Messiahs: The Visions and Prophecies for the Second Coming

by John Hogue

Explores the concepts of messianic myths in different cultures and discusses specific messianic figures including the Dalai Lama, Nostradamus, Buddha, Y'shua, and Malachi.

Genres: Religion

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published immediately before the Millennium by the New Age publishing house Element Books, any book that puts a quotation by Adolf Hitler right next to one by Jesus Christ in order to send a negative message about Messiah ideology ought to have something going for it.

Unfortunately what starts out as an interesting critique of all forms of organised religion that are based on charismatic leadership eventually degenerates into a sales pitch for New Age alternatives in general and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho in particular.

The initial argument is not, in fact, a bad one. The book is even a useful compendium of selective quotations designed to prove his point but Hogue's mildly gonzo style of writing does not inspire confidence in his objectivity. Any sign of this being more than a polemic disappears by the end.

There is an interesting question to be answered here and it is not one answered by an appeal to the right side of the brain - why is it that our species has to find unusual individuals as exemplars in order to build institutional systems that rely on visions of end times and apocalypse?

What I would like to have seen is not an angry excoriation of such phenomena but rather an analysis that deploys historical and textual research, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology in order to help explain the repeated absurdity that is messianic religion.

It would, of course, be a sub-set of a wider analysis of the apparent human need for religion and 'spirituality' with the question at hand being why so many religious leaders seem to repeat each other in adopting a negativity and pessimism about the future and making promises they cannot keep.

From there we have to ask why so many people end up believing in often lurid apocalyptic nonsense cast in the most obscure and metaphorical terms. Hogue may identify the problem here only to fall into a new trap drawn from his interest in the Eastern religions.

Instead of the present becoming worse and worse and ending up in terror and horror until the Messiah returns to save us all, the new gurus offered a general awfulness of the present which can only be resolved magically by a change of consciousness instigated by the gurus themselves.

These two types of response to reality may look like opposites but are just variations on a theme of absurd human belief, merely a civil war within a world of minds yearning for their right hemispheres to become a true representation of reality instead of a limbic residue.

We live in an age where, at the margin, expectations of the 12th Imam, Eretz Israel and the Rapture are all playing a walk-on role in the tragedy currently unfolding in the Middle East yet all the major Western religions and others contain apocalyptic and expectant seeds.

But are the cultic Eastern modes much better when naive and lost individuals lose themselves in following canny gurus whose promise is that, if only they follow them, they will lose their Egos, become 'themselves' and change reality itself? Oh, give us a break!

What seems to be going on is that great tranches of humanity have never been able to deal with the brute facts of having an evolved self-consciousness that is faced with both the inevitability of death and the reality of social and cultural impotence for the bulk of us for the bulk of our time.

The Eastern religions tend to solve this by coming to terms with both problems by withdrawing from reality yet accepting it when it cannot be avoided while the Western religions seem to emphasise inventing new and magical realities that can create the illusion of potency and even immortality.

There is much to say on this but not here. Suffice it to say I was not sorry to have read the book but it is on its way to the charity shop. It could have been so much better if it had been more disciplined in its analysis of the messiah complex (leadership and submission) at the heart of the human condition.

Perhaps we are left with humanity as still no better than baboons with their petty hierarchies and urges to dominate and submit to which evolution has added an existential fear of the future and of the chaos of a world we do not understand.

[Matty Lapointe-Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book sometime during college to do research on the concept of a Messiah for a script I was (and still am, should I ever get back to it) working on. I suppose it's my own fault for not paying closer attention to the subtitle, "The Visions and Prophecies for the Second Coming" but in some ways I don't feel that I got much information of use out of this book than if I had just looked up "messiah" on wikipedia (which of course didn't exist when I bought the book but whateves).

Published in 1999, the first half of the book is pretty much an outline of the fact that most cultures have stories about how, after humanity lets the world turn into a complete shithole for a certain amount of time, a deity (often someone who showed up to relay teachings hundreds of years ago in a different incarnation) will come again and dish out punishment and rewards as each person deserves. The book hasn't aged well, though there are a few mildly hair-raising "prophecies" about politics and the environment at the beginning of the 21st century that came close to hitting the mark.

There were some thought provoking quotes (some of which I'll include below) and stories about prophets and how revolutionary they were in changing the way people view the world, but that's about it. And then the second half of the book pretty much turns into a love letter to late-20th century mystic, Osho. Frankly, his Zen thoughts on taking the world as it comes and the necessity of people being better to each other were all things I could get behind. But the tunnel vision focus on his experience/teachings by the author who admitted to having been a follower in the late 70's kind of reeked of unabashed propaganda.

Ultimately I would guess there's probably plenty other places people could get the information they hope to get out of this book from a better book. I do have to say I enjoyed the plethora of quotes from different philosophers/prophets, found some concepts pretty interesting, and did learn a few new things about books I find myself shelving in the metaphysics section at work every day.

"Very rarely does a buddha exist in the world, so even if you meet him you will not understand his language. Most probably you will misunderstand him. You know misery, and he is talking about bliss. You know wounds, and he is talking about eternal health. You know only death, and he is talking about eternity." -- Osho, 1989

"The momentum of religious prophegating [propaganda regarding prophecies] almost predestines humanity to weaken its resolve to save itself. How can a sense of personal responsibility swim up a river of collective conditioning that marks us as victims of original sin before we are even born? A sinner before birth cannot save himself. He needs a savior."

"Ignorance is the cause of
all religious conflicts...
Ignorance has its roots in
the ego, it does not see
[the Divine] in all things."
-- Guru Nanak 1521

[Samantha McGuire (Mirror Bridge Books) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book on ancient religious and spiritual figures that changed history! Highly recommend this one for people interested in theology and religious history...