How to Survive Apocalypse

Practicing Public Mysticism in the Face of Despair and Catastrophe

This is the first in a series of essays adapted from an academic paper I recently wrote.¹

The other day as a few of us in DDS were checking into Studio Time (aka body doubling), one of our members who lives in Europe shared her sense of despair over the recent European Parliament elections, in which the far right surged to victory. She wondered how the rest of us cope with that sort of devastating news in the day-to-day, how we keep putting one foot in front of the other when things look so bleak.

I don’t think “apocalypse” is too strong a word for the age we are now experiencing, a terrifying time of rampant state violence, drastic redistribution of resources to the uber wealthy, escalating climate catastrophe, and bleak prospects for political solutions any time soon. I trace my understanding of the word “apocalypse” from So Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them), a white queer & trans Greek-American nature geek and in(ter)dependent scholar and writer, as well as from Steven Charleston, a Native American elder, retired Episcopal bishop of Alaska, and author of We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Both point to the Greek origins of the word meaning to “uncover” or “reveal.”

Charleston explains, “While many of us equate apocalypse with catastrophe or even with the end of the world, that is actually only half of the meaning…. Originally the word meant a vision of the future, a revelation about what was to come.”² Borrowing from the Greek spelling, So Sinopoulos-Lloyd titles their website “Apokalyptic Ecology,” explaining that “This new/old spelling intends to remind us of the emergence of other worlds/next worlds as opposed to the ‘end of “the” world.’”³

Thus, apocalypse can be both a vision and an event. It can also be about both destruction and hope, catastrophe and liberation. As Sinopoulos-Lloyd explains:

Apokalyptic Ecology is certainly about the ecological and cybernetic relationships and kinship networks that emerge in times of eco-social fracture (both contemporary and historical), but perhaps more emphatically … it is about reclaiming mythic imagination & visionary / oracular consciousness ….The apocalyptic … is part of the fugitive imagination, and to that it should return. The apocalyptic is also not necessarily “bad,” but has developed a negative valence due to its association with suffering, destruction, & collapse. Apocalypses can be liberatory just as they can be catastrophic, or they can be both.

I didn’t have a a very articulate answer for my European friend about how to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of despair, but the question she posed is one that consumes me. How do we survive this apocalypse of environmental catastrophe, state/structural violence, and economic ruin that we are already living through? These catastrophes all stem from a history of colonization and diaspora, white supremacy and capitalism that seem to have a life of their own in the face of which we, individually, often feel we have little agency. 

I think it’s important, especially for white people of European ancestry like me, to acknowledge that the apocalypse we are in the midst of, and our genuine and entirely reasonable fear and anxiety in the face of it, is not new, and is verifiably survivable. As the science fiction writer William Gibson has noted, “The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.” Nowhere is this more true than with regard to the so-called “end of the world.”

As Steven Charleston argues, “If you wanted to find an experiential example of an apocalypse, you would be hard pressed to find one more total than what North America’s Indigenous civilization confronted for more than four hundred years. If apocalypse means cataclysmic destruction—in essence, an end of the world—my ancestors went through it.” Significantly, though, as Charleston goes on to note: “But they did not all die. They did not disappear. They survived. Even if only as a remnant of what once had been, they came through the nightmare to live another day.”⁴ He goes on to ask, “How?” and offers the stories of several Native American prophets who offered hope to their people in the face of utter catastrophe and despair. If apocalypse is both an event and a vision, then our vision for the future can be—indeed must be—informed by the wisdom and visions of those who have already survived. 

In his essay How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse, Julian Brave NoiseCat begins by sharing, first in his native language Secwepemctsín and then in English, “who I am in relation to my kin, to my community, and to the places I come from, because those things matter—not just to Indians, but to all people.” In the midst of the apocalypse of pandemic and climate catastrophe, he exhorts us with a simple message that can help us to at least begin to frame a response to our fears about how to survive these times:

So my message to you is simple: Remember who you are. Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman. And remember that we all come from somewhere, and that those places, and the place called Earth, need us to fight for them.⁵

In this series of essays here on The Spiral Lab, I am making an attempt to accept NoiseCat’s invitation to remember these things, and to connect my own remembrances to the wisdom of three Native American prophets as described by Steven Charleston: Gandiodaiio, Tenskwatawa, and Smohalla. I will also connect them with my own understanding and practices of enchantment and public mysticism. My conclusion will be more humble than earth-shattering, a modest insight that helps me, in the words of So Sinopolous-Lloyd and their spouse Pinar Sinopolous-Lloyd, “reclaim mythic imagination … transform despair into creativity and hope … [and] live into the unknown in an era of ecocide.”⁶

“Remember Who You Are”⁷

Now here I go again / I see the crystal visions / I keep my visions to myself.

~Fleetwood Mac

I am Marta Eileen Rose, and I am named for both of my grandmothers and for my father’s ancestors.