Preface

The word prophecy originally meant “inspired utterance.” A god or goddess or spirit or, at any rate, some unseen being other than the person inspired, spoke through that person. At first, prophecy did not imply foretelling the future, but that meaning developed, especially in Greece and in ancient Israel. Largely because the Israelite prophets’ predictions were preserved in the Bible and because the Bible became a sacred book for many nations, the predictive meaning of prophecy came to predominate in the Western world.


Prophecy in the predictive sense, with or without a claim to inspiration, is the subject of this encyclopedia. A distinction is needed at the outset. The encyclopedia is not about intelligent anticipation or rational forecasting, such as that attempted by political journalists, economic prognosticators, statisticians, and scientists who project what they regard as historical and current trends into the future. Activity of this type enjoyed a special vogue between about 1965 and 1975, under the name of futurology. It is not considered here or is considered only marginally. One justification for considering other sorts of prediction is that the would-be rational sort has not been conspicuously successful. A fiasco that had repercussions was the failure of rational forecasters to forecast the downfall of the Communist empire in 1991. Most of them thought it would go from strength to strength. It is fair and relevant to add that on this great issue, when nearly all the experts were wrong, an obscure Portuguese visionary (whose story is in this book) was right.
From the experts’ point of view, most of the cases surveyed here would doubtless count as irrational. People are supposed to have acquired knowledge of the future through processes that may be closer to the old concept of inspiration: through a rapport with some divine or supernatural being, through clairvoyance, through dreams, or through some paranormal technique such as astrology. In all such cases, the encyclopedia is concerned with facts. It makes no prior assumption as to whether knowledge of the future really occurs or can occur. Sometimes the facts, upon examination, may be thought to favor that possibility. Sometimes they evidently do not. There are also prophecies where the main interest lies in the way they reflect hopes or aspirations or ways of thinking, so that they have a place in the history of ideas even though the predictions may be obsolete.
There is not much in the encyclopedia about science fiction, although, of course, it often has a future setting. The volume of material is too vast to accommodate, and the best of it is rooted in rational anticipation, however fancifully extended. Writers of science fiction do not pretend to have actually had visions or to have seen ahead by divination. However, a few classics are included in which the authors are not so much making forecasts as making points. They are using future scenarios to satirize the world they live in or to fabricate myths and nightmares with a bearing on it. Their

rich and influential, even with no implied paranormal factor, that their writings deserve a place in this volume. These are listed under the authors’ names. An author—H. G. Wells, for instance—may have written many other things, and, if so, the nature of this output is summarized, but the focus of the article is on a particular work. In one case, that of Olaf Stapledon, the author’s mythmaking raises an interesting question about the nature of prophecy itself. That alone would be enough reason for inclusion in this book.
The first requirement for coming to terms with the topics in the encyclopedia is an open mind. If the materials are approached in that spirit, I believe enough probabilities emerge to justify a discussion of how foreknowledge may happen. That discussion appears in its place. There is certainly no easy answer, but the alternative easy answer of simply denying everything does not work.


Geoffrey Ashe