403. Lanternari, Vittorio. "Messianism: Its Historical Origin and Morphology." History of Religions 02, 1962a: 52-72.
There are various indigenous traditions of a returning "desired demiurge" to renew the world: e.g., a disappeared culture hero who will bring a new beginning. The eschaton is equal to creation, therefore time is [or becomes] circular. "Someone" says that the culture hero idea is crucial to the origin of any prophetic movement which, in Lanternari's view, renews and revives the myth and tradition, independent of its rigid pattern. Themes of disappearing and returning supernaturals are pretty general and prechristian. Their direct intervention can be foretold even when the myth mentions no return.
Prophetic movements are creative religiously, socially, culturally, and politically. A messianic movement is
"a collective movement of escape from the present and expectations of salvation, promoted by a prophet-founder, following a mystico-ecstatic inspirationÊ.Ê.Ê.Êintend[ing] to start a renewal of the world which will be realized in an eschatological perspective as a return to a primordial and paradisiacal age" (p. 70).
404.———. The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Movements. New York: Knopf, 1963a.
"Surely takes too narrow a view in seeing all crisis cults mainly as anticolonial phenomena" and "contained many elementary ethnographic errors. Werblowsky's judgement of it as `overambitious and uneven' is widely shared." (La Barre, 1971, item 398) "Among the most useful references on causation." (Burridge, 1969, item 143) Barkun (1974, item 58) also finds this view overdetermined. Lanternari (1974, item 407) says he uses "a dynamic and comparative perspective" to explore movements of "primitive people." He distinguishes acculturative and non-acculturative origins but finds a continuity between them. Syncretisms are diachronically variable, and Lanternari coins "neo-traditional" to describe movements which reject syncretist elements already acquired without trying to return to ancestral tradition. [Isn't this contradictory? how can they do the one alone, unless the movements propose mass conversion to the new system?]
Prophecy is ultimately political. There is a fundamental subjunctivity in humanism: we behave "as if" our values were absolute, and "as if" the goal of freedom were final²an eschaton. Revivals and transformation movements are fundamental to "every political or military uprising" in the form of messianisms (p. 3). These movements "always" adhere to native tradition, and reject Western ideas though they may show some syncretism in adjusting to current conditions. [This isn't so, unless the movements are extremely narrowly defined as proper objects of study]. Imperialist land grabs are the fundamental cause of every other problem. Lanternari contradicts himself: prophetic cults are "nativistic interpretations of Christianity" (p. 7).
Fokke Sierksma's review (1965) notes that Lanternari points out crisis cult thinking among elites: e.g., Aztec conquerors. There was a Yaruro leaderless cult that "proves" the Great Man theory (that all movements require more or less charismatic leadership), since it was essentially static, not a movement.
[Lanternari aims to put the movements he discusses in historical context in order to understand their causes. Movements are seen as responses to needs arising in specific cultural and historical contexts. Lanternari takes traditional culture as well as the Western culture into account, viewing the process as a dialectic. All movements, whether or not they occur in the "ethnological field," arise out of conflict.]
The review authors nearly all take Lanternari to task for various faults of varying significance. Area specialists are unanimous in condemning him for misinterpreting movements they know of or for being flatly wrong in some of his generalizations. Lanternari blames many of these deficits on his American publisher and translator, claiming he was not allowed to revise the final draft. See also the following entries.
405. ———. Occidente e Terzo Mondo: Incontri di civita differenti. Bari, 1967.
406. ———. "Explanation of New Cults among Primitive Peoples and the Problem of a Conciliation Between Two Different Approaches." Proceedings XI International Congress of History of Religions Vol 3, Leiden, 1968.
The historical-religious and the socio-anthropological approaches should be integrated. Lanternari, 1974 (item 407).
407. ———. "Nativistic and Socio-Religious Movements: A Reconsideration." Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, 1974: 483-503.
All tribal NRMs are "obviously exogenous." (p. 484) [If he means this with regard to precipitating factors, it is doubtful; if with regard to ideologies, it is false.] Western movements are "endogenous" and "non-acculturative" [but, in resulting from rapid change, they are acculturative; it's just that the new culture is no longer foreign, just new. The distinction may be valid, but it's meaningless.] All these represent the "indirect protest of frustrated groups and their hope of a regeneration." Factors of endogamy and exogamy, acculturation and non-acculturation "are in relations of continuity and mutual oscillation" (p. 484). Anti-witchcraft movements are independent of contact, though they come to acquire nativistic or self-destructive traits as a result of contact. All nativisms are syncretic with Christianity, "even within original contexts" (p. 488). All attempts to devise classifications are "inadequate, mechanistic and incomplete.""
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