Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith

In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium investigates the origins of apocalyptic faith-the belief in a perfect future, when the forces of good are victorious over the forces of evil. Norman Cohn takes us back two thousand years to the world views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, and the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth, and he illuminates a major turning point in the history of human consciousness.

An incisive study of ancient religion and the rise of belief in an impending apocalypse, by the author of the classic study The Pursuit of the Millennium. Cohn (Emeritus/University of Sussex) has puzzled for nearly a half century over where and when the idea first emerged of a ``marvelous consummation, when good will be finally victorious over evil'' and human beings will enjoy a new life on a purified earth. As he demonstrates through a sequence of succinct histories of ancient religious cultures, neither the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, nor Vedic Indians possessed the notion of apocalypse. Instead, each of these peoples imagined the world as a vastly ancient creation in which the guardians of order, or cosmos, are locked in an eternal stalemate with the agents of chaos. Typically, as in ancient Egypt, the principle of order became embodied in the state and its monarchy (Cohn tends to see tight parallels between religious and political developments). The great break came around 1200 B.C. with Zoroaster, who developed ``a totally new perception of time'' in which the combat between cosmos and chaos (or, on the moral plane, between good and evil) will culminate in the triumph of cosmos--a transformation termed ``the making wonderful,'' including the bodily resurrection of the elect. As Cohn shows, Zoroastrian thinking wound its way into Palestine, where it united with the monotheism of the Israelite prophet Second Isaiah--an event Cohn describes as ``a particularly ingenious response to a situation of permanent insecurity.'' The result was a huge corpus of Jewish apocalyptic literature that led eventually to Christian ideas of a transcendent Messiah and a Final Judgment, encoded most strikingly in the Book of Revelation. Cohn's tendency to see religion as disguised politics (he likens theologians to ``political propagandists'') stays largely in the background here: a tight, intelligent study. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Cosmic order and human destiny provide the subjects for Cohn's (emeritus, Univ. of Sussex, England) most recent study. Students of his previous work, Pursuit of the Millennium (1970), will find in Cosmos the same rich tapestry encompassing history, archaeology, popular culture, mythology, and religion. With an eye to eschatology and apocalypticism, Cohn effectively leads us from the ancient Near East to the "new" thinking he locates in Zoroastrianism and its prophet, Zarathustra. He credits Zoroastrianism with providing the eschatological framework for Western thought. Cohn's depth and breadth of knowledge is marvelous, his enthusiasm for the subject infectious. Well documented and extremely readable, this is highly recommended for religion, history, and seminary collections.
- Sandra Collins, SLIS, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia perceived the world order to be a static and immutable stage on which the forces of good and evil battled incessantly. During the second millennium B.C., however, the Iranian prophet Zoroaster questioned this structure of the world order; he maintained that it was progressive rather than static and that humanity was moving toward a time that would be free from conflict. In his cogent, highly readable volume, Cohn traces these and other apocalyptic beliefs from their origins to the perfect future, in which the supreme god will defeat the forces of evil for the benefit of humanity, and he reveals how this new philosophy affected the belief systems of Judaism and early Christianity. Edward Lighthart