Gog and Magog
Times we are in
Gog and Magog
by Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw
I never saw Gog and Magog as some myth meant to frighten the faithful or entertain the apocalyptic imagination. They belong to a much older intellectual tradition, one that used story as historical analysis, not prophecy as spectacle. In the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds, the birth location of Abrahamic faiths, they were symbols for understanding recurring human patterns, not predictions of a single future event.
Gog and Magog appear across traditions Biblical, Qur’anic, Judaic, and even pre Abrahamic echoes not as a people with fixed geography, but as a force that emerges cyclically when power outpaces ethics. History shows that they surface whenever expansion becomes detached from responsibility and when technology, organization, or administration grows faster than moral consciousness.
In early texts, Gog and Magog are associated with excess: excess numbers, excess consumption, excess destruction. They are not described as innovative or creative forces, but as entities that overwhelm systems—ecological, social, and moral—until collapse becomes inevitable. This is important, because it reframes them not as invaders from outside civilization, but as products of civilization’s imbalance.
The wall built against them in Qur’anic narrative is often misunderstood. It is not merely a physical barrier, but a Metaphoric description of the end of times. It is a collaborative human effort engineered bringing the end of times, when the humane society is nowhere to be seen. Gog and Magog is a force of nature, proving once more to humanity, that we are all just creation and not superior to the creator of us all.
Historically, every era believed it was advanced enough to never face Gog and Magog. Empires collapsed not because of external enemies alone, but because internal systems became extractive, accelerated, and indifferent, through out the history there has always been
When societies normalized exploitation of land, of labor and their faiths and tradition, they kept their Gog and Magog tales. Our time is not unique, but it is intensified.
We live in an transparent age and no scale of mass fabricated systematic society can erasure. Decisions made in abstraction ripple across continents. Traditional memory is shortened. Accountability is deferred. This is precisely the environment in which Gog and Magog historically reappear, as conditions of excess without restraint.
They manifest when growth is worshipped and limits are treated as obstacles rather than wisdom. They manifest when identity is flattened, when origin no longer matters, when everything becomes interchangeable and extractable. They manifest when technology outpaces philosophy.
What makes our moment dangerous is not that Gog and Magog are approaching, but the world has lost the faith to recognize them. We externalize them. We mythologize them. We search for them in others. Yet the historical record suggests they emerge most powerfully from within systems that believe themselves immune.
Gog and Magog are not the end of the world, they are the beginning of the apocalypse, the consequence of forgetting how worlds are sustained interfering in the natural order, we are living in times where animal kingdom seems superior to mankind and respecting the creator and its creation
The lesson they carry is not about fear, but about proportion, between power and ethics, innovation and responsibility, expansion and care. When that proportion collapses, history does not end.
And at a certain point, when humanity is nowhere to be seen and humankind repeats its greed, in opposition to the creator and creation itself, that is the birth of the apocalypse, much like the times we are in now.
Lea Celik Sommerseth Shaw
Saint Germain Des Pres 5 February 2026