APOCALYPSE WAY BACK WHEN, AND NOW, AND REALLY REALLY SOON

A FIRST FORAY INTO APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE AND ITS INFLUENCE

Guess which were the two most popular non-fiction books in the United States in the 1970’s? The Joy of Sex? Wrong! The most popular non-fiction book was:

“The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsay

And the second most popular book was: “Chariots of the Gods” by Erich von Daniken.

My young friends, this is what your grandparents were reading. My parents had von Daniken in their bookshelf. If you don’t know what they were, look them up. They are what you might call pop Apocalypticism, and they still are madly influential. If it were not for Hal Lindsay, we would not have the kind of Christian nationalism we have today.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.

First of all, the Apocalypse does not mean the end of the world. It is a form of literature. Here is the fairly standard definition, often quoted by scholars, from John Collins (1998):

“A genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”

Adela Yarbro Collins from The Society of Biblical Literature (1986) states that the function of apocalypses is:

“…intended to interpret the present earthly circumstances in the light of the supernatural world, and of the future, and to influence both with the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority”

There are two main types: the heavenly journey, and the review of history. Some apocalypses contain both.

They have many common features. They are mostly written by people pretending to be other people, often ancient heroes such as Moses or Enoch. They often involve predictions “from the event”, predictions after the fact. Eschatology, the end of the world, is often central, and often this end of the world involves a transformation of the world, and the final judgment of individuals. There is often what is called Urzeit/Endzeit, meaning the end mirrors the beginning: the earth is made new.

When we think about an apocalypse we think of The Book of Revelation in the New Testament. There are however apocalypses or proto-apocalypses strewn through the Old Testament as well, and some of these owe their narratives to their Canaanite neighbours, or even to contact during the Exilic period with Zoroastrian Persians. Mesopotamian influences include the common themes in apocalyptic literature of combat myths, prophecies after the fact, and dream visions.

Was Zarathustra’s revelation an apocalypse? I guess so. It was a revelation from a divine being, Ahura Mazda, via an intermediary. It does not involve a journey into heaven, but it does involve a supernatural world, and eschatology. It also occurred at a time of great threat to Zarathustra’s people. Bands of warriors, using the new technology of chariots, were stealing cattle and threatening the pastoral way of life. Cattle always held a great symbolic value for the Indo-European people, as well as being a source of sustenance.

Apocalyptic literature and thought often flourished at difficult times. During the exile in Babylon, Ezekiel prophesied about the world being against Israel, and the king Gog of the kingdom of Magog, and the powers of the world, to wit: Persia. There will be a final battle and then the ideal temple and city will be described. 2 Isaiah sees Cyrus, the Persian king who overtook Babylon and freed the Jews, (sort of), as being a messiah. God says: “I am the first and the last; besides me there is no God”. The proof of God is the redemption of Israel, and in the future all nations will recognize God.

The Hellenic period was particularly fraught for the Jews. After the death of Alexander the Great, his empire in the Middle East was divided among the Ptolemies, who got Egypt, and the Seleucids, who got Syria and lands east. The Jews straddled these rulerships, but ended up under the Seleucids. For a while the Seleucid yoke was not too burdensome, and many Jews became quite Hellenised. Then Antiochus, who ruled over them from 175 to 164 BCE, broke this rather fragile arrangement apart. Antiochus’s persecution of the Jews was not just brutal, but capricious, and aimed at the soul of Judaism. He not only presided over a massacre of thousands, but he sacrificed a swine at the image of Moses and sprinkled the fluids from the sacrifice over the holy books, in punishment for a perceived revolt. This may have led to a real revolt, that of the Maccabees, which began in 167 BCE. This is the background for the Book of Daniel, which was written around 165 BCE.

Daniel is the most developed apocalypse in the Old Testament. It is set during the period of exile in Babylon. The chapter contains Daniel’s interpretations of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and Daniel’s own dreams and visions. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, which Daniel interprets to be about four kingdoms in the future, is reminiscent of the four-kingdom historical arc in Hinduism. The idea of four kingdoms, each lesser than the last, and the final one being replaced by a utopia – except in Daniel’s interpretation, the final kingdom falls by the hand of God, not human effort. In Daniel’s own night vision, the end is near. When the end comes, the archangel Michael will appear, there will be great suffering, and the virtuous will got to live with the angels. There is a lot about the writer’s own times, and this is why the book can be dated so accurately.

These apocalypses are often seen as revenge fantasies. They might also be populist works, propaganda designed to shore up the Jewish population and assure them of victory – if not now, then soon. They are usually about the times of the writer themselves, and they make no account of the distant future. They are not actually about now. They speak to the exigencies of their own times. But I find them interesting reads for another reason. Scholars talk about the sociopolitical context, but I wonder if they are genuine visions. Reading Daniel, it is interesting how much of the story takes place in non-ordinary reality. Dreams and visions are of the greatest import. The wise men who fail to interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s dream are killed. Daniel shows his certainty and faith in God when he offers his own interpretation, which he says comes from God. The visions deeply affect Daniel; he takes days to recover from them. As a person who has done some wandering in non-ordinary reality, it sounds to me like something genuinely happened, in a culture that valued such things. The other thing that makes me wonder is the frequent use of the word “like”. Here is Ezekiel in the New International Version of the Bible, giving rise to the “Biblically correct angel” meme:

^“I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze.  Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

 Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle.  Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upward, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body.  Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went.  The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches. Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.”

Ezekiel can’t quite get there. It was like coals of fire or like torches, but his descriptions are often not straightforward. Non-ordinary reality is like that. It scales wrong, it can’t be seen straight on, it messes with you. It feels to me like the author, whoever they were, has really been somewhere.

Of course there was no Daniel. Daniel was written by someone centuries afterwards. And these books were written often over a period of many years, by many different authors. I have not even begun on some of the best bits, being The Book of Revelation, and the Books of Enoch, because they deserve separate treatment.

Apocalypses are as important now as they ever were, because they have been interpreted over and over, often to make them about the era and the politics of the interpreter. In a weird way they are timeless, because the end is always nigh, we are the good ones and we are always just about to win. In this way, the apocalypse is central to the Cosmic War.

If you are still with me, thank you, nga mihi, and I hope you will read on.

Further exploration: Read Ezekiel, all of it, honestly. And Frederick J Murphy “Apocalypticism in the Bible and its World”