[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Something in the April air has me fascinated with all things apocalypse—literature (the Flood myths of Genesis / Enuma Elish and the fall of Ages in Hesiod’s “Works and Days”), shows (Fall-Out), movies (Civil War, Knock at the Cabin, World War Z), and everything in between!
It would be easy to say the fascination started with the eclipse on April 8, but I think something started stirring in me during the days of peak COVID… when I, along with the rest of the world, began to have this vague yet palpable felt sense that we stood at the ending of a world.
This week’s journey through the apocalyptic involved a re-read of the Book of Revelation (the last book of the Bible). This was inspired, in part, by the fact that I will be co-hosting my second international men’s retreat in Patmos, Greece, later this year (September 15-22), and John wrote the Book of Revelation while he was exiled in Patmos. In preparation, I wanted to start wrestling with the text and any insights it might offer to the modern man. (You can apply for that retreat here.)
As I started to re-read Revelation, I couldn’t help but reflect on how, when I was younger, I avoided the Book because I thought all it did was tell a terrifying tale of how the world would one day end. As a teenager and young adult, I dismissed it as a scare tactic to get people to repent… or else!
It wasn’t until I came across Ambrose’s advice to Augustine to read biblical passages not just in their literal sense but also in their spiritual and symbolic sense that much of the Bible opened back up to me. (In a way, you could say this was the interpretative key that opened the seals of the scroll… a metaphor only someone who just finished reading Revelation would use.)
As I moved through Revelation, I was struck by how much of John’s imagery hyperlinks to the imagery of Dante in the “Divine Comedy” and how several of the Book’s symbols—like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the “Red Dragon” (i.e., the Eternal Dragon)—remain in popular consciousness today. It’s an intimidating book with a lot of layers. Scholars across the ages are split on how to make sense of it so far be it for me to claim to have the authoritative key.
But to my humble (and undoubtedly faulty) attempt to make sense of what the text of Revelation is trying to tell us about the ending and renewal of worlds, I devote the rest of this essay.]
Popular culture often views the Book of Revelation the same way I viewed it growing up: as God’s literal plan for planetary destruction. This makes it easy (both for those within and without the Christian tradition) to dismiss the Book as being without value… offering nothing but a faith-based conspiracy theory. But such a reading turns a book about revelation (as the title affirms) into one of concealment.
The original title of the Book of Revelation in Greek, Apokalysis, is a verb meaning “to uncover, reveal, or unveil.” What, you might ask, does the Book unveil or reveal? The patterns of death and rebirth, falling and rising that are continuously manifesting in the world—patterns belonging to the order of Alpha and Omega as things past, present, and future… things that were, are, and are to come.
Among these eternally recurring patterns are two of the deepest symbols in the collective consciousness: (1) the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and (2) the Eternal (or “Red”) Dragon of Chaos. We’ll look at each in this essay, but before we do that, we have to set the stage.
The first bit of context to understand: John1 wrote Revelation on the Greek island of Patmos while exiled from an increasingly authoritarian Roman Empire. (Most New Testament scholars believe the text was written sometime around 95-96 A.D. during the reign of Domitian.) One of the first things John does in Revelation is write to seven churches (symbolized by seven lampstands) and encourage them to have “patient endurance” despite their persecution. Why should they have hope? Because nations rise and fall, but truth, beauty, and goodness remain… the Word always wins in the end.
I believe all of Revelation, through its use of imagery and symbols, is one long meditation on this theme. Here’s the beginning of John’s dreamlike vision:
I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mount came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he placed his right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this.’”2
In this introductory vision, we are introduced to Christ as the first, the last, and the living one… the Word that was with God at the beginning of it all, an embodiment of the Wisdom or Way animating the universe. This tips us off that what is about to be revealed to John is a vision of something everlasting—something he has not only “seen” in Egypt’s past persecution of the Israelites, “what is” with the current persecution of the Roman Empire, but also “what is to take place after this” in an eternally recurring pattern of civilization.
With this in mind, we are now ready to examine the symbols of the Four Horsemen and the Red Dragon. We will start with the Four Horsemen.
The Four Horseman
In Revelation 6:1-8, the Four Horsemen appear after opening the first four (of seven) seals accompanying the ushering in of a “New Jerusalem.” The first horseman rides a white horse and is a conqueror with a bow. The second horseman carries a great sword and rides a red horse, symbolizing war and bloodshed. The third horseman holds a balance sheet on the back of a black horse, symbolizing famine. And the fourth horsemen gallops on the back of a pale green horse and is identified as Death (or the Reaper).
Some read of the Horseman as literally marching out across the clouds as part of God’s plan on the Day of Judgment. Perhaps that will one day happen. But to me, these Four Horseman seem something more like the pattern of God’s universe… that is, a feature of the fabric of reality and part of the created code of the cosmos. Seen this way, the Four Horsemen become something like the signs or omens (portents they are called in some translations) that a new world is on its way—the repeating patterns and themes that show up when something is on its way out, and something else is being ushered in.
Take Lion King, for example. First, we are introduced to Simba as the rising son and rightful heir to the throne (First Horseman). Then we watch as Scar makes war on the animals and pits the Lions against the Hyenas (Second Horseman). This war leads to famine in the Pride Lands (Third Horseman) until Simba and his side arrive to send the oppressors to Hades (Fourth Horseman). There’s also the example of Moses, Egypt, the Plagues, and Passover. But let’s move to the Red Dragon before we make that analogy.
The Eternal Dragon
The cosmic drama of the Women and the Dragon comes in Revelation 12:1-6:
A great [sign] appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another [sign] appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that there she can be nourished for one thousand two hundred sixty days.3
A number of things are happening in this vision of a cosmic struggle. The first thing to understand is the Dragon’s association (as a Western symbol) with the tyrant. In offering a summary of the Bible, John uses the Dragon to point to a pattern of tyrants who always try (unsuccessfully) to eliminate the one who will overthrow them. Pharaoh decreed all the firstborns to be killed. Herod ordered all children slaughtered in an attempt to kill Christ. Saul took many tries at David’s life.
The second thing to understand about the Dragon is its association with chaos and the watery depths. For all intents and purposes, the Dragon is the spirit of uncreation, darkness, and chaos—the creature that prefers non-being to being and always works to bring about destruction. This is Tiamat as the dragon goddess of chaos and the watery sea in Mesopotamian myths. This is also the watery depths of Noah’s flood that washes away in the world in Genesis and the dragon dwelling in the sea conquered by Yahweh and called Rahab in Psalm 89. (In Isaiah, the name “Rahab” is associated with the Egyptians, whom Yahwel conquered in the depths of the Red Sea.)
After the Dragon, we are told of a Beast who rises and is given authority by the Dragon. “In amazement, the whole earth followed the beast. They worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, ‘Who is like the beast, and how can fight against it?’”4 Here we are invited to think not only of Pharaoh’s tyranny of the Israelites but all tyrants and authoritarians that have come since. How often people join the banner of the Dragon and the Beast in the interest of self-preservation. Just think of those in Nazi Germany who welcomed Hitler as a figure capable of healing a crumbling Germany or the Soviets participating in the perpetuation of the gulags.
But John’s vision is a reminder of the eternal fact: that truth, beauty, and goodness always win in the end. Lies, destruction, and power can dominate for a while but cannot be sustained. The corrupt kingdom always falls because it has set itself against the relentless current of the ordered cosmos. Only those who are aligned with the Word—those living aligned with the Way, the Truth, and the Life—will remain to inhabit after they inhabit the restored world.
Apocalypse as Re-Alignment
At its most basic level, the Book of Revelation is John’s revealing what was revealed to him. And what was revealed to him were symbolic representations of the structure of reality and how the cosmos is always witnessing an ending and renewal of worlds accompanied by certain recurring patterns. In writing to the seven churches of his age (and to all future people), part of his point was to lay out the cataclysmic consequences of ignoring this revelation.
We can experience this all the way down at the individual level. If we gain insight about ourselves, our motivations, or our desires and then attempt to go about our lives as if we never learned it, we do nothing but invite strife into our hearts… a sort of internal apocalypse where things get increasingly dire until, eventually, we become so violently ill that we have no choice but to change.
This is why trying to deny or outsmart the order of the universe is always inviting the plague and the flood—the Horseman and the Dragon—to come and wipe us out. They are the consequences of our ignorant actions and failure to orient and order our lives properly. The point of the “apocalypse” in the cataclysmic sense of the word is always to re-establish a world in proper orientation and alignment with God’s order or the order of the universe generally. When viewed this way, the Book of Revelation looks less like God’s plan for planetary destruction and more like the revealing of a Word alive in the world that is constantly bringing about its renewal.
But then again, maybe I’m wrong…
Scholars are split on whether John of Patmos is the same person as the John credited with writing the Gospels.
Revelation 1:12-19.
Revelation 12:1-6.
Revelation 13:3-4.