“Zombie Apocalypse? What the hell are you talking about?”It was our weekly astronomy group lunch when everyone, from the professors down to the undergrads, gets together for pizza. I’m not quite sure how the conversation took this turn, but at some point I quipped: “But of course that’s after the Zombie Apocalypse.”
Everyone at the table nodded knowingly. Everyone, of course, except one of our emeritus professors who, as she so strongly noted, had no idea what the hell we were talking about. And that got me thinking. How the hell did the Zombie Apocalypse become a ubiquitous all-consuming (no pun intended) meme?
It's not the why of the Zombie Apocalypse that matters, it's the how. For here, at the dawn of a new age of planetary limits, zombies are our greatest teachers.
There are not many fully modern mythologies (). True mythologies are stories that give both instruction and insight. In the long march of human evolution, we've accreted a storehouse of such myths. These are narratives across time and culture that speak to the common experience of being human: the hero's journey; the coming of age; the passage to mortality. These stories became codified over many thousands of years and that is what makes them universal.
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