In my essay on The Great Flood I mentioned the teachers of my Christian preschool showing us pictures of the end of the world, as was depicted in the biblical Book of Revelation. I remember that this happened, perhaps on several occasions, but there is only one image that I can recall in particular: an illustration of the sun dawning over a world in flames. Our teacher was telling us that horrible things were going to happen to the world, but that it would be alright in the end — better than alright; great even, a veritable paradise — if we had faith in Jesus.

Later in my education, I was taught of history, which is a litany of atrocities. It seems that horrible things had already happened to the world, both often and recently. What terrified me the most was that I could observe clearly, as anyone can, the linear regression of these atrocities, increasing always towards greater horrors, towards larger numbers of dead. I was never able to find anything in my own studies that I thought would abate the regression. I was a devout Christian for a good part of middle and high school, but whatever I believed at a given time, it seemed to me as though something horrible was coming down the line.

And it seems that people have been writing of this through much of written history.

The New Testament Book of Revelation is one of the most distinct and bizarre books of the entire Bible, and I think that its author was saying the same things about what was to come that I had learned from both my Christian teachers and from history. Though there is some precedent in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament, nothing else in the Bible quite approaches this book’s evocative, baleful style. Owing to this distinction, it is not surprising that the book was the last one to be accepted as part of the biblical canon. For example, the Codex Vaticanus, the oldest extant copy of the Bible in Greek (dating to the 4th century CE), does not include it.

Though Revelation’s style is unique among the other books of the Bible, it was not at all unique for its time period. To the contrary, this literary genre appears to have been entirely commonplace in the 1st century Judeo-Roman world. There are several other apocalypses from the period of which we have copies (such as the First and Second Apocalypses of James, found among the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945), and we have every reason to believe that there were many more that have been lost to time.

The word apocalypse is derived from the Greek word meaning “revelation,” thus the title of this particular biblical book, which is also known as the Apocalypse of John. It is due to this book that the word “apocalypse” has come to mean “the violent end of the world” rather than just revelation in general. The Book of Revelation’s extensive use of prophetic and highly symbolic imagery has inspired a host of various interpretations over the centuries, but whatever context is applied to the text, it appears to describe the end of the world, and a particularly horrific end at that.

The book begins with an introduction, in which the author, John (whose identity beyond just the name is unknown to us) claims that he received his revelation from an angel (or another messenger, possibly Jesus, but I’ll get to that) sent by God. He then addresses his revelation to the “seven churches that are in Asia,” saying:

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. verses 4-6, NRSV

This clearly situates John as being a disciple of Pauline Christianity, which is hardly surprising; had he been otherwise, the book likely would never have been included in the biblical canon. As with Pauline Christianity in general, it is not the message of Jesus that is important, but rather his status as the Christ and justification with God via his crucifixion.

What of the seven spirits before the throne of God? This comes up again in the narrative (Revelation 3:1, 4:5, and 5:6), but the meaning is unclear. Nowhere else in the Bible are the “seven spirits of God” (as they are called in Revelation 4:5) named or referenced in any way. It’s possible that this was an aspect of 1st century Judeo-Christian folk knowledge; I’ve wondered before whether there were beliefs held by the ancient Hebrews that were such common knowledge that biblical authors didn’t consider them worthy of inclusion or commentary (see the section on the Nephilim, again in my essay on The Great Flood). I think it more likely that the author was being poetic and setting a precedent for his use of numerological symbolism, given how frequently the number seven occurs throughout the book (55 times, averaging about once per every seven verses).

I’m curious about this numerological symbolism but I lack a scholarly basis by which to interpret it. I can only turn to gematria, the system of symbolic numerological interpretation of the Hebrew language. I’m not sure whether this symbolism was known to John and extant in his time, or whether it developed afterwards out of association with the text. According to Annick de Souzenelle’s odd book The Body and Its Symbolism (1974), the number seven is associated with the Hebrew letter zayin, and with “Disappearance. Death. Nothing; which imply: Return. Rebirth. Everything.” It’s an interesting correlation, at the least.

John describes the initiation of his vision, in which he hears a loud voice and turns to see “one like the Son of Man.” The heading for this section in my copy of the Bible is “A Vision of Christ,” but I’m not sure whether that’s what John intended here. In the first verse of the book, John says that his revelation came from an angel that was sent to him by God, and though it is commonly believed that the term “the Son of Man” refers to Jesus, there’s actually no consensus among scholars that that is the case. And John does not even say that he saw the Son of Man, but rather one who is like the Son of Man, though when the messenger speaks to John in verses 17-18, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever,” that does indicate that the vision may indeed be of Jesus.

This is not the first time that the term “the Son of Man” appears in the Bible in an eschatological context. In Matthew 13:40-42, Jesus says to his disciples (by way of explaining a parable he just offered to a crowd):

Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. NRSV

This verse may have been part of John’s inspiration in writing the book. Towards the end of the book, John describes the judgement of the dead: “…and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15, NRSV).

John sees this messenger surrounded by seven golden lampstands, holding seven stars in his right hand, and after the messenger performs a reverse sword-swallowing routine (Revelation 1:16), he dictates letters to John to be sent to the aforementioned seven churches (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea, all now-ruined cities in what is now Anatolia). Like Paul’s letters to the various churches of the Judeo-Roman world, these likely address specific concerns related to the individual churches. Absent that context, the meaning is difficult to discern. Some of them offer praise to the works of the churches, some are much more polemical and condemnatory, but most are a mixture of both. Each of them is interesting and warrants further exposition, but I believe those details would be best left to another essay (as would many other details of this fascinating book; I hope to return to visit some of these ideas in more depth).

Next, John receives a vision of the throne room of God in Heaven, where an entourage of twenty-four elders and four fantastic beasts worship God unceasingly. John sees that God is holding a scroll with seven seals, and then Jesus arrives to open them (Jesus is described here symbolically as a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, but references to the lamb’s having been slaughtered and his blood having ransomed for God “saints from every tribe and language and people and nation,” verse 9 NRSV, make the reference unambiguous, substantiating my theory that the agent of John’s vision, the angel who is like the Son of Man, is not Jesus).

With the opening of each seal, save the fifth, some terrible atrocity is unleashed upon the earth. With the opening of the fifth seal, the souls of Christian martyrs come forth and beseech God to avenge them, but they are told to “rest a little longer” (Revelation 6:11, NRSV). There’s an abeyance after the sixth seal, wherein angels mark twelve thousand individuals from each of the twelve tribes of Israel as being servants of God, but then the seventh seal is opened and seven angels of God are given seven trumpets to blow, each one unleashing yet another atrocity.

Revelation contains 13 chapters (out of 22) detailing war, plague, famine, natural disasters of cosmic proportions, general torment and dismay, and epic battles of good versus evil. The forces of good finally triumph and John is shown a vision of a world rebuilt, with a new Jerusalem where God will live among humans in an idyllic paradise.

The Book of Revelation is of historical and symbolic relevance to the Satanist in part because it contains the basis for the Miltonian narrative of Satan’s fall from Heaven:

And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Revelation 12:7-9, NRSV

Bear in mind that, if we are to take Revelation as prophecy, then this is describing a future event, at least relative to John’s own time. It would be inconsistent with the rest of the narrative to place this story in the distant past, at the beginning of creation. It appears then, that the chronological re-assignment of this story was a retcon that allowed readers to interpret the serpent of the Garden of Eden as Satan (which was almost certainly not the original intent). Indeed, this depiction of Satan as the Adversary of God is not how Satan appears in the rest of the Bible (which I wrote about in Satan the Accuser; in brief, Satan was part of God’s retinue in Heaven with the role of a divine prosecutor of sorts). It appears that John is aware of this, as he immediately provides a justification for this turn of events that reconciles this depiction of Satan with that of the Old Testament:

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. Revelation 12:10, NRSV

Taken as a purely literary work, John’s Apocalypse is poetically striking, rich in evocative symbolism, and highly entertaining, some of the best reading in the entire Bible. But of course that is not how the work is taken by modern Christians. Many of them believe that the book is a description of what is to come, and they are looking forward to it. The last pages Revelation (and of the Bible and the New Testament) include this description:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. Revelation 22:1-5, NRSV

If you take the Bible as a literal document, this is indeed something to look forward to. The atrocities that happen in between our world and this one are just grist for the mill. I have my problems with the work of Sam Harris (which I’ve detailed elsewhere), but neither I nor Richard Dawkins (in whose brilliant book The God Delusion, from 2006, I found this quote) can do much better than Harris does on the topic in his Letter to a Christian Nation (2006):

It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves — socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Is this what the author of Revelation intended? Did he foresee us in our cities, with our cars and smartphones, and foresee as well how it would all turn out, and then translate all of these visions into his ancient Koine Greek in which no words like “smartphone” were available? Or was he just another person in a lineage of those who have looked at history and foreseen, in the most general terms, what is to come?

It’s not hard to read the text and understand that John was speaking of things relevant to his own Judeo-Roman world. In chapter 17, John describes the “Great Whore of Babylon,” “a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns.”

This calls for a mind that has wisdom: the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated. Revelation 17:9, NRSV

And at the end of the chapter:

The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth. Revelation 17:18, NRSV

In the world of John, what city was a great city seated on seven mountains (or hills) that ruled over much of the world? Rome. Christians like John had suffered at the hands of the Roman government and John satisfied the public desire for vengeance with a prophecy in which their nemesis is vanquished by the hand of God. But do we anymore see Rome as the city that rules over the kings of the earth? Certainly the Catholic Church maintains a great deal of influence over world affairs, but I don’t see them as ruling over the earth. And of the leaders of our own modern world, the Book of Revelation seems to have nothing relevant to say.

And then there’s the matter of the Number of the Beast. John sees a beast that rises out of the earth:

…it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six. Revelation 13:16-18, NRSV

The number of a name? The number of a person? To anyone at all familiar with Hebrew, the meaning here is obvious. In Hebrew, letters are used not only as letters but also as numerals. Revelation was written in Koine Greek, but Hebrew would have remained a sacred language among the early Pauline Christians. So 666 is the numerical interpretation of a name, and the most likely candidate is the Roman emperor Nero. Nero was a known persecutor of the early Christians and the letters of “Emperor Nero,” when translated into Greek and then transliterated into Hebrew, add up neatly to 666. Perhaps another name was intended, but in any case it seems that John intended to refer to someone who was known and reviled among the early Christians. As such, we have no reason to believe that John had intended his works to be understood as a vision of the distant future. Rather, I think that John had intended his writing to be a kind of revenge via a fictional proxy, something his readers could read delighting in the ignominious defeat of those who persecuted them. As well, the book promotes solidarity among the suffering faithful and hope for a better world to come.

Perhaps it would be best to take from John not some modern interpretation based on our modern world, of which he could have foreseen and understood nothing, but rather what he actually understood of the world in his own time: that atrocity comes. I don’t know to what degree we can rest in the hope that a future world may be better than this one, but whatever John understood of the course of history, he was wrong about the details. I think that he might not have cared about that so long as we understood what is truly likely in our future.