Eschatology and the End of Days

Eschatology (/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/ (listen); from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last', and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of the present age, human history, or of the world itself. 

The end of the world -- or the End Times - is predicted by several world religions with teachings or prophesies that specific events will reach a climax and result in ultimate catastrophe. 

Believing the end of the world is imminent is known as apocalypticism, and over time this belief has been held by both members of mainstream religions and by doomsday cults.

The last few years -- and particularly in the last few months -- there's been a lot of talk and speculation about if we're approaching the end of the world as we know it. I've been doing a lot of thinking about that myself. Cue the earworm R.E.M. rock song...

 

That song was actually released in 1987, so we've been waiting for the end of the world as R.E.M. knew it for a very long time -- 36 years. Other end dates on civilization and/or the human race have certainly come and gone in those three-and-a-half decades. 

This is a blog I wrote over 11 years ago that also dealt with the subject of eschatology and the End of the World and how it intersected with my writing life (at that point, it wasn't an authorly life yet). 

I promise it's not a doom and gloom read, and it might even give you a smile.

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Something's coming. Something BIG!

Or not.

Lately I've been living a sort of immersion scenario while I work on my third novel and reflect on the current uneasiness in our culture surrounding an upcoming date on our calendar.

Let me explain...

Living With World-Changing Prophecy

2012

We're living in a time where our world has gone edgy with expectation.

Many cultures of the past--the Mayan, the Hopi, the Chinese, and others--have all hinted that on one particular date in the future something big is going to happen. Many researchers agree they are all pointing to the same date--December 21, 2012.

12-21-12

Eleven months from now.

No one really knows exactly what will happen, only that an ancient calendar comes to an abrupt end on that particular date.

Some forecast doom and gloom in the eerily prophetic Mayan calendar--a calendar that has supposedly marked every major astronomical event for eons. Its terminus has been put forth by some to correlate to an energy surge from alignment with the galactic rift, a polar shift, intense solar flares, impact by a stray comet or errant asteroid, a direct hit from a gamma ray burst, an overdue supervolcanic eruption, shut down of the ocean conveyor and the inevitable instant ice age, or the mysterious planet X that's supposedly going to swoop in from the edges of our solar system, gallop through the orbital planes of the inner planets to collide with Earth.

Some believe it will be a change for better, for enlightenment, for the next step in human evolution.

And then there's the school of thought that nothing is going to happen at all. It's just going to be another date on the calendar.

After all, how can an ancient society predict what's going to happen in the future--long after their civilization has ceased to exist? How can they know?

There's actually a precedence for that, according to some researchers. They're studying a sudden spike in global consciousness the morning of September 11, 2001, hours before the events of that day actually occurred. They claim random event generators can predict catastrophes that are yet to happen. [Read more.] Are they quacks, or is there really a way to tap into a global consciousness and "see" events that are yet to happen? Are some people wired to tune in to the future?

Was Nostradamus a prophet who predicted the rise of Hitler and other upheavals in history, or merely a very clever creator of enigmatic words with symbolism that could be interpreted or twisted in any way to mean anything a person chooses?

The Great Prophecy of Draxis

In my work in progress, Draxis, the people of this fictional society are living with a prehistoric prophecy that might be coming true. And just like the theories surrounding 2012, many are jittery and fearful. They aren't sure if the change that's foretold will result in annihilation, or glorious evolution...or if anything will happen at all.

The Great Prophecy was written by a philosopher-visionary named Hamaden Sarcassius sometime around 9,000 BC by our time scale, the text carefully preserved for over twelve thousand years.

Who Sarcassius really was is lost to the centuries. Heck, maybe he was a mad. Or maybe he had ulterior motives for penning his prophecy. Or maybe--just maybe--he had the gift of vision and sent a dire warning to his race across a great expanse of time that something was coming--something the Draxians needed to prepare for.

The events of the Great Prophecy center around a person identified only as "the Flame," who according to the scripts will make a single decision that will destroy or "turn" their world.

The novel opens as the one who many believe may be "the Flame" wakes up on Draxis after being abducted, drugged and hurled through space and time to be thrust into this maelstrom of fear and fanaticism spurred by her arrival.

The parallels between the Draxian empire and our present day culture are easily drawn. Two societies living with the fear, apprehension, skepticism and denial surrounding a world-changing prophecy and the potential Armageddon it portends. Or doesn't.

No one on Draxis really knows what the words of Sarcassius mean.

And no one on Earth really knows what the end of the Mayan calendar indicates.

We live in interesting times.

Write what you know.

Working on an Author Signature Block

One of my favorite tools to use for creating graphics and promotional images is BookBrush. I have a lot of fun rifling through their many templates looking for themes that will fit my books and series. 

Recently, I found some author signature blocks in the templates, and of course I had to give it a try. 

Though my end product wasn't quite as slick as their original image, I was pretty happy with how it turned out. The nice thing about graphics is you can also come back and tweak them as time allows and inspiration strikes, but for now...tada. My signature block. (I could have animated it too, but that seemed just a leetle bit over the top. So it's a static signature block. Which sounds kind of boring, but hopefully isn't.)

Of course I couldn't stop at just an author signature block, so I decided to also do a graphic featuring one of the thoughts plucked from my series overview. It's a funny thing about history. It's often forgotten, sometimes to be rediscovered in the future and sometimes to be lost to sands of time. But sometimes history is intentionally changed, which led to the perilous situation Lieutenant Commander Dek Garr finds herself in in Juggernaut. 

This short snippet from the series overview hints at what knowledge may have been lost from ages long past. I love how the background illustrates that mysterious "cross-rip in time and space."

The clincher is that the readers of this series know that Earth is real and not imagined or just a fading legend. The people of The Inherited Stars Series can't be sure.

I hope to be back soon with a few snippets (but no spoilers!) from Courting Disaster.  

Luna Says Hello

Luna wants you to know she's feeling much better after her surgery last month, thank you very much. But she wants "Mom" to hurry up and finish her book! 

Yes, Luna was the inspiration for the StarDog (also named Luna) in my next release, Courting Disaster.

Like her namesake, Luna is one clever little StarDog, and it might just be up to her to save the day when her people end up in serious peril. 

One crafty little StarDog to the rescue!

I'll be posting more about Luna -- and her namesake's roll in the story -- soon!

Viva la StarDog Luna!

I'm Still Among the Living!

Why, yes, I have been missing in action this last week or so. Sorry for the dark blog!

But I have a very good excuse. I'm up to my earlobes in Courting Disaster edits. This will be the last of my rewritten and published-as-standalone books from the StarDog tales formerly published in annual Pets In Space volumes (so no longer available). 

And it's a lead-in to the next--and last--novel in this timeline of the series, so it's a pretty major story.

I'll have a couple more weeks of work to wrap this one up and shoot it off to my editor, then I'll be working on my next project. (More on that soon.) Meanwhile, I have some new graphics and fun stuff to show you.

In the meantime, if you haven't caught one of the free reads on this blog, here's one you can check out. The Shell and the Star is an aquatic Science Fiction Romance!

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ <<<