Revelation (3)–
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Crossing into the Hidden
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Dispersing, Growing. —I Ching, Hexagram 59 |
Confronted with any seeming jumble, chaologists look for repeating elements. Among these in the I Ching is a Great River (Ta Ch’uan), reoccurring both by that name and as k’an, one of the trigrams from which the I Ching is built. In an age before bridging could span large streams, crossing them was a dangerous step into the unknown and thus served as a natural analogy for the act of prognostication itself.
In the above Hexagram, the phrases juxtaposed or presented in parallel form are meant to be roughly equivalent to one another (as much an underlyingassumption in Chinese poetry as in Biblical). The words “Harvesting: wading the Great River” form a verse parallel to the line “Harvesting Trial” (li chen). Ritsema and Karcher explain the latter idiom as meaning “advantageous divination.” In the Hexagram, the crossing and the divinatory “trial” follow without transition the line, “The king imagines possessing a temple.” In other words, the same omen can appear as taking mental possession of a sacred precinct (a place for meeting the gods), wading a Great River, or engaging in the paranormal testing and questioning that the I Ching’s text provides. These are all versions of moving into the perilous Beyond. Comparably, in Hexagram 27, “Not permitting crossing the Great River” parallels “Rejecting the canons [the ching or scriptures, the I Ching among them].” Thus again, crossing a “Great River” is like believing in and using such writing as the I Ching.
In Revelation, the river of salvation flows within the Tree of life: “… on either side of the river [was] the tree of life…” (Rev. 22:2). This tree (and consequently the river flowing though it) may be an alternative version of the Book of Life: “the Tree of Life or the “heavenly book,” on the leaves or pages of which the fates of men were inscribed” (Eliade, Shamanism 393). Also in Revelation, sources of the terrifying powers that God unleashes include scrolls and waters. The forces are dynamic and therefore at least as appropriately associate themselves with water (a perennial image of sudden change) as with apocalyptic writing.
Indeed, the early idea of writing included two contrasting aspects:
(1) the lapidary and fixed, e.g., stone tablets; (2) the chaotic, e.g., ink or Tibetan
writing on wate (Thomas 1992, 19). Recall Numbers 5.12–31, where holy writing is
dissolved into a bitter
Potion as an ordeal.
J. Massingbyrde Ford notes influence of that trial on Revelation
10.9–11, where John consumes a scroll (Ford 164). This manuscript comes from the
hand of an angel with a rainbow on his head, one foot on the land, the other on the
sea. He crosses between water and land. His emblems include that bridgelike rainbow
and the scroll destined to dissolve within John (Belief in “the rainbow as road of
the gods and bridge between sky and earth” was a common motif in ancient mythology.
According to Eliade it was associated with the Shaman’s ecstatic ascent in the heavens.
He specifically cites Rev. 4.3 (a rainbow surrounding God) as part of that pattern.(
Eliade, Shamanism 134).
The liminal scene of textual consumption is a model for readers of Revelation, themselves
digesting a work as bitter and sweet as the scroll. They are to see themselves on
trial and in transition. Although they may hope for a decision in their favor, the
situation is still fluid and unpredictable like Revelation itself. In almost a single
breath, for instance, it foretells the damnation of the Laodiceans (3.16) and hopes
for their redemption (3.19).
Revelation and the I Ching make more conspicuous use of the fluid than of the lapidary aspect of writing. As evidenced by sheer number of interpretations, the exact configuration of images in canonical works is typically elusive. Confronting complexity, readers sometimes substitute simple conflations for more elaborate guess work. For instance, instead of speculating about various waters and crossings, they may imagine a single, definitive transit through one stream to an ultimate goal. Thus, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress reprocesses diverse Biblical images from Revelation and elsewhere into the protagonist’s passing a river into the heavenly city (In the ending of Pilgrim’s Progress, allusions to Revelation include both specific citations (e.g. 5.13, 19.9, 21.18, 22.14) as well as more general images in common such as angels with trumpets and the Last Judgement). Bunyan’s Chinese contemporary Chih–hsu Ou–i explains the Fording–the–Great–River (She Ta Ch’uan) motif in the I Ching: “in the end one can cross the great river of birth and death, and climb up onto the shore beyond, which is great ultimate nirvana.” (Cleary, The Buddhist I Ching, 39).
Despite considerable popularity, however, neither Pilgrim’s Progress nor Chih–hsu Ou–i’s commentary on the I Ching enjoys the canonical status of the works on which they are based. Mere simplicity lacks a chamelionlike quality—the adaptive appearance of seeming to speak about the ever–changing, near future. Amorphousness, however, is not enough, or else Finnegan’s Wake would have become scripture. Also requisite is the faithful’s conviction that the obscurity reflects a supernatural vision of what cannot be made more clear, e.g., the Tao Te Ching’s initial assertion that the Tao cannot be expressed literally. Comparably, for St. Paul (or whoever wrote I Corinthians 13.12), “we see through a glass darkly.” In Revelation, a celestial voice makes explicit that the text is no full exposition of the future;
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And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write: but I heard a voice from heaven saying, Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down. And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and land lifted up his hand to heaven and swore by him that lives for ever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth, and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it, that there should no more delay [literally “no more time”], but that in the days of the trumpet call to be sounded bt the seventh angel, the mystery of God should be finished, as he announced to his servants the prophet, should be fulfilled. (Revelation 10.4–10.7) |
The above phrase “his servants the prophets” also appears in a similar passage in
a Dead Sea Scroll (1QpHab 7:1-5; Ford 163). Both indicate that the prophetic writings
are mysteries and their meaning will be accessible to the reader almost immediately,
but not quite yet. Mystery (raz) is a common word in those scrolls as also
in Daniel (Ford 163). In both it implies “that everything that exists or ever has
existed or ever will exist does so because in the very beginning the God of knowledge
established its design and destiny.… all graven before God …,” albeit, hidden to
humanity (Coh 189).
Interestingly, Hexagram 4 of the I Ching interprets obscurity as auspicious. The situation is (tu), meaning “confuse, muddy, agitate; muddled, cloudy, turbid; agitated water; annoy through repetition.” These examples of clouds, turbulent water, and, above all, extreme iteration further call to mind chaos. In the hexagram, the condition is of youthful innocence expected to have a successful outcome. According to one of the basic assumptions of the I Ching, Yin (meaning wet, dark, et cetera.) “is the murkiness that gradually clarifies.” Since everything changes, a turbid beginning (and consequently obscurity itself) is propitious. The tendency is to trust the natural “far–from–equilibrium” order to lead toward meaning. Thus, the ancient Taoist Khang taught, “When we walk we should not know where we are going,” but unconsciously follow the Tao (Legge 1891, 502). The late biblical and early post–biblical assumption is not altogether different: the darkness will yield to revelation (albeit, as a result of divine faithfulness rather than, as in Taoism, through a natural process).
The chaotic mysteriousness of such texts as the I Ching and Revelation resembles descriptions of modern clairvoyants at work, e.g., one in Michael Crichton’s Travels: “As time went on, I began to notice patterns in the way the psychics behaved. For example, the psychics tended to circle around things. They were like blind people touching a statue on all sides, trying to figure out what it represented. They got bits and pieces of the whole. And they tended to repeat themselves. Just as if they were going around and around something, trying to feel it, to give their impressions” (218). The I Ching is like a distilation of this fragmentary repetitiveness, particularly as the commentators added their own intuitions and gropings. Revelation somewhat smooths and expands the circling. Nonetheless, its array of disasters has repetitions resembling cycling or flux reduced to numbers.
As already mentioned, letter mysticism branched into numerology, particularly gematria, changing words into numbers and back again. For instance, “Early Christians arrived at the dove for the symbol of Christ, because the Greek letters of alpha and omega (the Beginning and the End) and the Greek term for dove, peristera, add up to the same number, 801” (Guiley 230). Obviously, the 666 of Revelation is meant to be gematria, but its referent remains unknown (although Nero is the leading candidate). Numbers are emphasized throughout Revelation, most conspicuously the pervasive sevens. The sixteen–thousand stadia of Armagedon is the four corners of the world squared then multiplied by the magic number one thousand while the one–hundred–forty–four thousand survivers from the tribes of Israel is again one thousand times the number of tribes squared (Martindale 105; Schimmel 73). The sixty–four hexagrams of the I Ching are its eight basic patterns squared.
Reader responses to both works have continued to play with its
numbers and other symbols, e.g., centuries of search for the 666 of Revelation. The
Chinese built whole systems of meditation, exercise, and martial arts based on the
I Ching’s patterns, with crossing the Great River, for instance, interpreted by one
Tai–Chi scholar as “crossing the great water of the abdomen and mouth” (liu 11).
The I Ching influenced folklore as well, e.g., “Though the members of the group have
changed from time to time, the choice of eight [immortals] was apparently an attempt
to give the eight trigrams in the Book of Changes human form. As such, the
eight immortals are said to represent various sets of yin–yang relationships, such
as first and last, old and young, male and female, beautiful and ugly” (Porter 210).
The obscure patterns can seem more accessible if they are personified—a practice
chaology almost defends by showing chaos self–organizing as if it were alive.
Personified Texts as Models of Character
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Written discourse [is] born out of a primary gap and a primary expatriation, condemning it to wandering and blindness, to mourning. —Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
—Aksamalikopani.s ad |
Likewise, a Targum on Isaiah 30:33 writes: “… the Memra (Word)
of the Lord [is] like a mighty river” (Ford 315 and 322). As for the Word as the
long–sought Great Person, Christ is “Word of God” (Rev. 19:13). He is Alpha and Omega,
Holy Alphabet. “The Hebrew would be aleph and taw, probably standing
respectively for Urim and Thummim, the sacred lots of the high priest used
to determine the will of God…” (Ford 379). The Word is aleatory, likened to cast
omens.
He is also represented by scrolls and seals: “In Near Eastern Civilizations, the seal’s potential for replicating a prototype gave it talismanic properties; it was treated as Doppelgänger of the original owner, allowing him to manifest himself whenever and wherever it was used” (Steiner 114). Extensions of holy language, those who have “kept [Christ’s] word and … not denied [his] name” will become at once words and pillars of righteousness: “[each will be] a pillar in the temple of my God; never shall he go out of it: and I shall write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, [which is] the new Jerusalem, which comes down from heaven from my God out of heaven: and [I will write upon him] my own new name” (Rev. 3.12).
Here identity promises to become static, written in stone, but
the very next verse reminds readers that this has not yet occurred: “He who has an
ear, let him hear what the Spirit [Tongue of Flame, Holy Wind] says to the churches”
(3.13). Again in Revelation 2.17, the faithful have new names written on stone: “To
him who conquers …I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone,
which no one knows except him who receives it.” Complexly associating the faithful
with the Great Person, they are to have a secret name, the name of God, the name
of Jerusalem, and the new name of Christ. Even after the time of flux when seals,
scrolls and celestial discourse yields fire and flood, inscribed identity will still
be as polymorphous as the Word.
Sacrifice
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Sacrifices offered to the spirits and Gods were not just bribes or pleas. They opened communication between humans and spirits so a dialogue could take place. —Rudolf Ritsema and Stephen Karcher, I Ching
—Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus |
Kamenetz interestingly suggests that even the Name of God, usually
considered eternally holy, must be sanctified by the symbolic death of the faithful.
For Judaism, of course, God cannot Himself die to redeem that Name, but in Revelation
he does, acquiring a new designation. Indeed, the Lamb is worthy to open the scroll
because he was sacrificed (5.9), implying that his worthiness comes not from His
Nature but from that sacrifice, which has changed His Name.
As spiritual transformation through literal or figurative sacrifice
underlies Revelation, so does it also permeate the I Ching. Thirty eight of its sixty
four Hexagrams have in the Huangs’ translation some form of the phrase “Sign of the
Sacrifice.” Eight of these term the Sacrifice “Great.” Two refer instead to a “small”
sacrifice. On the most prosaic level, the I Ching was probably used to determine
if the time was auspicious for sacrifice and whether the immolation should be average,
large or small. Consequently, the basic assumption was that not every moment is ripe
for oblation and the offering must be suited to the occasion. Here the I Ching contrasts
most obviously with Revelation, which concerns a critical time (kairos) that
will require overwhelming sacrifice (e.g., those who “shed the blood … [as] saints
and prophets,” 16.6).
In addition to the calls for sacrifice, the I Ching employs other imagery of oblation. Hexagram 20 concerns a sacrifice discontinued in the middle, bringing disaster (Huang 110). Hexagram 35 commemorates the presenting of horses. Hexagram 41 refers to food “fit for sacrificial rites” Huang 152). More interestingly, Hexagram 57, includes the verses, “Crouching under the bed./ The shaman smears blood on you./ All’s well” (Huang 184). In a rather modern way, the Huangs explain, “Allowing fears and self–doubt to control our actions impedes our ability to make progress, just as crouching never gets us anywhere. A ritual cleansing is indicated, to clear out our regrets and doubts and dispel our most hidden fears” (185).
Quite possibly, the I Ching assumes that the cowering in fear comes
from some very real guilt or magical contamination that must be ceremonially purified
with literal blood. Revelation defines Christ as “him that loved us, and washed us
from our sins in his own blood” (1.5)—a creative mixture of figurative and literal
in its conflation of baptism and crucifixion. Because of the association with violence
and pain, blood is an even–more vivid image of chaos than water and thus a powerful
medium of initiatory transformation.
The polymorphous line that the Huangs render in terms of blood baptism also suggests that annalists (shih) and shamans “tangle” (fên), yet this confusion is auspicious. Annalists (i.e., scribes) appear as parallel to shamans, magic workers whose obscure texts lead through chaos to higher order. In the same chapter of Revelation, John presents Christ as shamanic washer with blood and as Alpha and Omega, so that if the images were combined they would suggest a wounded alphabet. In a certain sense, both the I Ching and Revelation undergo an oblation of meaning—the literal sacrificed as readers/hearers rise to higher levels of discourse in a painful struggle with paradox and obscurity.
Continue to Revelation (4)
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