The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from right to left: Invasion, War, Famine, and Epidemic. (By Victor Vsnetsov, 1887. Public domain.) Horses that died in Pancho Villa’s raid in Columbus, New ...

Coined by psychologist Dr. John Gottman, the Four Horsemen are named after a metaphor in the Bible that signaled the “end of times”—conquest, war, hunger, and death.

The Book of Revelations wrote of four plagues unleashed upon the earth as Four Horsemen. The first was a charismatic horseman on a white steed, carrying the bow of Invasion, and the crown of Conquest.

And the Four Horsemen—the Biblical war, pestilence, death and conquest—gallop across the sky at intervals like a belly-clenching commercial for stomach pills. Of the actors, only Boyer, who ...