Terror Of History Research Articles

Horia Lovinescu, Between the “Terror of History” and Psychoanalytical Dreams

This paper focuses on Horia Lovinescu (1917-1983), a member of one of the most important dynasties of modern Romanian culture. Six of Horia Lovinescu’s dramas are interpreted in a close reading system, by psychoanalytical tools and by focusing on the family constellations the author imagines. These plays are related to the historical context (“the terror of history”), in order to understand how works of art are the reverberation of biographical-creative data of the greatest importance and how they echo in a paradoxical way social-political transformations. This double reading, psychological and historical, is justified by the playwright himself, through the construction of his plays and through his many allusions to psychoanalysis in his writings. Keywords: Horia Lovinescu, psychoanalysis, historical reading, communism, dramas, artistic creation, myth.

Eugen Ionescu. Personajul rizibil

Eugen Ionescu – a figure long controversial in both national and universal literature – writes in order to express his astonishment at this world. He senses and experiences perpetual amazement at any thing, from the very existence or presence on this planet to performing seemingly banal actions, such as uttering words or eating. But, even more profoundly, he feels the loss of the mundane miracle, the lack of awareness from his fellow men, their estrangement from the light and sinking into the mire. Hence the specificity of Ionescu's playwriting, which, in his view, goes beyond what has generally been established as the theater of the absurd and is, in its essence, more a theater of wonder, of the uncommon, an inquisitive theater . We consider that the nucleus or engine of this artistic universe – which is therefore a projection of existential anxieties – is the ridiculous character, who is the very subject of our analysis, as announced in the title. This character is created, first and foremost, with the help of humor – a harsh, dark humor, which from the author’s point of view, offers no escape, but actually exacerbates the tragedy of the human being: "humor, being an intuition of the absurd, seems to me more desperate than tragedy. Humor offers no way out". Thus, Eugen Ionescu discovers the comic in the tragic and the tragic in the comic, the ontological emptiness in playing, and vice versa. The ridiculous character corresponds to this vision, because tragicomedy is inherent to his nature. In the Ionescian world, both connotations are to be found: first, in the surface layer of the text, the connotation is that which triggers laughter, illustrated by a puppet or a mechanism; then, in its depth, gradually and unsettlingly revealed, the connotation is worthy of ridicule, laughable at – semantics which shows the true nature of the Ionescian character, illustrating not merely the mechanism but also the man, fated to death and sentenced to life by the terror of history and society, or doomed, burdened with the misfortune to be born and powerless in the face of the oppression of time and the Creator. Thus, beyond the persona, the buffoonish style, the clowning with which Eugen Ionescu shocked his audience in a Baudelairean manner ever since his Romanian times, his entire work reveals the reflection of the self in confrontation with itself, with its anxieties. Through the ridiculous character created, the playwright transitions from the particular to the universal, his goal being to figure the non-figurative, to express the inexpressible. In this dialectic where roles change, paper beings come to life through our projection onto their construction mechanism, and can be identified in our profound social self. Under these circumstances, this type of character represents the only solution, the only weapon or shield for living in this absurd universe. It implies only apparent acceptance or tolerance, because its very construction conveys the cry of despair and the author’s revolt against the opaqueness of the world and his awareness of his condition. Could the ridiculous character be an answer to the playwright's questions? We cannot answer this question with certainty, but undoubtedly, by creating this archetype, Eugen Ionescu responds to a way of creating and living because, beyond the resurrection of the tragic – mentioned throughout our presentation – the playwright creates a new style, in keeping with the complexity of the 20th-century man. The loss of the mundane miracle is thus portrayed through a character that simultaneously embodies ridicule, fragility, and grandeur. Laughter turns into a grimace, the true value of the character being self-awareness, in a Camusian spirit. Beyond linguistic and ethnic barriers, transcending time and space, carrying a part of Romanian spirit and culture within, at the same time accessing universality, Eugen Ionescu promotes the idea that we are all actors in the theatrum mundi. Consequently, laughter remains one of the constants of the character created, a hypostasis of an individual who is not necessarily tragic, but rather skeptical and inquisitive.

Indigenous Rhythms in Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill

Indigenous rhythms are new genre which mainly focuses on tribal literature. Indigenous people are referred as tribal in India, are ethnic group of people whose members share a cultural identity that has been shaped by their geographical region and they generally regarded as the original inhabitants of a territory or region. Indigeneity displays a strong association between people and their rootedness to their surroundings, material or emotional connection to the land. The bioregionalist thinkers and practitioners help human beings to reconnect themselves with the land and places because they are part of them and without them survival is not possible. Mamang Dai belongs to Arunachal Pradesh, a state inhabiting Northeast India. Her novel The Black Hill captures the forgotten tales and terror of history in the Abor and Mishmi hills. The novel covers the time and space of both the pre-colonial and the post-colonial world. By this she gives a glimpse of the changing situations and atmosphere of the places which is an interesting part of the study. Land is considered as a precious asset, sacred and revered among the tribal people of Northeast India. The land is not simply a surface but it is a home and pride of the tribal people. Even before the period of colonization, different tribes were at war with each other because of land inheritance, fishing and hunting. The love for their native land which they called home is the first thing the people protected when the British troops migluns tried to take possession as unused underused or empty-areas of rational deficit. This study focuses on the land, folklore, language, presence of evil, status of women and resistance of foreign rules.

Th e healing the „wounded identity” through the spiritualization of the tragic

Th e author of the paper signals, fi rst of all, the urgent need to introduce the phrase “wounded identity” (Michael Pollak) into the scientifi c circuit manifested with unparalleled eloquence in Transylvania and Bessarabia. The excursion into the area of autochthonous arts of the post-war period resulted in the discovery in the subtext of the works by I. Druță, V. Vasilache, G. Vieru, etc. of the “obsession with self-identifi cation”, which later becomes the guide of the subject and of genuistically-stylistic structures. The cardinal problem of the nation’s consciousness, that of losing oneself in the rush of the “terror of history”, is extrapolated in the 60s in the seventh art, culminating in the two archetypal samples: Pădurea spânzuraților/ The Forest of the Hanged and Gustul pâinii/The Taste of Bread, inscribed in the solemn gravity of the tragic genre. In these cinematographic works of universal resonance, the unprecedented psychoanalytic survey impresses the turbulent state of mind of the protagonists, who face, even at the cost of their lives, the nation’s Golgotha “of carrying the life of a stranger in oneself ” (L. Rebreanu). Th e fi lms, subjected to a comparative analysis, reveal the shocking phenomenon — the interpenetration of the great echoes of the ancient tragedy; the prophecies of nature and music corresponding to the famous chorus. In conclusion, the author launches a novel hypothesis: the “ethnic renaissance” is due to the recuperative mission — the healing of the “wounded identity” through the cathartic impact of the work of art.

The “musicality” of modern prose: Towards the genesis and typology of forms (part 1)

This article deals with the intermedial dialogue, a literary-musical transfer that has changed the idea of the novel and “prose” per se, the ideal of which in Western literature in the 18th and 19th centuries was referential transparency. Using the methods of intermedial and comparative studies, narratology and stylistics, the logic of the development of this dialogue is traced. Whereas the Bildungsroman, the career novel, and the novel of naturalism developed under the sign of “the individual’s rebellion against idealism” (Lukacs), the modernist novel seeks to return the individual to the intimate space of the self and abstract meditation. The character of modern novel tends to have a “terror of history” and seeks refuge from the rumble of technology and catastrophe, from the influence of the “ornament of the masses” (Kracauer) in myth, archetypes, and the codes of other arts. This utopian space for James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Bernhard is music, which they implement under the influence of the Romantic idea of an “absolute”, “autonomous” art that expresses the invisible and (un)possible. Music performs the function of a meta-poetic code in this context, with the specific embodiments of the dialogue between the novel and music taking various forms, from the imitation of early music genres (fugue, passion) to modern styles (jazz, atonal music). The influence of music leads to the complication of the structure of the novel, to the creation of a hermetic style, which turns the process of reading into a procedure of deciphering score. The novelty of the research consists in clarifying the typology of musical-literary dialogue, and in the historical-literary aspect in identifying the semiotic, epistemological and poetological foundations of modernist quasi-musical prose, which developed its own equivalents of musical techniques and styles on the way to deconstructing the bourgeois novel.

CRYPTOCURRENCY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF TERRORIST FINANCING

The purpose of the article is to explain the use of cryptocurrency as a terrorist financing tool. This article has emphasized the ways, which terrorists appraise for being a reliable fundraising means and their adoption. Methodology. For the purposes of the study, the methods of scientific abstraction, synthesis, observation, generalization, as well as the method of induction of literature and legal documents were used to determine the features of bitcoin, promoting and preventing its use for terrorism financing. Results. The development of the Internet and electronic devices has radically changed all spheres of human life, including criminal activity. Digitalization has led to the improvement of ordinary crimes and the emergence of new types of crime, which, in principle, cannot exist without special digital electronic devices. Among the first implementers of new technologies were terrorists, who took advantage of digitalization to increase profitability. Thus, terrorists have now significantly increased their attention to cryptocurrency as a digital means of payment, namely Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a number of features that have attracted the attention of criminals as a way to evade responsibility for a crime. In particular, decentralization avoids the need for confirmation by a central authority, and pseudo-anonymity provides a certain level of anonymity. In addition, terrorists are aware that Bitcoin's confidentiality is extremely fragile and needs to be enhanced. The paper analyzes several ways to enhance anonymity, such as software that anonymizes traffic and prevents IP identification, peer-to-peer mixers, centralized mixing services (tumbler), and other approaches. It is worth emphasizing that for the fight against crime, the main issue is the de-anonymization of the Bitcoin owner/user, which allows the identification of the criminal. Currently, law enforcement agencies use direct and indirect de-anonymization, proliferation analysis, quantitative analysis, time analysis, and transactional network analysis, among others, to achieve the above goal, which are discussed in detail in this article. In addition, agencies around the world investigated and uncovered terrorist groups and their financial facilitators. Specifically, on August 13, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Public Affairs announced "the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the context of terrorism in history." To investigate the agenda, the legal documents of those investigations that contain information about the terrorist fund-raising mechanism were examined and analyzed. The legal documents revealed that these investigations used the aforementioned de-anonymization approaches.

COVID-19 as archetype rather than event: Thinking COVID-19 in the light of Eliade’s ‘terror of history’

For Eliade, linear time constitutes the metaphysical substrate of modernity. Consequently, the modern subject experiences time as an irreversible series of events occurring within an absolutised history. It is this subject that ‘makes’ that history. By extension, this time, and the history it valorises, cannot be transcended. This sets up the modern view against a premodern one where temporality is seen in multiple ways, allowing history to be transcended by archetypes. Eliade mourns the alternative ways of being and meaning cultivated by the premodern self that have been lost to hegemonic modernity and its associated, often precarious, subjectivity. He believes that these archetypal modes need to be recovered to counter the damage caused by modernity’s desire to ‘make history’. I reflect on this Eliadean thesis in the light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, drawing on an example from the Islamic tradition to show what an archetypal, rather than event-centred, approach to the crisis might look like. Specifically, I examine the thoughts of British Muslim theologian, Abdal Hakim Murad, on COVID-19, who reflects on the phenomenon both in the light of the archetypal Islamic concept of the divine names and the event-centred capitalism of late modernity.Contribution: Through an examination of Eliade’s important text, the article continues the decolonial interrogation of modernity’s foundations and its implications for being and acting in the world as distinct from premodern approaches. By highlighting time in both approaches, Eliade shows modernity’s foundations to be just as ‘theological’ as those of religion.

Stratégies transnationales dans l’œuvre de Mircea Eliade

"Transnational Strategies in Mircea Eliade’s Writings. In this article, we will consider the techniques through which an important hallmark of Romanian culture, Mircea Eliade, negotiated his transnational strategies, in a continual back-and-forth movement between his place of origin and a larger, cosmopolitan context. Paradoxically, as proven by Paul Cernat, it is not exoticism that will lead to his treatises on the history of religions, but on the contrary, the return to Sambo’s room, as described in The Forbidden Forest novel. Moreover, the European modernist project, defended by Eliade, is in itself an antinomic project: exceptional avant-garde techniques succeed regressive strategies. The latter are based on the modern hermeneutics of meaning, developed by Eliade in his approach to the history of religions, which is an all-encompassing way of interpreting religious facts as hierophanies. Keywords: terror of history, antimodernist strategies, hierophany, autochthonism, transnational techniques "

Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam: Poetry under the Critique of Language

The dialogue of Paul Celan, a reader and translator, with the poetry and the whole complex poetic views of Osip Mandelstam demonstrates an important general condition: both poets worked in the context of the modernist language crisis and language critique. Mandelstam takes on the task of creating a pure language of poetry in the struggle against the symbolist “code,” in the “resurrection” of words (V. Shklovsky) by means of a “defamiliarizated” intermixture of meanings and contexts, in intentional semantic oblivion and, among other things, by immersing himself in foreign languages (“An alien speech will be my warming ear husk”). Paul Celan’s work, under the conditions of “poetry after Auschwitz” (T. Adorno), aiming at clearing up the German language of the terror of history, was influenced, among other things, by his strategy of creating a non-figurative, hermetic poetry language comparable to the so-called “absolute music” (K. Dahlhaus). This paper identifies the common poetic motifs in the works of Celan and Mandelstam, as well as individual solutions for overcoming the lingual crisis.

Reflections on the Influence of the 9/11 Attacks on Domestic Security Practices and Future Cyber Security Needs

The 9/11 terrorist attack is arguably the most famous act of terrorism in history. This event changed the worlds view about the security of the United States. More importantly the attack brought into the question safety of U.S. citizen’s safety within the borders of their own country and the need for domestic security. Prior to this deadly attack most Americans had no experience with terrorist attack within the nation’s borders. In fact, most government agencies, especially local and domestically focused agencies had little to no experience with terrorist attacks. Attacks were seen as things that happened elsewhere in other countries. The closest information or experience that Americans and government employees with terrorist attacks prior the 9/11 tragedy were the unique airplane hijackings that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, American were not prepared for the 9/11 Attacks and were taken by surprise. This paper discusses the events that led to the 9/11 Attacks, the government response to the attacks, the changes made as a result of the attacks, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the most important lesson to be taken from the attacks -- be vigilant and do not be complacent. Taking that lesson into account, a brief discussion on cyber security needs concludes this paper.

After the Fall: The Terror of History in Philip Roth's <em>Indignation</em>

After the Fall: The Terror of History in Philip Roth's <em>Indignation</em>

Analysis of topologies and key players in terrorist networks

While topologies and key player positions and roles differ across terrorist networks, similar ideological networks share similar structures and topologies, maintaining structural properties of their predecessor groups. In this study, we look at basic ideological waves of terrorism in history, classify terrorist network ideologies, and describe the patterns in network topologies and key player characteristics. We show that ideological differences in terrorist networks in part explain the differences in the structure of links between key players.

Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the «Terror of History» in the Rhetoric of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania

Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the «Terror of History» in the Rhetoric of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania This article analyses the alternative temporality visible in the rhetoric of the «Legion of the Archangel Michael», Romania's interwar fascist movement. It argues that, in line with its palingenetic ideology, the legionary movement adopted a temporal vision in which a timeless Romanian nation spanning both an immemorial past and an infinite future was made salient in an urgent present, interpreted as a «threshold» between the old and the new world. Thus oscillating between the seemingly opposing poles of revolution and eternity, this alternative temporality was responsible both for the attraction of a significant number of intellectuals to the movement, and for the Legion's typically fascist radicalism that justified and valorised violence as a form of «creative destruction» that would bring about the eschatological abolition of history and the establishment of a new order. These aspects are illustrated by focusing on the case of Mircea Eliade, one of the most prominent interwar Romanian intellectuals who became a legionary sympathiser. Making use of Eliade's notions of «sacred time» and its opposition to the «terror of history» as a conceptual framework, the paper analyses the correspondences between the legionary temporal vision and Eliade's visible preference for a transcendental, religious understanding of history, endowing it with meaning and allowing modern man to escape the meaninglessness of clock time.

"This Time Round": David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism

David Mitchell's experimental novel, Cloud Atlas , confronts the potentially apocalyptic effects of both linear and cyclical modes of temporality. Using as a framework Micea Eliade's well-known philosophical treatise, The Myth of the Eternal Return , the essay demonstrates that Mitchell's preoccupation with cyclical temporality can be understood as a reaction against what Eliade calls "the terror of history." Cloud Atlas 's characters, events, and motifs register the destructive effects of both historicist and cyclical understandings of time, culminating in its complex treatment of human clones as an embodiment of eternal return. The novel interrogates historicism through its formal experimentation.

‘Imposed Authenticity’: Approaching Eastern European National Characterologies in the Inter-war Period

The article analyses the concepts of national specificity and the national past in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary; focusing on debates in the inter-war period. It seeks to discern the common features, as well as the considerable divergence, between the local versions of this characterological discourse, while also placing them into a wider European cultural context. It concentrates on the use of history and the category of historicity, which became an important question in the inter-war period as nineteenth-century evolutionary narratives encountered challenges. To explain the differences between the characterologies, it goes beyond a monocausal scheme. It provides a contextual analysis of the symbolic resources and available ideological references that were used for creating these discourses in the respective countries. In the light of the three case studies, it also seeks to contribute to discussions of the problem of modernism and anti-modernism in twentieth-century political thought.*The present essay draws on several sub-chapters from my forthcoming book, The Terror of History. Visions of National Character in Interwar Eastern Europe.

The passion of the country: bearing the burdens of traumatic histories, personal and collective

Jonathan Lear, inRadical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation,movingly writes: ‘We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name … It is as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse’. It is this ‘vulnerability’ and ‘anxiety of collapse’ that has led to what has been called in Australia the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ and the ‘terror of history’ which refers to the silence that surrounded the Stolen Generations and still surrounds the psychic distress of our indigenous first peoples. This article explores Lear's statement in terms of the psychic pain of a culture founded upon waves of migration and traumatic dispossession to think about the question ‘What does it mean to live here?’ And what can that teach us about the formation of identity and cultural identity?

Utopian Landscapes and Ecstatic Journeys: Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, and Mircea Eliade on the Terror of Modernity

AbstractAgainst the background of fascism and the disasters of two world wars, during the first decades of the twentieth century many European intellectuals were formulating negative responses to “modernity” and to what they regarded as the decline of human civilization. Often, these intellectuals sought for alternatives to the modern conditio humana and looked for solutions in religion, art, or philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the Dionysian and the Orphic is of particular importance for such a discourse of modernity. After introducing Nietzsche’s contribution as a referential framework, the article compares two representatives of this intellectual discourse: Hermann Hesse and Mircea Eliade. At first glance, Hesse, the writer and poet, does not seem to have much in common with Eliade, the scholar of religion and writer of novels. Upon closer examination, however, there are remarkable similarities in their work and their evaluation of the modern human condition. For Hesse, it was art, music, and literature that provided the antidote against the predicaments of modern culture. Eliade shared Hesse’s search for an alternative to the modern condition and found it in the pure religion outside of time and space, in the illud tempus of the homo religiosus. For him, it was shamanism in particular that provided a model for a contact with the absolute world of truth untouched by the “terror of history.” The article argues that these dialectical responses are part and parcel of the project of European “modernity” itself, rather than representing an “anti-modern” claim.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (review)

Reviewed by: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family John Lauritz Larson (bio) The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Pp. 608. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00; Paper, $18.95.) Here is a book that was not written, cannot be read, and will not be reviewed with the crisp academic efficiency that I usually endorse. Annette Gordon-Reed's collective biography of The Hemingses of Monticello is an epic tale capturing (on the head of a pin, as it were) the enormous tragedy that was American slavery, the staggering complexity of the human heart, the sometimes brutal intersections in our lives of race and sex and power, the sting of unrequited longing to be acknowledged that comes with every instance of denial, the lure of fame, the terror of history, the shame of rank transgressions, the risks (and rewards) involved in dredging it all up anew. It is hard to say when I have read a "bigger" book; no wonder at all that it won the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for history. The story starts in the 1730s with the birth in colonial Virginia of Elizabeth Hemings "to an African mother and an English father." It ends with her descendents, ninety years on, keeping watch over the dying body of Thomas Jefferson, a white Virginian whose soaring rhetoric helped crack the shell of race-based slavery and whose personal needs and imperfections kept most of those Hemingses enslaved to his will until his final hour and beyond. In between we meet three generations of enslaved African Americans whose stories upset every one of the neat analytical pronouncements with which we try to put this history behind us. Readers of this particular journal will expect the last word on the "story of Sally and Tom"—and it is here; but as the title correctly insists, Gordon-Reed's book is about the slave family who lived their lives constrained by nested boxes of ownership, race, sex, exploitation, law, love, and loyalty. Equally at home in law and history, Gordon-Reed has lavished on this family history an exhaustive feat of research, trans-Atlantic in scope, as thorough and creative as all the CSI wizards could imagine, focused not on the famous man who owned the mountain (already the object of way too much attention) but on persons Jefferson labored all his life to erase from the record. As hard as it is to track "life among the lowly" (as Harriet Beecher Stowe styled it), how much harder is it when your antagonist [End Page 730] elides the crumbs as fast as your subjects scatter them? And don't forget the "disinformation" laid on by parties in whose interest it remains to curse the darkness. With rare patience Gordon-Reed conducts a running seminar on research methods, historiography, law and process, formal logic, human psychology, race relations, and the pain of memory as she turns evidence cards face up, one by one, building her case, testing hypotheses, casting about for the next expository move. But what about the dirt on Sally and Tom? Was it rape? Yes and no. Was it love? Yes and no. Was she almost white? Yes and no. Did that matter? Yes and no. Was he deluded? Self-serving? Hypocritical? Yes and no. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings shared an intimate relationship for thirty-eight years, spanning most of his public life, which produced seven children, four who survived to adulthood, none of whom he acknowledged, all of whom went free (but only two with his explicit blessing). Yet this is not the "Sally and Tom" of James Calendar's slanderous tales. Much of this relationship simply defies complete understanding—because the record is thin or corrupted, and because these two persons (like all persons not invented by historians) were opaque and contradictory. Neither devotees nor critics of the master of Monticello will find smug comfort in this book, but they will all be moved to ponder what we can know—and dare to say—about the human past. Of particular interest in this tome are the discussions of the Hemingses in...

Transcendence and History in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance

The article examines Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance ( Przypadek, 1981) as a film with a distinct philosophical significance. According to the interpretation proposed, in Blind Chance Kieslowski touches on both universal philosophical topics (death, meaninglessness, quest for certainty and truth, deciphering silence) and “local” themes (East-European historical pessimism, geography as destiny, “terror of history”). In spite of Kieslowski's self-declared religious agnosticism, Blind Chance could be—thanks even to the aesthetics of the film—read as a paradoxical theological statement, not so much about God per se, as about the necessity of his existence. In the same vein, the film occasions a series of meditations on historical fate and the role of geography in history, about hope and hopelessness, existential exhaustion, and legacies of silence.

Teresa Urrea: Mexican Mystic, Healer, and Apocalyptic Revolutionary

This article is a study of the mystical and apocalyptic dimensions of Teresa Urrea. As explained in this article, Urrea’s mystical experiences and visions are unique for their connection with a propheticapocalyptic and political worldview. This apocalyptic dimension is more than a communication of a hidden message or spiritual world; it also includes a reading of history that is catastrophic and discontinuous. The crisis and terror of history are given expression in Urrea’s mystical and apocalyptic pronouncements. In particular, the chaotic and oppressive circumstances of Mexican society during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz was confronted and denounced in Urrea’s mystical and apocalyptic ministry. This apocalyptic healer castigated those culpable or even complicit with the injustices affecting the indigenous communities of Mexico during the late nineteenth century. In the case of Urrea, the transformation and healing of Church and society was an important aspect of her spiritual, healing powers. Because Urrea possessed neither arms nor the weapon of the pen, her sole weapon became her mystical experiences and the insight and healing powers that flowed from them. People of Mexico—especially indigenous groups—began to flock to her hoping that she would bring God’s presence to the troubled and chaotic circumstances of their lives. Her compassion and tenderness for the afflicted as well as the apocalyptic expectations that she stirred up among the indigenous groups of Northern Mexico were enough to get this mystical-political Mexican mestiza exiled from her homeland.