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Principal Prophecy: What the Future Holds For You
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Also by Sylvia Browne VISITS FROM THE AFTERLIFE SYLVIA BROWNE'S BOOK OF DREAMS PAST LIVES, FUTURE HEALING BLESSINGS FROM THE OTHER SIDE LIFE ON THE OTHER SIDE THE OTHER SIDE AND BACK ADVENTURES OF A PSYCHIC PROPHECY d What the Future Holds for You SYLVIA BROWNE w it h Lindsay Harrison NEW AMERIC AN LIBRARY New American Library Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 100 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition. First Electronic edition, January 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © Sylvia Browne, 2004 Excerpt from Phenomenon copyright © Sylvia Browne, 2005 All rights reserved NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Browne, Sylvia. Prophecy : what the future holds for you / Sylvia Browne with Lindsay Harrison. p. cm. MSR ISBN 0-7865-6217-X AEB ISBN 0-7865-6218-8 1. Prophecies (Occultism) 2. Prophets. I. Harrison, Lindsay. II. Title. BF1815.B89A266 2005 133.3—dc22 2005008534 Set in Fairfield Light and Cantoria Semibold Designed by Eve L. Kirch Without limiti; ng the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. publisher's note The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability. www.penguin.com From Sylvia and Lindsay— This one's for Bonnie Solow. A very long thank-you note. Contents d Introduction xi 1. Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies 1 2. What Is a Prophet? 33 3. Where Prophecies Come From 75 PART I. THE EARTH 4. The Ecology 101 5. Weather and Topography 111 6. Space Travel: Ours and Theirs 119 PART II. SOCIETY'S LANDSCAPE 7. Politics and the Economy 133 8. Religion 145 9. Education 157 vii Contents 10. Technology 167 11. Crime Fighting and Forensics 177 PART III. OUR PHYSICAL, EMOTIONAL, MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH 12. Health and Medicine 195 13. Diet, Fitness and the Way We Look 219 14. Mental Health 231 15. Relationships 251 16. Spirituality: The Benediction 261 viii Introduction d was eighteen years old. I'd been psychic for eighteen years, but I still hadn't made peace with it. I was starting to do readings for people, successfully, and I was even building a clientele, to my amazement. The problem was, while I never doubted my God-given ability to see into people's futures (I didn't especially appreciate it, but I never doubted it), I kept hoping that somehow none of these new clients would notice that, accurate or not, I didn't especially know what I was doing or how I was doing it. Except for my much adored and brilliantly psychic Grandma Ada, I had no one to talk to about it, no one to ask advice from or express my insecurities to or, probably most of all, tremble to about the responsibility of people turning to me for insights and warnings about what their lives held in store. And so, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about other people who'd seemed to be "like me," communicating with spirits, seeing clients, peering into the future, using their gifts for other people's benefit and trying to serve God in the process. Somewhere between a biography of Madame Helena Blavatsky and one of Edgar Cayce's many books I became intrigued with the idea of I ix Introduction expanding my visions of the future from one client at a time to the world at large, just like Cayce and Madame Blavatsky and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so many others I was reading about had done, with often remarkable accuracy. I wasn't very ceremonious about it. I just sat down one day, surrounded myself with the White Light of the Holy Spirit to keep God's presence and protection around me, told Him what I was about to do (as if He didn't know) and prayed for His wisdom and insights as I looked into the future of life on earth, took a deep meditative breath and nearly fainted. The rush of images and sounds and flashes and special effects and explosions and music and words and cars and doctors and rocket ships—it was like seeing and hearing every movie you've ever sat through, all at the same time, superimposed over one another. Needless to say, I put a stop to that very quickly, and realized that if I was ever going to be able to expand my gift to anything beyond one-on-one prophecies, I was going to have to find a way to organize those prophecies into some kind of sequence my mind could sort out and make sense of. After a bit of trial and error early on, I finally learned that breaking prophecies down into one subject at a time— focusing on that one subject and then stepping aside for whatever information comes in—was what worked best for me. Which explains the structure you'll find in the pages of this book. As some of you may know, I have "standing dates" on several television and radio shows to do annual New Year's predictions for the coming year. Those are great fun, and I enjoy them and am thrilled to be accurate enough that they keep inviting me back. But this book, subject by subject rather than year by year, is written at my real "comfort level" and my ultimate pleasure when it comes to prophecies. I hesitate to call them "my" prophecies, because again, ultimately, everything comes from God. That doesn't mean you should read these prophecies as a series of divine messages directly from Him. As you'll x Introduction read in Chapter 3, prophecies have a variety of sources, all of which trace back to our Creator, but by the time we fallible humans have finished translating them and communicating them, we're bound to get it wrong some of the time. I simply meant to acknowledge that never do I write a book, do a reading, give a lecture, make a media appearance, appear at a book signing or, for that matter, even take a breath, without God and His love at its core. I thank Him for being with me through every page of writing Prophecy, and with you through every page of reading it. —Sylvia C. Browne xi PROPHECY d Chapter One d Our Timeless Connection With Prophets and Prophecies t is our nature to want to know what the future holds. From the moment we first began to inhabit this earth in human form, we've believed that forewarned is forearmed, and we've sought out those who seem to have a clearer view of the road ahead than we do. On a small scale, we don't want to get caught in the rain without an umbrella, but we also wouldn't mind knowing whether or not we should save that rainwater for an upcoming drought or man-made crisis. On a much larger scale, we want to know that we personally, we as a community, we as a faith, as a society, as a nation or as a surprisingly fragile planet, are going to be okay and, more to the point, what "okay" is going to look like. We look to prophets and prophecies not just for warnings but also for hope and for comfort, no matter how far in the distance they might be. And because we've been fooled before, and/or not paying attention, and/or too naive or greedy or in too much of a hurry to always rely on our own judgment, we explore prophecies in search of a blueprint for discerning the real from the counterfeit, the truth from the lies, the heroes from the villains, meaningful road signs from time- and soul-wasting detours and, probably I 1 PROPHECY most essential of all, the genuinely God-centered from the countless clever pretenders. The Cultural Bond of Prophecy One of the countless aspects of prophets and prophecies that has always fascinated me is that they've always been traditional and fundamental to civilizations throughout the world, even the most ancient, isolated cultures who had no interest in or means of communicating with each other. It's not as if the Aborigines of Australia heard that predicting the long-range future had become very popular among American Indians and decided to give it a try, or the Mayans only started coming up with prophecies so they wouldn't be outdone by those Egyptian prophets they kept hearing about. Cultures tend to express the most deep-rooted essences of their people, and each of these cultures, so vastly different in so many ways, has demonstrated, separately and together, that we're eternally united as human beings around the world in our insistence that the future is knowable. Of course, the future is knowable, and I'll explain in Chapter 3 exactly why that is. That fact alone, and our universal agreement that it's true, should bring us more peace than it does. Who's "good at" and "bad at" foreseeing the future, and which information is accurate and which isn't, is almost beside the point when it comes to simply appreciating how dearly held our global yearning to look ahead really is. It would be impossible to explore the prophecies of every culture that ever existed, or that exists today, but I want to highlight just a few, hoping that as you read them you'll focus on the respectful purity of spirit at their core, no matter what corner of the world they came from. 2 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies The American Indians A friend of mine was involved in a recent documentary about native American Indians. The film crew shot for a couple of weeks, capturing great footage of several generations of the tribes they were focused on, their rituals, their daily lives, their traditions and ceremonies, their relationships within families and within the tribe, and the extent to which "civilization" had irreversibly seeped into their lives. As wonderful as the footage and the camera work were, though, and as mesmerizing as that collage of brown, beautiful faces from ages one year old to a hundred were to watch, the producers and the director realized that their film was still missing something, some special element that would set it apart from every other documentary ever done about the American Indian. As a solution, someone came up with the idea of giving a camera to the Indians themselves and letting them shoot some footage, so the makers of the documentary could really get a look at life through the eyes of the subjects of their film. And that's exactly what they did. A week later the producers and director found themselves gaping, with chagrin at first, at the results of their bright idea: a coyote's pawprints in a muddy riverbank, a wisp of white fur caught in a broken branch, a hawk circling, an aura around a full moon, an approaching thunderstorm, a bear catching fish in a waterfall, a wolf loping across a hill—hour after hour of footage, and not for one second was there so much as a glimpse of a human being. What they finally edited together was a gorgeous documentary and eloquent, simple proof of what's been written about American Indians for thousands of years: ask them to tell you their story and they'll tell you about Nature. Of course, the many tribes of the native American nations each have their own distinct language, customs and cherished legacy of 3 PROPHECY prophecies. But even their prophecies reflect their reverence for this earth and our essential spiritual connection to it, without which humankind can't and won't survive. One of the most beautiful examples is an excerpt from a Lakota prophecy. It refers to the Star People, whom many tribes believe to be their ancient extraterrestrial ancestors, and to the Sacred Mother, who is the earth: In the next decade, the Star People that you call meteorites will come to this earth in answer to the Mother's call for help. You see, we are all relations. So the Star People are beings, and they are the planets, and the other bodies in the heavens as well. The Sacred Mother is screaming for life and the meteorites will hear her cries and answer her call for help. They will hit the earth from the heavens with such force that many internal things will happen as well as external. The earth will move as a result of the impact. This will cause the sacred fire that is the source of all life to the Mother to move through her body. The rains will change their fall and the winds will alter their course and what has existed for three hundred years will no longer exist. And where there is summer, there will be fall. And where there is fall, there will be winter. And where there is winter, there will be spring. The animals and plants will become confused. There will be great plagues that you do not understand. Many of these plagues are born from your scientists whose intentions have gone awry. Your scientists have let these monsters loose upon the land. These plagues will spread through your waters and through your blood and through your food because you have disrupted the natural chain through which your Mother cleanses herself. Only those who have learned to live on the land will find sanctuary. Go to where the eagles fly, to where the wolf roams, to where the bear lives. Here you will find life because they will 4 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies always go to where the water is pure and the air can be breathed. Live where the trees, the lungs of this earth, purify the air. There is a time coming, beyond the weather. The veil between the physical and the spiritual world is thinning. And this came from Brave Buffalo of the Brule Sioux Nation: It is time for the Great Purification. We are at a point of no return. The two-legged are about to bring destruction to life on earth. It's happened before, and it's about to happen again. The Sacred Hoop shows how all things go in a circle. The old becomes new; the new becomes old. Everything repeats. White people have no culture. Culture is having roots in the earth. People without culture don't exist very long because Nature is God. Without a connection to Nature, the people drift, grow negative, destroy themselves. In the beginning we had one mind, and it was positive, a thing of beauty, seeing beauty everywhere. The Aborigines Half a world away from the American Indians, and very probably unaware of their existence, the Australian Aborigines are thought to have been on this earth for more than eighteen thousand generations. From their ancient beginnings they've been nomadic hunters and gatherers, traveling and living in clans, orally passing their culture and traditions along from one generation to the next to the next to the next. They revere Nature and their elders, they're intensely connected to both the practical and the spiritual sides of their lives, and they embrace a gorgeous mythology called the "Dreamtime" that lies at the heart of their belief system. The Dreamtime, which is woven through Aboriginal lives in a variety of daily applications, is at its core their treasured account of 5 PROPHECY that time when their spirit ancestors moved through the bare, unsanctified land and gave it its physical form and its sacred laws. There was the Rainbow Serpent who slithered across the world creating rivers and valleys with its massive body. Bila was the sun woman whose fire lit the world. She was destroyed by two lizardlike creatures called Kudna and Muda, who, frightened by the darkness they'd brought about by killing Bila, began hurling boomerangs into the sky in all directions, trying to bring back the light. Kudna's boomerang flew into the eastern sky and a brilliant ball of fire appeared, which slowly crossed the sky and vanished again beyond the western horizon, and day and night were born. The countless spirits and stories are the exquisite foundation on which the Aborigines build their reverent awe of all of Nature and their belief that it is humankind's privilege to live among and serve such hallowed creations. Dreamtime is a tangible reality of the Aboriginal past, present and future. It isn't something that happened a very long time ago and was completed; it's an ongoing consciousness and responsibility with tragic consequences if it's ignored. A prophecy from an Australian Aboriginal Tribal Elder named Guboo Ted Thomas, orally preserved until it was committed to writing, reflects their profoundly simple faith: I was in Dreamtime. I see this great wave going. I tell people about this wave. It wasn't a tidal wave. This was a spiritual wave. So, to me, I believe that the Dreamtime is going to be that. I believe the revival is going to start in Australia when we're Dreaming. It's the hummingbee that I'm talking about. And love. 6 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies We've got to learn to love one another. You see, that's really what's going to happen to the earth. We're going to have tidal waves. We're going to have earthquakes. That's coming because we don't consider this land as our Mother. We've taken away the balance, and we're not putting back. I look at the bush, and those trees are alive. They're not dead, they're alive. And they want you to cuddle them. The Incas Thousands of miles from the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, the ancient Inca civilization evolved on the South American continent. The origins of the Incas are a mystery, primarily recorded through the oral legacy of a people whose world was destroyed and whose vast wealth was pirated by Spanish conquistadors in 1532. At its most powerful, the Inca Empire was the largest nation on earth, stretching 2500 miles along the Andes Mountains. They were artisans, hunters, gatherers, farmers and incredibly gifted builders and engineers, constructing more than fourteen thousand miles of roads before such a thing as the wheel even existed, roads built for foot travel but so time- and weather-resistant that some of them are still virtually intact today. Also still intact today, and marveled over by visitors from around the world, are Inca pyramids, temples, observatories and some structures that were never finished, mute reminders of lives interrupted forever and a brilliant civilization thrown aside for power and greed. Nature formed the heart of the Inca language and the Inca religion as well. The Incas believed that all creation in nature was the work of the Sun God, and they considered themselves to be descendants 7 PROPHECY of the Sun. They held festivals at the end of every harvest season to thank the Sun God for their bountiful crops or to pray for better crops in the season ahead, and at the solstices when the earth and the Sun are at their farthest from each other, the Incas held ceremonies to ask the Sun God not to leave his children. They believed in reincarnation and even carried the mummies of revered ancestors to the holiest of rituals so their ancestors could share the events with them. After the Inca civilization was destroyed in the 1500s, a small tribe of refugees called the Q'ero escaped to isolated villages in the high Andes. They've lived there ever since, with the Q'ero elders and shamans passing along the Inca language, history, traditions and prophecies to five hundred years of descendants. The Western world's first actual sighting of the Q'ero villages didn't happen until 1955. Communication between the Westerners and the Q'ero evolved from there, and in 1996 a tribal leader, the head shaman and other Q'ero elders honored the United States with a historic visit in which, among other shared knowledge and rituals, they passed along the prophecies of their revered Inca ancestors. Those prophecies read, in part: The new caretakers of the Earth will come from the West, and those that have made the greatest impact on Mother Earth now have the moral responsibility to remake their relationship with her, after remaking themselves. The prophecy holds that North America will supply the physical strength, or body; Europe will supply the mental aspect, or head; and the heart will be supplied by South America. The prophecies are optimistic. They refer to the end of time as we know it—the death of a way of thinking and a way of being, the end of a way of relating to nature and to the earth. 8 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies In the coming years, the Incas expect us to emerge into a golden age, a golden millennium of peace. The prophecies also speak of tumultuous changes happening in the earth, and in our psyche, redefining our relationships and spirituality. The next pachacuti, or great change, has already begun, and it promises the emergence of a new human after this period of turmoil. To which the Q'ero shamans added in closing: Follow your own footsteps. Learn from the rivers, the trees and the rocks. Honor the Christ, the Buddha, your brothers and sisters. Honor your Earth Mother and the Great Spirit. Honor yourself and all of creation. Look with the eyes of your soul and engage the essential. Three timeless civilizations, each a part of the earth's earliest fabric but existing so far from one another, in such remote isolation, that they might as well have lived on different planets. And those ancient civilizations, like too many others to elaborate on here, obviously shared certain common needs that extended far beyond food, clothing and shelter: ✴ a need to believe in a Force greater than themselves ✴ a need to understand their relationship with the natural world around them 9 PROPHECY ✴ a need to formulate prophecies, and then embrace them as such an essential part of their culture that they passed them like treasured heirlooms from one generation to the next It may be even more fascinating, though, that those three very separate, isolated societies searched the land, the stars, the rivers, the sun, their own souls, wherever they thought their answers came from, and arrived at prophecies that all added up to the same identical conclusion: humankind's sole hope for sustaining the privilege of life on this earth is through its constant, humble, reverent connection to its own spirituality. Three remote civilizations, one prophetic conclusion. It's enough to make you believe those prophecies might all have been coming from the very same Source. Prophecies and Religion Without faith, without our beliefs, we're lost. It doesn't matter that God, by whatever name we call Him, never stops believing in us. If we don't reciprocate and keep that connection alive on our end, we're tragically squandering God's belief in us, which is the one gift that makes everything possible. It's like someone calling to announce that you've just won the richest lottery in history—that call is worthless if you don't bother to pick up the phone. Whether we're consciously aware of it or not, our beliefs are the driving force behind our behavior, our opinions, our actions and inactions, our decisions and the choices we make. They're essential to our identity, our individuality and, above all, our dialogue with our spirit minds, where our absolute knowledge of our genetic eternity is held for safekeeping. Our beliefs are all we have that can't be taken from us, or threatened or harmed. No matter what specific 10 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies words and images and allegories we choose to best express and expand those beliefs, they define us, they make each one of us utterly unique because they're ours and ours alone, and yet they unite us all by the breadth and depth of their existence. The great religions of the world through which we express and explore our beliefs have too much in common to be disrespectful of each other. We all worship a Supreme Being, a loving Creator who gave us the gift of eternal lives. And from the first moments that small groups of followers began to grow into the millions upon millions who practice these great religions today, prophets and prophecies were essential to the story of that growth in each and every case. Christianity The temptation is to say, "To see how prophets and prophecies played a part in the dawn of Christianity, read the Holy Bible, pages 1 to 981." I'm not a fan of hypothetical questions like "Would Christianity have become such a powerful force among world religions without prophets adding so much anticipation to Christ's arrival?" His virgin birth, His unparalleled life, His crucifixion at the age of thirty-three and His resurrection that changed the world forever would certainly have found their way on their own into our hearts and our consciousness on this earth, I'm sure, because I'm certain beyond all doubt that our spirits would have searched until we found Him. But with prophets preparing us for His arrival hundreds of years before He was born, and giving us specifics about how we'd know Him, we were given the added advantage of a divine road map leading straight to Him. Of course I believe that Christ and Christianity were inevitable, according to God's plan, which means I believe that the prophets and their prophecies were inevitable too, along with every other person, event and moment that contributed to Christianity's 11 PROPHECY inception and growth. God is hardly in a position to have to rely on accidents or luck to get His message across, after all. The Old Testament of the Bible was written between about 1450 b.c. and 430 b.c. It is too rich with prophets—Joseph, Moses, Elisha, Samuel, Hosea, Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Nathan, Ahijah, Micah, Jonah and Malachi, to name a few—to begin to do it, or its prophecies, even a pathetic attempt at justice, nor would I presume to try for the purposes of this particular discussion. Instead, I'll focus on only two of the Old Testament prophets whose prophecies were especially descriptive of the life and crucifixion of Christ, which were still hundreds of years in the future, and on Christ's acceptance of His sacred destiny. The prophet David, king of Israel from approximately 1010 b.c. to 970 b.c., is believed to have written several of the Old Testament's magnificent psalms. Among them is Psalm 22, which contains some prophetic images of Christ's crucifixion too precise to pass by lightly: My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? . . . In thee our fathers trusted; they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. To thee they cried, and were saved; in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed. But I am a worm, and no man; scorned by men, and despised by the people. 12 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies All who see me mock at me, they make mouths at me, they wag their heads; "He committed his cause to the Lord; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, for he delights in him!" . . . Yea, dogs are round about me; a company of evildoers encircle me; they have pierced my hands and feet— I can count all my bones— they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots . . . It was hundreds of years later, of course, that Jesus was crucified and the New Testament of the Bible written, probably from 45 a.d. to 95 a.d.. One account of the crucifixion, in the New Testament book of Matthew (7:27–50), reads, in part: Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head, and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!" And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him . . . And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots; then they sat down and kept watch 13 PROPHECY over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, "This is Jesus the King of the Jews." . . . And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, "You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross." . . . At about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, "This man is calling Elijah . . . Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him." And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. The prophet Isaiah, whose book of prophecies appears in the Old Testament, was born in Jerusalem seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. No other prophet was quoted more often than Isaiah by Jesus and His disciples, and it's easy to understand why Isaiah's prophecies about the coming Messiah would have resonated so deeply in the heart of Christ and those who followed Him. Isaiah 7:14, in the Old Testament, reads, "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel (which means 'God with us')." And in Matthew 1:18–21, in the New Testament, we find: Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy 14 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." From Isaiah 53:3 He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. And from the New Testament, Luke 23:13–23 Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and said to them, "You brought me this man [Jesus] as one who was perverting the people; and after examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him; neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise him and release him." . . . But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed. Jesus' profound reverence for the prophecies and His divine place among them is woven throughout the New Testament. In Matthew 5:17, He said, as part of His magnificent Sermon on the Mount, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them." 15 PROPHECY In Matthew 26:53–56, as Jesus was captured by a crowd of armed soldiers and high priests and elders in Gethsemane, He said: "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?" At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, "Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has taken place, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled." It's as impossible to cite every prophecy from every prophet in the literature and legacy of Christianity as it is to try to separate the concepts of Christianity and prophecy themselves. They're as intertwined in their historic resonance as they are in their shared sacred Origin. Judaism According to the Jewish faith, prophets were far more than simply those who could see the future. They were people chosen by God to speak for Him as His messengers and teachers, and they were admired for their scholarship and their closeness to God. The greatest of all prophets in Judaism was Moses, who freed the Israelites from their slavery to the Pharaoh and delivered them to the Promised Land of Canaan. It was Moses whom God summoned to the top of the holy mountain of Sinai to present him with the sacred tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. Jewish faith teaches that Moses saw the combined prophecies of all other prophets to come, so that any prophecies that followed would be nothing more than recitations of what Moses had already seen. 16 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies The written Torah, called the Torah Shebiksav, which is God's teaching to the Jewish people, is divided into three parts: ✴ Torah—the five books presented to Moses by God on Mount Sinai Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy ✴ Nevi'im, or Prophets—the messages received by the prophets from God Joshua Judges the two books of Samuel the two books of Kings Jeremiah Ezekiel Isaiah Trey Asar, or the Twelve, which combine the writings of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi ✴ Kesuvim, or Writings—written by the prophets with God's guidance, but not devoted exclusively to prophecies Psalms Proverbs Job 17 PROPHECY Song of Songs Ruth Lamentations Ecclesiastes Esther Daniel Nehemiah the two books of Chronicles The Talmud is, to put it very basically, the source book of Jewish law, describing how to apply the rules of the Torah to a variety of different circumstances. According to the Talmud, there were actually twice as many prophets as the number of people who fled Egypt. But only the prophets whose messages were intended to apply to future generations were recorded, and those numbered fifty-five—fortyeight males and seven females. The female prophets listed in the Talmud are Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah and Esther. Sarah was held in such high esteem as a prophet, in fact, that her ability was thought to be superior to that of her husband, the prophet Abraham. As I've said in many of my books, I was raised in a Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Jewish home. I'm sure that unique upbringing planted the seeds of my lifelong passion for world religions, and I deeply appreciate each of them for the gorgeously singular ways in which they celebrate and glorify God. If I had to credit just one of those influences, though, with my earliest awareness and awe of prophets and their impact in this world, I would give that credit to Judaism. 18 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies Islam Islam is total surrender and obedience to God, called Allah in this religion. Followers of the Islamic faith are called Muslims, and they believe in one God and only one God, our Creator, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-merciful, supreme, sovereign and just. God, or Allah, sent his messengers to guide mankind, and the last of those prophets and messengers was Muhammad. Like all other prophets in Islam, Muhammad was considered to be human and not a part of divinity. Muslims never refer to Muhammad as "Allah." Allah is God and no one else, the only entity in the universe worthy of worship. Muhammad was born in Makkah (Mecca), in what is now Saudi Arabia, in a.d. 570. Orphaned at a very young age, he was raised by his uncle, Abu Talib, and was recognized early on for his wisdom, honesty, generosity and sincerity. Through his popular gift for arbitrating business disputes, he met a widow named Khadijah, whom he married, and his importance and esteem in Makkah continued to grow. Never completely comfortable among society, Muhammad went on meditative retreats from time to time, in the cave of Hira, near the "Mountain of Light" not far from Makkah. He was forty years old when, during one of those retreats, the Angel Gabriel appeared to him and delivered the first of what would become twenty-three years' worth of revelations from God. The first revelation read: Recite: In the name of your Lord who created man from a clot [of blood]. Recite: Your Lord is Most Noble, Who taught by the pen, taught man what he did not know. (96:1–5) Those twenty-three years of revelations, given to Muhammad by God through the Angel Gabriel, became the miracle of the Qur'an (Koran), the Holy Book of the Islam faith. 19 PROPHECY Muhammad died at the age of sixty-three. Within a hundred years of his death, Islam had spread throughout Europe and across Asia as far east as China. Muslims cherish and emulate Muhammad as God's final messenger and prophet, but again, their worship is reserved only for God. One of the most famous of the Islamic prophecies is called "The Final Signs of Qiyaamah [Islam]," their version of the apocalypse: The ground will cave in: one in the east, one in the west, and one in Hejaz, Saudi Arabia. Fog or smoke will cover the skies for forty days. The nonbelievers will fall conscious, while Muslims will be ill [develop colds]. The skies will then clear up. A night three nights long will follow the fog. It will occur in the month of Zil-Hajj* after Eidul-Ahja,** and cause much restlessness among the people. After the night of three nights, the following morning the sun will rise in the west. People's repentance will not be accepted after this incident. One day later, the Beast from the earth will miraculously emerge from Mount Safaa in Makkah, causing a split in the ground. The beast will be able to talk to people and mark the faces of people, making the believers' faces glitter, and the nonbelievers' faces darken. A breeze from the south causes sores in the armpits of Muslims, which they will die of as a result. The Ka'aba*** will be destroyed by a non-Muslim African group. 20 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies Kufr [Godlessness] will be rampant. Haj [the pilgrimage to Makkah] will be discontinued. The Qur'an will be lifted from the heart of the people, thirty years after the ruler Muquad's death. The fire will follow people to Syria, after which it will stop. Some years after the fire, Qiyaamah [Islam] begins with the Soor [trumpet] being blown. The year is not known to any person. Qiyaamah will come upon the worst of creation. (*Zil-Hajj—the last month of the Islamic calendar **Eidul-Ahja—the Festival of Sacrifice ***The Ka'aba—an oblong stone building in the center of the Holy City of Makkah that houses the sacred Black Stone given to Abraham by the Angel Gabriel) The religion of Islam teaches that because the Bible and the Torah were divinely revealed by God to their respective prophets, Christians and Jews deserve the respect and protection of all Muslims. That same respect and protection was extended to Buddhists and Hindus in later years when the Muslims were conquering parts of India and realized that, contrary to their first impressions, the Buddhists and the Hindus weren't idol-worshippers after all. In fact, Muslims have a particular respect for Jesus, and never say His name without adding the words "peace be upon Him" as a sign of homage. The Qur'an refers to the immaculate birth of Christ, acknowledges His miracles and anticipates His second coming. Muhammad himself said: Whoever believes there is no God but Allah, alone without partner, that Muhammad is His messenger, that Jesus is a servant and messenger of God, His worth breathed into Mary and 21 PROPHECY a spirit emanating from Him, and that Paradise and Hell are true, shall be received by God into Heaven. Respect for other religions besides our own is something a lot of us could learn a lesson or two from, don't you think? Oh, yes, that, and one other thing—the most frequently spoken word in the language of Islam is "peace." Buddhism More than twenty-five hundred years ago a child named Siddhartha Gautama was born in northern India. He would become the Buddha Shakyamuni, "the Enlightened One," and by the beginning of the twenty-first century, 665 million people around the world would be Buddha's devoted followers in a religion and way of life called Buddhism. While there are many different styles of Buddhist practice, some of them basic and simple, some of them very complex, they all maintain the same essential principles from the life and teachings of "the Enlightened One." According to legend, Queen Maha Maya, wife of King Suddhodana, had a dream one night in which a beautiful white elephant encircled her and entered her right side. Brahmin wise men interpreted the dream to be a sign that a splendid son would be born to the queen and her husband. If that son remained in the palace, he would become a great ruler. If he declined his royal heritage, he would become a Buddha, an Awakened One. The child was born and named Siddhartha, meaning "all wishes fulfilled." His mother died seven days after his birth, and he was raised with love by his mother's sister, who later married the king. Siddhartha was a brilliant student and athlete, strong, charming, handsome, inquisitive and remarkably compassionate. The king, remembering the words of the Brahmin wise men and not wanting to lose his 22 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies son to the world outside the palace, created an impossibly exquisite life of privilege and beauty for Prince Siddhartha, while building high guarded walls around the grounds and ordering that his son never be exposed to anything that might disturb his isolated perfection—he should never lay eyes on the seriously ill, the very old, the dying, or certainly not any wandering holy men. The prince married the lovely princess Yasodhara when he was thirteen and lived happily with her in the royal household for thirteen years. But he felt something wasn't right about this life, and the more he stared at those guarded walls around the palace, the more determined he was to know what was beyond them. He finally began a series of excursions outside the palace walls with the help of his charioteer Channa, and the assault of exposure to the sick, dying, dead and starving devastated him. The belief in India, which was explained to him, was that birth and death are simply an endless cycle that could only be stopped by somehow escaping the trap of continual rebirth. Siddhartha became consumed by the tragic inevitability of birth, deprivation, illness, dying and death over and over again, until his final excursion, when he saw yet another sight he'd never seen before: a small, barefoot man, his head shaved, draped in a simple yellow robe, holding a beggar's bowl. The man's calm face radiated peace and dignity. Channa explained to Siddhartha that the man was a monk, a spiritual man who found happiness in a life of simplicity, purity, discipline and meditation on his journey to be delivered from suffering. In a decision that would come to be known as the Great Renunciation, Prince Siddhartha left behind his beloved wife and newborn son, his father and stepmother, his royal heritage and unlimited wealth and luxury and, at the age of twenty-nine, set out alone to find a way to end the cycle of suffering and rebirth and then somehow help this sad afflicted world. After six years of pain, severe self-mortification and debilitating discipline, with companions around him who only 23 PROPHECY seemed impressed if he was denying himself even the slightest comfort, he finally concluded that an exhausted, neglected, malnourished body was hardly a welcoming environment for a healthy, awakened, enlightened mind and spirit. He began to nourish himself again and to rebuild his strength and physical vitality. His companions abandoned him, convinced that he'd given up his disciplines. He was wandering alone in a lovely forest on his thirty-fifth birthday when a woman presented him with a bowl of milk-rice. "Venerable sir," she said, "whoever you may be, god or human, please accept this offering. May you attain the good which you seek." Later that day in the same forest he met a groundskeeper who offered him fresh-cut grass for a cushion. Siddhartha laid the cushion of grass at the foot of a spreading fig tree, which later became known as the Bodhi Tree, or "Tree of Enlightenment," and contemplated his life, and his near-death through the futility of his abusively extreme self-discipline. As he sat beneath the tree he vowed, "Though my skin, my nerves and my lifeblood go dry, I will not abandon this seat until I have realized Supreme Enlightenment." When he was a young child, Siddhartha had found himself alone, resting under a tree one day during the Ploughing Festival, and discovered that by sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, mind focused attentively on simply breathing in and out, he could achieve a kind of mental bliss. He had never forgotten that peaceful, private exercise, and he practiced it again that day at the foot of the Bodhi Tree. A thousand doubts, fears, memories, cravings and temptations assaulted his mind, waging war with all the good he was seeking, as he sat there through a raging storm that thundered during the long night, trying to terrify Siddhartha away from his resolve. But he sat with perfect poise, in meditative serenity, finally asking the Mother Earth Herself for confirmation of the worth of his journey. He reached 24 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies out with his right hand and touched the ground, and it quaked and trembled and roared back: "I, Earth, bear you witness!" And during the night, at different stages of his meditation, he came to know how darkness of the mind is born, and how it is destroyed, never to be born again. He destroyed past, present and future spiritual ignorance. Delusion finally gave way to total clarity, and he finally understood "things as they are." When dawn came again, Prince Siddhartha had become the great Buddha Shakyamuni, the Enlightened One, and formulated the Four Noble Truths on which all of Buddhism is based: ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ that suffering is universal and inevitable that the immediate cause of suffering is desire that there is a path leading to freedom from suffering that it is the Eightfold Path that leads to freedom from suffering And the Eightfold Path is spelled out as: ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ Right (balanced) View or Understanding Right Aim or Purpose Right Speech Right Action Right Livelihood Right Effort Right Mindfulness Right Concentration Buddha gained a great following during his lifetime, expanding on and deepening his teachings and becoming greatly revered throughout the land. He eventually reunited with his father, stepmother, 25 PROPHECY wife and son, all of whom he bestowed with enlightenment and all of whom predeceased him. Buddha was eighty years old when he died, surrounded by teachers who had learned at his feet and would carry on his message. He didn't name a successor. Ancient texts say that as he entered a final state of meditative bliss and passed away, the trees around him blossomed out of season and fragrant flowers scattered to encircle his body in homage. One of the many gorgeous aspects of Buddhism, clearly inspired by the life of Buddha himself, is that it's an active, self-propelled religion. Buddha's enlightenment was the result of his own determined efforts, and Buddhists are taught that the same is true of their own enlightenment, its depth and its benefits—they're the sole responsibility of each individual's efforts and no one else's. If something is missing from your life, don't look to Buddha, or to the people around you, in other words. Look to yourself. The Buddhist scripts contain a prophecy of another Buddha, a future Buddha still to come. He currently resides in the Tutshita, or heaven, and his next incarnation will be his last. His name, the scripture says, will be Maitreya, "the Best of Men": He will have a heavenly voice which reaches far; his skin will have a golden hue; a great splendor will radiate from his body; his chest will be broad, limbs well developed, and his eyes will be like lotus petals. His body is eighty cubits high, and twenty cubits broad. He will have a retinue of eighty-four thousand persons, whom he will instruct in the mantras. With this retinue he will one day go forth into the homeless life. A Dragon tree will then be the tree under which he will win enlightenment; its branches rise up to fifty leagues, and its foliage spreads far and wide over six Kos. Underneath it, Maitreya, the best of men, will attain enlightenment; there can be no doubt on that. 26 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies And he will win his enlightenment the very same day that he has gone forth into the homeless life. And then, a supreme sage, he will explain the Four Truths, because he has seen that generation, in faith, ready for them, and those who have listened to his Dharma [means of protecting ourselves from ignorance] will thereupon make progress. They will be assembled in a park full of beautiful flowers, and his assembly will extend over a hundred leagues. Under Maitreya's guidance, hundreds of thousands of living beings shall enter upon a religious life. Hinduism The third largest religion in the world is Hinduism, thought to have followers numbering well over 750 million. Its roots are deeply imbedded in the Indus valley of northern India, but the beliefs about how and when those roots were planted seem to be a matter of debate. One school of thought takes Hinduism back to somewhere between 4000 b.c. and 2200 b.c. and the influence of the IndoEuropean invaders, who practiced a religion called Vedism. Another is that the Indo-European invasion may never have happened at all and that the Hindu religious texts were the result of an already sophisticated Vedic culture in India. There's no disagreement, though, that this ancient religion, unlike the others we've discussed, wasn't the result of any one leader or group of leaders, or any one prophet or group of prophets, or any specific sequence of events. Hinduism seems to have evolved instead, although its sacred texts can certainly be narrowed down a little better than that. Those texts include "the Vedas," four volumes containing hymns, incantations and rituals from ancient India, which were committed to paper around 600 b.c., and "the Upanishads," which expanded on the Vedic philosophy and were written between 800 b.c. and 400 b.c. 27 PROPHECY Hinduism recognizes one supreme God, the principle of "Brahman," one divine entity who is both at one with the universe and transcends it at the same time. Brahman, though, is believed to exist as three separate parts: ✴ Brahma, the Creator, who perpetually creates new realities ✴ Vishnu, or Krishna, the Preserver, the protector and preserver of the creations; when eternal order is threatened, it's Vishnu who travels to earth, in the form of any of ten incarnations he chooses ✴ Shiva, the Destroyer Hindus believe that everything comes from nothing and goes back to nothing, in cycle after cycle. Therefore Brahma creates the universe, Vishnu takes over as its caretaker and then Shiva destroys it so that Brahma can begin the cycle again. The cycles are very long, with current Hindu wisdom suggesting that the universe has approximately 427,000 years left before this one ends and a new cycle begins. Hindus gear their lives toward what they call the "four aims of Hinduism." Three of those aims are the goals of those who are in the world, or the pravritti: ✴ dharma: righteousness in their religious life ✴ artha: economic success and material prosperity ✴ kama: finding sensual, sexual and mental enjoyment The fourth aim is for the nivritti, or those who renounce the world: ✴ moksa: liberation from samsara, the indefinitely repeated cycles of karma involved in the Hindu's interpretation of reincarnation and eternity 28 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies The Hindu faith embraces the concept that our bodies die, but our souls are eternal. When the soul leaves the body at the time of death, it simply passes on to another body. That next body can be human or any other living thing, depending on the kind and quality of life lived in the previous body, and the continuing cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth is called samsara. By the Hindu definition, karma is the net total of one's good deeds and bad deeds throughout a lifetime. Karma in one lifetime determines how you'll live your next one— whether you'll be reborn at a higher level, perhaps as a more successful, wealthier or more privileged person, or at a lower level, perhaps as a severely disadvantaged person or even the most humble of animals. Eventually, through the purest of acts, thoughts and total commitment to God, the soul can escape samsara and achieve true enlightenment. And to the Hindu, the ultimate goal has nothing to do with heaven, or status and admiration among others in the faith. The ultimate goal is simply to be in selfless service of God, in whatever highest, purest ways the individual can find for that service to express itself. Because Hinduism is such an ancient religion, there are many divisions and variations in customs, traditions and details. Hindus are not unlike Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, et al., all appropriately falling under the much larger heading of Christianity. Hindu sects are enormously tolerant of each other, and of other religions for that matter, believing as they do that there are many paths to the one true omnipotent God. The Hindu Puranas, which are a written weaving of mythology and history, contain a list of Hindu prophecies. I saved them for last in this chapter because I have a feeling you'll want to read several of them more than once. ✴ Apocalypse for the Hindu is the natural ending of the world in the fourth age, the Kali Age [Age of Darkness and Discord]. ✴ It is one of a series of apocalypses, each of which marks 29 PROPHECY ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ the end of one cycle and the beginning of another creation. The central figure in the story is Vishnu, the preserver God, into whose self the world is absorbed before being born again. Vishnu has already saved humanity on a number of occasions, symbolically appearing as a savior in many different forms. It is said that He will appear again soon, as Kalki, a white horse, destined to destroy the present world and to take humanity to a different, higher plane. All kings occupying the earth in the Kali Age will be wanting in tranquillity, strong in anger, taking pleasure at all times in lying and dishonesty, inflicting death on women, children and cows, prone to take the paltry possessions of others, with character that is mostly vile, rising to power and soon falling. They will be short-lived, ambitious, of little virtue and greedy. People will follow the customs of others and be adulterated with them; peculiar, undisciplined barbarians will be vigorously supported by rulers. Because they go on living with perversion, they will be ruined. Dharma [eternal order, righteousness] becomes very weak in the Kali Age. People commit sin in mind, speech and actions. Quarrels, plague, fatal diseases, famines, drought and calamities appear. Testimonies and proofs have no certainty. There is no criterion left when the Kali Age settles down. People become poorer in vigor and luster. They are wicked, full of anger, sinful, false and avaricious. Bad ambitions, bad education, bad dealings and bad earnings excite fear. The whole batch becomes greedy and untruthful. 30 Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies ✴ Many sudras [Godless ones] will become kings, and many ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ heretics will be seen. There will arise various sects; sannyasins [elevated ones, gurus] wearing clothes colored red. Many profess to have supreme knowledge because, thereby, they will easily earn their livelihood. In the Kali Age, there will be many false religionists. India will become desolate by repeated calamities, short lives and various diseases. Everyone will be miserable owing to the dominance of vice and Tamoguna [apathy, inaction]. Earth will be valued only for her mineral treasures. Money alone will confer nobility. Power will be the sole definition of virtue. Pleasure will be the only reason for marriage. Lust will be the only reason for womanhood. Falsehood will win out in disputes. Being dry of water will be the only definition of land. Praiseworthiness will be measured by accumulated wealth. Propriety will be considered good conduct, and only feebleness will be the reason for unemployment. Boldness and arrogance will be equivalent to scholarship. Only those without wealth will show honesty. Just a bath will amount to purification, and charity will be the only virtue. Abduction will be marriage. Simply to be well dressed will signify propriety. Any hard-to-reach water will be deemed a pilgrimage site. The pretense of greatness will be the proof of it, and powerful men with many severe faults will rule over all the classes on earth. 31 PROPHECY ✴ Oppressed by their excessively greedy rulers, people will hide in valleys between mountains, where they will gather honey, vegetables, roots, fruits, birds, flowers and so forth. ✴ Suffering from cold, wind, heat and rain, they will put on clothes made of tree bark and leaves. ✴ And no one will live as long as twenty-three years. ✴ Thus in the Kali Age humankind will be utterly destroyed. 32 Chapter Two d What Is a Prophet? do not know whether it is owing to the anxiety of my mind, or what, but this afternoon, as I was sitting at this table engaged in preparing a dispatch, something seemed to disturb me. Looking up, I beheld standing opposite me a singularly beautiful female. So astonished was I, for I had given strict orders not to be disturbed, that it was some moments before I found language to inquire the cause of her presence. A second, a third and even a fourth time did I repeat my question, but received no answer from my mysterious visitor except a slight raising of her eyes. "By this time I felt strange sensations spreading through me. I would have risen but the riveted gaze of the being before me rendered volition impossible. I assayed once more to address her, but my tongue had become useless, as though it had become paralyzed. "A new influence, mysterious, potent, irresistible, took possession of me. All I could do was to gaze steadily, vacantly at my unknown visitor. Gradually the surrounding atmosphere seemed as if it had become filled with sensations, and luminous. Everything about me seemed to rarify, the mysterious visitor herself becoming more I " 33 PROPHECY airy and yet more distinct to my sight than before. I now began to feel as one dying, or rather to experience the sensations which I have sometimes imagined accompany dissolution. I did not think, I did not reason, I did not move; all were alike impossible. I was only conscious of gazing fixedly, vacantly at my companion. "Presently I heard a voice saying, 'Son of the Republic, look and learn,' while at the same time my visitor extended her arm eastwardly. I now beheld a heavy white vapor at some distance rising fold upon fold. This gradually dissipated, and I looked upon a strange scene. Before me lay spread out in one vast plain all the countries of the world: Europe, Asia, Africa and America. I saw rolling and tossing between Europe and America the billows of the Atlantic, and between Asia and America lay the Pacific. " 'Son of the Republic,' said the same mysterious voice as before, 'look and learn.' At that moment I beheld a dark, shadowy being, like an angel, standing, or rather floating in midair, between Europe and America. Dipping water out of the ocean in the hollow of each hand, he sprinkled some upon America with his right hand, while with his left hand he cast some on Europe. Immediately a cloud raised from these countries, and joined in midocean. For a while it remained stationary, and then moved slowly westward, until it enveloped America in its murky folds. Sharp flashes of lightning gleamed through it at intervals, and I heard the smothered groans and cries of the American people. "A second time the angel dipped water from the ocean, and sprinkled it out as before. The dark cloud was then drawn back to the ocean, in whose heaving billows it sank from view. A third time I heard the mysterious voice saying, 'Son of the Republic, look and learn.' I cast my eyes upon America and beheld villages and towns and cities springing up one after another until the whole land from the Atlantic to the Pacific was dotted with them. "Again, I heard the mysterious voice say, 'Son of the Republic, 34 What Is a Prophet? the end of the century cometh, look and learn.' At this the dark shadowy angel turned his face southward, and from Africa I saw an illomened specter approach our land. It flitted slowly over every town and city of the latter. The inhabitants presently set themselves in battle array against each other. As I continued looking I saw a bright angel, on whose brow rested a crown of light, on which was traced the word 'Union,' bearing the American flag which he placed between the divided nation, and said, 'Remember, ye are brethren.' Instantly, the inhabitants, casting from them their weapons, became friends once more, and united around the National Standard. "And again I heard the mysterious voice saying, 'Son of the Republic, look and learn.' At this the dark, shadowy angel placed a trumpet to his mouth, and blew three distinct blasts, and taking water from the ocean, he sprinkled it upon Europe, Asia and Africa. Then my eyes beheld a fearful scene: from each of these countries arose thick black clouds that were soon joined into one. Throughout this mass there gleamed a dark red light by which I saw hordes of armed men, who, moving with the cloud, marched by land and sailed by sea to America. Our country was enveloped in this volume of cloud, and I saw these vast armies devastate the whole country and burn the villages, towns and cities that I beheld springing up. As my ears listened to the thundering of the cannons, the clashing of swords, and the shouts and cries of millions in mortal combat, I heard again the mysterious voice saying, 'Son of the Republic, look and learn.' When the voice had ceased, the dark shadowy angel placed his trumpet once more to his mouth, and blew a long and fearful blast. "Instantly a light as of a thousand suns shone down from above me, and pierced and broke into fragments the dark cloud which enveloped America. At the same moment the angel upon whose head still shone the word 'Union,' and who bore our national flag in one hand and a sword in the other, descended from the heavens attended by legions of white spirits. These immediately joined the inhabitants 35 PROPHECY of America, who I perceived were well nigh overcome, but who, immediately taking courage again, closed up their broken ranks and renewed the battle. "Again, amid the fearful noise of the conflict, I heard the mysterious voice saying, 'Son of the Republic, look and learn.' As the voice ceased, the shadowy angel for the last time dipped water from the ocean and sprinkled it upon America. Instantly the dark cloud rolled back, together with the armies it had brought, leaving the inhabitants of the land victorious! "Then once more I beheld the villages, towns and cities springing up where I had seen them before, while the bright angel, planting the azure Standard he had brought in the midst of them, cried with a loud voice, 'While the stars remain, and the heavens send down dew upon the earth, so long shall the Union last.' And taking from his brow the crown on which blazoned the word 'Union,' he placed it upon the Standard while the people, kneeling down, said, 'Amen.' "The scene instantly began to fade and dissolve, and I at last saw nothing but the rising, curling vapor I at first beheld. This also disappearing, I found myself once more gazing upon the mysterious visitor, who, in the same voice I had heard before, said, 'Son of the Republic, what you have seen is thus interpreted: three great perils will come upon the Republic. The most fearful is the third, but in this greatest conflict the whole world united shall not prevail against her. Let every child of the Republic learn to live for his God, his land and the Union.' With these words the vision vanished, and I started from my seat and felt that I had seen a vision wherein had been shown to me the birth, progress and destiny of the United States." If that quote isn't familiar to you, I'm sure you're wondering the same thing I did the first time I saw it: what American prophet should I have been paying more attention to? And you might be as surprised as I was to hear that what you've 36 What Is a Prophet? just read was written in 1777, not by some mysterious, cloak-draped spiritualist or trance medium or fortune-teller but by our first president, George Washington. I think one of the things I least expected when I started actively studying prophets and prophecies in my early twenties was how diverse and unique each of them is. I've long since forgotten what my predisposed image of a typical prophet might have been before then. I'm sure I thought prophets were a little otherworldly, and they didn't live in ordinary houses or have ordinary problems and ordinary friends and families and ordinary jobs and, God forbid, even ordinary, mundane conversations, but instead they kind of wafted around like virtual hermits, spouting prophecies when not busy meditating. As it turns out, prophets—or maybe "those who were prophetic" puts it in better perspective, since prophecy is rarely a full-time career—are much more interesting than I ever dreamed they'd be, precisely because there is no such thing as a "typical prophet"; they're actually just an extraordinary array of people who happened to be able to peer into and express the near and the distant future. It would be ludicrous for me to imply that I can cover every significant prophet and prophecy in one book, let alone one chapter. All I hope to accomplish in this chapter is to share some glimpses of a few of the prophets and prophecies that have made lasting impressions on me. If it inspires you to explore further, great. If it does nothing more than help you take a slightly different view of the word "prophet" than you might have had when you opened this book, I'll be happy. For example, here's a quote that's likely to seem very familiar to you: Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to 37 PROPHECY do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. That, of course, was the conclusion of the magnificent sermon delivered at the Masonic Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the night of April 3, 1968. In the late afternoon of April 4, less than twenty-four hours later, Dr. King was assassinated, and the world lost a great, courageous, passionate friend. In any context, that sermon in Memphis in 1968 remains one of the most eloquent speeches in American history. But in the context of Dr. King's imminent death, it's so movingly prophetic that I'd be doing him an outrageous disservice if I didn't include him in a chapter about some of the prophets who've passed our way. Also passing our way was Abraham Lincoln, who, in November of 1864, three and a half years after the Civil War began, wrote the following in a letter to Colonel William F. Elkins: I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. 38 What Is a Prophet? Don't you wish he could come back today, spend a week or so in Washington, D.C., just listening and observing, and go on national TV to give us his version of a State of the Union address? And then there was Sir Winston Churchill, former prime minister of England, Nobel Prize winner, unparalleled statesman and orator and achiever of enough other accomplishments during his lifetime that his gift of prophecy tends to get overshadowed. To name just a handful of Churchill's traceable, recorded prophecies, he predicted: ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ the German invasion of France, two years before it happened the atomic bomb the formal establishment of the state of Israel the gathering evil of Adolf Hitler, years before the rest of the world caught on the German invasion of Russia, despite the pact between Hitler and Stalin the fierce aggression of the Soviet Union under Stalin against Europe the ultimate demise of any "criminals" who assaulted innocent civilian populations by air, even during war, several months before Germany unleashed the devastating blitzkrieg bombings of London the collapse of the Soviet Union In fact, Churchill had such an impressive accuracy rate as a prophet that it makes me wonder how some of our leaders can so arrogantly ignore another of his clear and simple warnings: If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce. 39 PROPHECY Nostradamus Probably when you hear the word "prophet" you're likely to think of Nostradamus, who's without question one of the most famous, most prolific, most exhaustively written about and most tirelessly debated prophets in history. One school of thought on Nostradamus is that we've only begun to scratch the surface of the brilliance of his prophecies. Another is that the language of his prophecies is so vague and obscure they could be interpreted as predictions of almost anything. Still another is that it all depends on the accuracy of the translations, since Nostradamus's prophecies were originally written in French in the 1500s, with some Greek, Latin and word puzzles thrown in for good measure. Which means, as far as I'm concerned, that whether he was a genuinely gifted prophet or an ingenious fraud, he's held our interest for almost half a millennium, so it's impossible to argue with his remarkable impact. Nostradamus was born Michel de Nostradame in St. Remy de Provence, France, in 1503. The family lineage was Jewish, but they had converted to Christianity and raised Michel in the Catholic faith. After putting in his years as a talented student, he graduated from the University of Montpellier and became an equally talented physician. A deadly plague ravaged France a few years into Nostradamus's medical career, and patient after patient not only survived but recovered completely for no other reason than being in his remarkably successful care. He was accused of heresy and of being a magician (a serious charge under the circumstances) for his seemingly suspicious ability to cure the incurable, but his battle against the terrible illness had earned him enough renown that the Pope himself protected him against the charges. In one of those twists of fate that almost seem too cruel to be true, Nostradamus became a hero for 40 What Is a Prophet? treating the same plague that ended up killing his beloved wife and two children. Their deaths devastated him, and he seems to have been fairly aimless for six years, traveling throughout France and Italy. It was during these years of grieving and struggling to heal his broken heart that he first felt the prophetic gift inside him starting to wake up. According to one of countless stories from those six years, Nostradamus encountered a group of Franciscan monks on a path in Italy. Like any good, respectful Catholic, he was in the process of stepping aside to get out of their way when suddenly, for no apparent reason, he was overcome with awe, fell to his knees and genuflected, reaching to reverently touch the robe of Father Felice Peretti, the least distinguished and lowest-born monk in the group. "What are you doing?" the monk asked him. "Why are you behaving like this?" To which Nostradamus replied, "I must yield myself and bow before his Holiness." Nostradamus died in 1566. In 1585 Felice Peretti became Pope Sixtus V. Nostradamus eventually married again and made a home for himself and his second wife, Anne Ponsart Gemelle, in Salon, France. It was in Salon that he started a new family, which ultimately totaled six children. And it was also in Salon that he started his prophetic writings. The structure of Nostradamus's writing as a prophet is very distinctive. First, he wrote in four-line verses called quatrains. Then he organized the quatrains into what he called "Centuries"—one hundred quatrains per Century, theoretically, although since he wrote a total of 942 quatrains in his lifetime, there was one Century that only contained forty-two quatrains. Nostradamus was fifty-two years old when he wrote his first quatrains. It's a tribute to his continued fame and brilliant reputation in 41 PROPHECY the medical world, and the quickly spreading word of his gifts as a prophet, that nine years later he was appointed royal physician to King Charles IX. Legend has it that on July 1, 1566, Nostradamus had spent time with his priest and was in the process of leaving when the priest said as a casual good-bye, "Until tomorrow." Nostradamus turned, looked at him and stated with calm, quiet authority, "You will not find me alive at sunrise." And that night, at the age of sixty-three, Nostradamus died. Again, the answer to "What exactly did he predict?" depends on which camp of the ongoing controversy you talk to. "Anything you want to read into him" will be one answer. "Who can tell, with all that Greek and Latin and all those anagrams thrown in, and translators who may not have been accurate in the first place?" will be another answer. But for those who believe the answer is "Almost every significant world event since the 1600s," the list of Nostradamus's accurate prophecies is almost endless, far too exhaustive to do justice to here, and even now, in 2004, many of them still lie ahead of us, waiting to unfold. Among the most often quoted, especially in recent years, are his warnings of three powerful, tyrannical, sadistic Antichrists who would terrorize, brutalize and demand slavish loyalty from their own people. Nostradamus's description of the first of these Antichrists has been translated to read: An Emperor shall be born near Italy Who shall cost the Empire dear, They shall say, with what people he keeps company He shall be found less a Prince than a butcher . . . From a simple soldier he will rise to the Empire, 42 What Is a Prophet? From the short robe he will attain the long. Great swarms of bees shall arise. This is unanimously thought to be a description of Napoleon, the emperor of France from 1799 to 1814. He was born in 1769 on the island of Corsica, fifty miles from the coast of Italy. No one would argue with the description of his being a "butcher." And for his imperial crest, he chose the symbol of the beehive. The next Antichrist according to Nostradamus's prophecies would be a "great enemy of the human race" and a master manipulator: Out of the deepest part of the west of Europe, From poor people a young child shall be born, Who with his tongue shall seduce many people, His fame shall increase in the Eastern Kingdom. He shall come to tyrannize the land. He shall raise up a hatred that had long been dormant. The child of Germany observes no law. Cries, and tears, fire, blood, and battle. This has obviously been widely accepted as a description of Adolf Hitler, born into a poor family in Austria in 1889. And to say he "tyrannized" and "raised up a hatred" and "observed no law" after "seducing many people with his tongue" is to soft-pedal what a vicious, psychopathic, inhuman monster that "child of Germany" really was. The third Antichrist is a great subject of current interest, for reasons that will be obvious the minute you start reading Nostradamus's description: Out of the country of Greater Arabia Shall be born a strong master of Muhammad . . . 43 PROPHECY He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban. He will be the terror of mankind . . . From the sky will come the great King of Terror. He will bring back to life the King of the Mongols; Before and after war reigns. The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city. By fire he will destroy their city, A cold and cruel heart, Blood will pour, Mercy to none. By the way, this brings up a perfect example of how different scholars can interpret the same passages in different ways and still come up with the same answer. It's always been widely accepted that the "great new city" was a reference to New York City. Before September 11, 2001, the words "the sky will burn at forty-five degrees" were taken as an "obvious" indication of New York's location near forty-five degrees latitude. After September 11, 2001, those words became an "obvious" image of the World Trade Center, consumed in flames from that unspeakable act of terrorism, burning so high in the air before the towers collapsed that the flames were at a forty-five degree angle to the horizon. God bless New York, though, and sorry, Nostradamus, but even after taking the most horrific sucker punch on its own soil in this country's history, that city was most certainly not destroyed. As for the identity of that third Antichrist, you'll find those who swear it's Saddam Hussein, and those who use the description of the attack on the World Trade Center to point out how clear it is that it's 44 What Is a Prophet? Osama bin Laden. I'll keep my opinion on that to myself, except to add a plea of my own inspired by these passages: To use such words of Nostradamus's as "out of the country of Greater Arabia" and "a master of Muhammad" and "wearing a turban" as an excuse for discriminating against Middle Easterners and/ or committing hate crimes against them as retribution for the despicable acts of "one of their own" is exactly as insane, as far as I'm concerned, as holding all of us who happen to be Caucasian accountable for the acts of our fellow Caucasians Napoleon and Hitler. So let's save our outrage for its most specific, appropriate targets, shall we, unless we want to wake up one day on the receiving end of a whole lot of misplaced outrage ourselves? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle If Arthur Conan Doyle had accomplished nothing in his lifetime but to create the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes, and then feature him in four novels and fifty-six short stories, he'd have more than earned our attention. If he'd limited himself to his successful career as a physician and surgeon, he would have had a full, rewarding life. That career included service in a medical unit in South Africa, which led to his writing an article called "The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct" in defense of England's handling of the Boer War and its aftermath. He was knighted by King Edward VII for that article, an honor he would have modestly declined if his mother hadn't convinced him to accept. His personal life alone would have been enough to keep most men too confused to accomplish much of anything. He met his wife Louise when he treated her brother Jack for terminal cerebral meningitis. Jack's illness and death drew them into a marriage of enormous 45 PROPHECY fondness and respect, and they had two children together as Conan Doyle made the transition from his life as a doctor to his brilliant literary career. When Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1893, Conan Doyle moved his family to healthier climates in an effort to help her, eventually ending up in Hindshead, Surrey, England, in 1897, where he met and fell instantly in love with a woman named Jean Leckie. For nearly the next ten years, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jean Leckie carried on a deeply passionate but purely platonic relationship, Conan Doyle somehow never violating his oath that Louise was never to know about Jean and was never, ever to be hurt. When Louise died in 1906, Conan Doyle sank into health problems and depression for a while, until he'd recovered from the guilt and the pressure of so much secret-keeping and withholding from a wife who'd devoted her life to him, and he and Jean were finally married in the fall of 1907. The fact that Conan Doyle found time to develop even a passing interest in spiritualism is amazing under the circumstances. But he did far more than that. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ultimately devoted the full force of his attention and reputation to the world of spiritualism. He was raised in a devoutly Catholic home but became an agnostic and showed no interest in any belief system until he attended a lecture on spiritualism in 1881. Some facet of it clearly resonated in him, since from then on he attended séances, began writing articles for spiritualist publications, volunteered to be hypnotized at a lecture on mesmerism and, in 1893, joined the British Society for Psychical Research, an organization that, among other things, investigated alleged hauntings and similar unexplained phenomena. By 1920 Conan Doyle was one of England and America's most active and courageous writers and public speakers on the subjects of spiritualism and the afterlife. He knew it would cost him some of the credibility he'd spent a lifetime earning, and it did. But he was so 46 What Is a Prophet? sure of his spiritualist convictions that he paid that price with no apologies until the day he died in 1930. It's no big surprise that a man as open-minded, diverse and spiritually available as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would find himself in possession of prophecies that he felt compelled to express out of his lifelong concern for humankind. Between information he channeled from his Spirit Guide Phineas and material he gathered from mediums he'd come to know and respect throughout England and the United States, Conan Doyle wrote a letter shortly before his death that spelled out the prophecies he'd been given to pass along to anyone who cared to pay attention. The letter, published in July of 1930, predicted: ✴ A period of natural convulsions during which a large portion ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ ✴ of the human race will perish; earthquakes of great severity and enormous tidal waves would seem to be the agents. War appears only in the early stages and appears to be a signal for the crisis to follow; the crisis will come in an instant. The destruction and dislocation of civilized life will be beyond belief. There will be a short period of chaos followed by some reconstruction; the total period of upheavals will be roughly three years. The chief centers of disturbance will be the Eastern Mediterranean basin, where not less than five countries will entirely disappear. Also in the Atlantic there will be a rise of land which will be a cause of those waves which will bring about great disasters upon the Americas, the Irish and the Western European shores, involving all of the low-lying British coasts. 47 PROPHECY ✴ There are indicated further great upheavals in the southern Pacific and in the Japanese region. ✴ Mankind can be saved by returning to its spiritual values. Madame Helena Blavatsky Like the other prophets in this chapter, Madame Blavatsky and her complicated, fascinating life can't be done any real justice in a few short pages, but I'd love to think you'll be intrigued enough by what you read here to explore further. Believe me, you won't be disappointed or bored. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was an extraordinary woman, as outspoken as she was controversial. I won't promise that you'll find her own writings enjoyable. In fact, they can be a lot of work—dense, obtuse and a struggle to get through. But a biography, or a few studies of her exhaustive work in the fields of religion, philosophy and the occult, would be valuable additions to your library. Helena Blavatsky was born in Russia in 1831. Her father was a soldier in the Russian army, and her mother was a successful novelist. One of the first of countless peculiarities about her life is that she often claimed that her mother died when she was an infant, when the truth is that she was twelve when her mother died. She wasn't an especially healthy, stable child, and there are accounts of her sleepwalking at a very early age and of occasional emotionally triggered convulsions. The Russian culture into which Helena Blavatsky was born was an almost devoutly superstitious one, and little Helena was fascinated with the talk of otherworldly beings and powers that were a common part of the tapestry of her childhood. The willow trees by the river where her nurses took her for walks, for example, were said to be populated by green-haired nymphs called russalkas. One day when Helena was four, a fourteen-year-old boy began teasing her 48 What Is a Prophet? during a walk with her nurse, and she angrily let out a roar and threatened to have the russalkas tickle him to death. He was frightened enough to run away from her, disappearing over the riverbank. He wasn't seen again until weeks later, when his drowned, lifeless body washed up on the shore downstream. There are any number of logical explanations for what was undoubtedly an accidental death. But in later years Helena would refer to the homicide she committed at the age of four. Apparently none of her nurses or other servants in the household were sure enough of themselves to argue the point, because they secretly performed rituals centered around their belief that little Helena was special and powerful and could control supernatural beings. She decided they were probably right, she was special and powerful, and a well-placed, full-blown temper tantrum when she didn't get her way certainly did seem to satisfy her need for control over everyone in the household, supernatural or not. Her family tried everything from scoldings to corporal punishment to exorcisms, but this child wasn't about to modify any behavior that ultimately suited her purposes. When Helena's mother died, she and her two siblings went to live with their maternal grandparents. Helena's grandmother was a renowned botanist, and it's no stretch of psychology to say that a very headstrong, extremely self-confident young girl, raised by first a mother and then a grandmother who commanded and received respect for their hard-won careers, wasn't being shaped for a quiet, dutiful life as a housewife in the mid-1800s Russian version of suburbia. The first real love affair Helena claimed was with Prince Alexander Galistin. She was sixteen, and she was probably more attracted to his interest in the occult than she was to him. When she was seventeen she embarked on what was by all accounts a loveless marriage to General Nicephore Blavatsky, who was more than twice her age. She left him after three months, actually escaping past his bodyguards to 49 PROPHECY get away, and spent the next ten years in a haze of travel, the details of which vary from one biography to another. Her version included two years in Tibet, studying with the Lama, and a story that her fans claim was a pivotal experience in her life as a medium and her critics claim never happened. She was in India in 1856, she said, when, wearing a disguise, she gained entry to an amazing reincarnation ceremony by showing the guard a special talisman she'd carried with her since childhood. The ceremony itself began with a four-month-old baby being laid on a long prayer rug or carpet in the center of the small assembled group. Then, according to Helena Blavatsky's account: Under the influence of the venerable lama, the baby rose to its feet and walked up and down the strip of carpet, repeating, 'I am Buddha, I am the old Lama, I am his spirit in a new body.' Whatever can be made of Helena Blavatsky's story, there seems to be no question that she did spend time in Tibet, where admittance was not granted easily in the 1800s, particularly to women. Helena finally returned to Russia and to Blavatsky, on the condition that she be required to spend as little time with him as possible. She began holding séances in her grandfather's home, frequently attended by two of her cousins and a cross-section of highly educated Russian intellectuals who were becoming increasingly intrigued by the paranormal in general and by Madame Blavatsky in particular. A guest at several of the séances later wrote, "On one occasion she caused a closed piano in an adjacent room to emit sounds as if invisible hands were playing upon it. This was done in my presence, at the insistence of one of the guests." Helena Blavatsky's appeal obviously wasn't limited to her paranormal gifts, since somehow in the next few years she found herself romantically involved with both an Estonian spiritualist named Nicho50 What Is a Prophet? las Meyendorff and a married opera singer named Agardi Metrovich, all while continuing to live with her husband and hold regular séances in her grandfather's parlor. The most conspicuous consequence of this impossibly complicated period of her life was the birth of a child, a boy named Yuri, who was born deformed. None of the men Helena was involved with claimed paternity of him, and the specifics of his deformities have never been completely clear. But when Yuri was five years old, Helena took him to Spain to get him some kind of medical attention. Tragically, Yuri didn't survive the trip, and Helena lovingly brought her son back to Russia to bury him in his homeland. Her child's life and death had an enormous impact on her. She later wrote in a letter that "I loved one man deeply but still more I love occult science," and yet nothing else "in all the world" would ever surpass her love for Yuri. In a separate letter she also wrote that the Russian Orthodox God had died for her on the day of Yuri's death. She never quite abandoned her religious beliefs completely, though, and also wrote that "there were moments when I believed deeply . . . that the blood of Christ has redeemed me." Money was dwindling, and Helena's life as a medium and her passion for the occult demanded more fertile ground and inspiration than she could find around her anymore. She began to travel, to Odessa, to Egypt and to Paris, and it was in Paris that she heard about the spiritualist movement that was taking root in the United States. She saw it as a new beginning and, almost without a dime to her name, boarded a steamship to cross the Atlantic, arriving in New York in July of 1873. She struggled along, barely making ends meet, holding séances on Sunday nights and working in sweatshops when she could, until finally, one day in October 1874, she made her way to a remote farm in Chittenden, Vermont, for the purpose of introducing herself to Colonel Henry Steele Olcott. Colonel Olcott, a former appointee to a three-man commission 51 PROPHECY to investigate the assassination of President Lincoln, had been hired by the New York Daily Graphic to write a series of research articles on the Eddy Brothers, who were conducting séances at the Chittenden farm. Helena had read the first of those articles when she decided that Colonel Olcott was someone she wanted and needed to meet. She stayed for ten days, conducting séances along with the Eddy Brothers. While Colonel Olcott wasn't an avowed spiritualist, he was certainly interested in the paranormal as a journalist and a researcher, and he was very impressed with the exotic Madame Blavatsky. He wrote several articles about her, and he was delighted when she volunteered to translate them for publication in Russia. What followed was yet another rocky, difficult, sometimes contentious period in Helena's life. But her fame throughout New York and beyond began to spread, and her relationship with Colonel Olcott ultimately blossomed into the founding of the Theosophical Society in September 1875. It's a credit to Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Olcott that the Theosophical Society is still alive and well in 2004. It was basically formed to study spiritualism, the occult sciences, Egyptian mysteries, the kabbalah and other related esoteric fields. It was, and is, a nondenominational, nondogmatic organization devoted to cultural understanding between Eastern and Western philosophies, religions and sciences. The emphasis is on peace, truth and individual freedom of thought, with beliefs based on personal experiences and insights rather than blindly accepted declarations. Among the countless controversies about Madame Blavatsky's life that continue to this day were her claims of a parade of manifested spirits during séances and an infamous photograph of her seated in front of three "Ascended Masters" who materialized to pose with her: her master, El Myora; an ermine-cloaked Saint Germain; and her teacher, Kuthumi, through whom she claimed to have chan- 52 What Is a Prophet? neled much of her written work, including The Secret Doctrine. Some researchers and associates at the time took great delight in accusing her of being a fraud, and there were those who claimed that she admitted to her share of hoaxes shortly before her death in 1891. What Helena Blavatsky couldn't have faked is the accuracy of many of the prophecies she committed to paper, since she didn't live long enough to see them come to fruition. Madame Blavatsky wrote The Secret Doctrine in 1888, with or without the help of her Ascended Master Kuthumi. In it she said: ✴ "Between 1888 and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic science will receive a death-blow." "Materialistic science" in this context referred to the way scientists of the time assumed the world was only composed of its material, visible, tangible elements and approached it accordingly. That assumption changed forever when: 1895—Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays, exposing a whole new universe of realities beyond the naked eye. 1896—Antoine Becquerel discovered radioactivity. The Secret Doctrine also included descriptions of the reality of energy that had nothing to do with the beliefs of scientists in the 1800s. For example, Madame Blavatsky wrote in 1888 that: ✴ Atoms can be divided. ✴ Atoms are perpetually in motion. ✴ Matter and energy can be converted. 53 PROPHECY And then, sure enough, after her death in 1891: 1897—Sir J. J. Thomson discovered the electron. 1900—Max Planck's work laid the foundation for the quantum theory of physics. 1905—Albert Einstein unveiled the theory of relativity, also known as E=mc2, familiar even to those of us who don't know the first thing about physics. Einstein's niece, incidentally, claimed that her famous, brilliant uncle kept a copy of Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine on his desk. Helena Blavatsky's insights and prophecies weren't limited to science. She also had a thing or two to say about Atlantis—far too many to quote here, actually, but you'll get the idea: ✴ "That the periodical sinking and reappearance of mighty continents, now called Atlantean [Atlantis] and Lemurian [Lemuria] by modern writers, is no fiction will be demonstrated. It is only in the twentieth century that portions, if not the whole, of the present work will be vindicated." ✴ "The elevated ridge in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almost at right angles to proceed in a south-easterly line toward the African coast . . . This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent . . . Could it be traced further, it would establish the reality of a submarine horseshoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean." ✴ "An impenetrable veil of secrecy was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught [there], after the submersion 54 What Is a Prophet? of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some 12,000 years ago." As luck, time, effort and a lot of genius would have it, that ridge Helena Blavatsky was describing really could be traced further, and was, by satellite photographs, some of which were shown and described in Discover magazine in March of 1996, more than a century after Madame Blavatsky committed her images to paper: The Midatlantic Ridge snakes down the center of that ocean off Greenland to the latitude of Cape Horn . . . Under South Africa, the Southwest Indian Ridge shoots into the Indian Ocean like a fizzling rocket, or perhaps like the trail of some giant and cartoonish deep-sea mole. Or, when you look at the satellite photos, like the second leg of a horseshoe. A 1954 issue of Geological Society of America, reporting on the exploration of the summit of this Midatlantic Ridge, seems to confirm that Madame Blavatsky's mention of the submersion of the Atlantean race twelve thousand years ago might not be too far off: The state of lithification of the limestone suggests that it may have been lithified under subaerial [i.e., above water, on land surface] conditions and that the sea mount [summit] may have been an island within the past 12,000 years. And then there was this, also from 1888's The Secret Doctrine: ✴ "England is on the eve of such or another catastrophe; France, nearing such a point of her cycle; and Europe in general threatened with, or rather, on the eve of a cataclysm." 55 PROPHECY Twenty-six years later, the blink of an eye in the context of history, Germany would declare war on Russia and France, England would declare war on Germany, and the first of two world wars would begin, which would leave indelible scars on Great Britain, France and the rest of Europe and almost make the word "cataclysm" look like an understatement. As I said earlier, Madame Helena Blavatsky lived a complex, controversial and, yes, undoubtedly imperfect life. I've only scratched its surface in these pages, and again, if you find yourselves inspired to dig more deeply, you'll be fascinated at the very least. As for the ongoing debate about whether or not she was a legitimate psychic and medium, I'm frankly not very interested. In the end that boils down to "Yes, she was" versus "No, she wasn't," and I hope we've all got better things to do with our time than that. Was she a prophet? I repeat, I've only given you glimpses of her prophecies, and you know I'm the first to encourage you to do your own research and come to your own informed conclusions. But I don't mind telling you, I'm impressed. Lucia dos Santos and the Fatima Prophecies I should clarify right from the beginning that Lucia dos Santos herself is not a prophet, but her story and the story of the Fatima Prophecies are too remarkable not to acknowledge, particularly out of respect for Sister Lucia and Pope John Paul II, both of whom are still alive at this writing. Lucia dos Santos exemplifies beautifully that prophecies aren't just given to the sophisticated. Sometimes they're presented to the innocent, the unsuspecting and the very young. On May 13, 1917, three children named Jacinta, age seven, Francisco, age nine, and Lucia, age eleven, took their family's flock of 56 What Is a Prophet? sheep to graze in a hollow called the Cova da Iria, near the town of Fatima, Portugal. They were playing while the sheep grazed when suddenly they saw a brilliant flash of light. Confused and frightened by what appeared to be lightning from a cloudless sky, they had begun gathering the sheep and starting for home when a second flash of light appeared. They ran, even more frightened, until they stopped to stare at the sight of a Lady, dressed in white more radiant than the brightest sun, standing above a small tree. "Don't be afraid," the Lady reassured them. "I come from Heaven, to ask that you come here for six months in succession, on the thirteenth day, at this same hour. I will tell you at that time who I am and what I want." There were more messages and more instructions from the Lady, after which she seemed to disappear into a cloud of light. The children told their parents about the experience, and Lucia's mother punished her for lying and then refusing to admit the lie. News of the children's story spread through the village, and they were subjected to relentless ridicule. But when the thirteenth of each month came, the children went to the Cova da Iria, and the Lady never disappointed them. By the second month,