The Enduring Mythology of Apocalypse

Modern prophecy scenarios are in fact updated versions of very ancient ones. In some cases highly specific beliefs have been transmitted intact for over 1500 years or more.- Paul Boyer

In my previous posts I tried to demonstrate how the apocalyptic myth emerged as a fantasy of supreme power in a precarious moment for Christianity (and Judaism before it), and I explored how apocalyptic forms a specific tradition in Western art that has lasted well over a thousand years. Religious and art history are specialized fields, and apocalyptic art and religion form subgenres within them, so I have not yet suggested how pervasive apocalyptic thinking has been to Western civilization. It has been a driving force behind not just minor episodes, such as the radical Protestant revolts of the 16^th-century, but also the Crusades and the Cold War. Revelations has been the obsession not just of kooks and cult leaders like Charles Manson and David Koresh, but some of history’s most important figures: Christopher Columbus thought that his discovery of the new world was prophesied and portended the end of the world, Martin Luther thought the world would end by 1600, and Isaac Newton wrote a commentary on thebooks of Daniel and Revelations. The Book of Revelations has been the favorite of nearly-illiterate authors of populist political tracts. Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More describes how American pamphleteers used Revelations to agitate against the British during the time of the American Revolution, interpreting the Stamp Act as the infamous “mark of the beast,” without which one cannot buy or sell. It has generated pulp novels, such as the recent Left Behind series, which as political as it is eschatological, casting the antichrist as—of all things—the secretary-general of the United Nations. On the other hand, it has also influenced some of the greatest poets of the Western canon: Dante, Milton, Blake, Shelley, and Yeats.

More important than the specific events and people who have been influenced by the apocalypse myth is the fact that the nearly two-thousand year-old visions of John of Patmos have entered into the deep structure of our civilization, forming a mythology which forms a dark undercurrent to our official mythology of perpetual progress, and undercurrent which forces its way to the surface in times of great social conflict and anxiety in the face of an uncertain future.

Fiction

Reality

The corpse is a new personality.- Gang of Four

Apocalyptic ideas and themes continue to inform films and novels even in our secular and scientific age. If you don’t believe that this mythology has shaped the popular consciousness today, then I have one word for you: zombies. The dead rising from their graves has its ultimate source in Revelations’ description of the last judgment (see my post on apocalyptic art for zombie imagery in a gothic cathedral). The zombie genre, like the biblical genre of apocalypse, was largely the creation of one visionary during a time of social turmoil (though Romero and John of Patmos both built upon and transformed prior influences). George Romero’s Nightof the Living Dead, the first modern zombie film, opened in 1968. The story of undead cannibals can be read as an allegory for the racial (the black protagonist is mistaken for one of the undead and shot by redneck cops) and generational (a young child attacks and devours her unwitting parents) conflicts that seemed to be tearing apart the fabric of American society in the 1960s. The 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead, satirized consumer culture by staging the battle between zombies and survivors in a mall (satire being a decidedly un-apocalyptic mode), but this can also be seen as an expression of economic anxieties in the age of stagflation (a perfect economic storm that combines high consumer goods prices with high unemployment). Later Romero films and their knockoffs became a recognized horror sub-genre, but they didn’t enjoy mass popularity until the 2000s, which have seen a remake of Dawn of the Dead, three more installments of Romero’s Living Dead series, 28 Days Later (and its lackluster sequel), Zombieland, and a television series, The Walking Dead, just to name a few. Why are zombies so popular? I believe that zombies are figures of apocalyptic dread, and with the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and the prospect of global warming and peak oil, we have plenty of reasons to wonder what kind of future, if any, our civilization has. 

It's not just zombie movies, either. Apocalyptic themes have recently become popular in more “serious” genres as well, from art-house films such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (perhaps also his apocalyptically-named Antichrist, but I haven't seen it) and Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, to novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, which was of course also made into a movie.

Fiction

Reality

It should be noted that the modern apocalyptic genre by and large dispenses with God as an eschatological agent and replaces it with nature, (typically in the form of diseases and natural disasters), but Gaia proves to be as vengeful a master as Jehovah. In its more fantastic modes it merely changes the apocalyptic monsters from angels, demons, and beasts from the sea into zombies, aliens, and vampires. What is truly different in the modern apocalypse is its ending. With few exceptions, at the end of these films and novels are a small number of humans (perhaps only one, perhaps even none) who have survived the catastrophe. The religious command of repent-and-be-saved is replaced by the Darwinian imperative of survive-at-all-costs. The building of Zion is deferred, left as an ambiguous hope at best. The old version of apocalypse was a brutal fantasy, but in the end it offered utopia. The new secular iteration is far more pessimistic, doubtful that humanity is worthy of a new earth, much less a new heaven.