With the famous four horsemen, the real drama begins. These four horsemen are obviously pagan. They are not even Jewish. In they ride, one after the other — though why they should come from the opening of the seals of a book, we don’t know. In they ride, short and sharp, and it is over. They have been cut down to a minimum.
But there they are: obviously astrological, zodiacal, prancing in to a purpose. To what purpose? This time, really individual and human, rather than cosmic. The famous book of seven seals in this place is the body of man: of a man: of Adam: of any man: and the seven seals are the seven centres or gates of his dynamic consciousness. We are witnessing the opening and conquest of the great psychic centres of the human body. The old Adam is going to be conquered, die, and be reborn as the new Adam: but in stages: in sevenfold stages: or in six stages, and then a climax, seven. For man has seven levels of awareness, deeper and higher: or seven spheres of consciousness. And one by one these must be conquered, transformed, transfigured.
And what are these seven spheres of consciousness in a man? Answer as you please, any man can give his own answer. But taking common ‘popular’ view they are, shall we say, the four dynamic natures of man and the three ‘higher’ natures. Symbols mean something: yet they mean something different to every man. Fix the meaning of a symbol, and you have fallen into the commonplace of allegory.
Horses, always horses! How the horse dominated the mind of the early races, especially of the Mediterranean! You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. He is a dominant symbol: he gives us lordship: he links us, the first palpable and throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potence: he is the beginning even of our godhead in the flesh. And as a symbol he roams the dark underworld meadows of the soul. He stamps and threshes in the dark fields of your soul and of mine. The sons of God who came down and knew the daughters of men and begot the great Titans, they had ‘the members of horses’, says Enoch.
Within the last fifty years man has lost the horse. Now man is lost. Man is lost to life and power — an underling and a wastrel. While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived.
The horse, the horse! the symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man. The horse, that heroes strode. Even Jesus rode an ass, a mount of humble power. But the horse for true heroes. And different horses for the different powers, for the different heroic flames and impulses.
The rider on the white horse! Who is he then? The man who needs an explanation will never know. Yet explanations are our doom.
Take the old four natures of man: the sanguine, the choleric, the melancholic, the phlegmatic! There you have the four colours of the horses, white, red, black, and pale, or yellowish. But how should sanguine be white? — Ah, because the blood was the life itself, the very life: and the very power of life itself was white, dazzling. In our old days, the blood was the lite, and visioned as power it was like white light. The scarlet and the purple were only the clothing of the blood. Ah, the vivid blood clothed in bright red! itself it was like pure light.
The red horse is choler: not mere anger, but natural fieriness, what we call passion.
The black horse was the black bile, refractory.
And the phlegm, or lymph of the body was the pale horse: in excess it causes death, and is followed by Hades.
Or take the four planetary natures of man: jovial, martial, saturnine, and mercurial. This will do for another correspondence, if we go a little behind the Latin meaning, to the older Greek. Then Great Jove is the sun, and the living blood: the white horse: and angry Mars rides the red horse: Saturn is black, stubborn, refractory and gloomy: and Mercury is really Hermes, Hermes of the Underworld, the guide of souls, the watcher over two ways, the opener of two doors, he who seeks through hell, or Hades.
There are two sets of correspondence, both physical. We leave the cosmic meanings, for the intention here is more physical than cosmic.
You will meet the white horse over and over again, as a symbol. Does not even Napoleon have a white horse? The old meanings control our actions, even when our minds have gone inert.
But the rider on the white horse is crowned. He is the royal me, he is my very self and his horse is the whole mana of a man. He is my very me, my sacred ego, called into a new cycle of action by the Lamb and riding forth to conquest, the conquest of the old self for the birth of a new self. It is he, truly, who shall conquer all the other ‘powers’ of the self. And he rides forth, like the sun, with arrows, to conquest, but not with the sword, for the sword implies also judgment, and this is my dynamic or potent self. And his bow is the bended bow of the body, like the crescent moon.
The true action of the myth, or ritual-imagery, has been all cut away. The rider on the white horse appears, then vanishes. But we know why he has appeared. And we know why he is paralleled at the end of the Apocalypse by the last rider on the white horse, who is the heavenly Son of Man riding forth after the last and final conquest over the ‘kings’. The son of man, even you or I, rides forth to the small conquest: but the Great Son of Man mounts his white horse after the last universal conquest, and leads on his hosts. His shirt is red with the blood of monarchs, and on his thigh is his title: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. (Why on his thigh? Answer for yourself. Did not Pythagoras show his golden thigh in the temple? Don’t you know the old and powerful Mediterranean symbol of the thigh?) But out of the mouth of the final rider on the white horse comes that fatal sword of the logos of judgment. Let us go back to the bow and arrows of him to whom judgment is not given.
The myth has been cut down to the bare symbols. The first rider only rides forth. After the second rider, peace is lost, strife and war enter the world — really the inner world of the self. After the rider on the black horse, who carries the balances of measure, that weigh out the measures or true proportions of the ‘elements’ in the body, bread becomes scarce, though wine and oil are not hurt. Bread, barley is here the body or flesh which is symbolically sacrificed — as in the barley scattered over the victim in a Greek sacrifice: ‘Take this bread of my body with thee.’ The body of flesh is now at famine stage, wasted down. Finally, with the rider on the pale horse, the last, the physical or dynamic self is dead in the ‘little death’ of the initiate, and we enter the Hades or underworld of our being.
We enter the Hades or underworld of our being, for our body is now ‘dead’. But the powers or demons of this underworld can only hurt a fourth part of the earth: that is, a fourth part of the body of flesh: which means, the death is only mystical, and that which is hurt is only the body that belongs to already-established creation. Hunger and physical woes befall the physical body in this little death, but there is as yet no greater hurt. There are no plagues: these are divine wrath, and here we have no anger of the Almighty.
There is a crude and superficial explanation of the four horsemen: but probably it hints at the true meaning. The orthodox commentators who talk about famines in the time of Titus or Vespasian may be reading the bit about barley and wheat correctly, according to a late apocalyptist. The original meaning, which was pagan, is smeared over intentionally with a meaning that can fit this ‘Church of Christ versus the wicked Gentile Powers’ business. But none of that touches the horsemen themselves. And perhaps here better than anywhere else in the book can we see the peculiar way in which the old meaning has been cut away and confused and changed, deliberately, while the bones of the structure have been left.
But there are three more seals. What happens when these are opened?
After the fourth seal and the rider on the pale horse, the initiate, in pagan ritual, is bodily dead. There remains, however, the journey through the underworld, where the living ‘I’ must divest itself of soul and spirit, before it can at last emerge naked from the far gate of hell into the new day. For the soul, the spirit, and the living T are the three divine natures of man. The four bodily natures are put off on earth. The two divine natures can only be divested in Hades. And the last is a stark flame which, on the new day is clothed anew and successively by the spiritual body, the soul-body, and then the ‘garment’ of flesh, with its fourfold terrestrial natures.
Now no doubt the pagan script recorded this passage through Hades, this divesting of the soul, then of the spirit, till the mystic death is fulfilled sixfold, and the seventh seal is at once the last thunder of death and the first thunderous paean of new birth and tremendous joy.
But the Jewish mind hates the mortal and terrestrial divinity of man: the Christian mind the same. Man is only postponedly divine: when he is dead and gone to glory. He must not achieve divinity in the flesh. So the Jewish and Christian apocalyptists abolish the mystery of the individual adventure into Hades and substitute a lot of martyred souls crying under the altar for vengeance — vengeance was a sacred duty with the Jews. These souls are told to wait awhile — always the postponed destiny — until more martyrs are killed; and they are given white robes: which is premature, for the white robes are the new resurrected bodies, and how could these crying souls put them on in Hades: in the grave? However — such is the muddle that Jewish and Christian apocalyptists have made of the fifth seal.
The sixth seal, the divesting of the spirit from the last living quick of the ‘I’, this has been turned by the apocalyptist into a muddled cosmic calamity. The sun goes black as sackcloth of hair: which means that he is a great black orb streaming forth visible darkness; the moon turns to blood, which is one of the horror-reversals of the pagan mind, for the moon is mother of the watery body of men, the blood belongs to the sun, and the moon, like a harlot or demon woman, can only be drunk with red blood in her utterly maleficent aspect of meretrix, blood-drinker, she who should give the cool water of the body’s fountain of flesh; the stars fall from the sky, and the heavens depart like a scroll rolled together, and ‘every mountain and island were moved out of their places’. It means the return of chaos, and the end of our cosmic order, or creation. Yet it is not annihilation: for the kings of the earth and all the rest of men keep on hiding in the shifted mountains, from the ever-recurrent wrath of the Lamb.
This cosmic calamity no doubt corresponds to the original final death of the initiate, when his very spirit is stripped off him and he knows death indeed, yet still keeps the final flame-point of life, down in Hades. But it is a pity the apocalyptists were so interfering: the Apocalypse is a string of cosmic calamities, monotonous. We would give the New Jerusalem cheerfully, to have back the pagan record of initiation; and this perpetual ‘wrath of the Lamb’ business exasperates one like endless threats of toothless old men.
However, the six stages of mystic death are over. The seventh stage is a death and birth at once. Then the final flame-point of the eternal self of a man emerges from hell, and at the very instant of extinction becomes a new whole cloven flame, of a new-bodied man with golden thighs and a face of glory. But first there is a pause: a natural pause. The action is suspended, and transferred to another world, to the outer cosmos. There is a lesser cycle of ritual to fulfil, before the seventh seal, the crash and the glory.