Six Trumps are blown, so now there is a pause: just as there was a pause after the Six Seals were opened, to let the angels of the four winds arrange themselves, and the action transfer itself to heaven.
Now, however, come various interruptions. First there comes down a mighty angel, a cosmic lord, something like the Son of Man in the first vision. But the Son of Man, indeed all Messianic reference, seems missing in this part of the Apocalypse. This mighty angel sets one burning foot upon the sea and one on earth, and roars like a lion throughout space. Whereupon the seven creative thunders roll out their creative utterances. These seven thunders, we know, are the seven tonal natures of the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: and now they are giving voice to seven vast new commands, for a new cosmic day, a new phase in creation. The seer is in a hurry to write down these seven new words, but he is commanded not to do so. He is not allowed to divulge the nature of the commands which will bring the new cosmos into being. We must wait for the actuality. Then this great ‘angel’ or cosmic lord raises his hand and swears, by heaven and earth and water under the earth, which is the great Greek oath of the gods, that the old Time is over, the mystery of God is about to be fulfilled.
Then the seer is given the little book to eat. It is the lesser general or universal message of the destruction of the old world and creation of the new: a lesser message than that of the destruction of the old Adam and the creation of new man, which the seven-sealed book told. And it is sweet in the mouth — as revenge is sweet — but bitter in experience.
Then another interruption: the measuring of the temple, a pure Jewish interruption; the measuring or counting of the ‘chosen of God’, before the end of the old world; and the exclusion of the unchosen.
Then comes the most curious interruption of the two witnesses. Orthodox commentators identify these two witnesses with Moses and Elijah who were with Jesus in the transfiguration on the mount. They are something much older too. These two witnesses are prophets clothed in sackcloth: that is, they are in their woeful aspect, hostile or reversed. They are the two candlesticks and the two olive trees which stand before ‘Adonai’, the god of the earth. They have power over the waters of the sky (rain), power to turn water into blood, and to smite the earth with all the plagues. They make their testimony, then the beast out of the Abyss rises and slays them. Their dead bodies lie out in the street of the great city, and the people of the earth rejoice because these two who tormented them are dead. But after three and a half days, the spirit of life from God enters the dead two, they rise to their feet, and a great voice says from heaven, ‘Come up hither’. So they rise to heaven on a cloud, and their enemies in fear behold them.
It looks as if we had here a layer of very old myth referring to the mysterious twins, ‘the little ones’, who had such power over the nature of men. But both the Jewish and Christian apocalyptists have balked this bit of Revelation: they have not given it any plain meaning of any sort.
The twins belong to a very old cult which apparently was common to all ancient European peoples; but it seems they were heavenly twins, belonging to the sky. Yet when they were identified by the Greeks with the Tyndarids, Kastor and Polydeukes, already in the Odyssey, they lived alternately in Heaven and in Hades, witnessing to both places. And as such, they may be the candlesticks, or stars of heaven, on the one hand, and the olive trees of the underworld, on the other.
But the older a myth, the deeper it goes in the human consciousness, the more varied will be the forms it takes in the upper consciousness. We have to remember that some symbols, and this of the twins is one of them, can carry even our modern consciousness back for a thousand years, for two thousand years, for three thousand years, for four thousand years, and even beyond that. The power of suggestion is most mysterious. It may not work at all: or it may carry the unconscious mind back in great cyclic swoops through eras of time: or it may go only part way.
If we think of the heroic Dioskouroi, the Greek Twins, the Tyndarids, we go back only halfway. The Greek heroic age did a strange thing, it made every cosmic conception anthropomorphic, yet kept a great deal of the cosmic wonder. So that the Dioskouroi are and are not the ancient twins.
But the Greeks themselves were always reverting to the pre-heroic, pre-Olympian gods and potencies. The Olympic- heroic vision was always felt to be too shallow, the old Greek soul would drop continually to deeper, older, darker levels of religious consciousness, all through the centuries. So that the mysterious Tritopatores at Athens, who were also called the Twins, and Dioskouroi, were the lords of the winds, and mysterious watchers at the procreation of children. So here again we are back in the old levels.
When the Samothracian cult spread in Hellas, in the third and second centuries b.c., then the twins became the Kabeiroi, or the Kabiri, and then again they had an enormous suggestive influence over the minds of men. The Kabiri were a swing back to the old idea of the dark or mysterious twins, connected with the movement of the cloudy skies and the air, and with the movement of fertility, and the perpetual and mysterious balance between these two. The apocalyptist sees them in their woeful aspect, masters of sky-water and the waters of earth, which they can turn into blood, and masters of plagues from Hades: the heavenly and hellish aspect of the twins, malevolent.
But the Kabiri were connected with many things: and it is said their cult is still alive in Mohammedan countries. They were the two secret little ones, the homunculi, and the ‘rivals’. They were also connected with thunder, and with two round black thunder-stones. So they were called the ‘sons of thunder’, and had power over rain: also power to curdle milk, and malefic power to turn water into blood. As thunderers they were sunderers, sundering cloud, air, and water. And always they have this aspect of rivals, dividers, separators, for good as well as for ill: balancers.
By another symbolic leap, they were also the ancient gods of gateposts, and then they were the guardians of the gate, and then the twin beasts that guard the altar, or the tree, or the urn, in so many Babylonian, Aegean, and Etruscan paintings and sculpture. They were often panthers, leopards, gryphons, earth and night creatures, jealous ones.
It is they who hold things asunder to make a space, a gateway. In this way, they are rainmakers: they open the gates in the sky: perhaps as thunder-stones. In the same way they are the secret lords of sex, for it was early recognised that sex is a holding of two things asunder, that birth may come through between them. In the sexual sense, they can change water into blood: for the phallos itself was the homunculus, and, in one aspect, it was itself the twins of earth, the small one who made water and the small one who was filled with blood: the rivals within a man’s own very nature and earthly self symbolised again in the twin stones of the testes. They are thus the roots of the twin olive trees, producing the olives, and the oil of the procrea- tive sperm. They are also the two candlesticks which stand before the lord of earth, Adonai. For they give the two alternate forms of elemental consciousness, our day-consciousness and our night-consciousness, that which we are in the depths of night, and that other very different being which we are in bright day. A creature of dual and jealous consciousness is man, and the twins witness jealously to the duality. Physiologically, in the same meaning, it is they who hold apart the two streams of the water and of the blood in our bodies. If the water and blood ever mingled in our bodies, we should be dead. The two streams are kept apart by the little ones, the rivals. And on the two streams depends the dual consciousness.
Now these little ones, these rivals, they are ‘witnesses’ to life, for it is between their opposition that the Tree of Life itself grows, from the earthly root. They testify before the god of earth or fecundity all the time. And all the time, they put a limit on man. They say to him, in every earthly or physical activity: Thus far and no farther. — They limit every action, every ‘earth’ action, to its own scope, and counterbalance it with an opposite action. They are gods of gates, but they are also gods of limits: each forever jealous of the other, keeping the other in bounds. They make life possible; but they make life limited. As the testes, they hold the phallic balance forever, they are the two phallic witnesses. They are the enemies of intoxication, of ecstasy, and of licence, of licentious freedom. Always they testify to Adonai. Hence the men in the cities of licence rejoice when the beast from the abyss, which is the hellish dragon or demon of the earth’s destruction, or man’s bodily destruction, at last kills these two ‘guardians’, regarded as a sort of policemen in ‘Sodom’ and ‘Egypt’. The bodies of the slain two lie unburied for three and a half days: that is half a week, or half a period of time, when all decency and restraint has departed from among men.
The language of the text, ‘rejoice and make merry and send gifts to one another’ suggests a pagan Saturnalia, like the Hermaia of Crete or the Sakaia at Babylon, the feast of unreason. If this is what the apocalyptist meant, it shows how intimately he follows pagan practice, for the ancient saturnalian feasts all represented the breaking, or at least the interruption of an old order of rule and law: and this time it is the ‘natural rule’ of the two witnesses which is broken. Men escape from the laws even of their own nature for a spell: for three days and a half, which is half the sacred week, be a ‘little’ period of time. Then, as heralding the new earth and the new body of man, the two witnesses stand up again: men are struck with terror: the voice from heaven calls the two witnesses, and they go up in a cloud.
‘Two, two for the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-O! — ’
Thus the earth, and the body, cannot die its death till these two sacred twins, the rivals, have been killed.
An earthquake comes, the seventh angel blows his trumpet and makes the great announcement: The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. — So there is again worship and thanksgiving in heaven, that God takes the reign again. And the temple of God is opened in heaven, the holy of holies is revealed, and the ark of the testament. Then there are the lightnings, voices, thunderings, earthquakes, and hail which end a period and herald another. The third woe is ended.
And here ends the first part of the Apocalypse: the old half. The little myth that follows stands quite alone in the book, dramatically, and is really out of keeping with the rest. One of the apocalyptists put it in as part of a theoretic scheme: the birth of the Messiah after the little death of earth and man. And the other apocalyptists left it there.