The new year has brought about an abundance of apocalypse-themed television shows. Revelation, Hell, the Antichrist, Nostradamus, Mayan 2012 doomsday prophecies, Armageddon, Satan — this stuff is everywhere. Apocalypse is a big seller just now, as I suppose is to be expected given that this is 2012 and all.
I always watch these shows when I happen to catch one. It’s a kind of morbid fascination. It’s been so long since I subscribed to such a worldview and yet it was so saturating during some of the most formative years of my life that I can still step into that mindset and see through its eyes. It is a very hard life, that kind of fear.
In light of all this mainstream doom, what I want to get back to my real passion and the purpose of this blog: Christian mythology and our relationship to it in the context of our historical moment.
On Background: Genesis
In Cognitive Archaeology of the West, published over at Ribbonfarm last year, I presented my take on Genesis, the first book of the Bible. I believe Genesis is a collection of cultural traditions and histories that accurately reflect the origins of Western will-to-empire. These traditions and histories are not literally accurate, but rather are literarily accurate, and our challenge is to unpack them in accord with their original significances.
The central theme of Genesis is “the Fall,” the moment when Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s edict not to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the Genesis narrative God told Adam and Eve: “On the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.” Whatever the literal facts, the story represents quite explicitly a profound cognitive shift in the here-and-now temporal world. It was not something abstract that happened in some invisible spiritual dimension, and it had very tangible consequences. It was what we might call real.
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