Revelation invites fantasies of the world’s unmaking. Upon reading John’s visions of a world undone, interpreters have often inserted their own world into the middle of the unravelling, imagining the Apocalypse’s disasters unfurling in their own times and places. Revelation’s readers across centuries understand their own kings and generals, their own rich and powerful, and the enslaved and free persons of their own day, as characters and actors in the Apocalypse’s tale of undoing. The evocative symbolism of Revelation makes it easy to see oneself, and one’s enemies, in the story.

The reservoirs of potential meaning held in Revelation’s text never seem to dry up, and the sixth chapter is one of the deepest. Readers through two millennia have seen something of their own world in the horses and riders of the first four seals, in the suffering signified by the fifth seal, and in the destruction wrought by the sixth. Representations of this part of Revelation flourished in medieval Europe, often with a focus on the military symbols that saturated that era (O’Hear & O’Hear, 76). In the Reformation era, woodcuts and paintings became sites from which to exercise ecclesiastical grudges, as in the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Dürer. Later, as evangelical Christianity and premillennial fervour grew in popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the four horsemen became fixtures in popular culture as a shorthand for the arrival of divinely sanctioned chaos and destruction. And in many places and times, the upheaval imagined by Revelation 6 has been deployed by those on the underside of power as a way of imagining comeuppance, vindication, or justice.

Traces of this perspective are visible in the work of Juan Gerson, who painted in the midst and wake of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Gerson’s choice to show the third horsemen in a Spaniard’s garb is a bluntly explicit acknowledgement of where the economic disruption and deprivation of his own world came from. The artistic decision to have the spear of Death pointing directly at the face of a helpless man, frozen in paint at the moment of Death bringing death, speaks to the central place of violence in Gerson’s own life and among his people.

The Angers Apocalypse Tapestry imagines the opening of the fifth seal of Revelation 6:9–11, portraying the pieties and anxieties of medieval European Christianity in a scene of patiently waiting martyrs. Here, beatific death takes a privileged place, skipping past earthly life and resting on the afterlife as a potential site of blessing and holiness. The martyrs’ proximity to sanctity and to God—living under the altar of heaven—is here signified by the white robes bestowed on them by an angel and by John the Revelator himself, on the left side of the scene.

Even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Revelation finds its way into our imaginations in powerful ways. Here at the dawn of the Anthropocene, passages like 6:13–17 give voice to images like the environmental destruction photographed by Ebrahim Noroozi, speaking to our own experiences of unmaking the world; unveiling the consequences of hubris in a way that would have been familiar to the author of Revelation. Scholars like Allan A. Boesak and Brian K. Blount have documented how Revelation speaks to the lives of oppressed people, offering a framework for resistance to oppression, the martyrs of the fifth seal serving as models for modern people who cry out to God for deliverance.

The six seals of Revelation 6, with their four horsemen and waiting martyrs and urgent cosmic undoing, break open one after the other in a drumbeat of spiralling drama. They offer a vision of a world transformed and unravelled, broken loose from normality and plunged into divine chaos. Perhaps that is why this chapter holds such a prominent place in popular imagination, and makes such frequent appearances in the visual arts. Readers across time see in Revelation 6 a story of their world as it is and might yet be, a vision of both hope and terror, and they imagine themselves as a part of the upheaval, sheltering in God’s presence while God’s judgement washes over the earth.

References

Blount, Brian K. 2005. Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through African American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox)

Boesak, Allan A. 1987. Comfort and Protest: The Apocalypse of John from a South African Perspective (Louisville: Westminster John Knox)

Huber, Lynn R., with Gail R. O’Day. 2023. Revelation, ed. by Amy-Jill Levine, Wisdom Commentary 58 (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press) pp. 81–95

O’Hear, Natasha, and Anthony O’Hear. 2015. Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia (Oxford: Oxford University Press) pp. 93–110