Blurb:

The second chapter plays a propaedeutic role. It analyzes the political, cultural and social situation in the nineteenth-century Poland that led to the emergence of Mariavitism. It helps the reader to understand why eschatological ideas could grow so easily in Congress Poland and why Mariavitism should not be a kind of aberration, but rather something that it explicable in its cultural and historical context. This chapter also briefly discusses Polish Messianists who were considered by early Mariavites to be the heralds announcing the coming of the Kingdom of God. Their ideas were widely used, studied, and reinterpreted by Mariavites and helped them shape their theology. Kowalski’s “Lecture on the Apocalypse” may have more references to their works than to the Book of Revelation as he believed that without their output the Apocalypse cannot be correctly understood. Finally, the chapter presents a reader with a short biography of Mateczka before she was given revelations in 1983.