Apocalypse. Restoration. Emergence.

Three myths to make sense of the polycrisis

And here we are again

Whenever we face a really big shock - like Covid, or a multi-front polycrisis like the one it looks like we might be heading into - it’s tempting to see our situation as unprecedented. It’s not, though.

Humans have always faced periodic cataclysms. Floods and earthquakes, invasions and exiles, plagues and pogroms: our forebears have been there, done that.

They knew all about moments when everything feels like it’s falling apart, and they have lots to share with us - above all, the stories they drew on to find their way.

Which is handy, because myths aren’t things that you can just sit down to design from scratch as though they were psychological plug-and-play software. Instead they’re organic, living things, that are particular to places and peoples.

What Walter Brueggemann calls the prophetic imagination must always, he says, “move back into the deepest memories of this community ... symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history”.

So when we go into our community’s deepest memories of catastrophe, what do we discover?

This is one of the questions explored in a report I co-wrote during the pandemic with my friends and colleagues Ivor Williams and Casper ter Kuile. What we found, as I started to set out in my last post, is that our ancestors have bequeathed us three kinds of myths that can help us to stay afloat in conditions of breakdown and upheaval:

• Apocalypse myths - which, rather than being about the end of the world, need to be understood as showing an unveiling of things as they really are;

• Restoration myths - which tell of how a wound or rupture in the world is healed, and things are made whole again; and

• Emergence myths - which tell of how the death of the old also leads to the birth of the new, or even how we grow up as a species.

Apocalpyse myths

Let’s kick off with the subject of this whole series: apocalypses.

As I noted in my first post here on Substack, we usually think of ‘apocalypse’ as meaning the end of the world. And you can see why, when you look at texts like the Book of Revelation with its four horsemen of pestilence, war, famine and death.

Nowadays we have a whole genre of fiction and movies devoted to imagining apocalyptic futures (and reader, it’s possible I have watched / read all of them). The Last of Us, World War Z, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, The Day of the Triffids, Station Eleven, The Dog Stars (under-appreciated gem, that) - and dozens more.

But as we’ve touched on before, ‘apocalypse’ means something far more subtle and interesting than the end of the world. It refers to the idea of an unveiling of things as they really are; a revelatory moment of full disclosure, when illusions fall away.

Covid was like that. It suddenly revealed who the real key workers are in our economy, and how they’re often the lowest paid, least visible, and most vulnerable among us. It revealed the vulnerabilities that come with interdependence in a globalised world. Above all, Covid revealed what really matters to us - with millions of us realising amid months of enforced solitude that what we most want isn’t stuff, achievement, or status, but connection, belonging, and love.

The pandemic also shone a light on the things in ourselves that we might prefer not to see. Carl Jung had a lot to say about the idea of the Shadow in our psyche - the aspects of our personality that we refuse to face up to, and push out of conscious awareness into our unconscious minds.

During the pandemic, a lot of the psychic gunk that’s usually tucked away in our collective Shadow suddenly burst into collective awareness.

Spiking levels of domestic abuse. Opportunistic looting amid riots against lockdowns. Scapegoating for the pandemic, especially towards Chinese people, but also other East Asians, Jews and Muslims. Systemic racism - both in health treatment and outcomes, and in wider society. And too many conspiracy theories to count.

For Jung, the task of facing up to the parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at (and instead delight in seeing in everyone else) is fundamental. It’s not much fun, but it’s the thing that makes us whole.

Apocalypses are like the collective version. They force us as communities and societies to look ourselves in the mirror and see who we actually are. It’s dramatic, frightening, and often painful - but it can also be cathartic and restorative.

Which leads us neatly on to our second set of myths: those that tell of restoration, of a world made whole again.

Restoration myths

In restoration myths, something fundamental has gone wrong. Society, the world, maybe even the entire cosmos has suffered a rupture in the natural order of things. Often, the wound has been caused by our own greed or folly. And unless we can heal it, we risk losing everything.

The Bible is a restoration myth. It starts with humanity expelled from a garden that has the Tree of Life at its centre. Sixty-six books and three quarters of a million words later, in the very last chapter of Revelation, we finally regain access to the same tree.

Restoration myths are also the basis of an absolute armful of the most popular works of fiction and film of our times, including the Star Wars series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Harry Potter saga, The Lord of the Rings, Frozen and His Dark Materials.

All of these stories stem from ancient myths about a covenant formed at the dawn of time, when the cosmos was first created, which bound all of creation together, with the sea in its proper place, the seasons in balance, and the stars in their orbits.

Crucially, though, the covenant can be broken, for instance through ignorance, injustice, or abuse of knowledge. At that point, everything is at risk of unravelling - especially through environmental catastrophe.

So in the 8th century BCE, for instance, we find the Jewish prophet Hosea describing a time in which “the land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea are swept away”.

Similar imagery of a broken covenant crops up in Saruman’s despoliation of Isengard in Lord of the Rings; when seasons go out of kilter and winters never end, like in Frozen or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; or in the spectres that terrorise worlds in His Dark Materials.

So how do you heal the breach and restore a broken covenant? In the old myths, through atonement - essentially, self-sacrifice. This was the role of the high priest in Judaism’s First Temple period (who once a year, on the Day of Atonement, would symbolically take society’s sins on to himself), and of Jesus in the New Testament.

In our contemporary myths too self-sacrifice is (spoiler alert!) everywhere. Harry Potter in The Deathly Hallows. Obi-Wan in Star Wars. Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Gandalf and then Frodo in Lord of the Rings. Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Anna at the end of Frozen. Will and Lyra entering the land of the dead to free those imprisoned there (and, later, sacrificing their love to heal the last tear between worlds) in His Dark Materials.

What happens as a result of self-sacrifice? Things are brought back into balance and the world is made whole again. The powers that imprison or bewitch us are destroyed or defeated. Images of winter or environmental catastrophe are replaced by ones of flourishing and plenty.

Is self-sacrifice relevant to the polycrisis? Um, yes. Of course there are the obvious aspects - like, say, getting past the hyper-individualism that’s at the heart of consumerism and extreme inequality. But there’s also a more subtle kind of self-sacrifice going on when, for instance, we show the kind of curiosity that bridges divides, or when we forgive people, or when we compromise in order to make peace.

There’s one more detail. In restoration myths, the people doing the self-sacrificing - Gandalf, Anna, Obi-Wan, Aslan, Lyra, Will, Jesus - think they’re going to die. They do. But then something else happens. They get resurrected.

Which brings us to our third kind of myths.

Emergence myths

Rebirth myths take us into very deep psychological territory. The key thing we need to understand here is that while self-sacrifice leads to rebirth, that does not mean that everything goes back to exactly the same as it was before. Instead, those that are resurrected come back changed. These are stories of the emergence of something new, not just the restoration of the old.

In Christianity, for instance, when Jesus is resurrected, Mary Magdalene and his disciples fail to recognise him. When Obi-Wan returns in Star Wars, it’s not in his corporeal body. When Gandalf reappears in Lord of the Rings, it’s as Gandalf the White, not Gandalf the Grey.

In our own times, trauma psychology emphasises that healing from trauma is more subtle than simply being ‘fixed’ back to how we were before. We inevitably come back changed by the experience - but we may also discover new capacities in ourselves in the process.

This is the idea of post-traumatic growth, which explores how adversity can drive new understanding of ourselves, each other and the world - not instead of, but alongside deep distress. It’s a lot like Carl Jung’s concept of the ‘wounded healer’, which drew on the Greek myth of Chiron, the wisest of all centaurs, whose ability to heal derived from having himself been incurably wounded by a poisoned arrow.

There’s another set of emergence myths that I find fascinating, too: those that invite us to think of ourselves as a species in its adolescent years.

The writer Duane Elgin observes that all over the world, people in all kinds of cultures seem to share an intuitive sense that we have been living through the adolescent years of our species.

For years, Elgin has done informal straw polls asking, “When you look at human behaviour around the world and then imagine our species as an individual, how old would that person be - a toddler, a teenager, a young adult, or an elder?” No matter where he is, two thirds to three quarters of people say that we are in our teenage years.

Which, he argues, makes a lot of sense. Adolescence is a time in which we test the limits, rebel against them, make mistakes, and learn from the consequences. It’s just part of growing up.

Yet it’s not a given that we’ll make the transition to our species’ adulthood successfully. In indigenous societies all over the world, initiatory rites of passage often take the form of a trial by ordeal that involves the possibility of death and the probability of wounding - but also the prospect of coming through the fire into maturity as an adult, if we have sufficient wisdom and willpower to pass the test.

It’s a mythic framing that I think has deep relevance for us today. We’ve been growing up as a species. Our learning curve has been unbelievably steep. Of course we’ve made mistakes on the way. But now is the threshold moment, the supreme test. The risks are absolutely real. We might not make it. But the test only comes when we’re ready for it. And the prize - of initiation into adulthood, and taking our rightful place as co-creators and stewards, who act with real wisdom and rootedness - is immense.

So those are the three kinds of myths I think we can draw upon as we look back into our community’s deepest memories of cataclysmic times: apocalypse, restoration, and emergence. In the end, it comes down to three deceptively simple questions.

What’s being revealed in this moment? What have we ignored or repressed, and what might we need to face up to, especially in ourselves?

What needs to be healed in this moment? Where are there wounds or ruptures in our society that need attending to, and what do our oldest myths have to say about how to do so?

And what might be trying to be born in this moment - in ourselves, in our communities, in the world - and how can we lean in to the process?

Links I liked

I can’t write the links for this post without a shout out to my two amazing co-authors on This Too Shall Pass, the report mentioned above.

Ivor Williams does absolutely fascinating work on dying and end of life care, and he’s now designed a small group course - Mortals - which is partly about that, and partly about how we live well. I was one of the guinea pigs for the first prototype! It’s awesome.

As indeed is Casper ter Kuile’s work at Sacred Design Lab! It’s all about spiritual innovation, and you can read their most recent report on this endlessly fascinating subject here. Casper was also one of the founders of Nearness, another brilliant small group experience you can take part in, which you’ll find here.

Inauguration Day in the US yesterday, in case this somehow escaped you (lucky you, if so). Here’s veteran journalist Zack Baddorf with advice on the news exhaustion we may all be about to feel, and Timothy Snyder on why Trump is zoning out on Greenland (no, not because of the post-apocalypse movie).

Another Carole Cadwalladr link, second newsletter in a row? Why yes! Scroll down to the second story in her piece - the one about how the Guardian broke a strike by using AI. The future is already here…

I had a rant on LinkedIn about the “business case for sustainability” and felt much better for it.

Postscript

One last thought about emergence / initiation myths. There’s an essay I’ve always loved by Rolling Stone journalist Michael Ventura, written back in 1989, called ‘The Age of Endarkenment’.

At the end of the piece, he tells the story of a time when he was trying to console his partner’s 13 year old son, who’d burst out sobbing that “everything is so fucked, it’s all so fucked, what’s the point, it’s all so fucking fucked” - a thought that many of the rest of us may also have entertained lately.

What Ventura said to him - and it’s stuck with me ever since - was this:

That we are living through a dark age. An age, if you like, of "endarkenment" -- and I don't necessarily mean that negatively. The world is aflood with dark psychic fluid, everything's stained with it. We all say we hate the stuff, but we don't act that way, we splash in it. It's an age in which, for reasons we can't comprehend, everything's being turned inside out, everything's imploding and exploding at once, and we can't stop it. And it's going to continue, it'll go on for a long, long time, longer than we're going to be alive. So we can't find peace, we can't "win," it's not going to be all right. Not for us.

But that doesn't have to rob us of purpose; in fact it's the opposite, it implies a great purpose; That what each of us must do is cleave to what we find most beautiful in the human heritage -- and pass it on. So that one day, one day when this endarkenment exhausts itself, those precious things we've passed on will still be alive, stained perhaps but functional, still present in some form, and it will be possible for the people of that day to make use of them to construct a life that is a life -- that life of freedom and variety and order and light and dark, in their proper proportions (whatever they may be). The life that we'd choose now if we could.

And that to pass these precious fragments on is our mission, a dangerous mission -- that if you were going to volunteer for crucial, hazardous work, work of great importance and risk, this might be the job you drew. And it isn't a bad job at all. Actually, it's the best job. And his mother, and me, and our friends -- "And you too, man," I said, "I can see it in your eyes" -- that's what we're doing here. Trying to do. And it's no small thing, it's the best, man, it's one of the few things left to be proud of.

See you next time.