Brian Lum, Period 7, 1/4/2022

 Brian Lum 

Period 7 

January 4, 2022 

Modern Mythology 2022 

Literacy and Learning 

To me, one of the most fascinating topics our class explored in the past couple of months was the apocalypse. Human culture contains vast interpretations of how the world will end and, typically accompanying that, how the world will eventually be “reborn”. For example, the Christian interpretation of the apocalypse depicts the world being engulfed in all sorts of calamities in an elaborate scheme: a mountain falling into the sea would turn a third of its water into blood, supernatural horses exhaling fumes of fire, smoke, and sulfur would roam the earth, and stars would fall to the ground, all perpetrated by God to cleanse the earth of wicked sinners. After the apocalypse finished, however, a gleaming kingdom would come down from heaven, where only pure humans would be allowed to live. 

Norse mythology depicts an apocalypse both like and unlike the Bible in several ways. First, the main players - in this case, the Norse gods - have not done anything wrong; unlike the people depicted in the Bible, Norse mythology does not invoke the gods’ wickedness as a reason for why the apocalypse happens. Yet like the Bible, the apocalypse has been extensively planned out regardless, with the gods of Asgard fighting against the forces of Loki and supernatural monsters. In contrast to the Bible, the gods fight back against the forces that aim to destroy the world: Thor and the others engage in numerous battles against monsters such as Fenrir and Surtr while humans in the Bible are helpless in the calamities’ wake. However, like the Bible, the

world is reborn once more following the chaos: the green earth arises from the gray waters, a daughter sun emerges in place of its mother, and mankind eventually re-populates the earth. Having fears about the uncertainties of life and what comes after is no more alien to us than it was to humans hundreds of years ago. Clearly, Christians and Vikings would have felt much safer knowing exactly what would happen to their civilizations than continuing to have no idea, and even safer believing there would be a happy ending after the apocalypse had concluded. Those stories of rebirth serve to encourage humans that there is a point of living and contributing to their societies. After all, if there was no belief system that promoted a happy ending or if no one knew what would happen, people from those cultures who questioned their existence and the earth’s would have felt hopeless. All in all, apocalypse stories have taught me that my life will barely affect the outcome of the apocalypse and, if it eventually does happen, the end of the world is in the distant future. Therefore, I should instead keep on doing what I always have been and plan to do: giving meaning to my own life myself and living it out in a way that makes me happy.