Peste: 1. pest [noun] a troublesome person or thing. 2. pestilence [noun] (literary, old-fashioned) any type of deadly epidemic disease, especially bubonic plague.
—Cambridge English Dictionary (emphasis added)
I will bring a sword against you, that shall execute vengeance for the covenant. And if you gather into your cities, I will send pestilence among you, and you will be delivered into the hand of the enemy.
—Leviticus 26:25
Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.
―Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
In 2003, Sharon wrote a novel called The Armageddon Strain about a manmade disease that provides an excuse for governments to enslave all the world beneath the yoke of a New World Order. Though the book was written nearly two decades ago, the plot now plays out before our very eyes—only, we know it as a disease called COVID-19.
According to a March 13, 2020, article posted to the South China Morning Post, the first known SARS-CoV-2 patient entered a Hubei hospital on November 17, 2019. Looking back, epidemiologists have followed contact tracing, travel patterns, and hospital records to determine the earliest patterns of the novel disease that would come to be called COVID-19. It is one of those shocks to the world system that resonates like a punch in the proverbial gut, and it came as a complete surprise, which is why experts refer to this type of event as a “black swan.” (Most swans are white, and though black swans can occur, they usually don’t.)
Did China or another human group manufacture SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon—as in the plot of The Armageddon Strain? Perhaps, but as of this moment, there is no definite proof of it. However, there is evidence that the disease may have been part of a research project into possible mutations of the original SARS virus. At some point during the fall of 2019, one of these mutated forms escaped from a Wuhan lab and infected Patient Zero. This cannot yet be proven, but as of this writing, it a likely scenario.
No matter how SARS-CoV-2 emerged into the world of men, this much is fact: Rider number four has taken control of every aspect of modern society and government. After six months, most travel remains at a standstill, affecting every industry with which it’s associated: airlines, car rentals, hotels, restaurants, retail, tourism, and entertainment. Public gatherings have been curtailed, canceled, or limited; and most states require we wear a mask when shopping or walking through a park.In short, our freedom of movement is strictly controlled.
SARS-CoV-2: Weapon of the pale rider?
Government leaders put on their perfectly practiced smiles for the camera as they explain why our freedoms have vanished—making it sound as though governors and legislators are our protectors. Lockdowns have come and gone, only to come back around again. Business meetings and conferences are now conducted via Zoom, Skype, and Meet. Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, and even Memorial Day weekend were primarily celebrated at home.
Protesters, however, are given a pass, it seems. Yes, they wear masks, but they do so to protect their identities; not to protect others.
We’re promised that, one day, travel will resume, schools will reopen to full classrooms, and filled sports stadiums and sizzling hot dogs will make a comeback. Planes will fly and cruise ships will set sail. But underneath all of it, we will wonder. We will fear. We will worry. Will it come back? And if it does, will it be worse?
And what about the vaccine? Will I be forced to take it? Will my children be permitted to enter school without it? Can I board a plane?
Even if SARS-CoV-2 vanished tomorrow like a thinning shadow, humanity can never be truly safe from Thanatos (“Death”) and his hellish ride. If not this pandemic, another will arise—and then another, followed by another—until God Almighty shouts the final command, “Come!” to Thanatos and the last pandemic of the world as we know it commences. Death will be given permission to ride to such an extent that his passage will end the lives of 25 percent of the world’s population.
One out of four will die.
Compare that to the estimated case fatality rate for COVID-19: 0.5–1 percent. In other words, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
In January of 2018, Sharon authored an article for SkyWatchTV Magazine, whose first lines now seem eerily oracular, though they were based solely on scientific observation, logic, and her strong belief in God’s prophetic Word:
Something is brewing out there. Mutating. Recombining. Running through species after species to perfect its nature; becoming more transmissible, more pathogenic. And it will be deadlier than anything yet seen upon the earth.
Now, in case you’ve never studied Revelation, if you have never dug deeply into the Greek behind our English translations, let us explain two points: Thanatos is the name of the rider on the fourth horse, and therion (meaning “little beasts”) is one of his weapons.
Pandemics are nothing new. Viruses are often, but not always, the culprit. Sometimes, bacteria can cause widespread destruction and loss of life. For millennia, Thanatos, the rider known as Death, has been mounted and riding across the earth.
One hundred years ago, the world was in the grip of a deadly wave of influenza. When the pandemic at last ended, the final tally of dead equaled anywhere from 2–5 percent of the global population. We know it today as H1N1, dubbed by the mainstream media of the day as the Spanish Flu.
The Spanish flu of 1918-19 killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
The commonly quoted root of the pandemic lists the initial occurrence at Camp Funston, a US Army training camp in Fort Riley, Kansas. However, recent research indicates that the pandemic started much earlier, as many as five to ten years earlier, in fact, as a localized epidemic in the Far East.[1]
The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic most likely originated in China as a local epidemic. The virus had probably been living within a local host population for decades or even centuries. When Chinese laborers were shipped to Canada and England, as well as to parts of Europe to serve as construction workers, because most young men were serving as soldiers in World War I, some of those aboard the ships were listed as ill or became ill during the voyage. These ships stopped at ports along the way for supplies, and the sailors enjoyed a little shore leave. It’s believed that influenza literally jumped ship at these cities, infecting local populations with no immunity.
Bottom line: The Spanish Flu was actually the Asian Flu.
Pandemics have caused the deaths of large swaths of populations for millennia, but Scripture makes it clear that, as we near the return of Christ, these will increase in number and severity. As devastating as it’s been, COVID-19 is but a Braxton-Hicks event.
Somewhere out there lurks an endemic virus, waiting for the perfect storm of mixing vessel, availability, access to vulnerable populations through travel, and brewing time.
Rider Four’s name is Thanatos, who is one of a pair of psychopomp twins who escort the dead to the underworld. Thanatos takes the condemned unjust to hell, whilst Hypnos carries away the “just” or “justified,” those who “fall asleep.”
The sickle traditionally carried by Thanatos (Death) is derived from the curved blade used by the Titan Kronos to castrate his father, the sky-god Ouranos.
Hades (Hell) rides along with Thanatos, so it’s no coincidence that the Pale Rider carries a rhomphaia—a curved blade, which looks very similar to the blade carried by Kronos, who used his to castrate his father, Ouranos.
You see, Hades and Kronos are both linked with the underworld—in fact, they’re often named as rulers there. But who is Thanatos?
According to Greek mythology, Thanatos was born of Nyx (“Night”) by her brother Erebus. And Erebus is the son of the primordial dragon, Chaos.
Get that? Thanatos is the grandson of Chaos. Nice family, huh?
Here’s the kicker: “Erebus” is another name for “Tartarus.”
Did you get that? The primordial dragon Chaos fathered Tartarus, who fathered Death.
Bottom line: The Pale Rider is way more than Clint Eastwood on an oddly colored horse. He is a very powerful rebel with Hell riding along as his disciple. When Death makes his final ride, the devastation to humanity will end the lives of one-quarter of all mankind.
We mentioned the rhomphaia carried by Thanatos, a blade similar to that carried by Kronos, but Thanatos uses other weapons to end the lives of humans.
Here’s the quote:
Power was given to them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with the sword and with hunger and with death and with beasts. (Revelation 6:8, KJV; emphasis added)
Therion is the final weapon in Thanatos’ arsenal. The general translation of therion is “beasts of the earth.” While true, there’s much more to it.
First of all, it may refer to actual “beasts” or wild animals. As chaos arises across the earth (in the wake of the Four Riders’ travels), city services and infrastructure will break down. Zoos will empty and starving animals will flee their enclosures, but also, research animals in the world’s thousands of laboratories could escape. Picture what might have happened in Reston, Virginia, if the Ebola-ridden monkeys housed at the animal facility there had escaped back in 1989. Then multiply that by a factor of ten thousand or more.
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A second meaning to therion might refer to the virus riding in the bloodstreams of those escaped monkeys, or to an emerging disease not yet discovered. “Little beasts” is the proper translation of the Greek term, for therion is a diminutive of thera.
Hittite depiction of a kusarikku (“bison-man”), a demon who served the chaos-dragon Tiamat.
“Little beasts” may also refer to microscopic “beasts.” We think we know all about them today, but most are still poorly understood, and some are mutating into more pathogenic forms. Yet others still hide within host organisms, awaiting their chance to infect a wary hunter or tourist.
Therion is also the Greek name for a constellation, and this gets us into Redwing Saga territory again. The Redwing Saga is about spiritual warfare. Redwing experiments with human and angelic partnerships, hybridizing humans with wolf “germ plasm” (we’d call it DNA).
How does Therion take us there? You see, the constellation Therion is also called Lupus—the Wolf.
The Greeks called this southern-sky constellation after their word for “little beast.” It’s thought that the constellation Therion might be based on a Babylonian figure called “the Mad Dog,” a hybrid with the head and torso of a man, and the legs and tail of a lion. The Mad Dog is often linked to another Babylonian figure called the “Bison-man.”
Derek wrote about bison-man imagery in Last Clash of the Titans, revealing how the theriomorphic species of spiritual villain is connected with the old gods of the Greeks, the Titans:
The Akkadians believed that the primordial chaos-dragon Tiamat was served by a host of demonic creatures, one of which was the kusarikku, or “bison-man.”[2] This chimera was human above and bovine below, a sort of bullish centaur but with horns on the human head. The kusarikku was defeated by the god Ninurta, but it was also associated with—surprise!—the Titans, by way of the ancient Amorite Ditanu tribe.[3]
Later, in the Babylonian creation myth, the kusarikku appears in the army of the chaos serpent Tiamat in her battle against Marduk.[4] (emphasis added)
Interestingly, the name of the Titan king Kronos may well mean “horned one.”[5]
This depiction of Kronos, from the film Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, might actually be on the right track.
And there’s a real twist in this description of the disease-spreading rider upon the fourth horse. If he’s wielding weapons that relate to a host of infernal entities, then are these really weapons or something else?
Might they be his partners? Aspects of his personality? Followers on Hell’s version of a social media site?
It’s difficult to reach a rock-solid conclusion, but the fact that these words indicate both weapons and entities is a major clue. Another is the notion of “plague” in the primary weapon, therion. Why?
Simple. Rephaim.
First Titans and now the Rephaim?
Derek has spent years researching the connection between the Titans and the biblical Rephaim. References to the Valley of Rephaim/Titans occur in the Septuagint translation of 2 Samuel 23:13 and 1 Chronicles 11:15.
The point? By the time the Greeks controlled the lands of the Bible, after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, Jewish religious scholars directly linked the Titans to the Rephaim and identified them specifically as giants—the Nephilim, sons of the rebel gods who’d rejected the authority of the Creator.
Okay, then, we can connect Thanatos to Kronos, and perhaps even Molech, through the idea of theriomorphic (bovid or bull-like) imagery. It’s tenuous but bear with us.
Rephaim has numerous connotations, all based on how we interpret the root word, rpu.
First of all, they’re sometimes called “healers.” The root of the word rendered “healer” is rp’, the same one behind the name “Rephaim.” We see this idea of healing in the attributes of ancient gods (read that as “spiritual rebels”) like Asclepius and Apollo, who is also a god of plague.
There’s another aspect to the name Rephaim that undergirds the notion of this scenario being way more than Death on a green horse. Again, using Derek’s excellent research, let us quote from a section of chapter 4 of Last Clash of the Titans, ‘The Great Ones’:
Searching for hints about the Rephaim in texts outside the Bible gets more difficult as you go farther back in history. While most scholars lean toward a definition of the Semitic root rp’ as “healers,” another meaning has been proposed:
In the light of the repeated occurrence of rp’um in military and heroic contexts and the inadequacy of alternative hypotheses, the significance of Ugaritic r-p-’ might best be understood in the light of Akkadian raba’um “to be large, great,” and its derivative rabium (< rabûm) “leader, chief.” Thus, the rp’um would be “the Great Ones” or “the Mighty Ones.”[6] (emphasis added)
Mighty Ones? Great Ones? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? How about “Men of Renown”?
Boom. Nephilim. Rephaim. Titans.
Our conclusion?
Death and his entourage are Titans, possibly accompanied by members of the Rephaim, who, as we noted earlier, are the demons who’ve plagued the world for thousands of years. Maybe all of the Horsemen are Titans, or perhaps the first three are just the opening acts to a final grouping.
Does this sound far-fetched? It wasn’t strange at all to the early church.
The early church identified the Titans with the Watchers of Genesis 6. Early Christian theologian Irenaeus even speculated that the name of the Antichrist would be “Titan.”
The second-century theologian Irenaeus, a student of Polycarp, who in turn was a disciple of the apostle John, concluded that the most likely name of “he who is to come”—the Antichrist—is “Titan.” Bear in mind that Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies around AD 180,[7] about ninety years after John wrote Revelation, and John’s disciple Polycarp was Irenaeus’ mentor. It’s possible that Irenaeus’ thoughts about the Antichrist might have come from John himself.
The bottom line is this: These entities have been riding across our world, acting as spies and warriors, bringing wars and plagues with them during times of great stress. However, these have been but Braxton-Hicks contractions—prodromal events presaging the final ride.
Soon, these Titans will bring back their own brand of chaos and havoc to our space/time continuum.
As you read this, a division of Thanatos’ therion soldiers surround you. It’s called COVID-19, but this “little beast” has lots of friends who’ve yet to be deployed. They linger upon your surfaces, sit beside your children, and ride upon the molecules of the air like hellish ghosts with tiny teeth.
We are at war, but most of us have no idea that we stand upon a battlefield. If you consider the ultimate origin of all these therion beasts, then you’ll understand the nature of our enemy. It is spiritual at its rotten core. Thanatos is an entity. Hades is an entity. And therion are supernaturally organized battalions who follow Death.
[1] Dan Vergano. “1918 Flu Pandemic That Killed 50 Million Originated in China,” National Geographic, Jan. 2014. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/, retrieved 9/15/20.
[2] Amar Annus. “The God Ninurta in the Mythology and Royal Ideology of Ancient Mesopotamia,” State Archives of Assyria Studies, Volume XIV (Helsinki: The Neo‐Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002), pp. 111–112.
[3] The name of the Ditanu/Tidanu tribe is probably based on the Akkadian word for “bison” or “bull.” Nicolas Wyatt. “À la Recherche des Rephaïm Perdus,” in The Archaeology of Myth (London: Equinox, 2010), p. 53.
[4] Amar Annus. “The Antediluvian Origin of Evil in the Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions,” in Dietrich M./Loretz O., eds., Ideas of Man in the Conceptions of the Religions (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012), p. 25.
[5] Wyatt, op.cit., p. 55.
[6] Brian B. Schmidt. Israel’s Beneficent Dead: The Origin and Character of Israelite Ancestor Cults and Necromancy (doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1991), pp. 158–159.
[7] Gustaf Wingren. “Saint Irenaeus,” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Irenaeus, retrieved 8/12/20.
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