This week, Beyoncé released her seventh studio album, Renaissance. Soon—if the hidden messages in the album’s various promotional images are correct—the end days foretold in Revelation will come.
Or, at least, that’s what some folks believe. Social media has told us for years that Beyoncé is a member of the Illuminati. Now, the internet is adding an addendum: These days, Beyoncé is not necessarily trying to run the world—she’s just trying to tell us it’s ending.
It started with the horse imagery. The cover of Renaissance is a striking shot of a mostly nude, be-heeled Beyoncé on top of a silver horse. The cover of this month’s British Vogue is a striking shot of Beyoncé riding a red one. Newsweek explains the rest: “In July 2020, Beyoncé sat atop a white horse in the Black Is King movie and in August 2022 she posed with a black horse for Harper’s Bazaar.” It’s a simple enough equation: Beyoncé. Horses. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—one riding a white horse, one a red one, one a black one, and one a pale one. Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. When they show up, it means our earthly world is over.
At least one TikToker explained that Beyoncé was tipping her hand re: the impending literal actualization of the Bible’s Book of Revelation (a third of the world dying immediately and all that) because “they [vaguely defined “they,” presumably Illuminati-adjacent] have to tell you what’s next on the agenda.” If you want to dig deeper, you can lose yourself in a 42-minute YouTube video promising that “Beyoncé OPENS Demonic PORTALS in JULY.” (There’s only a few days left in the month; she better hurry up.)
The writer Titi Shodiya, who’s analyzed Beyoncé’s career on the podcast Dissect, says the Beyoncé Apocalypse era is a natural continuation of the Beyoncé Illuminati era. “She’s so good at what she does, she has so much influence and power, everything she does is so exquisite,” Shodiya says. “Most people don’t understand how a person can get it right every time. In order to compensate for our own insecurities, we have to project. We say ‘It’s impossible. There has to be some kind of magic associated with it, or the Illuminati.’ But really, it’s because she works really hard, she’s really serious about her craft, she takes her time, and she surrounds herself with people that she trusts that are also very talented.”
Beyoncé is too good. She’s not fallible. She’s not really one of us. Sprinkle in the horses and the well-worn history of theorizing around the superstar, and it’s actually not that much of a leap to “Beyoncé is proselytizing the end of days.” Just to be clear with something this important, I ask the on-hand Beyoncé expert bluntly: So is Beyoncé telling us that the apocalypse is coming? “Nah, I don’t think so,” Shodiya laughs. But “I’m open to other interpretations.”
This also feels like a dramatic spin on the old trope of asking your favorite celebrity to kill you. As The Cut’s Gabriella Paiella reported in 2019, fans of everyone from Sandra Oh to Timothée Chalamet have asked their beloveds to run them over or smack them with a hammer. As an editor named Brandy Jensen (the hammer-smack desirer) quite rationally explained to Paiella, there’s something to be said for the idea that “the ideal resolution of a crush is to be completely obliterated by it and suffer no longer under the terrible demands of desire.”
And that was all before the pandemic. Maybe, nowadays, some of us don’t just want our idol to end us—we want our idol to end everything. Maybe we already feel like the world is collapsing; maybe we’re secretly happy to have confirmation from as hallowed a source. @jvanmaraj2: “Beyoncé riding the four horses of the apocalypse, we are about to be slayed.” @jestom: “love Beyoncé as horsewoman of the apocalypse. end us queen.” Even some of the sincere conspiracists who fear Beyoncé’s dark powers seem to be welcoming her signaling of the Lord’s smiting of it all. In her interpretation of the horse material, YouTuber Shelby Ellimac referenced a meme that says empires generally last 250 years, and that America is 245 years old. “The United States is definitely an empire and it’s definitely time,” she said. “We need a reset.”
But as we wait for Beyoncé’s further communications on the end days, it may also be worth taking a glance at Equestrian Living, which recently posed a very provocative question: “What is Beyoncé’s story with horses?” Equestrian Living then went back to March 2004, when freshly solo Beyoncé “performed in her hometown of Houston at the Livestock Show and Rodeo” and pulled up on a horse to “one of the largest livestock exhibitions and rodeos in the world.”
As to that very tantalizing question—“What is Beyoncé’s story with horses?”—the truth may not be all that apocalyptic: She’s from Texas, and she likes horses.
