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 dragon 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.