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The Revelation to which this book claims to be a beginner's guide is the Revelation (or Apocalypse) of St John, the last book in the New Testament. It is composed of a series of visions depicting the imminent end of the world. Perhaps more than any comparable work, John's Apocalypse has down the centuries spawned a welter of wild and varied interpretations. Religious teachers with bees in their bonnets have been able to bring to it their own theories and presuppositions, and have claimed confirmation for them in John's visions. How hospitable is John's tract to this Jungian approach?
The author of the present work treats John's Apocalypse as a big dream, arising from the collective unconscious, through John as medium. This approach relieves him of the need to consider the questions which a theologian would regard as an essential preliminary to interpretation, such as questions about the circumstances in which the book came to be written, and the characteristics of the literary genre of apocalyptic writings to which it belongs. To attempt to understand John's Apocalypse without even a glance at such issues is like attempting to understand an analysand's dream without paying attention to the dreamer's own circumstances and associations.
Consistently with this approach, Robertson employs something like the method of amplification as his main tool for uncovering the meaning of the biblical text. He draws on a wide range of resources from the fields of comparative religion, science and mathematics. For example, he cites the I Ching, Hildegard of Bingen, the Egyptian myths of Isis, Osiris and Horus; also Cantor's theories about infinity, Weber's law regarding sensation and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In particular, at the outset, Robertson describes the history and religion of the Hopi native American people. According to their prophecies, the world is now entering a critical phase which will determine its destiny for good or ill. And that is the message which Rober