the timboucher experience

My friend’s grandma wrote him a weird letter. He showed it to me. It was neatly typed out on rose stationery. According to the letter, one of “God’s prophets” had a vision of New York City being nuked (to make way for the second coming of Jesus, of course). Grandma wanted to make sure her grandson avoided this catastrophe. Her letter was sweet and sincere. She really seemed to just want the best for him – even if it did somehow have to include dire apocalyptic warnings.

It seems like everybody has a family member or friend who’s into this type of stuff. They may be a little wacky but are generally good-hearted. They’re the type of people who will bake you cookies while pronouncing the coming wrath of God. Possibly the weirdest part of all this is that no matter how many times the prophecies don’t come true, it never seems to phase them. Numbers just get shuffled around, passages get reinterpreted and the whole affair is pushed off a few more years into the future. You’d think people would get tired of this cycle after a while, but they don’t. In fact, nowadays prophecies seem to be more popular than ever.

Most of the prophecies we’re familiar with today are filtered through the Judeo-Christian tradition. Strangely enough, the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy (chapter 18:10) explicitly forbids anyone from practicing divination or interpreting omens (or from setting your son or daughter on fire, for that matter). Even Jesus in the New Testament warns his followers not to waste time trying to figure out when the world will end. But, wait a minute! If they weren’t allowed to predict the future, what were they doing running around making prophecies left and right?

It seems foreign to us now, but back in the day prophets were seen more as social commentators. Sort of like ancient science-fiction writers, they revealed God’s will by reframing current events in the context of a “what if” story. This new outside-looking-in perspective allowed for greater objectivity and could help people get mentally and emotionally “unstuck” from their problems. Thinking about weird possible futures also got people to focus on patterns of behavior, and make corrections where needed. Many prophecies thus acted as cautionary fables to motivate behavior. We see this trick used on us all the time:

“If you don’t brush your teeth, they’ll fall out,”

“If you don’t surrender your civil liberties, the terrorists will get us.”

And yet, religious people today will swear up and down that prophecies are literally “true” – despite the historical tradition suggesting otherwise, and despite the much more obvious fact that they rarely (if ever) come to fruition. If you have a lot of free time on your hands, and don’t mind being dragged down strange mental roads, I have an experiment for you. Find somebody who’s really into prophecies, and ask them to explain one of their favorites to you. What you’re likely to see is an elaborate matching game between esoteric symbols and worldly events which somehow “proves” the whole thing (at least in their mind). If you earnestly try to follow the mental gymnastics behind it all, you may be hard-pressed to uncover anything logical or rational about it – despite whatever protests they may have to the contrary.

This is because another simple fact about prophecies is often taken for granted. They almost always arise in the form of a dream, vision, or a magical visitation (angels, aliens, etc). This may not sound like much at first, but it means that prophecies are not a product of the rational mind. They are an entirely different animal, although they are rarely recognized as such. Things which come to us from creative and non-rational sources don’t always completely follow our waking logic. They simply don’t have to. They consist of weird symbols, arcane imagery and impossible events. Rather than one static literal interpretation, they hold many overlapping meanings and endless chains of associations.

The vast majority of prophecies foretell of apocalyptic destruction. The word “apocalypse” actually comes from a Greek word which means “to reveal that which is hidden.” These revelations tend to come about when we are forcibly ejected from the safety of our ordinary reality. The normal world is rearranged into something totally bizarre and usually frightening. Everything takes on new meaning. Even seemingly small things may become psychologically and spiritually significant.

This ability to creatively and symbolically rearrange how we see the world should not be taken lightly. It might sound like religious gobbledegook, but it has the power to catalyze people to action around a shared set of goals and ethics. People who are oppressed or under-represented gain a cultural voice through its creative expression.
Apocalypses let people mentally act out their fantasies of revolution and retribution in a safe fictionalized setting. Their enemies are punished and those on the path of righteousness are ultimately vindicated.

Many scholars believe that the Christian Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation was a veiled attack on the Roman Empire. Likewise the Book of Daniel (the Old Testament’s main source of Apocalypse imagery) is considered by some to have been written as an attack against the Macedonian rulers who controlled much of the Holy Land in the 2nd century, BCE. The prophecies they describe functioned (and still do) as sort of universal dreams for an entire culture to rally around. In this sense, apocalyptic prophecies have much in common with protest music: especially anti-war folk & rock in the 1960’s and 70’s, as well as anarchist and anti-police punk & rap in the 1970’s and 80’s (and the early 90’s too, but a lot of that spirit seems dead nowadays).

In the case of prophecies, these creative expressions usually consist of the types of weird non-rational symbols and imagery we described above. They may not be as intentionally crafted as a song, for example, but they still encode and transmit cultural values and stories about what’s important. So when grandma tells you to watch out for nukes hitting NYC, she’s also giving you a sly reminder (whether she realizes or not) to stay true to the values you were brought up with while you’re out there exploring the broader world.

The big problem with apocalypse stuff is that it’s really easy for people to become fixated on it. Out-of-this-world Apocalypse prophecies act sort of like pornography for the symbolic side of your mind, putting it on overload. Your wife doesn’t understand you? Don’t worry, cause ten hot college sluts want to screw you till you can’t take it anymore. Your boss is a jerk? Don’t worry! When you get lifted up to Heaven, Mr. Harvard MBA is gonna be stuck swimming in the Devil’s toilet. Both porno and prophecy can be a lot of fun, but the thing to remember is that it’s not really an accurate depiction of how the world works. They are caricatures of real life designed to fulfill our fantasies & fears and thereby show us life in a totally new way. It’s useful at times, but linger too long and you end up living a story instead of your life. 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. If you find yourself in that situation, remember: Apocalypses reveal what is hidden, and in difficult times what is hidden is hope. Grandma, of course, never loses hope. And as long as she keeps baking us cookies, neither should we.

• Notes: Land House Heaven
• The Dream of Peak Oil
• Heat Death
• Mark Morford on Civ’s Collapse
• RFID Protest