Joseph Campbell stressed the importance of reading myths from other cultures. The reason he gave was that the myths of your own culture sometimes escape your notice, because you’re too accustomed to believing them as facts. Foreign myths though become a doorway revealing universal patterns which apply even to your own culturally-significant stories.

For that reason, I think it’s useful to look at things like the Hopi Blue Star Prophecies. Supposedly these prophecies have been handed down through tribal elders for thousands of years - but since they don’t have written records, there’s really no way to verify it.

The story though, as I understand it, is that the Hopi believe in a cyclical cosmology: successive destruction and rejuvenation of eons. Supposedly, after the last devastation occurred, the Hopi people emerged from a cave in the ground. From there, the people broke up into four groups which became the (main) races: black - African; white - Caucasian; Yellow - Asian; red - Native American. Each group was supposedly given stone tablets, the guardianship of an element, and secret signs and handshakes so that they would know each other when they were reunited.

We were given a sacred handshake to show when we came back together as brothers and sisters that we still remembered the teachings. It was indicated on the stone tablets that the Hopis had that the first brothers and sisters that would come back to them would come as turtles across the land. They would be human beings, but they would come as turtles.

So when the time came close the Hopis were at a special village to welcome the turtles that would come across the land and they got up in the morning and looked out at the sunrise. They looked out across the desert and they saw the Spanish Conquistadores coming, covered in armour, like turtles across the land. So this was them. So they went out to the Spanish man and they extended their hand hoping for the handshake but into the hand the Spanish man dropped a trinket.

And so word spread throughout North America that there was going to be a hard time, that maybe some of the brothers and sisters had forgotten the sacredness of all things and all the human beings were going to suffer for this on the earth.

The Hopi claim to still have their stone tablets hidden somewhere. Anyway, after that, the prophecies seem to explicitly “foretell” the advent of railroads, cars and airplanes, plus a series of “Great Shakings” which took the form of the World Wars, plus a “gourd of ashes” which signified the atomic bombs. It goes on to describe several other important events in American history using thinly veiled symbolism. Another site has a listing of the “signs” which were foretold by the Hopi prophecies, all but one of which has been fulfilled. Actually, that site has a decent list of a few different overlapping Hopi prophecies.

The thing with most of these Hopi prophecies that is hard for me to swallow is the seeming one-to-one correspondence between the image and the literal event to which they refer. “True” prophecies I don’t believe work like that. They utilize symbolic language from the unconscious which never has one strict literal meaning. As Jung writes:

A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known. But the sign always has a fixed meaning, because it is a conventional abbreviation for, or a commonly accepted indication of, something know.

And in the Hopi prophecy we have things like the so-called “gourd of ashes”:

They said the gourd of ashes will fall from the air. It will make the people like blades of grass in the prairie fire and things will not grow for many seasons.

That seems to be a pretty clear-cut reference to the atomic bomb. In fact, I’m especially hard-pressed to come up with any other possible meaning for such a thing. Does this mean that the Hopi prophecies are fake or somehow not legitimate? It’s a good question, especially since the prophecies weren’t “revealed” to the White Man until (I think) the 1970’s (or later… I’ll have to check).

Really though, this is an integral component of how prophecies work. From the papal prophecies of Malachy to the Biblical Book of Daniel, the vast majority of prophecies contain after-the-fact predictions of past events. The trick really is to concoct a reasonable explanation of why if you’ve been correctly predicting things for years, you didn’t come out and publicize it sooner? For the Hopis, it’s because their prophecies were “sacred” to them as a people. In other cases, it’s because the information was “buried” for whatever reason.

Now, I’m not trying to say that these or other prophecies are invalid. Far from it. I think prophecy serves a really important and valid function in society. I’m merely trying to say that even if prophecies are divinely inspired, they are still transmitted through and manipulated by humans for thoroughly human ends.

As far as end times prophecies are concerned, a central component to their human purpose is to show the importance of a particular group of people. Usually they are a marginalized group who are protesting against the ways of the majority, and who’s wisdom and righteousness ought to serve as a guide for the rest of us. In many cases, this assertion may be true. But it’s important to recognize that every cultural group thinks they are the center of the world.

This idea is even expressed mythologically through what is called the “axis mundi” or the “world navel”. It is the central point around which the entire world and the entire cosmos is said to revolve. Once upon a time, we thought the universe revolved around the Earth. For other culture groups, they will have a particular geographical feature which serves as the axis mundi. It is basically a way for them to sanctify the spaces they live in, and commune with God through the landscape.

I just saw a Christian television show about Jerusalem and the Biblical end times prophecies. They showed a (presumably medieval) cartographic drawing of the world. It was depicted as a flower with three petals. At it’s center was the city of Jerusalem. Each of the three petals were labeled Europe, Asia & Africa. In Biblical prophecy, Jerusalem acts as the axis mundi around which all other end time events revolve. It goes through great turmoil, but at the end, a magical city descends from the sky: a shining New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem is the center then of a worldwide Golden Age.

Many of the Hopi prophecies seem to echo this axis mundi phenomena. A key point of the prophecies seems to be that despite whatever destruction will come to the world, the Hopi will play a key role. Those who inhabit their land and abide in their teachings will survive and carry the torch onward past everyone else’s destruction.

The trick with apocalyptic prophecies, I think, is in realizing that every person or group who comes up with one believes that they are the righteous elect who will be spared God’s wrath, while everyone outside of their group or ethical system will be decimated. Joseph Campbell preserved for us an excellent quote which can help one to grapple with this phenomenon. It supposedly originated in the Corpus Hermeticum in the 3rd century:

“God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

This basically means that every single point on the earth, every social group, IS literally the center. Each and every one is God’s elect. All groups seem to believe such a thing. Which means that if you overlay all these beliefs together: nobody is left on the outside of the circle. Everyone is the chosen people. This way of thinking might be useful for people to dispel the fear and hostility that seems to accompany end times prophecies. What if instead of some people being saved and some people slaughtered - what if when the end came, God decided to make good on all his many promises and save everybody? Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Problem solved!