Archetype of the Apocalypse

Revelation – Flooding of Images from the Unconscious

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

 

Are we facing the end of times?  Many believe that we are – some of them are environmentalists, observing the degradation of our natural world.  Some are observers of so-called weapons of mass destruction, that are falling into more and more unstable hands.  Many are religious folks, not all of them Christian, who feel that we have been living on borrowed time and that the illusion of this world is soon to pass away.  Carl Jung himself could be called apocalyptic – he purportedly believed that the unconscious was not going to allow this experiment to go on much longer, perhaps only until 2012.  Whatever the basis for their beliefs, apocalyptic thinkers are common.  In this series, we will not be exploring the factual basis or plausibility that we are facing literal mass annihilation.  Instead, we will explore apocalyptic thinking in terms of archetypal patterns.  Since apocalyptic imagery has been around from thousands of years, at least, and has manifest in many world cultures, it must, indeed, be archetypal.

 

To place the Archetype of Apocalypse into the Jungian perspective, it’s important to remember the underlying divine program or process described by Jung.  The Self longs to become manifest in the world of humankind, in the world of consciousness.  It attempts to do so on the individual level – in the forms of dreams, visions, synchronicities, and so on – but much of the time the individual ego resists the intrusion.  As a consequence, these dreams, visions, synchronicities, and other manifestations of the Self have a tendency to become more and more gripping, more intrusive, more difficult to ignore or dismiss.  They can even bring about a psychic break if the ego is not prepared for the experience.  That’s all on the individual level.  There is also a collective level to this process.  Masses of people come under the influence of archetypal energies, which have their origin in the Self.  That which is denied on the individual level is projected into the collective level.  In his book Answer to Job, Jung actually talks about two books of the Bible:  The Book of Job, and the Book of Revelation.  One might say that the Book of Job describes the process of an individual confronting the unconscious, while the Book of Revelation describes the whole of humanity confronting the unconscious.  Another central Jungian concept is that experiences denied on the individual level tend to become played out on the collective level.  Unfortunately, while consciousness has a decent chance of emerging as a consequence of the individual encounter with the Self, the prospects are much bleaker for encounters on the collective level.  Such collective encounters are much more likely to end in war, holocaust – perhaps even the end of the human race as we have known it.  That’s the theme in the Book of Revelation.

 

For the primary text for this lecture series, I will draw upon the work of Edward Edinger, whose last book was titled Archetype of the Apocalypse:  Divine Vengeance, Terrorism, and the End of the World.  Although this book was published just after Edinger’s death in 1998, its relevance in our post-September 11 era is striking.  In keeping with Edinger’s analysis of the archetype, we will explore four main aspects of apocalypse:  revelation, judgement, destruction, and new world.  We will also draw upon the last book of the Christian Bible, The Revelation of John, for illustrative imagery. 

 

If you ask the average person what “apocalypse” means, they will probably say “the end of the world.”  In fact, “apocalypse” is a Greek term meaning “revelation of what was once hidden.”   We Jungians are well aware of the concept of revelation of what was once hidden to us, what lay in the unconscious, just out of conscious reach.  Every night, when the Self presents us with dreams, we have a revelation of sorts.  Occasionally, we may have a flash of insight, or become gripped with an image during waking life – also forms of revelation.  There are some among use – Jung suggests that the author of the Book of Revelation was one of these – who are ill prepared for the onslaught of such unconscious imagery, and are overwhelmed by it.  They become passive witnesses to images that shock and horrify.  In his book Answer to Job, Jung describes it this way:

 

Let us be psychologically correct, however: it is not the conscious mind of John that thinks up these fantasies, they come to him in a vio­lent "revelation." ... he is a passionately religious person with an oth­erwise well-ordered psyche. But he must have an intensive relationship to God which lays him open to an invasion far tran­scending anything personal. The really religious person, in whom the capacity for an unusual extension of consciousness is inborn, must be prepared for such dangers.

The purpose of the apocalyptic visions is not to tell John, as an ordinary human being, how much shadow he hides beneath his lumi­nous nature, but to open the seer's eye to the immensity of God, for he who loves God will know God. We can say that just because John loved God and did his best to love his fellows also, this "gnosis," this knowledge of God, struck him.

 

So, in other words, we would be mistaken to dismiss the author of the Book of Revelation as a crazy person, or to seek the meaning of the imagery in his personal psychology alone.  Edinger says, “John’s visions opened him up to the immensity of the collective unconscious.”  (page 12)  These revelations reflect more than the author’s individual process of coming into relationship with unconscious forces.  His visions were collective in nature – the revelation was not just to him, but to his contemporaries, and to modern society, as well.

 

It’s telling that John had his visions while imprisoned on the island of Patmos. This is a fitting image for limitation or narrowing of consciousness, a literal imprisonment and isolation.  John hears a voice from behind him; this tells us that he is harkening to something from the unconscious.  From that point forward, John is a passive observer of a flood of images, which he then recounts in vivid, often terrifying, detail.

 

Psychologically speaking, this is a very common scenario.  Someone who has been living in a very narrow spectrum of consciousness is suddenly broken out of their narrowness by a torrent of long-ignored unconscious contents.  This, in itself, is neither good nor bad.  The critical question is:  how does the ego handle the situation?  Some egos simply crack under the strain.  They go insane, have a psychotic break.  They project these internal happenings entirely into the external world and suffer from hallucinations.  Other egos seek to explore, understand, and relate to these contents, growing and individuating in the process.  Unfortunately, John provides an example more akin to the first reaction rather than the second.

 

There is far too much imagery in the Book of Revelation for any sort of comprehensive analysis in our short time together.  Instead, let’s explore a couple of scenes from the book, just to give a sense of what images emerge from the archetype of apocalypse.  The first vision of John is a logical place to start.  What did he see when he turned to observe that voice behind him?  Here is what he describes:

 

I saw seven golden lamp-stands and, in the middle of them, one like a Son of man, dressed in a long robe tied at the waist with a belt of gold. His head and his hair were white with the whiteness of wool, like snow, his eyes like a burning flame, his feet like burnished bronze when it has been refined in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of the ocean. In his right hand he was holding seven stars, out of his mouth came a sharp sword, double-edged, and his face was like the sun shining with all its force. (1:12—16)

 

Imagine having a waking vision like this!  What sort of ego could survive such an encounter?  Certainly, if the ego had no context for the experience – either religious or psychological – it would shake the very foundations of reality.  John had a religious context – he interpreted what he saw as an encounter with Jesus, and that his role was to passive record what he witnessed in order to recount it to the world.  Jung, of course, would propose a psychological context.  This is an encounter with the Self, one with a distinctly apocalyptic archetypal character.  This of course, is no trivial difference in interpretations.  If you are a religious fundamentalist, you dismiss deeper meaning, and you believe that Jesus literally manifest in this way, and that all the predictions contained in the Book of Revelation will literally come to pass.  Fantastic beast will literally rise from earth and sea to ravage the earth;  four literal men on literal horses will come from the sky.  The psychological interpretation takes a bit more digging to find the true meaning.

 

So, let’s dig a bit into this first vision of John.  It contains themes which reappear multiple times in the remainder of the book.  First, the groupings of seven objects.  Later, there are seven seals, seven churches, and a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes.  Why the number seven?  According to Edinger, seven symbolizes the process of psychological transformation, usually depicted as moving through seven stages as part of an initiation process. (page 57)  In part, this is because seven is the sum of 3 and 4.  Three represents egohood, in that it is linked to sequences that are traversed in time and space (past, present, future; beginning, middle, end).  Four, on the other hand, is a number of wholeness and completion, and, thus, linked to eternity.  Quoting Edinger directly:  “I suggest that 3 refers to a process of an ego-based operation that has the possibility of leading to the experience of the Self from the standpoint of the ego.  On the other hand, 7 refers to a process of a Self-based dynamic sequence, leading to an experience of the Self from the standpoint of the Self . . .7 is the process whereby the Self comes into realization through its own terms.”  (page 58)  That is a scary proposition to the conventional ego, that does not easily accept the prospect of an autonomous entity greater than itself.

What about the imagery of “seven lights”?  Often, in mythology and dream, lights represent the ability to see in the darkness, and thus operate something like eyes.  In the biblical book of Zechariah, the prophets says that God has seven eyes which range over the whole world, looking into what’s happening on earth.  So, at the outset, the Book of Revelation is telling us that God is watching us, that we are being observed.

 

Next, let’s discuss the idea of the Son of man.  It is important to note the difference between Son of man and Son of God when applied to Jesus.  To refer to Jesus as Son of man is to point out that he is the product of the human ego, in the same sense that alchemical texts refer to the stone, the opus of the alchemical work, as the filius philosophorum or “son of the philosophers.”  Human beings have had, and continue to have, and ongoing role in manifesting the divine on the earthly plane through the process of individuation.

 

What of the imagery of the brilliant white light from the Sun?   Remember, John was supposedly having this vision at a very bleak point in his life – a dark night of the soul, as it were.  The image, therefore, is at least somewhat compensatory.    This image is also very consistent with the overall Christian approach, that there will be an ultimate light that forever banishes the darkness.  Later in the Book of Revelation, darkness does reappear with a vengeance, leading ultimately to a balancing of these opposites that occurs at the end of the story.

 

Then there is the image of a sword emerging from the mouth.  Both the sword and the mouth refer back to a central Christian theme, the idea of Logos, of that force, equated with Word or language, divides totalities into categories and allows for rational analysis.  The sword also calls to mind the alchemical process known as separatio, which is the process by which things that have become interpenetrated and amalgamated can be sorted out, like the wheat from the chaff.  Psychological speaking, separatio is an essential process for analyzing unconscious contents that have become contaminated with one another so that one can come to grips with them in their individual significance.  For instance, due to Christian theology, both the feminine and dark evil have been cast out of the godhead and sent into the unconscious, where they have contaminated one another.  Hence the many times when the feminine has been regarded as evil in our culture.  It is important to apply the process of separatio to separate these archetypal contents, to know each in their fullness.  And, of course, this theme of separatio will reappear over and over again throughout the Book of Revelation.

 

All of that imagery, just in the first few lines of the Book of Revelation!  No wonder reading this book is such a daunting task, and no wonder that there have been such wildly divergent interpretations of this book.

 

From this point, a flood of images present themselves to John.  There are seven angels and seven messages to seven churches.  There is a mandala – a divine throne in the center, an outer circle of 24 elders, four animal-like entities, seven lights, and a surrounding sea of glass.  There is a scroll with seven seals, opened by a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns.  There are the infamous four horsemen of the apocalypse – a white one, a black one, a red one, and a pale one – who unleash miseries on the earth.  There is an unlocking of the abyss, unleashing darkness and stinging locusts.  John is instructed to eat a scroll, which tastes like honey but sours the stomach, and then he measures God’s sanctuary.  We will come back to some of these passages in future lectures, but for today, I would like to explore Chapter 12, which Edinger considers to contain the pivotal revelations in the book:  The Sun-Moon Woman and the War in Heaven.  First, I will read these passages in their entirety:

 

 AFTER that there appeared a great sign in heaven: a woman robed with the sun,  beneath her feet the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was about to bear a child, and in the anguish of her labor she cried out to be delivered. Then a second sign appeared in heaven: a great, fiery red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. On his heads were seven diadems, and with his tail he swept down a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that when her child was born he might devour it. But when she gave birth to a male child, who is destined to rule all nations with a rod of iron, the child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman herself fled into the wilderness, where she was to be looked after for twelve hundred and sixty days in a place prepared for her by God.

Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon with his angels fought back, but he was too weak, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who led the whole world astray, whose name is the Devil, or Satan; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels with him.

I heard a loud voice in heaven proclaim: `This is the time of victory for our God, the time of his power and sover­eignty, when his Christ comes to his rightful rule! For the accuser of our brothers, he who day and night accused them before our God, is overthrown. By the sacrifice of the Lamb and by the witness they bore, they have conquered him; faced with death they did not cling to life.  Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you that dwell in them! But woe to you, earth and sea, for the Devil has come down to you in great fury, knowing that his time is short!

When the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he went in pursuit of the woman who had given birth to the male child. But she was given the wings of a mighty eagle, so that she could fly to her place in the wilderness where she was to be looked after for three and a half years, out of reach of the serpent. From his mouth the serpent spewed a flood of water after the woman to sweep her away with its spate. But the earth came to her rescue: it opened its mouth and drank up the river which the dragon spewed from his mouth. Furious with the woman, the dragon went off to wage war on the rest of her offspring, those who keep God's com­mandments and maintain their witness to

Jesus. He took his stand on the seashore.

 

What makes this passage so special?  For one thing, the passage about the Sun-Moon woman is devoid of allusions and references to other books of the Bible – the rest of Revelation is filled with them.  Instead, this image bears a striking resemblance to the Greek story of the birth of Apollo and Artemis on the island of Delos.  In addition, there is striking alchemical imagery depicted here concerning the coming together of opposites, a coniunctio, which is not quite ready for the earth (is taken up to heaven, to the unconscious).  Edinger refers to the significance of the sun-moon woman passage as follows:

 

I think we could say that this particular visionary episode embedded in the very middle of the Apocalypse of John is the living heart of the entire vision, understood psychologically. It is buried, as a rela­tively quiet little episode, in the midst of all the sound and fury of the apocalypse. This passage in chapter 12 is clearly an authentic spontaneous expression of coniunctio symbolism and even demon­strates its authenticity by the fact that it sits outside the elaborate fabric of textual parallels containing the rest of the text. And the very fact that this imagery derives from a pagan source further veri­fies its psychological authenticity. Jung says as much:

 

The fact that John uses the myth of Leto and Apollo in describing the birth may be an indication that the vision, in contrast to the Christian tradition, is a product of the unconscious. But in the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one's consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave, if in the rejected heathenism there are values which are important for life—if, that is to say, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water, as so often happens

Indeed, the supreme value is to he found embedded in this Greek or so-called heathen imagery; because it is the symbol of wholeness. It is the image of totality, the coniunctio: That is the "baby."

 

Now we turn to the portion of the passage that deals with the war in heaven.  Psychologically speaking, John has had a vision of the split that occurred in the godhead, between light and dark, with darkness and evil being cast out.  Where does it end up?  On the earth – in other words, in the realm of the ego.  God is only goodness and light; the ego is responsible for all darkness and evil.  This has built up a progressive tension, which may, indeed, only be resolved through a terrible compensation, a catastrophe of unprecedented impact, a full shift of human consciousness.

 

To sum up, we have been exploring one of the four aspects of the Archetype of Apocalypse, the aspect of revelation.  The individual and the collective come face to face with the reality of the psyche, in the form of visions that are overwhelming and irrefutable.  There is a literal flooding of consciousness with images from the unconscious, and the author of the New Testament Book of Revelation is an excellent example of this.  In the weeks ahead, we will talk about four additional aspects of the archetype – judgment, destruction, and the coming of a new world.  Again, the Book of Revelation is rich with imagery of these additional aspects.