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.
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