The Scarlet Path

Congratulations, you've ascended! Now, I don't know why you chose the Scarlet Woman astride the back of the Seven Headed Beast, and I don't think you do either. I think most of our choices bubble up from our unconscious minds and repressed desires. (I realize that's very Freudian of me.) But our motives often have little effect on the outcome of our choices. It's true that wicked people do exist whose motives lead to immoral choices that conclude in cruelty; only a fool disputes that reality. But the cliche "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" indicates that our good motives often have terrible consequences. It seems there is an asymmetry in moral choice that's shifted in favor of evil. Which is pretty shitty. The Christian story, on the other hand, tries to counter that asymmetry by claiming that the shittiest thing we can do--torturing to death an innocent, good man--can result in the best conclusion--the salvation of the world. I think Christianity is trying to balance the asymmetry inherent in the sphere of moral choice.

So, how did choosing the Scarlet Woman move you upward? From a Christian perspective, it seems an unlikely if not heretical possibility. Here's the origin of the symbol from the Apocalypse of John: "Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, 'Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who is seated upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the dwellers on earth have become drunk.' And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. She was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: 'Babylon the great mother of harlots and of earth's abominations.' And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (Rev. 17:1-6).

Now the AI image created from my prompt makes the Scarlet Woman look more attractive and vulnerable, and her youth and vulnerability may have affected your choice. She doesn't seem menacing. But more important for our game is that she has become over time a profoundly ambiguous symbol. At the time the Apocalypse was written--around 95 CE--she was a symbol of Rome and the Roman Empire. Domitian was emperor, and he was persecuting the Christians. The kings of the earth, subject as they were to Rome, were fornicating with the Woman, that is, forced to comply with Rome in any number of ways, from trade to paying taxes to complying with Roman law. That's what the Scarlet Woman was intended to mean.

But the Reformers of the 16th century lifted this symbol of imperial Rome and applied it to the Roman Catholic Church. One could argue that if "the shoe fits, wear it," and if I were in danger of being burned at the stake, the fear of misrepresenting a symbol would be the least of my worries. However, you can go online and find any numbers of fundamentalist websites that still claim the same thing. They believe that the Apocalypse is a prophetic book and that John the Baptist was predicting the future some 15 centuries after his time.

That belief has spawned a slew of absurd and dangerous interpretations: from trying to identify the Anti-Christ to unraveling the mystery of the mark of the Beast to justifying Israel's wholesale slaughter of Palestinians while exempting Christians from having to struggle with the morality of that slaughter. Must Israel destroy thousands of innocent men, women, and children in order to defend itself against Hamas? God forbid! Are we exempt from compassion for those hapless, persecuted people because of some misbegotten eschatology? God forbid!

Christianity without compassion is sterile, expendable, and meaningless.

There is one natural law that we disbelieve to our ultimate peril, and I adapt it from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Every person possesses an equal, inalienable, and inherent dignity that ought not to be violated." That includes Palestinians. And Ukrainians. And immigrants. From what I can tell, the Catholic Church has been reforming itself to assimilate consistently that fundamental natural law. The pronouncements of Popes Francis and Leo clearly indicate an ongoing reformation according to the dictates of Vatican II. In effect, a persistent misinterpretation of symbols from the Apocalypse are being deployed to legitimize the unjust projection of ancient prejudices (masquerading as sound theology) onto an institution that is radically conforming itself to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration that has its roots in Scripture but nevertheless required the horrors of the Holocaust; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the smoking ruins of Europe to come into being.

Besides of all which, the symbolic equation of Rome with a prostitute is nothing more than a projection of masculine desire onto a political and social shit show. There would be no whores if there were no johns.

The Scarlet Woman inevitably leads us to these considerations, and that inevitably has inevitably moved you up. Good choice!