Anyone who’s ever read through the Apocalypse of Saint John or watched a Hollywood movie about the impending end of the world knows that during the last days of humankind all kinds of animals and animal-like creatures will emerge: monsters, devils, dragons with ten horns, four-headed panthers with bird wings—but cows? Prim as cows normally are in the pasture, you hardly expect them to play a special role in the horrors and carnage of the end time. And yet, they keep on showing up in works about the apocalypse.
“Apocalypse Cow” was a headline in the German weekly Die Zeit in April 2001. It was the height of foot-and-mouth
disease, which in England alone cost more than 6 million cattle their lives. Under the headline was a photo of a pyre on which the cows’ cadavers were being burned. Die Zeit’s unusually cabaret-style headline was obviously an allusion to the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s famous 1979 antiwar movie Apocalypse Now. Whereas Coppola’s masterpiece about the Vietnam War deals with American GIs, North Vietnamese jungle fighters, and civilians, the article in Die Zeit is “merely” about sick cows. But the subliminal message in both cases is very similar. Under the fragile varnish of human civilization the potential for violence and unimaginable horror still lurks. A heart of darkness beats in the bodies of seemingly civilized people. Cleansing and sacrificial rituals reminiscent of the Middle Ages continue to exist even in modern and postmodern times. As the theologian Georg Pfleiderer remarked with regard to the pyre photograph and its headline in Die Zeit:
The combination of images of the inferno with sacrificial semantics . . . dramatically illuminates the apocalypse: the sacrificial semantics is heightened into an image of Armageddon . . . The return of the sacrificial rites that the modern era had seemingly eliminated is a premonitory announcement . . . of the end of this era.
The death of millions of cattle and their incineration on a massive scale thus seem to foreshadow the end of civilization. What prosaically speaking is nothing more than a cruel but temporary agricultural policy measure is heightened into an end-of-days massacre.
The expression “Armageddon” that Pfleiderer uses comes from the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse of Saint John. It refers to the location of the battle “of the Great Day of God Almighty,” one of the last confrontations between the powers of God and those of darkness. In the course of this battle very heavy hailstones fall from the sky, a massive tremor shakes the earth, islands disappear beneath the surface of the sea, and mountains collapse. Shortly after that, the city of
Babylon—the epitome of earthly sinfulness—is razed to the ground. The Antichrist has to admit defeat; the dead arise from their graves and the Last Judgment takes place. This is the end of the world as we know it. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” it says in the Apocalypse of Saint John, “because the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared, and the sea was gone.”
Despite the catastrophic cow epidemics of the late second and early third millennium CE, the world has not yet come to an end. And yet, it’s fascinating that we assign so much importance to cows that we interpret their mass slaughter as a warning sign, a bad omen for our own survival. But if we consider that to the ancient Egyptians the cow was a precondition for life on earth and that in Germanic mythology the divine cow Auðumbla marked the beginning of time and human civilization, it’s not that surprising that the cow’s demise is so closely associated with our own and that she should be present at the end of time. Her return at the end of the world is consistent with philosopher Karl Löwith’s idea that world history is just a big detour that at the end of time leads back to its beginning.
Cows culled in the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Great Britain are prepared for incineration.
Cows have always been harbingers of the apocalypse. Not when they graze peacefully on the pastures but when they show unnatural or even perverse behavior—and most of all, when they leave their ancestral place on God’s green earth and abruptly take flight, be it with the help of a crane that lifts them onto the pyre or by other means.
“This is what things have come to in this world. The cows sit on the telegraph poles and play chess.” These are the first lines of Dadaist poet Richard Huelsenbeck’s poem “The End of the World,” published in 1919 in the magazine Der Dada. The doomsday mood of World War i was the historical background for this work—and for the emergence of the Dada movement in general, which had begun three years earlier in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Huelsenbeck describes the mood as a “feeling of terror,” “an existential despair” to which the Dadaists reacted with “creative irrationalism.”
The image of the cows sitting on telegraph poles playing chess expresses this irrationalism in a concise yet desperately funny way. A touch of irony is added by the indignant bourgeois exclamation “This is what things have come to in this world,” as if chess-playing cows were just more proof of general moral decline. At the same time the image lends itself to political interpretation. After all, chess is nothing but a war game in the course of which kings must be protected, knights positioned, and pawns sacrificed. The fact that this power game is played by cows of all species, cows that sit on long-distance communication lines with their broad behinds, speaks volumes about the catastrophic state of the world.
At the same time, castling cows at airy heights can look back to a long ancestral line of strange metaphors that predate Dadaism by centuries. For example, the German expression “the cow walks on stilts,” an allegory for a world turned upside down, dates back to the late seventeenth century. “The cow will dance on a rope, the ox will understand Latin” had a similar meaning. In the English nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle,” which dates back to the eighteenth century, a cow is even said to jump “over the moon”—one of several images of inexplicable but endearing oddness. All these expressions share the idea of cows suddenly taking to giddy heights where they perform high-wire (or high-jumping or stilt-walking) acts that proclaim an out-of-whack or even upside-down world order. If a very heavy animal like the cow, which is not exactly known for its artistic subtleness, acts counter to all known patterns of behavior and maybe even defies the basic laws of physics, we may well say that strange things are happening on earth.
The cow jumps over the moon in “Hey Diddle Diddle”—a sign of a world turned upside down?
Although most of these expressions are no longer in common usage, the absurd and even disturbing image of cows balancing at great heights or flying through the air still lingers in today’s cultural memory. It’s interesting that the image recurs in connection with collapses or catastrophes of civilization. At the beginning of Apocalypse Now, for example, a brutal assault of American soldiers on a Vietnamese village is followed by a scene in which a cow is taken away in a helicopter. She seems to be part of the American war booty; stealing her is clearly an offense against the rules of martial law. While an army chaplain celebrates mass in the foreground, the cow—hanging helplessly from a rope under the helicopter—disappears into the air in the background. Her mooing blends with the voices of the chaplain and a handful of his flock as they recite the Lord’s Prayer. In this instance, Christian ritual, in the form of a desperate evocation of moral norms, is foiled by a violation of rules and the aerial animal sacrifice.
A similar haul takes place in Steven Spielberg’s movie Jurassic Park, set on an island-turned–supposedly safe dinosaur park, where a cow is lifted into a cage full of velociraptors with the help of a giant cable winch. What happens afterwards remains invisible for the spectators (those in the movie as well as those in the movie theater). But the cow’s death roar leaves no doubt that an uncontrollable and bestial elemental force reigns at the lower end of the rope, within the shadows of the dense, tropical canopy. And lo and behold: shortly afterwards, nature, genetically mutated and abused by humankind, strikes back. Together with a few specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex and other maladjusted pets, the predatory dinosaurs break out of their high-security cages and give the humans who get in their way the same treatment they gave the cow.
And finally, in a key scene of the disaster movie Twister, a cow is yanked up into the air by an approaching tornado, presumably an allusion to the children’s classic The Wizard of Oz. Twister is actually about a couple of meteorologists and their daring research into super-tornados. But many spectators view this sequence as the climax of the entire movie and the cow as its real star. The apocalyptic force of the tornado manifests itself in a grotesque way that is both convincing and aesthetically captivating. In its clutches even a cow—and an especially large-framed and heavy Holstein at that—can effortlessly be wrenched from the powers of gravity.
All these scenes have one thing in common: the catastrophic destiny of the cows foreshadows that of humans. Captain Willard, the protagonist of Apocalypse Now, will very shortly also have the rug pulled from under his feet. Most of those watching the feeding of the velociraptors will not survive their visit to Jurassic Park. The super-tornado not only sucks up the cow but also the small town of Wakita, Oklahoma, which is now home to a Twister museum, replete with flying-cow memorabilia. You could say that when cows go to heaven, humans will usually follow without delay. Another feature these films share is that the events they describe are “apocalyptic” only in a larger, colloquial sense. Although they portray catastrophes that may seem like end-of-days events to the people and cows involved, history and the world at large continue to run their course.
British author Douglas Adams took a much more radical approach to this idea. In his comical science-fiction epic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a four-volume “trilogy in five parts,” he actually describes the end of the world, the absolute end of time. And there again, of course, at the end of time, a cow is waiting.
According to Douglas Adams the end of the world happens every evening. It’s the main attraction and unique selling point of the restaurant Milliways, also known as “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” which gave the second volume of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy its title. The restaurant is built on the fragmented remains of a destroyed planet “which is enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.” Again and again enormous “Time Turbines” slowly rock it over the edge of time and, lucky for the restaurant patrons, quickly back again. The establishment is thus constantly perched at the end of the world. Protected by the cupola’s energy shield, visitors can enjoy their dinner while watching the demise of the universe. However, the most astonishing thing about this restaurant—or at least the one that shakes the trilogy’s protagonist to the core—is not the breathtaking spectacle of “livid, swollen stars” that will go out any minute but the sight of the main course.
The main course of the Last Day is a cow: “a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.” We can assume that the animal is the result of billions of years of efforts to create a low-maintenance beef cattle breed. The actual breeding success, though, lies hidden behind the watery eyes and winning smile. The cow hasn’t just been bred to be eaten—she wants to be eaten, and she can clearly express this wish:
“Good evening,” it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, “I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?” . . . “Or the rump is very good,” murmured the animal. “I’ve been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there’s a lot of good meat there.” It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.
The polite Brit Arthur Dent is appalled when he hears the dinner invitation from the victim’s mouth. The argument that it’s better to eat an animal that wants to be eaten than, say, a head of lettuce that does not want to be eaten doesn’t sway him. This is where Zaphod Beeblebrox, the galaxy’s president, takes command:
“Four rare steaks, please, and hurry. We haven’t eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years.” The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. “A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good!” it said, “I’ll just nip out and shoot myself.” He turned away and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said, “I’ll be very humane.”
And indeed, shortly afterwards a waiter appears bearing four juicy, steaming steaks.
The cow in this example is the caricature of a docile, meek sacrificial animal. The creation of a breed that wants to be eaten is of course a deliberately outrageous fantasy and so is clearly and excessively satirized. But Adams addresses a moral problem that has accompanied humans from the very beginning and will probably stay with them until the end of time: the dilemma that in order to stay alive, we have to constantly incur guilt. We can’t eat without killing an animal or at least wrenching a poor head of lettuce from the vegetable patch. The optimistic vision of the end of the world that Adams projects in this story finally removes the sting of this ethical problem. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a truly “heavenly” place where humans and animals live together in harmony and the former can eat the latter without scruples.
But in order to do so they first have to swap roles. The cow’s last words are, “I’ll be very humane.” In the context of the book, this is obviously supposed to mean, “I will kill myself in a humane way.” At the same time, a second meaning is clearly audible: I will be very human. By committing an act that is normally the prerogative of humans—that is, by taking my own life—I become human. In this version of the end of the world, the cow adopts surprisingly human traits. The humans, in contrast, who simply accept her death and eat her without thinking, look like animals (or, in the case of Zaphod Beeblebrox, like a two-headed extraterrestrial). As soon as the cow moves into higher spheres, the world order is once again turned upside down.
The cow is dead, long live the cow. Her flesh is made into juicy steaks and eaten. Her skin is made into leather, her horns are fashioned into combs and buttons, her eyes end up on the dissecting table in high-school biology courses. What remains? In light of all the cows that rove about at airy heights at the end of the world, be it on telegraph poles, tightropes, or in the ruins of the planet Frogstar World B, we have to ask ourselves what actually happens to them after their death, other than being processed by humans. Do cows belong to the “righteous” in the sense of Saint John’s apocalypse? Is their name recorded in the “Book of Life”? In other words: do cows, since they seem to prefer the heavenly spheres during the apocalypse anyway, go to heaven?
Among theologians the question of whether animals go to heaven was a point of controversy for a long time. The church father Aurelius Augustine roundly excluded animals from the Christian resurrection community, because he believed that they have no soul. Saint Thomas Aquinas, too, believed that neither plants nor animals have a place in heaven. Only Martin Luther speculated during one of his table talks that there might be a spot in paradise reserved for animals. “Heaven does not just mean air and land, or what is above us, but also everything that is part of it, all cattle, small animals, and so on.” According to the reformer, honest domestic animals like cows would actually make up a majority in heaven. This is because God has mitigated Adam and Eve’s punishment for their misdemeanor and the ensuing Fall by stocking the worldly realm with “more animals that are useful and serve us than animals that harm us”—that is, “more oxen than lions; more cows than bears.”
From the point of view of well-meaning humans—and surely that of cows, too—the ascension of cows to heaven must be highly desirable. As writer Eckhard Henscheid puts it: “The mere sight of grazing and resting and ruminating cows awakens and stokes in us the constricting and irrepressible longing for a future encounter with them in the other world.” A nice thought in principle, but are such aesthetic pleasures enough to give cows the right of access to heaven, a decision that, at least in the case of humans, is made based on moral criteria?
Henscheid’s argument that cows should “on account of their especially difficult labor go to heaven” seems more convincing. In the Christian world great suffering has always been known as a tried and tested means to reach the kingdom of heaven. And anyone who has ever heard the bloodcurdling roar of a cow giving birth can’t doubt that cows are especially worthy of ascending to heaven. Against this backdrop the seemingly radical adage of the naturalistic poet Conrad Alberti makes sense. He postulated that the “birth-throes of a cow” are equivalent to the “death of a great hero.” The suffering she endures while giving birth to a little calf is hardly easier and sometimes maybe even much more prolonged than that of a dying hero—and the humility with which cows take their suffering is no less admirable. In a sense, cows atone for the fall of our ancestors by doing so. As we know, labor is the punishment that God inflicted for the progressive curiosity of the primordial mother Eve. Men were punished with having to work in the fields. And the cows and oxen that are used as draft animals traditionally also carry the burden of this curse on their broad backs.
In the case of the “daily special” in Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the cow seems almost Christlike. By voluntarily and ungrudgingly sacrificing her body and blood for hungry humans, she embodies the imitatio christi, the Imitation of Christ, like early Christian and medieval martyrs. “May I interest you in parts of my body?” is a polite version of the call to Holy Communion as issued by Christ in the Gospel of Matthew: “Take, eat; this is my body.”
The poem “Das Kalb” (The calf) by Swabian writer Justinus Kerner, written one and a half centuries before Adams’s trilogy, points in a similar direction:
Dear calf, you were born in a shed in the dark,
You hardly have time to be gay.
The butcher, he grasps you, so cold in his heart,
From your mother he tears you away.
So bright, so pious shine your large eyes,
The moment they see the green lea.
The dogs’ vicious barking soon darkens your skies
How frightened you are, woe is thee.
And soon they will bind your frail legs with a rope,
No matter how fearful your cry.
Once thrown on the shambles, you will have no
more hope.
They will cut through your throat and you’ll die.
But with your last breath I can quite clearly see
Your eyes speaking, shiny and awed:
“I too have a soul that’s alive within me.
I too will be judged by a god.”
The preordained life journey of the young cow is obviously a kind of Via Dolorosa. And there are indeed hints that point toward a certain similarity in nature between the calf and the crucified one. Like the infant Jesus, it’s born in a “dark stable,” between ox and donkey; and the intimacy between mother and child is highlighted by the brutal act of the calf’s being wrenched from her.
Of course, that doesn’t make the calf the son of God (who preferably appears as a lamb when taking the metaphoric guise of an animal). But it does have the features of a righteous human being (in the sense of the Saint John apocalypse) who is chosen for suffering. Its eyes are “pious.” It’s bound by its persecutors (a choice of words again reminiscent of the suffering of Christ as described in Luther’s Bible translation). Finally, at the moment of death, its eyes emit a brightness that testifies to the fact that its soul has just left it; that, just like humans, it will participate in the divine Last Judgment after its death or at the end of the world. It’s safe to say that the verdict for the young cow will point toward heaven. Apart from the fact that cows are peaceable and fundamentally good animals anyway, the calf, after all, had no chance to sin, because it went directly from the manger to the slaughterhouse without ever becoming aware of the seductive possibilities that life offers. If such an animal doesn’t go to heaven, then nobody deserves it.
We can thus justifiably assume that the happy hunting pasture of the afterlife will resonate not only with the flutter and singing of angels but also with the odd blissful moo. In his vision of a future messianic kingdom, the prophet Isaiah already saw cows as the epitome of natural and peaceful coexistence, as a model for all those carnivorous predators that bring death and damnation to their fellow beings in this world: “Calves and lions will eat together and be cared for by little children. Cows and bears will graze the same pasture, their young will lie down together, and lions will eat straw like cattle.” That’s a prospect that should allow us to face our own death and, should it come to that, the end of the world, with equanimity.