Modern Apocalypse

History will, undoubtedly, recognize the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001 as the signaling endpoint of the 20th Century. Collectively in one form or another humanity had braced for possible monumental disaster nearing the century’s close. Y2k threatened the disruption of a newly formed yet fragile technological infrastructure regulating the flow of commerce and information. Prophetic ideologues from centuries past forecast visions of doom and devastation, while ancient myth pointed towards a great winding down of a celestial mechanism. What ultimately manifest at the Millenniums turn was, in some sense, less expected. The scale and degree of terror unleashed by this Modern Apocalypse is measured by one and only one important fact – this was not the end.

Perhaps the events of 9/11 remain too close in the vortex of time to rightly assess their larger, long-term, multigenerational ramifications, but what immediately was felt on 9/11 continues to be felt through the ripples and reverberations made by those people who responded to the disaster. For a short time, the countries national identity, pride and strength echoed a sense of heroism not seen since the Second World War. If there is a lesson here, it is within that quick glimpse into the absolute humanity of man in the face of his absolute brutality. The loss of life and devastation on American soil was with out precedent any sense of national pride or unity would eventually dissipate among sentiments of revenge and political mismanagement.

At this scale the magnitude of devastation was unmatched, save for the tragic arrogance and the loss of opportunity for country to listen, lead, and inspire. Instead political maneuvers manipulate the crisis at hand to further internal political agendas. By choosing not to acknowledge the threats to a broader cultural integrity, national interests and resources were effectively bound to continuing war and bloodshed. As the magnitude and depth of destruction is amplified, a now distinctly polarized, apathetic, and distracted population surrenders easily what were once inalienable rights at the heart of a national identity. The nation-state is set on edge by the lure of continual disaster, both real and imagined. Sacrifices of individual liberty, autonomy, and personal freedom are what purveyors of the cultural experience recognize as Modern Apocalypse.

In some fashion every civilization accounts for its own ending or demise. Prohibitions within the cultural edifice, despite an apparent or even pleading sense of urgency, do not promote the sustainability of culture; as such parameters exist to maintain a sense of boundary between cultural identities. It is in this cultural-mythosphere that culture norms intersect to form collective experiences. Apocalypse will always remain a modern convention as manifestations of the Apocalyptic are wholly based in the present. The West’s almost fanatical attachment to ideas of Apocalypse as the end of civilization or the end of time – generated mostly from within the Christian tradition – misinterprets a construct of introspection and revelation. Although there may be nothing less certain as an actual “fossil record” of – who penned what – during the first centuries A.D. (suggesting certain texts may be instead the continuation of much older oral traditions), the author of the final book in the Christian New Testament, The Book of Revelations, attributed to St. John the Divine, through a complex sequence of imagery, attempts the resolution of the universal struggle initiated among archetypal sources and symbols of power, which begins in the Christian Bible’s first book, the Book of Genesis. What is often read as a literal portrayal of the events of an inescapable yet undetermined future can also be seen in a context which binds the concerns of the author more closely to conflict between early Christian sects and the Roman Empire. Despite even the best historical positioning or preteristic localization, The Prophecy of St. John, part hallucinatory dreamscape and part numerological puzzle, part wrath of god and part political treatise, yields a powerful and haunting iconography, but not one that simply contextualizes or re-interprets historical events. The epic of this saga and the stage such drama un-folds upon connects, even passively, the once critical function of the shamanic experience, to the now dormant collective imagination.