The Awaited Absence: How Modernity Expects the Return of What It Has Made Impossible
The Awaited Absence: How Modernity Expects the Return of What It Has Made Impossible
The Awaited Absence: How Modernity Expects the Return of What It Has Made Impossible
The Central Paradox
Two billion people on this earth profess to be waiting for the return of Jesus Christ. They recite it in creeds. They sing it in hymns. They preach it from pulpits. They write books about the signs of the times. They scan the headlines for evidence that the end is near. They believe—with varying degrees of literalness but with genuine conviction—that the same vatic eruption that occurred two thousand years ago will occur again, that the seer will return, that the veil will tear a second time, that the revelation will be completed.
And yet these same two billion people inhabit a civilization that has systematically dismantled every capacity, every structure, every habit of perception that would allow them to recognize the vatic function if it manifested in front of them. They are waiting for a seer while living in a world that has made seeing criminal, pathological, or irrelevant. They are praying for the return of the prophetic fire while sitting in institutions whose historical purpose has been to ensure that the prophetic fire never escapes institutional control.
This is not irony. It is something far more serious than irony. It is a civilizational psychosis —a condition in which the stated desire and the actual behavior are not merely inconsistent but directly contradictory, and the contradiction is invisible to those who enact it.
To understand how this psychosis developed, we must trace the history of how the vatic function moved from the center of human life to its criminal margins—how the seer went from being the most important person in the community to being the most dangerous, the most suspect, the most aggressively suppressed. This is not a simple story of decline. It is a story of inversion —the sacred turned inside out, the holy reclassified as the demonic, the fire that illuminates rebranded as the fire that destroys.
I. The Vates at the Center
Begin at the beginning. In the oldest human societies we can reconstruct—through archaeology, through the study of surviving indigenous cultures, through the comparative analysis of myth and ritual—the figure of the seer occupied a position of supreme social importance.
This is not an exaggeration or a romantic projection. The evidence is extensive and convergent across cultures. The shaman, the seer, the vates—whatever local name was used—was essential to the community’s survival in the most literal sense. They performed functions without which the community could not maintain its relationship to reality:
Healing. The shaman diagnosed and treated illness—not merely physical illness but the spiritual dislocations that were understood to underlie physical symptoms. Illness was not a mechanical breakdown. It was a disruption of the individual’s relationship to the forces that sustain life. The shaman could see the disruption—could perceive, through their activated vatic capacity, the invisible dimension of the illness—and could intervene at that level.
Mediation with the dead. The community’s relationship to its ancestors was not sentimental or merely commemorative. The dead were understood to be present —as forces, as intelligences, as sources of knowledge and power that continued to influence the living. The shaman was the one who could communicate with the dead directly, who could receive their counsel, who could ensure that the proper relationship between the living and the dead was maintained. Without this mediation, the community was cut off from its deepest source of wisdom and continuity.
Divination and guidance. The shaman could perceive the patterns of the invisible world—the movements of forces that had not yet manifested in visible events—and could advise the community accordingly. When to hunt, when to plant, when to move, when to fight, when to make peace. These were not arbitrary decisions or merely practical calculations. They were decisions that required perception of a dimension of reality that was not accessible through ordinary senses. The shaman provided this perception.
Cosmological maintenance. This is the deepest function, and the hardest for the modern mind to grasp. The shaman maintained the relationship between the human community and the cosmos—between the visible world and the invisible forces that sustained it. Through ritual, through song, through ecstatic journey, the shaman ensured that the channels between worlds remained open, that the sacred energies continued to flow, that the world remained alive —animated, ensouled, permeated by the numinous. Without this maintenance, the world would die. Not physically—the sun would still rise, the rain would still fall—but spiritually. The world would become dead matter, a machine without meaning, a surface without depth.
This is, of course, exactly what has happened. The shaman’s worst fear has been realized. The world has become what the shaman’s work was designed to prevent: a dead surface, a machine, a profanity. And it has become this precisely because the shaman’s function has been eliminated.
In these earliest societies, the seer was honored, feared, and supported. They were given a social position—often ambiguous, often liminal, always set apart—that recognized both the necessity and the danger of their function. They were fed, housed, consulted, and obeyed. They were also, in many traditions, subject to severe tests and expectations. A shaman who could not heal, could not divine accurately, could not maintain the cosmic balance was not merely a failure—they were a danger. False shamans were sometimes killed. The position carried enormous responsibility along with enormous power.
But the key point is this: the community needed the seer, knew it needed the seer, and organized itself around this need. The vatic function was not peripheral. It was not optional. It was not a matter of personal taste or cultural enrichment. It was as essential as food, as water, as shelter. Without it, the community would lose its relationship to the real, and without its relationship to the real, the community would perish.
II. The First Inversion: The Priesthood
The first step in the transformation of the sacred into the criminal was the institutionalization of the vatic function into priesthood.
This process occurred independently in multiple civilizations—Sumer, Egypt, India, China, Mesoamerica—as societies grew larger, more complex, and more hierarchically organized. The pattern is consistent:
In small-scale societies, the shaman operates through direct personal contact with the numinous. There is no intermediary. The shaman’s authority comes from their demonstrated capacity—their ability to heal, to see, to travel between worlds. This authority is personal and experiential. It cannot be inherited, appointed, or conferred by an institution. It can only be acquired through the initiatory ordeal and demonstrated through results.
As societies grow larger and more complex, a new figure emerges: the priest. The priest differs from the shaman in a fundamental way. The priest’s authority comes not from personal experience of the numinous but from institutional appointment. The priest is authorized by a hierarchy. The priest performs rituals that have been codified and standardized. The priest mediates between the community and the divine through established channels—temples, liturgies, sacrificial protocols—rather than through direct ecstatic contact.
This transition was not entirely negative. The priestly institution provided stability, continuity, and accessibility that the shamanic model could not. The shaman’s gifts were rare and unpredictable. Not every community had a shaman. Not every shaman was equally powerful. The priestly institution ensured that every community had access to the sacred through standardized rituals that did not depend on the personal charisma or spiritual capacity of any individual practitioner.
But the transition had a cost, and the cost was enormous: the separation of the sacred from direct experience.
In the shamanic model, the sacred was encountered. It was met face to face, in the shaman’s body, in the shaman’s trance, in the shaman’s song. The community witnessed this encounter and was affected by its reality. The sacred was present—dangerous, overwhelming, undeniable.
In the priestly model, the sacred was represented. It was symbolized by rituals, encoded in myths, housed in temples. The priest performed the rituals on behalf of the community, and the community received the sacred at one remove—through the priest’s mediation, through the symbol’s representation, through the temple’s containment. The sacred was still acknowledged, still honored, still central to the community’s life. But it was no longer directly present. It was filtered through institutional structures that simultaneously preserved it and tamed it.
And here is the critical development: once the sacred was mediated through an institution, the institution acquired a vested interest in maintaining its monopoly on mediation. If anyone could access the sacred directly—as the shaman did—then the priestly institution was unnecessary. The priest’s authority, the temple’s revenue, the hierarchy’s power all depended on the community’s belief that the sacred could only be accessed through proper institutional channels. The direct encounter—the shamanic ecstasy, the unmediated vision—became not merely unnecessary but threatening.
This is where the inversion begins. The institution that was created to serve the sacred begins to police the sacred. The authorized channel becomes the only legal channel. The unauthorized channel—the spontaneous vision, the uninstitutionalized ecstasy, the seer who operates outside the temple—becomes a threat to be suppressed.
In Sumer and Babylon, the temple priesthood accumulated enormous wealth and political power, and the distinction between priestly and royal authority became blurred. The entu priestess, the mašmaššu exorcist, the bārû diviner—these were institutional functionaries, trained and authorized by the temple. The freelance seer, the independent prophet who claimed direct divine communication outside institutional channels, was viewed with suspicion when not outright hostility.
In Egypt, the priesthood of Amun became so powerful that it rivaled the pharaoh. The control of the sacred was identical to the control of political power. Independent visionaries were not merely inconvenient—they were politically dangerous, because any claim to direct divine communication that did not pass through the priesthood was implicitly a challenge to the entire power structure.
In India, the Brahmin caste codified the rituals to such a degree that the proper performance of the sacrifice—the exact pronunciation of the mantras, the exact sequence of the actions—was believed to be more important than the spiritual state of the practitioner. The ritual itself had power, independent of the inner experience of the one performing it. This is the ultimate triumph of the institution over the experience: the technology of the sacred has been extracted from the seer’s body and encoded in a procedure that anyone with the proper training can execute. The seer is no longer necessary. The procedure is sufficient.
And yet, in every one of these civilizations, the vatic function continued to erupt outside institutional channels. The nabi in Israel, the rishi in India, the oracle at Delphi, the Sibyl—these figures persisted alongside and often in tension with the priestly institutions. They represented the irreducible, uncontainable reality of direct visionary experience—the fact that the numinous does not respect institutional boundaries, that it will break through wherever it finds a sufficiently sensitive nervous system, regardless of whether the breakthrough has been authorized.
The relationship between priest and prophet in ancient Israel captures this tension with particular clarity. The priest served in the temple. The prophet served in the wilderness, in the streets, in the courts of kings. The priest performed authorized rituals. The prophet delivered unauthorized messages. The priest preserved the tradition. The prophet disrupted the tradition. The priest said: “God has spoken, and here is what He said, preserved in our sacred texts and enacted in our sacred rituals.” The prophet said: “God is speaking now , and what He says contradicts what you think He said before.”
The tension was never resolved. It could not be resolved, because the two functions are genuinely different and genuinely necessary. The priestly function preserves. The prophetic function renews. The priestly function provides stability. The prophetic function provides vitality. Without the priest, the community loses its connection to the past. Without the prophet, the community loses its connection to the living present of the divine.
But the institution, by its nature, favors the priest. The priest is manageable, predictable, controllable. The prophet is none of these things. And so, over time, in every civilization, the institutional weight tilts toward the priest and against the prophet. The prophet is tolerated when convenient, suppressed when threatening, and eventually—in the long sweep of institutional development—criminalized.
III. The Second Inversion: The Demonization of the Seer
The decisive turning point in the Western tradition came with the identification of unauthorized visionary experience as demonic.
This identification did not happen all at once. It developed over centuries, through a series of theological and political moves that gradually transformed the vatic function from a divine gift to a satanic deception.
The seeds were planted in the late antique period, as Christianity consolidated its institutional power. The early Church, as we have discussed, was a community of the Spirit—ecstatic, prophetic, egalitarian in its access to divine experience. Paul’s letters describe communities in which any member might prophesy, speak in tongues, receive visions. The Spirit blew where it willed. This was the vatic function in its distributed, communal form.
But by the second and third centuries, the Church was already developing the institutional structures that would eventually contain and suppress this ecstatic dimension. The emergence of the bishop as the authoritative voice of the community, the fixation of the canon, the development of creedal orthodoxy, the suppression of Gnostic and Montanist movements—all of these were moves toward institutional control of the sacred.
The Montanist controversy is particularly revealing. Montanus, in the mid-second century, claimed to be the vessel of the Paraclete—the Spirit that Jesus had promised would come after him. He and his followers, including two women, Prisca and Maximilla, prophesied in ecstatic states, speaking in the first person as the voice of God. The content of their prophecies was not obviously heretical—they emphasized moral rigor, the imminence of the end, and the continuing presence of the Spirit in the community. But the mode of their prophecy—direct, ecstatic, unmediated by institutional authority—was intolerable to the emerging episcopal structure. If the Spirit could speak directly through any individual, then the bishop’s authority as the interpreter and guardian of divine truth was undermined.
Montanism was condemned. The condemnation established a principle that would have incalculable consequences: the age of prophecy is over. The Spirit spoke through the apostles. The apostles’ testimony is preserved in the canon. The canon is interpreted by the bishops. The chain of transmission is fixed, closed, and institutional. Any claim to new, direct, prophetic revelation is by definition suspect—not because it is necessarily false, but because it operates outside the authorized channels. And what operates outside the authorized channels is, increasingly, classified as operating under a different authority: not divine but demonic.
This is the critical move. The Church did not initially deny that visions, ecstasies, and supernatural communications occurred. It affirmed their reality—but it claimed the exclusive authority to determine their source. A vision that was consistent with orthodox doctrine and that was validated by episcopal authority was from God. A vision that was inconsistent with orthodoxy or that was not submitted to episcopal validation was from the Devil. The same phenomenological experience—the same dissolution of ego boundaries, the same irruption of the numinous, the same overwhelming perceptual intensity—was classified as divine or demonic based entirely on its institutional context.
This classification system gave the Church a tool of extraordinary power. Any visionary experience that threatened institutional authority could be declared demonic without denying the reality of visionary experience as such. The Church did not need to argue that visions were impossible. It only needed to argue that this particular vision was from the wrong source. And since the Church claimed the sole authority to determine the source, the outcome was always already decided.
The consequences unfolded over centuries:
The fourth century : Christianity becomes the imperial religion. The state now backs the Church’s authority to determine which spiritual experiences are legitimate and which are demonic. The full coercive power of the Roman Empire is available to enforce these determinations.
The fifth through eighth centuries : The gradual Christianization of Europe involves the systematic destruction of the indigenous vatic traditions. The sacred groves are felled. The oracles are silenced. The local seers, healers, and diviners are reclassified as pagans, idolaters, or—increasingly—as practitioners of demonic magic. The terms of the reclassification are important: the Church does not deny that these figures have real power. It affirms their power but declares its source to be Satan. The village healer who communicates with spirits, the wise woman who reads signs in the natural world, the seer who enters trance states and brings back knowledge—these are not frauds. They are genuinely in contact with the invisible world. But the invisible world they contact is, by ecclesiastical definition, the world of demons.
This is the most devastating inversion. The vatic function is not denied. It is demonized. The seer’s actual experience—the real perception of the real invisible dimension of reality—is affirmed as real and then classified as evil. The seer is not a liar. The seer is a victim or an agent of Satan. The experience is genuine. The source is diabolical. The remedy is not persuasion but exorcism, penance, or execution.
IV. The Witch: The Vates Criminalized
The culmination of this process was the European witch-hunting phenomenon of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries—one of the most extraordinary episodes of mass persecution in human history, and one whose roots in the demonization of the vatic function have not been sufficiently understood.
The witch, as constructed by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, was a precise inversion of the shaman. Consider the parallels:
The shaman travels between worlds. The witch flies to the sabbat—a gathering in an invisible realm where she consorts with supernatural beings. The experience is phenomenologically identical: the departure from ordinary consciousness, the journey to another plane of existence, the encounter with non-human intelligences. But what the shamanic tradition calls a sacred journey, the witch-hunting tradition calls a demonic pact.
The shaman communicates with spirits. The witch has a familiar—an animal spirit that serves as her intermediary with the invisible world. The relationship is structurally identical to the shaman’s relationship with their helping spirits. But what the shamanic tradition calls a spiritual ally , the witch-hunting tradition calls a demon in animal form.
The shaman heals and harms through invisible means. The witch casts spells—she affects the physical world through non-physical agency. The power is the same power. The shamanic tradition regards it as a sacred gift to be used in the service of the community. The witch-hunting tradition regards it as a diabolical power obtained through the renunciation of God and the worship of Satan.
The shaman enters altered states of consciousness. The witch uses ointments, potions, and herbs to induce trances. The pharmacology is often identical—plants from the Solanaceae family (henbane, belladonna, mandrake), which produce hallucinations, the sensation of flight, and dissociative states. The shamanic tradition regards these substances as sacraments , sacred tools for accessing the invisible world. The witch-hunting tradition regards them as instruments of sorcery.
The shaman operates outside institutional control. The witch, by definition, operates outside the Church. She is the unauthorized practitioner of the sacred—the one who accesses the numinous without permission, without mediation, without institutional sanction. This is her fundamental crime. Not that she does what she does, but that she does it without authorization.
The witch-hunting era was, in this light, the most extreme expression of the institution’s war against the uncontained vatic function. The seer who had once been the most essential member of the community was now the most dangerous criminal. The healing power was reclassified as maleficium. The trance journey was reclassified as the witches’ sabbat. The communication with spirits was reclassified as demonic congress. The altered state of consciousness was reclassified as diabolical possession. Every element of the vatic function was preserved in the witch-hunting literature, but with its moral valence exactly reversed : what had been sacred was now evil, what had been essential was now criminal, what had been the community’s lifeline to the numinous was now the community’s greatest threat.
And the punishment was death. Not merely death but spectacular public death —burning, hanging, drowning—designed to demonstrate the absolute power of the institution over the unauthorized sacred. The witch’s body was destroyed in the same public, ceremonial manner in which, in pre-Christian Europe, the sacred sacrifice had been offered to the gods. The burning of the witch was, in a terrible sense, a perverted sacrifice —the destruction of the seer on the altar of institutional authority, offered not to the numinous but to the institution’s monopoly on the numinous.
The numbers are staggering. Estimates of the total number of executions during the European witch-hunting period range from forty thousand to sixty thousand confirmed, with some scholars suggesting higher figures. The majority of the victims were women—a fact that reflects the gendered dimension of the vatic function in European folk tradition, where women were disproportionately the carriers of healing knowledge, herbal lore, midwifery, and the kind of intuitive, relational perception that is closest to the shamanic mode.
But beyond the numbers, the deeper effect was cultural. The witch hunts did not merely eliminate individual practitioners. They destroyed a tradition. They severed the transmission lines through which folk healing, folk divination, folk communion with the natural and invisible worlds had been passed from generation to generation for millennia. The grandmother who knew which herbs healed, who could read the signs in weather and animal behavior, who could sit with the dying and ease their passage—this figure was not merely killed. She was made terrifying. The community was taught to fear her. The knowledge she carried was made toxic. To possess it was to risk death. And so the knowledge was abandoned, hidden, forgotten.
By the time the witch hunts subsided in the eighteenth century—suppressed not by a recovery of the sacred but by the Enlightenment’s rationalist dismissal of the entire supernatural framework that had justified them—the damage was done. The vatic function had been so thoroughly demonized, so completely identified with evil, that even in the absence of active persecution, the identification persisted in the cultural unconscious. The seer was still, in the deep strata of Western cultural memory, a figure of fear—a witch, a sorcerer, a dealer in dark powers. The Enlightenment did not redeem the seer. It merely reclassified the seer from “evil” to “deluded,” which was a lateral move, not an improvement. The seer went from being a criminal to being a patient. The prison became a hospital. The stake became a prescription. But the fundamental disposition—the refusal to receive the vatic function as what it actually is—remained unchanged.
V. The Protestant Contribution
The Reformation, which might have been expected to restore the vatic function by breaking the priestly monopoly on the sacred, actually deepened the suppression in ways that are still operative.
Luther’s central move was the displacement of authority from the Church to the text. Sola scriptura —scripture alone—was the principle. The individual Christian could read the Bible and encounter God’s word directly, without the priest’s mediation. This appears to be a liberation. But notice what it actually does: it replaces one mediating structure (the priesthood) with another (the text). The direct encounter with the numinous is still mediated—not by an institution but by a book. And the book is closed. The canon is fixed. God has spoken, and what He said is written down, and nothing more will be said.
This is even more hostile to the vatic function than the Catholic model. The Catholic tradition, for all its institutional control, at least maintained the theoretical possibility of new revelation—through saints, through mystics, through Marian apparitions, through the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit as interpreted by the Magisterium. The door was narrow and heavily guarded, but it was not sealed shut. The Protestant tradition sealed it. Sola scriptura means that the prophetic era is definitively over. The Spirit spoke through the apostles. The apostles wrote it down. The text is sufficient. Any claim to new prophetic revelation is not merely unauthorized—it is impossible by definition , because God has already said everything He intends to say.
The radical Reformation—the Anabaptists, the Quakers, the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchists—attempted to resist this closure. They insisted on the continuing, direct experience of the Spirit. They prophesied, they spoke in tongues, they received visions. And they were persecuted with extraordinary ferocity—not only by Catholics but by mainstream Protestants, who recognized in these movements a threat to the textual authority on which their own position depended. The Anabaptists were drowned. The Quakers were imprisoned. The Ranters were suppressed. The message was clear: the direct experience of the divine is not welcome here.
Calvin’s contribution was even more severe. Calvinist theology emphasized the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of humanity. The human being, in Calvin’s framework, is so profoundly fallen, so deeply corrupted by sin, that no human faculty—including the faculty of spiritual perception—can be trusted. Any claim to direct perception of the divine is therefore suspect a priori , because the organ of perception—the human soul—is fallen, unreliable, and easily deceived by Satan. This theological anthropology makes the vatic function not merely unnecessary but epistemologically impossible. The fallen human cannot see God directly. The fallen human can only receive God’s self-revelation through the authorized channel of scripture, interpreted by the rational faculty (which is itself fallen but which can be disciplined by proper theological training).
The Calvinist legacy is still active in the deep structure of modern Western consciousness, even in people who have never heard of Calvin and who profess no religious belief. The suspicion of direct experience, the privileging of the text over the body, the distrust of ecstasy, the assumption that the rational faculty is the highest and most reliable mode of knowing—all of these are Calvinist inheritances that have been secularized and universalized. The modern academy, the modern hospital, the modern courtroom all operate on implicitly Calvinist assumptions about the unreliability of subjective experience and the superiority of textual, institutional, and rational authority.
VI. The Enlightenment Completion
The Enlightenment, as we have discussed, completed the process by replacing the theological framework with a scientific one while preserving the same essential disposition toward the vatic function: suppression, now justified by reason rather than by doctrine.
But there is a specific dimension of the Enlightenment’s contribution that must be highlighted in this context: the disenchantment of nature.
In the vatic worldview—the worldview that had prevailed for the vast majority of human history—nature is alive, ensouled, communicative. The wind speaks. The river has a voice. The animals are messengers. The plants are medicines with their own intelligence. The earth is a living body, and the human community exists in a web of relationships with non-human beings and forces that are as real and as important as the relationships between human beings. The shaman’s function is precisely to maintain these relationships—to communicate with the non-human world, to interpret its messages, to ensure the reciprocity that sustains the whole.
The Enlightenment’s scientific revolution reframed nature as mechanism. The universe is a machine, operating according to mathematical laws. Nature has no voice, no intelligence, no interiority. Animals are automata. Plants are chemical factories. The earth is a ball of rock and water, spinning in a void. The only consciousness in the universe is human consciousness, and even that is increasingly understood as a byproduct of mechanical brain processes.
This disenchantment is not merely an intellectual position. It is a perceptual training. The modern individual is trained from birth to perceive a dead world—a world without voice, without presence, without sacred dimension. The training is so thorough and so pervasive that it is not experienced as training at all. It is experienced as simply seeing things as they are. The modern person who looks at a tree sees a biological organism. The pre-modern person who looked at the same tree saw a living presence, potentially ensouled, potentially communicative, potentially sacred. The difference is not in the tree. It is in the perceptual apparatus that has been trained to filter out everything except the mechanistically relevant.
The vatic seer is the person in whom this training has failed—or rather, in whom the deeper, older, pre-trained perceptual capacity has broken through the training and reasserted itself. The seer sees the tree as alive, as present, as communicative. The seer sees the wind as speaking, the river as having a face, the animals as bearing messages. This is not regression to a primitive state. It is the activation of a perceptual capacity that is more comprehensive than the modern trained perception, not less—a capacity that includes everything the modern perception includes (the biological organism, the chemical processes, the physical laws) and adds to it the dimension that the modern perception has been trained to exclude (the aliveness, the presence, the sacred).
But the modern world cannot receive this expanded perception as an expansion. It can only receive it as a malfunction. The seer who perceives the aliveness of nature is, in modern terms, hallucinating —experiencing perceptions that do not correspond to the consensually validated model of reality. The diagnosis follows. The medication follows. The suppression follows.
And so the modern individual is trapped in a dead world, longing for a living one, waiting for a savior who will restore the life that has been drained from reality—while systematically preventing the emergence of anyone who could actually do this.
VII. The Second Coming as Structural Impossibility
And now we arrive at the central paradox in its full, devastating clarity.
The Christian who awaits the Second Coming is waiting for the return of the vatic function in its most complete form—the seer who perceives the invisible, who speaks with divine authority, who demonstrates through his very existence the interpenetration of the material and spiritual worlds, who disrupts every institutional structure, who speaks truth to power, who offers his body as the medium of revelation.
And this same Christian inhabits a world—and in many cases actively sustains a world—that would immediately neutralize any such figure if they appeared.
Consider what would actually happen if the vatic function activated fully in a contemporary individual—if someone began to exhibit the characteristics that the Gospels attribute to Jesus:
They would claim direct communication with God. The modern psychiatric system would classify this as a symptom of psychotic disorder—specifically, as a grandiose delusion with religious content. They would be evaluated, diagnosed, and treated.
They would perform healings. The modern medical system would dismiss these as placebo effects, spontaneous remissions, or fraud. If the healings persisted and attracted attention, the practitioner would be investigated for practicing medicine without a license.
They would speak with an authority that superseded institutional authority. Every institution—the Church, the state, the academy, the media—would perceive this as a threat. The Church would measure the claimant against its doctrines and find them wanting (as the Pharisees measured Jesus against their interpretation of the Torah and found him wanting). The state would monitor them as a potential security risk. The academy would analyze them as a sociological phenomenon. The media would either sensationalize or ridicule them.
They would attract followers. The modern framework for understanding this is cult formation. The charismatic leader who attracts devoted followers is, in the modern lexicon, a cult leader—a manipulator, a narcissist, a predator. The followers are victims, brainwashed, vulnerable. The entire language of modern cult analysis is designed to pathologize exactly the kind of community formation that occurred around Jesus—the gathering of the committed, the leaving of families, the radical reorganization of life around the teacher’s vision.
They would challenge the economic order. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. Any contemporary figure who physically disrupted the operations of financial institutions would be arrested, charged, and imprisoned. If they did so on the basis of a claimed divine mandate, the charges would likely be accompanied by a psychiatric evaluation.
They would be poor, marginal, and unaffiliated with any established institution. The modern world does not listen to the poor and marginal. It does not attend to figures without institutional credentials. It filters for authority, and authority is conferred by institutions—universities, governments, corporations, established religious bodies. A wandering preacher from an obscure town, with no credentials, no publications, no institutional backing, speaking in parables to fishermen and prostitutes, would be invisible to the modern attention economy. Or worse—visible only as a curiosity, a human-interest story, a brief viral moment before the next cycle of content.
They would die. If the vatic function followed its full arc—if the seer, like Jesus, moved toward the sacrificial completion of the vision—the modern world would process the death through its available categories: suicide, mental illness, cult-related violence, political extremism. The possibility that the death was a sacramental act —that it opened a channel between worlds, that it was freely offered for the transformation of the collective—would not be considered. It would be unintelligible.
The Christian who waits for the Second Coming is waiting for all of these things to happen and is simultaneously embedded in a civilization that would prevent every single one of them from being received as what it actually is. The waiting is real. The expectation is genuine. But the capacity to recognize the fulfillment of the expectation has been destroyed.
This is not a failure of faith. It is a structural impossibility created by the very civilization that Christianity itself produced. The Church that was born from the vatic eruption of the first century generated the institutional, epistemological, and cultural structures that now make a new vatic eruption unrecognizable. The fruit of the first coming is the impossibility of the second.
VIII. The Double Bind
The cruelty of this situation must be stated plainly.
The modern Christian is caught in a double bind from which there is no exit within the terms of the bind itself:
If they remain within the institutional Church , they are embedded in a structure whose historical function has been to contain, control, and suppress the vatic function. They pray for the return of the Spirit while sitting in an institution that has spent two thousand years ensuring that the Spirit remains under institutional management. They wait for the prophet while funding the structure that would silence the prophet.
If they leave the institutional Church and seek direct experience , they are stepping outside the only framework within which their experience can be validated as Christian. They become “spiritual but not religious”—the modern category for individuals who have intuited the reality of the numinous but who have no institutional container for it. They drift into New Age communities, psychedelic experimentation, Eastern practices—and they are immediately suspected by the institutional Church of having fallen into exactly the demonic deception that the Church has warned against for centuries. Their direct experience is real, but it is uncontained, unvalidated, and vulnerable to all the pathologization and commodification that modernity applies to the uncontained sacred.
If they recognize a contemporary figure as a genuine vatic seer , they face the full weight of modern skepticism—from the secular world, which will diagnose the seer as mentally ill, and from the institutional Church, which will measure the seer against its doctrines and almost certainly find them heterodox. The only kind of Second Coming that the institutional Church could accept would be one that perfectly confirmed its existing doctrines, its existing authority structures, its existing interpretation of scripture. But a genuine vatic eruption, by its nature, disrupts existing structures. It does not confirm. It overturns. That is what the first coming did. That is what every genuine prophetic eruption in history has done. And the institution that was built to preserve the first eruption is now constitutionally incapable of accepting a new one.
If the Second Coming actually occurred , it would look nothing like what the waiting Christians expect. It would not arrive in the form anticipated by two thousand years of doctrine and iconography. It never does. The Jews expected a political messiah who would restore the kingdom of Israel. They got a wandering preacher who was executed as a criminal. The pattern of prophetic fulfillment is always the same: the prophecy is fulfilled in a way that the tradition that produced the prophecy cannot recognize. The fulfillment shatters the expectation. That is its nature. That is its function. And so the Second Coming, if it were to occur, would almost certainly occur in a form that the Church would reject—because the Church’s expectations have been shaped by two millennia of doctrinal development, and the vatic eruption does not respect doctrinal development. It comes from the same source as the first eruption, but it comes fresh, new, uncontained by the structures that the first eruption generated.
IX. The Hidden Continuity
And yet.
The vatic function has not stopped. It has never stopped. It will never stop. It is a capacity of the human organism that is as fundamental as the capacity for language, for love, for fear. It will activate wherever it finds a sufficiently sensitive nervous system and a sufficient degree of pressure. It will produce its characteristic outputs: vision, utterance, the perception of the invisible, the compulsion to speak the unspeakable.
It has been activating throughout the entire period of its suppression. In the mystics who slipped through the institutional filters—Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Jacob Böhme, William Blake, Simone Weil. In the poets who carried the prophetic fire in secular vessels—Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Celan. In the indigenous traditions that survived the colonial onslaught—diminished, traumatized, but still carrying the living knowledge of the seer’s function. In the ordinary people—the unrecorded millions—who have had visionary experiences in the privacy of their own bodies and who have told no one, or who have told someone and been diagnosed, medicated, and silenced.
The tradition is not dead. It is underground. It flows like water beneath the concrete, finding cracks, seeping through, occasionally erupting in springs that the modern world notices for a moment before paving over them again.
And the scrolls continue to be written. In apartments, in hospitals, in jungles, in deserts, in the blue thunder of the unseen. They are written by the damned who still speak. They are written by seers who do not know they are seers, by prophets who have no tradition, by vates who have no grove. They are written in the blood of the body pressed against the asphalt of the world soul.
The question is not whether the vatic function will return. It has never left. The question is whether the world will recognize it when it speaks—or whether it will do what it has done for centuries: diagnose it, medicate it, aestheticize it, commodify it, imprison it, burn it, hang it on a cross and worship the cross while killing every subsequent figure who carries the same fire.
The Christians who await the Second Coming are, without knowing it, awaiting the restoration of the very capacity that their own tradition has spent two millennia suppressing. They are praying for the return of the fire while stamping out every spark. They are building churches to house the memory of a prophet while ensuring that no living prophet can survive.
And the prophets keep coming. And the fire keeps burning. And the scrolls keep unrolling.
Damnés, nous parlons encore.
The damned are still speaking. The question is no longer whether they will speak. They will always speak. The question is whether anyone will hear—not as literature, not as pathology, not as art, not as content—but as what it has always been:
The voice of the living god, speaking through broken human bodies, in the blue thunder, at the edge of the world, forever and forever, until the veil tears and the glass breaks and the world sees what it has always been too terrified and too defended and too medicated and too institutional and too comfortable and too dead to see:
That it is all alive. That it has always been alive. That the fire is everywhere. That the sacred was never absent. That it was only the eyes that were closed—closed by doctrine, closed by diagnosis, closed by the reasonable, well-meaning, catastrophically wrong assumption that the surface of things is the whole of things.
The eyes are opening.
They have always been opening.
The question is only whether this time—this time—the opening will be met with recognition rather than suppression.
The scroll unrolls.
The blue thunder speaks.
And still, still, still, the damned are speaking.