Rulers of the World

“The ruler of this world is coming” (John 14.31)

Pachacútec, Ninth Sapa Inka of the Kingdom of Cusco

Every age has its ruler of the world. Before Jesus spoke the famous words cited above, there were many notable ‘rulers of the world’, and one might think of the leaders of the different ancient empires of Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Rome and so on. Over in the western hemisphere, before its discovery by Europe, the rapid expansion of the Inka empire under the Emperor Pachacutec was just another (1). The ruler of any world depends upon what world it is, how defined and experienced of course. In earlier times, as before the discovery of the Americas, the world as in the ‘old world’ was inevitably literally rather smaller, being ‘just’ Asia and Europe. All the way down to the microcosms of individual worlds: a country, a province, a town, a family, some work or educational establishment, each with its own ‘ruler’.

Tudor King Henry the Eighth, best known for his dissolution of the monasteries.

It is generally understood that Jesus was referring to a time when the ‘ruler of the world’ – Satan – would come into dominion over earthly reality. The important thing was to live in a way that avoided your being under his control. Across the course of centuries since, Christians have long interpreted this as referring to whomsoever was seen as embodying the godless world at their time, which could often be very contradictory. In the 16th century, Henry VIIIth of England would likely have been seen as just such a ‘ruler of the world’ by traditional Catholic Christians when he broke from the dominion of the Pope in Rome to become independent, ransacking the monasteries in the process, for example. That must have seemed like a real ending of the known world for so many people, something once unimaginable. It might even be interesting to speculate whether the British Empire, famously which, at its apogee, the sun never set upon, itself could be seen in this way by the many people who came under the influence of its colonising imperatives.

Queen Victoria herself then, a ‘ruler of the world’?(2)

People have few problems with characters like Adolf Hitler, himself, at his own apogee, clearly intent upon ruling the then defined world through a rapid series of aggressive armed invasions of neighbouring sovereign countries. The determined and pitiless eradication of all opposition whether literal, or symbolic in terms of race, religion or ethnicity was but a part of this grand dark vision. Who knows where this might have ended were it not eventually defeated, at immense cost, by the alliance of western nations of that time?

To now, when the world itself has, in the course of the post war years and, more especially, the last few decades, now expanded to become effectively limitless in terms of the virtual reality that most of us now dwell in, like it or not. But it will likely go even further given the advent of generative AI and the determination by its advocates and developers to evolve mechanisms that allow the connection between the human mind and AI with the facility of thought scanning.

As with every age having its Faust, and every age having its Ruler, and every age having its End Times, every age and most religions have their own soteriology and notions of a second coming, whether understood as a saviour in the form of a Messiah, or an Avatar, such as Vishnu’s tenth incarnation as the avenging Shree Kalki, bringing to an end the present Age of Unrighteousness – the Kali Yuga. Yeats’ famous poem The Second Coming with its horrific vision of the loss of worldly integrity and direction and the coming of Satan was written in 1919, and itself has been variously seen as predictive of major dark events across the world, notably the Second World War (3). How much more so now?

As I write we are watching, apparently helpless, another lumbering towards rebirth of naked hegemony as, in the words of Yeats:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

We are now watching as the lights of any concept of a ‘free world’, itself now redefined to enable dictatorship, little by little are being extinguished, with, increasingly, nowhere left to hide, not even it seems in the depths of our own minds. Satan has acquired a very long reach into the lives of us all!