CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - BRONWEN NEIL BACK TO THE GARDEN? ANCIENT IMAGINARIES AND CONCEPTS OF THE (POST-)APOCALYPSE IN EUROPE & THE PACIFIC
This project brings material and oral cultures about the end of the world from two very different traditions together: those of the Pacific Islands and the early Christian Mediterranean. In both of these regions, people were heavily reliant on the sea for their survival. Its tides, its creatures and its destructive power played a part in their cultural imaginaries. Pacific cosmologies emphasise the creative and destructive powers of their gods as well as the importance of living in harmony with nature. I seek to retrieve a similar narrative from the early Roman Christian tradition, which also accepted the destructive power of the divine revealed through natural events. These two very different cultures developed similar cosmologies to deal with frequent natural disasters and a perilous existence that depended on unpredictable climate patterns. Spiritual interpretations of natural phenomena, such as floods, earthquakes, famines and comets, were common to both traditions. After the introduction of Christianity to the Pacific by European and local missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indigenous Pacific cultures often included elements of early Christian mythology. Concepts of divine and human sovereignty over nature reflected different ancient cultural beliefs and were preserved in some of the earliest accounts of missionary and colonial enterprises in the Pacific. These concepts continue to exist side-by-side in an uneasy hybrid that informs diverse modern day positions on environmental issues.