The seven Apocalypse Banners are based on Chapters 6-8 of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. As far as we can tell, the writer was an early, exiled Christian who, from his place of persecution wrote primarily to give hope and encouragement to other Christians in trouble. Apocalyptic means just that – visions of hope in times of trouble.
This particular apocalyptic vision of St. John on Patmos was extremely intense, because the sufferings of early Christians, under Greek and Roman rule, were extremely intense. His full vision of the emergence of the New Jerusalem, of which these banners of the seven seals are a part, is meant to be compelling and arresting. It breaks through the barriers of rational thought to appeal to the heart and soul of what it is to engender – faith, hope and love. We believe that Revelation’s themes, images, symbols, visions, etc. are not meant to be taken literally, despite what some say. They have been, are being, and will continue to be, understood and interpreted liturgically and artistically. We invite you to spend some time with these Apocalypse Banners and try to discover meaning for yourself.
The banners are the result of a project undertaken by Faith and the Arts, an ecumenical group, created to enrich faith through all forms of artistic expression. The banners were originally commissioned by the CBC as a backdrop for a multi-media production called Apocalypsis, composed by R. Murray Schafer, which was originally scheduled to be performed in 1977, but because of limited funds, was not performed until 1980. The banners were designed in 1976 by Marion Spanjerdt, an Ontario artist who is well known in the field of embroidery, appliqué, collage, and all textile arts. The concept was initiated by Leo Del Pasqua and after Spanjerdt’s design was completed, five different Ontario churches undertook the volunteer responsibility for the stitching and sewing.
Marion Spanjerdt explains their production, “The execution, that is all the sewing by hand and machine took well over a year. My share was the purchasing of all the fabrics and threads (each banner has approximately 23 colours), the cutting and pinning of the banners, visiting the workshops and finally the assembling.”
Once they were completed in 1978, the banners were loaned to various churches, universities, and cultural centres across Canada and the U.S. It was said in 1983 that if a permanent home were to be built for the Apocalypse Banners, it would look like All Saints’ Cathedral in Edmonton. Some All Saints’ parishioners, who were overwhelmed by the perfect fit and the bold colours of the banners, purchased them for the Cathedral where they now reside.
In the book of Revelation Chapter 4, John, who is on the island of Patmos, is lifted up to heaven and sees through a door in heaven, a great throne with odd figures standing all around. The One who sat on the throne held a scroll in his right hand. An extremely official looking document, the scroll was sealed with not just one wax seal, but seven.
What worthy official was sanctioned to crack open these seven seals and begin the procession of revelations contained within the scroll? There was no answer – only silence and distress. Then the meek, mild, blood stained Lamb appears who, amidst songs of relief and praise, begins to open the seals and unravel this divine drama.
As the first of the seven seals is broken open, what emerges is a white horse and its rider, holding a bow, Then a crown was given to him.
In a striking way this banner depicts the horse, commandingly white, with the rider and bow held close to the head of the horse. The orange-red-brown crown is distinct in the upper right yet seems also to rule out over the whole scene. Interestingly, the great white tail of the horse is whipping up bluish bubbles of air under the scene.
Throughout mythic history, the horse has represented the noble and civilized taming of nature. In Greek literature, from which much of John’s vision derives, Pericles uses a creature that is half horse and half human. In the Gospels, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a Palm Sunday pony. Here the image is of a white horse, together with the bow and crown of the rider. The crown is given over the heads of the horse and rider suggesting that the divine is sharing with others both consciousness and thought. It is the human rider with the bow who can then take direction and action. There is a primordial sense of divine illumination shining in and through the natural and human world.
Overall this first seal reveals the blissful movement of harmony, nobility, and peace in the realms of the physical, natural, human, and divine.
The second image reveals a red horse whose rider is wielding a great sword taking peace from earth. It becomes apparent that, with the four horsemen, we are on a ride down through the experience of human history.
Unlike the noble harmony of the first banner, here the piercing, swashbuckling sword flints into fire and draws out blood. The dividing sword cuts into the original peace and harmony of creation, even as the action of the uncontrolled individual human ego and appetite can sever personal relationships. The community of creation is torn asunder and dissension flares because of individual aggression and passion. Despite the impending sense of dissension and demise, the movement from white to red, from bubbles of air to flames of fire suggests in these two banners the opening up of the wide spectrum of creative possibility.
Ominously, the black horse rides onto the stage and its rider has a balance scale in his hand. As he appears to be weighing out in measurement and cost certain produce, a voice cries cryptically “spare the oil and the wine.”
We seemed to have galloped into a dark, closed, material world, where symbolically everything is reduced to scientific calculation and commercialized business.
There is no other biblical reference to scales, but again from the Greek world, the image of the scales of justice is well known. This banner may also be suggestive of Christ’s compelling question “What does it profit, if one were to gain the whole world but lose one’s own soul?”
The swirling, blue-green water continues the depiction in these banners of the four basic elements: air, fire, water, and next earth.
The journey of the four horsemen finally carries us into the haunting and sinister world of death. The pale horse in this banner is shrouded by death’s dark veil and is well interred within the green earth.
As in great literature (Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens), it is the courage of those who face their ghostly pasts or unresolved fears that merits the rewards of greater insight and fulfillment. So too this fourth seal confronts us, as it did early persecuted Christians, with that world of fear and finality that we would otherwise choose to avoid. It is only with courage and faith that we ride on.
Of all that has been written and said about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, they ride alone and together representing a variety of mystic truths and symbols. But as in these banners, they both comfort and confront all generations of Christians with truths about the life of faith.
The fifth seal opens onto a very different image – that of the souls of the righteous cowering under the altar of God and crying with a loud voice “How long, O Lord?”
In the banner, the bluish white altar is marked by the symbol of the cross. The symbol of the altar is extremely important for Christians as the place of communion with God, through the sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist. In the Greek world, however, the shape of the altar is also that of a casket or sarcophagus, the place of the dead. In an early Christian sense, here the souls of the righteous are pictured as in both a tomb of the risen Christ and in the altar of the communion with God.
Jesus’ resurrection gives a new witness that the tomb for the righteous believers is really empty and there is a new hope for those persecuted and martyred that their sufferings will not be forever.
The predominant images of this sixth revelation are the violent earthquake tearing right down the centre of the scene with the sun turning black and the moon red and all of the powerful of the earth scrambling for cover in the rocks.
Certainly the experience of earthquakes and worlds splitting apart are among the most fearful in human history. As well, this most apocalyptic of the seals conveys the total cosmic and social disintegration of history. In a sense this is also the most contemporary scene given recent earthquakes around the world, cracks in nation-states and alliances, the nuclear splitting of the atom, or the nervous breakdown and broken hearts common in personal experience.
As in the fifth banner where the tomb is also the altar, the revelation here is the breaking of worlds being met with a radical new Christian image of hope, the breaking of the bread. It is in brokenness that faith is born. Christian faith in an unsteady and apocalyptic world turned upside down sees the revelation of new hope breaking into the scene. That new hope is the One who sits upon the throne, the sacrificial lamb, the power of God to minister in and through human brokenness. In the light of this new power of self-giving, the old powers of self-seeking finally fall among the rocks.
The seventh seal blasts forth with the sounds of the trumpet, the rising of the incense with the prayers of all the Saints. There is triumph here, but also silence. The drama and these seven seals is complete and the victory won, yet the revelation of St. John continues to its consummation in the New Jerusalem.
For now, that initial sense of harmony, nobility, and peace of the first banner is restored and even surpassed in this seventh banner. The primal elements of air, fire, water, and earth combine in the lifting up of the great quantity of incense. The colours of white, red, blue, and green fill out the widening spectrum. The horsemen, the souls of the righteous, and the forms of the rich and powerful, are all transformed to the seven glistening angels standing creatively in the presence of God.
The story of the seven seals and of these seven Apocalypse banners is that, for early Christians persecuted and martyred as well as for us in the breaking apart of the many worlds of today, there is yet hope. There is with Christian faith and apocalyptic vision, the increase of the community of hope and love, the Church of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God, and yes, one day, the New Jerusalem.