Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (12 page)

The Secret Revelation of James, the Secret Revelation of John, and the Dialogue of the Savior also show
how
to seek revelation. Each of these “revelations” includes prayer. The Secret Revelation of James is preceded by the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, a prayer that echoes Paul’s words and asks for illumination:

Whoever opened the heavy leather-bound book called Codex I to begin devotions, then, would likely begin with this prayer and conclude with the praise that the scribe who copied it added at the end: “Christ is holy!” Other books also contain prayers to guide the reader, and some suggest specific techniques meant to help invoke revelation. The Dialogue of the Savior says that Jesus took his disciples to a remote place, where he placed his hands on their heads as he prayed “that they may see”
⁴⁵
the path he opened up before them.

Around the same time that these texts were written, certain freelance Christian teachers apparently used techniques like these to invoke the Holy Spirit to come to their followers. The charismatic prophet Marcus, for example, who claimed to have received visions from God, preached around 160
C.E.
in rural Gaul, encouraging his hearers to seek divine inspiration. When Marcus attracted large crowds from local Christian congregations, Irenaeus, the local bishop, charged that he was demon-possessed, a
fraud and seducer. Irenaeus apparently had investigated Marcus’ methods, for he derisively tells how, when someone came to Marcus requesting prayer, the prophet would place his hands on the person’s head and invoke divine grace. Irenaeus claims even to know the actual prayer that he says Marcus offered, which echoes Jesus’ parable of faith as a mustard seed:

Irenaeus also seems to have read the Secret Revelation of John, or similar “secret writings,” since he briefly describes its content. He sharply warns his congregations to reject

Many “secret writings” recently discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt begin with prayer before encouraging their hearers to ask questions about Jesus’ teachings and about the meanings of the Scriptures. In the Secret Revelation of John, for example, John asks Jesus about the account in Genesis 1—what happened “in the beginning,” and what this says about the human condition. In the Dialogue of the Savior, Mary Magdalene asks Jesus about his parable of the mustard seed and about certain sayings—“Today’s
trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:34)—before she receives new insight and speaks “as a woman who had completely understood.”
⁴⁸
Thus in this dialogue she shows how a disciple, questioning Jesus in prayer, may come to deeper understanding. As we have seen, other texts, from the Revelation of Ezra to the Secret Revelation of James, also offer hints of ritual practices like baptism and specific disciplines of fasting and prayer intended to guide the heart, mind, and spirit and turn them toward God.

Each of these revelations shows its protagonist—whether Peter, Ezra, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, or James—undergoing spiritual transformation. Thus Ezra begins by telling how grief kept him awake night after night, “greatly aroused in my spirit, and my soul in distress,” and concludes as he rises and walks through a field praising God, no longer pleading for help but having found consolation he hopes can help others. So, too, the Secret Revelation of James opens with James and the other disciples describing what they previously had heard from Jesus, unaware that he is still accessible, but ends as he and Peter bring new revelation to the other disciples. The Gospel of Truth, also found at Nag Hammadi, has a wider scope: it tells how all beings, alienated from God, suffer anguish and terror as they search “for the One from whom they came forth”
⁴⁹
and ends as those who receive the true gospel are resting in God, no longer searching for truth, since “
they themselves are the truth … and the Father is within them, and they are in the Father … set at rest, refreshed in the spirit
.”
⁵⁰

Although we do not know for sure who collected the “revelations” found at Nag Hammadi, many scholars think they were Christian monks who appreciated a wide range of disparate sources, perhaps including such non-Christian writings as the
Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth. This remarkable discourse recounts spiritual transformation through prayer and dialogue—but not with Jesus. Instead the discourse describes dialogue between a young Egyptian devotee of the Greek god Hermes and his spiritual teacher. Impatiently seeking enlightenment, the young man reminds his spiritual teacher that he has already worked through the required preliminaries, and now expects results: “O my father, yesterday you promised that you would bring my mind into the eighth, and afterwards into the ninth,”
⁵¹
that is, into the higher levels at which human consciousness may unite with the divine. Acknowledging that the initiate has struggled hard to purify his body, master his emotions, and discipline his mind by studying “the wisdom [found] in books,” the teacher protests that he only can set forth “the order of the tradition.” He cannot guarantee union with God. But the teacher tells his frustrated “son” to join with his spiritual brothers and “pray to God with all our mind, and all our heart and our soul, to ask him that the gift of the eighth extend to us.”
⁵²
The son prays intensely, while his spiritual father praises God in prayer that moves beyond intelligible words into divine names and mantras: “Zoxathazo a oo ee ooooooooooo … zozazoth.” Telling his son to “sing a hymn in silence,” the teacher enters into ecstatic union and embraces his disciple, exclaiming that he sees “the power, which is light, coming to us”:

Seeing his teacher transformed as he embodies the divine Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice greatest”), who mediates between heaven and earth, the initiate praises God and then begins to shout:

The book called Allogenes (Greek for “The Stranger”) also relates dialogue between an initiate, Allogenes, and a spiritual teacher, this one more than human—a feminine angelic being whom he calls “all glorious Youel.” Weaving Jewish esoteric lore associated with Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, often called “the stranger,” together with Neoplatonic concepts of cosmology into teachings that also may include Buddhist meditation practices, the author of Allogenes sets out to show how to realize one’s spiritual self.

Allogenes says that when Youel first spoke to him, “I fled and was very disturbed”; but that after “I turned to myself” and began to engage in intense meditation and “saw the light that surrounded me, and the good that was in me, I became divine.”
⁵⁵
Youel then begins to show him the structure of divine reality and promises that despite the difficult path ahead, “if you completely devote yourself to seeking, you shall know the good that is in you, and then … you shall know yourself as one who comes from the God who truly exists.”
⁵⁶
Allogenes says that “I did not despair of the
words that I heard, but I prepared myself, and deliberated with myself for a hundred years.”
⁵⁷
After what seemed like endless time, Allogenes reports that he, like Ezekiel and Paul of Tarsus, was taken out of the body and received visions; yet this was only the beginning. Youel then taught him more:

Practicing what she taught, Allogenes says he began to experience “within me a stillness of silence, and … I knew my true self … and I was filled with revelation by means of a primary revelation,” apparently a firsthand experience of coming to know “the One who exists in me.”
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Allogenes concludes with a paradox: that the One he has come to know within himself cannot be known except through what Jewish and Christian mystics later called the
via negativa,
the way of “unknowing.” Allogenes says he wrote this book for his own disciple, “full of joy … I wrote this book which was appointed for me, my son Messos, so that I might reveal to you what was proclaimed before me in my presence.”
⁶⁰

These books of revelation have taken us a long way from the Revelation of John of Patmos—but the revelation called Thunder, Perfect Mind (more literally translated “Thunder, Complete Mind”
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) takes us even further. For where John of Patmos sees only opposites—Christ against Satan, the saved and the damned, holiness and filth, the virgin bride and the whore of
Babylon—this revelation sees opposites in dynamic interaction and so claims to speak for the “
complete
mind.” Thunder was written as a poem to chant or a hymn to sing, in the voice of “thunder,” heard in many cultures as a divine voice—from the Greeks, who called Zeus “the thunderer,” to the God of Israel, often manifested in thunder, who, the Gospel of John says, spoke to Jesus as “a voice from heaven,” which other bystanders heard only as thunder.
⁶²

Yet Thunder, Perfect Mind envisions thunder as a
feminine
power, perhaps because the Greek word for “thunder,”
bronte,
is feminine—a power in whom all opposites meet:

While the form of this poem resembles hymns to the Egyptian goddess Isis, several passages hint that the speaker also may be seen as Eve, “begotten,” so to speak, from Adam. Since the divine voice speaks through human beings as well as divine ones, apparently this presence cannot be limited to a particular person, nor called by a single name. Instead the poem called Thunder, Perfect Mind, which contemporary American authors from Toni Morrison to Leslie Marmon Silko have woven into their writing, speaks as if the divine presence were everywhere—worshipped in Egypt as the goddesses Isis and Hathor but often ignored among “the barbarians,” that is, among Jews and Christians who recognize no feminine deity. “Loved everywhere” for bringing forth life, she is also “hated everywhere” for bringing death, just as the Genesis story blames Eve, whose Hebrew name means “life,” for bringing death:

The poem praises a power manifested in both “the whore and the holy one,” a presence found not only in palaces but also where one least expects it: “cast out upon the dung heap … among those who are disgraced … among those violently slain.” The voice claims to speak through

Whoever recognizes that voice, the poem concludes, will recognize his or her own name in relationship to that divine energy.

While John of Patmos acknowledges no feminine power within the divine, many of the “revelations” found at Nag Hammadi, from the Secret Revelation of John to Allogenes and Thunder, Perfect Mind, give voice to feminine manifestations of God. According to the revelation called the Trimorphic Protennoia (Greek for “The Triple-Formed Primordial Consciousness”), the voice who says she existed before creation and “moves in every creature” speaks of how all beings intuitively long to commune with her, God’s immanent presence: