Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (review)

Landes contends that “secular” historians have often failed to account for millennial prophecies and millennialist movements, mainly because they are ill at ease with religious movements. That is, they have often walked away from such movements or failed to understand them, thus undervaluing the drama of their ordinarily turbulent, if not catastrophic, consequences.

Methodologically he supports his thesis with a conventional narrative history comprising ten movements or episodes. He is at heart a storyteller who cannot resist breaking up his larger narrative with brief asides that are usually humorous or satirical. Yet he cannot be content merely to rely on narratives, since he has a grand interpretive scheme in mind that involves many different kinds of evidence. He has to be at home with “intellectual” history, because the millennial prophets on whom he focuses are given to extravagant—many would say “weird”— ideas that he must probe and then connect to form a coherent plot. Call what he does “cultural” history, because he deals with assemblages of behavior fused with ideas, the proper subject of cultural studies. He also needs and favors the methods of “theological” history, which resemble the “philosophical” ones, except in subject matter.

To be precise, one would have to say this book is a multi-methodological history, or, in exasperated moments of reading, that it is a study devoid of method, just a set of engrossing ideas culled from Landes’ reading in idiosyncratic stories. Landes leaps from one subject to another with a style that a cynical reviewer might expect from someone with attention deficit disorder. Nonetheless, it would not be fair to damn the book with faint praise, because the research is vast and deep, discovering meanings that one might have overlooked, had one not the impulse to upset convention.

Landes puts many academic historians in their place—his chosen place for them!—in the early pages of the book. He has an irritating habit of labeling; trying to remember all of the linguistic cubby-holes into which he slots phenomena can be exhausting. His labels are often privately devised and applied, catalogued with terms that can be distracting. Get used to “semiotic” this and “demotic” that. Sometimes he even produces charts to help readers through the thicket.

All is forgiven, however, when Landes connects perceptive and revelatory stories that otherwise might seem impossible to connect: for example, Xhosa cattle slaying in modern Africa and Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic culture or the French Revolution, Marxism, Bolshevism, Nazism, ufo cults, and, strangely, though not implausibly, today’s global Jihadism. On balance, Heaven is a work of enormous erudition and an imparter of knowledge and insight, capable of arousing curiosity, if not much of anything semiotic among those of us who are more staid and prosaic readers.