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TAOIST MESSIANISM* ANNA SEIDEL The longing for paradise on earth and for the savior, the messiah, who promises to lead us to it, is one of those most elementary hopes which lie deeply hidden in man. The powerful emotional energy of these yearnings is, in a normal society, tamed and channeled by rationality and common sense. It is only in times of crisis and bewildering change, when ordinary behavior patterns are disrupted, that these yearnings can come to the surface, often with explosive force, and sweep away whole societies into irrational phantasies and inspire radical and often violent solutions to the problems at hand. When normal ways of coping with crisis have failed, the search for renewal continues on a religious and emo- tional plane: the messiah appears bringing his good tidings of an imminent earthly paradise. Since Norman Cohn's important work on medieval European messianism, The Pursuit of the Millenium (1957), the study of mes- sianic movements in all cultures has become almost a fashion. It was discovered that such movements do not depend on a Jewish or Christian tradition of prophecy or on a medieval world view. Dur- ing the last 100 years, politico-religious movements that
Numen – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1984
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