In a new book on those end pages, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (Viking), Elaine Pagels sets out gently to bring their portents back to earth. She accepts that Revelation was probably written, toward the end of the first century C.E., by a refugee mystic named John on the little island of Patmos, just off the coast of modern Turkey. (Though this John was not, she insists, the disciple John of Zebedee, whom Jesus loved, or the author of the Gospel that bears the same name.) She neatly synopsizes the spectacular action. ...I haven't read the book and I don't know how well the review reflects what she actually says, but I think it's a mistake to regard a "hallucinatory," or at any rate visionary prophecy to be mutually exclusive with a coded allegory of contemporary (with John) events. I don't think Professor Pagels would disagree with me.
Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.
After decoding Revelation for us, Pagels turns away from the canonic texts to look at the alternative, long-lost “Gnostic” texts of the period that have turned up over the past sixty years or so, most notably in the buried Coptic library of Nag Hammadi. As in her earlier books (“The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis”; “The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters”; “The Gnostic Gospels”), she shows us that revelations in the period were not limited to John’s militant, vengeful-minded one, and that mystic visions more provocative and many-sided were widespread in the early Jesus movement.More on the Thunder-Perfect-Mind Prada ad and related matters here, here, and here. The link to the YouTube video of the Prada ad has rotted, but you can find the ad here. And the video of Meredith Brooks's "Bitch" is here.
As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song. In a series of riddling antitheses, a divine feminine principle is celebrated as transcending all principles (the divine woman is both whore and sibyl) and opening the way toward a true revelation of the hidden, embracing goddess of perfect being who lies behind all things:
Putting "Revelations" in the title of a book about the biblical Book of Revelation is unfortunate, or perhaps mischievous. People have enough trouble getting the title of the biblical book right without having the wrong title next to it on the same line. I see that Eric Herschthal at the New York Jewish Week has fallen into the trap: A Revelation: Elaine Pagels and the Jewish Cult Behind the Book of Revelations.
But that's a quibble. This sounds as though it is as interesting a book as we have come to expect from Elaine Pagels.
UPDATE: Liv Ingeborg Lied e-mails to point me to Current 93/Nurse with Wound, Thunder Perfect Mind.