The Two Revelations

If, by some twist of fate, only the first eleven chapters of the Book of Revelation had been preserved, the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity would still regard this text as a work of profound religious and spiritual significance. Yet, it is in the full span of its twenty-two chapters that the true complexity and depth of John’s apocalyptic vision unfolds—a vision that has compelled me, almost against my own will, to embark on the daunting task of translating it into music.

See below, The “Two” Revelations

If writing music to the Book of Revelation would simply require to “paint” all those images with musical colors, while rigging them with an effective harmonic edifice I may have already abandoned this project years ago. Why I finally resolved to undertake this monumental project remains, to some extent, a mystery even to myself. It was not merely a matter of setting vivid images to either harmonious or horrendously dissonant tones, or constructing an intriguing musical framework with variable slots to fit these prophetic scenes. Rather, it was an imperative—a calling that seemed to insist upon itself, demanding expression without recourse to shortcuts, musical artifices, or transcending considerations of tonal or atonal modalities.

Introduction: John and The Book of Revelation

For a brief summary of my musical approach to the Book of Revelation I refer the reader to the page dedicated to the Apocalypsis Iesu oratorio.

We can only speculate about the circumstances under which John of Patmos penned the Book of Revelation. Was he a young man, his imagination ignited by tales of the world’s end? Did the inspiration strike during an unjust imprisonment, akin to Cervantes, amidst the stark brutality wielded by those in power—the ones who make the laws and hold the keys to enslavement? Perhaps he was an elder, overwhelmed by visions that besieged him relentlessly, feverishly inscribing what he could scarcely comprehend himself. Did these revelations descend upon him in a singular, blinding moment, or were they the culmination of a lifetime’s travail—a final, encompassing vision of an ancient world teetering on the brink?

While we possess approximate dates—whether around 68 AD, before the Temple’s destruction, or circa 96 AD—and scant details of his biography, much about John remains shrouded. Some scholars posit that he did not complete the Book of Revelation himself, that perhaps a disciple, lacking the master’s finesse, assembled and ordered the material into the form we now know. I think of great composers in Hollywood who have assistants rearranging and orchestrating the master’s ideas, or of my childhood hero Isaac Asimov’s, with a workshop populated by diligent helpers; every Santa has his elves. As a composer grappling with this text, such considerations bear practical significance, I can feel the burden of the work and more than once I wish I had help. The author of the Book of Revelation, be he singular or composite, exhibits an artistic instinct that invites deeper exploration—even after all these centuries. For me, as for most, he is John of Patmos: his story intrigues me, his book fascinates me.

The problem of structure in the Book of Revelation

For a more itemized and beautifully illustrated look at the structure of the Book of Revelation I refer the reader to the article in Wikipedia.

Traditional Narrative Structure

One of the greatest challenges in approaching the Book of Revelation musically lies in the nature of the text itself. Revelation does not unfold as a straightforward linear narrative, nor does it behave like a perfectly closed cyclical structure. Rather, it seems to progress through recursive visionary returns: the text repeatedly revisits conflict, rearticulates judgment, shifts between earthly and cosmic perspectives, and enlarges its symbolic scale through successive waves of revelation. Images, events, and theological tensions reappear transformed, not merely repeated, creating the impression of a spiraling architecture in which the same realities are contemplated from progressively expanded vantage points; or as I will argue, from a closer and closer experience of the material.

The musical architecture of Apocalypsis Iesu does not seek simply to depict Revelation externally, but to reflect something of its internal behaviour: its tendency to return, intensify, and reveal the same symbolic realities under continually transformed perspectives.
The chain of events presented to us in the Book of Revelation could be rather naively summarized as follows:

The chain of events within the Book of Revelation, as shown, can be listed, but it tenaciously resists simple linearity. Its recurrent sequences of sevens—the seals, the trumpets, the bowls—do not readily yield a straightforward timeline. Indeed, some interpreters regard entire chapters as digressions or interludes, extraneous to a supposed central plot. They see this plot as (at least roughly) linear and consistent with a main sequence of events. These alleged digressions within the book are often referred to as interludes. I disagree with this interpretation. The text seems less a linear narrative and more a tapestry woven with threads that cross and recross, forming patterns both intricate and profound.

Α → Ω

Let us consider for a moment the notion of a linear progression (with digressions) from an initial point, Alpha (Α), to a terminal point, Omega (Ω):

In this framework, the so-called interludes—chapters 7, 10, parts of 11, and generally also 14—are viewed as deviations from the main narrative arc. Yet I find this perspective limiting. While such digressions are plausible, we should delve deeper and ask whether another configuration more responsive to the narrative exists. In this sense, I find that the text seems to radiate from different centers, sometimes getting frustratingly nowhere; it is, in a word, an antiplot.^[1]Modern interpreters such as Richard Bauckham, G. K. Beale, Kenneth A. Strand, and G. B. Caird have emphasized Revelation’s recursive, non-linear architecture—variously describing it in terms of … Continue reading

Septenaries and other key elements in the Book of Revelation

The septenaries in the Book of Revelation would have allowed me to reuse the same musical material, varying it or re-elaborating it, depending on the circumstances and without the need to compose new musical strands. This would already constitute in itself a great help, and it would have allowed me to find some orientation as to the planning of the project. The task in this case would be to identify obvious reiterative elements such as the septenaries and conceive the work as a series of musical variations or elaborations of a subject or group of subjects. And musically this is feasible: narratively speaking (though perhaps I should say “narratologically”, as pertaining to narratology* ) But I do not see it. Or simply I did not see it viable as a musical form that could sustain the whole, or at least to give the work a coherence that was beyond that of the musical form itself, one that needed to embrace the meandering meaning of the text.

Worse still: if the correspondence between, say, all septenaries was used as a musical artifice this would imply that some images or objects would in my view become charged with an excessive importance, or sometimes devalued, or associated with conflicting or undesirable content in a different septenary (a content that may not be relevant at all just then). There are ample references in the [septenaries] text that make significant association of certain elements (objects, characters, etc.) to others who are not included accordingly in another septenary.

Some of these elements, such as the Book or the Two Witnesses, that seemed crucial to me to understand the message of the Book of Revelation, were not reflected satisfactorily in any of the numerological series that I could identify, and I clearly see that some peaks of the narrative such as the human-to-demonic association of the Two Witnesses (the two olive trees, two candelabra) with the two beasts, or the book with Satan’s deceitful propaganda unleashed in Rev. 13:14, and 20:7-10, pointed to a richer structural significance than any set of recurring patterns. Those numerological patterns are there, to be sure, but they seem to me like the leaves of a tree, radiating necessarily outward from a center that develops almost perpendicular to them.^[2]Juscheld’s reflections on the Apocalypse repeatedly suggest that certain symbolic correspondences exert a deeper structural force than purely sequential or numerological arrangements alone can … Continue reading

For these opposites to make it into the overall musical structure I decided to drop the septenaries as the main pillar sustaining the musical edifice. The septenaries are still musically there, in a rather ornamental manner helping the composer to move ahead with a fiendishly difficult piece of work, but the music has moved on to enhance and connect more relevant correspondences and themes: those that connect John of Patmos’s priorities and mine as a reader and listener of his work.

If to all this we add the fact that there are other important “numbers” in the Book of Revelation, specially twelve and four (five and six are also there, but to a lesser extent). There is also a convincing (or remarkable parallel) presence of astrology in the mind of John of Patmos, to the point in which whole chapters of the Book of Revelation seem to be written large in the late summer night sky.

For further references and outline see this.
There are numerous erudite views of how to divide the Book of Revelation in series of seven events. The most obvious series leave no doubt and are included by many, but there are others that have been proposed over the years.

For a more thorough treatment of the subject I refer the reader to Biblical and Classical Myths, by Northrop Frye* and Jay MacPherson.

The Book and The Little Book

Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

(Rev 10:9 KJV)

The appearance of the “book” (βιβλίον, biblion) in Rev. 5, and its counterpart, the “little book” (βιβλαρίδιον, bibliaridion) in Rev. 10, emerged as significant thematic motifs. The directive to John to consume the little book—sweet in his mouth but bitter in his stomach (Rev. 10:9)—symbolizes the arduous task of internalizing and proclaiming profound truths. This motif compelled me to reassess the musical structure, allowing this theme to weave coherently through the composition. Additionally, the associations of the book thematic with what John had to announce to the “peoples, languages, tribes, nations, peoples, and kingdoms” (we missed one for an interesting sevenfold, maybe faithful?) were too obvious. Here, I thought, is the key to the book, simply that it is a book: not a treatise, not a code, nor anything else. And to John, writing that book must have cost him dearly, to the point of tormenting him even.

Go, take the book which is open in the hand of the Angel, who is of standing on the sea and on the earth. Rev. 10:8

To start writing this music I needed something stronger than numbers or demonic parodies in cosmic opposition, and this was what I found: a story about a character tormented by visions that he saw around him as much within himself. A writer of visions, an old man telling stories.

He wrote a book (Revelation) that exists simultaneously within and above another book, the Scriptures he constantly invokes throughout the text. Certainly, John could scarcely have imagined that his own “little book” would one day become the closing vision of the Christian canon: preserved, transmitted, and interpreted by communities increasingly shaped by forms of Christianity with which he may not have fully identified, and eventually by an imperial Church established within the very Roman world he symbolically denounced as Babylon. The historical irony is profound: the Apocalypse became canonized precisely within the civilization whose spiritual and political sway it so fiercely resisted.

John of Patmos was an author who, nearly two millennia ago, also had to wrestle with structural problems. One imagines him rewriting passages, shifting visions from one place to another, erasing, recomposing, perhaps even abandoning entire sections when the burden of what he had seen became too difficult to order into language. At times, Revelation gives the impression of an imaginative tidal wave arriving all at once, nearly overwhelming the very act of writing itself. Maybe even the Book of Revelation was originally an epistle that went out of hand, because John was not destined to teach but to reveal. History has proven this man right repeatedly, and his prophecy fulfilled in the deeds and imagination of man; and still does, only we do not see it like he did. This is what interests me more about the Apocalypse of John—how the divine overwhelmed him, illuminated a world sunk in darkness, told him the true names of things human, and how he finally came to terms with it all.

The “two” Revelations

The transition into the second half of the Apocalypse, beginning with the vision of the Woman and the Dragon in Rev. 12, is often understood as a deliberate strategy to heighten the dramatic intensity of the book. In one sense this is true. The imagery unfolds almost like a primordial myth or fairy tale: a radiant Woman clothed with the sun and crowned with stars cries out in labor; a great red Dragon waits to devour the promised child; the child is born and snatched away; war erupts in heaven; Michael and his angels cast the Dragon down; the Woman flees into the wilderness where she is hidden and preserved. The sequence possesses all the clarity and symbolic force of archetypal narrative.

[…] in the days when it was the voice of the last angel hear, when put to sound, it will have accomplished the mystery of God. Rev. 10:7

Compositional premises

Through repeated readings, I began to discern a kind of double-helix structure within the Book of Revelation, an intertwining division that aligned with both thematic content and emotional intensity. The text, in my view, seemed to naturally separate into two arcs, which I have come to call the Missionary Cycle and the Visionary Cycle. These terms encapsulate the dual facets of John’s work: his role as a messenger to the churches and as a seer of profound cosmic visions. John’s narrative is simultaneously embracing these two missions, as if the eleven first chapters were occurring simultaneously with the subsequent eleven chapters from Rev. 12 to Rev. 22.

Rev. 5 is in my view the first apotheotic moment in the Book of Revelation; one which paradoxically resists instrumentation and calls for a kind of contemplative stillness in the music. Here Johns tells us that he “wept much that no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to into into it.” Immediately after the “Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” appears as a “Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth”. This image haunted me. It also gave me what is possibly one of the most important structural clues as to the meaning of the text: the parallel of John and The Lamb, or put another way, John become transfigured, possessed by a monstrous Lamb that defies representation, that is incongruous and, as it were, difficult to “swallow”. One that can see through the seven spirits of God from heaven, which are the Seven Churches that John sees from Earth. The mission given to John in Rev. 1:19 , “write what you see”, tenses unbearably in Rev. 5 and breaks asunder into what he sees and what he must write, his vision and his commission. By the time we reach Rev. 10 and John swallows the “little book” I was under the impression that John suffered a kind of spiritual pregnancy, a cosmic indigestion, and that Rev. 11 was just the calm before the storm; wishful thinking and John’s vain hope that it would all end just then.

What follows sits on this first half with uncomfortable symmetry. A symmetry truly impregnated with meaning. The Meaning.

We may never get to know how the twenty-two chapters that make up the final draft of the Book of Revelation were written. There is no reason to think that the so-called grand visions came last. Perhaps the most arduous task was to give the whole work an epistolary and communicable form, to write the first eleven chapters after having experienced the dizzying roller coaster that goes from the appearance of the celestial woman until the arrival of the New Jerusalem. What good are these great visions in isolation? The ancient world was familiar with beasts, dragons, and celestial apparitions. John needs to provide his visions with a new Christian context but something seems to be blocking the way: this may be the reason why there is a continuity after chapter 11: the image of God portrayed in the first part is simply unreachable. All that will change in the final apotheosis in chapters 21 and 22: an apotheosis of feeling, faith, and hope with an immediacy possibly never surpassed ever since.

I am not attempting to resolve issues that have been debated for almost two thousand years, and without being fully solved for all involved. I just want to point out where my experience in reading the Book of Revelation led me, while trying to shape a coherent musical outline of that work. John of Patmos, it appeared to me, seemed to have written two books in one. There was no need to destroy the earth so many times with all sorts of plagues and disasters: it always felt like John was reaching for something he could not quite shape completely (until the very end of the work), and at times the whole thing reads like a draft.

Apocalypsis Iesu: Formal Structure

“Double Arc” as Compositional Plan

From a creative perspective, one that is committed to give meaningful expression to its subject, the Book of Revelation tells us most of the time that everything has a beginning and an end, an Alpha and Omega. It speaks to us, calls us in a sense, to represent it and say it one more time, to retell the story with different accents and rhythms if that is what it takes, without adding or subtracting to it; that of itself is perhaps the greatest challenge of all. The book itself is the beginning and end of a cycle, one that repeats itself indefinitely but which is every time accomplished in each of us, who are the key and the axis of a wheel that does not stop. Every artist or visionary that approaches the book must re-write it all over again, swallow it whole, and experience what that feels like.

Authorship and Agency in the Book of Revelation

Apocalypsis Iesu – Juscheld

God, in the account of the Book of Revelation, tells John: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” a novel, succinct, and shockingly human expression of God that only a man imbued in Greek, Hellenistic culture could come up with. As in Einstein’s famous formula, John’s “I Am the Alpha and the Omega” encapsulates the essence of the unimaginable with stunning grace and elegance.

It also provides us with a meta-structure to the Book of Revelation, one that could also be seen as a formal universal resource present ubiquitously in the cultural and creative production of our human community through time: a literary structure, as we now say, or mythological, as we used to. From complex stories such as the Odyssey or the saga of Heracles in Greek mythology to a simple grammatical sentence (“Heracles is a Greek hero”), all creation or human utterance has a beginning and an end, either implicit or fully stated: an arc form.

This order is what primarily gives meaning and guidance to that process of rapport between the author and the reader. The author-reader relationship takes on a different perspective when we are dealing with works such as the Book of Revelation, where John is in some manner reading (hearing, digesting) from a book himself:

In this context the work of John has God himself as a “structuring” subject, that is to say, the A and Ω, the cycle itself. Depending on the perspective we take, and taking God as the manifested “I” of the narrative, Case 1 would put us in the “visionary” path, in which John is led through a number of visions until the final chapter, in which God himself is fully manifest and allows John to witness it. That would also make John the “you” of the narrative, the one that has to write what he sees and hears to his fellow men. That would situate him in Case 2, which we could then call “missionary”, as John is entrusted with writing vision and prophecy for the eyes and ears of the peoples he often mentions.^[3]This is a curious septenary. John mentions this universal-humanity formula in:Rev.5:9 “omni tribu et lingua et populo et natione”Rev.7:9 “omnibus gentibus et tribubus et populis et … Continue reading

In the former we are in the presence of God revealing himself and his intentions to John, in the latter we have John coming to terms with writing the vision and the prophecy.

John moves between writing and seeing, from admonition to ecstasy, being told to write impossibilities, things that go far beyond ordinary representability: hybrid creatures, impossible liturgies, cosmic simultaneities, paradoxical identities, visions collapsing heaven and earth into one another. He is also tasked with “swallowing” the little book that is opened in the hand of the angel that stands upon the sea and upon the earth. In Rev. 5 John cried because no-one was found worth it to open the scroll with the seven seals, in Rev. 10 John has to swallow it all; the seven trumpets are perhaps left behind, but the worst is yet to come and it is John (and by extension each one of us reading that book) the one that has to digest it, not just write it. John becomes, in some sense, the new Lion of Judah, the impossible Lamb he saw in Rev. 5: he is now in charge of opening the seals. Fortunately, he does not commit blasphemy by saying or believing such a thing, and so his mind ultimately did not shatter. For anyone that has been to Patmos, walked up and down those hills always in view of the sea, the thought of a man believing he is God is the at the most remote that it could be. But immerse in those visions, he must have felt uncomfortably close to the divine when alone in that cave, and perhaps occasionally by chance banged his head once or twice against the painful roof of that lonely abode.

Cycles

The musical structure of Apocalypsis Iesu is that of two parts (Part I and Part II) that share two common thematic areas, as I have already proposed: those thematic areas could be called, as far as their reader is concerned, humanistic (corresponding to what epistolary and missionary that is included in the book), and spiritual (or visionary). The first, or humanistic, deals with what John is doing (seeing, listening, and writing) and has experienced (his possibly traumatic biography). The spiritual perspective is the one that John transmits to us as a witness, the one that he attempts to articulate with the apocalyptic imagery that constitutes the most spectacular side of the Book of Revelation.

Thematically these two areas, the humanistic and the spiritual, are intertwined in two musical arcs, both with a clear and spectacular beginning, a series of conflicts/trials, and a typically apocalyptic or revealing resolution:

1. Part I (first apocalypse):
   1. Heavenly Vision and Commission
   2. Contrasts between suffering of the faithful and destruction of the wicked
   3. Opening of the Sanctuary of God and vision of the Ark of the Covenant
      
2. Part II (second apocalypse):
   1. Cosmic Vision
   2. Sharp contrasts (punishments and rewards)
   3. The New Jerusalem descends (without sanctuary)

Each part establishes a hierarchy of images or symbols that can be understood as framed in a self-sufficient (or in some way creative) musical structure. Let’s call those parts arcs and those thematic areas that are intertwined in these missionary and visionary . In order to define these acts more precisely, or to give them a more relevant meaning in the context of the book, I am going to call the predominant orientation cycles in each one of them. Thus, Part I will correspond to the Missionary Cycle , and Part II to the Visionary Cycle, without losing sight of the fact that both are inextricably linked in the narrative of the Book of Revelation in an almost sinusoid wavy pattern in each of the arcs.

Part I: Missionary Cycle

The first part of Apocalypsis Iesu goes from App.1 to App.11. These two chapters, the opening and closing of the first arc, were composed as a diptych in the form of a choral symphony.

Part II: Visionary Cycle

The second part of the oratory is structured around a theme of antagonisms significantly more marked than in the first part. There is a clear continuity between Rev. 12-13, Rev. 14 brings back the missionary (or epistolary, elevated to revealing) facet of the Book of Revelation (and, in a sense, Rev. 15 might be understood as a continuation, despite the introduction of the seven plagues).^[4]Rev.6-7 opens with the seven seals, and in Rev.14-15 John concludes his missionary cycle and reverses the order, witnessing the final cataclysmic destruction of a corrupted world. Other thematic pairs are Rev. 17-18, 19-20, and 21-22.

Final Considerations

To understand the Book of Revelation from an artistic perspective we have put ourselves first in its author’s place. That is the first and insurmountable problem: Where to start? So much has been written (and more is being written) about the Book of Revelation, that it is simply impossible to start anywhere other than reading it. Herein lies the second problem: we may not possess the parameters or even the same categories of judgment (or thought in general) as those early disciples of Jesus, in the era that followed the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

What to do? The answer: read it, in any case, and reread it until its structure, the one that best satisfies the questions with which we approach the book, makes its way into our minds. An additional, or perhaps complementary option is to spend a lot of time reading apocalyptic literature, and the comments that two millennia of Christianity have produced about the book of Juan de Patmos. Over time this corpus of comments, which is going from praise to denigration, it begins to take more or less, and figuratively, the shape of a cross: the spiritual (or “pneumatic”) axis goes from what we could call theological, going down to the purely historiographic terrain; both use the symbol as an interpretive tool, either in their mysterium aspect, or as a code to some extent decipherable. The other axis, let’s call it humanistic, inevitably horizontal, goes from religious fanaticism to its other extreme, the complete disqualification of the book; here fits both the speech and the most abject intolerance. In the midst of all this, how could it be otherwise, is the figure and the message of Jesus, of Christ.

As far as the creative task inspired by John’s work is concerned, the option of trying to embrace the message of the Book of Revelation through an artistic work remains valid, as much now as it has been since its inclusion in the canon. Many artists have dedicated their creative genius or at least their continued effort to this subject (see here for a good review of these efforts). Whenever the artist has found his inspiration in the Book of Revelation, he has to ask himself a question that could be called structural: the unity of the work. The vision must encompass the meaning of what the apocalyptic landscape present in the text shows, that outlandish parade of images to which only the apocalyptic adjective does it justice. And this is already a third problem: how much can the visionary and detailed gaze of the person who has to create it cover? It could be said in another way: what legitimates you to do it? Why do you want to do it?