Millenialism is, generally speaking, the religious belief that salvation and material benefits will be conferred
upon a society in the near future as the result of some apocalyptic event. The term derives from the Latin word
for 1,000; in early Christian theology, believers held that Christ would return and establish his kingdom on earth
for a period of a thousand years.
Millenialist movements, Christian and non-Christian, have arisen at various points throughout history, usually in
times of great crisis or social upheaval. In “nativistic” millenialist movements, a people threatened with cultural
disintegration attempts to earn its salvation by rejecting foreign customs and values and returning to the “old
ways.” One such movement involving the Ghost Dance cults, named after the ceremonial dance which cult
members performed in hope of salvation, flourished in the late 19th century among Indians of the western
United States.
By the middle of the 19th century, western expansion and settlement by whites was seriously threatening Native
American cultures. Mining, agriculture and ranching encroached on and destroyed many Indian land and food
sources. Indian resistance led to a series of wars and massacres, culminating in the U.S. Government’s policy
of resettlement of Indians onto reservations which constituted a fraction of their former territorial base. Under
these dire circumstances, a series of millenialist movements began among western tribes.
The first Ghost Dance cult arose in western Nevada around 1870. A Native American prophet named
Wodziwob, a member of a Northern Paiute tribe, received the revelation of an imminent apocalypse which
would destroy the white man, restore all dead Indians to life, and return to the Indians their lands, food supplies
(such as the vanishing buffalo), and old way of life. The apocalypse was to be brought about with the help of a
ceremonial dance and songs, and by strict adherence to a moral code which, oddly enough, strongly resembled
Christian teaching. In the early 1870s, Wodziwob’s Ghost Dance cult spread to several tribes in California and
Oregon, but soon died out or was absorbed into other cults.
A second Ghost Dance cult, founded in January 1889, evolved as the result of a similar revelation. This time
Wovoka – another Northern Paiute Indian, whose father had been a disciple of Wodziwob – received a vision
during a solar eclipse in which he died, spoke to God, and was assigned the task of teaching the dance and the
millennial message. With white civilization having pushed western tribes ever closer to the brink of cultural
disintegration during the previous twenty years, the Ghost Dance movement spread rapidly this time, catching
on among tribes from the Canadian border to Texas, and from the Missouri River to the Sierra Nevadas – an
area approximately one-third the size of the continental United States.
Wovoka’s Ghost Dance doctrine forbade Indian violence against whites or other Indians; it also involved the
wearing of “ghost shirts,” which supposedly rendered the wearers invulnerable to the white man’s bullets. In
1890, when the Ghost Dance spread to the Sioux Indians, both the ghost shirts and the movement itself were
put to the test. Violent resistance to white domination had all but ended among the Sioux by the late 1880s,
when government- ordered reductions in the size of their reservations infuriated the Sioux, and made them
particularly responsive to the millenialist message of the Ghost Dance. As the Sioux organized themselves in
the cult of the dance, an alarmed federal government resorted to armed intervention which ultimately led to the
massacre of some 200 Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in December of
1890. The ghost shirts had been worn to no avail, and Wounded Knee marked the end of the second Ghost
Dance cult.
Which of the following was NOT part of the spiritual revelation described in the fourth paragraph of the
passage?
Section: Verbal Reasoning
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