Next up in the ever expanding Black Lodge Encyclopedia, one of the more obscure characters (if the word "character" even applies): the White Horse.

The White Horse

Perhaps the most straightforward theory regarding the The White Horse is that it is a character foreshadowing death or impending danger. This equates the White Horse with the "pale horse of Death", one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Bible. The Log Lady's intro to episode 2.06 features a poem along these lines:

The White Horse is first seen during this episode by Sarah Palmer, before Maddy Ferguson is killed by Leland/Bob. In FWWM, Sarah sees the White Horse the night before Laura dies.

The White Horse a Lodge spirit?

There are some hints throughout the show that the White Horse may be a spirit of the White Lodge. In manner of appearance, the White Horse closely resembles Laura’s White Angel and the Giant:

* The three spirits always appear in front of a bright flashing light
* They are largely "white"
* They are strongly associated with (or seen by) a single person only
* They usually appear at a point near unconsciousness (death, sleep, drugs)

The Giant is seen only by Agent Cooper (maybe the Log Lady), the White Horse only by Sarah Palmer, and the White Angel only by Laura Palmer (also Ronette, however). Nevertheless, there is still an important difference between, say, the Giant and the White Horse (aside from the fact that the Giant is a giant, and the horse an animal, of course): the Giant inhabits the Elderly Waiter while the White Horse inhabits no-one as far as we can tell, unless we posit that the horse in fact possesses Sarah herself. This would be consistent with a role for the White Horse as a sort of spirit protector. When she sees the horse, she knows she will be safe from danger. On the other hand, the horse doesn’t necessarily have to inhabit Sarah Palmer. Remember the words of Philip Gerard in episode 2.06 (Demons). He is interrogated as Mike and presented with a police sketch of Bob:

"This is his true face, but few can see it; the gifted… and the damned."

Following Gerard’s comment, we might draw up a list of people who actually see BOB throughout Twin Peaks: Leland Palmer (damned), Laura Palmer (gifted and damned?), Maddy Ferguson (damned), Windom Earle (damned), Agent Cooper (gifted and damned), and Sarah Palmer, who appears to be the only one to be genuinely "gifted". This is corroborated by her final appearance in episode 2.21 (Beyond Life and Death), where she is able to psychically communicate messages from the Lodge. Therefore, Sarah Palmer is not only able to see BOB’s true face but also the White Horse, from time to time.

Returning to the earlier theory of possession, however, we might wonder how Sarah Palmer is able to receive messages from the Lodge in the first place. Perhaps she is merely "gifted" and therefore sensitive to paranormal vibes, OR she literally has one leg inside the Lodge as a consequence of being inhabited by the White Horse. Still, most of this is pure speculation.

The Horse as a state of denial

An interesting theory about the White Horse, credited to user "It Is Happening Again...", is that it may represent Sarah Palmer’s denial about the incest taking place in her family. On some level of her consciousness, she is aware of what is really going on between Leland and Laura but chooses not to face this reality. The White Horse represents the bliss of ignorance, an escape into temporary oblivion. The White Horse could quite literally be said to represent the elephant in the room in this case: the one thing she refuses to acknowledge. One may wonder to what extent she willingly allows herself to be drugged by Leland.

In many ways BOB fulfills a similar function as the White Horse, acting as a supernatural distancing device for the Palmer family to deny the horrors within their family (more on this in my entry on BOB). BOB and the White Horse are Sarah's most extreme strategies to cope with reality, however. From FWWM, we also gather that she has a habit of chain smoking. On the show, she uses Maddy Ferguson for a time as a substitute for Laura, possibly exacerbating her situation. She does not seem to recover until the death of Leland.

The White Lodge

Perhaps this is an ideal time to address the White Lodge. If anything can be gathered from the movie and the show it is that the forces of light seem woefully undermanned compared to the forces of darkness, and appear to be less powerful too. Furthermore, if we accept Hawk’s words on the White and Black Lodges, the majority of "souls" likely never achieve perfection and are probably destroyed in the Black Lodge. This idea is fairly consistent with Buddhist thought which holds that man is more or less trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, with pain and suffering (Garmonbozia?) in between. Nirvana is difficult if not outright impossible to attain.

Judging from Agent Cooper’s trip into the Black Lodge in episode 2.21 (Beyond Life and Death), the Black Lodge is a bit like George Orwell's Room 101, in that every person who passes through must confront his own worst fears. Most likely then, the White Lodge contains everyone’s deepest comfort. Throughout Twin Peaks and FWWM, several characters have or relate an experience that seems consistent with this thought: Laura Palmer, Major Briggs, the Log Lady and Catherine Martell, possibly also Agent Cooper but this is open for debate.

There seems to be almost unanimous agreement that the final shots of FWWM show Laura inside the White Lodge. We might wonder, however, how Laura Palmer got to the White Lodge in the first place. Hawk states that every soul must pass through the Black Lodge on the way to perfection, AND that the person must face his fears with perfect courage. Did Laura pass through the Black Lodge? Did she face her doppelganger? Or did she automatically bypass this test when she slipped on the green ring? Why or hows aside, what we see when Laura is in the White Lodge is the Red Room lit by bright flashing lights and the White Angel and Agent Cooper as her guardians nearby. This is Laura’s vision of happiness.

Of the Log Lady’s trip to the White Lodge we know very little, unfortunately. It appears that, when she was a child, she got lost in the woods for three days, once, and returned with a strange tattoo on her leg. This experience is similar to the one of Major Briggs, whose abduction does provide some problems, chiefly the hooded figure in the forest and the vision of him sitting on a throne in the jungle. Frankly, these scenes never struck me as particularly Lynchian and most likely shouldn’t be accepted as his conception of the White Lodge. In fact, in episode 2.01 Major Briggs relates a vision to Bobby which seems a lot closer to what the White Lodge might be like, a vision in which he visits his childhood house, a place of "radiant white marble" where he embraces his son and experiences a deep feeling of harmony and optimism. If the Major did travel to the White Lodge this is probably his vision of happiness.

Catherine Martell has a similar experience during the Packard Mill fire, which she reveals to Sheriff Truman upon her return. She claims that a "guardian angel" protected her while she was in the fire and that she was inexplicably transported from the mill to a place in the middle of Ghostwood; a place where she felt a deep fear. The following day, she began to walk and stumbled upon her childhood home where she spent the next several days in hiding.

Many of the above experiences feature some element or memory from childhood. The White Angel appears to be Laura's childhood conception of a protector spirit, a memory of innocence before her father/BOB started abusing her. Both Major Briggs and Catherine Martell find themselves in the house from their childhood. If Sarah Palmer ever reached the White Lodge, would she see the White Horse?

When Laura Palmer is in the White Lodge, she sees the Angel, and is guarded over by Agent Cooper

Actually that happens in the Red Room/Waiting Room - The Angel takes her to the White Lodge and you see her there in the very last scene with the end credits superimposed - She is surrounded by white when she is in the White Lodge. 

 i believe it has been established that both lodges, AND the waiting room all have the same look as the red room image. i think youre both saying the same things, just in wording it different. laura doesnt move from the chair that whole last scene, and the strobe lights seem to be universal to the lodges, so im not sure i see the logic that the strobe lights are symbolic of the white lodge. i think the angel is much more so.

also, dont forget the scene of briggs in the stone chair in the jungle the begins the episode after he returns from his disappearance, from what some have called the white lodge, tho the fact that his only memory of it is a giant owl(who is symbolic of BOB throughout the series) makes me wonder if in fact he went to the black lodge, or even both. there was that shot of hooded figure before briggs disappears, which, if you believe  hawk, that figure would be 'the dweller on the threshold', another lodge figure with little context. but by confronting it without fear, ones supposed gains entrance to the white lodge. and remember the log lady has a strange tatoo that appear after she had disappeared in the woods one time(and this wasnt the only time it happened to her). maybe she has made a similar journey to the major's.

re:white horse
in the past horse was sometimes slang for heroin, possibly the drug leland slips her.

It has also been referenced with the white horse being a symbol of drugs with Sarah being drugged and all. 

If you can do one of these on the white horse, please do one on Jimmy Scott, the electrician, and also whoever the shadowy hooded figure is when Major Briggs disappears.  Also, the main one I am waiting for is the demon himself, BOB.

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

I usually put the longer ones on hold because they're well, longer to write :) I still have additional theories to add to the MFAP's page.

As for Jimmy Scott, I don't think there is much to say. The song Sycamore Trees is just a way to render an otherwise straightforward scene (Cooper enters the Lodge) more poetic and surreal. The same is done in Mulholland Drive, when Diane visits Club Silencio. The song Llorando really has no point, other than to evoke Diane's regrets (and crying) in a less direct, more poetic way. Remember also that "where we're from, there's always music in the air." Music can be heard throughout the entire Black Lodge scene in episode 29.

If I really had to make a stretch about the Jimmy Scott character, I might suggest that he and the Jumping Man are one and the same person. Both appear to fullfill a somewhat ceremonial function, dancing or singing. And both are played by a black actor. The Jumping Man also holds a wooden sceptre in his hand, while Jimmy Scott has a microphone.

On the other hand: the Jumping Man has a red suit with a tie, while Jimmy Scott has a black suit with a bowtie. Finally, if they are indeed meant to be the same character, I see no reason why Jimmy Scott couldn't have played the Jumping Man in FWWM, unless for some reason, he was unavailable, which would be a very good reason why the Jumping Man is masked in the first place...

So there you have it... :)

Jimmy Scott portrayed the minstrel welcoming Dale Cooper to the Black Lodge. Nothing more, nothing less. Great singer, though 

  Minstrel 

A minstrel was a medieval European bard who performed songs whose lyrics told stories about distant places or about real or imaginary historical events . .

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper

I have no clue at all, I'm afraid.

Probably some poor sap who, like the Woodsmen, wandered into the Lodge more or less by accident. Perhaps the Electrician was working on the power lines of Fat Trout Trailer Park when he accidentally picked up the current from the Lodge spirits, and vanished with them.

 Jimmy Scott provided Cooper the lyrics to Sycamore Trees to dissect

I love the Black Lodge Encyclopedia, Sourdust!  Maybe once this is finished, you can follow up with the highly anticipated sequel Deer Meadow Encyclopedia!! (I'm not joking!)

"Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. Like this."  -Dale Cooper