The Horse

Almost never the subject. Read the rider, then read what the colour of the horse is doing.

Six works here carry a horse, and in every one of them the horse is a colour before it is an animal.

The sixth chapter of the Apocalypse is the source of that habit, and it is unusually plain. “And I saw: and behold a white horse, and he that sat on him had a bow, and there was a crown given him, and he went forth conquering that he might conquer.” Then red, then “And behold a black horse. And he that sat on him had a pair of scales in his hand”, then the fourth, which the text names outright: “And behold a pale horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Death. And hell followed him.” Four horses, four colours, four offices. Dürer's woodcut of 1498 rides all four down the page at once.

The colours travel. On the Flamel sheet the three riders are carried by lions rather than horses, black, red and white, and the archive records that swap as the painter's own since the chapter puts them on horses. In the Abraxas plate the team is white and Hall makes them elemental: “The four white horses drawing the chariot of ABRAXAS symbolize the four ethers”.

Where the horse is single it is white and it carries someone the picture wants you to trust or fear. Waite on Death: “The mysterious horseman moves slowly, bearing a black banner emblazoned with the Mystic Rose, which signifies life.” Conway on the knight of 1513: “He is S. George, the Reformer, fearlessly riding through the dark valley of life.” The animal is the same. Everything else has changed.

1. The Apocalypse of Saint John, Douay Rheims, Challoner revision, : Quoted from the Challoner revision, the English text the archive uses for the Apocalypse throughout.
2. William Martin Conway, Literary Remains of Albrecht Durer, : Conway's translations and commentary. A nineteenth-century scholar reading the prints, not Durer explaining himself.
3. Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, : Waite commissioned the 1909 designs and wrote the key to them, so his account is the closest thing the deck has to an author's statement.
4. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, : Hall's text and plate captions, 1928. Transcribed here, not yet read against a printed folio.

• 

  The Four Horsemen

  Albrecht Dürer · 1498
• 

  Knight, Death, and the Devil

  Albrecht Dürer · 1513
• 

  Death (XIII)

  Pamela Colman Smith · 1909
• 

  The Sun (XIX)

  Pamela Colman Smith · 1909
• 

  Abraxas, a Gnostic Pantheos

  J. Augustus Knapp · colour plate, 1928

Plates that carry the symbol, tagged by eye and not yet decoded: first where it is the central motif, then where it plays a secondary part. Each opens in the viewer; the key and the notes come with the entry.

Central motif · 1

• The Four HorsemenAlbrecht Dürer, 1498Death, Famine, War and Conquest ride down the people; an angel above; from the Apocalypse of 1498, by eyeApocalypse 6:1, “And I saw that the Lamb had opened one of the seven seals: and I heard one of the four living creatures, as it were the voice of thunder, saying: Come and see.”

Secondary motif · 5

• Abraxas, a Gnostic PantheosJ. Augustus Knapp, colour plate, 1928a rooster-headed figure in armour, whip raised and shield on the arm, stands in a chariot drawn by four white horses, his legs two serpents; the sun at the upper left, a crescent moon at the upper right, the name ABRAXAS lettered below; the Sun and the Moon as the central motif by Hall's reading of the figure as solar, the Serpent and the Horse by eye; one body made of a rooster, a man and two serpentsHall, 1928 “The seven-lettered name of ABRAXAS is symbolically significant of his seven-rayed power.”Central motif: the Sun and the Moon
• God Judging AdamWilliam Blake, ca. 1795an aged God seated in a disc of fire and light points down at Adam, who stands bowed before the flaming horses of the chariot; the Divine as the central motif, the Horse, the Sun and Fire by eyeCentral motif: the Divine
• Death (XIII)Pamela Colman Smith, 1909an armoured skeleton on a white horse carries a black banner with a white rose; a king lies fallen with his crown beside him, a child and a maiden kneel, a bishop stands with clasped hands; the sun rises between two towers, a river with a boat behind; Death as the central motif, the Horse, the Sun and the Crown by eyeWaite, 1911 “The natural transit of man to the next stage of his being either is or may be one form of his progress, but the exotic and almost unknown entrance, while still in this life, into the state of mystical death is a change in the form of consciousness and the passage into a state to which ordinary death is neither the path nor gate.”Central motif: Death and the Skull
• The Sun (XIX)Pamela Colman Smith, 1909a sun with a face, straight and wavy rays; a naked child crowned with flowers rides a white horse and carries a red banner; sunflowers over a garden wall; the Sun as the central motif, the Horse by eyeWaite, 1911 “The characteristic type of humanity has become a little child therein--a child in the sense of simplicity and innocence in the sense of wisdom. In that simplicity, he bears the seal of Nature and of Art; in that innocence, he signifies the restored world.”Central motif: the Sun and the Moon
• Knight, Death, and the DevilAlbrecht Dürer, 1513a knight in armour rides between two figures: Death, crowned and snake-haired, holding up an hourglass from a pale horse, and a horned figure with a pike walking behind. A dog runs at the horse's heels and a skull lies among the roots at the foot of the plateConway, 1889 “They were intended to represent the Sanguine and Melancholic temperaments and to shadow forth the religious and intellectual spirits of the day.”Central motif: Death and the Skull

• The Angel and the Wing
• Death and the Skull
• The Demon and the Monster
• The Serpent and the Dragon
• The Crown
• The Sun