n., pl. -cies (-sēz).

1. 1. An inspired utterance of a prophet, viewed as a revelation of divine will.
   2. A prediction of the future, made under divine inspiration.
   3. Such an inspired message or prediction transmitted orally or in writing.
2. The vocation or condition of a prophet.
3. A prediction.

[Middle English prophecie, from Old French, from Latin prophētīa, from Greek prophēteia, from prophētēs, prophet. See prophet.]

noun

Something that is foretold by or as if by supernatural means: divination, oracle, soothsaying, vaticination, vision. See foresight.

For English popular ‘prophetic’ writings, see Merlin, Nixon, Mother Shipton. Foreign texts, notably the verses of Nostradamus, have also been frequently translated and reinterpreted to fit the pre-occupations of each generation.

See also DOOMSDAY, NUMBER 666.

Early modern Europeans inherited from their ancient and medieval forebears a vast and complex range of ideas and practices to which the term "prophecy" was, and still is, loosely applied. While prophecy often denotes simply the prediction of future events, the Greek prophetes referred more broadly to one who delivered divine messages. The Old Testament prophets warned and consoled through visions that encompassed past, present, and future. Christian prophecy had inherent (if often latent) apocalyptic tendencies, which surfaced when perceptions of crisis evoked urgent efforts to glimpse God's universal blueprint. Medieval and early modern prophecy also incorporated various forms of natural divination and the mantic, or prophetic arts. This entry highlights biblical and spiritual strains and the varied functions of prophecy.

Comprising both divine messages and their interpretation, prophecy was both an inspiration and an art. Prophetic forecasts did not need to be fulfilled in order to be regarded as true, nor did the failure of a particular prophecy make it false, for the prophetic spirit, by foreseeing events, also worked to influence and change them. As Jonah told the Ninevites, true repentance could sway God's will and hence turn away disaster (Jonah 3: 7–9). Here the outward failure of a prophetic expectation was proof of its deeper truth. The most significant and influential messages were at least implicitly connected with divine judgment and the "last things"; such associations allowed prophecy to function as both a weapon of dissent and a shield for the powerful throughout the early modern era.

Sources of Prophetic Authority

The issue of prophetic authority was central to the establishment and maintenance of power well into the early modern period. The central fount of authority lay in Scripture, the interpretation of which could be seen as a prophetic act. In the late Middle Ages the main prophetic texts of the Bible became crucial battlegrounds on which established powers, both sacred and secular, were contested and defended. But the same was true of venerable ancient sources such as the sibylline oracles, numerous pseudonymous texts, and legends such as the predictions of Merlin. Nature presented another key source of prophecy. The reading of wonders, both celestial and terrestrial, became a major obsession by the sixteenth century; almost anything unusual could be taken to herald war, rebellion, natural disaster, the death of a great prince, or even the Last Judgment. Attention to wonders overlapped closely the various arts of divination, the most pervasive of which was astrology. Moreover, the spirit could communicate to individuals through direct revelation, angels, dreams, or visions.

Prophetic History

The prophetic understanding of history was manifest in several competing schemes, such as the Augustinian six ages corresponding to the ages of man, and the Four Empires of the Book of Daniel. The triadic "Prophecy of Elias," derived from the Talmud, posited three 2000-year periods before, under, and after the Law. More radical was the Trinitarian vision of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130–c. 1202), in which the world-historical stages of the Father and Son would be followed by that of the Holy Spirit, a time of spiritual fulfillment before the Judgment. Through at least the seventeenth century, thinkers debated these schemes and their application with great intensity. Not only the outlines but also the details of prophetic world-chronology took on immense importance in efforts to legitimize governments, religious movements, and programs of reform.

Reformation Prophecy

The late fifteenth century saw a surging confluence of older currents, evident for instance in the 1488 Pronosticatio of Johann Lichtenberger, a grab bag of biblical, astrological, Joachimist, and other ideas. Hopes and fears regarding the fate of the church, the empire, or Christendom fed on one another. Governments worked hard to control the spread of popular prophecies, volatile and dangerous as they often were. Nonetheless, growing lay involvement in all realms of culture brought a proliferation of competing claims to prophetic insight.

The religious explosion of the Reformation saw a dramatic escalation in this contest; the evangelical movement itself was interpreted by Martin Luther as a fulfillment of scriptural as well as extrascriptural prophecies. The reformers placed new emphasis on the prophetic dimensions of preaching and faith. At Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) introduced a form of public biblical teaching, based on learned discussion, known as "the prophecy." But did the Spirit speak only through Scripture? The prophet Joel spoke of a general spiritual outpouring in the last days, and many souls felt the flow of a mystical spiritualism that challenged all limits on prophetic inspiration.

The emergence of confessional orthodoxies was partly a reaction to the threatening anarchy of prophetic voices; confessional identities reflected shared prophetic understandings. Protestants almost universally assumed that the Antichrist had been revealed in the Roman papacy. Among Lutherans, apocalyptic expectancy became virtually a mark of true gospel teaching; Luther himself, who denounced many of his enemies as false prophets, became widely viewed as a "last Elijah." Calvinists, though often dispersed and embattled, took a more confident and aggressive stance, buoyed by a sense of God's plan for the elect. Catholic orders such as the Franciscans found missionary inspiration in powerful traditions such as Joachimism.

Early modern concepts of rulership and nationhood had major prophetic dimensions. Well known is the image of Queen Elizabeth as Deborah, prophetess and savior of her people. Conflicts such as the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War evoked countless prophecies, both political and religious; in fact, the early and mid-seventeenth century appears to mark a peak of stridency in efforts to sanction political goals through Biblical prophecy. Calvinist millenarianism was among the most fertile breeding grounds for a variety of radical political programs.

The Slow Retreat

During this same period, however, a reaction against prophecy set in, moderating this surfeit of the spirit. The slow demise of prophetic history had already begun in the 1560s when Jean Bodin (1530–1596) attacked the traditional scheme of world empires; the dismantling of this framework accelerated in the following century. By 1700 the traditional prophetic worldview was in rapid retreat, at least among intellectuals, along with belief in miracles and most aspects of medieval cosmology. Yet the break between that worldview and a more enlightened outlook was by no means complete. Millenarian hopes, for example, have been convincingly linked to modern conceptions of historical progress as well as to positive attitudes toward the investigation of nature. Similarly, the transition from such prophetic notions as the Quaker "inner light" to the idea of natural reason was subtle, especially in an age when the distinction between nature and spirit was a matter of intense speculation.

While biblical prophecy was broadly attacked and ridiculed in the Enlightenment era, its retreat was both slow and stubborn. Isaac Newton was among the learned figures who worked to pare away the non-biblical accretions to prophecy in order to establish a purer science while preserving true prophecy. Major religious movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Pietism and Methodism, seethed with prophetic conviction. Eighteenth-century rulers and churchmen still had to reckon with perceptions based on long-standing prophetic traditions. The new age of reason was frequently understood in terms of prophetic fulfillment, even if the framework was often no longer biblical. The French Revolution was accompanied by a groundswell of prophetic interpretation and debate, much of which drew directly on the traditional biblical imagery. Certain prophecies had the potential to be self-fulfilling by creating a shared psychological readiness for the predicted outcomes.

Among European elites, however, spiritual prophecy was increasingly relegated to the subjective sphere, in which its public, political role was radically limited. In the eighteenth century spiritual inspiration was already frequently conceived in terms of artistic and literary genius. As biblical and supernatural imagery lost potency, Europeans encountered a world in which the realms of personal and political experience had lost their common prophetic ground.

Bibliography

Barnes, Robin Bruce. Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford, 1988.

Froom, Le Roy Edwin. The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers. 4 vols. Washington, D.C., 1946–1954. An older but still useful survey by a Seventh Day Adventist. Volume two addresses the early modern era.

Lerner, Robert. The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. Berkeley, 1983. Fine survey of a single prophetic tradition.

Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Princeton, 1990.

Petersen, Rodney L. Preaching in the Last Days: The Theme of "Two Witnesses" in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York, 1993.

Reeves, Marjorie. The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism. Oxford, 1969.

——. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future. New York, 1977. Studies aspects of Joachimism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Schwartz, Hillel. The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England. Berkeley, 1980.

Taithe, Bertrand, and Tim Thornton, eds. Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300–2000. Gloucestershire, U.K., 1997. Includes several helpful articles on the early modern scene.

Wilks, Michael, ed. Prophecy and Eschatology. Oxford, 1994.

—ROBIN B. BARNES

In premodern society, prophets appeared both informally as gifted individuals with a sudden prophetic insight or as functionaries identical with what Western scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth century called witchdoctors, priests or shaman. For an example of the prophet/seer/judge functionary, see the biblical book of I Samuel which traces the history of the last judge to rule the Hebrew tribe. Samuel was, as a child, dedicated to God and placed in the care of Eli, the corrupt judge/seer of Israel. His career includes a number of clairvoyant and prophetic (precognitive) utterances, but the most illustrative of his daily functions is pictured in I Sam. 9 in which Samuel helps locate the lost donkeys of the future king Saul.

In many instances prophetic utterances were made in what appeared to be a normal state (see the references to prophecy in the biblical book of Acts) but often occurred in an altered or ecstatic state of consciousness (see the opening verse of the book of Ezekiel, or the sixth chapter of Isaiah). In general the Hebrew prophets went through a period in which "the word of the Lord" spoke to them and then they in turn went among the populace and spoke what they had been told. We know that the pythonesses attached to the oracles of ancient Greece uttered prophetic words under the influences of natural gases or drugs, and when the magical practitioners in tribal cultures attempt to peer into the future they often attain a condition of ecstasy by taking some drug, the action of which is well known to them. But this was not always the case; the shaman often summoned a spirit to his aid to discover what portents and truths lie in the future.

Most often divination is not prophecy in the true sense of the term, as artificial aids are employed. Those aids can stimulate the psychic attunement, but most of the time appear merely as a pretended prediction of future events by the chance appearance of certain objects that the augur supposedly understands. We often find prophecy disassociated from the ecstatic condition, as among the priests of the Maya Indians of Central America, known as Chilan Balam, who, at stated intervals in the year, made certain statements regarding the period which lay immediately before them.

Prophecy may be regarded as a direct utterance of the deity, taking a human being as mouthpiece, or the statement of one who seeks inspiration from the fountain of wisdom. In the biblical writings, Yahweh desired to communicate with human beings and chose certain persons as mouthpieces. Again individuals (often the same as those chosen by God) applied to the deity for inspiration in critical moments. Prophecy then may be the utterances of the deity(ies) through the instrument of an entranced shaman or seer, or the inspired utterance of a seer who later repeats what has been learned while in an altered state (hearing the word of the Lord).

In ancient Assyria the prophetic class were called nabu, meaning "to call" or "announce"—a name probably adopted from that of the god Na-bi-u, the speaker or proclaimer of destiny, the tablets of which he inscribed.

Among the ancient Hebrews the prophet was called nabhia, a borrowed title probably adopted from the Canaanites. They differed little in function from similar functionaries in the surroundings cultures, but differed greatly in the particular deity to which they were attached. Prophets were important functionaries in the ancient Near East. Four hundred prophets of Baal reportedly sat at Queen Jezebel's table (I Kings 18:19). The fact that they were prophets of this deity would almost go to prove that they were also priests. We find that the most celebrated prophets of Israel belonged to the northern portion of that country, which was more subject to the influence of the Canaanites.

Association of prophets appeared in Israel quite early (see I Sam. 10:5) and records of such appear periodically through Israel's history. In the era after the death of Ahab and Jezebel they appear to have had some formal organization (see II Kings 2) with chapters in various towns (II Kings 2-5). They served to consolidate Elijah's victories over the prophets of the hated deity Baal. They seem to have died out by the time of the exile.

The general idea in Hebrew Palestine was that Yahweh, or God, was in the closest possible touch with the prophets, and that he would do nothing without revealing it to them. While often ignored or persecuted during their lifetime, their preserved written words were later given greatest veneration and still later canonized.

In ancient Greece, the prophetic class were generally found attached to the oracles and in Rome were represented by the augurs. In Egypt, the priests of Ra at Memphis acted as prophets as, perhaps, did those of Hekt. Among the ancient Celts and Teutons prophecy was frequent, the prophetic agent usually placing him or herself in the ecstatic condition. The Druids were famous practitioners of the prophetic art, and some hint of their utterances may be still extant in the so-called "Prophecies of Merlin."

In America, as has been stated, prophetic utterance took practically the same forms as in Europe and Asia. Captain Jonathan Carver, an early traveler in North America, cited a peculiar instance where the seers of a certain tribe stated that a famine would be ended by assistance being sent from another tribe at a certain hour on the following day. At the very moment mentioned by them, a canoe rounded a headland, bringing news of relief.

A story was told in the Atlantic Monthly many years ago by a traveler among the Plains tribes, who stated that an Indian medicine-man had prophesied the coming of himself and his companions to his tribe two days before their arrival among them.

In recent years, channeling and contactees contributed more to American prophecy than any other sources. Hundreds of channeling books have been published in the past few decades, but the majority contain unspecified prophetic content. More often than not, the predictions are about millennial earth changes and a new era of spiritual transformation and peace. Prophetic channeling by Edgar Cayce, Kryon and Elizabeth Clare Prophet are considered the most prominent. More traditional psychic seers such as Jeanne Dixon, Ruth Montgomery, Gordon Scallion, Dannion Brinkley and Lori Toye are in the forefront due to the lack of more particulars from channeled sources. Today, mass market prophecy paperbacks are just a number of hodge-podge collections of bits and pieces from Cayce, Nostradamus, Native American lore, etc. Much analysis on prophecy is rare, but works by John White and Tom Kay are considered noteworthy in their field.

Sources:

Alschuler, Alfred S. "When prophecy succeeds: Planetary visions near death and collective psychokinesis." Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 90 no. 4 (October 1996).

Ascension, Soul Ways and Its Meaning.http://www.spiritweb.org/Spirit/ascension.html. April 10, 2000.

Cannon, Dolores. Conversations with Nostradamus, vol 1. Huntsville: Ozark Mountain Publishing, 1997.

Cayce, Hugh Lynn. Earth Changes Update. Virginia Beach: ARE Press, 1980.

Center for Millennial Studies.http://www.mille.org. April 10, 2000.

Ellis, Keith. Prediction and Prophecy. London: Wayland, 1973.

Garrison, Omar V. Encyclopedia of Prophecy. New York: Citadel, 1979.

Geertz, Armin W. The Invention of Prophecy : Continuity and meaning in Hopi Indian religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Kirkwood, Annie. Mary's Message to the World. Nevada City: Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1994.

Kay, Tom. When The Comet Runs. Norfolk, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing, 1997.

Millennial Prophecy Links.http://www.wholeagain.com/millennial.html. April 10, 2000.

The Millennium Matters. http://www.mm2000.nu. April 10, 2000.

Morgana's Observatory.http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana. April 10, 2000.

Montgomery, Ruth. The World To Come. New York: Random House, Harmony Books, 1999.

Prophet, Elizabeth Clare. Saint Germain on Prophecy II. Livingston: Summit University Press, 1986.

Rowley, Harold H. Prophecy and Religion in Ancient China and Israel. New York: Harper, 1956.

Shellhorn, G. Cope. Surviving Catastrophic Earth Changes. Madison: Horus House, 1994.

Stanford, Ray. Fatima Prophecy, New York: Random House, Ballantine Books, 1990.

Timms, Moira. Prophecies and Predictions: Everyone's Guide to the Coming Changes. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Unity Press, 1981.

Vaughan, Alan. Patterns of Prophecy. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973. Reprint, London: Turnstone, 1974.

White, John. Pole Shift. Virginia Beach: ARE Press, 1980.

A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce

n.

The art and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.

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Quotes:

"The are and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery." - Ambrose Bierce

"Don't ever prophesy; for if you prophesy wrong, nobody will forget it; and if you prophesy right, nobody will remember it." - Josh Billings

"The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on." - Noam Chomsky

"Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men." - Alistair Cooke

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them." - Umberto Eco

"Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error." - George Eliot

See more famous quotes about Prophecy

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Common misspelling(s) of prophecy

• prophacy

Dansk (Danish)
n. - profeti

Nederlands (Dutch)
voorspelling, profetie

Français (French)
n. - prophétie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Prophezeiung, Vorhersage

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (θρησκ., μτφ.) προφητεία

Italiano (Italian)
profezia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - profecia (f)

Русский (Russian)
пророчество

Español (Spanish)
n. - profecía

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - profetia, förutsägelse, spådom

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
预言, 预言能力

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 預言, 預言能力

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 예언, 신의의 전달

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 予言能力, 予言, 預言

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) تنبؤ, نبوة, تكهن‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮נבואה, התנבאות‬

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