End of Evangelion, End of Eschatology

Spoilers for Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion are found below.

In retrospect, I do feel that I ended up first watching The End of Evangelion (and Evangelion as a whole) precisely at the perfect time when I needed it the most. I watched it right after I graduated from high school, during a summer in which I had no job, no plans for the future, nothing to do but take care of my brother and sister, and to ruminate on the past.

The way we culturally structure life is semi-arbitrary, but now, after I've turned 30 last month, I can't help but acknowledge that there is some truth to 'milestones'. And at 18, I had reached such a milestone, but I had no real way to cope with it other than to ignore it. My mother and father had separated for good, my grandparents had used my college money to buy themselves a new car, and I was left in a state of critical suicidal ideation, thinking about how I had 'wasted' all my years of public school, and had amounted to absolutely nothing -- had disappointed everyone in my life, had let them down in an unforgivable way, a way that indicated my life was already over just as most of my classmates were beginning theirs.

So it doesn't take much to see how I'd relate to Shinji. I had felt that I was -- and to some extent this was true -- stuck in a perpetual adolescence, a chicken who was trapped inside the eggshell. Years of seclusion had made me unable to hold a conversation with anyone, or even look at them in the eyes; I had no resources, and couldn't even afford to attend the graduation ceremony of my high school, a graduation which I barely attained after flunking in Biology and Mathematics classes. In a very real sense, I had not made any real progress with my life since I was 14, the same age that Shinji is in Evangelion -- looking at the show, I saw the worst version of myself being put through the wringer of an oncoming apocalypse that Shinji wanted nothing to do with, but whose self-destructive urges were inevitably going to help facilitate.

I watched the whole show in one weekend -- perhaps not the ideal experience for a deranged person at that vulnerable age. The conclusion that I drew from it was that Hideaki Anno gave us two separate endings:

1. The Ending of the 26-episode show, in which Shinji is absorbed into the Human Instrumentality along with everyone else, and has to sort himself out and affirm his existence & connection to others in an extended bout of psycho-mythic therapy.

   

2. The Ending of The End Of Evangelion, in which Shinji is held outside of Human Instrumentality along with Asuka, and they both are left to suffer in the ruins of the planet as the souls of everyone else are unified in an immense spectacle of biblical proportions.

   

One ending was about accepting the end of everything you've known, confronting your inner demons, and achieving some manner of peace, and the other was about rejecting that reality out of fear and anger, and thus forever being stuck on 'the outside' of what happened to the rest of the world.

In my delirious point-of-view when I first watched it, I had seen myself as being like Shinji in The End Of Evangelion: my world was over, I was a dead person walking apart from the rest of society, and that suicide was the only way to 'affirm' any meaning that my life had by refusing to go on with the farce of living. Soon after began the first of several serious suicide attempts featuring guns, trains, cars and other over-dramatic ways that I was trying to exert any semblance of control over my reality, the only way I knew how was framed in these apocalyptic terms. Don't mistake me here, I am not saying that Evangelion as an artwork made me undergo these suicide attempts -- rather, it is that I was already in that mood for several years, and Evangelion, among other things, was a particularly prism by which I tried to understand my situation. So I would drone on and on for a couple of years afterwards, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I had 'Komm, Süsser Tod' burned onto a CD that I would listen to while lying in bed or going on walks -- hey, everyone needs to act like an embarrassing cliche for once in their life, and this was my version of that after missing out on the whole 'emo' scene.

I think I've written about what all this was to me before, but the point is that I know for a fact that for many people, Evangelion held this potent position in their life. I've spoken to others who've recognized their own depression in the show, I've read reviews from trans people who could relate to the discomfort that Shinji, Asuka and Rei have in being gendered a certain way and expecting to act accordingly, I've seen some become intensely religious because of the intensely theological force that the show leans into. All of that makes me wonder that, besides its standout quality as a work of expression by Anno and the animation team, what exactly is it that makes this show so meaningful to so many people? It has literally changed lives, challenged perspectives, and made us view ourselves in different ways -- I cannot conceive of that dangerous point in my life without relating it to the impact that the show had on me, how it seemed to embody the totality of my existence in a radically confrontational fashion.

This isn't something that can be quantified easily, and I won't try to. But I do think it has something to do with the overall enframement of the show as a story about apocalypse in both meanings of the term, as revelation and as end-times, which each ending fits nicely into.

Watching those endings today, I find them more ambiguous than before -- the show's ending has an exhilarating rush of mania, like the impossible optimism one can have in a manic episode that seems to 'solve' all your problems in a tidy revelation. The movie's ending, meanwhile, strikes me as more symbolistic and less storm-and-stress, although it is undoubtedly that as well. They are not so easily opposed to each other, but rather seem like an interior/exterior relation, one depicting a physical reality of apocalypse and the other depicting a spiritual realm, both concurrently real but in different wavelengths. My younger self wanted answers so badly that I broke Evangelion into a schizophrenic dichotomy of 'either enthusiastically embrace the contradictory impermanence of life, or reject it entirely' -- it doesn't seem to me now that most people end up doing either of those things, but instead navigate a space between them, a space where birds sing and funerals are held and laughter is intermittently hushed between friends, a liminal zone that we relate to as a consensus reality. What Anno was trying to show, in my view, was that both endings were a cubist depiction of one event, one apocalypse, where the world was over yet just beginning, where nihilism and absolution exist in relation, inseparable faces on a multi-sided shape that showed a different iridescent skin depending on where you stood.

Built into the show is this multiplicity of perception -- all the characters relate to one another with barriers of consciousness in the middle, language as a mediator caught adrift when personal preconceptions clashed with another's expectations. Communication in Evangelion is both impossible, but necessary -- Human Instrumentality is the transcendental collective of the human race as a whole unit, yet it also must function on an individual level to 'leave behind' the problems of the Earth, so Shinji is in effect split in two, one physical being abandoned to the annihilated hellscape, another spiritual personality absorbed into Instrumentality. The frightening conclusion of the show might be that, to go beyond the limits of language and society and our current consensus, we have to abandon our individuality as 'broken shells' in the material substrate, which ties into the show's use of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life -- much like how Evangelion has two endings about the same thing, The Tree of Life is itself also duplicated in several lesser 'shades', which are called Qlipoth, the imperfect trial-runs of the full Sefirot and its Four World structure. One could see The End of Evangelion as depicting what is happening when the lowest sphere, Lilith/Malkuth, is being split and having humanity drawn up into the higher Sefirot on the chain -- Lilith's presence in the show would make a lot of sense in this understanding, as she is the primary creator of humanity, imprisoned in the lowest Sefirot that she descended into, and thus is the 'broken shell' at the center of our sphere, who is then used in the Instrumentality process to force humanity's 'evolution' into the greater spheres.

This problem of two endings, the problem that I faced myself in the choice I had over my life, it is an issue that is a non-issue -- I was not thinking dialectically enough at that time and had not yet read Hegel, nor explored Hermeticism or Kabbalah, so I was unable to see the wider implications of what the show was trying to say on a cosmic scale, and I misinterpreted it by forcing it to conform to my previously-held destructive cycle of behavior. I remained trapped in the Qlipothic shell and could not see the roundness of the whole sphere, and effectively only received 'half' of the truth that Evangelion was communicating -- this misunderstanding led me to where I am today, so in the end it was 'productive', but only because I am now able to situate it in relation to the hard-won lessons of life that I had yet to experience at 18 years-old.

So when I said earlier that it was the 'perfect' time to watch Evangelion, it was perfectly imperfect: my youth remains to this day ensconced within that Qlipothic sphere of Lilith, the descended one, my memory resides in the same place that The End of Evangelion depicts, the terrible wasteland, that is what my childhood amounted to in its capacity as a self-sustaining period of time. After the encounter with Evangelion and then my suicidal response afterwards, I violently transitioned myself out of Lilith and entered the actually-extant world of Malkuth, and occasionally the other spheres -- the show itself was a catalyst because it directly confronted the problem of youth's embattled transformation, not just in mundane terms but in the wider terms of the soul. I had reached the age of eighteen, but my soul had to lurch ahead suddenly after it was held in place by various events, some of which were out of my control and some of which belonged to my failure to face the facts. That lurching could have destroyed me -- I did my best to make sure it did -- but little-by-little, I crawled out of that Abyss thanks to the habits I formed, like going to the cinema, like writing. Only now do I feel that I 'get' what Hideaki Anno was saying, and I can see why he then went and made the Rebuild series, which are simply another iteration of those characters and that world he created ascending further up The Tree of Life and into stranger territories.

It is as if what I needed the most was a work of art that would compel me to get something wrong -- to take on the responsibility of making a wrong choice, to own that action instead of sleepwalking or hiding from living. Evangelion was that artwork, the anvil that made me either shatter myself or withstand the pain that was needed to get over my regrets and despair -- when I rewatch it, I feel it exists at the exact hinge when I could no longer run away from what my life had become, it was the end of my childhood and the beginning of a long period of recovery, which started with a violent expunging of my own worst desires, the appetite for despair and oblivion. I thought that I related to the show deeply in 2015, the year that it fictionally takes place in, but I relate to it even more now in 2025 -- not because I find myself in the exact position of the younger characters, I'm not that person anymore. What I relate to is the artistic conception, the breadth of scope and ambition, the magnitude of what Anno understood when he was making Evangelion -- like many of Godard's films, you can tell that the show was an evolving process, each instant revealing what Anno was grappling with at that time, until a confessional aspect overtook the narrative and suddenly we were all faced with the same question of Instrumentality and what it meant not only for the characters, but for us and for Anno as well. What Instrumentality meant to me when I was eighteen: death or misery. What Instrumentality means to me as I am thirty: life and growth.

That's what I feel the answer is to the earlier question of why Evangelion continues to be relevant -- no matter where you are in life or who you are, it functions as a developmental Rorschach test, because every major character and every episode is another side of the cubist gambit that Anno gradually constructed. I think many of the greatest artworks function in this exact way -- you see something different when, where and how you watch them, gaining a new insight which each iteration. This power is not because the show is 'vague', but because it holds within itself the contradictions that life has, including The Tree of Life and its Qlipothic obverse, which are in effect the same thing but shown in differing emanations. And that living itself is one of these emanations -- you start one place, but someday you will no longer recognize that beginning because you have changed on the path, and thus you have to re-evaluate your very foundations and what those meant to you now. I think it's very fruitful to return to artworks and memories like this, because even as we might feel a semblance of the pain or sadness that was present before, we also pick-up on little details we might have missed, and the distance from the object gives it a new aura that can fascinate us all over again.

The gift of time is exactly that we aren't trapped, we are subject to change, we ARE change itself -- we can ascend past the broken shells we've outgrown, we just to be shown what the other side might look like, and we can inadvertently stumble our way there.