Most religions have a story of the coming of the end times, and we are always in error when we think of this as a prediction, belief, or theory about the future. Prophecy of the coming fire is always a wish, a hope, and a begging for a future that is alive. When a people comes in to existence, it is co-temporal with the writing of their myths; with a sharp eye you will find that to every people corresponds a myth, though it is invisible as a myth to the people who live in the world of the myth. (Such was the case with Joseph Campbell, who thought his people had lost their myths, not knowing that the natural sciences were a myth too.)
Why beg for the end of the world? Because the founding of a people is the end of a world, and one turn deserves another. A people, a myth, a world these three things go together, the three arise, and the three depart. The highest moment for man is the creating of a myth, an opening of a new world, which is filled with the people of that myth. This creation is also the destruction of the three that it replaces. As one myth is dismissed as a fiction the world of the myth becomes fiction and the people wed to it are made into savages (which are no longer persons in the fullest sense since they no longer can speak), a new myth/truth is substituted and it is revealed/created for those wed to the new myth/truth the new people occupying a new world. Yet how can the firey lion that writes the new myth, discovers the truth, makes the world, and founds the people not wish for the fire of creation to keep burning? It is a joy to burn a new world into being, who would wish that the new world live forever as the end of history? Hegel and other charlatans. This fire makes the ash that nurtures the soil of the earth on which the people dwell. Wisdom dictates though that this soil/earth will deplete and that the people will grow weak and that the myths will die and change from books into kindling. So even in writing a myth for a world and founding a people, there is the unspeakable knowledge that it too will someday burn, lest it be preserved and protected to the point of its own decay, which is really just a slow burning fire.
The Christian Myth is a case in point. The natives were born again into the Christian people but light of a new truth of the new world, the kingdom of god. It was a good fire, but its ashes were spread too thin across Europe (and now the planet) such the the Christian people quickly (most of them at least) degenerated into weaker and weaker peoples (though from a genealogical point of view still Christian) first Catholics were born when the ashes were first spread to thin (by fault of the Romans) then the contemptible Westerners were born when those ashes (plus, somewhat, the ashes from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but still only a by product of the Christian ashes) were spread even thiner (by fault of capitalism, which is still to say the Romans) over all the planet. Yet in those too few days before its ashes were spread, when it still had its strength Christianity, in Revelations, foresaw that this world too must burn when its day comes.
So when one does this creative/destructive action, it is no surprise that in the stories of this deed there is commonly a part prophesying that the world shall end. Because for the people wed to the myth, the day when their myth will falter in strength and be consumed by the coming fire is the day when all creation is brought to an end.
Why does the strength of a people falter, and tend back toward nihilism? I suppose from a certain perspective the reason can be related to the faltering of the person from old age or the failing of soil from over use, though this is no answer. It seems that the strength at the birth of a people is its love of live and existing, this including its love of pleasure and pain together, and its acceptance of the hard realities about the nature of death as a part of life. Yet for as long as the people live within the world that was created for it, they will weaken. An act of revolution against this original myth is the source of new strength, yet the revolution doesn't so much reinvigorate the original people as it destroys them in creating another. Put simply, life is change, and this is creation and destruction. The people that doesn't change isn't alive, and as it petrifies it weakens and tends toward nihilism, unwillingness to let the weak die is a common cause. The weak is the part of life which must change for life be be creative, blessed are the weak, for their destruction is the change that is life and the birth of the strong. A society that composts it by products, and burns its trash, and culls its weak will prosper and stay strong the longest. But it too shall one day come to its reckoning where strength beyond what can be expressed within its confines will demand to be expressed, and will shatter its wall and burn it down.
The overmen who are the arsonists of history, lighting fires when the fuel is ready, know that the world/myth/people forged in the fire will one day fail, so they tell of the end days. This is a sign of good instincts. That what ever we bring into the world is mortal, and that is must one day die.
Live in this world, as it is, and do as one in this world does, remember that the fire that burns the world is part of the world too.
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But what is myth? I don't trust the whole category. On the one hand there is high myth, or cosmogony. The split that first creates sacred and profane, and maintains it. The determinate negation of the body that, in one act, assimilates the body itself to the standard of our dualistic spatial organization; and then empties it of positivity, transferring life and fullness to the gods, and repeating the whole bodily organization anew, and above. In one act the body becomes a landscape (a face) and the world becomes a face (a landscape.) Purusha shows us this true heart of myth: body is carved up to make the world, and all the bodies in all the castes are found in this world, reflecting its order.
ReplyDeleteEschatology, for high myth, is what Eliade calls in illo tempore; the time of chaos. That is, the beginning/end of the world cycle. The breakdown of all order that is so feared. But not so fast. As Eliade shows, this chaos--the end of all order--is, by being made cyclic, precisely fitted into a new order. This order is the order of the circle, which travels eternally from order to disorder, but is the triumph of order precisely in making the transition of disorder to order an alternation that always follows one after the other--and never for the individual, but always for the world as a whole in a particular successive time cycle. Eschatology, here, is the closing of the world even as it looks--and often functions individually--like an affirmation of creation and spontaneity. The eschaton is always afterwards in the future where we're safe. In Hesiod we're even told that Typhoeus, the monstrous mating of Tartaros and Gaia, was forever annihilated, ushering in an eternal reign for Zeus.
low myth doesn't function like this. it has no final frame of existence. Stories, legends, and bodies of magical practice; healings and divinations involving the spirits. These function as novel becomings and exits/entrances; mergings and splittings apart. They are the place where the unconscious is always moving and discovering new permutations of feeling; where the unconscious is staying unconscious instead of being locked into interpretation. The story, in low myth, does not serve to fit every nuance of life into the lineage of the gods, making it perfectly intelligible from out of that lineage. it deals with bastard children borne from the dirt, undergoing events that struggle out of every interpretation like Houdini.
The Eschaton for low myth is always out there, as a roving dimension of existence that can come upon you as a spirit in the dark. And it is always programmatic. How can we call for this dimension, and find landmarks and allies on our journey? How can we find a mantra or mark the body to provide a memory of our self to draw us back? The danger is real death. You could go catatonic if you aren't careful! It takes the form of a recipe for a traverse to the end and the after-end. "Here is how you become a raven, and cross over to the land of the dead, and commune with them and come back."
And yet, fundamentally, the rift of sacred and profane is still there. As are the realms of life and death. But Christ is not a myth. He is, among many other things, the annihilation of myth. The word became flesh and dwelt among us! God and the world meet. pantheism? "god and the world are one." No. God, as the fullness in the one, becomes one among many. To those who are trapped and dwell only in the rift, an overture is made from grace. The Eschaton in Christ? It comes upon you like a thief in the night. That's all I can say.