D H Lawrence Apocalypse

Lawrence is one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century. His Apocalypse, published in 1931, is a study of the book of Revelations from the New Testament, against the framework of pagan star religion. A first observation is that the popular English Christianity of Lawrence’s day, at the Salvation Army and Primitive Methodist Chapel level, sees the social inversion promised by the Apocalypse as a primary myth – with prayers for the downfall of the rich another form of the socialist promise, and the messianic hymns invoking the sea of glass and the lake of fire touching a popular nerve. Established religion, by contrast, has little real place for the Apocalypse, and has actively misunderstood it. Lawrence argues the Apocalypse of John of Patmos is a pagan intrusion into the Bible, and was resolutely fought by the Jewish-Christian hostility to pagan star worship. Hence the ideas of Revelation are in code, because the ancient star religion of the messiah was not understood by the theology of Christianity. For example, the image of the Messiah at the Second Coming has him holding the seven stars, which Lawrence very reasonably argues are the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper, in its temporal cycle around Polaris the Pole Star (see http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/conste ... Minor.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Minor ). Similarly, the twelve stars of the Queen of Heaven in Revelation 12:1-5 are the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the seven eyes of the Lamb in Revelation 5 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?bo ... &chapter=5 are the seven known planets including Sun and Moon. The four creatures at Rev 4:7, retained from Ezekiel, the man, bull, lion and eagle, are the four corners of the zodiac at Aquarius, Taurus, Leo and Scorpio.

Lawrence is highly ambivalent towards the Christian vision of the Apocalypse, arguing that John of Patmos and others placed a gloss over the main ideas to conceal the pagan message. My own reading of the Apocalypse suggests Lawrence is correct in this basic interpretation. There is, however, even more within Revelation, analysed on this pagan star basis, than Lawrence sees. The image of the tree of life as bearing twelve fruits one for each month is an obvious reference to the zodiac signs. As well, the twelve jewels of the New Jerusalem directly encode the precession of the equinox as the structure of time, from the Age of Pisces through the coming Age of Aquarius on to the next cycle of twelve Ages each lasting 2148 years.

In addition to the daily rotation of the ‘cosmic mill’ of the dipper around the pole, a longer cycle of the Little Bear and Polaris, due to precession, takes it around the northern axis every 25765 years. Jesus Christ is depicted in Revelation holding this group of seven stars as a symbol of his return to earth - a potent image. When linked to the tree of life and the twelve jewels, the seven stars have a coherent message which has been heavily suppressed by monotheism with its inability to imagine a cosmic demiurge – an intermediary between human life and the infinite eternal God.

Lawrence argues that the living essence of humanity is cosmic. He observes that mainstream religion has denied the cosmic nature of life through its doctrine of God. I agree with Lawrence in this analysis. The suppression of star religion by monotheism presents a main story of our planet. We can compare Lawrence’s study of the Apocalypse with Santillana and Von Dechend’s Hamlet’s Mill, where the myth of the cosmic mill is traced through Finnish Saga to Shakespeare. In the Finnish national epic the Kalevala, the problem of time is described as the historic loss of knowledge of the great cosmic mill the Sampo, smashed by thieving man. We can compare this tale of the hero Ilmarinen with the Apocalypse image of Christ holding the seven stars of the Bear, markers of the cosmic mill. Just as the Finns tell of their loss of cosmic understanding and hopes for restoration, Christianity can analyse the Revelation along the lines suggested by Lawrence to identify its potent pagan mythic message.

RT

Interesting, Robert. I don't recall ever hearing or reading of this particular way of interpreting Revelation.

Under this interpretation, any thoughts on how the number 666 might relate to it? Or the Magic Square of the Sun? Just curious.

Gary Val Tenuta wrote:Interesting, Robert. I don't recall ever hearing or reading of this particular way of interpreting Revelation. Under this interpretation, any thoughts on how the number 666 might relate to it? Or the Magic Square of the Sun? Just curious.

Hi Gary. The key to DH Lawrence's approach is that cosmology provides a physical basis for mythology. It chimes in well with other studies of this broad precessional topic such as in Hamlet's Mill. If the Biblical idea of the age corresponds to the ~2148 year period during which the equinox is physically in the constellation of Pisces, then the overall picture is that the second coming of Jesus Christ will introduce the Age of Aquarius, and that the Age of Pisces will culminate in the domination of the world by the beast of the apocalypse. I interpret the 666 against this approach as a prediction that a subsequent empire would replicate Rome at a global scale.

I don't interpret this idea of the beast in the traditional negative terms, but rather look at it to find a prediction of actual dominant features of our current world order, now that we are reaching the end of the Age of Pisces, by looking for dominant world symbols that exhibit this number. The United States Dollar fulfills the prediction of Revelation 13:17-18 "no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name... 666" in that the Bretton Woods system makes the US Dollar the foundation of trade, and the United States Dollar has six letters in each of its three names, as does Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The issue here is that if the Bible is a true source of salvation, then it needs to be in accord with the true unfolding of human history. If we can't reconcile the bible with history in this way then it casts heavy doubt on it as a whole. My claim is that the connections work in an elegant way.

At a more interpretive level, it is not that Jesus had a full vision of the future, but that he saw how the 666 is imbedded in time as a symbol of human pride. What I mean by that, and here with apologies I get slightly numerological and poetic, is that six seems to be a stable and complete number, as the product and sum of three, two and one. The problem is that in reality six is not a complete organic group whereas seven is. Six imagines it can control the world, but seven actually controls through external linkage. In this sense it harmonises with the traditional cycle of six days for work and one day for rest. The syndrome of the 666 is to pretend that work and control are all, and not to give due respect to the seventh day, in which we look out from our finite constructions to see the whole context.

Thanks for your interest

Robert