By the beginning of the year 2000, there were in excess of a billion Web pages in existence, as compared to only 1.3 million five years earlier. Besides the sheer volume of material it can accommodate, the Internet is the first mass medium without gatekeepers. No intermediaries, such as editors, publishers, or producers, stand between the content provider and the distribution of the message. In addition, the creation and dissemination of content require only a modest financial investment. Anyone can place a message before a potentially global audience.7
One effect of the Internet is to obscure the distinction between mainstream and fringe sources; another is to bind together individuals who hold fringe views. The validation that comes from seeing one’s beliefs echoed by others provides a sense of connection for otherwise isolated individuals. Excessive claims have sometimes been made for “virtual community,” but surely one effect of the Internet is to confirm and embolden those whose beliefs normally receive scant social reinforcement. The result insofar as millennialism is concerned is that the dissemination of a message is no longer linked to such traditional requirements as financial investment, popularity, or social acceptability. The bizarre, eccentric, and obscene appear on the same screen that might display the Times of London or CNN.com.
The second condition for the flourishing of improvisational millennialism, as mentioned earlier, is the erosion of existing authority structures. Even repressive governments find it difficult to block unwanted communications. Although secularization has not marginalized religion, it has weakened many traditional religious authority structures. Contributing factors to this decline have been the prestige of science and technology; population migration to diverse, media-rich urban areas; and the spread of compulsory secular education. Many religious authorities have responded by attempting to withdraw into enclaves, while others have tried to adapt their teachings to avoid conflicting with secular ideas. In either case, a reduction in power, scope of authority, and prestige have commonly resulted. Paradoxically, although science has contributed to the decline of religious authority, science too has seen its standing decline, especially in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The fruits of scientific research—whether they be nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the application of fossil fuels, or the manipulation of genetics—appear morally ambiguous. Hence science itself, instead of emerging as a surrogate for religion, has faced challenges to its authority, notably from those claiming access to nonrational forms of knowledge.
In short, many forms of authority that might in other circumstances have interfered with the ability of new belief systems to arise have proved unable to do so. Taken together, open communications and weakened authority create an environment favorable to millenarian entrepreneurs. Unconstrained by confessional traditions or ideological systems, they are free to engage in the kind of bricolage that distinguishes the improvisational millenarian style. They can borrow freely from many religious traditions, from occultism and the esoteric, from radical politics, and from both orthodox and fringe science.
In an environment in which authority has come into question, the very unclassifiability of these belief systems makes them attractive. Are they Christian or Buddhist, Western or non-Western, scientific or antiscientific, religious or secular? The very questions and categories seem out of place when the belief systems themselves ignore such boundaries. In the act of ignoring boundaries, improvisational millenarians implicitly challenge orthodox conceptions of belief and knowledge. By picking and choosing among a variety of beliefs, improvisationalists convey the message that no single belief system, whether religious or secular, is authoritative. By implication, only the idiosyncratic combination associated with a particular leader or group is deemed to be valid. The millenarian entrepreneurs who construct such collages of beliefs assert that they alone possess insights that transcend conventional differences, whether among religious traditions, between religion and politics, or between science and esotericism. The result has been a dramatic proliferation of millenarian schemata, both in terms of the number of competing visions and in terms of their diversity.
THE SOURCES OF IMPROVISATIONAL MILLENNIALISM
Where does improvisational millennialism come from? The religious and secular forms of millennialism described earlier in this chapter have relatively unproblematic origins, because they rose out of well-defined bodies of religious and political ideas. Even systems of millenarian thought that are clearly heretical or deviant define themselves in opposition to a known orthodoxy. For instance, the more militant forms of late medieval Catholic millennialism emerged in opposition to the official Augustinian doctrine of the church, just as fringe Maoist revolutionary groups later placed themselves in opposition to more established custodians of Marxist thought.
Religious and secular millennialism are, to be sure, never absolutely pure types, emerging solely from within a single tradition with no outside influences. Soviet Marxist-Leninism surely absorbed and secularized some of the religious salvationism of the Russian Orthodox Church, and many in the Nazi inner circles combined racial pseudoscience with occultism. Nonetheless, neither participants nor observers have much difficulty in assigning most millenarian movements to some single, dominant category. A movement is religious or secular. If the former, it may be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, or some such; if the latter, racialist, socialist, and so on. Classification problems can sometimes emerge concerning particular cases (to what secular category does one assign French revolutionary Jacobinism?), but it is rarely in much doubt that some appropriate category can be identified.
The belief systems with which this inquiry is concerned, however, permit no such easy pigeonholing. They are beholden to no dominant set of ideas. They are not the work of religious heretics rebelling against the constraints of orthodoxy; nor are they the product of deviationists defying received political doctrines. Instead, they combine elements so disparate that it is often impossible to determine what if any influence predominates. The practitioners of improvisational millennialism are not mere syncretists, hybridizing a few belief systems that happen to impinge on their consciousness. Rather, they construct wholly new creations out of bits and pieces acquired from astonishingly diverse and unrelated sources. It is as though there were some reservoir of motifs into which the new millenarians can dip, acquiring scraps of this or that ideology, idea, or creed. But what sort of reservoir is this that encompasses not only the familiar themes of religious and secular millenarians but also the more outré elements—Jesuit-Masonic conspiracies, Jewish cabals, sudden shifts in the polar axis, UFOs bearing alien emissaries, subterranean tunnel systems populated by strange races? This is a mélange that we may intuitively recognize as standing outside the boundaries of even most typical millenarian discourse.
Three ideas will help us to gain a clearer understanding of the reservoir from which improvisational millennialists draw their ideas: rejected knowledge, the cultic milieu, and stigmatized-knowledge claims. Rejected knowledge is a concept developed by James Webb to aid in mapping the outer boundaries of the occult in Western culture. The closely related concept of the cultic milieu was devised by sociologist Colin Campbell to designate the sources from which many New Religious Movements draw their inspiration. Finally, in reaction to these ideas, I use the concept of stigmatized knowledge claims to designate a broader intellectual universe into which both rejected knowledge and the cultic milieu may be fitted.8
Rejected Knowledge
In his histories of European occultism, Webb describes the occult as “rejected knowledge.” This term refers less to the possible falsity of knowledge claims (though they may indeed be false) than to the relation between certain claims and the so-called Establishment—the dominant institutions associated with the spread of European Christianity. Christianity, in the course of achieving cultural