The Real History of the End of the World (2 page)

Which brings me to the tricky topic of terminology. There are several words and phrases used by people who study the end times (
end times
is one). Some of them are just different ways of saying the same thing. Some are technical terms, like
eschatology,
an academic term for study of the idea of the end times. Still others have picked up new meanings over the years. For my purposes,
Apocalypse
means everything ending with a bang: war, fire, flood, etc. Even though it means the same thing as Revelation, too many people see them as different. I will use
Revelation
to refer to the book of the New Testament attributed to John of Patmos, although sometimes that is also called the Apocalypse. Okay?

Millennium
is the happy time during which the saved or the elect will live in peace before the final grand reckoning. Some Christians think that Jesus will return at the beginning of the Millennium, some think it won't be until the end. This return of Jesus is expressed in many ways: Second Coming, Second Advent, Parousia (my favorite).

I will try to explain these terms as they appear in the text but, just in case, there is also a short glossary at the end of the book. It's for my benefit, too, because there are some words I have to look up every time I run across them.

At times it seemed to me as if everyone who had ever picked up a quill or pen or stylus had written about the end of the world. Everywhere I looked, someone was either predicting the end or at least describing the events that would precede it. But, after a while I began to see that almost all of the movements fell into categories, although the categories often overlapped. For instance, there were those who were interested in predicting the end as a mathematical exercise, using primarily the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. This includes Isaac Newton and William Miller. The difference between the two is mainly that Miller felt he should warn people. Newton seemed to think everyone was on his own.

Most of the millennial movements, as distinct from individual date-setters, are tied to a belief that only a few people can be saved from the coming destruction. I thought that this was just a Christian phenomenon but then found it in non-monotheistic societies, like the Chinese Yellow Turbans and the Hopi. So perhaps the belief in an imminent end coupled with the salvation of the elect believers is either very ancient or universal common sense. It's difficult for people to imagine their own end, even if everything else goes up in a cataclysm. There are hard-nosed scientists, who know that one day the sun will use up its fuel, who still hypothesize that humanity will figure out a way to colonize another planet before that happens.

Therefore I have selected representative groups and influential writers or leaders of apocalyptic or millennial movements, such as people who believed their leader to be the Messiah, or a prophet, who would build a heaven on earth or give them a free pass to the real heaven; those who thought that the thousand years of happiness would start if they helped it along with military force; and those who thought that we were at the end of the thousand years and braced themselves in various ways to survive the horrors of the final battles and breakdown of society before the final judgment.

The reader may be surprised to know how many mainstream religions today began as millennial movements that later adapted their dogma to living in a world that didn't end when expected.

I also included some people and groups that fascinate me. Although most of them did not leave lasting memorials or establish religions that still exist, they reflect the myriad ways that humans have interpreted their own times as apocalyptic. It is also intriguing to consider why most people muddle on through good times and bad without ever assuming that the end is upon them while a small but intense segment of society feels compelled to fix the time and prepare for it, sometimes in terribly destructive ways.

However, this is not a book of sociology or psychology. I looked at a number of theoretical studies on the reasons behind millennial movements, charismatic leaders, and doomsday cults. I would always find exceptions to the conclusions. So as a historian, I've simply tried to record, as accurately as possible, how humankind has anticipated the end of the world in various ways.

Here and there in this work, I mention the upcoming prediction that the world will end on the winter solstice of 2012. I did some work on the ideas that the poles will flip, or that there will be catastrophic solar flares, or that a galactic alignment will occur that will signal some great upheaval. I haven't found a clear explanation for what. None of these things seems to be of serious concern.

For instance, the magnetic poles wander about all the time within a certain radius, never far from the geographic pole.
^a
But they don't move together. The North Pole is moving toward Siberia at about fifty kilometers a year. The South Pole is heading northwest at about five kilometers. I have been assured that they will not end up making snow in Ethiopia.
^b
I love the idea of independent poles, each setting out on its own adventure. What is even more amazing is that the movement of the magnetic poles has been known since the 1600s. It's only recently that the fact has been dragged out to join the list of scary things that might happen in 2012. Now, some people say that the poles aren't just going to wobble; they'll reverse, so south will be north and north will be south. Birds won't know where to migrate; planes won't be able to navigate. It does seem that north and south trade places every so often. But there's a lot of debate about when, where, and how long it would take, never mind what the effects might be. It's not high on my list of worries.

Solar flares can be a problem with power plants and other technology, and scientists are saying we may have a lot of them around 2012, but the last round was just a few years ago and the world didn't end then. But there's no point in trying to refute each of these 2012 end-of-world theories individually because there's always a new one coming up. However, I do make a point of giving the background on the Maya, the Hopi, and Nostradamus, whose supposed prophecies tend to be cited most often. I heard the other day that the Mother Shipton, invented by a journalist in the eighteenth century, had predicted the end in 2012. I hadn't even considered writing about her since she, like the Greek tradition of the Sibyl, is basically a franchise. There never was a Mother Shipton. Publishers just hired writers to put together new prophecies every few years in her name.

A word on footnotes. As I have said in my earlier books, I believe in using them. I know that seeing lots of footnotes can be intimidating. You don't have to read them. There will not be a test. But, if you want to check my facts or find out more about something, the information is there so you can find it. Also footnotes keep writers honest. It is all too tempting just to write down what you want to be true without being certain that it is. Several of the books that I looked at, both ones that stated a theory and ones that debunked it, have suffered from this problem. I don't want to add to the confusion.

Anyway, research is fun. Many of the things I found surprised me and fascinated me. I hope you agree.

 

 

 

 

T
he idea that the world will end some day makes a lot of sense. People are born and die, plants grow and wither, floods and volcanoes change the landscape with terrifying suddenness. The people living thousands of years ago must have been brilliant to take the uncertainties of life and create systems that would make sense of why they were on this planet.

With fire, flood, drought, predatory animals, and disease to contend with, it must have been a comfort to look at the stars and realize that they formed a constant pattern that could be used to signal the coming of spring and times to plant and harvest. It's no wonder that early cultures like the Vedic Hindus, Maya, and Egyptians got a bit carried away, measuring the stars, sun, and moon from every conceivable angle throughout the years. The belief that stars could predict the future must have begun shortly after the patterns were recognized.

Theories about the beginning of the world must have been an amusing speculation for an evening around the campfire or during those three-thousand-mile migrations our ancestors made as they spread across the world. Imagining the end seems to have come later.

The earliest known stories of the end of the world come from the Indo-European tradition. Many of these cultures use the same image of the cyclical ages of the world, from a Golden Age, in which people are happy and live almost forever, down (in the case of Daniel, literally) to an Iron Age, the present, in which humanity has declined. In the Mediterranean world the influence of the Greek author Hesiod, writing in the eighth century B.C.E., was strong. He was decidedly pessimistic, feeling that his age would be the last. The signs of the end include a shortening of lifespan, until babies are born with gray hair.
^c
Hesiod believed that humanity can stave off the end, though. All we need to do is live just and moral lives.
^d
Hesiod's ideas are part of an intertwined tradition of very similar stories from all over the Mesopotamian, Indian, and Egyptian worlds. The similarity among them indicates that they may have come from even older traditions that were passed on only orally.

In this first section I look at some of the earliest end stories I could find. Often they are part of an epic cycle of stories of gods and heroes. For the most part, the end is not the main thrust of the story. To use a cliché, it's the journey that matters. But in those stories are the seeds of our current obsession with the end of all things.

Has some living soul escaped? No man
was to survive the destruction!

—
Epic of Gilgamesh
(the God Enlil on learning that Atrahasis
and his household have escaped the Great Flood)

 

 

 

 

T
he name of the original Noah started out as Atrahasis, which in later versions became Utanapishtim. One can see how a mouthful like that would be changed. In Hebrew, he is called Noach, meaning “rest” or “comfort.” But it is as Atrahasis, Utanapishtim, or sometimes Ziusuddu (which is almost as bad) that the leader of the sole survivors of the first destruction of the world appears. The fact that he has so many names indicates that there probably was a flood once and that similar stories were told of it in several traditions.
^e

There are many versions of the story of the Great Flood in Mesopotamia. They almost certainly predate written history, which began in Babylonia (now Iraq and bits of adjoining countries) about 4000 B.C.E. Evidence of a complex society there has been dated by archaeologists to around 5000 B.C.E. The area was inhabited by two different groups, which joined eventually to become the Babylonians. In the north were the Akkadians, who were Semitic. In the south were the Sumerians. Their language has been deciphered, but it doesn't seem to be related to any other known language, so where they came from is uncertain. However, their invention of cuneiform writing was revolutionary and acclaimed from the start, especially by merchants who needed to keep track of inventory. Cuneiform was adapted for other languages and used for nearly two thousand years.
^f
The language was lost well before the Common Era and deciphered again only in the nineteenth century. It came as a major shock to linguists and an even bigger one to theologians when one translation turned out to be a flood story that paralleled Noah's, down to the measuring of the Ark, but which predated the Bible by two thousand years.
^g

The story of the flood is first found in the “Myth of Atrahasis,” which was discovered in its entirety by Iraqi archaeologists when they unearthed a library at Ninevah in 1986. It is around 1800 years older than the earliest known rendition of the
Epic of Gilgamesh
in which it was incorporated.
^h
In it, the reason for the flood is not the wickedness of humankind but the noise made by so many people carrying on with their lives. According to the Atrahasis, there were once two levels of divinity. The lesser gods had to do all the work for the higher gods. So some lesser god had the bright idea of inventing people to take over the hard jobs. But the gods didn't take into account how quickly people procreate. The god Enlil, who was one of the upper echelon, couldn't get to sleep for all the nighttime activity. He decided that creating a humanity eager to reproduce had been a mistake. When plague and famine didn't work in slowing them down, he sent the flood.
ⁱ