking at the kinds of concerns and anxieties that believers look to
resolve, we can establish correlations between the trajectories into apoca-
lyptic time and behavior within it. Of particular interest for historians
will be the dynamics of apocalyptic interaction with outsiders, i.e., those
who are perceived through a dualistic grid as sons of darkness. From here
one could establish a whole range of further correlations between group
dynamics (visions of the future, type of leadership, forms of nomian and
antinomian behavior), and the changes in relations between such groups
and the outside world as their movement grows in intensity with the
approach of the (perceived) End. It is equally important in studying this
period of time to distinguish between apocalyptic communities (sectar-
ian), movements (social and political), and moments (highly anomalous
and brief periods when the perception of apocalyptic time dominates
public discourse).
(2) Post-apocalyptic time and re-entry: For historical analysis, the key
moment is the turning point at which normal time reasserts its domi-
nance. This is a key moment for the historical record in two senses. First it
is after this reentry that we first get most of our historical documents, in
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 51
medias res.
Second, it is at this point that the apocalyptic community
makes its mark on the larger society, the point of mutation at which, in an
act of great social creativity, it produces an association which can survive
in normal time. It is at this stage that these groups become what we might
call rational or functional (they always were, just not by our standards),
that they mutate into more stable forms. Here a number of key correla-
tions suggest themselves: the role of literacy, manual labor, and technol-
ogy in crystallizing a (now economically productive) community that can
survive in normal time; the retrospective effort to construct a non-apoca-
lyptic ideology which both explains the dissonant past and, in many
cases, relocates the apocalyptic moment in the future; the behavioral
interaction with an outside world which, only recently, members had
vividly imagined burning in a cosmic conflagration. The changing rela-
tionship between such mutational communities and the larger society
can have far-reaching consequences.
(3) The dynamics of memory in cases of unintended consequences: As a
result, all mutations are marked by a range of ad hoc concerns which
stamp the movement with a particular character. Since successful muta-
tions are (by definition) functional, there is a tendency both on the part of
group members and outside observers to view the group's origins in
functional terms. But this is to take the later stages of the movement as,
for all analytic intents and purposes, the beginning. It produces the kinds
of analyses that leave apocalyptic phenomena out of the grand narrative
of history. By using contemporary studies from the social sciences to con-
jecture about the pre-history of the movements our documents inform us
about, historians can hope to define those phenomena that have an apoc-
alyptic origin, an apocalyptic genealogy which goes far to explain its
dynamics and motivations.
SIGNIFICANCE
The historical significance of such an approach is substantial: as sug-
gested, it has the potential to shed light on everything from the dynamics
of orthodoxy and dissent in the axial age, to the formation of the Christ-
ian church,2 to the "mutation of the year 1000" in northwestern Europe,3
to the formation of the American nation,4 to the relations between popu-
lar and elite culture. But there are different and equally important poten-
tial benefits to such an approach. First, it promises to generate important
material on how social solutions to impossible situations are generated: it
52 RICHARD LANDES
is a study in how radically incompatible worlds, when forced to share the
same temporal space, come to accommodations. This takes on particular
importance in our current situation where the global village of modernity
has jostled together a host of such incompatible worlds in a mixture that
is proving less congenial than was first imagined. The resurgence of reli-
gious fundamentalism, so utterly unanticipated by the sociology of the
1950s and 1960s, has turned the global village into a wide array of local
battlegrounds.
APOCALYPTIC TIME AND MODERNITY:
REACTION AND ACCOMMODATION
Much has, in fact, been written about the phenomenon of fundamental-
ism; it is perhaps the single most important religious phenomenon of our
age. And yet little of the research in this field has paid more than limited
attention to the links between the two, to the impact of apocalyptic time
on the tenor and development of fundamentalist attitudes. 5 And yet the
fundamentalist approach shares with apocalyptic fervor a common and
paradoxical relationship to modernity: they characterize both poles of
response. On the one hand, apocalyptic time offers an opportunity for
communities of believers to protest the invasive effects of modernity in
the most violent fashions.6 But once we tum from the lurid products of
apocalyptic time to their more functional mutations, we find that many
an apocalyptic movement has served to acculturate its members to the
demands of modernity-prophets bring literacy (often dreaming the new
alphabet), technology (viewing a particular tool or artifact of modern cul-
ture as part of the new earth in formation), and above all they provide an
enormous elasticity to social bonding-both in breaking old and forming
new bonds-thereby giving the apocalyptic community the tools with
which to adjust to the radically different and constantly shifting condi-
tions of modernity. The particular power of communications technology
in the modern world can be traced back, at least in part, to the rapid
adoption of such technology by apocalyptic groups: from the early Chris-
tian use of the codex, to the Protestant use of the printing press, to the
contemporary use of the Internet by new religious movements.
This social creativity is perhaps the key element in the historical
dynamics of apocalypticism: each social product it generates represents a
kind of social experiment, and apocalyptic time is a laboratory of social
mutations. In both short and long run, the process can have far-reaching
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 53
consequences.7 Thus it seems like a particularly valuable exercise to
explore how, and how often, successful cultural and social developments
have had an apocalyptic genealogy. This is particularly true at the
approach of the year 2000, which holds a fascination not only for Chris-
tians who hold their calendar sacred (ab incarnatione Domini), but also for
purely secular users of the "common era." Thus many facets of global
culture consider 2000-ironically or not-as a marker in time. Futurolo-
gists regularly use the date as their conceptual framework for discussion
of future crises and future cultural mutations, and the most anti-apoca-
lyptic, anti-chiliastic institution, the Catholic church, has been preparing
a Jubilee year 2000 for ten years now, exhorting the faithful with unmis-
takably apocalyptic rhetoric.a
APOCALYPTIC TIME AND THE DOCUMENTARY RECORD:
OWLS AND ROOSTERS
Apocalyptic beliefs are the only religious beliefs that people in the past
have held about which the historian can safely say: they are false. Indeed,
by definition, they are almost always proven false in the lifetime of the
believer. This curious point has great significance for the kind of record
these beliefs leave behind in the documentation, hence in those sources
by which a historian must reconstruct what happened in the past. Before
analyzing these phenomena, let me introduce two animals in the eschato-
logical breviary: the roosters and the owls.9 Roosters crow about the
imminent dawn. Apocalyptic prophets, messianic pretenders, chronolo-
gists calculating an imminent doomsday-they all want to rouse the
courtyard, stir the other animals into action, shatter the quiet compla-
cency of a sleeping community. Owls are night-animals; they dislike both
noise and light; they want to hush the roosters, insisting that it is still
night, that the dawn is far away, that the roosters are not only incorrect,
but dangerous-the foxes are still about and the master asleep. In some
sense, the history of eschatology is the history of the conflict of these two
birds; and the documentation naturally favors that one who has been and
will be correct as long as history is written-the owls.
First, consider what one might call the apocalyptic curve, that is to
say, some variation of a sine curve whereby one can trace the natural
rhythm of an episode of apocalyptic time. This can be divided into three
major stages: first, the period of apocalyptic ascent, in which apocalyptic
beliefs are growing and spreading, a period in which communities and
54 RICHARD LANDES
movements form and gather elan; second, the period of growing disso-
nance, in which the momentum of the movement peaks without the
anticipated payoff materializing, and believers are gradually led to doubt
their expectations; and finally, a period of return to normal time, in which
the movement or community must either mutate to adjust to the failure
of expectations, or will in some way disappear. Let us look at each stage
in terms of the kinds of documents that it generates, and more specifically
the relationship between the documents and the oral public discourse.
Stage one is a time when roosters dominate. Whatever combination of
conditions-signs, wonders, catastrophes, growing evil-may make the
time favorable to their rhetoric, 10 they find a willing and responsive ear
among the larger population and, in the words of Henri Desroches, they
"take," the way a fire takes.11 Part of the (short-term) strength and (long-
term) weakness of this stage is that as long as the signs and wonders of
the day continue to mount, the roosters have the most compelling
answers. In fact the enthusiastic response they get often becomes yet one
more sign of the coming end. Thus, in this first stage, a variety of apoca-
lyptic prophecies dominate public discourse. In the terms laid out so sug-
gestively by James C. Scott, the millenarian is the most "full-throated of
hidden transcripts" whereby those not in power express their resentment
towards those in power.12 Under the cover of its success, then, a whole
range of hidden transcripts, with all their subversive and even violent
consequences, can become public in apocalyptic time.13 This is not to say
that no voice is raised against apocalyptic discourse; on the contrary, the
owls grow more and more agitated as time goes by, and their hooting
becomes so shrill that it may even resemble crowing as they denounce the
roosters and their followers as anything from unscrupulous seducers to
evil incarnate. 14 But stage one can last for only a limited time, itself a
function of "the times," the dynamics of the movements that emerge, the
serendipity of celestial and "natural" occurrences. Some apocalyptic
social fires are contained; some burn themselves out; all must extinguish,
disappearing, at least for a while, from the public domain.
During this stage of the process, we find the formation of tight-knit
communities drawn together in the expectation of the imminent end; in
some cases these community fires can break out into mass movements.
Again, the dynamics depend largely on conditions; they are volatile,
capable of fading quickly, but also of snowballing, of drawing in new
adherents purely on the basis of their momentum. In these circumstances
of mass enthusiasm, the voices of the owls are like straw in the wind, like
German liberals at the time of the Nazi ascension to dictatorial power;
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 55
their prudence appears as timidity, their warnings as envious petulance.
Indeed, under the most extraordinary circumstances, the wave of signs
and apocalyptic responses can so overwhelm a given culture that one
gets a public apocalyptic moment, when even some of the owls find
themselves drawn into the vortex of expectation. Such moments-like
the imperial responses in fourth- and fifth-century Constantinople to the
earthquakes 15-can produce extraordinary acts of collective penitence
and public confession, or humility and self-abasement even by the
proudest and most powerful members of a society. Hidden transcripts
find ready voice in such circumstances, subject to nothing other than pub-
lic response: these are moments of intense public discourse, when masks
are stripped away along with shoes and fine clothing. They are subver-
sive and exciting in equal parts, moments of social bonding and reconfig-
uration.
Stage 2 marks the point at which the apocalyptic elan begins to loose
its momentum, the moment when the gravitational pull of normal time
begins to reassert itself. Here the signs fail to follow the one on the other;
here the massing of believers has surpassed the capacity of the leadership
to accommodate them; here the excitement and fever pitch, towards
which all apocalyptic moments must move, can no longer be sustained.
Here God should step in and finish the job that his faithful have begun,
but He never has, making the only dawn that of a growing realization
that the prophecies and expectations have been wrong. It is difficult to
analyze what goes on in this period-how, and how rapidly, various
groups first suspect, then consider, and finally acknowledge this failure.16
Certainly the owls are first to defect (if they ever joined) and to raise their
voices in condemnation. This is still a period of equilibrium, although the
final results have inexorably favored the owls. The apocalyptic groups,
depending on how they deal with this devastating setback, will begin to
disintegrate here and, faced with extinction or mutation, must begin the
process of readjusting to the return of normal time, by detaching them-
selves from the very apocalyptic beliefs that brought them together.
Stage 3 marks the period when the fever has broken and conditions
return to normal, when it becomes obvious to the overwhelming majority
that the end will not come now, that the fevered hopes were in vain. At
this point, the roosters must retreat, and the owls once again dominate
public discourse. Roosters, now discredited in the public eye, must (if
their followings would survive) reshape their message to conform with
the new but decisive social consensus that the End is not imminent. These
are periods of radical reversal for such groups: they must develop a dis-
56 RICHARD LANDES
course that plays down precisely what the previous period had played
up, that passes over in silence those very words which had, with all the
force of a booster rocket, propelled the messiah and his following into
orbit in the public sphere.
THE DOCUMENTARY VESTIGES OF APOCALYPTIC TIME
The significance of this sine curve for our interpretations of past move-
ments emerges when we consider the role that writing plays in the vari-
ous levels of discourse. For the sake of clarity I will confine my discussion
to the case of cultures of limited literacy (pre-Gutenberg), a situation that
applies to the vast majority of cases in the past.
In the first stage, writing tends to be rare, and, when extant, highly
ambiguous-the Apocalypses of the Second Temple period, for example,
couch their prophecies in intentionally allusive, symbolic language. This
is understandable: roosters tend not to write, although in rare cases (like
Paul of Tarsus), they can write some. But because any text that becomes
too explicitly apocalyptic is not likely to survive its inevitable disconfir-
mation, apocalyptic authors tend to hedge their prophecies, to pass spe-
cifics over in literary silence, leaving the details to face-to-face situations:
"do you not remember that I told you these things," says (pseudo?-) Paul
as he makes a maddeningly vague allusion to that "obstacle," to
Antichrist, which, in a surely anachronistic reading, has shaped much of
the political philosophy of the West from the fourth to the sixteenth cen-
tury.17 This allusiveness alerts us to a final aspect of any surviving apoca-
lyptic text: what is written is only a limited guide to what was said.
Roosters, when seeking to mass the faithful in fervent community,
engage in a kind of apocalyptic jazz, an improvisational discourse which
consistently leads down a path of increasing excitement in which the
increase becomes part of the elan.
The majority of documentation surviving the first period, however,
opposes the roosters, warning, denouncing, bemoaning their mad excess.
In 594, Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote of the spread of a millenarian
movement following a "False Christ" from Bourges in 591.18 With thou-
sands of followers and huge crowds going to meet him, he posed such a
threat that the bishop of Clermont had him assassinated and his "Mary"
seized and tortured into confession. To little avail: three years later,
visionary women had proclaimed numerous such charismatic leaders as
saints who "acquired great influence over the common people. I saw
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 57
quite a few of them myself. I did my best to argue with them and to make
them give up their inane pretensions." Given Gregory's tendency to boast
about his victories in debates, and the notorious resistance of apocalyptic
believers to the arguments of owls, we can safely bet that Gregory had no
success. To the contrary, Gregory himself, now a very old man, seems
drawn into the apocalyptic vortex. He introduces this tale with an apoca-
lyptic invocation-"these were the beginnings of our sorrows ... " -and
cites a locus classicus of apocalyptic thought, the little Apocalypse (Matt
24:7; Mark 13:22). Here we have a trained owl, 19 becoming a rooster
malgre lui, calling his enemies minions of Antichrist.
The second stage remains the greatest mystery: given the rapidity
with which changes occur, and the level of unconscious and preconscious
activity at which much of it occurs, very little reaches writing here. These
are days and weeks of tremendous pressure, uncertainty, shifting percep-
tions; even the most literate rarely write during these times. It is difficult
even to know whether any given document survives from so volatile and
confused a period. Those one can assign with certainty to this transitional
period (e.g., a letter from Munster written in later 1034), must number
only a handful.
The literary activity from the third period dominates our documenta-
tion with an almost iron grip, and this for two reasons: almost all narra-
tives of such moments are written down after they have reached a
coherent pattern, after the "sense of an ending"-though obviously not
the anticipated ending-has made it possible to tell a coherent tale.20 This
invariably comes as a retrospective account in which the outcome has
become clear: however our authors may view the future at this point-be
they roosters or owls-they must review the past's view of the future. In
these rewritings, from the pens of triumphant owls and chastened roost-
ers alike, the most important single message of imminence becomes alter-
nately the ridiculous or the denied. Our most eloquent sources, our
storytellers, are, by nature, incapable of telling us directly about apoca-
lyptic time: the roosters may tell us what it was like, but will try as best
they can to avoid being tarred with the apocalyptic label; the owls may
tell us that the roosters crowed, but only to ridicule and scorn.
If, perchance, owls themselves have fallen prey to apocalyptic fears
and hopes, they will deny it completely: the very signs and wonders that
had swept even them up in the social fevers must be reinterpreted. The
series of prodigies which, in stage one, had read as a continuous revela-
tion of the imminent End, becomes in stage three, the prediction of a past
event-a civil war, the death of a king, a terrible plague. In stage one,
58 RICHARD LANDES
these were among the most powerful apocalyptic signifiers; in stage
three, in the hands of retrospective narrators, they become the signified,
the ending whose sense has been revealed by the inexorable return of
normal time. This kind of narrative I call capstone, in that it tries to place a
cap on the tale, to exclude the apocalyptic element, to normalize the phe-
nomenon.
It is the nature of a narrator to clean up the mess, to restrict the
thread of the story from the blooming confusion of perceptions and deeds
and responses that any event consists of into a coherent story line. Apoca-
lyptic belief becomes one of the first victims of such a clean-up. Nor does
the clean-up-itself at once instinctive and programmatic-stop at retro-
spective narratives. Societies of limited literacy are not only restricted in
their range and number of authors, but also in archival sites; and archiv-
ing may be a more significant factor than composition in shaping our his-
torical documentation. From a purely pragmatic view, space and
parchment both being highly valuable, even the most anodine apocalyp-
tic document is likely to yield to palimpsest. Apocalyptic documents are,
by nature, ephemera; like the groups who produce them, the more
explicit, the shorter-lived. Products of Stage 1 acquire, in Stage 3, a range
of distinctly negative values: they may be ridiculous (when embraced by
roosters who have been humiliated),2 1 embarrassing (when embraced by
roosters who have found a place in the post-apocalyptic public dis-
course),22 dangerous (when embraced by roosters who have been exe-
cuted, or have fled with their followers). 23 In any case, before the
documentary anarchy brought on by the diffusion of printing, we are
likely to get little from their pens.
As Karl Morrison has remarked, trying to understand the writings of
[twelfth century, Christian] apocalyptic writers is like coming to a ball
game after the clean-up crews have already set to work.24 That is unfortu-
nately our condition as historians of apocalyptic time and chroniclers of
its deeds. If we do not compensate for the kind of capstone narratives we
get, if we do not look at the possibility that an apocalyptic narrative lies
sealed within, we end up losing our only chance to reconstruct the game
that left this mess. Rather than becoming detectives, we join the clean-up
crews.
Historians who take the latter path (what I call capstone historiog-
raphy),
conform, whether they realize it or not, to techniques that, for
theological reasons, Augustine of Hippo laid out in the early fifth cen-
tury.25 Like Augustine, they take the surviving documentation as reason-
ably transparent on reality: if there are few apocalyptic texts, there were
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 59
few beliefs; like him, they dismiss the roosters as insignificant, marginal,
ignorandi; like him they relegate to the trash any evidence that roosters
may have dominated public discourse. At the end of the Emperor's New
Clothes,
Hans Christian Anderson has the emperor walk with all the more
feigned dignity until the end of the procession, his courtiers holding his
invisible robes still higher with pomp. It may be understandable that, for
reasons of public order, his courtiers need to insist that nothing untoward
happened; and we historians may be condemned only to hearing their
version. But it would be the worst journalism to base an account on a
straight rendering of their narratives. In apocalyptic matters, a narrative
cannot be taken at its word; we must look for the apocalyptic genealogy
that lies behind the (often deliberately) vague or misleading text.
This does not, of course, mean that we have nothing to work with, or
that we can make it up as we go. The clean-up job of the composers in
stage 3 is always sloppy, and in societies in which some kind of apocalyp-
tic hopes and fears are a fundamental element in the elite's ideology
Gudaism, Christianity, Islam), the amount of material can be abundant.
The New Testament itself is perhaps the most astounding collection of
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writings ever assembled; and societies
that take this collection as canon are remarkably susceptible to apocalyp-
tic moments and the trail of documents they leave. Here, for example, we
find apocalyptic documents that are neither destroyed nor erased, but
revised ... changing or removing the name, the number, the date, giving
the text a new life, resetting the apocalyptic clock to go off in the near to
distant future. There is in fact a wealth of apocalyptic and anti-apocalyp-
tic documents that is generated on every occasion that apocalyptic time
invades public discourse. It is just for us to detect them, and give them
their place in a narrative which restores Stage 1.
THE GENEALOGICAL APPROACH
AND THE "TERRORS OF THE YEAR 1000"
Let me conclude with a specific illustration of what I mean by a genealog-
ical approach to the documents. To capstone historians, the traces of
apocalyptic behavior, narrowly defined to include only the most explicit
texts, are so much meaningless flotsam and jetsam from a ship that time
sank long ago. Thus they have argued (and continue to claim) that
between the time that Augustine sank the ship of Christian millennialism
in the fifth century and the time that Joachim of Fiore rebuilt it in the late
60 RICHARD LANDES
twelfth century, belief in a millennial kingdom of heaven on earth found
no significant exponent in Latin Christendom. 26 They drive their ship of
historical analysis through these waters with no fear of ignoring the occa-
sional traces of apocalyptic and millennial beliefs that litter the waters.
Thus, come to the year 1000, they insist that it was a year like any other,
one with no scriptural basis for an eschatological meaning, the specific
date of which most contemporaries seemed ignorant of, or indifferent to;
one whose very few texts attesting to apocalyptic beliefs are either
insignificant or the product of unstable and unreliable witnesses. Even if
some traces of popular superstition can be found, little suggests that the
leaders of Christian Europe gave such matters more than passing
thought. 27
The genealogical historian, however, one who wishes to find the
traces of a once-powerful discourse and restore it to its place in the narra-
tive, must examine this flotsam carefully, for it holds the clues to the ear-
lier fight. Like some half-buried twisted mass of metal remaining from a
spent booster-rocket, it can speak eloquently of a former time, when it
was capable of launching some mighty movements and communities
into the orbit of public discourse. In the case of the centuries between
Augustine and Joachim, there is a wealth of evidence-both revised and
anti-apocalyptic-that permits us to restore the voice of those roosters
silenced so consistently by time's inexorable passage. And when we
attend to these traces rather than sweep them up and toss them into the
bin reserved for documents that do not pass the positivist's critical
muster, we find out that apocalyptic and millennial beliefs played a key
role in the history of the Latin West.
More specifically, it turns out that the Augustinian owls, whose
retrospectively arranged documentary record so carefully reflects the
theologically correct position delineated by the master, were also using,
in debates with roosters, a rather unorthodox but popular argument-the
sabbatical millennium. 28 That is to say that owls, faced with apocalyptic
moments, regularly invoked the necessity of waiting for the end of the
current (sixth) millennium in order to witness the inauguration of the
millennium of true peace. In Augustine's day that target date had been
set, two comfortable centuries earlier, for the year AD 500. Augustine and
Jerome, realizing with foreboding how dangerous such a chronology
would be in the hands of roosters a century hence, succeeded in eliminat-
ing the older chronology from use and substituting one (proposed by
Eusebius) that rejuvenated the world some 300 years later. Thus, in a pat-
tern the above discussion can easily account for, the texts that survive the
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 61
first Christian millennium (6000 AM I= AD 500) leave little trace of apoca-
lyptic discourse.29 For the writers who found favor among later archivists
(Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours), it was the year 5700.
But this merely reset the clock-with a new target date of AD 801 for
the year 6000 AM II. Chroniclers showed increasing levels of fascination
with the approaching date in the 5800s (seventh century), counting the
number of years remaining "until the completion of this millennium." By
the end of the 5800s some of the more insistent owls, latter-day Augus-
tines and Jeromes, explicitly opposed the accepted chronology, increas-
ingly favorable to the rooster, and they often, in the process, denounced
the popular [crude] millenarianism that lay behind it. In the 5900s, once
again, the voices of these owls came to dominate the written record, sub-
stituting Bede's AD for the now dangerous AM II, so that by the time the
year 6000 rolled around, virtually all our written sources (and especially
the most important and mainstream) did not make any allusion to the
eschatological significance of the date. For them, and for those historians
who accept their silence as indifference or ignorance, Charlemagne was
crowned emperor on the first day of the year 801 AD, not in the year
6000.
30
Did no one know? Did no one speak of these matters? Were there no
apocalyptic (Charlemagne as "Last Emperor") or anti-apocalyptic
(Charlemagne as continuator of the "obstacle to Antichrist") elements in
this imperial discourse? If we confidently affirm that no such questions
were on the minds and in the mouths of the men who planned, attended,
and heard about Charlemagne's coronation, then we relegate ourselves to
interviewing the court historians and joining the clean-up crews the day
after the procession. We also find ourselves forced to invent later geneses
for the profound and enduring eschatological imagination that fixes on
the figures of Charlemagne and his imperial descendants for centuries.
Of course, like Augustine and Jerome, Bede and his Carolingian di~-
ciples had again reset the clock, this time to the year 1000. Indeed 1000
was an eminently Augustinian date since, as Augustine had himself
insisted in his effort to rid Christianity of millennialism, the millennium
was not to come, but had already begun at the time of Jesus' first Parousia:
if not the millennium of the Incarnation, then that of the Passion (1033).
And if we take the approach of this date as a moment of both extravagant
hope and fear (not just paralyzing fear as the "wet-blanket" school of his-
torians would have it), then we find ourselves confronted with a society-
wide period of intense apocalyptic expectations, of a vast double-headed
apocalyptic sine curve which, peaking first in 1000, retargetted and
62 RICHARD LANDES
peaked again, perhaps still more powerfully, in 1033. Looked at in this
light, the documentation of these millennial generations (965-1035) is
immensely rich in material for the genealogical historian.31
Where the millennial generation is concerned, at the very least, cap-
stone historians have driven their ships of historical analysis through
waters where those fragments of apocalyptic discourse were not so much
flotsam and jetsam, but vast icebergs, submerged not so much below the
line of public discourse as below the line of written documentation. As
with Charlemagne's coronation, there seems to be not only disjuncture,
but even inversion between what was said and what was written. Did
Otto ill visit Charlemagne's tomb on Pentecost of 1000 because, he, not a
descendant, wished to show his solidarity with the emperor of the year
6000, or because he happened to have had a vision telling him where to
find Charlemagne and he followed it? The historian who sails through
this period ignoring the apocalyptic flotsam has, without knowing it,
already sunk on the edges of an iceberg he has not seen. No wonder that
one historian, looking at the extraordinary changes that these same histo-
rians have attributed to this tum of the millennium-some even speak of
a "mutation of the year 1000" -was struck by what he called the explana-
tory aporia of the historiography.32 These changes are, I think, incompre-
hensible without attention to the role of this highly volatile, highly
powerful apocalyptic discourse which, with unusual vigor, dominated
these generations' public life.
With the approach to apocalyptic time suggested above, I think we
can begin to unlock the key to this millennial generation. We can find
repeated descriptions of moments when roosters dominated and owls
were cowed, when whole towns and regions joined in mass assemblies of
collective penitence, when people driven to the depths of fear (at the
imminence of the Coming Judge), were moved to mighty feats of public
confession and mutual forgiveness, to joyful celebrations of God's peace
on earth. It is not, I think, a coincidence that in the decade preceding each
millennial date there was, in France, an ecclesiastically sponsored mass
movement known as the Pax Dei.33 Nor need we stop at the evidence for
Stage 1. The documentation for the period follows the apocalyptic pat-
tern: most of it comes from Stage 3, and deserves a careful rereading in
this light. But, most exceptionally (a reflection of the exceptional nature of
the times) we have a number of historians who, writing in the 1020s, offer
us a particularly rich range of texts reflecting all three stages.
Indeed, the greatest of the historians, Rodulfus Glaber, whose auto-
graph text survives in several layers, may even provide examples of writ-
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 63
ings from all three stages.34 He is, characteristically, derided as an unreli-
able gossip by capstone historians (perhaps a monk deserves criticism for
being a gyrovague, but a chronicler of times?). 35 He concludes his
account of the prodigious events of 1033, in which, according to him,
huge popular assemblies gathered to declare and to swear the Peace of
God, believing that they had made a covenant with God, with a descrip-
tion of a massive pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Let us take this account as a
good example of the difference between the standard capstone exegesis
and the genealogical approach I am suggesting here. Glaber wrote the fol-
lowing passage around 1040:
At this time an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world,
greater than any man before could have hoped to see began to travel to the
holy sepulcher of the Savior in Jerusalem. Many did not want to return at all,
and prayed on the Mount of Olives for Christ to take them up. First the order
of the inferior plebs then those of middling estate, and after these, the great
men, that is kings, counts, marchlords and bishops, and eventually, and this
was unheard of before, many women, noble and poor, undertook the jour-
ney. Many wished to die there before they returned to their own lands ...
[indeed] a certain Burgundian called Lethbaud went to the Mount of Olives
whence the Savior ascended into heaven with the promise that he would
return to judge both the quick and the dead. There [he prayed for Christ to
take him up into heaven] .... (Five Books of Histories, 4.6.18)
When a number of people consulted some of the more anxious of the day, as
to what so many folk, in numbers unheard-of in earlier ages, going to
Jerusalem meant, some replied cautiously enough that it could portend
nothing other than the advent of the accursed Antichrist who, according to
divine testimony, is expected to appear at the end of the world. Then a way
would be opened for all peoples to the east where he would appear, and all
nations would hasten to meet him, thereby fulfilling that prophecy of the
Lord, that even the elect will, if it is possible, fall into temptation. We will
speak no further of this matter, but we do not deny that the pious labors of
the faithful will be then rewarded and paid for by the Just Judge (4.6.21).
Capstone historians dismiss the apocalyptic material in this passage
as minimal, in no way a disproof of their insistence that:
There is no hint in any of this that Glaber had expected the world to end at
either of the millennia. He tells us that the great crowds of pilgrims to
Jerusalem in the year 1033 inspired men to ask the meaning, and that the
"more watchful of the age" suggested that it might portend the coming of
Antichrist, but he seems to dissociate himself from these watchful people
64 RICHARD LANDES
and to report such speculation only to impress on his readers the unique
scale of the pilgrimage.36
Note here the close reliance on the literal meaning of the text and the
assumption that anything that is not explicitly apocalyptic contains no
such meaning. Thus the only people who entertain such notions are these
sollicitiores, and certainly not Glaber who disagrees with them. The evi-
dence suggests, once again, that apocalyptic beliefs are so much free-
floating jetsam with no connection to significant social or political
activity.
Let me, instead, repeat Glaber's text with genealogical annotations.
Since it is a product of Stage 3 (written almost a decade after the passage
of 1033), the text has played down the apocalyptic element systematically.
But Glaber, who has told us in almost explicit terms that with the passage
of 1000, "there was no lack of perspicacious men to predict similar prodi-
gies and wonders at the advent of the millennium of the Passion," 37
wants us to understand the apocalyptic meaning of the time despite the
current consensus that it was a mistake. In order to read him as [I think]
he meant [to be read], I restore his meaning by filling in the blanks in the
narrative with my text in smaller type in brackets: my filler appears in
normal type, and notions about the End that were current in his Christian
culture and that Glaber assumed his readers would understand, in italics.
At this time an innumerable multitude of people from the whole
world [moved by a belief that the millennium of the Passion would mark the
Day of the Lord], greater than any man before could have hoped to
see [in his imagination of how the final days would move people] began to
travel to the holy sepulcher of the Savior in Jerusalem [as Isaiah
prophesied about the nations turning to Zion, in order to be present at the mount of
Olives, site of the Parousia of Jesus in power and glory.
J First the order of the
inferior plebs [it being absolutely extraordinary that initiative for such a
tremendous event should come from the bottom up] then those of mid-
dling estate, and after these, the great men, that is kings, counts,
marchlords and bishops, and eventually, and this was unheard of
before [a classic apocalyptic trope], many women, noble and poor,
undertook the journey. Many wished to die there before they
returned to their own lands [read: these people did not expect to return
because they thought this would be the End] .... [In one typical and famous
case a pilgrim] even prayed on the Mount of Olives for Christ to take
him up [read: to come down]. (4.6.18; ed. France, pp. 198-201)
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 65
[This wave of public apocalyptic fervor reached such alarming proportions,
drawing so many people to leave their fields and workshops, inducing even
the powerful and wealthy to abandon their homes, that those left behind
began to wonder whether these pious pilgrims might not be right about the
millennium of the Passion.] When a number of [such] people consulted
some of the more anxious [clerical owls] of the day, as to what [read:
whether] so many folk, in numbers unheard-of in earlier ages,
going to Jerusalem [to be there for the End] meant [read: were correct in
their radical apocalyptic convictions], some [of these owls] replied cau-
tiously enough [as should be the way with owls] that it could portend
nothing other than the advent of the accursed Antichrist who,
according to divine testimony, is expected to appear at the end of
the world. Then a way would be opened for all peoples to the east
where he could appear, and all nations would hasten to meet
him,38 thereby fulfilling that prophecy of the Lord, that even the
elect will, if it is possible, fall into temptation. [Thus even the owls
sounded like imprudent roosters in their efforts to discourage the more radi-
cal expressions of apocalyptic behavior: unable to move anyone with cus-
tomary cautions about not being hasty, they found themselves forced to
invoke apocalyptic notions to fight others, in particular the idea that those
alive when Antichrist comes will almost surely
be damned, since he will tempt even
the saints.]
NOTES
1. See the monumental bibliography presented by Ted Daniels, Millennialism:
An International Bibliography
(New York: Garland Press, 1992); the introduc-
tion to this work is one of the best brief treatments of the subject.
2. Despite the (to the historian) obvious origins of Christianity in apocalypti-
cism, there is a vast debate within NT studies over this, with a vigorous case
for an anti-apocalyptic Jesus being made by a number of scholars (e.g., Mar-
cus Borg, "A Tempered Case for a Non-Eschatological Jesus," Society of Bibli-
cal Literature: Seminar Papers
25 [1986), 521-35; this position has gained a
substantial following in NT studies). Partly as a result of this debate, partly for
reasons that affect other fields as well, little serious work has been done on the
role of apocalyptic in the subsequent centuries of Christian development in
Late Antiquity. Thus, a brilliant survey of the first millennium of Christian
history (Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity
[Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996)) can essentially tell the story with no allusion to
66 RICHARD LANDES
apocalyptic issues. For a lucid apocalyptic Jesus and early Christianity using
the kind of analysis here proposed, see Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
3. A similarly contentious debate of apocalyptic beliefs around the year 1000 has
produced a generation of historians of France who discuss a fundamental
mutation around the year 1000 without any reference to the possible role of
apocalyptic expectation: see below, n. 32.
4. Ruth Bloch's work, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought,
1756-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), on the millenarian
origins of the American Revolution is a fine example: well received by Ameri-
can historians, it has nonetheless found little place in their "grand narrative."
5. In the 800-page volume on Fundamentalisms Observed (1991), the index entries
on apocalypticism, millennialism, eschatology and related topics are fairly
limited, and the discussions to which they refer are of the encyclopedic vari-
ety referred to above. It is almost impossible to discuss the phenomenon of
Fundamentalism without some reference to apocalyptic beliefs. Cf. Charles
Strozier, Apocalypticism: on the Psychology of Fundamentalism in the United States
(1994).
6. These protests are the most visible manifestations of apocalypticism, and
from Norman Cohn's peasants in pursuit of the millennium, to the Cargo
Cults and self-destructive revolts of the third world, they populate most of the
literature.
7. In fact one might rephrase the dynamic laid out by Norman Cohn in The Pur-
suit of the Millennium
(New York, 1961, 1970) thusly: apocalyptic movements
are not only the reaction to modernizing economic and social conditions, in
their mutational forms, they are further spurs to the modernizing process.
8. "All this is accomplished in the Holy Spirit, and belongs, by consequence, to
the content of the future grand Jubilee. The Church cannot prepare herself for
this Jubilee other than in the Holy Spirit. That which, in the 'fullness of times'
[code for the approach of the End] has been accomplished by the Holy Spirit,
and can only revive in the memory of the Church by that same spirit. It is by it
that all this [the work of the Holy Spirit over time] can be rendered present in
the new phase of the history of man on earth: the year 2000 since the birth of
the Christ." (Papal encyclical of June, 1986, Dominum et vivificantem, 3.51). For
a resolutely anti-millenarian church, that goes pretty far in the direction of an
earthly redemption.
9. Inspiration for this pair comes from the passage in Sanhedrin 97a in which
Rabbi Simlah contrasts roosters who eagerly anticipate the dawn with bats
who flee at its approach. Since his opposition was inherently invidious (a con-
trast between himself as a rooster and his interpolator, a Min [probably a
Christian] who was not smart enough to realize he should fear the dawn), and
since I want to target not so much someone who fears the dawn as who fears a
premature excitement about the dawn (which includes many rabbis and bish-
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 67
ops) I prefer to speak of the owl, with the connotations of wisdom (pru-
dence?) that it carries.
10. For an excellent discussion of the tropes that roosters use, see Stephen
O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric.
11. Henri Desroches, Sociologie de l'esperance (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1973),.espe-
cially 18-39.
12. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), passim, see especially pp. 5--6, 80, 198-99.
13. Scott emphasizes how dominant elites know well that hidden transcripts of
resentment exist, and accept them partly from impotence to eliminate them
(cf. the effort of totalitarian governments to root them out), partly from a
sense that they permit subordinates to blow off steam. The advent of apoca-
lyptic time becomes, then, a particularly dangerous time when the normal
inhibitors to the expression of hidden transcripts-future retaliation-loose
their weight.
14. See below, n. 18.
15. See Brian Croke, "Two Early Byzantine Earthquakes and the Liturgical Com-
memoration," Byzantion 51 (1981): 122£.
16. One imagines that an entire field of psychology, concerning the ways in
which repressed awareness forces its way into consciousness, could be con-
structed from a study of this passage from apocalyptic to disappointed.
17. II Thess. 2; on the history of the identification (near unanimous among the
patristic writers) of the Roman empire as obstacle, see Paschoud, "La doctrine
chretienne et l'ideologie imperiale romaine," in L'Apocalypse de Jean. Traditions
exegetiques et iconographiques, Ille-Xllle siecles, ed. Y. Christe (Paris, 1979), pp.
31-73; and Daniel Verhelst, "La prehistoire des conceptions 'Adson concer-
nant l' Antichrist," Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 40 (1973), 52-103.
18. Gregory of Tours, Historiae 10.25; tr. L. Thorpe, History of the Franks, pp.
584--86.
19. See his opening invocation of chronology which, in his time, has over 200
more years before 6000, as a comfort to those who "despair at the coming End
of the world" (see analysis in R. Landes, "Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled:
Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography, 100-SOO
CE," The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. W. Verbeke, D.
Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen (Leuven: Katholieke U., 1988), pp. 165--66,
and below).
20. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1966).
21. E.g., the "pseudo-prophetess Thiota" who gathered a large following of both
commoners and clerics in Mainz by predicting the end of the world for the fol-
lowing year (Rudolf of Fulda, Annales fuldenses, ad an. 847, MGH SS 1.365; tr.
Timothy Reuter, The Annals of Fulda [New York: Manchester University Press,
1992], pp.26-27).
68 RICHARD LANDES
22. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Sir Isaac Newton, whose extensive
commentaries on the Book of Revelation historians of science have been loathe
to acknowledge. See Frank E. Manuel, ed., The Religion of Isaac Newton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
23. The only surviving texts from the apocalyptic millenarian leader Fra Dolcino,
tortured and executed in 1308, comes in a paraphrase from the inquisition: see
Bernard Gui, Manuel de l'Inquisiteur ed. and tr. G. Mollat (Paris: Champion,
1927), vol. 2, pp.75-99.
24. Karl Morrison, "The Exercise of Thoughtful Minds: The Apocalypse in Some
German Historical Writings," in Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. R. K.
Emmerson and B. McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) pp. 352.
25. Paula Fredriksen, "Apocalypse and Redemption in Early Christianity: From
John of Patmos to Augustine of Hippo," Vigiliae Christianae 45:2 (1991),
151-83; and R. Landes, "Millenarismus absconditus: l'historiographie augu-
stinienne et le millenarisme," Le Moyen Age 98 (1992), 355-77.
26. The academic consensus dates back at least to the tum of this century: Gry,
Leon, Le millenarisme dans ses origines et son developpement (Paris, 1904); both
the surveys (e.g., Michael St. Clair, Millenarian movements in historical context
[New York: Garland Pub., 1992)), and the more specifically medieval works
(The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. R. Emmerson and B. McGinn [Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1992)) pass over this period with only a passing
glance. See Robert Lerner, "The Medieval Return of the Thousand-Year Sab-
bath," in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, pp. 51-52, especially n. 3.
27. For a bibliography on the subject, see the entry "Year 1000, Terrors of," in the
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. I. Strayer (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1989)
vol. 12, p. 723.
28. On this issue and the following discussion, see R. Landes, "Lest," 137-211.
29. Cf. the twice repeated, if frustratingly laconic passage in the Chronicon campa-
nensem
ad an 493 and 496: "presumptuous ignoramuses" (493), and "other
delirious people" (496) announced the coming of Antichrist (Consularia Italica,
ed. Mommsen, MGH, Auctores Antiquissimi vol. 9, pp. 492-93); discussed in
Landes, "Lest the Millennium," p. 162, n. 102.
30. See Landes, "Lest the Millennium," pp. 191-205.
31. See Johannes Fried, "Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende,"
Deutsches Archiv fur Erforschung des Mittelalters, 45:2 (1989), 385-473; Richard
Landes, Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes,
989-1034 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), especially chaps.
14-15.
32. See Alain Guerreau, Le feodalisme: Un horizon theorique (Paris: Le Sycomore,
1980), pp. 29-40; the mutation de l'an mil has been the subject of a fairly exten-
sive recent debate (Annales, 1992; Revue historique de droit fran,ais et etranger,
1994, 1995; Past and Present, 1994, 1996), without any discussion of an apoca-
lyptic dimension to either the culture or its dynamics.
ON OWLS, ROOSTERS, AND APOCALYPTIC TIME 69
33. The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year
1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1992).
34. Rodulfus Glaber Opera, ed. John France, Neithard Bulst, and Paul Reynolds
(Oxford Medieval Texts; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); on his text, see pp.
lxxxii-lxvi.
35. See R. Landes, "Rodulfus Glaber and the Dawn of the New Millennium:
Eschatology, Historiography, and the Year 1000," Revue Mabillon n.s. 7 [68]
(1996) 1-21; on the criticisms leveled at him, see p.1 n. 3.
36. John France, Rudolfi Glabri opera omnia, p. lxiv.
37. In the introduction to Book IV, which is where he picks up his tale after the
passage of 1033. See Landes, Relics, pp. 320-21.
38. France translates obviam illi cuncte nationes incunctanter sint processure, as "the
nations will march against him without delay." This contradicts the context,
rather it reads "march towards him," i.e., to join him.