Doomsday dress rehearsals

The ancient Greek festival of Thesmaphoria looked disaster straight in the face, not so much to avert it, but to inoculate against despair and prepare the citizens for civilisational failure.

A Hellenistic terracotta statue of Demeter and Persephone, the myth figures at the heart of the Thesmophoria ritual practices, around 100 BC, Myrina (Lesbos), British Museum

Ancient Athens hosted an annual event that would make modern disaster preppers blush: a state-sanctioned ritual where citizens rehearsed the collapse of their civilisation with gallo…