Book of Revelation

>it was translated into greek from the old testament, wasn't it?

No. Have you even read the OT?

Or maybe he just read those books and then wrote his own book?

Have you ever tried writing during a trip? Or even after? It's very difficult.

Producing a work like Revelation requires sobriety and planning. It's extremely structured and content-dense with a clear narrative thrust and few tangents and alludes to many other texts. I don't see how it could be based on a drug trip. It's so orderly.

>I don't see how it could be based on a drug trip. It's so orderly.
Yeah the Rigveda is orderly and complex as well, and yet the visions described therein were definitely soma-induced.

Eh you can create your own images based on the templates provided by previous works without drugs. The creatures in Revelation are elaborations on previous apocalyptic imagery and standard Christian symbology. The multi-headed animals for example were a standard way to represent organizations like nations, as established in Daniel. You can also access altered states of consciousness through prayer and fasting (staples of the mystic's life) where that kind of imagery comes easily, so even if the conten was the result of hallucinations, they probably weren't drug-induced hallucinations. I think the drug most people claim John was on was wormwood absinthe since he mentions wormwood in the text, so a mushroom seems like even more of a stretch to me. I think people are just projecting associations on psychedelic counterculture back on a literary tradition that was just a bit alien to our own.

You're probably right, he wouldn't have required actual drugs to come up with the narrative and its symbolism, but I think what the original greentexter was getting at was the obvious hallucinations John went through, drug-induced or otherwise. That's the point believers will find fault with, instead claiming it was literally divine inspiration.

In Christian mysticism, personal revelation is encountered all the time in dreams and visions. I don't think Christians would write it off as mere hallucinations.

Now THIS makes sense!

>original hebrew
>adopted by pagan celtic/anglo

What the fuck am I reading

Have you even skimmed a wikipedia article about this?

Wow, drugs are pretty amazing when they can predict that China will field a 200,000,000 man army and march west almost two thousand years prior to the event.

It was literally time travel.

>I think people are just projecting associations on psychedelic counterculture back on a literary tradition that was just a bit alien to our own.
This pisses me off to no end.
I've seen people project their pseudo-commie theories on communal villagers, middle eastern christian male bonding ceremonies becoming gay marriage, revelations on weeds, early human sex lives becoming free love, orgies and gangbangs because a relative of our closest primate relative is a bit more chill about sex, and even the rise of sapience being blamed on apes tripping balls(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna).

Leave the people of the past alone with your stupid ass projections and wishful thinking, people.

It's the evolutionists. They believe we are better than the people of yesteryear. More highly evolved.

Even though they deny it, it's obvious.

Psychedelic drugs are often cited as inducing a religious experience.
You get your visions, believe you have been visited by a great entity, the whole shebang.
It's not hard to imagine a guy tripping on drugs and then writing about his experience after the drugs have worn off.

I don't recall that verse.

>200 million
The PLA is barely double the size of the U.S. military and that's questionable at that.

Pretty much this. Apocalyptic literature was a pretty common literary genre for the time (and especially during second temple judaism), and John's apocalypse follows exactly the same conventions as the other apocalyptic writing. It's coded messages about contemporary events in the form of revealed information presented in surreal imagery. John uses the same kinds of imagery seem in many other writings, including Daniel.It's really not remarkable at all in its narrative or its imagery. Lots of scholars think the only reason it was chosen over other books is that people confused John of Patmos for John the Apostle and assumed it was an apostolic writing.

Modern people are just very removed from the genre, and only being exposed to one apocalyptic writing makes it harder to understand its background and intention. It's not a drug trip, it's just a genre most people don't understand anymore.