Cartographies of Time by Daniel Rosenberg & Anthony Grafton

Author:Daniel Rosenberg & Anthony Grafton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2012-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

[14]

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In 1853 Jonathan Cummings, one of the founders of the Advent Christian Association, published his stunning Prophetic Chart publicizing a new calculation of the date of the coming Apocalypse in 1854. Like Millerite charts of the previous decade, Cummings’s chart mixes words, numbers, and symbolic images, but it omits a regular chronological scale.

In the Millerite charts, of course, the frame was symbolic too. The end lines of Priestley’s chart, at 1200 BCE and 1800 CE, had no intrinsic significance. The date 1800 CE was just a round number coming up in the near future, and 1200 BCE, the date three thousand years before. The darkly inked margins of the Millerite Chronological Chart of the Visions of Daniel and John of 1842, however, could not have been more significant. They marked the beginning and end of history itself. In charts like this, the course of time looked straightforward from both a graphic and a conceptual standpoint: the end was fixed, known, and almost upon us. But when 1843 came and went without incident, and then 1844 too—a nonevent henceforth known as “The Great Disappointment”—both Miller’s predictions and his chronology charts had to be radically revised. During the next decade, many attempts were made to clean up the theological and the graphic mess that 1843 had brought about. [fig. 14]But many of these new charts suffered the same fate as the earlier ones, when their own predictions failed to pan out, as was the case with the beautiful and curious Prophetic Chart published by the Adventist minister Jonathan Cummings, predicting that Christ would return in 1854.

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