Moloch

Chapter Five: Moloch!

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! ....

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!”

C Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

The most difficult concept for we humans to comprehend ― particularly in this time of vanity in which we now live ― is our own Being. Not only are we in exile from Eternity, but we have lost all conscious memory of our Life there, the one and only true Life we possess, each of us and all of us together. Yet we-who-have-forgotten-even-who-we-are are destined ― very soon ― to remember that and much more. Because who-we-are is the I AM which comprehends all of the sensible Universe as well as the Infinity which penetrates and surrounds it.

And so our essentially collective nature is not only inescapable, it is the only thing about us that is Real. Our isolated ego-identities exist for a pitiful fragment of Time only as transient “virtual” entities, spontaneously coming and going in Space/Time like ripples on the surface of the sea. Still we live our lives in a consciousness which regards the ripples and not the wind which arouses them, the Chaos of the World and not the Logos of its Lord. In our religions we even imagine immortality for our individual souls, be it through the mode of past and future incarnations or in the form of an afterlife tailored to our own merits and desires. But it is not the fruit of the Tree of Life which dispenses such ego-immortality, but rather the fruit of the Tree guarded by the Serpent.

Indeed, the greatest act of all the Creator’s many acts of mercy toward us consists exactly in making us mortal ― that our exile from Eternity might not be endless, as it is for the Fallen Angels. In his Paradise Lost, Milton pictures these wretched immortals as Titans plummeting into a seething, fiery Ocean. Among Satan’s horde the poet sees one as holding the foremost rank:

First Moloch, horrid King besmear’d with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,

Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud

The children’s cries unheard, that passed through fire

To his grim Idol.^{^[1]}

Scripture records that King Solomon had barely completed the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem when he turned to raising altars to Moloch on the Mount of Olives.^{^[2]} It=s as if the realization of Man’s divine Body demands the concurrent manifestation of his body of Error ― the collective Man of Sin. That=s precisely why Christ chooses to speak prophetically of the destruction of the Temple and of the end of Time from the notorious vantage point of the Mount of Olives,^{^[3]} the “mount of corruption”^{^[4]} where the high place of Moloch had stood.

Just as the Chaos of the World ― embodied in Leviathan, the dragon of the waters^{^[5]} ― is ephemeral, so it is also self-annihilating. In other words, we may say that all temporal things exist only long enough to complete themselves, and, at the precise moment of their completion, vanish back into the oblivion from which they sprang. Hence, the Six Millennia of humanity’s Fall and Redemption are now culminating in the consummation of Man’s false Self, as William Blake prophesied:

Giving a body to Falsehood that it might be cast off for ever.^{^[6]}

While we perceive Moloch to be external to ourselves and demonize him, this very perception is part of the Falsehood which sustains the Beast. This Falsehood consists of the conviction that we are not One, but many, each with his/her own unique will and destiny; and so, for a Time, we are, like ephemeral bubbles rising from the Abyss. If we are centered in this fleeting and unreal ego-identity, then it is not Light and eternal Life which surrounds and infuses our World, but rather Death and corruption. The word “Eternity” itself then becomes for us synonymous with Death, and the end of Time looms before us as a horrible shadow of doom. Ironically, while all of the World’s institutional religions teach us to await the Coming of the God-Man with joyful anticipation, there is nothing that we dread more, because we rightly see in His refiner’s Fire the final terminus of our cherished insular existence.

Though our most ancient spiritual traditions uniformly teach that we are ― physically, mentally, and spiritually ― part of a single Being, we are all violently stripped of the divine garments which we wear at birth, all “frightened out of our natural ecstasy”, as the poet Allen Ginsberg aptly puts it. Thus, each of us “passes through the fire of Moloch” very early in life, in a traumatic process which the psychologists euphemistically style “socialization”. To be “socialized”, then, is to be initiated as a member of the body of the Beast, the abominable body of Moloch. As we shall see when we examine the mythological origins of Moloch, his allure is the false promise of ego-immortality, the wretched immortality of the Fallen Angels, the immortality of the vampire sustained by the blood of innocents.

Even in Moloch we remain One in the Body of the God-Man, because such is our true and Eternal nature. But this Reality of our Oneness is totally obscured by the immense body of Falsehood in which we are subsumed. Through the spiritual and mental rape to which the World subjects us early in life ― wiping away even the memory of our infancy before Moloch entered our soul ― our traumatized psyche withdraws within the walls of its ego-prison. And indeed, Moloch is a vast spiritual prison. As his body reaches its full manifestation in our Time of Tribulation, the tentacles of this prison grow to encompass the realms of mind and matter as well.

While mankind forfeited its sublime unity of Spirit with the Fall and exile from Eden, for most of the ensuing Six Millennia we humans retained, in varying degrees, at least the mental and physical remnants of the Oneness. These remnants found expression in concepts like “community”, “tradition”, and “culture”. In the ancient World, therefore, Aristotle could still write of a Man who was conscious of his collective, albeit secular, unity in the polis, or commonwealth. At that stage of history, humanity still experienced a direct organic nexus between and among individuals. This nexus depended, for its continued viability, on our shared memories of the divine Justice of the Creator.

But, beginning in the 19th Century, Moloch began to break through his restraints and decimate even these relics of the lost Oneness. Mankind’s instinctual yearning for a return to Eden was perverted into a worship of the all-powerful Nation-State, the tangible embodiment of Moloch. Its ideology proclaims that the Messiah will not come to restore us to Paradise in Eternity, but the State will establish a paradise on Earth.

Let me digress to make one point perfectly clear, because we read a plentitude of complacent nonsense on this score from the “religious Right” (an oxymoron if ever there was one). “Socialism”, in its various avatars, is not the source of this evil of which we are speaking. The World has stigmatized Socialism not because it deifies the State, but because it retains, if only in theory, the tattered threads of community and Justice that are so out-of-fashion nowadays. In place of community, Moloch has inserted the Corporation, the body which enjoys the legal status of a “person”, but a “person” created not by God but by the State! And in place of Justice, Moloch has planted a thick forest of prisons, so that his abominable body may at last take on the flesh of concrete and steel, and that his appetite for blood may be appeased by the consignment of wretched millions into his burgeoning bowels.

Like Solomon, we are today raising altars to Moloch throughout our land and eagerly feeding them with human lives ― the lives of those who have failed to become effective members of his abominable body. “But,” the reader will perhaps object, “these are criminals!” Yes, they are criminals, and need I observe that Jesus was a criminal? Or that the thief who is today with him in Paradise was a criminal? Or that all of the martyred saints and holy men and women of history have been considered criminals? “Let’s not be absurd,” my reader may retort, “the vast majority of criminals are not martyred saints but violent animals!” Hmm ... but isn’t it odd that a society which so exults in the vicious domination of the strong over the weak should be, at the same time, terrified by the impotent rage of its outcasts and misfits? Odder still that, within the infernal bowels of Moloch’s prisons, we do not find the purgation of animal violence, but rather its apotheosis, its codification as the paramount law of survival. We banish our brothers and sisters to these cruel confines because they are not violent enough, because they have not mastered the spiritual violence in which abides the true worship of and fealty to Moloch.

Pathetically, in our feeble minds we believe it is always “the Other” to whom we do these inhuman things; it is “the Other” who threatens our security, arouses our Fear. Having submerged our Oneness and excluded it from our conscious, “rational” thoughts, it festers in our unconscious psyche, breeding fantastic demons which seem to menace us from all directions. Prisoners in Moloch ourselves, we cannot feel safe until the World itself becomes one great Prison. And it is absolutely without exaggeration that I tell you we are fast approaching that Time ― the Time when the physical body of Moloch is complete and consumes within its guts the entire planet.

Man’s true nature, as we have said, compels his unity in God. As children, we wee all taught a “science” which sneered at the story of Genesis, ascribing it condescendingly to the incapacity of “primitive” minds to probe the complexities of the Universe. If we all descended from a common parentage, “science” assured us, those “parents” were microbes wriggling in the primordial ooze, or at best, some yet-to-be-discovered extinct species of primate. It=s surely a compelling “sign of the times”, therefore, when we read that Moloch’s own “science” has now uncovered genetic proof that we are all descended from one man and one woman. According to these recent findings, our common parents were humans who lived not millions, but mere thousands of years ago ― virtually “yesterday” on the scale of geological time.^{^[7]} It follows that we are not brothers and sisters in some abstract philosophical sense, but on the most elemental visceral level. We thus share a Communion which is not merely symbolic, but absolutely Real in flesh and blood.

But while the World still tolerates ritual enactments of this Communion, it strictly proscribes the conscious experience of the Oneness which the ritual implies. Since this Oneness is indelibly imprinted in the body and psyche of each one of us, however, it cannot be so easily denied, and we long, if only unconsciously, for the union which frees us from the prison of ourselves. The more violently this longing is suppressed, the greater the pressure which builds within us, leading to the social pathologies which are so prevalent in our day. Like a river whose principal channel is blocked, the energy of Oneness seeks and finds other outlets, some of them proving to be quite destructive to ourselves and others, such as compulsive sexuality, drug-induced ecstasies, and hysterical violence. It is always in our youth culture that these symptoms manifest themselves most vividly, because it is still free of the sophisticated dodges of adult society ― the sophistry which is the quintessential hallmark of Antichrist.

The collective human psyche is very susceptible to the delusion of the “Leader” as a substitute for (or projection of) our submerged visceral Oneness. And the further the atomization of our collective Being progresses, the more inevitable and imminent does this mass delusion become. Over the past thirty years, this trend has become particularly appalling. As our throw-away society has hastened to discard all its remaining pretenses of brotherhood and community, it has at the same time jettisoned all restraints on the self-indulgence of its elite. What would have been considered revolting and boorish narcissism mere decades ago now passes for normal conduct among the “celebrities” of our culture. In business and politics, the abusive exercise of power to humiliate one’s subordinates is not only routine, it has become the acid test of “toughness”, the stamp of “effective leadership”. Disloyalty, dishonor, betrayal, casual cruelty are all “part of the game” as it’s now played in the big city , while humility and sincerity are not to be suffered any longer ― not even among children. Meekness must be regarded as the emotional dysfunction of naive fools, deservedly crushed beneath the juggernaut’s wheel.

When I was a youngster playing sports, if I had been told by an adult supervisor that, “Winning isn’t the main thing ― it’s the only thing,” I would have instantly lost all respect for his/her tutelage. Yet nowadays one hears that same adage routinely imparted to youth without the slightest reproach. We literally feed our young people to Moloch by teaching them that, without “achievement” and “recognition”, their lives are “wasted”. Not only do we seal them off from Eternity, but we sell them on the false promise of worldly immortality ― the futile pursuit of “stardom”. For the vast majority, assuming that despair does not drive them to self-destruction, the actualization of “stardom” must be vicarious, through identification with the famous, the wealthy, the glamorous, the powerful.

The principal reinforcement of such ego-identification is through the consumption of some of the same things that the idols consume ― an obvious reason why celebrity endorsements are the lifeblood of advertising. Since identification with the idol is the only available avenue of ego-immortality, the imperative to consume ― without reference to need or gratification ― becomes the locomotive of our collective will, the will of the “marketplace”. Like the Nation-State, the marketplace is a body of collective humanity uninformed by a human Consciousness. We all function as consumers in the marketplace without knowing how our individual actions affect the rest of the body. Thus, the marketplace appears to exercise a will of its own, an impersonal, inhuman will, the will of the ultimate consumer ― Moloch the Insatiable, who devours the human Spirit.

It=s of more than passing historical interest that the people who gave Moloch his name were the Phoenicians, the preeminent merchants of the ancient World ― and possibly of the antediluvian World as well. Of the entire catalog of abominations which Scripture enumerates, a substantial portion is of Phoenician pedigree, including the likes of Baal, Dagon, Tammuz, and Astarte. The Phoenicians introduced the earliest known version of the alphabet now in use, and they founded great cities wherever they traded. Tyre, Cadiz, Marseilles, perhaps even Troy were all one-time Phoenician ports. Of all the Punic cities, the most renowned, however, was Carthage, the imperial rival of Rome herself and home of the invincible conqueror Hannibal. Actually, Carthage gets its name from the Punic word for “city”, kartha, from which also comes the title of the City’s guardian deity ― Mel-Kartha, the “Lord of the City”, rendered as Milcom or Moloch in Hebrew.

The title “Lord of the City” reminds us of St. Augustine’s formulation of the “two Cities”. The first of these is the Celestial City or New Jerusalem, existing partly on high with the Lord and His Host of Angels, partly here below in the company of God=s people on pilgrimage until the end of Time. Opposed to this is the City of the World, founded by the descendants of Cain, whose citizens travel with the Fallen Angels on the road to perdition:

We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self.^{^[8]}

Quite fittingly, then, Moloch is the Lord of the City of the World. The people of this City conceive of Time as a permanent condition, and of the World as their perpetual habitation. In the fantasies of their literature, they picture endlessly successive future ages in which Man’s dominion extends across the Universe and his power reshapes Creation to his own liking. In mythology, we find the recurring theme of the hero, the superman whose astounding feats of strength and daring win for him the prize of earthly immortality. Our culture, which is an extension of the Greco-Roman civilization, identifies this hero with Hercules. Interestingly, the name Hercules is derived from the ancient Sanskrit title Heri-cûleus, which means “Lord of the City” ― the very same title associated with the Punic Moloch.

In fact, the Greek historian Herodotus traces the mythical origins of Hercules to the Phoenician city of Tyre, where the idol was worshiped in the form of twin pillars of gold and emerald.^{^[9]} A similar shrine was erected by the Phoenicians near Gibraltar, hence the well-known designation of the Straits as the “Pillars of Hercules”. We=ve learned that duality is an attribute of Set/Satan, the principle of scission which divides Time from Eternity, and this duality is symbolically invoked by the two pillars.

The notion that Hercules represents the Greek version of Moloch gets further support from the lore surrounding the famous “Twelve Labors” of the Hellenic hero. One part of the myth relates how the Labors of Hercules were atonements for his murder of his own children. Thus, there is a strong inference that Hercules= “immortality”, like that of his Punic namesake, was based on child sacrifice. Given this background, it’s remarkably appropriate that the family name of Herod the Great was derived from Hercules, who his ancestor served as a temple slave in Tyre.^{^[10]}

The Labors of Hercules are in fact metaphors for pagan rituals which purported to confer upon a “sacred king” endless life in an earthly paradise. This “life without end” ― actually perpetual death in exile from Eternity ― was granted by the great Moon goddess Hecate. Her name, meaning “one-hundred”, signified the one-hundred months of a sacred king’s reign, after which he was sacrificed to the goddess. As his reward, the king would receive from the hand of the lunar goddess an apple. The apple served as his passport to a fabled island, located in the Western Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where he would live forever, never growing old. In Homer’s Odyssey, this island is called “Ogygia”, after Ogyges, the legendary ruler of Greece at the time of the Deluge ― which suggests that Ogygia is another name for storied Atlantis. Presiding over the sepulchral island of Ogygia is the nymph Kalypso. Her name, meaning “hidden”, is the antithesis of Apokalypso ― the uncovering of the Eternal immanent in the temporal.

Thus, in order for the god-king to live indefinitely, the end of Time must be forever postponed. Eternity must remain forever “hidden”, shrouded in the veil of Mystery, which is the worship of the “natural world”. I employ the quotations here to make plain that I do not mean Creation or Nature, which contains the full Glory of God right down to its minutest particle. Mystery employs the prophylaxis of Fear ― the mask of the snake-headed Gorgon, whose terrible gaze turns human flesh to stone ― to imprison human consciousness in its “paradise”, the island of the Dead. Fear, in the service of the goddess Mystery, blinds us to the Infinity which penetrates every micron of Creation, the true perception of which is the natural ecstasy of the infant, the “fool”, and the saint. Mankind’s sacred traditions refer to the loss of this ecstatic perception as the Deluge, the rising of the waters of Chaos to submerge all but the “islands” ― an atomized, insular “reality”. This fragmented “reality” is grounded in the illusion of a World consisting of separate “objects” embedded in a continuum of Space/Time.

In one of his more cryptic (and ignored) pronouncements, Albert Einstein said, “Space and Time are not conditions in which we live, but modes in which we think.” Quantum physics and cosmology now confirm that we do not live in a universe of discrete “things” having a continuous existence, but rather in a universe of forms which are constantly cycling back and forth between Space/Time and Eternity. In our fallen consciousness, we observe only the portions of these cycles which pass through Space/Time, our minds reflexively filling in the intervening gaps in same way as they do when we watch a movie or television. Obviously, however, nothing physically prevents us from seeing the Eternal portions of these cycles ― and in fact, the extraordinarily pure and innocent souls of the World do see them. It is as if Creation were an Escher painting, containing two sets of patterns within one seamless whole. In our “socialization” as individual ego-objects, however, our psyche is traumatized to block perception of the Infinite strands of the tapestry ― a pattern which we regard as “invisible”, but which is actually just as accessible to our sensory organs as Space/Time “reality”.

Getting back to our tales of Hercules, in the course of his fabulous Labors he constructs the celestial edifices of Space/Time, known to us as the constellations, whose ostensible patterns are themselves exemplify the “connect-the-dots” objectifications of our fallen consciousness. Weaving through these stellar patterns, however, we also find the decidedly nondescript Milky Way, which visibly affirms the immanence of the Infinite complement within the Universe. According to the myths, the Milky Way was also created by Hercules. As an infant, he impudently tried to suck from the breast of the heavenly Mother the milk of Eternal Life, which instead sprayed out across the sky. And indeed, ignoring their sequence (which appears to have been arbitrarily imposed by later mythographers anyway) the Twelve Labors tend to trace the path of the Milky Way across the Zodiac from Scorpius to Taurus.

Thus, in the Eleventh Labor, Hercules steals the golden apples of immortality from the paradise island of the Western Ocean. The apples grew on a tree which was guarded by Ladon, a serpent gifted with the ability to speak all human tongues. Ladon was the offspring of two monstrous parents: Echidna ― a voluptuous woman from the waist up, a venomous viper below ― and Typhon, an enormous ass-headed serpent who spewed forth flaming boulders. To dispatch Ladon, Hercules called upon his skill as a bowman, which he had learned as a youth from his Scythian tutor ― Scythia being a wild region of Central Asia east of the Black Sea, corresponding to modern Tartary. Scythia was peopled by nomadic horsemen, consummate archers whose equestrian skills led them to be portrayed mythologically as Centaurs ― half horse and half man. It’s in that form that they are memorialized in the constellation Sagittarius, where the Milky Way’s galactic center is to be found.

After Hercules had slain Ladon, the creature’s image was cast in stars as the constellation Serpens. Then, on his circuitous route back to Greece, Hercules traveled to Scythia, where he slew an immense eagle ― another of the monstrous brood of Echidna and Typhon ― which daily tore at the liver of the Titan Prometheus as punishment for his legendary theft of fire from the gods. Not only was the eagle translated into the heavens as the constellation Aquila, but the arrow which dispatched the voracious bird was also set among the stars as Sagitta.

If we follow the Milky Way across the sky eastward from Sagitta, it wispy trail next leads us through a group of constellations which depict the exploits of Perseus, the great-grandfather of Hercules. Here the astral patterns tell of how Perseus decapitated the Gorgon Medusa, the serpent-tressed sister of Echidna. Perseus, whose name means “Destroyer”, seized the Gorgon’s head ― with its petrifying evil eye ― at the behest of the goddess Athena, who affixed it to the terrifying aegis of her Mysteries. After slaying Medusa with the ancient sickle of Saturn, Perseus escaped on the winged-horse Pegasus, which had sprung from the Gorgon’s dead body. On his way to deliver the Gorgon head to Athena, Perseus encountered the beautiful Ethiopian princess Andromeda, her naked body bound in chains as an offering to the Dragon of the Sea. Responding to the pleas of her mother, the queen Cassiopeia, the hero rescued the princess and won her hand in marriage. An astral rendering of this entire drama unfolds along the Milky Way as we pass the constellations Pegasus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and of course, Perseus, whose starry image is seen triumphantly holding aloft the severed head of Medusa, her demon eye flashing as the ill-omened variable star Algol.

Having reviewed Hercules’ ancestral pedigree in Perseus and its related constellations, we follow the Milky Way back to the Zodiac, where it takes us just beyond the horns of Taurus, the celestial rendering of the sacred Minoan Bull, which Hercules captured in his Seventh Labor. The two remaining constellations derived from Hercules’ heroic feats ― Leo and Aquarius ― portray the Nemean Lion of the First Labor and the water-monster Hydra of the Second Labor (both also children of Typhon and Echidna). In combination with the Milky Way’s Taurus-Scorpio tandem, Leo and Aquarius complete the set of four “kerubic” (aka “fixed”) Zodiac signs.

Accordingly, the “grid” of Space/Time mythically erected by Hercules is actually aligned to the four kerubic signs. These four “fixed” Zodiac signs are, as we discussed in the first section of this treatise, emphatically linked with the Apocalypse in the prophecies of Revelation and Nostradamus. Implicit in this scenario is the notion that the Six Millennia allotted from the Fall to the Parousia must begin and end with the “cardinal” points ― i.e. the equinoxes and solstices ― entering by precession into the four kerubic constellations. Therefore, mankind’s exile from Eden would have been marked by the entry of the vernal equinox into Taurus about 4200 BC,^{^[11]} while the end-Time should be expected after the vernal point crosses into Aquarius sometime during the 21^st Century. The onset of the so-called “Age of Aquarius” is somewhat difficult to ascertain, since the constellations Pisces and Aquarius overlap quite a bit, and any boundary drawn between them is, of necessity, quite arbitrary. A somewhat more precise timeframe for this transition can, however, be derived from a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which he describes:

Satan in likeness of an Angel bright

Betwixt the Centaur and the Scorpion steering

His Zenith, while the Sun in Aries rose[12]

We can interpret this passage as an image of the parousia of Antichrist ― i.e. Satan appearing in the guise of an “Angel bright”. In the area of the sky between the Centaur Sagittarius and Scorpius the Scorpion are found the constellations of Hercules and Ophiuchus. The latter is the figure of a man intertwined with the body of a serpent. In mythology, Ophiuchus corresponds to Aesculapius, the ship’s physician of the Argonauts, who was struck down by Jove for daring to resurrect the dead. In that sense, Aesculapius represents a sort of pseudo-Christ figure, in the pattern of Antichrist. Milton envisions the constellation Ophiuchus at the sky’s zenith when the Sun enters the sign of Aries, which corresponds to the vernal equinox. In 1845, the first star belonging to Ophiuchus ― though not incorporated into the figure of Aesculapius ― passed through the meridian at dawn on the spring equinox. It was followed by other “unincorporated” stars of Ophiuchus in 1892, 1966, 1987, and 1995. The first “incorporated” star, ν Ophiuchus ― representing the Serpent-holder’s right hand ― will reach its zenith at dawn on the vernal equinox of the year 2047.

Before we take our leave of Hercules, it will be worth our while to accompany him on one more of his Labors ― the Tenth, in which he again travels to the western isle of immortality for more or less larcenous purposes. This time he rustles the sacred cattle of the Sun from the custody of Geryon, the King of the Punic city of Tartessus in Spain ― the Biblical “Tarshish” with which King Solomon traded. In this tale, he launches his unerring arrows to dispatch yet another of Typhon’s brood, the two-headed watchdog Orthrus. When the Sun attempts to prevent his escape by beating down on him with scorching heat, the defiant Hero aims his bow at the sky’s zenith and assails the solar deity himself. On his way home with the stolen cattle, however, Hercules is again waylaid into Scythia, where he sires three sons on the viper-woman Echidna. The youngest of these, Scythes, would inherit his father’s talent as an archer and found the royal dynasty of Scythian kings.

As the father of Echidna=s children, Hercules ostensibly steps into the role of her spouse, Typhon. This odd correspondence between Hercules and Typhon is further evidenced by the mythical pattern of the Hero=s murder of his own children, reenacted in his slaughter of the offspring of Typhon during the Twelve Labors. Hence, we discern here a strong identity linkage between Hercules and Typhon, who, together with Moloch constitute a sort of “abominable trinity”. This notion, in turn, reminds us of the infernal trinity of Revelation, i.e. the Red Dragon, Antichrist, and the False Prophet. Which begs the question: Who, or what, does the monstrous Typhon represent?

The Comet of the Apocalypse

Paralleling the Biblical account of the “War in Heaven” between the angelic legions of the Red Dragon and Michael the Archangel,^{^[13]} the Greek myths tell of a primordial battle on Mt. Olympus between a band of giants and the pagan gods. Sons of Mother Earth with long, flowing beards and coiled serpents for feet, the giants bombarded Olympus with huge rocks and firebrands. Initially, the gods were defenseless ― immobilized by the noxious breath of the giants’ leader Alcyoneus, whose name means “mighty ass”. For several days Zeus forbad the Sun and Moon to shine while he searched the earth for an herbal antidote to the paralyzing poison. After he had found the herb, the gods were roused from their torpor and repelled the giants, while Hercules picked them off with arrows.

According to the myth, Mother Earth then sought to avenge the destruction of her giant offspring by having intercourse with infernal Tartarus to conceive the largest monster ever known ― her youngest child, Typhon. His body coiled serpents from the waist downward, Typhon’s ass-head reached up to touch the heavens’ vault, while his enormous wing-span obscured the Sun. Stretching out 100 leagues in either direction, his arms ended in countless serpents’ heads instead of hands, and his mouth spewed flaming rocks which bombarded the Earth. Like his dead brother, Typhon breathed out a “stupefying smoke” (the Greek meaning of his name) which paralyzed Zeus for a time. Once again, however, the Olympians revived their leader, and his thunderbolts ultimately got the better of Typhon, whose prodigious outflow of blood reddened the waters of the World.

Now, let us we pause a moment to gather up some of the commons threads of these myths and see what we have. We have a lot of huge creatures with coiled serpents growing out of their heads and/or torsos, creatures who throw or eject showers of flaming rocks, and whose breath (or eye in the case of Medusa) has a paralyzing effect. That these creatures are said to be the instigators of “war in the heavens” suggests to us that they are associated with an extraordinary celestial phenomenon, one which is capable of producing natural havoc. Indeed, the hideous descriptions of these creatures bespeak an astral apparition which excites a terror deeply-rooted in the ancestral human psyche. All things considered, therefore, the unavoidable inference here is that we are dealing with mythical renderings of a comet ― a menacing object whose “head” appears to be connected to a snake-like torso of multiple coiling “tails”. A comet spews out a trail of meteoric debris in its wake and, in close encounters with the earth, is capable of spawning life-extinguishing cataclysms, such as that which ended the age of the dinosaurs.

As for the “noxious breath” or “stupefying smoke” which is ascribed to this mythical comet, many comets are known to be surrounded by a toxic atmosphere. This “coma” may contain the poisonous gas cyanogen, the “cyanide gas” used in modern chemical warfare. The physiological effects of inhaling this gas progress from listlessness and torpor, at low levels of exposure, to complete paralysis and death as its concentration increases. Highly soluble, cyanogen imparts an extremely bitter taste when dissolved in water, which brings to mind the passage from Revelation:

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountain of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and a third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.^{^[14]}

Wormwood is an herb notorious through the ages for its exceptionally bitter taste and for the stupefying effect of its extract, which was the active ingredient in the now-proscribed liquor absinthe. At high dosages, wormwood induces paralysis and death, and thus if archaic people had been exposed to cyanogen gas, they would naturally associate its effects with those of the bitter herb. This association may also explain the mythical references to an herbal antidote for the cometary gas, since it was a common belief in ancient medicine ― and remains so in the homeopathic school today ― that the most effective antidote must be prepared from the poison itself.

Having deduced that Typhon is the mythological rendering of a great comet, can we go one step better and identify him with a specific cometary apparition based on historical records? One of the traits invariably assigned to Typhon by mythos is his bloody redness, which leads us to conclude that the ruddy hue is an attribute of the comet also. In the works of the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, he describes a “terrible comet” of “fiery appearance and twisted like a coil”, and goes on to say that it appeared in Egypt during the reign of a pharaoh named Tau-Thom, after whom it was named.^{^[15]} Tau-Thom, known as “King Typhon” to the Greeks, was the last pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom, which precipitously collapsed after a series of natural catastrophes and foreign invasions around 1500 BC. Several ancient sources identify him as the ruler of Egypt at the time of the Exodus.^{^[16]} According to these records, in the Roman year 2453 (1495 BC), at the very time when the Israelites were fleeing Egypt, an immense globular comet with a spiral-shaped head “of bloody redness” appeared in the sign Capricorn.

To be sure, the earth’s passage through the tail of a huge ferruginous comet would likely produce a scenario very similar to the plagues of Egypt described in Scripture. As our planet entered the tail, we would first encounter the fine red dust which turned the Nile to “blood” and the cyanogen gas which poisoned its waters. Next, upon beginning to penetrate the rocky debris further within the comet’s wake, there would come a rain of hot cinders from countless small meteors burning up in our atmosphere ― the corrosive “soot” which the Bible describes as inflaming the skin of men and cattle. Finally, as the earth passed through the densest part of the comet’s tail, a hailstorm of large meteors would bombard our planet, decimating man, beast, and crops alike.

If a sufficiently sizeable fragment broke off the comet and struck the earth, the Sun could be darkened for a time by the fallout from the impact. But we should also consider that the plague of darkness, as recounted in the Book of Exodus, was accompanied by a mysterious inertia: “They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days.”^{^[17]} While we might conjecture that the impenetrable obscurity itself prevented people from moving about, the rabbinical tradition ascribes this immobility to a trance:

Nothing could be discerned.... None was able to speak or to hear, nor could anyone venture to take food, but they lay themselves down ... their outward senses in a trance. Thus they remained, overwhelmed by the affliction.^{^[18]}

As we have discussed, such torpor is symptomatic of exposure to cyanogen, a toxic gas present in many comets. Moreover, we recall that the breath of the mythical Typhon was said to have a paralyzing effect.

Taken together, all of these facts point to the conclusion that Typhon is the personification of a great comet that was responsible for many ― perhaps all ― of the plagues of Egypt. Such a comet would have been visible to the camp of the Israelites as the “pillar of cloud by day” and the “pillar of fire by night”, as related in Scripture.^{^[19]} This tells us that the comet was both very large and exceedingly bright, since it was visible even in broad daylight.

Comets orbit the Sun is very elongated ellipses, which take them out beyond Pluto and back to the inner solar system over periods which may be hundreds, even thousands, of years in duration. It is safe to assume that a comet as spectacular as Typhon would have been reported in some historical annals had it reappeared since its rendezvous with the earth in 1495 BC. As noted earlier, however, Revelation’s prophecies seemingly refer to this same comet, insofar as they speak of “star called Wormwood” which will poison the Earth’s waters and turns them the color of blood.^{^[20]} Could it be that the prophesied Comet of the Apocalypse is the return of Typhon, the Comet of Exodus?

Retracing the path of Comet Hale-Bopp/Typhon through the constellations, we find that it uncannily follows the celestial footsteps of Hercules ― Typhon’s mythical alter-ego ― along the Milky Way. Thus, the comet’s journey began in the constellation Sagittarius, the sign of the wander ring Archer-Centaur, harkening back to the nomadic bowmen of Central Asia whose Scythian brood was begotten by the Hercules in his Tenth Labor. We are reminded that, on his way to Scythia, Hercules shot an arrow at the zenith of the sky, and it is an intriguing coincidence that Hale-Bopp attained the summit of its northerly flight just as it conjoined the Andromeda galaxy on March 25, 1997. This cosmic tryst occurred at the sky’s zenith over Almaty, the capital of the former Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. As we shall come to examine later, prophecy suggests that Central Asia will spawn the “World Leader” who will play the role of Antichrist. En route to Andromeda, the comet=s passage through Serpens ― the Serpent entwined with the constellation Ophiuchus ― evoked the Hero’s slaying of Ladon, serpent-guardian of the “golden apples” of immortality. Hale-Bopp’s celestial itinerary also encompassed Aquila, the Eagle of the Caucasus Mountains, as well as the arrow Sagitta, with which Hercules dispatched that bird of prey.

As Hale-Bopp approached perihelion in March 1997, it appeared to mount on the back of the constellation Pegasus, thus reenacting Perseus= mythical flight to rescue the virgin Andromeda from the sea dragon. This tableau recalls the imagery of Revelation Chapter 12, in which the pregnant Woman is pursued by the red dragon. Since Revelation’s Woman is described as “clothed with the Sun”, our pattern of associations leads back again to the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fatima and the “eclipse” which augurs a great schism in the Roman Catholic Church. All of this archetypal symbolism converged in the total solar eclipse of March 9, 1997, an eclipse seen at dawn in Central Asia, with the comet becoming visible in the sky as the Sun was occluded.

As if to underscore the dualistic character of its portent, the comet rushed from the embrace of the maiden Andromeda to a liaison with the “demon” star Algol ― the petrifying evil eye of Medusa. April 11, 1997, the date of this sinister conjunction, was remarkable for several reasons. On that date, a fire of unknown origin broke out in the Cathedral of Turin, Italy, nearly destroying the legendary Shroud bearing Christ=s image. The very next day, Pope John Paul II narrowly escaped death when a bomb was fortuitously uncovered along his motorcade route to Sarajevo only hours before his arrival.

April 11^th is also the Feast of Leo the Great, the 5th Century Pontiff who faced invasions by Attila the Hun, from Central Asia, and the Vandal Genseric from Carthage. When we analyze the relevant prophecies of Nostradamus, we will find they foreshadow another Pontiff named Leo who will pay tribute to a new Attila. The cometary tryst with Algol also continues the symbolic theme of the eclipse, since Algol is actually a double star, with a dark companion orbiting the bright star and occluding it every three days ― a reminder of the three days of darkness which accompanied the Comet of Exodus. From all of this we may deduce that the Great Comet of 1997 augurs a dual epiphany. The first is associated with the sea monster that menaces Andromeda ― i.e. a World Ruler who will seek spiritual as well as temporal hegemony. The other is identified with a latter-day Pope Leo, who will bend the Church to the wishes of that Ruler.

Needless to say, this dual epiphany invokes the vision of St. John the Divine, in which he sees two Beasts, one rising out of the Sea, and the other coming up from the Earth:

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

....

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.^{^[22]}

Similarly, in the apocryphal Book of Enoch the prophet speaks of “two leopards”. One is called Leviathan, that is, a beast of the ocean, and the other is named Behemoth, a land creature.^{^[23]}

The meaning of this enigmatic scenario becomes clearer if we consider the ritual, known as the “Opening of the Mouth”, which was performed by the Egyptian high priest after the death of the Pharaoh. Dressed in leopard-skin, the priest would insert into the mouth of Pharaoh’s mummy a adze-like instrument. The latter represented the Big Dipper, an asterism which connotes immortality because its seven stars never set below the horizon. In fact, the seven stars which form the Big Dipper of Ursa Major were known to ancient astrologers as the “Leopard”, and the goddess Seshat, who ordained unending life for the Pharaoh, was depicted wearing a crown of seven stars and a leopard-skin sheath.^{^[27]} Upon the Opening of the Mouth, the mummy would “speak”, proclaiming the name of his rightful heir to the throne. After the collapse of the Middle Kingdom at the time of the Exodus, corrupt priests would come to abuse this ceremony to establish their own fraudulent claims to the throne. This brings to mind the bogus “Donation of Constantine” from which the Church’s historical claims to temporal sovereignty derive.

We may justifiably infer that the second Beast or “False Prophet” ― identified in Revelation by the two-horned bishop’s miter ― is a false claimant to the Chair of St. Peter, i.e. an Antipope. Taking the name Leo XIV, the Antipope will resemble the leopard-clad priests of Seshat, dissembling “miracles” to establish the immortal status of the first Beast, who is Antichrist. This, then, is the twin epiphany which the return of Comet Typhon portends.

The Parousia of Antichrist

Since there are numerous prophecies, going back to the 1st Century, concerning the appearance ― or parousia ― of Antichrist, we would do well to review them in the light of our cometary thesis. One common theme of all of the Millenarian prophecies has been the significance of the year which consummates the cycle of Six Millennia beginning with the Fall of Adam. The completion of Six Millennia mystically signifies the fulfillment of the Six Days of Creation, bearing in mind that the Scriptures stipulate one day of the Lord is equivalent to a thousand mundane years.

For it has been said that, twenty centuries after the Incarnation of the Word, the Beast will be incarnate in his turn, and will menace the earth with as many evils as the Divine Incarnation has brought blessings....

Towards the year 2000 Antichrist will be made manifest.^{^[28]}

A 13th Century prophecy concerning the incarnation of Antichrist will help us to narrow the date down further. St. Bridget of Sweden recited it as follows:

When the Feast of St. Mark shall fall on Easter, the Feast of St. Anthony on Pentecost, and of St. John on Corpus Christi, the whole world shall cry, Woe!^{^[29]}

First of all, it will save some time to observe that, if the Feast of St. Mark coincides with Easter, the remaining dates of the prophecy will automatically line up as well. In the West, the Feast of St. Mark is observed on April 25th, but before we go looking for years in which that date falls on Easter, we must first adjust for the different calendar used in the 13th Century ― that is, we must compute the Julian date which is equivalent to the Gregorian April 25th. For a date in the 13th Century, the Julian calendar would be seven days behind the Gregorian, so that our April 25th would be their April 18th ― a date which fell on Easter in the year 1965. We find additional confirmation of the year 1965 in an alternate rendering of this same prophecy, in which the prediction is made that the first pope to cross the Atlantic Ocean will do so in a year when the Feast of St. Mark falls on Easter. The first to make the transatlantic crossing during his pontificate was Paul VI, who did so in October 1965.

The year 1965 also crops up in the vision of the Melanie Calvat ― the seeress who encountered an apparition of the Blessed Virgin on the mountain of La Salette, France, in September 1846. We touched upon this prophecy briefly in our discussion of Fatima, and we recollect that the Secret of La Salette, like the Third Secret of Fatima, is essentially a warning that the throne of St. Peter will, for a time, be usurped by the False Prophet, the apologist of Antichrist. It is a warning to the people of God as old as the words of St. John the Divine:

Come out her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.... Therefore shall her plagues come upon her in one day... and she shall be burned with fire... And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication with her and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.^{^[30]}

According to the message given by Our Lady of La Salette, Antichrist entered the World in the year 1965. When Melanie Calvat first transcribed the Secret, she recorded the date of his incarnation as 1865, but she later corrected her error. Several older prophecies advise that the year of this infernal birth would be marked by a distinct departure toward wickedness and Godlessness in the World, as Jesus meant to forewarn us when he said:

For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.^{^[31]}

For those of us who lived through the era, the year 1965 did indeed constitute a perceptible watershed separating the flawed-but-benign postwar World from the beginnings of the World in which we now live ― a World in which Eternity is not only denied and forgotten, but mocked and scorned. Look at the faces of the men who “lead” today’s World, my dear reader, and behold what we have collectively become! Do you not detect in those all of those faces the slightest trace of a sneer always lingering about the lips, as if that sneer is the expression these men habitually wear when they are not in the public eye? I tell you that it is a sneer of contempt for all of those who do not live by the code of the predator, the Law of Moloch. Disregard the words in you history books (for they lie), and regard instead the faces of your “leaders” (which cannot lie), and tell me when that sneer of which I now speak first became apparent? Something happened in the year 1965, and that something was the birth of Antichrist.

If we search for astrological events in the year 1965 which would augur such a birth, we do not have to look far. From our previous discussions, we know that the Roman god Saturn was the pagan prototype of Satan, and that he was, like Moloch, a Titan who consumed children. In this regard, we might also note that the 2^nd Century St. Irenaeus predicted that Antichrist would actually be called by the name “Titan”.^{^[32]} Hence, we should expect the celestial configuration heralding the birth of the Deceiver to involve the planet Saturn. Also from our previous discussion, we are aware of the apocalyptic significance that Nostradamus attaches to the transits of Saturn through an area of the constellation Aquarius known as the “Pond” or “Urn”. According to the prophet of Provence, this transit symbolizes the “anointment” of Antichrist as the Monarch of the World.

On the vernal equinox in 1965, we find Saturn entering the “Pond” and shortly thereafter forming an opposition to Uranus, which was then in the sign of the Virgin. This opposition bespeaks the great eschatological battle between the Woman ― who symbolizes the people of God ― and the Serpent, a struggle preordained from the moment of the Fall by the words which Yahweh spoke to the snake:

I shall put enmity between you and the Woman, and between your seed and hers; and She will bruise your head, and you will strike Her heel.^{^[33]}

Appropriately, Uranus is the planet of chaos, and thus its opposition to Saturn heralds the descent of Time into the infernal vortex of violent disorder, the horrifying vision of which was revealed by Our Lady to the shepherd children at Fatima. Truly then, there could be no more fitting astrological aspect to symbolize the incarnation that would usher in the Time of Tribulation.

If we peg the nativity of Antichrist to the date and time in 1965 when the opposition of Saturn and Uranus became exact, we can cast the birth chart which appears in Figure 2. I have chosen the French city of Angoulême as the site of the abominable nativity based on several Quatrains of Nostradamus which point in that direction:

The year 1999 seventh month,

From the sky will come a great King of Terror:

To restore to life the King of Angoulmois ...^{^[34]}

As we have previously noted, Revelation Chapter 13 informs us that Antichrist will be “miraculously” restored to life after being killed by a sword wound to his head. This spurious “resurrection” appears to be the principal “wonder@ by which he will convince his followers of his divinity. Angoumois is the district of western France whose principal city is Angoulême, located midway between the cities of Bordeaux and Poitiers:

Bordeaux, Poitiers, at the sound of the tocsin,

A great summoning will reach as far as Langon,

Against the French will be their polestar,

When a hideous Gorgon-like monster will be born.^{^[35]}

We have already encountered the Gorgon as the petrifying goddess of Mystery who holds out the false promise of temporal immortality. Her snake-like tresses recall the spiraling gaseous jets of Comet Hale-Bopp/Typhon. The comet’s closest approach to the “polestar” occurred when it conjoined the Andromeda galaxy at a celestial declination (a measure of angular separation from the polestar) corresponding to the latitude of the city of Angoulême. Because of this correspondence, the Andromeda galaxy culminates at the zenith of the sky above Angoulême, which helps to explain the following Quatrain:

The Prisoner Queen seeing her daughter pale with fear,

From a regret she bears within her:

Lamentable cries will come then from Angoulême...^{^[36]}

According to star lore, Andromeda’s mother Queen Cassiopeia was condemned to be bound forever to a chair circling the polestar, hence the “Prisoner Queen”. As the reader may recall, her daughter Andromeda was to be the sacrificial bride to the Sea Dragon. We can imagine Andromeda blanching at the prospect of bearing the monster’s child ― the Beast of the Sea ― and lamenting at the sound of his birth cries.

Getting back to Antichrist’s natal chart (Figure 2), we are immediately struck by the tight conjunction of his Uranus with Mars and Pluto in the 8^th House ― an unequivocal portent of the sudden and violent death for which he is destined. Quite fittingly, his ascendant is the 13^th degree of Capricorn the Goat ― the degree of the Zodiac whose Sabian image is the “hissing serpent”,^{^[37]} emblematic of the truly devastating tongue which the Accuser possesses. So pernicious will be the sting of his irony and the needle of his sarcasm that he will be capable of literally shattering people’s faith and self-esteem by ridicule alone. Of all the weapons in his arsenal, this will be Antichrist’s most potent, as he will effortlessly ravage the reputation of anyone who stands in his way.

Of special significance is the placement of the planet Jupiter in Antichrist’s chart. Jupiter, the pagan monarch of the heavens, defines the leadership role which the Deceiver will play in the World. At his birth, Jupiter was exactly conjunct with the “demon star” Algol ― the evil eye of the Gorgon Medusa of which we have spoken earlier. Moreover, this pairing occurs very close to the position at which Jupiter joined Saturn in the constellation Aries in the Great Conjunction of May 28, 2000 ― which, according to Nostradamus, inaugurated the momentous changes of the end-Time.

Jupiter and Saturn in the head of Aries,

Eternal God, what mutations!^{^[38]}

Taken together, these elements strongly identify this as the birth chart of the apocalyptic World Ruler. With Neptune opposing Jupiter, moreover, we see that Antichrist will also project himself as a spiritual leader, laying claim to recognition as a prophet or Messiah. Because Jupiter is afflicted by Neptune in the 4^th House, however, we deduce that his native country will not be receptive to his brand of religion, and that he will have to relocate to a nation distant from France to gather his initial flock of disciples. Perhaps further scrutiny of the chart may reveal some clues as to Antichrist’s adopted homeland.

Not coincidentally, a great comet ― named Ikeya-Seki ― appeared in the year of Antichrist’s birth. If we place the comet at the time of his birth, we find it in conjunction with the Moon’s north node, which astrologers call “the Head of the Dragon”. This is a remarkable symbolic correspondence, since the “Head of the Dragon” succinctly defines the eschatological role of the Son of Iniquity. Just as the Messiah is the Head of humanity’s divine Body ― which is associated with the Scriptural image of the Woman ― so Antichrist is the head of Man’s body of Falsehood, for which we have the emblem of the Dragon.

In determining what a great comet portends, much importance must be attached to the location in the sky where it was first observed. In the case of Hale-Bopp/Typhon, as we have seen, its initial appearance in the constellation Sagittarius conjures the archetype of the ancient warrior-horsemen who periodically swept out of Central Asia. Scriptural allusions to this archetype can be seen in the Apocalypse’s bowman riding a white horse as well as the Scythian cavalry of Og and Magog at the Battle of Armageddon. On the other hand, the comet of Antichrist’s nativity was discovered at the 17^th degree of the tropical sign Leo, for which the Sabian symbol is a white man in Arab dress riding a camel. The archetypal nexus here is reinforced by the fact that this is the very degree of the Zodiac which was rising at the nativity of T. E. Lawrence.^{^[39]} One of history’s most enigmatic and fascinating characters, Lawrence is, of course, remembered for organizing a rebellion against the disintegrating empire of the Ottoman Turks during the First World War.

What does this tell us about Antichrist? If we look for a parallel, in today’s geopolitics, for the failing Ottoman realm at the turn of the century, the former Soviet Union is the obvious choice. The bloody civil war in Chechnya was but a harbinger of the escalating turmoil in the Turkic/Tartar republics of the defunct U.S.S.R. ― the emerging tinderbox of World instability and conflict. Never envisioning the day when these republics would be independent, the Soviets located the principal hubs of their weapons and aerospace programs there, and the aftermath of the first Afghan conflict and Gulf War I left the region saturated with sophisticated armaments. It’s no accident that the first two major wars of the 21^st Century ― the second Afghan war and Gulf War II ― have been fought in Central Asia and have accelerated the militarization of that region. Just like the feudal sheikdoms of the old Ottoman empire, these nations possess enormous petroleum wealth which Russian domination had prevented them from exploiting. And, as happens whenever traditional societies are subjected to rapid “modernization”, a spiritual void has opened which invites false messiahs. All in all, the region presents a milieu made to order for the Warrior-Prophet.

Thus, we are attracted to the hypothesis that Antichrist, albeit French-born, will emerge from one the former Soviet Islamic republics of Central Asia. As we shall subsequently learn, this change of venue is facilitated by the fact that the Deceiver is actually of mixed Franco-Arabic lineage. In his birth chart, we also note that, at the “apex” of the t-square formed by the Saturn-Uranus opposition and the north lunar node, Comet Ikeya-Seki is joined by Aldebaran ― “the Watcher of the East”, the Royal Star of Persia. From this we may draw the added inference that the Beast’s initial power base will encompass Persia, i.e. the modern Iran. At this juncture, our little detour into astrology leads us right back onto the main highway of historical prophecy regarding Antichrist by evoking one of its most salient recurring themes: Nero redivivus ― the reborn Nero Caesar presaged to one day lead a Persian army of a million men against Rome.

Nero redivivus

Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus, the fifth Emperor of Rome, was born at dawn on December 15, 37 AD, with Pluto in Sagittarius rising in conjunction with the Sun. Throughout history, Pluto’s transits through Sagittarius ― we should note here that Pluto again entered that sign in 1995 ― have marked periods of the severest religious persecutions, and Nero’s reign was, of course, infamous in this regard. According to the historian Tacitus, he devised “exquisite refinements” in the already ghastly gallery of torments practiced upon Christians. Such were his blasphemies and atrocities that God occasionally responded by reducing one of his bronze likenesses to a molten lump with a direct lightening strike.

Shortly after his birth, the Imperial astrologers observed that Nero’s natal Moon was squaring (i.e. forming a 90E aspect to) Jupiter out of his 8^th House. From this aspect of Nero’s horoscope, the astrologers foretold that his mother would make him Emperor, and that he would repay the debt by murdering her. Such was her own insatiable ambition, however, that, upon hearing this prognostication, Agrippina is reported to have exclaimed: “Let him kill me then, so long as he becomes Emperor!”^{^[40]} By poisoning her husband Claudius just before he was about to name his older boy Britannicus as his heir, Agrippina did indeed wrest the scepter into the hands of her Nero. But the son proved too much like the mother, and, after poisoning his brother Britannicus, he ordered that Agrippina be dispatched as well. It is interesting to observe, by the way, that Agrippina’s birth chart, like Antichrist’s, is marked by a Saturn-Uranus opposition.^{^[41]}

In the year 66 AD, a great comet appeared in Rome which was widely interpreted to augur a change of emperors. Believing that the comet embodied a divine wrath which might be appeased by the blood of other nobles, Nero went on a homicidal spree unprecedented even for himself. With a number of the great families of Rome facing utter extinction, the Senate finally issued a decree condemning their monarch to death. Nero fled into hiding and is said to have stabbed himself in the neck, but legend has it that he faked his death and escaped to Persia ― or Parthia, as it was then known ― to raise an army against Rome. Subsequently, the incident of the mortal head wound which had “miraculously” healed became inextricably linked to the tradition of Nero redivivus thanks to Revelation’s description of the Beast:

And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed.^{^[42]}

Students of Nostradamus know that he loved to play games with the multiple meanings and connotations of words, both within the same language and across the many different languages he had mastered. In French the word chef means “head” in the sense of a “head nurse” or a “head of State”, as opposed to the anatomical head, which is tête. Thus, Nostradamus invokes two elements of Nero redivivus lore ― his mortal wound and his re-emergence as a Persia ruler ― by referring to the reborn emperor both as “le chef de Perse” and “tête Perse”.^{^[43]} Another title by which the Provençal seer betokens Nero-cum-Antichrist is “Bronzebeard”^{^[44]} ― which is the meaning of his father’s Latin surname Aenobarbus and an allusion as well to the Emperor’s narcissistic mania for brazen self-images.

In the prophet’s Quatrains, we find numerous other parallels drawn between Nero and Antichrist. In one instance, he describes Antichrist as “a grandson of Agrippa”^{^[45]} ― referring to the renowned Roman general Agrippa, the grandfather of Nero’s mother Agrippina. Still another stanza eerily weaves together snippets of biographical detail concerning the dead Caesar with prophecies of the Beast to come:

Who born through iron in a nunnery-brothel of a father to be dead,

Of the Gorgon blood conceiving on the pregnant one:

In a strange land he will practice total concealment,

Who will burn along with his child.^{^[46]}

Throughout the Centuries, fer or “iron” typically stands for the planet Mars ― which rose within minutes after the time of Nero’s nativity. Precisely as envisioned in the Quatrain’s first line, the untimely death of the infant’s father followed soon after his birth, thus making Nero the “son of the widow” ― a status which, as we will come to learn, connotes the bloodline of Antichrist. As for “nunnery-brothel”, this is more word-play based on the similarity of the two corresponding Latin words nonneria and nonaria ― cleverly summoning the popular tradition which depicts Antichrist as the child of a debauched nun.^{^[47]} By now the reader should be familiar with the Gorgon and the Mystery cult of immortality over which she presided, as well as the link between the quest for such immortality and the Moloch-style child immolation upon which the last verse touches. Of perhaps the greatest interest in this Quatrain, however, is the third line concerning the “hidden years” of Antichrist. This suggests that, in a sinister parody of Christ’s early life, the Man of Sin will likewise not make himself known to the World until his 33rd year.^{^[48]} Since Nero died at the age of 31, moreover, there is a symmetry in Nero redivivus’ reappearing at the same approximate age. On this basis, we should expect Antichrist to have emerged as a public figure in the “strange land” of his adopted home in Central Asia sometime before his 34th birthday ― i.e. before April 1, 1999. And in fact, a number of Nostradamus’ prophecies, which we shall explore shortly, focus on the spring of 1998 as a probable time for the Beast to begin his rise to power.

But before we get to predictions as to the When? of the Son of Darkness, we would first do well to define the Who? a bit better. According to Nostradamus, he is of noble lineage, but of poor and obscure parentage:

From mount Aymar he will be noble obscure,

The evil will come at the confluence of the Saône and Rhône:

Soldiers laying in ambush on St. Lucy’s day,

A throne never was so horrible as his.^{^[49]}

Since aima is Greek for bloodshed, “mount Aymar” denotes “Red Mountain”. This translates into the Turkic language as Alma Ata, the erstwhile name of Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan and the locale of the huge Soviet space complex at Baikonur. St. Lucy’s day is December 13th, suggesting the date of a military coup or assassination which will launch a chain of events culminating to Antichrist’s reign. While the French city of Lyon lies at the confluence of the rivers Saône and Rhône, Nostradamus often uses geography of France ― just as ancient Egyptian soothsayers once used the Nile ― as a microcosm of the heavens. Hence, we should look at the latitude of Lyon, which corresponds exactly to the maximum declination of Comet Hale-Bopp on March 25, 1997. This was the precise time when the Great Comet of 1997, at the peak of its brilliance, was conjoining the Andromeda galaxy at the zenith of the sky above Almaty. Would it be too bold to surmise that the Deceiver will have interpreted this prodigious apparition as a celestial sign of his messianic mission?

Getting back to another Quatrain which deals with Antichrist’s humble patrimony, we find the following:

Libyan prince powerful in the West

French from Arab will come to inflame so much ....

Of a feeble land and poor parentage,

“Piece by peace” he will assemble his empire.^{^[50]}

As was mentioned earlier, Antichrist’s transition from the France of his birth to the Tartar steppes of Asia is facilitated by his mixed blood:

The great Neptune from the depths of the sea

Of the Punic race with Gallic blood mixed.^{^[51]}

In the prophet’s lexicon, “Punic” applies to the peoples of the Islamic World, and hence he is here describing the Beast of the Sea as being a “cross-breed” of Middle Eastern and French pedigrees. As a matter of fact, several of the Quatrains pun with the homophonic French terms for “cross-breed” and “guard-dog” ― mâtiné and mâtin ― to portray simultaneously the accursed man’s mongrel genealogy and rabid temperament.^{^[52]} Furthermore, in medieval European iconography, the dog was a symbol associated with the Turks, which tends to reinforce the connection between the Beast and the Turkic peoples of Asia:

From the Black Sea and great Tartary,

There will be a King who will come to visit Gaul ...^{^[53]}

Nostradamus forecasts that Antichrist will begin to build his dominions “piece by peace” out of the same Asian steppes from whence swept the hordes of Attila the Hun:

Then the great Empire of Antichrist will begin where Attila’s was, and Xerxes will descend with a great and innumerable host... ^{^[54]}

As it turns out, Attila has more in common with his infernal alter-ego than the geography of their respective realms, for both men follow the pattern of Cain and Nero in being murderers of their own brothers. In the case of Antichrist, the Centuries depict him as one of three brothers:

The affluent will suddenly be removed,

By the three brothers the world put in trouble,

City of the Sea will seize its enemies,

Famine, fire, blood, pestilence, and all evils doubled.^{^[55]}

Ironically, the wealthy and powerful will back the great Leader, only to be later cut off at the knees for their trouble. Like Nero, his historical prototype, the Beast will not brook the presence of potential challengers in his “City of the Sea” ― the ultimate World empire whose only boundaries are the oceans.

Saturn will transmute itself from gold to iron,

RAYPOZ will exterminate all who oppose him,

Before his advent, signs will appear in the sky.^{^[56]}

Starting with the last verse first, one of the celestial signs of the Beast’s “coming out” was the return of Comet Typhon in the spring of 1997. Astrologically, this time was propitious for him to begin realizing his ambitions, since his progressed Moon was conjunct with his natal Jupiter.^{^[57]} In the second verse, the title Raypoz is a simple anagram formed by transposing the vowels of Roy-paz ― the “King of Peace” ― an obviously ironic title which reminds us of Nostradamus’ little joke about Antichrist’s Empire being built “piece by peace”. Hence, we can expect that duplicitous “peace” overtures will figure prominently in the Deceiver’s psychological warfare. As regards Saturn’s metallic metamorphosis described in the first line, this is astrological symbolism for the malefic planet’s movement from conjunction with the Sun in March 1997 ― coinciding with the time of Comet Typhon’s spectacular perihelion ― to conjunction with Mars in April 1998. These dates, then, would seem to bracket the beginning of the World Leader’s ruthless rise to power.

Returning to the theme of the Beast being one of three brothers, we have the following Quatrain:

Pol[lux] in the Sun’s mind one will die three leagues from Rhône,

Fled the two closest the destroyed Tarasque monster:

Because Mars will reach its most horrible throne,

Of the Cock and Eagle of France, the brothers three.^{^[58]}

Here we encounter one of many references in the Centuries to the Gemini Twins ― a metaphor which Nostradamus applies both to the “Brothers Antichrist” and to the rival claimants to the papal throne. According to Ptolemy, the preeminent astronomer of the ancient World, the twin stars which mark the constellation Gemini ― Castor and Pollux ― are considered to have the nature of the planets Mercury and Mars, respectively. In the case of Pollux, the star itself resembles Mars both in its orange hue, and in the sense that its mythological namesake was a Spartan/Roman god of battle. When the first verse speaks of “Pollux in the Sun’s mind”, therefore, an astrological aspect between Mars and the Sun is clearly implied. Since ancient times, Light has symbolized Logos and the Mind, and hence Mars would be in “the Sun’s mind” when the planet approaches close enough to that luminary to be “under the rays”, as astrologers characterize it. Mars came under the rays of the Sun in March 1998 and remained “in the Sun’s mind” until June. By an odd, and perhaps significant coincidence, the Red Planet was also under the rays of the Sun in early January 1996, when former French President François Mitterand died ― an event which resonates eerily with the prognosis “one will die” in the first verse above.

Antichrist is readily identified as the “monster” in the second verse, and in the final section of this book we will see how the Tarasque beast of Provençal folklore relates to his genealogy. Based on the mention of the “closeness” of Antichrist’s two brothers in the second verse, they are nearer in age to each other than to their monstrous sibling ― and perhaps they are even twins. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the star Castor of the celestial Twins is itself a “twin”, or binary system, composed of two stars which draw closest to each other every 420 years ― last doing so in 1965, the year of Antichrist’s birth. Other prophecies suggest that the brothers of the Beast are at least ten years his senior, and the Virgin’s message at La Salette envisions the two elder brothers distinguishing themselves in war when the Deceiver is only 12 years old.

Piecing all of this together ― but, hopefully not “peacing” it à la Antichrist ― we come to conclude that the beastly younger brother will begin to drive off his two senior siblings and take direct control over their Central Asian fiefdom when “Mars reaches its horrible throne”, i.e. when the Red Planet enters Aries ― its “throne” in the sense of being the sign ruled by Mars. Since Mars made its Aries ingress on March 5, 1998, this supports our projection of the timing of the Beast’s first “move” ― and, moreover, satisfies our expectation that the Man of Sin, like the Son of Man, should embark on his mission before his 34th birthday.

Before leaving this meaning-laden Quatrain, we must observe that the last verse speaks of the three brothers as being “of Cock and Eagle”, with the former being a national symbol of France. Plausibly, then, this might be yet another allusion to a mixed Franco-Islamic genealogy; thereby begging the question: which Islamic nation employs the symbol of the Eagle? Quite remarkably, the flag of Kazakhstan features an eagle flying beneath the Sun, an image which immediately invokes the following Quatrain:

In the third month the Sun rising,

Wild Boar, Leopard in the field of Mars for combat:

The Leopard wearily looks up to the sky,

Seeing an Eagle frolicking about the Sun.^{^[59]}

As we have seen, the Beast is described in Revelation as a “Leopard”, so the struggle which launches his ascent to power is again pegged to begin in the “third month” ― March 1998. Considering the imagery of the last verse, might we not imagine the exhausted-but-victorious Leader gazing upward toward the flag flying above a government building ― a flag bearing the emblem of an eagle with the Sun?

The two bastards taken off because of the elder,

And Bronzebeard the kite-nose will reign.^{^[60]}

“Bronzebeard”, of course, is Antichrist in his role as Nero redivivus, taking command of a Asian army to lead it against Rome. As we will learn when we consider the Beast’s genealogy, a hawkish hooked nose is perhaps a distinctive trait of his clan, but the word “kite” also refers to a “sharpie” in the sense of a rogue-swindler. This tells us that the Deceiver does not need to use much force in his meteoric rise: instead he relies on his vaunted “tongue” to “divide and conquer” ― even setting his own brothers against each other.

A great King fallen into the hands of a young one,

Not long before Easter confusion revolution in the faith:

Times of everlasting captivity! lightening strikes the topmast,

When the three brothers wound and murder each other.^{^[61]}

Again Nostradamus repeats his invocation of the Gemini motif. The mythical Twins were associated with the electrical discharges called “St. Elmo’s Fire”, often seen above a ship’s topmast during a storm. Along with the lightening-like emergence of the abominable World Ruler comes a “revolution in the faith” ― the long-prophesied domination of the Holy See by Antichrist ― pegged by this stanza to begin during Easter season. This revolution in the Papacy will trace its origins back to the prodigious apparition of Comet Typhon/Hale-Bopp during the spring of 1997:

During the apparition of the bearded star,

The three great princes will be made enemies

Brought down from the sky, peace earth quaking^{^[62]}

Passing over the Sun=s north pole, the Great Comet of 1997 triggered a massive storm in the solar magnetosphere ― the Sun=s vast magnetic “atmosphere” which extends well beyond the Earth. This magnetic storm had the immediate effect of temporarily disabling several communications satellites and creating a spectacular Aurora Borealis ― ominously reminiscent of the celestial sign by which, the reader may recall, Our Lady of Fatima heralded the onset of the World War II. Since the magnetosphere exerts a powerful influence on the Earth=s weather and seismic activity, moreover, we may well speculate that the catastrophic flooding (U.S. Midwest), earthquakes (Iran), and volcanic eruptions (Montserrat) during the spring and summer of 1997 were further consequences of the magnetic storm unleashed during the comet=s perihelion passage. Might this not be the portent of the words “earth quaking” in the last verse above? Turning now another stanza which deals with the calamitous aftermath of Comet Typhon’s visitation:

The antichrist three quite soon wiped out,

His war will last for 27 bloody years:

The dead heretics, exiled captives,

Blood human corpses the water reddened Earth pelted by hail.^{^[63]}

The “hail” of the last verse could come from the broad swath of meteoric debris left by Comet Typhon’s crossing of the Earth’s orbital plane in May 1997. Sooner or later, our planet will encounter this cometary residue, and when that happens, its ruddy hue may indeed be imparted to our waters as it was the River Nile of old. As far as the “27-year war” is concerned, this likely relates to the seemingly unending conflict which began in Afghanistan in 1973 with the overthrow of the traditional monarchy there. If we go back to Melanie Calvat’s prophecy, which envisioned Antichrist’s brothers being prominent military commanders when he is only 12 years old ― i.e. in 1977 ― then we may surmise that they have emerged from the Afghan turmoil of the past three decades.

Let’s get back to the consequences of the terrestrial consequences of the long wake of gases and rocky fragments left along trajectory of Comet Typhon, which seem to be presaged by the following Quatrain:

The year that Saturn and Mars are equally combust,

The air greatly dried long trajectory:

By secret torrid fires large area scorched,

Little rain, hot wind, wars, invasions.^{^[64]}

In astrological parlance, a planet is “combust” when it is within six degrees of the Sun ― as both Saturn and Mars were in mid-April 1998. In view of ensuing verses, the aftermath of the Earth’s traversing the comet’s path may include, in addition to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, a major drought. These dire prognoses are further sustained by another stanza:

Mars and Mercury and the silver joined together,

Near the meridian extreme drought:

In the middle of Asia news of an earthquake...^{^[65]}

Once again, Nostradamus sets his clock by a planetary aspect, in this case a conjunction of Mars, Mercury and the Asilvery@ Moon, which occurred not once but twice in March-April 1998. A couple of other Quatrains prominently feature this Mars-Mercury conjunction, auguring cosmic mutations:

When iron and letter are enclosed in the fish,

Then one will go forth to wage war...

....

A little before the monarch is slaughtered

Castor and Pollux in ship, bearded star.^{^[66]}

As we have mentioned, “iron” corresponds to the planet Mars, while Mercury is the patron planet of literacy. Thus, “iron and letter enclosed in the fish” translates astrologically as “Mars and Mercury conjoined in the Fish”, and we are astounded to find these two planets meeting in the constellation Pisces precisely on Antichrist’s 33rd birthday, April 1, 1998! Moreover, this conjunction occurs very close to the position which Mercury occupied at Antichrist’s birth. At this point, we can infer that Nostradamus is speaking of Antichrist when he says “one will go forth to wage war” ― words which ominously echo those of Revelation:

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.^{^[67]}

Not only did the Mercury-Mars conjunction of April 1, 1998, occur in the constellation Pisces, in compliance with Doctor de Nostredame’s prescription, but it took place close to the constellation Pegasus ― the mythical winged horse which sprang from the Gorgon’s blood. The starry rendering of Pegasus includes only the steed’s head and forequarters, because the constellation was originally intended to depict the equine figurehead of a ship. In fact, the name Pegasus in the Punic language translates as “ship’s figurehead”.

Holding onto the thought of the ship’s bow, let’s jump back to the second of the two Quatrains quoted above. The astrological correspondence of Castor and Pollux to Mercury and Mars is employed to create a metaphor for the conjunction of those two planets:

A little before the monarch is slaughtered

Castor and Pollux in ship, bearded star.

The ancients believed the celestial Twins to be the guardians of seafarers ― a belief often expressed by placing carvings of Castor and Pollux on the bows of their ships for good luck. In the Acts of St. Paul, he recounts a shipwreck he experienced on the voyage from Sidon to Rome ― a trip which ultimately led to his condemnation and crucifixion by Emperor Nero. Washed ashore on the island of Malta, Paul completed his voyage on another ship which he describes as having the Twins carved on her figurehead.^{^[68]}

In earlier an earlier portion of this treatise, we discussed how Nostradamus uses the shipwreck as a metaphor for the impending crisis in the Bark of St. Peter at the end of the Sixth Millennium. In the verses quoted above, we find him clearly alluding to St. Paul’s trip from Jerusalem to Rome ― a trip allegorically representing the transference between those two ancient cities of the spiritual center of Christianity. Slowly coalescing before our eyes, therefore, we begin to discern the outlines of a dominant and recurrent theme of our studies to date: the prophecy of another relocation of the Catholic Church ― this time away from the Eternal City. From our exegesis of the Third Secret of Fatima, we have concluded that the “new Rome”, into which the remnant of the faithful will be gathered, is Russia.

Out of all this we can now perhaps infer that the portents of April 1998 deal not only with Antichrist’s first public manifestation, but also with the imminent “shipwreck” of the Church. The two are connected, of course. Just as St. Paul’s voyage led him to martyrdom at the hands of Nero, so the pilgrimage of the Catholic faithful is now leading to their eschatological confrontation with Nero redivivus. It is a struggle which will put them into the teeth of a persecution of unprecedented ferocity. The apparition of Comet Hale-Bopp in March-April of 1997 was truly a harbinger the fateful events which would begin to unfold a year later.

The Persecution of the End-Time

We have now reached a stage of our study when we can actually see a “picture” of Antichrist emerging with some quite specific individual traits: master of verbal combat, consummate liar and manipulator, unscrupulous betrayer, fratricide ― even some potential physical particulars, like the red hair and hawkish nose. Based on our analysis of prophecies of Nostradamus and others, we have speculated about his date and place of birth, ethnic background, and the likely geopolitical arena from which he will emerge. All of this is useful to the extent it may help us to identify the Man of Sin early enough to steel ourselves against his nigh-irresistible lure. But there is a danger of going too far in this direction, because the Deceiver is not like any other man who has ever been born. By his very nature, he is a “shape-shifter”, capable of assuming many different forms in order to confuse us and astound our intellects, which are far inferior to his own.

Indeed, we can expect him to use our pride in our mental prowess as a potent weapon against us. If, in our vanity, we permit ourselves to believe that we can resist him with our rational nature, we stand absolutely no chance, because he is the quintessence of rationality, capable of making even our greatest thinkers appear as fools and simpletons. Anyone who attempts to interpose logical arguments against him will be publicly humiliated and thoroughly ostracized ― their reputation and respect in society utterly destroyed. Only those who accept Christ’s lessons of humility, only those who would gladly be classed as fools ― so long as they are God’s fools ― can hope to resist him.

And this is where it is so important that we understand the nature of the persecution which is coming. Virtually everything we hear from institutional religion nowadays about the Tribulation of the end-Time incorporates the very themes which the Deceiver will use to isolate and discredit true believers. The radio evangelists tell us that the “Elect” have already been chosen ― presumably based on their financial contributions to the appropriate “ministry” ― and will be “beamed up” so that God can unleash his vengeance on those who remain. So when Antichrist does appear, those of us who are still around must conclude ― based on this preaching ― that we are already damned. Those who believe that they are already damned by God will, obviously, make the most eager followers of the Man of Sin.

Other orthodox teachings lead us to anticipate that the persecution will be like those of past ages ― i.e. that a manifestly sacrilegious ruler will seek to compel believers to renounce their faith. But prophecy actually instructs us that the Beast will not confront our beliefs head-on, but instead will cloth himself in the mantle of legitimacy. That is why the conquest of the Vatican is such a vital goal in his program, because he needs control of the “imprimatur” of Christ’s putative Vicar ― and he will get it! Once he has achieved this, his invincible tongue will have no problem overcoming the theological objections of the Protestant denominations, and we will see the emergence of what will appear to be the long-awaited Universal Church ― the ostensible Bride of Christ.

Only a tiny remnant of the faithful will dare to call this “Bride” by her true name ― Babylon, the Great Whore. But, in the eyes of the World, it is they, not the followers of Antichrist, who will be viewed as execrable blasphemers. Hence, the savage persecution which is to be unleashed against this remnant will not at all be perceived or portrayed as “martyrdom” in society at-large. Rather it will be cheered, applauded, acclaimed as “just deserts” by the vox populi. Even as I write these words, the World is inciting the self-righteous vindictiveness of the mob to a fever pitch unprecedented in history. The so-called “media” ― a monopoly of the World’s most powerful men ― implants in mass consciousness the belief that those who decline to tread the path of social conformity are intrinsically evil ― potential, if not actual, criminals.

Naturally, the “opinion-shapers” will be among the first to rally behind the banner of Antichrist, who they will perceive as representing the interests of the powerful. Like the true chimera that he is, however, the Deceiver will simultaneously project himself as the champion of the poor and downtrodden. Behind this demagoguery will be Antichrist’s aim of inducing dependency ― precisely what Revelation warns against when John tells us that no one will be able to buy or sell anything without the Beast’s sanction. If we all take an honest look at our lives today, we will see that we are only a short step away from such abject dependency already. To the extent that we accept the benefits of Moloch and his City, to the extent that we have forsaken our traditional community based on visceral interdependence rather than “competition”, to the extent that we have withdrawn from God’s Creation as the provider of our needs, we are already in thrall to the State and to its creature the Corporation. In other words, we are already part of the body of Moloch ― the abominable body which is about to become complete and to receive its head, its Antichrist.

Even now we can see how the great Betrayer will reward his dependents. Even now we watch in stunned amazement while the Moloch-State withdraws its “manna” from millions of wretched souls who are unfortunate enough to rely on its largesse ― a reliance which the State itself has bred and fostered for the past 70 years or more! Thus far, the plutocrats of the World have supported and encouraged this process in the fatuous faith that their place at the trough of Moloch’s beneficence will remain forever sacrosanct. But those who now single-mindedly pursue a larger piece of the pie are unwittingly setting the table ― “piece by peace” as Nostradamus puts it ― for one who will claim the whole pie for himself. Once that happens, anyone who accepts the benefit of access to the “pie” will be inextricably committed to the Man of Sin.

By now I can hear my reader asking aloud, “Very well then, enough said: but how are we as individuals to avoid this fate?” To this question I have the simple, if discouraging, answer that, as individuals, we cannot avoid it. We will all be saved together or not at all! None of us, standing alone, is strong enough to withstand the persecution which is to come. If we remain grounded in our insular lives, if we continue to keep each other “at arms length”, if we delay any longer the building of our all-inclusive “Ark” of collective humanity, then we will be swept away by the first wave of the spiritual Deluge which is already descending upon us.

How are we to accomplish this seemingly impossible task, especially so late in the day ― so late in this Sixth Millennium, which is the last “day” before the Day of the Lord? Thankfully, at least here I can offer some solace: God does not expect us to do it alone. In His Scriptures and in the words of the prophets, He promises to send us two Witnesses ― one to minister to the Jews and the other to the Gentiles. The prophecies refer to the Witnesses by many names ― Elijah and Enoch probably being the most common ― but what is crucial is not the names, but rather the fact that there will be the only two voices which will not be silenced by Antichrist. We must be able to hear those voices if we are together to come out of Egypt, out of the abominable body of Moloch, and avoid the plagues that will be visited upon that body once it has been joined to its infernal head.

In the vision of the Old Testament prophet Zechariah, we find the Witnesses allegorically depicted as two olive trees, which brings back to mind the motto assigned by St. Malachy to the penultimate Pope ― “The Glory of the Olive Tree”. Let this, then, be the point of departure for the next leg of our prophetic journey.

Chapter Five: Moloch!

[1]. Paradise Lost I: 392-396

[2]. 1 Kings 11:7; It is interesting to note that the preceding chapter mentions Solomon’s annual tribute as amounting to 666 talents of gold. 1 Kings 10:14

[3]. Matthew 24:3

[4]. 2 Kings 23:13

[5]. Psalms 74:13-14

[6]. Jerusalem I: 12.13

[7]. See e.g., N.Y.Times, May 26, 1995. While carbon dating indicates that “Adam and Eve” lived 200,000 years ago, this dating is based on the assumption that Space/Time can be extended indefinitely backward and forward and that it remains uniform in those extensions ― both of which propositions modern cosmology unequivocally refutes.

[8]. St. Augustine, The City of God, Penguin 1972, p. 593.

[9]. Herodotus, The Histories, ii 42-47

[10]. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, i. 6.7, quoting Africanus

[11]. The year 4240 BC corresponds to the inception date of the ancient Pharaonic calendar. See R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, Sacred Science, Inner Traditions, 1982, pp. 174-175.

[12]. Paradise Lost X: 327-329

[13]. Revelation 12:7-12

[14]. Revelation 8:10-11

[15]. Pliny, Natural History, ii, 91.

[16]. See Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, MacMillan 1950, pp. 81-85.

[17]. Exodus 10:23

[18]. I. Velikovsky, op. cit., pp. 58-59, quoting Ginzberg, Legends, II, 360.

[19]. Exodus 13:21-22

[20]. Revelation 8:8-11 and 16:3-7

[21]. Report of A.Fitzsimmons and M.Cartwright, Queen’s University of Belfast.

[22]. Revelation 13:2-12

[23]. 1Enoch 60:7-8 (compiled in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Doubleday, 1983)

[24]. H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Theosophical University Press, 1988, pp. 568-569.

[25]. Genesis 10:9

[26]. The City of God, op. cit., pp.657-658.

[27]. E.A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Dover, 1969, vol. I, pp. 424-425.

[28]. John of the Cleft Rock (1340), quoted in R.G. Culleton, The Reign of Antichrist, TAN Books 1974, p. 136.

[29]. St. Bridget of Sweden (c. 1320), quoted in R.G. Culleton, The Prophets and Our Times, TAN Books, 1974, p. 154.

[30]. Revelation 18:4-9

[31]. Matthew 24:28

[32]. Quoted in R.G. Culleton, The Reign of Antichrist, op. cit., pp. 88-89

[33]. Genesis 4:15; I have relied on the Latin version, which uses the feminine pronoun, AShe will bruise ...@.

[34]. C10Q72. As in previous sections of this book, I am relying on the French text as published in Edgar Leoni’s Nostradamus and His Prophecies (Bell, 1982) and have also borrowed freely from Leoni’s translations.

[35]. C1Q90

[36]. C10Q17

[37]. The Sabian symbols are a system of 360 archetypal images, each representing one degree of the Zodiac.

[38]. C1Q51. For more concerning the significance of the Great Conjunction, see Appendix 2.

[39]. Helene and William Koppejan, The Zodiac Image Handbook (the Fixed Signs), Element, 1990, pp. 162-167.

[40]. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, Penguin, 1956, p. 317.

[41]. Brian Coombs, “Pluto in the Chart of the Emperor Nero”, Geocosmic Magazine, vol. 20, Winter 1995/96, p. 89.

[42]. Revelation 13:3

[43]. C3Q64 and C5Q86

[44]. C1Q74, C5Q45, and C5Q59

[45]. C6Q91

[46]. C8Q79

[47]. See e.g. Melanie Calvat’s account of the Secret of La Salette, which includes the prediction that, “Antichrist will be born of a ... nun, a false virgin...”.

[48]. It is now widely accepted that the Star of Bethlehem was formed by the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC. Based on Scriptural clues, the author has refined the birth date of Jesus to October 1, 7 BC (see Appendix 1). Since Christ’s public ministry began in the spring of 28 AD, he would then have been 33 years old. Over the centuries this has become confused with Jesus’ age at the time of his Passion.

[49]. C9Q68

[50]. C3Q27-28

[51]. C2Q78

[52]. C2Q41, C10Q29, and Epistle &28

[53]. C5Q54

[54]. Epistle ¶23

[55]. C8Q17

[56]. C9Q44

[57]. Secondary progression is an astrological method which tracks the position of the heavenly bodies in the days following a person=s birth, with each day corresponding to a year of the native=s life. For example, the position of the “progressed” Moon on a person=s 20^th birthday would be the Moon=s position 20 days after his/her birth.

[58]. C8Q46

[59]. C1Q23

[60]. C5Q45

[61]. C9Q36

[62]. C2Q43

[63]. C8Q77

[64]. C4Q67

[65]. C3Q3

[66]. C2Q5 and C2Q15

[67]. Revelation 6:2

[68]. Acts 28:11

Chapter Five: Moloch!

The City of the World

The Comet of the Apocalypse

The Return of Typhon

The Parousia of Antichrist

Nero redivivus

The Persecution of the End-Time