The Book of Revelation

A writer whom we know as John of Patmos, called John the Divine, wrote descriptions of a series of his remarkable visions that were compiled to become the New Testament's Book of Revelation. The visions are by turns breathtaking, moving, nightmarish and bizarre - at times so bizarre that these writings only just made it into the canon at the Council of Nicaea presided over by Emperor Constantine. No less a personage than Thomas Jefferson considered them to be [1]'the ravings of a maniac' and regarded them as anything but divinely inspired. But the Book of Revelation has a mysterious and powerful hold upon those who read it, and has inspired and informed the human imagination ever since. The paintings here are adapted from frames created for my own [2]video version of John's book: four months of intensive work for fifteen minutes of animated film.

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." My version above of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse is a simple acknowledgement that I personally consider Albrecht Dürer's 15th-century woodcut to be the best ever portrayal of the horsemen (Plague, Famine, War and Death) riding out. Dürer's genius cannot be improved upon - merely adapted in some way, and his work surfaces in my own more than any other artist's.

"And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters... and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." I find this particular passage uncomfortably prescient of our own time. Corals struggling to survive in polluted waters are dying, life in the oceans is diminishing, and rafts of floating plastic refuse the size of Cleveland accumulate at the intersections of major currents. It took some considerable time for me to stitch this montage of skulls together. I'm hoping that it will defy John's prophesying and remain as an image, rather than transforming into a future grim reality.

"Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six." Some paintings that look like they took a lot of work can just pop out, and others which seem straightforward-enough end up involving me in a tortuous amount of time and effort. The Beast belongs to the latter category. Many different animal skulls were layered over each other: I ended up creating almost a hundred different Beast faces, some seven of which made it into the finished video. So much speculation has been expended in attempting to unravel the riddle which John poses here in his text. The true identity of the Beast has been speculated to be everyone from the Emperor Nero to the Papal Office. Is it really possible to untangle this enigma? Yes it is! My post 666: The Number of the Beast unravels the mystery...

"Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth." As much as the Four Horsemen and the Beast, the Whore of Babylon has entered popular culture. And as with the Beast, there has been much speculation about her identity, which could be the all-consuming might of Imperial Rome in John's own time, or the self-serving financial wolves of Wall Street in our own contemporary world, or some other force of dark destiny whose influence contaminates and despoils those things which it touches.

 "And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns." Seven cities, perhaps? Seven rulers? So many versions of this particular scene from John's book have been created, both in film and by other artists. All that I could do was to go my own way, and feel how this bizarre monstrosity with its female rider appeared to me.

"And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." The whore of Babylon represents all that is treacherous, evil, repugnant, immoral. The woman clothed with the sun embodies all that is pure and good. It is perhaps the ultimate blasphemy, the ultimate heresy, to portray these two women as actually being two different aspects of one and the same woman, and that is how I decided to treat things. Not through any shallow attempt to shock, but through what for me is a profound truth: that the more seemingly-extreme a heresy is, the closer it approaches a deeper spiritual reality. Both ends of the spectrum are ultimately simply different aspects of the same unity. The greater we imagine the difference between things to be, the closer we approach to this realization.


Notes:
[1] Jefferson forcefully expressed his dim views of Revelation in a letter of January 17, 1825 to General Alexander Smyth Monticello. It is my own contention that, in his scathing dismissal of John's book, Jefferson missed the mark by a considerably wider margin of error than he himself realized. I believe that much of what we take in Revelation to be fanciful visions are in reality forms of Gnostic knowledge travelling, as it were, in disguise to avoid being expunged by those early church fathers who were only too eager to let such material hit the cutting room floor. It can be established that a complex numerological code exists in John's writings (which applies specifically to the number 666), and the mere fact that there actually are no less than twenty one sets of sevens (seven candlesticks, seven seals, seven plagues, etc.) must surely give some pause for thought as to whether these vividly descriptive visions really are 'the ravings of a maniac' as Jefferson contended. Of course they are not.

[2] You can watch my video REVELATIONS: The End of Time on YouTube. 

Prophesies of the Hopi

The prophesies of the Hopi nation of the southwest have become more widely known through the release of the film Koyaanisqatsi ('Life out of Balance'). Perhaps the best-known of these prophesies describes how 'cobwebs' will drape the skies and a 'gourd of ashes' will fall from above. This has been connected in our own times to the appearance of our ubiquitous electricity grid pylons, and the form of an atomic explosion, which certainly fits the description of a huge inverted gourd. But the source and the actual dating of the prophesies is complex, and as with the extant writings of Hermes Trismegistus, they might not be as ancient as has been suggested. Whether this is so or not, the prophesies remain a valid and essential message - and a warning - about our stewardship of our planet, and the Hopi need to be listened to.

The best resource I know for a scrupulous and conscientious anthropological study of the prophesies is Rudolf Kaiser's The Voice of the Great Spirit: Prophesies of the Hopi Indians. And of course there is always the mesmerizing Koyaanisqatsi with its score by Philip Glass. The central image of my painting is adapted from a 19th-century photograph by Edward S. Curtis, against a background of masterful Hopi ceramic ware. The silver crescent on the pendant has its own culturally intriguing history: it has been adapted from designs by the Spanish who were the first Europeans in the region, who in their turn adapted the crescent from the Moors. The crescent worn by this Hopi is therefore Islamic in origin!

Cultural paths cross and recross, sometimes with surprising and unexpected results, sometimes with benefits to both - and sometimes disastrously. Were it possible for us to view these events at the time that they actually happen with the same insight and perspective which the distance of history allows us, would we do things differently? Perhaps this is what we crave from prophesies: to reach an understanding of affairs in our own present with the insight of a history which has yet to happen.

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