Читать книгу The Woman on the Beast - Helen Simpson - Страница 3

Table of Contents

This book tries to interpret a contradiction, that the most hateful actions are, as often as not, performed for the best of reasons. In the Prologue a Divine promise is made and, for good cause, broken. The three stories that follow have only this same idea in common, that men are driven to persecute and betray, not by malice or folly, but by the good they passionately wish their fellow men; that energy of which St. John speaks, sweet as honey in the mouth, bitter to the belly. The Epilogue shows Heaven defeated because divided against itself.

One personage needs explanation, the hermaphrodite who embodies this contradiction; Johannes of the first story, St. Esprit, the Grand Master, of the second, Mrs. Sopwith of the third. He-she is Antichrist, the false prophet of Revelation, who deceived with miracles all those having the mark of the beast on which the woman rode.

On another page I give some of St. John's terrific texts, but the chapter headings are taken from a lesser prophet, Nostradamus, whose book was Englished and annotated by Theophilus de Garancieres in 1692.

From the Revelation of St. John the Divine

So he carried me away in spirit into the wilderness; and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple, and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abomination and filthiness of her fornication. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints.

And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go, and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea, and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel, and said to him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth as sweet as honey.

And lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as the fig-tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind; and the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?