Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Zsolt K. Virágos: The American Brand of the Myth of Apocalypse

tribulations as a necessary prelude to the victory promised by God to his chosen. Thus in classic apocalyptic logic destruction is clearly seen as a prelude to reconstruction: earthly sufferings are seen as a small price to pay for eternal happiness. This last characteristic was still very much operative in the last century in that Protestant adherents of millennialism were ready to interpret even the Civil War as a bloody but ennobling purgation, an inevitable "scourging" dictated by the apocalyptic timetable. Viewed by a nation of Bible-readers as a moral conflict, the Armageddon of the Civil War, "a biblical crusade in blue and grey" (Dewey 16), seemed to fit exactly into a pattern long established. Indeed it seemed to confirm the validity of that pattern: seeing the evil of the times as a necessary prerequisite of the birth throes of the new order. In the Civil War years the apocalyptic trumpet sounded its clearest note in 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe (1819—1910), first published in February, 1862. Deploying imagery that shows a close correlation with the symbols and general spirit of Revelation, the "Battle Hymn's" ultimate message is futureoriented, millennial, therefore intrinsically optimistic. Like all complex and popular myths, traditional apocalypse has been subject to the inevitable process of fragmentation into a loosely interrelated cluster of constituent elements: a satellite of images, symbolic patterns, iconic cliches, visions of violence, thematic segments, hermetic symbols, numerological references, etc. Since both religious and secular, and often even looser, uses have added new analogous components in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic era, and in the 20th century, often it is not easy to find a synchronic family resemblance among these often mutually exclusive, apocalyptic components such as "the end of things," "earthly beatitude," "loss of energy," "social renovation," "end of history," "earthly paradise," "end of the present age," "the Third Reich," "one world government," "heat death," "the seven seals," "world revolution," "concern with final things," "the ideal king," "Judgment Day," "great ruler myth," "the four horsemen," "last emperor myth," "an optimistic 126