The Birth of Apocalyptic Meaning from the Spirit of Communication: Preconditions for the Formation of Eschatological Consciousness in the Modern Spiritualist Movement

Abstract

Two ideas haunt the eschatological consciousness of modernity: antifinalism, signifying the infinity of spiritual evolution of man and the cosmos; anthropological agency, postulating the important role of man in the development of the eschatological process. The article focuses on the modern spiritualist movement, whose participants anticipated the imminent beginning of a new stage of human evolution. The study suggests that the genesis of the eschatological consciousness of the movement’s participants was conditioned by the specifics of their communication with the spiritual world. Firstly, the condition for the genesis of eschatological consciousness was the loss of a significant person and the psychological experience of nostalgia. Thus, the eschatological verificationism of spiritualists is defined as the projection of their traumatic experience onto the world around them. Secondly, automatic writing practice played a crucial role in the emergence of eschatological consciousness, it determined the spiritualists’ treatment of the medium as a special anthropological type. Thirdly, the features of the séance that may have shaped eschatological consciousness are revealed, while the movement itself is categorized as a millenial cult. The spiritualist interpretation of spiritual communication as an act of transcending “earthly” language into the realm of the “language of thought” is eschatological, because it affirms un unambiguous vision of reality, which is unmediated by any “natural” symbolic system. The borderline situation of eschatological expectation was the key reason for the formation of eschatological consciousness.