Revelation (1)—

Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Chaos as Intermezzo

Before proceeding to Revelation, pause for analogues of it in the city that serves this chapter as paradigm of the “far—from—equilibrium,” ever—shifting Tun—huang. In cavern 275, “one of the oldest extant in [T]unhuang,” several bas reliefs portray Maitreya, the next Buddha, predicted to descend as savior after the world has fallen almost irretrievably into anomie (Dunghuang Institute for Cultural Relics 238). Additional, vivid portraits of him appear in caves 17, 156, 249, 254 and 257. This fear of entropy and anticipation of a savior are not surprising since apocalypticism was particularly common on the pilgrimage route that transected that city:
The Chinese pilgrims not only mention statues and sites connected with Maitreya but seem to feel a personal devotion to him …. He makes revelations, and saints like Ka´s yapa, hidden in mountains and absorbed in trance, await his advent. [The famous pilgrim] I—Ching speaks and even sings of the joy of meeting him, much as devout Christians look forward to the second coming of Christ…. (Eliot 119).

In many civilizations, apocalyptic writings form a literature for the unsettled, a group including pilgrims, though certainly not restricted to them. As Hillel Schwartz demonstrates in Century’s End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s, instead of being a relic of medieval superstition, Occidental apocalypticism increases over the centuries as accelerating information exchange pushes cultures ever further from equilibrium, speeding technological change, generating economic turbulence, and exacerbating class tensions. Nonetheless, some insecurity about and prophecies concerning the future perhaps always already existed. For millenia at least there has been hope that the present flux is but an intermezzo to be resolved in a final act by returning Jesus, Maitreya, Lao Tzu, King Arthur, King Gezar, et cetera, who will have their court of L8-like supporters.

Evidencing the particular strength of apocalyptic imagery on the social fringes, along the Chinese pilgrimage routes, cliffs frequently bore the inscription in large calligraphy, “Come, Maitreya.” In revolutionary periods, however, devotion to Maitreya proliferated in China itself. “[N]umerous popular uprisings centered on []his cult…. [when] white–the color associated with Maitreya–figured prominently in the symbolism and ideologies of rebel movements” (Wright 1959, 69). Thus, that color in such secret societies as the Pai lien chiao (White Lotus) and Pai yün hui (White Cloud) alludes to that Buddha of the Future.

In another sense, it alludes to the future itself–a blankness containing all possibilities. In China, such emptiness often connotes the mysterious Other. White is the color of the West, toward which the pilgrims traveled for revelation. Maitreya, West, and White all stand for death and afterlife: Maitreya’s Tushita heaven, the West as direction of endings, and the su (unbleached sackcloth) of mourning, commonly described as “white” (Eberhard 312).

Even more important than its connection with paradises in heaven and earth is the symbolism of whiteness in the scrolls that evoke ideal places of mind and spirit. Particularly under Zennist or Taoist influence, large, empty spaces surround the figures of Chinese traditional painting or the ideograms of its caligraphy. This capacious blankness is an invitation to imagine the lines undrawn, the words unwritten. Chinese art is deliberately fragmentary and its classic language so concise as to be cryptic, leaving a maximum margin, a screen for dreaming. Because Taoism and Buddhism emphasize “emptiness” (the world viewed as interdependent and chaosmotic), a Chinese perspective makes one acutely aware of this white void. Nonetheless, with varying sizes, margins are an inherent component of any text–a tangible reminder of what is deliberately left unsaid.

For the most part, previous chapters look at manuscripts as past (the inscribing that precedes the finished work) and present (their being read aloud). Let us now turn toward the future in a world of developing complexity, that seems to be moving to higher-numbered Graves/Jung levels. Meant to endure, manuscripts of any sort also presume relationships to the future, especially in predictions. In China, the very beginnings of prognostication focus on the margins of the texts. As previously mentioned, the oldest known Chinese divinations (also the earliest extant Chinese writings) are incised along the cracks of oracle bones. The characters border the mysterious chaos they interpret. Less conspicuously, as Deborah Steiner argues, the ancient Occident sometimes also conceived of writing as deciphering cracklike “chaos.” Her examples include the following:
In Augustine’s famous account of Ambrose reading in Confessions 6.3., the author describes how “his eyes scanned the page and his heart searched out [rimagatur] the meaning.” The verb rimor, related to the noun rima meaning a crack or fissure, is used … by Juvenal of an auger scrutinizing the heart of a sacrificial chicken (6.551) (Steiner 22n33)

Although in more than one sense a marginal literature, apocalyptic is the culmination of central themes in scripture writing, such as that of revelation itself, deciphering what lies beyond the border of rational knowing. In China, “For more than two thousand years, the literary topos of the handing down of a book from supernatural powers has figured [in secret societies’ legends of a coming age]” (Eberhard 44). As to the West, the term revelation not only serves as a general way of describing the whole Bible but (in the Christian version) as the title of its apocalyptic climax–a book describing what lies beyond ordinary time. In the second century C.E., that book was the portion of the New Testament most cited (Cohn 212).


Sensing Temporal Flux

Balanced on the acute, shifting angle between the city of yesterday and the city of tomorrow stands the rank, fragrant, bustling, dusty oasis of [T]un—huang–its caravansaries crowded with camel dealers and curly haired traders from across the desert, its markets rich with conjurers … and priests telling instructive tales. Or perhaps the city is balanced … in a cycle that has rolled round since the long—ago reign of the Yellow Emperor.…It is, in any case, not riding on a line … left to right across the page. –Jeanne Larsen, Silk Road

Yü—chu, a Chinese term for universe, means “space—time” (Needham 92-93). A text of 120 B.C.E. states: “All the time that has passed from antiquity until now is called chou; all the space in every direction, above and below, is called yü. The Tao (the Order of Nature) is within them, yet no man can say where it dwells” (Huai Nan Tzu, chapter 11 as translated in Needham, 93). In traditional Chinese thought, space and time form an organic unity, held together by an ineffable Tao, from which there is a “spontaneous arising” (tzu—jan) of order.

In the modern Occident (before Einstein), the unity of time and space was only glimpsed by a few visionaries, such as William Blake. He, by the way, particularly associated time with Jesus (Damon 246-47)–an idea entirely consonant with the Book of Revelation–indeed, possibly drawn therefrom. Its Father seems to have largely moved outside of temporality. Eternally, he authorizes the Son (2.28), or accepts human service after time has apparently passed away (1.6). Like one of the sky deities of which Eliade has written so much, the Father sits on his throne (3.21), seemingly little more than a personification of that Heavenly place–a Marker in space. In contrast, Christ has become Lord of Time, moving history toward its climax, yet, despite this separation, He is One with the Father.

In contrast to an ancient ambience of paradox and mystery, which once surrounded such abstractions, the Occident eventually spatialized time linearly (e.g., the hands of a clock). Perceived thus (anachronisitically), the Book of Revelation presented a linear chronology from Adam to Apocalypse. Evangelicals scanned its obscurities for the exact date of the locusts with scorpions’ tails (9.9) or the falling of stars like figs (6.13). Nonetheless, it comes from a period of reading aloud, when texts manifested simultaneously in unreconciled, contradictory modes: spatial constructs (a text present all at once) and temporal ones (the invisible, spoken word, revealing itself over a duration–reader responses constantly drifting as it shifted into the mysterious future).

In the dynamic ambiance of ancient communications, these two modalities were one yet not one. This is easily misunderstood today. Thus, for instance, in “Confucianism: Scripture and Sage,” Rodney L. Taylor tries to simplify the problem; “there is an intriguing contrast to be made between China and the classical antiquity of Europe in terms of the visual and auditory metaphors of wisdom; while the Greeks saw, the Chinese heard! Thus the sage hears the ways of Heaven. There is also a very close philological relation between the word for sage, sheng, and the word t’ing, to hear, to acknowledge, to listen. In fact the word sage was often written as t’ing, emphasizing the capacity of the sage to hear” (183).

Considering the extreme prestige of caligraphy in China, however, one might say more accurately that, in East and West, sages both heard over a period of time and saw at a glance (even though those perceptions do not always report the same things). Typical of Occidental and Oriental scriptures, Revelation demands repeatedly that its audience “hear” (e.g., 1.3, 2.7, 2.11, 2.17, 2.29, 3.6, 3,13, 3,20, 3.22, 13.9) and “see” (e.g., 6.1, 6.3, 6.5, 6.7, 22.4). In Revelations’s Koine, even a “voice” (fo nen) is something one expects to “behold” (1.12). In a world defined by similar media, Europe and Asia, despite limited communications between the two, had comparable responses to time: “A sufficient search would reveal … that each major Oriental view [of time] had at least one independent advocate in the West” (Fraser 39). The primary difference is that the paradoxical mingling of orality and writing lasted longer in China. This endurance stems partly from the nature of the Chinese language, which, being essentially monosyllabic and possessed of relatively few sounds, consequently has an unusually high number of homonyms. In conversation, literate Chinese will trace a pictograph in their hands whenever the spoken word leads to confusion. The impediment of learning those pictographs has posed an unusual obstacle to increasing literacy in China. This difficulty enhances the prestige of the literate, the mysteriousness of scripture, and the effort necessary to transcribe or read it. Thus, both orality and literacy constitute extremely energetic traditions. In looking for analogs of Revelation’s acoustical literacy, China provides many in such preserves of the past as Tun—huang.

Continue to Revelation (2)