… or Kali yuga

From Winter Is Coming, and No Election Can Stop It

The old descriptions of that age are unnervingly exact. A man will be
measured by his money and nothing else. Law will go wherever power
goes. Holiness will be a performance. The rulers will be thieves with
better titles.
The Frenchman René Guénon put it into a phrase that is hard to shake
off: in the last age, quantity devours quality. Whatever cannot be
counted is thrown out. You cannot count honour, so it is traded for a
poll rating; you cannot count a man’s depth, so it is traded for his net
worth. The coinage tells the same story; it once carried the face of a
god, and now it is a number that believes in nothing.

This is the point where my Christian readers and my heathen readers usually drift to opposite walls of the room. So let me set down one thing that belongs to both of them and to neither.

Two traditions that never met, and never traded so much as a word, drew the end of the long winter as the same image.

In the Hindu telling, at the blackest hour of the last age, a rider called Kalki comes down on a white horse, a sword of fire in his hand, and cuts down the false kings who dared to dress as kings; and out of his coming, the age of truth begins again.

In the Book of Revelation, at the end of all things, the sky opens, and there is a white horse, and its rider is called Faithful and True, and a sword comes out of his mouth to strike the nations, and across his robe is written: King of kings, and Lord of lords.

Is this some abstraction of the same horse, sword and rider?:

They’ve come at the end of a rotten age to put it to the blade and start the world over.

I am not claiming a secret shared scripture, of course. But the same shape keeps surfacing in unconnected minds whenever they try to picture the end of a dying age.

The rider + The white horse + The sword

Heathen or Christian, you are looking at one thing from two sides:

The wheel’s deep winter giving way to spring, or the broken world meeting its rightful King.