EVIL INCARNATE:
The Archetype of the Antichrist
ROBERT A. CLARK
The optimism that has ruled in the developed world is now in grave doubt. Barbara Tuchman has said, “The idea of progress was the greatest casualty of the first world war, and its aftermath was cynicism, confirmed by a second round of world conflict and by the implications of the Nazis’ gas chambers…Now we live under the weight of a weird paradox…too many people in the world and too much power to destroy them.”1 World War II, ending with nuclear bombing, left a legacy of fear of mass death and destruction. Stockpiling of thousands of nuclear weapons keeps that fear alive, fueled further by the possibility that such weapons may fall into the hands of dictators and terrorists.
Meanwhile, within democratic countries, there have been many instances of assassination, hijacking and terrorism. Doubts of inevitable progress toward utopia are on the increase. Is civilized man on a downward course? Is he possessed by a demonic spirit leading him toward self-destruction—a spirit the opposite of the Jewish and Christian tradition of a Messiah leading us toward universal peace and plenty?
According to Christian doctrine, Jesus of Nazareth was the only Son of God, sent to Earth to fulfill the Jewish prophecies of the Messiah. He was to redeem not only the Jewish Nation but all humanity. In order to account for the presence of evil in the world, a fallen angel called Lucifer or Satan was said to be the source of sin and the ruler of the underworld to which sinners were condemned. To match God’s action in sending Christ, Satan would dispatch Christ’s counterpart to the Earth as his representative. This arch-demon was called the Antichrist. This word appeared in the New Testament after the times of Jesus and St. Paul, when the Christians were first being persecuted by the Roman authorities. The Antichrist is portrayed as one or more antagonists to the spirit of Christ. He appears thus in the first epistle of John (1:18 & 22): “My children, this is the last hour! You were told that the Antichrist was to come, and how many Antichrists have appeared, which proves to us that this is indeed the last hour…who is the liar? Who but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist, for he denies both the Father and the Son.” Later, in the same epistle (4:2-5) John returns to the subject: “…every spirit which acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God and every spirit which does not thus acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is what is meant by Antichrist. Such men are called false prophets who inspire the godless world.”
Similarly, we read in II Thessalonians: 3, 4, 9, that before Jesus’ second coming, there would be a “final rebellion against God, when wickedness will be revealed in human form, the man doomed to perdition. He is the enemy…claiming to be God himself…the coming of the wicked man is the work of Satan.”
Victor Maag, a theologian at the University of Zurich, defines the Antichrist as “a hostile power which confronts Christianity in the sphere of human, earthly existence, impedes its growth and strives to destroy it.”2 Neither Jesus nor Paul distinguished between Satan and Antichrist. “What is new in Second Thessalonians is the division within the dualistic schema: God’s earthly exponent is Christ and…Satan’s is the Antichrist.” The Antichrist is “the eschatological aspect of Satan.” In the day of judgment the Antichrist will cease to be.
Maag traced the idea of the deceiver back to the Old Testament, even to Canaanite mythology. When a King of Israel or of Canaan crushed an enemy he was re-enacting on an earthly plane the primordial cosmic act of subduing chaos. Isaiah transformed the warlike king into the king of salvation (Isaiah 11:4), who “strikes down the tyrant with his mouth and the godless with his lips.” In the last days good will triumph by word and spirit alone. In the Christian tradition, Christ is the conqueror of chaos, “In none of our sources does God take part in the struggle…for he has already defeated chaos by creating the world.”2
Since Biblical times the image of the Antichrist has again and again been projected upon hated individuals and institutions.3 Christians saw the Antichrist in the Roman emperors, their persecutors. In the Middle Ages, Frederick II (1194-1250), the Holy Roman Emperor, was denounced as Antichrist. He questioned church doctrine, corresponded with Moslem scholars and freed Jerusalem by treaty rather than by a good Christian war. During the Reformation the Pope was given the title by Protestants. Luther was so labeled by Catholics. In recent years communist leaders have been called Antichrists because of their atheism and suppression of religion. Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler have richly deserved the epithet.
C. G. Jung traced the Antichrist archetype both to Jewish sources and to astrology. “We are justified in speaking of a Christian aeon which would find its end with a Second Coming…this expectation coincides with the astrological conception of the Platonic month of Fishes (Pisces) corresponding to the 2000 years of Christian development. The Antichrist idea is revived in our time because of the dechristianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, the frightful material and moral destruction left behind by the Second World War,” which suggests “the eschatological events foretold in the New Testament.”4
In another article Jung wrote that if an archetypal image “is not recognized consciously, then it appears from behind in its wrathful form as the dark son of chaos, the evildoer, an Antichrist.”5 In the Old Testament Satan was one of the sons of God (Job 1:6). When the Christian definition of God as the summum bonum excluded the devil, he remained outside the trinity and in opposition to it.6 So Christ and Antichrist are like two sons of God, adversaries, equal and opposite.
John predicted that the reign of Antichrist would begin after a thousand years. Jung wrote, “Already the atom bomb hangs over us like the sword of Damocles…could anyone deny that John foresaw at least some of the dangers which threaten our world? Not nature, but the genius of mankind has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.”7
In his commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, Jung wrote: “The ideologies are the long-expected Antichrist! National Socialism comes as near to being a religious movement as any movement since A.D. 622 (when Islam began). Communism claims to be paradise come to earth again. We are far better protected against failing crops, inundations, epidemics, and invasions from the Turk than we are against…psychic epidemics.”8
Three examples of men who were possessed by the Antichrist archetype illustrate different outcomes: one farcical, one tragic and one felicitous.
The first appears in a book written by a Canadian clergyman about his older brother, Edward Wilson.9 Their parents were sternly religious Protestants. The younger brother, Herbert, became a Baptist pastor; Edward went the opposite way.
At age 10 Edward told his parents he believed in neither God nor devil. He doubted that Jesus was God. At 14, he told a neighbor girl he could not sin and made her pregnant. When discovered, he stole money and ran away to the United States. There he traveled about with evangelical and occult groups. In 1897 he went to the Orient as a seaman in order to study ancient wisdom. Subsequently he said that he had been sent from the planet Aquarius by eleven rulers of the universe called the White Council. Adopting the title “Brother 12,” he claimed that the others talked to him from outer space.
In Italy he converted a wealthy retired couple to the Aquarian religion. With money from them he went to England and converted other rich people. Since a requirement for membership was giving him all their funds, he soon was able to set up the Aquarian Foundation and buy an islet off the coast of Vancouver Island, a secret refuge from an invisible empire of evil. In 1926 he moved his followers there, calling himself a guru, the supreme leader of the universe. He set everyone to clearing land, building houses and planting vegetable gardens. For himself he reserved the biggest house, many luxuries, and women he had brought from India or selected from among his followers. He had much of his fortune converted to gold and buried on the island.
For 5½ years everything flourished. Then he made the mistake of appointing as his chief assistant a woman who was able to dominate him. When he tried to bring in a younger woman whom he had met on a recruiting tour to Seattle, the older woman beat them both. Meanwhile the second Isis, as he called the former, was supposed to deliver a son who would be the Messiah. When the infant was born it was a girl! Brother 12 then became depressed and lost his super abundant energy. In 1931 his exploited disciples finally rebelled and called in the local police. Within a year Brother 12 was totally discredited and fled with his mistress in their yacht. In the book’s epilogue, Herbert Wilson tells how 11 years later his brother turned up in Australia (where Herbert was living) a broken old man. Soon afterwards he died. His buried treasure has never been found.
The life of Reverend Jim Jones parallels and diverges from that of Edward Wilson.10,11,12 He was born in a small town in Indiana. His father, gassed in World War I, was a Ku Klux Klan member. His mother disparaged the father for his lack of success and urged her only child to be a doctor. At first young Jones played at being a preacher. Yet a neighbor said he was “mean” and that he shouted obscenities at passersby. In high school he was a loner, interested only in religion. When 16, at a hospital job in Richmond, Indiana, a nurse instilled in him a social conscience. At 18 he married her and entered Indiana University but soon dropped out of the premedical course to become pastor of a small church. When 22, he opened the “Peoples’ Temple” in Indianapolis. After observing Father Divine’s methods in Philadelphia, he demanded from his members absolute loyalty and that they call him “Father” and his wife “Mother.” He opened soup kitchens and got jobs for unemployed youth, white and black. He performed miracles—allegedly fraudulent. Soon he grew more autocratic. All his parishioners were required to deed their property to him and to hand over most of their earnings. He put these funds into a corporation. Rumors began that he was having relations with women parishioners.
In 1965, announcing that there would be an atomic war in two years, he moved the Peoples’ Temple and its congregation to Ukiah, California. There he instituted an Interrogation Committee to discipline anyone who questioned his authority. In 1971 he set up Peoples’ Temples in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He continued his programs for the poor and delivered the votes of his followers to Democratic candidates. As a reward, he was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority.
Beginning with an arrest in 1973 for lewd conduct, Jones’ fortunes ebbed. He told his followers the CIA was after them. Fortified with amphetamines, he lengthened his sermons to six hours at a time. His relations with female parishioners became more open. He put 5 million dollars in foreign bank accounts. After a magazine had accused him of fraud and sexual exploitation, he preached mass suicide. Finally in 1978 he moved with most of his followers to several thousand acres he had bought in Guyana. There his increasing paranoia led him and 900 of his followers to mass suicide and murder.
Wilson was more theosophical than Jones, more consciously fraudulent, without Jones’ concern for the downtrodden. Yet both relied upon charisma and autocracy. They both extorted property and money. Each had a hearty appetite for sex. They kept themselves above and separated from their followers. Wilson, more sociopathic than paranoid, saved his own skin. Jones, with a mixture of idealism and exploitation, led himself and his victims to their graves.
It would be easy to dismiss both of these men as merely examples of sociopathic personality, ending in paranoia. To my mind, however, they represent more, for there are numerous types of sociopath. Wilson fits the sociopathic pattern better than does Jones. Jones was more complex with elements of idealism mixed with an inclination toward fraudulent faith healing and sexual and financial exploitation. Both differed markedly from the criminal sociopath of psychiatric texts, who have little interest in religion or charismatic leadership.
The third example is different, although having several traits in common with Brother 12. He is the last subject in a monograph by two psychologists, Masters and Houston, concerning the effects of LSD on human personality.13 This study was done before LSD and other hallucinogens were made unavailable for experiment. The subject (S-3) was a psychologist in his late 30’s, born about 1928, the only child of well-to-do Protestants. He was told that at birth his body was covered with black hair. As far back in childhood as he could recall, he felt alien and was attracted by everything negative—preferring the bad guys in films and when playing cops and robbers. At six years he was fascinated by the Devil and declared his disbelief in God. By the age of 12 he was reading books on demonology, sorcery and black magic. He identified with the demons. His first sex experience was at 13. Each year he became more promiscuous. Sex to him was never evil. He enjoyed it without guilt.
At college he was an outstanding student. He made himself a “scholar of evil,” reading widely on Satanism, witchcraft and black occultism. He added psychology and psychoanalysis to his reading list. Becoming a militant atheist, he advocated a philosophy of total debauchery. He preferred the company of low-level women. In graduate school, he developed severe anxiety symptoms. However, as a psychotherapist he did not feel anxious with his clients because he had the upper hand. At 28 he began seven years of self-analysis. He gradually gained control over his fears. He continued to be promiscuous. He feared alcoholism because he had to drink in order to approach women of his own level.
At 35 he decided his preoccupation with the devil was juvenile. After a mystical experience he tried to get in touch with God. He volunteered for Masters and Houston’s LSD experiment.
At first under LSD he was “locked in a titanic struggle.” He saw his whole life as “a recapitulation of Lucifer’s struggle with God.” Formerly he wanted to “lead the whole world away from God into evil,” to victory over God. In one LSD session he saw himself underground with dragons and snakes. “This is where I come from,” he said. Finally he envisioned himself emerging into an immense hall.
He was to be initiated into an order. Beyond a huge occult circle etched into the floor were two thrones. In one of these was an enormous tiger. In the other was an equally large lion. The initiation was to invest him with the “Order of the Lion.” He then stepped onto the lion’s throne and found himself identical with the lion. He was no longer the tiger; he had left behind him “blood-lust, anger and unrestrained sensuality.” He then had an image of God’s hand, which meant that the relationship between God and man was revealed in terms he could accept. “Satan has no more power to control me.”
Immediately after this session he found that when he looked in a mirror his face was without its “characteristically tormented look.” He felt contented, as though reborn, his body energized, more compact and better coordinated. A year later he reported that his work capacity was greater, with respect to both psychotherapy and literary output. He had no more wish to be promiscuous and had fallen in love with a woman who was his equal. They were planning marriage. He felt more gregarious and fully human. Devils no longer “whispered in his ear,” meaning that each positive thought was no longer swiftly followed by a negative one. “A destructive response to the world has been replaced by a response that is essentially creative.”
The three examples illustrate three courses of the development of an identification with the Antichrist archetype. Wilson and the third man manifested it in childhood. Wilson remained consistent, until trapped by his own excesses. Jones went from ambivalence to possession, at the cost of his sanity. The last subject, through his own anxiety, self-analysis and LSD experience, changed his identification from negative to positive, with considerable maturation and individuation.
As we have seen, C. G. Jung had much to say about the Antichrist archetype. He traced it back in history to Persian, Jewish, and astrological thought. He also found that gnostic thinkers “tackled the problem of evil on a broader basis than the Christian fathers.” They taught that when Christ “cast off his shadow” it became the Antichrist. “The Antichrist develops in legend as a perverse imitation of Christ…who follows in Christ’s spirit like a shadow following a body…In the Christian concept the archetype (of the Self) is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading to a metaphysical dualism—the final separation of the kingdom of heaven from the fiery world of the damned.”14
The Antichrist, to Jung’s way of thinking, was the counterstroke of the devil provoked by God’s incarnation: “for the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ and hence of God…only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the book of Job he was still one of God’s sons…The dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that…it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. This inevitable opposition led very early to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanael. The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction—it is an inexorable psychological law…We hear of a reign of a ‘thousand years’ and of a ‘coming of the Antichrist' just as if a partition of worlds and epochs had taken place between two royal brothers.”15
In “Answer to Job” Jung again brought up the subject of the Antichrist. He asked: “Why this wearisome forebearance toward Satan? Why this stubborn projection of evil on man, whom he has made so weak?…Why not pull up evil by the roots?…Where did (God’s) darkness go—that darkness by means of which Satan always manages to escape his well-earned punishment? This may well be the meaning of the belief in the coming of the Antichrist the expectation of the Antichrist is a far-reaching revelation…Despite his fall and exile the devil is still ‘prince of this world’…God still hesitates to use force against Satan. Presumably he still does not know how much his own dark side favors the evil angel.”16
When the author of the Epistles of John tried to practice what he prescribed and to shut out all negative feelings, he wrote: “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (John 1:5). But these negative feelings “continued to rankle beneath the surface of his consciousness and eventually burst out as the book of Revelation: a terrifying picture that blatantly contradicts all ideas of Christian humility, tolerance, love of your neighbor and your enemies…a veritable orgy of hatred, wrath, vindictiveness and blind destructive fury…Blood and fire overwhelms a world which Christ had just endeavored to restore to the original state of innocence and loving communion with God.”17
Practically speaking, how are we to avoid being misled by those possessed by the Antichrist archetype? We meet the problem at two levels: that of demonic leaders whose followers are no more than several hundreds, and that of those who gain control of a government and consequently threaten international peace and the lives of their own citizens.
In the first instance, we must educate ourselves and the public concerning demonic leaders. When such persons demand total allegiance they should be suspect. When they harangue their followers for hours with hypnotic words in order to gain full control of their property, when they exploit them sexually, when they isolate themselves and reserve for themselves special privileges, and when they insist they are above all human laws, our suspicions will be confirmed. When they talk of plots and conspiracies, we will realize that they are crossing the boundary into paranoia and are becoming dangerous to their followers and to themselves.
In the second instance, citizens should beware of leaders who are egocentric and self-aggrandizing, who are gathering all power into their hands and who play upon fears and prejudices. Both Hitler and Stalin had traits like those of our two first examples, asking absolute allegiance, making long speeches, scapegoating antagonists, dissidents and minorities, and succumbing eventually to ideas of persecution. Their command of secret police and armies made them vastly more dangerous than any cult leader ever has been. They themselves died only after the deaths of millions. Their ghosts still stalk the world. Their Antichrist possessions have infected the political and military leaders of the nuclear powers so that we live in the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war.
The threat of nuclear war has reminded Christian fundamentalists and psychiatrists alike of the New Testament prophecies concerning the coming of the Antichrist.18,19,20 Eleanor Bertine, a Jungian psychiatrist, once wrote in this vein. “The late World War,” she said, has shown “the utter reality, power, and autonomy of evil in the psyche of man, which like a fiend of hell is likely to possess itself of his mind and actions…The new fact is the atomic bomb…Is mankind to be…in the grip of an inscrutable fate which pushes him relentlessly to…his own fiery suicide?…To discover that the inner patterns which made us hate…have been fastened on ourselves would indeed be an ironic fruit of victory…the juggernaut of war…making our hearts…able to accept complacently the hideous methods of destruction which one finds necessary to employ ‘against’ our own enemies.”21
In short, the archetype of abysmal evil, the Antichrist, has spread from the Nazis to ourselves. It has been aroused first within our own unconscious minds and then outwardly expressed in nuclear weapons.
Can we regain our optimism? Yes we can, if we are realistic about the capacity of human nature for evil. By assuming that evil will wither away, or that it is only the absence of good, we succeed only in keeping it in the unconscious, where it grows stronger and more malignant. Evil has been boiling underground. It erupts periodically in the lives of individuals and of nations, misleading or destroying many in the process.
If, on the other hand, we realize the potential power of evil, we can deal with it openly and rob it of much of its destructive force. We can recognize demonic individuals, learn how they get that way, and either transform them or unmask them and warn potential followers and victims against them. At the national level, we can try to prevent the economic and social chaos which is the soil in which dictators grow. We can destroy lethal weapons and stop inventing new ones, before they destroy us. We can create social institutions to handle international conflict, like the developing United Europe or like the United Nations was meant to be. This will enable nations to solve problems cooperatively while each keeps its own economic system, ethnic customs and religions.
This will be a long row to hoe. We had better get on with it while there is still time.
1. Tuchman, B., Practising History, New York, Knopf, 1981, p. 52.
2. Maag, V., “The Antichrist as a Symbol of Evil,” in Evil, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp. 57-82.
3. Chamberlin, E.R., Antichrist and the Millennium, New York, Dutton, 1975, pp. 31-58.
4. Jung, C.G., Aion, Collected Works, Vol. 9, ii, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, p. ix.
5. Jung, C.G., A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Collected Works, Vol. 11, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 107.
6. Ibid., p. 174.
7. Jung, C.G., Answer to Job, Collected Works, Vol. 11, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 451.
8. Jung, C.G., A Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, Collected Works, Vol. 11, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 488.
9. Wilson, H., Canada’s False Prophet: The Notorious Brother 12, Richmond Hill, Ont., Simon & Schuster of Canada, 1967.
10. Mills, J., Six Years with God, New York, A & W Publishers, 1979.
11. New York Times, Nov. 21, Nov. 26, Dec. 24, Dec. 29, 1978.
12. Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 21, Nov. 30, Dec. 1, Dec. 3, Dec. 4,Dec. 5, 1978.
13. Masters, R.E.L., and Houston, J., The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, New York, Dell, 1966.
14. Jung, C.G., Aion, Collected Works, Vol. 9, ii, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 36.
15. Ibid., p. 42.
16. Jung, C.G., Answer to Job, Collected Works, Vol. 11, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 433.
17. Ibid., p. 438.
18. Meerlo, J.Q.M., “Can War Be Cured,” in Breakthrough to Peace, New York, New Directions, 1962, pp. 192-205.
19. Moreno, J.L., “The Future of Man’s World,” in Group Psychotherapy, NewYork, 1945.
20. Clark, R.A., “Psychiatrists and Psychoanalysts on War,” in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 19:549, 1965.
21. Bertine, E., Jung’s Contribution to Our Time, New York, Putnam, 1967, p. 209.
The splitting of the atom has changed everything, save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophy. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking…to survive.
Albert Einsten
ROBERT A. CLARK, member of Frankford, PA Friends Meeting and on the staff of Friends Hospital, Frankford, for 24 years, trained at the Harvard Medical School and at the Jung Institute, first as a Rockefeller and later as a Bollingen Fellow. Deeply concerned with the psychological roots of war, he is presently doing research on religious psychoses.