I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but Norman Cohn, who wrote The Pursuit of the Millenium, died last month at the age of 92. The Guardian has an obituary.

best,
Chris H

Wow, I'm just in the process of starting The Pursuit of the Millennium.

I'm four chapters in and it's fascinating stuff. I've found myself wondering how the popular media has changed the potential for millenarianism to spread these days. I was surprised to realise that I couldn't even decide whether it made it more likely, or less.

Most of the cults Cohn has mentioned so far have focused on individuals who are both eloquent and charismatic. In the middle ages folk like that ended up as the figurehead of their followers' own religious revolt. These days they'd probably end up with their own TV show.

Apart from the ones covered in weeping sores, who wore hair shirts, of course.

They'd be the ones with the hyper-successful websites...

best,
Chris H

I've had it laying around for most of the summer and actually got it off the shelf this morning to make a start on it, just before reading your announcement of Cohn's death. Which sort of makes me nervous of getting any other books from the shelf now. May have to stick with already dead authors for a while.

I really just need to read the first chapter because of something I'm writing on the idea of Apocalypse, but have a funny feeling that I'll be reading it all once I start.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: betamax,

This article seems a good primer on Cohn's work and sheds some (serious) light on WG's use of the reference in Milgrim's chapters.

[snippet]
In a key passage, Cohn writes:

As for the Communists, they continue to elaborate, in volume after volume, that cult of Thomas Muntzer which was inaugurated already by Engels. But whereas in these works the prophetae of a vanished world are shown as men born centuries before their time, it is perfectly possible to draw the opposite moral -- that, for all their exploitation of the most modern technology, Communism and Nazism have been inspired by phantasies which are downright archaic. And such is in fact the case. It can be shown (though to do so in detail would require another volume) that the ideologies of Communism and Nazism, dissimilar though they are in many respects, are both heavily indebted to that very ancient body of beliefs which constituted the popular apocalyptic lore of Europe.
[/snippet]

Direct commentary on Brown as an agent of Nazism/Neoconism. (I don't think that can constitute a spoiler.)