Happy Ragnarok

[Roger Mexico]

http://www.swide.com/art-culture/22-...ing/2013/12/31

On the 14th November 2013, a terrifying sound of a horn was herd through York, the mythical Gjallerhorn was blown to signal 100 days to the Apocalypse.

Ragnarok, which translates to ‘Doom of the Gods’, is due to be preceded by the winter of winters. Legend has it that all morality would disappear and fights would break out all over the world, signalling the beginning of the end. There will be huge earthquakes, the sea will rear up and the soil and the sky will be stained with poison. The wolf Skoll would devour the sun, and his brother Hati would eat the moon, causing stars to vanish from the sky and the Earth to be thrown into eternal darkness. On the day of Ragnarok, calculated to be the 22nd February 2014 the god Odin will be killed by the wolf Fenrir and the other ‘creator’ gods.

Firstly, a part of the legend claims that the Midgard Serpent, named Jormungand, shall free itself from its tail and rise up from the ocean. Which in a way happened when the two huge oarfish were beached on the coats of California in November. And when it comes to the winter of winters? Well, record low temperatures were recorded in the Middle East for example, with Egypt seeing the first snow in a century.

I'm sitting pretty down here on Quetzalcoatl's turf, who's been back and kicking around for two years now and doesn't seem to be making with the floods and armies of zombie dolls, but what are the rest of you going to do?


Also what is it with ancient prophecies about "apocalypses" and people in wealthy industrialized countries making an effort to believe they're living through one? Are we feeling a little insecure lately? (Not that this is unprecedented--I know that.)

[Madrigal]

This just reminds me of the last apocalypse that didn't happen (2012?). My mother was chirping about it while making lunch in the kitchen, but nobody was paying attention to her. So she repeated the announcement to the maid who had just come back from cleaning dogshit in the garage.

"Rosana, do you know that the world is going to end tomorrow? That's what they're saying!"
"Ay sí, señora, let's hope that it does."

I think I'm the only one who appreciated that.

[Aven]

This just reminds me of the last apocalypse that didn't happen (2012?). My mother was chirping about it while making lunch in the kitchen, but nobody was paying attention to her. So she repeated the announcement to the maid who had just come back from cleaning dogshit in the garage.

"Rosana, do you know that the world is going to end tomorrow? That's what they're saying!"
"Ay sí, señora, let's hope that it does."

I think I'm the only one who appreciated that.

Jajajaja! I called my abue today, she has been on dialysis for a while.

[Delilah]

Well, my work week has felt like an apocalypse which may or may not be over (day seven of ?) but I have booze, a nice comfy bed, and I am actually digging this "winter of winters", so...I'm okay.
For the record though, I welcome any and all apocalypses? Apocalypseses? Apocalii? Apocoloco.....

[Makers]

There is a reason the apacolypse didn't happen in 2012. The years 600-900 were made up, which means it's actually 1714. The end is yet to come.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

[Senseye]

Well, it has been the winter of winters, in my part of the world so I am sold. The apocalypse is nigh! I've got the flu right now, so I'm going to wait a few days before I hit the booze.

[msg_v2]

Also what is it with ancient prophecies about "apocalypses" and people in wealthy industrialized countries making an effort to believe they're living through one? Are we feeling a little insecure lately? (Not that this is unprecedented--I know that.)

It's interesting to live in other countries and realize that the things people take for granted as "necessities" aren't really, and living without them isn't going to kill you.

Although, I would say that there were doomsday prophecies going back for years before industrialism.

[Roger Mexico]

It's interesting to live in other countries and realize that the things people take for granted as "necessities" aren't really, and living without them isn't going to kill you.

Although, I would say that there were doomsday prophecies going back for years before industrialism.

Tons of them. It's pretty much an intrinsic human behavior to worry about the future and make up imaginary scenarios to justify your anxiety.


I just mean it's interesting to me how much money and energy went into mass-culture rumination and deliberate anxiety-stroking about, e.g., the Y2K 'bug' (LOL) or the 2012 thing. Industrialized societies have huge amounts of infrastructure available for meme propagation, but at the same time they tend to be stable cultural and political power centers, so superficially you'd think they'd spend more time feeling secure and congratulating themselves (which they do) and somewhat less time going out of their way to pay attention to improbable catastrophes and invest them with more plausibility than they deserve.

But Americans just can't seem to watch enough movies about "zombie apocalypses." And mind you, these can't just be movies about zombies per se. The intrinsically transgressive and uncanny horror of necromancy doesn't seem to be the point, ironically. It seems to be more of a lazy excuse for what people really want to see. A few reanimated corpses engaged in mindless cannibalism aren't scary enough on their own--they have to reproduce in such large numbers that they take over the world and effect the downfall of human society. Then and only then--when the still living in the conventional sense humans have been reduced to a state of pre- or post-civilization and imminent extinction on account of the number of zombies running around--do they become interesting, apparently. It has to be the End of the World, not with a bang, but with zombies.

Conventionally, you expect to see this more in societies that have collapsed or are obviously declining toward collapse. Like the Sioux Ghost Dance thing--which I've been reading a little about, and the more I read the eerier and eerier it gets. It's like they were saying "we think we're about to die, sure, but more than that this represents our awareness that our civilization is dying, meaning our deaths, like our lives, won't even be remembered by the people who outlive us. Our ancestors are dying again. We will disappear from the earth in a way that mere individual, physical death can never achieve on its own."

Dark Age Europeans were pretty obsessed with the Apocalypse--a lot of them thought Jesus was literally coming back in a few years, and for whatever reason he would really want to see that just about everything with letters printed on it had been burned by that point. This sounds and almost certainly was a batshit insane mentality, but to be fair everything that had provided a measure of stability and a sense of order to their world for centuries had fallen apart--they kind of were living through the End of the World as They Knew It.

But why would 21st century American and British people even care about Ragnarok other than as a literary/anthropological curiosity? It's a myth from a culture even their ancestors probably regarded as barbarians a thousand years ago. Why would even small numbers of them be going "hey, did you see that big dead fish? Obviously it's Jormungand and it means the Twilight of the Gods is upon us--here we go."

I guess Ragnarok does involve zombies, though. Maybe that's it--zombie appeal.

[floid]

The human mind abhors nothing quite so much as it does lack of stimulation and will look for it in the most perverse places.

When you no longer have a legitimate concern about being preyed upon by life ending predators.
When you don't have to hunt for you next meal with no guarantee of finding it.
When your shelter isn't going to be blown away in the next windstorm or reduced to muddy pulp by the next thunderstorm....

Theres a lack of palpable stimulation and you have to improvise.

Thusly apocalypses

All the thrills without the spills

[Jimothy]

Chaos is fiiiine. All my friends are griping about mercury retrograde but I say bring it on motherfuckers. It's not like shit wasn't broken anyway.