Relax, Apocalypse is Just the Death of Ego

A Storm. The Woman and the Dragon

Page from the Apocalypse, an illuminate manuscript, c. 1320

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection

The imagery comes from Revelation 12:-3: "...a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns..."

As a fanatic reader and lover of art, I’m fascinated by allegory and its multi-layered possibilities. I am disregarding the traditional, literalist explanation of this imagery to consider something else:

She is Hagia Sophia, Divine Wisdom, known as the feminine aspect of God. After transcending the seven demons that represent stages of experiential understanding in the material world, she sits at the eighth level, the cosmos, the mythological refuge of the Goddess. Her Wisdom leads (in this case, her child, or in other terms, her world of children: us) to the Mysterious Portal of All.

In other words, after toiling in identification with experience, the ego dies allowing the human-being to be handed over by Wisdom and Understanding to its true nature.