In parenthesis let us remark that the very ancient world was entirely religious and godless. While men still lived in close physical unison, like flocks of birds on the wing, in a close physical oneness, an ancient tribal unison in which the individual was hardly separated out, then the tribe lived breast to breast, as it were, with the cosmos, in naked contact with the cosmos, the whole cosmos was alive and in contact with the flesh of man, there was no room for the intrusion of the god idea. It was not till the individual began to feel separated off, not till he fell into awareness of himself, and hence into apartness; not, mythologically, till he ate of the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life, and knew himself apart and separate, that the conception of a God arose, to intervene between man and the cosmos. The very oldest ideas of man are purely religious, and there is no notion of any sort of god or gods. God and gods enter when man has ‘fallen’ into a sense of separateness and loneliness. The oldest philosophers, Anaximander with his divine Boundless and the divine two elements, and Anaxi- menes with his divine ‘air’, are going back to the great conception of the naked cosmos, before there was God. At the same time, they know all about the gods of the sixth century: but they are not strictly interested in them. Even the first Pythagoreans, who were religious in the conventional way, were more profoundly religious in their conceptions of the two primary forms, Fire and the Night, or Fire and Dark, dark being conceived of as a kind of thick air or vapour. These two were the Limit and the Unlimited, Night, the Unlimited, finding its Limit in Fire. These two primary forms, being in a tension of opposition, prove their oneness by their very opposedness. Herakleitos says that all things are an exchange for fire: and that the sun is new every day. The limit of dawn and evening is the Bear: and opposite the Bear is the boundary of bright Zeus.’ Bright Zeus is here supposed to be the bright blue sky, so his boundary is the horizon, and Herakleitos means probably that opposite the Bear, that is down, down in the antipodes, it is always night, and Night lives the death of Day, as Day lives the death of Night.
This is the state of mind of great men in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, strange and fascinating and a revelation of the old symbolic mind. Religion was already turning moralistic or ecstatic, with the Orphics the tedious idea of ‘escaping the wheel of birth’ had begun to abstract men from life. But early science is a source of the purest and oldest religion. The mind of man recoiled, there in Ionia, to the oldest religious conception of the cosmos, from which to start thinking out the scientific cosmos. And the thing the oldest philosophers disliked was the new sort of religious conception, with its ecstasies and its escape and its purely personal nature: its loss of the cosmos.
So the first philosophers took up the sacred three-part cosmos of the ancients. It is paralleled in Genesis, where we have a god creation, in the division into heaven, and earth, and water: the first three created elements, presupposing a God who creates. The ancient threefold division of the living heavens, the Chaldean, is made when the heavens themselves are divine, and not merely God-inhabited. Before men felt any need of God or gods, while the vast heavens lived of themselves and lived breast to breast with man, the Chaldeans gazed up in religious rapture. And then by some strange intuition, they divided the heavens into three sections. And then they really knew the stars as the stars have never been known since.
Later, when a God or Maker or Ruler of the skies was invented or discovered, then the heavens were divided into the four quarters, the old four quarters that lasted so long. And then, gradually with the invention of a God or a Demiurge, the old star-knowledge and true worship declined with the Babylonians into magic and astrology, the whole system was ‘worked’. But still the old Chaldean cosmic knowledge persisted, and this the Ionians must have picked up again.
Even during the four-quarter centuries, the heavens still had three primary rulers, sun, moon, and morning-star. But the Bible says, sun, moon, and stars.
The morning-star was always a god, from the time when gods began. But when the cult of dying and reborn gods started all over the old world, about 600 b.c., he became symbolic of the new god, because he rules in the twilight, between day and night, and for the same reason he is supposed to be lord of both, and to stand gleaming with one foot on the flood of night and one foot on the world of day, one foot on sea and one on shore. We know that night was a form of vapour or flood.
CHAPTER XVIII
Three is the number of things divine, and four is the number of creation. The world is four-square, divided into four quarters which are ruled by four great creatures, the four winged creatures that surround the throne of the Almighty. These four great creatures make up the sum of mighty space, both dark and light, and their wings are the quivering of this space, that trembles all the time with thunderous praise of the Creator: for these are Creation praising their Maker, as Creation shall praise its Maker forever. That their wings (strictly) are full of eyes before and behind, only means that they are the stars of the trembling heavens forever changing and travelling and pulsing. In Ezekiel, muddled and mutilated as the text is, we see the four great creatures amid the wheels of the revolving heavens — a conception which belongs to the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries — and supporting on their wing-tips the crystal vault of the final heaven of the throne.
In their origin, the Creatures are probably older than God himself. They were a very grand conception, and some suggestion of them is at the back of most of the great winged Creatures of the east. They belong to the last age of the living cosmos, the cosmos that was not created, that had yet no god in it because it was in itself utterly divine and primal. Away behind all the creation myths lies the grand idea that the cosmos always was, that it could not have had any beginning, because it always was there and always would be there. It could not have a god to start it, because it was itself all god and all divine, the origin of everything.
This living cosmos man first divided into three parts: and then, at some point of great change, we cannot know when, he divided it instead into four quarters, and the four quarters demanded a whole, a conception of the whole, and then a maker, a Creator. So the four great elemental creatures became subordinate, they surrounded the supreme central unit, and their wings cover all space. Later still, they are turned from vast and living elements into beasts or Creatures or Cherubim — it is a process of degradation — and given the four elemental or cosmic natures of man, lion, bull, and eagle. In Ezekiel, each of the creatures is all four at once, with a different face looking in each direction. But in the Apocalypse each beast has its own face. And as the cosmic idea dwindled, we get the four cosmic natures of the four Creatures applied first to the great Cherubim then to the personified Archangels, Michael, Gabriel, etc., and finally they are applied to the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. ‘Four for the Gospel Natures.’ It is all a process of degradation or personification of a great old concept.
Parallel to the division of the cosmos into four quarters, four parts, and four dynamic ‘natures’ comes the other division, into four elements. At first, it seems as if there had been only three elements: heaven, earth, and sea, or water: heaven being primarily light or fire. The recognition of air came later. But with the elements of fire, earth, and water the cosmos was complete, air being conceived of as a form of vapour, darkness the same.
And the earliest scientists (philosophers) seemed to want to make one element, or at most two, responsible for the cosmos. Anaximenes said all was water. Xenophanes said all was earth and water. Water gave off moist exhalations, and in these moist exhalations were latent sparks; these exhalations blew aloft as clouds, they blew far, aloft, and condensed upon their sparks instead of into water, and thus they produced stars: thus they even produced the sun. The sun was a great ‘cloud’ of assembled sparks from the moist exhalations of the watery earth. This is how science began: far more fantastic than myth, but using processes of reason.
Then came Herakleitos with his: All is Fire, or rather: All is an exc
hange for Fire, and his insistence on Strife, which holds things asunder and so holds them integral and makes their existence even possible, as the creative principle: Fire being an element.
After which the Four Elements become almost inevitable. With Empedokles in the fifth century the Four Elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water established themselves in the imagination of men forever, the four living or cosmic elements, the radical elements: the Four Roots Empedokles called them, the four cosmic roots of all existence. And they were controlled by two principles, Love and Strife. — ‘Fire and Water and Earth and the mighty height of Air; dread Strife, too, apart from these, of equal weight to each, and Love in their midst, equal in length and breadth.’ And again Empedokles calls the Four: ‘shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Vestis.’ So we see the Four also as gods: the Big Four of the ages. When we consider the four elements, we shall see that they are, now and forever, the four elements of our experience. All that science has taught about fire does not make fire any different. The processes of combustion are not fire, they are thought-forms. H2O is not water, it is a thought-form derived from experiments with water. Thought-forms are thought-forms, they do not make our life. Our life is made still of elemental fire and water, earth and air: by these we move and live and have our being.
From the four elements we come to the four natures of man himself, based on the conception of blood, bile, lymph, and phlegm, and their properties. Man is still a creature that thinks with his blood: ‘the heart, dwelling in the sea of blood that runs in opposite directions, where chiefly is what men call thought; for the blood round the heart is the thought of men’. — And maybe this is true. Maybe all basic thought takes place in the blood around the heart, and is only transferred to the brain. Then there are the Four Ages, based on the four metals: gold, silver, bronze, and iron. In the sixth century already the Iron Age had set in, and already man laments it. The age before the eating of the Fruit of Knowledge is left far behind.
The first scientists, then, are very near to the old symbolists. And so we see in the Apocalypse, that when St. John is referring to the old primal or divine cosmos, he speaks of a third part of this, that, or another: as when the dragon, who belongs to the old divine cosmos, draws down a third part of the stars with his tail: or where the divine trumps destroy a third part of things: or the horsemen from the abyss, which are divine demons, destroy a third part of man. But when the destruction is by non- divine agency, it is usually a fourth part that is destroyed. — Anyhow there is far too much destroying in the Apocalypse. It ceases to be fun.
CHAPTER XIX
The numbers four and three together make up the sacred number seven: the cosmos with its god. The Pythagoreans called it ‘the number of the right time’. Man and the cosmos alike have four created natures, and three divine natures. Man has his four earthly natures, then soul, spirit, and the eternal I. The universe has the four quarters and the four elements, then also the three divine quarters of Heaven, Hades, and the Whole, and the three divine motions of Love, Strife, and Wholeness. — The oldest cosmos had not Heaven nor Hades. But then it is probable that seven is not a sacred number in the oldest consciousness of man.
It is always, from the beginning, however, a semi-sacred number because it is the number of the seven ancient planets, which began with the sun and moon, and included the five great ‘wandering’ stars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn. The wandering planets were always a great mystery to man, especially in the days when he lived breast to breast with the cosmos, and watched the moving heavens with a profundity of passionate attention quite different from any form of attention today.
The Chaldeans always preserved some of the elemental immediacy of the cosmos, even to the end of Babylonian days. They had, later, their whole mythology of Marduk and the rest, and the whole bag of tricks of their astrologers and magi, but it never seems to have ousted, entirely, the direct star-lore, nor to have broken altogether the breast to breast contact of the star-gazer and the skies of night. The magi continued, apparently, through the ages concerned only in the mysteries of the heavens, without any god or gods dragged in. That the heaven-lore degenerated into tedious forms of divination and magic later on is only part of human history: everything human degenerates, from religion downwards, and must be renewed and revived.
It was this preserving of star-lore naked and without gods that prepared the way for astronomy later, just as in the eastern Mediterranean a great deal of old cosmic lore about water and fire must have lingered and prepared the way for the Ionian philosophers and modern science.
The great control of the life of earth from the living and intertwining heavens was an idea which had far greater hold of the minds of men before the Christian era than we realise. In spite of all the gods and goddesses, the Jehovah and the dying and redeeming Saviours of many nations, underneath the old cosmic vision remained, and men believed, perhaps, more radically in the rule of the stars than in any of the gods. Man’s consciousness has many layers, and the lowest layers continue to be crudely active, especially down among the common people, for centuries after the cultured consciousness of the nation has passed to higher planes. And the consciousness of man always tends to revert to the original levels; though there are two modes of reversion: by degeneration and decadence; and by deliberate return in order to get back to the roots again, for a new start.
In Roman times there was a great slipping back of the human consciousness to the oldest levels, though it was a form of decadence and a return to superstition. But in the first two centuries after Christ the rule of the heavens returned on man as never before, with a power of superstition stronger than any religious cult. Horoscopy was the rage. Fate, fortune, destiny, character, everything depended on the stars, which meant, on the seven planets. The seven planets were the seven Rulers of the heavens, and they fixed the fate of man irrevocably, inevitably. Their rule became at last a form of insanity, and both the Christians and the Neo-Platonists set their faces against it.
Now this element of superstition bordering on magic and occultism is very strong in the Apocalypse. The Revelation of John is, we must admit it, a book to conjure with. It is full of suggestions for occult use, and it has been used, throughout the ages, for occult purposes, for the purpose of divination and prophecy especially. It lends itself to this. Nay, the book is written, especially the second half, in a spirit of lurid prophecy very like the magical utterances of the occultists of the time. It reflects the spirit of the time:
as The Golden Ass reflects that of less than a hundred years later, not very different.
So that the number seven ceases almost to be the ‘divine’ number, and becomes the magical number of the Apocalypse. As the book proceeds, the ancient divine element fades out and the ‘modern’, first century taint of magic, prognostication, and occult practice takes its place. Seven is the number now of divination and conjuring rather than of real vision.
So the famous ‘time, times and a half, which means three and a half years. It comes from Daniel who already starts the semi-occult business of prophesying the fall of empires. It is supposed to represent the half of a sacred week — all that is ever allowed to the princes of evil, who are never given the full run of the sacred week of seven ‘days’. But with John of Patmos it is a magic number.
In the old days, when the moon was a great power in heaven, ruling men’s bodies and swaying the flux of the flesh, then seven was one of the moon’s quarters. The moon still sways the flux of the flesh, and still we have a seven- day week. The Greeks of the sea had a nine-day week. That is gone.
But the number seven is no longer divine. Perhaps it is still to some extent magical.
CHAPTER XX
The number ten is the natural number of a series. ‘It is by nature that the Hellenes count up to ten and then start over again.’ It is of course the number of the fingers of the two hands. This repetition of five observed throughout nature was one of the things that led the Pythagoreans to a
ssert that ‘all things are number’. In the Apocalypse, ten is the ‘natural’ or complete number of a series. The Pythagoreans, experimenting with pebbles, found that ten pebbles could be laid out in a triangle of 4 + 3 + 2 + 1: and this sent their minds off in imagination. — But the ten heads or crowned horns of John’s two evil beasts probably represent merely a complete series of emperors or kings, horn being a stock symbol for empires or their rulers. The old symbol of horns, of course, is the symbol of power, originally the divine power that came to man from the vivid cosmos, from the starry green dragon of life, but especially from the vivid dragon within the body, that lies coiled at the base of the spine, and flings himself sometimes along the spinal way till he flushes the brow with magnificence, the gold horns of power that bud on Moses’ forehead, or the gold serpent, Uraeus, which came down between the brows of the royal Pharaohs of Egypt, and is the dragon of the individual. But for the commonalty, the horn of power was the ithyphallos, the phallos, the cornucopia.
CHAPTER XXI
The final number, twelve, is the number of the established or unchanging cosmos, as contrasted with the seven of the wandering planets, which are the physical (in the old Greek sense) cosmos, always in motion apart from the rest of motion. Twelve is the number of the signs of the zodiac, and of the months of the year. It is three times four, or four times three: the complete correspondence. It is the whole round of the heavens, and the whole round of man. For man had seven natures in the old scheme: that is, 6 + 1, the last being the nature of his wholeness. But now he has quite another new nature, as well as the old one: for we admit he still is made up of the old Adam plus the new. So now his number is twelve, 6 + 6 for his natures, and one for his wholeness. But his wholeness is now in Christ: no longer symbolised between his brows. And now that his number is twelve, man is perfectly rounded and established, established and unchanging, for he is now perfect and there is no need for him to change, his wholeness, which is his thirteenth number (unlucky in superstition), being with Christ in heaven. Such was the opinion of the ‘saved’, concerning themselves. Such is still the orthodox opinion: those that are saved in Christ are perfect and unchanging, no need for them to change. They are perfectly individualised.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 991