Review: Black & White & Rainbows
BONUS:
Astrology and the Goddess in Revelation
An Essay by Jennifer Hamilton
NT3101
April 3, 2023
“With good fortune. (Artemis) herself, the virgin huntress, chose as her priestess hydroforus Vera of Patmos, the noble daughter of Glaukios, to offer sacrifices of squirming new-born goats under favorable auspices. Vera was raised as a young girl in glorious Argos, but she was born and nourished in Patmos, the very venerable island of Letos’ daughter (Artemis), which emerged from the depths of the sea and became Artemis’ throne and she became its guardian, ever since the war-faring Orestes snatched her statue from Scythia and installed it here; and afterwards she calmed his terrible madness, caused by the murder of his mother. Now she, the tenth (priestess of Artemis), Vera, the daughter of the wise physician Glaukios, by the will of Scythian Artemis, crossed the perilous Aegean Sea in order to celebrate gloriously the feast and sacred meal, as the divine law prescribed. With good luck.”
– inscription at the Temple of Artemis on Patmos
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/inscription-from-the-temple-of-artemis/
The author of Revelation takes images of a Goddess and twists her into a hyperbolic parody to create fraternity and subdue sorority. In the letter to the angel of the church of Thyatira, it is written, “I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (Rev 2:20). An enemy of the author, someone he takes pains to mention and describe, she is accused of the crimes of practicing the duties of a priest. He does not think that she should be allowed to prophecy, teach, practice rituals and worship the deities of her choice. This attitude of intolerance towards female leadership in religious life that stems back to the time of the Apocalypse is still present and painful. Part of the strategy that the author of Revelation uses to subordinate women is to parody the astrological worldview and disrespect the Goddess. Even today the “reader is facing the sexism that developed into the exclusion of women from positions of equality and power in the early church” (Pippin 117). Since we are still living in a world where astrology is ridiculed, and the Goddess has never regained her rightful place in popular cult practices especially in the Christian tradition, and public discourse continues to dominate women instead of listening to us, I will take the time to look at the images of women in Revelation through my own feminist lens.
Women theologians have long been concerned with the imagery in Revelation, as Tina Pippin points out in her commentary on Revelation where she refers to “the apocalypse of women” which is the “the misogyny and disenfranchisement that are at the roots of gender relations, accompanied by (hetero)sexism and racism, along with violence, poverty, disempowerment, and fear” (Pippin 110). Pippin refers to the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wrote The Women’s Bible in 1895. Marked by the prejudices of their own time, Pippin tells us that as white women, they “were not completely aware of…their role in the systemic oppression of women of color” (Pippin 111). However, they did make some contributions to the scholarship by being open-minded to the symbolic motifs that recur. The Book of Revelation “is a purely esoteric work, largely referring to woman, her intuition, her spiritual powers, and all she represents” according to Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They say that the book “cannot even be approximately explained without some knowledge of astrology “(Gage & Stanton 176). Even though their contribution to the scholarship has been ridiculed or ignored, they bravely point out the astrological undercurrents of scripture: “The whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation demands a knowledge of astrology, of letters, and of numbers, with their interchangeable values as they were understood by those who wrote it” which they claim was “a book written by initiates for initiates” (Gage & Stanton 177). Pippin also refers to the work of Yarbro Collins who tells us that “the social context of women’s lives in late first century Christianity can be discovered in Revelation” and points to the “sexual purity” of the “all-male group of holy warriors” in Rev 14:1-5 (Pippin 113). Pippin’s take that “Inherent in these purity laws is the exclusion of women and the conclusion that contact with women’s bodies is dangerous” allows us to enter the text of Revelation not just as a benign metaphor used by a member of a frustrated minority but as a foundation text for Christianity that systemically marginalizes women (Pippin 113). As Pippin states, after an “initial active reading” of the text of Revelation, a feminist scholar must assess that “the making of archetypes of the female and the abuse of women’s bodies in Revelation reveals a deep misogyny” (Pippin 116).
Like the authors of the Women’s Bible, the author of Revelation may not have been conscious of the extent of his bias. Other feminist scholars have shirked reflecting on the consequences of portraying women in allegorically derogatory ways, such as Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, who “is inconclusive of issues of race, class, and gender in reading Revelation” due to her “grounding her work in a political hermeneutic” which is in “dialogue with literary and ideological studies” (Pippin 115). Schussler-Fiorenza prefers to “engage the text at the level of reconstruction rather that deconstruction” as she calls us to look at how the imagination is activated without asserting our “agency, subjecthood, contextuality, particularity, stand and perspective when reading Revelation” (Pippin 116). This is a convenient strategy for a female Catholic theologian who does not wish to ruffle the feathers of a patriarchy that continues to negate the agency of people who have wombs, those do not conform to heteronormative gender roles, and those who choose to be independent of religions that will not allow us access to positions of leadership. As a reader of this text in 2023 when abortion access is being denied to American women, girls in Iran are being poisoned at school, there are still so few women and non-binary people in leadership positions throughout the world and many Christian denominations still do not allow women to become priests, it behooves us to look at “the roots and results of women-hatred” (Pippin 116).
The Goddess falls from grace in chapter 12 of the Apocalypse. She goes from appearing heavenly as though embodying astrology “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” to being shamed by a dragon who “went off to make war on the rest of her children, those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus” (Rev 12:1 & 17). By subverting the “Ancient Near Eastern combat myth” by “consciously evoking the story of pregnant Leto, the dragon Python, and the birth of Apollo” (Boxoll 28). This sun clothed woman “gave birth to a son, a male child” who “was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne” which echoes the motif of the Messiah, so she is deported while he replaces her in Heaven (Rev 12:5). In fact, she grew wings and flew away, which is exactly what men in the Christian tradition have done to women ever since, silencing us, forcing us to quit, putting unnecessary barriers in place in the church and at work and at home effectively punishing us for existing. According to Pippin, the Goddess is “captured and subdued and molded (or in Revelation 12 is exiled) to fit male fantasies of the ideal female” but this act of literary domination is more than an unequal relationship, it is a direct attack on the cults, leaders and practices that honour Goddesses. The author gives this Goddess the wings of Isis in the form of “the great eagle’s wings” and she flies off, not because she is unworthy as a deity, priestess or scholar, but because the author categorically rejects her holiness (Pippin 118). The only place that she is safe “is in exile in the wilderness and is alone, her child taken from her” (Pippin 119). This resentment that the author projects onto the Goddess imagery is so familiar. As Pippin writes, “Revelation is not a safe space for women” (Pippin 110). I have found that to be true of the text itself and of the class that I am writing this paper for, where I was silenced and then exiled. I wish I had a pair of wings to fly away.
One goddess who may have irritated the author of Revelation is Artemis, who was worshiped on the island of Patmos at the time of his imprisonment. An inscription from the 2nd Century B.C.E. calls Patmos, “the most august island of the daughter of Leto” (Boxall 25). The Island of Patmos “was sacred to Artemis” and both she and Apollo “were prominent in the rival symbolic world with which John’s apocalyptic world would have to engage and which it attempted to subvert” (Boxall 28). The author of Revelation shows disrespect through his caricatures where “the ancient goddess in all her characteristic diversity of motherhood, erotic sexuality, virginity, and as warrior, justice giver, caretaker, creatrix of nature and arts and destroyer is segmented into these binary oppositions of good and evil, whore and virgin-mother” (Pippin 119). Recall that Ephesus is the first of the seven churches that John writes to (Rev 2:1). The temple to Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (Arnold 20). The Artemis of Ephesus is different from the Artemis of the Greeks in that she is a mixture of Cybele, Meter, Ma although she does have qualities “of the Greek huntress-goddess” in addition to her “three roles” as “mother goddess, fertility goddess and nature goddess” (Arnold 26). In depictions of Artemis she has many breasts (Arnold 25). Her skirt is decorated with “frightful-looking creatures” and Christians thought that she was a demon (Arnold 27). The Christian attitude towards worshipers of Artemis can be summed up in the book of Acts 19: 34-41 when the artisans who make statues of the goddess are confronted and defend their trade shouting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Hall 116). It should be noted also that Artemis was a very popular goddess who appeared on coins, bowls, urns and statues all over the ancient world from before 300 B.C.E. to around 450 C.E. (Hall 116). Her adherents were missionaries who set up temples all over Asia, including “in the cities of Colossae, Laodicea and Hierapolis” and the cult became very financially important through “its function as a banking and financial centre” in the temple (Arnold 20). She was known as “Queen of the Cosmos”, “Savior” and “Lord” for her practical and transcendant powers (Arnold 21). Artemis was the “daughter of Zeus and Leto, twin sister of Apollo… virgin goddess of wild animals, the hunt, vegetation, chastity and childbirth, who danced, usually accompanied by nymphs, in mountains forests and marshes” (Parsons 113). She was also associated with goddesses who had the keys to Hades “and therefore authority over the underworld gods and demons” (Arnold 24). By mixing together the imagery of beasts, birth and heavenly warfare, the author of Revelation may be ridiculing the astrological practices prevalent in his own time as well as defaming the Goddess Artemis.
Of particular interest, in relation to the Book of Revelation is that Artemis wears a very similar outfit to the woman clothed with the sun. When the Book of Revelation was written in the first Century C. E., the Ancient Hellentistic world was a polytheistic place with an “astromythic” worldview and “Astrology in Revelation is a case in point” (Chevalier 28). The author of Revelation, like Philo of Alexandria, rejected fatalistic astrological views “as they undermined the Jewish ethics of human freedom and godly omnipotence” and yet they did use astrology to “regulate the order of time” and “as representations of sacred temple objects” notably when signified by the numbers 7, for the luminaries, and 12 for the houses of the zodiac which appear as a menorah and on the priestly breastplate (Chevalier 78). “While notoriously opposed to polytheistic equations between gods and bodies of the sky, ancient Jews made use of zodiacal imageries to represent Yahweh bringing order into the universe and placing his chosen people under the protection of the heavenly forces” (Chevalier 79). For an exhaustive exploration of astrological corelations, see Chevalier’s chapter 9, “The Sun Robed woman” in his inspiring book A Postmodern Revelation. “A distinctive feature to the cult of the Ephesian Artemis was its close association with the astrological beliefs of the time” as evidenced “through extant images of the goddess” (Arnold 28). She was ornamented with a necklace of the signs of the zodiac and was “lord” of the fates of the stars so people would go to her knowing they were “worshiping a goddess who was unaffected by the grip of astrological fate” thereby consulting her as an oracle (Arnold 28). She “is the only divinity to depict visually her divine superiority with the signs of the zodiac” by wearing a necklace of the star signs (Arnold 21). Even her many breasts “may be laden with astrological significance” (Arnold 28). For the author of Revelation, a primary ordering of society was the subordination of women. To this end, he uses the female figure in chapters 2, 12 and 17 to attack rival cults which were coeval with the dominant empire. Far from being a benign choice of metaphor, this allegorical representation of women is foundational to the misogyny of the Christian tradition.
In the Revelation, Chapter 17 the bloodthirsty Goddess takes on the form of a horror movie when “Babylon the great, mother of whores and earth’s abominations” is “drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus” (Rev 17:5-6). Artemis’ birth was celebrated annually and her devotees were initiated with a baptism by “the blood of a slaughtered bull was drained through the lattices of the altar onto the neophyte below” and through “sacred prostitution” (Arnold 26-27). Recall the letter to the angel of the church in Pergamum where the author exhorts “you have some there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the people of Israel, so that they would eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication” (Rev 2: 14). The author of Revelation takes the Goddess apart piece by piece telling us that the multitudes and the beast will “hate the whore, they will make her desolate and naked; they will devour her flesh and burn her up with fire” (Rev 17:16). This echoes the motif of the whore in the whore in the Hebrew Scriptures, notably the “strange woman” of “Prov 2:16-22, 5:1-14, 6:20-35 and 7:5-27″ and “woman folly” of “Prov 9:13-18″ (Goff 25 & 28). Although the women of Revelation are more allegorical than human, they are built on a tradition that conflates the two where “Proverbs does not consistently recast the Strange Woman into an allegory or negatively charged symbol. Throughout much of the book she is depicted as an “actual” immoral woman” (Goss 36).
So how is an actual woman, immoral or otherwise, to read Revelation? Every person can read the text in their own way. For, as Pippin claims, “there is no universal experience of women reading Revelation. The voices that have been made Other or have been silenced – both in the fictional universe of the narrative and outside by the real readers of the text- have to be heard, have to be spoken to” (Pippin 121). If I mine the story for symbols, though I am not an astrologer just a curious neophyte exploring Hellentistic Astrology, I find the dragon could refer to the North and South nodes which are also known as the head and the tail of the dragon. These points in the natal chart refer to the fate of the native, that is the inheritance from the past in the south node, or tail of the dragon and the destiny to come in the north node or head of the dragon. The woman who flees to the wilderness says there for 1260 days, about half of an 8 year Venus cycle. The numbers “seven heads, ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads” could refer to the parts and places of significance in a natal chart, since this moment of the story is also a moment of birth (Rev 12: 3). It seems to read like a joke where the first and second portent are setting up the punchline when “a war broke out in heaven” as the author mocks the practice of corelating celestial events with the narrative of the story. This parody of belief in fate is echoed in chapter 17 “I will tell you the mystery of the woman, and of the beast with seven heads and ten horns that carries her. The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to ascend from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the inhabitants of the earth, whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will be amazed when they see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come” (Rev 17: 7-8). The Goddess cults of the empire were shamed through the fear that the author of Revelation projects through the “bitterness that ran deep in Jewish consciousness against Babylon” and paired it with his bitterness against women (Nyuhuma 22). Whether the author of Revelation was actively hoping to dismantle the world he parodied or if he was just a frustrated convict with a lot of time on his hands, “there can be no doubt about the existence of astrological beliefs in the first century” (Arnold 28). His anti-astrology, anti-goddess imagery helped to illustrate and fuel the misogyny of the church and continues to operate as the subconscious matrix of the church today. Luckily, astrology also survived to the present day.
In recent years astrology has seen a renewed popularity with a wonderful twist that many young, and especially queer astrologers are looking at Hellenistic Astrology as the base of their practices. There was an academic interest, notably the Catalogue of the Codices of the Greek Astrologers, published in twelve volumes between 1898-1953 as well as the translation work of “Project Hindsight” started in 1992 by Robert Schmidt, Robert Hand and Robert Zollar which made Latin and Greek texts available to English readers (Brennan 135-139). The recent popular reemergence is thanks to Demetra George and Chris Brennan, among other contemporary astrologers who have published manuals on ancient techniques, based on these earlier translations, which have come to inform an approach that uses the seven visible planets, whole sign houses, and planetary condition to determine the fate of a person, country or event by looking at the astrological chart of a given moment (George 32-35). Babylonian and Egyptian astrology dates to 2000 B.C.E. but natal astrology, looking at the location of the planets at the moment of birth, shows up in the historical record after 290 B.C.E when an astrology school opened on the Greek Island of Kos (George 13). The timing techniques used for reading astrology charts and the mythological overlay of the cult stories onto the predictions of fate and fortune spread from Egypt to the Hellenistic world in the first century B.C.E. when Rome conquered Egypt (George 13). Much of this knowledge was lost with the rise of Christianity, notably when Origen and Clement of Alexandria and other church fathers railed against astrology and “Hellenistic astrology was virtually forgotten in western Europe due to the loss of the Greek language and the condemnations against pagan practices by both the church and the state” (George 113). However, these traditional techniques migrated through “Persia and India, where they were translated into Pahlavi and Sanskrit” and have been preserved with some mutations in what is now known as Vedic Astrology, which is also having a resurgence in contemporary astrological discourse (George 113). Astrology was rejected by academics who did not consider it a part of the ancient worldview only because it is absent from a modern worldview, but thankfully contemporary scholars are picking up the slack! A recent dissertation Astrology in the Torah acknowledges this bias, that scholars and theologians did not acknowledge “astrology as the cultural background to the Scriptures” because of “Biblical injunctions against astrology…and the apparent admonitions of the prophets against astral divination” (Rubin 12). Now scholars are beginning to acknowledge that astrology was an “integral component of ancient culture”, “were regarded as advanced sciences” and that “it was a normal part of the majority worldview” (Stuckrad, Neusner and Campion in Rubin 23). This flow of information across cultures in the ancient world and the literacy of astrological techniques and concepts may have been common knowledge to the author of Revelation, since he employs the motifs and symbols from traditions that surrounded him to at least literary if not theological effect.
The Book of Revelation, the motifs of torturing the Goddess and a tradition of rejecting astrology are part of an ongoing discourse that requires women to be subordinate. Contemporary African feminist scholar, Blessing Nyahuma, reports that the “Revelation of John utilizes women as symbols, signs and images in an ambivalent way” (Nyahuma 316). She links the language of Revelation to the current struggles of “gender and power” in Zimbabwe of ”women in the workplace, women and dress, women power and wealth” where gender “is performance, especially performance in gendered spaces” (Nyahuma 326). The attitudes towards unmarried or divorced women and “women activist who disturbed the status quo” are very negative (Nyahuma 329). “Women empowerment is viewed as an impediment to structures status quo of masculine authority and a movement of disempowering men” (Nyahuma 329). The popularity of mini skirts and pants signaled the end of the world for some believers and led them to rampant “dress-based violence” that was a response to “the evolution of.modern women and the new gender roles” (Nyahuma 331). The misogyny that is present in the Book of Revelation is still here. Although the “political realities represented by these images are subverted and reverse, the stereotypes of female figures in themselves remain unchanged and unchallenged. Following in the footsteps of Ruether’s criticism of “the hermeneutics of oppression and exegesis that perpetuates superiority in gender and race” Nyahuma reminds us that “Christianity is envisioned on an anti-empire circuit while constructed on a callous outlook against women and slavery” (Nyahuma 333). She rails against the contemporary discourse against women which uses the Book of Revelation as fodder for perpetuating sexism (Nyahuma 333). She warns that “conscripting apocalyptic language to the service of gender discrimination is tantamount to religious terrorism” (Nyahuma 337).
In conclusion, by taking a closer look at the lens through which the text was written and how it is read, especially by feminist scholars, a new view emerges. I began by situating my own lens in the last century of feminist theologians, followed by a brief exegesis of Revelation Chapter 12. I then took a closer look at Artemis, the deity widely worshipped in the Ancient World and specifically venerated on the island of Patmos and in Ephesus. I examined Artemis’s attributes in the context of the imagery of Revelation and astrological allusions. By briefly looking at Chapter 17, Babylon the bloodthirsty whore with a nod to the Hebrew Scriptures, I opened my imagination to an intuitive astrological reading of the text. I also looked at the contemporary scholarship related to the Hellenistic Astrology Tradition. I closed the discussion on the topic by sharing a contemporary African feminist scholar’s take on the relevance of the images of women in Revelation to the current gender issues she is facing. I will close this paper now by reiterating a point that I have beleaguered in class, that the Christian church has a long history of silencing women. I see the book of Revelation as evidence of that misogyny. This is a misogyny that I experience directly at school and at work, as both milieus are dominated by this patriarchal tradition. While it is my role to share any openings that come my way with people who are more marginalized, I encourage anyone with privilege, whether it is by gender, race or religious authority, to open their ears and hearts to another way of reading the text and for the love of God, please stop silencing the Goddess in all of her forms.
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Jennifer Hamilton 