The Conservative Case for Antichrist

REVIEW: ‘Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries’ by Sebastian Morello

“For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” — Matthew 24:24

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In my book After Christendom, I explain that West is undergoing a process of repaganization. Since the Fall, the world has been under Satan’s power. This is why Saint Paul calls him “the ruler of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The deities worshipped by the pagans were, in fact, fallen angels. This is why King David says, “The gods of the nations are demons” (Psalm 95:5).

A few centuries ago, these lands were baptized in the martyrs’ blood, the missionaries’ sweat, and the mystics’ tears. The “gods of the nations” were driven from their thrones, at least here in the West. They were not vanquished, however, but driven underground. They have been fighting a guerilla war against Christian civilization ever since.

In the last few centuries, the tides have turned quite dramatically. The demons are making a comeback here in the West. This will, most likely, culminate in the Reign of Antichrist.

Part of my thesis is that many on the political Right will hasten the West’s repaganization and, therefore, the coming of Antichrist. Some will do so knowingly—for instance, ethnonationalist and radical traditionalist groups who dismiss Christianity as a Jewish conspiracy against the white race and seek to restore Norse polytheism. However, many “Christian conservatives” will unwittingly assist the West’s repaganization as well. In seeking to preserving Christendom as political, social, and cultural entity, they will help the demons to undermine the West’s spiritual foundation: the Church.

As an example of this latter group I gave Sebastian Morello, an editor at The European Conservative. In 2023, Morello wrote a series of essays in which he argues that Hermetic magic can save the Catholic Church and, by extension, Christendom.

I assumed this would be a non-starter for virtually everyone who calls himself a Christian. After all, the Scriptures take rather a dim view of magic:

• “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” (Rev. 21:8)

• “Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies. . . .” (Gal. 5:19-20)

• “Also, many of those who had practiced magic brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted up the value of them, and it totaled fifty thousand pieces of silver.” (Acts 19:19)

• “And it shall be in that day,” says the Lord, “That I will cut off your horses from your midst and destroy your chariots. I will cut off the cities of your land and throw down all your strongholds. I will cut off sorceries from your hand, and you shall have no soothsayers.” (Mic. 5:10-12)

• “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.” (Deut. 18:10-11)

• “You shall not permit a sorceress to live.” (Ex. 22:18)

The Church has upheld this teaching consistently for the 2,000 years since Christ died. For instance, the first-century catechism known as the Didache addresses this question in its chapter on “gross sin,” along with abortion and pederasty:

And the second commandment of the Teaching: You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.

Now, would Christian conservatives be comfortable with an article defending pederasty? Would any of our magazines publish an article saying that abortion could save the Church—or the West, or anything else worth saving? Of course not. When I put it that way, it sounds ridiculous. But then how could we justify the “gross sin” of magic in any form?

Frankly, I expected Morello’s essays on Hermeticism to be a career-ender. It’s not that I wanted him to get “canceled”; I just assumed that conservative Christians would be so repulsed by his proposal that they wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But no one seemed to care.

In fact, Morello recently brought out a book on this topic. It’s called Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries. It was released in 2024 by Os Justi Press, a traditionalist Catholic publisher. The folks at Os Justi were kind enough to send me a review copy. So, here is my review.

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Morello begins by diagnosing a three-fold crisis in the West:

1. Post-Authority Era: The collapse of religious institutions and leadership.

2. De-Enchantment: The emergence of materialism and naturalism as our default worldview.

3. End of History: a triumphalistic presentism that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for modern Westerners to look to the past for guidance.

I don’t think Morello uses the third term in the book, but it captures a central theme: a kind of militant anti-traditionalism that prevents Western man from understanding the true nature of our present crisis, or its solution.

Anyway, I thought this part of the book was excellent. No quibble here.

The question is, what do we do about it? How do we address the threefold crisis? Morello’s answer, as you may have guessed, is Hermeticism: “A set of practices and disciplines of mind, will, and imagine to habituate the practitioner to a vision of the world that acknowledges it as God’s icon” (p.71).

As we said, the problem Morello faces is quite simple: Magic is evil and is condemned univocally by Scripture and the Church Fathers.¹ But don’t worry: Morello assures us that it’s not that kind of magic. It’s the good, Christian kind of magic:

The Western world has always believed in magic. It has always held that curses exist and that they can be placed on people, animals, fungi, and inanimate objects. And the Western world has always held that such curses can be banished by special words, special objects, and special concentration, which in that order it has been content to call “blessings,” “sacramentals,” and “prayer.” In short, even the most orthodox in the West have always believed what the Hermeticist calls the opposing forces of “goetia,” or black magic, and “theurgy,” or sacred magic—though they generally would not put it in such terms. (p.90)

Morello is pulling a classic syncretist gimmick: the false equivalence. Hermeticists believe in some kind of supernatural Thing. Christians also believe in some kind of supernatural Thing. Therefore, Hermeticists and Christians essentially believe the same Thing.

We don’t, though.

The word magic refers to the use of certain words (spells), gestures (rituals), and/or objects (crystals, herbs, etc.) to exercise control over natural and supernatural forces. According to its own internal logic, magic is morally neutral. It taps into certain laws that govern the universe, similar to the laws of gravity. Casting a spell, therefore, is not intrinsically immoral—no more than it’s intrinsically immoral to roll a rock down a hill.

Morality is determined, not by the means, but by the end. Why are you rolling the rock down the hill? If you’re using it to make a stone wall, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to flatten someone at the bottom, that’s evil. Likewise, magic that helps people is good, while magic that hurts people is bad.

Why, then, does Christianity condemn magic? Well, for two reasons.

First, there are no neutral powers. As Fr. Stephen De Young once said, “There are only two spirits: the Holy Spirit, and the other one.” There’s God and there’s the Devil. There are angels and there are demons. There are sheep and there are goats. There’s Heaven and there’s Hell. And every intelligent lifeform—corporeal or not—must choose a side.² “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad” (Matt. 12:30).

So, whatever power Morello’s “magic” is tapping into, it is either beatific or demonic. Either it comes from God or… the other one.

Secondly, those powers can’t be controlled by spells or rituals. Morello is correct, of course, to say that Christians believe in the efficacy of blessings and curses. However, we do not believe that words and/or gestures have any inherent power. Again, the power comes from either beatific or demonic powers. And the response they give to our words and gestures is not automatic. We do not compel them to act in a certain way. We don’t compel them to act at all.

For example, say an Irish Catholic priest blesses a bomb, which the IRA will use to blow up a train station. Say that the priest prays that it will kill every single person in the station. Is the bomb automatically suffused with Divine Power? Does it become deadlier? Of course not.

Christ taught us these rituals—above all, the Divine Liturgy—so that we may cooperate with His divine grace. By saying these words and performing these gestures, we signal our desire to serve as vehicles for His energeia, to help Him achieve His goals. We can also use His power to achieve our own goals, but only if they align perfectly with His. We are not the boss of God.

To put it another way, God allows us to participate in His saving work the way a father allows his daughter to “help” wash the dishes… even if she takes three times as long, breaks a few plates, and leaves a puddle of water on the floor. It’s a beautiful gesture of paternal love. And it’s all right if the child, in her innocence, believes that she’s actually helping Dad. But “when I became a man,” Saint Paul writes, “I put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). Christians shouldn’t imagine that we mortals have the ability to channel God’s energy on demand, as though He were obedient to us.

In a malicious inversion of this divine condescension, the demons will often give a magician the illusion of control. They will make it seem as if their spells are inherently efficacious. They will even pretend to be his slave. But this is always a deception. One day. the magician will discover that—quite without realizing it—he has become enslaved to the demons. And by then. it may be too late.

This is why the Church has always forbidden the use of any kind of magic. It is always a lie, a delusion, a blasphemy.

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Now, if Morello was simply jazzing up mainstream Catholic theology with edgy Hermetic language, that would be bad enough.

For instance, we all understand that James Martin, S.J., undermines the Catholic Church’s witness on sexual morality by adopting the LGBT lexicon. He doesn’t need to come out and say, “I think homosexuality is great.” He doesn’t need to. He’s got the rainbow flag, celebrates Pride Month, blesses same-sex couples, etc. And in the process, he does measurable harm to the Catholic Church’s witness on sexual morality. Clearly, this is his goal. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt. 13:9).

Likewise, imagine if we showed Morello all the passages where Scripture and the Fathers condemn magic. I know exactly how he would respond. He’d give us a certain look—knowing, pitiful, a little bored—and say, “Of course, I’m not talking about that kind of magic.” But where does the Church ever differentiate between good and bad magic? The same place where it distinguishes between good and bad pederasty, good and bad abortions, etc.

And Morello goes a step further than Martin. Not only does he introduce Hermetic language: he introduces Hermetic concepts as well.

The most glaring example comes in chapter seven, in which Morello discusses the concept of egregores. According to the dictionary, an egregore is an “autonomous psychic entity that is composed of, and influences, the thoughts of a group of people.” By way of example, Morello quotes a certain Catholic theologian who also happened to be a Hermeticist: “As Joseph de Maistre detected, the people did not lead the Revolution; the Revolution led the people. In such cases, it looks a lot like we are dealing with egregores” (p.91).

Now, this isn’t the most egregious example. But it only gets worse from here.

For instance, all of you Catholics will remember Fiducia Supplicans: Pope Francis’s encyclical authorizing the blessing of same-sex couples. And you’re probably not a huge fan. But why not? Well, you would probably say that it further erodes the Church’s witness on sexual morality. Some would point out that it offends God by misusing the sacred authority with which Christ invests the priest by at his ordination. A few would argue that, by inverting the proper sacramental order, it becomes a sort of demonic parody of itself.

According to Morello, you would be wrong. You’re actually afraid of conjuring an egregore: “The fact is, embarrassing as it might seem, we still believe that special words said with special concentration, perhaps combined with special gestures and special artefacts, can possess a special causal power when aided by special, powerful spirits” (p.92).

That’s not the end of it, either. In this same chapter, Morello writes this:

Some time ago, I visited an old friend, a monk, at his priory. He and I discussed the notion of egregores in some depth. Eventually he said, “It seems to me that what the Hermetic tradition calls ‘egregore,’ the mainstream of Christianity would call ‘antichrist.’” Then, I thought: What indeed could antichrist—the antithesis of Christ—be? The spiritual Logos descended into matter, while egregores are spiritual error-structures that arise from the material plain. The truth became incarnate, while egregores are falsehoods that become spirits. The Incarnation is one; egregores are many. (p.93)

There are at least two massive problems with this statement.

First, the spiritual can’t “arise” from the material. This violates the ontological hierarchy. In fact, the Catholic Church teaches that God alone can create spiritual entities. Even in sexual reproduction, a man and a woman only create the body of a child; the soul is given to Him directly by God at the moment of conception.

Secondly, Antichrist is not a “spiritual error-structure.” He is a person.

To be exact, there are many antichrists who herald the coming of a final Antichrist. According to Saint John the beloved: “Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18).

The final Antichrist is described by Saint Paul as the lawless one:

For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. (2 Thes. 2:7-10)

So, the concept of egregores maps on to neither traditional Christian metaphysics nor the traditional Christian account of Antichrist. Morello’s position is heretical, historically illiterate, and metaphysically nonsensical.

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I expect many folks still won’t understand why I’m making a big deal about this. So, let me be as blunt as possible: Sin is still sin, even if it’s got a RadTrad vibe. Heresy is still heresy, even if it’s based and red-pilled.

Morello explicitly aligns himself with Renaissance Hermeticisits such as Pico Della Mirandola. What he neglects to mention is that his use of magic led Mirandola into conflict with Catholic authorities, or that he eventually repented and embraced a life of prayer and fasting. The Church gives this exact prescription to everyone who has ever dabbled in magic—myself included. She always has; she always will.

So, where could Morello possibly go from here? Is Christian Hermeticism no longer a heresy because it’s an old heresy?³

There is much more to be said about this book. On Friday, I’ll post a second review, critiquing the book specifically from an Orthodox perspective. I want to leave it here for now, though, as a warning to all Christians. Remember what the Lord says: “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matt. 24:24).

Let me say this one more time, so no one can accuse me of mincing my words. A “conservative” like Sebastian Morello is no less dangerous than a “liberal” like James Martin. Yes, one is trying to prop up Christendom while the other is trying to destroy it. But though their ends are different, their means are exactly the same: the normalization of grave sin. Both, therefore, attack Christian civilization at its very foundation: the Church.

Ultimately, Morello and Martin are on the same side. They are both hastening the advent of Antichrist—whether they realize it or not.

1. Even those who speak favorably of Hermes Trismegistus as a philosopher implicitly or explicitly condemn his magical system. For instance, Morello names Cyril of Alexandria as a supporter of Hermes. But look at what the saint actually says:

This Hermes of Egypt, then, although an initiator into mysteries, and though he never ceased to cleave to the shrines of idols, is [nevertheless] found to have grasped the doctrines of Moses, if not with entire correctness, and beyond all cavil, yet still in part.

In other words, Cyril admires Hermes despite his sorcery, not because of it. God knows he would not have supported an effort to revive the Hermetic mystery cult—especially not within the Christian Church.

2. According to the Qur’an even says that the djinn (genies) must choose sides. Some are Muslims; some are infidels. Some are even Jewish or Christian!

3. Is this why so many “conservative” Christians are so keen on Nestorianism these days?