Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Also Known As: the four riders of the Book of Revelation, chapter 6; popularly called Conquest or Pestilence, War, Famine and Death, though the text itself names only Death
Region/Culture: Global
Mythos: Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Each rider is handed one thing, a crown, a great sword, a pair of scales or authority over a quarter of the earth, and rides out to do what it allows.
Role in Mythos: They are released one by one as the Lamb breaks the first four of the seven seals on a scroll in heaven, and they open the judgments that fill the rest of the Book of Revelation.
Relation to Humans: They bring conquest, bloodshed between neighbours, ruinous food prices and death by sword, hunger, plague and wild animals. Nothing in the vision offers people a way to turn them aside, and only the oil and the wine are ordered to be spared.

A wax seal cracks, and a voice like thunder says a single word. Come. Out of the silence that follows steps a white horse, and on its back a rider with a bow in his hand. Somebody gives him a crown. He rides off to win, and to go on winning, and the page never looks at him again.

That is how the most famous cavalry in Western imagination enters the record: in eight verses, near the end of the Christian Bible, in a vision set down by a man named John on the island of Patmos. The setting is a throne room in heaven. The one seated on the throne holds a scroll closed with seven seals, and nobody in heaven or on earth is fit to open it except a figure called the Lamb. Around the throne stand four living creatures, one like a lion, one like an ox, one with a human face and one like an eagle. Each time the Lamb breaks one of the first four seals, one of these creatures calls out its summons, and a horse and rider answer.

The second horse is red, the colour of fire. Its rider is given a great sword and permission to take peace away from the earth, so that people butcher one another. The wording matters. He does not do the killing. He removes the thing that was holding everyone back.

The third horse is black, and its rider carries a pair of scales, the kind a merchant hangs from one hand to weigh out grain. Then a voice speaks from among the four creatures, and for a moment the end of the world sounds like a market stall. A whole day’s pay for one measure of wheat. The same for three measures of barley. And an order: do not harm the oil and the wine. A labourer could eat on those terms and feed nobody else. The luxuries, meanwhile, come through untouched. It is the most precise detail in the passage, and anyone who has lived through a shortage will recognise it.

The fourth horse is the one that stays in the mind. The Greek word for its colour is chloros, the green of new plants, the root of the modern words chlorine and chlorophyll, and also the word Greek physicians used for the skin of the very sick. English Bibles settled on pale. Its rider is the only one of the four who is given a name. He is called Death, and Hades, the realm of the dead, comes along behind him like a cart behind a harvester. Together they are handed authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill by the sword, by hunger, by plague and by the wild beasts.

Then the fifth seal is opened and the vision turns to other things. The riders do not come back.

They had ancestors. Some six centuries earlier the prophet Zechariah saw horses of several colours, red, sorrel and white, standing at night among myrtle trees, and was told they had been sent to patrol the earth. Later he saw four chariots burst out from between two mountains of bronze, drawn by red, black, white and dappled teams, and these were explained to him as the four winds of heaven. Zechariah’s horses are scouts. They report that the world is quiet. The prophet Ezekiel supplied the other half, a list of the four dreadful judgments of God: sword, famine, wild beasts and plague. John put the two together. The patrol became the punishment.

The names everyone knows are mostly not in the text. War for the red rider and Famine for the black are fair summaries, and Death is given outright. The white rider is the trouble. He carries a bow and wears a crown, and that is all. Some early Christian readers took him for Christ or for the spread of the gospel, since Christ himself rides a white horse later in the same book. Others have seen plain military conquest, and have pointed to the mounted archers of Parthia, the one enemy on Rome’s eastern border that the legions never broke. From the nineteenth century a third camp read him as the Antichrist, a false saviour in borrowed white. The name Pestilence is the newest of all. It cannot be traced earlier than an encyclopedia article of 1906, and it reached the public through a Spanish novel of 1916, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and the films made from it. Plague does appear in the passage. It belongs to the fourth rider, as one of his four ways of killing.

Nobody has ever agreed on when they ride. Some hold that John was describing the wars and famines of his own first-century world. Some have matched each seal to a stretch of Roman history. Others expect the riders still, at the start of a final tribulation. The image survived every reading. Illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages painted them one seal at a time. Around 1497 Albrecht Dürer cut them into a single block of wood, all four abreast and at full gallop, trampling a crowd, with Death as a starved old man on a starved horse. Almost every picture since owes something to that one.

What the Horsemen can do is exactly what they are handed. One is given a crown, one a sword, one a set of scales, two a share of the earth, and each gift is a licence. Within it nothing stops them. No prayer or charm is offered against them, and no hero rides out to meet them.

Their limits are written into the same sentences. They own nothing. Every power is given, and the vision never lets that word drop. They move only when a seal is broken and a creature calls. The black rider is told what he may not touch. Death, with all of Hades at his heels, is held to one quarter of the world and not a field more. They are terrible, and they are on a leash, and the hand holding it belongs to a lamb.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four riders who appear in chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation. Each one rides out when the Lamb breaks one of the first four seals on a scroll in heaven. They are commonly called Conquest or Pestilence, War, Famine and Death.

What do the four horses and their colours mean?

The white horse carries a rider with a bow and a crown who goes out to conquer. The red horse carries a rider with a great sword who takes peace from the earth. The black horse carries a rider with scales and stands for famine, and the pale horse carries Death, with Hades following behind.

Is Pestilence one of the Four Horsemen in the Bible?

No rider is called Pestilence in the Book of Revelation. The only rider the text names is Death, and plague is listed as one of the four ways Death kills. Calling the first rider Pestilence cannot be traced earlier than 1906 and was made popular by a 1916 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

Who is the rider on the white horse?

The rider on the white horse has been read in several ways. Some early Christians saw him as Christ or the spread of the gospel, others see military conquest, and from the nineteenth century some have read him as the Antichrist. The text says only that he carries a bow, is given a crown and rides out to conquer.

Where did the idea of the Four Horsemen come from?

The Four Horsemen draw on two older passages in the Hebrew prophets. Zechariah saw coloured horses and four chariots sent out to patrol the earth, and Ezekiel listed four judgments of God: sword, famine, wild beasts and plague. The Book of Revelation combines the two into four riders who bring those judgments.