ABSTRACT
Aum Shinrikyo, or Aum Supreme Truth as it refers to itself in English, is a Japanese millennial movement founded in the 1980s by the blind charismatic prophet Asahara Shoko (b.1955). It had about ten thousand members in Japan, of whom just over one thousand had renounced the world to live in Aum’s communes. It gained international notoriety in 1995 because of the attack it carried out using sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground. It transpired that Aum had committed a number of other attacks on opponents and had manufactured chemical weapons on a large scale, apparently in order to defend itself against what it believed was a vast conspiracy against it and in order to fight in the sacred war between good and evil that it believed would engulf the world and herald the end of contemporary materialist civilization. Aum is highly significant in millennial terms because of its espousal of weapons of mass destruction (the first case, it is believed, by a private organization) and because it is a movement that began with an optimistic form of millennialism that became progressively more catastrophic and destructive in nature until it finally came to seek destruction and death on a grand scale.
