seven heads & ten horns

When it comes to literal depictions of symbolic texts, I've never seen the like of Albrecht Durer, the great 16th century German master whose woodblock of Revelation's Beast ridden by the Whore of Babylon is both scary and ridiculous.

This is partially because Revelation is an incoherent narrative, with a couple of beasts at a minimum, one coming out of the sea and the other from the land. The main beast, a red animal with seven heads and ten horns, is the one who conveys the lewd jockey. She holds up a golden cup full of obscenities.

What does it all mean? There are more theories about the symbols of Revelation than there are symbols in the book. I'm not a New Testament expert, and know only a little of the history of the time. However, I'll take a stab by pointing out that when John of Patmos wrote this troublesome text, about 95 CE, there had been 11 emperors, with three of them, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, barely having time to sit down on the throne before they were disposed of, and a fourth, Titus, who ruled only a couple years before dying of the plague and being succeeded by his brother, Domitian.

If we subtract four from 11 that leaves seven emperors whom I believe to be symbolized by the heads of the monster. Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian carry the Great Whore, who quite obviously symbolizes the zeitgeist of the Romans, their sensate and sensuous culture, and the autocratic military dictatorship which ruled the empire from Rome.

There are other possibilities, of course. Seven heads might equal the city's fabled seven hills, and the ten horns the emperors who had ruled until the advent of the timid and vicious Domitian, who  banished John to the tiny island of Patmos, thereby setting the stage for possibly the most overinterpreted and misinterpreted literary work of all time.