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Millennial Dreams: Visions and Prophecy in American Folk Art
From: Columbia University
| By:
Gerard C. Wertkin |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Throughout history, people have made prophecies or invested events with cosmic meaning according to their religious beliefs, perhaps foreseeing the beginning of the apocalypse or the seeds of a New Jerusalem. Often, their art reflects these anxieties and hopes. Gerard C. Wertkin, the director of the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, explores religious and utopian millennial ideas in America and the everyday symbols in folk art, such as weathervanes, angels and Father Time, that express their vision. |
 mid-nineteenth-century figure of the archangel Gabriel has been associated with the Museum of American Folk Art almost from its inception in 1961. A gift to the museum from Adele Earnest, one of its founding trustees, the simple but elegant sheet-metal weathervane has served as a widely recognized symbol for the institution for many years. Of course, as the trumpeting angel of biblical lore, Gabriel has a more profound significance. He is an interpreter of dreams (Dan. 8:16, 9:21) and a messenger of great tidings (Luke 1:19, 26-27). According to Christian tradition, he is also the herald of the millennium. |
 The origin of the museum's emblematic weathervane is uncertain, but it probably was created about 1840 somewhere in the countryside of the northeastern United States. Winged figures of Gabriel, trumpet in hand, often were intended to grace the steeples of New England churches, facing east, because "[f]olk tradition assumed that the millennial day would start in the east with the rising of the sun...." Whether the figure was used in sacred or secular settings, however, Gabriel's august office as divine herald was understood. The 1840s were a time of millennial speculation in this country. The followers of William Miller (1782-1849), for example, calculated that the thousand-year period would begin in 1843 or 1844. We have no record of the artist who created this figure, but it is highly likely that he intended his work to reflect the prophetic tradition. |
With the approach of 2000, talk of the millennium was again a common feature of everyday life in America. Hardly a day passed without the offering up of millennial lists or summations of one sort or another in newspaper columns or radio and television programs. Together with these attempts at sorting out the most important events or personalities of the last 1,000 years, communications media regularly described efforts to avert technological breakdown in the face of the new era. Although much of the United States was said to be "Y2K compliant," the coming of the next millennium continues to pose a serious challenge both here and abroad. |
 Darker forebodings about the millennium, often but not exclusively from the fringes of society, were also prevalent in late 1999, hinting at a cosmic significance to the event that transcends a mere change in the calendar or more ordinary uncertainties about the future. In this context, each report of a natural disaster or public tragedy was invested with special meaning. The interpretation of these events in light of biblical prophecy was a feature of countless books, tracts, newsletters and websites and perhaps even a greater number of Sunday sermons. In one way or another, millions of Americans are absorbed by the millennium. |
Sensing time
In its simplest meaning, "millennium" is nothing more than a measure of time, a span of 1,000 years. Why then is so much significance being given to it? To be sure, time is a powerful idea. It measures our days and orders the comings and goings of our lives. It is not surprising that a striking change in the calendar should capture our imagination, even if the next millennium actually will not be ushered in until January 1, 2001. But the concept carries other, more complex meanings that are not necessarily related to 2000 or 2001 or to any specific year, for that matter. A millennium, in this sense of the word, is a long-awaited period of peace, harmony and abundance, a messianic or "golden" age; the kingdom of God on earth, the end of time itself. |
Millennial sources
This idea finds expression in many ancient cultures, including the Greek and Roman. Its more immediate source in Western civilization is the Hebrew Bible, especially the prophetic books of Ezekiel and Daniel, other Jewish apocalyptic writings, and the New Testament, in particular the Book of Revelation. Although the latter work is replete with millennial themes throughout its visionary text, the source of the concept is found in chapter 20: "And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled..." |
Although the Book of Revelation does not specify when the events that it prophesies will occur, the advent of 2000 has fueled speculation among evangelical Christians that the fulfillment of these visions is imminent. As Paul Boyer demonstrates in his fascinating study When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, this idea is not new. The prominent colonial clergyman and jurist Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) was convinced that the long-awaited millennium would begin about 2000, an opinion shared by Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), Congregational minister and president of Yale College. More recently, the television evangelist Pat Robertson has associated himself with this view. |
Millennial thought
Millennial thought is deeply rooted in American history and culture. It is based on the assumption that history is the unfolding of a divine plan, the culmination of which will be the triumph of good over evil. This idea spoke to the aspirations of America's Revolutionary leaders, many of whom saw the struggle for independence as a harbinger of the millennium. As Ruth H. Bloch observed in her provocative study of millennial themes in early American thought, "The conviction that history was drawing to its glorious conclusion, when the world would be transformed into a paradise for the righteous, predisposed large numbers of American Protestants to throw themselves behind the revolutionary cause with a fervency that is otherwise hard to explain." |
Randall Balmer, in his essay accompanying the exhibit "Millennial Dreams" at the Museum of American Folk Art, provides a complicated prophetic timetable of events related to the millennium as set forth in the Book of Revelation, most notably the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment, and the widely varying interpretations of the end-time chronology. He also provides a summary of millennial thought in American life and demonstrates the contemporary immediacy of these concepts in the lives of millions of evangelical Christians. Whatever one's religious heritage, however, millennial ideas--which once fueled American social reform, including such movements as abolitionism--represent a national legacy of great importance because they speak to the promise of America as a place where a truly just society may be built. |
Folk art intersecting with millennial thought
Folk artists are keen observers and astute recorders of American life. Their work speaks eloquently not only to the great questions of the day but also to smaller, more personal concerns. As a cultural terrain, folk art has always been receptive to prophetic voices and visionary experiences, in the twentieth century as much or more than during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The exhibit "Millennial Dreams: Vision and Prophecy in American Folk Art" explored this remarkable visual resource for a consideration of millennial ideas in American history and culture. |
Millennial thought represents a convergence of time and belief. For the Puritans and their spiritual heirs, time was an expression both of the here and now and of eternity. Thus, it is not surprising that in the spare iconography of Puritan gravestone imagery, time, death and the millennium are often linked. Indeed, as David H. Watters has observed, Puritans understood death as "the event which inaugurates individual participation in the grand drama of the last things...." Moreover, "the expectation of the apocalyptic moment sent ripples throughout the Puritan imagination, influencing thinking about literature and art at all levels of New England culture." |
Symbols in folk art
Among the canon of symbols used by stone carvers in early America, Father Time is an ambiguous figure, either dispassionately measuring the years and pointing to the impermanence of human endeavor or contending actively against death.  He is generally depicted as a bearded, aged figure holding the traditional hourglass and scythe. Interestingly, the scythe may be a borrowing from the Greek mythological figure Chronos (Time), the agricultural deity who presided over a legendary Golden Age of eternal spring, not unlike a millennial era. |
The image of Father Time appeared in America at least as early as 1681, in the carving of a gravestone for John Foster in the North Burial Ground, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In this image, Father Time is depicted grasping a skeleton, representing death. As Dickran and Ann Tashjian demonstrate, the source of this depiction is Hieroglyphiques From the Life of Man, an emblem book by the poet Francis Quarles (1592-1644) that was published in London in 1638. Representations of Father Time continued to appear on American gravestones in the eighteenth century and beyond, but later in American history it became more likely for allegorical representations of time to be seen in secular settings. |
 Angels also figure importantly in the traditions of gravestone carving in America; carvers employed images of clarion angels to emphasize the belief that the resurrection of the dead would occur at the time of the Last Judgment. As revelatory agents, interpreters of dreams and instruments of divine judgment, angels are given a significant place in prophetic writings of a millennial character, especially the Book of Revelation, in which trumpeting angels and other angelic figures play a central role. Representations of angels may be found in virtually every period and medium of American folk art, including nineteenth-century weathervanes. |
Although the weathervanes that graced the steeples of early-American churches were for the most part in the form of openwork banners or arrows of the ubiquitous weathercock, figures of the archangel Gabriel also had a place high above Northeastern towns and villages. The Index of American Design, for example, records Gabriel vanes on the steeples of the Baptist church in Whiting, Vermont (1814), and the Universalist church in Newburyport, Massachusetts (1840). Prior to the fourth century, angels had been depicted as wingless men in Christian art. When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, borrowings from contemporary pagan art became common. Angels "assumed the triumphant form of the winged Greco-Roman goddesses of Victory and of Fame...." In particular, the image of Gabriel seems to owe much to Fame, who was also a heralding goddess and is represented as a winged figure with a trumpet. |
 The archangel Michael also plays a significant role in millennial prophecy. He is a great warrior, and he leads angelic forces in casting Satan out of heaven (Rev. 12:7-9). By Christian tradition, Michael will hold the scales of justice at the Last Judgment, weighing the good and evil in human souls. Michael was especially revered in fifteenth-century Spain, his victory over the devil being associated with the reconquista of Spanish territory from the Moors. Veneration of San Miguel was carried by the Spaniards to Latin American and the American Southwest. Iconographic representations of Michael in the retablos and bultos (religious folk paintings and carvings) of northern New Mexico date back at least to the eighteenth century and continue to be created by santeros to this day. Michael also figures prominently in Los Pastores, a Christmas pageant that has been performed in the American Southwest for more than two centuries. He is often depicted holding a sword and scales, the vanquished devil at his feet. |
The millennial clock
As we have seen, the Bible is not specific as to when the millennium will begin. Nevertheless, students of biblical prophecy, serious scholars and dreamers alike, have often looked to the skies for signs of apocalypse, associating unusual natural occurrences--comets, meteor showers, solar halos and hailstorms--with the events described in the Book of Revelation. Folk artists have given tangible expression to these signs and portents in a wide variety of media, sometimes accompanied by urgent calls for repentance. For example, Reverend Daniel Schumacher (1729-87), a Pennsylvania German pastor, drew a representation of a comet that appeared over Pennsylvania in 1769; his drawing, in the fraktur tradition, includes a clarion angel and a warning to his flock to repent. |
In the same context, the African-American artist Harriet Powers (1837-1911), of Athens, Georgia, included similar references in one of her two great appliquéd Bible quilts. In this compelling work of art, Powers revealingly combined symbolic illustrations from the biblical narrative with several near-legendary natural occurrences. These included the famous "Dark Day" of May 19, 1780, when the skies from eastern New York all the way to coastal New England remained dark--apparently the result of forest fires and a weather inversion--fueling widespread millennial speculation. According to Stephen A. Marini, the "impact of the Dark Day was electric: To the already indubitable millennial signs of war and revival, God had added yet another through dramatic natural omens." |
Of all the nineteenth-century efforts to calculate the timing of the millennium, perhaps the one with the greatest impact was that of William Miller (1782-1849), a farmer-turned-preacher from Low Hampton, New York, a village near the Vermont border. An intensive study of the prophecies contained in the books of Daniel and Revelation convinced Miller that the millennium would commence in 1843 or 1844, and he gathered a substantial following in the Northeast and elsewhere in the country through tent meetings and the circulation of a considerable body of prophetic literature. |
In 1842, two of Miller's followers, Charles Fitch and Apollos Hale, prepared a chart, painted on linen panels,  that outlined Miller's calculation of the Second Coming in graphic detail; they exhibited their work at a conference of Millerites, and it was deemed so successful that the leadership of the movement unanimously resolved to have 300 of the charts printed. From then on, Millerite preachers carried a copy of the chart with them wherever they went, using it as a visual aid to help audiences understand the complicated biblical chronology of the end-time. The American folk painter William Matthew Prior (1806-73) was an ardent follower of Miller's. He painted a version of the chronological chart under Miller's direction and was so moved by the preacher that he also painted his portrait. |
 Other versions of the charter were widely circulated in the periodicals of the Millerite movement, and provided an iconographic resource for attempts by others to outline the timing of the millennium. The twentieth-century artist William A. Blayney (1917-85) may well have been familiar with this imagery when he painted his impressive diptych Anti-Christ and Reign of the Gentile Kingdoms and The Sealed Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ. |
The belief and art of the Shakers
The failure of William Miller's prophecies left many of his adherents demoralized, but at least some turned their energies to the reform movements of the day, among them abolitionism. Out of Millerism came several Adventist denominations that remain part of the American religious terrain to this day, including fringe groups like the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas. Others among the disappointed drifted from Millerism to the Shakers, a faith community that believed the millennium to be in progress and the Second Coming to have already occurred. In fact, the formal name of the celibate, communal group is the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Another name traditionally used by the Shakers is the Millennial Church. Through their reading of the books of Daniel and Revelation, early Shakers calculated the beginning of the Millennium to have occurred in 1747. |
 From the late 1830s through the 1840s and beyond, the Shakers experienced a period of great spiritual intensity during which the doors of heaven appeared open to them. During this "Era of Mother's Work," the Believers became especially receptive to vision and prophecy, producing a body of "gift" songs and drawings, among thousands of prophetic messages. The songs are soulful and affecting, the drawings among the most beautiful representations of millennial ideas in America art. The Shakers were also practical community builders, with a genius for innovation and design. Their villages were often magnets for the utopian socialists of the day, who saw in these neat, productive communities models for a radical reshaping of society. |
Portraying the New Jerusalem
The followers of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, among other utopians, formed ideal communities throughout the United States on the conviction that a perfect society could be created in the present time. As a response to the millennial impulse in American life, sectarian and secular experimental communities soon dotted the countryside.  The great Mormon trek west was also an expression of American millennialism; the trumpeting angel among Latter-day Saints may have been Moroni rather than Gabriel, but the impulse was the same. In a real sense, these were attempts to realize in America the promise of the New Jerusalem set forth in the Book of Revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth ... the holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven" (Rev.21:1-2). |
 American folk artists have created diverse and exuberant versions of the New Jerusalem, the millennial heaven on earth. Among African-American artists, the vision of New Jerusalem is especially powerful. Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-64), for example, returned to the image in her paintings again and again. Called to preach and create art through personal visionary experiences, she was deeply affected by the Book of Revelation. Another African-American visionary, James Hampton (1909-64), created a monumental installation, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly, out of cast-off furniture and other found objects that he covered with silver and gold foil. |
Of course, these themes are not limited to African-Americans: Howard Finster (b. 1916) regularly explores apocalyptic ideas in his paintings, sculpture and assemblages. Indeed, Norma J. Girardot demonstrates that millennial thought is at the heart of Finster's work. "Although [Finster's] medium and audience have changed, the message has always been pretty much the same: 'come see the spirit that is within even the despised of the earth and repent, the end is near....'" |
Of all the images of a time of peace and harmony in American folk art, perhaps the most widely known is that of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom,  which embodies the millennial concept of America as a paradigm of a society without war, want or inequality. Hicks (1780-1849) was a member of the Religious Society of Friends. As a Quaker, he was especially aware of the promise of peace, although peace did not always prevail among the fractious Quakers of his time. Hicks returned to the subject time and again; more than 60 of his paintings of the image survive. It is significant that he illustrated not only biblical prophecy (Isaiah 11:6) but often a semi-legendary event in American history as well--William Penn's treaty with the Indians--in anticipation of the harmony among peoples of different races and cultures that represents the potential of America. |
The founders of the United States believed that America had been assigned a special role in the divine plan. Even secularists and religious liberals envisioned the fulfillment of millennial dreams in a place deemed blessed by God and nature. There has been little acknowledgment of this heritage in the public discourse of the late 1990s. On the contrary, a pre-millennialist emphasis on cataclysmic destruction--perhaps either a natural response to the depredations of racism and war in the twentieth century or a fear of rapid change--has developed. The books of Daniel and Revelation are being studied and their prophecies are being taken seriously. In the face of these dark forebodings, it is appropriate to recall that America was founded on the hope of millennial peace. On the brink of a new millennium, it may be well to remember that heritage. |
Direct quotes within this article are attributed, in order, to the following works: David H. Watters, "With Bodile Eyes": Eschatological Themes in Puritan Literature and Gravestone Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1981, p. 149); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, xiii-xiv); Watters, op. cit., 15; Erika Langmuir, Angels (London: National Gallery Publications, 1999), 22; Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 47; Norma J. Girardot, "Howard Finster," in Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology (San Francisco: Chronical Books in association with the Museum of American Folk Art, 1998), 164. |
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