The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are among the most important of the great Bible symbols because they give the key to the nature of man as we know him. When you understand these symbols thoroughly you will understand your own makeup, and you will be able to begin the work of getting dominion over yourself and over your surroundings.

There is another reason why it is important to understand the Four Horsemen. They form a typical example of the way in which the Bible makes use of the general principle of symbolism. When you have grasped their full significance, by realizing how the Bible talks about horses, for instance, in order to teach psychological and spiritual truth, you will have mastered the general scheme of Bible allegory. The Bible is not written in the style of a modern book. It has a method all its own of conveying knowledge through picturesque symbols, the reason being that this is the only possible way in which knowledge could be given to people in all ages in different parts of the world and of different degrees of spiritual development. A direct statement in the modern manner would appeal to a particular kind of audience, but a symbol appeals to any audience, each individual getting just what he is ready for.

The Bible is not full of predictions. The Bibles does not undertake to say just what is going to happen in the future, because if this could be done it could only mean that we have no free will. If the future is all arranged now—like a movie film packed in its box—what would be the use of praying or studying metaphysics? Why did Jesus pray for so many hours, even all night long, if he could not change anything? But, of course, you can change the future and the present by prayer, and, indeed, it is your attitude toward prayer that makes or mars you—makes you sick or well, happy or sad, stupid or wise.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 1 stand for the four parts or elements of our human nature as we find it today. As we know ourselves in our present embodiment we seem to be made up of four parts. There is, first of all, the physical body—the thing that you see when you look into the glass. Then there is your feeling nature or emotions. This is an extremely important part of you, and although you cannot “see” your feelings, you are tremendously conscious of them. Third, there is your intellect. You cannot see this either, but you are quite aware of its existence, because it contains every bit of knowledge, important or unimportant, that you possess.

Finally, there is your spiritual nature, or your real eternal self; the true you, the I AM, the Indwelling Christ, the Divine Spark, or what you please to call it. This is your real identity, which is eternal. Almost everyone believes in its existence, but for the most part people are very little conscious of it as an actuality.

Students of metaphysics are aware that ultimately the time will come when the first three will be merged in the fourth, and then we shall all know instead of only believing that the spiritual nature is all. Meanwhile, however, this is not the case, and so we find ourselves living with these four elements of our nature—and the Bible calls them the Four Horses.

The first horse we shall consider is the Pale Horse and “pale” means the color of terror. Perhaps you have seen terror depicted on a human countenance—I do not mean just nervousness or moderate fear, but terror. It is not a pleasant sight. The skin turns a kind of ashen gray, and that is the color of the Pale Horse.

And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed after him. 2

Well, the Pale Horse means the physical body, and here we are told that he who rides on him is Death, and that Hell follows hard after. If you are that kind of horseman, if you live but for the body, there is nothing but hell awaiting you on this plane or anywhere else. People who live for the body are to be pitied. The body is the most cruel taskmaster of all, when it is allowed to be the ruler. The person who lives for eating and drinking and sensuality brings nothing but evil and destruction into his life right here on this plane. Remember that the person who lives for the body cannot be regenerating and therefore he is getting older every year. That means that the body is steadily failing, and he has no other resources. To him old age brings decrepitude and emptiness, and probably pain and discomfort too. He has ridden the Pale Horse, and hell must follow that horseman.

But the Pale Horse does not mean only the physical body. It means all other physical things too—what the Bible sometimes calls the “world”—money, position, material honors.

If you put money before everything else, you are riding the Pale Horse even though you are not a glutton or a sensualist. Money is your God, and you will probably get it, but you will be sorry—because hell follows after. Why worship money? After you have bought a little food, a little clothing, paid your rent, and got a few other things, what can money give you? There are millionaires walking down Fifth Avenue who find that there is not a single thing they really need that their money can buy for them. They cannot walk into any store with a blank check and purchase peace of mind, or a healthy body, or friendship, or loyalty, or, above all, a contact with God.

Other people again do not care for money, but they do crave worldly honor and distinction. They want to be important or, it is more accurate to say, they want to be considered important. They want to be the Head of something. They want to be looked up to. They are not thinking of how much good they can do in the world, but of how much honor they can receive. They too are riding the Pale Horse, and hell follows after. If you could read the hearts of those that sit in the seats of the mighty you would be surprised how often you would discover disappointment and chagrin—for the Pale Horse always runs true to form.

If a person accepts an important office because he honestly wants to serve others and to glorify God, he is not on the Pale Horse, and in his case, if things go wrong or he is misunderstood or abused, he does not care. It does not grieve him, because he was trying to do God’s work and that is true success.

He who lives to eat and drink, the sensualist and the drug addict; he who lives for money or worldly honors; is the rider on the Pale Horse.

Next I am going to take the Red Horse. 3

And there went out another horse that was red; and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

What is the Red Horse? The Red Horse is your emotional nature, your feelings. Your human mind, as you know it, consists of two parts, intellect and feeling, and there is nothing else. Every thought that you can think has two parts, a knowledge content and a feeling content; and so you always get these two things, knowledge and feeling. Knowledge belongs to the intellect, and feeling, of course, to the emotional nature. In some thoughts the knowledge content is much greater than the feeling content, and in other thoughts it is the feeling content that is greater.

In mathematics, to take an extreme case, the feeling content is almost absent. No one gets very emotional over the knowledge that any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third side, or that when two straight lines intersect the vertically opposite angles are equal. A small emotional content does exist because definite and certain knowledge always gives a little satisfaction to the mind, and there is also a certain beauty in these mathematical truths; but it is still true that for most people the amount of feeling would be quite small.

On the other end of the scale are thoughts connected with religion and politics. We all know how full of feeling (not to say prejudice) these subjects are. People feel so strongly about them that they are generally tabooed at social gatherings—and yet the amount of real knowledge that most people have concerning them is surprisingly small. For instance, few people have really studied the doctrines of the particular church to which they belong. Yet they feel very strongly about them and are apt to resent the slightest criticism concerning them. Few people have carefully considered the political principle underlying their own political party, nor have they taken the trouble to familiarize themselves with very much data on the subject, in spite of which they will be heatedly partisan. On these and other questions people have a mass of feeling almost unenlightened by the intellect. The intellectual content of such thoughts is very small.

It is very dangerous to allow your emotions to have control—to allow the Red Horse to run away with you, for he will undermine your health and wreck your life in every phase. The Red Horse is just as dangerous as the Pale Horse, but of course he is not so base, and for this reason he wrecks many more lives. An adult person is a person who has control of his feelings. A person who cannot control his feelings is still a child, even though he be a hundred years old. If you cannot control your emotion, your emotion will control you and wreck you.

This does not mean that emotion or feeling is a bad thing in itself. It means that uncontrolled emotion is a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it is almost as bad to have too little emotion as too much. People who are emotionally weak never amount to anything. They are those very nice people who are never considered or even noticed. No one knows or cares whether they are in the room or not. They drift into life seemingly by accident; they drift into a business where they never amount to anything; they drift into marriage; and finally they drift into the grave—all seemingly more or less by inadvertence.

A strong emotional nature is like a great powerful automobile. If you control it, it is a fine thing. It will take you wherever you want to go, through the roughest country, or to the top of a mountain, because it is full of power. But if you do not control it, if you do not understand how to steer it, or if you are stupid and step on the gas when you ought to step on the brake, the car destroys itself and you with it, just because it is so powerful.

If you get an old feeble car which can hardly chug along it won’t get you anywhere, but it won’t do you any harm either. Even if you run it up against a wall it only coughs and stops.

A strong emotional nature is a splendid endowment if you are the master, but if it is mastering you, you are riding the Red Horse; and if you are riding the Red Horse you had better get off as soon as possible. There is no salvation for that horseman.

How do you know if you are riding the Red Horse? Well, if you get excited over nothing at all, if you get angry and indignant about trifles, particularly when it happens to be none of your business; if you get worked up over things you read in the newspaper; if you are trying to run other people’s lives and getting excited about that, then you are riding the Red Horse—and you had better get off.

The time when you learn to control your feelings is the time you will begin to make something of your life.

Next I come to the Black Horse and here it says:

And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny. 4

A pair of scales, that is, a balance such as a grocer or a druggist uses, is here a symbol of famine or lack. It means that there is not enough to go round and therefore that things have to be rationed. The Black Horse stands for the intellect, and if you ride the Black Horse you will get famine or starvation of the soul. Very few people ride the Black Horse as compared with the number of those who ride the Red one, but some do, and the civilized world as a whole has been riding it for several centuries.

To ride the Black Horse does not mean having a good intellect. That is not a bad thing at all. In fact, a great many people, particularly in the religious world, would be much better off with a little more intellect than they have. Riding the Black Horse is letting your intellect dominate you to the exclusion of the emotional, and especially of the spiritual, nature. It is a good thing to have the intellect well trained and polished by use, but it is a misfortune to let it be the master. There are people who say that the universe can be understood intellectually—that everything about God can be put into plain English and explained precisely in words. This is absurd because it is really an attempt to define the Infinite, and, as Spinoza says, to define God is to deny Him. Other people dogmatize and say that nothing exists but matter and that mind is a secretion of matter, and that therefore mind cannot dominate matter, and man cannot survive death because he cannot take his body with him. These people say that the brain thinks, and that when the brain rots in the grave, the thinker cannot be alive. There are other people who would resent being called materialists, yet they say that they cannot believe in prayer because the laws of nature are deterministic and therefore prayer could not possibly change anything.

All these people are riding the Black Horse and they suffer famine because such mistaken beliefs starve them of all spiritual understanding and growth.

Intellect is an excellent thing, and indeed we could not live on this plane without it; but intellect can only deal with three-dimensional things. Beyond that it breaks down. We must have the intellect for buying and selling, for putting up buildings and making roads, for doing our daily work, in short; but as we approach God, we leave the territory of the intellect and go beyond it into the region of the spiritual, where the values are perfection and dimension is infinity. The truth about God must go beyond the intellect and it calls for the spiritual nature to understand it. The instrument of the intellect is reason, and while it is true that anything that contradicts reason cannot be true, the truths of religion must go beyond reason though without, of course, contradicting it.

The intellect cannot give you the truth about God, and to suppose that it can is like trying to use a thermometer to weigh a package or to try to use a pair of scales to measure the temperature of the room. When you do that you are confusing your instruments.

If you try to live without knowledge of God, without prayer or spiritual contact, you are certain sooner or later to reach a condition of depression and disappointment, for that is the fate of the Horseman on the Black Horse.

In the nineteenth century many men of science did not believe in anything that could not be isolated in a test tube or examined under the microscope. These materialistic scientists rode the Black Horse; but today some of the most eminent natural scientists are beginning to recognize the existence of spiritual things.

Western civilization has been definitely riding the Black Horse since the close of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance rediscovered the intellect and that was a splendid achievement, but Western civilization did not keep the intellect in its place. It was allowed to become the master. Ever since then our form of education has been predominantly intellectual, to the neglect of other things. Especially has this been the case since the Modern Age began with the invention of a commercially practicable steam engine in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The recent World War, which was in reality but a continuation of the previous World War, was directly due to this policy. Humanity has developed scientific, intellectual knowledge far beyond the point to which it has developed the moral and spiritual understanding of the race. This development has given man the power to make high explosives, for example, and to build submarines and aircraft, but because his spiritual development has lagged so far behind his intellectual achievements, he uses these things for destruction and tyranny. Had the understanding of true religion kept pace with scientific discovery, such knowledge would be used for the enlightenment and happiness of mankind instead of for its destruction. All this is riding the Black Horse.

The Horseman on the Black Horse is like the pilot who spends the whole day taxiing around the ground—never soaring up. Now a plane is not built to run on the ground. Even the cheapest and oldest automobile will go better on the ground than the best airplane. The plane is built not for the ground, but for flying through the sky, and until it does leave the ground it is not in its element.

Finally, I come to the fourth horse, and here we have the solution of all our problems.

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. 5

The White Horse is the Spiritual Nature, and the man or woman who rides the White Horse gets freedom, and joy, and ultimate happiness and harmony; because the White Horse is the realization of the Presence of God.

When you put God first in your life, when you refuse to limit God, when you will no longer say that God cannot do something, when you trust God with your whole heart, you are riding the White Horse, and it is only a question of time until you shall be free—when the day will break and the shadows flee away. The White Horse will carry you to health and freedom and self-expression; to a knowledge of God, and finally to the Realization of Him. On the White Horse you will go forth conquering and to conquer.

We are told two very interesting things about the Horseman on the White Horse: the Bible says that he that sat on him had a bow. The bow and arrow is an ancient symbol of the spoken Word. The spoken Word brings things to pass. When you speak the Word you shoot an arrow. It goes where you aim it and it cannot be recalled, nor can it return void. Note that the Word does not have to be spoken audibly. Silent prayer is usually more powerful than audible prayer, but if you find it hard to concentrate because you are worried or afraid, you will find it easier to pray audibly. The Horseman on the White Horse speaks the Word.

The rider on the White Horse wears a crown, and the crown has always been the symbol of victory. Whoever wins in a struggle gets the crown. The Greeks used to give a crown of palms to the winner of a race, and all through history kings have been crowned. The crown is a symbol of victory, and the rider on the White Horse is always the victor.

This, then, is the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If you want peace of mind, if you want healing, happiness, prosperity, and freedom; above all, if you want an understanding of God, there is only one way—you must ride the White Horse.

If you are interested only in material things, or if you are letting your emotions run away with you, or if you are trying to judge eternal values by finite intellectual standards, you are riding one of the other horses and only trouble can come to you.

The fatal defect in the Roman Empire was that it rode the Pale Horse, and we know what happened to it. Our own civilization for about four hundred years has ridden the Black Horse, and we see what has come of that. Now, however, I believe that humanity is ready, or very nearly ready, to climb upon the White Horse, and we must all help it to do so in every way that we can by prayer and by personal example. The Horseman on the White Horse goes forth conquering and to conquer.

This, then, is the way in which human nature, as we know it, is made up. We seem to have four elements, but as a student of metaphysics you know that only one of these is real and eternal. This, of course, is your spiritual nature. Some day you will realize this and then the other elements will fade away into nothing, leaving you spiritual, complete, and perfect. That event, however, will not come yet; and in the meantime you have to understand your fourfold nature in order that you may control it.

This fourfold constitution of man is also taught in the Bible in other ways. For instance, the four beasts of Revelation6 are really the four horses treated in another and most interesting way. We find here a lion, a calf (or ox or bull), a third beast with the face of a man, and a flying eagle.

Here, the second beast “like a calf” represents the body and the physical plane in general and takes the place of the Pale Horse. The third beast “had a face as a man,” and represents intellect or the Black Horse. It has been traditional to have the face, and especially the forehead, stand for intellect, just as the heart stands for the feelings. The fourth beast “was like a flying eagle” and he represents the emotional nature, or the Red Horse. The first beast was “like a lion” and represents the spiritual nature, or the White Horse.

These different references in the Bible are not mere repetitions or restatements, for each one treats the subject from a slightly different angle and thereby gives us further knowledge. We see here, for instance, that the emotional nature is expressed by an eagle. This represents Scorpio in the Zodiac, and Scorpio may be expressed either by a reptile (sometimes a scorpion and sometimes a snake) or an eagle. The lesson here again is that the emotional nature has to be redeemed by transmuting the lower into the higher so that the once crawling reptile becomes a soaring eagle. Only then will you have dominion over it. You will see that this is a much higher and fuller statement of the subject than the mere comparison to a Red Horse, although that was striking and useful to begin with.

It is interesting to note here that the symbol of an eagle with the snake in its mouth (conquering the snake) is still used in Mexico. An old Aztec legend said that when the people entered the new land (modern Mexico) they were to march on until they found an eagle devouring a snake. At that point they were to build their city—and thus was chosen the site of the Mexico City of today.

The Aztecs undoubtedly derived this legend from their Atlantean ancestors, and the real meaning would be that The City, the true consciousness, can only be built when the emotional nature has been transmuted.

The ox (sometimes a calf or a bull) is obvious as the symbol of materiality. It is traditionally dull, heavy, and earthy, and was used in the Old World for the useful but commonplace work of pulling the plow. The ox does not soar like the eagle, think like the man’s head, or lead the kingly life of a lion.

The lion, the king of beasts, well represents the spiritual nature, and corresponds to the White Horse.

These four beasts are at the throne of God where there is “a sea of glass like unto crystal.” We are always at the throne of God, although we know it not, for He is everywhere, and our separation from Him, tragic as it seems, is only a separation in belief. The sea of glass means a sea as smooth as a sheet of glass, and this is the consciousness which has gotten away from fear—which has subdued the ox, changed the reptile into an eagle, redeemed the intellect, and enthroned the lion.

“The four beasts had each of them six wings.” In the Bible the number six stands for labor or work and this means that we have to work out our salvation by constant vigilance in seeking God and overcoming self. We must not wait in idleness for God to come and do it for us; because there is no attainment without work. If you want anything you must work for it. We find this meaning given to the number six in many parts of the Bible. The number six comes before the number seven, and the number seven stands, in the Bible, for individual perfection in the life of a man, and for a particular demonstration where that demonstration is complete. We find six days of creation leading to the seventh day of rest in attainment; six steps to the throne of Solomon, who stands for wisdom or the understanding of God; six pots of water at the marriage of Cana; and, of course, six working days of the week leading to the Sabbath. 7

The wings enabled the beasts to soar from the ground, and again there are six of them because liberation has to be earned. We must seek God day and night. To say Holy, Holy, Holy, is, in our modern language, to see the Presence of God everywhere, instead of accepting the appearance of evil.

“Which was, and is, and is to come,” means that we have to realize that we are in eternity now, because the belief in the reality of time is one of the principal errors that hold us in bondage.

The four beasts are “full of eyes before and behind” and that is only another way of telling us that we must exercise unceasing vigilance in the Practice of the Presence of God.

Outside of the Bible we find many references to the four-fold constitution of man. In the ancient world they invariably referred to the four parts as “Elements,” and called them earth, air, water, and fire. Earth meant the physical body; air meant the intellect; water meant the feeling nature; and fire meant the spiritual or divine part of us. It was thought best for many reasons not to give all this knowledge openly to the general public, but to hide it behind the veil of such symbols and to give the key only to those who were ready for it.

The Zodiac 8 which may be called the Cosmic Clock, is divided up in this way. Of the twelve Signs, three are allotted to each element, and they thus form a graph or picture diagram of man.

The idea of these four elements is also expressed in the traditional symbols for the four Gospels. Matthew is represented by an ox or calf. The lion of St. Mark is familiar to all. John has an eagle, and for Luke a man’s face is the accepted symbol. This tradition goes back to the earliest times and these creatures appear, each attached to his own Gospel, in many of the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and in the stained glass windows of the earliest cathedrals in Europe.

Here we get a still higher development of the lesson of the four elements because, just as the Gospels are the highest expression of the Christian message, so these symbols give us the final statement concerning the method of man’s overcoming.

Matthew takes people as he finds them on the material plane, assumes their customs and traditions, and, meeting them on their own level, gives them the Gospel in the way that he thinks they can receive it. The physical body and the material world of which it is a part, are with us for the time being, and we have to tolerate them and handle them as well as we can. You will see how well this idea is expressed by the element Earth (ox).

The Gospel of Mark is the most intellectual of the four. It is simple, direct, and businesslike as a military dispatch or an engineer’s report; yet its symbol is the lion which as we have seen stands for the spiritual element. Why is this? The object is to teach us that the intellect has ultimately to be absorbed by the spiritual nature, not that the intellect will really be destroyed but that it will lose its limitations and become Illumined Intelligence. The reader should here note the immense difference between the words intelligence and intellect. Intellect is only a small and narrow segment of intelligence. There are many forms of intelligence that are not intellectual although the modern world forgot this for a time.

The Gospel of Luke represents the emotional nature. It is often called the “human” Gospel because of its kindly understanding of and toleration for human nature, and because of its liberal attitude toward the Gentiles and toward women, an attitude not characteristic of most ancient writers. It is symbolized, however, by the face of a man which we know is the symbol for intellect, and the profound idea behind this fact is this, namely, that the student on the path has first to learn to make his emotional nature subject to his intellect. He has to make that which he knows control that which he feels. After that will come the spiritualization of both elements.

The Gospel of John stands for the spiritual nature and is the highest of the Gospels as well as the most profound. It is symbolized, not by the lion as one might expect, but by the eagle. As we have seen, the eagle is the emotional nature redeemed and purified, and when this transmutation has taken place, it too is absorbed in the spiritual nature.

It is necessary to note that in some instances the symbols for Matthew and Luke have been mistakenly interchanged.This was done at some time by people who did not understand the meaning behind them and was originally probably a copyist’s error. The slightest reflection will show that the ox does not fit Luke nor does the human face, the symbol of all mankind, belong to the restricted outlook of Matthew.

To sum up then, we have to take ourselves as we find ourselves here and now, without unnecessary regret or self-condemnation. We have to become master of the body, and of the physical plane in general. We have to make the emotional nature subservient to the intellect in order that both emotions and intellect may be transformed into the spiritual. To human perception these processes go on at the same time, and when they are complete, the earth plane disappears from consciousness and Spirit is all. This is what is called translation, dematerialization, or the ascension demonstration. You will see that the story is told in a subtle but very clear way by the Gospel symbols.

The four elements are also referred to in Daniel’s story of the three men thrown into the fiery furnace.9 That chapter is a parable of human nature redeemed. The characters took their ordeal or initiation successfully, and the result was the appearance of a fourth man “like unto the Son of God.” That was the emergence of the spiritual nature.

A remarkable treatment of the four elements is given in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 2. It is concerned with the marshalling of the Twelve Tribes of Israel in the great camp around the Tabernacle in the wilderness. The Tabernacle in the wilderness represents the human body and mind at the stage when we are still in the wilderness,which means that we have gotten out of Egypt (no longer believe that outer things really have power over us) but have not yet been able to prove it by demonstrating all-round harmony in practice, which is, of course, the present condition of most students of metaphysics.

The Twelve Tribes are drawn up in camp to correspond with the signs of the Zodiac; for each of the tribes was symbolized by one of the Signs, and carried it as a banner or totem at the head of the ranks when they marched.

It may seem strange to the reader that the Signs of the Zodiac should be brought into this at all, but, of course, we have to take the Bible as we find it. These things are in the Bible, and it is our business to interpret the Bible rather than to think it should have been written in some other way.

Judah represents the spiritual element (Leo—Fire) and is placed “on the east side toward the rising of the sun.”10 The east traditionally stands for God. The historical Christian churches and most pagan temples are oriented. The altar is in the east and the usual custom is to bury the dead with their feet toward the east so that the body shall face that way. Thus, it is entirely natural that the Bible should put Judah in the east.

Reuben 11 represents the physical body or the Pale Horse (Taurus—Earth). He is placed in the south because that is where the sun shines. (The Bible, of course, was written for people living in the northern hemisphere.) The spiritual nature arising in the east must be focused on the physical body because that has to be redeemed. The body is not to be denied but redeemed. Religious people generally have tended to curse the body, to regard it as something evil, and we know that when we curse a thing it strikes back and gives trouble. Humanity must not curse the body but must redeem it by learning to demonstrate perfect health and self-control. Many of the Christian mystics, for instance, neglected or crucified the body in the hope of thus reaching God; but they still failed to control it.

Reuben, like the Pale Horse, stands for all material and worldly conditions as well as the body itself. We are not to run away from the world—we are to learn to overcome it. 12 And so we allow the sunshine of Truth to shine upon material things.

There is another important lesson here. People too easily forget that material conditions are always changing, and that the only permanent thing is God and His self-expression. As a matter of fact, all worldly arrangements and the physical universe itself are as unstable as water and pass away like a dream. In the case of solid matter the change takes much longer to happen than it does in the case of liquids and so we are apt to think of solid objects as permanent, but nevertheless they are always changing and fading too. Buildings, bridges, cities, the shapes of mountains, and the courses of rivers, and the very continents themselves come and go in the course of time. We have to realize that all worldly conditions, good and bad, pass away sooner or later and that nothing permanent can be built here below. The curse of Reuben is “unstable as water: thou shalt not excel.”

Coming around to the west side we find Ephraim 13 who represents the intellect. (Aquarius—Air). This is, of course, another phase of the Black Horse; and we know that the sun seems to disappear in the west leaving us in the darkness of night—and this is the condition that comes from riding the Black Horse. The intellect also has to be redeemed by the spiritual nature for the light “cometh out of the east and shineth unto the west.” 14

Finally we have Dan15 on the north side, standing for the emotional nature or Red Horse (Scorpio-Water). It is not necessary to repeat what has already been said about the emotional nature and the need for gaining control of it. The north, in the occult tradition, stands for trouble, fear, and general disharmony. It is the cold and dark region as distinct from the sunny south. In the present state of humanity, man’s life is ruled by his emotional nature, and he must recognize this. Without emotion there is no action. Wrong thoughts, unaccompanied by fear or ill feeling, do the possessor no harm—they are sterile. Right thoughts or treatments devoid of feeling do not demonstrate. They are void. The feeling nature is what matters, and yet the control of the emotions is the last thing that the average person tries to attain. He will seek far and wide for health for his body. He will make great sacrifices to get an education for his intellect. He will seek God, or at least recognize religion, perfunctorily. Yet he will fail to understand or refuse to face the fact that he must learn to control his feelings in order to attain any of these ends. He places that subject in the “cold north.”

There is a remarkable point about the treatment of Dan in the Bible. He is omitted from the final triumphant gathering of the tribes in the book of Revelation.16 At that day—the day when man attains his realization of God—the lower emotional nature will have been completely obliterated and the higher emotional nature merged in the spiritual. So that Dan drops out altogether. Joseph, on his death bed, said, “Dan shall judge his people … Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’s heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”17 It is the lower emotional nature that is the downfall of the vast majority of people. It strikes at the “heel” or vulnerable spot in character, the part where the individual “touches the ground,” and it is glorious to know that ultimately Dan will disappear.

The fourfold nature of the human being was taught in ancient Egypt by means of the Sphinx. The Egyptians inherited the idea from a previous civilization. There were many ancient civilizations in the world which are not yet known to our archaeologists. Man has lived in organized societies for tens of thousands of years, although all traces of most of these civilizations have disappeared. The Sphinx was probably Atlantean originally, and the true Sphinx consists of the body of an animal (Earth-Taurus), with a human face (Air—Aquarius). It has the wings of an eagle (Water-Scorpio), and on the forehead it carries the sacred device, the Ankh, which represents spirit, the eternal Life (Fire—Leo).

Centuries afterward the Greeks copied the Sphinx, but, not understanding the hidden import of the symbolism, they sometimes changed it to suit their artistic preferences, giving it a woman’s bust, and making other changes. The Oedipus legend refers to the City of Thebes which is in Greece, and is not concerned with the original and authentic Sphinx, which is Egyptian.

For modern readers it is especially interesting to note that outside the great Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis where Moses was a priest18 there stood four great obelisks teaching the same lesson of the four elements. The priests would see them every time they passed in and out, and the location of the obelisks there at the entry implied that this knowledge is the portal to the understanding of God. In the intervening centuries these columns have been widely scattered, and, after a number of removals, one of them is today in Central Park, New York City, one in London on the Thames embankment, one in Constantinople, while the fourth still remains on the very spot where it was originally fixed, although all trace of the temple itself has disappeared. It is impossible not to feel a thrill of interest when we look at “Cleopatra’s needle” as it is incorrectly called, when we walk through Central Park and try to realize that Moses himself often looked at that very column.

And so we have the same story told over and over again in the Bible and outside of it. Divine Mind has inspired individuals with this truth in all ages including the present one because it is the basis of all spiritual growth. The most important lesson to learn is the lesson of your own nature, for to understand that fully is to have the power to control it. Pythagoras wrote over the door of his school MAN KNOW THYSELF, and the Bible shows us how to do this.

1. Revelation 6.

2. Revelation 6:8.

3. Revelation 6:4.

4. Revelation 6:5-6.

5. Revelation 6:2.

6. Revelation 4:6-9; Ezekiel 1.10 10.14

7. And see Isaiah 6.

8. “The Zodiac and the Bible.”

9. Daniel 3:25.

10. Numbers 2:3.

11. Numbers 2:10.

12. John 17:15.

13. Numbers 2:18.

14. Matthew 24:27.

15. Numbers 2:25.

16. Revelation 7:4–8.

17. Genesis 49:16-17.

18. Acts 7:22.

EMMET FOX