On the End Times and the Antichrist

A theory

This post envisions a scenario of the End Times and the Antichrist based on historical trends and psychological incentives toward ever-increasing centralization and control.

Welcome back.

I previously wrote a post about how upcoming central bank digital currencies (CBDC) will be combined with a ubiquitous woke AI spying on everyone’s electronic data to form the rough equivalent of the biblical Mark of the Beast, which I called the digital panopticon. I think that post was successful because the pieces are already in place, the evidence sharable and it’s already being implemented on a smaller scale. All it needs is a triggering event such as World War 3, an enormous stock market crash, or a terrorist attack (Cyber Polygon?) to roll out comprehensively, providing the pre-determined “solution” to the artificial crisis. Such a shift will also mark an end to growth-centered capitalism and slow-moving first world erasure, applied not just throughout the white West but also in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and the inception of a formalized boots-on-face tyranny, which is now required for elite survival because of how the internet pierces false establishment narratives.

This post aims to take the biblical Mark of the Beast theme further: into the realm of the End Times and the Antichrist. I am neither a biblical scholar nor can this topic be covered to the extent it deserves to be within a single Substack post, but nonetheless I’m interested in offering the theory in it’s broad strokes. It will arrive at religious conclusions based on certain historical and psychological understandings and the argument is not reliant on religious belief itself. As Robert Browning said, “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or else what's a heaven for?” I want to state that the following is an idea I’ve been playing around with; I do not necessarily subscribe to it. It is simply a possibility I am considering among others. The hope is that it may serve as food for thought and offer a perspective, especially to those outside of an exoteric Abrahamic religion framework, that has either not been previously considered or has otherwise been sneeringly dismissed out-of-hand as belonging to low status, closed-minded, backwater religious bigots.

Let’s start with a recent Note referencing a different but related topic: some of the far-right’s mono-causalism where they attribute everything wrong in the world to Jews. I wrote:

The monocausalists blaming Jews for everything wrong in the world is an over-simplification that I don’t agree with.

I am at least a quad-causalist: (1) the malevolent Jewish central bank owners parasiting off humanity, (2) the egalitarianism rooted in Christianity that allowed this parasitical system to develop, (3) humanity's trends toward ever-increasing centralization and decrease of autonomy and privacy, and (4) underneath it all the Demiurge who loves torturing God souls for nefarious purposes. But there's lots of other reasons for things generally; over-simplification is a useful heuristic, but this is a complicated world.

Rurik Skywalker

and

aux playing@radio phanærozoic

offered pretty similar pushback here and here, basically arguing that either the first three or all four of these tie directly into the monocausal argument. I responded to them, but on reflection I thought it was worth elaborating on further, which will then lead into this post’s topic.

Let’s begin with a broad story about human history.

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Human history as ever-increasing centralization

For almost all of humanity’s history our species was comprised of small hunter gatherer tribes. We roamed the land and the men hunted and made war while the women raised children, cooked and foraged for fruits and nuts. These tribes were small and egalitarian and the tribe listened without reservation to it’s leader, who in turn was responsible for his actions and accountable to the tribe. This is why we have the Dunbar number where we can only maintain ~150 relationships and why so many people believe authority figures without pushback, leading to the NPC meme. Prior to technological society there was an intimate relationship between the ruler and the ruled, a symbiotic relationship of power and accountability that doesn’t exist today.

About ten thousand years ago, for reasons unknown, humanity underwent the neolithic agricultural revolution where humanity discovered agriculture and became sedentary, along with domesticating animals. This resulted in major population expansions and a rapidly changing genetic makeup, covered previously here. There were all sorts of new diseases that humanity endured and adapted to arising from living in crowded, unsanitary environments (which provided a huge advantage when conquering North America; 90% of Native Americans died of smallpox which they had no genetic resistance against), and a development of alcohol and lactose tolerances, for example. The neolithic agricultural revolution also resulted in major economic inequality that had not existed previously: in a hunter gatherer society everyone was fairly equal, but in sedentary agricultural communities a king could demand the excess production of farmers under penalty of death. Those who resisted the king were killed and removed from the gene pool, as were violent or disruptive individuals who interfered with tax collections, leading to more docile populations over time.

This development of agricultural communities eventually gave way to cities, from there to the written word, and from there to the creation and dissemination of exoteric, left-brain, liturgical religions, which over time out-competed the right-brain, esoteric, experiential, shamanistic religions of the hunter gatherers (which I have significant sympathy for and interest in). They were successful in outcompeting shamanistic religion because esoteric experiential religions do not scale to size the way exoteric liturgical religions do, where you can have a priest telling the masses what to believe. Getting a large group to believe the same thing allowed a much larger group of people with similar ideas to outcompete smaller groups with much more individualistic beliefs.

What we see from this story is one of ever-increasing centralization over hundreds and thousands of years. Humanity went from small hunter gatherer tribes to being centralized in agricultural communities, which then gave birth to more centralized cities with much greater populations and religion centralized in written liturgical forms in order to scale for size and to centralize power in priests. These groups grew larger and larger because it’s easier and safer to cooperate with others instead of fight to the death over resources, and also because larger entities are both stronger and create economies of scale in a way that smaller communities don’t. This centralization was therefore natural and inevitable.

We can look at the development of Christianity as an extension of this process: the switch from polytheism to monotheism centralized the realm of the Gods. It’s push for spiritual egalitarianism aimed to treat everyone within society more or less equally and therefore in a more standardized, efficient way. Christianity had certain developments that aided strongly in this process: it’s belief in Heaven and Hell, it’s division of the world into regional administrative areas headed by priests, and it’s focus on almsgiving as examples.

With respect to Heaven and Hell, belief in it allowed authorities to harass believers and spy on them in a way previously unheard of in tolerant, polytheistic Hellenism, where everyone ended up in Hades regardless of one’s actions. Under Christianity Christ was the way, the truth and the light, and every other religion was not merely wrong but plunged its followers into a demonic darkness and risked them eternal damnation.  To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive. With each individual soul the battlefield between Heaven and Hell, John Chrysostom preached that Christians should spy on each other and everyone else to root out sin.  They should watch their fellow congregation and when they found them sinning, they should hound them, shun them, report them.  Nowhere was to be beyond the gaze of the good Christian informer, even private homes.  “Let us be meddlesome and search out those who had fallen,” he advised in a sermon that encouraged Christians to hunt out those who were lapsing from true Christian ritual.  “Even if we must enter into the fallen one’s home, let us not shrink back from it.”  Lest any of his flock felt awkward about such an intrusion, Chrysostom reassured them that what they were doing was not done to harm others but to help them.  To turn on, hound and hunt their fellows in this way was not to harm them — it was to save them.

Indeed, when the last Hellenic emperor Julian the Apostate (who I covered previously here) tried to roll back Christianity and save Hellenism, he adopted the Christian centralization strategies of establishing regional Hellenic priests to be in charge of large administrative areas (as recounted by Gore Vidal, “I suggest we fight them on their own ground. I plan a world priesthood, governed by the Roman Pontifex Maximus. We shall divide the world into administrative units, the way the Galileans have done, and each diocese will have its own hierarchy of priests under a single high priest, responsible to me”) and offered alms to the poor (“I set about reorganizing…no, organizing Hellenism. The Galileans have received much credit for giving charity to anyone who asks for it. We are now doing the same. Their priests impress the ignorant with their so-called holy lives. I now insist that our priests be truly holy. I have given them full instructions on how to comport themselves in public and private”). Historian Tom Holland believes Christianity impacted Julian’s value system more than he acknowledged publicly or even probably to himself. So we can see here that these centralization and control technologies found in religion were highly adaptive; even Hellenism would have needed to adapt them if Julian had been successful!

Even though Christianity’s ascension ultimately helped result in the destruction of Roman art, science, architecture, etc. and plunged the world into a much more decentralized Dark Ages which lasted hundreds of years, humanity eventually came out of this process ready for more centralization and control given the egalitarianism that had taken hold in the prior centuries, which would allow governments to treat giant populations equally in standardized processes. One step back, two steps forward on a long enough timeline. While humanity’s centralization processes have undergone long reverses that lasted depending on the region for hundreds of years, judging from this story, they should be seen as eras of consolidation and change necessary for even more control in the future. This can also be seen in how technology developed over time.

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Technological innovation as hyper-increases in centralization

First, let’s define technology. “Technology” as used herein means the technical processes that create efficiencies for standardized, expected outcomes. Picking up a rock and bashing in your enemy’s skull is a use of technology. Lighting a fire is technology. The benefits of technology are that it allows one to dominate others who are less technologically advanced. A man with an iron sword will defeat a man with a bronze sword. A man with a steel sword will defeat a man with an iron sword. A man with a gun will defeat a man with any sword, etc. Because people do not enjoy being dominated, there is a constant and ever-present competitive arms race for stronger and better technologies. When China resisted England shoving opium down it’s throat, England went to war and forced China to accept the opium and then to pay for the cost of the wars (the family behind it, the Sassoon’s, remains ultra-wealthy to this day). China didn’t like that very much and they were in the right, but no matter; England’s technology was better, they won and China had to suffer the consequences. So what we can say is that technological advancement is always going to happen; the luddite Kaczynski’s analysis was wrong. Technology may have terrible things associated with it - it does! - but technological advancement is inevitable regardless (one can argue that technology advances can be steered and directed, of course).

Now, technology is limited by the traditions, beliefs, culture, and religions of a people. This is because technology causes unforeseen changes in society, which can be disruptive and unpleasant and may therefore be resisted. As an example Rome had invented water mill technology but did not make widespread use of it; they were based on a slave economy and either could not envision or received too much pushback from slave-owners for widespread implementation of such a radical technology. But because a higher-tech society will dominate a lower-tech one, the long-term trends are to discard tradition, belief, culture, and religions in order to effectively pursue technological advancement, which is what we see today. Interestingly, increases in technology are occurring at a faster and faster pace as humanity develops. As those prior roadblocks to technical advancement withered and died, people’s willingness to adopt new technologies occurs at an increasingly faster and faster pace. Rene Guenon in his The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, previously covered here and here, notes how time speeds up and technology advances more rapidly in this age, which he calls the Kali Yuga. Ernst Junger also recognized this process, reviewed by

Michele di Adelaide

here.

Let’s continue with our story after the rise of Christianity and the decline of Rome. After Rome fell and Catholicism arose the West entered the Dark Ages, which lasted many hundreds of years. Increases in technology began in earnest after Muslims reintroduced Aristotle to the West, whose works had almost been entirely purged during Christianity’s ascension. Aquinas’s integration of Aristotlean logic into Catholicism paved the way for the Renaissance and massive increases in technological innovation. Inventions during the Renaissance included the compound microscope, the telescope, the thermometer, the barometer, the air pump, greatly and improved clocks, and the world was discovered by Columbus, Vasco de Gama and Magellan.  Manuscripts of the Hellenists were unearthed and translated.  Many of the schools of the ancient world flourished again.

Technological innovation sped up global centralization efforts and standardized people’s thoughts. Gutenberg’s printing press made the communication of ideas cheaply available to the public and led to Protestantism taking power out of the hands of the Catholic Church. The wide dissemination of the written word made people more similar via written propaganda. Tocqueville described the NPC meme in 1895: "What is still more strange is that all these men, who kept themselves so apart from each other, had become so much alike that it would have been impossible to distinguish them if their places had been changed." He was talking about the effects of reading books mass-produced by the printing press. The effects of the printing press then gave rise to the modern nation state by tying larger groups of people together via ideologies and propaganda in ways that were previously not possible. The world transitioned from a world controlled by kings to a world controlled by the owners of mass media and banking, but one which worked carefully, indirectly, and in the shadows away from the potential outrage of the masses. This system of indirect control gave rise to ever-expanding managerialism, which

N.S. Lyons

commented on in a recent post where he wrote:

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality….

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

The extremely bloody wars of the 20th century, along with further increases in communications and propaganda technologies (telegraph, phone, internet, television) gave rise to this managerial state, as well as the United Nations, global economic and military groupings like the United States’s worldwide military and cultural domination and the Soviet Union, along with smaller economic units like the European Union and NAFTA. In the current era we are seeing further integration into almost Orwellian continental worldwide blocks through forced immigration and increased trade akin to this:

So one of the things that the reactionary nationalist right gets wrong is that they want to return to a bygone era of nation states; they do not see the story of humanity as one of ever-increasing centralization and control. The nation state was a product of technological innovation and it was rendered obsolete by further increases in technological innovation and control.

If these four Orwellian-type zones are formalized and fully integrated, would that be the last form of centralization and control by our elites? Not likely. Perhaps there would be further attempts to integrate into a simple One World government. Perhaps there would be further attempts to control worldwide populations on an individual level. Perhaps the control gets so extreme they simply wipe out most of the world’s population (they take up too many natural resources, as Yuval Harari argues) and blend the remaining population into a permanent 500 million or one billion slave class to be used for medical and sexual exploitation. Perhaps humanity itself is simply the biological bootstrap for A.I. to take over the world or galaxy.

But there is another possibility: the world centralizing in Greater Israel according to biblical prophecy.

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Biblical end times

One of the possibilities of the final stage of centralization and control is the Greater Israel project, the rebuilding of the Third Temple and the return of the “Messiah”. As the central bank owners are mostly or entirely Jewish, since it’s inception Israel - directed by Lionel Rothschild via the Balfour Declaration - has been treated unlike any other country on the planet, i.e. it is allowed ethnic and religious exceptionalism in a world that otherwise forbids it. What we are seeing today is astonishing in it’s rapidity:

1. Hamas is wiped out and Gaza’s population forced into the southern part of the strip (with steps being made to ship them out permanently),

2. Israel is about to annex the West Bank,

3. Hezbollah is totally decimated (with Israelis calling for settling southern Lebanon in opinion pieces in their newspapers and Israel secretly sending archaeologists to create Israeli claims for the area),

4. Iran, Israel’s last enemy, is sitting quietly and toothlessly in response even as its proxies are destroyed, its generals are assassinated, it’s president dies in a mysterious plane crash, and foreign dignitaries on its soil are murdered (as Iran is, like other so-called enemy countries like Russia and China, controlled by the central bank owners). Even Israel’s propaganda outlet the Jerusalem Post gloats about how weak Iran is.¹

5. Saudi Arabia wants to sign a peace treaty with Israel as soon as it can, just like Jordan and Egypt have done.

6. Syria is destroyed - Israel regularly bombs Assad’s remaining territory with no response and Israel/the U.S. are secretly sponsoring the Islamic attacks in Aleppo.

Two years ago it would have been impossible to believe that Israel would have completely destroyed its neighboring enemies and that Iran would be so toothless, but here we are, as

Rurik Skywalker

also points out here and here.

It was the 10/7 Hamas attack that set Israel’s extremely aggressive response in motion. Of course, Israel at minimum knew about the attack ahead of time and let it happen; there are plenty of reports about front-line soldiers reporting military build-up and being ignored. Are we supposed to believe that Israel had detailed knowledge of every aspect of Hezbollah’s chain of command to the point of placing explosive beepers and assassinating all twenty of its top leaders but it didn’t know that Hamas had a military build-up right on the border? The concept is ludicrous. It was allowed and possibly even planned by Israel as a casus belli for wiping out Gaza to pave the way for oil and gas pipelines and the Ben Gurion canal and to remake the face of the Middle East.

The Greater Israel project won’t happen today or tomorrow - Israel doesn’t have the population for it yet - but in a couple more generations based on Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox birthrates?² What would stop it, perhaps an Iranian nuke? Jewish, Christian and Islamic messianism have prepared the Abrahamic world for the rebuilding of the Third Temple to usher in the End Times; whether or not biblical prophecy is real or not is irrelevant - what matters is the nature of belief itself, because belief can summon an egregore and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, even if there is no true biblical prophecy, if enough people believe in it then their beliefs can lead to such an outcome. According to Chabad, “One of the principles of Jewish faith enumerated by Maimonides is that one day there will arise a dynamic Jewish leader, a direct descendant of the Davidic dynasty, who will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and gather Jews from all over the world and bring them back to the Land of Israel. All the nations of the world will recognize Moshiach to be a world leader, and will accept his dominion.”

This seems to play into developing trends. With Greater Israel effectuated, the Third Temple rebuilt, with the CBDC/woke AI social credit score Mark of the Beast applied everywhere, and with extreme control technologies cutting out anyone from society who disobey, would that not be the right time to proclaim the Messiah and the End Times? This Messiah would be the apotheosis, the cumulation, of all the world’s power centralized in the hands of one man and his backers, formalized and open for all to see; the fulfillment of divine prophecy.

Antichrist in the Catalan Atlas (1375). The label reads: "Antichrist. He will be raised in Goraym of Galilea, and at the age of thirty he will start to preach in Jerusalem; contrary to the truth, he will proclaim that he is Christ, the living son of God. It is said that he will rebuild the Temple."

At the same time, anti-semitism is rising quickly in the West as it’s quality of life dramatically decreases into neoliberal feudalism - would that stop this project, or perhaps advance it in accordance with “gather[ing] Jews from all over the world and bring them back to the Land of Israel”? Is there a time limit involved, is there enough competence to pull this off? Is that why it seems like our elites are sprinting ahead to enact their schemes?

This leads into the next question: what happens if or after this Messiah occurs? Where can power centralize further after it is entirely centralized? The Tower of Babel rebuilt - then what? One can envision the cumulation of thousands of years of human history which labored so hard toward centralization: crystallized into it’s maximum form, there would be only one direction left for humanity to go, where it would have to go as change is inevitable in life: de-centralization and a loss of centralized power, permanent, in the long term. The Kali Yuga would be over; it would be an entirely different world.³ Under this conception the Messiah would be revealed as the Antichrist; psychologically and spiritually, Carl Jung stated in his Answer to Job that the God figure of Christ must eventually result in it’s polar opposite, as God would need that experience in order to grow spiritually as well.

The Preaching of the Antichrist (1500-1504) by Luca Signorelli. A Jesus-like figure is preaching on the pedestal; note Satan is whispering in his ear.

Nikolai Berdyaev, too, believed this period of global technological subjugation would give way to a spiritual revolution which would accompany widespread dissolution of state power. The true Messiah would be the one who ends the centralized system and collapses the Tower of Babel. It wouldn’t be the Rapture with bodies disappearing into Heaven, but it would result in an entirely and radically new paradigm for living.

The energy released by such an event would be incalculable; the memory of pure maximized centralization and the horrors it would unleash onto the world’s population (which will/would be beyond our nightmares) would serve as an enduring reminder about the dangers of believing authority figures and trusting in ideology; it could usher in formally the Age of Aquarius, much as Jesus ushered in the Age of Pisces.⁴ As Jung wrote, “The astrological sign of Pisces consists of two fishes which were frequently regarded as moving in opposite directions. Traditionally, the reign of Christ corresponds to the first fish and ended with the first millennium, whereas the second fish coincides with the reign of Antichrist, now nearing its end with the entry of the vernal equinox into the sign of Aquarius.”

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Analysis

Would such a scenario outlined (and as stated at the start, it is not one I necessarily subscribe to) somehow justify all the horrors, the pain and suffering that came before and is yet to come? Would it redeem that suffering in the eyes, ears and hearts of those who lived through it and experienced it by giving meaning to it? How would it explain the Jewish role in world history - always at the forefront of disruptive revolution, of terrifying control and deceptiveness and insane will-to-power couched as “tikkun olam” in an inverted horror-simulacra? Would it show that the Jews, indeed, had an important if dreadful role to play in the ensuing drama?

Waiting for this or any other scenario to play out is, of course, a fool’s errand. Every generation since the time of Christ has thought that this would be the End Times; all were disappointed. The early Christians thought that the Antichrist would arise out of Rome and that the End Times were imminent; the stories told inspire and provide hope to each generation carrying their own cross today. There is so much we can do individually within our own power to further our individuation process (not to be confused with individualism) and try to build life balance without waiting for a magical new era to begin.

Still, it’s strange that we are living in a moment of such rapid technological change where it feels like it is heading to some sort of final cumulation, the crux of thousands of years of history which will likely be horrible. Does our placement as humans in this particular time and place give weight to the simulation hypothesis? Could this process have happened before, with the final trauma searing into our collective unconscious ala Jung and remembered as the Tower of Babel, Atlantis, Noah’s flood?

I hope you found this to be an interesting story. I’m not sure I necessarily buy it, but it’s an explanation worth exploring and wrestling with, and it does another thing: it offers long-term hope and perspective that if things get much worse, that there may yet be a dawn and a new day after the nightmares to come. On the flip side, just as everything on this plane contains both positive and negative elements within it, taking the theory too seriously could be de-motivating for action against globohomo in the present.

Thanks for reading.

1. From here: “It is evident that the succession and escalation of Israeli assassination operations against prominent Iranian leaders or Iran loyalists has not resulted in any significant cost to Israel; the reaction of the Islamic Republic did not exceed verbal threats and the firing of antiquated missiles – which were intercepted by Israel and its allies – to satisfy the psychological needs of the pro-Iranian public. 

These minimal consequences will encourage Israel to target Iran’s top leaders, including Khamenei himself.

It turns out Israel’s successive and escalating assassinations of prominent Iranian or pro-Iranian leaders have not, as of now, resulted in a cost that would compel the Israeli security establishment to discontinue of these bold operations, even if they hit the head of the Iranian regime.”

2. The ultra-Orthodox have the highest birthrates in the developed world, their population increased by 50% between 2009 and 2019, and per this report are projected to increase from 1.1 million to 6.2 million by 2064, a mind-boggling increase:

3. Rene Guenon came to the same conclusions, although he approached it from a different angle, discussed here. To him humanity is experiencing the “solidification” of the world as part of a cosmic cycle where energies increasingly descend from the higher levels of spirituality and connection to God down into the most secular materialism imaginable. Eventually the point is reached where it was not possible to become any more secular or materialistic, that spirituality had been entirely excised from people’s lives, and there would be nowhere left to go once that process completed except into a new paradigm, a new age where connection to God would be everywhere and the cycle of descent would begin anew.

4. Stephan Hoeller argues in an interview that Carl Jung, the greatest gnostic of our era, believes that we are entering, with great difficulty and pain, the Age of Aquarius where mankind’s spiritual abilities will be changed and uplifted in accordance with gnosis. He states (and is discussed further here and here):

[Hoeller]: Speaking of Jung, it is no doubt known to many that his mysterious and long-awaited book Liber Novus (The Red Book) has been published at last. One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.

Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.

There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.

In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.

I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous.