Ninth Issue: Messiahs
I’ve been looking at Wikipedia’s list of messiah claimants lately. It is interesting that they don’t have a list of messiahs just claimants. I guess Wikipedia doesn’t believe that any of the messiahs are real. Oh well. Guess we’re still waiting. I am only talking about messiah claimants who develop a following, because people claiming they’re Jesus isn’t a new thing, but it’s certainly strange for people to actually believe you when you say that you are the messiah. Here are four that I thought were interesting!
The first interesting person I found is Rael. He was born in 1946 and is the founder and leader of the UFO religion known as Raelism. He was a singer and then later a sports-car journalist and test driver for his magazine Autopop. He’s French, and he’s half Jewish and half Catholic. He ran away from his boarding school when he was fifteen and spent the next three years in Paris busking and singing, but eventually he released some songs and got on the radio.
I guess eventually he got sick of singing? Rael’s Wikipedia page is a mess of [citation needed] so I can’t promise any of this is real or true. It’s a fun story though. Anyway, Rael got married to a nurse and started Autopop, a magazine about the motor racing world. Then he saw an alien.
“In the book Le Livre qui dit la vérité ("The Book Which Tells the Truth"), he stated that he had an alien visitation on 13 December 1973. According to Raël, in a secluded area within a French volcanic crater, an extraterrestrial being came out of a craft that had descended gently from the sky, and told him, in French, that he had come for the sole purpose of meeting with him. Raël said that he was given a message by this alien and told that it was his mission to pass this message on to the people of Earth.”
What is the message? Well, all life on earth was created by other humans on another planet who are called Elohim (those who came from the sky). The Elohim sent forty prophets to Earth but their messages were all messed up by humans who couldn’t grasp what they were told by this too-advanced society. Rael said he got some mysteries explained to him and he went to another planet and met Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
The next year, Rael gave up his magazine Autopop and devoted his life to dispersing the message of his “biological father”, an alien named Yahweh. He founded the International Raelian Movement – in other words, he gained a following. He went to Japan, Peru, Florida, Brazil, and Martinique to spread his message in the 1980s. He dumped his wife and married a Japanese woman, but then he met a 16 year old girl named Sophie who married him next, with her mother’s permission. He went to South Korea to spread his message but was kicked out in 2003 with his wife.
I guess eventually he got sick of singing? Rael’s Wikipedia page is a mess of [citation needed] so I can’t promise any of this is real or true. It’s a fun story though. Anyway, Rael got married to a nurse and started Autopop, a magazine about the motor racing world. Then he saw an alien.
“In the book Le Livre qui dit la vérité ("The Book Which Tells the Truth"), he stated that he had an alien visitation on 13 December 1973. According to Raël, in a secluded area within a French volcanic crater, an extraterrestrial being came out of a craft that had descended gently from the sky, and told him, in French, that he had come for the sole purpose of meeting with him. Raël said that he was given a message by this alien and told that it was his mission to pass this message on to the people of Earth.”
What is the message? Well, all life on earth was created by other humans on another planet who are called Elohim (those who came from the sky). The Elohim sent forty prophets to Earth but their messages were all messed up by humans who couldn’t grasp what they were told by this too-advanced society. Rael said he got some mysteries explained to him and he went to another planet and met Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
The next year, Rael gave up his magazine Autopop and devoted his life to dispersing the message of his “biological father”, an alien named Yahweh. He founded the International Raelian Movement – in other words, he gained a following. He went to Japan, Peru, Florida, Brazil, and Martinique to spread his message in the 1980s. He dumped his wife and married a Japanese woman, but then he met a 16 year old girl named Sophie who married him next, with her mother’s permission. He went to South Korea to spread his message but was kicked out in 2003 with his wife.
In 1994, Rael took up race car driving again, to generate publicity for the movement. He got third place one time and seventh place another time. Nowadays, some people who used to be part of the Raelian movement have been accusing Rael of plagiarism, comparing his works to Jean Sendy (another author), and noting many similarities. Rael’s still around, and still doing his thing. There are almost 100,000 Raelian people in the world which is WEIRD TO THINK ABOUT.
Cyrus Reed Teed is another messiah. He lived in the 19th century, mostly, in the United States, and started a religion called Koreshanity, named after the name he took as his own, Koresh. He is described on Wikipedia as being an ‘eclectic physician’ specifically he was “was always interested in unconventional experiments, such as alchemy, often involving dangerously high levels of electricity”. During one such experiment he electrocuted himself and passed out and once he woke up he said he was visited while he was out by a divine spirit who told him he was the messiah. So he changed his name to Koresh.
He decided that everything about the universe that we knew at the time was wrong and put forth is own theory of Cellular Cosmogony, explaining that “human beings live on the inside of the planet, not the outside. The sun is a giant battery-operated contraption, and the stars mere refractions of its light”. Sounds legit.
Weirdly enough Koreshanity (??) caught on, and formed a group and took them to Chicago to make a commune. There were also other small groups in California and other states. Koresh and his followers began to take over a small Florida town called Estero to form a “New Jerusalem”, building a bakery, store, power plant, and newspaper publishing company. The town was 110 square miles and had more than 250 residents in its peak.
In 1904, Koresh got into a fight and died four years later of the injuries he sustained then. His followers thought he’d resurrect like he said, but it didn’t happen. They watched his body for two days and then finally the health officer was like come on guys, it’s decaying, this isn’t sanitary, and he was buried, the followers of his religion disbanding. In 1910, a hurricane destroyed his tomb and washed his body off to sea. In 1961 the last remaining follower of Koresh (Hedwig Michel, which, what a great name) deeded the town to the State of Florida, which made it into a historical site.
Ann Lee is another messiah, but this time a female one from the 18th century. She was the leader of the Shakers, which I’d heard of offhand but don’t really know much about so here’s my chance and yours to learn! Ann Lee was born in England, and not educated. She worked in a factor, as an assistant to a hatter, and as a cook in an infirmary. She joined a religious sect called the Wardleys, which taught that you could achieve holiness if you gave up sex. She was taught that if you shook and trembled that was because sin was being purged from your body, purifying you.
Ann Lee was always uncomfortable with sexuality, and her father forced her to marry, but her four children all died during infancy and the pregnancies were difficult. She believed that celibacy and the abandonment of marriage was the way to get to a perfect life. She urged others who believed as she did to spread their message, and was thrown in jail a bunch of times for this. She supposedly performed miracles and spoke in tongues.
Sick of getting thrown in prison, Ann went to the United States, with her brother, niece, the man who funded the trip, his son, and his wife. They went to New York near Albany and lived there for five years. During the Revolutionary War, Ann and her followers were neutral, as they were pacifists. Ann Lee held a revival on the famous Dark Day in May 1780 when the sun was gone and recruited many more followers.
She led these followers to other states in the Northeast, spreading her message where she went. Ann Lee’s followers began to believe that she was perfection in female form and the second coming of Christ. She said that men and women should be treated equally, but kept separate so that there would be no impure acts between them. The Shakers were met by violent mobs in some places they went, and Ann kept getting hurt – she ended up dying in 1784.
Jacobina Mentz Maurer was a Brazilian religious leader who led a REVOLT! In the 19th century, Jacobina was the daughter of German immigrants. Her community was almost all German immigrants, and her family built the first Protestant church in Southern Brazil. In 1886, Jacobina married, and two years later her husband, João Maurer, had a divine vision. He decided he was meant to be a healer, not a farmer. A local named Bucchorn taught him medicinal herbs and rudimentary healing since there was no doctor in their rural community.
Meanwhile, Jacobina had fainting attacks since she was a kid and people associated this with special powers. People came over for Bible readings, and soon enough they began to gain a following, at first around Jacobina’s husband but then mainly around Jacobina. The local religious leaders got worried, and the community basically broke into two – the Muckers (people who followed Jacobina, the word literally means ‘false saint’) and the Spotters (against Jacobina). The Muckers began to see Jacobina first as the manifestation of God, then as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Jacobina and the Muckers began to stock up on weapons, and the police began to get involved. People against the Muckers began to fall victim to murders, and conflicts arose.
On May 4, 1874, Jacobina hosted a large meeting. 100 to 500 Muckers showed up, then a month later, the murders began to become more frequent and violent. A family was massacred. Fourteen houses were burned. Ten people died, including children. The police were sent in, but the Muckers defeated them, only reinforcing their belief in Jacobina’s holiness. Finally in August of that same year a Mucker turned on his people and led the police to Jacobina’s hideout, where she and most of the remaining Muckers were killed.
There are a TON of other messiah claimants out there. One whose Wikipedia page I found interesting was Joanna Southcott. Another more contemporary one I found interesting was a black supremacist named Yahweh Ben Yahweh who was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder and one of his followers turned out to be the only 'Blacks for Trump' guy. Not sure how legitimate that whole thing is, but it's definitely interesting!
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