Six Seals and Four Horsemen

Revelation has a knack for telling the story of social disintegration as a tale of the destruction of the natural world, and vice versa. Revelation imagines the unravelling of both of these worlds as intertwined; economies and politics and class distinctions dissolve alongside the sky, the earth, and the water, with the world ‘rolling itself up’, as the text says in 6:14, ‘like a scroll’.

Ebrahim Noroozi series The Lake on its Last Legs documents the decline and disappearance of Lake Urmia in his native Iran. Once a large saltwater body, the lake has diminished through cycles of shrinkage and expansion due to drought, water diversion for agriculture, and damming. Noroozi shot this series at one of the lake’s recent nadirs, in 2016, when the surface area of the lake was about a tenth of its natural extent, and the water was never too deep to walk across.

In his Urmia compositions, Noroozi is always careful to include the human and the natural alongside each other, showing both the human appreciation for the lake and the human causes and consequences of its demise. In this photograph, a fishing boat sits abandoned and corroding on the dry lakebed, encrusted with salt and melting slowly back into the earth.

The opening of the sixth seal in Revelation 6:12–17 unleashes the unmaking of human and natural worlds. An earthquake, a blackened sun, a blood moon, and falling stars upend long-held certainties, and cause everyone—kings and generals, enslaved and free alike—to flee and hide. In the Anthropocene, it is anthropogenic and not divinely sent destruction that threatens the world, and the effects are not always experienced equally by ‘the rich and the powerful and everyone’, as 6:15 puts it. Some of the ‘everyone’, everyday people and especially people on the underside of power structures, are more susceptible than ‘the rich and the powerful’ who have amassed the resources to endure. But as is the case in both Revelation 6 and this series of photographs by Noroozi, the story of climate apocalypse will always be an intertwined story about both the natural world and the human beings who rely on it and help to bring about its destruction.

References

Noroozi, Ebrahim as told to Kieran Morris. 2019. ‘On Its Last Legs: Otherworldly Photos of a Dying Lake in Iran, March 13, 2019’, www.vice.com [accessed 4 April 2024]

The apocalyptic paintings by Juan Gerson adorning the Church of the Franciscan Monastery in Tecamachalco, Mexico, are a double commentary. First, Gerson’s art interprets the extravagant text of Revelation 6 and its four horsemen in a visual register, giving form to the Apocalypse’s strange world. Second, Gerson glosses the work of Albrecht Dürer, the German printmaker and painter, reproducing Dürer’s compositional structure and iconography while subtly overwriting and altering them to suit a new context and circumstance.

Juan Gerson was an indigenous man, of the Nahua people, working in the 1560s in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla during the height of Spanish conquest and colonialism. Perhaps because his art adorns the walls of a Franciscan monastery church, Gerson’s work is more straightforwardly pious and generous to the clergy than Dürer’s, whose German Reformation version of this scene famously placed a Catholic bishop in the mouth of Hades. Compositionally, Gerson followed the lead of Dürer, whose woodcuts were by then about sixty years old, and which must have travelled quickly to the ‘new world’. But Gerson was no imitator. The third horseman, who rides on a black horse and seems to signify profiteering from the sale of the essentials needed for sustaining life, is depicted in Gerson’s version as a Spaniard in a nobleman’s clothing—perhaps a commentary on the economic injustice brought by conquest. And while the fourth horseman, Death, carries a three-tipped spear in both Dürer’s and Gerson’s versions, for Dürer the spear points backward where it does no harm, but in Gerson’s version the spear is poised at the moment of killing a man, its points on the verge of bringing Death itself.

Gerson, who painted first on a kind of indigenously produced paper made from tree bark and then pasted those paintings onto the surfaces of the church, was using his compositions to interpret Revelation 6 for his own moment and place. Faced with violent conquest and social upheaval, Gerson adapted the ominous symbols of the Apocalypse’s world to speak to the death, deprivation, and apocalypse of the world he knew.  

References

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. 70–92

When the fifth seal opens in Revelation 6:9–11, the plot shifts. The first four seals had each loosed a horseman, but the fifth seal opens instead onto a scene in heaven. Rather than looking only ahead to suffering and death still to come, as the first four seals and their four horsemen do, the fifth seal looks both backward to the suffering and death that have transpired in the past, and foreshadows more to come. ‘I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given’, writes the Revelator. The faith’s martyrs, the reader learns, have been gathered and gathering under heaven’s altar to await their justice. They are told that they will have to wait a while longer, and watch the number of the martyrs grow.

The Angers Apocalypse Tapestry is an early exquisite example of what was a burgeoning industry in fourteenth-century France. Beginning then, and continuing through the Renaissance, tapestry-weaving was one of Europe’s chief art forms, and one of its most prized. The Apocalypse Tapestry was commissioned by Louis I, Duke of Anjou, and woven over a decade in the 1370s and early 1380s. Rarely for a tapestry of that period, it is extant, mostly intact, in its restored form.

In this scene, the tapestry follows the martyrs from their place under the altar of heaven to their moment of supplication to the ‘Sovereign Lord, holy and true’. In response to their request for vengeance, the martyrs are given white robes by an angelic figure, shown here as a winged lion with human facial features, and told to wait a while longer. This scene interprets a part of Revelation that received a great deal of attention in popular imagination from antiquity to the present, with strong traditions understanding that martyrs had special proximity to God, and that a set number of martyrs would be fulfilled before God’s intervention. As traditions and practices of martyrdom developed within Christianity, this part of Revelation—giving martyrs pride of place in heaven—inspired both zealotry and devotion among believers.

References

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