But there are three more seals. What happens when these are opened?
After the fourth seal and the rider on the pale horse, the initiate, in pagan ritual, is bodily dead. There remains, however, the journey through the underworld, where the living ‘I’ must divest itself of soul and spirit, before it can at last emerge naked from the far gate of hell into the new day. For the soul, the spirit, and the living T are the three divine natures of man. The four bodily natures are put off on earth. The two divine natures can only be divested in Hades. And the last is a stark flame which, on the new day is clothed anew and successively by the spiritual body, the soul-body, and then the ‘garment’ of flesh, with its fourfold terrestrial natures.
Now no doubt the pagan script recorded this passage through Hades, this divesting of the soul, then of the spirit, till the mystic death is fulfilled sixfold, and the seventh seal is at once the last thunder of death and the first thunderous paean of new birth and tremendous joy.
But the Jewish mind hates the mortal and terrestrial divinity of man: the Christian mind the same. Man is only postponedly divine: when he is dead and gone to glory. He must not achieve divinity in the flesh. So the Jewish and Christian apocalyptists abolish the mystery of the individual adventure into Hades and substitute a lot of martyred souls crying under the altar for vengeance — vengeance was a sacred duty with the Jews. These souls are told to wait awhile — always the postponed destiny — until more martyrs are killed; and they are given white robes: which is premature, for the white robes are the new resurrected bodies, and how could these crying souls put them on in Hades: in the grave? However — such is the muddle that Jewish and Christian apocalyptists have made of the fifth seal.
The sixth seal, the divesting of the spirit from the last living quick of the ‘I’, this has been turned by the apocalyptist into a muddled cosmic calamity. The sun goes black as sackcloth of hair: which means that he is a great black orb streaming forth visible darkness; the moon turns to blood, which is one of the horror-reversals of the pagan mind, for the moon is mother of the watery body of men, the blood belongs to the sun, and the moon, like a harlot or demon woman, can only be drunk with red blood in her utterly maleficent aspect of meretrix, blood-drinker, she who should give the cool water of the body’s fountain of flesh; the stars fall from the sky, and the heavens depart like a scroll rolled together, and ‘every mountain and island were moved out of their places’. It means the return of chaos, and the end of our cosmic order, or creation. Yet it is not annihilation: for the kings of the earth and all the rest of men keep on hiding in the shifted mountains, from the ever-recurrent wrath of the Lamb.
This cosmic calamity no doubt corresponds to the original final death of the initiate, when his very spirit is stripped off him and he knows death indeed, ytt still keeps the final flame-point of life, down in Hades. But it is a pity the apocalyptists were so interfering: the Apocalypse is a string of cosmic calamities, monotonous. We would give the New Jerusalem cheerfully, to have back the pagan record of initiation; and this perpetual ‘wrath of the Lamb’ business exasperates one like endless threats of toothless old men.
However, the six stages of mystic death are over. The seventh stage is a death and birth at once. Then the final flame-point of the eternal self of a man emerges from hell, and at the very instant of extinction becomes a new whole cloven flame, of a new-bodied man with golden thighs and a face of glory. But first there is a pause: a natural pause. The action is suspended, and transferred to another world, to the outer cosmos. There is a lesser cycle of ritual to fulfil, before the seventh seal, the crash and the glory.
CHAPTER XI
Creation, we know, is four-square, and the number of creation, or of the created universe, is four. From the four corners of the world four winds can blow, three bad winds, one good one. When all the winds are loosed, it means chaos in the air, and destruction on earth.
So the four angels of the winds are told to hold back their winds and hurt neither earth nor sea nor trees: that is, the actual world.
But there is a mystic wind from the east which lifts the sun and the moon like full-sailed ships, and bears them across the sky, like vessels slowly scudding. — This was one of the beliefs, in the second century b.c. — Out of this east rises the angel crying for a pause in the blowing of the winds of destruction, while he shall seal the servants of God in their foreheads. Then the twelve tribes of Jews are tediously enumerated and sealed: a tedious Jewish performance.
The vision changes, and we see a great multitude, clothed in white robes and with palms in their hands, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, and crying with a loud voice: ‘Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb.’ Thereupon angels and elders and the four winged beasts fall on their faces and worship God saying: ‘Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen.’
This suggests that the seventh seal is opened. The angel cries to the four winds to be still, while the blessed, or the new-born appear. And then those who ‘went through the great tribulation’, or initiation into death and rebirth, appear in glory, clothed in the white dazzling robes of their new bodies, carrying branches of the tree of life in their hands, and appearing in a grand blaze of light before the Almighty.
They hymn their praise, and the angels take it up.
Here we can see, in spite of the apocalyptist, the pagan initiate, perhaps in a temple of Cybele, suddenly brought forth from the underdark of the temple into the grand blaze of light in front of the pillars. Dazzled, reborn, he wears white robes and carries the palm-branch, and the flutes sound out their rapture round him, and dancing women lift their garlands over him. The lights flash, the incense rolls up, the brilliant priests and priestesses throw up their arms and sing the hymn to the new glory of the reborn, as they form around him and exalt him in a kind of ecstasy. The crowd beyond is breathless.
This vivid scene in front of the temple, of the glorification of a new initiate and his identification or assimilation to the god, amid grand brilliance and wonder, and the sound of flutes and the swaying of garlands, in front of the awed crowd of onlookers was, we know, the end of the ritual of the Mysteries of Isis. Such a scene has been turned by the apocalyptists into a Christian vision. But it really takes place after the opening of the seventh seal. The cycle of individual initiation is fulfilled. The great conflict and conquest is over. The initiate is dead, and alive again in a new body. He is sealed in the forehead, like a Hindu monk, as a sign that he has died the death, and that his seventh self is fulfilled, he is twice-born, his mystic eye or ‘third eye’ is now open. He sees in two worlds. Or, like the Pharaohs with the serpent Uraeus rearing between their brows, he has charge of the last proud power of the sun.
But all this is pagan and impious. No Christian is allowed to rise up new and in a divine body, here on earth and in the midst of life. So we are given a crowd of martyrs in heaven, instead.
The seal in the forehead may be ashes: the seal of the death of the body: or it may be scarlet or glory, the new light or vision. It is, really, in itself the seventh seal.
Now it is finished, and there is silence in heaven for the space of about half an hour.
CHAPTER XII
And here, perhaps, the oldest pagan manuscript ended. At any rate the first cycle of the drama is over. With various hesitations, some old apocalyptist starts the second cycle, this time the cycle of the death and regeneration of earth or world, instead of the individual. And this part, too, we feel is much older than John of Patmos. Nevertheless, it is very Jewish, the curious distortion of paganism through the Jewish moral and cataclysmic vision: the monomaniacal insistence on punishment and woes, which goes right through the Apocalypse. We are now in a real Jewish atmosphere.
But still there are old pagan ideas. Incense rises up to the nostrils of the Almighty in great clouds of smoke. But these clouds of incense-smoke are allegorised, and made to carry
up the prayers of the saints. Then the divine fire is cast down to earth, to start the little death and final regeneration of the world, the earth and the multitude. Seven angels, the seven angels of the seven dynamic natures of God, are given seven trumpets to make seven annunciations.
And then the now-Jewish Apocalypse starts to unroll its second cycle of the Seven Trumps.
There is again a division into four and three. We are witnessing the death (the little death) of the cosmos at divine command, and therefore each time there is a trumpet blast, a third part, not a fourth, of the world is destroyed. The divine number is three: the number of the world, foursquare, is four.
At the first Trump, a third part of vegetable life is destroyed.
At the second Trump, a third part of all marine life, even ships.
At the third Trump, a third part of the fresh waters of earth are embittered and become poison.
At the fourth Trump, a third part of the heavens, sun, moon, and stars, are destroyed.
This corresponds to the four horsemen of the first cycle, in a clumsy Jewish-apocalyptic parallel. The material cosmos has now suffered the little death.
What follows are the ‘three woes’, which affect the spirit and soul of the world (symbolised now as men), instead of the material part. A star falls to earth: Jewish figure for an angel descending. He has the key of the abyss: Jewish counterpart of Hades. And the action now moves to the underworld of the cosmos instead of the underworld of the self, as in the first cycle.
It is now all Jewish and allegorical, not symbolical any more. The sun and the moon are darkened because we are in the underworld.
The abyss, like the underworld, is full of malefic powers, injurious to man.
For the abyss, like the underworld, represents the superseded powers of creation.
The old nature of man must yield and give way to a new nature. In yielding, it passes away down into Hades, and there lives on, undying and malefic, superseded, yet malevolent-potent in the underworld.
This very profound truth was embodied in all old religions, and lies at the root of the worship of the underworld powers. The worship of the underworld powers, the chthonioi, was perhaps the very basis of the most ancient Greek religion. When man has neither the strength to subdue his underworld powers — which are really the ancient powers of his old, superseded self; nor the wit to placate them with sacrifice and the burnt holocaust; then they come back at him, and destroy him again. Hence every new conquest of life means a ‘harrowing of Hell’.
In the same way, after every great cosmic change, the power of the old cosmos, superseded, becomes demonic and harmful to the new creation. It is a great truth which lies behind the Gea-Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus series of myths.
Therefore the whole cosmos has its malefic aspect. The sun, the great sun, in so far as he is the old sun of a superseded cosmic day, is hateful and malevolent to the new-born, tender thing I am. He does me harm, in my struggling self, for he still has power over my old self and he is hostile.
Likewise the waters of the cosmos, in their oldness and their superseded or abysmal nature, are malevolent to life, especially to the life of man. The great Moon and mother of my inner water-streams, in so far as she is the old, dead moon, is hostile, hurtful, and hateful to my flesh, for she still has a power over my old flesh.
This is the meaning away back of the ‘two woes’: a very deep meaning, too deep for John of Patmos. The famous locusts of the first woe, which emerge from the abyss at the fifth Trump, are complex but not unintelligible symbols. They do not hurt vegetable earth, only the men who have not the new seal on their foreheads. These men they torture, but cannot kill: for it is the little death. And they can torture only for five months, which is a season, the sun’s season, and more or less a third part of the year.
Now these locusts are like horses prepared unto battle, which means, horses, horses, that they are hostile potencies or powers.
They have hair as the hair of women: the streaming crest of the sun-powers, or sun-rays.
They have the teeth of the lion: the red lion of the sun in his malefic aspect.
They have faces like men: since they are directed only against the inward life of men.
They have crowns like gold: they are royal, of the royal orb of the sun.
They have stings in their tails: which means they are in the reversed or hellish aspect, creatures which once were good, but being superseded, of a past order, are now reversed and hellish, stinging, as it were, backwards.
And their king is Apollyon: which is Apollo, great Lord of the (pagan and therefore hellish) sun.
Having made his weird, muddled composite symbol at last intelligible, the Jewish apocalyptist declares the first woe is past, and that there are two more still to come.
CHAPTER XIII
The sixth Trump sounds. The voice from the golden altar says: Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates
These are evidently four angels of four corners, like those of the four winds. So Euphrates, the evil river of Babylon, will no doubt stand for the waters under the earth, or the abysmal under-ocean, in its hellish aspect.
And the angels are loosed, whereupon, apparently the great army of demon-horsemen, two hundred million, all told, issue from the abyss.
The horses of the two hundred million horsemen have heads as the heads of lions, and out of their mouths issue fire and brimstone. And these kill a third part of men, by the fire, smoke, and brimstone which come out of their mouths. Then unexpectedly we are told that their power is in their mouths and in their tails; for their tails are like serpents, and have heads, and with them they do hurt.
These weird creatures are apocalyptic images, surely: not symbols but personal images of some old apocalyptist long before John of Patmos. The horses are powers, and divine instruments of woe: for they kill a third part of men, and later we are told they are plagues. Plagues are the whips of God.
Now they ought to be the reversed or malevolent powers of the abysmal or underworld waters. Instead of which they are sulphurous, evidently volcanic beasts of the abysmal or underworld fires, which are the hellish fires of the hellish sun.
Then suddenly they are given serpent tails, and they have evil power in their tails. Here we are back at the right thing — the horse-bodied serpent-monster of the salty deeps of hell: the powers of the underworld waters seen in their reversed aspect, malevolent, striking a third of men, probably with some watery and deadly disease; as the locusts of the fifth Trump smote men with some hot and agonising, yet not deadly disease, which ran for a certain number of months.
So that here probably two apocalyptists have been at work. The later one did not understand the scheme. He put in his brimstone horses with their riders having breastplates of fire and jacinth and brimstone (red, dark blue, and yellow), following his own gay fancy, and perhaps influenced by some volcanic disturbance and some sight of splendid red, blue, and yellow cavalry of the east. That is a true Jewish method.
But then he had to come back to the old manuscript, with serpent-tailed watery monsters. So he tacked on the serpent tails to his own horses, and let them gallop.
This apocalyptist of the brimstone horses is probably responsible for the ‘lake of fire burning with brimstone’ into which the souls of fallen angels and wicked men are cast to burn for ever and ever more. This pleasant place is the prototype of the Christian hell, specially invented by the Apocalypse. The old Jewish hells of Sheol and Gehenna were fairly mild, uncomfortable abysmal places like Hades, and when a New Jerusalem was created from heaven, they disappeared. They were part of the old cosmos, and did not outlast the old cosmos. They were not eternal.
This was not good enough for the brimstone apocalyptist and John of Patmos. They must have a marvellous, terrific lake of sulphurous fire that could burn for ever and ever, so that the souls of the enemy could be kept writhing. When, after the last Judgment, earth and sky and all creation were swept away, and only glorious heaven remai
ned, still, away down, there remained this burning lake of fire in which the souls were suffering. Brilliant glorious eternal heaven above: and brilliant sulphurous torture-lake away below. This is the vision of eternity of all Patmossers. They could not be happy in heaven unless they knew their enemies were unhappy in hell.
And this vision was specially brought into the world with the Apocalypse. It did not exist before.
Before, the waters of the hellish underworld were bitter like the sea. They were the evil aspect of the waters under the earth, which were conceived as some wondrous lake of sweet, lovely water, source of all the springs and streams of earth, lying away down below the rocks.
The waters of the abyss were salt like the sea. Salt had a great hold on the old imagination. It was supposed to be the product of ‘elemental’ injustice. Fire and water, the two great living elements and opposites, gave rise to all substance in their slippery unstable ‘marriage’. But when one triumphed over the other, there was ‘injustice’. So, when the sun-fire got too strong for the sweet waters, it burnt them, and when water was burnt by fire, it produced salt, child of injustice. This child of injustice corrupted the waters and made them bitter. So the sea came into being. And thence the dragon of the sea, leviathan.
And so the bitter waters of hell were the place where souls were drowned: the bitter anti-life ocean of the end.
There was for ages a resentment against the sea: the bitter, corrupt sea, as Plato calls it. But this seems to have died down in Roman times: so our apocalyptist substitutes a brimstone-burning lake, as being more horrific, and able to make the souls suffer more.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 988