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

began to disobey Tawa’s laws, becoming violent and sexually promiscuous, and so he brought the world to an end and made another. A different Hopi god, Spider Woman, took pity on the few people who were living virtuous lives but were trapped in the first world. She made a bridge out of a giant hollow reed, and the escapees crossed it into the second world, where the cycle began again. Our fourth world will, we can assume, go the same way,* and we can imagine this process happening over and over again. The end of the world becomes not a finality, but a repeating reiteration.

This is, in fact, a feature of the single most influential version of the end of the world ever written: Revelation. Its author was a man who called himself Yohannon but who, as a first-century Greek-speaking Jew, transliterated his name as Ἰωάννης (Iōánnēs). English has further morphed this name into John.

The Revelation of St John is the last book in the canonical Bible. It relates a series of bizarre visions of what the end of the world will look like, and it is the most famous ‘end of the world’ there has ever been. Fanatics and believers still pore over its details, while the popular culture we all consume still has a fascination with this potent vision of the apocalypse. It is manifestly present in modern works as different from one another as Stephen King’s enormous novel The Stand (1978) and Genesis’s lengthy prog-rock song ‘Supper’s Ready’ (1972), as different as the portentous Omen movie series (1976–91) and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s masterly comic pastiche Good Omens (1990). All have fictionalised John’s particularities by updating and recontextualising them. Victorian painter John Martin created gigantic canvases illustrating scenes from Revelation that have directly influenced the work of cinematic special-effects artists to this day in the scope and detail of their representations of disaster. This is the way the world ends: not with a whimper but a bang.

‘Revelation’ is the standard translation of the book’s first word: Ἀπख़κάλυψις, ‘Apocalypse’, a word that originally meant ‘unveiling’, because St John was removing the sheet that veiled the future from us. Perhaps a more up-to-date translation of the word apocalypse would be ‘striptease’: the story certainly takes its time, building up the tension, as it works through its layers of titillating horror. In the video for Robbie Williams’s 2000 single ‘Rock DJ’, the singer performs a striptease before an audience of adoring women, first taking off his clothes, then his skin and finally his flesh, leaving his skeleton dancing and cavorting. That is the kind of striptease that you will be signing up for if you step inside John’s ‘apocalypse’ nightclub.

The bare bones of John’s narrative are worth laying out in a little more detail, both because they have been so influential on later versions of the end of the world and simply because it shows just how drawn out this ending is.

Firstly, John sees a vision of the throne of God, with twenty-four smaller thrones arranged around it. A magic scroll is presented before the big throne. It is sealed with seven wax seals, and the opening of each one is accompanied by a different horrific eventuality that is indicative of the end times. When the first seal is opened, a white horse appears, with the second a red horse, followed by a black horse and finally a pale horse ridden by Death and followed by Hell – the infamous ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’. The fifth seal reveals the souls of those who had been martyred for the word of God, and the sixth seal unleashes a big-budget endof-the-world spectacular:

There was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’*

The events that follow the opening of the sixth seal look pretty comprehensively like the end of the world, but we are only just getting started. The seventh seal discloses seven trumpets, and the sounding of each unleashes a whole new series of terrible world-ending catastrophes: burning hail falls and destroys one-third of the earth’s vegetation; then a flaming mountain falls from the sky, lands in the ocean and destroys one-third of all marine life; the star called Wormwood falls to earth, poisoning the rivers; sunlight, moonlight and starlight lose one-third of their light; a falling meteor opens a smoking abyss in the earth, from which monstrous locust–scorpion hybrids that are shaped like men and wearing iron breastplates swarm. Then four angels that were previously imprisoned in the Euphrates river are released, summoning an army 200 million strong and killing a third of mankind with fire and poisonous gas. The world, says John, is now under the control of the entity that he calls ‘the Beast’.

Just as the seventh seal opened to reveal seven trumpets, each one heralding a further horror, so the seventh trumpet announces the arrival of a new set of seven harbingers of disaster, contained in bowls, although the Greek (phialas) could also be translated as ‘vials’. The contents are not pleasant. The first causes blistering sores on everybody’s skin; the second completely poisons the sea; the third turns the