John writes that disaster and affliction had come upon the world, and more specifically upon the bit of the world that really matters, the bit that has a particular covenant with God. He writes that this world had been destroyed by a series of astonishing horrors, but that it still, somehow, continues. He writes that the world ends in fire, just as Jerusalem was burnt; that the mountains of the world collapsed to rubble, just as the Temple was shattered; that disaster rains down from the sky – one of the main legionary forces that wrecked Judea was the ‘Thunderbolt Twelfth’ and that terrible monsters, shaped like men wearing iron breastplates, ruined the land.
Revelation deliberately hides specific Roman references behind codes and hints. There was a good reason for this: direct attacks on Roman authority might invite sanctions, up to and including crucifixion. For example, by styling the invading Roman legionaries as ‘locust– scorpion’ hybrids, John was stressing their monstrosity; but combine locusts with scorpions and we also have a flying insect with a sharp sting – a wasp. The cognomen vespasianus means ‘the waspy one’; both Vespasian and Titus were surnamed ‘the Wasp’. We can imagine John writing that ‘the Wasp’s people’ had come to plague his country, before deciding that was a little too close to the bone and so disguising the wasps as ‘locust–scorpions’.
John’s ‘Beast’ doesn’t have a name, but he does have a designator: 666 – the ‘number of the Beast’, the number most associated with the end of the world. This too is likely to be a code. In Greece at the time, numbers were notated using letters (Arabic numerals didn’t arrive in Europe until the Middle Ages). The chart below shows which letter corresponded to which number.
αʹ 1
ιʹ 10
ρʹ 100
͵α 1,000
βʹ 2
κʹ 20
σʹ 200
͵β 2,000
γʹ 3
λʹ 30
τʹ 300
͵γ 3,000
δʹ 4
μʹ 40
υʹ 400
͵δ 4,000
εʹ 5
νʹ 50
ϕʹ 500
͵ε 5,000
ϛʹ 6
ξʹ 60
χʹ 600
͵ϛ 6,000
ζʹ 7
oʹ 70
ψʹ 700
͵ζ 7,000
ηʹ 8
πʹ 80
ωʹ 800
͵η 8,000
θʹ 9
ϙʹ 90
ϡʹ 900
͵θ 9,000
In the first century CE, it was common to add up the numerical values of the letters of a person’s name to get a number to represent that person. ‘Isopsephy’ – to use the splendidly tongue-twistery technical term – was very common at the time. Graffiti scrawled on the walls at Pompeii from that time often plays these games: ‘I love her whose number is 545’; ‘Amerimnus pondered well his lady Harmonia. The number of her honourable name is 45.’ It’s a fun game,* if you want to keep a name hidden, for erotic reasons – or indeed for reasons of political expediency.
So whose name is encoded in 666? Most scholars think it refers to Nero, who was Roman emperor when the Jewish rebellion began. But Nero died before Jerusalem fell, and it was not he who destroyed the Temple. I think it is more likely that 666 is Titus, the Roman general who ended the world of the Jews when he sacked Jerusalem and tore down the Temple. Titus afterwards became emperor himself. Indeed, if John wrote Revelation in 79, 80 or 81 CE – perfectly possible dates for its composition – he was writing when Titus was Caesar.
My larger point is that John is describing something simultaneously local, specific and historical, and something universal, general and spiritual. He is doing so because for him Jerusalem is both an earthly city and a spiritual actualisation of God in the world. It’s for that reason that Revelation has such a jarring psychedelic oddness to it: what we are looking at are two images superposed one over the other. John of Patmos treated a localised disaster as having a cosmic as well as a local significance. How could it not, for a Jew in 80 CE?
To be clear: I’m not suggesting that John of Patmos wrote a historical account of the fall of Jerusalem rather than a prophetic account of the end of the world. Revelation is, manifestly, the latter and not the former. After all, if John had wanted to write a historical narrative he could have done so, just as his fellow Greek-speaking Jew Josephus did, without any surreal and symbolic bizarreness. John is certainly writing a prophetic account of the end of the world – it’s just that he is using a historical event as the prototype for that coming end. For John, Jerusalem was the heart of the world and its destruction enacts, in all its particulars, the coming destruction of the world.
I’ve discussed John’s Revelation at length partly because it has proved so influential on the way art and literature imagine Armageddon, and because my reading of it draws out the ideas I consider important about how we conceptualise the world’s end: the idea that it happens not once, but over and over again, each resulting in a new beginning; and that the grand statements of apocalypse all relate back to something parochial.
But it’s also important because of the way this story has been interpreted and, in some cases, affected real-world events. People have looked for a reflection of the book’s symbols in the world around them to predict the real end of times.
In 1000 CE, the reign of the English king Ethelred was paralysed not so much by the ongoing Viking raids on his kingdom as by the warnings of his clergy, most prominently Wulfstan, the Bishop of London, that these raids should be welcomed in order that the millennial apocalypse could be fulfilled. The belief that John’s millennium was coming true crippled Ethelred’s ability to defend his kingdom. Various popes, political leaders and VIPs have been proposed for the role of John’s Beast: Pierre Bezukhov, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), becomes obsessed by a theory that Napoleon Bonaparte is the beast, and tries to make the French emperor’s name fit the number it was designated: 666. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, that dreadful explosion at a Ukrainian nuclear reactor, Revelation-literalists became very excited by the fact that the variety of wormwood scientifically known as Artemisia vulgaris is called ‘Chernobyl’ in Russian – despite the fact the disaster did not poison all the rivers in the world and although a nuclear reactor is hardly a star that can fall from the sky.
In some ways it is understandable: there is an ornate fretwork of bizarre details but they all come down to superficial changes on two fundamental themes running throughout the story. One is what we might call ‘environmental disaster’: fire and poison falling from the sky, the dying back of vegetation, drought and the contamination of the oceans. The other is political: evil rulers oppress the ordinary people of the world, and soldiers invade the land. Famine and natural disaster are made much worse by war, massacre and destruction. Take away the fanciful grotesqueries in which John’s imagination clothes his account and we have something not just familiar but perennial.
And so, as the influence of Revelation spread and the context in which it was written became obscured, people reinterpreted it in terms of their own situations. If you were English in 1000 CE, Viking raids, political instability and the imminence of the very millennium John mentions would have convinced you that the world is ending. If you were an American evangelical in the 1980s who had just discovered that the Russian for wormwood is Chernobyl, then you might convince yourself that the world is ending. It’s possible that you are finding yourself struck by elements in the world today that seem to match moments in John’s potent book – oceanic dieback, acid falling as rain, myriad environmental pollutions and ongoing war. If you are, you’re doing exactly what Revelation invites you to do: stepping from the personalised local to the generalised cosmic and back again. That is natural, because cosmic apocalypse always has an impact on our individual situation. Any death ends the world of that one person; this specificity is inevitable – it’s just not important. And at t
he risk of sounding paradoxical, the fact that it is not important is where its importance lies. We’re all ordinary, but this extraordinary thing will happen to each of us: we will die. St John returns again and again to the horror of this, until a magic door opens for a chosen few and they step through into a new heaven and a new earth.
* Phil Torres, ‘How religious and non-religious people view the apocalypse’, The Bulletin, 18 August 2017.
* Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 8.
* Since Frankenstein stands at the head of a long tradition of science fiction about scientific hubris, of stories of science creating something over which it loses control, it is worth noting that Mary Shelley subtitled her novel ‘The New Prometheus’. She had a different myth about Prometheus in mind when she did this, but let’s not split hairs. Or, indeed, livers.
* Prometheus suffered profuse Zeus abuse.
* William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
* ‘According to the Chinese view, the circumpolar stars represent the palace surrounding the emperor, who is the pole star, and the various members of the celestial bureaucracy. Indeed, the Chinese saw the night sky as a mirror of the empire, and saw the empire as a mirror of the sky, on earth.’ Alexus McLeod, Astronomy in the Ancient World: Early and Modern Views on Celestial Events (Springer, 2016), pp. 89–90.
* Tom Shippey, ‘Gloomy/Cheerful’, London Review of Books, 3 January 2008, p. 22.
* The question of what will happen in this fourth world is complicated by the question of whether the Hopi conceptualise past, present and future in the ways we do. It used to be thought the Hopi language was tenseless, which would put the concept of a future end of the world in question; the consensus now is that they do have tenses, although the matter is still being debated.
* Revelation 6:12–17.
* Géza Vermes, Christian Beginnings from Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30–325 (Penguin, 2012), p. 116.
* My own name, Aδάμ, sums to forty-six, which I’ll be honest strikes me as a little disappointing (I don’t even stretch to a half-century!).
A SWARM OF UNDEAD: THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
You are one of the last human beings left alive. You’ve hidden for as long as your supplies lasted, but now you must venture outside to find more, or starve. You should tread carefully, because in every street, shambling across every garden, their flesh rank and yet still moving inexorably on, are zombies, hordes of zombies, everywhere, and all of them have only one thing on their mind: to get to you, tear you to pieces and devour you as they come shambling towards you, their flesh rotting and their eyes blank.
It’s the premise of thousands of books and films, a scenario so common as to approach cliché. St John’s was the dominant vision of apocalypse for generations, but the zombie apocalypse is now more familiar. This is the way the world ends now – not with a bang, but with a monster.
Halfway between religion and science are those myths in which we don’t actually believe but that shape our lives anyway. Most people don’t believe in ghosts, vampires and zombies, and yet these stories are everywhere in our culture. None, however, have figured quite so prominently in end-of-the-world scenarios as zombies. From George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) to the big-budget Hollywood movie World War Z (2013), zombies have become a screen phenomenon. There are even books that offer readers advice on how to survive any future zombie apocalypse.* These tend to combine a jaunty tongue-in-cheek tone with practical advice, combining a wry sense that it’s not serious with the material information we would need if it were. It’s a striking combination of qualities, as if we neither want to believe in these monsters nor altogether want to sacrifice our belief in them.
Why is it that zombies have become one of the most popular portrayals of the end, more so than any other monster? Partly perhaps because the zombie genre is so versatile; its themes of death, decay, mass-destruction and loss of control can be a useful metaphor for many things. Clearly they speak to our anxieties about death, both as individuals and as a species, but their reanimated corpses can also point to fears of cannibalism, the supersession of thought by empty craving, brainwashing, speechlessness and the herd instinct, to name a few.
So while the ‘zombie’ trope has become somewhat ubiquitous, there are plenty of examples of writers and directors using the zombie to brilliant and unique effect – although in fear of provoking a ‘whatever’-shrug of world-weary readers resistant to cliché they often steer clear of the Z-word itself. So it is that The Walking Dead (2003–19), a series of graphic novels written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore, and later adapted into a successful TV series, talks not of zombies but of ‘walkers’. These gruesome figures provide a constant backdrop of threat and menace to The Walking Dead’s post-disaster gritty soap opera; even when they’re not the main focus of the storyline, and the survivors are busy grappling with each other, they’re lurking round the edges, almost fading into the background. The walkers could be said to represent our dread of the real world around us; our sense that outside our small circles of life and work the world is a horrible and dangerous place.
Likewise, Justin Cronin’s blockbuster trilogy, The Passage (2010), The Twelve (2012) and The City of Mirrors (2016), explores our fears of plague and disease – presciently so for works written before the Covid-19 global lockdown – with his zombie–vampire hybrids as ‘virals’. Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One (2011), set in a New York overrun with ‘skels’, uses its premise powerfully to explore the anxieties of contemporary urban America, including immigration. And M. R. Carey’s deftly handled novel The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) is written from the point of view of an intelligent and self-aware zombie girl, a ‘hungry’, being studied in a facility. With the characters searching for a cure by any means necessary, including killing and dissecting these almost human-like child zombies, the story thoughtfully explores conflicts between scientific endeavour, ethics and compassion, as well as the struggle for survival and evolution.
Whether cliché or unique, our modern portrayals of the zombie have evolved considerably since its origins as a specifically Haitian, voodoo idea, in which a sorcerer is able to reanimate the dead, but they are fully under his control. As the science fiction writer Charlie Stross* notes: ‘The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations. These stories are fairly transparently about the slaves’ fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death.’
Shuffling out of the margins of empire, from Haiti and the French Antilles, zombies made the leap from folklore to film in director Victor Halperin’s surprise hit White Zombie (1932) in which Bela Lugosi plays a mill-owner in Haiti who uses voodoo not only to control his black zombie workers, but to control a beautiful young white woman too – ‘With These Zombie Eyes He Rendered Her Powerless,’ screamed the posters, over a lurid representation of the creature’s stare. ‘With This Zombie Grip He Made Her Perform His Every Desire!’
As times and society gradually changed, signalling the end of slavery and of white supremacy, so the idea of the zombie changed with it – unleashing them from their masters, and leaving them free to run rampant across the world. As Stross says:
This narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV and fiction, where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner’s reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.*
In its origins, the zombie is undeniably a racialised figure, but in the last half-century its connotations with race have largely disappeared. An echo of the original narrative still exists in its own guise, as concerns regarding racial discrimination in its many forms have not gone away. Part
icularly in America, the Black Lives Matter protests have spread across the country in response to police brutality and the targeting of the black population, and this continuing struggle for equality is still discernible in popular culture. Get Out (2017) may not have featured the characteristic zombies we have come to recognise today, but in the horrifying kidnapping and brainwashing of its black victims, we can certainly recognise the zombie in its original form, and related fears of domination and oppression.
Nowadays, of course, the word ‘zombie’ conjures a different picture. The general consensus of their characteristics is that they look like us – ordinary people in dressed-down clothes – but in some state of decay, their flesh rotting, body parts missing, blank-eyed and void of consciousness. In most cases they move with a stumbling, forward shuffle. They are motivated not by rational thought but by hunger to reach us, the living: to devour our brains and to make us like them.
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is the movie that set in motion the rise of the zombie as we know it in popular culture. It features the African American actor Duane Jones as protagonist, leading the survivors. This was a bold casting choice by Romero, and works as a deliberate inversion of the racist connotations that Stross identifies. But Romero’s many zombie sequels, and the many more films made by other directors, move beyond race as a focus.
It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) Page 4
