Divining the Dream Machine: Part 1

Science-Fiction, Hollywood, and the Technology of Antichrist

by Thomas Millary

Sci-Fi and False Signs

In his seminal work, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose condemned “the spirit of science fiction.”¹ His critique of that literary genre is found within the chapter “Signs from Heaven: An Orthodox Christian Understanding of UFOs.”² Fr. Seraphim incisively argued that the so-called ‘UFO phenomenon’ would be a major component of the emerging religion of the future, the religion of Antichrist. By examining the descriptions of supposed ‘alien encounters’ and the beliefs of UFO enthusiasts, he demonstrated that an Orthodox perspective can only consider this phenomenon to be demonic. Before launching into this critique, he contextualized it by looking at the sector of pop-culture which had done the most work to prime society to accept outlandish spiritual beliefs about extraterrestrials. He turned to the popularity of science-fiction to answer the question “What were men prepared to see in the sky?”³

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This article originally appeared in-full as an essay published on The Ludwell Review on November 8^th, 2023. It is reproduced here, in three parts, with permission from the author.

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Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.

Providing a standard history of the genre, Fr. Seraphim references its prehistory in the work of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley, its solidification through HG Wells and Jules Verne, and its flourishing in then-contemporary pop-culture (the second edition of the book was first printed in 1979) through film and television such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He identified a dangerous underlying philosophy to the genre, listing four traits of science-fiction narratives that lend themselves to the subversion of traditional Christianity and the propagation of the religion of Antichrist. Firstly, traditional religion is absent; the science-fiction universe is either secular or it contains vague mysticisms that are inspired by Eastern religions or the Western occult. Secondly, human meaning is oriented not toward God but toward highly evolved beings encountered in journeys across time and space (sometimes these evolved intelligences are superhuman versions of ourselves). Thirdly, “the standard practices and claims of sorcerers and demons”⁴ (telepathy, direct human flight, dematerialization, shapeshifting, the creation of illusory environments, augmented intelligences becoming totally free of matter, etc.) are depicted as technological achievements, implicitly or explicitly affirming that the scientific future of humanity is a realization of the longstanding aspirations of the occult. Fourthly, science-fiction is utopian, not usually in the sense of depicting a perfect society, but rather through portraying society as reorganized through encounters with the aforementioned ‘more advanced’ intelligences.

In the decades since Fr. Seraphim’s death, the continued direction of the genre has vindicated his critique. We can see this through the persistence of the anti-Christian traits that he identified, the relationship of those elements to the alternative spiritualities (New Age, spiritual but not religious, occult, syncretic, psychedelic, etc.) that are now closer than ever to the cultural mainstream, and through the highly suspicious ongoing process of Pentagon ‘UFO disclosure.’⁵ Fr. Seraphim saw science-fictions depictions of UFOs as one major trend among several that heralded the arrival of the demonic religion of the future (others included ecumenism, interest in Eastern religions and their meditation techniques, charismatic revivalism in Christianity, and the proliferation of interest in paganism and the occult). He quotes Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, “The miracles of antichrist will be chiefly manifested in the aerial realm, where Satan chiefly has his dominion.”⁶ However, the genre holds an even greater key to understanding the religion of the future than described by Fr. Seraphim. Without contradicting any of his insights, it is the purpose of this essay to suggest that in the very name ‘science-fiction’ (which describes the intersection of imagination and technology) we see the blueprints for both the form and content of the rapidly emerging Antichrist religion.

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The Machine and its Religion

On his Substack, the Abbey of Misrule, recovering environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth has been warning about the Machine. For many years, he was a high-profile ecological and anti-globalization activist, cofounding the Dark Mountain Project in 2009, which mourned modernity’s destruction of the natural world, while calling into question environmentalist assumptions about progress and technological solutions. His 2021 essay “The Cross and the Machine” describes how his shifting perspective regarding environmental activism was accompanied by a series of successively adopted religious identities.⁷ Growing up nonreligious with a moribund English Protestantism as his reference for Christianity, he turned first to Zen Buddhism, then to Wicca, and finally to Orthodox Christianity.

Convinced as ever of the deadly effects of technological globalized modernity, Kingsnorth’s newfound Orthodoxy has given him the religious framework to diagnose the true spiritual pathology of our age. “…the rebellion against nature, against life, against God – has […] made us homeless. It has also wrecked and ravaged the living Earth to the point of disaster, in pursuit of a universal human empire of calculation and control.”⁸ Kingsnorth describes this rebellion as the global instantiation of the Machine, characterized by “the breaking of bounds, the destruction of limits, the homogenisation of everything in its pursuit of its continued growth….to its core, anti-limits and anti-form…The Machine is aimed squarely at what C S Lewis termed the abolition of Man, which is also the abolition of nature itself.”⁹ The Machine is not a form of wickedness unique to modernity but rather a temptation that societies have faced throughout history, having manifested previously in Sumeria, Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and other eras. Technological advancements from the Industrial Revolution onward have simply provided the mechanisms by which the Machine can now proceed unimpeded across the globe.

In the first entry of his series “Divining the Machine” (a phrase that inspired the title of this present essay), Kingsnorth lists its characteristics, including centralized/hierarchical/large-scale society, bureaucracy (able to order and monitor citizenry), mostly urban/metropolitan concentrated populations, a centrally directed economy with powerful financial institutions, a drive to replace the human with technology, advanced universal communications networks, and a propaganda system that normalizes all of this.¹⁰ He then describes its corresponding values – progress, openness, futurism, universalism, individualism, technologism, scientism, commercialism, materialism, and TINA (“there is no alternative”). “The Machine…rips up our roots in nature, in real cultures connected to time and place, in our connection to the divine centre. In their stead we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present…”¹¹ Later essays make it clear that leftist environmentalist critiques of capitalism are not alternatives but rather part of the Machine, the voice of “Machine Greens,” playing a central role in sinister efforts toward the World Economic Forum’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and similar totalizing technocratic agendas. “…the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine… one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to ‘heteronormativity’ to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.”¹²

In a December 2022 essay, “God in the Age of Iron,” Kingsnorth puts his conception of the Machine in conversation with Seraphim Rose’ description of the religion of the future.¹³ He aptly describes Fr. Seraphim as “a kind of patron Saint of Lost Western People,” as he was an admirer of Jack Kerouac, a follower of Alan Watts, and infatuated with Taoism and Zen before he found his home in Orthodoxy (a journey with some parallels to Kingsnorth’s). Kingsnorth unsurprisingly finds Fr. Seraphim’s analysis of the coming worldwide religion of Antichrist extremely relevant to his own critique of the global monoculture produced by technological modernity. The religion of the future is the religion of the Machine, found in the interface of the trends examined by Fr. Seraphim (UFO cults, witchcraft, neo-paganisms, shamanism, Eastern-inspired mysticisms, etc.) and technocratic totalitarianism. Kingsnorth provides another list of traits, this time as an initial attempt to discern the characteristics of the religious beliefs generated by the Machine– the self-as-idol, “Do what thou wilt,” ecumenism, religious inversion, salvation in this world, creation over Creator, sex as sacred expression, relativism, self-creation through technology, and the transhumanist quest for godhood.

The thread tying all of this together is the worship of self, the promise of the serpent in Eden that we will become like God. Kingsnorth mentions nineteenth century theosophist Helena Blavatsky’s claim that the serpent Satan was the true God of the Genesis story, the light-bringing genuine father of human spirituality, adding that “This kind of talk was probably outrageous in the 1880s, but today it would just make a good few seasons of drama on Netflix, or a funky series of Instagram images…What better symbol of the great rebellion of modernity, after all, than Lucifer-as-liberator: a Fallen Angel, exiled for resisting unearned privilege? Like Narcissus, Lucifer is entranced by his own beauty and power. Like both of them, we gaze entranced at our own avatars in the black mirrors in our hands, unable to tear our gaze away.”

Along with self, he names science and sex as the other two pillars of a triad of Machine values that have replaced the “prayer, people, and place” triad of traditional religious societies¹⁴. The heirs of the sexual revolution are relentlessly ‘queering’ all which is normative, while the totalitarian mantra of “trust the science” makes it increasingly easier to imagine the world prophesied in Revelation 13:17, in which “no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark.” A society increasingly defined by scientistic technocracy and unrestrained sexuality allows inhabitants of its digital grid to indulge in unlimited projects of self-creation and experimentation. “How can a human become like a god? By doing what gods do: creating. And how can a human create? Through our unique gift: the power of technology.”¹⁵

It is on this note, technology as the means to engage in Luciferian endeavors of self-creation, that I wish to add to the description of the religion of the Machine. Kingsnorth’s essay on Seraphim Rose does not mention his critique of science-fiction that I recounted earlier. That lack of reference is understandable, as Fr. Seraphim does not attribute any special significance to the spiritual pitfalls of sci-fi, viewing it mostly as a literary phenomenon with the function of preparing society for Antichrist-related UFO beliefs and false signs. However, latent within Fr. Seraphim’s warnings about science-fiction is a possible deeper critique, one that unveils a fuller picture of how contemporary civilization was seduced by the Machine. Having examined the science (technology) side of the equation with my brief summary of Kingsnorth’s penetrating essays, we must now turn to the fiction side, to a crucial node of the Machine not much treated by Kingsnorth, one that has worked tirelessly to ensnare our attention and imaginations. We need to look at Hollywood.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future (Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1979), 72.
2. Ibid., 70.
3. Ibid., 71.
4. Ibid., 75.
5. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously,” The New Yorker (2021). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously
6. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, Of Miracles and Signs (1870)
7. Paul Kingsnorth, “The Cross and the Machine,” First Things (2021).
8. Paul Kingsnorth, “The Green Grace,” (2021). https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-green-grace
9. Paul Kingsnorth, “Blanched Sun, Blinded Man” (2021). https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/blanched-sun-blinded-man
10. Ibid.
11. Paul Kingsnorth, “You Are Harvest,” (2021). https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/you-are-harvest
12. Paul Kingsnorth, “Down the River,” (2022). https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/down-the-river
13. Paul Kingsnorth, “God in the Age of Iron,” (2022). https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/god-in-the-age-of-iron
14. Paul Kingsnorth, “The Migration of the Holy,” (2022). https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-migration-of-the-holy
15. Kingsnorth, “Age of Iron.”