Apocalypse Of John Pdf

[Jarrell Campbell]

The latest in a series of posts about little-known Christian Apocrypha that could not be included in my recent book, Secret Scriptures Revealed: A New Introduction to the the Christian Apocrypha, to be released later this month)

The earliest Christian apocalypse is the canonical Book of Revelation ascribed to John. The focus of this text is the end-time battle between cosmic powers of good and evil, with Jesus leading the heavenly host against the forces of Satan and the Beast. With the victory of Jesus, Satan and his minions are thrown into a lake of fire, and the faithful are raised from death to live forever in a new heaven and earth ruled by God. But the story does not end there for John; he is called on again to receive new visions in several other apocalypses in his name.

For a full discussion of the apocryphal Apocalypses of John see John M. Court, The Book of Revelation and the Johannine Apocalyptic Tradition (Journal for the Study of the New testament Supplement Series 190. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000).

In fact, in my Long Now talk and elsewhere, I have used The Road as a marker for the imaginative challenge facing us. What McCarthy offers is the most brilliant literary expression of the nightmare which haunts our collective imagination. Its scenes present a photographic negative of the world as we know it, framed by the icons of contemporary civilisation: the man and boy push a shopping cart; the internal combustion engine may be almost extinct, yet their instincts drive them down a tarmac road; what may be the last ever can of CocaCola appears as a sacramental gift from the world before the never-quite-defined Fall.

It is fascinating to discover this shared experience of outsiders in post-earthquake, pre-ecological apocalypse Mexico City. There is something here of the taste of the gang, the ragpicker, the garbage dump dweller. Our difficulty is finding a language to speak about this alternative, because, contrary to professional wisdom, people with unmet basic needs are surviving with new forms of conviviality.

Over the course of thirteen years, director John Carpenter created three seemingly unrelated films that form what he has dubbed his "Apocalypse Trilogy:" The Thing (1982), Prince of Darkness (1987), and In the Mouth of Madness (1995). Not merely separated by time, they're also disparate in style, subject matter, and quality. They were filmed under different production companies, with different casts, and from screenplays penned by different writers. At first glance, there's nothing to tie them together besides their director, and his designation of them as a trilogy. When you begin to scratch below the surface, though, you find that they are connected by strong thematic underpinnings that could easily be overlooked or underplayed in any one of them alone, but which come strongly to the fore when all three movies are viewed as a linked trilogy.

These thematic underpinnings are basically those of what's known as cosmic horror. Cosmic horror is mostly associated with H. P. Lovecraft, though his conception of it was in turn inspired by earlier writers like Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson, and can be summed up in a quote from his collected letters where he said, "Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large." In short, cosmic horror is less the horror of some specific bogeyman, and more the horror of a cold, uncaring universe, in which humans are of no importance. Carpenter has said many times that he is a fan of the works of Lovecraft, and two years before he made the first movie in his "Apocalypse Trilogy" he was already working references to Lovecraft into some of the names in his classic ghost film The Fog. While Carpenter wouldn't go on to make an overtly Lovecraftian picture until In the Mouth of Madness, cosmic horror and Lovecraftian traits form the thematic backbone of all three movies in the "Apocalypse Trilogy," along with threats that are apocalyptic both to human life and to the basic human sense of self.

In the present day, The Thing is widely regarded as one of John Carpenter's greatest masterpieces, and I would personally consider it a contender for the title of the best horror film ever made. It didn't always receive such a rosy reception, though. It was released in theatres just weeks after Steven Spielberg's much more blockbuster-friendly E.T., and its theatrical performance and initial critical reception weren't anything to write home about.

Perhaps because it's the first film in the "Apocalypse Trilogy," the themes that tie the three movies together are the most subtle in The Thing. The story concerns an alien creature found frozen in Antarctic ice that can absorb, digest, and then imitate perfectly any creature that it comes into contact with. What follows from its discovery is a classic meditation on paranoia, punctuated by some of the best practical special effects ever put on film. The Thing is a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World, which was itself based on a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?" While there aren't any direct references to Lovecraft in The Thing, there are certainly no shortage of indirect ones, beginning with the Antarctic setting (a nod to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness"). While the creature in The Thing isn't found in a cyclopean ruined city, it is discovered in an equally gigantic spaceship, frozen in ice that one of the characters hypothesizes must be "100,000 years old at least." And, in true Lovecraftian fashion, the implications of the creature's nature drives one of the protagonists (played by Wilford Brimley) insane.

Once it is revealed, the titular Thing is almost entirely unknowable. Not only is it alien in the most literal sense, but it's also outside of normally understood biology, genetically dissimilar from all life on earth. When discussing how the Thing can do what it does, or how it can live after being frozen for so long, one of the characters (played by Kurt Russell) says, "Cuz it's different than us, see. Cuz it's from outer space." And that's about all the more understanding of its reasoning the characters ever get. Though the creature can obviously speak perfectly when it is imitating one of the humans, it never explains itself, or attempts to reason once it's found out. In fact, once revealed to be a Thing, it never speaks at all. Like Lovecraft's ancient alien gods, its psychology appears to be as far outside of man's sphere as its biology is.

As the moniker might imply, all three movies in the "Apocalypse Trilogy" concern threats with apocalyptic consequences for the human race. The goal of the titular creature in The Thing, as near as the humans can guess, is to get out of Antarctica and into the civilized world, where it can find more hosts to consume and imitate. Early in the movie, Wilford Brimley's character runs a computer simulation of what would happen if the Thing were to succeed, a simulation that ends with the prediction that the entire world's population would be assimilated roughly 27,000 hours from first contact.

In all three movies, however, the threat to the world is less disconcerting than the threat posed to the individual concept of self. The Thing's negation of the individual self is perhaps the most obvious of any of the films in the trilogy. When the creature devours someone, it produces a perfect duplicate, complete with memories and behaviors. So perfect, in fact, that the only way to tell the difference is through a blood test. "If I was an imitation," one character asks another, "a perfect imitation, how would you tell if it was me?" That moment of realizing that everything about a person could be completely subsumed and replaced by an alien imposter and no one would know the difference is more chilling than all the gory carnage that the monster wreaks when it's discovered.

The story concerns the discovery of an ancient green liquid in the basement of a church, which was heretofore guarded by a secret sect of priests called the Brotherhood of Sleep. The last member of the sect has died and the secret has finally come to Father Loomis (played by Donald Pleasance), who brings it to the attention of the professor and some other scientists in the hopes that they can scientifically prove the nature of the substance and thereby warn mankind. The liquid proves to be a demonic force (characters sometimes call it Satan), "A substance, malevolence. Asleep, until now." It possesses insects, worms, homeless people (who stand in nicely for Lovecraft's degenerate cultists), and eventually the scientists themselves in order to bring across from another dimension its imprisoned father, the Anti-God, which all sounds very Lovecraftian once you strip off the Christian theology names. (There's a line in the diary of the last member of the Brotherhood that could have come straight out of Lovecraft: "The sleeper awakens. I have witnessed his stirrings.") Even Jesus gets in on the act, when an ancient tome found near the liquid reveals that Jesus was a member of an extraterrestrial race of human-like creatures who came to warn mankind against the devil-liquid.

Much more than even The Thing, Prince of Darkness conveys a Lovecraftian sense of slumbering malevolence, and a universe in which mankind is far from the center. While the events that would occur if the Anti-God were released from its dimensional prison are certainly world-endingly apocalyptic, once again it's really the implications for mankind's sense of self that are portrayed as the most terrifying. The devil-liquid is capable of possessing and effectively deleting the identities of those it comes into contact with, but it's mankind's cosmological selfhood as a whole that is in the greatest danger. Father Loomis talks about how the Church made a decision, "to characterize pure evil as a spiritual force, the darkness in the hearts of men," which would allow "man to remain in the center of things." The awful truth, however, is that there's a "universal mind" controlling everything on the subatomic level, the "Anti-God, bringing darkness instead of light."

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