The Title: The title is a biblical reference: "When [the Lamb] opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature[the one with the face of a man] say 'Come!' And I saw, and behold, a black horse, and its rider had [a set of scales] in his hand; and I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, 'A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not harm the oil and wine!'" (Revelation 6:5-6).
The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse is said to represent Famine, interpreted by some (e.g., Billy Graham) to represent callousness self-absorption of the privileged surrounded by the poor and needy bringing on even worse deprivation--Famine. The four living creatures, described in Revelation 4:6-8, have been linked to the first four books of the New Testament and to the four Fixed signs of the zodiac, as follows: 1st living creature(like a lion) = Leo = Mark; 2nd living creature(like an ox) = Taurus = Luke; 3rd living creature(with a man's face) = Aquarius = Matthew; 4th living creature(like an eagle) = Scorpio = John. Aquarius is the Sun-sign of Ronald Reagan, the Moon sign of the U.S., and also a sign traditionally associated with Russia, and also associated with Romania, once ruled by the demented, corrupt and sensual dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a man renowned for his cruelty.
(1) Lord of the Cockroaches: Beelzebub, regarded since about the 17th century as Satan's chief lieutenant, is a Canaanite deity whose name means "lord of the flies." Cockroaches are also insects, but essentially earthbound--they cannot fly, except briefly when mating; however, their disease-carrying characteristics are well-known, and they are extremely ancient(as a type) and hardy.
(2) Rats: Rats are sacred to Ganesh, Hindu god of prosperity, and they are fed by priests of Ganesh in that god's temples in India in spite of the depredations of rats upon people and foodstuffs there. Ganesh is often represented in Hindu religious art as an anthropomorphic god with an elephant's head, riding a huge rat. Not to criticize Hinduism or India. Rats are also good test animals for scientific research. Rats can be pets. "The rat race" is a common term. There are things that we venerate that can do us harm as well as good.
(3-5) Refer to the tale of the original Passover in the Bible(Exodus 11 & 12).
(8-9) Tithonus, the human husband of Eos(Aurora), goddess of the dawn in Greco-Roman mythology. She obtained eternal life for him from Zeus but forgot to ask for eternal youth for him as well. When old age had made him so decrepit he could no longer function, she locked him in a room and turned him into a grasshopper, a type of insect also known as locust. Grasshoppers, or locusts, are notorious for their depredations on humanity's food supply, but are said to be the food of the ancient Jewish ascetic sect known as the Essenes and of John the Baptist.
Biblical references to the locust include the following:
"So Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all that night; and when it was morning the east wind had brought the locusts. And the locusts came up over all the land of Egypt, and settled upon the whole country of Egypt, such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever shall be again. For they covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left; not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt."(Exodus 10: 13-15)
"Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me; and, behold, he formed grasshoppers in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and lo, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings."(Amos 7:1)
"The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands."(Proverbs 30:27.)(Belial in Hebrew means "without a master.")
"And John[The Baptist] was clothed with camel's hair, and with a girdle of skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey..."(Mark 1:6)
"And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God upon their foreheads."(Revelation 9:2-4)
Back to Tithonus for a second. He outlived everything that makes life meaningful. The Sibyl of Cumae, an ancient female prophet who guided Aeneas to the realm of the dead in Vergil's Aeneid, was another mythological figure who outlived her ability to function through asking for and being granted eternal life from the gods but forgetting to ask for eternal youth as well: "I once saw the Sibyl of Cumae with my own eyes. She was hanging in a bottle, and when the boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?', she said, 'I want to die.'"(Petronius, Satyricon, Chapter 48.)
(10-11) The Potter's Field: Aceldama, a Jerusalem pauper's cemetery which once served as a potter's field and which was reportedly bought with the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot got from Caiaphas for betraying Jesus; after Jesus was arrested by the Romans and Caiaphas' Temple police, Judas tried to give the money back but Caiaphas refused it, so Judas threw the money into the temple and then went out and hanged himself.(Matthew 27:1-10.)
(16) The evil number: "Let he who has understanding reckon the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a man; it is six hundred and sixty six."(Revelation 13:18)
"666. Last of the mystic numbers of the sun. [Gematric meanings include] the spirit of Sol; [also] the Satanic Trinity; also...the name of Jesus. The names of Nero, Napoleon, [19th-century British prime minister] W.E. Gladstone, and any person that you may happen to dislike [can be made to] add up to this number."--Aleister Crowley, 777.
(19)Some battle dirty, etc.: This line combines two images. One is the damned souls of the Wrathful in Dante's Inferno (Canto 8, lines 106-116):
Beyond its rocky race and wild descentthe river floods and forms a marsh called Styx,
a dreary swamp, vaporous and malignant.
And I, intent on all our passage touched,
made out a swarm of souls in that bog
savage with anger, naked, slime-besmirched.
They thumped on one another in that slime
with hands and feet, and they butted, and they bit
as if each would tear the other limb from limb.
And my kind Sage [Vergil]: "My son, see the souls
of those who lived in wrath."
The other is a passage from John Milton's Paradise Lost (Book 1, lines 497-502):
In courts and palaces[as well as in temples],[Belial]... reigns,And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and, when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
"Luxurious"--lustful. "Flown"--flushed.
(22)allegorically, Sodom and Egypt:: The Bible, Revelation 11:9: "...and [the prophets'] dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which is allegorically called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified."
(27-33)To the south, etc.: South of the U.S., south of Europe, in the Southern Hemisphere, are a lot of developing countries whose poverty and overpopulation are engines of political unrest and environmental degradation; this is a problem which will be neglected at the peril of everyone on the planet.
(32)Looking at Polaris and seeing a cross: Emperor Constantine the Great of Byzantium, legend has it, converted to Christianity after winning a battle after seeing a cross in the sky with the words In hoc signo vinces (By this sign conquer). Polaris, the North Star at this time, signifies universal and eternal principles, which some may see, wrongly in my view, as identical with Christianity. Polaris is not a cross; Polaris is a star, basically a fixed one. Christianity has no monopoly on Truth.
(33)"Let them eat cake!": Marie Antoinette never said this, but it's a nice phrase, if not a nice sentiment. I mean politicized callousness--specifically, as expressed by Ronald Reagan, who said once that he believed that compassion for the less fortunate was unpatriotic, and by the era in which he was President.("The gaudy and frantic prostitutes.") Reagan continues to cast his shadow today.
The Thief: Refer to the following Biblical passages:
"But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you must also be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect."(Matthew 24:43-44)
"One of the criminals who were hanged railed at [Jesus], saying, 'Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!' But the other rebuked him, saying, 'Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.' And he said, 'Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.' And [Jesus] said to him, 'Truly, I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise.'"(Luke 23:39-43)
"For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night."(1st Thessalonians 5:2)
"The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forebearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens shall pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up."(2nd Peter 3:9-10)
"Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God. Remember then what you received and heard; keep that, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you."(Revelation 3:2-3)
Refer also to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death":"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night."
And also to Dante's Purgatorio, where Dante has Hugh Capet, King of France, lying on his face in the dirt of the Fifth Cornice of Purgatory with the Avaricious, say: "I see [Jesus] mocked again and crucified, the gall and vinegar once more sent up. He dies again--with live thieves at his side." (Canto 20, lines 89-90)