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Frank Cotolo
November 28, 2013 |
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Ever since the world began there have been those who predict its ending. As far back as the days of
early mankind, there have been wise guys who claim the Earth will be blown up, burned or sucked
away into the sky. We know this because modern man has found drawings on the walls of caves, put
there by primal men who had nothing better to do than draw on caves' walls. These drawings indicate
the caves will crumble soon and are accompanied by an urging to read the drawings quickly, in case
the end comes sooner than expected.
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As man became more civilized, he continued to forecast the end of the world but replaced writing on
caves with writing on parchment. The messages, however, remained remarkably similar. Even after
Columbus proved the world was not flat, smart alecks found reason to believe that a round world
could end even more quickly than a flat world. No matter what discovery disproved false beliefs,
men developed end-of-the-world scenarios.
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However, even the most knowledgeable men seemed to have theories about the world's end. For
instance, Leonardo Da Vinci's younger brother, Ralph, made a bold claim while Leonardo was painting
the Sistine Chapel. It was recorded in a diary he wrote while trying desperately to keep up with
the intellectual changes during the Renaissance.
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Ralph wrote: "When God gets a load of how my brother is painting his image, the almighty is bound
to hurl a large lightning bolt into the Earth’s core, knocking it off of its axis and making it
spin for as long as it takes to shake every human off of it. This is truly when the world ends. We
can only hope that my brother runs out of paint before he completes the ceiling picture."
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Back in the New World and even before it was new to anyone, early Native American tribes had
doomsayers. One vision of Earth's end came from a tribesman that predicted the sky would fall upon
the land and all on the ground would be buried in clouds, making it impossible to see when walking,
so all creatures would walk off of cliffs and be hurled into the ocean, which survived because it
was blue like the sky. Native American end-of-the-world scenarios always involved elements of
Nature.
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Religious beliefs, of course, always heralded the end of times, when God would level the Earth,
especially the unbalanced portions. This is where, by the way, the rumor that the world was flat
originated.
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