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he visions of John of Patmos have been scaring Christians for nearly two millennia. Two thousand years ago, John, a Greek recluse on the island of Patmos, wrote the last book of the Bible. John called his vision “Revelation,” because angels parted the curtains of time for him, revealing the cosmic drama in exact and pitiless detail. John was not simply a prophet, he was an interactive spectator to events that he then described in the past tense, though they were yet to occur. John witnessed the destruction of the world and the end of time from a front-row seat. He was prey to the terror, nausea, and exaltation of the witness. The imperative to describe what he saw conflicted with his all-too-human desire to flee the theater and purge himself of the eschatological vision. After witnessing the end of humanity, the destruction of the earth, and the abolishment of time, John was given a little book by an angel who told him, “Eat it up and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.” At this point, John barely had the stomach to go on looking, even though the promised message would be as sweet as honey. He had to keep witnessing and describing until the Redemption.
The “little book” was given to John at a midway point in the cosmic dramaâworse was yet to come. It was a long way to Redemption: the destruction of time was to be followed by the destruction of memory, the
complete erasure of human history. But even that was not yet the End, because God's own tools of destruction, his prophets and saints, had to be destroyed because they had been contaminated by the evil they had helped vanquish. The Revelation abounds in false endings because God's wrath is insatiable and the True End will not come until God has reversed every trick of his creation and rooted it down to the seed. It is during these reversals that John makes his appearances, advising us of his fear and trembling. Nonetheless, he goes on to witness things inconceivably more dreadful, but ever more precise, more structurally harmonious, more daring. The cosmic punishments and battles that were, in the beginning, rooted in the psychology of men's weaknesses become slowly transmuted into an elemental order that flirts with chaos and transcends it.
The Revelation begins where most human imaginations fail, though human elements are still recognizable. John is vouchsafed the awesome vision of God, the “alpha and the omega,” the creator and the destroyer, the beginning and the end. In the course of what is to come, God takes on many aspects: the Spirit, Christ, the Lamb, even the Beast. As Christ, the Spirit begins, reasonably enough, with complaints to and about those entrusted to carry his message, namely the Ten Churches. His churches have been contaminated by fornication, sacrifices to Balaam, failure to wash, falsity, pretense, greed, lack of passion, and lack of will. He offers them a pretty good deal: repent, and you will go to Paradise and get to eat fruit from the Tree of Life. More immediately, there will be other rewards for repentance: manna to eat, a cleansing white stone with a “new name” written on it, the “morning star,” food, and jewels.
John is here, as elsewhere, very specific: he lists every particular. John is especially punctilious about numbers and measurements. His slide rule and his abacus are always at hand, even in the midst of the most desolate carnage. Seven is his favorite number. There are seven lamps, seven spirits, seven seals, seven horns, seven eyes, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven heads, seven crowns. He's also fond of four, ten, and twenty-four. Four beasts, four angels, four horses, four horsemen, four winds, ten churches, ten horns, twenty-four elders. John's favorite fraction is one-third. The destruction of the world proceeds by thirds: the First Angel burns up one-third of the earth; the Second Angel burns up one-third of the sea, kills one-third of the life in the sea, and destroys one-third of all ships; the Third Angel kills one-third of people by causing the Wormwood Star to make the waters bitter; the Fourth Angel kills one-third of the sun so there is no more light on
earth. This divine numerology sets up the architecture for the brilliant hall of horrors and mirrors that is to follow.
The “carrot-and-stick” policy offered to churches out of the way, the second curtain opens and the Spirit gets down. We are now treated to the awesome complexity of the heavens, with its myriad of angels, thrones, beasts, churches, and spirits. Each member of the divine edifice has specific jobs in the coming devastation, which unfolds, curtain after curtain, or layer after layer, until the blinding core of the Heavenly Jerusalem is exposed at the heart of the universe. What occurs at each stage has been subject to myriad interpretations, but the scenes have never lost their luster. There is never one Death, there must always be a second Death. There is never one battle, there are always others. Even at the very End, when Satan has been vanquished and relegated in chains to the Bottomless Pit, there is the suggestion of another End. Satan will be imprisoned only for one thousand years. After that, he will come again, and the whole terrifying cycle of destruction and redemption will begin anew.
It is easy to see why readers of the Revelation have found there all the proof they needed for every paranoid fantasy. If the numbers alone don't do the job, the numberless beasts and angels fold neatly into the intuitive geometry built into us all. The Revelation is a mirror of the crystal connecting our oldest brain, the one that had witnessed great cataclysms, with the neocortex that promised deliverance from nature. Oddly enough, the line between the divine and the human is drawn physically by tattoos. Only those marked by God on the forehead with his own bar code may see the coming of Salvation. Others, who have tattooed their bodies with the aesthetic of the Beast, will be doomed. Tattoos, like numbers, pillars, and the entire hierarchy of heaven and hell, are the reiteration of a consistent and classical aesthetic. John's Revelation stands between the classicism of the Parthenon and the emotional exaltation of Gothic. The drama of the Revelation is Greek, but the sensibility is psychedelic.
The passage of time has not diminished the power of John's Revelation. It haunts our fin-de-millennium as strongly as it haunted the last fin-de-millennium, when humanity had neither penicillin nor computers. If anything, we can see more clearly now the perfect architecture of the prophecy, the crystalline structure of the events, their suspenseful unfolding and relentless rhythm. It is precisely because of our new insight into the structures of the brain, life, and the cosmos that we can better appreciate their terrifying poetry.
By the time John wrote the Revelation, the Beast was well developed. To find its roots one has to go much further back, when it barely had a name.
Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it to the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel.
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âDeuteronomy 31.19
This is one of the Torah's heaviest passages, in every sense: weight, gravity, and import. The weight of it is enormous: God tells Moses that it's time to retire and prepare his successor, Joshua; that God will personally see to it that the people cross over Jordan into the Promised Land; that he will aid them in destroying the people already there; that the people will grow forgetful; that he will hide his face from them in anger; and he gives Moses a poem (or song) to be read (or sung) publicly every seven years to remind people that he is the only God.
Literally, that's heavy. Moses has the burden of resigning, of insuring a successful succession, of reassuring the people, and of insuring that God's poem is placed in the Ark of the Covenant with the right instructions. Joshua's burden is to take the reins of power from the nearest-to-God and to persuade the people that the crossing and the coming battles will be won. The people's burden is to trust blindly in Moses' word, to accept Joshua, to have faith, to play out the destiny laid out by God, and to listen to the poem every seven years. God's burden is to put up with this unfaithful people and to hold on to the strictest interpretation of the covenant, with all the tiresome clauses of punishment and reward.
These are the burdens, the weight.
The gravity of the passage is retroactive, present, and forward into the future. When this was written, the events it describes had already happened. God's scenario had come to pass exactly the way he'd presented it to Moses. There are two ways of looking at this:
1) The truth of it is evident: the people under Joshua were successful. The Promised Land was a reality. The writer had no need of making the story fit the reality.
2) The times of the scribe were bad; the existence of the people and their divine right to the Promised Land were in jeopardy; God's command to Moses had to be told so as to renew the fighting spirit. But, essentially, it
does not matter. The Event itself is eternally present because it is the foundation of the legitimacy of the people. Retroactively, the Event recapitulates Moses' entire relationship with God from the very beginning and thus the people's relationship with God. The forward projection insures that every time Deuteronomy is read or God's poem recited, the Event becomes present.
The import of the passage is that it establishes once and for all the divine links between God and his people, between the people and their land, and between the people and their religious leaders.
The weightiness thus established, the questions begin.
1) Why do God and Moses keep meeting behind the bushes, at night, in secret? Why does God have to keep disguising himself? Since God's words to Moses seem clearly intended for all the people, why does he have to whisper them to Moses in the middle of the night? Why not just boom them out to everybody, thereby increasing his awesomeness and credibility?
In this instance, God first speaks to Moses alone and tells him that it's time to retire. Then God has him bring Joshua to the Tent of the Meeting at night where he shows himself in the shape of a cloud.
Two subquestions:
a.
Did Moses make up God?
b.
Did God and Moses have a carnal relationship?
Speculation:
a) Moses may have written the Laws, Moses may have composed the poem. Moses may have been a great writer. Who can vouch for his story? Again, we can look retroactively and say, “The story has come to pass; that is the proof of its divine origin.” But perhaps the story had come to pass and then, only then, was the story written. Perhaps a writer as great as Moses looked back on the writer Moses and gave him divine certification. In the beginning, after all, was the Word. This story of receding writers does, in the end (and in the beginning), lead to a story-telling creator. Once again, it does not matter. Whoever wrote it made sure that the story would not be forgotten, through the use of such skillful mnemonic devices as a poem that pops up every seven years. This is the kind of story that, if repeated sufficiently, hardwires a tribe for business. If Moses made up God, he did it unconsciously. There is no doubt that Moses believed that he was hearing God speak to him and through him. And if a voice be this successful, it can only be God.
b) God displays every human attribute, especially jealousy, and later in
history he has a Son. Is it not possible that something went down between him and humans that wasn't mere spirit intimacy? After all, the Greek gods had all hankered after humans and made many semidivine beings. If this is the case, it changes nothing, but for giving Moses even more authority.
2) Why does God talk about himself in the third person? Is it because Moses needs enough distance from God to underline his utter subjection to his Word?
Unnumbered observations:
Moses' retirement sets the precedent for graceful yielding of power. There is no democracy to force Moses to yield to Joshua. Only God can force the succession. Later in history, one breathes a little easier when God gives up this job. Democracy relieved God of some of his burdens.
God loves to kill for the ones he loves. “He will wipe out those nations from your path and you shall disposess them.” That sounds like a lot of fun, God, and if that's what you want ⦠. In exchange God asks only that he be not ignored or forgotten. However, he knows well that these people for whose sake he had wiped out multitudes will grow fat and forgetful. He knows that they will be bad and that he will punish them. He could force them to be good, but he doesn't: he gives them freedom of choice. Why? Is it because he loves to punish them?
Or is it because the Devil, fallen angel that he is, is already preparing the future when he will become an alternative to God, thus giving people a choice but not
freedom
of choice? Is the Devil one of God's inventions gone awry? A story that is going to tell itself, a story that has escaped the authority of the narrator?
Moses' will, God's poem: Moses intends God's poem to be revealed after his death. This poem is Moses' last will: he bequeaths it, within the ark, to the people. Every seven years they will read his will out loud and be reprimanded and rejoined with the Word. Moses' last will was written by God, but it is nonetheless a testamentary document bearing his name.
What is this poem? It's a praise of God himself. It's a mirror. God praises God. Still, God has to pass this mirror on to his people because it's better if
they
praise him. Once more, it seems that God is lonely. He needs company, he needs Moses, he needs the people to read his own words back to him. He needs to speak of himself in the third person. There may not even be any Moses or any people: there may just be God speaking himself through the media of these fictions, these projections of himself that he chooses to call
Moses, people, etc. In any case, it appears that either Moses made up God, in which case God exists only as long as people believe Moses, or God made up Moses, in which case Moses and the people do not exist.