Chapter 1817

[←1805]

So occult and mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in Revelation (xii), as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana) under her feet, who being with child “cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.” A great red Dragon stands before the woman ready to devour the child. She brings forth the man-child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God—the Sun. The woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the Earth helped the woman and swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her seed who kept the commandments of God. (See xii. 1, 17.) Anyone who reads the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognize the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for the man-child of Revelation, “who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” is surely not the meek “Son of God,” Jesus, but the physical Sun, “who rules all nations”; the Dragon being the North Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona “to bring forth”—the Sun to appear. “She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she can bring forth,” until Neptune, the Ocean, in pity, makes immovable the floating isle of Delos—the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from Jupiter under the waves of the Ocean—on which Latona finds refuge, and where the bright God Delius is born, the God, who no sooner appears than he kills Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns—with an iron rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys) in the just cited chapter of Revelation. Latona became a powerful Goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his Occult aspect Apollo is patron of number Seven. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of Myorica swim seven times round Delos singing that event; he is given seven chords to his Lyre—the seven rays of the Sun and the seven forces of Nature. But this is only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely geological.