Hindu mythology includes the story of a great flood called Pralaya. In this myth, the first man, Manu, gets advanced warning of it from Vishnu and is able to construct a boat in which to escape. In Mesoamerica, the Tlapanec and Huastec peoples told stories of gods who drowned everybody, outraged at human iniquity. One man survives with his dog and, fortunately for the continuing existence of humankind, the dog possesses the ability to metamorphose into a woman at night, which allows them to repopulate the earth. In India, Puluga, the creator god of the Andaman peoples, punishes human wickedness with a devastating flood, but two men and two women survive in a boat. One of the earliest stories that survives from human prehistory, recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh (written in 2100 BCE in Mesopotamia) concerns a great flood sent by the gods to wash the wickedness of humanity off the face of the world. This plan misfires because one of the gods, Ea, breaks ranks with the others and warns a human he favours: Utnapishtim. Ea tells him to build a boat so that his family and ‘all the animals of the field’ can be saved from the coming flood, and so he lives, ensuring the survival of humankind.
Many religions put a positive spin on these stories to gain adherents; God is punishing only those heretics and unbelievers, not us. For us there will be a little escape hatch through which we can make our way to a new heaven and a new earth. Our salvation tends to come in the form of a saviour figure, sent to guide the faithful through the end. The Jews are still waiting for their promised messiah, while Christians – who budded off from that ancient faith 2,000 years ago – believe the saviour came once and will return again. In fifth-century CE China, an unknown Taoist master wrote the Divine Incantations Scripture, which promises the coming of a messianic figure who will rule over the faithful and destroy the rest of humanity. The text talks about the end of the world as a battle between the gods, or the ‘officials of the celestial bureaucracy’, and ‘daemon kings’, a metaphysical war between order and chaos that will lead to the renewal of our terrestrial world.* We humans are exhorted to follow the tao, or ‘way’ – to live a moral life under the proper authorities with ‘dynamic obedience’. This Scripture offers the assistance of heavenly ‘ghost soldiers’ to those who upheld its teachings. It was so popular that two centuries later many people believed the Han prince Li Hong was the promised messiah. His mother, alarmed that he would use his popular support to seize power, had him poisoned.
Not every story allows a loophole for the righteous. Norse myths of the end of the world tell a story that includes both gods and men in the coming disaster, something which neither can escape. It’s also a flood, of sorts – an apocalypse of ice. According to this legend-arium, Odin, the leader of the Norse gods, knows that one day soon the universe will come to an end. By way of preparing for this grim fate, he assembles an army of the bravest warriors – those who die valiantly in battle are collected by Odin’s Valkyries and entertained at a feast in the halls of Valhalla. Odin wants these warriors on hand and ready to fight when the end times come: when giants, monsters and the huge sky wolf Fenrir will attack. At that time, Odin and his warriors will fight. They will not win, but that is not the point. Odin is well aware that they will lose, that Thor will be killed by the poisonous Midgard Serpent, that Odin’s wife Frey will be killed by the fire monster Surt, and that Odin himself will be devoured by Fenrir. The sun will turn black, the stars will disappear, the earth will sink into the sea, steam will rise and flames will burn the heavens. People will flee in terror, though they are doomed wherever they go. What matters is not that we will lose, but how we lose – and that we go down fighting. It degrades one’s dignity, according to Norse culture, to whine about suffering or reverses. They are inevitable. What matters is not that they happen, but how much defiance we can face them with, both in life and in death.
It is strangely fitting that this account of the inevitable death of the universe was almost lost to us. These stories, once passed about as the oral culture of early Scandinavians, had entirely died out by the Renaissance – there is no mention of them in any of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance. But then in 1662, a bishop called Brynjólfur Sveinsson happened to come across a manuscript, written in Old Norse, in an Icelandic farmhouse. If this bundle of papers had been burnt, eaten by mice or otherwise discarded, we would have almost no connection to the old Viking myths. Since Iceland at this time belonged to Denmark, Brynjólfur donated the manuscript to the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where it gathered dust for several centuries. Only in the nineteenth century, with the chance discovery of an ancient Icelandic manuscript, did interest in Norse mythology bring this material back into popular consciousness. It was, as Tom Shippey says, a dead tradition before then, although he notes that ‘Things are very different these days, now that one-eyed Odins, trickster Lokis and hammer-wielding Thors are fantasy and comic-book clichés.’
Why have these stories broken out of their academic and antiquarian milieu? One secret of their appeal is surely that, in a manner which has always been seen as typically Anglo-Scandinavian, they are deeply gloomy, in a cheerful sort of way. The most striking aspect of Norse mythology is that it is fundamentally hopeless.*
This fundamental hopelessness is important because it grounds the cheerfulness. We can all agree that when disaster looms, despair is a debilitating and counterproductive reaction. What is more contentious is that hope is not much better; it’s the hope that generates the anxiety, the tension, that fills you with the terror of uncertainty. It is much better, psychologically as well as practically, to greet the impending disastrousness with a cheerful hopelessness. After all: we are all doomed. Everybody dies. There are no exceptions, and it demeans us to deny that fact. The only thing that matters is the courage with which we encounter our inevitable fate.
But then there’s one final wrinkle: after all has been lost, there will be a new beginning. The first section of Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Prose Edda, the Gylfaginning, contains a detailed account of Ragnarök that moves its story beyond the death of the sun, the devastation of the world, the sea flooding the earth and the sky splitting in two. But ‘what comes after the sky and the whole world are burned? After all the gods are dead, and all the world’s bravest warriors and the whole of humankind?’ The sun’s daughter will take her parent’s place in the sky; the world will come back to life and two humans whom the gods had hidden away during Ragnarök will emerge: a Norse Adam and Eve called Lif and Lifthrasir. ‘They feed on the morning dew,’ the Gylfaginning tells us. ‘From these so numerous a race is descended that they fill the whole world with people.’
The end turns out not to be the end – Ragnarök turns the universe off and on again. We still can’t bring ourselves to come to terms with the total absence of life. Something must continue, something must exist. And so we’re locked into a cycle – imagining an end to the story, but afraid to really bring it to an end once and for all. This, counter-intuitively, turns out to be one of the most reliable features of all the stories about the end of the world. A world ends. The world never does.
The Hopi peoples, indigenous to North America and now concentrated in the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, believe that our world is the fourth made by Tawa, their sun spirit creator god. In the first world, things went well initially, but then human beings began to disobey Tawa’s laws, becoming violent and sexually promiscuous, and so he brought the world to an end and made another. A different Hopi god, Spider Woman, took pity on the few people who were living virtuous lives but were trapped in the first world. She made a bridge out of a giant hollow reed, and the escapees crossed it into the second world, where the cycle began again. Our fourth world will, we can assume, go the same way,* and we can imagine this process happening over and over again. The end of the world becomes not a finality, but a repeating reiteration.
This is, in fact, a feature of the single most influential version of the end of the world ever written: Revelation. Its author was a man who called himself Yohannon but who, as a first-century Greek-speaking Jew,
transliterated his name as Ἰωάννης (Iōánnēs). English has further morphed this name into John.
The Revelation of St John is the last book in the canonical Bible. It relates a series of bizarre visions of what the end of the world will look like, and it is the most famous ‘end of the world’ there has ever been. Fanatics and believers still pore over its details, while the popular culture we all consume still has a fascination with this potent vision of the apocalypse. It is manifestly present in modern works as different from one another as Stephen King’s enormous novel The Stand (1978) and Genesis’s lengthy prog-rock song ‘Supper’s Ready’ (1972), as different as the portentous Omen movie series (1976–91) and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s masterly comic pastiche Good Omens (1990). All have fictionalised John’s particularities by updating and recontextualising them. Victorian painter John Martin created gigantic canvases illustrating scenes from Revelation that have directly influenced the work of cinematic special-effects artists to this day in the scope and detail of their representations of disaster. This is the way the world ends: not with a whimper but a bang.
‘Revelation’ is the standard translation of the book’s first word: Ἀπख़κάλυψις, ‘Apocalypse’, a word that originally meant ‘unveiling’, because St John was removing the sheet that veiled the future from us. Perhaps a more up-to-date translation of the word apocalypse would be ‘striptease’: the story certainly takes its time, building up the tension, as it works through its layers of titillating horror. In the video for Robbie Williams’s 2000 single ‘Rock DJ’, the singer performs a striptease before an audience of adoring women, first taking off his clothes, then his skin and finally his flesh, leaving his skeleton dancing and cavorting. That is the kind of striptease that you will be signing up for if you step inside John’s ‘apocalypse’ nightclub.
The bare bones of John’s narrative are worth laying out in a little more detail, both because they have been so influential on later versions of the end of the world and simply because it shows just how drawn out this ending is.
Firstly, John sees a vision of the throne of God, with twenty-four smaller thrones arranged around it. A magic scroll is presented before the big throne. It is sealed with seven wax seals, and the opening of each one is accompanied by a different horrific eventuality that is indicative of the end times. When the first seal is opened, a white horse appears, with the second a red horse, followed by a black horse and finally a pale horse ridden by Death and followed by Hell – the infamous ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’. The fifth seal reveals the souls of those who had been martyred for the word of God, and the sixth seal unleashes a big-budget endof-the-world spectacular:
There was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’*
The events that follow the opening of the sixth seal look pretty comprehensively like the end of the world, but we are only just getting started. The seventh seal discloses seven trumpets, and the sounding of each unleashes a whole new series of terrible world-ending catastrophes: burning hail falls and destroys one-third of the earth’s vegetation; then a flaming mountain falls from the sky, lands in the ocean and destroys one-third of all marine life; the star called Wormwood falls to earth, poisoning the rivers; sunlight, moonlight and starlight lose one-third of their light; a falling meteor opens a smoking abyss in the earth, from which monstrous locust–scorpion hybrids that are shaped like men and wearing iron breastplates swarm. Then four angels that were previously imprisoned in the Euphrates river are released, summoning an army 200 million strong and killing a third of mankind with fire and poisonous gas. The world, says John, is now under the control of the entity that he calls ‘the Beast’.
Just as the seventh seal opened to reveal seven trumpets, each one heralding a further horror, so the seventh trumpet announces the arrival of a new set of seven harbingers of disaster, contained in bowls, although the Greek (phialas) could also be translated as ‘vials’. The contents are not pleasant. The first causes blistering sores on everybody’s skin; the second completely poisons the sea; the third turns the rivers to blood; the fourth brings drought; the fifth a choking fog that darkens the whole world; and the sixth dries up the Euphrates and initiates the ‘Battle of Armageddon’.
After the seven seals and the seven trumpets, we empty the last of the seven little bottles and finally reach the world’s coup de grâce. The whole earth convulses and the sky collapses in great chunks, each fragment weighing a talent – about 25 kilograms in modern terms. Every island sinks into the sea and every mountain collapses – the world is dead.
But I spoke too soon, because John’s vision continues and so does the world – although how anyone has survived the previous blizzard of world-ending disasters is something of a puzzle. A great city, personified as a sexually promiscuous woman saddled on a gigantic monster, is destroyed. God and the Beast continue to battle; a dragon is released, and once again there is a world-ending war, and another defeat for the Beast. Finally, John sees the replacement of the old heaven and the old earth with a new heaven and earth in which there is no more suffering, death or sin, and where God lives with humanity forever. Phew!
There has been more interpretation of Revelation than all the other books of the Bible put together. I do not propose to add to that great heap, but there are a few things worth drawing out of this account.
The context in which Revelation was written is crucial to our understanding of it. It was created at a time when Christianity was a sect of Judaism, and John was a Jew who believed that Christ was the messiah promised by Jewish scriptures. He may or may not have believed that Christ also came to non-Jews, but it was the fate of his fellow Jews that concerned John most closely.
There’s nothing else like Revelation in the New Testament or in the Apocrypha, and while it’s true that much of the specific detail of John’s vision tends to strike us today as bizarre or incomprehensible, it makes more sense in the context of Jewish prophetic writing, a discourse that has its own symbolic idiom. In the words of the Bible scholar Géza Vermes, ‘Revelation, unlike the Gospel, is a typical Jewish apocalypse in which a belligerent Christ, wearing the warrior’s bloodstained robe, exterminates all the enemies of God before being transformed into a heavenly bridegroom.’* But even the old Hebrew prophets, though they do sometimes pronounce doom on us miserable sinners, don’t lay out the intricate specificity of details about the end of the world in the way that John does. That hadn’t been the Jewish way before, but by the time he came to write his book towards the end of the first century, something profound had changed in the world of the Jews.
In 66 CE the Jewish people staged a prolonged and bloody uprising against Roman rule and the Romans spent the next few years brutally suppressing it. The general in charge, Vespasian, crushed Jewish resistance in the north of Judea and then marched south to lay siege to Jerusalem, where he left the army under the command of his son, Titus. After a seven-month siege, Titus finally broke through Jerusalem’s city walls, the occupants of which were all either killed or enslaved, and most of the city was burnt or torn down. Most terrible of all, so far as the Jews were concerned, Titus broke into the inner sanctum of Judaism: he marched his soldiers through the seven entrances of the great Temple, the heart of Jewish religious praxis, and tore it down.
Jews today still mourn this disaster. The only piece of
the temple still standing, a small fragment of the Western Wall, is a place of pilgrimage to modern Jews, known as the Wailing Wall on account of the public lamentation devout Jews make at that place. Before 70 CE, the Jews lived in Judea, centred around their great Temple in Jerusalem, which was presided over by a high priest. After 70 CE the Jews became a diasporic people scattered all over the world among hostile nations, in an environment poisoned by defeat, oppression and prejudice, setting up synagogues wherever they happened to be staying, with their religious life tended by rabbis, or ‘teachers’, rather than priests. I am always struck by the way that Passover, the most important religious ritual in Judaism, ends with the claim, pitched somewhere between yearning and that blithe invocation of impossibility that characterises human resilience, that wherever we celebrate this year, next year we will celebrate in Jerusalem.
It was in the immediate aftermath of this catastrophe that John wrote his apocalypse. In fact, the word ‘armageddon’ has a grand and global sound to it, although John’s usage was more parochial: ‘ar’ means hill and ‘Megiddo’ is a town in northern Israel, once important as a walled city guarding the trade routes from Egypt to Syria and Turkey. Therefore armageddon means ‘the battle of Megiddo hill’. While John talks about the whole world, he is fixated on a small stretch of land: modern-day Israel, going no further south than Jerusalem, no further north than the Euphrates (which rises in Turkey and flows through Syria), no further east than Babylon (near modern-day Baghdad) and no further west than Rome. We have taken John’s localised world’s end and turned it into a cosmic drama, just as we do with our individual mortalities: magnifying them into a collective disaster.
So, by the time John was writing his book, the world had already suffered its terminal catastrophe, and he was writing in the ruins of the disaster. Something integral to Jewish religious practice had been destroyed, never to return. And though it wasn’t the end of absolutely everything, it certainly felt like it was to a dispossessed Jew and a persecuted follower of the self-declared Jewish messiah Jesus Christ. The coming of the messiah was supposed to signal the end of times, but instead Christ was crucified and history had rolled on. What could it mean? The Gospels record Christ’s own declaration that people with whom he was talking would still be alive when the world ended (Matthew 16:28 and Luke 9:27, for instance). Then, a quarter-century later, the world of the Jews did end.
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 3
