(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
Margaret
Smith writes in her online article that Armageddon represents the last
struggle between the worldly self and the spiritual self before they
become as one. She says, “Doom and gloomers have taken St. John the
Divine literally even though they are unaware of the symbolism encoded
into the language in which it was written. The Revelation involves a
series of events that occur in the spiritual world of the cosmos. In
the first part of the account, John sees the scroll with seven seals,
each which represents an aspect of vengeance that must come to pass
before the last judgement.
“Modern theologians are untrained into the mystery of ancient thought
and they are unable to contend with the complexities of the Apocalypse,
for him this divine message in the mystical writings is unreal and
highly questionable. No book has been subject to more criticism in the
New Testament than Revelations. The fact is that the whole Book of
Revelation, no less than the Book of Job, is simply an allegorical
narrative of the ‘Wisdom Schools’ and the description of the initiation
of the initiate himself. In this case St. John the Divine is the
Kabbalist. It’s quite possible that Revelation was written to appease
the differences between early Christian and pagan religious
philosophies.”
“When the zealots of the primitive Christian Church sought to
Christianize paganism, the initiates of the ‘Wisdom Schools’ answered
with a counter offensive to paganize Christianity. The Church won the
battle but not the war: With the decline of paganism the initiates
transferred their symbols to the newly emerging Christianity and
therefore saved the priceless wisdom of the ages. The Apocalypse shows
clearly the subsequent fusing or melting of pagan and Christian
symbolism and consequently is undeniable evidence of ancient minds at
work in the formation of the Christian Gnostics.”
Lucifer has often been considered a fallen angel, one who fell out of
God’s favor when he began to have his own ideas about how to go about
things. However, it may well be that Lucifer (Satan) was a friendly
force that gave mankind the ability to think freely and learn in the
world of cause and effect. Perhaps Lucifer is the name humanity has
given its own tendencies toward evil rather than owning these itself.