Copyright © 1982, 2013, Victoria University

LECTURE TRANSCRIPT: Lecture 7

THE WORLD OF ANGELS

I was speaking about some of the sacrificial images in the Bible associated with its agricultural symbolism, which form part of the general table of imagery we've been dealing with. We've said that these symbols on the idealized side have both a group form and an individual form. Now in that table, all of these categories are metaphorically identical with one another, and the group form and the individual form are united by what I've been calling the royal metaphor, the metaphor which combines identity as with identity with. So that the individual and the group forms are likewise identified: the garden and the tree of life are essentially the same thing.

In the New Testament, Jesus is represented explicitly, when instituting the Eucharist, as identifying the bread and wine of the Eucharist supper with his own body and blood, as both a human and an animal victim: the shepherd giving his life for the sheep, and the sacrificial lamb, which is the antitype of the Passover. Now the statements in the New Testament are too explicit for historical Christianity to avoid, considering what these metaphors mean in that context. And of course any consideration of a principle like that in historical Christianity leads eventually to persecution and heretic-burning and everything else. But such things merely muddle the actual picture of what's going on. There have been various doctrines: the Roman Catholic doctrine, which is the pure metaphor, that the bread and wine of the host are the body and blood of Christ; and the Lutheran consubstantial theory that the bread and wine are the body and blood of God because God is universal, and so on. These are all conceptualized or rationalized translations of a metaphor into another kind of language. Unfortunately there's a very strong smell of intellectual mortality about these rationalized translations: sooner or later they disappear and we're right back to the metaphor. Nobody can deal with a metaphor except by something like Saint Patrick's shamrock expounding the doctrine of the Trinity. The actual statement is a metaphor, and the function of the metaphor is to release the imagination by paralyzing the discursive reason. It's like the koan in Zen Buddhism. The general tendency in historical Christianity is, so far as is possible, to consider these other metaphorical identifications as 'just' metaphor" That is in keeping with the rationalistic distortions of Biblical imagery, which is essentially a metaphorical structure.

The identification of the categories with one another is clear enough: the city is described as Jerusalem, the bride adorned for her husband, and consequently identified with the human category. And if all the buildings in a city are one building—a house of many mansions—it follows that all the buildings are one stone. Consequently, you find in Biblical imagery the body of Christ identified with the one stone. There's a verse in the Psalms saying, 'The stone that the builders rejected is made the head of the corner'. That's quoted three or four times in the New Testament: it obviously was a very important verse to them. But the cornerstone of the Temple is again part of this metaphorical structure. And as this is a world in which nothing can ever be dead it follows that the stones are as much alive as anything else.

In the Book of Revelation, the churches are told that 'To him that overcometh will I give… a white stone'. But the white stone there has a metaphorical connection with the man's body. We are told later on that an angel came out who was clad in what the King James Bible calls 'white linen', but 'linen', again, is a rationalized translation, because there's far better textural evidence for lithon, stone. Consequently, you have to include a dimension of symbolism in which human beings are also, as the Epistle of Peter says, lively stones.

We've already seen various identifications of the body of Christ with the tree of life, as in the word 'anointed', and various other explicit references. That gives a special importance in the Gospels to those 'I' metaphors where Jesus says 'I am the vine, ye are the branches', 'I am the door,' 'I am the Way' and so on. These 'I' metaphors are insisting on the metaphorical identification of all these categories of reality in the world that he's talking about—his spiritual kingdom.

This isn't all the universe, of course. There is also the world between God and man, the spiritual world. The group form of the spiritual world consists of angels or messengers. Now the function of angels in the Bible is of some interest and importance. In the hierarchy of existence they are above human life, but in the apocalypse, all these categories are not a hierarchy anymore: they are all interchangeable, and consequently all equal. Therefore, there are some sharp warnings in the New Testament against the dangers of worshipping angels. Angels are fellow creatures of man: their function is that of messenger, and they are not to be regarded with the feelings of adoration that one would reserve for God.

The question is, where does the imagery of angels come from? And the obvious answer is, that it comes from 'up there'. That is, the imagery of this world is derived from the categories of ordinary existence, and the categories of ordinary existence are permeated by the conceptions of up and down. You can raise all kinds of both theological and scientific objections to such a story as that of the Ascension of Christ in the first chapter of Acts, where he sails up into the air and 'a cloud received him out of their sight'. We are by no means the first generation to ask, well, where did he go from there? Did he just sail into outer space, or what? The answer is that this is the mythological universe, and there is no outer space in the mythological universe. In the universe of nature, there is no such thing as up or down: in the mythological universe, there is nothing else.

And so, the tendency to think of hell as 'down there' and of heaven as 'up there' is built into our mythological ways of thinking. I think as long as the human body has a top and a bottom it's likely to be read into the symbolism of the mythological universe that man lives in. The temple, for example, in all the nations surrounding Israel, the holy building, the ziggurat in the Mesopotamian or Persian cities, was thought of as a tower stretching from earth to heaven, and as, consequently, a connecting point between man and God. I imagine that the basis for the imagery is the basis of the human body. The spatial difficulties in the matter, of course, do give trouble in rationalizing the imagery, but as long as it remains metaphorical it doesn't have to be rationalized.

Consequently, the only place for the imagery of the angels to come from is the sky. Now there are two levels of the sky: the upper level, which is the fire level, and the lower level, or the air level. The fire level is derived from the sun and the stars, the fiery bodies in the sky. The other level is the level of clouds and the air and birds.

There are two kinds of angels mentioned in the Bible, the seraphim and the cherubim, and in later iconography they were associated respectively with tongues of flame and with birds in the sky. Later iconography got very elaborate and developed a system of nine orders of angels, but they retained those two as the spirits of love and contemplation. In medieval pictures where angels appear, you will see the seraphim colored red and the cherubim colored blue.

The seraphim come into the vision of Isaiah in Isaiah 6, where again the seraphim were associated with fire: they take a hot coal off the altar and put it on the prophet's lips to make him articulate. The cherubim are seen in Ezekiel's vision at the beginning of the Book of Ezekiel of a curious vehicle that has wheels within wheels and is drawn around by four living beings: that is, angel figures which have the forms of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Those four living beings of Ezekiel's vision reappear in the Book of Revelation, where they are seen surrounding the throne of God.

From a Christian point of view, what Ezekiel saw was the Son or Word of God. Consequently, these living creatures that drew his chariot could be typologically identified with the writers of the four Gospels, who carried the message of Christianity all around the world. And so, if you look again at medieval pictures of Christ, you will usually see these four living beings in the corners, representing the four Gospels—Matthew the man, and Mark the lion, (as you will remember if you've ever been to Venice, which is under the patronage of Saint Mark), Luke the ox and John the eagle. The opening words of the Gospel of John, 'In the beginning was the Word', are regarded as the most sacred utterance in Christianity, and it is very largely because of that that churches still have lecterns in the shape of an eagle.

The group of angels is, of course, all one Spirit, later considered to be the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. And so there are two aspects to the imagery of the Holy Spirit also: fire imagery and a cloud, air and bird imagery. He is associated with tongues of flame descending from the sky like lightning, and also with the wind and birds, typically the dove, which has been the chosen bird just as sheep has been the chosen animal.

The dove has a reputation for chastity that I think would soon be exploded with any careful observation of them. As a matter of fact, I suspect that the reason for choosing them is precisely the opposite: doves were the birds that were sacred to Venus, and whether it's Christian love or pagan love, the dove's qualifications for being the typical bird of love are always in the foreground. We are told in the Synoptic Gospels that at the baptism of Christ, the spirit of God in the form of a dove was seen descending on him. Jesus says to Nicodemus, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth' and goes on to associate wind and spirit.

You notice that quite a lot of things happen to the four elements in apocalyptic imagery. We've already dealt with the water of life: we've said that the description of the garden of Eden seems to assume a fresh-water sea below the actual salt sea and waters above the heavens which are much higher up than the rain clouds. So the suggestion is that man is in the middle of the water of life, and that in a higher state of being, he could live in the water of life, which has a good deal to do with the fishing imagery connected with Christianity and the identification of Jesus with the fish in some contexts.

Similarly, it's a world where the inanimate no longer exists, where the stones are alive, so that earth becomes a part of a living world. It follows, therefore, that there must be a fire of life as well as a water of life, and that all of these elements can be seen as living in the fire of life in the apocalyptic vision. The fire of life is a fire that burns without burning up. At the beginning of the Book of Exodus, Moses sees a bush burning, which nevertheless doesn't burn up. This puzzles him, so he turns aside to see why: it turns out to be the place of the theophany, of the revelation of the future of Israel. The burning tree is also symbolized by the candlestick so important in Jewish ritual—and in Christian too, in another context.

When John the Divine, in the Book of Revelation, has a vision of the city of Jerusalem, he sees it as glowing with gold and precious stones. He takes that from the account of the building of Solomon's Temple. The account of Solomon's Temple, by the narrator of the Book of Kings, says that nobody thought of silver in those days; they only put gold on, and several centuries later we have the Book of Chronicles where the author is using the Book of Kings as a source, but is so far away in time from what he's describing that it's become a kind of romantic fairytale. The Chronicler tells you that the Temple of Solomon, though in its dimensions a rather modest building, actually was constructed with something like twenty tons of gold. Similarly, in the Book of Revelation, the New Jerusalem is described in terms of gold, and as having twelve gates which are each one a precious stone or jewel. That in its turn is the antitype of the breastplate of the high priest Aaron, which contained the twelve precious stones for the twelve tribes of Israel. So this city, glowing with gold and precious stones, is not there because the narrators are vulgar, and it's not there solely to be the antitype of certain things mentioned in the Old Testament. The gold and the precious stones are there to suggest a city burning in the fire of life: a city which is constantly burning, but is not burning up. The fire is an image of life and exuberance and energy, but not of torment or destruction.

If you set a bird on fire, you'll get of course a phoenix, which is not in the canonical Bible except for a reference in the Book of Job, which the cautious King James translators have rendered something like 'sands'. But the phoenix comes into folklore very early, both in the books surrounding the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, and in Classical mythology from Herodotus on, and the bird that burns and rises from it to be a bigger and better phoenix consequently becomes an image of the Resurrection. The phoenix appears on the coat of arms of Victoria College. It ought to represent the Faculty of Theology, but again the original designers were more cautious and put it there as a symbol of medicine: they knew that that at least might do you some good. There's also a wonderful poem by an Elizabethan poet, a Jesuit, Robert Southwell, who was martyred, tortured about a dozen times by the secret police, and finally killed. His poem called 'The Burning Babe' is a poem about Christmas Day, in which the rising sun is identified with a burning babe who is the newborn Christ.

I don't know how familiar you may be with Mozart's Magic Flute, which is built on a symbolism that's said to be derived from Freemasonry, but at the very end of the story the hero goes through the final ordeal, which is the ordeal of water and fire. And evidently the assumption is that he acquires, symbolically at least, the power to live in all four elements and not simply on earth and air.

I've been constructing a table of imagery in which in each category one has an idealized or apocalyptic and a demonic side. There is the paradisal imagery of trees and water, and on the demonic side the wasteland imagery of dead trees and dead water. There are angels, with their imagery derived from the fire world of heavenly bodies, and the air world of birds, and on the demonic side there are fire demons, the jack-o-­lanterns, will o' the wisps over marshes, and spirits of storm and tempest.

On one side we have Christ, who is the unifying figure of the apocalyptic world, and opposite him Antichrist, the world ruler who demands divine worship. The latter is, of course, a figure that is pre-Christian: it's in the Old Testament as well. Its types are the Pharaoh of the Exodus; Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Jerusalem, and Antiochus Epiphanes, the persecutor of the Jews just before the Maccabean rebellion. And the imagery carries on into the New Testament period, where the type of persecutor is Nero, although a predecessor of Nero, Caligula, also expressed a strong desire to place his statue in the Holy of Holies. In the animal category, there is the sheepfold, with the sheep and the lamb as the typical animals of the apocalyptic world—as in the 23rd Psalm and elsewhere; and opposed to that there is the beast of prey, the sinister animal, of which perhaps the best example is the dragon. The dragon is a particularly useful demonic animal, not just because of its antisocial habits of breathing fire and eating virgins, but also because it doesn't exist, and is consequently an admirable animal for illustrating the paradox of evil, which is a very powerful moral force in human life as we know it, but in the apocalyptic world becomes simply nothingness, simply cannot exist at all. And that, perhaps, is why the author of Revelation speaks of the dragon as 'the beast that was and is not and yet is'. That last 'is' in Greek is parestai: which means, continuing for the time being.

There is a myth in which creation takes the form of a dragon-killing. The Hebrews were quite familiar with the story: they constantly employed it, and by no means always in a demonic context. They used it simply as poetic imagery, that is, not as a myth that they believed to be factual, but simply as decorative. The dragon of chaos has various names in the Bible, but the most common is the name Leviathan and sometimes Rahab.

And the leviathan is portrayed as, again, an image of chaos, of the still untreated which survives in the human world incarnate in the heathen kingdoms of Egypt and Babylon and Rome. In Ezekiel 29: 'Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh, King of Egypt the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself. But I will put hooks in thy jaws, and I will cause the fish of thy rivers to stick unto thy scales, and I will bring thee up out of the midst of thy rivers and all the fish of thy rivers shall stick unto thy scales, and I will leave thee thrown into the wilderness, thee and all the fish of thy rivers: thou shalt fall upon the open fields; thou shalt not be brought together, nor gathered: I have given thee for meat to the beasts of the field and to the fowls of the heaven'. Now here, the prophet is prophesying to the Pharaoh of Egypt, whom he identifies with the dragon which is also the River Nile—'my river is mine own'. And remember that on the principles of metaphor, a monster in the sea is the sea. And whatever the origin of this dragon might be—a crocodile or whatever you like—still, a crocodile in the Nile metaphorically is the Nile. So that the prophet is saying that the dragon will be hooked and landed and thrown into the open fields, which is metaphorically the same thing that John is saying in the Book of Revelation when he says that in the last day there was no more sea. Because to hook and land a sea monster is metaphorically to bring up the sea as well.

In Isaiah 27: 'In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea'. The next verse seems to have no logical connection with it: 'In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine'. But it's more logical than it looks, because the hooking and landing of Leviathan is also the destruction of the sterile and the chaotic in the world, and consequently, a great outburst of fertility would follow it. We come much closer to the center of this kind of imagery if we turn to Isaiah 51: 'Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?' Now here the prophet adopts as a poetic image the account of creation as the dragon-killing; and we'll come to verses in the Psalms that praise God for having brought Creation into existence by destroying the dragon of chaos.

Then he says that God twice won this victory over the dragon. He did it the second time at the crossing of the Red Sea, where the dragon was Egypt. And now he's calling upon God to make a third exhibition of his power, and this third is the Day of the Lord, to quote the King James version of it, which the prophets are constantly referring to as that time in the future when Israel will be restored and those who have, well, listening to the prophets will be happy, but the vast majority of people will be anything but happy. The prophecy of the Day of the Lord is in practically all the prophets, and it is here connected in imagery with the two great victories over chaos and evil, the victory at the original creation and the victory at the creation of the nation of Israel.

The most eloquent of all these prophecies of the Day of the Lord is in the prophecy of Zephaniah, which is the ultimate basis for the medieval hymn Deus Irae. It's a mad, magnificent poem, and has been incorporated into the Requiem Mass, but its origin is in these Day of the Lord prophecies.

Northrop Frye and Michael Dolzani

Copyright © 1982, 2013, Victoria University

TEACHERS GUIDE: Lecture 7

THE WORLD OF ANGELS, Part 1

Synopsis

These programs have now indicated the following categories of Biblical imagery, together with their particular images: mineral (urban imagery), vegetable (agricultural), animal (pastoral), human (sexual) and paradisal (garden, trees and water). All of these categories are metaphorically identical, and the individual and group forms of each category are united by the royal metaphor. There remains, in the Bible's mythological universe, the category that bridges the human and divine, that of the spiritual or angelic. There are two bodies of imagery associated with angels, those of fire and of air (including wind and birds): from these are derived two major orders of angels. But all angels are metaphorically united as one Spirit, sometimes identified as the Holy Spirit, to whom both categories of imagery attach.

Program Lecture Outline: Key Facts

1. All categories of this Biblical table of imagery are metaphorically identical with one another. Christ, for example, is identified with the bridegroom figure, with bread and wine, with the sacrificial lamb, with the stone that the builders rejected.
2. Also, the individual and group forms of each category are united by the royal metaphor, which combines identity-as and identity-with.
3. The world between God and man is the spiritual world, whose group form is the angels.
4. Angels are identified with the sky because the imagery of the Bible's revealed world is derived from the ordinary categories of existence as experienced by the human body, with its built-in sense of up and down.
5. Two kinds of angels are derived from the two levels of the sky: the lower or air level, from which comes imagery of wind and birds, particularly the dove, bird of love; and the upper or fire level.
6. All spirits are metaphorically one Spirit, later identified as the Holy Spirit, to whom is attached the imagery both of wind and birds and of tongues of fire.
7. One of the implications of this chart is that all four elements become alive or identified with life: there are 'lively stones', 'living waters' and a fire which burns without burning up. The jewels and gold of the apocalyptic Jerusalem glow with this living fire. The burning bird is the phoenix.

Biblical Passages Cited

• Mark 14:22-24.—'This is my body'.
• Psalm 118:22.—'The stone which the builders refused'.
• Revelation 2:17.—'To him that overcometh will I give… a white stone'.
• Revelation 15:6.—Angels in white 'linen'—or lithon, stone.
• I Peter 2:5.—'Ye also, as lively stones'.
• Acts 1:9.—'a cloud received him out of their sight'.
• John 3:8.—'The wind bloweth where it listeth'.
• Exodus 3:2.—The burning bush.
• I Kings 10:21.—Silver for building temples: 'it was nothing accounted of'.
• 11 Chronicles 3.—Solomon's temple: gold.
• Revelation 21:19-20.—The 12 gates of Jerusalem, each a precious stone.
• Exodus 28:15-21.—Aaron's breastplate.
• Job 29:18.—The phoenix, disguised as 'sand' by the AV.

The Teacher's Perspective

With this program we finish building up a picture of the structure of Biblical imagery on the apocalyptic side; and once again, the teacher may refer both to the chart on p. 166 of The Great Code and to the slightly modified version of it given above, which reproduces what Prof. Frye put on the blackboard in the video lecture. Because this imagery as a total structure makes up the apocalyptic or revealed world, the first part of this program is closely related to the more historical and typological discussion of apocalypse as a phase of revelation in programs 28 and 29. It is also closely related to the discussion of interpenetration and metaphors of particularization discussed in program 6 as implications of the principle of the royal metaphor. These are crucial concepts for this series, so that the teacher might profit from reiterating them in this more complete context, where their full meaning is more evident.

Is an experience of such an apocalyptic world possible? This is the question that all of us would ask perhaps, and the question upon which everything in this series depends. Fuller discussion will have to wait until programs 28 and 29: at this point, the most appropriate comment is possibly that all the means by which man might possibly attain to such an experience, including art, nature, sex and work, or action, are ultimately expressions of human imagination and creative power. If an experience that transcends the ego cannot simply be willed, if it must finally be what was traditionally called a gift of divine grace, still the human reception of such a revelation must be the active response of the creative imagination. The corresponding principle in The Great Code is that although the Bible may be more than a work of literature, we can only reach whatever in it transcends the merely imaginative through its imaginative aspects of myth and metaphor.

In addition to considering such broader questions, the class may also examine specific Biblical and literary passages bearing upon various aspects of our table of Biblical imagery, as for example the spiritual and angelic world. An expanded discussion of the (literally) colorful topic of seraphim and cherubim, with their red and blue color symbolism, is available in the transcripts. The seraphim are spirits of love associated with fire, as for example with the hot coals of Isaiah 6; the cherubim are spirits of contemplation, and are therefore appropriate as the four beings who are the vehicles of the Word in Ezekiel's vision (Ezekiel 1), and who are later identified with the four Evangelists. Milton recreated them magnificently in Paradise Lost, VI, 746-79, and Blake recreated Milton in The Four Zoas, identifying the four 'beasts' (Greek zoa) with the four faculties of the human imagination.

In its very nature, a spiritual being is not confined by the categories of ordinary experience to a single mode of existence: it may manifest itself either as an externalized body or as an indwelling presence. In Christian tradition, the externalized form of the spiritual world is the host of angel, and the indwelling form the holy Spirit. The discrete nature of ordinary physical bodies apparently accounts for the tendency to think of the angels as being plural and the indwelling Spirit singular; but the Spirit takes on a plural form when it is conceived as dwelling in the hearts of each of the faithful. The teacher might have the class compare Milton's angels in Paradise Lost with his evocations of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

If the angels are identified with the Holy Spirit, they must be united metaphorically with God himself. This becomes a convenient justification for cautiously substituting an angel whenever it becomes a question of the direct manifestations of God. Thus, though Jacob claims actually to have seen God face to face (Genesis 32:24-30), he is usually said to have wrestled with an angel. This is not necessarily a faked account: it just implies that since God too is a spirit, his visible form might reasonably be that of an angel. Students may be puzzled at this, since it seems to contradict the admonition that angels are fellow creatures of man and not to be worshipped. But the Bible is really cautioning its readers not to worship angels instead of God, not to worship them as gods apart from God himself. It is true that some phrases in the Bible, such as Psalm 8:5's 'a little lower than the angels' (repeated in Hebrews 2:6-7) suggest the concept of a chain of being. But at an apocalyptic intensity of vision, the principle of the royal metaphor takes over, and the creator becomes metaphorically identified with his creatures. The Classical parallel is the passage from the Iliad (viii) cited on p. 10 of The Great Code; the most famous instance of angels as embodiments of an apocalyptic consciousness is that of Rilke's Duino Elegies.

The great passage in the Bible concerning the transformation of the elements is in the Book of Wisdom 19:18-21, quoted on p. 165 of The Great Code. Two great poems to set alongside of this are Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium' and Dylan Thomas' 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid'. Prominent in both these poems is the element of fire, the spiritual element par excellence: in Thomas' poem, the vision of an apocalyptic world where everything burns and glows with the fire of life erupts out of the horror of its demonic opposite, the burning London of the World War II air raids. Eliot's war imagery in 'Little Gidding' is startlingly similar: see The Great Code, p. 162. Thomas also supplies us with a demonic parody of Southwell's 'The Burning Babe' (see the transcripts) in his short story 'The Burning Baby'; and a burning bird who is also a 'burning bride' in 'A Winter's Tale'. In popular literature, the hero of Alfred Bester's extraordinary science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, at the climax of a spiritual transformation from criminal to redeemer, becomes a Burning Man who exists simultaneously at more than one point in time and space, and who is explicitly identified with Blake's 'Tyger, tyger, burning bright'. For the difference between demonic and living fire, the class may compare Milton's description of the fires of hell ('darkness visible') with the imagery of light in heaven.

Another image of demonic fire is the burning of witches and heretics. An apocalyptic marriage between birds symbolic of the fire and air levels is found in Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. The classical source of the phoenix legend is Ovid's Metamorphoses, XV: see also the Old English poem, The Phoenix.

In fact, there are too many examples to fit into this very crowded program, and the teacher must be referred at this point to the Supplementary Reading below: most of the examples there are also mentioned inThe Great Code, pp. 161-65. One further suggestion, however: one of the great instances of the Biblical sublime, the vision of the 'seven eyes of God' in Zechariah 3-4, is so full of the symbolism we have been examining as to serve as an index of the students' ability to interpret apocalyptic imagery. The seven facets of the high priest's 'stone' (or jewel), associated also with a seven-branched candlestick, become seven spirits who are 'the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth'; two 'anointed ones', a high priest named Joshua who is called 'my servant the BRANCH', and a king Zerubbabel, connected with a restored Temple, are identified with two olive trees: from this complex of symbolism, students should be able to pick out what should by now have become the familiar imagery of living stones, jewels, fire, angels, temple, Messiah, and tree of life. Commentators with a historical bias are often puzzled by the high priest's graven stone; but metaphorically, it is clearly to be associated with the jewelled breastplate of the high priest Aaron, with the stone having 'a new name written' in Revelation 2:17, with the corner stone of the Temple, and with lively stones in general. The antitype of this vision is in Revelation 5:6.

Supplementary Reading

1. Biblical Passages

• Isaiah 6:7.—Isaiah and the seraph with the burning coal.
• Ezekiel 1.—The four cherubim of the chariot of the Lord.
• Revelation 21:23.—'And the city had no need of the sun…the Lamb is the light thereof'.
• I Thessalonians 4:17.—'to meet the Lord in the air'.
• Genesis 32:24-30.—Jacob wrestling with the 'angel'.
• Luke 20:36.—'for they are equal unto the angels'.
• I Corinthians 6:3.—'know ye not that we shall judge angels?'
• Psalm 8:5.—'a little lower than the angels'.
• Hebrews 2:7.—'a little lower than the angels'.
• Daniel 3:25.—The fiery furnace.
• Matthew 21:42, Acts 4:11, I Peter 2:7, Luke 20:17, Mark 12:10. —'The stone which the builders rejected'.
• Zechariah 3-4.—The seven eyes of God.
• Colossians 2:18.—Against worshipping angels.
• Revelation 22:9—Against worshipping angels: 'for I am thy fellowservant'.
• Matthew 3:16.—The Holy Spirit in the form of a dove: Jesus' baptism.
• Acts 2:3.—The Holy Ghost as tongues of fire.
• James 3:6.—Demonic fire: 'the tongue is a fire'.
• Exodus 25:31-40.—The seven-branched candlestick.
• Revelation 5:6.—'seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God'
• I Kings 18:38.—Fire descending from God to the altar on Carmel.
• II Chronicles 7:1.—Fire descending from God to the altar in Solomon's temple.
• Wisdom 19:18-21.—The transformation of the elements.

2. Corresponding Passages in The Great Code

• Chapter Six. Metaphor II.
  • pp. 161-62.       The spiritual world: angels.
  • pp. 165-168.     The table of Biblical imagery; interpenetration.

3. Other

• The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard, Boston, Beacon Press, 1964.

Suggested Essay or Discussion questions

1. In the light of what we have now studied about apocalyptic symbolism, discuss Wallace Stevens' poem 'Of Mere Being'. The poem refrains from applying traditional names—phoenix, tree of life—to its images: does this mean that they are not identifiable with traditional images?
2. Read the account of angelic sexuality blushingly delivered by Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost VIII, 618-29. When Blake later says, In eternity, embraces are comminglings from head to foot, and not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place', he is transferring the context to human creative power. What influence has the idea that the creative imagination apocalyptically transcends the limitations of natural sexuality had on later thinkers? A discussion especially worth noting is that of the 'liberation of Narcissus' in Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.

Discuss Luke 20:36-38 in light of this program, especially the phrase, 'for all live unto him'. Is there a difference between resurrection and immortality?

LEVIATHAN, DRAGONS AND THE ANTICHRIST, Part 2

Synopsis

Every image in the chart of apocalyptic imagery that we finished building up in program 9 has a demonic counterpart. Prof. Frye briefly reviews the demonic imagery introduced in several of our previous programs, then goes on to focus upon one of the images serving as a key to the whole symbolic complex, that of the dragon. The dragon is, first of all, the favorite demonic animal image in the Bible. The image, however, expands to cosmological dimensions in the creation myth that takes the form of the slaying of a dragon of chaos. The Bible uses this dragon as a poetic image, calling it 'Rahab' or 'Leviathan'. By an even further expansion of its symbolic dimensions, the Leviathan contains the entire fallen world of time and space: when we ask where we are in relation to the dragon, the answer is that we are in its belly: we have all been swallowed by him.

Program Lecture Outline: Key Facts

1. We now turn to the demonic side of our completed table of Biblical images. We have met many of these images on the demonic side before: the demons of fire and tempest, the Great Whore and the Antichrist, the dying gods, the beasts of prey.
2. The favorite demonic animal of the Bible is the dragon, admirable symbol for the paradox of evil by reason of its great power and yet its non-existence. Revelation 17:8.
3. In a common myth, creation takes the form of the killing of a dragon of chaos. The Hebrews were aware of this myth, and used it poetically, rather than as sacred history. Ezekiel 29, Isaiah 27 and 51, Psalm 89. The dragon's common names in the Bible are Rahab and Leviathan.
4. Leviathan is also identified with the heathen powers that continually surrounded the Israelites, so that it became easy to visualize Israel as swallowed by the dragon.
5. By taking one step further, we can conceive of the dragon as the entire body of time and space, the fallen world we all inhabit. The implications of this will emerge in our later study of Leviathan as he appears in the Book of Job.
6. For now, the suggestion is that we are all inside the belly of Leviathan, living an underworld existence that can be conceived of both as subterranean and submarine. From the former point of view we are in a prison or tomb; from the latter, Noah's flood has never receded, and we are drowned symbolically under the chaotic sea of time and space.

Biblical Passages Cited

• Revelation 17:8.—'the beast that was, and is not, and yet is'.
• Ezekiel 29:3-5.—Egypt as Leviathan.
• Revelation 21:1.—'there was no more sea'.
• Isaiah 27:1.—'the dragon that is in the sea': Leviathan.
• Isaiah 51:9-10. —'Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?'
• Psalm 89:10.—'Thou halt broken Rahab in pieces'.
• Job 40-41.—Leviathan and Behemoth.

The Teacher's Perspective

Prof. Frye's chart for this program, of which the above is a reproduction with the demonic animal categories added in as occurs during the course of the video lecture, is rather simplified from the table given inThe Great Code, p. 167. The teacher should probably be careful to point out that this is a condensed version for the purpose of review, and does not distinguish between parody and manifest demonic or between group and individual forms. Full treatment of each type of imagery has occurred in the following programs:

program 4:  the waste land, tree and water of death

programs 5,6: the Great Whore, Antichrist as the human tyrant

program 7:   the dying god, beasts of prey

program 8: false gods: Moloch, etc. (parody demonic of the spiritual category)

program 9: fire and air demons (manifest demonic of the spiritual category)

Evil spirits are traditionally shapechangers, capable of taking myriad disguises, and this accounts for a curious shifting quality amongst the various demonic categories, an ambiguity that is not simply a result of the Bible's confusion or of the students' unfamiliarity with the material. The false gods of the heathen—Moloch, Baal, and the like—are masks of the fallen angels; but taken in their cosmological dimension, less as personalities than as a numinous and mysterious collective principle, the demonic spirits also become what St. Paul calls the stoicheia tou kosmou, the powers of nature, that set themselves up as a rival First Principle against God (see The Great Code, pp. 164-65). In their individual form they are therefore the Antichrist; however, in this program we are not considering the Antichrist as a role played by the human tyrant, as in program 5, but rather in his fully revealed form as a parody of the divine: on this level, his manifest form is Satan himself, though Yeats' famous 'The Second Coming' is an attempt at a vision of Antichrist in a non-Christian context.

But the evil spirits may take on forms below the spiritual level as well as aping the powers above. The students may have a look at Isaiah 13:21-2, a prophecy against Babylon, repeated in Isaiah 34 as a prophecy against Edom, in which the demonic animals, the beasts of prey inhabiting the waste land exist 'on the border of a shadow world in which it is difficult to know where animals stop and evil spirits begin, (The Great Code, p.151). In the Isaiah 34 version, moreover, the AV's 'screech owl' is Lilith, as we saw in program 6. Similarly, calling the Biblical dragon 'Rahab' associates it metaphorically with the Great Whore—in the original creation myth, the dragon of chaos tends, like Tiamat, to be female—even though in other contexts it is identified with the Antichrist as human tyrant (Ezekiel 29) or as Satan (Revelation 12:9, 'And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil'). It is easy to see how all this can make for some confusion, but the students should please lay the blame for it on the evil spirits, not on the Bible or Prof. Frye.

The symbol of the dragon will be elaborated further in the next program, but amongst instances having cosmological overtones, one may mention the Midgard Serpent of Norse mythology, who shall be unloosed at Ragnarok, the end both of the gods and of the world; the Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, forming a circle symbolic of eternity, an alchemical symbol going back to Egyptian times; and the Greek Laokoon, of which an aphorism-studded drawing by Blake supplies The Great Code with its title. For Biblical examples, see in the Supplementary Reading Psalms 91 and 148, and Revelation 12:3, 12:7, 12:9, 17:8 and 20:2.

We have still not spoken much of Satan himself. All the demonic imagery we have discussed is identified with him, as all apocalyptic imagery is identified with Christ. He is demon of both fire and tempest, both 'Lucifer, son of the morning' (Isaiah 14:12) and prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2). The next verse (14:13) of the Isaiah passage gives another of his associations, that with mountains and the north: north and the vertical interpenetrate metaphorically, and their sinister overtones resonate all through non-Biblical literature, from Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn', to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the Bible itself, he is the terrible figure of the Covering Cherub in Ezekiel 28: Ezekiel here identifies, with great metaphorical boldness, this heathen cosmological principle not only with the human tyrant, the Prince of Tyre, but with the angel with the flaming sword who has guarded the gates of Paradise since the Fall. And of course, he is Leviathan. The battle of the archangel Michael with the dragon, a variant of the St. George motif to be discussed in our next program, appears not only in Revelation 12:7, but in the mysterious reference in Jude 9 to the dispute of Michael and Satan over the body of Moses, apparently a reference to an incident in a lost apocryphal book. The connection between the two conflicts was in fact made by Blake: see Prof. Frye's Fearful Symmetry, pp. 334-35. In addition, Fearful Symmetry, Chapter Five, section 8, sums up, from Blake's metaphorically uninhibited point of view, the symbolism we have been speaking of, and does it in one breathtaking sweep.

Supplementary Reading

1. Biblical Passages

• Psalm 91:12-13.—'the dragon shalt thou trample under foot.'
• Matthew 4:6, Luke 4:10-11.—The Temptation: Satan quotes Psalm 91, above.
• Psalm 148:7.—'Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons'.
• Revelation 12:3.—The red dragon with seven heads.
• Revelation 12:7.—The battle of Michael with the dragon.
• Revelation 12:9.—'that old serpent'.
• Revelation 13:4.—'the dragon which gave power unto the beast': Satan and the Antichrist.
• Revelation 17:8.—'the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
• Revelation 20:2.—'the dragon, that old serpent'.
• Isaiah 13:21-2.—The beasts of prey: prophecy against Babylon.
• Isaiah 34:11-15.—The same prophecy against Edom.
• Isaiah 14:12.—'Lucifer, son of the morning'.
• Ephesians 2:2.—'prince of the power of the air'.
• Ezekiel 28.—The Covering Cherub.
• Jude 9.—The dispute of Michael and Satan over the body of Moses.

2. Corresponding Passages in The Great Code

• Chapter Six. Metaphor II.
  • pp.146-47.—The creation as a dragon-killing.
  • pp.151-52.—Dragons and beasts of prey.
  • pp.162-65.—Demonic spirits, false gods, the Antichrist.
  • pp.188-92.—Leviathan.

Suggested Essay or Discussion Questions

1. One of the greatest Canadian poems is E.J. Pratt's 'The Truant', written during the dark hours of World War II. Who is the 'Great Panjandrum'? What relation does the poem bear to this program?
2. Discuss Psalm 82 in light of this program, including Jesus' allusion to it in John 10:34. Who are these 'gods'? Compare the author of the commentary in the Anchor Bible, vol. 17, pp. 268-71, who claims they are the gods of the heathen, to the author of the commentary in vol. 29, pp. 408-10, who interprets them as human judges who have been rendered godlike by their power, but who are now to be cut down to size.
3. We have discussed the cosmological implications of the symbolism of the Leviathan: are there psychological implications as well to the idea of evil spirits? Consider the ministry of Jesus, as he himself characterizes it in Luke 13:32—'Go ye and tell that fox (Herod), Behold, I cast out devils'. Compare Freud's superego concept to the Biblical idea of Satan as the Accuser, or what Blake called the Idiot Questioner, the principle of neurotic doubt: see Luke 8:12, then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved. In the fallen world, we are imprisoned externally in a hostile environment of time and space: are we all more or less mad as well?