Revelation: The Coming of the Antichrist

In Revelation, the Devil is locked into a hole without a bottom for a thousand years. After this he must be free for a while. As it is written: “When the thousand years are finished, Satan will be free to leave his prison. He will go out and fool the nations who are over all the world.”

We can find a parallel in Norse mythology, with the trickster God Loki, eventually punished and bound by the gods. A serpent hangs above Loki, and drips venom onto him, which makes him writhe in agony, making the whole world shake and bringing about the earthquakes that preceded Ragnarök, the end of the world and the destruction of the gods. But why must the figure of the Devil be freed? Jung writes: “The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction – it is an invariable psychological law whose existence… brought him [John, author of the Book of Revelation] a sure knowledge of the impending enantiodromia.”

If there is any one-sidedness to a pair, a conversion, or shift over to the other is likely. This is the fundamental psychological law of enantiodromia (a running towards the opposite), which Jung discovered from Heraclitus.

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