Shabat shalom y’all,
A friend of mine sent me this podcast titled, “Unlocking the Secrets of Prophecy - For Sorcerers, Astrologers, and Magicians” by author, Gordon White. As Christians (adventists no less) I feel this discussion is something we should have a vested interest in. After all, isn’t prophecy what we pride our theology upon? Here is the link to the podcast. Required viewing as far as I’m concerned.
Gordon describes prophecy as “a hectic yelling about the future,” reflected in the Hebrew, nabi, meaning “bubbling forth” as a voice from an ecstatic frenzy. “Prophecy is a powerful line that birthed Western magic,” Gordon says, estimating that 40% of grimoire invocations call upon the classical, biblical prophets by name.
[Aside: The grimoire tradition is a practice that embodies the myths of King Solomon. The Book of Daniel is written pseudoepigraphically, after an ancient Hebrew sage mentioned thrice in Ezekiel. The only other instance in the Hebrew Bible a character named Daniel is mentioned is in 1 Chronicles 3:1 as another, elder son of David. On some concordance level, Christian prophecy and grimoire occultism are estranged half-brothers of sorts.]
Prophecy is often assumed to be the same thing as predicting the future, but this assumption misses an even larger component of prophecy: contextualizing past events as causes for the present moment. These postdictions usually portray history and the present moment within a mythic scale. The poetry of the prophets ferries between the scales of macrocosm and microcosm. Cities are single persons, kings represent nations, prophets embody their own God attacking his own people. The outlier of the prophets, the Book of Daniel, was (badly) written as if 2nd century geopolitics were dreamed as mythic statues and chimeras centuries earlier by a soothsayer learned in the sorceries of Chaldeans and Babylonians. The radical imagining of the future demands a radical reimagining of the past.
Along with this reimagining of the past, another crucial component to prophecies–and apocalypses in particular– is an innovative relation to a text, or at least canon of images. We can see this in Revelation’s recycling of the images from the Books of Daniel and Enoch. One of Ellen White’s earlier visions illustrates this textual intercourse, appearing like a blend of mesmeric trance and Burroughs’ cut-up method. Even her account of this event is shaped after Luke’s account of Zechariah being struck dumb.
While at family prayers one morning, the power of God began to rest upon me, and the thought rushed into my mind that it was mesmerism, and I resisted it. Immediately I was struck dumb and for a few moments was lost to everything around me. I then saw my sin in doubting the power of God, and that for so doing I was struck dumb, and that my tongue would be loosed in less than twenty-four hours. A card was held up before me, on which were written in letters of gold the chapter and verse of fifty texts of Scripture. After I came out of vision, I beckoned for the slate, and wrote upon it that I was dumb, also what I had seen, and that I wished the large Bible. I took the Bible and readily turned to all the texts that I had seen upon the card.
I’m not trying to advocate for Ellen as a biblical prophet. We have inherited a watermill in disrepair, but the river is still flowing. We are inheritors of this tradition. If we don’t take responsibility for it, it remains at risk of being used by the next Koresh.
If we are to take up this human responsibility of radically imagining the future, we need to radically cohere our present with a newly imagined past. In her contribution to Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet, historian Ann Taves describes Ellen and adventism’s early context of visionaries and inheritance of the shouting Methodist tradition.
Ann Taves– The early religious experiences of Ellen Harmon make a great deal of sense when viewed in relation to the Methodist shout tradition. While some scholars have questioned her mental health, her religious experience was not unlike that of the Methodist itinerant preacher Benjamin Abbot. In both cases, dreams and trances played a significant role…
While the official writings of Ellen G. White and other early sources uncovered by Adventist historians portray the process of ‘prophet-making’ rather differently, both acknowledge the challenge that mesmerism presented to that process…
Other historical sources discovered by Adventist historians in the last twenty years provide a view of the young Ellen Harmon only hinted at in the official writings. These sources indicate that she was one among a number of adventist visionaries who surfaced in Maine in early 1845 and that she participated fully in the “fanaticism” from which she would later want to distance herself. Taken together, they illustrate how early Seventh-day Adventists “made” a prophetess by demonizing mesmerism. In doing so, Seventh-day Adventists both neutralized mesmerism and inscribed it at the heart of the Seventh-day Adventist cosmos…
New sources documenting the events of this period suggest that the radical adventists borrowed from the Methodist organizational structure, adopting small groups (bands) as their basic structure with visionaries traveling from group to group to convey their visionary insights regarding October 22…
Adventists also have tended to discount the fact that ‘nominal Adventists,’ by White’s own account, reckoned her not only as a fanatic, but as the leader of the fanatics…
Did you think that adventist history involved a network of Christians engaging in mesmeric trances? That was the original, dynamic energy that was redirected into an incorporated church. Taves goes on to speculate as to why Ellen was established as the “prophetess” out of a tradition of traveling visionaries:
Ann Taves– Two factors come immediately to mind, both speculative, given the current state of the historical research. First, I think it is likely that White’s visions spoke more consistently to the needs of the movement both in terms of content and timing than did those of her competitors. Second, and at least as important, the ‘symbiotic relationship’ between Ellen and James White, to borrow Jonathan Butler’s phrase, provided Ellen White and her visions with a forceful promoter that the other visionaries lacked.
Are we custodians of the biblical prophetic tradition or 19th century church politics?
Gordon describes the history of prophecy as, “a linear history of a shamanic expression of a hyperdimensional now.” The images from Revelation are as alive today as they were in the first century. What, then, is the “hyperdimensional now” that we share with Daniel, or John, or Ellen? Wars and rumors of wars? By thy pharmakeia were all nations deceived? The health impact of prophecies being mistaken for predictions? The times are prophetic and in need of prophets. These moments are filled with living images that are burgeoning through our imaginations. Dance, sing, write, draw them out.
Acts 2:17– And it will be in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all people; then your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.
Thanks for reading.