Defining an apocalypse

Defining an apocalypse

The concept of the apocalypse was first most readily defined by religious ideologies having been conceived as far back to the earliest age of the Sumerians, more than 2000 years before the Christian apocalypse was first recorded. Today the end times still have a profound effect on all of humanity, however such apocalyptic nuances has little to do with prophecy and has much more in terms of real-life issues and subjectivity with modernization.  Apocalypse has its etymology in the word “apokalypsis” ancient Greek meaning “to unveil” or “uncover” giving name to revelations of the bible.

Of ancient manuscripts the book of John and the book of Daniel are two most recognised as apocalypses and their use of extravagant, obscure and ambiguous imagery span a wide range of literary genres and devices including epistolary, symbolic, allegorical and esoteric leaving itself widely open to many interpretations. Ideas of the apocalypse from this viewpoint largely focused on the destruction of an old corrupt degenerate society that was dying limping on its last leg for the substitution of an earthly paradise. Before the culmination of a second coming however such apocalypses (the Revelations especially) promised a long bloody and violent intersect that would be dense with fantastic and bizarre symbolic and allegorical undertones pervaded with destructive conflict, famine and plague and all of Hell itself generally opening up in the Earth. This basic structure would come to be known as millennialism and was an ideal that occurred throughout earlier and later religious sects such as that of Zoroaster which all believed in a final cosmic battle that would instigate the formation of a thousand-year global spanning kingdom. This part is thought of as millennialism and would often be adopted by world leaders during particular times of great travesty such as Adolf Hitler in the Second World War whose Third Reich sought for a reign that would last for a thousand years. In this way appearances of war or what is merely the turning of ages can certainly seem apocalyptic with food rationings and the perpetual threat of raining artillery and the moral degradation during the waning of the middle ages. The long period known as the dark ages that soon followed the collapse of the Roman Empire ensued with disastrous plague and war, crime and poverty ran rampant devastating large cities to small neighbourhoods during the middle ages religion proved to be a sole stabilising element in a chaotic world where the smallest provocation was applied to divine intervention.

With notable advancement with technologies and scientific discoveries and recline of religious influence in the feudal age paved the way for modern concepts revolving around the apocalypse. Humans have always been surrounded by death which has always been profound and proved very versatile over the course of human existence, the cold war a time that was ripe with tension and the threat of nuclear excursion was vivid and very real. The wanton death and destruction in the middle ages bred apathy, nihilism and severely crippled the religious integrity of the times that were among the first to die from the Black Death as result from reading the last rites over dying patients. Religion in general became less influential in the turning ages even being vilified by the critical thinkers of the enlightenment age as the reason for social regress in the dark ages. This kind of relinquishment coincide with a chain of scientific discoveries that; in a sense paved a way for discoveries that shaped modern day perception of weapons of mass destruction, globular climate change and other threats to human existence.

The concept of death and the apocalypse has a large impact on media and exists in virtually every form of modern expression and much of the ancients concepts and ideas are echoed or modernized through film, literature and art. The bowls of wrath that cause destructive foul and painful sores over the skin can be attributed to radiation sickness and there are even vestiges of the modern zombie apocalypse in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh where Ishtar threatens to raise the dead who will “outnumber the living” and “devour them.”