Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near. (Apocalypse 1.3)

"He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches." (Apocalypse 2.7a, 11a, 17a, 29a, 3.6, 13, 22)

Before we leave the First Letter Of John as the introduction to the present discussion, it is necessary to note here another part of the Johannine tradition - the last chapter of the gospel, chapter 21. Many commentators have thought it to be a later addition to the whole of the gospel, a judgement we will repudiate here. It is of interest for many reasons; for example, it contains the first and only reference in this gospel to 'the sons of Zebedee' (21.2), disciples who assume quite important roles in the synoptic gospels. It is held by some scholars to have been written by the redactor of the gospel, whom they regard as the author of the First Epistle of John. Others maintain that it sits well within the gospel and that the author of the gospels of John as a whole and the author of the Epistle are one and the same. What most concerns us however, is that it shows clear evidence, the clearest of any, that the tradition of the six messianic miracles consisted as an entirety, quite early in the history of the tradition. The portion of the text which concerns us immediately here is as follows:


We notice in this passage at once, two things most pertinent to our studies, the presentation of the motifs which are tantamount to the categoreal paradigm, identity and unity. The identity motif has already been given as just one of several contrasts drawn by the author between Simon Peter and '(that) disciple whom Jesus loved' (21.7, 20):


The idea of identity surfaces here as surely in the appearance stories as it does in the transcendent miracle narratives, and previously just as it did in the first half of the creation taxonomy. The cryptically unnamed beloved disciple is not referred to in the same terms in the opening of the narrative which lists the seven persons engaged in the fishing expedition, but we understand him to be one of the 'two others who were his disciples' (21.2). This has the effect at once of returning us to the initial list of persons given in the lead up to the first miracle story:


There are so many deliberate points of contact between these two episodes, the commissioning of the first disciples, and the events related in chapter 21. The last chapter of the gospel of John all but reverts to the story as it begins with the calling of the first disciples, so that to consider them all, worthy indeed as it is, would take us far afield from our immediate concerns. Apart from the names of the figures, Simon Peter, Nathanael, somewhat remarkably, along with the reference to 'Cana', and the two unnamed disciples, the verbs common to both pericopae are as follows: 'follow' (1.37, 38 cf. 21.20, 22); 'turn' (1.38 cf. 21.20); 'see' (1.38, 42 cf. 21.9, 20); 'stay/remain' (1.38 cf. 21.23). Equally remarkable is the manner in which Jesus addresses Simon Peter on both occasions: 'Simon the Son of John' (1.42), Si/mwn o( ui(o\v I)wa/nnou and 'Simon Son of John' (varr. Jonah), Si/mwn I)wa/nnou, (21.15-17). This is too conspicuous to miss, for the evangelist uses it no less than three times in the 'epilogue' (as well as the more traditional 'Simon Peter' (1.40 cf. 21.15)): 21.15, 16, 17. This form of address is important both in its use of the expression John, and in its variant form in part of the tradition  'Jonah' (Iwna), for it connotes the expression 'sign of Jonah' employed by Matthew and Luke in the pericope following the recapitulation of the two miracles of loaves and fish, The Demand For A Sign (Mark 8.11-13). Indeed, Matthew in fact uses it twice:




Mention of 'the sign of Jonah' and the recurrence of that highly charged name in this the last chapter of the gospel of John is not the main reason we have cited it here, even so, we should nevertheless make a momentary digression in the interests of several factors, the main one being the history of the tradition. As noted, this last appearance story in John recurs to the opening of the gospel. There was no mention of a fishing expedition or The Sea of Tiberias  in John's narrative of the commissioning of the first disciples, but  such a reference here in the final scene with its clear resonance of the former stories, suggests that the first narratives of the disciples having been called, may be read along lines which set the gospel more in keeping with the synoptics on this score (John 1.35-51 cf. 21.1). This means also of course, that efforts to harmonise the name 'Nathanael', since it is a given name, with the figure in the synoptic lists referred to only by his patronymic, 'Bartholomew', must be accorded some credibility (Mark 3.13-19). He, Bartholomew, is the sixth figure in Mark's list, and as noted, in the gospel of John, the same number is purposively associated with Nathanael, as it is with the miracle at Cana, and with the story of Jesus And The Woman Of Samaria, the pericope which concludes the evangelist's presentation of the haptic form of memory. More to the point, and this applies even more emphatically still to what we are about to contend regarding the incidence of numerical referencing in chapter 21, accounts of the relation between John and the synoptic gospels and between John and Mark in particular which rule out of court any interdependence or influence will not stand. But first to the enigmatic Jonah references, and to the equally important clues which Matthew provides  in this context for the theology of semiotic forms.

We may suspect that the 'sign of Jonah' logion has something to do with the tradition history of the messianic miracles. We have not rehearsed the full argument concerning the durations of these six events within the nocturnal/diurnal cycle here, but we have alluded to it as party to  the polarity which logically and consistently throughout the gospels elaborates the Markan formula '... to the other side'. For the chiasmos arranges in pairs of one-to-one correspondence exactly three of each polarity, nocturnal, the feeding miracles, and diurnal, the identity, that is transcendent, miracles. This coheres with the Matthew's prompt for the theology incorporative of the optic semeia, his remark which combines references to colour, to 'signs', to Jonah, and of course to time(s). There is no mention of Jonah in the same context in Mark, which allows some historians of the tradition to assign the saying about the sign of Jonah to a putative Quelle source (Q).

Matthew more than once refers to Jonah, and this in its turn would seem immediately to evoke one particular messianic miracle, The Stilling Of The Storm, which of course he relates (Matthew 8.23-27). The first reference in Matthew to the 'sign of Jonah' mentions 'three days and three nights' twice (Matthew 12.40). The second does not include such a mention, although the pericope comes most noticeably immediately on the heels of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, which we have said denotes optic memory, and just as significantly immediately before the recapitulation of the details of the two miracles of loaves, and again just as tellingly, just prior to Peter's Confession (Matthew16.13-20), in which the evangelist yet again refers to 'Simon Bar-Jona' (Si/mwn Bariwna~ varr. Ba\r Iwna~ v 17). There is no mistaking the names 'John' and 'Jonah' here, just as there wasn't in John 21. In all then, this makes for five references to Jonah in Matthew within just as many chapters.

This is the first of the three Passion predictions, and its parallel in Mark (8.27-30) lacks the same patronymic, as do the following two both in Mark (Mark 9.30-32, 10.32-34), and Matthew (Matthew 17.22-23, 20.17-19), although the second Markan prediction includes the phrase 'three days' (9.31), as does the last (10.34), just as the second in Matthew uses the expression 'raised on the third day' (17.23), while the last has the very same Greek clause (20.19). In Luke's accounts of the same three sayings, the first is almost identical to the last two of Matthew's expressions, but it reads 'and on the third day be raised' (Luke 9.18-22). Of Luke's two subsequent Passion predictions (Luke 9.43b-45, 18.31-33), the next has no references to periods of time, diurnal or nocturnal, whereas the last does: 'and on the third day he will rise' (Luke 18.33b), in which the form of the verb is different yet again from Matthew's form of the same verb, and from Luke's own previous usage.

Mark interpolated the story of the healing of The Blind Man At Bethsaida (8.22-26), just before the first Passion prediction, and indeed there is an even logical flow from the last miracle of loaves, the one which denotes optic memory as a radical form of sentience, to this healing narrative about the very same phenomenon. But Matthew's recension also deserves enormous credit, for it conjoins so adroitly the themes proper to this aspect of biblical metaphysics. We noted just now in the first of Matthew's two references to 'the sign of Jonah', how articulately he forges a connection to the book of that name in the Hebrew scriptures. For he places that saying after his recension of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, the transcendent partner to which is The Stilling Of The Storm. These are the two Pneumatological miracles of the messianic series, the one immanent in kind, and specifying the radical of consciousness optic memory, the other transcendent, and specifying optic imagination. Of course the book of Jonah is instantly recognisable in the transcendent miracle story itself, centering as it does on a storm at sea, and the peculiar role of the 'prophet' who, in order to quell the tempest, is thrown overboard and spends the ensuing three days and nights in the belly of the whale. This must certainly have been an accessible enough paradigm for the evangelists. Whether or not the miracle story, The Stilling Of The Storm, can be accounted for in terms of it is undecidable.

If the 'sign of Jonah' saying is as early as proponents of the Q source theory would have us believe, then this may be the first of the six stories to have been committed to writing. On the other hand, we aver here the integrity of the messianic miracle series as an entirety, and equally the fact that it corresponds formally and referentially to the P creation narrative. This tells against any division of the series into single units composed independently of one another. A single correspondence between the book of Jonah and only one particular messianic event is hardly sufficient to warrant the contention that it served as a prompt or a source of some kind for the messianic series as a whole. Yet the same name itself occurs three times in the final chapter of John, a fact which is highly significant, as we shall see, for the messianic series. If it refers to the book of that name in the Hebrew canon of the twelve minor prophets, then it also recalls another famous narrative in the canon in virtue of another of its meanings. The  meanings of the name given by the Koehler-Bumgartner Lexicon are as follows:

I hnfwOy: I dove, Columba Gn 8.8-12; cooing, symbol of the moaning of those who suffer Is 38.14; ...  II hnfwOy n. pers. Jonah 2K14.25, Jon 1-4 ... (William L. Holliday, Ed., A Concise Hebrew And Aramaic Lexicon Of The Old Testament, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1971, p 131). The following discussion resumes this first meaning of the word in its original form, the Aramaic one, not the Greek of the text. For the latter inclines us to overlook the associations of the word any further than the single book of Jonah.

In the first reference to the story of The Flood with its certain and immediate links to the creation narrative, we may indeed find something of the intention behind the 'sign of Jonah' saying. The story is a well known one, just as well known as that of the prophet Jonah himself. The references to 'dove' are many; Genesis 8.8, 9, 10, 11, 12. (There are further references in Psalms 55.6, 68.13, The Song of Songs and so on.) In the story of The Flood, Noah first sends out the raven, 'and it flew to and fro until the water on the earth had dried up.' (Genesis 8.7):


Surely the mention of '7 days', like the three tentative dispatches of the 'dove', as well as still other elements of the story, are relevant to our argument here. Time is a salient factor, as is the fact that the creatures are enjoined to 'increase and multiply' after leaving the ark at God's command, just as they were in the creation, (8.17). After the description of Noah's building an altar upon which he offers whole-burnt offerings, we read:


The latter text, the later blessing and covenant made by God with the new creation, is as noticeable, and just as significant, as its sign, particularly given the Matthean redaction of the Jonah saying. Here we resume the discussion of Matthew's articulation of the two Pneumatological miracles - signs of The Holy Spirit, represented by the dove in Christian iconography - in conjunction with their underlying subject, that of optic sense-percipience.  The first instance of the Jonah saying extends the references of its second version. The expression 'stormy' in the latter (xeimw/n Matthew 16.3), in league with 'the sign of Jonah' and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, just related (Matthew 15.32-39), reiterates the miracle of The Stilling Of The Storm, the transcendent counterpart to that feeding miracle, and whose optic semeia is explicitly given, even if Matthew uses for the latter, 'storm', an expression quite different from that which the transcendent miracle story contains: seismo\v (Matthew 8.23). He twice mentions the colour of the sky in relation to the stormy weather. The Greek word for 'sky' is also the word for 'heaven'. Simply put, the sign or signs of 'Jonah', signs of 'the dove', for that is a meaning of the Hebrew word every bit as salient as the proper noun, are in the second variant of the Jonah saying, thus just two,the two colours of the heaven/sky: one the blue of 'fair weather', which is only referred to implicitly, the evening colour, and secondly the reddish or 'fiery' hue, of the morning of the stormy day. These then are two of the 'signs from heaven/sky' (Matthew 16.1). (Mark's account of the discourse on The Demand For A Sign (Mark 8.11-13), just after the second miracle of loaves (8.1-10) and just prior to the recapitulation of the details of both feeding miracles (8.14-21), even though it lacks any mention of  'Jonah', contains the phrase 'a sign from heaven' (shmei~on a0po\ tou~ ou)ranou~ (v 11)). These 'signs', blue and fiery red, are the chromatic values to be assigned to the Pneumatological events; and at a stroke Matthew has deployed them both, mentioning one twice by name, and referring to the other under the noun 'sky/heaven'. Thus in the second of the above citations from Matthew, themes germane to the two miracle narratives, their time of occurrence and their optic semeia, are clearly interwoven.

The first 'sign of Jonah' saying (Matthew 12.28-42) may have been included after the second saying, since this latter pericope (Matthew16.1-4) is situated immediately after the Pneumatological miracle of loaves in accordance with its Markan parallel (Mark 8.11-13), which we presume he was following, and since Matthew also places the recapitulation of the two miracles as does Mark, immediately after the pericope The Demand For A Sign From Heaven, (Matthew 16.7-12 cf. Mark 8.16-21). He therefore has to find another context for the first instance of the 'sign of Jonah' logion. He places it after the pericope A Tree and Its Fruits (Matthew 12.33-37 cf. Luke 6.43-45), and prior to the story of The Return Of The Unclean Spirit (Matthew 12.43-45), which notably includes sevenfold imagery. Luke contains only one occurrence of the Jonah logion (Luke 6.43-45), citing the pericope about The Unclean Spirit in which he too uses sevenfold imagery, prior to his redaction of the Jonah saying, though not immediately (Luke 11-24-26), and the parable about The Light Of The Body: The Eye (Luke 11.33-36), immediately after the Jonah saying. This parable too intersects perfectly with the Pneumatological mode of sentience, vision. (Most exegetes have argued that Luke's single version of the saying better reflects its Q origins. But if we dispense with Q altogether, which would entail the hypothesis of some sort of interdependence between Matthew and Luke if not Luke's dependence on Matthew, then there is no reason to entertain this argument. Matthew's versions may better reflect any presumed original version, not that this matters a great deal to our argument.)

What is of greater moment is that the prior of Matthew's two versions extends the referentiality of the second account from just two to all messianic miracles and hence to all six or seven optika. For in addition to the mention of 'the prophet Jonah', 'the belly of the whale', 'Nineveh' and so on, it has 'three days and three nights'. This accounting indicates the series in its sixfold and Christological entirety.

Part of the rationale of the signification of such semeia rests upon the time of the occurrence of the two episodes; we shall put that The Stilling Of The Storm took place during the morning (prwi~ Matthew 16.3, h(merw~n Luke 8.22), and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, during the precisely complementary interval, twelve hours prior to/after, the morning, that is, during the 'evening' (oyi/av 16.2), though not of course on the same day. The connotations of the name 'dove' are thus several in fact. We fully concede the allusion to the book of Jonah, with its clear mention of the time interval. This does not proscribe however other purposes behind the same word. One of these is of course to specify the identity associated with The Stilling Of The Storm, as with its complement, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, namely The Holy Spirit whom we know from the very inception of scripture as associated with water:


The important points are these: we are allowing the two 'sign of Jonah' sayings in Matthew their fullest referential compass as recurring not only to the book of Jonah, but to the story of The Flood, and by extension, to the story of creation, thereby finally presenting the messianic series as a sixfold whole. Both the 'three days and three nights' saying and the narrative of The Flood in its capacity as creation theology serve as references to the entire messianic miracle series. One final point concerning the 'dove' as an invocation of the story of The Flood must claim our attention; at the conclusion of that narrative we notice not only the role of the dove, but also the 'sign' of the rainbow, which immediately confronts us with the phenomenon of seeing itself, and calls to mind the optic semeia. In the story of the Flood, the three flights of the dove square at once with the threefold patterns of the creation narrative and messianic cycle, just as its references to '7 days' tend towards the same meaning.

Before we pass to a brief exposition of the optic iconography behind the miracle stories, we need to see that there is yet another reference to the messianic series, which once again maintains its integrity. This will justify the attention just given to the three 'Jonah' references in the last chapter of John.




We began by noting the triple usage of the expression 'Simon, son of John' in this chapter, and a well attested variant reading of the latter name, 'Jonah'. Even if in the setting of the first instance of this form of address of Peter by Jesus (John 1.40-42), we are not evidently in the vicinity of the sea, in the last, we certainly are, a fact which tells in favour somewhat for the variant reading. There is no storm here; nor any appearance of Jesus on the sea. But there is a miraculous catch of fish, and an episode in which Jesus gives both fish and bread to the seven disciples. The same or a similar incident is told in Luke 5.1-11, in the course of which Simon also, or Simon Peter also,  figures prominently; he is referred to by both names, (Luke 5.5, 8 respectively and once again as Simon (v 10)). But Luke's account lacks any Eucharistic motif as well as what is equally notable for us:


This text abounds with threes, so often a veritable formal signature for the evangelist Mark; there are the three figures constituting the number of fish, which as we shall argue in a moment, are as important as the figures in Mark's own recapitulation of the two miracles of loaves of bread and fish (Mark 8.11-13, 14-21); as just observed, this episode is enumerated as the third (tri/ton v 14) appearance of the risen Lord to the disciples; finally there are the three times which Jesus puts to Simon Peter the question concerning his love for him (vv 15-19), these too are enumerated lest we fail to notice the pattern: ' ... a second time ... a third time ...' (vv 16-17).

We contend here that efforts on the part of textual critics to determine the chapter as anything other than an integrated whole are misguided for failing to notice the underlying theme - the Eucharist. In its record of Jesus' actions, there is no mention of  'thanksgiving' as there was in the Johannine miracle story. The text simply says e!rxetai I)hsou~v kai \lamba/nei to\n a!rton kai\ di/dwsin au)toi~v, kai\ to\ o)ya/rion o(moi/wv - 'Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish.' (21.13) However, both verbs recall John's recension of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand - e!laben ou)~n tou\v a!rtouv ... die/dwken ... o(moi/wv kai\ e)k tw~n o)yari/wn ... (John 6.11) (The verb rendered 'distributed', (die/dwken), is a cognate of the verb 'to give'.) Mark has both verbs 'take' and 'give', in both accounts of the two Eucharistic miracles contained in his gospel (Mark 6.41, 8.6). The occasion John describes in chapter 21 in itself, the fact that this event speaks of the risen Christ feeding his disciples, an action which he then three times enjoins Peter to repeat, surely settles its Eucharistic status undeniably. But we have to do with the mysterious or not so mysterious figure, 153, which has generated speculations ranging from the mundane to the bizarre.

The Eucharistic/feeding motif is the one single theme which binds together this final chapter of the gospel of John. From start to finish, the action gravitates about this idea. Scholars who have deemed it to consist of two or more parts are thus oblivious to its aesthetic integrity. Little wonder then that this cipher, '153', which is really not so enigmatic at all, combines at a stroke all three Eucharistic miracles, The Transformation Of Water Into Wine - the first; The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, the fifth; and The Feeding Of the Five Thousand, the third. Why does the ordering of the events vary their chronological sequence? Quite simply because it takes into account not just the immanent (feeding) miracles themselves, but the entire sixfold series. In this series the Pneumatological episodes, The Stilling Of The Storm, and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, are second and second last respectively, or what is the same thing, second and fifth respectively. Therefore the enumeration of the feeding events alone, reckons the inclusion of the three transcendent miracles in its specification of the innate chiastic complementarity of the series. In other words, the enumeration of the serial order of the immanent episodes alone, points just as surely to their complements. The setting, by the sea again supports this, since it denotes the same location of two of those miracles. This figure '153', is extraordinarily concise in its reference and meaning, since it articulates by means of indicating the seriality of the feeding events, the entire sixfold series of messianic miracles. As it now exists, the cipher sits within its context as a succinct summation of the entire messianic miracle series and the Eucharist, the last episode now taking place. It would seem then, that it was included in the gospel to achieve this very purpose; the final full summation of the sevenfold messianic series. In other words, this last episode,may be considered the seventh and final member of the messianic series, it is for John 'the' Eucharist. Whoever wrote this last chapter of the gospel knew well enough for sure of the existence of all six of the miracle stories, even though three of these are missing from John, and the same author knew also of their chiastic form, just as that person knew of the Eucharist. We can summarise this hermeneutic as follows, where the order of the events on the left, all immanent (feeding) by definition, conforms to their signification in John 21 as first, fifth and third respectively. This ordering follows that of the diurnal/nocturanl sequence. Thus the juxtaposed complements in one-to-one correspondence according to their Tinitarian rationale, occur at opposite intervals within the same twenty-four hour cycle. So for example, the two Christological events, Transformation and Transfiguration, take place during the intervals centred on midnight and midday respectively:




There is only one further point we need to enter here, that of the normative status of the immanent messianic events. The author of John 21 tallies the full six episodes, adding the seventh, the Eucharist proper, while  referring only to the feeding events. The effect of simultaneously highlighting their chiastic structure thus both incorporates the three complementary transcendent episodes and acknowledges the Eucharist itself, while it also stresses that these 'feedings' are definitive for this entire class of events, that is, normative for the series as a whole. The obvious echo of all of which follows in the ensuing three times Jesus enjoins Peter:


In the second essay of Miracles As Metaphysics, we considered the close links between the three transcendent messianic miracles and various Resurrection narratives in Mark, Matthew and John, having concentrated on the last gospel. We contended that the three appearance stories in John, The Appearance To Mary Magdalen (John 20.11-18), The Appearance To the Disciples (20.19-23), and Jesus And Thomas (20-24-29) portrayed the identities of The Transcendent ("The Father"), The Holy Spirit and The Son, respectively, just as the three miracle stories did, albeit in relation to The Son. That is, we postulated the triune rationale behind these texts as equally and systematically formulated behind the three miracle narratives, only one of which is contained in John. Chapter 21 of John needs to be assessed in the light of this clear pattern which aligns the three prior stories of appearances of the risen Christ with the three transcendent miracles. For it delivers to us the fourth and final feeding episode - again, apparently despite the fact that John lacks The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, and some would say, also the Eucharist proper. There is in this final chapter thus a very clear and certain summation of the theology of immanence as given in terms of Christian epistemology/psychology. For it brings into focus as a whole, not just the three immanent episodes which taxonomise the perceptual soma, and in so doing, their three transcendent counterparts, but all four immanent events. It thus speaks with the utmost  clarity of the manifold of sense-percipience. The ordering of the three feeding events appears to contradict their sequential pattern, for if we take the two subspecies patterned in terms of the three figures, first, fifth and third, the Pneumatological occasions are ostensibly not the last, as they were in the creation, Days 3 and 6 being the final members of their respective halves. But this ordering in John 21 complies with the occurrence of the events relative to one another within the nocturnal-diurnal cycle, and it conforms with the optic semiosis as indicated by the presence of two references within the narratives, temporal references to the same twenty-four hour cycle and colour terms.

The several stories of The Flood, The Sign Of Jonah and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand dovetail in a way that makes it binding upon us to link the sevenfold series of both Genesis and the gospels and The Apocalypse, with what the miracle narrative indicates, the semeia of vision and so of inscription, of the visible word; that is, the seven or so visible hues of the spectrum. The utility of these to our task will be indispensable, for their serial structure will avail the exposition of the variety of relationships that the various radicals of consciousness subtend to one another. But in addition to that, they will also disclose certain aspects of time, and so of mind, which will be otherwise insusceptible of description. As qualia, that is as certain properties or qualities which are visually perceptible, they will tell us about the entities in question; they will as no other resource will, put certain judgements about the actual nature of not only the categoreal forms, but the modes of intentionality which these entail. It is going too far to say that the semeioptika perform certain propositional functions of which other semiotic system is capable. The same may be said of the acoustic semeia, and it may seem that these are even more resourceful in that they more adequately approximate mathematical language, if indeed mathematics may be said to be such. But it will be necessary to use all three semiotic series if we are to reach any comprehensive and balanced doctrine of mind.


We have just seen in the 'sign of Jonah' sayings which include a reference to 'three days and three nights', another application of the optika vis-a-vis the six conceptual radicals along with their six perceptual counterparts. Two of these signs were framed for us in the Matthean redactions of the 'sign of Jonah' saying. They are the orange of dawn-morning and the blue of evening-night, which are formally separated by a twelve hour interval. These designate the Pneumatological dyads: the conceptual categories, male and female, and their perceptual equivalents or counterparts, optic imagination and optic memory respectively. All three pairs of events, whether 'Days' or messianic miracles, that is, whether conceptual or perceptual categories, are thus signified by means of oppositional or complementary optic semeia as these refer to the diurnal/nocturnal temporal cycle. Later we can and will utilise also the annual, that is solar, cycle, as well as the lunar cycle, which will entail a twelvefold system, but for the moment at least, we will pursue our task as simply as possible and address the sixfold schema as referent to the twenty four hour cycle alone. Moreover, we will rely on the indications given in the miracle narratives, for we have already noted in the Matthean pericopae the prompt for this part of the theology of semiotic forms. There are expressions in the creation taxonomy also which will avail us in this procedure, but the messianic series remains the best guide, not only due to its references to colours, but also its references to time. This link between colour qua light and time is perfectly consonant with the same semantic in the creation story.

Just as comprehensibly, both Christological miracles use the hexad in relation to the Christological categories, which always serve to focus our endeavours. Those narratives speak of two processes, 'becoming' in the case of the first and 'changing of form' in the second. These two processes of transmutation reflect as noted, the relation of God to the world, and that of the world to God; the first pointing to the event of birth and the last being a clear reference to the phenomenon of death, not just the birth and death of The Son, but also to the same events for ourselves. (In which respect we must allow that The Transfiguration defers to the Day 1 rubric which posits Mind, as precisely normative in this case.) Thus the 'changing of form' (metemorfw/qh Mark 9.2) or 'transfiguration' of Jesus, is nothing other than his death as a human person, a fact which Mark and the other synoptists articulate in the subsequent pericope dealing with Elijah and the Son of man, and which Luke makes doubly clear in speaking of his, that is Jesus', 'departure'.

The six conceptual and the six perceptual categories stand in a relation of one-to-one congruence. So in the examples just noted, the symbolic masculine and optic imagination are equally about the transcendent Holy Spirit; whereas the feminine and optic memory are equally about the immanent Holy Spirit. This is the logical justification for employing the optika for both series congruently. The use of the optika must reflect this; the fact that the same signs designate both conceptual and perceptual radicals. At the basis of this same congruence, represented in the two processes of change in the two Christological 'events', is one and the same entity: a specific value. In this instance, that of The Holy Spirit, it is the value beauty. The difference between the two processes of change, of transmutation, has already been observed. In the case of immanence ('transformation'), change is continuous and conforms to the symbolic feminine and to memory; in that of transcendence ('transfiguration'), it is discrete, conforming to the symbolic masculine and to imagination. The legitimacy of this distinction devolves upon the fundamental disparity between the relationships of the present to the past and to the future respectively, and is tantamount to the difference obtaining between unity and identity.

It must be emphasised that what we are about to advance, the theology of optic semiotic forms as this concerns The Holy Spirit, in no way depends on either or both of the two 'sign of Jonah' sayings in the gospel of Matthew. We have already postulated as the hermeneutic of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, the existence of two centres of consciousness inextricably stemming from the phenomenon of visual sentience - optic imagination and optic memory. The latter is of course the topic of the feeding miracle story, and the former, the topic of its counterpart, The Stilling Of The Storm. If the theology of optic semiotic forms, (henceforth 'semeioptic' forms and semeioptika), depends upon any of the biblical texts at all, it is this second of the miracles of loaves. We must emphasise that the 'sign of Jonah' logia as we have understood them in Matthew at least, merely confirm the hermeneutic of the feeding miracle story. Thus the feeding miracle narrative repeats one of the most immediately recognisable of all ciphers for The Holy Spirit:



It is well worth noting that in both episodes, the recounting of the miracle itself and the recapitulation of the two miracles of loaves, which follows it  so promptly, the words for 'loaves'  and 'baskets' are sometimes dropped, making the figures function even more abstractly. It is not necessary to repeat the arguments resulting in the hermeneutic. Its further  application is what must now occupy us. In the first place we should observe the clear function of the repeated figure 7. For if it refers to the role of visual sentience in human consciousness, then it must also certainly apply not only to the systematic arrangement of the narrative cycle of which The Feeding Of The Four Thousand is part, the sevenfold messianic series, but equally to those other cycles in Genesis  and in The Apocalypse which are formally consonant with the messianic events. In other words, the text reflects itself. In bringing to our notice the phenomenon of vision, and so too the visible semeia, it is at the same time referring to itself as manifesting the very patterns inherent in the visible semeia. We notice this again and again as according with the Johannine and creation descriptions of mind; for they both depict its reflexive or self-referential capacity. The first purpose in applying the hermeneutic therefore must consist of the recognition that the visible forms of the words in Genesis, the gospel, and The Apocalypse, in a word, these 'scriptures', all comply with the heptadic schema. This does not entail that the four series of sevens in The Apocalypse can be mapped onto the existing relation between the categoreal morphology that binds together the creation and the salvific events in a relation summed up in the paradigm transcendence : immanence, as well as by the various Christological formula, 'beginning and end' and so on. We have insisted all along that  the categoreal paradigm presents us with just two relata and their ensuing relatedness. There are two terms at work here, not three, and we must be mindful not to multiply our categories beyond the exigencies of the principle of parsimony. The relation of the contents of The Apocalypse will necessarily concern us, and these will become clearer as we proceed, but it will repay us now at the outset to be constantly aware of the systematically dyadic relation that obtains between beginning and end as between creation and salvation. The categories of consciousness are taxonomically two in number at the most radical of levels; we know these as conceptual (Genesis) and perceptual (the four gospels).

There is an obvious reference of the repeated figures in each of the three feeding miracles to the intertextuality of the three narrative cycles. Clearly the Christological events which portray the figure six in relation to the identity of The Son, can be read in terms of the central relation obtaining between beginning and end, creation and salvation, Genesis and the gospel. The Sabbath day in the P narrative is passed over if not in silence, then without the same import as that story attaches to the six Days of beginning proper. This fits it to the Christological purposes of the later narratives in the messianic series, Transformation Of Water Into Wine and Transfiguration. If then, we find in the gospel of John no real formal equivalent to the account of Jesus instituting the Lord's Supper or Eucharist such as we have it in the three synoptic gospels and in Paul, that speaks for the awareness of the author(s) of John of the logical contact between the two cycles, Days and messianic miracles, as between the conceptual forms and perceptual forms. The sixfold enumeration of these leaves the Sabbath-Eucharist correspondence out of consideration in order to make the clearer the precise semantic attaching to the Christological titles as well as to the categoreal paradigm. John's understanding of the messianic series posits it in relation to the Christological. If it reduces the categories to the hexad then it also highlights the singular relationship between Genesis and gospel as 'messianic'.

Thus the two Christological miracle narratives centre the theology of semiotic forms for they interrelate the 'two' members of the canon, the two testaments as reflected in the events of 'beginning and end'. This reverts to the status of the categories belonging to the same identity, The Son. For whereas the repeated fives of the first miracle of loaves posit the semiosis of the acoustic, it is weighted in favour of transcendence, just as it identifies The Transcendent. On the other hand, the repeated figure seven, of the last of the miracles of loaves, is referent to the identity of immanence and The Holy Spirit. These formal patterns are immediately recognizable as configuring essential aspects of the internal construction of the same two narrative cycles and their relatedness. There is a clear reference in the story of The Five Thousand to the organization of the Hebrew canon as it consists of two related sets of texts, Torah and Megilloth, The Festival Scrolls. The Hebrew Tanakh collects the twelve minor prophets on a single scroll, calling them The Book Of The Twelve. But it would be difficult to ascertain how widespread knowledge of such formal features as these was at the time when the two miracles stories were written. In keeping with this, there is a certain reference to the internal constitution of the New Testament by means of the repeated figure seven, indicating the corresponding connection between the (four) gospels and The Apocalypse.

We do not need to rely on such notions however. For the rationale which interrelates the three texts concerning us is the phenomenological one; it adverts to the obvious orientation of each of the three texts in virtue of a specific sense-percipient mode.  In addition to this, we will interpret the figures of the three miracle narratives which logically denote the same three modes of sentience. This we will do in relation to a theory of language, and simultaneously, a doctrine of the word, and a theology of revelation itself. Thus centering the synthesis of the texts, Genesis 1.1-2.4a and The Apocalypse on the gospels not only introduces the eschatological dimension first adumbrated in the story of beginning as the paired rubrics concerning the eschatological category, the anthropic category, Day 3 and Day 6, major concerns for The Apocalypse. It also reduces to two relations what might be otherwise reckoned as three divergent and unrelated terms. The initial or 'beginning' and final or 'end' point of reference for all three texts remains the gospel. It is not this co-ordination of the three main textual cycles alone which occupies us, it is the corresponding co-ordination of their governing phenomenal modes of sense-percipience, acoustic, haptic and optic, and hence the prospect they offer to semiotic and linguistic theory as to the doctrine of revelation.

It will be possible to elaborate this hermeneutic when we come to deal with the first of the gospels. The point necessary to grasp here is that of all three episodes, the story of the miracle at Cana co-ordinates the theology of semiotic forms. For not only do the two concerns with which it and its complement, The Transfiguration, concern themselves, the haptic radicals of consciousness, evince their intermediate status as to the total disparity between transcendence and immanence, 'heaven and earth' so to speak, as emblematic of the very person of The Son, and in so doing corroborate the same premise first predicated of the Christological conceptual categories, mind and mind : body, but they serve simultaneously to model the actual correlation between the two canons as between the two events, 'beginning' and 'end'. The elementary formal logic of these patterns can be put here. We shall elaborate upon them when dealing with the gospel of Luke, when we shall have occasion to consider the nature of the body as semiosis indicative of the dialectic between identity and unity.


Further to the opening of the first letter of John, and the introduction to the theology of semiotic forms, we repeat what was said previously as regards the difference between the three phenomenal modes of sense-percipience and the categoreal paradigm: the haptic semeia are weighted according to neither principle. They do not as the acoustic signs do, propose more or less exclusively a theology of transcendence; nor only a theology of immanence, the business of the optic signs, given that these two interact and are mutually inclusive according to the bifurcated phonetic and graphic structure of language itself, and according to their mediation by the haptic. Alternatively, we say of the haptic semeia as of the mind : body as conceptual form of unity, that they are accentuated in both directions at once. They are equally transcendent and immanent. The peculiar identity of the Christological categories resides in this fact, and is manifest in the nature of language itself. If the category mind : body mediates between primordial and eschatological categories, then just so does the haptic semiosis mediate between the acoustic and optic semiotic series. This corporeal mediation, or co-ordination of the primordial (archaeological) and teleological (eschatological), itself confers alterity on the two antithetical semioses as represented in the two components of the canon, Old and New testaments as they are known in the Christian tradition.  In short then, the body and haptic sentience as equivocally determined in respect of transcendence : immanence, entail the reality of language itself; this will be vital to a doctrine of revelation. Thus for the conceptual polarity of mind as for its perceptual pole, the intervenient and Christological categories correlate both enumerative systems detailed in the feeding miracles, those of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. Without the story of the miracle at Cana and its complement, The Transfiguration, we can never make any sense at all of any of the many numerical details of the immanent messianic events, including the Eucharist.


The implications of the archaeological and teleological semioses, the acostic and optic, and of the haptic and Christological semiosis for a Christian theory of language as for its doctrine of revelation are far reaching. We must understand at once the primordiality of orality, or the orality of primordiality. If we take the creation story in terms of its own self-referential nature, its own operation as 'logos', then the acoustic semiotic forms, the patterns reflected in the story of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, signal the orality of the word. On the other hand, its inscripted form, its graphic and visible mode, that of 'scripture' as a whole, of which The Apocalypse must remain in some sense, the final exemplar, stands in direct opposition to this very primordiality. The final or written epiphany of language as of the word, its self-constitution as text, and as all but palpable, something which orality necessarily lacks, stands in antithesis to the primordial. There is thus an absolute discrepancy as far as the theology of semiotic forms is concerned, between beginning and end of the word; between the sound and the sight of the same. This collocation, the juxtaposition of the primordial and eschatological (consequent) natures of the word are disclosed in the haptic as in the soma. That is, the resolution between these ultimately variant aspects of language is the business of the theology of hapsis. In this way, cognition and conation both may be understood as embodied, and language must begin with the body itself. The identifiable membra disjuncta of the body, those of its components or elements which are nevertheless whole, as fully integrated as immanence itself, these establish the basis of communication. This 'erotism' of the word, the tangibility or haptic reality of communication as of physical love, will be discussed in the first of the gospels at which we must look, Luke, in the context of the intentionality of desire and the conceptual form soma.




We cannot press into service a specific sense-percipient modal propensity  vis-a-vis  each gospel. Even if the sense-percipient manifold, the soma, the body is reckoned in this fourfold way, it will never serve to explicate the specific natures of each of the four gospels. We must look elsewhere. The inapplicability of the fourfold structure of soma as a manifold of sense-percipience to the fourfold form of the gospels, should be also at once clear from the fact that no one of these in particular can be deemed Eucharistic, to the exclusion of the remaining three. All four gospels gravitate towards the final episode in the messianic series, the Eucharist, including the gospel of John. Whether the final chapter of that gospel is intended largely to make up for any apparent absence of a narrative relating the institution of the Lord's Supper or not, and so exhibits a synoptic provenance, does not belong to the discussion here; but we must observe the clear existence of a theology of the Eucharist in John 21. In just this sense, we again confront the collusion that occurs between the mode representative of The Son, the haptic, and the Eucharistic modes(s), smell/taste. The prevalence of references to taste in the Christological narratives, the first and last miracles of the messianic series, ad the story of Lazarus, has been noted. It is equally clear that no one evangelist evinces a clear inclination for any particular form of sentience. Even so, all four gospels may be deemed 'Eucharistic', and this renders by dint of the closest possible intimacy between touch and taste, what we have put concerning the haptic orientation of the gospels.  Just such an orientation, the apparent predilection of the gospels for the haptic, reiterates the mediatory nature of hatpicity itself, the fact that it is weighted neither in favour of transcendence nor immanence, but realizes both equally, as do the two conceptual Christological categories, soma and mind. This intervenience, this mediation of what are the otherwise disparate conceptual and sentient modal entities reflecting transcendence and immanence, is put in the above data. It should follow from what was said at the beginning of this study that we may attribute the three phenomenal modes to the three instances in scripture of texts given according to serial forms of order. Thus it was argued that The Apocalypse does exhibit a certain predilection for that form of sentience, vision, which identifies The Holy Spirit. Nor need we resile from the observation concerning the prevalence of the acoustic mode in Genesis and by extension in John.

We must emphasise that the same formal systems disclosed in the pericopae formulate the actual texts. We have then, twelve healings, twelve oral traditions. (We shall later deal with the two stories of Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law and The Syrophoenician Woman's Daughter a propos of this reckoning.) That they were passed down to us in this way is probable as noted from the many variations involved in their several recensions. Not that this counts against them. As for the written 'gospel', a word fairly infrequently used in the New Testament, but remarkably present in The Apocalypse, matters are very much otherwise. Not only are all seven accounts of the messianic episodes in closest conformity with one another as to their details, but their very existence as inscribed places them at significant remove from the healing miracle pericopae, and also completes the promulgation of the gospel as finally written. It achieves this in just the same way as the oral kerygma, that of the reflexive, the self-referential, so pronouncing the idea of selfhood indivisibly from the content. The Apocalypse, whatever else may be true of the time of its composition,  articulates as written, the very last stage of this process of the embodiment of the Word. Hence this coherence must be the first recourse for the hermeneutic of the miracles. We cannot suppose, nor have I supposed, that the evangelists were prescient enough of the course of the evolution of human culture to know anything much concerning the final determination of the dodecaphonic series, and the various acoustic scales, which replicate the sevenfold, sixfold, and fivefold patterns of the three miracle narratives. That was never posited. But that they might indeed have understood at one or another level of consciousness, just as John seems to have understood, the clearest possible link between language itself and the semiotic variance between heard and seen signs, and the role of the intervenience of haptic semiosis in all of this, as again expressed in the opening of the first letter, this certainly seems not simply possible, but very probable.








We should never expect to understand these narratives without some conviction that the numbers contained within them, are at least as meaningful as the words which comprise the text, assuming for the moment  the existence of some kind of difference between numbers and words. Yet that invariably happens. Few if any interpretations of the narratives even broach the subject. The figures in the texts, figures which are the same in all synoptic versions of the narratives as well as in John's account of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand are generally passed over in silence as Livio Stecchini justifiably and indignantly observes. Indeed in the recapitulation of both miracles of loaves and fish in Mark (8.14-21), where the same details are faithfully repeated, Jesus reproaches his disciples for their 'hardness of heart' (Mark 8.17), and their failure to understand (v 21). These same reproaches still stand; they indict contemporary theologies which purport to deal with these very narratives while ignoring the numerical details. No reasonable hermeneutic of the three feeding miracles can afford to neglect these most salient details of the narratives, the figures. Furthermore no truly biblical theology of the Eucharist itself, can evade the same responsibility, given that the feeding miracle stories are intrinsically germane to it. Reading the events of either series, beginning or end, in terms of a semiosis of the hues of the visible spectrum is at last a start towards unraveling some of the pedagogical objective behind Mark's very purposive accounts of the stories. Theological method may not do without such a procedure; even though we shall argue later that it is necessary initially to dispense with the Pneumatological occasions in search of the meaning of the fourfold form of the gospels, and even though the acoustic semeia will fully articulate the forms of relatedness and the doctrine of intentionality (consciousness) as an essential component of Markan metaphysics.

Why methodologically employ such 'signs', the semeioptika? Is it merely for the re-enchantment of theology? There is no reason for theology to remain monochromatic, or achromatic, and still less why it should remain innumerate. The semiological factors in the theology of semiotic forms occur hand in hand. There is no other way to begin the exposition of the details in the miracle narrative, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, which are of such import to Mark than by means of the semeioptika. Colours are in a sense, inscribed upon everything visible to us. If we are to understand the messianic miracles, we are to understand the fact of this phenomenon as incorporated quite literally not just in one particular member of the seven episodes, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, and to codify the entities in question, both conceptual and perceptual radicals of mind accordingly. We are also by the same means to begin to pursue a doctrine of revelation itself. For the tradition as written, inscribed as well as passed on orally, demands the same method of understanding.  Indeed it is this written tradition with which we have most to deal. This does not mean simply The Apocalypse alone, that most 'written' part of the whole written tradition, and the most abstruse book in the canon. It means the systematic entirety which is the theology of semiotic forms, and which as 1 John suggests is more than merely tangential to the doctrine of the Word.

Here at the beginning of the theology of semiotic forms, it will greatly assist us in simplifying matters and in forestalling misunderstandings if we conjure with the semeioptic series. Its elements will moreover be available to those of us who choose to avail ourselves of visualization techniques in Christian meditation. That is, semeioptika commend themselves at the level of praxis as well as that of doctrine. We shall deal first with the Pneumatological semeioptikon in association with the transcendent term of the anthropic category, the conceptual form symbolic masculine, identifying the transcendent Holy Spirit. We encounter the semeion for the optic imagination, the subject of The Stilling Of The Storm, in the allusions in Matthew 16.1-4, the perceptual radical analogous to the conceptual radical, symbolic masculine. We need not put too fine an edge on this. For above all, we have urged that the immanent inclination of vision itself towards unity, is immediately evinced in the very fact that spectral hues proximate  to one another, colours in the visible spectrum which are contiguous, tend imperceptibly to fuse. This phenomenon puts better than anything else, that which is germane to consciousness as intentionality: wholeness, integrity, unity. If Matthew's use of 'fiery' red of the morning in connection with the time of day, as well as miracle story may allude to  both incipient intervals, dawn and morning, The Walking On The Water and The Stilling Of The Storm, that is good and well. For these two forms of the imagination, the 'first' and 'last' forms, the acoustic and the optic, are ordered in the texts in the same way, proximately, in the greatest possible propinquity. This means that such forms of imagination are mutually compatible, as are their equivalent forms of memory. Even so, it will be possible just as it is necessary, to isolate one of these texts, and so too, one form of the imaginal consciousness, as signified by the expression 'fiery red'.

Here we can repeat the bare outlines of the diurnal/nocturnal sequence with which the six messianic miracles are synchronised. The details of the argument remain to be rehearsed. If we adopt the sixfold schema rather than include the Eucharist so as to reckon with the full compass of seven events, that is because of the centrality to the theology of semiotic forms of the hexad as already noted. The procedure here therefore follows the Christocentrism of the texts in their co-ordination. It is in the later consideration of the concatenation of four sevenfold serial events in The Apocalypse, and in relation to the Pneumatological doctrines espoused by the same, that it will be incumbent on us to reconfigure the semeioptika in their role. We shall also have to include the fivefold forms referred to in the other similar miracle of loaves. That is, we shall have to bring into mutual correlation the numerical details of both stories, hence the obvious and simplest way to set out is by means of the shape central and mediatory to both as just indicated, the Christological hexad. We enter here also, in advance of the full argumentation, the semioptika assigned to the messianic miracles.

WALKING ON WATER	STILLING THE STORM	TRANSFIGURATION	FEEDING THE 5,000	FEEDING THE 4,000	TRANSFORMATION
dawn	morning	midday	afternoon	evening	midnight

There is nothing new for the history of thought, in methodically relating analogously the hues of the spectrum to the intervals of the  twelve hour diurnal cycle. Aristotle carried out the same procedure in De Metereologica (colorsystems, Color order systems in art and science), obviously with results quite different from those given here.  Our premise differs from his own empirical method. At its base, stands our conviction implicit in the creation narrative that time is a radical constituent of human (conceptual) consciousness, and that it is of fundamental importance to religious consciousness in particular. This means that the theological exposition of the fourfold form of the gospel will have recourse to the same fact: the pertinence of time both to the Markan catechetical project, his metaphysical doctrine, and to religious praxis, the ritual celebration of times and 'seasons'. This last is of course the operative word for us, since it is only in relation to the broader annual pattern that such an analogy, that between the semeioptika  and the cardinal points of the (annual) temporal cycle, will serve the exposition of what is rudimentary to the morphology of all mandalas, their fourfold structure. The method we are employing here is not empirical, insofar as it does not depend on any supposed observations of particular colours at particular times of day. Again in departure from Aristotle and others, we shall also plot the semiosis consisting of analogous relations of the visible spectrum and the annual cycle. But our procedure relies in the first place on the analogy between the six visible hues as these are sequentially or serially ordered in the spectrum and the diurnal/nocturnal cycle and sets them in one-to-one correspondence with the contents of revelation. We have emphasised that the spectrum is polarised; it has a 'beginning' and an 'end'. We have thus taken the beginning as the red end, repeating the pattern of the colours as every school child learns them: red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo. (Regarding the connection between 'the sign of Jonah' and the 'sign of the rainbow' in the story of Noah and the flood, see the following two articles in The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning: Chad Pecknold, Reading the Sign of Jonah: A Commentary on our Biblical Reasoning and Rachel Muers, Reading the Rainbow).



Matthew twice uses the verb purra/zw meaning 'to be fiery red, of the sky', to depict the colour of 'the heaven' on the morning of an approaching storm.  Liddell And Scott cite its use in Josephus, Pausanius, and Strabo as well as in the New Testament, but only here in Matthew. The Apocalypse uses purro\v both of the second horse to appear at the opening of the seven seals, and of the 'great red dragon', Apocalypse 6.4, 12.3. The miracle narrative, The Stilling Of The Storm has already been told (Matthew 8.23-27). The root of the word for this hue is 'fire'. The translations almost always given in The Apocalypse notwithstanding, we are reluctant on several counts to translate the term that Matthew uses, simply as 'red'. First we should note that a word for the same is extant in Greek, eruqro/v, occurring in Acts 7.36 and Hebrews 11.29 of the 'Red Sea'. Secondly, this derivative of the word for 'fire' occurred in the compounds 'red-haired' (pu/rro-qrix)  or 'red-bearded' (purro-gen/eiov). Yet again, the words describing the redness of skin used the former, thus, e)ruqrai/nomai: 'to blush', 'to become red', and e)ruqrai/nw: 'to paint red', 'to rouge'. Considering the differences in these two applications to anatomical features, hair/beard colour and skin colour, we can more exactly determine the meaning of 'fiery' as a Pneumatological signifier. Colour terms are notoriously slippery and we need to be sure just what is intended in the sign of Jonah logion. Since the cognate of 'fire' is used of the stormy sky in the morning and also of the colour of hair and of beards, we can legitimately propose that what is meant is akin to that which we understand by the expression 'orange', the predominant colour of fires, which Luke also will associate with The Holy Spirit in a description that also involves visionary experience:


The rubric describing the sixth Day, has for its counterpart in the theology of transcendence, Day 3. On the third Day both types of plants are produced. We have interpreted the two dyads as representative of the instantiation of The Holy Spirit in sexual dimorphism, male and female. The degree to which transcendence is applicable in this final and indeed eschatological category is circumscribed. Nonetheless all the entities in these taxa, the two types of conceptual entities given in the halves of the narratives, are formulated according to the same categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence. This entails that a transcendent form obtains for the anthropic just as for the other categories. We refer to this as 'symbolic masculine'. The word 'man' used in the story of the last day of the creation proper, is a generic term, which the Septuagint renders similarly: a)nqrw~pon. Nevertheless, the link with the previous 'beginning' half of the narrative is ensured by this same expression. In every case, Days 1 and 4, Days 2 and 5, and Days 3 and 6, we have to consider that the preferred stance of the author is that of transcendence. This was what was meant by saying that the first three Days represent normative occasions for what is at stake - conceptual forms, true ideas. Therefore to miss the certain invocation of the role of the masculine here, even where the feminine stands as emblematic of the conjunction male and female, is mistaken. With this in mind we should observe that this is effectively the second allusion to a colour word in the scriptures: md): qal w,md:)F: be red; I mdf)f: people, men; III mdf)f: n. pers., Adam, first in Gn 4.25, 5.1a, 3, 5, IC 1.1; IV mdf)f = I hmfdf)a:fa ground; ... surface of the earth Zc 9.1; ... mdO)f (4x) mwOd)f (1x) colour of blood, red (-brown) Gn 25.30. (A Concise Hebrew And Aramaic Lexicon Of The Old Testament, p.4).

Here we encounter a longstanding difficulty associated with all language referring to colour, and indeed with sense perception in general. The history of language is also the history of consensus or accord concerning entities as 'subjective' as percepta. 'Red' is among the first of references to any hue in many languages. (See World Atlas of Language Structures Online). Nevertheless, colour terms often expose language at its most duplicitous. The surest way to represent, that is refer to, any colour, is literally to exhibit it. So once again, because soils present an extraordinary range of colours, predominantly browns, reds, ochres, yellows, and greys, it may seem insuperably difficult to fix any specific meaning to the term as precisely referent to a known colour. In accordance with the hermeneutic of the creation story the specific rubric denoting the symbolic masculine is that of Day 3, which speaks of the two types of plants as produced by the earth or ground. We posited that these stand in relation to the male and female of Day 6, but there, in the more definitive account of the Pneumatological category, the anthropic is finally realised, because logically placed in the immanent second half of the narrative, in favour of which this particular form of unity is weighted, the male and female as sexually dimorphic and conjunct relata manifest the eschatological contrastively to the primordial. This meant that the anthropic itself should be subsumed under the symbolic feminine, and the symbolic masculine understood as that first expressed in terms of transcendence, fission, separation, the condition of the two types ('kinds') of plants. Effectively then, the hermeneutic reads the Day 3 narrative as denoting the symbolic masculine. Thus the  plants signify a method of generation, the asexual, distinct from the final ordering of the human couple. In just this respect they denote the symbolic masculine which insists on the concept of identity, symbolic masculine being the category under which either the exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine are subsumed. The point is that as in each occasion of transcendence, there is no commerce, no transaction, no fusion between the two. It is to this rubric of Day 3 signifying the application to the anthropic of the nature of transcendence then, that in keeping with the hermeneutic we should take the term denoting both 'ground' or 'surface of the earth' and its related colour term 'red', 'red (-brown)'.

Although the Day 6 rubric does include the proper noun 'Adam', the Day 3 story does not. This name will be the subject of the paronomasia establishing the link between the generic term 'man' (humankind) and the word 'ground' or 'soil' in the ensuing J narrative of Adam and Eve, and of course the Day 3 story does indeed mention 'the earth' (Cre)e Genesis 1.10, 11, 12). Of these two narratives, the former is the most important for us, since we are working on the temporal sequence given by the messianic series rather than that of the Days.  We should note  in direct support of this link, the mention of 'three days' in both accounts of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, Mark's and Matthew's. The references to the humans in both narratives, P and J, in close association with the 'ground', or 'soil', or 'earth', establishes something of the illuminative power of the optic semeion, amber, or orange, as a sign for both radicals of mind, the symbolic masculine and optic imagination. This first association between the transcendent Holy Spirit and the 'earth', 'ground' and so on, may be the reason for the proliferation of references to jewels in The Apocalypse. It connects directly with the tradition of the breast-piece of the high priest's accoutrements, which was adorned with twelve stones representing the twelve tribes and is writ large in the book of Ezekiel, so much of which functions as a prompt for that part of The Apocalypse which must concern any discussion of the forms of the gospel, and immanence: the four living creatures. In the latter as in Ezekiel the stones are representative of these collectively identifiable groups. We have consistently associated the attenuated concept of identity in the case of the anthropic category, the symbolic masculine, with the same, collective or generic identity, the identity of one's own 'kind'. An equally common metaphor for the transcendent Holy Spirit is that of fire, and it too will be resumed in the last book of the canon, further to the precedents established in Ezekiel. That there is a logical thread binding the several notions light, fire, and colour is obvious enough. 


The creation taxonomy is arranged serially. There can be no doubting that as the concept of time is so central to its meaning, it is a logically ordered sequence. But is it an actual temporal one? With the achievement of the archaeological week and the institution of Sabbath, we can see something of mundane lived time, but the six conceptual categories are presented distinguishably from this. The hermeneutic which posits the conceptual categories as pervasive, ultimate, epistemic and psychic generalities does not require that we read the hexadic structure of the narrative in this way. In the first instance, the interpretation rested upon the tenet that the story's paramount concern is mind, principally transcendent mind. There is a definite relation between the two entities, time and mind, this after all is set out in the Transfiguration narrative. Something of the kind is set out in evolutionary theoretical accounts of the pre-history of humankind. Only in the latter case of course what we mean is the mind : body unity, the psychophysical. The abiding perspective of the creation story remains that of transcendence, and this must qualify any understanding of the conceptual categories as serially ordered in virtue of a temporal scale of whatever sort. The two primary concerns that shape the awareness of the author(s) P, space or 'the heavens', and mind, and so, Transcendence, must repudiate the organization of the conceptual forms as a graded hierarchy unless that be with recourse to the insights that are to be provided by the messianic series, since it is there that we encounter the description of actual time (space : time), which will portray in terms of its perceptual manifestation, this same scaled hierarchy. Here is the reason after all for accepting the sequence of the messianic miracles as definitive. They portray events clearly located within the spatiotemporal continuum; they deal with the data of consciousness, as these obtain inseparably from what we mean by time (space : time).  But just as surely, the two series are ordered differently, a major part of the meaning of the messianic events is the consequence of their chiastic arrangement. The messianic series certainly exhibits adaptation of the paradigms set out in the story of beginning. In view of this, in reckoning the proper optic semeion for the events under consideration, The Stilling Of The Storm and the Day 3 rubric, it is vital to consider the messianic event by reason of its provision of actual temporal criteria. These are the outcome of (i) its sequential location, and (ii) actual temporal references which  also assist us to resolve uncertainty.

In the brief introduction to the hermeneutic of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, we observed the use made by astrophysics, and by spectography in particular, of the hues of the visible spectrum. The latter utilises the inherent polarity of the spectrum. Consequently it speaks of a red shift and a blue shift; of lights sources moving away from the observer and of those moving towards the observer respectively. This same polarity fits the categoreal paradigm. We can co-ordinate both the archaeological category, space : time and the teleological category, male : female, just as we did for the categoreal analogy of immanence. Thus it was put with reference to the intermediate event, that of psychophysicality, that the symbolic masculine and the vector present-to-future, and the symbolic feminine and the vector present-to-past, stand analogously to the inherent polarity of the optika. The real import of the categoreal analogy of immanence is not effectively, merely the alignment of the masculine with the future and conversely that which occurs between the feminine and the past, but of the eschatological category itself, male and female, with the entirety of the percipient modes, those of imagination and memory respectively. These modes are to be thought of as an unity in the first instance, as must be suggested by the principle of immanence: male and female. However, notwithstanding its own innate paradoxes, imagination presents us with virtual transcendence, which means virtual distinguishability. In the case of Ezekiel for example, we see the prevalence of optic sentience over other forms of the percipient. (In the discussion of the forms of intentionality which is to follow, we shall notice of the form of intentionality proper to optic imagination, just how appositely it fits with his incorporation of the theme of movement in his visions. This is so often a feature of portrayals of The Holy Spirit in the literature, we saw it first in the opening verses of Genesis.)

As to the sequence of the Pneumatological miracles, the second and fifth of the chiasmos, they are so to speak, of the essence of betweeness. They sit between the two pairs which identify now Transcendence  and now The Son, and here once more we can envisage the very same theme - that of movement, of an intervening phase, of transition from an initial to a final state. We can revert to what has already been said in relation to the polarity of the diurnal/nocturnal cycle. The distinguishing criterion is that of the increasing/diminishing light, so that the entire spectrum if it is to be mapped onto the same, must contain an equal number of members for the two halves of the twenty-four hours. In the second essay of Miracles As Metaphysics, we introduced this pattern of the diurnal/nocturnal cycle vis-a-vis the six messianic miracles. We have a clear and certain indication from Mark as to the time of the occurrence of the first of the three transcendent episodes. We recall that it recapitulates the 'first' of the conceptual forms, the archaeological initiation of space, the primordial entity par excellence, in terms of the percipient manifold.  Therefore the first of the optika must be proper to these things - space in itself as conceptual form (Day 2), and acoustic imagination (The Walking On The Water), the perceptual equivalent. That temporal reference, repeated verbatim in Matthew, (Mark 6.48 peri\ teta/rthn fulakh\n th~v nukto\v: 'about the fourth watch of the night'  cf. Matthew 14.25 teta/rth| de\ fulakh~| th~v nukto\v: 'in the fourth watch of the night'), tells for the fact that the miracle occurs in the first of the six intervals of four hours each. That is, it takes place in the first of the three intervals during which the light increases as the sun moves towards its zenith. It will be this episode of course which is to be signified by the very first, 'beginning' optikon at the transcendent (solar) pole of the spectrum, red.



Matthew presents no temporal construct regarding when the event took place. This is certainly passing strange given the working assumption that he was copying from Mark who begins his account:


and given moreover, that Luke flatly contradicts this:


Mark of course does not mention the length of the journey, none of the three do. But even allowing for the intervention of the stormy weather it would be amiss to reckon it such lengthy journey as to have taken the entire night, thus fitting with the morning arrival depicted in  Mark 5.1. Matthew's parallel text not only omits the initial reference to time which we find in Mark, it also lacks the ensuing statement of Jesus to his disciples of his intention, having it at 8.18:

Matthew's mise-en-scene here is somewhat sudden. 'The' boat suggests that we ask, 'Which boat?' There has been no prior mention of a boats nor of boats. The last explicit reference to place was to Simon Peter's house where his mother-in-law lay ill with a fever (Matthew 8.14). In the Matthean text there is an intervening couplet of parables regarding dwellings:


It is at the beginning of this pericope containing the two sayings that we find:


The statement regarding Jesus' intention and the reference to time both thus bear the traces of redaction. This is neither the first nor the last of Matthew's emendations of the Markan text which we may suppose him to have been following. Mark much earlier in the piece, at the beginning of chapter 4, provided the setting:


A collection of parables follows, notably The Sower and considerable text on the purpose of parables and the explication of this, one of his most important parables (Mark 4.10-12, vv 13-20); A light Under A Bushel (vv 21-25); The Growing Seed (26-29); The Mustard Seed (vv 30-32); and finally, two verses again on the use of parables (vv 33-34). In all of which there has been no apparent deviation from the previous location.

Luke's text previously has had Jesus traversing cities and villages with 'the twelve' and also some women. His collection of parables prior to the miracle story more closely resembles that of Mark, but there is no prior setting beside the sea for these. We thus have three witnesses and absolutely no multiple attestation about the time of the event. Luke and Mark in fact contradict one another, since for Luke clearly the event occurs during the day. We are unable to argue from silence, but at least this contradiction suggests the temporal clause in Mark to be redactional. In all three cases (Mark 5.1-20, Matthew 8.28-34, Luke 8.26-39),  the healing of The Gerasene (Gadarene?) Demoniac - in Matthew, two demoniacs - follows the crossing during which the sea had been calmed. Clearly there is a theological link between the two miracles. The latter one presents nature in a demonic guise. And if we are to make any sense at all of this strand of biblical metapsychology, there is no better place to begin than here. Nature itself as well as human nature does manifest an aspect that can only be called 'demonic' - here it is the symbolic masculine in its destructive aspect which confronts Jesus. The meaning of the healing narrative is the conceptual form now depicted in the Markan twelvefold series just as it was in the Day 3 rubric. Thus the messianic miracle at sea recounted immediately prior to the healing, so places the perceptual structure, optic imagination in closest proximity  to the conceptual  form, symbolic masculine. (We find this and similar patterns elsewhere in the gospel, for example, the close proximity of the two healings, The Leper and The Paralytic, Mark 1.40-45, and 2.12, which locate the perceptual form haptic imagination vis-a-vis the conceptual form mind.)  The provenance of both  components of mind in this case is the transcendent Holy Spirit. Hence the miracle at sea  is portrayed in terms very similar to the 'exorcism'.  This particular healing story is very clearly for Mark as for Matthew and Luke, about the symbolic masculine. So once again, we are in the province of the Pneumatological. The storm at sea and the powers extant in the figure, or figures whom Jesus heals, are one and the same. On this account the cure of the Gerasene man takes place during the morning, Mark telling us that: 'And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped him;' (Mark 5.6), so clearly by the time of the arrival on the other side of the sea, it is morning. In view of these facts, and since the temporal clause 'when evening had come'  finds no support from Matthew and is moreover contradicted by Luke, we are justified in questioning its value. But there is one other point to consider, and that is Matthew's use of a temporal adverb in his discussion of the 'sign of Jonah' pericope:


This word is usually translated 'in the morning', although 'early' is a reasonable alternative. We find the same expression in John 18.28, just after the story of the cock crowing and signaling the fulfillment of the prophecy of Peter's denial, a more exact and explicit reference, and it is used also in Acts 28.23, there in juxtaposition to evening, a)po\ prwi~ e(/wv e(spe/rav, 'from morning till evening'. John's example is salient, for it complies with the sense in Matthew. Once again it is certain that the colour indicative of the approaching storm to be visible, must occur after the period initiating the diurnal half of the cycle. For this latter interval of course belongs to the story of The Walking On The Water, and we possess a clear marker as to its temporality - 'about the fourth watch of the night'. (Matthew clearly associates Peter with that event which initiates the chiasmos from its centre and which mirrors space, the initiating event unparalleled in this capacity.) This means that The Walking On the Sea sits on the cusp between night and day, marking the very initiation of the same. The Pneumatological episodes are located internally within the chiastic structure, as second and fifth, a locus which supports their processive role in keeping with the identity of The Holy Spirit, to whom the notion of movement is so often ascribed.  The Johannine epilogue made this quite certain by means of  referring to The Feeding Of The Four Thousand as fifth, simultaneously referring to the order of the companion event, The Stilling Of The Sea as second. It thereby recalls the importance of serial order for the messianic events generally, as well as their chiastic arrangement. Thus the assignation to the second miracle of the series, The Stilling Of The Storm of the second hue of the spectrum receives support from this source also. Given so many considerations, the use of 'evening' in Mark, which in any case, applies to the embarkation only, should not be allowed to obscure the pattern of events. We have more than sufficient warrant for the claim that the Pnematological miracle at sea takes place during the morning, the interval succeeding the dawn, and the second of the six durations dividing the twenty-four hour cycle. Its semeioptikon is therefore as Matthew has already put, the one we see occupying the second  position in the visible spectrum beginning at the 'solar' (red) end.

Designating both Pneumatological radicals, optic memory (The Stilling Of The Storm), and symbolic masculine (Day 3, and again in the twelvefold healing series, The Gerasene Demoniac), by the same chromatic value which we have translated as 'orange' or 'amber', is confirmed by the optic signifier given above, the term  used twice in Matthew 16.1-2, purra/zei; by the temporal reference in 16.3 to 'morning'; and also by the serial contiguity of the miracle story with that for which there is a precise temporal reference, The Walking On the Water.




This narrative has so much potential for the hermeneutics of all the narratives which concern us, that it is difficult to know where to begin. That is because the very narratives  themselves are written visible texts, and this particular miracle narrative itself taxonomises the functions of optic memory in consciousness. The miracle story therefore brings to our attention the existence in either cycle, Genesis and gospel, of a sevenfold series; but of course it points beyond there to the same morpheme in The Apocalypse. The word 'morpheme' is intended to convey that these three series remain consistent. Their semantic value and import for Christian metaphysics insists on as much. We must therefore attempt to integrate all three, even though until now, it it has been two series, those of creation and salvation, the Days and the messianic events, which have claimed the bulk of our attention. In the first of the messianic episodes, mention is made of this broader pattern:


This mention of 'two or three measures' is decisive, coming at the very inception of the messianic series. It points to the systematicity involved in the theology of signs. That is, it points not just to the two series, Days and messianic events, which, both because of the status of the seventh event, Sabbath, and Eucharist, are radically determinable in terms of the sixfold pattern, here the one at large in the actual miracle, as in its counterpart, The Transfiguration Of Jesus, which speaks literally of 'six days' not seven. It also points to the sevenfold serial form itself - properly confined to the eschatological and Pneumatological Eucharistic episode, The Feeding Of the four Thousand, where the same cipher is repeated, as 7 loaves and 7 containers full of fragments. The term 'two or three' perfectly encapsulates the significant difference of The Apocalypse from the Genesis and gospel series, which may be counted as two, conformably to the relation of beginning and end. In either case, we have only one series of 6-7 events. In The Apocalypse, we have in all, four. Thus the two salient figures of the Pneumatological feeding miracle, are systematically engaged at the core of the organisation of this last book of the canon, and the one which is most readily recognizable as a Pneumatology.

There are several other instances of threefold symbolism in the first miracle story of John, which reiterate the coherence or consistency of the three verbal (phenomenal) modes of sense-percipience. The account begins with 'On the third day ...' (John 2.1), which also figures in the last of the three feeding miracles, Mark 8.2, and Matthew 15.32. In John there are three references to 'the steward of the feast' (John 2.8, and verse 9 twice). This term, a)rxitri/klinov, is a translation of a Greek expression which even if poetically, certainly alludes to the creation story since it consists of three roots, one meaning 'three' - tri - and the other, a)rxh, meaning 'ruler' (a!rxwn), as it does here, but also, of course' 'beginning' - a!rxomai. (The verb kli/nw means 'to incline', 'to recline', but also 'to wear away'; Luke uses it in this very sense in his introduction to the story of the Five Thousand : 'Now the day began to wear away ... ' (Luke 9.12.))

The introductions of both Mark's and Matthew's version of The Four Thousand (Mark 8.2, Matthew 15.32), contain the expression 'three days' which comports with the introduction to the miracle at Cana:



The temporal clause in Mark and Matthew's story of The Four Thousand is similar to and comparable with John's expression 'On the third day', nor can it be a reference to the theology of transcendence in Genesis. Indeed these references in the gospel if taken in respect of the creation series, might give rise to the confusion of the episodeswith the rubric Day 3, which first introduces the concept of food as well as that of life, into the creation story, notwithstanding that this rubric is our first encounter  of the theology of immanence, and the identity of The Holy Spirit within the actual taxonomy. The Day 6 narrative which fully and finally realises the presentation of the Pneumatological conceptual category, that is, which presents the symbolic feminine precisely as masculine and feminine, in keeping with the Pneumatological emphasis in favour of immanence, is invoked in these references of Mark and Matthew, just as it is in John, and just as it will be in The Apocalypse, where both categoreal principles, masculine and feminine figure to a degree reminiscent of their presentation not in the P story of creation, but in that of J. It is the sexual psychology redolent in the latter, that these represent archetypal forms of evil, as they did for the Jahwist, which fits them for a remaking of the original myth of 'the fall'. The apocalyptist, unlike Paul, seems perfectly aware of his material as mythical. He makes no effort to contrive the Eden myth as anything other than a 'literary' account of the 'last things'. In this sense, his vision of the course of history, a vision quite literally, because it must necessarily take into its sweep the full final course of events first portended in the J account, can be nothing other than 'literary', nothing other than 'symbolic'. It must view, or review the total trajectory of history as an accomplished fact just as  the Jahwistic 'beginning' is; except of course, what lies in the past is not the event formulated in the P narrative.

We affirmed of the temporal referentiality of Genesis, that it primarily concerns 'heaven' as the ordering of primordial events of the kind envisaged by the philosophical tradition by expressions such as 'universals', or more recently 'eternal objects' (Whitehead), since these indicate in the first instance, the existence of the pivotal category, Mind itself as transcendent. The concept will be taken up and amplified in the messianic series, particularly in the narrative of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand. It is the second story of creation, where the perspective is that of immanence,  that the course of mundane history commences. The creation story of J taken in the full context of the syntax that obtains between the three scripted landmarks which concern us, the three points of reference of the tradition, grasped according to their obvious morphological intertextuality which itself reifies or exemplifies the essential, universal event, perceptual (immanent) Mind, and hence the incarnate logos, The Word, represents history already fulfilled, ' the fall' so called as what is definitively a past occasion. It too points ahead of itself. Both the J story and The Apocalypse will be obliged logically  to comprehend with the full force of the same means, the symbolic, the literary, that which will have taken place, where the perfect future so to speak, is a settled, fixed event. The Apocalypse can therefore do no other than speak of such things as a 'red dragon', and variously coloured horses, of a woman clothed in scarlet and purple, and so on. For its essential  topoi are the contents of visual sentience, the hues of the visible spectrum, and the anthropic categories, male and female, which compel the symbolic nature of its discourse, and these formulate the stuff of its historical case, its narratological understanding.

Neither of the two accounts of the Pneumatological miracle of loaves has a reference to any nocturnal-diurnal interval. But just as we did find such a term in the story of The Walking On The Water, so in the complementary episode immediately prior, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, we find:


John's account has no such reference, although it does refer both to 'barley loaves' and 'grass' (John 6.9, 10), the latter agreeing with Mark's even more explicit 'green grass' (Mark 6.39); Matthew has simply 'grass' (Matthew 14.19). So whereas the time of the first of the three transcendent messianic events supports the assignation to that event of the first optikon of the series, red, so here, concerning The Feeding Of the Five Thousand, the time and optikon accord complementarily; they are the  interval of afternoon shading into evening and its token 'green'. This means that the next, or 'later' chroma, blue, the complement of orange, is proper to the second miracle of loaves. We have seen already in the Matthean text (16.1-3) the use of  'sky/heaven' and the temporal expression 'evening' as pointing in the very same direction, while the same intention stands behind Mark's own recension of the 'sign from heaven' (Mark 8.11-13), since he puts this immediately after the story of The Four Thousand. Then just as the colour of 'grass' is green by default, so the colour of the sky is blue by default, notwithstanding the 'fiery' hues of the morning when the storm is approaching.

Having completed the determination of the two signs for the Pneumatological dyads: symbolic masculine/optic imagination and symbolic feminine/optic memory, which are orange and blue respectively, we shall pursue the questions surrounding the form of the gospels. The issue of form is highly significant, for it is only through the arrangement of physical objects relatively to one another in space-time that we see what we see in the first place. (See Handprint: color vision, for example, where the criteria for colour modeling are listed as four: colour specification; geometrical framework; unique colour identifier or colour notation, 'now usually the numerical value of the three colormaking attributes - brightness/lightness, hue and hue purity'; and physical exemplars. We need not here concern ourselves with these details, although the issues surrounding geometrical framework are certainly relevant to any discussion of the mandala. What must remain is to examine the sources for the other four radicals of the series, those which identify The Son and The Transcendent. This means of course another eight items in all. We shall continue the attribution of optic semeia to the same four elements of consciousness according to the theology of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand as they arise in the course of the study of the fourfold form of the gospel. For it is the doctrine of consciousness, or as we say, intentionality, one of the most fundamental tenets of Christology, that this 'optic' component of the theology of semiotic forms subserves.




This book repeatedly attests use of the title 'Son of man', it occurs also in Daniel, Job, Psalms, and Isaiah. In Ezekiel however, we meet it more than ninety times. This formula, which we have identified as synonymous with what is meant by 'symbolic masculine', finds in the book of Ezekiel its single greatest meditative concentration in the Hebrew scriptures. The value and meaning of the semeia, symbol, sign of the 'phallos' accords with this conceptual form. It is perfectly at home in this frame of reference rather than in the New Testament. For all three transcendent conceptual forms, mind, which exemplifies The Son, space which exemplifies The Transcendent, and the symbolic masculine, exemplifying The Holy Spirit, as manifest in specific members of the Tanakh, elaborate the Christological postulates given definitively in the creation taxonomy. In other words the conceptual polarity of consciousness has its proper representation in the Hebrew Scriptures rather than in the New Testament. We have repeatedly drawn attention to the link between immanence, the feminine as masculine and feminine, and The Holy Spirit, and to the fact that the feminine rather than the masculine, remains the defining occasion of the anthropic category, as of The Holy Spirit. It is in the light of this fact that we are to understand The Apocalypse as representative of the feminine, for its context, that of the New Testament, assures it of this role, complementarily to that of Ezekiel in the former canon. Ezekiel in this respect is indeed a prophetic work - it is pre-emptive or proleptic in respect of The Apocalypse, thoroughly in keeping with the symbolic masculine, and the Son of man. Feminist theologies have failed, just as have secular psychologies, to account adequately for the roles of the masculine and feminine in Christian theological texts beyond determining the all too plainly obvious faults endogenous to their male authorship. Criticism has thus far had the last word, much to the detriment of hermeneutics.

The stance here adopted is that the book of Ezekiel therefore requires no apologia for what may occur to some as undue anthropomorphism; nor, to take issue with the more strident polemics of at least some current feminist theologies, whose governing intention is political rather than theological, is it necessary to rebut charges of 'phallocentrism'  or 'phallocratism', on the part of the work. (See for example Cynthia R. Chapman's 'Sculpted Warriors: Sexuality and the Sacred in the Depiction of Warfare in the Assyrian Palace Reliefs and in Ezekiel 23:14-17'.) It is of course in this particular chapter of the book that we encounter that which is to some the most shocking of Ezekiel's utterances:


There is of course another colour word pertinent here: r#f$#f$ : 'red pigment used for paint: minium (lead oxide) or vermilion (= red ocher, hematite, an iron oxide) Je 22.14, Ez 23.14' (A Concise Hebrew And Aramaic Lexicon Of The Old Testament, p. 385). The latter of these two references accords with what has already been put regarding the semeioptikon of the symbolic masculine. We shall have to consider much of the Book of Ezekiel in this essay, not merely because the visions of the four living creatures so-called in chapter 1, and of the similarly described cherubim, they are referred to as such only in the second vision, that of chapter 10, certainly concern the fourfold aspect of the gospel, by virtue of the later reconfigurations of this same iconography in The Apocalypse. We shall contend that if these four icons, 'likenesses', do indeed immediately refer to the gospels themselves, by dint of their later 'canonical' adoption in The Apocalypse where they are subordinated to a purely and clearly eschatological purpose. In describing this procedure as 'canonical', we mean to fully articulate the relation between time, which as the motif of change of place and movement is a preeminent concern in the visions of Ezekiel, and the four gospels themselves. This very relation moreover involves immediate implications for the Christian doctrine of time, as is apparent from the 'apocalyptic' concentration on the phenomenon of death and the final destiny of the created order.

We must mention here, as already stipulated, not in any apologetic tone, but rather in the interests of Pneumatology, that of the many references to The Spirit in Ezekiel, the following are feminine in gender:  Ezekiel 1.12, 1.20-21, 2.2, 3.12, 3.14, 3.24, 8.3 (twice), 11.1, 11.5, 11.24, 36.26, and 43.5.  Needless to say, none of these references are derogatory, pejorative, or 'sexually violent' in any way whatsoever. In the following references, the gender cannot be decided due to the absence of a pronoun or verb: 10.17, 36.27, 37.1, 37.14, 39.29. Thus there are no instances of a masculine 'Spirit' as such in this entire book, which is replete of references to this identity. The real point is that without this member, by which I mean the actual text, as well as that which from the point of view of a corporeal, somatic, haptic semiosis it must signify, to wit, the phallos, the actual canon would remain emasculated. This symbolism must needs be understood in the context of the identity of The Paraclete as lifegiver, a function we first observed in the Day 3 rubric of the creation story. That the sign does not function as it does in contemporary secularist iconography cannot be stated too emphatically. It bears a meaning altogether at variance with the almost compulsorily sexual denotation of the phallos in current mainstream western cultures.

The creation rubric, Day 3, presented the symbolic masculine vis-a-vis its complement, the symbolic feminine, Day 6, which latter is to say, male and female, in terms of the contrast between two different 'kinds' of plant, biota, or living things which reproduce asexually - and the anthropic category, the sexually dimorphic humans, male and female, made in the image and likeness of God. The hermeneutic therefore stressed  the aptness to the concept 'symbolic masculine'  of transcendence of the phenomenon of sexual dimorphism as a whole, thus leaving no room at all for any charge of misogyny to be leveled at Ezekiel. Hence there is an essential paradox at work in the semeion of the phallos, lingam, vajra, and so on, its signifiers are legion. It does not matter how we refer to it, since taken by itself, and in itself, rather than as 'the jewel in the lotus', that is, as conjunct with its somatic counterpart, it is the least 'sexual' of any signifier. For as such, what does it amount to? The phallos does not refer to the erotic in systematic biblical semiology - it designates the same idea of collective identity as is given by the name 'Son of man'. As for actual libidinal consciousness, this consists of two categoreal radicals: the conceptual form of unity the body, soma, systematically proposed in the Day 4 rubric, and the (perceptual) haptic memory, the subject of The Transformation Of Water Into Wine (John 2.1-11). The bodily, (haptic) sign for the conceptual form the body, is the gut, the belly, the stomach, so beautifully evoked in the book of Jonah, arguably the reason why that same parable has been used by Christian theology to refer to the ultimate destiny of the body in the 'sign of Jonah' logia, Resurrection; and further to which, by means also of the story of The Daughter Of Jairus with its unmistakable references to the girl's menarche and by the conclusion, 'And he told them to give her something to eat' (Mark 5.43). The bodily, (haptic) signifier for the perceptual radical haptic memory, is the hand, which Mark presents in his story of The Man With A Withered Hand (Mark 3.1-6), a narrative  which he adroitly locates at the conclusion of several pericopae all of which deal with the same category: The Calling Of Levi; The Question About Fasting; and Plucking Grain On The Sabbath (Mark 2.13-28). His intentions here are unmistakable. These observations are put here in advance of the ensuing references to Ezekiel, some of which in accordance with post-feminist sensibilities may be deemed pornographic; so be it. What is remarkable about and  in keeping with Ezekiel's contemplation of the 'loins' of 'the one that appeared to be a man', is the prevalence of terms relating to colour, many of which will be utilised later in The Apocalypse. These testify to the sense in which the work participates in the epistemic-psychic category, optic imagination, as well as that of the symbolic masculine:


Because Ezekiel so often refers to dates, that this prophet, who later married, was probably about thirteen years old when he received the first vision of the four living creatures, which we may reasonably conjecture,  is highly relevant in coming to terms with the significative power of what is so often modestly translated as 'loins downwards' or 'waist down'. The visions in Ezekiel speak repeatedly of  mynat:mf, the strong musculature which unites the upper & lower part of the body, lumbar region, hips & small of the back, loins Gn 37.34 ... ' (Ibid p.223).

I mean to suggest here that essential to the understanding of both writers, or sets of writers, the authors of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, are all four Pneumatological categories: the concepts 'symbolic masculine' and 'symbolic feminine', which latter is equivalent to both male and female of the anthropic category, and the two forms of optic sense-percipience, both that of the imagination and that of memory. All four of of these are exemplars of the beautiful. In each case there is a different emphasis: we may reasonably expect of the book of Ezekiel that it will in some way adhere to the predominant perspective of the Hebrew scriptures, namely transcendence. This leaves The Apocalypse the essential as well as supplementary role of establishing the import of the symbolic feminine and of course optic memory, which in large measure will be synonymous with the epistemic or cognitive aims of historiographical literature. By the latter we mean not just history of course, but evolutionary theory. It is by dint of such concerns that theriomorphic forces both for good and evil are presented throughout the latter work. We need to consider Ezekiel here insofar as it functions proleptically for The Apocalypse and additionally of course, the title 'Son of man', as these both concern the present study. Regarding the latter however, it may be signal of the currently critical if not parlous state of scholarship that it all but abjures understanding the title as employed in the New Testament vis-a-vis its plainly remarkable prominence in Ezekiel. The two references in Daniel to the same, have been afforded a vast amount of attention, the reason of course being that they are seen to be 'apocalyptic' and 'eschatological' both, in accordance with the majority of New Testament usage, and these have claimed the lion's share of academic attention at the expense of Ezekiel. No examination of the fourfold form of the gospel in light of the essential tenet of the  story of The Four Thousand, which construes vision generally, and so by logical extension the written tradition itself, can maintain such a stance.

The four Pneumatological categories establish the rational and not just rational alone, but also the affective defining parameters for both texts, Ezekiel and The Apocalypse. These categories engage both species of intentional modes, cognitive and conative, thinking and feeling, epistemic and psychic. The discussion of these modes belongs to the next stage of our study, but it is necessary to put here in broaching the semiotic forms, the obvious consonance of these two members of the canon. For whether we wish it or not, any discussion of the messianic miracles, and effectively any discussion of the Christian doctrine of revelation, must comprise The Apocalypse. It is not just the single story of the messianic miracle, which poses for us the value of the visible, actual texts to any doctrine of the Word as also to any Christian theory of language itself, though clearly that makes addressing The Apocalypse in part incumbent upon us; it is also the clear consonance of the four sevenfold series it contains  in conformity with the creation rubrics and messianic series, which insists that it be accepted in reference to the gospel and the stories of creation both. The discussion of The Apocalypse is best entered by a careful consideration of some of the contents of the book of Ezekiel.

Of course the visions of Ezekiel predate the appearance of the four gospels. It is possible that the same may even be true of The Apocalypse, the other text in the canon which speaks of 'four living creatures'.  Namely, that its reference to the latter may occur prior to the manifestation in the canon of the New Testament, of four distinct gospels. Whether or not the images of the latter in that text can be taken as referential to the gospels will be hotly contested by any scholar with a view to the history of the tradition. The adoption of the 'four living creatures' as iconic representations of the four gospels, takes place at a later period in the overall development of Christian iconography. Hermeneutists with a specific concern for the historicity of the tradition will doubtlessly and necessarily urge that construing 'the four living creatures' in The Apocalypse (4.6b-9, 5.6-11, 6.1-8, 14.3, 15.7) referentially to the actual gospels themselves is anachronistic. But as it stands this claim, must be tested against the fact of the intertextual nature of that book. The apocalyptist is also laying claim to aspects of the tradition in a completely different way. The Apocalypse strategically replicates the tradition from Ezekiel 1 and 10. Thus it binds together the two canons, Judaic and Christian just as the Days series and messianic series function congruently. The charge of anachronism against the interpretation of the four living creatures as references to the gospels must therefore address the intimate bond between the two books. Clearly Ezekiel predates The Apocalypse, and just as clearly, the astral imagery it adopts, whatever its provenance, predates both. We are confronted in either case, Ezekiel 1 and 10 and those sections of The Apocalypse already cited, with a 'religious' tradition of greater antiquity than is suggested by even the relevant details of Babylonian mythology, if as is put here, the essential meaning of these images situates us within an emerging stream of cultural consciousness, at the basis of which remains the temporal constructs we are adducing. (On the history of Babylonian zodiaal astronomy see Gary D. Thompson The Origin of the Zodiac).

In any case we reaffirm that our method is overtly that of speculative philosophical psychology, which takes a synchronic view of the texts. We will differ in terms of the emphasis given to this reading of the figures. That is, we will specify the four symbols not as symbols tout court as if that were the end of the matter. For what is the value of such a claim? To identify the four living creatures of the visions of Ezekiel and The Apocalypse with written documents, as well as being naive, does not advance our understanding in any degree. We have merely substituted one thing, a document, for another, a visual symbol or icon. That is the reason here for interpreting the vision of Ezekiel with specific reference to time, and subsequently the observations that the common periodic patterns of both temporal, and visible cycles, solar and lunar, are analogous. We have therefore set ourselves the more comprehensive task of incorporating a vital aspect of natural theology, one which has occupied religious consciousness since the dawn of time itself, that is since the emergence of consciousness itself. Certainly when it comes to the 'literary' and visionary appropriation by the author(s) of The Apocalypse of Ezekiel's visions of the four living creatures, which ought to be the first recourse for any interpretation of the structure of the text as a whole, and as such, the first step in interpretation, it will be necessary to acknowledge the obvious astral imagery operative from start to finish. That these same four living creatures are discernible prior to their appearance in Ezekiel as elements of Babylonian astronomical time keeping, matters not a whit. Rather it performs the necessary duty of a prompt, since the same four zodiacal figures mark the four quarters of the solar, annual, year as marking the equinoxes and solstices. This does not mean that the significance  of the entire book can be dispensed with by allowing such imagery its fullest and freest rein. Astrology is not a key to unlock the meaning of The Apocalypse. Indeed what is understood in the contemporary context by the term 'astrology' does not apply to the argument put here at all. We must remember that the author of The Apocalypse  firstly and foremost refers to Ezekiel's visions. So much in that book is indeed about other biblical texts; it is the most intertextual member of the New Testament canon. Instead, the observation of the parallel between the same iconic tetrad and the creatures of the visions of both Ezekiel and The Apocalypse removes us to the furthest reaches of the past and delivers us to the realms of the emerging consciousness of humankind. For the immediate significance of the four 'zodiacal' signs given in Ezekiel and The Apocalypse does not devolve upon the beliefs of Babylonian astronomy. It defers rather to fundamental features of the solar year which have at various times and places been observed. That is, it concerns precisely the four cardinal point-instants of time which in turn belong to the subject under survey, the rapport between mind and time as disclosed in the story of Transfiguration.

The recapitulation of the theology of the Holy Spirit in respect of the narrative of the second miracle of loaves, our point of entry into the discussion of the fourfold aspect of the gospel, has been given because we must initially dispense with the  very same identity in order to appreciate the fourfold paradigm which acts as the rationale of the form of the gospels. Such a procedure may seem at first altogether at odds with our reading of the same figure, the four, indicative of unity, as in the Pneumatological event, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. However we have urged that one purpose behind the identification of optic sentience as evincing the same identity, The Holy Spirit, recurs to the existence of a fourfold written, that is visible, inscripted gospel. We do not have six gospels, a number which might immediately suggest the Christological hexad; neither do we have five, which might be signal of The Transcendent. For although the gospel(s) must have been transmitted orally at some stage, what we have to conjure with here and now, is its final graphic, written form, immediately recognisable as fourfold. At a later point, we shall still more closely align The Holy Spirit, and the two immanently oriented categories of the same, symbolic feminine, and optic memory, with The Apocalypse, so as to make up for any apparent shortcoming in this method.

In other words, The Apocalypse replicates the figures, 4 and 7 of the Pneumatological feeding miracle, and in utilising these same two figures to an extraordinary degree, it posits its paramount theological topos, the Holy Spirit, at the same time adapting the morphological relation already sustained between Genesis 1.1s and the gospel.  But it inflects this narrative, with the later creation story of J, as is shown by the prevalent role of the woman and the serpent.  Thus the Apocalyptist takes for granted the continuity between the two stories, regardless of their differing perspectives. It is of course, the second narrative, that of the immanentist oriented J that is the more important  of the two creation stories for this book. Even so, the P narrative and the categories inherent in both it and the messianic series, are indispensable to the meaning of the work.

This reverts to what we began by saying, namely the peculiar specificity to The Apocalypse of the perceptual mode of vision. Nevertheless, the same figures, 4 and 7, point to the role that immanence and The Holy Spirit play in both other narrative cycles, the creation story and the messianic miracles. These too are texts, written traditions, visible, though without an equivalent emphasis on immanence. The cipher 4, can therefore aptly and logically be applied in the case of the gospels - its intended meaning is aimed directly at what we understand by 'incarnation', the final achievement of immanence - the bodily existence of 'the Word', 'the divine Eros', the divine bridegroom, as a being in all respects like ourselves. As far as must therefore concern the doctrine of the 'triune' nature of God, the gospels remain more focused on The Son, and to a lesser extent 'The Father', since the former designation implies the same.  Whereas the creation sufficiently addressed the latter, the identity of The Holy Spirit remains to be accounted for in equally adequate terms. This is the task of The Apocalypse. The same motivation is present in The Acts, which Luke appended to his gospel. Its purpose is to provide an adequate theology of The  Holy Spirit insofar as this seems to him requisite by a comprehensive canon.

But we need to stress the reason for the apparent reduction of the hexadic structures which resonate in all three textual cycles, ostensibly and initially at least, to a tetradic form, as again omitting from consideration The Holy Spirit. For we do not have six gospels, reducible to a threefold pattern, but rather four, outlined in the miracle narrative, and if the same morpheme indicates the role of The Holy Spirit, as is entailed by the notion of 'inspiration', while somehow leaving for later consideration of this identity, that fact conforms with the radical tetramorphic structure reducible to the twofold binaries - solstistices and equinoxes - representative of both The Son and 'The Father' respectively and mirrored in the mandala as in the annual course of time itself. For finally, there are just four tipping points, four turning points, four morphologically distinct moments or point-instants in the annual (solar) year, not six. This is affirmed throughout both apocalyptic and Pneumatological narratives themselves, Ezekiel and The Apocalypse.




Mention has been made just now of both sevenfold series, that of the seven Days and the seven messianic events, in terms of the twenty-four hour cycle, the diurnal/nocturnal pattern. This is the most effective way of determining the optic semeia proper to each rubric/messianic event. We have begun with the Pneumatological members for a good reason, for as we shall argue, it is the remaining four non-Pneumatological members which establish the four cardinal points in the mandala. 'Points' of course is too exclusively spatial an expression if by that we mean simply, the four cardinal points of the compass. These are ineffective for our requirements due to the relative cardinality of space. They will not meet the analogical needs of metaphysical method. In the  two visionary experiences of Ezekiel  just cited, as in so many other  of the Pneumatological texts, descriptions of movement are a key to the theological hermeneutic. A major innovation introduced by this work to the theology of the Hebrew canon, is the realisation that the divine presence was not confined, not spatially restricted to the temple in Jerusalem. This, the exiles had left behind. The strikingly novel feature of so much of the two visions involves movement. For us, the relevance of this, the introduction of the concept of time to the notion of sacred space, that of the temple, is considerable. It is evinced in a variety of expressions all of which are concerned with movement: 'wings', 'moved', 'each moved straight ahead', 'wherever the spirit would go they went, without turning as they went', 'torches moving to and fro among the creatures', 'The living creatures darted to and fro like a flash of lightening', ' a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them', ' their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel', 'when they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved', and so on. There is here a plethora of images almost all of which have to do with movement, change, and of course the passage of time.

Thus no longer is the 'God' of Israel confined to a single place. The same God can and does move 'wherever the spirit would go'. This movement occurs in time, that is in space-time. The same characterisation of The Holy Spirit by means of the idea of movement and process, or change, resurfaces profusely in The Apocalypse. We have tied the figure four to the idea of immanence and to the identity of the (Holy) Spirit. Much else in this extended text from Ezekiel complies with the general cast of the theology of immanence. The 'stormy wind' for example recalls the Day 3 rubric and more nearly the story of The Stilling Of The Storm, both of which identify The Paraclete; the various expressions referring to colour - 'amber', 'flash of lightening', 'beryl', 'sapphire', 'gleaming amber', 'splendour all around', ' Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendour all around ... This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God.' All of these expressions concern visual experience, and this sits well with the previous description: ' for the rims of all four were full of eyes all around.' Our hermeneutic has consistently allied the specific mode of sense percipience, vision, with the same identity, The Paraclete.


This now brings into view the analogical spatiotemporal sequence which will supply the basis of the next stage of our inquiry; the annual cycle, that of the four seasons, which we found first set down in the creation story. There it was pronounced within the Day 4 rubric, which we have interpreted as essentially linked to the Christological purposes of the text. The Day 4 rubric lists the category mind : body (soma), relatively to the other two members of the same taxis or class, space : time (Day 5) and male : female (Day 6).  It reiterates the diurnal/nocturnal pattern of light-time. So its references stand in very good stead the next step in our procedure:


We have previously employed one of the four forms of serial order, the four being: beginning with end, beginning without end, end without beginning, and neither beginning nor ending. In the discussion of the denumerability of mind, we referred to one such: beginning without ending. This  reference was in order to highlight the categoreal distinction of the psychophysical from the spatiotemporal, since both evince transcendence and do so equally. We affirmed that whereas  space as defined in the creation narrative, is precisely that which has a beginning and no ending, we can say of Mind, that is has no beginning and no end.  Care is needed to avoid understanding this in any mathematical manner, at least where mind is concerned. It may be logically appropriate to posit some sort of numerical form of seriality where space is concerned, although it is assuredly more the property of the symbolic masculine. These categories, Space and the masculine, though they stand in the most direct antithesis to one another, are depicted in quite comparable terms in the rubrics, Day 2 and Day 3 respectively. But number is finally epistemically appropriate to the symbolic masculine and to the anthropic category. Geometrical method properly belongs to the spatial. Thus in having said of mind that it remains insusceptible of counting, that it has neither beginning nor end, which also means effectively that we cannot decide either way for or against either the singularity or plurality of mind, we are speaking not of any numerical transfinite, nor of a spatial (geometrical) transfinite, but of the temporal one.


This analogy of the 4 seasonal divisions of the year best fits the exposition of the fourfold aspect of the gospels, and it is that referred to in the story of 'beginning' just noted (Genesis 1.14). The four  annual or solar 'cardinal' points of the spatiotemporal compass, as of the mandala, are the two solstices and the two equinoxes. These iconically frame the four different point-instants in the annual cycle. The word 'mandala' here should be extended to comprise those ancient and varied systems of thought cognizant of these very same contours of the solar year. Hence it can include some of the earliest examples from archaeoastronomy such as Stonehenge, the temple at Karnak, and many more. From earliest recorded history given to us in architectonic and graphic symbols, it is obvious that the human spirit was aware of these same fundamental formal aspects of the course of time. It  has always continued to develop with consciousness, and with religious consciousness in particular, due to the compresence of or affinity between time and death.

IDENTITY AND UNITY

... And it was evening, and it was morning, a ... Day. (Genesis 1.8, 13, 19, 23, 31)

And God said: Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens, to separate the day and the night; let them serve there as signs (tOtO)0) to determine the seasons, days and years.

And let them serve as lights in the vault of the heavens, so that it may be light on the earth. And it was so.

And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule over the day, and the lesser light to rule over the night, and the stars too. (Genesis 1.14-16)

The complexity of the calendar is a permanent challenge to human ingenuity. That's why we say: if God exists, either he's got a sense of humour or he's a lousy mathematician ... or else he just can't be understood by the human mind. (Stephen Jay Gould, Time Scales and the Year 200, in Conversations About The End Of Time, Edited by Catherine David, Frederic Lenoir and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, Translated by Ian Maclean and Roger Pearson, Penguin, London, 1999, p.7)

NORMATIVE AND NON-NORMATIVE CATEGORIES

"I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat; and if I send them away hungry (nh/steiv = 'fasting') to their homes, they will faint on the way; and some of them have come a long way." (Mark 2-4)

On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; Jesus also was invited to the marriage, with his disciples. (John 2.1-2)

The Jews then said to him, "What sign have you to show us for doing this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." (John 2.18-19)