The Apocalypse Archetype, Part Two

Ongoing reflections on Israel, war, myth, and history

I will explain the idea behind this image next time.

I thought I would write today’s piece in a somewhat stream of consciousness style, to reflect my inner turbulence.

I am still reading up on Israeli history. As I wrote previously, although I am Jewish because my mother is Jewish, I barely grew up in a Jewish context. I was never Bar Mitzah’d. We didn’t celebrate Passover, commemorate Yom Kippur, or follow any of the other Jewish holidays. My father was not Jewish, and my daughter is only one-quarter Jewish, as her mother is from a German / Christian background. Therefore, I belong to the assimilation of the Jews, genetically attenuating and disappearing into the Goyim mass, as was ongoing in Western Europe before the dire intervention of the Holocaust which ultimately annihilated six million of nine million European Jews.

I still feel Jewish, on a deep level. Particularly, I have always identified with the cultural genius of the Jews, from Kafka to Marcel Proust to Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg (who I knew as a kid), and musically, from Lou Reed to Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen, from Stanley Kubrick to Roman Polanski (still one of my favorite directors despite his heinous acts) to Woody Allen. Not to mention (okay, I will) Freud, Marx, Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxembourg, Abbie Hoffman (whose first book, Revolution for the Hell of It, my mother edited), Wittgenstein, Kurt Weill, Derrida, and, of course, the list goes on and on. I always felt that Jewish greatness was defined by our standing for universal principles of human rights and justice for the oppressed, as oppressed and dispossessed people ourselves. Suffering and intensity of consciousness are, history reveals, tightly linked.

Following my mother’s lead, I never particularly cared for the institutional, religious forms of Judaism. Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I was surrounded by it — gloomy, capacious Synagogues and yeshivas. A number of my high school and college friends were far more connected to our Jewish heritage than I was. It has been part of my life to remain a loner, innately steering away from all kinds of institutions and defined community structures — probably, often, to my detriment.

I also never gave deep consideration to Israel and Zionism. As I mentioned in another essay recently, I always found the whole set-up perverse: To carve a Jewish homeland out of a strip of desert in the Middle East where the Jews would be permanently surrounded by sworn enemies after we had just endured the horror of the Holocaust, seemed to me, an outsider, a form of insanity.

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Later in life, after I explored the power of archetypes for shaping the collective Psyche while writing Quetzalcoatl Returns (originally 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl), my book on prophecies, I started to see a kind of mytho-historical intention in all of this. It appears we are unconsciously compelled — sleepwalkers stumbling through a surreal nightmare — to enact what the Jungian Edward Edinger called the “Archetype of the Apocalypse,” on every level, both on an inner, psychological level and outwardly, in some performative sense, as if “The Book of Revelation” was a script that must be followed, more or less to the letter, by hypnotized human meat-puppets.

I did go to Israel once, around five years ago, for a brief visit, and instantly fell in love with the place. I was invited to speak at a neo-Tantra festival put on by the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA.life), held on a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea.