The sixth Trump sounds. The voice from the golden altar says: Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates
These are evidently four angels of four corners, like those of the four winds. So Euphrates, the evil river of Babylon, will no doubt stand for the waters under the earth, or the abysmal under-ocean, in its hellish aspect.
And the angels are loosed, whereupon, apparently the great army of demon-horsemen, two hundred million, all told, issue from the abyss.
The horses of the two hundred million horsemen have heads as the heads of lions, and out of their mouths issue fire and brimstone. And these kill a third part of men, by the fire, smoke, and brimstone which come out of their mouths. Then unexpectedly we are told that their power is in their mouths and in their tails; for their tails are like serpents, and have heads, and with them they do hurt.
These weird creatures are apocalyptic images, surely: not symbols but personal images of some old apocalyptist long before John of Patmos. The horses are powers, and divine instruments of woe: for they kill a third part of men, and later we are told they are plagues. Plagues are the whips of God.
Now they ought to be the reversed or malevolent powers of the abysmal or underworld waters. Instead of which they are sulphurous, evidently volcanic beasts of the abysmal or underworld fires, which are the hellish fires of the hellish sun.
Then suddenly they are given serpent tails, and they have evil power in their tails. Here we are back at the right thing — the horse-bodied serpent-monster of the salty deeps of hell: the powers of the underworld waters seen in their reversed aspect, malevolent, striking a third of men, probably with some watery and deadly disease; as the locusts of the fifth Trump smote men with some hot and agonising, yet not deadly disease, which ran for a certain number of months.
So that here probably two apocalyptists have been at work. The later one did not understand the scheme. He put in his brimstone horses with their riders having breastplates of fire and jacinth and brimstone (red, dark blue, and yellow), following his own gay fancy, and perhaps influenced by some volcanic disturbance and some sight of splendid red, blue, and yellow cavalry of the east. That is a true Jewish method.
But then he had to come back to the old manuscript, with serpent-tailed watery monsters. So he tacked on the serpent tails to his own horses, and let them gallop.
This apocalyptist of the brimstone horses is probably responsible for the ‘lake of fire burning with brimstone’ into which the souls of fallen angels and wicked men are cast to burn for ever and ever more. This pleasant place is the prototype of the Christian hell, specially invented by the Apocalypse. The old Jewish hells of Sheol and Gehenna were fairly mild, uncomfortable abysmal places like Hades, and when a New Jerusalem was created from heaven, they disappeared. They were part of the old cosmos, and did not outlast the old cosmos. They were not eternal.
This was not good enough for the brimstone apocalyptist and John of Patmos. They must have a marvellous, terrific lake of sulphurous fire that could burn for ever and ever, so that the souls of the enemy could be kept writhing. When, after the last Judgment, earth and sky and all creation were swept away, and only glorious heaven remained, still, away down, there remained this burning lake of fire in which the souls were suffering. Brilliant glorious eternal heaven above: and brilliant sulphurous torture-lake away below. This is the vision of eternity of all Patmossers. They could not be happy in heaven unless they knew their enemies were unhappy in hell.
And this vision was specially brought into the world with the Apocalypse. It did not exist before.
Before, the waters of the hellish underworld were bitter like the sea. They were the evil aspect of the waters under the earth, which were conceived as some wondrous lake of sweet, lovely water, source of all the springs and streams of earth, lying away down below the rocks.
The waters of the abyss were salt like the sea. Salt had a great hold on the old imagination. It was supposed to be the product of ‘elemental’ injustice. Fire and water, the two great living elements and opposites, gave rise to all substance in their slippery unstable ‘marriage’. But when one triumphed over the other, there was ‘injustice’. So, when the sun-fire got too strong for the sweet waters, it burnt them, and when water was burnt by fire, it produced salt, child of injustice. This child of injustice corrupted the waters and made them bitter. So the sea came into being. And thence the dragon of the sea, leviathan.
And so the bitter waters of hell were the place where souls were drowned: the bitter anti-life ocean of the end.
There was for ages a resentment against the sea: the bitter, corrupt sea, as Plato calls it. But this seems to have died down in Roman times: so our apocalyptist substitutes a brimstone-burning lake, as being more horrific, and able to make the souls suffer more.
A third of men are killed by these brimstone horsemen. But the remaining two-thirds do not refrain from worshipping idols which can ‘neither see nor hear nor walk’.
That sounds as if the Apocalypse here was still quite Jewish and pre-Christian. There is no Lamb about.
Later, this second woe winds up with the usual earthquakes. But since the shiver of the earth must immediately give rise to a new movement, it is postponed awhile.