LUST/LOVE/ECSTASY

Note: this chapter is currently under revision.

To help answer the question "What happened to love?" let us first address the presence of two women who are key dramatis personae of the Apocalyptic drama:

The first of these women appears "clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars."[1]

The second is described as a "Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth."[2]

Curiously, the two appear nowhere else in Christian and/or Gnostic literature other than by reference to their appearances in the Apocalypse. Pryse passes over them perfunctorily as if they are mere theatrical cast extras. In fact, I contend that they are pivotal to understanding not only the Apocalypse but also the metaphysical system that underlies it and which its authors tried to conceal and subvert. For me, these two characters constitute the most convincing evidence that the Apocalypse is a reworking of earlier source materials that predate not only the Christian and Gnostic era but also the Indian Vedas from which the gnostics borrowed for their composition of the Apocalypse.

Why do these two women appear? Who are they? What do they represent? If, as I think, these two women represent a fundamental theme of the Metaphysic of Ecstasy why did the gnostic authors of the Apocalypse with a very different metaphysical ideology to propound leave them in the drama at all? I’m going to try to answer these questions and in doing so I think reveal a mystery that has profound implications.

FULL MENU

1. Apocalypse 12:1
2. Apoclalypse 17:5