Cults, Mass Delusions, and The Antichrist
Mass delusions, especially if fear-based, dualistic theologies, have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies and manifesting their own meta-narratives. Right down to the sordid details. As per usual, toxic belief has created a toxic reality. Just as Evangelicals once thought Trump was the Second Coming, some among them are now starting to see him as the Antichrist.
I saw this happen in a local cult, whereby the leader, who went by the name of Vijaya, permitted his followers to worship him as the reincarnation of Christ. Then, when he inevitably disappointed them and, worse, abandoned them, deserted his ‘wife’ (who went by the name of ‘Dharma’), and his four children with her by running off to Hawaii with a fetching new young acolyte, they began to see him as Christ’s incarnated opposite, which is to say the Devil, or ‘Antichrist.’ (They also theorized that he was the reincarnation of a long line of demonic types, like Rasputin and Hitler.)
In the wake of his desertion, his followers, though thinking he was the Antichrist, didn’t have any other gig, so were continuing to raise funds by selling pencils and proselytizing on the streets of Victoria and Vancouver. They were like the rudderless members and limbs of a chicken, that keep running around for a bit, if unrestrained, fuelled by habitual nerve impulses, even once the head has been removed. One of the followers, a tall, red-headed, angry, disturbed and very violent former Catholic and an Irishman, was picked up by the cops in Vancouver plying his religious/graphic instruments trade, arrested and summarily deported back to Ireland.
Meanwhile, Vijaya had quit Hawaii and hightailed it back to England, his native land, where he was working as the manager of a brass shop in London. His angry and delusional follower tracked him down there within weeks of his own arrival in the U.K., surprising him at work in the shop, and in the absence of any other customers, cut off Vijaya’s head, carefully placed it in the lap of Vijaya’s corpse, which he had propped up against the sales counter, and called the police. He remains incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane to this day, to my knowledge. This all happened in 1987–88.
All this nonsense is a function of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of mentally and emotionally over-run, jingoistic, fundamentally Christian cult members, creating their own crazed reality, that the rest of us are subject to. The Book of Revelations by John of Patmos was a revenge fantasy aimed against the Roman Empire, the Great Satan, the ‘Beast,’ that had exiled him to the barren island, and at which he was royally pissed off. So he unloaded his foully weaponized arsenal of Christian nightmare Judgement scenarios of punishment and destruction, upon Rome, the city of as the ‘Seven Headed Beast’ and the empire as the Dragon, with the toxic spew that became the last book of the New Testament when the fuck-wits at the Council of Nicea (May to August AD 325, called by Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor) decided they needed a stick by which to chastise, terrorize and drive the faithful toward their ultimate goal of dominion in the minds, hearts, and imaginations of their flock.
It worked. It’s still working. And horror-scenario gold can be endlessly spun from its toxic strands. Weaponized nonsense that cycles as it’s own self-fulfilling prophecy in the fear-based excuse for cognition operative in the sub- and super-consciousnesses of millions of brainwashed and conditioned subscribers to the weaponized meta-narrative, with a deeply conditioned terror of Hell and the Devil operative at the foundations of their so-called ‘thinking.’ Trump, narcissistic or not, is no more the Antichrist that Hitler was — or Gorbachev, or Rasputin, or poor, hapless, headless Vijaya — any of the other scores of individuals pegged as Christianity’s bogeyman over the centuries.
There is no ‘Antichrist.’ There’s only a toxic, hugely influential narrative that’s making people sick in their millions. The supposed ‘Antichrist’ isn’t the enemy. Toxic ideology is. As per always. Every human experience is constructed. Even perception is culturally constructed. Ideology, which includes theology, certainly is. And the polarized, dualistic Judeo-Christian ideology of the Abrahamic Stem is currently the most toxic of constructed ideological world-views of the lot. Not least of all because it promotes our and the Earth’s utter annihilation as some kind of ‘holy’ good and ‘Second Coming of Christ,’ when, according to the Nicean Creed (also called the Apostolic Creed, and recited at the outset of every mass and most Christian Church services), as it’s the ideology’s manifesto and Statement of Belief, when, according to it’s ongoing, brainwashing tenets: “Christ shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”
