Pynchon's RC sources

[Dave Monroe]

Joachim of Fiore's "Third Age" is in the lineage of
Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.  From Roger Griffin,
"Party Time: Temporal Revolution of the Third Reich,"
History Today, Vol. 49, No. 4 (April 1999), pp. 43-50
...

"... the name given to Hitler's regime, the Third
Reich, was not just numerically correct in that it
followed the Holy Roman Empire (Reich) and the
Bismarckian 'Second Reich'. It also resonated with the
esoteric connotations of an 'earthly Jerusalem' first
given it by the twelfth-century Italian abbot Joachim
of Fiore, whose speculations about the unfolding of
the divine plan 'triadically' within history in the
three ages of the Law, the Church and the Spirit, had
a major impact on the sporadic epidemics of
millenarianism which broke out in Europe in later
centuries. This fusion of the political with the
mystical was encouraged by the fact that in German
'Reich' applies equally to a territorial 'empire', to
the 'realm' of the spirit, or to the 'kingdom' of God.
In 1937 the Marxist cultural critic, Ernst Bloch,
published an essay from exile which portrayed Nazism
as the eruption of ancient longings for a 'paradise on
earth' and for a  messianic leader which had been
forced to the surface by the acute crisis of Weimar
Germany ..."

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/humanities/Roger/party.htm

This seems useful as well ...

http://ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/~blackhir/Joachimessay.html

Have something around that might be of interest as
well here, but can't find, can't recall author, title,
will keep hunting ...

--- David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Terrance,
> 
> J of F seems an interesting dude, but how does "the
> novel V. include his 
> theory of history?"  It's not that I don't believe
> you, it would just be 
> nice to get more than a postulation without some
> evidence.  This one is not 
> self-evident, is it?


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