Catholic Commentary
The Third Trumpet: The Star Wormwood and the Poisoned Waters
10The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from the sky, burning like a torch, and it fell on one third of the rivers, and on the springs of water.11The name of the star is “Wormwood.” One third of the waters became wormwood. Many people died from the waters, because they were made bitter.
Revelation 8:10–11 describes the third angel's trumpet sounding as a great burning star named Wormwood falls on one-third of the world's freshwater sources, poisoning them and causing many deaths. The star's name evokes Hebrew covenantal language about apostasy and bitter judgment, signaling spiritual corruption at the source of divine truth rather than mere environmental destruction.
When the source is poisoned, drinking from it kills you — and the deepest poison is false teaching that corrodes the springs of living truth.
Revelation 8:10 — The Falling Star
"The third angel sounded" continues the sevenfold trumpet sequence (Rev 8–9), each blast unleashing a plague structurally modeled on the ten plagues of Egypt (Ex 7–12). The "great star" (Greek: astēr megas) is described as "burning like a torch" (Greek: lampas), a word that elsewhere in Revelation evokes brilliance and authority (cf. Rev 4:5). Unlike the meteoric rock imagery of the second trumpet (Rev 8:8), this is explicitly a named, torch-like entity — a detail of enormous significance. Stars in biblical apocalyptic literature consistently refer to angelic or spiritual powers (cf. Rev 1:20; Isa 14:12; Job 38:7); a star that falls almost universally signals the defeat or rebellion of such a power.
The star "fell on one third of the rivers and on the springs of water" — that is, on freshwater systems, the very source of life. The fractional "one third" (repeated throughout the trumpet sequence) signals a partial judgment: severe enough to warn, restrained enough to permit repentance. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1040) reminds us that divine judgment is always ordered toward ultimate justice and mercy; these partial judgments in Revelation are properly read as penultimate, not final.
Revelation 8:11 — The Name Wormwood
That the star bears a name is theologically charged. In Scripture, to name something is to define its nature and claim authority over it (cf. Gen 2:19–20). The name "Wormwood" (Greek: Apsinthos; Hebrew cognate: la'anah) refers to the Artemisia absinthium plant, an intensely bitter herb used in the ancient Near East as a figure for suffering, punishment, and especially the spiritual consequences of moral betrayal. In Lamentations 3:15, 19, the prophet describes Jerusalem's devastation using wormwood as the taste of God-abandoned grief: "He has filled me with bitter things; He has sated me with wormwood." In Deuteronomy 29:17–18, Moses warns that an apostate Israelite is a "root that produces wormwood and gall," poisoning the covenant community around him.
The poisoning of "one third of the waters" means that the sources — springs, headwaters, the generative origins of rivers — are struck. This is more devastating than the fouling of surface water, for the corruption goes back to the root. Many die "because the waters were made bitter" (Greek: epikranthēsan). Death from water is a particularly arresting image in a world that associated flowing water with life, blessing, and divine presence (cf. Ps 46:4; Ezek 47:1–12; Rev 22:1–2). To have water turned against you is to have the most basic condition of life become lethal.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers were alert to the typological resonance with the ordeal of Marah (Ex 15:23–25), where Israel found bitter water in the wilderness and cried out to God, who sweetened it with a piece of wood — widely read by Fathers including St. Justin Martyr and St. Augustine as a type of the Cross transforming the bitterness of sin into the sweetness of redemption. What Christ healed, Wormwood re-poisons. The star's fall also echoes the fall of Satan in Isaiah 14:12 ("How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn!"), a text applied to the devil's primordial fall by Origen (De Principiis I.5.5) and confirmed in Luke 10:18. Many patristic and medieval commentators — including St. Bede (Explanatio Apocalypsis) and the Venerable Caesarius of Arles — identified Wormwood with a great heresiarch or with heresy itself, reasoning that no plague is more deadly to souls than the corruption of divine truth at its source. This is not an eccentric reading: it is structurally coherent, since the "springs of water" in Revelation's own symbolic vocabulary represent the life-giving Word (Rev 7:17; 21:6; 22:1, 17).
Catholic tradition offers several converging lenses through which Wormwood becomes theologically profound rather than merely terrifying.
The Poisoning of Truth as Spiritual Death. St. Bede the Venerable, commenting on this passage, identifies the falling star as a figure for those who once shone with grace and authority in the Church but became instruments of bitter false teaching, "corrupting the streams of holy Scripture." This resonates with the Catechism's teaching that Sacred Scripture and Tradition together form "one sacred deposit of the Word of God" (CCC 97); to poison the springs of interpretation is an assault on the very means by which the faithful receive life. Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (2010, §44), warned against readings of Scripture severed from the living Tradition of the Church, precisely because they render the Word bitter and undrinkable rather than life-giving.
Apostasy and Bitterness. The Council of Trent (Session IV) addressed the corruption of scriptural interpretation as one of the gravest dangers to the faithful. The wormwood motif — bitterness born of turning from God — maps precisely onto what the Catechism calls "voluntary apostasy" (CCC 2089): a full and deliberate repudiation of the faith once held, which produces in the soul a spiritual barrenness akin to poisoned ground.
Sacramental Resonance. Water in Catholic sacramental theology is not merely symbolic but ontologically transformative — the matter of Baptism, the instrument of regeneration (CCC 1213–1214). The contamination of springs thus strikes at the sacramental imagination of the Church: what is meant to give new life instead brings death. This makes Wormwood's assault spiritually analogous to sacramental sacrilege — the perversion of holy things into instruments of harm.
The Cross as Antidote. Against this darkness, Tradition consistently holds up the wood of the Cross as the antidote to Wormwood, mirroring Moses casting wood into the waters of Marah. St. Paulinus of Nola wrote that Christ "sweetens every bitter water of the human condition with the wood of His Cross." This Christological inversion — the bitter made sweet, death made life — is the theological heart of the Easter Vigil's celebration of the Exsultet and the typology of Baptism.
Wormwood does not need to arrive dramatically to do its work. For a contemporary Catholic, this passage raises an urgent and specific question: What are the springs from which I drink? The imagery of poisoned headwaters is a striking metaphor for the slow corruption of the sources of spiritual formation — what we habitually read, watch, listen to, and whom we allow to shape our understanding of God and morality.
In an era of proliferating voices claiming to interpret Catholic faith — online media, ideological communities, dissenting theologians, and cultural commentators — the danger of drinking from bitter springs is immediate and concrete. The Catechism warns that faith can be corrupted not only by outright denial but by gradual distortion (CCC 2088–2089). A Catholic who feeds primarily on sources hostile to the Magisterium, or who replaces regular Scripture reading and prayer with endless consumption of contentious commentary, is drinking from waters that are being made bitter.
The practical antidote is deliberate return to the authentic springs: daily Scripture reading in communion with the Church's lectio tradition, reception of the sacraments (especially Confession and Eucharist), immersion in the writings of the saints, and fidelity to the Magisterium. The wood cast into the waters at Marah — the Cross — is accessed concretely through the sacramental life of the Church. Wormwood's power is real; so is the sweetness Christ offers in its place.