kaos

In Revelation 13:4 the dragon is said to give power to the beast, this is the sevenheaded,
ten-horned, ten-crowned leopard-bear-lion beast, which seems to indicate they
are to be regarded as two separate creatures, as William Blake painted them in his “The
Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea” (c. 1805, in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, dc). Babalon’s beast is never described as a dragon, but the scarlet colour
seems to link it with the red dragon. And, to confuse matters still further, after the
seven-headed, ten-horned, ten-crowned beast rises up out of the sea in 13:1 another
beast comes up out of the earth in 13:11 and this one has two horns like a lamb and
speaks like a dragon, and—although it’s ambiguous—it’s this beast that seems to be
666 in 13:18 (these two beasts were illustrated together in a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer).
So, “The Beast 666” doesn’t appear to be the same beast that Babalon rides. Aleister
Crowley in Chapter 49 of the Book of Lies indicates that it is the seven-headed beast
that Babalon rides that he “frankly identifies himself with”, yet it is far from clear that
Babalon’s beast should necessarily be construed as “The Beast 666”, nor is it clear whether
the Beast 666 is a two-horned lamb with a dragon’s voice from the earth or a sevenheaded
ten-horned leopard-bear-lion beast from the sea, although it is definitely one
or the other. And as if that wasn’t enough, we may have to revise our idea that the
number of the Beast is 666. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which contains a fragmentary
papyrus of Revelation that is the earliest known (late third / early fourth century), gives
the number of the Beast as 616 [P.Oxy. LVI 4499]. Irenæus had previously cited and
refuted this number. The Greek word used for “beast” in Revelation, incidentally, is
therion (qhrion), hence Crowley as “The Master Therion” and “To Mega Therion”, the
Great Beast.
To summarise and gather as much clarity as possible so far from John’s bizarre account
of his revelation: Babalon’s beast, though seven-headed and ten-horned, could be one
of two seven-headed ten-horned beasts, one being the Great Red Dragon Michael
fights that has seven crowns on those heads, the other being the leopard-bear-lion
beast from the sea with ten crowns on those heads. Babalon’s beast, however, is scarletcoloured,
like the Great Red Dragon, which we know for certain is not the Beast 666.
Perhaps it is a mistake to expect to be able to distil clarity from a phantasmagoric
hallucination, nonetheless this image of Babalon—the Great Whore, the Scarlet
Woman—riding the Beast represents for occultists a profound sexual mystery quite
apart from such notions read into Revelation of “fornication” being a metaphor for
worshipping other gods and “Babylon” as really being merely a guarded reference to
Rome. In John’s vision the word that interests me the most used to describe Babalon is
“Mystery”, in the Greek musterion (musthrion), a derivative of muo (muw), “to shut
the mouth”, hence a secret or “mystery”, which, according to Strong’s Dictionary, comes
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