Daniel

Daniel supplies the symbolic architecture, the beasts and kingdoms and numbered weeks, that later interpreters mined for their forecasts, much as Pseudo-Methodius and the Sibylline Leaves were mined in the Middle Ages. His visions sit behind the book's distinction between the spectacular side-issue of planetary destruction and the real end, the Last Judgment of souls. He matters because the whole numerological tradition Dennis chronicles, from Stoffler's 1524 flood to the Fifth Monarchy Men, runs on the rails his prophecies laid down.