The Buffet Never Closes
My experience as a Biblical conspiracy theorist
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I dwell in the cracks between posts. Pry your timeline open. Slip down into the crevice between a shitpost and rage bait. You’ll find me in the dark, coiled up, snacking on my tail. I am the great serpent btw. Chaos incarnate. The snake who will devour the world. I was in Eden peddling the Fall of Man like a used Honda. I am Jörmungandr and Nāga and Apep. I was before. I will be the long, interminable after.
Hiss, hiss, bitch.
Today, like all days, is exciting. Check your Google Calendar. We have the apocalypse again. That’s ssssssshowtime for me, the ouroboros. I release my tail from my maw. The whole of my scaly, sinewy body hinges open. Everything I was muscling in place spills into the void: heroes and devils and storms and earthquakes and plague. lol. lmao, even.
The end is nigh. Bring me Thor. Freak the fuck out.
I briefly became a micro-influencer on Threads, a text-based social media app developed by Meta. This was a month ago. I became the go-to guy to explain a conspiracy theory that had cropped up seemingly out of nowhere and that I was simultaneously promulgating myself.
The government, the theory went, had used their weather machine to create the recent snowstorm in order to keep Leviathan frozen in place in the sea. In the Hebrew Bible, Leviathan is a massive, fire-breathing monster embodying chaos, evil, and untamable power. It’s also a euphemism for a great enemy. Babylon, most likely.
Like all conspiracies, this one was a constellation; lines drawn between distinct points. There was the ice storm, for one. For two, Leviathan had recently become visible on Google Maps off the coast of Virginia. Its eyes and head and enormous snoot could clearly be discerned. Threads users did what any reasonable person would do. They spread the word. The great snake is waking up. It stirs in its icy prison. It is coming. Say your prayers. It is coming.
“So let me get this right. The government created a FAKE snowstorm so that Leviathan (a giant MALE mystical sea creature similar to Godzilla but way stronger and bigger allegedly) from the Bible does not fully thaw out. If it does thaw it will destroy the world because only God can defeat this creature like he did the female so that she didn’t reproduce. Did I get that right?”
It’s not important to get it right. It’s important to paint a picture. And what a picture! A mystical sea creature, similar to Godzilla but way stronger and bigger (allegedly)1, battling God like in Pacific Rim.
I became a high priest of this digital apocalyptic movement because I was bored and eager to look at anything other than Heated Rivalry content and because I found something gorgeous about the whole thing. Here was an ancient practice playing out on a contemporary medium. From caves to phones, storytelling is a communal ritual to give flesh to fear with our breath. We name the fear so that it can be managed. Some of our earliest stories are of snakes and the end of the world.
Why snakes?