Apocalypticism

Today may be a suitable day to speak on this subject in that, based on the biblical calculations of Harold Camping, May 21, 2011 is the first day of the end times. These times will extend and conclude on October 21 of this year. Camping is an 89-year old retired civil engineer and religious radio figure (Family Radio). There have been at least a score of such predictions in my lifetime, of the western variety, thus all based on various calculations using biblical references, particularly Revelation and Daniel.

End-times are a favorite subject of mine, albeit in the much more limited sense of cyclic history—thus the end of civilizations. Thus I thought I’d look things up. Come to think of it, the two subjects are closely linked, certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Apocalypse (meaning the Book of Revelation) appeared in a time when the Graeco-Roman civilization was entering its end-stages. The date of the book is unknown but falls somewhere between the first and second centuries of our era. In rough terms, I would say, the Roman civilization fell apart between 44 BC, with Caesar, and 305 AD, when Diocletian’s reign ended. He was the one who formally split the empire. In times like that, above all, sensitive souls intuit that something is wrong. All manner of Gnosticisms rise; in our case, for instance, in the form of existentialism. Sophistication and book-learning are wide-spread. People read—and they do so because others write. Our peculiar version of that is that everybody writes—but nobody reads…

Imposing some sort of structure onto the maddeningly structure-less nature of sheer, brute Duration must be at least one reason why apocalypticism is a perennial fruit of human civilization. It becomes acute in hard times—and attracts particularly the elderly. The latter have actual cause for having end-time feelings. These begin to rise geometrically as we pass 75—and what I feel must be the very law of the universe. Mustn’t it? Let the wicked finally be punished; and let me be saved from the turmoil of the end-times.

I note that the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least my 1956 version, restricts the subject to Christian speculation, but Wikipedia, the now encyclopedia, avoid the word itself and substitutes “End of the World” instead. And it embraces a wider cultural interpretation. We learn there that apocalypticism has the same structure all around the world. There is a definite, precise, calculable end—take that, insufferable Duration. Evil, very often personified, is finally defeated. And the blessings of timelessness are always brought to us by a divine or divine-like grand benevolent figure.

It was already so in Mazdaism, Zoroastrianism, said to be humanity’s first higher religion (second millennium BC). With the end-times will come the Saoshyant, the savior. In China and in a Taoist tradition, Ling Ho will appear and set heaven and earth back into proper alignment. The Hindus have the most grandiose scheme of all, first in showing featureless duration where its place is, second in preempting false alarms by using very long periods and with great precision. Thus they divide time into eras or ages, yugas; these come in sets of four, 432 000 years—but the first is multiplied by 4, the second by 3, the third by 2, and so on. We are now in the last or fourth of the yugas of this particular dispensation, the Kali Yuga. The savior who shall appear at the end of it is Kalki, whose image (thanks to Wikipedia here) I am reproducing. It will be a while yet before Kalki arrives. The Kali Yuga began on midnight on February 18, 3102 BC, therefore we have another 426,887 years to go. Each yuga is divided in turn into ten dispensations ruled by a Great Incarnation of Vishnu, of which Kalki is the tenth. The other image, above, is the monogram for the Antichrist.

I like the Hindu version of apocalypticism best of all. Plenty of time to see if the strawberries we planted, and I enclosed in a protective mesh against the rabbits yesterday, will actually eventually, with a little help from Duration, end up in a bowl with my breakfast.