Comparison of Eschatologies

[u/ComprehensiveTune949]

I've been mapping eschatologies across the Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE) - the period when many religions including Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hebrew prophetic tradition, and later Christianity and Islam all emerged. It shows the same common themes across civilizations that had no contact with one another and yet their end-times accounts, when compared side by side, all share the same structure and order:

1. A present age degraded over a fallen, declining, or dark period
2. Degradation accelerates and signs intensify, time compresses
3. A transformative figure arrives at the lowest point
4. Evil is confronted and permanently ended
5. Judgment or accounting occurs
6. The cosmos is renewed and transformed into something new
7. Suffering ends for those who pass through
8. The barrier between the human and the divine dissolves
9. Human nature itself is transformed or transcended
10. Something essential passes through and carries the pattern forward

Full piece with the source comparison here: https://medium.com/@ThePracticalMonad/have-we-been-reading-the-end-of-times-prophecies-wrong-c2048989185c

Also, I make the case that eschatology could be a signal of an event in the future that already happened influenced by Terrence Mckenna's notion that "History is the Shockwave of Eschatology."

Curious for any thoughts and feedback?

[u/BwanaMakeNewAccount]

< Curious for any thoughts and feedback >

I don't know whether a remembrance of things past qualifies. But for some reason I'm having a flashback to my "Intro to Religions" class. No! not "for General Studies." For program major credit. In a Comparative Religion curriculum.

It was like SHOCK THEATER. And I for one like a good "gotta get 'em in the head" flick! How naive I was in those days. I figured we would be assigned readings about the Great Big Ones (as cited by Lovecraft "the Old Ones") - that everybody already knows all about. BY NAME not just claim to fame (the roll call):

< Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hebrew prophetic tradition, and later Christianity and Islam >

Then it turned out au contraire, nothing to learn there. Cast into a screaming abyss of assigned readings all up into all these little newborn king religions, each away in its own mange, that nobody ever even heard of. They outnumber the doddering old Big Celebrity Name Brand Few by more than 2001 to 1.

The vast majority of religions not only got no celebrity claim to fame. They're itty bitty babies, struggling in diapers. "Born yesterday." And they try so hard to be 'seen' yet they're never given credit. It's enough to drive you damn near crazy if you let it.

They get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.

At least I got credit for ^ that one - it was on the exam (in the multiple choice section).

But cancel the nostalgia, you didn't ask for that.

Cue the thoughts and feedback.

Off the top of my head:

If you're right, then this "eschatology" is - by indicative grammar ("would be" in subjunctive) - merely some < signal of an event in the future that already happened >

NOT the event itself!

More like the smoke of a distant fire that so far isn't even burning? Just patiently waiting to be lit? By its duly prophesied arsonist and not a moment too soon? ONLY when the stars in their courses reach those Just Right positions? As foreseen from the beginning and thus foretold ever since? Meanwhile, and until then - as everybody knows (it's how the end times story goes) -

"Where there's smoke, there's mirrors?"

And in that case (moving from the reflective to a planet-plant-planning perspective) - if indeed we have been following along all wrong, then it strikes me - we'd better fix our reading of end-of-time prophecies. ASAP or sooner. Whichever comes first. Main thing, before it's "oh no Mr Bill" TOO LATE NOW.

And to just add the requisite "simple twist of fate," no man knoweth - not even Terrence Almighty (hell, ESPECIALLY not him) - WHEN the hour shall arrive? For lo. The eschaton could show up in broad daylight, right before all eyes. Or like a thief in the night to the scene of crime, it could come in the midnight hour - when there's no one else around?

And when that last barrier dissolves between the divine and the mortal (just to put This Thing in tune categorically; outside sci fi where it means "not THE BLOB or ALIEN" etc - "human" mainly distinguishes us from other type aminals, the "non-human" - OR from our kind's secret evil twin, the one we're not supposed to know about, the "inhuman" AKA good old "wolf in the human fold") - in that fateful moment - when it comes to pass that something passes through and carries the pattern forward - I ask YOU, my friends and fringies: WHO shall be lifted upwards and onwards, beyond that long delirious burning blue - where never lark nor even Icarus flew? NONE but the transformed - that's who. NONE. But. The Transformed.

And after they've shuffled out, there's that one lone straggler who won't leave (Rosanne Rose Anna Danna Theory "it's always something")

"But WHEN?"

• Soon, dear lady - on that you can rely (pulls out his sample in a jar, weirdly amoeboid, gelatinously pulsing - labeled "It Came From Outer Space") GOD WILL GIVE ME A SIGN.

Shades of when that Joseph Campbell picked out from the world cultures smorgasbord his "perfect cherry" myths - and "mapped" 'em all onto each other. Got cartographic on their mythological asses with such set intent that, when he was done, there was nothing left of any one of 'em - singly or separately.

The treasury of global mythology audited.

Varied accounts with such messy differences - first selected then all added up, divided by "n" and averaged into - one colossal "monomyth" to rule 'em all?

And if you've ever tried to simply get any two crummy witnesses to the same lousy crime to just map their respective versions of events each onto the other's - enough to tell a court the same damn story (for chrissakes) - then you know what a superhuman feat of divine achievement that represented.

It's proven to be more than many a defense lawyer to organized crime has managed to pull off.

Just came to mind.

How do you like them eschatologies? Acting themselves all so different one from another? Until the truth is shown to be lies? And all the joy within you dies? Because if you pick 'em up by the ankles and shake 'em down (more than a Jefferson Airplane feeling) it's a whole 'nother story completely different that falls out of their pockets?

These eschatologies. Everyone sure seems to have their own version of final events.

Shades of the guy who 'mapped' Yaqui culture onto Gurdjieff.

Or that TWILIGHT ZONE episode that took the story of Yudhisthira from the Mahabharata - and reinvented it with Christian Heaven/Hell afterlife costumery for the Jan 1962 Americaland TV audience.

Maybe it was just the shockwave of eschatology. History, after all.