The Battle of Armageddon and Other Hallucinations

by Revilo P. Oliver

AN ADVERTISEMENT in the Seattle Times (28 December 1985) urged the readers of that newspaper to view, over a local television station that evening, a cinema produced by one Morris Cerullo, who comes “direct from Israel” as an “end-time prophet of God.” He claims to have stood on a mountain that he calls “Mt. Megiddo,” overlooking a place that he calls “Armageddon,” and there to have “revealed the prophetic events happening today” to an audience of five hundred “worldwide [sic!] believers” and Jews. Residents of Seattle were warned to watch the film “before it is too late” and learn “many unknown facts about Armageddon and the second return of Jesus Christ.” (If that will be his second “return,” he must have visited this planet once since the Crucifixion, probably coming, as it says in the “New Testament”, like “a thief in the night” and as stealthily stealing away before anyone saw him.)

It is not worthwhile to remark that Megiddo was a city on a plain, not a mountain, or to review the half-dozen principal theories about what ‘Armageddon’ (or ‘Harmagedon’ or ‘Hermagedon’ or ‘Harmamegedon’) meant in the delirium described in the Apocalypse that was included in the “New Testament.” Whatever the etymon of the word, it has been used by salvation-hucksters since the beginning of Christianity as a bogy to scare credulous prospects, and has been frequently furbished up for political propaganda. In 1917, holy men who were whooping it up for an insane “war to end wars” often told American boobs they were being marched to Armageddon to defeat the wicked Germans and their wicked Kaiser, after which everything would be hunky-dory and everybody would love everybody else. Today the script-writers for the White-House shows are having old Ronnie gabble obscurely about a proximate Armageddon to scare the tax-paying animals into working harder for their enemies.

The crude use of this nonsense by mystery-mongers should not make us overlook the fact that the notion of a climactic and final battle, as elaborated by Christian rhetoric, was one of the elements in the cult that appealed strongly to our ancestors. Unlike most of Jewish mythology, it was not of Semitic origin, although it appears in a Jewish form, already charged with the race’s appalling hatred of our race and civilization, in the Essene document found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and usually translated under the title, “War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.” The Christians (misunderstanding their Apocalypse) took the notion of a final battle between the mortal armies of the gods of Good and Evil, as they took their idea of a Resurrection and a Final Judgement, from Zoroastrianism, and they must have been partly aware of their source, since, as everyone knows, most of the tales about the miraculous birth of their Jesus include the appearance of Zoroastrian priests (Magi) to salute the newborn Saviour (Saoshyant). The Zoroastrian eschatology, furthermore, was based on a distinctively Aryan conception.

The Christian propagandists’ prediction of an Armageddon was congenial to our Nordic ancestors because the vision of a Götterdammerung is one of the archetypal concepts latent in our racial psyche. That archetype has found expression in many monuments of our literature that are racially authentic, uncontaminated by Jewish malice, even though many of them have Western Christianity as their background. For example, the conclusion of the Arthurian cycle that inspired Tennyson’s beautiful Morte d’Arthur. A more recent example, freed from that background, is the epochal battle so vividly described in the third volume of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I cannot but feel that if the more cultivated Christians would only read our great literature, they would not only find in it the emotional satisfactions that our innately imaginative nature requires, but would soon find intolerable to their taste the crude and tawdry tales in the Jew Book.

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, May 1986