The Evil Archetype

reflections on Matthew Fox’s Trump and the MAGA Movement as Antichrist: Reimagining the Archetype of Evil in Our Time

The Preaching of the Antichrist Fresco by Luca Signorelli

I was excited to receive a review copy of Matthew Fox’s Trump and the MAGA Movement as Antichrist because I’ve spent many hours wrestling, writing about personal and collective evil as an archetype in my own ways: as cold giants, as sociopathy, as the demonic path,  as miasma, as untruth and as ruthlessness.

It seems to me that Antichrist is as good a word as any for these dangerous instinctive forces.

Fox was called to write this text after being struck by Luca Signorelli’s fresco The Preaching of the Antichrist:

Two years ago, I was inspired by a fresco in an Italian basilica to write a book on the forthcoming American election. This is that book in a modestly updated version. At the times, it was difficult to get reviews in religious journals, and it became clear to me that applying the archetype of Antichrist to a presidential candidate frightened editors who felt it would alienate many churchgoers and was overly strong language for churched and unchurched people alike.

I get it. Not a lot of people want to talk about evil or even think about it. It can make the world feel like a lonely place for those of us who must, who have encountered it externally and summoned internally:  

It is about recognizing and naming evil and its archetype in our time.

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we all know the evil archetype:  killing rage, a wish to dominate and destroy and control, a desire to press an imbalanced world further into injustice to provide us with more pleasure, comfort and power than we deserve.

I have come to realize that the opposite of evil is not the good. Bad is the opposite of good. The opposite of evil is the sacred, the holy. A recovery of the sacred is the key to working through evil.

And in a discussion of Antichrist as one face of the evil archetype, Christ is one word, among many, for that which is sacred. In From Modernity to Cosmodernity, which I’ve also been reading recently, Basarab Nicolescu proposes his own definition of the sacred: that which is not subject to any rationalization, the presence of something irreducibly real in the world.

Or in Fox’s words: the sacred is that which is bigger than ourselves, our best aspirations of who we might become.

The Antichrist here is that which manipulates, diverts and seduces us away from these possibilities, it is our shared attraction to evil, to unencumbered power for power’s sake, to ego inflation. All archetypes carry instinctive energies and impulses which threaten to overwhelm and possess us, and that we may also need to draw on, in greater or lesser doses, to survive in the world. Mothers, for example, may lean hard into their maternal instincts and find protective powers they might not be able to summon without a child to activate them.

And many of the men who imagine that they dominate the world currently and indefinitely, actively appreciate and take up the grotesque goals and strategies that the Antichrist whispers into their ears.

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Let’s spend a moment with Signorelli’s 16th century image that shook Fox, and Sigmund Freud, and many others to their core. I encourage you to click on the image and zoom in.

At the forefront we see a False Messiah listening attentively to the demon whispering in his ear and spreading its message while   We see violence breaking out, a seeming pile of dead bodies accruing on the lower left side of the screen. We see murderers, assassins, famous and infamous 16th century celebrities and strange spirits mixed in with the listening crowd who are apparently agitated, excited, confused or explicitly frenzied by the call of the demonic.

In reality he is nothing other than a master of deceit, a lover of power, skilled in corruption and driven by an insatiable ambition to stand above all.

We see a small group behind the Antichrist of those who are suspicious and resistant to his message. We see a temple being infiltrated and violated by soldiers wearing black stealth military gear. We see a man being abducted and yanked by his hair just before the temple steps. At the front of the temple on the right, we see the Antichrist martyring the prophets who challenge his lies.

At the upper left side we see Archangel Michael descending, to challenge Evil, and to break the spell, a rain of fire falling upon the followers of the false messiah, they collapse and fall to the ground.

Set in the social, religious and political environment of Signorelli’s place and time, it invites us to transpose the preaching of the Antichrist onto our own moment substituting a contemporary cast of characters, the brave, the virtuous, the resistors, the martyred, the oligarchs, the advisors and cabinet members.

We might see entities like Peter Theil, Pete Hesgeth, Stephen Miller and Elon Musk sprinkled in the crowd. Roy Cohen spent decades whispering evil and mesmerizing those driven by insatiable ambition: the prosecutors in the Rosenberg case, Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump.

It is important to note that the range and expanse of this archetype’s influence ebbs and flows, swells and recedes – although it is always present– sometimes it is louder, more dominant and more explicit.

And please remember that archetypes are collective, historical, political and cultural forces, not merely personal ones.

We must avoid falling into literalism when speaking of a symbol or a metaphor or an archetype. No one thing, no one person, or movement or time in history is a single, once-for-all time archetype. Rather the archetype comes and goes, becomes incarnate at different times and in different expressions in history. That is its power.

Fox explicitly discusses racism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, injustice, oppression, and extraction as examples of the continuous presence of this archetype throughout American history. Fox also notes that the inverted, distorted, authoritarian archetype of fatherhood is at play in the abuses of fascism, that I often refer to as The Daddy-Hole:

 Fascists invariably have a father problem as well. A punitive father problem.

He calls on artists and creators to identify the forces of destruction that we must stop shying away from. And to summon images of the sacred to remind us of the world we yearn for and are called to create together.

We need metaphors and symbols, stories and archetypes and those who name them and arouse them.

And I would add dreams. And dreamers.

From The 45 Dreams Project at Collective Dreaming

Trump appears in many of our dreams as an Antichrist figure.

He kills:

Trump was walking north up Fifth Avenue with a sub-machine gun, shooting everyone. Rocking a Davy Crockett fur hat… ~Anonymous

He cheats:

My dream last night had Trump loading up a Toyota pickup truck with ballots he had collected from polling places as he said, "I'll take this batch over... I'll meet you there...

He annoys:

I had a dream the other night about Trump taking us back to the pre-Gregorian calendar just to screw with people.

He attacks:

I had a dream that Donald Trump punched a reporter in the face on national TV and the reporter punched him back and Trump was bleeding everywhere and we were all like, "Welp! Just another day in America, I guess!"

He steals:

My husband woke up this morning and told me he dreamt Trump et al were taken down in the biggest money laundering scene ever uncovered.

And worse:

...once I dreamt trump was a cannibalistic rapist/serial killer who tore open his own head to reveal another identical trump inside.

Last night I dreamed Trump suddenly disappeared into an alternative universe, leaving nothing behind but the smell of sulfur.

Fox’s chapter on Hildegard of Bingen’s dreams and visions of the Antichrist speak to the importance of dreams and artwork as revealing the evils of injustice and patriarchy that has spread across the land like a fecal stench. Hildegard’s vision of the Antichrist archetype attempts to dismantle the love that binds all living things to each other.

Yet we also know that Hildegard depicted a fiery angelic life-force standing squarely upon a terrible monster of injustice, selfish desire, and deception.

There is hope.

Evil will recede, or collapse falling to the ground because it is inherently unsustainable, although it will never disappear. Archangel Michael wins the battle of Revelations at the end of time, and the Antichrist and company are released to a deserted and solitary place.

Love can also rise and swell, for it is never fully extinguished.

Equality and justice can be envisioned, created, built.

Our interdependency on the earth and all conscious beings is inalienable, and we are part of this place whether we understand that or not.

Love returns always. Life wins, one way or another.

Whatever comes next, whatever we are facing now or later, whatever suffering awaits, our highest aspirations, our best selves, who we might become – all together and alongside each other – matters.

And so do those, like Fox, who have the courage to name the many faces of the evil archetype when they see them.

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Trump and the MAGA Movement as Antichrist: Reimagining the Archetype of Evil in Our Time by Matthew Fox is available for pre-order and will be released on October 13th‍ ‍