Eschatology is the study of last things. It is where myth and history intersect. At a mythical level the tension is between cosmic order and chaos. Chaos has come to be interpreted by us as disorder but, as “the primeval void”, it is thought to be the very ground of being, the formlessness out of which form emerges, the primordial source of order rather than its opposite. At an historical level the mythical processes of death and rebirth are located in particular events, whether geological or human - geological as the various mass extinctions that have punctuated the Earth’s four billion-year history, human as the collapse and rebirth of civilisations.
The first of my six essays are now published by Amazon as a book, entitled Everything and Nothing: Essays on Climate Change and Cultural Transformation.