The Dangers of an Unchanging Foe

Like so many other things regarding End-Times speculation, apocalyptic enemies are full of paradoxes.  They are at once particular to the Final Days – such as the Antichrist or al-Dajjal – yet are also composed of perennial foes – heretics, schismatics, hypocrites, violent oppressors, non-believers, demon-influenced, etc.  Some traditions and sub-traditions emphasize some of these more than others, and the identification of serious threats often changes, though some groups (unfortunately often Jewish people) are frequent targets of accusations of satanic involvement.  Yet above and beyond merely attributing nefarious intentions to a single group across centuries, some people excited by the idea of apocalypse take the idea of a perennial threat a bit further.  To them, there are not many threats but, in fact, only one.

The idea behind an unchanging foe pairs with those who believe that those who are good, righteous, and virtuous have been isolated to a single group throughout history as well.  Righteousness, to such people, has not entailed historical change, illumination, and development but has been complete and crystal clear from the beginning.  Morality was fully developed and comprehensible 4,000 years ago, and nothing since has added to it, and nothing must in any way be taken away from it.  This is an extreme view even among the Abrahamic faiths, since Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious thinkers recognize historical change and in-time revelation.  But if such be the case, that a single, obvious, unchanging morality has always existed, then immorality must be equally timeless and comprehensible.  And if there has always been a group of divinely blessed individuals abiding by the eternal moral code, according to such belief, it only makes sense that all the evil throughout time shares not only the same moral failings endemic to humanity but an organized will hell-bent on opposing divine goodness.

Certainly Satan has frequently been invoked in these speculations as the demonic mastermind behind human evil.  But this is not what I mean.  I mean, and so do those who frequently espouse such ideas, a very human threat.

Since even before the Protestant Reformation, the pope has been called an (or the) Antichrist.  After Martin Luther in the 16th century helped establish the many Protestant churches, the entirety of Catholicism came to be seen as in league with Satan (of course, Catholics would say similar things about Protestants).  But accusations of wickedness and heresy were not new.  By definition, no Christian heresy could trace its origin before Pentecost, though one might be accused of having Jewish or pagan influence.  But in the mid-19th century, a new argument emerged.  What if the Catholic Church were older than Jesus Christ and had its origin not in Judaism but in satanic paganism?  That is what Alexander Hislop, a Scottish minister, argued in his work, “The Two Babylons: Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife” (1853).  Hislop wrote that Nimrod, the king in Genesis responsible for building the tower of Babel in mockery of God, founded a pagan religion that survives to the present day.  Its deities, ceremonies, festivals, organization, goals, methods, and (especially, despite the anachronism) anti-Christian beliefs were preserved after the fall of Babel in many pagan cultures.  A core part of its followers, however, were always aware of its origins and held an immortal hatred for “true” godliness.  After Christ came and departed once more, this “Babylonian” religion first tried to destroy Christianity.  When that failed, it instead became Christianity in the form of the pope of Rome and the Catholic Church.  For over a thousand years, the Church was actually an anti-Christian organization.  Any opposition to the hierarchical church before 1517 was not based on historical pressures particular to the time and place they occurred but rather the elect of God, hidden among the ungodly, trying to break free.  Though that finally happened with Martin Luther, the Catholic/Babylonian Church continued to exist.  Why?  Because it is the Babylon spoken of in Revelation 17, that is, the ultimate foe for Christians at the End of Time.  Thus, according to Hislop, a secret war has been waged by Babylon for thousands of years against God.  Though many are ignorant of the true purpose of Babylon, its leaders are not.  Its form has altered, but its essence has been unchanging since the Beginning and will remain so until the End.

Absolutely nothing in Hislop’s theory is historically accurate, so I will not trouble disproving it here.  Nevertheless, Hislop’s ideas (both regarding Catholicism in particular and conspiracies in general) have endured.  An older, equally absurd, yet still persistent and harmful conspiracy involves Jews as secretly in constant, universal contact, plotting various crimes.  In both the distant past and more recently, accused groups have included members of the Masonic Lodge, pagans, witches, communists, Knights Templars, and the always ambiguous Illuminati.  In popular culture, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code has made the Priory of Zion, the powerful but secretive keepers of the knowledge of Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s child, a similar type of organization.  For the Ubisoft game series Assassin’s Creed, the Knights Templar (historically formed in the 12th century but, in-game, dating back far longer) fill the role of eternally nefarious secret organization.  The Templars are opposed by the equally undying and virtuous secret order of Assassins.  And in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), Ra’s al Ghul reveals to the hero, “The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plague rats, burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance.”  One-world-governments frequently play into such conspiracies, both expressly fictional and those repeated in earnest.  Though Hislop was merely peddling religious bigotry, it is easy to see why he gained fame for it: conspiracy makes entertaining stories by weaving historical events together into a larger pattern of absolute good against absolute evil.

Of course, that is the problem.  When something is obviously a story, it can be fun.  But when a real life group is cast as an eternal enemy, a foe that has remained true to its secretive and evil plans – plans that are antithetical to any sense of morality and goodness – for hundreds if not thousands of years, terrible things happen.  The salacious anti-Semitic hoax known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1903) was used to grave effect against Jewish peoples in the 20th century and still finds advocates of its lies to this day.  But perhaps you think that conspiracies like that are quickly spotted these days and easily dismissed?  Sadly, that is not true.

On the political stage, since his declaration of candidacy for president in 2015 to the present, Donald Trump has cultivated the myth of an eternal, unchanging enemy.  In these efforts, he has found many targets: Mexicans, Muslims, the European Union, Democrats, journalists, socialists, the “deep-state,” and a host of others.  Don’t be confused: he does not simply target these groups as enemies but as “eternal” enemies.  Trump frequently gives way to exaggeration (when not outright lies), especially superlatives.  But he also tends to dilate the length of a grievance.  Note how he uses “always” or any reference to “for a long time now.”  He uses such words and phrases frequently when talking about his enemies.  He does not place (even valid) grievances in an historical context but into a vague perpetuity.

The Orwellian line, “We have always been at war with Eastasia,” (or, “We have always been at war with Eurasia”) is apt.  This line is often quoted to mean one is to think a former ally is now an enemy because the state says so.  The “always” is unconsciously thought to mean “you were mistaken if you believed we had been allies last week.”  But “always” is also very vague.  This bit of propaganda from Orwell’s 1984 does not give any details.  Why should it?  Details are harmful to propaganda.  It does not say, “We have been at war with Eastasia since we were attacked on such-and-such a date.”  Eastasia is not a new enemy with historical reasons for enmity with Oceania (us).  It is a perpetual enemy – until it becomes an ally, in which case it has always been one, while Eurasia has always been the enemy.  Saying what caused the war or when would only lead to thinking, which would interfere with obedience.

Trump’s vague language about grievances is in perfect lock-step with ideas regarding an eternal, unchanging foe.  It is no surprise that he also casts these foes (whomever they happen to be) as the worst of all possible enemies, whose very existence threatens the life of this country.  Eternal, unchanging foes are inherently powerful and apocalyptic.  Any violence against them is justified.  Any accommodation with them is treason.  Their defeat must happen, or else all is lost.  When they are defeated, a great evil will pass from this world.  What could be more apocalyptic?

And of how much evil has such thinking been the cause?

Do Not Open Until Doomsday

“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”

-Oath of the Night’s Watch, Game of Thrones, G. R. R. Martin

The life and deeds of Alexander the Great, king of Macedon and conqueror of the Persian Empire, inspired myths and fanciful imaginings long after his death in 323 BCE.  Among these was the legends of the Gates of Alexander.  Though not begun by Christian authors, the legend eventually became popular among Christians interests in political and especially apocalyptic prophecies.

According to the story, while campaigning in the East, Alexander came upon a coalition of particularly savage and powerful armies.  Rather than fight them, he ordered that in a mountain pass a wall be built, made of iron with magic worked into the structure itself, with a gate that could not be opened – at least, not until the appointed time.  The peoples on the other side, according to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors, were the prophetic and mysteriously powerful armies of Gog and Magog.  It was said that the gates, often thought to lie in the Caucasus Mountains, would be broken at the start of the End Times.  The fierce and bloodthirsty armies would pour out of their prison to ravage the civilized lands, terrorizing all good and holy peoples.  Fanciful historians throughout time have attempts to give historical identities to these hordes, from the Scythians to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  Whoever they were, their emergence would mean that the End had finally come.

The fact that the identity of Gog and Magog changed throughout the life of this apocalyptic legend is important.  As people tried to place recognizable features and names to the mysterious Gog and Magog, they revealed what they considered to be things or peoples they considered suspect, reprehensible, or enemies waiting for a chance to slaughter without mercy.  They projected their biases across Alexander’s Gates, painting the hordes beyond to resemble those they hated and distrusted in the world around them.  This habit is not unique to the Alexander legend.

Emperor Hadrian erected a wall across northern England in the 2nd century to establish the limit of Roman military power.  While it remained fortified, though there was violence between Romans and locals (the same was true wherever Rome had an armed border), there was also the peaceful movement of people and trade.  It was a semipermeable barrier.  Hadrian’s Wall might have been seen as the end of the Roman Empire’s political authority, but it was not the edge of the world – those who lived on it did not expect to fall off if they crossed it.  Despite this historical reality, the myth of Hadrian’s Wall as a boundary between the civilized and the barbaric, order and chaos, peace and war, or life and death, has remained a popular idea.  Movies like The Last Legion (2007), Centurion (2010), The Eagle (2011), and King Arthur (2004) use Hadrian’s Wall in this very manner.  Even when some peoples on the other side are presented in a more sympathetic light, the lands north of the wall are still shown as threatening for any Rome to enter.  The Great Wall of China has been used in similar ways.

In art, prophecy, and popular culture, these walls must stand – or else!  But “or else” what?  Or else death and destruction, the ruining of a proud, noble culture?  Roman legions left off manning Hadrian’s Wall because of tax problems and internal issues back on continental Europe.  Their wall fell because they abandoned it; it was not overwhelmed by “barbarians.”  China’s Great Wall has been reworked and expanded many times over the centuries to keep out the nomadic steppe peoples.  But when the Mongols came in, they made China the center of the largest empire the world has even seen.  These are the historical realities, and they clash with our expectations of what happens when a wall is breached.  Why is that?  Because, for a variety of historical, cultural, or psychological reasons, when we see walls, we have the propensity to imagine they are protecting us from something.  The great the wall, the greater the danger, or so we assume.

The best example of a wall in popular culture today is the Wall in HBO’s Game of Thrones.  It is a 600-foot-tall wall of ice, stretching from sea to sea, blocking off the northern barbaric peoples from the civilized southerners (an image G. R. R. Martin lifted and exaggerated from ideas surrounding Hadrian’s Wall).  The oath that the Night’s Watch (the defenders of the) take dehumanizes those on the other side.  “I am the watcher on the walls.  I am the shield that guards the realms of men.”  Are not their enemies also men?  Martin’s books and the TV series is good enough later on to (somewhat) humanize the “Free Folk” north of the Wall.  Ultimately, though these people are raiders and live lives antithetical to the rigid hierarchies of their southern neighbors, these people are not apocalyptic enemies destined to bring complete ruin to Westeros (though some guarding the Wall have thought so).  They are people, and Martin loves making villains sympathetic while tainting heroes.

And yet there is a 600-foot wall.  There must be a great evil on the other side.  And indeed there is.  An army of the dead, raised by ancient, cursed souls, are waiting on the other side.  They are bringing nothing but death.  They will fight, they will kill, and the world will end.  With this enormous edifice taking a central role in the setting, we the reader and viewer expect something equally powerful and existentially threatening to match our half-formed mental image of evil that can only be stopped (but not killed) if imprisoned in a far-distant land behind such a wall.

To put it another way: where there is a wall, we will imagine it protects us from a danger whose power is in proportion not to the reality behind it but to its size in our cultural identity.  As the wall stands, we will gradually develop reasons to resent those on the other side of it.  Certainly, reasons will be given why such a wall was built to begin with, but the founding motivations, good or bad, will vanish as the years pass.  Whatever the original builders had in mind, only one fact will remain: there is a permanent wall separating us from them.  Sooner or later, this will lead to only one conclusion: “The wall exists because those on the other side are evil.  They are barbarians.  They are the bringers of death and destruction.  They are chaos while we are order.  If the wall ever falls, all will be lost.”

In the human mind, such walls are signs of a rotting edifice, hiding, not protecting, those who build them.  For even if the motivations be pure, the end is dehumanization.  The greater the wall, the more those on the other side will be seen as harbingers of the apocalypse, as enemies of humanity, even though they, too, are only human.  And yet the gates will stay barred, with a sign above them reading, “Do not open until Doomsday.”

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”

-“Mending Wall,” Robert Frost

Defining the Apocalypse

Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.
Block: And you will reveal your secrets?
Death: I have no secrets.
Block: So you know nothing?
Death: I am unknowing.

—The Seventh Seal, 1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman

Last October, I gave a lecture to a medieval history class about apocalyptic beliefs.  I opened the class the same way I have similar ones.  I asked, “What does ‘apocalypse’ mean?”  (My advisor starts his apocalypse course in a similar way, and I have adapted his approach.)  The answer, even from some of the non-traditional adult students, was typical.  They defined it as a disaster, the end of all things, human extinction, the end of the world, and so forth.  I think the vast majority of people would give the same answers.  They are all right in terms of popular culture, but quite wrong when discussing the apocalypse until relatively recently.

“Apocalypse,” derived from Greek, means “to unveil” or “to reveal.”  That is why the last book of the New Testament is called variously The Apocalypse or The Revelation of St. John of Patmos—it is the vision “revealed” to him of future events.  There is a long series of changes in the history of the word, but it isn’t too hard to understand that, over the course of 2,000 years, the word for the knowledge John received became a shorthand for the book he wrote, which in turn came to denote its frightening contents.  While “apocalypse” will almost universally be used today to mean something horrible of global significance, it is important to not forget its use and meaning in days long past.

As scholars have discussed (but especially Norman Cohn in his book, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith), the concept of linear cosmic time is relatively knew and was an innovation from cyclical cosmic time.  In other words, long before the Abrahamic faiths, people in the Near East tended to believe in gods of order that were part of an endless struggle with the forces of chaos.  Victory was always temporary, and renewal was a typical motif for these ancient religions.  When monotheism began to develop with the Hebrews and Zoroastrians roughly 3000 years ago (though the timing is quite debatable), the traditional view of the cosmos began to change.  These people believed in one God who was not only all powerful, the maker of heaven and earth (which might also be subject to ultimate destruction), but was also a moral judge, a being who cared not just for maintaining a static cosmic order by any means necessary but one who wanted things done according to a code of right behavior.  These two ideas came together in trying to solve the problem of evil: why do bad things happen to good people and not only to bad people?  The answer for previous peoples had been: if you suffer evil, you must have deserved it somehow.  The new answer, however, was tied closely to a monotheistic god’s absolute power, his role as moral judge, and the belief in a finite amount of time to human history (that is, linear time leading to a conclusion rather than cyclical time continuing forever).  This new answer was: if bad things happen to a good person now, in the world to come after this life, God will provide the perfect judgment for eternity that is lacking in this present life, even if we don’t know or can’t understand it yet.  In other words, the mystery of why good people suffer will remain hidden until a later day when God will reveal the truth, and we will understand his ultimate purposes.  Since that answer was formulated many centuries ago, there have been people who have claimed to have received special revelations about what is hidden behind the veil that separates human knowledge from divine knowledge.  John of Patmos, the author of the last book in the New Testament, is one such person, though there are many others.  Because “apocalyptic” knowledge of the future was closely tied in with awaiting the just reward for good people who had suffered and the righteous punishment of the wicked who had prospered, many apocalypses tended to speak of violence before humanity would received complete divine understanding, but apocalypses certainly did not require such horrors.  Nevertheless, it is John’s vision of dragons, beasts, the four horsemen, two-faced leaders, plagues, global disasters, and wars on earth and in heaven that most people in the United States think of when they consider “apocalypse” in a religious sense.  Modern secular apocalypses owe much to John as well, even when spiritual matters are the least of their concerns.

The shift in meaning for “apocalypse” carrying the sense of an “unveiling” to one of death and destruction, as I said, is a long one.  I think, however, that world events in the first half of the 20th century greatly helped to encourage the more recent definition.  Art also played a large part.  The 1957 Ingmar Bergman classic, The Seventh Seal, is a prime example, coming at about the time when the old definition of “apocalypse” ceased to have much meaning for the general public.  The story of The Seventh Seal follows a knight named Bloch, his cynical squire, and companions they meet along the way.  The story takes place during the Black Death, a time in the 14th century when 1/3 of people in Europe (not to mention huge numbers in Asia and North Africa) died of the bubonic plague.  Bloch, returning home after many years away, sees the widespread death around him.  He does not fear death as such (he even plays a friendly game of chess with a personified Death in order to buy himself time to get home).  No, what troubles Bloch is not death but the silence of God.  It was Hamlet’s “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no travel returns,” that gave him pause.  Block refused to believe like his squire that nothing but oblivion awaited us after death, but he lacked any evidence to refute him.  At one point, Bloch speaks to a young woman (condemned to be burned as a witch) to see if he could have a word with Satan.  Surely he must know something about God!  But the devil does not come.  Even Bloch’s banter with Death over chess gives witness to the knight’s hope that he will be able to peak behind the veil and gain some assurance that there is a divine plan and what it might be.  When Death says he cannot answer Bloch’s questions, he explains that it is not because he as Death has secrets to keep or because he knows nothing.  Rather, he says, death is the antithesis of knowledge.  “I am unknowing.”

The story of The Seventh Seal highlights (though I will not say “caused”) the change in modern culture when “apocalypse” lost its old meaning of “to reveal” and took on the now ubiquitous sense of death and mass destruction.  The Seventh Seal is certainly an apocalyptic movie.  Indeed, the title is a reference to a art in John’s book.  But it is apocalyptic in both senses of the world.  It is a story about a man wanting to received a revelation, but one that he is never given in life.  It is also the story of the Black Death, when millions were dying and one might have thought the Last Days were at hand.  I think most people, if they saw The Seventh Seal and then were asked to explain if, how, and why it was “apocalyptic,” would answer, “Because of all the death from the plague.  But it wasn’t really an apocalypse, I guess, because the world didn’t end.”  But I think someone with an understanding of the older meaning of the word would see the movie as apocalyptic because of Bloch’s agonizing search for meaning.  I have not studied this aspect of the film’s production, but I strongly suspect that is the sense Bergman would have favored.

Over the last half century or so, as society has moved away from believing wholeheartedly in divinely ordained universal truths—thus reducing the drive for revelation in most people’s lives—while becoming ever more aware of potential world-ending events, it makes sense that “apocalypse” has transformed its meaning.  Death is easier to imagine than the unimaginable knowledge of God.  We—even those among us of faith—have largely consigned ourselves to the belief that there will be no new revelation in this life.  Like our ancestors thousands of years ago, puzzling over the problem of evil, we can only say that Heaven remains silent, at least for now.

“And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”

—Revelation 8:1, KJV

There is an Apocalypse at the End of this Story

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world!?” -Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Many stories in literature, film, and video games deal with events to prevent the End of the World (in whatever form it might take) or to deal with the aftermath of a devastated planet. Examples of the first include the Pern series, The Fifth Element, and entries in the Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy franchises. Examples of the other includes The Road, 28 Days Later, and The Last of Us. Preventing the End from coming allows (not exclusively) for stories of the unambiguous struggle between good and evil, life over death, and freedom of will over the cold hand of fate. Coping with a post-apocalyptic world gives storytellers the chance to question what humanity’s true nature is in the face of calamity, whether morality can or should transcend social circumstances, and what there is in pre-apocalyptic society which is best left in the charred ruins of ground zero. Both of these approaches to apocalyptic storytelling deserves discussion, and they might receive treatment in later posts, but for the moment I would like to examine the tale which ends with an apocalyptic event.

While apocalypse-based stories come in many diverse forms and thus have a variety of tones and morals, those which end with an apocalyptic event tend, in my opinion, to have far more of a political or satirical aspect to them than most of their kindred tales in the genre. Why end a story with the bombs exploding, the comet crashing, or the gates to hell opening? Why do the heroes fail to save humanity? The solution lies in interrogating two things: who the heroes or protagonists are and whether humanity is worth saving. If the protagonists are not heroic (at least in a traditional sense) and if humanity is seen as too flawed or their preservation comes at too high a price, then the human race will likely suffer an apocalyptic fate.

Let us take a look at two examples briefly. First, the Cold War dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. This 1964 movie tells the story of a psychotic Air Force general who orders his nuclear bombers to drop their payload on the Soviet Union and the desperate attempts of inept of deranged politicians, scientists, and generals to prevent a radioactive doomsday. They do not succeed in this. As the movie ends, so, too, does our world. But why is this? In one sense, those directly responsible for the end of the world, the bomber crew who unwittingly follow unauthorized orders and trigger a chain reaction that will irradiate the earth for 100 years, are quite heroic. They do their duty as if their country was counting on them and accomplish their mission to the best of their abilities. As the movie’s US president sadly boasts to his Soviet counterpart, “It’s initiative!” They have a strong dose of the everyman in them, particularly the pilot. Those in the leadership, however, are the ones who make a mess of things. Aside from a secretary, we never see a regular civilian. We are only presented with soldiers, politicians, and scientists involved with classified information. Humanity certainly is worth saving, but they are absent. The bomber crew is heroic, but they are inadvertently the instruments of doom. Who are our protagonists? The world’s leaders, but they are not heroes. And so the end comes.

Next, let us turn to another Cold War movie about atomic destruction, though perhaps not an expected one: Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This is direct sequel to the original Planet of the Apes, both starring Charlton Heston. Most people are aware of the ending to the first movie which reveals the story of an ape-ruled planet actually takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The ending to the sequel, however, is also noteworthy in its own regard. In the ruins of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, a single atomic bomb still exists, one with the power to destroy the whole planet, bearing the extremely eschatological name “Alpha and Omega,” or “the beginning and the end.” It is worshipped by the mutated descendants of humanity. Taylor (Heston’s character). Tries to prevent the weapon from being triggered when an army of apes arrives to kill the remaining humans. But when Taylor is injured and asks for help from Dr. Zaius (the ape antagonist from the first film), he is spurned. With his dying breath, Taylor activates the bomb, destroying the apes, the humans, and all life on earth. In this act, Taylor repudiates both the humans and the apes. Both are incurably wicked in his eyes. Humans nearly destroyed the earth once; apes seem little better, and they all too prone to the same errors of pride and aggression. He is not heroic in a traditional sense, but that is because both humans and simians are not worth saving. He damns them all in deed, just as he had damned in words the humans responsible for the previous nuclear holocaust at the end of the first movie.

In both of these examples, overt yet non-specific criticisms are being leveled at their audiences and contemporary society. In the first case, doom might come about through incompetence and paranoia among the leadership, despite whatever ideological positions are supposedly at stake. Perhaps the ideologies themselves are driving the leaders to such lunacy.  In the other case, the movie seems to say that any people with the will to use such horrible weapons deserves to be destroyed by them. Perhaps these messages could have been portrayed without complete destruction, and many stories do end with a sense of relief at having narrowly escaped a fate that humanity might well have earned. But by letting the button be pressed, the storyteller gives the unmistakable impression that these things might actually happen, that someone might go too far – a sense harder to achieve when there is a happy ending. Even in stories that have ridiculous means of destroying the world (like Cabin in the Woods), when the world is allowed to die, the audience must ask themselves, “Should it have been saved, could it have been, or is destruction inevitable and, perhaps, appropriate?” By asking these questions, one hopes nihilism does not conquer but rather a desire to become a people both worthy and capable of overcoming absolute destruction.

“In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” -Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Human Hubris, and Doubts about Our Self-Sufficiency

“The spirits I have summoned I cannot now banish.” –Goethe

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is known to most due to the musical short in Disney’s Fantasia starring Mickey Mouse. The story has an older pedigree, however, dating back 2000 years, though it was a poem by Goethe 200 years ago that established the primary form we know today. For those unfamiliar with the tale, it can be told briefly as follows.

Once there was a sorcerer of great power who had a young apprentice. Despite wanting to learn how to perform all the magic of his master, the sorcerer gave his pupil few lessons in casting spells. Instead of casting great spells, the apprentice spent his days and night sweeping floors and fetching water, tasks he thought beneath him not to mention pointless since he knew his master capable of performing all of these things through magic with hardly any effort.

One day the sorcerer retired from his enchantments to rest while leaving his apprentice to finish bringing in the buckets of water to put in the enormous caldron. The apprentice, however, had a different plan. As soon as his master had left, the young man, who had been peaking at the sorcerer’s book when he wasn’t looking and listening closely to his incantations, decided it was time to show how powerful a wizard he could be. He cast an enchantment on a broom, bringing it to life, and commanded it to do his chores for him of fetching water. The spell worked and soon the caldron was full. The apprentice was very pleased with himself.

Unfortunately, the enchanted broom continued pouring water into the now overflowing caldron, causing the sorcerer’s chamber to be damaged. The apprentice tried to stop the animated broom but realized he had not learned the counter-spell which would have stopped it. Desperate to stop the broom before the room was flooded (and thinking he could still hide the fact he had been performing magic against his master’s will), the young man took up a nearby ax and struck the broom, splitting it down the middle. The apprentice sighed in relief, but his ease was short-lived. Suddenly, both halves of the broom stood back up and began carrying water even faster than before. The apprentice was at a loss, knowing there was nothing he could do and fearing how this disaster would end, if it ever could. But just as the room was becoming floored, the sorcerer returned. The apprentice cried out in fear and hope for his master’s rescue. The old wizard quickly perceived what had happened. With a single word, the enchanted broom halves froze and fell over, lifeless once again. The sorcerer surveyed the destruction caused by the water and his apprentice’s rash folly. The apprentice, ashamed for his presumption, returned to his chores.

This tale is not specifically apocalyptic in any sense of the word. Nevertheless, the general plot does a good job of outlining a type of apocalyptic narrative. Seen in eschatological terms, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an example of human hubris resulting in our (near) total destruction which can only be prevented by the intervention of the Divine or some other wise and powerful force which takes pity on mankind. If the apprentice represents humanity as a whole, then the lesson is we will cause our own destruction. This will not be through willful violence but because our misplaced pride in our own abilities. Examples of apocalyptic stories with this theme include Forbidden Planet, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and many others. Most of these modern stories use scientific advances rather than magical spells, yet the misuse of poorly understood power to make life easier is the same in either case.

The presence of the sorcerer at the beginning and end of this story is, I believe, very important for the stories endurance in the Western world. Though the original version came from pagan Rome (where the sorcerer was simply an educated Egyptian mystic and the apprentice a young friend of his), the form that Goethe and Disney adopted buzzes Christian overtones. The relationship between the two characters is very exact with multiple dichotomies: master and pupil, old and young, wise and foolish, restrained and impulsive, powerful and weak with the illusion of power, and so forth. It takes little effort to see these characters as potentially representing divinity and humanity. The fact that the sorcerer leaves but ultimately returns to save his apprentice when all hope is lost can be taken as the Christian conception of God’s return, either to rescue an individual from sin or Christ’s return during the End Times.

Curiously, there is no villain in this story. The enchanted, unstoppable broom is a threat to the apprentice, but it does wish harm on anyone though its actions, which are merely the results of the apprentice’s deem, will cause devastation. If there is no real villain, then how can this be seen as a Christian apocalyptic scenario? Where is the devil, the foe of mankind? The answer, however, is that, while much of Christian eschatology is often framed as a pitched battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, that is not always the way it has been conceived. In many ways, the end of the world in the New Testament is not even a fight at all. Though John of Patmos speaks of wars in heaven and on earth in Revelation, Jesus in the Gospels speak of harvest time. In these cases, evil is not a foe but a weed. It poses no real threat as an armed enemy might, and someday the master or harvester will simply come to remove the evil and pitch it into the fire to be consumed.

This is the type of eschatology on display in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Sin (or ignorance) are and have been part of humanity’s character, which has caused them to make terrible mistakes. Like Adam whose downfall came from a tree (what else is a broom made of if not wood?), the apprentice thought that he could be like his master, like a god. His rash actions soon caused a flood, much like what befell Adam’s descendants. The apprentice was doomed because he did not know the right word to end the spell; for Christians, mankind is doomed without the Word to save them. But whether one tells the story in religious or secular terms, the message is that of a cautionary tale. We all want to run, but it is necessary to walk first. If we trip and fall in our excitement, hopefully there will be someone to pick us back up. If there is not then caution is all the more necessary because we may not be able to stand back up on our own.

For the text of Goethe’s poem, in German and English: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_dual.html

I encourage you to rewatch Disney’s Fantasia with the above in mind.

One final note. This post comes shortly after the theatrical release of the Avengers: Age of Ultron. I briefly cited that movie above as embodying themes of human hubris and impatience. The movie itself references Disney’s Pinocchio multiple times, but for those who have seen or will see it, I challenge you to decide whether the movie actually owes more of its inspiration to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Pinocchio is about a wooden boy brought to life, though not because of his creator’s powers. The broom is also a piece of wood brought to life, but the apprentice stole this ability from another. Watch the film. Is Ultron Pinocchio turned evil or the broom simply doing what it was told?

Circles of Fate (Part 2): Pern, the Matrix, and Final Fantasy

“…the Red Star, obeying natural forces, began to spin closer to Pern, winking with a baleful red eye on its ancient victim”  -Anne McCaffrey, Prologue to The White Dragon, 1978

In this season of beginnings and endings, it seems appropriate to discuss cyclical time around the new years.  As discussed in part one of this series, superficially cyclical time appears to lack the possibility of apocalyptic scenarios more commonly envisioned in linear time.  Notions about “the end” require a fixed point in time to which everything leads up and after which history is irrevocably altered.  Linear time possesses these qualities but cyclical time does not, or so it is thought.  Nietzsche’s understanding of eternal recurrence embraces just this worldview in which nothing has, can, or will change, but this does not mean that eternal recurrence should be seen as a labor or a horror..  Everything that happens within the cycle, even the painful, should be looked upon as good, as a way to strengthen oneself.  It should be loved for its own sake, come what may: amor fati, the love of fate.  For Buddha, however, though time is cyclical, the circle of death and rebirth can still be transcended and escaped.  In this way, a moral if not a physical apocalypse can occur; the enlightened one saves his soul as the world and all that it in it (people, things, desires, passions, sufferings) vanish, replaced by a new, incomprehensible existence.  In this way, an apocalypse in cyclical time is indeed possible.

Yet perhaps these philosophical ideas are too abstract to clearly demonstrate how cyclical time and apocalyptic scenarios might work together.  For this reason I have chosen to examine (very briefly) three different serial works of sci-fi/fantasy storytelling in three different media in order to show how these ideas have been and continue to be incorporated in popular entertainment.  These works are Anne MacCaffrey’s Pern novels, the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix movie trilogy, and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy video game series.  Each is very different from the others and are present in their own unique medium, yet cyclical time and the theme of an apocalypse runs through and unites them.  Let us examine each in turn.

First, McCaffrey’s imaginative world of Pern is based upon a recurrent global crisis known as Thread, a thin, silvery, highly destructive organism that rains down from the sky for a period of 50 years every 250 years.  When Thread contacts any organic material, it immediately beings to consume it, causing the organism to expand rapidly.  To be sure, not all life dies out from Thread; the planet of Pern is resilient and can recover.  The human populations who began to colonize Pern, however, could not survive without some defense against Thread.  The danger may not utterly destroy the planet, but the cataclysmic danger Thread poses to humanity is indisputably absolute.  “Thread”:  it is a fitting name, not just because of the organism’s spindly appearance but also because it is simply one letter away from the word “threat.”  To cope with this global horror, the colonists, before they had to abandon their advanced technology, used sci-fi genetics to adapt indigenous flying lizards into a force of fire-breathing dragons capable of destroying Thread before it made landfall.  Because of the importance of these defenders, society on Pern evolved to ensure the dragons would be available whenever Thread returned.  There would be 200 years of peace and safety (called an Interval) followed by 50 years of near-continuous Thread-fall (known as a Pass).  During Passes, dragons and their human riders would protect the lands below.  During Intervals, they would rest while recuperating their loses.  It was a system that was built upon the fact that every 250 years the world would be threatened, and all of Pern society, whether directly or indirectly, was in turn based upon supporting that system.  There are a few occasions in Pernese history when Thread does not fall during its expected Pass (the result of celestial alignments blocking Pern from its recurrent foe), thus creating a “Long Interval.”  Though a time of joy, these periods are not without their dangers since they can cause humans on Pern to think Thread has ceased altogether, thus leading them to neglect up-keep of their dragon population.  When Thread returns after its long absence, their earlier inattention becomes a deadly problem for humanity.

Using the paradigms established in Part One of this post, Pern quite clearly represents a Nietzschean view of cyclical time.  Thread represents the threat of an apocalypse, but one that is familiar and manageable.  Thread simply is.  Like the dawn or the seasons, there is no stopping it.  Once every dozen generations, the whole of humanity will be at risk of utter annihilation, and once every dozen generations humanity must try to fight off this apocalypse using their long-time companions, the dragons.  Permanent destruction of Thread is impossible.  Though some books in the series play with that possibility, ultimately the history of Pern is based on this eternal cycle.  Ridding themselves of Thread is as inconceivable as eliminating blizzards.  The proper thing for a Pernese man or woman to think about is saving the world now, this time, just like future generations should look to saving their world in their times.  When the people of Pern embraced this fate, in an example of amor fati, they prospered.  When during Long Intervals they neglected the fact that Thread would always be with them and thought they would enjoy linear rather than cyclical time, they lowered their defenses and risked the calamity of complete destruction.  Thread is an example of an apocalyptic threat, but one that must always be seen as cyclical.  False optimism only brings the possibility of ruin.  But this doom is not purely negative.  Pern’s society, politics, culture, and economies are portrayed as rich and vibrant.  But they are at their peak only when they practice amor fati, when they shoulder the burden of Thread and yet take pride and joy in their labor and the labor of countless generations.

Turning to the second example, the Matrix series, we find a very different take on cyclical time and apocalypses.  The people of Pern might suffer horrors during every Pass, but each time they are ultimately victorious.  The humans in the Matrix, however, are not so fortunate.  The situation goes as follows.  In the future, Artificial Intelligence has enslaved mankind and imprisoned us in a simulated world from which we cannot escape unless we first understand (at least in part) its unreality.  The first movie in the trilogy establishes that the humans in the real world live in the besieged city of Zion, the last bastion of humanity free from AI control.  It was founded by the One, a human the people of Zion believe to be the first human to have escaped from the Matrix.  The character Neo is a kind of Second Coming of the One, someone who is prophesied to bring an end to the war between humanity and the machines.  At first, this seems like a very straight-forward linear time apocalypse: even casual observers will be able to note the Judeo-Christian symbolism strewn throughout the first movie.  Yet the two sequels radically alter this framework.  In the second movie, it is revealed that the founder of Zion was not the first human to become free of the Matrix.  The One is not a rebel to the AI but is in fact part of their system:  once every hundred years or so, a One emerges and the machines are able to extract useful data from his or her mind.  At the same time, whatever human settlement exists in the real world is completely eradicated.  The One is then sent out to found a new Zion, tell the humans the lie that he is the first and that a savior One will return to them one day, and the cycle continues itself.  In the third film, the series returns to its linear mode of having Neo being the true savior of humanity that ends the war once and for all time, but this is only accomplished because the system of the Matrix begins to break down due to forces outside his control.  Thus when Neo saves the day, he does not simply save humanity; he saves the machines as well.

In contrast to McCaffrey’s novels, the Matrix series, taken as a whole, constitutes a Buddhist form of cyclical apocalypse.  In the first movie, people think they can live linear lives and succeed, but they are in error, just like Buddha taught that success in this world could never bring true joy.  No matter what one did in this world, one would still suffer, die, and reincarnate, doomed to change in minor details but never escaping from the horrors of this world.  The second movie makes this horror felt in the revelation that the machines have destroyed Zion several times in the past and have full confidence in themselves to continue obliterating humanity and allowing them to return under a new One.  The machines cannot be stopped because they are part of the cycle.  It is the cycle itself, not the machines, that is the real enemy.  In the end, Neo abandons hope for saving himself or even for fighting out of a desire to win.  To win, to finally break the system, he accepts his fate, he becomes nothingness, he allows himself to slip into the otherwise fearful embrace of a faceless existence with calm composure.  Yet it is through this self-abnegation (Neo’s enemy literally turns him into a copy of himself) that Neo wins.  Like Buddha, he does not simply sacrifice himself through death but gives his Self away and transcends.  The result is, like Buddha, the destruction of the whole cycle of death and rebirth, or Zion’s destruction and foundation, and of apocalypse and genesis.  The Matrix returns, Zion still lives, but both are suddenly new.  Not just reborn but completely altered from their former station: the Matrix will no longer be a prison and Zion will be at peace.  The world has transcended itself, and Neo has achieved Nirvana.

Finally, there is the example of the video game series Final Fantasy.  I do not wish to focus purely on one example from the series or discuss in detail specific apocalyptic themes contained therein, though that could be done.  Instead, I’d like to consider the series as a piece of media which has these elements in it.  yet to do that, first a very brief overview of these themes are necessary.  There are over a dozen Final Fantasy games, with most of them existing in completely different continuities or at least so distantly related as to be irrelevant for the most part.  Yet while the characters and plots might vary, the games tend to share many common elements.  Typically the story revolves around a band of heroes (chosen, prophesied, or impromptu) caught up in a series of escalating adventures that ultimately lead them to confront an evil so great that it has the power and will to destroy world or even unmake reality itself.  Normally the cosmic terror is only revealed late in the game, with the first half being devoted to defeating a relatively minor threat like an evil warlord, an oppressive government, and so forth.  Sometimes the two (the immediate and the cosmic threat) are joined together in some way, either the corrupt political/religious leader working for this great threat, exploiting fear of it among his subjects for his own benefit, or hoping for his own personal reasons that this enemy will actually succeed in its apocalyptic goals.  But beyond the the apocalyptic, the cyclical time is a recurrent theme in the series, often negatively so.  Sometimes, as in Pern or the Matrix, the world of Final Fantasy is based upon a great evil that is thought to be eternally recurrent; in these case, the heroes must be the ones who put a stop to this awful cycle.  In such cases, those who blindly follow a Nietzsche outlook that assumes fate must be satisfied are in the wrong.  On the other hand, sometimes the ultimate foe wants to destroy the world or unmake reality because of a misguided Buddhist-like desire to end suffering.  For these antagonists, life is indeed a never-ending cycle of pain and misery because of countless sins but especially war.  If they can end this cycle by causing or helping another being cause the deaths of all humanity, mankind would transcend all of these evils, or at least no long suffer them.  But the heroes must fight this enemy, too, and find hope in life.  Thus here, it is the Buddhist outlook, the desire to break the whole cycle, which is the enemy.  As can be seen, the Final Fantasy series is by no means simple in its message or story elements.

Nevertheless, though Final Fantasy games may alter how they discuss cyclical time or apocalyptic scenarios, what is clear is that the franchise is based in large part upon featuring these ideas in some form in almost all of their titles.  And that is what should be noted about Final Fantasy’s approach to the subject of cyclical apocalypses: the fact that it is a franchise catering to both an established fan base while trying to be engaging as new players come of age and pick up a controller.  Whatever the motivations of the villains or the nature of time in each title, in the end the events that the player experiences are definitive and ultimately linear.  Though there have been over a dozen games to bear the name Final Fantasy, there is never the thought that when one game is done that the ultimate evil will return to destroy the world.  The heroes of the story and the player have seen to it that there is a happy ending.  Yet oddly, it is because there is a happy ending that Final Fantasy has grown far beyond a single game.  With each game released, players expect there to be a world-ending threat, maybe one that (in-universe) has always existed and is believed will never end, yet their job is to make sure it does.  But with this accomplished, the player then has to wait with anticipation until the next linear apocalypse.  Without much exaggeration, it can be said that the player hopes for an endless cycle of linear apocalypses.  The eternal recurrence he hopes to stop in a fantasy world he wishes to perpetuate in the real world.  In the game, he is a Buddhist; out of the game, he is a Nietzschean.  He wants to save the world, once and for all, but he wants to continue doing so for all time.  And, what is most startling, he is satisfied in both of these desires.

This post, long as it is, has only scratched the surface of a variety of subjects.  Each individually deserves far more time than has been given to all of them together.  Perhaps in the future I will come back to Pern, the Matrix, or Final Fantasy, but for now I leave them as presented here.  Cyclical time also may make a comeback in future posts.  For now, however, what should be taken away from this concept is the fact that apocalypses do, in fact, easily fit into such a conception of time.  These three series, each taken from a completely different artistic medium, demonstrate in quite diverse ways how recent authors, movie makers, and game developers have approached the subject, yet they are only a select few among many more artists and commentators stretching back much further than the birth of either the video game, the movie, or even the printed novel.  Whether time is seen linearly or cyclically, the notion of an/the apocalypse is so large to encompass both with room to spare.  Hopefully by understanding cyclical apocalypses it will be possible to better appreciate linear apocalypses and how they express in their own unique way humanity’s many possible fates.

“In two thousand years, I will remember none of this.  But I will be reborn again here.  So even as you die again and again, I shall return!  Born again into this endless circle I have created!”  -Final Fantasy, 1987