And here, perhaps, the oldest pagan manuscript ended. At any rate the first cycle of the drama is over. With various hesitations, some old apocalyptist starts the second cycle, this time the cycle of the death and regeneration of earth or world, instead of the individual. And this part, too, we feel is much older than John of Patmos. Nevertheless, it is very Jewish, the curious distortion of paganism through the Jewish moral and cataclysmic vision: the monomaniacal insistence on punishment and woes, which goes right through the Apocalypse. We are now in a real Jewish atmosphere.
But still there are old pagan ideas. Incense rises up to the nostrils of the Almighty in great clouds of smoke. But these clouds of incense-smoke are allegorised, and made to carry up the prayers of the saints. Then the divine fire is cast down to earth, to start the little death and final regeneration of the world, the earth and the multitude. Seven angels, the seven angels of the seven dynamic natures of God, are given seven trumpets to make seven annunciations.
And then the now-Jewish Apocalypse starts to unroll its second cycle of the Seven Trumps.
There is again a division into four and three. We are witnessing the death (the little death) of the cosmos at divine command, and therefore each time there is a trumpet blast, a third part, not a fourth, of the world is destroyed. The divine number is three: the number of the world, foursquare, is four.
At the first Trump, a third part of vegetable life is destroyed.
At the second Trump, a third part of all marine life, even ships.
At the third Trump, a third part of the fresh waters of earth are embittered and become poison.
At the fourth Trump, a third part of the heavens, sun, moon, and stars, are destroyed.
This corresponds to the four horsemen of the first cycle, in a clumsy Jewish-apocalyptic parallel. The material cosmos has now suffered the little death.
What follows are the ‘three woes’, which affect the spirit and soul of the world (symbolised now as men), instead of the material part. A star falls to earth: Jewish figure for an angel descending. He has the key of the abyss: Jewish counterpart of Hades. And the action now moves to the underworld of the cosmos instead of the underworld of the self, as in the first cycle.
It is now all Jewish and allegorical, not symbolical any more. The sun and the moon are darkened because we are in the underworld.
The abyss, like the underworld, is full of malefic powers, injurious to man.
For the abyss, like the underworld, represents the superseded powers of creation.
The old nature of man must yield and give way to a new nature. In yielding, it passes away down into Hades, and there lives on, undying and malefic, superseded, yet malevolent-potent in the underworld.
This very profound truth was embodied in all old religions, and lies at the root of the worship of the underworld powers. The worship of the underworld powers, the chthonioi, was perhaps the very basis of the most ancient Greek religion. When man has neither the strength to subdue his underworld powers — which are really the ancient powers of his old, superseded self; nor the wit to placate them with sacrifice and the burnt holocaust; then they come back at him, and destroy him again. Hence every new conquest of life means a ‘harrowing of Hell’.
In the same way, after every great cosmic change, the power of the old cosmos, superseded, becomes demonic and harmful to the new creation. It is a great truth which lies behind the Gea-Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus series of myths.
Therefore the whole cosmos has its malefic aspect. The sun, the great sun, in so far as he is the old sun of a superseded cosmic day, is hateful and malevolent to the new-born, tender thing I am. He does me harm, in my struggling self, for he still has power over my old self and he is hostile.
Likewise the waters of the cosmos, in their oldness and their superseded or abysmal nature, are malevolent to life, especially to the life of man. The great Moon and mother of my inner water-streams, in so far as she is the old, dead moon, is hostile, hurtful, and hateful to my flesh, for she still has a power over my old flesh.
This is the meaning away back of the ‘two woes’: a very deep meaning, too deep for John of Patmos. The famous locusts of the first woe, which emerge from the abyss at the fifth Trump, are complex but not unintelligible symbols. They do not hurt vegetable earth, only the men who have not the new seal on their foreheads. These men they torture, but cannot kill: for it is the little death. And they can torture only for five months, which is a season, the sun’s season, and more or less a third part of the year.
Now these locusts are like horses prepared unto battle, which means, horses, horses, that they are hostile potencies or powers.
They have hair as the hair of women: the streaming crest of the sun-powers, or sun-rays.
They have the teeth of the lion: the red lion of the sun in his malefic aspect.
They have faces like men: since they are directed only against the inward life of men.
They have crowns like gold: they are royal, of the royal orb of the sun.
They have stings in their tails: which means they are in the reversed or hellish aspect, creatures which once were good, but being superseded, of a past order, are now reversed and hellish, stinging, as it were, backwards.
And their king is Apollyon: which is Apollo, great Lord of the (pagan and therefore hellish) sun.
Having made his weird, muddled composite symbol at last intelligible, the Jewish apocalyptist declares the first woe is past, and that there are two more still to come.