Ultima Thule – The City at the End of the World: Jerusalem in Modern Christian Apocalyptic

Summary

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!

Here in thy harbors for a while

We lower our sails; a while we rest

From the unending, endless quest.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ultima Thule (1880)

My chosen subject—or has it chosen me?—is Ultima Thule, the Farthest Point, ‘limit of any journey’, a place at once final and frontier. Such a subject, in such a place as Jerusalem, may inspire a terrible illusion of self-importance, an illusion that local psychiatrists call the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’.

But one Emily Hiestand is the more important figure here.

At the end of July, 1990, Emily Hiestand traveled with her mother to the Orkneys, a group of islands off the NW coast of Scotland just south and east of the Faroes—and of Iceland, which appeared as Ultima Thule on many a medieval map and was still Ultima Thule to British adventurer Sir Richard Burton as late as 1875. In a meditative essay, ‘South of the Ultima Thule’, Hiestand describes her ‘transatlantic crossing by air’ from New York to Glasgow as itself ‘a chamber of eschatological thought’: strapped into a world with its own recirculating air, its own overhead light, its own fictions of departure and arrival, she is being transported from the New World at one end of the ocean to an Ancestral World at the other end, along a polar trajectory. She and her mother are headed for the land of her mother's Presbyterian faith.