Are Postmodernism, the CIA and Neo-Gnosticism satanic?
Invoking the Beyond: The Kantian Rift, Mythologized Menaces, and the Quest for the New Man
Paul D. Collins and Phillip D. Collins, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-6632-1351-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-1354-9 (e)
1160 pages
Reviewed by Joe Szimhart (May 2021)
If Satan, disguised as a reasonable Light-Bearer in Modernism, appeared through The Enlightenment and the metaphysical Kantian rift in epistemology that enabled man through a Promethean apotheosis to become the arbiter of his own divinity employing scientific and technocratic revolutions relying for credence on secular Darwinism and ancient Docetic heresies coupled with secret societies behind the incipient power grabs within the current Deep State intent on social control of the masses through greedy oligarchies and their Gnostic-influenced movies and books imbedded with Postmodern denials of objective truth and through new religions based on manufactured extraterrestrial gods, then the authors of Invoking the Beyond invoking the anti-modernist Traditionalism of René Guénon and his followers could be correct. Yes, chew on that for a while. I tried while reading through 1160 pages of a variety of Christian polemic aimed at rescuing the truth of Christian Gospel as representative of a Perennial philosophy formed by God that has eroded dramatically among the illuminated intelligentsia among the so-called Woke crowd for the past four centuries.
To reiterate, I thought that the authors presented the popular themes of conservative Christianity well enough, but they overreached in their dismissal of secular Darwinism while trying to establish a "satanic" basis for a Deep State that employs Gnostic themes, faux UFO revelations, and atheistic science to corrupt the human soul. The fierce fundamentalist struggle among all religions against secularism and modernism is well over a century old and this book adds to that legacy to support anxious conservative Christians facing irrelevance. The book's emphasis on certain Traditionalist followers of and including René Guénon added more problems than it solved. Guénon fancied himself in deeper metaphysical territory than mere Christianity.
The authors of Beyond warn that their approach is through a Christian lens. As I read it, that lens wavered from mainstream Athanasian apologetics into modern fundamentalism. The authors’ claimed intent to avoid crasser critiques of Modernism and New Ageism by earlier unnamed Christian writers (like Constance Cumbey, John Ankerberg and Tex Marrs) essentially fails. The Devil’s menacing angelic agency remains in the details throughout modern culture, as this book sees it. The authors find details in films like The Matrix, in UFO myths, and in the Skull and Bones personality of George W. Bush. The authors plunge into the Kennedy assassination, CIA psyops, and secret societies like the Skull and Bones. Regarding the latter while commenting on the occult influences on President George W. Bush, the authors have this to say: “This all bears too much resemblance to a satanic ritual to be merely dismissed as frat boy fun. If these features of Skull and Bones are, in fact, satanic in nature, then one must contemplate the impact they have on the initiate’s psychology” (Beyond, 1060). In line with conspiracy enthusiasts, throughout the entire text, the authors liberally rely on suggestive terms to lead the reader toward their conclusions. If/then, according to, bears too much resemblance, may, could, might, and maybe are a some of these leading terms.
The Beyond devil finds voice through neo-Gnosticism and Docetism, two of the enduring Christian heresies that deem the creator deity or the Old Testament God evil and the material world so fallen that Jesus could never have been fully human. Indeed, Docetists would say that Jesus and all enlightened beings know that they are not of the body, that incarnation is an insult to the spirit and a mistake or an illusion. The docetic influence of Hinduism is noted in yoga fads while man’s potential with superhuman powers appears in Harry Potter novels. The authors are at pains to counter these trends with a constricted definition of the Jesus gospel. Belief in the right or orthodox definition determines who ends up pleasing God and being saved. Gnostics are serving a devil, not the true God.
The history of Gnosticism is complex, but by all accounts, Gnostic sects and teachings appeared early during the development of Christianity and may have been based on actual teachings of Jesus that some early redactions deleted from the scattered oral and written traditions because they may have been too fantastic to accommodate Jewish Torah. Remember, an important segment of early Christians yet viewed themselves as Jewish reformers and not a new religion. The formal division took place around 132 C.E. when the tannaim or rabbinic sages declared the Nazarenes (Christians) as a heterodox Gentile religion. This split initiated around 40 C.E. with the ministry of St. Paul who opened the Nazarene rabbi’s good news to all nations. The early Christian struggle to retain the Jewish foundations wanted the orthodox Jesus to be one with the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, whereas the Gnostic Jesus was not of Adam’s lineage but rather a creature born of a virgin or young maiden and fathered by an alien God. The Gnostic God was not the Creator God or demiurge of the Jews.
Despite the insistence in Beyond on the evil inherent in Gnostic teaching, elements of Gnostic ideas like the virgin birth that appears in Gospels remains an essential article of faith. The virgin’s conception was beyond human experience, faith and reason, yet somehow known by the Virgin Mary through her personal gnosis during an angelic visitation. She knew God had fathered her child. The virgin birth story appears in two traditional Gospels (Mark and Luke). More so, Gnostic -like ideas appear in the Gospel of John that leans into Greek and anti-Jewish Gnostic foundations. [see: https://thegodabovegod.com/johns-gospel-gnostic/]. There are elements of Gnostic teaching in Calvinism and throughout Protestantism that holds to the predetermined salvation of the elect minority. This idea of a special elect corresponds to the salvation of pneumatics (those who know they are saved and one with God) in Gnosticism. And what could be more Gnostic than the Catholic belief in the Eucharist rite when common bread and wine transubstantiate into God upon the magical words spoken by a priest? Furthermore, we cannot know that the actual Jesus who taught and said many things not in the text (John Gospel 21:25) was not also a proto-Gnostic, so Beyond has a flimsy reality foundation that undermines Beyond’s claim that Postmodernism is responsible for the erosion of objective truth and reality. What is good about Postmodernism is a more honest assessment of metaphysics and what we can as humans know rather than hope for or believe in and that is beyond natural human ken.
The apologetics of Beyond heavily and repetitiously relies on misleading and logically fallacious argumentum ab auctoritate (appeals to authority). Beyond’s reliance on Traditionalist authors (René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Harry Oldmeadow, Charles Upton) veers from orthodox Christian belief into anti-modernist perennialism to prop up reactionary fundamentalism. Traditionalist ideas have led to right- and left-wing movements as well as new religions or cults that have little to do with orthodox Christian theology. Two sources that might help the reader reassess this book are Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodernism, Science, and Hindu Nationalism by Meera Nanda (2004) and Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgewick (2004). Sedgewick argues correctly that Traditionalism is not a social cult but is a cult of an idea informing many social movements as well as Beyond.
I will suggest only a few more examples of appeals to authority in Beyond: I personally knew and studied the works of the religious scholar and Christian Carl Raschke, the neo-Gnostic maverick John Lash, and the anti-Fascist, ultra-conspiracist John Judge. The authors rely on Raschke’s 1980 strong polemic against neo-Gnostic influence, The Interruption of Eternity and on Raschke’s least reliable 1990 study, Painted Black: The Alarming Story of How Satanism is Terrorizing Our Communities, but they avoid his 2008 work, GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn in which Raschke embraces salient Postmodern critiques rather than demonize them in toto as Beyond authors do.
On page 1081 of Beyond, the authors claim, “As was previously observed, secularization usually precedes an explosion of cults and occultism” in their attempt to blame humanism and Kant for our spiritual ruin. Yet, Raschke in GloboChrist, page 183, affirms this: “The first apostles and the early Christians faced the same daunting and promiscuous pluralism during the heroic era of pre-Constantinian Christianity. But they were not cowed by it. The streets and bazaars of the boundless Romanitas were swarming and teeming with every spiritual commodity and cult of which the mind could conceive…” The ancient Roman Empire was awash with sects and cults when Jesus walked as we have been throughout the entire modern era. Beyond’s “secularization” bogey man has no legs, especially when we examine the Christian communities within America where any number of bizarre and occult beliefs arise about the powers of prayer, prophecy, and the autonomous agencies of devils and angels. Gnosticism is as much a product of slick Christian denominations as it is of a secular society’s attack on religion.
In neither case, contra John Lash (Beyond 180) nor pro John Judge (Beyond 541), would Lash or Judge (in my opinion, having known them personally) support the Traditionalist underpinnings of this book. The Beyond authors suggest we can find more support for their Deep State facts by further readings into Deep State researchers like Mae Brussell and her protégé, John Judge, but I would suggest that Judge was as lost in his establishment of reliable conspiratorial evidence about the fascist deep state as the authors are (see Judge for Yourself: A treasury of writing by John Judge, 2016). As for Lash, his effusive eruditions amount to a New Age, ecology-oriented Gnosticism that only his relatively small following might appreciate, so I wonder why the authors bothered with Lash at all. Perhaps this is an example of grabbing low-hanging fruit to make a point. Lash is hardly relevant as a spokesman for neo-Gnostic movements (We can access a host of scholarly articles from Gnosis Magazine, for example), but I will relate this one anecdote that proves relevant to Beyond’s harsh analysis of Gnostics and their religions. John Lash and I were walking past the Plaza in Santa Fe, NM around 1990 when I asked for his view of orthodox Christianity. “Well,” he said, “we’ve heard the joke for two thousand years. Where is the punchline?” The delayed appearance or reappearance of the Messiah works as an enduring trigger for cognitive dissonance among all Abrahamic religious devotees who sustain hope in a coming messiah with their endless rationalizations—that is what Lash was getting at. Do not get me wrong: I have severely criticized Lash’s idiosyncratic Gnostic position in my review of Not in His Image by John Lamb Lash (2006) that amounted to a narcissist effort to establish Lash as a founder of a new mythology school with him at the center.
More significantly, the authors quote the Traditionalist essay “No Activity Without Truth” by Frithjof Schuon (1961) to promote their insistence that a perennial wisdom is real and that modernists willfully ignore it: “Frithjof Schuon summarizes this volitional ignorance as follows: That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things; the fundamental truths are always there, but they do not impose themselves in actual practice because they cannot impose themselves on those who are unwilling to accept them” (Beyond 54). That last quote is an example of circular thinking or the silly aphorism, if you do not believe me, just ask me. Schuon took Guénon’s Traditionalism in fringe cultic directions not mentioned in Beyond. In America, Schuon founded a new Sufi order, originally the Alawiyya that was renamed the Maryamiyya which was based on a series of visions Schuon claimed to have had involving the Virgin Mary in the early 1960s.
Science as supportive of modernist secularism finds a special ire in Beyond: “Where Prometheus opposed Zeus through his impartation of fire to man, man opposes the Christian God of “superstition” through his mastery of a new gnosis: science” (Beyond 84). That special ire has paranoid features when it comes to Darwin: “The shadow cast upon the world “out there” by the Kantian Rift darkened further with the enshrinement of Darwinism. Once more, not a single thought or belief of the human mind could be regarded as trustworthy. Ironically, this includes the belief that naturalism is true. Beliefs needn’t commune with reality if their sole function is to facilitate survival” (Beyond 260). In other words, Kant’s insight into the limits of human gnosis now becomes a “rift” rather than a natural feature of human inquiry that all scientists take into consideration. We invent instruments to extend what our natural senses cannot convey naturally, yet in our pragmatic sanity we know we cannot apprehend things directly or perfectly. No man can see like a bee or grasp the underlying mechanism of gravity, but we observe and use what we observe in ways that work, nevertheless, with or without technological enhancements. That is only natural, but the authors of Beyond want us to see that we somehow left “naturalism” behind with Kant and more so because Kant was influenced by a Luciferian plot. I think what bothers the authors of Beyond is more about how God created us than why when theology should concentrate on the latter. I mean, it helps to stay in your lane if you are driving a theology bus.
Beyond delves deep into the Deep State of planetary social manipulators who they say want to destroy the Christian faith: “For instance, a Brookings Institute report commissioned by NASA in 1960 found that “the effect of the discovery of extraterrestrial life on fundamentalists of all religious traditions would be ‘electrifying’.” The study further asserted that revelations of extraterrestrial life “would have potentially far-reaching consequences, especially in societies where fundamentalists were a powerful social force”” (Beyond 178). So, there it is—a fear that modernism in cahoots with Gnosticism and the beyond of UFO alien races is intent on diminishing the Gospel.
Beyond expresses fear of a coming totalitarian global religion or politic: ““The fatal flaws of her philosophical system aside, Ayn Rand rather effectively captures this trap: It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system… it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”” (Beyond 220). However, like Ayn Rand who presented her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged as a thought experiment with a poorly edited one thousand plus pages, the authors of Beyond likewise entertain a thought experiment: what if their devil in progressivism and socialism is true based on their analysis of modernism? Rand hated liberals, socialists, and Kant too, yet her Objectivism never passed the reality smell test either except that her secular thought system was without a God. Rand gained transcendent fame among some market wonks, but her inner circle of devotees were as grandiosely insular as any common cult. Using Ayn Rand as a reference to attack totalism only weakens Beyond’s position to a cult versus cult dynamic.
Beyond ironically criticizes modern mythmakers for their Gedankenexperimente (thought experiments) who would “foster man’s transfiguration into divine. Such a transfiguration was prophesied by modern mythmakers such as Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Alinsky, and several globalist theoreticians” (Beyond 237). Hegel, of course, was roundly dismissed by existentialist Soren Kirkegaard as the creator of the greatest thought system ever but if that thought system were taken seriously, Hegel becomes “merely comic,” quipped Kierkegaard. It seems that the authors want to echo Kierkegaard without accepting that their version of the Jesus story may be as much of a Gedankenexperimente as Hegel’s. Recall Lash’s caustic remark about the “joke” of Christianity lacking a “punchline.” I am not equivocating here. Personally, I continue to marvel at the elegant cosmic resolutions for humanity promised by orthodox Christianity. It is astounding to believe that God as our creator cares for all of us unlike the Gnostic Pleroma of divine Aeons who seem to care only about the few of us who know that we contain their light.
Beyond finds in Postmodernism’s lack of objective standards and morals a license for bad and unhealthy behavior. To an extent, this is correct. In some new religious cults and movements like Ramtha channeled by J. Z. Knight and the Rebirthing system influenced by Leonard Orr, even murderers are let off the hook because no one gets murdered unless they deserved it from past life behavior, and karma will eventually catch up with murderers who kill an innocent anyway. In those sick cults, the justice system can go to hell unless of course someone like me criticizes them publicly, then their lawyers appear accusing me of slander or something. Beyond states:
“Religion has dubbed this behavioral proclivity “sin.” The term “sin” is etymologically derived from the word harmartia, which is typically invoked in archery to denote “missing the mark.” When one sins, he or she is missing the mark. While the theoreticians of modernity claim to have rendered sin passé, they have not banished the perennial social ills that religion has traditionally associated with sin.” And: “Disease and treatment have been the watchwords of the day and little is said about selfishness or guilt or the “morality gap.” And certainly no one talks about sin!” (Beyond 270).
The problem here occurs when one group’s definition of sin conflicts with another’s. For example, Beyond authors argue that we were created male and female and that gender fluidity in merely a wrongheaded progressive social construct inserted into human experience by satanic agendas. They do not go so far as to endorse conversion therapy for gay people, but the implication arises that gay and trans behavior is sinful, disgusting, and satanic and not merely “missing the mark.”
A long-winded treatise like Beyond offers too much to cover in a review and I find it tiresome to go much further, but we can look at two more features that I found personally interesting: The critique of modern or avant-garde art as terrorism and Beyond’s voyeuristic fascination with CIA and Deep State experiments with the paranormal. Over 100 pages in the final section mention the book and film based on “The Men Who Stare at Goats” by Jon Ronson, for example, about the U.S. government’s secret experiments with psychic powers because of fear that the USSR was already doing the same. Was there anything to it? The infamous MK-Ultra programs and First Earth Battalion Operations manual featured in The Men Who Stare at Goats” are real history,
The book and especially the film use appropriate humor to portray this seriously ridiculous effort to create Warrior Monks with psychic powers for the U.S. Army. One experiment was to train a soldier to stare down a de-bleated (surgically silenced) goat and try to kill it with psychic energy. The film portrays the protagonist played by George Clooney as the only soldier whose goat died when he stared at it. Beyond and perhaps its sources or authorities cited fail to report where this idea may have come from. In my experience with cults, the influence of G. I. Gurdjieff (died 1949) looms large over New Age ideas. Gurdjieff claimed that he could sustain and project enough psychic energy to kill a yak some distance away, even 1000 yards. Gurdjieff, of course, was a notorious liar who told stories to teach secret truths using what he called the way of the sly man. In radical Buddhist circles this technique is employed by crazy wise adepts. In other words, it is up to the disciple or victim of this enlightenment game to figure out what is true or not while submitting to the guru’s crazy influence. The U.S. Army was tricked by its delusional, crazy-wisdom guru warrior monk, Vietnam vet Jim Channon and his supporters. Lesson learned—joke was on you, fool! But Beyond sees no humor in this debacle as real people were really hurt and fooled, not to mention the tax money wasted and a potentially dangerous mental state of a “warrior monk” sent into battle. Beyond sees an assault on Christianity and classical values that were purportedly once held dear in the Army.
As for the avant-garde in the arts, Beyond called it “terroristic” citing Raschke in Painted Black (171) citing Alberto Moravia’s article in Harper’s Magazine (June 1987) wherein Moravia states: “Everything [in avante-garde] transforms itself from the tragic into the comic, from the real into the unreal, from the true into the false, from the adequate into the inadequate, from the current into the obsolete. It is here, in the realm of historical change, that terror comes into play as an instrument of power (“The Terrorist Aesthetic” 38).” Based on Moravia’s insights, Raschke in Painted Black managed to show that the Manson Family murders were an outcome of avant-garde philosophy taken to its satanic ends with murder being a performance, an art experience, and an aesthetic statement. Manson held until the end that it was society’s perception that he killed anyone that was the problem, and this was not his problem as he remained a prisoner until he died. The New Age dictum that we create our own reality is not as simple as Manson wanted it to be. In the end, the values that the Beyond authors so nervously fear we are losing won out famously during the Manson trial, no matter what Manson thought or taught.
“In short, avant-garde culture represented the ultimate inversion. It undermined confidence in objective truth with its depictions of a bleak, Godless world. In the place of objective truth, the avant-garde enshrined its own appetite-laden values. It is not difficult to see how such a movement presaged the rise of existentialism, which also asserted that man created his own meaning” (Beyond 247). This statement from Beyond is repeated in various ways in the book. Now, I studied art to completion of a certificate in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1970s, so I have been immersed in that world that Beyond finds so troubling for Christians. Let me cut to the chase with this question: Why would a Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) painting that amounted to his graffiti style translated to a large canvas sell for over thirty million dollars at auction in 2021? https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/sothebys-basquiat-versus-medici-1234587793/
Most conservative Christians I know would look at that Basquiat as childish scrawling and a disgusting symbol of how far our collective art values have rotted. The path of art history has veered into an “ultimate inversion” or an Alice in Wonderland unreality lacking real world values. Yet, major collectors are flocking to purchase Basquiats because they know that his draw will bring money and support into their capitalist ventures called museums. What is missing here? Are we being taken for a ride by a hidden social menace called Satan? Beyond believes we are:
“When “The New American Painting” exhibition required financial assistance to make its appearance at the Tate Gallery in London, it was millionaire and Fairfield Foundation president Julius Fleischmann who stepped forward to help (ibid). According to Saunders, the Fairfield Foundation, “far from being a millionaire’s charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds” (ibid). Fleischmann’s intelligence background was impeccable; he sat on the board of International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York” (Beyond 250).
So, there it is: The avante-garde has been weaponized by secret CIA funds and liberal artists and collectors have no idea how much they are part of this evil cabal:
“Little did these artists know that their new movement owed a debt of gratitude to the very Establishment they claimed to despise. The Agency concealed its involvement in the rise of Abstract Expressionism through a “long leash” policy.” (Beyond 251)
And the avante-garde is not only Unchristian, but also Unamerican:
“Since its introduction to the Western ethos, American art has almost completely eschewed any expressions of truth and beauty. Instead, most modern American art celebrates all that is ugly and unintelligible. This trend is symptomatic of a pervasive nihilism that has choked the life out of most American principles. (Beyond 251)
The authors both uphold the American Constitution and deride the Enlightenment basis for it. They manage this tension by an assumption that America is a Christian nation at heart because God works through grace among believers in America. If that sounds like hyperbole and circular argument, it is. The question for the Founding Fathers was not about which version of Christianity or religion to embrace but about how to manage governance with no dominant perennial religion or king ruling the country. Their genius was to avoid destructive fascism or, as the Federalist Papers called it, rule by factionalism.
As for that devil Immanual Kant, a more useful critique of Kant’s system emerges in the work of American Philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (“Science and Sensibilia by W. V. Quine: The 1980 Immanuel Kant Lectures” (History of Analytic Philosophy).
And finally, we can turn to a prominent conservative Christian who wrote this about Kant: “We need a self-criticism of the historical method which can expand to an analysis of historical reason itself, in continuity with and in development of the famous critique of reason by Immanuel Kant.” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 2004. “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today”).
In the end, The Gospel may not appeal to everyone equally, but it remains open to personal interpretation which is the cornerstone of the Protestant revolution. Whether that personal interpretation satisfies the ultimate judge of our being, God only knows.
Some helpful links
https://thegodabovegod.com/johns-gospel-gnostic/
"No Activity Without Truth" - an essay by Frithjof Schuon (studiesincomparativereligion.com)
http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/ratzinger/biblical-crisis.htm
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NDS95NS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1