“2013: Or, What to Do When the Apocalypse Doesn’t Arrive” by Gary Lachman
The belief in a coming end of the world as we know it may seem
understandable to people living in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, but a look at history shows that it has been part of Western
psychology from the beginning.
The central figure of Western religion, Jesus Christ, told his
followers that the end was nigh, and most people who accepted Jesus
believed that the cosmic last call would come in their lifetime. Yet
Jesus worked within an age-old Jewish tradition that looked to the
coming of the Messiah, a religious and political leader who would set
the world to rights and, incidentally, free the Chosen People from
whomever it was who had conquered them at the time. As Jesus didn’t free
the Jews from the Romans—nor seemed able to free himself from them
either—the Jews who
denied
him seem justified in their disbelief. To them, and to the Romans, the
Christians who preached a coming Day of Judgment were rather like the
urban oracles who inhabit most major cities today, ranting on street
corners and pestering passersby to repent.
Post-Jesus, the Jews didn’t give up their anticipation of a Messiah.
They merely pushed back the date of his arrival, a tactic the Christians
soon adopted as well when it became clear that Jesus’ Second
Coming—after his crucifixion and resurrection—was delayed. The
last
major claimant to Messiahdom was the Turkish Jew Sabbatai Zevi, who,
after gathering a huge following, ignominiously abandoned his call in
1666 when threatened with impalement by Sultan Mehmet IV. As did later
students of eschatology (the study of the end times), the early
Christian theorists were adept in cooking the books and explaining why
their own final curtain hadn’t yet fallen. Nevertheless, against all the
evidence, the belief in some once-and-for-all denouement remained
strong. In 156 AD, for example, a Phrygian named Montanus declared that
he was the incarnation of the Holy Spirit and that, in accordance with
the Fourth Gospel, he would reveal “things to come,” such as the
imminent arrival of Christ’s kingdom, which would physically descend
from the heavens and transform Phrygia into a land of saints.
Understandably, thousands of Christians flocked to Phrygia to await the
Second Coming. Yet again, the expected kingdom’s failure to arrive did
little to dampen the belief that it would eventually show up. After
Montanus, there were several other false alarms, all of which ended in
the same way.
Ironically, the Church itself soon became a strong inhibitor of
apocalyptic thought. By the time it became the official religion of the
Roman Empire, with the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century,
the idea of a coming apocalypse was more of a threat than a promise. The
Church was the second most powerful organization in the empire, and
that it would lose this status because of the end of the world wasn’t
appealing. Drawing on the work of the third-century theologian Origen,
it shifted the emphasis from a historical apocalypse to a spiritual one
and developed an eschatology of the individual soul. This idea caught on
with the more educated and socially well-situated Christians, but the
more spectacular theme of a “real-life” apocalypse remained part of the
common people’s worldview and has been so ever since, as anyone aware of
the enormous popularity of the
Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels, based on a selective reading of the Book of Revelations, knows. Titles like
The Rapture,
Tribulation Force, and
The Mark don’t show up on the
New York Times bestseller
list, but millions of readers with a taste for Christian fundamentalism
buy and read these books — well — religiously, as page-turning guides
to the coming end times. The overarching theme of
Left Behind
is the fate of those who are not right with the Lord and who face a gory
retribution come the last days. A gateway to paradise for the faithful
few, for the disbelieving many, the millennium is their worst nightmare.
As the historian Norman Cohn argues in
The Pursuit of the Millennium,
millenarian scenarios share some basic ideas. Salvation is collective,
involving everyone, although not everyone will be saved; it is to be
experienced here on Earth, not in some afterlife; it is on its way and
will arrive suddenly; it will be total, effecting a complete
transformation of life as we know it; and it is to be achieved through
supernatural forces. As Cohn argues, by the Middle Ages, grassroots
expectation of the millennium was rampant. With a corrupt Church, the
common folk sought salvation through a cleansing apocalypse. This led to
some remarkable developments, like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a
loose community of radical Christians circa 1200 who, because of the
coming end times, believed they had become free of sin and acted
accordingly. Wandering from village to village, they rejected private
property—which meant they took whatever they wanted—and devoted
themselves to hedonistic pleasures, including “free love” and
drunkenness, rather like medieval hippies. Less driven by theology, this
and other millenarian sects sought to escape the deprivations of their
lives by envisioning a coming cosmic reversal that would set the
righteous lowly at the head of the table, with the worldly powerful at
best receiving scraps.
The motivation for many of these sects isn’t difficult to grasp.
Socially and economically disenfranchised, they resented the generally
fine living many monks and priests enjoyed, and understandably wanted
some for themselves. If it took an apocalypse to bring this about, so be
it. This aspect of millenarianism informed the secular varieties
familiar to the modern period, and while the French and Russian
revolutions lacked the supernatural forces common to most millenarian
movements, they both shared the other criteria admirably. The storming
of the Bastille inaugurated the Age of Reason, and the Bolshevik murder
of the Romanovs announced the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hitler’s
National Socialism was perhaps the most millenarian modern movement of
them all, celebrating a Third Reich that would, it claimed, last a
thousand years. (Thankfully, all it managed was twelve.) Yet just as the
Church did, the leaders of these secular apocalypses soon clamped down
on any who felt these events weren’t quite apocalyptic enough; and in
all three cases, for many the end times only brought new oppression.
Another example of secular millenarian belief was the hoopla in Europe
that accompanied the outbreak of the First World War. Many believed that
by the end of the nineteenth century Western civilization had become
rotten, and they looked to war as a way of clearing away the old world
in preparation for the new. It was not until the reality of trench
warfare took hold that those expectations dimmed and the war was seen as
yet another example of the very thing it was supposed to eliminate.
While I’ve been lucky enough to have missed anything like the French
or Russian revolution and the First World War, my own lifetime has been
peppered with quite a few millennial expectations. Growing up in the
1960s, through the media I was aware of the modern Brethren of the Free
Spirit in places like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury. I was also
aware that something called the Age of Aquarius either was on its way or
had already arrived (the jury is still out on this). Linked to this was
the idea that the fabled lost continent of Atlantis-—which I read about
in comic books and fantasy paperbacks—was due to surface sometime in
1969. Both were heralds of a coming golden age, when “peace will guide
the planets and love will steer the stars.” By the early seventies such
anticipations had fizzled, but in 1974 they were briefly revived when
comet Kohoutek sparked new interest in apocalyptic beliefs. A Christian
group called the Children of God—who, incidentally, advocated
“revolutionary lovemaking” (read: promiscuity)—distributed leaflets
announcing doomsday for January of that year, which my friends and I
read with interest. Predictably, Kohoutek fizzled as well. That same
year, the science writers John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann published
The Jupiter Effect,
a bestseller predicting the devastating results (earthquakes, tidal
waves, etc.) of a curious alignment of the planets on one side of the
sun. When the alignment took place and nothing happened, they wrote a
second book,
The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, explaining what went wrong. Not surprisingly, this sequel didn’t sell as well.
There were other millennial dates too. Remember the solar eclipse of
1999 and Y2K, the millennium bug? But the most significant millennial
date so far in my lifetime surely was 1987, the year of the Harmonic
Convergence—another planetary alignment—which was seen as the kickoff
for the most anticipated apocalyptic event in recent years, the year
2012. For those unaware, proponents of 2012 argue that an ancient Mayan
calendar—combined with permutations of the
I Ching—predicts
that tremendous changes will take place in that year and that, as one
advocate expresses it, a “singularity,” an event of unprecedented
ontological character, will take place and, as the saying goes,
transform life as we know it. Recalling Norman Cohn’s criteria for
millenarian belief, from everything I’ve heard about 2012, it fits the
bill nicely.
I first heard of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987 when I was working
at a well-known New Age bookshop in Los Angeles. Although items like
crystals and other spiritual accessories were already big sellers, I was
intrigued by the flood of people gathering metaphysical paraphernalia
in preparation for some major event. I was informed that like Kohoutek,
Atlantis, and the Aquarian Age, the Harmonic Convergence marked the end
of the old world and the beginning of the new. There would be some
disturbance, yes, the Harmonic Convergers I spoke with informed me; the
shift into the new time would not be smooth, but I shouldn’t worry.
Apparently, the bookshop was one of the safest places on the planet and I
would be protected. This was, I admit, a relief, and as my apartment
was just a block away from the shop, I wondered just how far the
protection would reach.
The sources about the coming event were José Argüelles’s
The Mayan Factor and, later, Terence McKenna’s writings on his “time wave” theory in
The Archaic Revival and other books. I read Argüelles but wasn’t impressed, and when a later book,
Surfers of the Zuvuya, appeared,
it just seemed silly. I was also not taken with his apparent adoption
of the role of avatar, an identity other proponents of 2012 seem to
embrace easily. (I did, however, find an earlier book,
The Transformative Vision,
to be a profitable study in cultural philosophy.) I found McKenna more
interesting and a better writer, but I still wasn’t sold on the idea. I
heard McKenna speak, and without doubt the man had kissed the Blarney
Stone, but after an entertaining ninety minutes I left the lecture no
more convinced than when I arrived. The fact that he banked a great deal
on a liberal indulgence in hallucinogens also made me question his
seriousness. I had had my own experiences with psychedelics, and while
some were interesting, for the most part they seemed more a distraction
than anything else.
Much has been written about 2012, pointing out both the value and the
flaws in Argüelles’s and McKenna’s interpretations. I don’t intend to
repeat those here. The strangeness of the ideas did not repel me. At the
time that I came across them, I was reading Rudolf Steiner, who had his
own prophecies concerning the third millennium, which, to be honest,
were rather vague. I had also already spent some years in the Gurdjieff
“work,” so odd ideas were not a threat. What troubled me then and today
is what I call the “apocalyptic gesture,” a point I raised recently on
the Reality Sandwich website, much of which is dedicated to the 2012
scenario. The desire for some once-and-for-all break with the given
conditions of life seems, to me at least, to be embedded in our psyche
and is a form of historical or evolutionary impatience. Social,
political, or cultural conditions may trigger it, but in essence it’s
the same reaction as losing patience with some annoying, mundane
business and, in frustration, knocking it aside with the intent to make a
“clean start.” While in our personal lives this may result in nothing
more than a string of false beginnings and a lack of staying power, on
the broader social and political scale it can mean something far more
serious.
In essays like “The Destructive Character,” “Critique of Violence,”
and “Theologico-Political Fragment,” the German-Jewish cultural thinker
Walter Benjamin, who combined an idiosyncratic Marxism with an equally
eccentric understanding of the Kabbalah, argued for the need for
apocalyptic violence in order to bring about the Messianic Age. Whether
it was the class war or Jehovah’s righteous wrath, Benjamin believed in
the necessity for some final conclusive event that would restore the
fallen world to paradise. The violence of divine intervention and a
sudden eschatological change informed Benjamin’s view of history, which
he famously saw as a “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage.” This hunger for some decisive action to clear away the
detritus of the postlapsarian world informed Benjamin’s personal life
too, and in 1940, trying to escape from the Nazis, he committed suicide,
enacting upon himself an apocalyptic violence he had long contemplated.
In mentioning Benjamin, I’m not suggesting that believers in 2012
advocate violence. I am saying that the anticipation of a singularity
associated with 2012 is a manifestation of what may very well be a
Jungian archetype, the archetype of the apocalypse. And while violence
may not be part of the prophecy, it can easily become part of the
anticlimax when the apocalypse doesn’t arrive and disappointment sets
in. Recent history suggests this. The “Summer of Love” in 1967—which by
many accounts wasn’t as groovy as believed—quickly became the year of
“Street Fighting Man” in 1968, when the “generation gap” promised to
turn into something like revolution, and dangerous slogans like “If
you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” promoted a
simplistic us-or-them scenario. Yet by 1969 the hopes of an Aquarian Age
had been severely battered by the gruesome Charles Manson murders and
the Rolling Stones’ disastrous concert at Altamont, when Hell’s Angels
murdered one man and terrorized hundreds of others, including the Stones
themselves. (I tell the story in
Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.)
Exorbitantly high hopes can often lead to very deep depressions, and in
a microcosmic popular sense, within a few years the peace and love
unreservedly embraced by the flower generation became the “no future” of
the punks. Cynicism, jadedness, and pessimism often constitute the
hangover from the intoxication of excessively high expectations. No one
rejects ideals more vigorously than a bruised romantic.
Again, in mentioning this I’m not saying that the many crises that
lead some to look to 2012 as a solution are not real. Clearly they are.
We all know them, and it would be tedious for me to roll off a list. But
anticipating an apocalypse or singularity is only one response to
crises. There are others. And a radical shift in the nature of things is
only one possibility.
The philosopher Jean Gebser, who argued very persuasively that we are
experiencing what he called a breakdown in our “structure of
consciousness,” likewise saw significant changes on the historical
horizon. Gebser did not, however, tie himself to a deadline and didn’t
anticipate a golden age. “The world will not become much better,” Gebser
wrote, “merely a little different, and perhaps somewhat more
appreciative of the things that really matter.” To those expecting some
unprecedented alteration in the conditions of existence, this probably
seems a bit tame. To me, it is more than enough of a goal to work
toward, and if only a handful of people become “more appreciative of the
things that really matter,” then the Life Force, evolution, or whatever
you want to call it is getting the job done.
In his
Study of History, an account of the rise and fall of
civilizations, the historian Arnold Toynbee argues that there are two
stereotypical responses to what he calls a “time of troubles,” the
crisis points that make or break a civilization. One is the “archaist,” a
desire to return to some previous happy time or golden age. The other
is the “futurist,” an urge to accelerate time and leap into a dazzling
future. That both offerings are embraced today is, I think, clear. The
belief that a saving grace may come from indigenous non-Western people
untouched by modernity’s sins is part of a very popular “archaic
revival.” Likewise, the trans- or posthumanism that sees salvation in
some form of technological marriage between man and computer is equally
fashionable. The 2012 scenario seems to partake of both camps: It
proposes a return to the beliefs of an ancient civilization in order to
make a leap into an unimaginable future. What both strategies share,
however, is a desire to escape the present. Given our own “time of
troubles,” this seems understandable enough.
Toynbee also believed in what I call the “Goldilocks theory of
history,” and to me it makes a lot of sense. If a challenge facing it is
too great, he argued, a civilization smashes. If it isn’t great enough,
the civilization overcomes it too easily, becomes decadent, and decays.
But if the challenge is “just right”—not too great and not too small—it
forces the civilization to make sufficient effort to advance
creatively.
Sadly, most of the civilizations Toynbee studied either cracked or
went soft. The verdict has yet to come in on our own, and as everyone
knows, there are no guarantees. But I’m willing to make a bet. There are
still a few years left, and, of course, things can change. But I’m
willing to wager that with any luck, 2013 will show that we got it just
right. If nothing else, trying to meet our challenges successfully will
give us all something to do when the apocalypse doesn’t arrive.
