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https://doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2017.69.

panchenko

THE BEAST COMPUTER IN BRUSSELS:


RELIGION, CONSPIRACY THEORIES, AND
CONTEMPORARY LEGENDS IN POST-SOVIET
CULTURE
Alexander Panchenko
Center for Anthropology of Religion, European University at St. Petersburg
Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences
St. Petersburg State University, Russia
e-mail: apanchenko2008@gmail.com

Abstract: Conspiracy theory is a powerful explanatory model or a way of think-


ing, which influences many cultural forms and social processes across the con-
temporary world. Recent academic research into conspiracy theories provides
a set of interpretations ranging from medicalization (social/political paranoids)
to the concept of ‘popular knowledge’ as a specifically postmodern phenomenon.
In modern and postmodern societies, conspiracy theories often motivate politi-
cal action and social praxis, accompany the transformation of institutional and
informational networks, and provoke moral panic and changes of identity. The
paper deals with the role of conspiratorial motifs and themes in the formation
and transmission of what is known as contemporary legend. The discussion of
empirical data focuses on apocalyptic narratives about ‘the Beast of Brussels’.
Proceeding from the memetic approach in folklore studies as well as the concept
of emotional communities, I try to show how and why present-day conspiracy
theories and practices of conspiratorial hermeneutics are inspired by particular
combinations of emotional, moral, and epistemological expectations.
Keywords: conspiracy theory, contemporary Christian eschatology, contempo-
rary legend, emotional communities, meme theory, post-Soviet culture, the Beast
of Brussels

INTRODUCTION

When we discuss the problem of the meaning of what we call folkloric texts,
we can approach the issue from quite different positions and use a variety of
explanatory models. It seems to me, however, that present-day debates on the
meaning of folklore generally proceed from two general models which I would
call semiotic and memetic. The first one, ranging from structuralism to psycho-

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Alexander Panchenko

analysis, implies that every text or theme or tale type possesses its own initial
or immanent meaning that might be transformed through time and place but
can still be investigated by means of proper analytical tools. The second one
that proceeds from the concept of memes or cultural replicators, suggested by
British zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), looks at
texts and all other units of cultural imitation as essentially meaningless and as
acquiring their particular meaning(s) depending on communicative context(s).
In this perspective, survival or long historical life of folk narratives and other
‘mind viruses’ is provided by their adaptive potential or fitness, which, in turn, is
related to the properties of human cognition, memory, and emotions rather than
rationally understandable information.1 A very similar approach was recently
elaborated by cognitive scientists of religion, who considered “religious concepts
and norms and the emotions attached to them” to be “designed to excite the
human mind, linger in memory, trigger multiple inferences in the precise way
that will get people to hold them true and communicate them” (Boyer 2001: 329).
Roughly speaking, this point of view means that any folklore item engaged or
employed by human beings or communities that will to connect or conflict does
not in fact express or project attitudes or meanings but rather parasitizes on
individual or collective emotions and cognitive devices that assemblage knowl-
edge and power in a given social context. Our task as folklorists then is not to
uncover any substantial structures of meaning related to this or that narra-
tive but to understand which cognitive and/or emotional properties provide its
adaptability in numerous contexts of social communication.
In this article, I try to demonstrate how this approach can be applied in
the study of contemporary narrative culture, more precisely, of one particular
group of motives or themes that combine religious eschatology with present-day
conspiratorial thinking and easily migrate from one confessional subculture
to another. Prior to the discussion of empirical data, I need, however, to look
in more detail at how conspiracy theories are related to contemporary legend
and why conspiratorial narratives appear to be so influential in present-day
religious culture. Conspiracy theory is a powerful explanatory model or way of
thinking, which influences many cultural forms and social processes through-
out the contemporary world. Generally defined as “the conviction that a secret,
omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the political and social order
or some part thereof” (Fenster 2008 [1999]: 1), a conspiracy theory includes
a number of principal ideas and concepts that make it adaptable for a broad
variety of discourses and forms of collective imagination. Proceeding from the
necessity to explain and localize evil as a social and moral category, conspiracy
theories produce ethical models that oppose ‘us’ to ‘them’, ‘victims’ to ‘enemies’,
‘heroes’ to ‘anti-heroes’. At the same time, conspiracy theories are extremely

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teleological; they do not leave any room for coincidences and accidents and
explain all facts and events as related to intentional and purposeful activities
of ‘evil actors’. Quite often, conspiracy theories are grounded in the holistic
worldview that leads, in turn, to particular hermeneutic style. Reality is always
considered to be deceptive; simple, superficial, and obvious explanations must
give place to more complicated intellectual procedures aimed at the disclosure
of ‘concealed truth’. From this perspective, the concept of mystery appears to be
the most powerful element of conspiratorial narratives that operate in both pre-
and postindustrial societies. Recent academic research of conspiracy theories
provides a set of interpretations ranging from medicalization (social/political
paranoids) to the concept of popular knowledge as a specifically postmodern
phenomenon (Hofstadter 1965 [1952]; Wood 1982; Pipes 1997; Marcus 1999;
Knight 2000; West & Sanders 2003; Birchall 2006; Pelkmans & Machold 2011).
It is obvious, however, that social, political, and cultural power of conspiratorial
narratives should not be underestimated. In modern and postmodern societies,
conspiracy theories often motivate political action and social praxis, accompany
transformation of institutional and informational networks, provoke moral pan-
ics and changes of identities.
One of the first theoretical explanations for a conspiracy theory (understood
here as an epistemological model rather than a form of collective imagination)
was suggested by Sir Karl Raimund Popper in the mid-1940s. It reads as follows:

In order to make my point clear, I shall briefly describe a theory which is


widely held but which assumes what I consider the very opposite of the
true aim of the social sciences; I call it the ‘conspiracy theory of society’.
It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the
discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of
this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be
revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about. This
view of the aims of the social sciences arises, of course, from the mistaken
theory that, whatever happens in society – especially happenings such as
war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike – is
the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups. This
theory is widely held; it is older even than historicism (which, as shown
by its primitive theistic form, is a derivative of the conspiracy theory). In
its modern forms it is, like modern historicism, and a certain modern
attitude towards ‘natural laws’, a typical result of the secularization of a
religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies
explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But
their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups

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Alexander Panchenko

whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as
the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the
imperialists. (Popper 1966 [1962]: 94; cf. Popper 1962: 163).

In fact, the reasoning cited was intended to emphasize Popper’s own inde-
terministic view on society and history. On the other hand, mentioning “the
secularization of a religious superstition” and the gods who are ‘abandoned’,
definitely refers to the progressionist conception of “disenchanted world” (in
Max Weber’s (1989) terms) if not historical determinism itself. It seems that
presently we could hardly rely on this conception, especially after so many
scholarly debates on desecularization as well as post-secular society (see, e.g.,
Berger 1999; Habermas 2006; Karpov 2010; Gorski et al. 2012). However, the
very issue of how religion and conspiracy theory are related to each other
(even if we approach both from the most radical constructionist positions) still
deserves discussion.
At first glance it seems likely that anthropology of secularism (if not the
theory of secularization itself) provides some explanatory perspectives in this
context. One could suggest, for instance, that conspiratorial modes of thinking
that are specifically characteristic of modernity are at least partly related to
those configurations of private and public, pluralism and monism, belief and
knowledge, which are in the core of ‘classic’ secular societies, and the gods after
their return discovered that they have to share the world, to enter into alliances,
or to be at war with secret powers and evil conspirators.
However, the very history of pre-secular Europe does not support this
hypothesis. Generally speaking, the conspiratorial ideas and themes that
became widespread in the period of the so called “persecuting society” (i.e., in the
eleventh–thirteenth centuries; see Cohn 2005 [1973]; Frankfurter 2006; Moore
2007 [1987]), did not, despite their religious contexts, essentially differ from
the conspiracy theories of the age of secularism. Moreover, we could trace back
the genealogy of those themes and motives to more archaic types of agrarian
societies. It is possible to recall, for example, the famous discussion of Azande
witchcraft by Edward Evans-Pritchard. Proceeding from a story about an old
granary that has collapsed, Evans-Pritchard (1976: 23) suggests that the very
idea of witchcraft allows for explaining why “two chains of causation intersected
at a certain time and in a certain place”:

The Zande knows that the supports were undermined by termites and that
people were sitting beneath the granary in order to escape the heat and
glare of the sun. But he knows besides why these two events occurred at
a precisely similar moment in time and space. It was due to the action of
witchcraft. If there had been no witchcraft people would have been sitting

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under the granary and it would not have fallen on them, or it would have
collapsed but the people would not have been sheltering under it at the
time. Witchcraft explains the coincidence of these two happenings. (ibid.)

I would also recall here the concept of ‘limited good’ formulated in the 1960s by
American anthropologist George Foster. According to Foster, peasant societies
“view their social, economic, and natural universes – their total environment –
as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health,
friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influ-
ence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply”.
This means that “apparent relative improvement in someone’s position with
respect to any ‘Good’ is viewed as a threat to the entire community” (Foster
1965: 296–297), and every serious crisis endangering life, health or wealth of
the group members often results in ‘scapegoating’, i.e., pursuit of individual(s)
considered to be responsible for the imbalance of goods. From this perspective,
the genealogy of the present-day conspiracy theories can be discussed not only
with regard to the intellectual history of European modernity (see, e.g., Wood
1982) but also as related to social explanatory models typical of archaic agrar-
ian societies.
At any rate, mutual relations between the conspiracy theories and religious
imagination require further discussions and investigations by social scientists.
These investigations could probably start with how evil is recognized and lo-
calized by various cultures and in different social or economic contexts. It is
symptomatic that certain contemporary social phenomena and ideological ten-
dencies that we usually label as religious demonstrate, so to speak, a specific
valency towards conspiratorial explanatory models. Christian eschatology gives
plenty of obvious examples in this context, especially in relation to present-day
apocalyptic thinking. In his book dealing with apocalyptic visions in contem-
porary America and symptomatically titled A Culture of Conspiracy, political
scientist Michael Barkun remarks:

Belief in conspiracies is central to millennialism in the late twentieth and


early twenty-first centuries. That is scarcely surprising – millennialist
worldviews have always predisposed their adherents to conspiracy beliefs.
Such worldviews may be characterized as Manichaean, in the sense that
they cast the world in terms of a struggle between light and darkness,
good and evil, and hold that this polarization will persist until the end
of history, when evil is finally, definitively defeated. (Barkun 2003: 1)

It seems then that religion in contemporary societies is not substituted by con-


spiracy theories, as it has been suggested by Popper, but absorbs them or is

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Alexander Panchenko

absorbed by them. Not accidentally, many religious subcultures today promote


not only conspiracy theories, but also a larger group of parascientific beliefs and
practices as well as key themes and motives of urban legends – UFO beliefs,
spiritual healing, astrology, alternative history, and so on (see Barkun 2003;
Birchall 2006). In his book, Barkun goes further to suggest that we presently
deal with “a new and growing form of millennialism”, which can be called
improvisational:

Unlike earlier forms, which elaborated themes from individual religious


or secular traditions, improvisational millennialism is wildly eclectic. Its
undisciplined borrowings from unrelated sources allow its proponents to
build novel systems of belief. (Barkun 2003: xi)

In terms of the history of religious ideas, this shift of religious thinking can be
interpreted as a specifically post-secular condition, in which successful religions
might and even should “draw upon science for their metaphors and inspira-
tion” (Bainbridge 1993; Rothstein 2004), thus claiming for their own positions
within socially valued systems of knowledge production. However, it is still not
clear why these or those types of stigmatized or rejected knowledge, including
conspiracy theories, are particularly attractive to religious audiences. What
makes conspiratorial narratives and themes so popular and adaptable for vari-
ous groups of believers throughout contemporary world?

THE BEAST OF BRUSSELS: CONSPIRATORIAL NARRATIVES


AND APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION

From this perspective, I would like to focus on a particular group of conspirato-


rial/eschatological themes of popular imagination, which make a certain impact
on religious cultures in present-day Russia, Ukraine, and some other post-Soviet
states, and at the same time have an interesting and analytically important
history. It is necessary then to start with historical observations.
The 1970s witnessed the rise of apocalyptic fears and expectations in the
United States. The wave of eschatology was mainly related to ideologies of the
so called Christian ultraconservatives or the New Christian Right. Although
this last term can be used in various ways (sometimes to point to those religious
activists who take part in political life), it generally refers to the New Protes-
tants – evangelical Christians oriented towards religious fundamentalism (i.e.
literal interpretation of the Bible) and extremely conservative views on politics
and society. The movement of religious conservatives involves an essential part

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of Baptist and Pentecostal congregations in the United States as well as numer-


ous non-denominational evangelical groups. Besides social conservatism and
certain anti-liberal views, the ideologies of the New Christian Right proceed from
clearly formulated eschatological expectations. The mentioned apocalyptic wave
of the 1970s was supported not only by theological writings and public sermons.
In fact, it gave rise to particular eschatological genres including prophetic vi-
sions of the near future as well as apocalyptic fiction and movies telling about
terrible events of the ‘end times’ (Boyer 1992: 115–290; Shuck 2005). In the last
decades, these genres of religious fiction were mainly represented by The Left
Behind novels and movies by evangelical writers Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
(the first novel in the series was released in 1995, and its film version in 2001).
However, the tradition started at the beginning of the 1970s with, for example,
low budget evangelical prophecy films produced by Donald W. Thompson:

His four-part series included A Thief in the Night, A Distant Thunder,


Image of the Beast, and The Prodigal Planet. The four films, especially
A Thief in the Night, dramatized the End-Times scenario familiar to
evangelical audiences and transformed it into a powerful conversion tool.
(Shuck 2005: 7)

It is necessary to remark here that the aspects of apocalyptic future of the


humankind are discussed by evangelical Christians in more detail than, for
example, by Russian Orthodox believers, who never paid too much attention to
the literal interpretation of the Bible. Attempts to systematize all the eschato-
logical prophesies found in the Old and especially in the New Testament allowed
the New Protestants to create several doctrines that describe the future of the
mankind before the end of the world and the Last Judgment with some differ-
ences. Without going into details of these debates, I have to mention that the
arguments mainly deal with the sequence of events related to the Millennial
Kingdom of the righteous (Rev. 20), the Great Tribulation described in the Olive
discourse by Jesus Christ (Matthew 24: 3–44; Mark 13: 3–33; Luke 21: 5–36), and
the Rapture of the righteous (or the true church) to heaven (Paul’s 1st epistle to
Thessalonians 4: 14–18). According to the doctrine of Pretribulational (dispen-
sational) Premillennialism, it will be Christ who comes back and performs the
Rapture. Then the Great Tribulation will come, and the Millennium will start
after it has ended. The doctrine of Posttribulational Premillennialism insists
that the sequence of apocalyptic events will start with the Great Tribulation,
and only those who survive it with true faith and righteousness will take part
in the Millennial Kingdom (Boyer 1992: 80–112; Barkun 2003: 41–45; Shuck
2005: 30–41; Fenster 2008 [1999]: 205–206).

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Alexander Panchenko

Figure 1. A Russian Orthodox leaflet: “Prophecies are coming true: The Beast
supercomputer in Brussels” (http://www.zaistinu.ru/articles/?aid=623).

At any rate, attempts to discover the signs of the Last Times2 in the prophetic
culture of the New Christian Right did not avoid the discussion of current po-
litical events. Special attention in this context was paid to the foundation of
the state of Israel in 1948. Although the details of the role to be played by the
Jews in the Last Times can be debated by various groups of the fundamentalist
Christians, all of them agree that “Israel is being gathered for conversion and
redemption” (to use the formulation by conservative Pentecostals in Russia).3

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At the same time, geopolitical scenery of the last decades of the Cold War
provided American evangelicals with a spacious field for apocalyptic fantasies
about the Antichrist, his allies and forerunners, appearance, activities, and so
on. The old Protestant tradition of thinking about the Holy See and Roman
Catholicism as somehow related to apocalyptic imagery was now supported by
a new political agenda. The movement that started with the Rome agreement of
1957 and led to the foundation of the European Union in 1992 was interpreted
by many ultraconservative Christians in the same eschatological context – as
preparations for the coming of the Antichrist (Boyer 1992: 273–277). The union
of European nations was considered to be the new incarnation of the Roman
Empire or even the ten-horned beast from the Revelation (13) and Daniel’s vi-
sion (7: 23); this was discussed when Greece became the tenth member of the
Common Market (Boyer 1992: 277). On the other hand, American Christian
fundamentalists were generally suspicious of international political organiza-
tions with global authority (the United Nations and others). This particular
anti-globalism was one of the leading themes of American apocalyptic narra-
tives of the 1970s.
Another eschatological theme that was getting more and more powerful was
the phobia of certain information technologies: first television that could be
used by demonic forces and the Antichrist himself, and later on also computers
(Boyer 1992: 106–107, 279–281). Those fears were related to the idea of total
control and manipulation of all the human beings from the side of hidden and
mysterious forces that use powerful and ubiquitous technical devices. In the
1970s, this image of the ‘surveillance society’, to use the term by the Canadian
sociologist David Lyon (1994; cf. Shuck 2005: 119–128), was discussed and in-
terpreted with special attention in 1984, the famous dystopian novel by George
Orwell. This literary text, although being purely secular, was read by many
Christian conservatives in terms of their own apocalyptic prophesies and could
be regarded by them as one of the signs of the Last Times coming soon or even as
a precise description of the near future of the mankind. It is possible, however,
to talk about more general social contexts that bring together the literary genre
of dystopia and the conspiratorial eschatology of the twentieth century. Accord-
ing to an astute observation by Maria Akhmetova, apocalyptic narratives that
became widespread in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s often depict the future
tyranny of the Antichrist “in correspondence with the dystopian novel, a liter-
ary genre that was taken by late Soviet and post-Soviet readers as describing
totalitarianism of the twentieth century” (Akhmetova 2010: 195). I would say,
however, that it is not only totalitarianism (or specific Soviet experience) that
influences both dystopian novels and apocalyptic narratives; the very image of
the ‘surveillance society’ could be related to global processes of modernization,

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Alexander Panchenko

urbanization, and formation of consumer society. It seems that collective fears


associated with anonymity, loss of social status, and control over one’s own
body are stimulated by those global factors and, in particular, represented by
dystopian and apocalyptic narratives.
Fears and expectations of this kind seem to constitute the initial context
for the story of the Beast computer that I am talking about. In the late 1970s,
Christian prophecy writers in the United States started repeating a rumor “that
a giant supercomputer is being created in Brussels for the purpose of taking
over the world’s banking system and creating a cashless economic system, as
was prophesied in Revelation” (Fuller 1995: 181). Its particular sources can be
debated, but it seems that the ‘canonic’ version of the story was invented in 1975
by a certain person from the Southwest Radio Church, a non-denominational
evangelical radio broadcast program in Oklahoma City.4 The most likely au-
thors of the story were pastors David Webber (1931–2004) and Noah Hutchings
(1922–2015), who later on published a special book titled Computers and the
Beast of Revelation (1986). In 1975, “the Southwest Radio Church reported that
this supercomputer, dubbed ‘the Beast,’ would link banks throughout the world
and gradually force ‘a socialistic economic leveling and a new money system in
the 1980s.’ In the same year Colin Deal (a prophecy writer especially known
for his bestseller Will Christ Return by 1988? 101 Reason Why) informed his
readers that ‘Common Market leaders during a crisis meeting in Brussels, Bel-
gium, were introduced to the ‘Beast,’ a gigantic computer that occupies three
floors of the Administration Building at the Common Market Headquarters.
The computer is capable of assigning a number to every person on earth in the
form of a laser tattoo. Then, through infrared scanners, this invisible tattoo
would appear on a screen’” (Fuller 1995: 181).
It is obvious that the rumor, on the one hand, proceeded from the images
and ideas of Revelation 13, and, on the other, hinted at the commercial use of
barcoding that in the mid-1970s was getting popular in the United States and
later in Europe (the first item with a barcode was a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing
gum sold in Ohio on June 26, 1974). Quite soon, the story about the Beast of
Brussels became popular enough in the United States without any references
to particular Christian authors. Its main version that can still be found on the
web reads as follows:

Dr. Hanrick Eldeman, Chief Analyst of the Common Market Confederacy


in Brussels, has revealed that a computerized restoration plan is already
under way to straighten out world chaos. A crisis meeting in early 1974
brought together Common Market leaders, advisers and scientists at which
time Dr. Eldeman unveiled “the Beast”. The Beast is a gigantic three story
computer located in the administrative building of the headquarters of

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the Common Market. That monster is a self-programming computer


that has more than one hundred sources distributing entries. Experts
in programming have perfected a plan that will handle by computer all
of the world’s trade. This master plan would imply a system of digital
enumeration of each human being of the earth. Thus the computer would
give each inhabitant of the world a number to be used for each purchase
or sale, removing the problem of present credit cards. This number would
be invisibly tattooed by laser, either on the forehead or on the back of
the hand. This would establish a walking credit card system. And the
number could be seen only through infrared scanners, installed in special
verification counters or in business places. Dr. Eldeman pointed out that
by using three entries of six digits each, every inhabitant of the world
would be given a distinct credit card number.5

In the 1980s, the narrative gained international popularity and was translated
into European languages. One of the books that especially promoted the rumor
was the bestseller titled When Your Money Fails, by Mary Relfe, a Christian
writer from Alabama. However, before discussing the book in more detail, it
is necessary to point out the immediate political context of the story about the
Beast of Brussels.
The mentioning of a crisis meeting in early 1974 in the narrative was not
accidental. The fact is that 1973 witnessed the first (and still the hugest) global
oil crisis. Eleven days after the beginning of the Yom Kippur (or October) war
between Egypt, Syria, and Israel, the OPEC states announced suspension or
shortage of oil supply for the United States and their allies supporting the Jew-
ish state. Soon the oil prices grew four times, from 3 to 12 dollars per barrel. On
November 6, 1973, the ministers of foreign affairs of the Common Market met
in Brussels and signed a declaration stating that Israel had to implement the
242 resolution of the UN Security Council, i.e., to quit the Sinai Peninsula and
the Golan Heights. Finally, those political debates led only to a split in NATO
and the maintenance of high oil prices, so the state that benefited was the So-
viet Union; the crisis laid the foundation for the ‘Brezhnev prosperity’. At the
same time, the 1973 war stimulated a new deterioration of relations between
the United States and the USSR. When the Israeli army launched a counter-
offensive and forced a crossing over the Suez Canal, Brezhnev threatened that
the USSR would go into action directly and the United States announced alert
of their nuclear forces.
For American evangelicals, the events of the October war directly corre-
sponded with their apocalyptic prophecies and expectations. One of the main
themes of the American prophecy narratives of the early 1970s was a future
catastrophic war between Israel, Arab states, and the USSR. According to the

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Alexander Panchenko

political predictions made by one of the most famous American prophecy writ-
ers, Hal Lindsey, in 1970, the following ‘players’ will dominate the geopolitical
scene in the Last Times:

Russia (equivalent to the ‘Gog’ peoples of Ezekiel), which is developing


a vast army and confederacy and will march on Israel; the Arabs, who will
join with Africans and be led by Egypt in a march on Israel; China and
a vast ‘Oriental horde’ of more than 200 million soldiers; and the European
Community, which will form a new Roman Empire and dominate the
world under its leader, the Antichrist. (Fenster 2008 [1999]: 201)

However, Israel was not defeated by Arabs, the world economy did not collapse,
the third world war did not start, and the story about the Beast of Brussels
started living its own life, acquiring new meanings and contexts. From this
perspective, its Russian biography appears to be quite interesting.
The narrative attempted to reach its Russian audience several times. As
far as I know, all the Russian translations of the story were related to the book
When Your Money Fails: The “666 System” Is Here (1981), by an evangelical
writer and founder of the League of Prayer, Mary Stuart Relfe (1916–2011), who
lived in Montgomery, Alabama. Proceeding from the idea that the number 666
was penetrating all realms of everyday life in America (the number was found
even on sections of floor tiles and shirt labels), Relfe paid special attention to
the development of international banking and spread of debit cards that would,
she thought, be the principle device of the economic enslaving of the mankind.
The story about the Beast computer and Dr. Eldeman was repeated in the book
several times (Relfe 1981: 37, 42–46). Moreover, its readers learned that the
“little ‘Beast of Brussels’ was giving way to the real Beast of Luxembourg, the
most gigantic Computer Complex in the world, due to completion in 1980” (Relfe
1981: 46). Among other signs of the future reign of the Antichrist, she pointed
to the rise of various international organizations, including the World Bank,
the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and others.
Some parts of the book focused on the future apocalyptic role of the Soviet Un-
ion, which was still believed to be the homeland of the ‘Gog’ peoples of Ezekiel.
To prove that Russia would indeed be the army of horsemen that would come
“in the latter years… against the mountains of Israel” (Ezekiel 38: 8), Relfe
reprinted in her book a 14-kopek stamp “10 years of the First Cavalry”, issued
in the USSR at the beginning of 1930. According to Relfe, the stamp picturing
armed horsemen with a red banner and the map of the Black Sea region with
the cavalry raids marked, “prophetically commemorated” the coming invasion
of Russians of Israel (Relfe 1981: 182–183).

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However, all those prophecies did not embarrass one of the first Russian
translators of the story about the ‘Beast of Brussels’, a professor of the Rus-
sian language and literature at the University of South Alabama, Pavel Vaulin
(1918–2007; see Aleksandrov 2005: 92). Vaulin was a Russian émigré, taken
prisoner during the Soviet-Finnish War. After the end of the Second World
War, he managed to escape from Finland to Sweden and later on to the United
States. There he soon joined the radical religious and nationalistic wing of the
Russian diaspora. In 1981, Vaulin translated the introductory part of When
Your Money Fails and published it (without references to the original) in his
Russian-language journal Niva ([Vaulin] 1981).
Another translation of the same part was prepared independently by either
Russian Baptists or Old Believers in America and reached Russia in the late
1980s. A handwritten version of this text was discovered among the manuscripts
left behind by an Old Believer from the Urals in 1989 (Ageeva 1997: 11, 16;
Soboleva 1997; Pokrovskiy & Zolnikova 2002). In the same year, the same text
was printed in the almanac Put’ Spaseniia (The Way of Salvation) published by
Russian Old Believers in Oregon ([Tayson V.] 1989). The publication mentioned
the author of the translation (a V. Tayson) as well as its sources. The latter
included (besides When Your Money Fails) another book by Relfe published in
1982 as well as publications by Australian evangelical missionary Don Stanton
(1977) and American Christian writer Willard Cantelon (1973). Yet, it seems
that When Your Money Fails was the principal source for the translation. Later
on, in 1993, the same text was published by a Russian Baptist publishing house
situated in Sochi (Tayson 1993). Although the very name Tayson does not sound
Russian, it is possible that the translator was another Russian émigré, Vera
Tayson, who in the 1980s was employed as a translator and proofreader by the
Russian language newspaper Nashi Dni (Present Days) published by the Pacific
Coast Association of Slavic Baptist Churches in Sacramento.6 It seems then that
this translation had been initially prepared by Russian Baptists in America in
the mid-1980s but was also publicized by global networks of the Old Believers.
At any rate, the story about the ‘Beast of Brussels’ penetrated the borders
of the USSR already in the second half of the 1980s. However, the mass spread
of the legend in post-Soviet Russia was stimulated not only by the Old Believ-
ers’ manuscripts and Baptist publications. In September 1991, the head of the
publicist department in the journal Nash Sovremennik (Our Contemporary),
Sergey Fomin, published a selection of apocalyptic ‘prophecies about the destiny
of Russia’ (Fomin 1991). Later, this selection became part of a huge volume
entitled Rossiya pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming)
and edited by Fomin as well. The volume was published repeatedly in Russia
in the 1990s and 2000s. Both the 1991 collection and the later separate edi-

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tions included a letter written by monk Antoniy Chernov who at that time
lived in the UK and was a member of the ‘old calendarist’ Genuine Orthodox
Church of Greece (Matthewite Synod). The letter (Fomin 1991: 128) included
the legend about the ‘Beast of Brussels’ (quoting the translation by Tayson) and
informed its readers about the coming reign of Antichrist, the Jewish pseudo-
Messiah who had been already born in Israel. This last part of the text was
openly anti-Semitic and clearly contradicted pro-Zionistic ideologies of American
Evangelical millennialism, so it was obviously borrowed from other (most likely
Greek Orthodox) sources. Finally, another independent translation of the story
about the Beast computer was printed also in 1991 in the radical monarchist
newspaper Zemshchina published in Moscow by the association Khristianskoe
Vozrozhdenie (Christian Revival).
It seems that the principal mediators between American evangelical mil-
lennialism and post-Soviet high-tech eschatology were Orthodox Greeks. It is
quite likely that official religious affiliation of Antoniy Chernov affected the
themes of his apocalyptic prophecies. It is worth mentioning that the late 1980s
witnessed a moral panic among Orthodox Greeks, the panic being related to the
implementation of the Schengen Treaty. The Greek government had signed it in
1992, but the national parliament ratified it only five years later. The principal
‘anti-globalist’ argument against the treaty from the side of Orthodox activists
was the change of national passports for universal identification cards. The
latter in particular were considered to be ‘marks of Antichrist’. An additional
stimulus for the panic was provided by a public discussion of whether the
cards should have indication of the holders’ religious affiliation on them (see
Molokotos-Liederman 2003). The rumors about the ‘Beast of Brussels’ related
to the panic were promoted not only by small and marginalized ‘old calendar-
ist’ churches but also, for example, the Greek Orthodox monks from Mount
Athos. The book by Relfe, which appeared to be extremely popular at least in
some Athos monasteries, was translated into Greek in the mid-1980s (Meletiy
2001: 5–9). In 1987, an Athos monk, Paisios Eznepidis (1924–1994, known also
as venerable elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain and canonized in 2015 by the
Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople), wrote a pamphlet titled Signs of
the Times, 666, which said, in particular:

The secular spirit of contemporary ‘freedom’, lack of respect to the Church


of Christ, to those elders, parents, and teachers who possess the fear of
God mask spiritual enslavement, confusion, and anarchy that leads
people into a dead end, to spiritual and physical catastrophe. The perfect
system of ‘convenient cards’ and computer security also masks the global
dictatorship, the reign of the Antichrist. […] And all that goes on when
the signs are so evident, when the computer ‘Beast’ in Brussels has nearly

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The Beast Computer in Brussels

swallowed up all the countries. Cards, IDs, ‘marks’ – what do they mean?
[…] After the introduction of cards and IDs and ‘computer dossiers’ they
will try to introduce marks. And they will talk on TV how people steal
somebody else’s cards and get cash. And, on the other hand, they will
advertise a ‘perfect system’ – invisible laser marks in hands and foreheads
with 666, the name of the Antichrist.7

The popularity of this text and some other writings of this kind by the Athos
elders among late Soviet and post-Soviet Orthodox believers seem to account
for the ‘explosive’ transmission of the Russian versions of the story about the
Beast of Brussels and Dr. Eldeman at the beginning of the 1990s (see Akhmetova
2010: 146–148). Soon this narrative became a part of the ‘conspiratorial canon’
shared by radical Orthodox groups protesting against barcodes, individual tax-
payer numbers, and electronic cards (see Verkhovskiy 2003: 73–94; Serzhantov
2007–2008; Beglov 2014: 123–126; Russele 2015). Moreover, this very story
served as a sort of a narrative foundation or even a trigger for the moral panic
that influenced theological and ideological discussions in many religious com-
munities, including the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate,
the latter having to consider the problem of the individual taxpayer and social
security numbers as well as passports with electronic chips at the highest levels
of hierarchy (Russele 2015). At the same time, the legend was shared by radical
Orthodox groups in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Kazakhstan, as well as some
Pentecostal and Baptist congregations. Here, the fears of computers, barcodes,
and individual numbers were largely supported by anti-Western sentiments
and ideologies. The Beast of Brussels now was considered to be a part or even
the center of apocalyptic conspiracy targeted at Russia (identified here as the
former Soviet Union rather than present-day Russian Federation) and the
Orthodox belief. Unlike American evangelicals, the post-Soviet supporters of
the legend sometimes interpreted it with respect to anti-Semitic beliefs, i.e.,
as a part of the global Jewish conspiracy.

CONCLUSION

What conclusions can be drawn from this story? Obviously, it is not unique or
absolutely novel in a broad historical context. Themes of count, manipulation
of individuals, and total control upon mankind by evil and hostile forces before
the end of the world penetrate the history of Christian eschatology. The image
of bodily marks inspired by Revelation 13 can be observed in many religious and
cultural contexts. American evangelicals and present-day Russian Orthodox

Folklore 69 83
Alexander Panchenko

believers feared laser tattoos inscribed on the body by the Beast of Brussels;
Russian nineteenth-century peasants refused vaccination considering it to be
‘marks of the Antichrist’.
At the same time, some aspects of the history of the legend about the Beast
of Brussels and its intercultural migrations seem to be relatively novel and
deserve special attention. Firstly, it brings us back to the memetic approach
in the study of contemporary legend. Its international transmission as well as
de- or re-contextualization gives one more example of the ‘virus’ spread of ‘cul-
tural replicators’ (Oring 2014a, 2014b). This means that we can talk of moral
panics inspired by particular conspiratorial narratives as ‘cultural epidemics’
or “emotional snowballing – runaway selection for emotional content rather
than for information” (Heath & Bell & Sternberg 2001: 1040). Secondly, this
particular text seems to be a part of a broader conspiratorial (meta)narra-
tive, which appeared to be equally valid for quite different religious ideologies
and cultures. The same package of eschatology of control and manipulation
contains, for example, religious homophobia, the unexpected and at the same
time extremely rapid spread of which in present-day Russia could be related
to the same American evangelical tradition. Another prophecy writer of the
early 1970s, a Pentecostal pastor David Wilkerson (1931–2011), for example,
combined in his major work, The Vision (1973), predictions about ‘new global
economic order’ and laser tattoos with the image of future ‘moral landslide’:

The most gripping images of America as Sodom appeared in the much-


reprinted prophecy books of the Assemblies of God evangelist David
Wilkerson. In contrast to most prophecy interpreters, Wilkerson in The
Vision reported verbatim communications from God foretelling a coming
“moral landslide” of “nudity, perversion, and a flood of filth.” Television
networks will show bare-breasted women; churches will feature nude
dancing; “wild, roving mobs of homosexual men” will attack unsuspecting
victims openly on the streets. (Boyer 1992: 234)

Nearly the same combinations of eschatological, conspiratorial, and moral ex-


pectations can be found in apocalyptic narratives supported and transmitted
by various religious groups (whether they were Orthodox, Protestant, or New
Age) in post-Soviet states. What factors, however, do shape those narratives
as well as their reception or target groups?
It seems to me that the studies of present-day conspiratorial cultures and
narratives could take into account the concept of emotional communities formu-
lated recently by American historian Barbara Rosenwein. This constructionist
idea that, in turn, proceeds from the theory of textual communities by another
American historian, Brian Stock, implies that we should pay more attention to

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emotions that are expected by a particular community and thus are especially
valued by its members. “Emotional communities,” wrote Rosenwein, “are largely
the same as social communities – families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic
institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts. But the researcher
looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling, to establish
what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess
as valuable or harmful to them (for it is about such things that people express
emotions); the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the
affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional
expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore” (Rosenwein 2010:
11). I would not argue that the conspiratorial communities that we are dealing
with in the present-day world should be recognized as purely emotional. By
and large, conspiracy theories try to make problematic not only socially shared
values, but also the status of conventional or official knowledge. I think, how-
ever, that conspiracy theories and practices of conspiratorial hermeneutics are
inspired by particular combinations of emotional, moral, and epistemological
expectations. These shared expectations provide the conspiratorial communi-
ties with particular narratives and practices and, on the other hand, allow for
combining traditional religious ideas with newly invented conspiratorial ones.
In this context, the legend about the Beast of Brussels as well as similar
conspiratorial narratives and themes appear to have enough potential to inspire
and even form religious communities that expect to share fears of modern tech-
nology and surveillance society, tend to distrust science and social institutions,
and feel a need of knowledge that can be easily interpreted in moral terms of
good and evil. Although some present-day anthropologists would argue that,
epistemologically, “there are no inherent differences” between conspiracy theo-
ries and other theories (Pelkmans & Machold 2011), it seems that in terms of
social effect and adaptability conspiratorial narratives that constitute a vast
part of contemporary legends should still be set apart. In my opinion, their
specific fitness potential is related to unique combinations of emotional, moral,
and epistemological expectations, which constitute the very idea of conspiracy
and secret power in many present-day societies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation,
project No. 14-18-02952 (“Conspiratorial Narratives in Russian Culture”).

Folklore 69 85
Alexander Panchenko

notes

1
For discussion, criticism, and further reading about the meme theory in general see
Aunger 2000. See also recent discussion of the memetic approach in folkloristics by
Elliot Oring (2014a, 2014b).
2
I would prefer to use ‘Last Times’ rather than ‘Doomsday’ to emphasize that premil-
lenial prophetic imagination deals not only with the Last Judgement as a particular
event but with sort of ‘histories of the future’ as a more complicated set of events.
3
On philo-Semitic and pro-Zionistic aspects of Evangelical millennialism see Ariel 2011.
4
I would also mention that there is, so to speak, a false trail here – the skeptical nar-
rative about a Christian author, Joe Musser, who is supposed to have invented the
story about the ‘Beast’ computer for his apocalyptic anti-utopian novel. This version,
which has received a wide diffusion on the Internet, has been believed by certain re-
searchers (see, e.g., Lewis 2001: 24; Akhmetova 2010: 147), but I have not been able
to find any factual evidence to support it.
5
See https://www.truthorfiction.com/beastofbelgium/, last accessed on July 3, 2017.
6
See her name listed among the former staff members on the website of the newspaper:
http://www.nashidni.com/index.php/aboutus-en/our-staff/former-and-current-staff-
members. See also her autobiographical article in another newspaper published by
Russian Baptists in Germany (Tayson 1980).
7
See http://www.odigitria.by/2012/06/28/znameniya-vremen-666-starec-paisij-svyatogorec/,
last accessed on July 3, 2017.

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