It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

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 the 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