THE PROPHECY
We live in interesting though frightening times. In many countries, governments have declare a state of emergency. There are restrictive measures to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus, such as a partial or complete lockdown. For many of us, we try to find a sense of safety in our own homes, and do our best to shun the virus to the best of our abilities. We wash our hands as much as we can (finding out that hand cream is essential for our now sore skin), we avoid approaching our fellow human beings (finding out that garlic is a multipurpose miracle plant), and we pillage the nearest supermarket in the village (finding out that toilet paper and weed are necessities of life). Also, drinking Corona beer doesn’t spread the virus, but it can give you hangovers if you drink too many bottles. Who knew? Apart from the quarantine meme machine entertaining all those confined to their own houses, religion is doing remarkable things as well. As a PhD candidate in Religious Studies, I find this absolutely fascinating. Therefore, based on a selection of recent articles on the subject, I aim to better understand how religions are coping with the threatening situation we are facing today. Let’s take a closer look at religion in times of the Coronavirus pandemic as observed from my office called Home.
Introduction
The Coronavirus pandemic has led to a renewed popular interest in apocalyptic theologies, remarkable prophecies and conspiracy theories. It is said that the terrifying COVID-19 virus has been foretold in various ways – from Bible verses to cryptic fragments in books, from prophecies by Nostradamus to those of the Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga, and, once again, in the animated television series The Simpsons, and the Illuminatus! board game. In the light of religious coping mechanisms, attempts to predict the future can be seen as a way of trying to gain control of an uncertain situation. Moreover, prophecy and precognition, as well as various methods of divination such as crying in a crystal ball, reading tarot cards, and astrology, are widespread practices that fascinate the believer and unbeliever alike. It is argued that these expressions of religiosity can therefore be better understood as ‘secular sacralizations’ in the context of implicit religion.[1]
Consfearacy
Let’s start with some enigmatic prophecies that people claim to have discovered in the Bible. The Old Testament is believed to hold many mysterious secrets. Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson claims to have cracked the so-called ‘Bible Code’. By means of a complex method, he shows that the Torah literally spells out words related to the virus and even the name itself as we know it today. The controversial claim is that the following words and phrases, among others, are revealed in the Five Books of Moses: in Hebrew Kāf כ – Rēsh ר – Vav ו – Nun נ – Hē ה spells out C’RON’H, or Corona, and Vav ו – Yōd י – Rēsh ר – Vav ו – Samekh ס makes VIRUS. Now that the code is believed to be cracked, the message of the Torah for people today, as the rabbi suggests, is in plain sight.
Some Christians are convinced that the New Testament also holds revelations about the current COVID-19 pandemic, be it in a more descriptive manner. A small group of Christians believes that the Pale horse of Revelation has finally arrived in the form of the Coronavirus, and that the end of the world is near. They argue that plaques are one of the signs of the End Times, and the virus is understood as one of the Four Horsemen: Death, War, Famine and Pestilence. These ‘fatal four’ are what the millennialist Christian is on the outlook for as a prelude to the Eschaton, as explained in Revelations 6:7-8:
“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.“
Not only the Bible, but also other books are said to hold prophecies. The pages of two books in particular went viral on social media the last couple of weeks. The author of the first book that we will discuss, the psychic Sylvia Browne, had as her objective to predict the future indeed. Her book with the telling title End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World, published in 2008, is said to have predicted the rise and fall of COVID-19 as follows:
“In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.“
The author of the other book that was shared a lot on social media couldn’t have foreseen what implications his work of fiction would have. However, writer Dean Koontz did, allegedly, predict the Coronavirus in his 1981 novel The Eyes of Darkness. People have been shocked by the similarities between the book’s biological weapon named ‘Wuhan-400’ and the currently spreading COVID-19 virus that originated in the Chinese city Wuhan:
“It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapons in a decade. They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400′ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center. “Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him parishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?” (…) “If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.” “Exactly,” Dombey said.”“
It seems that there can be no disaster without Nostradamus’ cryptic writings being closely examined for a prediction that points to it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that his prophecies have come to the surface again lately and started to circulate on social media. The one that has been shared in the context of the Coronavirus seems frighteningly accurate, and too good to be true:
“There will be a twin year (2020) from which will arise a queen (corona) who will come from the east (China) and who will spread a plague *virus) in the darkness of night, on a country with 7 hills (Italy) and will transform the twilight of men into dust (death), to destroy and ruin the world. It will be the end of the world economy as you know it.“
Indeed, it has been suggested that this Nostradamus prophecy is a forgery. The text was seemingly written in retrospect only recently and attributed to the great seer.
It is said that the ‘Nostradamus of the Balkans’, Baba Vanga, predicted the Corona pandemic in 1996, stating that “the corona will be all over us“. It was initially believed that the prophecy referred to a different threat: that of Russia, which seemed the most logical interpretation at that time. However, the present crisis situation has made people look at the prediction with fresh eyes. The Bulgarian seer also prophesied about the next event, which is the death of the 45th president of the United States caused by an “unknown disease“. People have been discussing if this disease might actually be COVID-19, as the 45th president is the one in office today, Donald Trump. Moreover, Europe will become a Caliphate with Rome as its capital city (which was predicted for 2016), the earth will cease to exist in 3797, and, after humanity’s space migration, the universe will collapse in the year 5079, according to Grandmother Vanga.
Apart from archaic prophecies and old oracles, contemporary pop culture has been a remarkable source of predictions and conspiracies. The episodes of The Simpsons have always seem pretty surrealistic and witty, but the series has come to be known for its odd predictions. One of the most well-known ones is foreseeing that Donald Trump would become president of the United States of America. It has been claimed that The Simpsons also knew that the Corona pandemic was going to happen. In 1993, there was an episode in which pretty much all inhabitants of Springfield eagerly wanted to have a juicer. We see hardworking warehouse employees packing the juicers, whereby an ill, Asian-looking employee coughs into one of the parcels. This is the beginning of the spread of the Japanese ‘Osaka Flu’, which some Simpsons conspiracy fans interpret as the Coronavirus. Even though COVID-19 originally emerged in China, the enthusiasts consider this close enough. One of the writers of the episode in question thinks this is too far-fetched, and he has denied that the story line is a prediction of the current health crisis. There is also a still of the series being shared on social media which explicitly shows the name ‘Corona virus’, but this turned out to be a photoshopped image – most likely created by someone eager to jump on the Simpsons prophecy bandwagon for some immememortality.
Lastly, let’s discuss a striking prediction coming from the countercultural underground. It is a source that plays with conspiracy theories and secret societies in a tongue-in-cheek manner, and has therewith fed rumours about them. In 1975, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea published The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The book(s)’s narrative combines already existing and non-existing conspiracy theories and secret societies, and portrays them as being part of the legendary battle between the Discordian Society (the good guys) and the infamous Illuminati (the bad guys) with all kinds of surrealistic events and plot twists happening. Having sophisticatedly implemented Robert Anton Wilson’s idea of ‘guerrilla ontology’ in the text, it is hard for the reader to discern what is true and what is not. In RAW’s own words:
“All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.”
Robert Anton Wilson
The books have been adapted into a play recently, but in the 1980s, it was also turned into a board game. Ever since, people believe that its playing cards depict events that have happened in later years. It is said that the board game’s cards predicted 9/11 and the tragic death of Princes Diana. In the current situation, the game card titled Disaster! (which is shown above) stands out. Individual cards belong to a certain category, and this specific card is part of ‘Epidemic’. The Disaster! card depicts a red cross behind medicine and a bottle of liquid, a face mask, gloves, something that looks like dead bodies in the background, and the words QUARANTINE. For some, this clearly points to the present-day Coronavirus pandemic, and therewith it is claimed to be another prediction of the Illuminatus! board game cards. Moreover, following Baba Vanya’s prediction about Donald Trump, but with a twist, people have argued that yet another card depicts a future event: the assassination of this 45th president of the United States.
Conclusion
In this last part of Religion in Times of the Coronavirus Pandemic, the focus is on a rather different aspect of religion – a form of religiosity that many people wouldn’t immediately consider as such. There is a broad fascination for the paranormal, mysterious and occult in society at large, and many people like to speculate whether or not the future can be foretold. Predictions that seem to have become reality in the light of current events appeal to many and give people the chills at the same time. Even when people don’t think of themselves as religious or spiritual – which is a significant number of those living in a contemporary secular society – there still is a strong tendency to wonder: but what if prophecies are true…? From a Religious Studies perspective, how can such expressions of religiosity in a secular environment be understood?
Social media seems to be the main distributor of prophecies in these times of mass quarantine. We have seen posts, quotes, memes, and videos in our feeds that like us to believe that there was foreknowledge about current (and future) affairs. In this regard, Christopher Partridge has argued that pop culture is an important source of alternative religious and spiritual ideas that re-enchant the secularized West. Pop culture can be an influential vehicle for planting ideas in the minds of its consumers which ‘sacralize the secular’. Partridge has stated that this spread of alternative ideas is a movement from the margins to the masses.[2] This rings true for the popular tv series, books and board game we discussed in particular. Other prophecies are part of the corpus of institutionalized religions, such as Bible verses of the Apocalypse. An unconventional way is the supposedly cracked Bible Code. Meanwhile, seers and psychics are often on the fringe of established religions or at the center of alternative spirituality. The various predictions, then, appeal to all kinds of people – both religious and non-religious.
The concept of ‘implicit religion’ can be useful in this context. It refers to religiosity of people that occurs outside of religious institutions.[3] In an article that I wrote together with Frans Jespers and David Kleijbeuker in 2012, Qualifying Secular Sacralizations, we proposed a tool to categorize and therewith better understand “free floating forms of religiosity” as ‘secular sacralizations’. Using this tool, it can be concluded that prophecies and predictions can be seen as ‘fragments of sacralization’. In our model depicting the experience of religiosity in the secular world, this sphere is the furthest away from the core that is religion. We have discussed two other degrees that move more towards religion, namely ‘moments of sacralization’ and, the most religion-like, ‘functional equivalents of religion’. Prophecies that are believed to have predicted the spread of COVID-19 can be considered as fragments of sacralization, because they can befall the religious and non-religious alike with a “confirmation of a meaning of some sacredness” as if struck by lightening. As a result, it can “evoke something extraordinary” in people, perhaps unexpectedly, in a secular environment.[4]
A prophecy that is perceived as true can raise questions about providence and even predestination. In a secular context, these questions can have religious undertones:
How did we end up in this frightening situation? If we knew that this was going to happen to us, why didn’t we do anything to prevent it? Did we fail to see the signs? Is there more between heaven and earth?
The questions imply, again, the wish to be able to control unfortunate events, and, even more, reveal the helplessness of humanity. Moreover, they add the lecturing element of “I told you so“. Posed next would be: “And now what? What can we do?“, which has been discussed in Part II.
On the other hand, the widespread circulation of prophecies, their mesmerizing effects as scary stories, and even the obsession of some people to create fake predictions in retrospect, could tell us something about the very human fascination for the unknown, the marvelous mystery of existence itself, and the burden that we might never really know what the future holds for us. As fragments of secular sacralization, prophecies provide a sense of meaning for some of the most dreadful events stored in our collective memory.
In Part I, we have discussed both the willingness of various religions to change and the conservatism when trying to safeguard religious belief and ritual, whereas in Part II, we have delved into the use of religious practices that empower believers to spiritually battle the Coronavirus, and which can be understood as a religious coping mechanism.
Did I miss an interesting story about religion and the Coronavirus? Is there more to come? Most probably… So if you come across anything worth checking out, feel free to let me know in the comments.
Footnotes
[1] Frans Jespers, David Kleijbeuker & Yentl Schattevoet. “Qualifying Secular Sacralizations” in Implicit Religion 15:4 (2012), 533-551. Weblog post.
[2] Christopher Partridge. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture (volume 1). London: T&T Clark International, 2004.
[3] Edward Bailey. “Implicit Religion” Encyclopedia of New Religions, edited by Christopher Partridge, 397–398. Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2004. Edward Bailey. “Implicit Religion” in Religion 40 (2010), 271–278.
[4] Frans Jespers, David Kleijbeuker & Yentl Schattevoet. “Qualifying Secular Sacralizations” in Implicit Religion 15:4 (2012), 541, 542, 548.
Kult ov Yentl 