THE FOUR HORSEMEN
The ages of the first estate, namely Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, and Leo, are the back of the human body, or the nerve ganglia of the spine and the glands of the brain. As such the ascent of the seven seals, or chakras, perfectly correspond to the epochs of human development from 24,000 BC to 11,000 BC.
Revelation employed the most ancient of teachings from the covenant temple cultures of the world, gathered and distilled in the several centuries before Christ. The ceremonial system of ascending virtues in Mithraism utilized an astronomical ladder passed down through millennia to chronicle four anthropological epochs preceding the cataclysm that turned planet earth from the Pleistocene to the Holocene age around 13,000 years ago. These epochs in Revelation are known as “the four horsemen of the Apocalypse” presaging the end of the world in the Last Days, but in this context they have been completely divorced from the significance of their original symbolism. Life was fraught with mortal peril when the proliferating descendants of Adam and Eve were predominantly hunters and gatherers. These ages, from around 26,000 years ago until the cataclysm are often characterized by conquests, wars, famine, and disease, but in the symbol of the horsemen ascending the spine, they primarily represent humankind rising from being as nature, to gaining mastery in the world by degrees, from grace to grace in humanity’s first estate.
As viewed through a frame of ascending human development, Sagittarius (“And I saw, and beheld a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering and to conquer” (Rev. 6:2)), may be conceptualized as taking thought, or aim, for the morrow, stemming from the prudence of thinking of tomorrow’s needs as much as today’s.
Scorpio follows, “And when he had opened the second seal…there went out another horse that was red (so named for Mars, Scorpio’s ruling planet): and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given to him a great sword (his stinger)” (Rev. 6:3-4, parenthesis added). Scorpio might symbolize the human capacity to take thinking for the morrow to the extreme, resulting in territorialism and the acquisition of goods and lands, even if by war and exploitation.
Concepts of avoiding war through fair trade and balancing the impulse to retribution with mercy might have given rise to the judicious nature of Libra, “And when he had opened the third seal…I beheld and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand” (Rev. 6:5).
Virgo, the spirit world, is the pale horse and the last of the four horsemen. It is the resting place comprising most of humanity who lived their first estate before the cataclysm. “And when he had opened the fourth seal…I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him” (Rev. 6:7-8). Signified by the cultivation of religious and abstract thinking, craft and toolmaking, the epoch of the Four Horsemen is known to anthropologists as the Magdalenian Age (21,000-12,000 years BC).
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 