Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2014 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Levy, Paul."Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil" Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 146-151.

 By Paul Levy

We as a species are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity from the beginning of time. This psychospiritual disease of the soul—which Native Americans have called wetiko—can be thought of as the bug in the system. It informs and animates the madness that is playing itself out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.

Native American mythologies portray the mythical figure of wetiko as a cannibalistic spirit who embodies greed and excess and can possess human beings. The wetiko was once a human being, but its greed and selfishness have transformed it into a predatory monster. Thus in indigenous mythology, indulgent, self-destructive habits are thought to be inspired by wetiko. In the Native American view, those who have become wetikos are individuals who have "lost their wits," a phrase that connotes not only being out of one's right mind, but also not knowing what one is doing (acting "unwittingly"). Native Americans have often portrayed the wetiko as having a frigid, icy heart, devoid of mercy. Like cannibals, those taken over by wetiko consume the life force of others—human and nonhuman—for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back anything of real value from their own lives.

The Ojibwa word for wetiko, windigo or weendigo, seems to have been derived from ween dagoh, which means "solely for self," or from weenin igooh, which means "excess." According to Native American lore, the wetiko monster can only prey on human beings who, like itself, have indulged in excess. Thus human beings' propensity for excess makes them vulnerable to possession by, and transformation into, a wetiko.

Like a werewolf, the wetiko is sometimes portrayed as a shape-shifter who can even appear disguised as a good spirit. In the indigenous legends, whenever the wetiko eats another person, it grows larger in proportion to the meal it has just eaten, so that it can never be full or satisfied. Buddhism portrays a similar figure, the hungry ghost, who, with its pinhole mouth, constricted neck, and huge, unfilled stomach, can never satisfy its insatiable cravings. At the collective level, this perverse inner process is mirrored by the insane consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending desires, conditioning us to always want more.

Just as viruses or malware infect a computer and program it to self-destruct, wetiko programs the human biocomputer to think and behave in self-destructive ways. Covertly operating through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, wetiko renders people oblivious to their own madness, compelling them to act against their own best interests. People under its thrall can, like someone in the throes of an addiction or in a state of trauma, unwittingly create the very problem they are trying to resolve, clinging desperately to the thing that is torturing and destroying them.

People taken over by wetiko are suffering from an autoimmune disease of the psyche. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism perversely attacks the very life it is trying to protect. In trying to live, it destroys life, ultimately destroying even itself. In the same way, once wetiko has insinuated itself into a living entity, it acts like a perverted antibody, treating the wholesome parts of the system as cancerous tumors to be exterminated.

This problem is being collectively acted out on the world stage. Humans are destroying the biosphere of the planet upon which we all depend for our survival. Wetiko is at the bottom of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking on this biosphere. One example is the destruction of the Amazonian rain­forest, the lungs of the planet. Another example is the terminator seeds that are genetically engineered not to reproduce a second generation, forcing farmers to buy new seeds and making life impossible for many poor farmers. If the planet were seen as an organism, and people seen as cells in this organism, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic and had turned on the healthy cells, destroying the very organism of which they themselves were a part. Our species appears to be enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale.

By whatever name we call it, wetiko is undoubtedly one of the most important discoveries in human history. Indicating the supreme importance of developing knowledge about how this predator of the mind operates, don Juan from the Carlos Castaneda books refers to it as "the topic of topics." (He doesn't use the name "wetiko," however, but calls it "the flyer.")

This cancer of the soul manages our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bedazzles consciousness in such a way that we become blind to the underlying viewpoint through which we are giving meaning to our experience. Wetiko is a form of psychic blindness that fancies itself to be sighted.

Wetiko subversively turns our genius for reality creation against us so that we become bewitched by the projective tendencies of our own mind. People afflicted with wetiko react to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are separate from themselves, delusionally thinking that they have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting. Over time this activity of endlessly reacting to and becoming conditioned by one's own energy tends to generate insane behavior, which can manifest internally or in the world at large. As if under a spell, we become entranced by our own intrinsic gifts and talents for dreaming up our world, unknowingly hypnotizing ourselves with our God-given power to creatively call forth reality so that it boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for evolution.

Though the origin of wetiko is within the psyche, at a certain point it develops enough momentum to become self-generating, attaining a seeming autonomy, like the Frankenstein monster. This pathological fragment can subsume the wholesome parts of the psyche into itself such that they become its slaves. As this process continues, wetiko gains sovereignty over the psyche, like the legendary tiger, which, when restored to life out of its bones, devours the magician who resurrected it. It then holds its creator in its thrall, and she is unable to escape from the hell of her own making. The person so afflicted has created her own sci-fi nightmare, with herself in the starring role.

Wetiko 2 by Liana Buszka, www.lianabuszka.com

To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic tapeworm or parasite has taken over our brains and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite. Noting our almost unlimited capacity for self-deception, psychiatrist R.D. Laing writes that we have "tricked ourselves out of our own mind" (Laing, 73). People are particularly susceptible to the spell of today's masters of deception when they are out of touch with the living and self-authenticating reality of their own experience. Not sufficiently knowing the nature of their own minds, they are overly susceptible to taking on others' perspectives, falling prey to the prevailing groupthink of the herd and to the wetiko parasite. When we are taken over by more powerful psychic forces, we don't know that we are possessed by something other than ourselves, which is precisely the way the wetiko bug wants it.

Wetiko can also subliminally insinuate thought-forms and beliefs into our minds which, when unconsciously enacted, feed the virus and ultimately kill its host. Wetiko covets the creative imagination that it lacks. As a result, if we don't use the divine gift of our creative imagination in the service of life, wetiko will use our imagination against us, with deadly consequences. The wetiko predator is in competition with us for a share of our own mind, wanting to sit in our seat. Instead of sovereign beings who consciously create with our thoughts, we will then be unconsciously created by them, as the wetiko pathogen literally thinks in our place.

If we are not aware of wetiko's covert operations within us, it is as if an alien, metaphysical "other" has colonized our minds and set up a seemingly autonomous regime, a "shadow government" within the psyche (outwardly reflected by the "shadow government" in the world), so that we become oppressed within the domain of our own being. The wetiko virus paralyzes the ego into an immobilized, powerless state, in which the life force and energetic potential are vampirically drained away. Zombielike, we are pushed around like figures on a chessboard, played and manipulated like marionettes on a string. We are held in check by these impersonal, intangible forces, which, unbeknownst to us, are gaming us from a hidden position within our own unillumined psyches. As compared to existing "by virtue" of something, the wetiko bug can only exist by the "lack of virtue" of our own obscured and unexamined minds.

As this rogue, split-off part incorporates itself within the psyche, it "dictates" to the ego, tricking it into believing that it is directing itself. We are allowed our seeming freedom and the ability to live our "normal" lives, as long as these do not challenge or threaten the deeper agenda of these sinister forces to centralize power and control. This internal process is manifesting externally in the creeping tendency towards fascism in the global body politic.

Shape-shifting so as to cloak itself in our form, this mercurial predator gets under our skin and "puts us on" as a disguise, impersonating us as it fools us into buying into its false version of who we are. Falling prey to its artificial yet uncanny intelligence, we become unreal to ourselves. Bamboozled and hoodwinked by this imposter, we mime ourselves, becoming false duplicates of our original, true selves. When we are taken over by the wetiko spirit, we can subjectively experience ourselves as being most ourselves, while ironically being most estranged from ourselves. This is a simultaneous state of fusion and dissociation, as the parts of the psyche that have split off from consciousness overwhelm and take over the whole through its unconscious blind spots. No longer belonging to or possessing ourselves, we then identify with who we are not while forgetting who we actually are. In so doing, we have effectively lost our souls.

The psychiatrist C.G. Jung refers to wetiko by the name Antimimos, which he describes as "the imitator and evil principle" (Jung, 371). Antimimos refers to a type of deception that could be thought of as countermimicry. This antimimon pneuma—the "counterfeit spirit," as it is called in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John (Robinson, 120), imitates something (in this case, ourselves) but with the intention of making the copy serve a purpose counter to that of the original. Antimimos is a maleficent force which tries to seduce us so as to lead us astray; it effects an inversion of value, transforming truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth, leading us to forgetfulness. When we fall for the ruse of this snake oil salesman of the spirit, we become disoriented, losing our sense of spiritual vocation, our mission in life, even our very selves. Writer and poet Max Pulver has said that "the antimimon pneuma is the origin and cause of all the evils besetting the human soul." The revered Gnostic text Pistis Sophia says that the antimimon pneuma has affixed itself to humanity like an illness (Campbell, 254; cf. Mead, 247ff.).

The Gnostics ("the ones who know") also call this subversive parasite of the mind the "archons." Every wisdom tradition has its own way of symbolizing wetiko; indeed illuminating wetiko is what makes a wisdom tradition worthy of the name. Such traditions include Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hawaiian huna, mystical Islam, shamanism, and alchemy. It is helpful to find other lineages and traditions that illumine the wetiko disease in their own fashion. In this way our multiperspectival vision can enable us to see what no one particular map or model by itself can reveal.

Viruses like wetiko are all about copying themselves. But a virus can't replicate itself; it has to use some other vehicle as its means of reproduction. Just like a vampire, the wetiko virus has a thirst for the very thing it lacks—the mystical essence of life—the "blood" of our soul, our very life force. The "undead" vampiric wetiko virus is fundamentally "dead" matter taking on apparently living form; it is only in and through a living being that it acquires a kind of life. These psychic vampires are compelled to replicate themselves through us so that we can then pass on to others. In wetiko there is a code or logic which infects awareness much as the DNA in a virus passes into and infects a cell. Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness. But its vectors of infection do not travel like physical pathogens. This bug both reinforces and feeds off our unconscious blind spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself. The greatest danger that threatens humanity today is the possibility that millions of us can fall into the unconscious together, reinforcing one another's madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in our own self-destruction.

The most horrifying part of falling under the wetiko virus is that it ultimately involves the assent of our own free will, as we willingly, though unknowingly, subscribe to our enslaved condition. This is to say that no one other than ourselves is ultimately responsible for our situaion. Though "relatively" real, and definitely needing to be dealt with at this level, from the ultimate, absolute point of view, the wetiko virus has no objective existence separate from our own minds. There is no entity outside ourselves who can steal our souls; the dreamed-up phenomenon of wetiko, which arises entirely within the sphere of the mind, tricks us into giving it away ourselves.

With wetiko disease, we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves, which is why there is in reality nothing outside of ourselves to be afraid of. The origin of the wetiko psychosis lies entirely within the human psyche. The fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means that the cure for it is likewise within us as well. Though not objectively existing, the wetiko pathogen has a virtual reality such that it can potentially destroy our species. The fact that something that only exists as a function of ourselves can destroy us points us to the incredibly vast, invisible, yet mostly untapped creative power that is our birthright.

Wetiko is nonlocal in that it is an inner disease of the soul that expresses itself on the canvas of the outside world. Thus it is not constrained by the spurious subject/object dichotomy or the conventional laws of three-dimensional space and time. In fact one of wetiko's unique ploys is to take advantage of the fact that there is no actual boundary between the inner and the outer.Wetiko nonlocally informs and configures events in the world so as to synchronistically express itself, which is to say that just like in a dream, events in the outer world are symbolically reflecting a condition deep within the psyche of each of us. If we don't understand that our current world crisis has its roots within and is an expression of the human psyche, we are doomed to unconsciously repeat and recreate endless suffering and destruction in more and more amplified form, as if we are having a recurring nightmare. 

To the extent we are unaware of this virus of the mind, we are complicit in its propagation. Since it pervades the underlying field of consciousness, potentially all of us have wetiko. Every one of us subjectively experiences the wetiko virus in his or her own unique way, regardless of what concepts or words we use to describe the experience, or whether we believe in such things or not. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko, leading us to think they have the disease and we don't, we have fallen under the spell of the virus, because wetiko feeds on separation, polarization, and the fear of the other.

We start to become immune to wetiko when we develop the humility to realize that any one of us, at any moment, can potentially fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for this virus to act itself out through us. Like a vampire, wetiko can't stand to be illumined, for in seeing how it covertly operates through our own consciousness, we take away its seeming autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves.

The wetiko psychosis is a dreamed-up phenomenon, which is to say that we are all potentially participating in and actively cocreating the wetiko epidemic in each and every moment. Wetiko feeds on our policy of turning a blind eye to its operations; the less the wetiko virus is recognized, the more seemingly powerful and dangerous it becomes. Since the origin of wetiko is the human psyche, recognizing how this virus of the mind operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. We normally think of illumination as seeing the light, but seeing the darkness is a form of illumination too. Wetiko is forcing us to pay attention to the fundamental role that the psyche plays in creating our experience of ourselves and of the world. Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, which is truly the world's pivot.

Wetiko can only be seen when we begin to realize the dreamlike nature of our universe, step out of the viewpoint of the separate self, and recognize the deeper underlying field of which we are all expressions, in which we are all contained, and through which we are all interconnected. The energetic expression of this realization, and the dissolver of wetiko par excellence, is compassion.

Similarly, the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by wetiko is to be in touch with our intrinsic wholeness, which is to be "self-possessed"—in possession of the part of ourselves that is not possessable, which is the Self, the wholeness of our being. Being in touch with our true nature acts as a sacred amulet or talisman, shielding and protecting us from wetiko's pernicious effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we've already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects. Grasping the multifaceted ways that the wetiko virus distorts the psyche enables us to discover and experience the part of ourselves that is incorruptible, which is the place from which we can bring real and lasting change to our world. It is as though the evil of the wetiko virus is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence designed to connect us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves. Testers of humanity, these nonlocal vampiric forces are guardians of the threshold of our conscious evolution.

Thus, although it is the source of humanity's inhumanity to itself, wetiko is at the same time the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known (as well as not known) to humanity, as it is the impetus for us to awaken to the dreamlike nature of the universe. While a typical virus mutates so as to become resistant to our attempts to heal from it, the mercurial wetiko virus forces us to mutate—and evolve—relative to it. In a paradoxical sense, we don't cure wetiko; wetiko cures us. How amazing—the very thing that is potentially destroying us is at the same time waking us up! Wetiko is a true conjunction of opposites: it is at the same time the deadliest poison and the most healing medicine. Will wetiko kill us? Or will it awaken us? Everything depends upon our recognizing what it is revealing to us. The prognosis for the wetiko epidemic depends upon how we dream it.

Sources

Campbell, Joseph, ed. Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 4. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1968.
Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Mead, G.R.S. The Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Miscellany. Rev. ed. London: J.M. Watkins, 1921.
Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library. 3d ed. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992.

Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (2006).

Printed in the Fall 2014 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Elsinger, Nance. "Surviving the End Times" Quest; 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 143-145.

The obituary of long-time Theosophist Roger Elsinger was published in the Summer 2013 issue of Quest.

He and his partner, Nance, met through Theosophy. Some Quest readers were at their May 1989 wedding by the lily ponds in the courtyard of the Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California. By that time, Rog had joined Nance in working with Joy Mills at the Krotona School. Drawn together by questing minds and hearts, the couple shared a Theosophical worldview that enabled them to navigate the ups and downs of an emerging relationship.

In this article, Nance shares her experience of end times in a marriage.

While the period from Roger's diagnosis to his death was only one month, the "end times" began fourteen years earlier, in the winter of 1998. Rog and I missed a turn in the road and went flying over an embankment. Instantly, our lives as we knew them changed.

Our new pickup truck—driven less than a hundred miles before it was totaled—lasted long enough to drive us through some forbidden door, into some dream world about end times. That shiny blue pick-up dropped us down thirty feet into a bank of pure, fluffy snow covering the impenetrable black icy ground. Here in this silent underworld the unconscious assumption that maybe we could escape the inevitable cracked.

Physically, we did survive. For three months while I recovered from our auto accident in a spinal brace, Rog nursed me back to health. But even after I had healed, the thought that our lives could end so quickly stayed with us. Something inside of each of us shifted. We realized that we needed to prepare for the end times.

Rog and I sorted and assembled the legal documents to prepare for our deaths so we could get on with living as before. We set up a revocable trust, wrote wills, and signed the necessary legal papers. Each of us drafted funeral plans, inventoried our possessions, and determined our successions. Years later, after our move to Albuquerque, we bought pottery burial urns and arranged for our cremations.

We put our death collection in a black travel bag in plain view so our adult children would know where to find it. We updated our trust several times as we ruminated about small details over the years. Every day we looked at that black bag on its special hook by the door—dusting, polishing, and straightening it—until it became a presence.

The black valise became a conversation starter, something focal like a cross on the wall, but free from all secular taboos, so that an unwary guest could ask, "Are you planning a trip?"Which of course gave us the opportunity to reflect on that trip a bit more. It was clear every time we looked at that bag, more questions arose that had nothing to do with paperwork.

Ostensibly, the process of packing our black bag was all about taking care of business so we could get back to traveling life's path together as before. By making our intentions as clear as possible, we wanted to protect each other and our families from as much of the emotional chaos that can happen at the end of life as we could.

But to our surprise, something else happened. The black bag attended to the superficial uncertainties about our deaths so that we could reflect on deeper mysteries independently. It was here, in our opposite explorations, that Rog and I found our worlds alight again with color.

Before I continue, some background may be helpful. When Rog arrived at the TS in Ojai, he was searching for truth. After years of education, Rog began his adult life as a parish priest only to become disenchanted with the Catholic institution. He went on to marry and father a child. When he and his first wife divorced, Rog felt driven to discover life on his terms rather than those dictated by the Catholic tradition. He traveled and explored, meeting new people, experiencing other cultures, and connecting with those who were exploring spirituality beyond fundamentalism.

When I met Rog I was leading an independent, busy life. Divorced for many years with three nearly adult children, I had enjoyed a successful career creating the first statewide clearinghouse for oral history holdings. In 1984, needing change and expansion, I set out alone driving from Denver. Reaching Ojai, I discovered Theosophy and moved within two months. The next fall, I became a student at the Krotona School and then was hired by the director, Joy Mills, to help national and international students strengthen their group work.

Rog and I could not have been more different. Working together in the school, we saw each other teach. Rog's style was to tell students what he had discovered and believed to be true, while mine was to draw out what the student already knew. We learned from each other and allowed our relationship to grow and nurture our best qualities. We knew that we had to be together.

Our differences were stark. Rog actively made things happen while I kept tradition and the peace. He left situations when they stopped working for him, while I stayed until I had something else in place. Rog enjoyed and protected his alone time; he didn't see value in discussing his feelings or emotions; his approach was primarily cerebral. His family was not close; they had few rituals and communicated infrequently. Holidays in my family, on the other hand, were joyfully celebrated with cards, gifts, and phone calls. My relatives enjoy being together, and news is shared on a regular basis no matter how far apart we are.

While Rog had plenty of psychological baggage related to his Catholic upbringing, I was weighed down with material trappings. When I moved to Ojai, I had a truck full of furniture, collected during my previous marriage. Rog moved to Ojai in a Volkswagen bus containing all his possessions; several boxes of books, some tools, and a few clothes. Frequent moves were not unusual for Rog, while moving to Ojai was my first move out of Colorado, my childhood home and the place where I raised my children. My attitude was that you kept what you might need, just in case, while Rog believed you kept only what you used and you can always get what you need when you need it. Rog was appalled by watching my process in deciding what to keep when my parents' home was dismantled after their deaths in 1999. Sentimental items didn't resonate with him.

For nine years, we worked for the good of the other and our relationship and let our personal desires fall by the wayside. We compromised and found a middle way between our habitual ways of being. Rog experienced the pleasures of a celebration, and I learned the value of alone time. Our marriage made us more flexible, patient, and loving. I became more adventuresome—even taking flying lessons. I became less interested in gaining approval (even his!). I realized there is no "right"way to do things and to perceive the world; everyone is different, and that is truly the beauty of this world. We both mellowed and softened.

After surviving the accident, the pattern shifted. Instead of merging our ideas and establishing a middle ground that worked for both of us, our paths of discovery diverged. While we happily shared the same home base and met at the end of each day to swap stories, our individual souls again became restless to connect to something beyond.

For those remaining years when the black bag was looming, Rog sought his truth in the distant cosmos. He went back in time to the material origins of our universe. As a volunteer for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, his special expertise was Mars, the red planet. Rog was mapping the surface of Mars using data from the Mars Rover expedition to visualize the surface coordinates. Rog had been working with a Washington, D.C. software company to create the necessary tools to contour the topography of Mars. In addition, he produced regular videos on the Rover's progress as part of the Mars exhibit. Just days before his cancer diagnosis, Rog continued his daily bicycle ride to the museum's space science department.

By coincidence (and HPB would say there is no such thing), Rog had all three of his main astrological houses in Aries. Swirling together in a constellation of meaning were Mars, Ares, war, fire in the belly, and, not surprisingly, the liver. While I cannot know exactly how all these pieces fit together, I know that there were battles within him that he struggled to resolve all his life. But I do know that before Roger died, he had, as he conveyed in this letter to friends and family, found peace.

In the days since my diagnosis I have experienced a calmness and centeredness such as religious faith had never provided. I have found a sense of place and process with the worldview of evolutionary cosmology such as I have searched for relentlessly in my seventy-seven years . . . And it is increasingly feeding my spirit daily with a sense of readiness for every present moment in this process of dying . . . a sense of contributing to the spreading of a new approach to this part of our process called living. I feel honored to enter this process consciously. I am finally learning how to live in the moment. Fear and hope have no place in this process. It is a readiness and willingness of an utterly deep knowingness that we are truly all in this together.

While Rog was going into outer space, I began a journey through inner space. Unlike Rog, with his objective approach, I went to subjective experience to find meaning. I kept a dream journal and learned the language of symbols and the soul's journey through Tarot. I took up painting—mapping the images that appeared in dreams using color, shape, and line. Through close friendships with a group of women, I learned about the power of community, trust, and listening.

Our private journeys prepared each of us for the news one sunny morning in early March of 2013. Our doctor delivered the diagnosis to us in our living room over speakerphone: "Roger, you have inoperable, irreversible liver cancer."I had always thought we would have more time together. While I cried, I saw Rog transform as calmness and clarity came over him and his spirit, opening to unexpected possibilities, readied itself for whatever might follow.

The black bag, once our captor, freed us to fully experience each remaining moment. Rog initiated a new volunteer into the Mars project so that the work he had been doing could continue. He composed reflections for those he was leaving. His initial reaction never wavered. Throughout his dying process Rog maintained his curiosity and serenity. Hospice entered our lives, and our community of family and friends gently joined us in trusting and celebrating his dying process. We managed the pain. His peaceful breathing slowed until it left him for good.

Once our carefully crafted rituals of passage had come and gone, things became very quiet in my world. It seemed as if I slept for nearly a year. In the depths of dreams, Rog and I met five times. In the first two dreams, Rog was in his office at home; he was sitting in his armchair in the dark. When I came into the room, he told me "I'm all right. I don't need anything. I am just fine."

In the third dream, he was excited about finding a good price, $7000, for a satellite dish he wanted installed on our roof. I did not know he needed such a dish for his museum work, but he assured me that it would benefit me too, because I could get better television reception. In the dream, I told him I wasn't happy to have him back alive if he was going to pretend that his desires were mine. I realized I could no longer afford him. When I woke up, I smiled at the image of seeking life at a distance. It was then that I knew I could stand my ground and focus on my earthly life.

The fourth dream took place on a cruise ship; I came to our cabin and found that Rog had packed up all my clothes and had taken them away. I was upset but knew he had only wanted to help. Then I saw that my purse was still there plus a carry-on bag that looked very full. There were also two hats and two pairs of gloves that I was trying to stuff into the carry-on bag when the loudspeaker announced we must leave the ship. As I woke up, I realized that my identification and money were in my purse and that the carry-on bag probably contained other items I might need. So even though it didn't appear so, I have everything I need to continue my journey.

The last dream also involved bags. I was on a large porch and I saw that all of Rog's suitcases were packed and rain was coming down. I went into the house and told Rog to bring in his bags as they were getting wet. He just looked at me, shook his head, and said, "I don't need them."It was at that moment that I realized that I must now move on alone. Through these dreams, I learned that my journey continues and I am free.

The end time for our relationship was a point on a spiral of meeting, growing, changing, and then releasing to begin again by sorting through who I was, have become, still am, and hope to be in the future. The cycle of this relationship, the effect of Rog's personality in creating a life together, has changed me. I have become more comfortable expressing myself to others because Rog honored and respected my views. I am more comfortable with asking for what I need and want without feeling I must justify my position. I look within myself more and more for guidance, not as concerned with people pleasing and everyone else's reactions. All of this I take forward now. I am profoundly grateful for the life that we had together.

Like all partners, Rog and I did our compromising in the creation of our very workable relationship. Rog was more comfortable in his mind than his body, so I let certain desires go dormant for a time. Right now I am socializing with friends, taking dancing lessons, golfing, bike riding, and savoring long walks. I move into my next stage with a greater appreciation for varied views, knowing that we are all stronger by exposure to different ways of seeing the world and making individual choices. I have a greater understanding of the woman that I am and the faith and intuition that have always been a large part of me.

After Rog died, I took the black bag off the hook, removed his documents, and put the bag away. For a time, the space remained empty. Now it is the place for my new, brighter, lighter, flowered cloth bag. This bag reminds me of the many miles I will travel as I continue my journey, alone again.

Nance Elsinger became a Life Member of the Theosophical Society in 1985. She worked at Krotona School of Theosophy until the fall of 1991. After moving to New Mexico, she continued her involvement in the TS by leading workshops at Krotona and Olcott and by participating in the Silver City, New Mexico study group as well as in a group now developing in Albuquerque.

Printed in the Fall 2014 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Shirley, John. "A Brief History of Apocalypse" Quest  102. 4 (Fall 2014): pg. 133-139.

The act of revealing, or disclosure—that’s what the word apocalypse used to mean. It meant revelation. It meant a rent in the veil; an opening up that revealed divine purpose.

For most people now, apocalypse has come to mean widespread destruction, even an end of the world as we know it.

People tend to associate apocalypse with widespread death; with divine vengeance. We link it with the punishment of human misdeeds. We assume it would be a judgment on all of us.

For all I know, an apocalypse of that kind might be in the offing. Whoever deals the cards in this big casino we call the universe—or whoever set the casino up in the first place—isn’t confiding in me.

But I doubt a Judgment Day per se is coming. Consider the precedents.

Spurious prophecies of world-ending apocalypse are as common as ragweed and thistles. They sprout in every culture; they put burrs under every saddle. Periodically, riders gallop about in terror, shouting a warning of coming disaster.

Such dire warnings go back thousands of years. If the prophets of doom had been right, the entire human world would have ended in fire and ice thousands of times by now. As you may have noticed, it didn’t happen. Large-scale disasters like the Black Plague happened at times, yes; world-ending ones, no.

Not a year passes without a charismatic pied piper luring his followers off some cliff to avoid an imaginary damnation. But the kind of apocalypse imagined by fanatic misinterpreters of allegory and myth never quite comes about.

Of course, something apocalyptic, in the sense of widespread destruction, could arise from sheer chance: a sufficiently large asteroid with an Oedipal yen for Mother Earth; or perhaps a derangement of the inner works of the sun, leading to nova.

But if the Four Horsemen do come galloping in, chances are human beings will be spurring them on. The destruction of Native American societies seemed apocalyptic to tribal peoples. World War I was unprecedentedly destructive; World War II felt like apocalypse for six million Jews in Europe; it was world-ending for Japanese civilians to be caught up in the fireballs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was the Vietnam war’s carpet bombing and napalming; there were the killing fields of Pol Pot, the purges ordered by Mao—all those events seemed apocalyptic to people enduring them. Americans have not forgotten the shattering jihadist brutality of the 9/11 attack; to people in south Manhattan it felt like the end of the world, for a time.

Somewhere catastrophic apocalypse is always going on—currently in Syria and the South Sudan. Apocalypse Now was the title of the Coppola film, and now is always the operative word.

We could recite an endless litany of human barbarism, human destructiveness. But good human beings died to end slavery in the Civil War. For every slavery advocate there was, somewhere, an abolitionist. Women for centuries were crushed under patriarchies, but they fought back, and marched to get voting rights—and good men gave them equal rights. Men and women gave their lives to stop Hitler. A public consensus—a kind of shared consciousness—that the Vietnam war was a big, brutal mistake finally forced its end. Something similar happened with the Iraq war.

Yes, the world sometimes seems to be run by the greedy, the short-sighted and opportunistic, so that millions constantly run short of food and countless children die of dysentery. But there are also big, well-funded organizations trying to feed those people, trying to provide clean water and medical help, and in many localities succeeding.

Our ongoing catastrophic “apocalypse” seems perpetually mitigated, hemmed in by the cooperative efforts of good people. These are people who, mysteriously enough, actually care what happens to strangers. Why? Is it merely some mindless sociobiological urge? Sometimes the most innately kind people can be desperately selfish—and yet altruism never goes away completely.

Given the selfishness we all tend to succumb to, why does organized sympathy ever catch on?

Maybe there’s a spiritual X factor, as the late Colin Wilson used to say. Could it be that there’s a magic that can enter the atmosphere of the world, that can crackle like static electricity, that ripples invisibly by like radio waves? Maybe that “magic” is sparked by words, but, like a flame needing oxygen, it requires a certain minimal degree of consciousness.

We’ve seen that apocalypse originally meant “revelation.” A revelation is a revealing, a disclosure—an opening. It could be that the apocalypse that is about opening is the one that matters. Something comes along and shocks us—whether vision or a disaster—and it awakens us, if only for a few moments; it makes us look around with fresh eyes. It has made us question what life is for. Does this existence have meaning, or is it all just a random alteration between suffering and satiety?

Revelation: an unveiling—an opening. Why does a revelation ever happen? Isn’t it for the sake of understanding? What’s the point of it, if not understanding? “When we talk about understanding,” said Jiddu Krishnamurti, “surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely—the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears. When you give your whole attention to it.”

If apocalypse is revelation and revelation is an unveiling, an opening, where do we find it in ourselves? And if we do find that revelatory consciousness, how can we share it with the world?

Cameras used to have shutters; perhaps digital cameras have them too. At any rate, somehow every camera opens to light. When a shutter opens, a dark place within the camera is exposed to light, and an image forms. A curtain of sorts is drawn back, a veil is opened—and the camera, without prejudice, can take its photo of whatever is there.

The methods of Buddhist vipassana meditation, of Zen teachers, of Krishnamurti, of G.I. Gurdjieff, of Black Elk, of Vedanta, of esoteric Christianity, of certain Sufi schools, all have something in common. The greatest spiritual teachers nudge us toward a deliberate movement of attention to the present moment; to the world around us, and to ourselves. They ask us to see and feel what is, without prejudice. They direct us to our inner camera, to find the shutter so we can open it and take that impression, that inner photo. In that moment, we can objectively take in the world around us. But this inner camera has two lenses, one pointing outward, one pointing inward, through self-observation. The two exposures somehow merge in one almost holographic realization. At first, the pictures can be out of focus, marred by glare. But as we work on it, we get clearer and clearer images.

This inner camera differs in another way from the mechanical kind: properly used, it registers feelings, sensations, scents, touch, as well as visual impressions. And eventually, we’re told, it takes all this in at once, merging this input into a master picture.

Since our symbolic camera takes everything in, it can seem pitiless. It can as be shocking as an explosion. Increased consciousness brings people the bittersweet shock of seeing themselves as they are, for the first time. Even the finest people are likely to be shocked by aspects of their own personalities, by their own automatic reactions, that they see for the first time through rigorous use of the inner camera of self-observation.

An increase of consciousness that includes real self-observation can be an apocalyptic shock. One’s inner house of cards collapses; one’s flimsy framework of rationales for selfishness falls apart. It is said to feel like the world is ending.

The person experiencing this inner apocalypse thinks, “I had no idea I was so self-absorbed, so childish, so automatic in my reactions, so without real volition.”

What, they wonder, is real inside them anymore? Is there a real self—something besides vanity, defensiveness, desire?

But with the apocalyptic collapse of the false self, a new possibility arises. The light of consciousness doesn’t just reveal the false, the transitory; it also reveals the finer energies, the intelligence infused into the cosmos. Something higher is revealed, and it helps in the building of new inner possibilities. A whole new range of choices open up; a new freedom from identification and blind suffering.

Apocalypse, even in the Judgment Day sense, offers a light at the end of the tunnel. In the various myths of deluge, like Gilgamesh and the tale of Noah, something is saved and the world begun again. The book of Revelation offers a kind of rebooting of the world, some cast into the lake of fire but the righteous offered a new, finer world.

The inner apocalypse—the true apocalypse, to my way of thinking—offers its own path to “paradise.” It’s not the fanciful paradise of heaven, but it is a release from the tyranny of suffering. It offers a gradual increase of freedom from the misery of identification, from blind anger and fear. Suffering is still part of life—but an authentic increase in consciousness changes our relationship to suffering. We’re no longer shivering, naked in the cold. We’ve built a new home; we have a fire; we have hope.

But what does that do for the outer world? What about the external world’s endless apocalypses—or the chances of a final one?

Catastrophe is always waiting in the wings. In 2010 there was an enormous explosion in the California town of San Bruno. A natural gas pipeline blew up, completely unexpectedly. Eight people were killed, thirty-eight houses destroyed. It had been quiet and peaceful till that instant; no one had the faintest notion it was going to happen. Then, from one moment to the next, a localized apocalypse consumed a whole neighborhood.

Last year the Texas town of West was blasted by a fertilizer factory explosion. Out of the blue, fifteen people were killed, 150 structures destroyed.

Those particular explosions could be traced to human error. But centuries ago the volcanic devastation from the eruption of Vesuvius seemed to ancient Romans to be the wrath of the god Vulcanus. Both kinds of localized apocalypse came about with shocking unexpectedness.

It would be foolish to walk the world in fear, but destruction on a colossal scale is always possible. Madmen can build bombs; earthquakes can shake cities to rubble. If I were walking in San Francisco and saw an enormous fireball consume a whole block, I would be startled, horrified, concerned, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Gas pipelines underlie the city. Magma underlies the continent.

And my own physical apocalypse will inevitably come one day: this body will simply die. My father died when I was eleven from an undiagnosed meningitis. There was no warning that his headache and fever were lethal. But in a few days, he was gone.

Consider W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; . . .
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster.

Cultures rise and fall; plagues sweep through. Wars devastate. The world in some region is always shattering—and we turn away quite leisurely from the disaster. Sometimes we do it because we must, perhaps for the sake of family; other times we turn away out of fear, indifference, selfishness.

Yet that mysterious X factor, that intelligent potential, remains: a background hum of communal consciousness, the wellspring of actual conscience, seems to draw people together to try to end foolish wars, to feed the hungry, to send FEMA and the Red Cross to disaster areas. That variable signal, that lighthouse gleam in the fog, indicates that there’s something more in people—something that might be awakened to address the outer “apocalypse,” ironically because of the possibility of inner apocalypse. People who work toward consciousness seem to blossom with empathy, with concern for other people. The spiritual apocalypse, the inner revelation, works against the external apocalypse.

Could a growth of consciousness, starting from within and spreading outward, change the world?

Certainly there’s a chance, instead, that humanity could bring about its own mindless judgment day through environmental irresponsibility. Anthropogenic climate change will lead to mass displacement of some people; our ability to raise food may be compromised; the struggle for resources could spawn wars. The risk of nuclear war has receded somewhat, but it is still quite real.

Gurdjieff spoke of “the terror of the situation”—of a world of people asleep when they supposed themselves awake; people armed with terrible weapons and equipped with too little conscience. He felt that walking, talking sleep, that absence of mindful consciousness, was the base cause of war, and could well lead to the premature end of humanity.

But if we are more conscious of ourselves, undergoing that inner apocalypse, we’ll be freer, more able to help in the world around us. And we’ll be more empowered to house those displaced refugees; to work together to raise and distribute more food; to find common ground so we can avert future wars.

It is a curious thing. We need an apocalypse of one kind to avoid the other kind.

John Shirley is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of many books including The Other End (a novel of “alternate apocalypse”) and Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. His latest novel is Doyle after Death, a tale of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the afterlife. His Website is http://john-shirley.com.

Printed in the Fall 2014 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "A Brief History of Apocalypse" Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 133-139.

Winged beasts from the abyss. Angels of bottomless pits. Lakes of fire. These are some of the traditional images of apocalypse. Lately Hollywood's restless imagination has added new images to the gallery: planets crashing into earth, invasions by malign and omnipotent aliens, ecodisasters on a global scale.

Author Howard Bloom has called it the "apocalyptic addiction," and it is still with us. If a radio preacher sees his ratings drop, he can stick a pin in the calendar, determine the date of the Second Coming, and garner attention nationwide. And one popular painting from around 1973, The Rapture by Charles Anderson, shows Jesus Christ returning over the skies of Dallas as the souls of believers waft up to him, leaving their crashed cars strewn about. 

From another angle, we can ask whether legitimate concerns (about the environment or nuclear war) have become hopelessly muddled with ancient apocalyptic fears, setting off waves of anxiety and obscuring what actually needs to be done. Thus it may be helpful to look at this addiction and how it has manifested in Western civilization.

Today the word apocalypse mostly refers to the end of the world. It did not originally have this meaning. The word comes from the Greek‚ (apokalypsis), which in its most basic sense simply means "uncovering" or "revelation." It has been applied to revelations of two types: (1) the eschatological (dealing with the end of the world and the judgment of the dead); and (2) the mystical, usually involving some kind of otherworldly journey. The first is by far the better known, largely because of the influence of the book of Revelation, whose title in the original Greek is in fact apokalypsis (Rev. 1:1). In the years after Revelation was written in the late first century AD, it exercised so much influence that the name came to be applied to apocryphal works with similar themes, such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul.

The Laurasian Mythos                                                                  

But the idea of the end of the world goes much further back. In his book The Origins of the World's Mythologies (reviewed in Quest, Fall 2013), the Harvard Sanskritist E.J. Michael Witzel explores the commonalities among the world's mythologies. He strikingly concludes that many of the world's mythic themes can be traced back well beyond the bounds of written history.

Witzel claims that there is a more or less consistent narrative (he calls it a "novel") that can be found in the myths and scriptures of the peoples of Eurasia, North and South America, and even Polynesia. From their common features, he argues that this narrative very likely dates as far back as 40,000—20,000 BC. Using a name taken from geology for one of the protocontinents, Witzel calls this the Laurasian mythos. It encompasses the history of the world from the generation of the gods to the end of time. As such, it recapitulates the human life cycle from birth to death: "Laurasian ‘ideology' seems to be based on a fairly simple idea, the correspondence of the ‘life' of humans and the universe" (Witzel, 422). Witzel also notes:

Laurasian mythology also tells of the destruction of our world. It may take place as a final worldwide conflagration—the Gaterdamerung or Ragnar in the Edda, Siva's destructive dance and fire in India; by molten metal in Zoroastrian myth or by devouring the world; or by fire and water in Maya and other Mesoamerican myths; or as in the Old Egyptian tale of Atum's destruction of the earth. However, the end also takes other forms, such as ice and long-lasting winter, for example, in the Edda, or in Iran with Yima's underground world, or again, a flood. (Witzel, 181)

Witzel includes the biblical apocalypse in this picture. Like most scholars, he sees the Persian religion Zoroastrianism as the immediate source of this idea, which percolated into Judaism around the sixth century BC and thence into Christianity, "the end of the world, judgment of humans, and emerging paradise in Zoroastrian myth," he says, being the source "from which the Christian belief in the end,' the final judgment, and paradise are derived" (Witzel, 181).

The Day of the Lord

A painting commissioned in 1973 by Leon and Ruth Bates of the Bible Believers Evangelistic Association and executed by Charles Anderson. Sometimes known as The Dallas Rapture, its actual name is simply The Rapture.

Given these preliminaries, we can see the biblical apocalyptic genre emerge in this way: The background is a covenant between God and Israel, described at length in Deut. 27—28: "And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee to this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations on earth" (Deut. 28:1; biblical quotations are from the King James Version). Then follows a series of curses that will beset Israel if it fails to keep its side of the bargain.

As initially understood, this covenant applies simply to the fortunes of the nation; it has no eschatological element. But by the time of the prophets (the eighth century BC onward), the orientation shifts. The prophets begin by denouncing the sins of Israel, with warnings about the devastation that must ensue if the people do not repent. The earliest version of this sequence appears in Amos, the oldest of the prophetic writings, dating to the (possibly early) eighth century BC. Threatening the wayward Israelites for their crimes and injustices, Amos says, "Thy wife shall be an harlot in the city, and thy sons and thy daughters shall fall by the sword, and thy land shall be divided by line; and thou shalt die in a polluted land: and Israel shall surely go into captivity forth of his land" (Amos 7:17).

Amos does not end his prophecy on this dire note. Ultimately, the Lord says, "I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them" (Amos 9:14).

Elsewhere (e.g., Amos 5:18—20), the prophet alludes to a "day of the Lord" in which these events will come to pass. This day of the Lord is not eschatological in the strict sense: Amos does not foresee an end of the world, but rather a time of chastisement of Israel along with an eventual restoration. None of these things are described as taking place outside the course of human events as such.

These themes develop in the later prophets, such as Second Isaiah, which portrays the Babylonian captivity (586—539 BC) as a time of chastisement for the nation and looks forward to the restoration foreseen by the earlier prophets, "for [Jerusalem] hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins" (Isaiah 40:2). Most scholars date Second Isaiah to the time of the Jews' return to their homeland under Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC. But even here there is little if any explicit reference to an end of the world. It is really only in the second century BC that the apocalyptic genre arises in a recognizable form.

Daniel's Time of the End

The first full-blown apocalyptic text, and the only one to make its way into the Hebrew Bible, is the book of Daniel. In many ways, Daniel sets the tone for the genre as a whole. Ostensibly a work by and about a prophet and sage of the sixth century BC, it almost certainly dates to centuries later—specifically, the second century BC. Alluding as it does to a number of datable historical facts, Daniel is a vaticinium ex eventu—a "prophecy" written only after the events purportedly foretold.

We find this prophecy in Daniel 10—12, which foretells the coming of "the abomination that maketh desolate" (Daniel 11:31). This refers to events of 167 BC, when the Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who then ruled Judea, tried to set up an altar, and possibly an image, of Zeus in the Jerusalem Temple. This was an abomination to the monotheistic Jews. Writing during this period, pseudo-Daniel foresees not only the ouster of Antiochus but the fulfillment of time, when "many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Daniel 12:2).

We can see the difference between this prophecy and the earlier ones in the Bible. Daniel predicts that the defeat of Antiochus will usher in, not merely the restoration of Israel, but "the time of the end" (Daniel 12:4). Thus appears perhaps the first instance in Jewish thought of the culmination of Witzel's Laurasian "novel."

What Daniel predicted did not take place. The coming of the "abomination of desolation" did not herald the end of time. Instead the Jews, led by the priestly family of the Maccabees, rose up, drove out Antiochus, and established an independent Jewish kingdom that lasted around a century. Because Daniel so closely connects Antiochus's "abomination of desolation" with the end of time—evidently unaware of this more prosaic outcome—scholars have argued that Daniel can be dated to no later than 164 BC, when the Jews were victorious (Metzger and Coogan, 151).

New Testament Apocalypse

For Christianity, the next significant apocalyptic documents appear in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew 21, Mark 13, and Luke 21). They are similar enough that they are known together as the Apocalyptic Discourse or the Little Apocalypse. This is a collection of Jesus's sayings in which he predicts the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem followed by the end of the world.

The relation of these two events is by no means clear from the texts themselves. In the first place, scholars tend to assume that, like the Sermon on the Mount, this collection consists of isolated sayings of Jesus that were later grouped together by the Evangelists, so their original mport may be muted. In the second place, even as presented, the sequence of events is vague. Some contend that Mark 13:7—"but the end shall not be yet"—is an attempt to separate the time of the Temple's destruction from the end of the world (Metzger and Coogan, 403), but this is not entirely convincing, since Christ goes on to say, "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be done" (Mark 13:30).

The Apocalyptic Discourse describes the invasion of Judea by the Romans and the destruction of the Temple, which took place in AD 70. Hence scholars date the synoptic Gospels, of which Mark is the earliest, to this period, usually AD 65—90. (Scholars agree that Jesus did not actually say many of the things attributed to him, so these prophecies too would be vaticinia ex eventu). They are unlikely to be much later, because, as we have seen, the authors still expected that the time of the end would soon follow after these events.

Certainly in the early days of Christianity, apocalyptic expectation was extremely high. The earliest New Testament text, 1 Thessalonians, dated to no later than AD 52 (Brown, 457), is partly meant to soothe the fears of Christians who were worried about the fates of their loved ones who died before Christ's return (1 Thess. 4:13—18). One verse here—"then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them [i.e., the dead in Christ] in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord" (1 Thess. 4:17)—is the source of the well-known Rapture doctrine.

The Vision of John

Finally, there is the centerpiece of the apocalyptic genre—Revelation. Much about this text is problematic. Its author, "John," has been associated with the writer of the fourth Gospel and the three epistles in the New Testament attributed to John, but scholars began to doubt this attribution as early as the third century, and it is now almost universally discredited. The book's date is also debated. Taking the lead from the second-century church father Irenaeus (Against the Heresies, 5.30.3, in Eusebius [3.17], 81), who placed it toward the end of the reign of the emperor Domitian from 81 to 96, most scholars put it in the last decade of the first century. By this theory, Revelation would have been written to encourage Christians suffering from Domitian's persecution.

This view has some difficulties. For example, the evidence for a persecution of Christians under Domitian is very weak. If it did occur, it had nothing like the vehemence of Nero's famous persecution of the Christians in 64.

There is also the problem of the celebrated "beast": "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six"—666 (Rev. 13:18). In the centuries since Revelation was written, this beast has been associated with such figures as Napoleon, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein. But scholars generally identify him with Nero, emperor of Rome from 54 to 68. By the numerological analysis known as gematria or isopsephy (in which the hidden meanings of words are divined by adding the numerical values of their letters), the number of the Hebrew letters for "Nero Caesar" add up to 666 (Brown, 793).

But this interpretation leaves us with a difficulty. If Revelation was written in the 90s, why should it focus on Nero, who had been dead for some twenty-five years? Some scholars say that John is referring to a Nero redivivus, whose supposed return was the subject of legend in the late first century (and was sometimes identified with Domitian), but the British biblical scholar Margaret Barker has another theory: the core of Revelation was written in the late 60s, during the Jewish revolt against Rome, when apocalyptic expectation would have been high. Revelation's clumsy Greek, full of Hebraisms, has usually been explained by the assumption that Greek was not its author's first language, but Barker suggests that it is because Revelation, at least in part, was originally written in Aramaic and only later translated into Greek. (Like a number of scholars, Barker believes that Revelation was not written at one time but went through several stages of composition.) If so, the traditional date of c.95 could simply mean that the text took its final shape and was translated into Greek at that point (Barker, 2000, 71—72).

Barker's theory has another argument in its favor: the intense, hallucinatory spirit of Revelation better reflects the dire period of the 60s—with the overthrow of Nero and the Roman invasion of Judea—than the comparatively calm times of the 90s.

What does all this amount to? If Revelation, or a large part of it, can be dated to the era of the Jewish War (AD 66—73), we see a striking commonality among the great apocalyptic texts of the Bible: each was written during a period of extreme crisis for the Jews, and each predicted that this crisis—which had not yet fully played itself out—was the harbinger of the end of time. Since these texts all came to be accepted as sacred scripture by the Christians, mainstream Christianity has always been beset with intense apocalyptic expectation. It has resurfaced in more or less every generation from the first century to the present.

The Monarch and the Whore

As the years wore on, the Christian apocalyptic tradition would expand and mutate. After the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476, it would speak of a coming universal Christian monarch who would rescue the faithful from the onslaught of barbarians or, later, Muslims—an idea that surfaces frequently over the centuries, for example in the prophecies of the sixteenth-century seer Michel de Nostradamus (Smoley, Nostradamus, 19—20). And Rev. 20:2—3, which speaks of a thousand years during which Satan is bound, gave rise to many elaborate millennial speculations. Indeed, today the word "millennium," meaning "a thousand years," is often used to refer to a coming age of peace and harmony.

The book of Revelation is intensely anti-Roman. While this is conveyed obliquely and symbolically (it would not have been safe to do otherwise), it is clear enough. We have already seen how the beast is probably to be identified with one of the emperors, whether it is Nero, Domitian, or Nero redivivus. Moreover, the "great whore" of Babylon described in Revelation 17 certainly refers to Rome, who sits on "seven mountains" (verse 9; Rome was built on seven hills) and who is identified as "that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth" (verse 18).

A sixteenth-century woodcut portraying the whore of Babylon as the papacy. Note the three-tiered papal tiara on the woman's head.The title above, Johannis, simply means. "of John," indicating that the illustration is based on the book of Revelation.

This anti-Roman polemic put Revelation in comparative disfavor in the late western empire (313—476), where Christianity was first tolerated and then proclaimed as the official religion, but the text regained its popularity in the Middle Ages, when many condemned the papacy's arrogance and corruption. At this time the whore of Babylon was again equated with Rome—not with the fallen pagan empire, but with the Catholic Church. No less a figure than Dante made this connection. In his Inferno, he says to the simoniac pope Nicholas III: "It was shepherds such as you that the Evangelist had in mind when she that sitteth upon the waters was seen by him committing fornication with kings" (Inferno 19:106—08; in Alighieri, 1:199).

The association between the whore and the papal power would prove hard to break. In the sixteenth century it was propagated by the Protestant Reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox. Engravings in early editions of Luther's German translation of the New Testament show the whore wearing the triple tiara of the popes. The theme persists. In 1964 the Jehovah's Witnesses sect published a book entitled "Babylon the Great Has Fallen!" God's Kingdom Rules! One illustration in it depicts the great whore, the church of Rome, as a glamorous woman with a cocktail glass. She is riding a scarlet-colored wild beast (Rev. 17:3), identified in the book as the United Nations.

The images in the apocalyptic texts, vivid when not lurid, lend themselves easily to embellishment by the imagination. But because these texts arose in unique historical circumstances, applying them to the current scene requires a great deal of mental contortion (as in "Babylon the Great Has Fallen," which has to overstate the links between the papacy and the U.N.). One must harmonize very different, often very obscure, prophecies from Daniel, the Gospels, Revelation, and elsewhere into a picture that is at least roughly self-consistent—while adapting them to a time and place of which the original writers could scarcely conceive.

Hence there are many disputes among today's believers. There are the premillennials versus the postmillennials—that is, those who believe that Christ will return before the thousand-year period mentioned in Rev. 20:1—6 versus those who believe he will come after. We have already encountered the idea of the Rapture inspired by 1 Thessalonians. Premillennials are split between those who believe this Rapture will take place before the "tribulation" mentioned in Rev. 2:22 and 7:14—a time of upheaval and pestilence on earth—and those who believe it will take place after. The immensely successful Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—as well as the painting The Rapture—are based on the premise that the Rapture will occur before the tribulation. The faithful will disappear instantaneously into heaven, leaving their dishes unwashed and their cars veering off the roads, and the rest will be left to reap the fruits of their unbelief. A rumor in the evangelical world, no doubt apocryphal, says that a certain major airline will not assign a Christian pilot to the same flight as a Christian copilot, on the grounds that the plane will crash if Jesus takes them both at once.

A stylish, cocktail-sipping whore of Babylon as conceived by Jehovah's Witnesses. The United Nations buiding and log appear in the background because the sect equates the beast of Revelation with the UN. From "Babylon the Great is Fallen!" God's Kingdom Rules!

The Displacement of Fear

At this point you may ask why we should care about these ideas.

Because they are still very much alive and active. They are the source of practically all of the "end times" prophecies that are floating about in the current psychic atmosphere. As outlandish as these predictions may seem, they are regarded by tens of millions of people as accurate pictures of events that will unfold in the near future. That every generation since the time of Christ has done this is, perhaps, amusing, but it may also make us want to understand the apocalyptic impulse more clearly.

The issue is intricate. I have tried to deal with it at some length in my book The Essential Nostradamus, but a few brief points can be made here.

To begin with, psychologists speak of the human propensity toward displacement. You are terribly afraid of something—so afraid that you cannot face it consciously. You deal with it by projecting it onto something that is more remote and hence less threatening.

This explains a great deal about the apocalyptic addiction. Your world, like mine, is going to end in a few decades at the most. That is certain and irrefutable. But the thought of your own death is terrifying, and there are few who can think about it for any length of time.

The end of the world is considerably more remote. Deep down, I suspect, everyone knows that the world is not going to end this way, with Jesus in the clouds over Dallas and the husbands of vanished believers wandering around the house wondering where their wives have gone. The Supreme Being, after all, is not a producer of preposterous disaster films. But by displacing anxiety over your own death onto a collective holocaust that is always just around the corner, you make it more distant and thus more manageable. That this is supposed to happen to everyone at the same time makes it all the more comforting, since many people are afraid of dying alone.

Then there is what theologians call theodicy or divine justice—why God permits evil. Most people would probably acknowledge that there is a rough justice in the world: more often than we care to admit, people get exactly what they deserve. But the accounts do not add up perfectly. Innocents suffer; the wicked prosper. Much of this is due to human evil, but not all of it. Pain and suffering seem to be woven into the stuff of the universe.

Theosophists, like many believers in Eastern religions, may see the answer to this question in karma and reincarnation: the harmless baby suffers now because it did evil in a past life. This presents problems of its own (which I cannot go into here), but it is much better than a meaningless, justiceless world. For religions that do not hold to reincarnation, like Christianity in almost all its forms, the issue remains. The end of the world, with its judgment of the quick and the dead, provides an answer: now, in this wicked system of things, the accounts are out of balance, but Jesus will come back in the end and set them right.

The Mortal Universe

Much more could be said about these matters, and thousands of books have been written about them. But I would like to end with just one further observation, which goes back to Witzel's Laurasian "novel." It is certainly true that this universal epic myth parallels the life cycle of an individual human. On the simplest level, this suggests that the human mind is foredoomed to cast the world in anthropomorphic terms: we are humans, so we are going to think of the universe in some way as human too.

Of course, if this is true for acknowledged myths, whether they are the legends of the Maya or the book of Genesis, it must also be true of the current scientific worldview, which also says that the universe has a lifespan, from the Big Bang to its eventual collapse. The end of the world is always essentially the same myth, whether it is imagined as a Big Crunch or as the Son of Man coming in glory amidst a cloud of saints. This truth may be hard for some to see, but then, as Joseph Campbell once observed, myth is someone else's religion. It is never your own.

Can we make the same argument about the Theosophical worldview, with its vision of countless universes at countless levels of manifestation, punctuated by eternities of sleep in pralaya? Yes, undoubtedly. The resemblance still holds, even if the scale of vision is immensely larger than even the most daring physicist might venture. The question is where we go from there. We could stop with a Kantian relativism, which says that we can never grasp the universe in its true form, outside the limited categories of human cognition. Or we could step past this barrier and suppose that our human experience and our human understanding of the world, though far from perfect or complete, are nevertheless a legitimate part of the great universal drama in which the divine beholds the divine—a drama that will continue beyond the death of this world and of innumerable others.

Sources

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Inferno. Translated by Charles S. Singleton. Two volumes. Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1970.
Anonymous. "Babylon the Great Has Fallen!" God's Kingdom Rules. Brooklyn: Watchtower Bible & Tract Society, 1964.
Barker, Margaret. The Revelation of Jesus Christ Which God Gave to Him to Show to His Servants What Must Soon Take Place. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000.
Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Eliade, Mircea, ed. The Encyclopedia of Religion. Sixteen volumes. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Eusebius. The History of the Church. Translated by G.A. Williamson and Andrew Louth. 2d ed. London: Penguin, 1989.
Ford, J. Massyngberde, ed. and trans. The Anchor Bible: Revelation. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2000.
Hanson, Paul D. The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1975.
McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
Metzger, Bruce M., and Michael D. Coogan, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Smoley, Richard. The Essential Nostradamus. 2d ed. New York: Tarcher/Penguin. 2010.
———. Introduction to Emanuel Swedenborg, The Shorter Works of 1758. Translated by George F. Dole. West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, forthcoming.
Witzel, E.J. Michael. The Origins of the World's Mythologies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Richard Smoley's latest book, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, was published in January 2015 by Tarcher/Penguin.