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In this presentation, I discuss how in Os Lusíadas (1572), Portugal’s most renowned poet Luís Vaz de Camões uses the classical figure of Daedalus to underscore the artificiality of the Portuguese Empire and, by extension, its attendant prophecies. I begin by recounting how anthropomorphized Indus and Ganges Rivers appear in a dream at Manuel I’s bedside and goad him to dispatch a fleet to India, though they emphasize that conquering the subcontinent will be far more difficult than landing there. This quintessentially prophetic vision impels the monarch to commission Vasco da Gama’s journey to India in 1497, a journey towards doom masquerading as imperial glory. Echoing the Velho do Restelo’s warnings of disaster on the day of their departure, the Portuguese explorers, once in India, bear witness to their future as successors in an Asian translatio imperiifounded by Bacchus (who never existed) and then inherited by Queen Semīramis and Alexander the Great, both of whom pierced just far enough into India to see their ambitions thwarted. Predicted to outstrip these forebears, the Portuguese find themselves destined for glory measured only by the spectacular failure of their imperial ambitions.

This presentation is an adapted excerpt from a longer dissertation chapter centering on the role of prophecy in early modern Iberian epic poetry. Throughout the dissertation, my overarching thesis is that more than foretelling the future, prophecy is a teleological interpretation of history that is brought to bear on the present. Especially pronounced in ancient Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions, this form of interpretation reads a destiny out of the past meant to incite action in the present in light of a preordained future. Prophecy of this sort, I argue, operates through two broadly defined modalities that I call “providentialism” and “accelerationism.” Oriented towards the past, providentialism shapes the historical narrative to justify the present status quo, whereas accelerationism attempts to erode the barrier between imagined potential and material actuality by stressing the imminence of the future. This erosion consists of bombarding listeners or readers with lively visions of the future, spurring the transformation of future potentiality into present actuality. Recalling how Marxist revolutionaries in some countries sought to bypass stages of historical development to arrive unscathed at the dawn of a socialist utopia, both prophetic modalities long predate Marxism and the revolutions it inspired. For example, drawing on a medieval prophecy, in the early sixteenth century it became thinkable for apologists of the Habsburg dynasty in Castile to label Carlos V the “Last World Emperor,” charged with bringing about the apocalypse through global conquest. Likewise, by the end of the century, many Portuguese subjects found solace in awaiting Sebastião I’s return, the boy-king whose fantasies of conquest and whose death in Morocco gave rise to a messianic prophecy of his impending resurrection.

As these examples suggest, while providentialist and accelerationist prophecies crop up across literary genres in early modern Iberia, given the simultaneously evangelical and acquisitive motives that underlay the development and expansion of Portugal and Spain’s respective empires, they are most prevalent in texts sitting at the crossroads of the sacred and the political. Such texts include, but are not limited to, epic poems, autos sacramentales, sermons, and political treatises that appropriate, develop, and use prophecy in their interrogations of empire. More specifically, I focus on epics such as Alonso Ercilla y Zúñiga’s La Araucana (1569, 1578, 1589) and Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s autos sacramentales, as well as António Vieira’s prophetic treatises and a selection of his sermons.

Chris Kark is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures (ILAC). Before arriving at ������ý, he earned his M.A. in Spanish Literature and Culture at Arizona State University and concurrent bachelors degrees in Political Science and Spanish Literature and Culture from the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University.

His current research analyzes the relation between prophecy and empire in early modern Iberian literature, with a particular focus on conceptions of history in light of an impending apocalypse. The bulk of this research appears in Chris’s dissertation, titled “Providence and Acceleration: Prophetic Modalities in Early Modern Iberian Literature.” Here, he argues that more than foretelling the future, prophecy in early modern Iberian literature works to read destiny out of the historical or legendary past. An act of “postdiction,” this teleological mode of reading also has an important pragmatic element: it calls for and even demands present action in light of a preordained future. Prophecy, in this sense, works to transcend time in order to make interventions within it.