Free The Real History of the End of the World by Sharan Newman Page A

the end of the world and how they have dealt with the concept.
    Very few people have actually believed that the whole world will end. But almost every culture has some belief or folk myth that tells how the gods or God renew an earth that has become morally corrupt. It seems that people everywhere have looked around at the chaos caused by nature or humanity and at some point just have thrown up their hands, too overwhelmed with the problem to see a way to fix it.
    But how could the world be fixed? Some cultures see time as cyclical; nothing ends, but now and then a new cycle begins. In many cases the birth of the cycle is painful and most of the corrupt world is lost in the transition. In other traditions time is linear. Western society, under the influence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, tends to view history as moving along a straight track from beginning to end. Whether the start was the Garden of Eden or the Big Bang doesn’t matter. The direction is the same.
    When I began work on this book, I didn’t think I would find much on the end in cultures with cyclical viewpoints. I was mistaken. Just as I could find few traditions that the world would end completely in linear societies, I discovered there were groups within Chinese, Hindu, and other societies with cyclical worldviews that shared endtime ideas that were much the same as the Western picture of the Apocalypse.
    Which brings me to the tricky topic of terminology. There are several words and phrases used by people who study the end times ( end times is one). Some of them are just different ways of saying the same thing. Some are technical terms, like eschatology, an academic term for study of the idea of the end times. Still others have picked up new meanings over the years. For my purposes, Apocalypse means everything ending with a bang: war, fire, flood, etc. Even though it means the same thing as Revelation, too many people see them as different. I will use Revelation to refer to the book of the New Testament attributed to John of Patmos, although sometimes that is also called the Apocalypse. Okay?
    Millennium is the happy time during which the saved or the elect will live in peace before the final grand reckoning. Some Christians think that Jesus will return at the beginning of the Millennium, some think it won’t be until the end. This return of Jesus is expressed in many ways: Second Coming, Second Advent, Parousia (my favorite).
    I will try to explain these terms as they appear in the text but, just in case, there is also a short glossary at the end of the book. It’s for my benefit, too, because there are some words I have to look up every time I run across them.
    At times it seemed to me as if everyone who had ever picked up a quill or pen or stylus had written about the end of the world. Everywhere I looked, someone was either predicting the end or at least describing the events that would precede it. But, after a while I began to see that almost all of the movements fell into categories, although the categories often overlapped. For instance, there were those who were interested in predicting the end as a mathematical exercise, using primarily the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. This includes Isaac Newton and William Miller. The difference between the two is mainly that Miller felt he should warn people. Newton seemed to think everyone was on his own.
    Most of the millennial movements, as distinct from individual date-setters, are tied to a belief that only a few people can be saved from the coming destruction. I thought that this was just a Christian phenomenon but then found it in non-monotheistic societies, like the Chinese Yellow Turbans and the Hopi. So perhaps the belief in an imminent end coupled with the salvation of the elect believers is either very ancient or universal common sense. It’s difficult for people to imagine their own end, even if everything else goes up in a cataclysm. There are hard-nosed