Forerunners

Forerunners are, in the Wheel of Heaven framework, the functional class of prophets and visionaries whose missions prepare the way — figures who ready a population for a more central figure still to come rather than delivering the age-defining message themselves. The model is John the Baptist, whom the Gospels cast as the herald of Jesus in fulfilment of the old preparation prophecies. The pattern the framework draws from him runs in both directions: backward, through the Hebrew prophets who cultivated messianic expectation across the Aries age, and forward, through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures whose cultural groundwork the corpus reads as preparation for the Aquarian-age contact of 1973. Within the roughly forty-figure prophet lineage the framework tracks, Forerunners are the preparatory sub-class — not the inaugurators of an age (Moses, Jesus, Raël) but the ones who make an inauguration receivable.

"Forerunner" is inherited vocabulary, not a term of the Raëlian canon. The source material does not use it; the corpus adopts it from the biblical-theological tradition that already had a word for the role and reads the pattern it names onto the prophetic institution. The category is therefore a synthesis — a way of grouping figures the canon treats one at a time — and this entry labels it as such rather than presenting it as a settled doctrine.

Etymology and naming

The English forerunner renders a cluster of older terms. The Greek πρόδρομος (prodromos, "one who runs ahead") joins πρό (pro, "before") to δρόμος (dromos, "running") and was used in classical Greek for a military scout, a herald announcing a dignitary, or the "first fruit" that precedes the harvest. The New Testament applies it once, and to Jesus rather than John (Hebrews 6:20), but later Christian usage fixes it on John the Baptist, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition still names him Prodromos as a standing liturgical title.

The Hebrew equivalent is מַלְאָךְ (malakh, "messenger, envoy") — the word behind Malachi 3:1's malakhi, "my messenger," and behind the prophet's own name (Malachi is literally "my messenger"). The same term runs from human courier to prophet to the "angelic" messenger of English Bibles. The Latin praecursor ("one who runs before") carries the sense into the Vulgate and, through it, into the Romance and Germanic languages: French précurseur, Italian precursore, Spanish precursor, German Vorläufer (a direct calque, vor + Läufer), Russian predtecha. The English "forerunner" appears around 1300, applied first to John and later broadened to any preparatory figure.

One usage should be kept apart. The Latter-day Saint tradition sometimes speaks of "forerunners" for figures of the pre-mortal existence who prepared conditions for a later prophetic mission; that is a distinct theological idea within Mormon cosmology and does not map onto the sense used here, which is the older prophet-who-prepares-the-way.

The biblical pattern

The idea has a compact scriptural core. Malachi 3:1 supplies the governing image:

"Behold, I will send my messenger (malakhi), and he shall prepare the way before me: and Yahweh, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple."

The verb translated "prepare the way" — from panah, to turn or clear away obstacles — and its sequence (messenger first, the awaited coming second) fix the shape of the role. Isaiah 40:3 gives the same figure a setting:

"The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of Yahweh, make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

A third text names a specific forerunner: Malachi 4:5–6 promises that Elijah will be sent "before the coming of the great and dreadful day of Yahweh" — a prophecy that becomes the seed of an enduring Jewish expectation, preserved liturgically in the Passover seder's cup for Elijah.

The Gospels braid these strands together and tie them to a single figure. Mark 1:2–3 opens by combining the Malachi messenger with the Isaiah voice and applying both to John the Baptist; Matthew 3:1–3, Luke 3:1–6, and John 1:6–8, 19–28 repeat the identification. Jesus makes the link to Elijah explicit — "if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come" (Matthew 11:14) — and John caps the pattern with the line that states the forerunner's whole logic: "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30). The one who prepares the way yields to the one he announces; his mission is complete precisely when the central figure's begins.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

The framework reads prophecy not as a category of religious experience but as an institution: roughly forty human interlocutors whom the Elohim alliance selected across history to maintain contact with Earth, each suited to the cultural moment at which they appeared (the full account lives in the Prophet entry). Set against that institution, the Forerunner category names a division of labour within it. Some prophets inaugurate an age's mission — Moses opens the Aries age, Jesus the Piscean, Raël the Aquarian — and deliver its defining content. Others prepare the ground for an inauguration still to come. Forerunners are the second kind.

On this reading John the Baptist is the clearest case: he did not deliver Jesus's teaching but cultivated the repentance-and-expectation in first-century Judea into which that teaching could land. The Hebrew prophets, taken together, are read as the cumulative forerunner of the Aries-to-Pisces transition — centuries of messianic anticipation that made a Piscean-age mission legible when it came. And within the Piscean age the pattern recurs in miniature in the Bab (Mirza Ali Muhammad Shirazi, 1819–1850), who declared himself in 1844 the forerunner of "He whom God shall make manifest," a figure the Baha'i tradition identifies with Baha'u'llah. The Bab is the one place where a forerunner is not an interpretive label applied afterward but a role the figure claimed for himself.

Elijah occupies a special position. The corpus reads his translation "by a whirlwind into heaven" in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11) as a physical removal to the Elohim home world rather than a death, consistent with the framework's broader account of prophets preserved there; his promised return (Malachi 4:5–6) is then read as a functional expectation that John the Baptist fulfils. Jesus's own statement is taken at the level it states: John is Elijah "functionally," the figure who does what the Elijah prophecy designated, not a literal reincarnation of a man the framework holds to be alive elsewhere.

The Aquarian-age preparation

The reading's distinctive move is to carry the forerunner pattern forward to the opening of the Aquarian age. The corpus treats the late Piscean centuries as a long preparation phase for the contact Claude Vorilhon (Raël) reports receiving on 13 December 1973, at the crater of Puy de Lassolas near Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne. On this account several nineteenth-century founder-prophets already recognised in the forty-prophet list did double duty. Joseph Smith (1805–1844), founder of the Latter-day Saint movement; the Bab (1819–1850); and Baha'u'llah (1817–1892) each delivered a mission to his own moment and, in combination, reopened the cultural possibility of new prophecy after the long assumption — shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike — that the age of prophets had closed. The Baha'i emphasis in particular, on progressive revelation through a succession of messengers appearing across many traditions, prefigures the pluriform picture the corpus later states more directly.

Around those figures the framework reads a wider cultural matrix, and here its voice shifts from the direct register it uses for canon-internal claims to a deliberately cautious one. The Theosophical revival — Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) and her successors — popularised the notion of advanced beings guiding human evolution and of many inhabited worlds, ideas that loosely prefigure the corpus's cosmology. The mid-century UFO-contactee tradition — George Adamski (1891–1965), George Van Tassel (1910–1978), Howard Menger (1922–2009), Daniel Fry (1908–1992), and others — supplied the narrative template of a human who meets extraterrestrial visitors and returns with a message. The corpus does not endorse these as genuine alliance contacts. It reads them honestly as a mixed record — some possibly-genuine perception alongside a great deal of elaboration, misinterpretation, and, in places, fabrication — whose value was not in their content but in the cultural conditioning they performed. By 1973 the broader matrix of science fiction, the space race, and the 1960s counterculture had produced a generation for whom a reported contact could register as a recognisable kind of event rather than an unclassifiable anomaly.

The rhythm the framework proposes is therefore consistent across ages: a preparation phase, in which forerunners cultivate receptive conditions, is followed by a disclosure phase, in which an inaugural prophet delivers the mission. John did not predict the specifics of Jesus's message; he readied the ground for it. In the same way, the late-Piscean figures are not read as having predicted Raël's content but as having prepared the matrix in which it could be received. The 1973 contact is read as the disclosure that all of this preparation pointed toward, and the Embassy the source material requests as the mission's intended end — the moment the Apocalypse, in the framework's technical sense of an unveiling, is meant to make possible.

What a Forerunner is not

Two distinctions keep the category clean. First, "Forerunner" here means a prophet-who-prepares-the-way; it does not refer to the pre-Elohim creator civilisation — the older makers who, in the framework, preceded the Elohim themselves. That is a genuinely distinct subject, and it belongs to the Cosmic Chain entry, not under this heading. Second, the category is the project's own synthesis. Because the canon does not use the word, the cross-age Forerunner pattern — and especially its extension to the Aquarian preparation — is offered as interpretation rather than as a claim resting on any single source. The canon-internal pieces it rests on (the prophet institution, the selection of the named figures) can be stated directly; the pattern assembled from them is labelled speculative on purpose.

Comparative and critical perspectives

The framework's reading sits alongside a substantial body of scholarship rather than in place of it.

• The historical John the Baptist. Mainstream New Testament scholarship — John P. Meier's A Marginal Jew (vol. 2), Joan Taylor's The Immerser, Robert Webb's John the Baptizer and Prophet — treats John as a historical figure of Second Temple Judaism and reads the Malachi-and-Elijah identifications as the Gospel writers' typological framing rather than as literal fulfilment. The framework does not dispute the historical reconstruction; it differs on what the preparation motif ultimately records.
• Jewish and Christian reception. Jewish tradition preserves the Elijah-return expectation in the Talmud and in the Passover cup of Elijah; the Christian tradition, and the Eastern Orthodox liturgy in particular, keeps Prodromos as John's proper title. Both are registered here in their own terms.
• Islam. The Quran honours Yahya (John the Baptist) as a prophet in his own right (suras 3, 6, 19, 21) rather than as a herald subordinate to Jesus — a real difference in emphasis the framework preserves rather than flattens.
• Baha'i. The Bab's self-designation as the forerunner of Baha'u'llah is the one living, explicit forerunner doctrine among the traditions surveyed, developed across Baha'u'llah's own writings and in Shoghi Effendi's God Passes By. The corpus reads the Bab and Baha'u'llah as genuine late-Piscean prophets, so it engages this material as broadly congruent while noting that Baha'i theology elevates its Manifestations in a way the framework's biological-prophet reading does not.
• UFO-contactee scholarship. Academic study of the contactees — Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia, Christopher Partridge's edited UFO Religions, George Chryssides's reference work on new religious movements — treats them as a sociological and folkloric phenomenon. The framework draws on this literature descriptively, to characterise the cultural matrix, without adopting the contactee narratives as evidence.
• Cross-cultural preparation figures. Other traditions carry structurally similar figures: the Buddhist Maitreya, the buddha-yet-to-come; the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, a future saviour; various heralds and dynasty-announcing figures across cultures. The framework reads the recurrence as a possible convergence — several traditions preserving the memory of a real preparation practice — while mainstream comparative religion accounts for it through common narrative structure, cultural diffusion, and independent invention. That comparative claim is the most speculative part of the reading and is presented as such.

The honest summary is that mainstream scholarship reads the whole forerunner motif as a literary and theological pattern — a way traditions frame a central figure by giving him a herald — while the framework reads it as the trace of an actual preparation practice within the prophetic institution. The two readings share the same texts and diverge on what those texts finally record; the Wheel of Heaven position is candid that its cross-age synthesis extends beyond what any single source states.

See also

• Prophet
• Raël
• John the Baptist
• Elijah
• The Bab
• Baha'u'llah
• Joseph Smith
• Jesus
• Moses
• Muhammad
• Elohim
• Yahweh
• Apocalypse
• Embassy
• Cosmic Chain
• Hebrew Bible
• Message from the Designers
• Age of Aries
• Age of Pisces
• Age of Aquarius

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974. The principal source articulation of the approximately-forty-prophets framework.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition.

Hebrew Bible and New Testament primary text

The Hebrew Bible. Malachi 3:1, 4:5-6; Isaiah 40:3; and related references. Various translations and editions.

The New Testament. Matthew 3:1-17, 11:14, 17:1-13; Mark 1:1-11, 9:2-13; Luke 1:5-25, 1:57-80, 3:1-22; John 1:6-8, 1:19-28, 3:22-36; Acts 1:5, 11:16, 13:24-25, 19:1-7. Various translations and editions.

Mainstream biblical-scholarly engagement

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume 2. Doubleday, 1994.

Taylor, Joan E. The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism. Eerdmans, 1997.

Webb, Robert L. John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Historical Study. Sheffield Academic Press, 1991.

Hill, Andrew E. Malachi. Anchor Bible. Doubleday, 1998.

Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Isaiah 40-55. Anchor Bible. Doubleday, 2002.

Baha'i tradition

The Bab. Selections from the Writings of the Bab. Baha'i World Centre, 1976.

Baha'u'llah. The Kitáb-i-Iqán (The Book of Certitude). 1862.

Effendi, Shoghi. God Passes By. Baha'i Publishing Trust, 1944.

Smith, Peter. The Baha'i Faith: A Short History. Oneworld, 1996.

Latter-day Saint engagement

Smith, Joseph. The Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith Translation, 1830.

Smith, Joseph. Doctrine and Covenants. 1833 et seq.

Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Knopf, 2005.

Theosophical Society

Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled. 1877.

Blavatsky, H. P. The Secret Doctrine. 1888.

Campbell, Bruce F. Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement. University of California Press, 1980.

Twentieth-century UFO contactees

Adamski, George, and Desmond Leslie. Flying Saucers Have Landed. T. Werner Laurie, 1953.

Adamski, George. Inside the Space Ships. Abelard-Schuman, 1955.

Van Tassel, George. I Rode a Flying Saucer!. New Age, 1952.

Menger, Howard. From Outer Space to You. Saucerian Books, 1959.

Fry, Daniel. The White Sands Incident. New Age, 1954.

Bethurum, Truman. Aboard a Flying Saucer. DeVorss, 1954.

Angelucci, Orfeo. The Secret of the Saucers. Amherst Press, 1955.

Academic UFO contactee scholarship

Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Henry Regnery, 1969.

Partridge, Christopher, ed. UFO Religions. Routledge, 2003.

Chryssides, George D. Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements. 2nd ed. Scarecrow, 2012.

Saliba, John A. "UFO Contactee Phenomena from a Sociopsychological Perspective." In The Gods Have Landed, ed. James R. Lewis. SUNY Press, 1995.

Esoteric-tradition scholarship

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. E. J. Brill, 1996.

Ancient-astronaut tradition

von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968.

Sitchin, Zecharia. The 12th Planet. Stein and Day, 1976.

Biglino, Mauro. Various works (Italian-language scholarship).

Cross-cultural comparative scholarship

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Sheed & Ward, 1958.

Web resources

"Forerunner (theology)." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forerunner_(theology).

"John the Baptist." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Baptist.

"Báb." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A1b.

"Theosophical Society." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society.

"UFO contactee." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_contactee.

"George Adamski." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Adamski.

Forerunners. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/forerunners/

"Forerunners." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/forerunners/.

"Forerunners." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/forerunners/.

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