Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation Read Online Free PDF Page A

me: a o ee o eee ooo iii oooo oooooo ooo oo uuuuu oo ooooooooooo. 54
     
    The book called Allogenes (Greek for “The Stranger”) also relates dialogue between an initiate, Allogenes, and a spiritual teacher, this one more than human—a feminine angelic being whom he calls “all glorious Youel.” Weaving Jewish esoteric lore associated with Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, often called “the stranger,” together with Neoplatonic concepts of cosmology into teachings that also may include Buddhist meditation practices, the author of Allogenes sets out to show how to realize one’s spiritual self.
    Allogenes says that when Youel first spoke to him, “I fled and was very disturbed”; but that after “I turned to myself” and began to engage in intense meditation and “saw the light that surrounded me, and the good that was in me, I became divine.” 55 Youel then begins to show him the structure of divine reality and promises that despite the difficult path ahead, “if you completely devote yourself to seeking, you shall know the good that is in you, and then … you shall know yourself as one who comes from the God who truly exists.” 56 Allogenes says that “I did not despair of thewords that I heard, but I prepared myself, and deliberated with myself for a hundred years.” 57 After what seemed like endless time, Allogenes reports that he, like Ezekiel and Paul of Tarsus, was taken out of the body and received visions; yet this was only the beginning. Youel then taught him more:
    When you become afraid, withdraw back … and when you become complete where you are, still yourself. Do not desire to be active, lest you diminish your receptiveness to the Unknowable One. 58
     
    Practicing what she taught, Allogenes says he began to experience “within me a stillness of silence, and … I knew my true self … and I was filled with revelation by means of a primary revelation,” apparently a firsthand experience of coming to know “the One who exists in me.” 59 Allogenes concludes with a paradox: that the One he has come to know within himself cannot be known except through what Jewish and Christian mystics later called the
via negativa,
the way of “unknowing.” Allogenes says he wrote this book for his own disciple, “full of joy … I wrote this book which was appointed for me, my son Messos, so that I might reveal to you what was proclaimed before me in my presence.” 60
    These books of revelation have taken us a long way from the Revelation of John of Patmos—but the revelation called Thunder, Perfect Mind (more literally translated “Thunder, Complete Mind” 61 ) takes us even further. For where John of Patmos sees only opposites—Christ against Satan, the saved and the damned, holiness and filth, the virgin bride and the whore ofBabylon—this revelation sees opposites in dynamic interaction and so claims to speak for the “
complete
mind.” Thunder was written as a poem to chant or a hymn to sing, in the voice of “thunder,” heard in many cultures as a divine voice—from the Greeks, who called Zeus “the thunderer,” to the God of Israel, often manifested in thunder, who, the Gospel of John says, spoke to Jesus as “a voice from heaven,” which other bystanders heard only as thunder. 62
    Yet Thunder, Perfect Mind envisions thunder as a
feminine
power, perhaps because the Greek word for “thunder,”
bronte,
is feminine—a power in whom all opposites meet:
    I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after med…
     
    Do not be ignorant of me at any time …
     
    For I am the first and the last.
    I am the honored one, and I am the scorned one.
    I am the whore and the holy one.
    I am the wife and the virgin.
    I am the mother and the daughter …
    I am the barren one,
and many are her children.
    I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband …
    I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my