Revelation 17:3–6

Revelation 17:3 — The Wilderness and the Enthroned Seductress John is transported "in the Spirit" (ἐν πνεύματι) — the same prophetic formula used in 1:10 and 4:2, marking this as a genuine apocalyptic revelation rather than ordinary experience. The location is significant: a wilderness (ἔρημος). In biblical typology, the desert is both a place of testing (Israel's forty years; Jesus' temptation) and a place of divine encounter (Sinai, Elijah, the Woman clothed with the sun in 12:6 who flees there for protection). That Babylon appears enthroned in a wilderness inverts the exodus tradition — where God's people were purified in the desert, here the great seductress holds court in desolation, a kingdom built on spiritual emptiness.

The beast she rides is "scarlet," mirroring the dragon of chapter 12, and bears "seven heads and ten horns," the same configuration as the beast from the sea in 13:1. The woman does not create the beast — she rides it, suggesting a parasitic relationship between corrupt civil-religious power and the demonic forces beneath it. The beast is "full of blasphemous names," indicating that its very nature is the systematic denial and counterfeiting of divine worship.

Revelation 17:4 — The Cup of Abominations Purple and scarlet were the colors of imperial wealth and military power in the Greco-Roman world; "decked with gold and precious stones and pearls" (cf. Ezek 28:13, describing the king of Tyre) evokes the seductive magnificence of Rome, whose wealth was built on conquest and trade. The detailed inventory of adornment recalls the harlot of Proverbs 7:10–20, who dresses to entice — beauty weaponized for destruction.

The "golden cup" is the passage's most chilling image. It appears precious and desirable on the outside, yet contains "abominations and the impurities of the sexual immorality of the earth" (βδελυγμάτων καὶ τὰ ἀκάθαρτα τῆς πορνείας). "Porneia" here carries its full Old Testament resonance: idolatry understood as spiritual adultery, the unfaithfulness of a people who exchange the living God for the satisfactions of earthly power. Jeremiah had already used the same image — "Babylon was a golden cup in the LORD's hand, making all the earth drunken" (Jer 51:7). John is deliberately invoking that prophetic tradition.

Revelation 17:5 — The Name Written on Her Forehead In Roman practice, prostitutes sometimes wore their names on headbands (Seneca, Controversiae 1.2.7). The inscription subverts this: rather than a name of seduction, it is a name of prophetic unmasking. "MYSTERY" (μυστήριον) signals that what follows must be read on multiple levels — this is not merely a city or an empire but a spiritual reality that can incarnate itself across history. "Babylon the Great" deliberately evokes the Babylon of Genesis 11 (Babel, the monument to human self-deification) and the Babylon of the Exile (the destroyers of Jerusalem and the Temple). Both are paradigms: the first of human pride, the second of the persecution of God's people.

"Mother of prostitutes" identifies Babylon not merely as one corrupt power among others, but as the generative source, the archetype, the matrix of all idolatrous civilizations. She does not merely sin — she reproduces.

Revelation 17:6 — Drunk on Martyrs' Blood The image of drunkenness on blood is almost unbearable in its grotesquerie, and deliberately so. The saints (ἁγίων) and "the martyrs of Jesus" (τῶν μαρτύρων Ἰησοῦ) may describe two overlapping groups — all God's holy people, specifically those who bore witness (μάρτυς, witness) to Jesus at the cost of their lives. Babylon's intoxication on their blood reveals the internal logic of anti-God empire: it is not satisfied by wealth or power alone but is energized by the destruction of those who will not worship it. John's own "great amazement" (ἐθαύμασα θαῦμα μέγα) is not admiration but the stunned horror of the prophet confronted with the full depth of evil — a reaction the angel will immediately proceed to interpret (17:7ff).

Catholic tradition has approached this passage on at least three distinct but complementary levels, refusing to reduce "Babylon" to any single historical referent.

The Patristic Level — Rome and the Persecuting Empire: The most immediate application for the early Church was the Roman Empire. Tertullian (Adversus Marcionem 3.13), Victorinus of Pettau, and Jerome all identify Babylon with Rome. The seven heads are the seven hills; the purple and scarlet mirror the imperial court; the martyrs' blood recalls Nero's and Domitian's persecutions. This reading is not allegorism but typology: Rome is a genuine historical instantiation of Babylon-the-principle.

The Augustinian Level — The Earthly City: Augustine's City of God lifts the interpretation to the cosmic plane. "Babylon" designates the civitas terrena — not any one empire but the entire civilization organized around self-love rather than love of God (CCC §§1404, 2817). On this reading, Babylon is a permanent spiritual adversary of the civitas Dei, present in every age in varying forms.

The Catechetical Level — Idolatry and Its Seductions: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, drawing on this passage and its Old Testament background, teaches that idolatry "consists in divinizing what is not God" and "perverts our innate sense of God" (CCC §2113). The golden cup — beautiful outside, poisonous within — becomes a powerful image of what idolatry does: it imitates the sacred (golden chalice of the Eucharist) while delivering corruption. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi §43, warns that systems promising human fulfillment apart from God ultimately generate the very dehumanization they claim to overcome — Babylon's cup in modern dress.

The challenge Babylon poses to a contemporary Catholic is not abstract. Every culture generates its own golden cup: systems of consumption that promise fulfillment through acquisition, ideologies that promise liberation through the erasure of moral order, political movements that demand a loyalty properly owed only to God. The woman's adornment — stunning, convincing, socially prestigious — is precisely the difficulty. She does not look like corruption from the outside.

The practical application is twofold. First, the discipline of discernment: Catholics are called to cultivate the capacity to ask of any system, institution, or cultural movement, "What is in this cup?" This is not paranoid withdrawal from the world but the critical engagement that St. John Paul II called "evangelizing culture" — engaging it without being consumed by it (Ecclesia in America §70).

Second, the witness of the martyrs. Babylon is "drunk" on martyrs' blood precisely because they refused the cup. In an age when public Christian witness carries increasing social cost, these verses remind us that the willingness to be countercultural is not sectarianism — it is the precise form that faithful witness has always taken. The martyrs did not merely avoid sin; they made their refusal visible, and Babylon noticed.