Three Riders on Black, Red and White Lions

The number twelve at the top of the sheet says this is a page from a series, and the series was the set of figures circulated in the eighteenth century under the names of Abraham the Jew and Nicolas Flamel, of which the Wellcome holds several coloured impressions. The Wellcome's cataloguer read the colours of the beasts, black, red and white, as the colours of the alchemical process, and that is very likely what the designer meant. But the scene itself is the opening of the seals in the sixth chapter of the Apocalypse, and the archive reads it from there.

Three riders charge across the clouds under a sun and a crescent moon. The chapter's riders are on horses: a white horse whose rider has a bow and is given a crown, a red horse whose rider is given a great sword and takes peace from the earth, a black horse whose rider holds a pair of scales, and a pale horse whose rider is Death. The painter has put three of them on lions of the same three colours, black, red and white, and dropped the fourth. Whether the change from horses to lions is the painter's invention or was in the figures he copied, the archive cannot say; what it can say is that the lion carries in alchemy the meanings the horse does not, the green lion, the red lion, the lion devouring the sun, and that black, red and white are the three colours the work passes through.

The rider on the white lion wears a crown and draws a bow, and both details are the chapter's: he that sat on him had a bow, and there was a crown given him. The rider on the red lion swings a sword. The third rider, in blue on the black lion, holds something the archive has not identified; it is not the pair of scales the black horse carries in the text, so the identification stops there.

Below them the ground is covered with the fallen. Men lie sprawled, one sits up among the bodies, and at the left a green beast with a long neck breathes a plume of fire across the middle of the sheet. The chapter's fourth rider is given power to kill with sword, with famine and with death and with the beasts of the earth, which accounts for the dead but not for the fire. No beast breathes fire in the sixth chapter. The archive records it and leaves it unread.

What the sheet shows, in the end, is a Bible scene borrowed for a purpose its designer did not write down, or did not write down anywhere the archive has found. The riders come out when the seals are broken, and the alchemists, who read every book as a book about their work, saw in the opened seals and the coloured beasts the stages of a process. The archive gives the chapter, gives the cataloguer's reading, and does not pretend to the designer's.