The Revelation of John

“Apocalypse” in Greek means not “the end of the world” but the lifting of the veil, the disclosure of the hidden, and the book was written about what stayed shut while the veil held. The end of the world takes up less of it than is usually assumed. Its central question is not when everything will end but how to look once the veil is lifted. The Revelation of John remains the most encoded text in the New Testament and the only prophetic book of the canon. From outside it reads as a description of visions, while inside it works as a political manifesto against Rome, encoded because it was written under persecution. Eighteen centuries later the whole occult numerology of the number of the Beast will grow out of this manifesto.

Not “the end of the world”, but the lifting of the veil

The Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokalypsis) is formed from the verb ἀποκαλύπτω, “to disclose” or “to take away the veil”, where καλύπτω means “to cover”. It is a technical word that contains nothing about catastrophe. When John writes “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to Him to show to His servants what must soon take place”, he is literally saying “a disclosure”, a taking-away of the dense.

The modern usage of “apocalypse” as a synonym for catastrophe is a drift that has taken place over two thousand years of reception. John himself puts no weight on destruction; his weight falls on the fact that the hidden will be seen. He who has been concealing himself will be exposed. He who has suffered in secret will be consoled openly.

Who is John of Patmos

The text is signed: “I, John, your brother and companion in tribulation... was in the spirit on the Lord's day... was on the island called Patmos for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ” (1:9). Patmos is a small island in the Aegean Sea, used by Rome as a place of exile.

Which John this is has been disputed since the 3rd century. The traditional attribution is the Apostle John, author of the Gospel and the three Epistles. But already Dionysius of Alexandria (mid-3rd century) noticed that the style of the Revelation differs sharply from the style of the Gospel of John: the Greek is rougher, the grammar non-classical, the vocabulary thinner. Dionysius suggested that this was another John, “John the Elder”, known in early-church literature.

Modern academic scholarship is by and large with Dionysius. The Revelation was most likely written not by the Apostle but by a prophet of the early Asia Minor church, active at the end of the reign of Domitian (~95 CE), when the emperor demanded to be worshipped as “lord and god” while the Christians refused. This is a book written in persecution, for those undergoing persecution.

Structure: the symmetry of visions

There are twenty-two chapters, the same number as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and whether that is a coincidence no one knows. The structure is fourfold, with an almost musical symmetry.

• Prologue (1) — John on Patmos sees the Son of Man among the seven lampstands.
• The Seven Letters (2–3) — addresses to the seven churches of Asia: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea. Praise and rebuke.
• The Vision of the Throne (4–5) — the heavenly scene, the Lamb who alone is worthy to open the sealed book.
• The Seven Seals (6–8:1) — the opening of the book. The four horsemen: conquest, war, famine, death. Then the martyrs beneath the altar. Silence.
• The Seven Trumpets (8:2–11) — the strikings of the earth, sea, rivers, luminaries. Locusts, horsemen with sulfur.
• The Signs (12–14) — the Woman clothed with the sun, the Dragon, the two Beasts, the number 666, the harvest of the earth.
• The Seven Bowls of Wrath (15–16) — the last plagues poured out upon the earth.
• The Fall of Babylon (17–19) — the Great Whore, the lament of the merchants, the marriage of the Lamb.
• The Thousand-Year Kingdom and the Judgment (20) — the binding of Satan, the thousand years, the final judgment.
• The New Jerusalem (21–22) — a new earth and a new heaven. The city descending from heaven.

Numbers: 7, 12, 666, 144,000

The Revelation is numerological, and the numbers in it are not random. Each is a significant code.

Who is the Beast

The most famous riddle of the book: “here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding count the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred sixty-six” (13:18). Modern exegesis is almost unanimous: this is the gematria of the name of Nero Caesar in Hebrew.

In some early manuscripts (for example in papyrus P115, discovered in the 20th century) the number is recorded as 616, which corresponds to the Latin form “Nero Caesar” without the final “nun”. This variation is an independent confirmation of the hypothesis, since both 666 and 616 point to one and the same man.

Nero reigned 54–68 CE, set fire to Rome (or did not, since historians dispute it), accused the Christians of it, and arranged the first systematic persecutions. He was overthrown and took his own life. But in Asia Minor a belief persisted that Nero did not die, that he is hiding in the East and will return with a Parthian army. This is the “myth of Nero's return”, nero redivivus. For John on Patmos, writing thirty years after Nero's death under a Domitian who was imitating the Neronian repressions, the image of “the Beast that was, and is not, and will appear” (17:8) is a direct reference to that myth.

Read from that side, the Revelation is an encoded political pamphlet against Rome in an age of persecutions. The cipher works only for those who know Hebrew and the context, and for everyone else the book stays a prophecy of the end of times. Both readings have proved stable: the first is academically correct, the second religiously working.

The Woman, the Dragon, the Whore

The principal female images of the book are two pairs of opposites. The Woman clothed with the sun (12:1) gives birth to a male child, is pursued by the dragon, and hides in the desert, while the Great Dragon that attacks her is the ancient serpent called Satan (12:9). After the heavenly battle the dragon is cast down to the earth and pursues “the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments”.

On the other side stands the Great Whore (17), seated on a seven-headed beast, clothed in purple, holding a cup of impurity. On her forehead is written: “Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth” (17:5), and this is Rome, where the seven heads are the seven hills the city stands on and the seven kings are the seven emperors.

In occult reception, and particularly with Crowley, the Great Whore is reinterpreted as Babalon: the liberating feminine principle set over against the masculine Beast, rather than “evil”. Crowley takes upon himself the number 666 (his “magical name” is To Mega Therion, “the Great Beast”) and sees in Babalon the highest feminine archetype, union with which constitutes the goal of the Great Work.

Influence on the esoteric

Of all the books of the New Testament, the Apocalypse has had the greatest influence on the occult and esoteric tradition.

• Joachim of Fiore (12th century) — built out of the Revelation a theory of three ages: the Father (Old Testament), the Son (New Testament), the Holy Spirit (the one to come). This scheme became the foundation of all subsequent millennial thought.
• The radical movements from the 15th to the 17th century — the Czech Taborites of the 1420s, the Anabaptists of Münster in 1534–1535, the English Fifth Monarchists of the 1650s — all read the Revelation literally and tried to “hasten” the end by establishing the Thousand-Year Kingdom now.
• William Blake (1757–1827) — poetically rewrote the Revelation in his own mythology: Los, Urizen, Orc. His illustrations to the Revelation are among the high points of European visionary art.
• Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) — took the name “To Mega Therion, the Beast 666”. In “The Book of the Law” (1904) he declared the beginning of the “New Aeon of Horus” — structurally parallel to Joachim's “Third Testament”. Babalon is a reinterpretation of the Great Whore.
• Kenneth Grant (1924–2011) — built apocalyptic imagery into the system of the Tunnels of Set. The Beast, the Whore, the number 666 receive Kabbalistic correspondences.
• 20th-century millennial movements — Jehovah's Witnesses (144,000), the Branch Davidians at Waco, the People's Temple in Jonestown, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo. All built their teaching directly on the Revelation.

Connection with the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah

The Revelation is not a Kabbalistic text. But it belongs to the same era as the oldest strata of Sefer Yetzirah, and proceeds from the same Jewish apocalyptic environment (Daniel, Enoch, 4 Ezra), so that the structure of thought is the same: symbols, numbers, visions, angels. The difference lies in the addressee, because the Jewish apocalypticists wrote for the community while John wrote for the Christians under persecution.

The Zohar, written twelve hundred years later in a different cultural environment, shares with the Revelation an apocalyptic gesture: the lifting of the veil from the hidden order of reality. In the Zohar the gesture is theosophical, since what is seen there is the working of the Partzufim. In John it is historical, since what is seen is the course of events. Ontologically it is one and the same work.

Where to read

In English, read the King James Version (standard) or the New Revised Standard Version with annotation. In Koine Greek, Nestle-Aland NA28. The standard work in Anglophone scholarship is David Aune, Revelation (Word Biblical Commentary, 3 vols.). For the esoteric reception there is Crowley's Liber AL vel Legis, which stands as the “Third Testament” and claims directly to complete the apocalyptic line.

A single recommendation holds for this book: read it twice, the first time as prophecy, the second as political pamphlet. Both texts are there inside it.