Oh, my goodness, how clickbait can a title get! What a hoot! But you must admit you thought it all along, didn’t you? Didn’t you? The only thing that stopped you saying it was knowing that Palantir is watching your every move….
Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.
On 15 September, Peter Thiel will start a four-part series of lectures “exploring the biblical figure of the Antichrist—through the lenses of science, theology, history, politics, and literature”. The hosts are Michelle Stephens and Michele Chinn Fahey from the new group Acts 17 Collective. Acts 17 Collective aims to bring Christianity to the tech community of the Bay Area San Francisco. The very perky Stephens is interviewed in Christianity Today, where she states that many people didn’t know about Peter Thiel’s Christian Faith, how rigorous and intellectually stimulating it is. My first reaction was to consider that Thiel would reveal at the end of the lecture series that he is in fact the Antichrist and thus bring on the end times. Lol lol lol. But life is not that simple a narrative, and we have been living in the end times for nearly four thousand years, since Zoroastrianism came into being. You’d think we’d be used to it by now.
So, let’s have a brief look at the Antichrist. Firstly, in 1 John and 2 John in the New Testament, antichrists are presented as those who oppose Christ, and who are deceivers. Paul in Thessalonians talks about a lawless one, who became identifies with one Antichrist, and also about some restraining force or person. The idea of one person who is the Antichrist evolves over time, and becomes a part of prophecy. Now, the Antichrist is the opposite of Christ, a perfectly evil person, controlled by Satan who indwells in him, as God indwells in Christ. Speculation about the identity of the Antichrist has been around since Irenaeus, who tried to calculate who it might be using numerology. Many Popes have been accused of being Antichrists, as have many US presidents (including the present one). Sometimes women are accused of being the Antichrist: Hillary Rodham Clinton, of course, Oprah Winfrey, and Kamala Harris. And, while we are cherchez-ing la femme, the Antichrist has a mother. Just as Christ’s mother was a virgin, the mother of the Antichrist is a whore. (Poor old sex workers, not only precariously employed in a dangerous and under-appreciated profession, but thought of as totally evil as well.)
Philip C Almond, in his article for the Conversation “Five Things to Know About the Antichrist” gives a useful potted history:
By the year 1000, the main outlines of the first of two narratives about the Antichrist was in place thanks to a noble-born Benedictine monk and abbot named Adso of Montier-en-Der (c. 920-92) who wrote a treatise on the subject.
According to him, the Antichrist would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan and born in Babylon. He would be brought up in all forms of wickedness by magicians and wizards. He would be accepted as the Messiah and ruler by the Jews in Jerusalem. Those Christians whom he could not convert to his cause, he would torture and kill.
He would then rule for seven years before being defeated by the angel Gabriel or Christ and the divine armies, prior to the resurrection of the dead and the Final Judgement.
The idea of the Antichrist has become more prominent as conservative Evangelical Christianity dominates Christian thought and gains political traction. Nowadays, he is a figure within the Christian fold, rather than an outsider like Osama Bin Laden. Sometimes the Antichrist is also seen as a trend or idea. He is also supposed to be a world leader with supernatural powers: proponents of this idea were Jerry Falwell the televangelist, and the LaHayes in the Left Behind series of novels, where he was a politician called Nicolae Carpathia (seriously!) who took over the United Nations. This ties into conservative conspiracy theory-style fears about the UN, about world government and the undermining of national sovereignty, by which we read US sovereignty.
Donald Trump is variously thought of as the Antichrist, but also a character called the Last World Emperor. I hinted previously at a personage who is an obstacle to the Antichrist, and the Last World Emperor is possibly that personage. The idea is a ruler, who is not necessarily a good person or a good Christian, is used by God to prepare the way for the final days, with the rapture, the seven years of tribulation, and the triumphant return of Christ. Here is Thomas Lecaque, writing for the Washington Post back in 2019:
The Last World Emperor originates in the apocalyptic sermon known as “Pseudo-Methodius,” written in Syriac between 685 and 690 after the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The prophecy speaks of a Byzantine or Roman king who would lead a successful war against the forces of Islam and establish a new era of peace. That calm would hold for a decade, at which point the forces of “Gog and Magog” would attack. Instead of resisting them, the king would travel to Mount Golgotha to lay down his crown, fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel and setting the stage for the Second Coming and a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil. The Last World Emperor and Daniel differ most notably in that the former demands a flawed secular hero as the champion. It therefore offers a model that allows the religious to cast secular political leaders as apocalyptic heroes, regardless of their personal failings.
Donald Trump has been regarded, especially by the QAnon set, as a figure similar to the Last World Emperor: God chooses a man, who may especially be immoral or compromised, to be a cosmic tool, a sign of God’s power in that God can work through whomever God likes, and proof that God works directly through history and political events. Trump’s advent is divinely inspired, a sign that the end times are upon us. Trump is more than human; he is the man of his times in Traditionalist terms, he is a cipher for the workings of destiny. He is inevitable.
Adso of Montier-en-Der, who wrote a popular book about the Antichrist in the tenth century CE, also mentioned the Last World Emperor as being Frankish. That chimes quite nicely with the role of the Crusaders as holy warriors in the Cosmic War, and resonates even now as far right writers invoke the Crusades and Crusader-adjacent ideas and characters in their dreams of conquering Islamists and saving white Europe. All these ideas are not logically connected, exactly, but they chime and rhyme and vibe. Oh my god! It’s all connected!
So, there we have it, and unlike Peter Thiel, I will charge you nothing at all. I don’t know what he charges for his lecture series, but I suspect I am not invited, so I won’t speculate too much.
Actually September is a busy month for the Cosmic War. The Velocirapture is due to take place on 23 or 24 September, according to numerous TikToks and YouTube videos and even bits of r/Christian. This seems to relate to the yearly Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah, which some eschatologically-minded Christians have appropriated as the Feast of Trumpets, and related it to the return of Christ and the beginning of the seven-year Tribulation.
We will see.
Thank you for reading this small piece of nonsense. I have pressing family issues currently, and while I am still reading a bit, I don’t have the mental bandwidth for writing much. I will write when I can. Ma te wa!
Further: I am indebted to Marco Visconti for alerting me to this lecture. He writes about Thelema and other forms of magic, a thinker worth following. The picture is Pope XXII the Papal Antichrist.
