Page - 71 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

“invisible religion” (T. Luckmann), “surrogate religion” (R. Robertson), “qua- si-religion” (A. Griel and T. Robbins), and “hidden religiosity” (H. Kommers). In 1516 Thomas More published in Latin his celebrated Utopia,8 which was in fact a socio-political satire. However, the notion of a perfect society is much older, starting with the myth of Eden. In classical Greece the legend of Arcadia was broadly exploited in arts and literature, and Plato wrote the Republic as an expression of his social philosophy. Christian theology was extremely dualistic, separating body from soul, with a similar polarity between the human commu- nity and the City of God (Augustine of Hippo). The Latin hymn Dies Irae, attrib- uted to Thomas of Celano in the thirteenth century and partially inspired by the book of Revelation, described the Last Judgment, with the trumpets sum- moning souls to the throne of God, where the righteous will be saved and the sinners cast into eternal flames; like many other medieval apocalyptic images, it involved the eschatology of a failed society and its annihilation. The sequels of Dies Irae spread over the centuries incorporated into requiem masses (by Mozart, Berlioz, or Verdi), contemporary music by composers like Wagner (Twi- light of the Gods), Scriabin (Mysterium), Ligeti (Lux Aeterna), Messiaen (Quartet for the End of Time), and Penderecki (Auschwitz Oratorio), and other cultured works describing doomsday either in biblical terms or in worldly holocausts. “Dystopia”, the concept coined by John Stuart Mill in 1868, is omnipresent in cur- rent media, where it has become a popular locus for varied cultural formulas and parallel academic interest. Utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, eutopia, critical dystopia, and other related terms are generally associated with literature, film, TV series, science fiction, and video games, but are associated much less with music, which is surpris- ing because there are countless musical-dystopian recreations: “[t]he sounds of the Bible are all over popular music, and its influence on that art form is inestimable.”9 The fact is that religion seems to return in our times (if it was ever absent), shrouded either in declared neo-pagan rites/beliefs or in unconscious formulas of de-secularization. [T]he media are nowadays suffused with content that may prime (especially young) people for New Age spirituality – “glossy” spiritual magazines, shows like Oprah or Dr. Phil, television series like the X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and films like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter may play a major role in opening teenagers up to spirituality, preparing a first introduction to the spiritual milieu.10 TV series like Doctor Who (UK 1963–) and Game of Thrones (US 2011–2019) somehow build modern polytheistic cosmologies that the audience demand 8 Dē Optimo Rēpūblicae Statu dēque Nova Insula Ūtopia. 9 Gilmour 2017, 76. 10 Van Otterloo/Aupers/Houtman 2012, 253. Apocalypse as Critical Dystopia in Modern Popular Music | 71www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 69–94