So Much for the Apocalypse
Well, you have to hand it to them. Few constituencies are so ostentatiously and consistently wrong, over so many generations of human history, as the doomsayers who promise that the end is nigh.
It did seem kind of nigh there for a second, though, didn’t it? Or, as the writer Kurt Andersen put it in the days leading up to today’s eclipse, after a rare (and rather substantial) earthquake rattled New York City: “Earthquake. Eclipse. The antichrist running for president. Check.”
In many corners of the internet, people suggested the eclipse would cause humanity to shift back into a parallel-universe timeline that we apparently collectively abandoned in 2012 (another highly popular year for apocalyptic types). Others warned that the eclipse was confirmation that a second civil war in America would soon begin. Still others predicted the Second Coming of Christ. TikTok users warned, variously: “We must be alert,” and “the end of the world is coming,” and “I’m telling you right now, something is not right about this eclipse,” and “insane prophetic events are coming!” (Not surprisingly, similar sentiment emerged from the parts of Congress that resemble the internet at its most chaotic: “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, tweeted. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens. 🙏”)
That the solar eclipse would generate some degree of collective foreboding was to be expected. Thousands of years of religious and cultural prophecies have primed us for such thinking. (Or, to quote from the Book of Revelation: “And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”) The human tradition of treating an eclipse as an occasion for apocalyptic doomsaying is ancient; apocalypticism is among the most enduring human obsessions, and the preoccupation with eclipses predates even the major religions that have perpetuated the most influential end-times stories.
The oldest known depiction of an eclipse, carved into stone in Ireland, dates to 3300 B.C.E. The eclipse that Homer describes in The Odyssey is believed to be based on an actual eclipse that took place on April 16, 1178 B.C.E. Confucius warned about eclipses in his writings. As did Hindu legends. Eclipses are sprinkled throughout the literature of Christianity and Judaism. A total solar eclipse over England, on August 2, 1133, came to be known as King Henry’s eclipse because people believed that it was an omen of his death. “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” Gloucester warns in King Lear.
Lately, in various forums where conspiracism blossoms, the eclipse has been an object of fascination for apocalyptic thinkers. Such theories are like the dandelions of the internet—they’re everywhere, and no matter what you do, they keep coming back, resilient enough to sprout alongside any other ideas or news event, no matter how many times the apocalypse never actually arrives.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to spread the word among his neighbors that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Over the years, he told people again and again: Christ would return on October 22, 1844. But when the anointed day arrived, the seconds ticked into minutes, then minutes became hours, and eventually October 23 arrived. No Jesus. Miller’s followers, known as the Millerites, came to remember that incident as the Great Disappointment. But the disappointment wasn’t great enough to shake them out of their apocalyptic worldview. Instead, they turned it into a religion that to this day has a strong eschatological focus. As I wrote in my 2020 story about the religious undertones of the conspiracy theory QAnon, the Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a worldwide membership of more than 21 million. (That is, by the way, 1 million more members than they had in 2020.)
I watched the eclipse today from Burlington, Vermont, where the event was anticipated with festivities that included eclipse parties, eclipse memorabilia, and celebratory banners draped all over town. I made the decision to travel to Burlington years ago—within seconds of the sun reemerging after the last time I stood in the path of totality during a solar eclipse, in South Carolina, in August 2017. I still cannot believe my good fortune to have seen a total solar eclipse even once, let alone twice, let alone twice in seven years. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be awestruck by the many ways, cosmic and mundane, that the magnificent materializes in your own life. When, at 3:26 p.m., on the shore of Lake Champlain, we finally passed into the path of totality, hundreds of people began to cheer. I overheard one young man tell his friends, in complete earnestness, “My life is changed forever.” The truth is, the wonder of totality is indescribable. You have to experience it. Please, if you ever have the chance to do so, you must.
Just before I left for Burlington, I was in New York when The Atlantic’s office began to shake with such intensity that my colleagues and I all stood up and stared at one another, blinking. Was that an earthquake? In Manhattan? Even my most empirically minded friend, who’d texted me to check in after the quake, felt that something intangible was off: “This week has had a majorly weird vibe,” she wrote.
But maybe that’s just it. Only rarely do we have shared experiences that are cosmic in scale—whether meteor showers, earthquakes, eclipses, or comets—ones that remind us, if briefly, that we are living on a planet that’s simultaneously spinning on its axis and corkscrewing its way through the vast wilderness of outer space. It is perhaps once in a lifetime, if we’re lucky, that we can collectively relate to our earliest ancestors, and experience firsthand the same phenomena that bewildered and inspired them thousands of years ago. Sometimes it takes the ground shaking, or the sun disappearing, to remember that while the universe is very old, humanity is still very, very new.
Few ideas are as durable and as seductive as the end of the world. And although people tend to see apocalyptic thinkers as gullible or captured by fear—which, sure, many of them are—there is more to it than that. There is also a dimension of hubris and presentism to the assumption that the world would end now, after so many failed predictions, just in time for you to see it. And there is, perhaps, a desire to take comfort in the notion that the whole wide world just might expire before you do. If the apocalypse is coming, the world cannot spin on without you, as it has for every other human in all of history who has been born and died. We’re in this together, that conspiratorial voice whispers, until the very end. However nigh that may be.