Charles Upton - The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age

The System of Antichrist:

Truth & Falsehood

in Postmodernism

and the New Age

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD

IN POSTMODERNISM

AND THE NEW AGE

SOPHIA PERENNIS

HILLSDALE NY

First published in the USA

by Sophia Perennis, Ghent, NY 2001

Series editor: James R. Wetmore

copyright 2001

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, without permission

For information, address:
Sophia Perennis, P.O. Box 611
Hillsdale NY 12075
sophiaperennis.com
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Upton, Charles, 1948

The system of Antichrist: truth and falsehood in postmodernism and
the New Age / Charles Upton

p. cm.

Includes index

ISBN 0 900588 30 6 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 0 900588 38 1 (cloth: alk. paper)

Ebook ISBN 9781597319515

1. New Age movement. 2. Tradition (Philosophy). 3.

AntichristMiscellanea. 4. PostmodernismReligious aspects. I. Title

BP 605 .N 48 u 68 2001

299.93dc2l 2001000394

By the same author:

Hammering Hot Iron: A Spiritual Critique of Blys Iron John

Doorkeepers of the Heart: Versions of Rabia

The Wars of Love ( in press )

Nasir [Sherif of Medina] rolled over on his back, with my glasses, and began to study the stars, counting aloud first one group and then another; crying out with surprise at discovering little lights not noticed by his unaided eye. Auda set us on to talk of telescopesof the great onesand of how man in three hundred years had so far advanced from his first essay that now he built glasses as long as a tent, through which he counted thousands of unknown stars. We slipped into talk of suns beyond suns, sizes and distances beyond wit. What will now happen with this knowledge? asked Mohammed. We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileos; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven. Why are the Westerners always wanting all? provokingly said Auda. Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions. We want the worlds end, Auda. But that is Gods, complained Zaal....

T.E. Lawrence, from Seven Pillars of Wisdom

A body of my people will not cease to fight for the truth until the coming forth of the Antichrist... but God will slay him at the hand of Jesus, who will show them his blood upon the lance.

Hadith

In this book I will essay ten things:

To take soundings in the present religious and cultural scene from the standpoint of traditional metaphysics.

To introduce to a wider reading public the doctrines of the Traditionalist School: Ren Gunon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, Titus Burckhardt, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Huston Smith et. al., and in the process give the reader a glimpse into the city of Traditionalism, and the field of spiritual battle presently surrounding it.

On the basis of traditional metaphysics, to critique the doctrines of the New Age spiritualities within the context of postmodernism, of which they are one expression.

To demonstrate, in the course of this critique, that metaphysics, mysticism and esoterism are fundamentally different from, and often radically opposed to, magical practices, the pursuit of psychic powers, and the channeling of spirit entities.

To demonstrate to my Christian friends that they are not the only ones who see in Neo-Paganism and the New Age a decline in our cultures understanding of both God and man.

To present lore and prophecy relating to the latter days of the present cycle from the standpoint of comparative religion, drawing upon relevant doctrines from Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Native Americans.

To publish the signs and speculate upon the social, psychic and spiritual nature of that being known to Christianity, Judaism and Islam as the Antichrist; to present him as both an individual and a system; to warn those willing to be warned against the spiritual seduction and terror he represents, and against the regime which will beand isthe social expression of that seduction and that terror.

To trace the roots of Antichrist in the forgetful and/or fallen nature of man.

To begin to define the particular quality of spirituality proper to apocalyptic times, the dangers it faces, the unique opportunities open to it.

To trace my own course from the spiritual revolution of the 1960s, through the world of the New Age spiritualities, to the threshold of traditional esoterism and metaphysics.

If I mean to hit these ten targets, I cannot make conformity with contemporary belief-systems my central aim, since it is my intent precisely to criticize these belief-systems. I can write neither as a modernist-materialist, whose unifying paradigm is history, nor as a postmodern juggler of alternate realities, who claims to need no such paradigm. The point from which I hope to write, subject to my limitations, is the sophia perennis , the Always So.

The modernist-materialist worldview, according to which historical dynamics and supernatural interventions cannot both be credited as explanations for the daily news, still has power. And postmodernism, now clearly the dominant view, while it may be closer to validating both these realities, only admits them as closed worlds of meaning united by no overarching paradigm. Consequently I have been forcednot against my will, but rather in line with my delightto return to traditional metaphysics (which, though profoundly consistent, cannot be a closed system since it opens on the Infinite) as the only worldview which can make unified sense of postmodern experience, as postmodern ideology clearly and admittedly cannot. Sometimes I write as a scholar, sometimes as a speculative theosopher, sometimes as a popularizer of basic metaphysical principles for the general reader, sometimes as a social critic, sometimes as an autobiographer, sometimes as a poet. I cross these forbidden borders deliberately. So shrunken and fragmented is the consciousness of latter day humanitypartly as an automatic reflection of the quality of the time, partly as the result of a deliberate program of mass social hypnosisthat only the stress of the encounter with a socially-prohibited breadth and depth of significance can shake it awake, now that repeated shocks, and the subsequent anaesthesia, have beaten it senseless. The specific medicine for the shock of despair is the deeper shock of meaning. Where time and history have crushed us under their unbearable lightness, nothing but the weight of eternity, breaking through the thin, brittle shell of the postmodern sky, can set us on our feet. This is one of the several meanings of the word apocalypse.