With the coming of Socrates and ‘the spirit’, the cosmos died. For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heaven hereafter. And all the religions have been religions of the dead body and the postponed reward: eschatological, to use a pet word of the philosophers.
It is very difficult for us to understand the pagan mind. When we are given translations of stories from the ancient Egyptian, the stories are almost entirely unintelligible. It may be the translations’ fault: who can pretend really to read hieroglyph script! But when we are given translations from Bushman folk-lore, we find ourselves in almost the same puzzled state. The words may be intelligible, but the connection between them is impossible to follow. Even when we read translations of Hesiod, or even of Plato, we feel that a meaning has been arbitrarily given to the movement that is wrong, the inner connection. Flatter ourselves as we may, the gulf between Professor Jowett’s mentality and Plato’s mentality is almost impassable; and Professor Jowett’s Plato is, in the end, just Professor Jowett with hardly a breath of the living Plato. Plato divorced from his great pagan background is really only another Victorian statue in a toga — or a chlamys.
To get at the Apocalypse we have to appreciate the mental working of the pagan thinker or poet — pagan thinkers were necessarily poets — who starts with an image, sets the image in motion, allows it to achieve a certain course or circuit of its own, and then takes up another image. The old Greeks were very fine image-thinkers, as the myths prove. Their
images were wonderfully natural and harmonious. They followed the logic of action rather than of reason, and they had no moral axe to grind. But still they are nearer to us than the orientals, whose image-thinking often followed no plan whatsoever, not even the sequence of action. We can see it in some of the Psalms, the flitting from image to image with no essential connection at all, but just the curious image-association. The oriental loved that.
To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-on-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images. Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge.
The old method of the Apocalypse is to set forth the image, make a world, and then suddenly depart from this world in a cycle of time and movement and event, an epos; and then return again to a world not quite like the original one, but on another level. The ‘world’ is established on twelve: the number twelve is basic for an established cosmos. And the cycles move in sevens.
This old plan still remains, but very much broken up. The Jews always spoilt the beauty of a plan by forcing some ethical or tribal meaning in. The Jews have a moral instinct against design. Design, lovely plan, is pagan and immoral. So that we are not surprised, after the experience of Ezekiel and Daniel, to find the mise en scene of the vision muddled up, Jewish temple furniture shoved in, and twenty- four elders or presbyters who no longer quite know what they are, but are trying to be as Jewish as possible, and so on. The sea as of glass has come in from the Babylonian cosmos, the bright waters of heaven, as contrasted with the bitter or dead waters of the earthly sea: but of course it has to be put in a dish, a temple laver. Everything Jewish is interior. Even the stars of heaven and the waters of the fresh firmament have to be put inside the curtains of that stuffy tabernacle or temple.
But whether John of Patmos actually left the opening vision of the throne and the four starry creatures and the twenty-four elders or witnesses in the muddle we find them in, or whether later editors deliberately, in true Christian spirit, broke up the design, we don’t know. John of Patmos was a Jew, so he didn’t much mind whether his vision was imaginable or not. But even then, we feel the Christian scribes smashed up the pattern, to ‘make it safe’. Christians have always been ‘making things safe’.
The book had difficulty in getting into the Bible at all: the eastern Fathers objected to it so strongly. So if, in Crom- wellian fashion, the heathen figures had their noses and heads knocked off, to ‘make them safe’, we can’t wonder. All we can do is to remember that there is probably a pagan kernel to the book: that this was written over, perhaps more than once, by Jewish apocalyptists, before the time of Christ: that John of Patmos probably wrote over the whole book once more, to make it Christian: and after that, Christian scribes and editors tinkered with it to make it safe. They could go on tinkering for more than a hundred years.
Once we allow for pagan symbols more or less distorted by the Jewish mind and the Christian iconoclast, and for Jewish temple and ritual symbols arbitrarily introduced to make the heavens fit inside that precious Israelitish tabernacle, we can get a fairly good idea of the mise en schne, the vision of the throne with the cosmic beasts giving praise, and the rainbow-shrouded Kosmokrator about whose presence the prismatic glory glows like a rainbow and a cloud: ‘Iris too is a cloud’. This Kosmokrator gleams with the colour of jasper and the sardine stone: the commentators say greenish yellow, whereas in Ezekiel it was amber yellow, as the effulgence of the cosmic fire. Jasper equates with the sign Tisces, which is the astrological sign of our era. Only now are we passing over the border of Pisces, into a new sign and a new era. And Jesus was called The Fish, for the same reason, during the first centuries. Such a powerful hold had star-lore, originally Chaldean, over the mind of man!
From the throne proceed thunders and lightnings and voices. Thunder indeed was the first grand cosmic utterance. It was a being in itself: another aspect of the Almighty or the Demiurge: and its voice was the first great cosmic noise, betokening creation. The grand Logos of the beginning was a thunderclap laughing throughout chaos, and causing the cosmos. But the thunder, which is also the Almighty, and the lightning, which is the Fiery Almighty, putting forth the first jet of life-flame — the fiery Logos — have both also their angry or sundering aspect. Thunder claps creative through space, lightning darts in fecund fire: or the reverse, destructive.
Then before the throne are the seven lamps, which are explained as the seven Spirits of God. Explanations are fishy, in a work like this. But the seven lamps are the seven planets (including sun and moon) who are the seven Rulers from the heavens over the earth and over us. The great sun that makes day and makes all life on earth, the moon that sways the tides and sways our physical being, unknown, sways the menstrual period in women and the sexual rhythm in a man, then the five big wandering stars, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, these, which are also our days of the week, are as much our Rulers now as ever they were: and as little. We know we live by the sun: how much we live by the others, we don’t know. We reduce it all to simple gravitation-pull. Even at that, strange fine threads hold us to the moon and stars. That these threads have a psychic pull on us, we know from the moon. But what of the stars? How can we say? We have lost that sort of awareness.
However, we have the mise en scene of the drama of the Apocalypse — call it heaven, if you like. It really means the complete cosmos as we now have it: the ‘unregenerate’ cosmos.
The Almighty had a book in his hand. The book is no doubt a Jewish symbol. They were a bookish people: and always great keepers of accounts: reckoning up sins throughout the ages. But the Jewish symbol of a book will do fairly well, with its seven seals, to represent a cycle of seven: though how the book is to be opened piece by piece, after the breaking of each seal, I myself cannot see: since the book is a rolled up scroll, and therefore could not actually be opened till all seven seals were broken. However, it is a detail: to the apocalyptist and to me. Perhaps there is no intention of opening it, till the end.
The Lion of Judah is supposed to open the book. B
ut lo! when the kingly beast comes on to the stage, it turns out to be a Lamb with seven horns (of power, the seven powers or potencies) and seven eyes (the same old planets). We are always hearing a terrific roaring as of lions, and we are always seeing a Lamb exhibiting this wrath. John of Patmos’ Lamb is, we suspect, the good old lion in sheep’s clothing. It behaves like the most terrific lion. Only John insists that it is a Lamb.
He has to insist on the Lamb, in spite of his predilection for lions, because Leo must now give way to Aries; for, throughout the whole world, the God who, like a lion, was given blood sacrifice must be shoved into the background, and the sacrificed god must occupy the foreground. The pagan mysteries of the sacrifice of the god for the sake of a greater resurrection are older than Christianity, and on one of these mysteries the Apocalypse is based. A Lamb it has to be: or with Mithras, a bull: and the blood drenches over the initiate from the cut throat of the bull (they lifted his head up as they cut his throat) and makes him a new man.
‘Wash me in the blood of the Lamb And I shall be whiter than snow — ’
shrieks the Salvation Army in the market place. How surprised they would be if you told them it might just as well have been a bull. But perhaps they wouldn’t. They might twig at once. In the lowest stratum of society religion remains pretty much the same, throughout the ages.
(But when it was for a hecatomb, they held the head of the bull downwards, to earth, and cut his throat over a pit. We feel that John’s Lamb was for a hecatomb.)
God became the animal that was slain, instead of the animal that does the slaying. With the Jews, then, it had to be a Lamb, partly because of their ancient paschal sacrifice. The Lion of Judah put on a fleece: but by their bite ye shall know them. John insists on a Lamb ‘as it were slain’: but we never see it slain, we only see it slaying mankind by the million. Even when it comes on in a victorious bloody shirt at the end, the blood is not its own blood: it is the blood of inimical kings.
‘Wash me in the blood of my enemies And I shall be that I am — ’
says John of Patmos in effect.
There follows a paean. What it is, is a real pagan paean of praise to the god who is about to demonstrate — the elders, those twice twelve of the established cosmos, who are really the twelve signs of the zodiac on their ‘seats’, keep getting up and bowing to the throne, like the sheaves to Joseph. Vials of sweet odour are labelled: Prayers of the saints; probably an aftertouch of some little Christian later on. Flocks of Jewish angels flock in. And then the drama begins.
CHAPTER X
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.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 987