Seekers

The Seekers, or Legatine-Arians as they were sometimes known, were a British Protestant dissenting group that emerged around the 1620s, probably inspired by the preaching of three brothers – Walter, Thomas, and Bartholomew Legate. Seekers considered all organised churches of their day corrupt and preferred to wait for God's revelation. Many of them subsequently joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

Origins

Long before the English Civil War there already existed what Hill calls a "lower-class heretical culture" in England. The cornerstones of this culture were anti-clericalism and a strong emphasis on Biblical study, but specific doctrines that had "an uncanny persistence"; rejection of Predestination, Millenarianism, mortalism, anti-Trinitarianism and Hermeticism. Such ideas became "commonplace to seventeenth century Baptists, Seekers, early Quakers and other radical groupings which took part in the free-for-all discussions of the English Revolution."

Beliefs and practices

When Prophecy Fails

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent Apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.

Overview

Festinger and his associates read a story in their local newspaper headlined "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood."

The prophecy came from Dorothy Martin (1900–1992), a Chicago housewife who experimented with automatic writing. (In order to protect her privacy, the study gave her the alias of "Marian Keech" and relocated her group to Michigan.) She had previously been involved with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics movement, and she incorporated ideas from what later became Scientology.

Seekers (TV series)

Seekers is a four-part TV mini-series released in 1992 about a police officer who disappears, and when his wife tries to find him, she discovers... another wife. They team up to search for him. It starred Brenda Fricker and Josette Simon, and was written by the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Lynda La Plante who also wrote the book of the same name. It was produced by Sarah Lawson.

Selected Cast & Crew

Cast

Crew

See also

References

External links