Indeed, there appears to be a causal relation between the sublime flights of the Spanish mystics, and the degradation and suffering that the Spaniards caused to non-Christians. But the Spanish mystics were exploring in their mystical flights a relation between transcendence and horror that was already implicit in the Christ and St. John of the Revelations. Nor later, after the Spanish atrocities, would the causal relation between the ideology of transcendence and the suffering of others remain exclusive to the Spaniards, but eventually include most of the Europeans. The drive for transcendence, for "going beyond", for "overcoming", for seizing upon a creative energy that seems to make one a part of the Creator- the desire to go beyond the Veil, beyond history, overcoming even death- these are desires that crave for death even as they cause it- crave for freedom, totality even as they limit, forbid and diminish the rights and freedoms of others. This desire for transcendent glory, very much a part of mysticism in general, imitates Christ's belief that "He that overcometh shall inherit all things", including all the nations, and that those who refuse Christ, will have plagues, diseases, fire, torture, brimstone and a hundred other punishments that are prefiguring and useful metaphors for the invasion of America, the slave trade and Nagasaki.[1]. Where there are atrocities one must look for mystic flights, drives for total knowledge, gods and eternities. Knowledge generates powers and powers kill even while they create; punish even while they benefit.

The apocalyptic idea grows out of the basic fabric of Christian symbolism and Christian symbolism is largely the result of a will to power. The Christ image is, like the image of the sage in the Tao te Ching, an image of contradictions. The "man of peace", who comes with a sword to divide husband and wife, brother against brother. The man of love who looks forward to the destruction of the whole world. Christ, like the Taoist sage, is a adequate symbol for creating a regime of knowledge and power because he embodies contradictions and paradoxes which can be used at cross purposes, thus allowing a wide berth of interpretation. The crucifixion image acts as a filtering mechanism separating those who will benefit from the new cult from those who must suffer for rejecting it. Christ is resurrected to save the world, but he only saves those who conform. those who do not must be destroyed with the rest of the world. Paul makes this quite clear when he writes that "all who are moved by the spirit of God are the sons of God". (Rom.8:14) Those who are moved by the spirit of god are Christians. When the apocalypse comes, Paul continues, those "who died in union with Christ will rise" while the rest of the world will be destroyed. Thus the apocalyptic idea grows out of the idea of the crucifixion. the world will be destroyed except those who accept Christ on the Cross.

The symbolism involved here sublimates the will to power through a knowledge system. Christ is identified with the cosmos because of the resurrection. This is a variation on the regenerative myth seen in many places. Hinduism offers a similar myth in the concept of the Purusha, the divine man who is dismembered and whose body parts make up the substance of the world. The Egyptian myth of Osiris is more or less identical. The function of the myth is to communicate the idea that this world is a place of exile and separation and that the return to wholeness requires the acceptance of the social norms and the knowledge systems and hierarchies dictated by the religion. The parts must be put back together, returned or transfigured back into the 'celestial body' of the world beyond. In other worlds, the world is a fall from the lost state of perfection of knowledge and just as Purusha had to be dismembered so that the earth could come into existence, Christ had to be crucified in order that the universe could be restored to wholeness. Of course, only those who conform to the high ideals and expectations will be restored to wholeness. The rest must pay for the crimes of ignorance and sin dictated by the religion. Christ who was killed by the world must destroy those parts of the world that killed him. The victim becomes a universal victimizer. The Christ that was crucified becomes the standard of all knowledge and power and he then threatens to destroy, ravage, dismember and burn the lesser and lower world that did not recognize his perfection.

The crucifixion is the price paid for the delusional excess of the belief that "I and the Father are one". Christ's drive to establish his universal identity- his drive to be the totality destroys his body. The crucifixion is the logical outcome of Christ's transcendent ambition. The drive for total identity, which Christ expresses here, once it is enacted by the institution of the Church, becomes not merely something that one lone man suffered, but an expression that turns on the world, held responsible for the crime. The world becomes a place to be crucified in payment and revenge. In this mythology, the only way to return to a balanced state is to submit to the Christian knowledge system, since destruction is predicted for all those who refuse it. The death of Christ thus creates a universal indebtedness which acts to make 'souls' receptive to social control. Christ's gruesome death is offered as a 'gift' for mankind, a gift for which no one has asked and that the price of eternal damnation if it is not accepted. Christ the man of peace has become a universal power broker, who uses spiritual blackmail to preserve power and control. Christ is pictured as the "ransom", or payment to keep us from the inevitable destruction by a god who demands perfection of us. In other words god's self immolation on the cross is a strategy for creating obedience, and a means of generating enormous institutional power for the church.[2] We must pay, and the debt is infinite: it is this that is the origin of capitalism.

The book of Revelations of St. John is exceptional: no more hauntingly beautiful testament to the terrorism of knowledge has ever been written. It is a book of love poisoned by its own perfection and unique in its vision of transcendental terror. In it the will to universal power becomes a totally and murderously encompassing first principle. The Christ of Revelations, in the act of "overcoming" the world, imagines he now has the power and glory to kill all of the earth's inhabitants, except the 144,000 who are supposed to be the "Remnant" of the 'pure', who will be saved after the apocalypse. The Calvinists or the Puritans who settled New England claimed to be these pure people who would remain after the apocalypse.[3] It is the drive to be among the elect, the chosen, the exceptional, gifted and the great that fuels that degradation of those thought impure, heretical, or of lesser worth. There is a righteousness in perfection and purity that needs blood victims: there is knowledge that kills. The 'highest' spiritual realization costs corpses for its glory. Christ's deification cost those dead of the Inquisition, the Children's Crusade and the conquest. So too, Einstein's vision of timeless space cost Hiroshima and the apocalyptic romanticism of Marx and Stalin killed millions.

The excessiveness of the Christian apocalypse and its drive for 'purity' of knowledge is one of its most unique features. It is not merely a matter of killing a few million people. The apocalyptic writers show us a Christ and a god so consumed with pathological hatred of the world that all measure is lost; nearly all creatures, the earth and the entire universe must be ruthlessly and exactingly destroyed with a precise and exquisite malice. Christ and St. John in the apocalypse are not seekers of justice, but psychotics who indulge a psychosis so terrible that Hitler and Stalin look like schoolboys in the sadistic arts, by comparison. But of course, the Christian mythology prefigures later developments, and the Inquisition, the conquest, Hitler, Stalin and the atom bomb are all later developments that extend the Christian drive for apocalyptic power.

One can find the same concern with purity and the apocalyptic despising of the world in Isaac Newton who believed the world would end in the 19th century in a fiery apocalypse, and that his science was somehow a pure distillation of universal truths that would help save him, give him immortality and allow him to scale the heights of knowledge and power.[4] As his biographer notes, for Newton "the dominion of God was primary, more important than compassion and love". His contempt for the world he lived in allowed him to embrace a theory of scientific knowledge and religious history that enabled him to imagine its ultimate destruction, while he would be saved. [5] He believed that the he was uncovering the truth of the ancients, which had long since become distorted and impure, and that by restoring this lost truth, he would help supply a correct system of knowledge to those few who could grasp it. The rest would die in the apocalypse that he predicted would occur in the 19th century.

Apocalyptic fantasy embodies a rage against the world, which it combines with a theory of knowledge and a need of greater power. The possession of power seems to allow the discharging of this rage against the world. This seems to be able to occur on both the individual and the collective level and involves a complex of psychological, social, political and epistemological factors. The will to power creates fear because it must see fear in others to know itself as powerful. Those with an interest in erecting a system of knowledge to supreme standing seek to eliminate possible threats and dissent. As we shall see, this has happened in the scientific world as well as the religious and political worlds.

One can maintain with some justice that the Christian apocalyptic ideology originated as a result of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 72 C.E. The frustrated hopes of an obscure religious cult blossomed into an elaborate fantasy of revenge and desire for power. This is expressed in many early Christian texts, the Revelations of John perhaps representing a later summation of this tendency. As the Roman Empire failed, the obscure cult took over the social fabric of the Roman Empire and combined the rationalistic regimentation of the Romans with the apocalyptic fervor of Christianity. The world denying Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius would combine with Christian notions of transcendent destruction of the earth. The result was a paradoxical combination of a world-hating will to destroy and conquer combined with a rationalistic and bureaucratic obsession to catalogue, impose order and legislate submission. It is not too difficult to see this development eventually resulting in the brutality of the conquest and the rise of a rationalistic irrationality that would murder for logic and commit atrocities for reason and science. The Christian Hell is an eternal Auschwitz or Nagasaki, created in advance in the imagination of Europeans such as Newton and the conquistadors and played out in reality centuries later. Likewise, Hitler's apocalypse mixes the Protestant will to power and purity with the purity of scientific extermination.[6]

The apocalypse pictures an orgiastic dismemberment of the very fabric of the universe in order to justify an intellect that desires totalistic power. The world must be destroyed so that the intellect in its drive for totality and purity finally can possess immortality. The prayers of saints for the 'next world' which is supposed to be better than this world, help to increase the suffering of this world. The New Jerusalem that St. John imagines is a frozen, theocratic city of deadly gnosis and transcendent cruelty. It is a city made of diamond like malice and the sterile architecture of tyranny. The building of totalistic, intellectual skyscrapers leaves poverty, suffering and torture in its wake. The sterile geometry, polished sapphire floors and golden gates of St. John's Jerusalem cannot make up for the millions killed in the pursuit of the dream of Christian glorification and duty.

The apocalyptic drive desires glory though violence and transcendent power through the dismemberment of people's bodies or the utter destruction of the earth itself. Transcendence requires destruction; the monistic god must destroy diversity; Christ the savior destroys nearly all the beings on earth. Plato's "Sovereign Good" demand total social control: just as the Aztec priests needed to rip out the hearts of children to prove their power. Christ wanted to conquer time so he could dominate the world. Those who refuse to be obedient to the Christian, Aztec or Platonic imposition of 'eternity' must be burned at the stake, eliminated, warred against, or destroyed in an apocalypse. Beyond the dreams of utopia, perfection, glory, wealth, El Dorado and the final End of History the reality of what happens in apocalyptic politics is a gruesome and bloody nightmare. The perfections of the 'next world' covers this world in blood.

[1] Revelations. 21:7

[2] Nietszche's declaration of gods death is reversal of the crucifixion, but no less a bid for social power. Whether god killed himself or man killed god is actually a moot question, Both theses are attempts create a system of symbols that would the will to power through transcendent knowledge. Whether god creates man or man creates god makes little difference if the purpose of the assertion is to obtain power.

[3] Ronald Reagan would hold similar beliefs in the 1980's. Convinced of an impending apocalypse he would punish the poor and give billions to the military in the belief that an elaborate system of nuclear lasers and satellites called "Star Wars" was necessary. He would also finance wars in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua that would kill hundreds of thousands.

[4] Newton practiced alchemy extensively and gave himself the secret name, "Jeova sanctus unus" which would translate, 'God of the Sacred Unity'. A name that reveals something of Newton's view of himself and his transcendent intentions. Newton's mathematical explorations in Physics have a quality of other worldly certitude. His work at the Mint of England involved him directly in the high financial world of colonial exploitation and the amassing of currency. He believed, apparently, the world would end in 1844 or 1867. His paranoid streak appears to be consonant with other men in history who have desired total knowledge or power. (see Westfall. Richard. Never at Rest: a Biography of Issac Newton Cambridge University Press 1980 pg. 325)

[5] As will be seen in later chapters the younger Einstein shared a similar contempt of the world and of humanity. He would regret this after he saw what happened in Hiroshima.

[6] The difference between Hitler and Christ is not one of good against evil. It is not a question of Christ being a reality and Hitler a parody of the 'truth'. As many people have died because of Christ as died for the Reich, indeed, probably many more. Once Christic mythology made him the 'Son of God', all beings, men and earth, become lesser realities, and atrocity, environmental degradation and apocalyptic justifications for brutal murder and holy war became inevitable. Questioning symbolic constructions like Christ or the Third Reich cannot be avoided, however Christians in particular may deny the historical record. The main question seems to be how to avoid symbolizing what is real in a way that orchestrates power motives.. Avoiding symbolization of reality seems to be a way of resisting constructions of knowledge and power, yet even this avoidance must use symbols to express itself. This is a problem I cannot answer at the moment. It needs more understanding and research.