Here I will point out only one other demonic plan of attack, without the knowledge of which it would be impossible to understand what follows and which should, both in history and metahistory, in time develop into, in a manner of speaking, the principal offensive thrust.
In mentioning the fact that no demon, no matter how powerful it might be, is capable of creating a monad, I had hoped that the reader would give due consideration to its implications. After the incarnation of the Planetary Logos, humanity became the decisive battleground, and an idea began to form in the demonic mind: to create, slowly if need be, a human puppet who would be capable of achieving absolute tyranny in terrestrial Enrof, of turning the population of the Earth into a satanohumankind. But once again the demonic lack of creativity made itself felt. Unable to come up with anything original, all the demonic forces could do was resort to the law of opposites and devise a blueprint to create a distorted mirror image of the efforts and paths of Providence. The Anticosmos was counterposed to the Cosmos, the principle of form to the Logos, satanohumankind to theohumankind, and the Antichrist to Christ.
The Antichrist! I will probably drive away more readers by introducing that concept into the Rose of the World's worldview than I have driven away in all the previous chapters combined.
The concept has been discredited numerous times: by the shallow, petty, and vulgarized meaning attached to it; by the abuse of those who proclaimed their political foes the servants of the Antichrist; and by the failed prophecies of those who saw signs of the imminent coming of the Antichrist in the events of the long-past periods of history in which they lived. But if by resurrecting the concept I were to drive away ten times more people than I actually will, I would still introduce it, for the concept of the Antichrist is woven into the worldview I am presenting with the strongest threads and will not be removed from it as long as the worldview itself exists.
As Gagtungr is incapable of creating monads, and demonic monads cannot be incarnated as humans, he had no alternative but to use a human monad in his plan. No matter what dark mission people perform, no matter what terrible stamps they leave on history, all that is dark has its origin in their shelt, not in their monad. It is only the shelt that can be demonized, not the human monad. In those rare cases, as with the father of the igvas or Klingsor, when an individual, having attained an extremely high clarity of consciousness, rejects God, it is his or her shelt, and not the monad, that does the rejecting. Thereupon something truly dreadful occurs: the renunciation of one's monad, for the very reason that it cannot sanction a rejection of God, and a total surrender of oneself - that is, of the shelt and all its material coatings - to the will and power of Gagtungr. The link between the monad and shelt is severed. The monad leaves Shadanakar to begin its journey anew in another bramfatura, and the shelt is either given to a demonic monad that for some reason has none or becomes the personal tool of Gagtungr, in which case the influence of his own spirit in part takes the place of the monad. In both instances, the shelt becomes demonized once and for all that is, there is a gradual transformation of its material composition. siaira, the materiality made by the bramfatura's forces of Light, is replaced by agga, the materiality of demonic origin. The same happens to the astral body as well. (Structurally agga differs from siaira in that it lacks microbramfaturas-the elementary particles that compose it are not animate and not even partly intelligent beings, as in siaira, but inanimate, indivisible material units. Agga is made up of only eleven types of those dark antiatoms, being the sum of their innumerable combinations.) Naturally, beings with such demonized shelts and astral bodies can no longer be born anywhere except on demonic planes. Thus, they are denied all possibility of incarnating as humans.
Since the plan to create an Antichrist called for its incarnation as a human, Gagtungr was left with only one alternative: kidnap a human monad, strip it of all its coats of siaira (that is, the shelt, the astral body, and the ether body), and by gradual effort fashion different coatings for it out of agga. It would be beyond the power of Gagtungr to destroy its former shelt of Light, but, without a monad, spiritually decapitated as it were, it would remain indefinitely in a state of spiritual lethargy somewhere in some out-ofthe-way transphysical crypt in Gashsharva. The kidnapping of a monad required enormous effort and long preparation. It was only in the fourth century A.D. that it was finally accomplished, and Gagtungr succeeded in snatching a human monad from Iroln, a monad that at one time had had an incarnation as a Titan and was presently linked to a shelt that had just completed a journey in Enrof in the person of one of the Roman emperors. But having only one such being caused the Antigod to fear that some unforeseen interference on the part of Providence might jeopardize the demonic plan. So later a few more monads were kidnapped as a kind of reserve of what we might call Antichrist candidates. Historically they faced the prospect of violent clashes with each other, the eventual victory of the strongest and luckiest, and the focusing of demonic efforts on that victor alone.
The shelts whose monads were kidnapped were indeed denied the possibility of being born anywhere. Walled up, as it were, in the depths of Gashsharva, they remain there to this day. The kidnapped monads, burdened by their material coatings of agga, with hands tied, so to speak, and controlled personally by Gagtungr, traveled down the road of demonic excellence, incarnating as humans from century to century.
One of them-that same monad of the former emperor soon began to outpace the others. Its kidnapper guided it from
incarnation to incarnation, overcoming its resistance, and over time causing an almost total extinguishment of its will of Light. As early as that startling being's incarnation in the fifteenth century, it had become obvious that the monad as an autonomous will was fully paralyzed and that the material coatings created for it were growing more and more obedient to demonic commands. The coatings were, however, still a long way from realizing their full potential. The incarnation in which that occurred was at the climax of the metahistorical battle within the Roman Catholic metaculture. It was connected with one of Gagtungr's most blatant, dramatic,
and sinister attempts to usurp control of the Church from within, an attempt that to this day remains the last.
I have already mentioned that behind the fanatical movement in Catholicism that cast a shadow over the end of the Middle Ages and found fullest expression in the Inquisition was one of the most nightmarish of the spawns of Gagtungr, and it was only in the eighteenth century that the forces of Light emerged victorious over it. As for the demonic human puppet, it appeared on the historical scene earlier, assuming the outward guise of an active champion of global theocracy. There is in Russian literature an astonishing piece of writing, the author of which undoubtedly must have had spiritual knowledge of that fact, though his waking self did not have full access to that knowledge. I am referring to «The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor» in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The one who is to become the Antichrist in the not too distant future was, one could say, captured by Dostoyevsky at one of the most crucial stages of its previous existence. It is true that he is not a widely known historical figure. His name is known now only to medievalists as the name of one of the rather notable figures of the Spanish Inquisition. It was about that time that Gagtungr was forced to admit the failure of his overall scheme to turn historical Catholicism into his lackey and the impossibility of unifying the whole world on the basis of a Roman cosmopolitan hierocracy. Absolute tyranny was impossible without the unification of humanity, and a host of prior conditions for unification of any kind was still lacking.