Aphrodite's Child: 666

You find answers in the most unlikely places. I had asked for a serious attempt at making sense of the Revelation, and Vangelis in his younger days obliged.

Actually, I had no idea how influential he was. But let's take this step by step.

As I pointed out while discussing Gordon Lightfoot, young people tend to think big. And so, Vangelis at the age of 29 explains to us what the salvation of mankind is about. It's not original, Schopenhauer said the same thing, Heaven and Hell is way more personal and detailed, but 666 is a very fine and serious take on the Revelation.

Having said that, Vangelis only focusses on a couple of passages he understands or thinks he does, but that's quite alright. Babylon doesn't add much, Loud, Loud, Loud provides some generic Hippie sentiment much like Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and then he comes around to the hard stuff. The Four Horsemen is mostly reciting, but by focussing on what they hold, I tend to think that he understood that the first three are about establishing the law by means of military force, and that the fourth one is the pest he says explicitly.

The next two songs (with lyrics), The Seventh Seal and Aegian Sea, are the heart of Vangelis' interpretation. Their lyrics are almost identical. He uses the difference to make a point about how we jump to conclusions. It's... well, it appears to me that Vangelis was offended by the idea that sensuality should preclude idealism. In order to get his point, you need to know how the flowers of date palms look like. Anyway, he doesn't understand the sixth seal, but he does understand the fifth one in general, and since he understood the fourth one precisely, it may be that he also understood the fifth one precisely. However, he falls into the pit of considering the Hussites and their heirs betrayed, for neither peace, nor justice has come since. And so, instead of to appreciate the unfolding of personal responsibility that the Hussites paid for with their blood, he suggests another salvation, one that is easier and doesn't require all the hardship, and he does so by pulling images from the sixth seal and the sealing of the 144 000, namely

• the hotless sun,
• the lightless moon,
• the windless earth and
• the colourless sky,
  

the latter probably as the imagined result of the rolled up scroll - a picture of detachedness that is foundational for the New Age movement and can still be seen 25 years later in the film Contact.

Actually, I talked about this myself, that it's frightening to think that we'd be caught up in the cycle of the ages forever, but we've passed the point of contentment in our age when we discovered the Americas and have to transition into the age of wonders now.

The Seven Bowls are correctly understood as a state of aberration. And The Beast is correctly understood as the United States, although Vangelis makes the mistake of treating the beast and the whore as one. The Fight of the Locusts, although instrumental, is quite to the point, because the youth of America was dancing to music like that while it was also spraying pure dioxine on the Viet Cong, but that's just God punishing those who mock Him, because Vangelis' stance here and in Infinity continues on the trajectory of Who can fight against the American way of life?, namely that, while there's some debauchery attached, the American way of life is a civilisational breakthrough insofar as it has allowed an entire generation to live in the light of a liberated detachedness where man is finally free from the tyranny of his heartstrings and where waiting for the return of Christ is seen as a psychotic atavism.

In reality it's just indifference, the cynicism of untouchables. Anyway, Seven Trumpets conflates the trumpets with the thunders and considers them to be the fist with which the atavistic psychotics will try to ram their obsession through. That is too harsh a description for the trumpets, which are distinct from the thunders, although they are indeed the results of the acts of power-hungry men. Basically, Vangelis fails to see that men wielding their power freely are no less likely to coerce others than men who feel duty-bound to do it. God's vengeance doesn't have to be forced on an innocent humanity, that is not the world we live in. In fact, how could powerful people not cause shock, whenever they act decisively? And how could this shock not turn against them?, lest of course it was petrifying.

So, too much kitsch there, too much self-righteousness of the indoctrinated. Though, I'm quite sympathetic with the feeling that the Revelation is pushed upon us. There are schemes all around. And many of them relate to interpretations of the Revelation. But truly the Revelation is pushed upon us by our inability to address the problems of our time, whatever we fail to comprehend, will be revealed to us, for logic alone has a desire to see it.