Imago

"The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed the girl who personated the goddess;then they drew her on her back on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden images of the goddess..."-Frazer, Killing the God in Mexico, page 709


The God of death lay still and silent upon the floor, sapphire eyes locked upwards towards the blue roof of his world. His enchanting limbs lying prone and listless, his flesh pale, his animated mouth still. In this tiny transparent world, the apocalypse had come. Shiva, Hindu God of Death, was gone. And it was with a heavy heart that the goddess of Shiva's own world flushed him down the dorm toilet. Just one of the many apocalypses that day.

"...the end of the world has already occurred, although it is to be repeated in a more or less distant future." States Mircea Eliade in chapter 4 of his Myth and Reality. I find this particular statement to be correct, the world has ended, and it continues to end each and every day. The apocalypse is a regular event in my own opinion, required for a normal and productive life.

World and Earth  have two very different meanings if viewed with the right perspective. Worlds are fragile, frighteningly insecure places we build around us. My world would be vastly different from anyone else's, and the world according to those whom are featured in Myth and Reality would be even more alien. But no matter what worlds we concern ourselves with, they routinely meet destruction and mayhem. As they are supposed to. However, when looking at Earth, I can only say it suffers minor changes. Tectonic plates move, the atmosphere changes, volcanoes erupt, but all in all the earth itself remains the same. I have yet to witness our Earth undergo an apocalypse and explode into flame while being sucked into the dark vortex that used to be our sun. That particular end is still some time off in the distant future.

But back to the subject of the everyday apocalypse, back to those spider-spin worlds we construct. Say your house burns down or your loved one leaves you, or even if your garden fails; apocalypse. Say your favorite jeans become so worn they must be thrown away, your cherished mug cracks and must be replaced, your grandmother fails to see you with her poor sight; apocalypse. Our tiny worlds so often and so daily meet their ends that I cannot help but agree with Eliade's statement. The end of the world has already been, and will soon again be. We build our Edens and we strike them down only to build them up again. And like the Phoenix Pythagoras describes, we rise new and young from the ashes of our worlds.The Apocalypse is merely change in some form or another. As Eliade tells us at the close of chapter 4 "They have understood that a true new beginning can come only after a real end.". Therefore, before change can enter, our worlds must meet their own apocalypses.

While destruction and change are never quite without pain, there is comfort at the end of the world. "For all things change, but no thing dies." says Pythagoras, the mythic is there to remind us of the comfort and safety at the world's end. Hercules nearly burned on his pyre, but he did not die; and Ariadne nearly lost her heart, but Bacchus offered her a place among the stars. No matter the brutality of the end, it is merely a change into another state. To look at Frazer's quote above, the Aztec corn-goddess(the girl impersonating her anyways) met with a particularly nasty end. And yet, in her end there is a beginning; "Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the body of the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn, together with all her sacred insignia by a man who danced before the people in this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the hypothesis that it was intended to ensure that the divine death should be immediately followed by the divine resurrection."(Frazer 710). Only change here, only the usual end of the world so a new one might be brought in.

The ancient and the mythic bring us relief and respite in those times our worlds lie dying in their tiny glass cases. And those cases, like the cocoon Caterpillars must weave,offer a "little" death to become something greater. The apocalypse is simply change, the cliche transformation of worm to winged. Your fish dies, and your skin wrinkles. But in the end of the world, there can be only metamorphoses. And it will happen in the more or less distant future, again and again.