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.
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