The numbers four and three together make up the sacred number seven: the cosmos with its god. The Pythagoreans called it ‘the number of the right time’. Man and the cosmos alike have four created natures, and three divine natures. Man has his four earthly natures, then soul, spirit, and the eternal I. The universe has the four quarters and the four elements, then also the three divine quarters of Heaven, Hades, and the Whole, and the three divine motions of Love, Strife, and Wholeness. — The oldest cosmos had not Heaven nor Hades. But then it is probable that seven is not a sacred number in the oldest consciousness of man.
It is always, from the beginning, however, a semi-sacred number because it is the number of the seven ancient planets, which began with the sun and moon, and included the five great ‘wandering’ stars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn. The wandering planets were always a great mystery to man, especially in the days when he lived breast to breast with the cosmos, and watched the moving heavens with a profundity of passionate attention quite different from any form of attention today.
The Chaldeans always preserved some of the elemental immediacy of the cosmos, even to the end of Babylonian days. They had, later, their whole mythology of Marduk and the rest, and the whole bag of tricks of their astrologers and magi, but it never seems to have ousted, entirely, the direct star-lore, nor to have broken altogether the breast to breast contact of the star-gazer and the skies of night. The magi continued, apparently, through the ages concerned only in the mysteries of the heavens, without any god or gods dragged in. That the heaven-lore degenerated into tedious forms of divination and magic later on is only part of human history: everything human degenerates, from religion downwards, and must be renewed and revived.
It was this preserving of star-lore naked and without gods that prepared the way for astronomy later, just as in the eastern Mediterranean a great deal of old cosmic lore about water and fire must have lingered and prepared the way for the Ionian philosophers and modern science.
The great control of the life of earth from the living and intertwining heavens was an idea which had far greater hold of the minds of men before the Christian era than we realise. In spite of all the gods and goddesses, the Jehovah and the dying and redeeming Saviours of many nations, underneath the old cosmic vision remained, and men believed, perhaps, more radically in the rule of the stars than in any of the gods. Man’s consciousness has many layers, and the lowest layers continue to be crudely active, especially down among the common people, for centuries after the cultured consciousness of the nation has passed to higher planes. And the consciousness of man always tends to revert to the original levels; though there are two modes of reversion: by degeneration and decadence; and by deliberate return in order to get back to the roots again, for a new start.
In Roman times there was a great slipping back of the human consciousness to the oldest levels, though it was a form of decadence and a return to superstition. But in the first two centuries after Christ the rule of the heavens returned on man as never before, with a power of superstition stronger than any religious cult. Horoscopy was the rage. Fate, fortune, destiny, character, everything depended on the stars, which meant, on the seven planets. The seven planets were the seven Rulers of the heavens, and they fixed the fate of man irrevocably, inevitably. Their rule became at last a form of insanity, and both the Christians and the Neo-Platonists set their faces against it.
Now this element of superstition bordering on magic and occultism is very strong in the Apocalypse. The Revelation of John is, we must admit it, a book to conjure with. It is full of suggestions for occult use, and it has been used, throughout the ages, for occult purposes, for the purpose of divination and prophecy especially. It lends itself to this. Nay, the book is written, especially the second half, in a spirit of lurid prophecy very like the magical utterances of the occultists of the time. It reflects the spirit of the time:
as The Golden Ass reflects that of less than a hundred years later, not very different.
So that the number seven ceases almost to be the ‘divine’ number, and becomes the magical number of the Apocalypse. As the book proceeds, the ancient divine element fades out and the ‘modern’, first century taint of magic, prognostication, and occult practice takes its place. Seven is the number now of divination and conjuring rather than of real vision.
So the famous ‘time, times and a half, which means three and a half years. It comes from Daniel who already starts the semi-occult business of prophesying the fall of empires. It is supposed to represent the half of a sacred week — all that is ever allowed to the princes of evil, who are never given the full run of the sacred week of seven ‘days’. But with John of Patmos it is a magic number.
In the old days, when the moon was a great power in heaven, ruling men’s bodies and swaying the flux of the flesh, then seven was one of the moon’s quarters. The moon still sways the flux of the flesh, and still we have a seven- day week. The Greeks of the sea had a nine-day week. That is gone.
But the number seven is no longer divine. Perhaps it is still to some extent magical.