The Great Year: Astrology, Millenarianism and History in the Western Tradition

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1995 by John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs

Nicholas Campion. Penguin Arkana. 696pp.15.00[pounds]. 0-14-019296-4.

Perhaps not many people read Spenser's Faerie Queene nowadays for pleasure -- and if so, it's a pity. But if the reader will turn to the opening cantos of the fifth book of that poem, the theme of which is Justice and the return of the Golden Age, he will find what he might take to be a surprisingly modern description of the phenomenon of `star shift'. Because of the precession of the equinoxes, in the course of approximately 26,000 years, the constellations including the signs of the zodiac, will re-assume their original positions in relation to the earth. Then, Spenser says, the Golden Age of Justice will return. This is not modern at all -- it goes back to the observations of the ancient Babylonian astronomers. The fact that the sun now rises at the spring equinox in the sign of Pisces and has done so since the beginning of the Christian era and not in that of Aries the Ram, and that in the next millennium it will rise in the sign of Aquarius, is a cardinal premise for the followers of the so-called New Age movement. In the Sixties the same idea was reflected in the well known chorus of the musical `Hair'.

At first sight there may seem to be little connection between these ideas and those of Jehovah's Witnesses and such sects. Even more distant from such ideas might seem to be the secular expectations of Marxism; the once fashionable ideas put forward by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West; or the more reasoned statement of a cyclical theory adumbrated by Arnold Toynbee.

But Mr. Campion shows in this very remarkable book that they all have a common source. Babylonian astrological ideas passed into Greek thought through Plato and the Pythagorians, and also impacted upon Jewish and Christian apocalyptic expectations. The Early Christian Church, and indeed we may surmise the human mind of Jesus Himself, did look forward to the Second Coming within a generation, and the establishment of the rule of justice on earth for a thousand years; but clearly this expectation was not historically fulfilled. We can perhaps trace in the Epistles of St. Paul -- if we could be sure of their chronology -- the transformation of this expectation into an internal and spiritual hope. The Second Coming is an eternal event to be realised in every individual soul, both now and at the hour of one's death. Mr. Campion, who is on the whole hostile to Christian ideas, perhaps misses this point.

However, especially at periods of historical crisis, there have been influential movements within the Church which have interpreted apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible literally and have looked forward to the coming of the Millennium. A most important figure in the connection was Joachim of Fiore, a Calabrian abbot whom Dante placed in Paradise as one endowed with the prophetic spirit. Joachim's ideas had a particular impact on the Spiritual Franciscans -- those followers of St. Francis who insisted on remaining loyal to the original rule of their founder, in going barefoot and practicing absolute poverty. The Church and the Papacy had sanctioned a modification of this rule, and the Spiritual Franciscans were savagely persecuted. This episode forms the background to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose -- a book which is rather more successful as a picture of the late Middle Ages than as a detective story. Joachist ideas also passed into the Reformation, especially among the more extreme sects such as the Anabaptists and the Antinomians. The direct influence can he traced as far as William Blake. It is no accident that Blake entitled one of his poems `The Everlasting Gospel', which had also been the title of a work by Joachim Mr. Campion could have made more use of Blake and also of Shelley:

The World's Great Age begins anew.

The golden years return...

But with the Renaissance, renewed interest in astrology, the idea of the Great Year and of a cyclical pattern of history and the return of the Golden Age (as we have already seen it in Spenser) entered humanistic thought. The cyclical idea of history was secularised in the 17th century in the work of Vico, and later entered into liberal, progressive and socialist thought in Auguste Conte and, above a]l, in Karl Marx. The idea of progress is in fact a myth, and this has already raised hackles in some readers of Campion's book. But, as the author wisely points out, it is not the myth that is wrong and can be harmful. but the failure to recognise that it is a myth. Progress is not inevitable, not conditioned by some arcane law of history. whether star-based or not. But this does not mean that we cannot and should not strive for the betterment of the human condition. For we are responsible human beings, not the chessmen of the stars, upon --

... The chequerboard of nights and days

Where destiny with men for pieces plays. -- I quote Omar Khayyam, who was, of course, a great astronomer and mathematician as well as a poet.