Variation on a theme of Rumi (Nicholson 1995, 49-50): Sleepers between dreams, and mystics even when awake, are free of sorrow and joy, fame and gain, personality and self-consciousness, decision and justice and judgment. The trumpet-blast of Resurrection calls them back from that state, calls souls back to their bodies and their world, calls the formless back to form.
According to Mircea Eliade (1949, 85), the ancient New Year ceremony marks the recreation of the whole cosmos; indeed for ‘archaic man’ (primal humanity), any real beginning regenerates reality through the ‘annulment of time’ and history. Death is the prelude to this recreation, just as the new moon begins its return toward the full.
The death of the individual and the death of humanity are alike necessary for their regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be restored to the primordial unity from which it issued …
— Eliade (1949, 88)
And then the original creation happens again for the first time. And yet, ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (Blake, PPB 551). The apocalypse is at once Judgment Day and Recreation Day.
Matthew 19:28, King James version:
And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration [ἐν τῇ παλιγγενεσίᾳ] when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
In the Revised Standard Version, παλιγγενεσία (literally, beginning again) is translated ‘in the new world.’ At this end of time, any Judgment is the Last, but in the beginning is the Word, where any verbum, verb, term, rhema is the First.