Lambs and mice (lambs!) already had been partly gestated in such contraptions.

 

And so there was the prospect of war, which I heard from many near-deathers, though one, Dr. Howard Storm, said he was told during his trip to the beyond that in the end, God wouldn’t allow a nuclear war to destroy His Creation.

During the tense 1980s, the Virgin reportedly assured seers at Medjugorje that a third world war, feared so greatly at that time, would not occur, a claim doubly fascinating because in her cloister (now Coimbra, Portugal, an hour north of Fátima), dear hidden Lucia would soon tell visiting prelates privileged enough to see her that, indeed, an “atomic war” nearly occurred in 1985 but had been prevented by prayer.

“The end of the world?” said Abrahams. “No. A punishment. There will be famine and extreme cold and we will not have medical supplies and we will have to go backwards. That’s all there is to it. We’ve become so advanced with things like cloning and we think we’re so smart. But [and this was said urgently] we have to go back to find God.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

19

 

God was filled with mercy. He was also just. Justice was often God’s mercy. “It is a justice that comes from love, from the depths of compassion and mercy that are the very heart of God, the Father who is moved when we are oppressed by evil and fall under the weight of sins and fragility,” Pope Francis said in 2023.

“If people change their ways, Our Lord will still avail the world,” was the way young Jacinta’s had put it. “Nosso Senhor ainda irá beneficiar o mundo. But if they do not, the chastisement will come.”

“If my people will not submit, I shall be forced to let fall the arm of my Son,” Our Lady of LaSalette said. “It is so strong, so heavy, that I can no longer withhold it.”

On her deathbed at Dona Estefania Hospital in Lisbon, Jacinta asked a nun named Mother Maria Godinho to “tell everybody that God grants us His graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that they should ask her for them, that the Heart of Jesus wants the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be honored along with Him, that they should ask the Immaculate Heart of Mary for peace because God has placed it in her keeping.”

Had there been events that already fulfilled this?

Jacinta spoke of “great world events that would take place around 1940,” which turned out to be the year Brussels fell to Germany, there was a Nazi invasion of Iceland, Norway, and Denmark, and the Battle of France began.

“Wars are nothing but punishments for the sins of the world,” Jacinta had said.

In 1941 had come the ghastly Holocaust. “If men do not change their ways, Our Lady will send the world a punishment like of which has never been seen,” she said.

“The sins that lead more souls to hell are the sins of the flesh,” Jacinta added — a comment perhaps more relevant to our time than hers. “Fashions that will greatly offend Our Lord will appear,” said the little prodigy. “People who serve God should not follow fashions. The Church has no fashions. Our Lord is always the same. The sins of the world are very great.”

And the Church?

In vision Jacinta saw the Holy Father besieged by critics, holding his head in his hands, weeping, kneeling by a table. “Outside the house were many people, some of whom cast stones at him, others cursed him and said many ugly words. Poor Holy Father! We have to pray a lot for him.”

“Pray much for priests! Pray much for religious!” Jacinta also urged. “Priests should only occupy themselves with the affairs of the Church. Priests should be pure, very pure. The disobedience of priests and religious to their superiors and to the Holy Father greatly offends Our Lord.”

The first two secrets of Fátima had ended, as far as what was initially released, with the words, “In Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc. …” Those words were added by Lucia three years before receiving the Enlightenment, as she was pushing herself to recall everything and write it for the bishop.

For decades that verbiage – eleven words, so enigmatic — entranced Fátima watchers. What did they mean? Did they imply that Portugal would remain steadfast while the rest of the Church, or a great part of it, fell into apostasy? “In the translation, the original text has been respected, even as regards the imprecise punctuation, which nevertheless does not impede an understanding of what the visionary wished to say,” was all the Vatican said.

 

So there was all that – foremost, the intimations of war, and a Church under attack, from inside and out.

The outward attack arrived viciously under Stalin. The Soviet tyrant slaughtered millions of Christians. Hitler wanted to create an occult version of the Vatican around a spooky SS castle. The “inside” one arguably took place, meanwhile, during the misuse of Vatican Two and the clerical sex scandals that ensnared at least 2,458 priests in the United States alone.

Clerics were openly defying bishops. By the 2020s, bishops openly defied the Vatican. This was foretold not only by mystics at spots such as Fátima and Akita (“bishops against bishops”), but by Emeritus Pope Benedict, who in 2015 sent a note to a friend saying, “We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil.”

The evil was on all sides, cyclonic, the winds every which way. Good was called evil and evil good. Yet the devil was rarely mentioned in homilies.

How could one fight an inimical force without seeing where the enemy was?

 

And there was also, perhaps urgently, that other aspect of the Fátima Enlightenment to do with geophysics.

Again there were the near-death visionaries, including the famous one in Seattle who saw that city vanishing in a tectonic event, unnerving because it lies near to the boundary between the “North American” and “Juan de Fuca” tectonic plates, a 700-mile span known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone as it slashes from northern California to Canada, the Juan de Fuca trying to force its way under North America.

When the next massive earthquake hits, pointed out a newspaper, the northwest edge of the continent will drop by up to six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west, “displacing a colossal quantity of seawater.

“One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins.”

Added a magazine, the New Yorker:  “In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem, Olympia, and some seven million people.”

Added the magazine, “We now know that the odds of the big Cascadian earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadian subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20

 

But really, we knew precious little. Where else might the hidden faults, too deep for discovery, spawn calamity?

Across America and around the world, major populations were in target zones.

If not quakes, it was hurricanes. What was Miami doing where it is? And New Orleans? Tokyo?

Storms. Tremors. No one could augur where or when the truly big ones would occur, just that they could and (without the Grace of God) would. When it came to natural events, the big stuff, we usually were surprised.

Were we now about to be shocked?

For guidance could we rely on mystics?

 

This was also problematic.

Many false ones had spread around the globe, and they spewed prophecy after dire prophecy.

Thus did Scripture say, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world [1 John 4:1].”

But as it also says, “Test everything; retain what is good” [1 Thessalonians 5:21].

And testing was crucial, for many predictions were dramatic, apocalyptic, drastic, among the more gripping those of James Wilburn Chauncey, a former military weather forecaster and cost engineer for NASA and the federal laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who told me of a near-death experience as a child in 1946 when he was escorted first by angels and Jesus and then “radiant beings” in their late twenties.

“We went to the edge of paradise, like a cliff, and you could see the blue earth hanging there and when you wanted you could just zoom in on various places on earth,” said Chauncey, whose “death” had been due to spinal meningitis. It was from this vantage point that he was shown not only what was currently transpiring, but what would occur in the world, and this entailed events that fit like confounding pieces of a jigsaw into the Fátima elucidation.

“Mountains had fallen; canyons disappeared; the courses of rivers were changed, and much land disappeared,” he recollected. “Portions of Texas and Arizona were now lakes. What had been deserts of the west were now green and lush with trees and vegetation. Asia, Africa, Europe, and the world over became lush with vegetation, clear water, lakes, and rivers, and an abundance of fish, fowl, and the animals.”

But getting there — cacophonous disturbances — was the trick, and many would not. This was implied in scenes he said flashed in front of him: pandemics, war, and volcanic eruptions as perturbations known to modern history rocked the planet, which he was shown would wobble before regaining equilibrium and ending up “totally straight” (which meant no more tilt on its “axis”). Along with the great new inland sea would be a gulf between California and the mainland, and loss of great chunks along the East Coast, especially Florida, to frothing, greedy torrents.

“I saw that we must not delay getting our lives in order,” said another near-deather, Julia Rowe of California. “The time has come to… prepare for the days ahead. I was shown upcoming natural disasters on a scale unlike anything the earth has ever experienced: earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, plagues, droughts, famines, pestilence, and all manner of disease will be upon the earth in such a deep and broadened scale that mankind cannot even imagine what it will be like,” she insisted, pointing to that set of tectonic boundaries around the Pacific, the “Ring of Fire,” which she believed would generate a large seismic event like the first “firecracker” in a series of catastrophes as the world beneath our feet was “jostled,” triggering many volcanoes and likewise fitting the idea of the earth’s axis “unlatched.”

This would be announced, she said cryptically, by an event that occurs along the Wasatch Range at the edge of the Rockies in Idaho and Utah.

Biological disaster was hardly out of the realm of possibility, though in the scenarios marshaled forth from future-gazers was every conceivable disaster, man-made or natural. Food shortages. Exchanges between Libya and Israel. Iran. Chauncey had “seen” people fleeing from the Vatican. Julie Rowe saw the Vatican destroyed and a Pope killed. She also saw an anti-christ arising as peacemaker in the Middle East.

In Utah, a woman named Sarah Menet predicted (in a book, There is No Death) that there will be small “cities” of refuge, where people will pray, share with each other, and protect themselves from marauders who she warned will all but take over the land. “There will be chaos in every part of the world,” she claims. “Many people ask me, ‘Where will it be safe?’ but I also give them great hope. I saw pockets of light on the earth. I know the power of God is greater than any army of the earth.”

 

Was this simply “tickling of the ears” (2 Timothy 4:3)?

In 2021, I was made aware of a young girl in Mexico who was said to have visions that started in 2005 when she was just three. “She dreams but also has apparitions in her own room,” Jaime Duarte, a prominent Mexican broadcaster, told me. “The Child Jesus played with her in her room. She has visions in a conscious state, and alone in front of Holy Sacrament, she sees the Virgin and dialogues with angels.”

One night, according to Duarte, founder of Cisne Catholic Radio, the girl encountered Jesus Crucified and, trying to comfort Him, offered herself, in whatever way a youngster might, as a victim soul. As a result, she had developed red stigmatic marks. At age nine, she’d informed her parents and a priest that world events were imminent, including a “warning” and “illumination” of conscience, the Mexican evangelist said. “The warning is very close,” he believed. “She says we have to prepare in four ways: 1) spiritual Rosary, prayer, not sinning, use of sacramentals, use medal of Saint Benedict, and also fasting 2) offering souls that are victims: sacrifices and pain 3) the Virgin asks that we are ready with food and clothing that would be necessary to survive some days during the warning and other things that will happen and 4) to meditate on a book written by Luisa Piccarreta on examination of conscience — to live the Divine Will of God.” In the realm of prophetic utterance, an air of familiarity hung heavily, as if a ghostly chorus of countless soothsayers had already sung the same tune. Indeed, the echoes of parallel prophecies reverberated across the landscape of visionary accounts. One striking similarity bore a resemblance to the alleged foretellings that resonated through the enchanting hamlet of Garabandal. It was there, amidst the rustic charm of this Spanish village, that young souls were bestowed with extraordinary revelations — or so it was said — of an impending epoch, a time when the fabric of reality itself would unravel, unveiling a phenomenon of unprecedented proportions. These seemingly gifted youngsters were entrusted with a peculiar message, a revelation of a forthcoming event — a grand “illumination” that promised to cast a radiant light upon the souls of all humanity. In this Divine illumination, the witnesses would peer into the depths of their being, glimpsing their own essence as God Himself perceived it. The magnitude of such a notion, real or unreal, was simply awe-inspiring, for it held the promise of an unprecedented revelation, a collective revelation that would transcend the boundaries of ordinary perception. Moreover, Garabandal’s enigmatic tale intertwined with the threads of the ethereal, for it harkened back to a distant day in the annals of recent history. In the final moments of the miraculous apparitions at Fátima in 1917, a moment of profound significance had transpired: Amidst the sacred grounds of Cova da Iria, the celestial manifestation of Our Lady revealed herself alongside the holy figures of Jesus and Joseph, showering their Divine benediction upon the throngs of fervent believers who had gathered there. And thus, it was at Garabandal that she chose to appear once again, assuming the ethereal visage of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The resonance with the momentous climax of the Fátima apparitions was undeniable, a connection that heightened the mystique surrounding this grand tapestry. The intertwined narratives of these holy manifestations, bridging the gap between generations, whispered of a profound continuum that bound the celestial and earthly realms together in an enigmatic dance.

But was it true? Was this not the region of massive deceptive phenomena just three decades before, starting at a place called Ezkioga, where there likewise was talk of warnings, an “illumination,” and great chastisements? The echoes of these prophecies, the overlapping motifs and sacred visions, painted a portrait of transcendence that if true and good parted the confines of time and space. A tapestry of Divine revelations unfolded before our eyes, intertwining the threads of history, faith, and the mystical yearnings of humanity. It was within this nexus of celestial whispers that the prophecies of Garabandal found their place in the eternal lore of Our Lady’s apparitions, forever etched upon the collective consciousness of those who dared glimpse beyond the veil of the mundane.Top of Form

 

As for the motif in which Mary allegedly showed herself, noted a priest named Father Alfred Combe: “Whenever Our Lady appears to her children on earth under a particular name, it is not without a purpose. At Lourdes in 1858, when a young Bernadette Soubirous asked the ‘beautiful lady’ who she was, the answer came: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.‘ This was clearly a reaffirmation of the newly proclaimed dogma of the Immaculate Conception decreed by Pope Pius IX a few short years before, in 1854. When Our Lady came to Fátima in 1917 as ‘The Lady of the Rosary,’ it was to emphasize that most powerful prayer and urge us to use it in imploring God’s mercy and gaining Our Lady’s help and protection against the catastrophic events which were to come in the form of World War II and the global spread of atheistic Communism. Why then did the Blessed Virgin come to Garabandal as ‘Our Lady of Mount Carmel’? What significance does this have for Christians today? If we go back to Lourdes we can begin to see a Divine theme being developed. The Blessed Virgin’s last appearance at Lourdes was on July 16, 1858, feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. During the final apparition at Fátima, October 13, 1917, when the ‘miracle of the sun’ occurred, Our Lady first appeared as she had been appearing to the three shepherd children with her sorrowful heart exposed. And then she appeared as Our Lady of Mount Carmel with ‘something hanging from her right hand.’ We can safely assume that ‘something’ was the Scapular. Forty-four years later in the little mountain hamlet of San Sebastian de Garabandal in northern Spain, Our Lady appears with a large brown Scapular prominently draped over her right wrist.”

 

In hot circulation was that prediction of a “warning,” during which, said the Mexican girl (as relayed by Duarte), “We’re going to see our sins, how God sees us. There will be an astronomical event. God wants that we should all ask God to forgive us. Everybody will see these extraordinary moments. It’s going to be something really strong, very hard. That’s why the Virgin asks us to prepare.”

While the youngster said nothing about death during the warning, she related, according to Duarte, “some planet or something comes close to earth. It’s not going to hit the earth. Some will fall on earth. Pieces will fall from it but won’t harm us. ”

 

But fright? A hard moment? This traversed onto strange nervous turf, the notion of a “Planet X” or massive bolide menacing our solar system, at least the girth of Pluto, but of course in a belt of comets splaying itself millions of miles beyond what we normally envision as the solar system. During one experience, according to Duarte, the girl saw the moon, or some heavenly body, split in two, which the Mexican broadcaster took as a metaphor, like her augury of a “temple, half-destroyed,” which he believed was the Church. “The Virgin said that after the warning, there will be the third world war,” he said. “And there will be a new virus on earth. She doesn’t know what virus it is. She made a drawing of it, which was shown to a doctor who said it resembled the smallpox virus. The girl also says she was told that in all the world is going to be a very powerful earthquake. There will be volcanic explosions and tsunamis. One volcano is a famous one in Mexico City and will have an eruption. She sees destruction and death in Mexico. The coasts are flooded. I don’t know if these events will be before or after the warning. She sees or dreams of destruction caused by an earthquake. What’s strange about this, on four occasions or so, hours after waking up or the next day, there always is an earthquake in some part of the world.”

 

In one case, added Duarte, a nightmare the girl had of people with “dark skin and slanty eyes” amid death and destruction was followed by an eruption, a volcanic event, in Indonesia — no dream, this. An omen? Her parents believe it actually pertained to an event that remains in the future and involves a great coming quake preceded by “a six-hour warning.”

Was this why there currently were so many hearing “hums,” “rumbling,” “booms”: were these mere microcosms, a presage for what would later detonate into a louder cacophony — global echoes — occurring, without explanation, in a future not so far away?

Duarte wasn’t sure if the girl had glimpsed as had so many others a tsunami or coastal floods for the U.S. “What she sees about the U.S.,” he said laconically, “is world war.”

I reflected back on Esperanza, who said it was “a crucial time, a decisive time for humanity,” that a “hard moment” would come, a “good test,” but a tough one, adding, “We cannot be concerned about money or houses or big cars. No. The moment is arriving when we must leave all those things. This moment is coming. Right now man is punishing himself through his egoism, through his lack of charity, through his lack of conscientiousness.

“There will be much upheaval. There will be some societal chaos. Our Lady is coming to lighten the chastisements. There will be problems and certain natural calamities. I see little quakes and certain others. A very difficult moment will arrive, but there will remain good because the Light and Grace of the Holy Spirit will always illumine those few who desire justice in the world — the truth and recognition of Jesus with His Love throughout all time.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

21

 

“Little quakes.”

Rumbles.

“Certain others.”

And weather? The world in 2023 endured intense heat just about everywhere — in some cases, such as Arizona and Italy, life-threatening temperatures. Was this what a seer in Cuenca, Ecuador predicted would be “natural disasters created by man”?

Whatever the source — human or natural (that blazing sun, those solar storms) – it was unnerving to see some areas with temperatures that for weeks seemed like an oven set on “low warm.” What would happen if electricity — and therefore air conditioning — went out during a heat spell of 120 degrees? Was it going to get even hotter?

As for war, the Enlightenment said just what Esperanza — who had not been privy to it – did. “It is the purification of the world by sin as it plunges. Hatred and ambition cause the destructive war!’”

And there was the anonymous locution, which in part said, “Chastisements will differ according to regions, and like the great evil, will not always or usually be immediately noticeable for what they are. In [this] period also will be a warning that involves not fire from the sky but fear of fire from the sky, and strange loud rumblings.”

 

The notion was captivating: loud sounds from high above or deep under. One had to step back and form one’s own inklings. Oh, the commotion! The undulating terrain! The agitation! A strange reverberation would occur, if there was truth to this, and a global quake? What would a tremor worldwide sound — and look — like?

Wide, roiled rivers, rollicking to a boil, a field of snap beans, disturbed, rolling like a blanket in a breeze. Rising, falling, billowing, rolling. Then, more distant rumblings and loud ones, far away and yet really just underneath. A blast from below, a temblor, a massive fissure. Ramparts slouching, tumbling into whitewater. The earth shaking fitfully; locally, regionally; with violence; water cascading into chasms — high cascades of water — as streams, creeks, and rivers flowed over hills. Towering water would seem to come from below as well as laterally – from the north; perhaps from the Great Lakes, if what occurred was in the Midwest (Lake Superior?), or a bay, a sea, if a coast was near the epicenter. Vapor and dust will swell and commingle, rise and plummet and elevate again, filling the atmosphere. Rumble after rumble, one deeper than the previous.

Or so one speculated.

Would America be singled out?

New York?

Wasn’t New York involved in every new trend?

The “fear” (of fire) — if such prophecy spoke true — raised the possibility, too, of a large astronomic object approaching, coming into view, and splitting in half, causing great fright and perhaps global panic but not devastation. This would fit the bill as “not fire from the sky but fear of fire from the sky.” It could also cause “skyquakes,” “a strange loud rumbling.” the threat of a massive celestial leviathan. An astral goliath in the far reaches of the great cosmos that dared to cross the boundaries of human complacency, jolting the world from the stupor of everyday existence. This celestial entity, born in the great factories of starlight, might split asunder upon arrival, bisected with the exactness of a divine mathematician. It would be a sight to behold, too majestic, too petrifying, its duality perhaps sparking a global tremor of the psyche, a terror not of destruction, but the mere specter of it. This seemed to align the cryptic prophecy — not a blight of combustion from the heavens, rather the very anticipation of such a cataclysm, a crippling dread of cosmic pyrotechnics that held the earth in its cold, paralyzing grip. A phenomenon that could be the source of tumultuous rumbles in the sky, the mysterious auditory stamp of the cosmic titan’s descent. A strange, terrible resonance of Divine portent that carried with it the thunderous echoes of celestial disturbance.

Yet there was no devastation in its wake, only the potent cocktail of fear and awe stirred up in the hearts of the earthly observers. The true weight of the phenomenon lay not in the potential for destruction but in its capacity to rattle the collective psyche of a species, its audacity to shake humanity from the comfort of its celestial ignorance. A reminder of our infinitesimal stature in the vast, uncaring theater of the universe. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, an expert on comets told me the likeliest scenario when it comes to apocalypse was of an object wholly unanticipated suddenly appearing and hanging in the sky.

For long moments, mankind would hold its collective breath, waiting to see what course such an intruder from darkness unknown would take. As for the sounds: here again were forerunners in the skyquakes and rumbles from clustered Europe to remote forests of Canada, and across the United States. “After about a month of silence, Fort Wayne’s mysterious ‘boom’ has returned,” noted television station WANE-TV in 2017. “‘You can’t describe it,’ said Helene Lilly, who heard it almost ten times. ‘You think you’re in a war.’”

 

In 2023, not far from New York, news outlets reported what one called “a loud, sustained rumbling” that “shook residents and buildings along the Jersey Shore, leading some to speculate on social media that an earthquake could be to blame.” There was, however, this twist: The U.S. Geological Survey logged no sign of seismic activity in New Jersey, New York, or neighboring states as of 2:30 p.m. on January 13, 2023, about thirty minutes after the tremors rattled windows and houses.

“Residents from as far south as Cape May and up to Manahawkin along the coast and as far west as Glassboro in Gloucester County reported feeling the shaking on social media. The tremor lasted at least ten seconds.”

Seismic? Cosmic? Perhaps the northern lights, strumming the atmosphere like a bass? Aliens?

Here we got into the bizarre, for such sounds often were included in reports — and they had become countless — of UFOs and strange “creatures.” It was like portals to mystical dimensions — floodgates — were opening. In spot after spot, aerial lights and rumblings, along with legendary “cryptids,” were reported near cemeteries, around places of wicca, at sites of ritual sacrifice, and especially, where there had been battles, massacres, or Indian activity, particularly burial mounds. Had such places been cursed, unlatching a vortex, or was it all raw demons, evil in masquerade, flaunting its capabilities of deception?

While the “mature” mind was wont to file it — skinwalkers, werewolves, bigfoot, lake leviathan, mothmen — as straight-up lunacy, there was Saint Columba to consider (he had once exorcised “Nessie,” which later regrouped near the cottage owned by Crowley), as well, when it came to UFOs, as the fiery wheel of Ezekiel. Befuddling huge red-eyes hirsute man-apes were reported as unexplained lights — what the military was now calling UAPs (unexplained aerial phenomena) — hovered overhead or zipped instantly to invisibility, often as if teleported or dematerializing, as did certain “yetis,” and as did sinister, bulb-headed, gray-skinned “aliens,” whose eyes (and here an exorcist might take note) were described as jet-black and almond-shaped: totally dark, no pupil, no soul, no iris, just coal. Hear this, from the Book of Wisdom: “In return for their senseless wicked thoughts, which misled them into worshipping dumb serpents… You sent upon them swarms of dumb creatures for vengeance… or new-created, wrathful, unknown beasts.”

I noted that strange rumblings often occurred in relation to bizarre phenomena, whether abominable snowman, “UFOs,” or old Indian haunts such as Moodus, Connecticut, where the Wangunk told colonists of sounds they took to be from angry “gods.” Indeed, the town’s name came from “Machemoodus,” or “place of bad noises.” Reports of strange rumblings and lights in the sky dated back to early Spanish missionaries in the 1600s in Colorado, this the terrain of Utes, a tribe known for its legendary “medicine men” who supposedly could transformed into wolfen creatures. Transylvania had nothing on Colorado! Had a veil there been breached, and were veils opening around the world?

In the Talala area ravaged by the 2004 tsunami, many who had taken to slumbering outdoors did so because they had felt tremors and heard “mysterious blasts” (according to the Times of India). Similar shocks had been reported from the Jamnagar district months before the Great Tsunami. The spiritual and geologic seemed intertwined.

Some geologists believed whole ancient continents had been “subducted” under the earth’s current crust, and below even that were molten flows or great areas of metal that it was speculated slide like plastic.

 

No geophysicist knew how big an earthquake could get; no one knew what else might jolt deep below the surface. Could the earth, the entire planet, “shudder,” to use Lucia’s verb? What was the Enlightenment referring to? Regional shudder? Global? The question was magnitude. When I spoke to one of the world’s leading authorities, Dr. Hiroo Kanamori, at the University of Tokyo, he told me it was impossible for scientists to speculate on the highest magnitude. “There is no real limit,” he said. “Of course, if you break the earth in two parts, that probably would be the biggest one.”

Quakes could come in swarms. They did in ancient Asia, the Middle East, and Mesopotamia: one could set off another. There were a shocking number of hidden faults beneath Los Angeles; a visible one shot up a hilly street to Columbia Records at the famous Walk of Fame in Hollywood.

Similar breaches could be below any state and any city, including America’s largest.

Could there be a global storm of them?

In ancient Turkey (“Anatolia”) tremors one after another wiped out early settlements, and the same may have occurred during the Bronze Age in Egypt and Israel.

Indeed, some scientists believed quakes may have set off the brimstone at Sodom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22

 

The fire was, and would be, as Scripture said: from the celestial vault, heaven, as seemed to occur in Central Wisconsin in 1871 when the “mother” of all wildfires, a truly historic one, rendered that million acres ash, twelve short years after a warning (of chastisement) from the Blessed Mother (near Green Bay). Of monumental curiosity, and yet as ignored by historians, it had been the same day, the very same, as the greatest urban blaze in history roared two hundred separate miles south, in Chicago, engulfing 17,000 structures; and also, back to forests, in Western Michigan (near Port Huron), which caused speculation that a comet’s blazing prolongation had touched — torched — several Midwest spots, falling from above the tree lines, from the celestial canopy.

No cow kicking a lantern, this.

It was impossible not to see this as a microcosmic harbinger, a cousin, of the Third Secret’s angel with spear aflame.

Would it repeat?

“Fire will fall.”

On a grander scale?

The more salient questions: “where,” “how,” and urgently, “when.”

 

One day, would searing heat descend upon the earth, this time across a vastly greater expanse? Would it be from the rise in global temperature — igniting desiccant brush – or reflecting on the Enlightenment, and geophysics, would the earth “bob” off center and trigger volcanoes?

There were those rumbles of it: sounds in the New Jersey (Pine Barrens) like giant tuba; low, rattling rumblings in Louisiana; a hum in England; a metallic echo in Moscow; many reports evoking the uncanny soundtracks of Close Encounters and Star Wars.

In Czechoslovakia, a deep vibration.

“Hell’s bells,” a witness elsewhere said.

Or was it the lion’s roar (1 Peter 5:8)?

 

But mainly it was a throbbing bass, and intriguing was that certain global echoes resembled the “shofar,” an ancient horn that summoned warning, and repentance, from the thick boiling clouds on Sinai (Exodus 19:16). Now, a dirge, a haunting echo, was heard without sure explanation in the modern world: In most cases officials ruled out sonic booms, distant traffic, the grinding noise of factories, quakes, heavy equipment, sewer belches. Some of it perhaps — only perhaps — was by way of an aurora borealis and its electromagnetism, which can strum the earth’s upper reaches, as energy streams from a flare — the eruption of tornadic magnetism — on the sun.

“In our opinion, the source of such powerful and immense manifestation of acoustic-gravity waves must be very large-scale energy processes,” a scientist named Elchin Khalilov had ventured, explaining the sounds. “These processes include powerful solar flares and huge energy flows generated by them, rushing towards earth’s surface and destabilizing the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and upper atmosphere. Thus, the effects of powerful solar flares: the impact of shock waves in the solar wind, streams of corpuscles and bursts of electromagnetic radiation are the main causes of generation of acoustic-gravitation waves following increased solar activity.”

Here too one could extrapolate the metaphor of a “flaming spear,” and in fact one recent flare resembled the profile, no pareidolia here, of an angel ready with trumpet.

And mystically, there were all the “miracles of the sun” at sites of apparition, the plunging, colored solar orb at Medjugorje, at Betania, or Kibeho, and Fátima. Yes, the sun or another astronomical force could be the jolt, could unlatch the axis, as could the hot blade of a comet.

 

But unless the world’s end, it was not a bolide, for one large enough to unlock the hatch would jettison torrents of debris to the point of shutting off the lights and killing photosynthesis, plunging earth into an endless winter night. Though other mystics saw an event that would cause three days of utter darkness, Lucia had not, nor, it seemed, had Medjugorje: at a conference on September 9, 2001, in Sacramento, a seer from there ribbed me for proclaiming during my talk that fire was about to fall on America, afraid, she joked, that the next thing I would declare would be those “three days darkness.”

When, less than two days later, fire did fall, it was on Manhattan.

 

Oh New York, with Babylon towers, with bronze bull! Had it learned no lesson, even when trounced by a virus? Had it seen no irony, this paragon of mammon, in the name “World Trade Center”? Did it not see aluminum cladding collapse into heaps of tortured metal.

And the devil? Demonic visages raged from the smoke that Tuesday, angry devils, exacting their measure, several beyond pareidolia (the imagining of an image). It wasn’t the mind playing tricks! God had allowed hell to deliver ashes to the front door of the new Nineveh and without warning (except in prophetic circles, where there had felled towers in paintings and dreams), fire had fallen, as if from Heaven, but really from the force of hell.

God had allowed it — spears had touched it — because it was the ultimate of what Jesus preached against: materialism. Did we think God was joking when He warned of it?

Glitz. Wealth. Celebrity.

Noah.

And so it was that in the vaporous days after 9/11 a man never identified somehow slipped beyond the barricades of the NYPD and in haunting fashion played a trumpet on a street devoid of cars, of pedestrians, of clattering deliveries. Who was this mysterious stranger, this soloist, sounding an actual horn in the cement canyons, mournfully? When a photographer tried to take pictures, reported a radio station, his camera — and this was a professional — inexplicably jammed. It was the singular figure of an unidentified man who managed to slip through the cobwebbed cracks of the NYPD’s rigorous barricade. He, alone, on a street scrubbed clean of the ceaseless bustle, an urban orchestra silenced; the tempo of automobile tires on asphalt, the staccato footfall of pedestrians, the grinding bray of delivery trucks — all had hushed in respect of this unanticipated requiem.

 

Perhaps his name was Gavreel, a mystery name for Gabriel, or Raguel, angel of justice. It was a unique exercise, imagining an angel with prophecy walking the streets of the world’s nerve center. If he did, perhaps he would leave a rarefied old Bible, the Latin Vulgate, by John E. Potter and Company, for someone to thumb through and notice parchment that was torn or missing, pages that held clues to the future.

When I lived in New York I ran into several mysterious strangers and I imagined if I ran into another, on the streets of Midtown, or Lower Manhattan, he might appear at first glance like a homeless soul or simply a clever clean-cut panhandler and leave, in his wake, a Bible with hints of the future — missing pages that lent clues to the future. Once I actually had encountered a mysterious elderly woman who simply and suddenly was there in front of me on Third Avenue, unfazed by the pedestrian crush, looking right at me while making the Sign of the Cross, and then vanishing into the crowd.

Perhaps if one were to come across a similar stranger it would be Gavreel and he would leave the Bible with those missing pages to hunt down. I imagined one to be page 585,  Isaiah 45:2 (XLV), which among other things says: “I will go before thee, and will humble the great ones of the earth: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and will burst the bars of iron.”

 

The New American and King James versions say “bronze” instead of “brass,” but either way, there were plenty of those closely-related metals in Manhattan and there was the bronze bull — emblem of unfettered capitalism, of Wall Street — and there was the brass of posh apartments in Midtown, not to mention the omnipresent bronze at Rockefeller Center.

There were bars of iron — grates — over the windows of old brokerage houses and bank vaults made of iron. Skyscrapers, subways, and bridges were fashioned or their cement reinforced with “bars of iron.”

As for “sunder,” that meant to cleave, rend, to divide, and sounded wroth. There were 140 search results for the word “bronze” in the Bible and eight for “sunder.”

A different version said, “I will go before you and level the mountains; bronze doors I will shatter and iron bars I will snap.”

“I will go before you and make the crooked places straight,” the King James had it. “I will break in pieces the gates of bronze And cut the bars of iron.”

More to the point was how instead of “make crooked places straight,” it said “level the mountains.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

23

 

That caused one to reflect on the words of that seer in Africa who relating her vision had said, “I saw mountains crashing into each other. Stones coming out of the earth, nearly as if they were angry. I saw storms crashing against each other and fire coming from them. I don’t know what this means. I was told that people are causing this and that it is coming…”

Since she and fellow seers had foreseen the historic genocide in the 1990s (incredibly, even warning the nation’s president before it occurred, and also listeners who heard radio streams from the apparition site), I paid close heed to her utterance. “Crashing storms”; “fire coming from them.”

As in Isaiah 9:10, “bricks” had “fallen,” but the response to it, to 9/11, and then to the coronavirus, was pride and defiance, the vow to build even better, taller buildings in New York.

A Bible search for “tower” turned up case after case in the Old Testament whereby God’s judgment was witnessed in the destruction precisely of towers.

Yet New York — the world — would have none of it. There were 340,000 millionaires and 107 billionaires, the richest man there, Jeff Bezos, at one point making four to nine million dollars an hour, or $6,541,666,666 a month (while minimum hourly wage for Amazon workers was fifteen dollars).

At the low end of his range, the Amazon guru made $66,666 a minute, more than the average American worker made in a year, while the founder of Microsoft was “worth” more than the annual gross national product of Puerto Rico — and neither of these two were as rich as Elon Musk.

 

Oh, those sixes! The tale was told in neon. A block or two from the bronze of Rockefeller Center stood a building where William Friedkin had edited The Exorcist, and at the summit had been a restaurant called “Top of the Sixes,” complete with rooftop sign playing on the tower’s address (666 Fifth Avenue).

Such was the world: two thousand richest controlled more wealth than five billion lesser souls.

The only surprise about the bronze and brass in New York was that it wasn’t solid palladium instead, or at least gold.

It was also a surprise that there had not been riots, though civil unrest, from each end of the political spectrum, and points between, seemed in the prophetic mix — all but inevitable — and would come quicker if there were natural disasters.

 

Perhaps, if there was a prophetic Manhattan angel, offering riddles, another page (in that old Vulgate of mine) would be 592: “But the wicked are like the raging sea, which cannot rest, and the waves thereof cast up dirt and mire” Isaiah (Chapter 57).

More than missing pages, there would be visions — cast onto the mind’s eye from a cosmic projector: Hordes of rioters, first in one city, then another, perhaps starting in New York, as they did after the slaying of George Floyd, moving next to the plazas and cul-de-sacs of suburbia; then exurbs; then farmland. This is what would occur in quick succession if a major disaster or series of them broke down our fragile, susceptible infrastructure.

They’d be best described as marauders: moving house to house, modern barbarians, like vandals of ancient Rome, for history must replay itself, when sin — gluttony, wanton sex, abuse of Creation — do likewise; in the plunder, residents who stocked food: now robbed of it. Especially sought: sugar, liquor, pasta, canned food, and rice, if food ran out; McDonald’s could get no supplies, nor Costco, nor Wal-Mart. Those stores will be emptied. The angel would show me this: gunshot from parts in curtains on suburban drives, as ruffians materialized first on one street, then on tree-lined others, accepting miniatures of liquor from those who had them to barter, raiding pantries and attics and the garage. Nothing frozen to rob, no, but freeze-dried food would be sought and gardens raided of what was to be had. Who to call? Where to seek help, if phones, radios, and laptops had been rendered useless; oddly — in the “vision” — a klatch of miscreants, sifting through coins, plucking out nickels (for their true silver: the only coin worth its weight), unless there was gold.

In the backdrop: buckled streets, punctured roofs. Chasms. Receding floodwater.

In the Bible bronze was used for shackles after a city was plundered and that, among other places, was on a missing page (641) from Jeremiah 15.

 

This was not just the dark bidding of dystopia. If not in detail, often there was the truth of essence — a feeling and sense – in prophecy. Despise it not (1 Thessalonians 5: 20)! If it seemed strange, so was much of the Old Testament. Goliath, a bronze helmet, bronze armor, bronze javelin (1 Samuel 17). A huge man  — a giant — slain.

“Giants” once had roamed earth — and there were those who claimed, perhaps wildly, they were being fashioned again.

Towering hybrids. Part human, part alien (fallen angels). Nephilim. Mysterious remains had been found in parts of the U.S. during the early 1900s, with countless articles in The New York Times hinting, with other news outlets, that the origin of humans (or at least some) was more complex than scientists knew.

Also, more bizarre.

Only God knew. Only His angels.

Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia, Minnesota, California, Missouri, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Mexico, South America, spots in Eurasia: these are where odd huge skeletons had been unearthed, and quickly hauled away by the Smithsonian.

The Times on February 11, 1920: “GIANT SKELETONS FOUND; Archaeologists to Send Expedition to Explore Graveyards in New Mexico Where Bodies Were Unearthed.”

*

Were these just mistakes, cases whereby scattered bones had been measured as much larger than they really were, or hoax? Had scavenging animals stretched skeletal remains? Would scientists have been so gullible a hundred years ago?

That could be argued. Or did one have to spend more time meditating on the era of Noah (Genesis 6:4), or some other page that might be missing? 2 Samuel 21:20: “There was war at Gath again, where there was a man of great stature who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number; and he also had been born to the giant.”

 

The world was a mysterious place. Upon death there would be much to learn! There’d be surprise after surprise. We had no idea about very much. If there’d been gargantuan humans, where were their bones? One researcher had amassed more than a thousand accounts of outsized skeletons unearthed in the U.S., and at least five hundred elsewhere, and it turned out that many early explorers such as Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake had said they witnessed giants in the New World. When Lucas Vazquez de Ayllón ended a voyage near the Santee River in South Carolina, he wrote that “the natives are white men. Their hair is brown and hangs to their heels. They are governed by a king of gigantic size, called Datha, whose wife is as large as himself.” The first Spanish explorer up the Mississippi described entire villages inhabited by them, and when Buffalo Bill Cody ventured into Wyoming, he said the Pawnees brought him a human thigh bone three times normal size. “These giants denied the existence of a Great Spirit, and when they heard the thunder and saw the lightning they laughed at it and said that they were greater than either,” Cody wrote in his autobiography. “This so displeased the Great Spirit that he caused a great rainstorm to come” until, according to Indian mythology, “it drowned even giants who had fled to the mountains.” Noah. Ventured Dr. Dennis G. Lindsay, a researcher, “The giants mentioned in the Scripture may have been a remnant of a once expansive, human giant race, beginning before the great Flood of Noah’s day, but also reappearing after the Flood. Moses, who wrote the Book of Genesis some 850 years after the Flood, reveals these giants had been around for a long time,” and added that: “the Bible gives warning that giants will appear at the end of the age.”

Were these then keys to the past — and the future? Said the prophet Enoch, “And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of Heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’ And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.”

Really, no one knew if Enoch was valid.

If it was, the giants, it seemed, were poised for re-entry.

And in it, an angel of prophecy?

Gavreel, once in Judea, now on the pavement of New York?

That was one thing: giants, extraterrestrials, orbs.

The other was their origin.

Is it another planet, a different dimension; did sin open portals to this? And the occult, as in the beguiling records of Enoch: was this — rituals — why New Age meccas and coven seclusions and Indians grounds were “haunted”?

Or was it simply a manifestation of hell?

In Close Encounters, the base had been in Devil’s Tower.

The fallen angels as in Genesis, materializing again?

According to a book of messages, Marija Pavlovic-Lunetti of Medjugorje recalled how she and fellow seers, asking Mary, in the early days, a flurry of questions, had queried: “Is there life on the planets?” Our Lady’s response: “That is not for you to know now.”

Oh, strangeness! Missionaries claimed a demonic creature haunted the swamp near Lake Vufao in Peru, while in the U.S., rock stars insisted that they had encountered flying saucers (when they weren’t on hallucinogens).

In both cases the smell of sulfur.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24

 

It was as if — with horror movies, drugs, music, sex, contraception, rebellion, feminism, sodomy, transvestites, and of course the occult — a kraken had been unleashed.

“You see,” Gavreel would say, walking the street, “there have been five major periods in this era, which soon will end. These are the ferocious epochs of temporal rule, brought about by the desires of the flesh from which the taint of sin is never absent. One was a dog, fiery, but not burning; another a yellow lion; another like a pale horse; a fourth like a black pig — your current period — and the last resembling a grey wolf.”

Brushing by pedestrians, the mysterious stranger would explain how the first period involved attacks on the Church, whether Masonic or by some other name, as the “synagogue of Satan” formed, with great upsets in Europe, leading into World War One.

This was fourteen years after “The Beast” Crowley had gallingly pronounced an end to the Age of Jesus and replacement with the pagan deity “Horus.” Seven years later, Hitler was meeting with the occult Templars, reading the dark works of Theosophy (in part inspired by Crowley), and offering his soul to a spirit he “felt” at a museum exhibiting the spear of Longinus (a centurion who, legend has it, pierced the side of Christ). “The air became stifling so that I could barely breathe,” Hitler would later recount. “The noisy scene of the Treasure House seemed to melt away before my eyes. I stood alone trembling before the hovering form of the Superman — a spirit sublime and fearful, a countenance intrepid and cruel. In holy awe, I offered my soul as a vessel of his will.”

 

In that mix had been Fátima.

 

It was the beginning of great electrical achievements, mass production, and the contrivances – not all good — of chemistry.

Edison was fond of spiritualism, and Tesla was born at the very stroke of midnight, during a fierce lightning storm in Croatia.

Who needed the Holy Spirit when now one only required the flick of a switch for illumination? And wasn’t the telephone bringing to mankind virtually supernatural communication?

Who wanted to live without it?

 

“You think of the changes in very simple ways, without realizing the fundamental mistakes of mankind,” Gavreel would say, repeating the 1990 prophecy, waving around at the buildings, at flashing neon, perhaps up at the old sign on a skyscraper that said “666.” “The very artifice of your societies is false and against the accordance of God’s Will. This artifice shall not last. Your very conceptions of happiness and comforts are a great evil and falsity. They will not stand.”

“Look at your laboratories,” the angel would explain – (did explain, in that anonymous locution): “The greatest nemesis of God is now science more so than your vessels of communication, more than media, the science that alters life, the science that creates a counterfeit heaven, which toils with the womb and genes, the science that has filled the air with the power of the enemy, the science which creates chemical witchcraft and fouls the earth; the science which seeks to create life but cannot in actuality even sustain it, the science which has denied God.

“This will fall,” said Gavreel, in this iteration, “and all of its creations with it.”

 

Oh that period of the sixes, of the Sixties. At its very onset had come approval in the United States of the Pill — capitalized, like Catholics used upper case for Eucharist — followed a decade hence by abortion.

“Yet evils arise equal to that,” said Gavreel. “Men will kill and yet aspire to be Creator. When your laboratories now move to creation of living things, Heaven cannot tolerate this. It is the high sin of Lucifer.”

 

Was the “pale horse” the pallid complexion of AIDS? And had not that pandemic also been brushed over, as simple happenstance, as now with corona?

Defiance. Rebellion. One cooked the other. Lust.

“Note how it began in those parts of Africa where the prostitutes plied their trade along the highway,” an angel pounding the pavement of Fifth Avenue would say. “And that brings you to the ‘black pig.’ Of that a saint of yours, Hildegard, had prophesied, ‘This epoch will have leaders who blacken themselves in misery and wallow in the mud of impurity. They will infringe on the Divine law by fornication and like evils, and will plot to diverge from the holiness of God’s commands.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

25

 

If demons seemed like they were under every rock, it was because often they were.

Did Jesus go anywhere without confronting them? Was it not this — exorcism — a key part of His mission, often the key part? Did not early French missionaries warn that forests in Upstate New York (see Auriesville) were filled with them? There Saint Isaac Jogues, a French missionary, in 1643 wrote: “How often on the stately trees of the forests did I carve the most sacred name of Jesus, so that, seeing it, the demons might fly, who tremble when they hear it! How often, too, did I strip off the bark to form the most Holy Cross of the Lord, so that the foe might fly before it; and that by it, Thou, O Lord, my King, ‘might reign in the midst of thy enemies’ (Ps 109:2), the enemies of thy Cross (Phil 3:18), the misbeliever and the pagan who dwell in that land, and the demons who rule so fearfully there!”

Jesus said He would know believers by their casting out of demons (Mark 16:17)!

 

Earth was not a playground; it was a battleground. Had it gotten to the point where modern society as spawned by the Sixties, refined in the Seventies, and marketed during the Eighties onward had become the equal of Sodom, as bad as the times of Nineveh? That seemed very possible, even likely. “Division is strong and evil is at work in man as never before,” the Virgin said on June 25, 2022, at Medjugorje.

“As never before” included the time of the Ark as well as Gomorrah.

Oh, that pale horse, wild, unbridled.

No wonder in 1953 in Ukraine at a hill called Seredne Mary said, “My daughter, my daughter, my daughter, you see what a fullness of grace I possess. But I have no one to give my graces to, for there are so many daughters and sons who have turned away from me. I wanted to obtain a great forgiveness for poor sinners, for disaster is upon us as in the times of Noah. Not by flood but by fire shall the destruction come. An immense flood of fire shall destroy nations for sinning before God. This is the kingdom of Satan. Rome is in danger of being destroyed, the Pope of being killed.”

 

Despite that, the Virgin came with peace and joy. She knew we were on a tough battlefield, a place of testing, but that goodness and brilliance awaited us in the eternal, if we battled successfully, if we avoided or erased the taint and tinges of a passing world.

Nothing was as powerful as the Name of Jesus. No evil could win against it.

But try?

Evil if nothing was tenacious, persistent, unrelenting, until its defeat. It was up to us to carry forth to that end. With Jesus, the road was straight. We simply had to exercise faith, and persevere. The Lord wasn’t out to scare. And while some found the prospect of future events espoused in His Name frightening, far more alarming was what happened to sinners after life on this planet was over.

Heaven came through love, and no love was remotely as pure as that of Jesus. What it took for Heaven was kindness, charity, patience, forgiveness, truth, humility, courtesy (1 Corinthians 13:4-8). That was love and with love all fear was cast out (1 John 4:18). When one feared, especially death, one had to ask if it was because the subconscious wasn’t ready for the afterlife and knew it. Here the closeness of Christ was urgent. For no prophecy is truer than this: all of us will die. Life on earth is less than a blink. This “passing world” (1 John 2:7) is better described as fleeting. But then comes existence forever. Through prayer, one conquered all; one reached the right destination. This was God’s lesson. He wasn’t trying to scare. He wasn’t trying to coerce, and neither were authentic prophets. To prophesy was to proclaim the truth, and the Truth always involved the Name Jesus.

 

But here was our query: Due to all the contamination and the potential for losing so many souls, was God about to cleanse humanity, His Creation; the face of His earth?

 

Reputed seers were everywhere, especially Brazil, where one named Pedro Regis on May 22, 2021, related a message he claimed was from Mary that said: “My Jesus awaits you with open arms. Courage. When everything seems lost, great joy will arise for you. Remain by my side and I will take you on a safe path.

“You are living in a time worse than the time of the Flood. Men have defied the Creator and are walking like the blind leading the blind. Do not allow the flame of faith to be extinguished within you. A great darkness is approaching and many of the consecrated will fall. I suffer because of what comes to you.

“Be attentive. This is the message that I give you today in the Name of the Most Holy Trinity. Thank you for having allowed me to gather you here once again. I bless you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Be at peace.”

The following month the Queen of Peace (as he called her) presumably added, with some reiteration: “Dear children, you are the Lord’s possession, and you must follow and serve Him alone. Turn away from worldly things, and turn toward paradise, for which you were created. My Jesus loves you and expects much from you. You are living in a time worse than the time of the Flood, and my poor children are heading for the abyss of self-destruction that men have prepared by their own hands. Pray much. Seek strength in the Gospel and Eucharist. The days will come when many will repent, but it will be late. Do not forget: it is in this life, and not in another, that you must testify for Jesus. I suffer because of what is coming for you. Turn back quickly! Do not put off what you have to do. This is the message that I give you in the Name of the Most Holy Trinity.”

Was it legitimate? Were the words extramundane? One took from voluminous locutions — and Pedro’s were certainly frequent — what seemed good, what was edifying, and rang authentic, and left the rest (1 Thessalonians 5:21). “Dear children, I am your Mother and I love you. I ask you to seek to imitate my Son Jesus in everything. He is the fount of every blessing and your true liberation and salvation is in Him alone. I am the Mother of Grace and Mercy. Open your hearts and accept the Lord’s Will for your lives. You know full well how much a mother loves her children. Be obedient to my call. Difficult times will come for the righteous, but the Lord will be with His own. Do not retreat! The Lord has called you and expects much from you. You will be persecuted and rejected for loving and defending the truth, but do not be discouraged. Heaven is watching over you. At this moment, as the Mother of Grace, I shower you with Heaven’s blessings. Onward without fear! This is the message that I give you today in the Name of the Most Holy Trinity. Thank you for having allowed me to gather you here once more. I bless you in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Be at peace.”

 

Yet another message that same month: “You are heading for a future of great spiritual darkness. The smoke of the devil will cause spiritual blindness in the House of God, and many dogmas will be denied.

“I suffer because of what is coming for you. Bend your knees in prayer. Trust in Jesus and you will be victorious. Onward in defense of the truth!”

 

Long before, another reputed mystic named Marie-Julie Jahenny had claimed she’d received a message, in this case from Joseph, saying even more pointedly, “My children, plagues of all sorts are reserved for the earth. Plagues and calamities will come with this time. To indicate mortality, in some places, they will place the pall on the Church! It will be that corruption and lawlessness will issue from these plagues. I warn [about them], since my Son orders it.” 

 

One thing for sure was that while the Spanish flu was more severe, Covid-19 still had not fully run its course (there were the long-term effects yet to be reckoned, along with possible vaccine casualties), and whatever the case, the world truly had come face to face with a disaster of epic stature. If nothing else — if the body count didn’t come close to the pandemic of 1918-1920, not to mention the medieval Black Death (which killed at least one in four in Europe, perhaps one in three) — there was the enormous psychological mayhem. The populace, unaccustomed to hard times, was first shell-shocked, then made angry, then indifferent, lethargic, a feeling of helplessness with division and hostility that spread dark tincture across the land. Bitter debate over everything seeped into the soil of society, painting a nightmarish canvas of cabalism with its brooding palette. There was refusal to accept it as a warning, admonishment, and turning point at which a long period of Mercy transitioned into Justice — a time in which “forerunners” and “pre-warnings” entered a larger venue.

And here one came to an African preacher by the name of Emmanuel Makandiwa, founder of a large Pentecostal mega-church called United Family International Church in Zimbabwe. According to biographies, “Prophet Makandiwa,” who was born on Christmas Day, in 1977, was sleeping under a sun-shade at his parents’ farm as a boy when the canopy caught fire. It turned out the slumbering young man was caught up in a “vision,” and when onlookers rushed to douse the blaze, they were amazed to see the wood planks still intact and Emmanuel peacefully somnolent, without a scratch or burn.

*

Whatever the final verdict (and certainly he had missed the mark with some prognostications), Makandiwa had made an extraordinarily accurate prediction of the coronavirus on November 20, 2016, when he told tens of thousands at the City Sports Centre in Harare that in a vision he had seen “diseases that are coming, many diseases — know that we are praying about it — and another disease more deadly, and I saw it coming from the sea. If they investigate, they will find that it comes from the ocean, more deadly than HIV and cancer.

“Very fast, very aggressive,” he said. “How does it come from the sea? Is it a creature in the ocean, I don’t know. Is it from food from the sea? It will originate from under the waters, from the ocean. And thousands and millions, perhaps billions, will die. This is something we can pray against, because it isn’t good news,” he told the rapt crowd.

“Imagine sitting and watching TV and seeing millions and millions die — thousands in one city in one day. It’s a plague. It’s serious. It’s something that you will see like it flies in the air. We need people to pray, because we can prevent it, we can slow it down. But we can’t cure it.” 

 

Two months (and eighteen days) later, Makandiwa returned to his warning.

The virus he was speaking about, he now said, was “coming closer and closer, a disease from the sea that will kill more people than any disease we have fought before — very fast. I saw people falling like leaves and dying. They will do everything to investigate where’s it coming from, and they will not find out, but eventually they will confirm what I’m telling you. Something will bring that disease from the ocean to the land of the living.

“It’s a plague that only God can stop.

“They will do everything, but God will give power to His people in the midst of global upheaval.”

 

Most astonishingly, Makandiwa, “We need to pray. China. China. China.”

 

That was on January 11, 2015.

Six years later to the month, on January 9, 2021, the World Health Organization announced a mysterious pneumonia had taken hold in the Chinese city of Wuhan, with speculation that it had spread from the local seafood market, where everything from fish and crabs to dogs and hedgehogs were sold.

It was a wide array (by one count, a total of thirty-eight species), and while bats, which is where the virus actually is birthed, were not sold, there was a facility very near, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that handled just such animals, from which it was extracting the exact virus — SARS-CoV-2 — behind the fast-moving and soon global pandemic.

Had someone from the lab been infected and then spread it at the wet market, which was in walking distance? Had a bat escaped? And most urgently: had it been extracted from bats and then genetically enhanced, either to test vaccines (in the event of a corona outbreak) or for bio-warfare purposes?

We knew only that Chinese officials — frantic and knowing more about it than the rest of the world — immediately instituted draconian quarantines, detained talkative scientists, burned the corpses of victims (sometimes, it was claimed, before the person quite died), and nailed the apartment doors closed. If technicians there had amplified the transmissibility and lethality of the virus — which almost certainly they had — this explained its bizarre effects, and left mankind guessing as to final outcome.

On television was footage of Chinese paramedics in space suits transporting coughing gasping victims in plastic isolation chambers to destinations unknown.

 

Makandiwa was right: millions were to die, by the end of the first year three, and at last count seven. “Imagine sitting and watching TV and seeing millions and millions die — thousands in one city in one day,” the prophet had said — years before the outbreak.

And where did the funds to engineer the coronavirus come from? A company in Manhattan.

 

In New York, of course, as harbinger, hospitals were overwhelmed, as were morticians, the dead stacked in refrigerated trucks as mass graves were excavated.

“It’s a plague,” the prophet had said. “It’s serious. It’s something that you will see like it flies in the air. It’s a plague that only God can stop. My question is, who is safe now?” he said to his followers before the contagion. “It is going to continue happening, over and over and over again. And it will not be the last of its kind.

 “Whatever you see happening far away is not going to end there,” Makandiwa said ominously. “It is really catastrophe, it is chaotic. It is a demonic spirit that is going on a rampage.”

 

A demonic spirit: During the Middle Ages, bizarre phenomena including lights in the sky accompanied waves of Black Death.

And unpredictable? Strange?

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was also accompanied by outbreaks of the paranormal, and caused everything from a cold to organ collapse, seemed to linger for months after symptoms dissipated, and even those who had no overt illness felt strange. Loss of smell. Hearing defects. Brain fog. In some cases, with the severely afflicted, blackened skin. Everyone knew someone who had succumbed to it, especially elderly: When it manifested as pneumonia, it was tantamount to drowning.

 

A rampage indeed. The world gasped collectively. Satan (prince of the power of the air) loved the respiratory tract. No one had been prepared psychologically. It could ruin the kidneys, sear the liver. All of a sudden, everyone had myocarditis or atrial fibrillation. And if not from the virus, from vaccines.

Yet most often it was no more than a sniffle, a raw throat. No one could prove when it actually began.

Oh, yes: we yearned for normalcy. It was not to be rendered. A spirit of division that had been incubating for years broke into the wider domain, slash and burn, detonating even health policy. Makandiwa said there would be “chaos” and in fact institutions buckled, stock markets swerved, unemployment surpassed those of the Great Depression. Added Makandiwa cryptically, “We need to pray because this time there is a place somewhere where these guys are working on the nuclear.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

26

 

At the corner of Sullivan and Bleecker, Gavreel would have stepped into view in front of the sidewalk flowers at a deli and pointed to the young pedestrians, many wearing masks, though not for a virus. “Now it is smoke,” he might say. “Residents of this island are being told to stay inside for the third time. This is, shall we say, an ‘indicator,’ and though it will be only fleeting, remember these words: When you see the great smoke rise, Satan will have touched the earth. His manifestation will be near. He will seek to destroy what Christ has built, as Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil. In the end, the Cross will predominate, but not before the end of an era that has strayed.”

There might another page missing from the wood-covered old tome. And it might be 65, torn, one would learn later, at Exodus 19:18. (“And all Mount Sinai was on smoke: because the Lord was come down upon it in fire, and the smoke arose from it as out of a furnace: and all the mount was terrible.” The more modern translation said, “the whole mountain quaked violently.”)

 

While this was fictive, perhaps it was also something else: true. Not imagined was the strange way that smoke from wildfires in Quebec five hundred miles distant had descended in 2023 on New York and then elsewhere, at the same time volcanoes began to fume at Kilauea in Hawaii and south of Mexico City in the highlands near an old and exquisitely holy shrine dedicated to the Archangel Michael.

If the devil came around — oleaginous of complexion, major grease — there was always Michael, mystery name Sabbathiel, to drive him off.

 

Smoke.

In Ukraine, water.

A dam collapsed. It was an apocalyptic nation.

The mystic Josyp Terelya had told me that.

But for now, there was a tendency to focus on New York because no one thought it could suffer more than it had on September 11 and now, before all eyes, with the coronavirus, it had. The city had been a “ground zero” again. This was not a good omen. Everyone recalled the torrents of smoke from its tallest towers on September 11 and I also remembered crossing the Whitestone Bridge on the way to deliver the eulogy for a close friend who perished in the South Tower and looking to the skyline and how, though it had been weeks since the attack, a strange fog shrouded the island, unlike any I had seen flying dozens of times from LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark or witnessed through the bay windows from which I peered every day when I’d lived in Manhattan.

 

It was a “cloud,” and the prophecy had been just under a dozen years before.

Was New York the portent? Was its suffering from coronavirus not a second harbinger?

Was it perhaps telling us with symbols in microcosm about the future of the world or at least America?

The evening of 9/11, cable news was rife with New Yorkers lamenting destruction of what one after another called the city’s “pride” (“Do not go there. The pride there will be broken.”)

Now that symbol was gone, as broken as anything could be broken with one exception: a nuclear detonation.

Were all the events a precursor for what larger events would look like? For years after 9/11, Manhattanites had softened. They were more polite. They were accommodating.  You could approach a cop for directions now.

But was the big-city hubris and coldness returning, and not just in New York but the entire country, which had become the “Manhattan” of the world.

Swift. Big. Fast. First. And flush with cash.

That was the creed of New York and America.

Had humbleness reigned and had honest work returned? Or was there just more paper, more mammon?

*

The fear was that the latter was true and while it’d been hard to imagine anything the equal to 9/11 that would come as a chastening for materialism, with the virus one witnessed something beyond the “smoke” of 2001 and likewise — now invisible — a nefarious scent through the air. No sackcloth here! No ashes (Jonah 3:5-6)! Instead, the United States — and really the entire globe — was tempting fate again.

 

On September 11 the article on cloning in The New York Times had said, “A panel of scientific experts has concluded that new colonies, or lines, of human embryonic stem cells will be necessary if science is to advance,” adding a few paragraphs later, “The report by the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s most eminent organization of scientists, is scheduled to be made public on Tuesday [September 11, 2001]” at a news conference in Washington.

That never came to be.

Did anyone notice?

“In four years there will arise a new evil the likes of which mankind has never before encountered,” said the anonymous prophecy eleven years before 9/11.

Four years later had come federal funding and technology paving the way for embryonic cloning, and so yes, a new and great evil had arrived, one that was “comparable” to abortion (a comparison made even by a secular academic) and touted for its “beneficial” applications. Some said it was even the distraction of embryonic stem cells that allowed terrorists to mount their attack unnoticed by the White House.

Science, in its arrogance, tossed the roulette of unmitigated peril. This arrogance — a hubris imbued with an unnerving degree of myopia — was too blind, too swollen with self-importance, to perceive its own ignorance.

The simple fact was that it had veered off like a rogue wave. It had sailed, not towards the sunset of calculated destination, but off towards the midnight of the enigmatic and unpredictable. It had, in essence, become a vessel adrift on the waters of caprice, an unwitting captive of the mercurial tides of chance.

And New York was where so much of its seed money was harvested. The skyline of Manhattan was a monument to Man. And in its pace, in the quick-rhythm of its steps, was “innovation,” always explained as “beneficial.” It was now dispensing birth-control pills for free. How soon would pills for euthanasia be distributed with equal magnanimity?

 

New York — a city with so much excellence, just soaring potential — played with fire, and in its deeds were clues for the future. It wasn’t just abortion and materialism, though these ranked high. It wasn’t blue-blooded insolence. It wasn’t just that New York — oh, great City that it once was, and could still be! — was the center of new-world-order diplomacy (the United Nations), spiritless media, entertainment (beyond television, print media, and Broadway, it financed much in Hollywood and Silicon Valley); it wasn’t just fashion (which, as Jacinta said, sent many to hell). No: it was also the role New York played in promoting the occult on the one hand and secular humanism on the other, covering all dark bases. There was a group in town that once had called itself Lucifer Publishing and a cathedral in Manhattan’s upper western reach that in audacity had displayed a naked crucified female Jesus (“Christa”). No wonder — and this was an actual finding — the city, the cement, the steel, the bronze, the asphalt, was sinking under its own weight. It had gotten more cordial of late; there were good aspects; and certainly, good people; sharp, diligent; hardworking. But a refined edge was the sharpest and skyscrapers were its temples, the higher the better, all but defying Heaven. Once I had seen an advertisement in the Village Voice for human skulls, and each year was the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village with men dressed in drag or as prophylactics or as priests, as nuns, and smirking behind demonic masks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

27

 

But were there not also angels, mysterious strangers, roaming mean streets?

Near Washington Square Park was there also not Saint Anthony of Padua Church?

Was not God there to assist?

“This will fall, and all of its creations with it.”

That’s what the anonymous prophecy had concluded in its complaint against science — after its warning about New York.

With the pandemic, the city again had been at an epicenter and so one wondered whether the disaster in Gotham, folks collapsing on subways, gasping for breath in hospital hallways, with the city out of rooms: was this a follow-through, an augmentation; the next act in a tragedy? Had the Lord allowed a “demon” to “rampage” because, instead of conversion, instead of humility, Manhattan and the United States had resumed old ways after September 11, its steel and glass scraping the heavens with renewed audacity, this time with more mammon and a taller Trade Center, consuming the steroids of ego?

 

One could speculate. This much was sure: New York wasn’t alone in transgression, just the most innovative, the most blatant, and as for science, since 1990 it had become a greater antagonist than media: A Pew Survey showed scientists half as likely to believe in God as the general public, and if they did, just thirty-three percent bought the notion of a Personal deity. They had tooled together that new religion of Scientism, nudging God from His Throne (or trying to), with the public slowly but surely and sheepishly following. By 2022, belief in Him, always well over ninety percent, had dipped to eighty-one, and religious affiliation was in dwindling supply (replaced by yoga, wicca, and “none”). Was it a coincidence that God’s Creation — nature — was degraded by these same forces of “progress” and in apocalyptic fashion?

Plastics, pesticides, “chemical witchcraft”: the contrivances of science.

A synonym for contrivance was “artifice,” ironic because, to reiterate, that anonymous message (if one believed it) had said, “You think of the changes in very simple ways, without realizing the fundamental mistakes of mankind. The very artifice of your societies is false and against the accordance of God’s Will. This artifice shall not last.”

Another way of saying this was done so by the Virgin, who at Medjugorje, again in earlier days (October 1981), had said, “The West has made civilization progress, but without God, as if they were their own creators.”

*

What else would science concoct that was “beneficial”? Hybrid creatures? Humanzees? Cyborg humans?

Coincidental it was that whether in Tibet, in the rarefied air of the Himalayas, or in an adobe, at an arid reservation in Arizona, mystics of all faiths were clanging the same alarm. Some elders — Hopi, Navaho – flatly saw events as the signal that the end of times was at hand. In December 1990, the same month as the anonymous prophecy, a dreamwalker reported “purple flowers and a pear-tree blooming in the winter,” an omen, he felt, that the “final war fought with the gourd of ashes (H-bomb) had begun.”

 

In 2023 came the report of seismic readings – undulations, waves — that showed earth’s inner core had stopped spinning and might now be reversing rotation, although scientists were quick to reassure that this probably happened every six or seven decades and should affect very little on the surface.

Yet, it brought out the irony of a ceremony those same elders had held “to stop the earth from turning over.”

 

Added to all this — also across cultures — were those “cryptid” reports: strange creatures that thousands of witnesses, many reliable, insisted upon. Most prevalent was “bigfoot”: Though touted as a missing link, bridging humans to apes, in many cases the legendary hairy creatures were linked to lights in the sky – “UFOs” — and paranormal phenomena. The “creature” itself was most often gritty and robust but in telling accounts seemed simply to vaporize, in a few cases before the tormented eyes of hunters and others who described the fear it engendered and, like “aliens” (and demons), left as calling card a faint hint of sulfur in the nostrils, the scent of the devil’s perfume, a terror seizing witnesses unlike that evoked by a simple bear. Bigfoot was one of many “monsters” in our time, so many it was beyond summary, a variety that spoke of games played by mischievous, devious entities. This question emerged from the shadows: are we the artists, the beholders, painting these chimerical beasts with the colors of our subconscious dread, emanating from the darkest depths of our own pit, or merely spectators of ultramundane reality, the intersection of otherworldly dimensions? While states such as Colorado, Oregon, and Pennsylvania had their versions of the yeti, Tibetans fretted over mythic water serpents and energy forms called “nagas” that in Native American lore caused earthquakes and other upheaval. Tempting it all was to dismiss, and perhaps warranting just that, but the idea of an aquatic leviathan brought to mind not only the Bible (where “leviathan” is used six times, most notably in Isaiah; a sea monster), but also popular mythology of again Loch Ness and other spectral specimens insisted upon by hunters, campers, cops, homeowners, from all corners. Throw into this poltergeists. Whether the “Flatwoods Monsters” in West Virginia or werewolves in Kentucky, or “Champy” on Lake Champlain, the question was whether folks were seeing something actual, a merging of dimensions, or envisaging in their minds what was rising from spiritual domains. No one could dispute that the endless extent of space allowed for the possibility of bizarre life forms elsewhere, and civilizations that tuned into our dimension via machines appearing to us as flying ones or perhaps indeed mastering fantastic interstellar physical travel were possibilities, but a bigfoot commandeering a flying saucer? Didn’t this seem a mockery? Or truly, as the veil thinned, were spirits of all ilk climbing out of portals? Whether the History or Travel channels or YouTube, crypto-animals seemed everywhere, a special nuisance atop mountains, near graveyards (especially Indian burial mounds), and in woods.

There was a story in every county (if not more than one).

The occult was coming out of the woodwork. Light was fighting dark. Monsters at the same time that there were sun miracles.

In the West, witchcraft was growing in bounds and leaps as the young exited organized faith, kids who had grown up on vampires, New Ageism, and Harry Potter.

 

But it was more: it was a general spiritual tsunami. The evil one was exercising greatly enhanced power just as forewarned at Medjugorje (“the hour of the power of darkness”) and by Sister Lucia (that “decisive battle”), and as had been prophesied by Leo XIII. How else could the world be so confused, exemplified now by those who believed humans were not born with a real gender?

A few short decades before, such a notion would have consigned a person to a psychiatrist’s couch (or that of an exorcist).

 

How possibly could there be greater confusion? But also, how could “Christians” hate?  How could poisoning drinking supplies be a corporate right? How could it be right to carry assault rifles? How could letting a baby die on a cold sterile stainsteel tray (after a failed late abortion) be tolerated by anyone who was humane, or a youngster to starve to death across Central Africa, in a world of nearly three thousand billionaires?

*

Christ wept for many reasons, in addition to abortion. Oh, but a spectacle it was. Paganism, that primal, earthy vein of belief we thought was buried in the crucible of time, had awakened from its slumber with a roar that pierced the veil of our understanding. The eddies of myth and legend spun about, obscuring rationality with veils of mystery and unfathomable knowledge, giving a life of its own to the strange dance that unfolded before our eyes. It was as though the annals of time had been unceremoniously ripped apart, each page flapping in the gales of history, spilling forth the relics of the old gods. The whispered tales that once swirled around campfires were back, flourishing in the limelight, creeping into the cracks of our civilized facade. We bore witness to occult mythology, rituals, and beliefs yanked out of the shadows of the forgotten ages, a dance between the ancient and the modern, the material and the ethereal, the transient and the eternal. The raw power of forgotten deities was resurrecting before our incredulous gaze, the forgotten runes, the clandestine rites, and the cosmic connections long dismissed as the misdirected understanding of the early men: They were now brazenly splayed in the open, as if flaunting their survival against our amnesia. It was as if the past had splintered from the hardened crust of history, fractured and fragmented, only to be forged anew in the present. Paganism, like a phoenix, was stirring amidst the smoldering embers of antiquity, ready to soar once again into the liminal spaces of our consciousness. And it all progressed, steadily and in great earnest, undeterred by the horrified or curious gazes of modernity.

These were not just echoes of the past, faded whispers of bygone eras, but a vibrant and terrifying and real resurrection. The earnest procession of this was overwhelming, intoxicating even. The paradox was stark: old gods in the age of silicon. But yet, it advanced, the monolith of forgotten ages, and catacombs, dragging itself into the murky light of the present, stirring the air with its primal energy — and real spirits. A grand tapestry of the arcane and ancient bloomed with renewed vibrancy, the past reviving within the throbbing heart of the present.

 

And so Indians saw signs. Were they superstitions, or did they meld with the observations of Eskimos who during the “Polar Night” season, traveling by sled in pursuit of seals, now found that instead of the standard one they had two sunlit hours a day unlike their ancestors and even their own grandfathers. Superstition? These were people who grew up observing the pattern of snow and stars and sun as a matter of livelihood. What they were seeing was bothering them: While the sun still rose where it always had, now it was setting in a different spot: not behind the highest peak nearby, they said, as it had all their lives, but to the side of that peak. Perhaps the earth had “tilted on its axis,” said an Eskimo who was interviewed by a reporter. He used those words. For some reason the sun was striking and heating differently. And there was no longer a north or south wind; it was the east wind that now claimed dominance. There were huge banks of snow called “tongue drifts.” These were used as travel markers shaped by the north wind, and these had changed. Said another Eskimo in a YouTube clip: “Today stars also look different. At night, returning from a hunt using the stars, it’s noticeable; they are no longer in their proper positions. Our earth has changed, land, sky, and environment. Tongue drifts now point in a different direction. The shifting wind has caused this. When moving east, we crossed them sideways. Today, heading east, we go with the drifts. ”

It seemed there was no longer a north or south wind; it was the east wind that now predominated — hardly a factor at all in past decades and known to bring bad weather.  Now an ill wind was blowing. Ancestral ice cellars were melting. Roadways, street signs, and telephone poles were collapsing as permafrost turned to mud. Asphalt sank, buckled. Polar bears roamed new territories. If one ran into Gavreel might the Bible he left in an igloo, in an ice shelter, be missing page 561, “And they shall make a noise against them that day, like the roaring of the sea: we shall look towards the land, and behold, darkness of tribulation, and the light is darkened with the mist thereof” (Isaiah 5:29-30)?

That same time-worn biblical page, yellowed at the furls, held between those wood covers, would say in the preceding verse, “Their roaring like that of a lion; they shall roar like young lions: yea, they shall roar, and take hold of the prey; and they shall keep fast hold of it; and there shall be none to deliver it.”

Curious it was, how the name “Osama” meant “roaring lion.”

 

That was on the etymology websites, and that was another omen New York – 9/11 — had for us.

 

“I will bring up many nations against you,” said Ezekiel. “They will destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers.”

“How have you perished, city most prized!” (Ezekiel 26 ).

Again page 585: “I will go before thee, and humble the great ones of the earth: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and will burst the bars of iron (Isaiah 45:2).

The day of wrath was a day of “clouds and darkness, a day of trumpeter and battle cry against the fortified cities and the high corner towers,” warned another missing page.

“I have cut off nations,” said Zephaniah 3. “Their corner towers are in ruins.”

And besides “towers,” besides the name Osama, these signs also: when the Trade Center collapsed, it sent seismic pulses that widened cracks in the masonry of Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George Washington had been inaugurated, where the Bill of Rights had been signed, and where the first Congress convened. When an earthquake hit Richmond, Virginia in 2011 — one further noted — it shook Washington D.C. to the point of causing a serious fissure in the Washington Monument.

The monument — such a national icon — had to be closed for more than a year, and the same happened to Liberty Island in New York, which had to be shuttered the following year due to damage from the hurling, vengeful surge, the spectral hand of nature, called Hurricane Sandy.

 

And still fate was being tempted — in fact, more than ever. On the island of Manhattan, former woodland, former Indian territory, once farms, stood now 309 towers over forty stories, and seven thousand standing higher than a hundred feet, a density of nearly seventy thousand penned souls per square mile. They lived on an island that now boasted a new naked gold statue of a woman with tentacle arms and hair coiffed into horns as she emerges from a lotus on top of a city courthouse next to Confucius and Moses and symbolizing the fight for abortion. It made sense in a city responsible for ten percent of national pregnancy terminations.

New York Babylon. Los Angeles Babylon. Washington Babylon.

As America babbled on.

Satan was always among idols. “I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth,” says the Book of Revelation.

Wall Street Babylon. Hollywood Babylon. Las Vegas Babylon.

When events came in response, they were ignored or brushed off. New York had absorbed 9/11 as tragic, epic, but in the thrum, the whoosh — once the smoke cleared — devoid of deeper meaning. Manhattan was too cool for omens. I pondered how on Wall Street — defiant, brazen, brass-knuckled Wall Street, even during the pandemic — there had been denial of signs. The fortress stone bank edifices, with iron grates, seemed unshakable, impenetrable, looking every bit as immovable as the most unyielding mountains, as intractable as the deepest-rooted oak. Bravado was in the very calcium, the bone, of The City. Yet during pandemic, the financial sector proved naught but fluff stuff: in the scheme of things, hollow, minuscule. For if real calamity like many in earth’s past were to climb from the crypt of prehistory — “planet-changers,” as would happen if there was all-out nuclear or: the interior of earth shifted — the fantastic soaring constructs of Man would be deleted with a clack from the cosmic keyboard.

The “Brazen Charging Bull” was not a mere totem. In ancient Greece it had been a device of torture, the condemned locked inside, a chamber fashioned to look bovine and a fire was set under, heating the bronze until the condemned, shouting, shrieking, was broiled. In Pompeii had been at what archaeologists called the House of the Bronze Bull, so named after a small statuette that stood at a fountain and was associated with Dionysus, the Olympian god of pleasure, festivity, frenzy, which brought to mind New Year’s at Times Square.

 

As for Pompeii: it had been another mother “spiritual” center of the Roman Empire, and the calamity that struck there around 79 A.D. — Vesuvius — involved the kind of fire and tremor one fretted for our own destiny, if mystics such as Padre Pio were correct. (When asked about future, he once said, “Can’t you see the world is catching on fire?”).