The Cows of Armageddon

our origin story and our annihilation is defined by a cow

This is our journey. United, and always together. We are one people, hand in hand with the same beginning, headed for the same calamitous end. We claw out of the womb, and into this world, naked and trembling, gasping for this thing called air in this horrible gaseous new world, screaming for mercy, screaming to be returned to the warm viscous cocoon from which we came. The florescent lights overhead are crackling unevenly, pulsing in a limpid backdraft of cylindrical horror, tubes like pointless arteries of artificial light. At the outset, you’re told this light is the new law. Everything else will be determined by this light like a million false suns tricking you to stay awake a little longer. You stare at it as a few nurses and other strangers loom over you, wearing masks, yanking you by the head, grunting towards you in these strange battle commands, like hooting enemies of a foreign and falsely timbered land. The lady you are being pulled away from is screaming louder than you. What is this horror? you think. The trauma. The episodic theater of original sin. The only thing that you want, the only thing that will shut your crying up, is to suck the nutrient-rich milk from one of the two bulging alabaster masses from that screaming lady.

So you suck, and you suck. You suck from one of her tits with an unmatched fervor, a two-handed all-you-can-suck greed. No one sucks with this wide-eyed fury quite like you, a sort of desperate neediness gnawing away at those perfect pink nipples that push upward this illustrious music of springtime. No one sucks like you. Those miniature volcanoes bursting because of Nature’s botanical frenzy.

The singular a priori knowledge is to suck mother’s milk. It is the only thing we are born knowing. Give us milk! It’s the milk that we’re after, like some mythic and insane kismet, some ridiculous magnetism that keeps you plodding along through the tedium until you die. It’s always been about milk, and it will always be about milk, and we will all die because of the milk.

This whole episode of your birth is probably recorded somewhere in the furthest cul-de-sac of where your memories are stored. It’s there, in the back of some forgotten file cabinet covered in dust, waiting to be discovered by some roaming courier of your memories. But you can’t just will it back into existence. You can’t quite remember that first holy moment of the nipple coming down to you like a massive god, giving you life from this miraculous spring. So you spend the rest of your life making up for it. You put milk in everything. You put it in your coffee. On your cereal. You turn it into fancy sulphuric cheeses. You’re told that your constant consumption of it is the only thing that will make your skeleton strong. The got milk? ads were incessant propaganda, rapturous theater impressing you of your earliest addiction. The flickering ads are still there: there was one of a man who proudly didn’t drink milk, and while mowing his lawn, all of a sudden he crumbled into a dusty heap. Look at what would happen to you if you didn’t drink milk. You would turn into a pile of ashen rubble. They wanted you to be unquestioning addicts from the very beginning. Your cashew or oat or almond substitutes are just mockeries of your own denial and despair. It’s the calcium-fortified screed of destiny, like some vague ruinous oasis looming out there on the horizon. Because it’s only the real stuff that satisfies your addiction. It’s the spluttering teet, the fountain, the spring. The nutrient-soaked liquid white gold gives you life.

The sexual act of sucking on your female partner’s tits is an overtly Oedipal act, a desperate plea to discover a gurgling spring from Earth’s dormant core. These two globular udders have fed us, grown us from our helpless infancy into whatever adult profanity we have now become, and all the sprawling modern comforts we have invented. In a way, everything has sprung from these springs. Carl Sagan liked to remind us that everyone you’ve ever heard of lived on this pale blue dot. But if it wasn’t for the first milk they drank, none of us would be here to know about it. The cosmos itself would be a lackluster void where rocks and explosions coruscated the stupid sky. The rocks would tumble in mediocre summersaults of blackened infinities, and there would be no one there to care.

So, what is the origin myth most closely associated with this stuff we call milk? We take this sort of thing for granted, pouring it greedily down our throats without another thought. But it lives there somewhere, dictating our desires, controlling the barbarity of our minds like a rawboned venom festering in the marred cauldron, bubbling into scalding bursts of evil. Because the truth is, the story of milk and milk-producing beasts is everywhere.

You will sometimes hear people bring up Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces to prove to you that the monomyth of heroic journeys is universal and therefore woven into the fabric of humanity, as if this story of our hero sets off from his ordinary and banal world, into a supernatural one with unseen challenges along the way that he must overcome. Religious people like to remind you that the story of an omniscient god has existed forever, and the story is usually the same, except for a few aesthetic garnishes that make our cultures distinct from one another. In science, there is the concept of multiple discovery, when something is discovered by multiple scientists independent of one another. Calculus was discovered by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Evolution wasn’t just discovered by Charles Darwin, but Alfred Wallace as well. Oxygen was discovered by several scientists, independent of one another. And inventions are the most interesting, with things like the blast furnace, the crossbow, and magnetism discovered simultaneously all around the world, unrelated to one another’s discoveries. All this suggests there is some larger consciousness, some metaphysical Beyond breathing through the undercurrents of the world. But cows are something altogether different. These provincial grass-eating beasts, these totems of agrarian domesticity, an artificially created quadruped whose turds grow magical mushrooms that give you visions of other dimensions, and whose belches cause the planet to warm.

Joseph Campbell also said that symbols of mythology are not invented, but rather they are “spontaneous productions of the psyche.” They bubble up from somewhere, like a divine origin of storytelling, where the metaphor of a story is closer to reality than reality itself.

Take the 13^th century Old Norse book, the Prose Edda, as an introductory example. In it, it tells the origin story of Búri, the god and creator of all other gods, the grandfather of Odin, Vili and Vé. It tells of a cow who licked Búri into existence over the course of three days. Known as Auðumbla, the primeval bovine fed the frost giant, the jötunn Ymir from her udders, who then grew the world from its flesh. It was Auðumbla who made the world:

“She licked the ice-blocks, which were salty; and the first day that she lick the blocks, there came forth from the blocks in the evening a man’s hair; the second day, a man’s head; the third day the whole man was there. His is named Búri: he was fair of feature, great and mighty. He begat a son called Borr.”

It’s milk that nourishes the world into existence, and it’s a cow that licks the creator into creation. Perhaps you brush this mythic tale off. Perhaps you say that yes, maybe if you lived on Iceland in the 13^th century, this would make more sense. After all, the shivering island remarked all storms with the fiercer antagonisms of its beauty. Thick beds of moss melted down boulders like liquid. The terraqueous bastions of a truly primordial landscape, a greener grandiosity than the gods ever thought possible, with waterfalls and ancient slow-moving glaciers and all the supporting natural marvel just waiting there for an eternity before being seen. And all of this came out of a volcano. If you don’t have a regular god to create it all, it’s very understandable to interpret that the whole world could from a cow, that the very life-stuff just comes out of this spring of her udders is not that unlike a verdant island coming out of the mysterious depths of a volcano. Perhaps you could brush this off as just a random myth on a strange Nordic island. Perhaps you could do this, if the primordial bovines weren’t everywhere, since the beginning, controlling our destinies with perturbed fantasies. 

The earliest cave paintings, the ones Picasso was mystified by their excellence, in Lascaux, France, are of cows. (They were actually aurochs, that extinct species of cattle from which all other cows descend from.) Those idiotic beasts who stare at you so blankly as they eat their grass, their jaws strutting blatantly from side to side, who somehow kill far more people than sharks do every year, those dumb animals who don’t even think about their existence, they just eat. Why them? Why cows? What on earth could be so special about them? Because every culture from every time period has had some iteration of a cow deity or cow sacrifice for the gods. Zoroastrianism have many mythological creatures fashioned after the cow, from the Gavaevodata, to the Hadhayans, to the Zoroaster, who all maintained special powers of strength or creation. In Exodus 42:4, it reads, “He took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf; and they said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.’” From the second to the fourth centuries, the Roman Empire practiced taurobolium, which was the sacrifice of a bull in order to ensure the well-being of the state and its people, and in honor of its deities. There is an unbelievable amount of bull-deities and bull sacrifices across millennium, in every corner of the world, that it makes you consider deeply what Campbell had to say about symbols of mythology. To simply list off the countless examples through the world’s cultures would only further prove our origin story, and how our worship of them is permanently woven into the collective psyche of the world’s inhabitants.

So, what about the apocalypse? Any good student of mythology or of reason will tell you that he who creates the world must also destroy it. Destruction is, of course, the preferable and easier engagement of one’s purpose. Entropy is the law of the land, and we are servile peasants who are forever dictated by empires of rubble and rebar and bombed-out cities The book of Job says, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” But it was cows all along. 

Perhaps you’ve heard about the red heifers in Israel. They’re being written and talked about with a sudden frequency and frightening urgency, the kind that makes you think something unusual really is afoot. Lawrence Wright wrote a blockbuster piece in The New Yorker back in 1998, which examines closer the passage in Numbers 19, in which the Israelites are commanded by God through Moses and his brother Aaron to obtain “a red heifer without spots, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke.” This pristine unadulterated cow is to be ceremoniously slaughtered by priests as a sacrifice to God. It is to be burned on a pyre of cedar wood, hyssop, and a thread of scarlet wool, and the ashes are used to ritually cleanse those who have come into contact with the dead. Now, this ritual is to be performed at what would be the “Third Temple” of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa mosque is today. The first two temples were destroyed, the first by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the second in 70 AD by the Romans. The Third Temple has long been believed will be built after the arrival of the Messiah. Al Jazeera recently wrote about the breeding of these red heifers in Texas, by evangelical ranchers, in support of the looming prophecy of the sacrifice and construction of the Third Temple. Hamas called their  October 7^th attack on Israel “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” because of the obvious threat to this important mosque.

The evangelicals care about what’s going on in Israel because their own fate depends on it. After Jesus Christ returns to Earth and proceeds victoriously at the battle of Armageddon, he will begin his thousand-year reign from the Third Temple. And the only way the Third Temple can be built is when the red heifer is burned, and the only way the red heifer will be burn is if the Al-Aqsa mosque is destroyed. Which means a further annihilation of the Palestinian people.

The TrueAnon podcast aired a thorough and expansive episode, “Red, Dead, Redemption,” about this distinct connection between American evangelicals and Israeli ultra-nationalists, and their mutual desire to bring about the apocalypse. Their commitment to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque once and for all and build the Third Temple is shared by both ideologies. And this is an important connection. As Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian children by the thousands, they are achieving the equivalent of clear-cutting a forest in order to build a monolith.

The Third Temple will be built. It’s laid dormant for two-thousand years, under the loamy subterranean vault of history, waiting for its day of summoning. The Al-Aqsa mosque will be destroyed. The Messiah will return, and the red heifer will be slaughtered, because this is the way things go. In this version of reality, the empire always wins. Palestinian children can throw all the rocks they want. Students at UCLA and Columbia can blockade themselves in tents all they want. None of it matters because the empire of Armageddon wants to eat the world.

It’s always seemed strange that the evangelical right in the US are the staunchest supporters of Israel, that you will often see the American flag and Israeli flag waving together behind a lifted truck with heavy brass balls dangling from the tow hitch. Because by most impressions, aren’t the Republicans supposed to be the antisemites? After all, it was Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” sentiment that carried through to much of the rightwing establishment, as he accused Roosevelt of being controlled by the Jews. (This is why some rightwing conspiratorial extremists deny the Holocaust ever happened, as such a widespread state-sanctioned evil would discredit their prejudices.) As one of the hosts of TrueAnon, Liz Franczak, explains, in early Protestant sects in the 16^th century, during the wave of the Reformation, we get myriad new interpretations of the scripture, along with the role of Jews and their return to the holy land, and the coming rapture. She signifies an important point: those who believe in the rapture, desperately want it to happen, and will do what they can to help manifest it. This is the current state of the world. These people want death. Armageddon is a very real possibility, only because those who desperately want it to happen would be the ones willing to make it happen. Look at the tone of the culture industry today. The success of Alex Garland’s Civil War is simply a masturbatory performance piece about how much people in the US wants to see their neighbors killed. And the conflict in Gaza is voyeuristic performance art for them.

As the porcine leader of the young Christian Republican attitude, Charlie Kirk, explained, Christians support Israel because Christians have the personal interest in proving the story of Jesus correct, and they can only visit those certain archeological holy sites if they are controlled by Jews. The Muslims must be eradicated because they won’t let Charlie Kirk visit where Jesus was born.

And they’ll annihilate them with a big fat red virgin cow. 

So it’s no wonder we wage so many pointless wars. Your precious hours on this earth are spent wasting away at work, trying to make enough money to pay your rent on time, spending whatever money you have left on discounted groceries, scrolling through the infinite doldrums on your phone, smearing your stupid thumb across the screen so many times it eventually becomes a tic, and you find yourself in strange unmarked places, flipping your thumb in the empty sordid air. Maybe you believe in an afterlife or maybe you don’t. It doesn’t matter what is beyond the wall of time, beyond the fortified gates of our mortality. Because the land of milk and honey is just beyond the next hill.