The Third Age Dawns in China: The Jiulian Baojuan

March 16, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

The transformative effect of the recent developments in sectarianism—Patriarch Luo’s teachings and the adoption of the Mother as supreme deity—is already apparent in second oldest millennialist baojuan that has come down to us, but so too is a new sophistication and complexity with regards to the Three Ages system. This text is the exhaustively-named Huangji jindan jiulian zhengxin guizhen huanxiang baojuan (Precious Scroll of the Golden Elixir and the Nine-Petalled Lotus Rectifying the Faith and Restoring the Pristine Teaching... Read more

The Third Age Dawns in China: Patriarch Luo and the Mother

March 7, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

The decades following the publication of the Huangji jieguo baojuan would see two key events fundamentally reshape the landscape of Chinese sectarianism. The first of these was the emergence of one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Chinese religion, a radical reformer who came to be known as Patriarch Luo. The second was the displacement of the Primordial Buddha in sectarian thought by a new supreme deity. How much these two occurrences were linked is difficult to... Read more

The Third Age Dawns in China: The Huangji Jieguo Baojuan

February 25, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

The Ming period was the golden age of sectarian thought in imperial China. Religious associations and forms of worship that fell beyond state approval and control had always existed and had very often flourished. As we have seen, unapproved sects and the rebellions they launched have been one of the great motive forces of Chinese history. But the Ming period saw a proliferation of these groups far beyond anything that had come before. Throughout China, sects arose, operated semi-openly,... Read more

Systems of Time in Chinese Eschatology

February 14, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

We have discussed in detail how much of Buddhist eschatology in China was simply a gloss on indigenous themes and ideas. With all that being said, however, the Buddhist arrival in China did introduce something new into the indigenous apocalyptic scheme. This was a concept of three ages. It was not, however, anything like Joachim’s Three Ages and bore no resemblance to the Three Ages system that would later develop in Chinese eschatology under the Ming. Those systems are both... Read more

Popular Themes in Chinese Eschatology

January 22, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

By the time that Zhu Yuanzhang rode to the imperial throne on the back of Maitreyan prophecy in the fourteenth century, the Chinese apocalyptic narrative had been relatively stable and established for over a thousand years. As we have seen, various figures—Li Hong, Prince Moonlight, Maitreya—fulfilled the role of messiah in that narrative. But the role that the messiah was expected to play in the grand scheme of things remained mostly constant. It was an important and long-lasting component of... Read more

China’s Buddhist Messiahs: Prince Moonlight and Maitreya

January 20, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

Before we can adequately discuss the nature of this popular sectarianism and its own tripartite scheme of history, we have to acknowledge how far Chinese apocalyptic thought had come since we last examined it in the immediate centuries after the fall of the Han Dynasty. The biggest new development was the introduction of a new religion into the Chinese cultural sphere. With it came a new messiah. When we last looked at China, the apocalyptic atmosphere was largely Taoist... Read more

The Originality of Joachim of Fiore

January 19, 2024 By Matthew S. Dentice

It has often been noted that great ideas have the odd tendency of occurring independently to two separate individuals at exactly the same time. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both worked out the theory of evolution simultaneously despite there being little contact between them. Had Elisha Grey been but a few hours quicker in filing his patent, he and not Alexander Graham Bell would be recognized as the inventor of the telephone. It is almost as though a truly... Read more

La Papessa: The Female Pope and the Feminine Face of God

November 25, 2023 By Matthew S. Dentice

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“A prophet foretells the future,” as Marjorie Reeves says. “He can also create it” (135). Her statement on Joachim’s influence remains apt. He did, of course, create the future, in more ways than one. His realization that history is a process, ever evolving, developing, and changing, introduced a revolution in human thought that transformed the medieval world into the modern one. His dream of a different and better future gave birth to countless other dreams of future improvement and progress.... Read more

Joachim and the Antichrist

November 12, 2023 By Matthew S. Dentice

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Among Joachim of Fiore’s many remarkable ideas, his unique understanding of the Antichrist has, from his own times until now, never failed to excite interest. This can be succinctly demonstrated by the fact that, on the day my previous article on Joachim went live, I happened across a slideshow article from the website Stars Insider entitled “What do we know about the Antichrist?” Joachim is featured prominently but his world-transforming idea of the Three Ages goes completely unmentioned. Rather,... Read more

Joachim of Fiore: The Man Who Invented the Future

September 12, 2023 By Matthew S. Dentice

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Everything you believe about the world can be traced back to an apocalyptic prophet who lived in the twelfth century. Everything. I’m well-aware that this is a bold statement to make. I do not, after all, know who you are or what you believe. But I do know that your beliefs about the world, as well as my own, and those of everyone living today have been shaped by our shared experience of the thing we call modernity.... Read more