A third of men are killed by these brimstone horsemen. But the remaining two-thirds do not refrain from worshipping idols which can ‘neither see nor hear nor walk’.
That sounds as if the Apocalypse here was still quite Jewish and pre-Christian. There is no Lamb about.
Later, this second woe winds up with the usual earthquakes. But since the shiver of the earth must immediately give rise to a new movement, it is postponed awhile.
CHAPTER XIV
Six Trumps are blown, so now there is a pause: just as there was a pause after the Six Seals were opened, to let the angels of the four winds arrange themselves, and the action transfer itself to heaven.
Now, however, come various interruptions. First there comes down a mighty angel, a cosmic lord, something like the Son of Man in the first vision. But the Son of Man, indeed all Messianic reference, seems missing in this part of the Apocalypse. This mighty angel sets one burning foot upon the sea and one on earth, and roars like a lion throughout space. Whereupon the seven creative thunders roll out their creative utterances. These seven thunders, we know, are the seven tonal natures of the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: and now they are giving voice to seven vast new commands, for a new cosmic day, a new phase in creation. The seer is in a hurry to write down these seven new words, but he is commanded not to do so. He is not allowed to divulge the nature of the commands which will bring the new cosmos into being. We must wait for the actuality. Then this great ‘angel’ or cosmic lord raises his hand and swears, by heaven and earth and water under the earth, which is the great Greek oath of the gods, that the old Time is over, the mystery of God is about to be fulfilled.
Then the seer is given the little book to eat. It is the lesser general or universal message of the destruction of the old world and creation of the new: a lesser message than that of the destruction of the old Adam and the creation of new man, which the seven-sealed book told. And it is sweet in the mouth — as revenge is sweet — but bitter in experience.
Then another interruption: the measuring of the temple, a pure Jewish interruption; the measuring or counting of the ‘chosen of God’, before the end of the old world; and the exclusion of the unchosen.
Then comes the most curious interruption of the two witnesses. Orthodox commentators identify these two witnesses with Moses and Elijah who were with Jesus in the transfiguration on the mount. They are something much older too. These two witnesses are prophets clothed in sackcloth: that is, they are in their woeful aspect, hostile or reversed. They are the two candlesticks and the two olive trees which stand before ‘Adonai’, the god of the earth. They have power over the waters of the sky (rain), power to turn water into blood, and to smite the earth with all the plagues. They make their testimony, then the beast out of the Abyss rises and slays them. Their dead bodies lie out in the street of the great city, and the people of the earth rejoice because these two who tormented them are dead. But after three and a half days, the spirit of life from God enters the dead two, they rise to their feet, and a great voice says from heaven, ‘Come up hither’. So they rise to heaven on a cloud, and their enemies in fear behold them.
It looks as if we had here a layer of very old myth referring to the mysterious twins, ‘the little ones’, who had such power over the nature of men. But both the Jewish and Christian apocalyptists have balked this bit of Revelation: they have not given it any plain meaning of any sort.
The twins belong to a very old cult which apparently was common to all ancient European peoples; but it seems they were heavenly twins, belonging to the sky. Yet when they were identified by the Greeks with the Tyndarids, Kastor and Polydeukes, already in the Odyssey, they lived alternately in Heaven and in Hades, witnessing to both places. And as such, they may be the candlesticks, or stars of heaven, on the one hand, and the olive trees of the underworld, on the other.
But the older a myth, the deeper it goes in the human consciousness, the more varied will be the forms it takes in the upper consciousness. We have to remember that some symbols, and this of the twins is one of them, can carry even our modern consciousness back for a thousand years, for two thousand years, for three thousand years, for four thousand years, and even beyond that. The power of suggestion is most mysterious. It may not work at all: or it may carry the unconscious mind back in great cyclic swoops through eras of time: or it may go only part way.
If we think of the heroic Dioskouroi, the Greek Twins, the Tyndarids, we go back only halfway. The Greek heroic age did a strange thing, it made every cosmic conception anthropomorphic, yet kept a great deal of the cosmic wonder. So that the Dioskouroi are and are not the ancient twins.
But the Greeks themselves were always reverting to the pre-heroic, pre-Olympian gods and potencies. The Olympic- heroic vision was always felt to be too shallow, the old Greek soul would drop continually to deeper, older, darker levels of religious consciousness, all through the centuries. So that the mysterious Tritopatores at Athens, who were also called the Twins, and Dioskouroi, were the lords of the winds, and mysterious watchers at the procreation of children. So here again we are back in the old levels.
When the Samothracian cult spread in Hellas, in the third and second centuries b.c., then the twins became the Kabeiroi, or the Kabiri, and then again they had an enormous suggestive influence over the minds of men. The Kabiri were a swing back to the old idea of the dark or mysterious twins, connected with the movement of the cloudy skies and the air, and with the movement of fertility, and the perpetual and mysterious balance between these two. The apocalyptist sees them in their woeful aspect, masters of sky-water and the waters of earth, which they can turn into blood, and masters of plagues from Hades: the heavenly and hellish aspect of the twins, malevolent.
But the Kabiri were connected with many things: and it is said their cult is still alive in Mohammedan countries. They were the two secret little ones, the homunculi, and the ‘rivals’. They were also connected with thunder, and with two round black thunder-stones. So they were called the ‘sons of thunder’, and had power over rain: also power to curdle milk, and malefic power to turn water into blood. As thunderers they were sunderers, sundering cloud, air, and water. And always they have this aspect of rivals, dividers, separators, for good as well as for ill: balancers.
By another symbolic leap, they were also the ancient gods of gateposts, and then they were the guardians of the gate, and then the twin beasts that guard the altar, or the tree, or the urn, in so many Babylonian, Aegean, and Etruscan paintings and sculpture. They were often panthers, leopards, gryphons, earth and night creatures, jealous ones.
It is they who hold things asunder to make a space, a gateway. In this way, they are rainmakers: they open the gates in the sky: perhaps as thunder-stones. In the same way they are the secret lords of sex, for it was early recognised that sex is a holding of two things asunder, that birth may come through between them. In the sexual sense, they can change water into blood: for the phallos itself was the homunculus, and, in one aspect, it was itself the twins of earth, the small one who made water and the small one who was filled with blood: the rivals within a man’s own very nature and earthly self symbolised again in the twin stones of the testes. They are thus the roots of the twin olive trees, producing the olives, and the oil of the procrea- tive sperm. They are also the two candlesticks which stand before the lord of earth, Adonai. For they give the two alternate forms of elemental consciousness, our day-consciousness and our night-consciousness, that which we are in the depths of night, and that other very different being which we are in bright day. A creature of dual and jealous consciousness is man, and the twins witness jealously to the duality. Physiologically, in the same meaning, it is they who hold apart the two streams of the water and of the blood in our bodies. If the water and blood ever mingled in our bodies, we should be dead. The two streams are kept apart by the little ones, the rivals. And on the two streams depends the dual consciousness.
Now these little ones, these rivals, they are �
��witnesses’ to life, for it is between their opposition that the Tree of Life itself grows, from the earthly root. They testify before the god of earth or fecundity all the time. And all the time, they put a limit on man. They say to him, in every earthly or physical activity: Thus far and no farther. — They limit every action, every ‘earth’ action, to its own scope, and counterbalance it with an opposite action. They are gods of gates, but they are also gods of limits: each forever jealous of the other, keeping the other in bounds. They make life possible; but they make life limited. As the testes, they hold the phallic balance forever, they are the two phallic witnesses. They are the enemies of intoxication, of ecstasy, and of licence, of licentious freedom. Always they testify to Adonai. Hence the men in the cities of licence rejoice when the beast from the abyss, which is the hellish dragon or demon of the earth’s destruction, or man’s bodily destruction, at last kills these two ‘guardians’, regarded as a sort of policemen in ‘Sodom’ and ‘Egypt’. The bodies of the slain two lie unburied for three and a half days: that is half a week, or half a period of time, when all decency and restraint has departed from among men.
The language of the text, ‘rejoice and make merry and send gifts to one another’ suggests a pagan Saturnalia, like the Hermaia of Crete or the Sakaia at Babylon, the feast of unreason. If this is what the apocalyptist meant, it shows how intimately he follows pagan practice, for the ancient saturnalian feasts all represented the breaking, or at least the interruption of an old order of rule and law: and this time it is the ‘natural rule’ of the two witnesses which is broken. Men escape from the laws even of their own nature for a spell: for three days and a half, which is half the sacred week, be a ‘little’ period of time. Then, as heralding the new earth and the new body of man, the two witnesses stand up again: men are struck with terror: the voice from heaven calls the two witnesses, and they go up in a cloud.
‘Two, two for the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-O! — ’
Thus the earth, and the body, cannot die its death till these two sacred twins, the rivals, have been killed.
An earthquake comes, the seventh angel blows his trumpet and makes the great announcement: The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. — So there is again worship and thanksgiving in heaven, that God takes the reign again. And the temple of God is opened in heaven, the holy of holies is revealed, and the ark of the testament. Then there are the lightnings, voices, thunderings, earthquakes, and hail which end a period and herald another. The third woe is ended.
And here ends the first part of the Apocalypse: the old half. The little myth that follows stands quite alone in the book, dramatically, and is really out of keeping with the rest. One of the apocalyptists put it in as part of a theoretic scheme: the birth of the Messiah after the little death of earth and man. And the other apocalyptists left it there.
CHAPTER XV
What follows is the myth of the birth of a new sun-god from a great sun-goddess, and her pursuit by the great red dragon. This myth is left as the centre-piece of the Apocalypse, and figures as the birth of the Messiah. Even orthodox commentators admit that it is entirely unchristian, and almost entirely unjewish. We are down pretty well to a pagan bed-rock, and we can see at once how many Jewish and Jewish-Christian overlays there are in the other parts.
But this pagan birth-myth is very brief — as was the other bit of pure myth, that of the four horsemen.
‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: and she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
‘And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
‘And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
This fragment is really the pivot of the Apocalypse. It looks like late pagan myth suggested from various Greek, Egyptian, and Babylonian myths. Probably the first apocalyptist added it to the original pagan manuscript, many years before the birth of Christ, to give his vision of a Messiah’s birth, born of the sun. But connecting with the four horsemen, and with the two witnesses, the goddess clothed in the sun and standing upon the moon’s crescent is difficult to reconcile with a Jewish vision. The Jews hated pagan gods, but they more than hated the great pagan goddesses: they would not even speak of them if possible. And this wonder-woman clothed in the sun and standing upon the crescent of the moon was too splendidly suggestive of the great goddess of the east, the great mother, the Magna Mater as she became to the Romans. This great woman goddess with a child stands looming far, far back in history in the eastern Mediterranean, in the days when matriarchy was still the natural order of the obscure nations. How then does she come to tower as the central figure in a Jewish Apocalypse? We shall never know: unless we accept the old law that when you drive the devil out of the front door he comes in at the back. This great goddess has suggested many pictures of the Virgin Mary. She has brought into the Bible what it lacked before: the great cosmic Mother robed and splendid, but persecuted. And she is, of course, essential to the scheme of power and splendour, which must have a queen: unlike the religions of renunciation, which are womanless. The religions of power must have a great queen and queen mother. So here she stands in the Apocalypse, the book of thwarted power-worship.
After the flight of the great Mother from the dragon, the whole Apocalypse changes tone. Suddenly Michael the archangel is introduced: which is a great jump from the four starry beasts of the presence, who have been the Cherubim till now. The dragon is identified with Lucifer and Satan, and even then has to give his power to the beast from the sea: alias Nero.
There is a great change. We leave the old cosmic and elemental world, and come to the late Jewish world of angels like policemen and postmen. It is a world essentially uninteresting, save for the great vision of the scarlet woman, which has been borrowed from the pagans, and is, of course, the reversal of the great woman clothed in the sun. The late apocalyptists are much more at their ease cursing her and calling her a harlot and other vile names, than in seeing her clothed in the sun and giving her due reverence.
Altogether the latter half of the Apocalypse is a comedown. We see it in the chapter of the seven vials. The seven vials of the wrath of the Lamb are a clumsy imitation of the seven seals and the seven trumps. The apocalyptist no longer knows what he is about. There is no division into four and three, no rebirth or glory after the seventh vial — just a clumsy succession of plagues. And then the whole thing falls to earth in the prophesying and cursing business which we have met already in the old prophets and in Daniel. The visions are amorphous and have fairly obvious allegorical meanings: treading the winepress of the wrath of the Lord, and so on. It is stolen poetry, stolen from the old prophets. And for the rest, the destruction of Rome is the blatant and rather boring theme. Rome was anyhow more than Jerusalem.
Only the great whore of Babylon rises rather splendid, sitting in her purple and scarlet upon her scarlet beast. She is the Magna Mater in malefic aspect, clothed in the colours of the angry sun, and throned upon the great red drago
n of the angry cosmic power. Splendid she sits, and splendid is her Babylon. How the late apocalyptists love mouthing out all about the gold and silver and cinnamon of evil Babylon! How they want them all! How they envy Babylon her splendour, envy, envy! How they love destroying it all! The harlot sits magnificent with her golden cup of the wine of sensual pleasure in her hand. How the apocalyptists would have loved to drink out of her cup! And since they couldn’t: how they loved smashing it!
Gone is the grand pagan calm which can see the woman of the cosmos wrapped in her warm gleam like the sun, and having her feet upon the moon, the moon who gives us our white flesh. Gone is the great Mother of the cosmos, crowned with a diadem of the twelve great stars of the zodiac. She is driven to the desert and the dragon of the watery chaos spues floods upon her. But kind earth swallows the floods, and the great woman, winged for flight like an eagle, must remain lost in the desert for a time, and times, and half a time. Which is like the three and a half days, or years, of other parts of the Apocalypse, and means half of a time-period.
That is the last we have seen of her. She has been in the desert ever since, the great cosmic Mother crowned with all the signs of the zodiac. Since she fled, we have had nothing but virgins and harlots, half-women: the half- women of the Christian era. For the great woman of the pagan cosmos was driven into the wilderness at the end of the old epoch, and she has never been called back. That Diana of Ephesus, John of Patmos’s Ephesus, was already a travesty of the great woman crowned with the stars.
Yet perhaps it was a book of her ‘mystery’ and initiation ritual which gave rise to the existing Apocalypse. But if so, it has been written over and over, till only a last glimpse is left of her: and one other corresponding glimpse, of the great woman of the cosmos ‘seen red’. Oh, how weary we get, in the Apocalypse, of all these woes and plagues and deaths! how infinitely weary we are of the mere thought of that jeweller’s paradise of a New Jerusalem at the end! All this maniacal anti-life! They can’t bear even to let the sun and the moon exist, these horrible Salvationists. But it is envy.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 989
