René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

This being, even if he appears in the form of a particular single human being, will really be less an individual than a symbol, and he will be as it were the synthesis of all the symbolism that has been inverted for the purposes of the ‘counter-initiation’, and he will manifest it all the more completely in himself because he will have neither predecessor nor successor. In order to express the false carried to its extreme he will have to be so to speak ‘falsified’ from every point of view, and to be like an incarnation of falsity itself. [170] Thus he will be the antithesis of the Christ saying ‘I am the Truth’, or of a wali like al-Ḥallāj saying in the same way ‘ ana’l-Ḥaqq . In order that this may be possible, and by reason of his extreme opposition to the true in all its aspects, the Antichrist can adopt the very symbols of the Messiah, using them of course in an inverted sense; [171] ‘The analogy existing between the true doctrine and the false has perhaps not received sufficient attention: St. Hippolytus, in his little work on the Antichrist gives a memorable example of it which will not be surprising to people who have studied symbolism: the Messiah and the Antichrist both have as their emblem the lion.’ (P. Vulliaud, La Kabbale Juive , vol. II, p373) The profound reason from the kabbalistic point of view lies in the consideration of the two faces, luminous and obscure, of Metatron ; it is also why the Apocalyptic number 666, the ‘number of the Beast’, is also a solar number (cf. The King of the World ). and the predominance accorded to the ‘malefic’ aspect, or, more accurately, its substitution for the ‘benefic’ aspect by the subversion of the double meaning of symbols, is what constitutes his characteristic mark. In the same way there can be and must be a strange resemblance between the designations of the Messiah ( al-masīḥ in Arabic) and of the Antichrist ( al-masīkh ); [172] Here there is an untranslatable double meaning: Masīkh can be taken as a deformation of Masīha , by the mere addition of a dot to the final letter; but at the same time the first word means ‘deformed’, which correctly expresses the character of the Antichrist. but the latter are really only deformations of the former, just as the Antichrist is represented as deformed in all the more or less symbolical descriptions that have been given of him, and this again is very significant. These descriptions indeed particularly emphasize the bodily asymmetries, and this implies essentially that they are the visible signs of the actual nature of the being to whom they are attributed, for such things are in fact always signs of some interior disequilibrium; this is why certain deformities constitute ‘disqualifications’ from the initiatic point of view, but at the same time it can easily be imagined that they are ‘qualifications’ in the opposite sense, that is, from the point of view of ‘counter-initiation’. The very name of the latter implies that it moves in opposition to initiation, consequently in the direction of an increase in the disequilibrium of beings, leading finally to the ‘dissolution’ or ‘disintegration’ previously referred to. The Antichrist must evidently be as near as it is possible to be to ‘disintegration’, so that one could say that his individuality, while it is developed in a monstrous fashion, is nevertheless at the same time almost annihilated, thus realizing the inverse of the effacement of the ‘ego’ before the ‘Self’, or in other words, realizing confusion in ‘chaos’ as against fusion in principial Unity; and this state, as represented by the very deformity and disproportion of his bodily shape, is actually at the lower limit of the possibilities of our individual state, so that the summit of the ‘counter-hierarchy’ is indeed the place that really befits him in the ‘world upside down’ that will be his. Furthermore, even from a purely symbolical point of view, and inasmuch as he represents the ‘counter-tradition’, the Antichrist is no less necessarily deformed: it has been explained that the ‘counter-tradition’ can only be a caricature of the tradition, and caricature implies deformation; moreover, if it were otherwise, there would be no outward means of distinguishing the ‘counter-tradition’ from the true tradition, but the former must bear in itself the ‘mark of the devil’, so that at least the ‘elect’ may not be seduced. Besides this, the false is necessarily also the ‘artificial’, and in this respect the ‘counter-tradition’ cannot fail, despite its other characteristics, to retain the ‘mechanical’ character appertaining to all the productions of the modern world, of which it will itself be the last; still more exactly, there will be something in it comparable to the automatism of the ‘psychic corpses’ spoken of earlier, and like them it will be constituted of ‘residues’ animated artificially and momentarily, and this again explains why it can contain nothing durable; a heap of ‘residues’, galvanized, so to speak, by an ‘infernal’ will: surely nothing could give a clearer idea of what it is to have reached the very edge of dissolution.

There seems to be no occasion to dwell further on these matters; it would be of little use in the end to seek to foresee in detail how the ‘counter-tradition’ will be constituted, and the general indications already given should be almost enough for anyone who wants to devise for himself their application to particular points and any such attempt being in any case beyond the scope of the present enquiry. That enquiry has now been extended to the final stage of the anti-traditional action that must lead this world toward its end; between the fleeting reign of the ‘counter-tradition’ and the final moment of the present cycle there can only be the ‘rectification’, which will suddenly put back all things into their normal place at the very moment when subversion seems complete, thus at one stroke preparing for the ‘golden age’ of the future cycle.

The various matters dealt with in the course of this study together constitute what may, in a general way, be called the ‘signs of the times’ in the Gospel sense, in other words, the precursory signs of the ‘end of a world’ or of a cycle. This end only appears to be the ‘end of the world’, without any reservation or specification of any kind, to those who see nothing beyond the limits of this particular cycle; a very excusable error of perspective it is true, but one that has nonetheless some regrettable consequences in the excessive and unjustified terrors to which it gives rise in those who are not sufficiently detached from terrestrial existence; and naturally they are the very people who form this erroneous conception most easily, just because of the narrowness of their point of view. In truth there can be many ‘ends of the world’, because there are cycles of very varied duration, contained as it were one within another, and also because this same notion can always be applied analogically at all degrees and at all levels; but it is obvious that these ‘ends’ are of very unequal importance, as are the cycles themselves to which they belong; and in this connection it must be acknowledged that the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many others, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara , and so of the temporal existence of what may rightly be called a humanity, but this, it must be said once more, in no way implies that it is the end of the terrestrial world itself, because, through the ‘rectification’ that takes place at the final instant, this end will itself immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara .