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So just who was this illusive character, "Saint John?" No one ever knew. It is about fifty percent likely that no such Apostle ever existed. However, if he really did live and follow Jesus of Nazareth around, it is almost certain that he was illiterate, since only a small fraction of the populace could even write. In his role as Apostle, he was sometimes styled as "Saint John The Beloved," and indeed the character Jesus had an almost motherly sentimentality toward this Apostle. But he had another role, that of "Saint John The Revelator," author of one of four of the legendary and Biblical "Synoptic Gospels." The problem here is that, since he was likely illiterate, he could not have been the author of that Gospel, in reality. Indeed, the age of the document was falsified originally, but we now know the book to be the last of the gospels, produced far too late to be real, and, furthermore, literary forensics shows it to be the most obvious of forgeries. Yet, the title of "Revelator" stuck, and as a nearly-infallible prophet, his letters, so-called "Epistles," are seen as the "Word of God" also. But the person who wrote John's Epistles could not have been the Apostle Saint John either, since the writer of the Gospel that bears his name is utterly unlike the Epistles that bear his name. The Epistles were then also further forgeries, associated with John. But none of this is central to the book you will read here. Indeed, there is a "Fourth John," and it is he I shall deal. This John probably did live, and probably resided on a Greek or island, and his name was probably John in reality, specifically, a curious fellow later tentatively identified as "John of Patmos," further, and most compellingly styled, "Saint John The Divine." If ever a Saint John existed and really wrote his own work, it was this one. But next to nothing is known about him, other than he is the utterly fantastic and terrifying author of the surreal, genocidal, hallucinogenic and apocalyptic "Book of Revelations." By some accounts, it was believed he was a practitioner of asceticism, extreme fasting, one given to long bouts of prayer and austere solitudes, in short, very likely a psychedelic madman who may very well, for all we know, have seen all of the mad dream states of which he writes. The Freudian and the Jungian know him at once, as does the Egyptologist and the Mesopotamian scholar. Saint John The Divine is the synthesizer of all archetypes of all Eschatologies. And yet, other than a few bits of possibly-identifying information and his short, spasmodic tract, he is a mystery. And this is where I come in, for I proclaim the era of "Speculative Scripture" writing to have begun, as I, not so uncoincidentally, perhaps, face many Apocalypses in my own world. In any case, this, "Revelations II," seeks to conflate all possible Saint Johns into this one monkish verbal terrorist living on an island. However, my story perversely and willfully speculates that the daily facts of Saint John The Divine could have been, and probably, the mundane facts facing a mentally-ill man who thinks he is a prophet. And, in the spirit of merciless modernism, I make him a notorious drug and sex fiend with an associate or two who make Jesus' prostitute friends look tame, and the criminals on the cross look like petty thieves, by comparison. The book is meant to shock the consciousness wide open and open the mind to religious possibilities that have been thought to be unthinkable by most peoples. But, unlike the others who wrote scripture, I don't hide my identity, nor do I claim any authority for my works. In fact, I feel that you, the reader, might, in the end, write a scripture surpassing both mine and the traditional ones. The whole of the cosmic journey is really nothing but a massive conceptual art piece, from the Big Bang to the Apple Computer. And, at last, my Saint John The Divine, far from answering questions, forces you to supply the answers, as he is simply crazy.