The four horsemen of the opened seals, read by Steiner as the unsealing of history, where each prepared culture-epoch rides forth to be made visible.
The Riders of the Apocalypse are the four horsemen who go forth as the first four seals are broken in Revelation, which Rudolf Steiner read not as coming wars but as the unsealing of what each age has written into the human soul. The white rider carries forth spiritualized intelligence, the red takes peace from the earth, the black holds the balances of measure, and the pale rider bears the name of Death. Together they loose the inheritance of history upon the future.
In Steiner's Own Words
This brings us to a consideration which may give rise to the question: Why does the unveiling of the first four seals provide such a comfortless picture? Because here come forth the men who wish to remain in these four preparatory civilizations in which is contained the old form of Lucifer that drives men asunder. Hence in the unveiling of the seals we are shown, too, how they got the form which they have acquired. They have slept through the event of Christ Jesus and are re-born in the forms which can be given them without the influence of the Christ-principle. Hence there appears again that which indicated the mere intelligence, the mere intellect; the horse appears four consecutive times. The old form of man appears which he obtains by receiving into himself the horse nature. This form appears at the opening of the seals.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading of the four horsemen, given across the Nuremberg lectures of June 1908, turns on one image most modern commentators pass over: the horse. He asks what animal nature humanity had to set aside in order to become clever, and answers that it was the horse-nature. The centaur of Greek art remembers the parting; the horse-skulls the old Germans nailed above their doors remembered it; the wooden horse of Troy hides the same wisdom. Because the horse stands for the bare intelligence won by that separation, the four riders are not generals but the bare intellect itself, riding out four times over in the souls of those who lived through the Indian, Persian, Babylonian-Egyptian and Greco-Roman ages without taking the Christ-impulse into them. So the white rider is spiritualized intelligence victorious; the red, who lifts peace from the earth, lets fall away what cannot ascend; the black, with the balances and the measure of wheat for a penny, carries the fruit of the age that learned to measure; the pale rider, whose name is Death, gathers all that is unfit for immortality. After these four the horse-symbol is spent, and the redeemed appear in white robes, no longer mounted. Read on its own terms, this is the unsealing of history: the four riders make visible what each epoch inscribed in the human heart, the long account that the seven seals hold closed until the War of All against All breaks them open.
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