Apocalypse Not

“It’s time to put the four horsemen of the Apocalypse out to pasture.”

New Agers count off the days until the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. Evangelical Christians look for the Antichrist and long for the Rapture. Extropians dream of the Singularity, when super-intelligent computers will abolish all human limits to progress. Doomers stockpile freeze-dried food as they wait for civilization to crash and burn. Why are we waiting for Armageddon be it a spiritual or physical event?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Druids, it’s that they certainly don’t think like the average bear.

“When the seventh seal was opened, says the Book of Revelation, there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour. In a very real sense, that brief interval of expectation in total silence sums up the whole history of the Apocalypse meme. For more than three thousand years now, people have managed to convince themselves that their world was teetering on the brink of total transformation, that their enemies were about to be annihilated and their fondest hopes fulfilled by a shattering event that would change the nature of reality itself.  FOR MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND YEARS, they have waited in breathless anticipation, moment by moment, for The great change to manifest.”  ~ Grand Archdruid John Michael Greer AODA

During these three thousand years, apocalypse prophecies and “theories” have convinced people all over the world that the future will provide them with the world they “want” instead of the world “have.” Does anyone ever notice that these doomsday, end of world, vision of Utopia prophecies and theories that have found a niche in the various forms of communication and media throughout every age have one major feature in common? Every one of them has been wrong. Yet we still persist …

I sense some fidgeting in the audience and a few struck chords of indignation so let’s pursue this a little further. How did humankind get on this track? Why are we drawn to these dismal tapestries of woven conjecture postulated as “absolute?”

According to Greer: “A strong case could be made for the idea that storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest and most powerful technologies. As soon as the extraordinary of human language finished emerging out of what-ever forgotten precursors gave it birth, hunters back from the chase and gatherers returning with nuts and tubers doubtless started describing their day’s experiences in colorful terms, and their listeners picked up more than useful tips about how to track an antelope or wield a doffing stick: the glory of the impala’s leap and the comfortable fellowship of gatherers working a meadow together wove themselves into the stories and minds of the audience, and helped shape their experience of the world.”

OK. So, basically, we like to amuse ourselves to the point where we have lost ourselves in our own BS. According to Greer’s research, the Apocalypse meme found its origins between 1500 and 1200 BCE, birthed in Persian Zoroastrianism and Zarathustra's first assertion that the world would end in a battle between the forces of the good god and his evil opponent. Since a meme is an idea or set of ideas which is transmitted from person to person until it becomes widespread and persists through time, it follows the same natural laws as biological evolution – it grows and transmutes itself to adapt to time and environment. This meme is a theme that has persistently been repeated in “… the tales of Ahura-Mazda, the Norse Ragnarok, End Times prophecies, Armageddon, the books of Daniel and Revelation, the Messiah, the Rapture, atomic war with UFOs rescuing the faithful, the defeat of Sauron, the Age of Aquarius, the communist revolution of 1917, ad infinitum, and, of course, the famous Mayan prophecy at the end of their current calendrical cycle on December 21, 2012.” ~ FATE Magazine

So, a few of you more logical types out there are saying, ‘Well, what about science and the natural death of the species?

“Someday far in the future—about four billion years from now, according to current astrophysical theory—the core of the Sun will have burnt enough of its hydrogen fuel that it can no longer counter the pressure of its own gravity. As it gradually collapses inwards, over the next two billion years, the Sun will balloon into a red giant, a hundred times larger than it is today, and any life that happens to remain on Earth at that distant date will be crisped by daytime temperatures that will peak somewhere around 2600° F.

A quarter million years or so later, the Sun’s core will pass a critical threshold and start fusing helium; the resulting “helium flash” will blast a third of the Sun’s mass into deep space in a matter of minutes. In all probability, whatever charred cinder remains of the Earth at that point will be blown to smithereens by that blast, and its fragments will be scattered back into the interstellar dust from which it formed some ten billion years before.

Countless millions of years before that happens, it’s a safe bet that humanity will have gone extinct. The average species, according to the few available rough estimates, lasts for about a million years, and our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for around two hundred thousand years, or some- thing like a fifth of that theoretical span; the average genus, again according to a rough estimate, lasts for about ten million years, and our genus, Homo, has been around for maybe a quarter of that. All of recorded history amounts to five thousand years so far, so if our species has an average lifespan and maintains written records from now on, we have compiled a little more than half of one percent of our ultimate written history. Still, one way or another, the time will doubtless come when the last human beings die out, possibly to be replaced after a time by some other intelligent species, perhaps not.

Much closer to our own time, in all probability, our current civilization will have joined the long list of human societies that overshot their resource base and ended up as one more addition to history’s compost heap. One common fantasy these days insists that contemporary industrial civilization has nothing in common with the civilizations of the past, and thus can expect to soar endlessly upwards to some date with destiny out there among the stars; another common fantasy insists with equal fervor that contemporary industrial civilization is poised on the brink of cataclysm and will shortly and suddenly be annihilated for its sins.

Both of these fantasies come straight out of the apocalypse meme, one by way of Joachim of Fiore and the Marquis de Condorcet, the other by way of secular re-hashings of the standard Christian apocalyptic myth, and both can therefore be discounted. It’s far more likely that future generations will visit the crumbling remains of today’s urban centers the way we visit the ruined cities of Egypt and the ancient Mayans, and scholars of that distant time will argue with one another about the reasons why the ancient Americans traced out the same course of political dysfunction, economic decline, and eventual technological collapse as so many other civilizations before—and, no doubt, since.”

One half of one percent of our ultimate written history … hmmmm. Well – not worrying about this for this lifetime.

Since the Mayan Calendar and 2012 is still a relatively hot topic …

“The Mayan calendar has many different cycles. One of them rolls over on that date, but there's only one brief reference to the date anywhere in the ancient Mayan inscriptions, it says nothing about an apocalypse, and there are dates in the Mayan inscriptions predicting events many thousands of years into the future after it. The notion that the some kind of end time scenario would happen then was invented out of whole cloth by the late Jose Arguelles, with some help from 60s psychedelic guru Terence McKenna, and it's frankly about as believable as Harold Camping's Rapture predictions. That won't keep hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people from expecting the end on that date, or from suffering the usual disappointments afterwards.”

Greer explains that now, when we can read “over ninety-five percent of all Mayan texts” we can find only one mention of the date December 12, 2012, which in Mayan is 4 Ahau 3 Kankin 13.0.0.0.0.  Greer describes this as “one passing reference on one stela at one minor Mayan site” (recently, Mexican experts revealed that there is another reference to the date, but interpretations vary on whether it refers to the past or future, and experts decry modern interpretations that they describe as having  “twisted the cosmovision of ancient civilizations like the Maya”).

Saucy fellow this Greer aye? Some of you might be saying “Har-umph! Well, of course we are not going to be annihilated BUT we are going to have a tremendous shift in consciousness!”

Well let’s hope so  … with or without a date. For a work of change to take on a life of its own, it must come from a positive spiritually based conception to be conceived and crafted.

What about increased UFO sightings connected to “end times” beliefs? Before reading this section, note that this excerpt has nothing to do with abduction phenomena and experiences.

“The UFO Phenomenon, is that the phenomenon was largely created and is still managed by the Air Force as protective camouflage for whatever the current secret aerospace technology happens to be. In 1947 it was high altitude balloons, in the 1950s it was the U-2, in the 1960s it was the SR-71 and early spy satellites, and so on. Do you remember how in the Eighties, black triangle UFOs were all over the place? That was when stealth planes were first being tested. If UFO sightings are on the increase, it's a safe bet that in ten or fifteen years, we'll find out that the Air Force was testing some new technology right about now. It's interesting, but it's not especially relevant to end times claims.”

This guy sounds like a pretty grounded rationalist to me but then I tend to be an analytical thinker. I do know that real Druids walk a natural path with some pretty heavy knowledge of arcanus AND according to myth and legend have been entrusted with maintaining cosmic balance so they also tend to have built in BS detectors.

So…. Common sense anyone?

Anyone at all?

John Michael Greer currently serves as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), a contemporary school of Druid nature spirituality. Greer has contributed articles to Renaissance Magazine, Golden Dawn Journal, Mezlim, New Moon Rising, Gnosis, and Alexandria.