All day I’ve been thinking about the end of the world. It’s all thanks to those dreams I had this morning about New York being hit by two successive tidal waves, and the lives that we carved out there after it all went down. I’m not of the opinion that these were prophetic dreams. They seemed too personal. They were not about the “earth.” They were about me. The two are easily confused in the field of study that is the Apocalypse.

A friend of mine got me wondering what the psychological function of the Apocalypse fantasy is, after I told him about it this morning. Aside from the fact that maybe it’s a real thing that will happen someday, that is. What purpose does it serve the human psyche to generate and dive into dreams, visions and fears of the annihilation of all that we know?

My best guess - as an armchair psychologist - is that the whole thing is not about death or destruction at all. Instead I think it has to do with the accumulation of patterns and structures. We are creatures of habit and the tendency in our lives is to organize, categorize and put things into a familiar framework. But there comes a point where the patterns and structures which we build or which are built up around us become so complex and convoluted and ossified that they naturally break open again, chaotically releasing the energy locked up back into the wild (Not unlike the Tower card in the Tarot). This is the utter catastrophic devastation so common in Apocalyptic fantasies. Everything that we know is suddenly and irrevocably shattered. The question then becomes how do we go on? Do we die in some atomic blitz, or do we crawl through the rubble and survive? In my dream, after the world ended, a bunch of us got together and opened up a “hot jazz club” and we played some of the most fucked-up mind-bending joyous music I’ve ever heard, cause it was all we had left amidst the destruction. And it was the seed of a new beginning.

Interestingly, the word “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek “apokalupsis” which means something which has been revealed or uncovered. The meaning was thus not originally associated with the end of the world or the final destruction of civilization, such as it is today. Apocalypses, revelations, were a genre of literature which rose to popularity in Palestine in the 3rd century BCE

perhaps as a protest against an oppressive and dominant establishment, either Gentile or apostate Jewish. … Apocalyptic eschatology is marked by the conviction that God will intervene decisively in the present evil age and vindicate his suffering elect over their oppressors, raising the dead, consigning the wicked to eternal destruction, and establishing a new creation.

Apocalypses were historically described in the form of a dream or a vision, which is pretty much how we do it right down to the present day as well. Aside from what we said above about the image of the Apocalypse acting as a means to mentally “clean house,” I think it’s also especially important to look at it as a genre of protest literature. In that sense, maybe it’s even sort of similar to a lot of the counter-cultural protest music that came out in the 60’s & 70’s with the Vietnam War and other shit. What that music did, and what fantasies of the Apocalypse do is turn power relationships upside-down, but in a fictionalized safe setting. Those who are downtrodden and oppressed can imagine the evil rulers and the unrighteous being struck down by the hand of God. And God will then lift his chosen people up to his bosom - quite literally and bodily in the case of those fundamentalist Christians who believe in the Rapture.

Part of the power of the sheer act of creating and identifying with a story is that your subconscious mind has a difficult time differentiating it from reality. If you immerse yourself in it deeply enough, you’ll actually experience it as though it were real - on a lower level of course, but it’s still an experience. As protest literature then, Apocalypses let people mentally act out their fantasies of revolution and retribution. Their enemies are punished and those on the path of good find out that their actions and value systems will be vindicated at some point in the future.

As described above, the genre of Apocalypse literature arose most likely among a group of people who were being oppressed, and who felt like they didn’t have an appropriate voice in the society. If you look at modern day Apocalyptic literature, you will find exactly the same thing.

The way I see it is there are two main camps (well okay, with a lot of sub-camps). On one side, you have the hardcore Christians - people typified by the Rapture Ready website. People who fear that their value system is slipping away from its position of dominance. As they lose power, they begin to cling to stories in which they gain back that power.

Then on the other side of the fence, you have the vast roiling sea of outsiders, conspiracy theorists and counter-culturalists. This is a diverse crowd of course, but they share a set of common characteristics.

1. They identify a set of bad guys, whether it’s governments, corporations, reptilian aliens, whatever. The main things that make these guys nefarious is not just that they are “evil” but that their actions and value systems are deficient and harmful.
2. Then you also have the good guys. Sometimes with conspiracy people it gets hard to tell who the good guy is, because the finger of paranoia may turn on anyone. In Apocalypse literature though, it’s always really easy to see who the good guys are. Who survives?
3. The more nihilistic, of course, say that nobody wins. The role of the heroes then in this scenario is not as survivors, but as revealers. Which is exactly what the word “apocalypse” originally meant: Revelations.

If I had to grab a favorite example of this style of contemporary Apocalypse literature, I would pick the awesome work of Ran Prieur. He has a section on his site devoted to news and essays about the impending “Crash” (ie, the crash of civilization). I like Ran’s writing on the subject because it functions according to the true tradition of Apocalypse literature, as I understand it. He helps you mentally up-end traditional power relationships and mainstream views of the world. In so doing he points out unhealthy and unviable trends and attitudes, and provides you with creative and constructive alternatives.

Thinking about the end of the world is an extraordinarily fine line to walk. On one hand, psychologically it’s not going to have an impact on you unless you “believe” the story somehow, and it acts on your nervous system as though it were a real experience. But go too far down that path of play-acting, and you run the risk of a total personal meltdown of stress. This is why I don’t like websites like Alex Jones’ Prison Planet. Topically, it’s not so different from Ran Prieur’s Apocalyptics, but there seems to me to be a certain unhealthy fixation that is born amidst real heavy immersion in this style of Armaggedon fantasy. What was originally intended as an alternate context to understand the world becomes a noose getting tighter and tighter until there is no way out, and no hope. Apocalypses function to reveal what is hidden, and in difficult times what is hidden is hope. By bringing this hope out and feeding it with stories, we can empower ourselves to take charge of our lives and come up with creative expressions of wild exuberance, celebrating our freedom from the patterns and structures which restricted us in the past.