JÖRMUNGAND, Midgard's serpent. L'univers des dragons, galerie Daniel Maghen, 2008
The London riots were just part of a volatile global brew that appears to be steeping. Whether it’s flash mobs in D.C., Syrian protesters, terrorist bombings in Iraq, Somalian genocide, or the collapse of the European Union, the world seems to be trending toward the unthinkable. The possible reasons are many and varied: Eroding faith in government, escalating food prices, high unemployment, corporate greed, depleting natural resources, nuclear threats, increasing restrictions on freedom, globalization, and stock market crashes being the most oft-mentioned culprits.
But behind our search for answers something else lurks. Despite all our utopian aspirations and humanistic mantras, a brooding sense of impending doom clings to our psyche. Will human civilization really collapse, we wonder, and are we witnessing the labor pains?
In The world riots, nations shudder, Cthulu wakes, horror writer and independent scholar Matt Cardin traces this global upheaval to an even deeper, more insidious evil. “There’s a revolution calling,” Cardin writes. “And not just in the visible world.” Cardin appeals to Lovecraftian imagery, a Cthulu-ian-like chaos the hovers just beyond the grasp of our waking minds threatening ever to intrude upon “normal.” He quotes novelist and screenwriter Robert Bloch speaking to the pre-war zeitgeist of the Atomic Age:
Like the turmoil and upheaval that preceded the return of the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft’s fiction, the world seemed to be preparing for its final fate now that “the stars were right”… In a time of turmoil there is a widespread intimation — not based on hereditary impulse but on today’s realities — that the evils abroad in the world may come from without as well as from within ourselves. While we may consciously reject [Lovecraft’s] cosmology, a part of us finds in it a chilling confirmation of secret fears. At the time Lovecraft created it, the “Cthulhu Mythos” and its threat of Elder Gods rising and returning to rule over earth could be easily dismissed as merely a paranoid fable of the future. Today there is growing suspicion that this future may become our present. (emphasis mine)
There is, in this, a strange parallel between biblical eschatology and the “Cthulhu Mythos.” The Bible also suggests that “the evils abroad in the world may come from without as well as from within ourselves.” But instead of “the Great Old Ones” arising to recover turf, Christians anticipate THE GREAT OLD ONE, The Ancient of Days, parting the heavens to judge the earth and gather His children.
Christians are notorious for forcing world events into prophetic biblical scenarios. More than once, a president has been labeled the Antichrist or a natural catastrophe has been interpreted as a precursor to the Great Tribulation. As much as believers should resist the religious end-times frenzy, the Scripture commands us to remain keen to “the signs of the times.”
Some of those signs are not unlike the ones we’re seeing.
Jesus described a time when there will be “Great Tribulation such as the world has never known” (Mat. 24:15-21). According to Scripture, the end of our present age will be marked by national upheaval, cosmological catastrophes, plague, famine, and economic collapse. It is into this vacuum that a Leader arises, wooing the masses. According to the Bible, the precursor to the unification of the nations and the rise of the Antichrist, is a volatile, unstable world. Global crises and existential terror is what pushes man toward his inevitable demise.
Lovecraft got it right in eschewing utopianism in favor of apocalypse. However, Lovecraftian horror and Judeo-Christian cosmology are at odds concerning the real Cosmic Horror. Both systems see forces within and without us converging to bring about chaos and the dissolution of our present system. In this way, the current state of our world today does more than just make for interesting reading, it serves as “a chilling confirmation of secret fears.” We intuitively know judgement awaits. However, the Cosmic Horror of Judeo-Christian eschatology is quite unlike the Elder Evils of Cthulu lore.
- It is not Evil we are ultimately terrified of, but Good.
- It is the fact that we are Evil, that terrifies us of this Good.
The fact that today’s global unrest provokes Cthulu-ian comparisons speaks to the fact that we fear Something Other; something other than just societal collapse, stock market crashes, and nuclear war. We fear existential dissolution. We fear the encroaching Void. We fear the arrival of Someone Else.
Like the Cthulu Mythos, many see the biblical Apocalypse as “a paranoid fable of the future.” But as our world staggers toward disintegration, we are forced to consider whether Someone Else is, indeed, watching.
Oh, Mike, I truly do dig your thought process and sensibility. And I’m glad my montage of a blog post could incite this absorbing article from you.
I don’t recall, have you read my paper (appearing as the final item in my DARK AWAKENINGS collection) that interprets the Book of Isaiah as a quasi-Lovecraftian horror story with Yahweh playing the part of a chaos monster who threatens to destroy the cosmos? Obviously, the resonances with what you’ve written here are patent, although the paper’s moral/religious center diverges a bit from yours.
Thanks for commenting, Matt. No, I didn’t read your essay. Sounds interesting. I’ll get hold of it. Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
Good post, Mike. Thanks.
Unstable world situations always provoke such frenzied speculation. Some people thought the great Depression was the Tribulation. It’s times like these that allow the authors to exploit the uneducated and line their coffers. See you in the next bull market.
The thing is, Pdj, that quite aside from apocalyptic speculation of a religious-spiritual-metaphysical sort, a lot of very reasonable people are looking at the global economic situation, as linked to the energy input situation (peaking fossil fuels etc.), as linked to massive systemic instability across the spectrum, as linked to the fact that we are presently interconnected at instantaneous speed by way of digital communications and lightning-fast international travel and so on, as linked to the fact that human civilization has entered a stage of true globalism and gigantism of a historically unprecedented nature, as linked to a huge number of additional factors of an empirical and quantifiable nature. And these reasonable people are observing the situation, and ruminating on it, and analyzing it, and coming to the conclusion that Business As Usual, including the modern-day market-based economy in its uber-corporate-consumer mode, has truly entered its death throes. This transitional period may last for decades — it won’t be a Hollywood ending where everything blows up spectacularly overnight — but, so this analysis goes, it really will signal the end of the economic way of life that we’ve all been culturally indoctrinated to consider as normal and unassailable, including the very notion of economic growth in its classical Adam Smithian mode (regarding which, even Smith foresaw that a necessary endpoint would come, although he thought it was so far off as to be negligible for current planning). This would mean that while the issues of the moment, such as the current nuttiness of the Dow and world markets, may truly be ephemeral in the way you suggest, the overall trajectory is anything but that, and in fact represents a massive, permanent, life-altering transition.
Perhaps you’ve guessed that I’m one of the people who finds this view reasonable and convincing. My overall point is that the apocalyptic feeling afoot in American and European and global civilization right now isn’t as glibly dismissible as you’ve framed it to be.
A life-altering transition does not necessarily equate with the apocalypse. Rather, it could signal a change of age. It isn’t glib to be wary of apocalyptic criers, who seem to find their soapboxes and stand on them during times of internal and external crises.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly with both you and Pdj about this, Jill. It was more the “see you in the next bull market” part that set me off on a too-long comment, since its tone seemed to blow off the significance of the situation, whether you want to read that significance in practical terms, apocalyptic ones, or some heady admixture of the two.
you are right…..we all know, deep within ourselves, that their will be a judgment, and it is because of our sin/evil that we ultimately fear it.
I believe it is innately in our nature to know things are winding down. That things must come to a conclusion. This conclusion, however, is in God’s time on His appointed day. If we are in Christ we should take heart that He is forever with us and nothing, not this world and it’s trials, not fearful speculation and prognostication, nor even the end of this world can separate us from the love of God
Oddly enough, Jesus said the end would arrive in a more or less normal flow of events. (eating, drinking, marrying, buying/selling) I’m well aware of the history of frenzied speculation and bogus predictions – even more so as a Christian and minister.
It’s just that one of these days, the “normal” cycle of crisis and contraction is going to act as a catalyst for the sequence of events to unfold as originally prophesied.
But I will confess the news these days draws my gaze to the eastern sky.
Even so, come quickly.
You ought to know better than to get me rolling on Lovecraft. He’s the absolute best at illustrating the natural sense of what is true: that matter, in all of its vastness and gravity, is winding down, and it truly doesn’t care one bit about us.
The non-consciousness of the universe was a horror in Lovecraft’s mind: its loneliness the darkest symptom.
…and yet… so passionate and colorful are his words. And what does he select to illustrate this nature of matter without senses or feeling? Through monster characters, full of ambitions, ends, designs: just ones that don’t account for humankind.
Even that great master Lovecraft couldn’t illustrate our natural sense of the biblical truth of the eschaton, without reverting to supernatural physical and spiritual entities. He’d never admit it, but there’s a very good reason why August Derleth (very hamhandedly) Catholoicized some of his unfinished, unpublished (and sometimes published) works:
Lovecraft’s materialism is trumped by his more natural (and limited) view of the spiritual truth:
Things are ending. Matter doesn’t care.
He’s wonderful at those points – an accidental Elijah, foretelling and illustrating the doom that is obvious by natural revelation.
It is too bad (for his soul) that he stops there, and no wonder Derleth made the logical (but disastrous – he didn’t have the skill to do it properly) conclusions.
But just because Lovecraft doesn’t make it home doesn’t mean his stories aren’t incredibly rich and worth it.
Ye cats. I could write about this for another couple of days, but my time here is up.
Heavy stuff, Mike.