The Conservative Case for Antichrist
Michael Warren Davis |
June 3, 2025
[On the strange
fascination of some modern “traditional Catholics” with Neo-Platonism,
Hermeticism, and Kabbalah. The reviewer is a convert to Orthodoxy from Roman
Catholicism. – Blog Admin.]
“For
false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to
deceive, if possible, even the elect.” — Matthew 24:24
In my book After
Christendom, I explain that West is undergoing a process of
repaganization. Since the Fall, the world has been under Satan’s power. This is
why Saint Paul calls him “the ruler of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The deities
worshipped by the pagans were, in fact, fallen angels. This is why King David
says, “The gods of the nations are demons” (Psalm 95:5).
A few centuries ago, these lands
were baptized in the martyrs’ blood, the missionaries’ sweat, and the mystics’
tears. The “gods of the nations” were driven from their thrones, at least here
in the West. They were not vanquished, however, but driven underground. They
have been fighting a guerilla war against Christian civilization ever since.
In the last few centuries, the
tides have turned quite dramatically. The demons are making a comeback here in
the West. This will, most likely, culminate in the Reign of Antichrist.
Part of my thesis is that many on
the political Right will hasten the West’s repaganization and, therefore, the
coming of Antichrist. Some will do so knowingly—for instance, ethnonationalist
and radical traditionalist groups who dismiss
Christianity as a Jewish conspiracy against the white race and seek to
restore Norse polytheism. However, many “Christian conservatives” will
unwittingly assist the West’s repaganization as well. In seeking to preserving
Christendom as political, social, and cultural entity, they will help the
demons to undermine the West’s spiritual foundation: the Church.
As an example of this latter
group I gave Sebastian Morello, an editor at The European Conservative.
In 2023, Morello wrote a series
of essays in which he argues that Hermetic magic can save the Catholic
Church and, by extension, Christendom.
I assumed this would be a
non-starter for virtually everyone who calls himself a Christian. After all,
the Scriptures take rather a dim view of magic:
·
“But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable,
murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars
shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is
the second death.” (Rev. 21:8)
·
“Now the works of the flesh are evident, which
are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery,
hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions,
dissensions, heresies…” (Gal. 5:19-20)
·
“Also, many of those who had practiced
magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of
all. And they counted up the value of them, and it totaled fifty thousand
pieces of silver.” (Acts 19:19)
·
“And it shall be in that day,” says the Lord,
“That I will cut off your horses from your midst and destroy your chariots. I
will cut off the cities of your land and throw down all your strongholds. I
will cut off sorceries from your hand, and you shall have no
soothsayers.” (Mic. 5:10-12)
·
“There shall not be found among you anyone who
makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices
witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer,
or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who
calls up the dead.” (Deut. 18:10-11)
·
“You shall not permit a sorceress to live.” (Ex.
22:18)
The Church has upheld this
teaching consistently for the 2,000 years since Christ died. For instance, the
first-century catechism known as the Didache addresses this
question in its chapter on “gross sin,” along with abortion and pederasty:
And the second
commandment of the Teaching: You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit
adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you
shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft,
you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.
Now, would Christian
conservatives be comfortable with an article defending pederasty? Would any of
our magazines publish an article saying that abortion could save the Church—or
the West, or anything else worth saving? Of course not. When I put it that way,
it sounds ridiculous. But then how could we justify the “gross sin” of
magic in any form?
Frankly, I expected Morello’s
essays on Hermeticism to be a career-ender. It’s not that I wanted him to get
“canceled”; I just assumed that conservative Christians would be so repulsed by
his proposal that they wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But no one seemed
to care.
In fact, Morello recently brought
out a book on this topic. It’s called Mysticism,
Magic, and Monasteries. It was released in 2024 by Os Justi Press,
a traditionalist Catholic publisher. The folks at Os Justi were kind enough to
send me a review copy. So, here is my review.
* * *
Morello begins by diagnosing a
three-fold crisis in the West:
1.
Post-Authority Era: The collapse of
religious institutions and leadership.
2.
De-Enchantment: The emergence of
materialism and naturalism as our default worldview.
3.
End of History: a triumphalistic
presentism that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for modern Westerners to
look to the past for guidance.
I don’t think Morello uses the
third term in the book, but it captures a central theme: a kind of militant
anti-traditionalism that prevents Western man from understanding the true
nature of our present crisis, or its solution.
Anyway, I thought this part of
the book was excellent. No quibble here.
The question is, what do we do
about it? How do we address the threefold crisis? Morello’s answer,
as you may have guessed, is Hermeticism: “A set of practices and
disciplines of mind, will, and imagine to habituate the practitioner to a
vision of the world that acknowledges it as God’s icon” (p.71).
As we said, the problem Morello
faces is quite simple: Magic is evil and is condemned univocally by Scripture
and the Church Fathers. [1] But don’t worry: Morello assures us that it’s
not that kind of magic. It’s the good, Christian kind
of magic:
The Western
world has always believed in magic. It has always held that curses exist and
that they can be placed on people, animals, fungi, and inanimate objects. And
the Western world has always held that such curses can be banished by special
words, special objects, and special concentration, which in that order it has
been content to call “blessings,” “sacramentals,” and “prayer.” In short, even
the most orthodox in the West have always believed what the Hermeticist calls
the opposing forces of “goetia,” or black magic, and “theurgy,” or sacred
magic—though they generally would not put it in such terms. (p.90)
Morello is pulling a classic
syncretist gimmick: the false equivalence. Hermeticists believe in some
kind of supernatural Thing. Christians also believe in some kind of
supernatural Thing. Therefore, Hermeticists and Christians essentially believe
the same Thing.
We don’t, though.
The word magic refers
to the use of certain words (spells), gestures (rituals), and/or objects
(crystals, herbs, etc.) to exercise control over natural and supernatural
forces. According to its own internal logic, magic is morally neutral. It taps
into certain laws that govern the universe, similar to the laws of gravity.
Casting a spell, therefore, is not intrinsically immoral—no
more than it’s intrinsically immoral to roll a rock down a hill.
Morality is determined, not by
the means, but by the end. Why are you rolling the rock down the hill? If
you’re using it to make a stone wall, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to
flatten someone at the bottom, that’s evil. Likewise, magic that helps people
is good, while magic that hurts people is bad.
Why, then, does Christianity
condemn magic? Well, for two reasons.
First, there are no neutral
powers. As Fr. Stephen De Young once said, “There are only two
spirits: the Holy Spirit, and the other one.” There’s God and there’s the
Devil. There are angels and there are demons. There are sheep and there are
goats. There’s Heaven and there’s Hell. And every intelligent
lifeform—corporeal or not—must choose a side.2 “He who is not with Me is against Me, and
he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad” (Matt. 12:30).
So, whatever power Morello’s
“magic” is tapping into, it is either beatific or demonic. Either it comes from
God or… the other one.
Secondly, those powers can’t
be controlled by spells or rituals. Morello is correct, of course, to
say that Christians believe in the efficacy of blessings and curses. However,
we do not believe that words and/or gestures have any inherent power.
Again, the power comes from either beatific or demonic powers. And the response
they give to our words and gestures is not automatic. We do not compel them to
act in a certain way. We don’t compel them to act at all.
For example, say an Irish
Catholic priest blesses a bomb, which the IRA will use to blow up a train
station. Say that the priest prays that it will kill every single person in the
station. Is the bomb automatically suffused with Divine Power? Does it become
deadlier? Of course not.
Christ taught us these
rituals—above all, the Divine Liturgy—so that we may cooperate with His
divine grace. By saying these words and performing these gestures, we
signal our desire to serve as vehicles for His energeia, to help
Him achieve His goals. We can also use His power to achieve our own goals, but
only if they align perfectly with His. We are not the boss of God.
To put it another way, God allows
us to participate in His saving work the way a father allows his daughter to
“help” wash the dishes… even if she takes three times as long, breaks a few
plates, and leaves a puddle of water on the floor. It’s a beautiful gesture of
paternal love. And it’s all right if the child, in her innocence, believes that
she’s actually helping Dad. But “when I became a man,” Saint Paul writes, “I
put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). Christians shouldn’t imagine that we
mortals have the ability to channel God’s energy on demand, as though He were
obedient to us.
In a malicious inversion of this
divine condescension, the demons will often give a magician the illusion of
control. They will make it seem as if their spells are inherently efficacious.
They will even pretend to be his slave. But this is always a deception. One
day. the magician will discover that—quite without realizing it—he has become
enslaved to the demons. And by then. it may be too late.
This is why the Church has always
forbidden the use of any kind of magic. It is always a lie, a delusion, a
blasphemy.
* * *
Now, if Morello was simply
jazzing up mainstream Catholic theology with edgy Hermetic language, that would
be bad enough.
For instance, we all understand
that James Martin, S.J., undermines the Catholic Church’s witness on sexual
morality by adopting the LGBT lexicon. He doesn’t need to come out and say, “I
think homosexuality is great.” He doesn’t need to. He’s got the rainbow flag,
celebrates Pride Month, blesses
same-sex couples, etc. And in the process, he does measurable harm to the
Catholic Church’s witness on sexual morality. Clearly, this is his goal. “He
who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt. 13:9).
Likewise, imagine if we showed
Morello all the passages where Scripture and the Fathers condemn magic. I know
exactly how he would respond. He’d give us a certain look—knowing, pitiful, a
little bored—and say, “Of course, I’m not talking about that kind
of magic.” But where does the Church ever differentiate between good and bad
magic? The same place where it distinguishes between good and bad pederasty,
good and bad abortions, etc.
And Morello goes a step further
than Martin. Not only does he introduce Hermetic language: he introduces
Hermetic concepts as well.
The most glaring example comes in
chapter seven, in which Morello discusses the concept of egregores.
According to the dictionary, an egregore is an “autonomous psychic entity that
is composed of, and influences, the thoughts of a group of people.” By way of
example, Morello quotes a certain Catholic theologian who also happened to be a
Hermeticist: “As Joseph de Maistre detected, the people did not lead the
Revolution; the Revolution led the people. In such cases, it looks a lot like
we are dealing with egregores” (p.91).
Now, this isn’t the most
egregious example. But it only gets worse from here.
For instance, all of you
Catholics will remember Fiducia Supplicans: Pope Francis’s
encyclical authorizing the blessing of same-sex couples. And you’re probably
not a huge fan. But why not? Well, you would probably say that it further
erodes the Church’s witness on sexual morality. Some would point out that it
offends God by misusing the sacred authority with which Christ invests the
priest by at his ordination. A few would argue that, by inverting the proper
sacramental order, it becomes a sort of demonic parody of itself.
According to Morello, you would
be wrong. You’re actually afraid of conjuring an egregore: “The fact is,
embarrassing as it might seem, we still believe that special words said with
special concentration, perhaps combined with special gestures and special
artefacts, can possess a special causal power when aided by special, powerful
spirits” (p.92).
That’s not the end of it, either.
In this same chapter, Morello writes this:
Some time ago, I
visited an old friend, a monk, at his priory. He and I discussed the notion of
egregores in some depth. Eventually he said, “It seems to me that what the
Hermetic tradition calls ‘egregore,’ the mainstream of Christianity would call
‘antichrist.’” Then, I thought: What indeed could antichrist—the
antithesis of Christ—be? The spiritual Logos descended into matter,
while egregores are spiritual error-structures that arise from the material
plain. The truth became incarnate, while egregores are falsehoods that become
spirits. The Incarnation is one; egregores are many. (p.93)
There are at least two massive
problems with this statement.
First, the spiritual can’t
“arise” from the material. This violates the ontological hierarchy. In fact,
the Catholic Church teaches that God alone can create
spiritual entities. Even in sexual reproduction, a man and a woman only create
the body of a child; the soul is given to Him directly by God at the moment of
conception.
Secondly, Antichrist is not a
“spiritual error-structure.” He is a person.
To be exact, there are many
antichrists who herald the coming of a final Antichrist. According to Saint
John the beloved: “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard
that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we
know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18).
The final Antichrist is described
by Saint Paul as the lawless one:
For the secret
power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will
continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one
will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his
mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one
will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays
of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that
wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused
to love the truth and so be saved. (2 Thes. 2:7-10)
So, the concept of egregores maps
on to neither traditional Christian metaphysics nor the traditional Christian
account of Antichrist. Morello’s position is heretical, historically
illiterate, and metaphysically nonsensical.
* * *
I expect many folks still won’t
understand why I’m making a big deal about this. So, let me be as blunt as
possible: Sin is still sin, even if it’s got a RadTrad vibe. Heresy is
still heresy, even if it’s based and red-pilled.
Morello explicitly aligns himself
with Renaissance Hermeticisits such as Pico Della Mirandola. What he neglects
to mention is that his use of magic led Mirandola into conflict with Catholic
authorities, or that he eventually repented and embraced a life of prayer and
fasting. The Church gives this exact prescription to everyone who has ever
dabbled in magic—myself included. She always has; she always will.
So, where could Morello possibly
go from here? Is Christian Hermeticism no longer a heresy because it’s an old heresy?3
There is much more to be said
about this book. On Friday, I’ll post a second review, critiquing the book
specifically from an Orthodox perspective. I want to leave it here for now,
though, as a warning to all Christians. Remember what the Lord says: “For false
christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to
deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matt. 24:24).
Let me say this one more time, so
no one can accuse me of mincing my words. A “conservative” like Sebastian
Morello is no less dangerous than a “liberal” like James Martin. Yes, one is
trying to prop up Christendom while the other is trying to destroy it. But
though their ends are different, their means are exactly the same: the
normalization of grave sin. Both, therefore, attack Christian civilization at
its very foundation: the Church.
Ultimately, Morello and Martin
are on the same side. They are both hastening the advent of Antichrist—whether
they realize it or not.
NOTES
1.
Even those who speak favorably of Hermes Trismegistus
as a philosopher implicitly or explicitly condemn his magical system. For
instance, Morello names Cyril of Alexandria as a supporter of Hermes. But look
at what the saint actually says:
This Hermes of Egypt, then, although
an initiator into mysteries, and though he never ceased to cleave to the
shrines of idols, is [nevertheless] found to have grasped the doctrines of
Moses, if not with entire correctness, and beyond all cavil, yet still in part.
In other words, Cyril admires Hermes despite his
sorcery, not because of it. God knows he would not have supported an effort to
revive the Hermetic mystery cult—especially not within the Christian Church.
2. According to the Qur’an even says that the djinn (genies)
must choose sides. Some are Muslims; some are infidels. Some are even Jewish or
Christian!
3. Is this why so many “conservative” Christians are so keen
on Nestorianism these days?
For another
review from a Papist author, see here:
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/occult-subversion-traditional-catholicism/
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