Hero and Dragon

John sees in heaven a woman in labor ready to give birth to a son while a dragon waits to devour the newborn (Revelation 12). It’s a scene of Mary and Jesus and Herod, Eve and the Seed and Satan, Israel and the Messiah. It is also a story that reverberates throughout mythology and literature. G.B. Caird ( A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine , 147-8) summarizes:

“In the folklore of many nations there are found stories of the usurper who, doomed to be killed by a prince as yet unborn, attempts to cheat the fates by killing the prince at birth. The prince is miraculously snatched from his clutches and hidden away, until he is old enough to kill the usurper and claim his inheritance. The same theme is found in many forms in the mythology of the ancient world . . . .

“In Greece it is the dragon Python who attempts to kill the new-born Zeus and is foiled by the escape of the mother, Leto, to the island of Delos; there Apollo is born, and he subsequently returns to Parnassus and kills the dragon in its Delphic cave. In Egypt it is Set, the red dragon, who pursues Isis and is later killed by her son Horus. These two stories were forms of the solar myth: the dragon of darkness tries to kill the sun god, only to be killed by him when the new day dawns.” The myth of the sun god was alive and well in the first century, now politicized: “there are coins on which the emperor’s head appears irradiate, a proclamation to the world that in the drama of man’s existence, where light and darkness are at constant warfare, the role of Apollo was now being played by imperial Caesar.”

John’s visit is a rewriting of the pagan myth designed “to contradict its current political application.” Specifically, “the killing of the dragon is being reenacted, but not by the emperor, who turns out to be instead one of the dragon’s minions. It is not the emperor who is son to the Queen of Heaven.” In Asia, Roma was worshiped and associated with the Mother Goddess in various cults: “On a coin of Pergamum there is the head of Augustus and a female figure with the legend THEAN ROMEN (the goddess Roma). On another coin, from the reign of Tiberius, Augustine and Livia, the ideal embodiments of Roman imperial authority, are represented as sun and moon. The coinage was one universal form of propaganda for the imperial ideology, which declared that Roma was the new queen of the gods and mother of the world’s savior.”

Not according to John: Lady Israel, not Lady Rome, is Queen Mother, Jesus not Caesar the conquering hero.