Abstract
Mythical stories are, according to Luce Irigaray, one source where the matrix of repression, desire and correction of the female body is made visible. The Book of Revelation is one of the parts of the Bible told in a typical mythical language framework. It is also one of the most infamous biblical books because of its misogynist approach and repeated use of female stereotypes such as the whore and the pure bride. The purpose of this article is not to deny the validity of this feminist critique, but to open up the meaning of the story of Revelation from an Irigarayan perspective as also to include possibilities of a counter-story where phallocentrism is challenged and finally altered into a new era where women, as well as other previously objectified categories, are aware of themselves as subjects in their own right.
So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, “Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth” (Rev. 10.9: all biblical references are taken from NRSV, 1995).
This suggestive scene from the Revelation to John could be read as a flagrant example of Christianity as a religion of speech and word. As such, it is a construction of religion within the law of the Father, expressing the matrix of the phallocentric culture. As such, Christianity tends either to exclude or to deform what is symbolically connected to women. When the scroll is eaten, is that, then, a symbol for the internalization of the patriarchal religion, demanded of those who aspire to enter the Christian community? The taste is sweet from the beginning; how good to be one of the righteous! But after some time it begins to ache. Does the one who eats the scroll experience the loss and pain that is caused by the oppression of maternity, body and nature as spiritually relevant categories?
Focal to Luce Irigaray’s theory and critique of theology and culture is the claim that Western culture has overvalued language at the expense of the body. Subsequently, Western religious tradition has primarily emphasized speech and has God figured as the Word. Such an emphasis could indicate a religion with a lacking interest in the silent spiritual reflection, and, in a wider perspective, lack of respect for life. For Irigaray, there is a general link between breath, spirit and life, which in religious traditions manifest either in the combination of speech, breathing out and death, or in the combination of silence, breathing in and life (Joy et al., 2002: 16-17).
Irigaray argues that Western Christian tradition has come to a dead end where women are valued because of their nature-given abilities to give birth and become mothers, but where they in return are closed off from exerting any influence on the androcentric culture where the male subject in different ways suppresses the connection to nature, which could be depicted as symbolically female. The effort to suppress nature is not entirely successful, but whatever is connected to nature, symbolically or otherwise, must be disciplined and subordinated to the aims of the androcentric culture. Thereby, a polarization rather than a dialogue is constructed between nature and culture (Irigaray, 2004: 176-77; 2008: 4). The process generating the subordination of women is similar to the process generating the subordination of nature. Such a structure is visible in Western Christianity and has been repeatedly illuminated by feminist theologians, particularly within the ecofeminist approach to feminist theology for the past several decades.
Desire and Correction
Irigaray makes use of two principles in order to visualize the process of creating subordination. The first principle is desire. Within the framework of a culture based on the law of the Father, and the suppression of the connection to the body of the Mother, a feeling of loss is generated, combined with a desire for these suppressed connections symbolized by women. However, the desire for women is dependent on the cultural power and superiority of the male subject, which is exercised in the correction of women (Joy, 2006: 11-13).
The correction, in turn, is dependent on the second principle; the economy of sameness. The economy of sameness depicting the androcentric norm (i.e. the law of the Father – which does not tolerate the difference between the two genders) is fundamental in Western culture, according to Irigaray. The category of woman is constructed in order to make it possible for men to mirror themselves in women. Women are not permitted to exist on their own conditions; they are limited to the roles and attributes offered by the heterosexual matrix within the law of the Father (Irigaray, 2002: 44; Joy, 2006: 9-11).
The fundamental interpretive task for Irigaray is to give voice to the silent traces of the historical process of silencing the Mother and her symbolic connections (Kelso, 2007: 26). Mythical stories are of central interest because they include the principal foundations for the social order, an order which the analysis of the myths should have the ambition to change (Whitford, 1994: 388). The matrix of repression of nature followed by desire and correction is found, for example, in Greek mythology as well as in the Christian blood-mysticism of the Eucharist (Armour, 2003: 37). The Book of Revelation in the New Testament clearly employs the language of myth. The book includes a traditional mythological dualistic worldview and several examples of mythological elements, such as talking animal figures, the birth of a divine child, and a sacred marriage (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 167).
Feminist interpreters have previously pointed to the Book of Revelation as a phallocentric text, where female images are constructed within an ideology based on a male desire to take control over women’s sexuality and reproductive power (Pippin, 1992: 84).
Matrix of Desire and Correction of Nature in the Book of Revelation
The tension between life and death is a general and, as we have seen, gendered structure in the works of Irigaray. But this structure is not deemed as eternal by Irigaray; she imagines a utopia, often articulated within the frames of a Christian language. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, she is explicitly evoking the image of the world on the threshold of a new, third era of the West, the Era of the Spirit and the Bride, following the eras of the Father and the Son, based on the Old and New Testaments respectively (Whitford, 1994: 385).
In this third era to come, God does not remain in a position opposed to humanity. God merges with the accomplishment of human beings, who transmute in a spiritual way and become divine. Such an understanding of God will include a redemption of physical love as one indispensable part of being human, as long as it is spiritualized and cultivated and not understood as a means of reproduction or possession (Irigaray, 2004: 169). When envisioning the era of the Spirit and the Bride, Irigaray makes use of the wedding foretold in the Book of Revelation 21-22 as a symbol for the new age to come. This requires a thorough reconsideration of traditional understandings of the categories of divinity and of woman. The woman’s body is no longer imagined as polarized to divine spirit. Woman is aware of herself as a subject in her own right, found in the confrontation with the other (Irigaray, 2004: 163; Whitford, 1994: 385). The spiritual task for the age to come is a more complete spiritual development for humans, and it is not a matter concerning the individual self, but rather dependent on establishing a relationship to the other as another. The simplest way to experience this is in the relation to a spiritually autonomous person of the other sex. There is a spiritual dimension to the attraction of the sexes, despite suffocation by the economy of sameness, still rendered threatening by dogmatic religions with an interest in making God resistant to perception and opposed to the potential divinity of humans. Irigaray concludes:
A spiritual relationship between the sexes would allow us to reunite human and divine elements that have been artificially separated by the domination of one sex over the other, by the dominance of the values of one sex over those of the other (Irigaray, 2004: 174).
It is important to keep in mind that this embracement is a confrontation with the other, in which it is necessary for women to establish their own identities, free from the needs of the male gender that hitherto have characterized the category of woman. The founding of a new feminine subjectivity is necessary in order to establish new ways of relating to the other, and in the long run this labor of love between the two genders is the source of the salvation of the world (Schwab, 1994: 370). Incarnation, then, is not fulfilled until the Lamb marries the Bride, in the last chapters of the Book of Revelation.
It is, however, equally important to keep in mind that according to Irigaray, no real encounter between the two genders ever took place; neither in the historic nor the prehistoric periods. She, like several other feminist thinkers, imagines that there once was a gynocentric civilization that was taken over by phallocentrism. Many feminists have made constructive use of this by imagining that the values from the ancient gynocentric era should be reclaimed in our time (see for example, Christ, 1997, 2003). Irigaray takes a somewhat different approach, at least in the earlier stages of her work, as evidenced by her claim that gynocentrism can never be the solution if the aim is a symbolic embracement between woman and man (Muraro, 1994: 326). Unfortunately, there is a tendency within the later writings of Irigaray to come close to an ontological essentialism where women are thought of as more close to nature and with the specific task of caring for life in all its dimensions. This appears to signal an acceptance of those feminine stereotypes constructed by the androcentric culture, which Irigaray herself strongly opposed in earlier texts (Joy, 2006: 159; Irigaray, 2004: 147).
Limits and Possibilities in the Heterosexual Paradigm of Luce Irigaray
It is easy to criticize Irigaray for her strong emphasis on the heterosexual couple as a significant category. If narrowly read, I would like to acknowledge that as an obvious limitation of her theory. An argument for the strength of the theory, however, is that it encompasses possibilities for understanding the heterosexual couple and the confrontation with the other gender as a symbolic paradigm that can be applied to other differentiated categories. The core of her argument is the respect for, and the wish for, an encounter with the different other, who does not belong to the same group or family but who is rather the stranger or foreigner not yet a part of our communities (Irigaray, 2004: 149; 2008: 22-24). The economy of sameness, usually applied in explaining the phallocentric construction of the category of woman, has much wider implications. According to Irigaray, man in the phallocentric culture does not know how to acknowledge the other as irreducible to himself, nor how to make an alliance respectful of one another’s values and limits. The Western mental habit is to reduce and make the other similar to oneself (Irigaray, 2004: 25). Therefore, working for the liberation of a feminine subject and a culture of two subjects means working for the liberation of humanity; an urgent task in the multicultural era in which we live, if the intention is to establish a global democratic culture and society (Irigaray, 2004: xv). Still, Irigaray does clearly reject same-sex relations as potential participants in the utopian realization of the spirit, although she admits that lesbian relationships are useful for developing subjective identities that do not reflect the norms and behaviours of phallocentric culture. However, there are a few lesbian theorists that have found ways to interpret Irigaray in a deliberative way, although it can be debated whether the potential for such interpretations can actually be found in the later works of Irigaray (Joy, 2006: 97).
Aim and Method
There is an inherent dynamic within feminist critical interpretations of the Book of Revelation that runs the risk of coming to a dead end, without any openings out of the phallocentric patterns. This dynamic is another version of the dualistic ideology of evil against good, usually taken as the dominant message of the Book of Revelation (Keller, 1996: 10-12). My ambition is to avoid the risk of closing up the message of the Book of Revelation, and instead explore the inherent matrix of desire and correction of nature, keeping in mind that the message ends with promise of a new era built on the ruins of the phallocentric culture and religion that erodes, though not without violent resistance, throughout the story of the Book of Revelation. My interpretation emerges through the lens of the theology-critical theory of Luce Irigaray. My reading of the Book of Revelation from an Irigarayan vantage point is motivated by her wish to transfigure and resurrect woman’s flesh and blood in order to establish a new era where women and men are relating to each other under hitherto unknown conditions, embracing each other as both spiritual and carnal subjects, different from each other. Margaret Whitford argues that the conditions for this new way of relating to others seem to be twofold: on the one hand, it is about interpreting what hitherto has been the male fantasy of women, and on the other, about constructing an alternative (Whitford, 1994: 390).
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has adopted a somewhat similar approach in her readings of the Book of Revelation within a feminist liberation theology, but from a feminist social and economic liberation perspective instead of a feminist perspective inspired by psychoanalysis. In her interpretation, the Book of Revelation might contribute to the establishment of a new world of right and just relations, where women are included together with other oppressed and marginalized groups (Stenström, 1998: 231-32). The New Heaven and The New Earth emerging at the end of the Book of Revelation are in continuity with the former heaven and earth, but form a qualitatively different and unified world (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 225).
My reading takes as a point of departure the mythological, poetic and symbolic character of the language of the Book of Revelation. I read the Book of Revelation as a symbolic-poetic work, but it is also a work of visionary rhetoric, with a cultural-political message as well as a theological message (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 187). My standpoint is that the messages of the Book of Revelation have to be read anew in every historical and cultural context in order to be graspable by its audience (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 199). The Irigarayan critique of phallocentric culture and religion offers possibilities for analyzing the symbols and bringing out the inherent imaginative power. In my reading, this is done within the wider frameworks of intentions of the Book of Revelation, which are usually understood as a call for justice for those exploited and killed in the name of cultural and religious oppression today as well as in the days of its author. The Book of Revelation concludes with a vision of a just world, free from the evil and suffering caused by the dominant culture. I understand the dominant culture to be based on the law of the Father, and I read the vision of a just world in the terms of the third era of Irigaray. This is not to say that my analysis is necessarily limited to gender relations (compare Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 22-25). As commented on above, I take the critique of and alternative to the economy of sameness delivered by Irigaray to be most relevant for culture in general and applicable to any confrontation with another kind. Still, I would render my reading as a feminist one, since it comes from the clear presupposition that women suffer from multidimensional oppression within Western culture, an oppression supported by Christian tradition as an androcentric religion. In addition to an analysis of the misogynist symbolic language in the Book of Revelation as an example of the destructive patterns undoubtedly found in biblical texts, I attempt to find openings for a constructive feminist reading of the Book of Revelation, and try to unveil the phallocentric patterns. It is a myth of male desire created by men, where women’s roles are defined by men (Pippin, 1992: 83). Correspondingly, male characters are defined by men in relation to the construction of the male subject within a phallocentric culture. Clearly, this holds for the description of God and Christ in the Book of Revelation. Therefore, one aim of my reading is to move beyond the surface of the slaughtered Lamb, the symbol for Christ commonly used all through the story of the Book of Revelation. How are rejection, desire and correction of mother/nature reflected in the subject of the Lamb?
I will make use of mimesis as a critical and creative tool in my reading. Mimesis is a tactic of deconstructive and reconstructive reading, aiming to reiterate the ideas behind a certain text in order to expose blind spots. When doing so, a space is opened up for reconstruction of the meaning (Joy, 2006: 2). I am not interested in situating the messages of the Book of Revelation in any specific historic context. Like Tina Pippin, I would like to ‘play with the polyvalence’ of the text (Pippin, 1992: 16). Nor is it my intention to suggest a complete reading of the Book of Revelation. The textual parts interpreted are deliberately chosen as powerful examples of the matrix of desire and correction of women, while at the same time the interpretation points forward to the hope for an alternative future in which women are not left out of the symbolism. Among those selected parts, there are passages where the Lamb figures. The reason behind including these passages is that here, the male subject within phallocentric spirituality comes to the fore. I do this in a mood of ‘constructive ambivalence,’ neither affirming nor negating the validity of the message (Keller, 1996: 24). The Book of Revelation is a story of ambiguity, where both revolution and reaction are possible frames of interpretation. These can in turn be interpreted as entwined with each other in a counter-apocalyptic story of abjection and integration in a complex dialectic (Keller, 1996: 10). This approach is also in line with the twofold critical and constructive project of Irigaray. On the one hand there is the purpose to deconstruct gender and sexuality within the frames of the law of the Father; on the other, there is the purpose of finding images, ideals and divinity that do not leave women bereft of symbolism (Kelso, 2007: 73).
Analysis
The following interpretation takes its departure from the Book of Revelation 4. The text from chapter 4 and further on contains the full developed apocalyptic vision, though not without connections to the letters of chapters 1-3 (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 173).
And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come.” And whenever the living creatures give glory and honour and thanks to the one who is seated on the throne, who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives for ever and ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4.8-11).
The stage for the apocalypse of phallocentrism is set. The Mother is, as usual, absent. The female genealogy is erased, and the mother line remains unsymbolized in Western culture (Kelso, 2007: 62-65). In relation to Christian views of God, this fact has been operative in the construction of a tradition where Kant and others view God as the one who has brought the world into being as the single parent (Jantzen, 1999: 142). The four beings allude to the four directions, of which God, and the law of the Father, is in charge (Keller, 1996: 52).
Next we are told that the scroll of the Father is not for anyone to touch. There is a price to pay for anybody who wants to enjoy the privileges of the Father.
And I began to weep bitterly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. See the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals” (Rev. 5.4-5).
Suddenly the Lion is transformed into a slaughtered Lamb, who is the one who is finally able to take the scroll and open its seals, while the world in all directions sings to the Lamb:
“You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God and they will reign on earth” (Rev. 5.9-10).
Previous interpretations have taken the Lion to symbolize an archaic power of carnality (Keller, 1996: 50). Such carnality is for Irigaray symbolically connected to the body of the Mother, left behind at birth and oppressed by the spirituality of the word that is a presupposition for a phallocentric religion. Provided that this carnal power, inherent in every human being, is disciplined and neutralized by the law of the Father, the subject can have access to the spirit transformed into text, now bereft of its carnal dimension. The sudden transformation of Lion to Lamb might symbolize the desire and the following correction of nature. As Schüssler Fiorenza notes, the Lamb is worthy of taking the scroll and does break its seals, since it has been slaughtered to purchase people for God with its own blood (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1998: 73). The conclusion to be drawn when the scenery is interpreted through an Irigarayan lens is that the Lamb symbolizes the slaughter of nature; a slaughter that is reflected in theology by the emphasis on text instead of nature as the mediator of divine revelation. The Lamb is worthy of touching the scroll because it has purchased people for God by breaking its own connections to the dimensions of body and nature, symbolized by the body of the Mother. The lesson of the Lamb has been followed by many, in order to stay righteous within a religion of the words of the Father.
The Lamb, symbolizing the disciplined category of nature worthy of entering the realm of the Father, breaks the seal and reveals the outcomes of the law of the Father. Four horsemen then enter. As well as the four beings in the Book of Revelation, chapter 4, they symbolize the four directions, showing that the law of the Father is supposed to rule everywhere (Keller, 1996: 52). The reader is told that the first horseman is here to conquer the world, and he is joined by the following three.
And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another; and he was given a great sword (Rev. 6.4).
The second horseman comes with a sword, taking peace away from earth, making people slaughter each other because of the intolerance generated by the rule of the economy of sameness. The desire to control and dominate the other has connotations much wider than if it were purely a matter of gender-relations (Irigaray, 2004: xv, 25).
…I looked and there was a black horse! Its rider held a pair of scales in his hand, and I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s pay, and three quarts of barley for a day’s pay, but do not damage the olive oil and the wine!” (Rev. 6.5-6).
Previous interpretations have taken the verses as a story about such injustices in the Roman Empire (Keller, 1996: 54). The third horseman confirms the message of the previous one. Riding for social and economic injustice, he can be taken as a symbol of the structural oppression of gender, class and ethnicity following the tendency to dominate instead of showing support and solidarity to the other (which all comes out of the economy of sameness). Conversely, to strive for a culture of two subjects is not only about liberating women, but also about liberating humanity, which is perhaps more appropriate now than ever for developing a global democratic society (Irigaray, 2004: xv, 25).
I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him; … (Rev. 6.8).
According to Catherine Keller, the fourth horseman – yellowish like death – is rather the symbol of the ‘hellish non-life’ that might be the consequence for those suffering from structures of subordination (Keller, 1996: 54). I would suggest that, put into the frames of an Irigarayan understanding of the structures of oppression caused by the law of the Father, the horseman symbolizes the lack of a full human life that is the consequence of the oppression of nature and carnality. The underlying denial of the Mother causes a kind of ‘womb-envy’ that can only be cured by satisfying the desire for the female other, channeled by the economy of sameness. This in turn denies the possibility of a female subject on its own premises, with the threat of melancholia or hysteria as a constant haunter of women (Kelso, 2007: 39, 55f). As a general cultural pattern, this could also be a description of the insanity behind the construction of unequal relations between groups in the center and in the margins of the global society. Perhaps all those are addressed in the next scene, as the fifth seal is broken:
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; (Rev. 6.9).
Are the readers now confronted with all people that through millennia have had their existence restricted and diminished by the prescriptions of the law of the Father? Have they suffered even harsher punishment for attempts to advocate their own subjectivity against what was expected of them, according to the norms and stereotypes offered by the law of the Father?
They cried out with a loud voice, “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?” (Rev. 6.10).
They call for revenge, and they ask God to help them. But which God do they ask? Let us set aside the image of God the Father in order to find an alternative image that might heal the damage done to humanity by the matrix of oppression and correction of women and nature. Is it the divine spirit dependent on the development of full humanity that enters the scene? Irigaray allows for an understanding of God that relies on transcendence as wholly immanent; God and humanity serve as each others’ mediators in order to bring each other into being. Bringing God to life through humanity is only possible in a setting that accepts the subjectivity and flourishing of the other, be it women, foreigners or animals. It presupposes an understanding of transcendence and immanence that is opposite to the pattern of dichotomies within the law of the Father (Jantzen, 1999: 273-75). Is it the vision of such a revenge on the law of the Father that comes up when the sixth seal is opened by the Lamb?
When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and there came a great earth-quake; the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood (Rev. 6.12).
The sun darkens. Is that a symbol for the fall of the phallus? Irigaray has interpreted the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic as a story where the sun symbolizes the ideas of the Father (the producer of the ‘real’ representation of reality), while the cave symbolizes the womb and the Mother, who is only capable of producing inferior copies of the original images made by the Father (Kelso, 2007: 28-29). We are not told about the cave here, but we are told about the moon, which is usually understood as something that is only capable of a similar passive reflection of the light of the sun. Like the cave, it serves as a parallel to the female object. As a former pale copy of the male subject, the moon takes back its own subjectivity, defining itself as a subject of flesh and blood on its own terms. Is this a symbol of the revenge of the silenced Mother and her body? Is it a spiritual revenge as well, a revenge on the God of the Father that presupposes the dichotomy of body and spirit, woman and man?
But the power of the Father is not that easy to render harmless. He certifies his power by transforming heaven into a scroll, the ultimate sign of the word-dependent spirituality of patriarchy.
The sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains (Rev. 6.14-15).
And all of humanity shivers and hides in the caves of the mountains from the rage of the Father. Is it a coincidence that they opt for caves as their hideaways?
An angel with the ‘seal of the living God’ appears, coming to rescue the righteous.
And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel (Rev. 7.4).
Are the ‘those who were sealed’ the ones who are faithful to the law of the Father? It is worth noting that in the verses afterwards, they are all mentioned by their connections to male genealogy. The Mother is absent as a signifier of their heritage, which is in line with the cultural refusal of the female beings’ access to the symbolic order in general, and to the sphere of the traditional religion in particular (Kelso, 2007: 63).
Then another mass of people appears:
…These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7.14).
The reader is told that they have washed their robes white in the blood sacrificed by the Lamb. This is a vicarious suffering; the Lamb was slaughtered in order to make these people live. But the question is: what kind of life? Are their lives dependent on their acceptance of living as subjects corrected by the law of the Father? Did they win their white robes as a prize for the sacrifice of their life-blood, once offered to them from the Mother and her body?
When the Lamb opens the seventh seal, the seven angels with their trumpets appear and terrible plagues are let loose, one by one.
Are the plagues symbols for the psychosis which constantly threatens women because of the non-symbolization of women, and which denies them any position other than what is defined by the interest of the law of the Father? Women are prevented from any healthy definition of themselves and their bodies (Kelso, 2007: 39-40).
Could this threat of psychosis be applied not only to women, but also to the many people outside the center of Western society? Psychosis is a symbol for alienation, exploitation, renunciation and forced integration into Western discourses (Irigaray, 2008: 131-33).
Then the star-crowned woman appears, giving birth to her son who is taken away from her to heaven. In feminist interpretations inspired by psychoanalysis, this deprivation has sometimes been understood as a sign of patriarchy defeating the Mother and taking children from their mothers in order to make them into men (Keller, 1996: 68). Irigaray’s theory is easily applicable to such an interpretation. The law of the Father, symbolized by the dragon, breaks in to disarm the power of the woman and her body and at first threatens to swallow the son. In the following verses the woman is pursued by the dragon into the desert. The story appears a bit ambiguous if one takes into account the common interpretations of mythological dragons as symbols of the cosmic mother (Keller, 1996: 69). If the dragon should be conceived of as a symbol with female connotations: how, then, does it pose a threat to the star-crowned woman? In such a case, I suggest that the dragon can only threaten a woman who is androcentrically identified, and that destiny is hardly possible to avoid within a culture ruled by the Father. The only position for a woman is the function the Father has decided for her. And for her, patriarchy comes to the rescue with wings that make her fly into the sky. Through this levitation, she transcends the abject lure of being tied deep down and behind that would make her a victim of psychosis. So far, the initial scenes of Revelation 12 could very well be interpreted as a resignation to the law of the Father, and as an illustration of the Irigarayan thesis of the economy of sameness.
But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony…(Rev. 12.11).
The dragon is conquered through the blood of the Lamb, and the power is in the hands of God. The righteous ones who fought the dragon are dead. Perhaps we should understand the death they have suffered as the ‘semi-death’ that the male phallocentric subject suffers because of the rejection of nature and the permanent loss it causes. But the gain is that the maternal and natural are rendered harmless.
They worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” (Rev. 13.4). …it was given authority over every tribe and people and language and nation and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slaughtered (Rev. 13.7-8).
Does the beast appearing in Revelation 13 symbolize the raw, despiritualized nature, the raw lust, the unsophisticated satisfaction of basic carnal needs? As previously mentioned, Irigaray is eager to assert that sexual attraction must be transformed, away from an animalistic and procreative instinct. Sexuality must become cultivated and spiritualized in order to gain the means to encounter the other as another subject on her or his own terms. If this fails, it continues to dictate the division of tasks between women and men on the basis of the reproductive matrix. This phenomenon has different features from the gender-matrix of submission and possession developed within the economy of sameness dictated by the law of the Father, for which the righteous have their names written in the book of the slaughtered Lamb. But no long-term gains for humanity would be made by letting the carnal instincts loose. Is it possible to avoid thinking of the sexualization of Western culture, where pornography is accessible anywhere to anyone, and where we are exhorted to consume bodies for fun, lust and pleasure? Confronting the other, with respect for his or her integrity is not facilitated. The path to a relational spirituality that allows God to come into being with people on the basis of just relationships with themselves and others would be as impossible to follow as the path offered within the framework of the law of the Father (Irigaray, 2004: 176; 2008: 4; Jantzen, 1999: 272-73).
Again, the Lamb appears in the story:
Then I looked, and there was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion! And with him were one hundred and forty-four thousand who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads (Rev. 14.1).
Along with the Lamb stand the 144,000 righteous, the ones who have not defiled themselves with women, which through the Irigarayan lens could be taken as a description of the male matrix of the economy of sameness. Strictly speaking, ‘women’, as a distinct and separate category, are absent from the texts. There is only the construction of the category called women which reflects men’s needs and desires, serving as a means for exchanges among men. The phallocentric culture is organized as a homosocial order, and, in a certain allegorical meaning, a male homosexual order (Kelso, 2007: 61).
We are now approaching the last parts of the Book of Revelation, those that have become infamous for their misogynist scenes in which the classic complex of the Whore and the Madonna are illustrated by the Whore of Babylon and the Bride of the New Jerusalem.
The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name, a mystery; “Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations”. And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus (Rev. 17.4-6). And the ten horns that you saw, they 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).
Feminist critical interpretations of the Book of Revelation have generally taken the Whore to symbolize the sexually autonomous woman who is punished and killed as a scapegoat representing a diversity of evil in society.
The Bride, on the other hand, represents the woman as an object: adorned and passive, and made beautiful for her future husband (Pippin, 1992: 72-73).
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready; to her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints (Rev. 19.7-8).
She is the ideal woman of patriarchy, or in the words of Irigaray, an example of the perfectly male-identified woman. Although altering her shape into the city of the New Jerusalem, she remains haunted by misogyny.
But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practises abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life (Rev. 21.27).
Previous feminist critical readings have suggested this as symbolizing a mass- intercourse of the 144, 000 righteous with the bride (Pippin, 1992: 80).
However, while I am not questioning the validity of these interpretations, I suggest a slight alteration since there are other possibilities within a critical feminist frame of interpretation. For example, it is possible that the Whore does not signify the sexually independent woman at all, which has often been the case in feminist interpretations. With inspiration from Irigaray and based on the previous discussions in this paper, I would suggest two possible interpretations of the Whore in the Book of Revelation. The possibility of sexual independence for a woman within the law of the Father must be questioned as a possible position for a woman. Instead, the Whore could be viewed as a woman who has made herself available to men; she has played the prescribed female game, in order to reflect the desire of men, and she has played it very well. Within the framework of such an interpretation, the destruction of the Whore might be understood as a sign of the destruction of the phallocentric construction of the female subject, and, in such a case, a sign of the apocalypse of phallocentrism. Another possible interpretation is that the Whore might be a sign of the raw carnal sexuality, uncultivated and unspiritualized, a sign not liberating for her or for humanity, but still confining her to a position limited by the gendered matrix of procreation. Regardless of which of the interpretations that is chosen, both can be applied to a situation where the monster of phallocentrism in any of its features, either as the book of the law of the Father or as raw carnality, ceases to exist.
Then the stage is set for the wedding of the Lamb. If we decide that the Book of Revelation ends in an apocalypse of phallocentrism and that the era of the Spirit and the Bride follows, then the wedding is a sign of something new. The wedding symbolizes the new way of embracing each other as subjects in our own right. The Bride disappears into the shape of the city of the New Jerusalem; in this new era, the phallocentric archetype of the Madonna has no place.
I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it (Rev. 21.22-24).
There is no longer any need for either sun or moon. Could that be a way of expressing that nature and culture, women and men, foreigners and neighbors, are no longer opposed to each other? The glory of God that shines upon the city – could that be the divine spirit brought to life within and between human beings, through the embracement of the other, thus putting an end to the need for a temple of phallocentric worship?
Conclusion
This analysis has, by following the theories of Luce Irigaray, suggested inherent openings and challenges to the very obvious matrix of male desire and correction of the non-male subject in the Book of Revelation. The story of Revelation is ambiguous. On the one hand, the Lamb, as one of the central figures of the text, could be read as a flagrant example of nature and carnality as helplessly disciplined to fit in the law of the Father. But on the other hand, there are parts of the Book of Revelation that could be read as asking for justice for all those that have had their existences diminished by the law of the Father. In the text, there are calls for revenge of the corrective Father to be heard. For example, the infamous slaughter of the whore of Babylon could be read as an ending of the male-identified woman of the phallocentric culture. Instead, there is a new era to come. The wedding of the Lamb is the symbol of a new way of encountering the other – not as an object to be disciplined through the male gaze, but as a subject in its own right. In this new era to come, God is no longer dependent on speech and word, but vivid through the spirit that comes into being through the embracement of the other.