The Myth of Apocalypse

Apocalypse has been a recurring theme in human thought. There has always been
some kind of a fascination regarding the cyclical nature of time, how ends and
beginnings rise from each other: birth, life and death. The ancient humans
recognized, intuitively, the cycles of nature: how life decays into matter, and out of
the dead matter sprouts life again. Death was thought of as a fertilizer to the new. In
a way we see this in nature as well: a population of species hits saturation and then
descends to extinction. Dinosaurs saturated the earth and were subsequently
decimated by nature. The theme of apocalypse is an ancient one and finds expression
in myths transcending geographical and cultural boundaries.
There is a certain apocalyptic element in our lives as well: times when something
catastrophic happens, the ground beneath our feet gives way and we are plunged into
chaos. This might happen when we lose our jobs, or our loved ones. This recurring
theme prompted the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung to deem it as an archetype ("The
Deluge").
The motif finds its mention in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Hindu puranas, the
Hebrew Bible, Greek mythology, African myths etc. These apocalyptic myths segue
into creation myths forming a circular narration, for example, the apocalypse in
Hinduism, called pralaya, ends with a flood and the creation then begins from the
water. In the apocalyptic theme, the structure of civilization is wiped out by a divine
entity (God, nature etc), only to have a few worthy people who survive the ordeal.
This can be thought of as a cleansing, cathartic event that exorcises the evils and the
filth of the society, only to leave the pure behind to rebuild it. This theme endures till
today, finding expression across generation through movies, TV series, books, comics
etc.
The appeal of this theme is still strong because it evokes an archetypical, ancient
response in us: of purification, of death and rebirth. If we take the movie "Children of
Men" for instance, the apocalypse or the disaster or the flood is not an explicit one. In
this dystopian world, women have lost the ability to reproduce. It has been two
decades since the last birth. The impending existential doom of annihilation and
mortality haunts every human being. Like every apocalyptic myth, there is a
saturation of structure, in this case the human population, and the flood, the global
infertility. And like every myth, there is a small hope for humanity, in the form of a
miraculously pregnant girl, who needs to be protected from the dystopian
government and several hostile factions trying to use her as a pawn. We suffer
through the ordeal with the characters and come out of the movie changed, with a
new perspective on things (the miracle of birth, fragility of humanity and so on). I
would go on and say that these flood myths, or disaster stories, work on us and
captivate us, because we yearn to be cleansed and purified by the wrath of nature. We
yearn to find repentance for our sins, for the sins of humanity, and when we rid
ourselves of our demons, we transform into someone new.