A History of the End of the World (15 page)

Conventional readings of Revelation see the woman as the Virgin Mary and the newborn infant as Jesus, “a man child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” and who “was caught up unto God, and to his throne.”
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But it is also possible to discern less orthodox origins and meanings. “St. John’s mind sets to work on the lines of a very old mythic pattern,” writes Austin Farrer, who suggests that John borrowed the figure of the woman from pagan astrology—“the Lady of the Zodiac” who is “crowned with the twelve constellations.”
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Other scholars see the goddess Artemis, who was worshipped in such splendor in the Artemesium at Ephesus, or the goddess Roma, the “queen of heaven” whose divine child the Roman emperor was imagined to be and whose attributes are found on imperial Roman coinage from the first century.
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Indeed, precisely the same figure is found in sacred myths all over the ancient world—“a high goddess with astral attributes: the sun is her garment, the moon her footstool, the stars her crown.”
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Even the dire predicament of a laboring woman beset by a ravening monster is a familiar motif in pagan iconography. The Egyptian goddess Isis, for example, struggles to save her son from attacks by snakes and scorpions, and the Greek goddess Leto is menaced by a python when she is pregnant with Apollo. “In each of these myths the dragon seeks the child, not yet born, in order to devour or kill him,” explains Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. “The woman, still pregnant, is pursued for the child she carries. She gives birth with the dragon only moments way, and the male child she has just delivered is caught up to the Heavens, safe from the dragon’s reach.”
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Above all, the “war in heaven” between the archangel Michael and the red dragon—the eschatological high point of Revelation—is strongly reminiscent of the so-called combat myth that can be found in stories of creation in pagan texts from all over the ancient Near East. Indeed, the notion of a primal struggle between a high god and a primal beast—that is, a symbolic account of the struggle between order and chaos, creation and destruction—can be discerned within the Hebrew Bible itself, where Isaiah (among other biblical authors) refers to the defeat of Leviathan, “the twisting serpent and the dragon of the sea,” by a sword-wielding Yahweh.
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The combat myth of pagan tradition can be glimpsed only through the cracks of the biblical text, but it is the centerpiece of the book of Revelation.

Some scholars insist that such pagan associations are mostly in the mind of the beholder. And, in any event, none of the pagan subtext that might be teased out of the book of Revelation need be seen as evidence of hypocrisy on John’s part. Rather, it is a sign of John’s savvy that his “language arsenal” is not confined to Jewish sources. “John co-ops this imperial propaganda,” proposes Adela Yarbro Collins, “to claim that the true golden age will come with the messianic reign of Christ.”
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After all, once he resolved to look beyond the Jewish community in search of readers and hearers, John apparently realized that he needed to use scenes and stories that would be meaningful to pagans who were strangers to the Jewish scriptures. John’s preachments would transcend both the Jewish and pagan sources that seem to have inspired him, and the words and images of Revelation came to be imprinted, deeply and ineradicably, on the Western imagination, ranging from the church paintings of medieval Europe to the music videos in heavy rotation on MTV. John, of course, fully expected that his words of prophecy—and the world itself—would last “but a short time,” and yet the sheer staying power of Revelation turns out to be John’s greatest achievement.
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A
few pious readers of Revelation imagine that John travels to the remote and barren island of Patmos on a kind of vision quest—he seeks a revelation and, like others who have done the same over the centuries and millennia, finds what he is looking for. Although there is nothing in the text to justify such speculation, the idea links John to the long line of mystics and ecstatics who come before him and long after him. Like the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Moses on Mount Sinai, and Muhammad in the hill caves around Mecca, John finds the wilderness to be a good place to get a glimpse of the divine.

John himself describes his visionary experience on Patmos in way that is surely meant to remind his readers of the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, among his other role models, John is favored with a series of revelations by a “God in heaven who revealeth secrets,” as Daniel puts it.
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And, like other prophets who struggle to use mere words to convey something ineffable, John describes his experience as both exalting and shattering, sublime and horrific.

“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day,” he writes, “and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet.”
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When he turns around to see who is speaking, John beholds the first of the many strange sights that fill the pages of Revelation: “One like unto the Son of Man,” a robed and girded figure whose face is “like the sun shining in full strength” and whose eyes are “as a flame of fire,” with a “sharp two-edged sword” projecting from his mouth and “seven stars in his right hand.” And John is literally staggered by what he sees: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead,” he explains, “but he laid his right hand upon me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the first and the last.’”
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Significantly, John is specifically charged by his celestial visitor with the task of writing down and publishing his revelations. “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter,” says the Son of Man. “Write what you see in a book, and send it to the seven churches.”
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Here, too, John places himself squarely in perhaps the single most crucial tradition in monotheism—the making of books. Then as now, human beings are more likely to believe what is written than what is said aloud, and John pronounces a curse on anyone who might be inclined to tamper with his text. And John makes it clear that the divine secrets revealed to him by God are meant to be secrets no longer: Revelation is intended for the ages and for the whole world.

“Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near,” says the last of the angelic messengers to John at the very end of Revelation. “And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.”
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John’s writings were to be preserved, passed along, and read with ever-greater ardor and imagination over the centuries to come, and he continues to serve as a shining role model for generation upon generation of visionaries. A couple of examples of the influence he wields on the religious imagination, one dating back to the Middle Ages and another of more recent vintage, allow us to glimpse the workings of the visionary mind, including his own, with far greater clarity than he records in his own writings.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was first blessed with visions—or, perhaps more accurately, afflicted by them—at the tender age of five. By the time she was eight years old, her mother and father felt compelled to deliver young Hildegard into the custody of the abbess of a monastery in Germany where she spent the rest of her life—an indication of what it must have been like for parents who were raising a juvenile mystic. Hildegard echoes the words and phrases that she read in the book of Revelation when she describes how she is “taken up in spirit” and hears voices “like thunder,”
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and she gives us an illuminating account of an experience that John himself may have shared.

“Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast,” writes Hildegard in her masterwork,
Scivias,
“and immediately I knew the meaning of the expositions of the Psalter, the Gospel and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and New Testament.”
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Some of Hildegard’s visions are populated with creatures who seem to have crawled out from the pages of Revelation. While at prayer in church, for example, she sees the spectral figure of a woman in front of the altar—and, as she watches in horror, she realizes that the woman is ready to give birth. But, unlike the laboring woman in Revelation—the woman clothed with the sun whose child is the Messiah—the one in Hildegard’s vision delivers herself of a monstrous beast: “From the navel to the groin she had various scaly spots,” writes Hildegard. “In her vagina there appeared a monstrous and totally black head with fiery eyes, ears like the ears of a donkey, nostrils and mouth like those of a lion, gnashing with vast open mouth and sharpening its horrible iron teeth in a horrid manner.”
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Not every reader of Revelation is attracted to the moments of terror and horror in John’s text. Twentieth-century poet and novelist Robert Graves, for example, was more intrigued by what he calls “St. John’s cryptogram”—that is, the meaning of 666, the number of the Beast—and he describes the experience in
The White Goddess
as an exercise in both ecstatic vision and number-crunching. Graves renders 666 in Roman numerals as D.C.L.X.V.I., and, like Hildegard, he imagines that a secret has been suddenly revealed to him. He sees the letters as an acronym for a Latin phrase that he translates as “Domitian Caesar basely killed the Envoys of Christ.”
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We might wish that John had described his own revelations as clearly as Graves does, and we might speculate that he experienced them in much the same way.

“I saw in a sort of vision the Roman numerals flash across the wall of the room I was in,” writes Graves in
The White Goddess.
“I had been aware that the
Apocalypse
was referred by most Biblical scholars to the reign of Nero, not to that of Domitian. And yet my eye read ‘
Domitianus.
’”
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Between Hildegard and Graves, we are given two very different but equally enlightening ways of understanding the visionary experience that came to be preserved in the book of Revelation. Hildegard, like John, reports what might described in the language of psychopathology as a series of auditory and visual hallucinations, and, again like John, she claims to have been given the divine power to see the secret meanings of the known world that are denied to others. That’s what prompts Adela Yarbro Collins to point out “a certain analogy between the creative imagination of the schizophrenic and the vision of the Apocalypse.”
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Graves, too, claims that a flash of insight can reveal secret meanings that are hidden from everyone else. But when he refers to 666 as “St. John’s cryptogram,” he is crediting John, rather than God, for putting the secret meanings in the text in the first place. That’s quite another way of understanding the author of Revelation: John can also be seen as a compulsive game player who delights in ornamenting his text with riddles and puzzles, signs and symbols that are meant to engage and tantalize his readers and hearers. Indeed, John repeatedly uses a kind of trademark phrase—“He that hath an ear, let him hear”—as if to say that we must penetrate his own wordplay and mind games in order to “get it.”
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Still, there is nothing cynical or calculating in John’s visions. He is clearly a driven man, wholly consumed with the fires of his own true belief and wholly persuaded that God has charged him with the task of spreading the word to the whole world. The point is made in the musings of perhaps the greatest apocalyptic preacher in history after John himself, the Dominican friar who set Florence afire in the fifteenth century, Girolamo Savonarola. Not coincidentally, Savonarola’s text of choice was Revelation, and his sermons must have resembled the ones that John himself delivered in the cities of Asia.

“I have sometimes thought, as I came down from the pulpit, that it would be better if I talked no more and preached no more about these things—better to give up and leave it all to God,” mused the fiery monk in the last sermon he delivered before his own martyrdom. “But whenever I went up into the pulpit again, I was unable to contain myself. To speak the Lord’s words has been for me a burning fire within my bones and my heart. It was unbearable. I could not but speak. I was on fire. I was alight with the spirit of the Lord.”
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We do not know when or how John himself died. But we know that some of his most ardent readers, including both Savonarola and David Koresh, were literally consumed by the flames that they sparked with their own sermons on the Apocalypse. Their endings remind us that the book of Revelation is not—and was never intended to be—a safe and soothing book. Rather, John sought to set the souls of his readers and hearers on fire, and in that effort he was wholly successful.

John may have been convinced that he was hearing the voice of God, but the sheer virtuosity on display in the book of Revelation marks it as work of human contrivance—“an act of creative imagination,” as Adela Yarbro Collins puts it, “which, like that of the schizophrenic, withdraws from real experience in the everyday world.”
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He is an astute propagandist who expertly stokes the hopes and terrors of his readers and hearers, an accomplished showman who delights in confounding and amazing his audience. But surely John believes that he is speaking the truth, as God gave him the light to see the truth, when he reveals what he calls “things which must shortly come to pass.”
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John does not seek to win praise as a great author, nor can the book of Revelation be safely contained and dismissed as a work of literature. Rather, he clearly means to win converts for Christian ity, and he wants his message, so fierce and so dire, to reach the whole world. And, significantly, he does not intend his message to endure for the ages for the simple reason that he is convinced—and wants to convince his audience—that the end of the world is nigh: “Behold, I come quickly,” John hears Jesus Christ say in his vision. “Blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book.
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