The Megami Tensei video game series has been a popular one over the decades. Since its first appearance on the NES in 1987 (released on 9-11, no less), it has surpassed 19 million units in sales. A spin-off series, Persona, has sold another 15 million units as of 2021. Another entry in the MT series is releasing in 2024, which makes this an ideal time to explore the messaging that is at the heart of such a popular video game series.
The root of the MT series is a Japanese science fiction trilogy of novels written by Aya Nishitani. Those who have looked more deeply into science fiction will recall that there is a heavy element of predictive programming within it:
Researcher Michael Hoffman defines “predictive programming” as follows: “Predictive programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the future” (205). Through the circulation of science “fiction” literature, the ignorant masses are provided with semiotic intimations of coming events. Within such literary works are narrative paradigms that are politically and socially expedient to the power elite. Thus, when the future unfolds as planned, it assumes the paradigmatic character of the “fiction” that foretold it.
This being the case, it is all the more urgent to understand what gamers are being exposed to in the MT series. Right from the start, in the first game in the series released in 1987, he is immersed in a deeply demonic storyline, one that has a great deal of relevance for us today – the use of technology to summon demons: ‘The plot sees Akemi Nakajima, a clever high school student who is the reincarnation of the deity Izanagi, develop a computer program which summons demons from the realm of demons. Initially using his program to gain revenge on his tormentors, the program goes out of control and he unleashes a horde of demons.’
Rod Dreher wrote recently about the real-world exploration of using technology to communicate with demons:
In one of the book’s later chapters, Pasulka profiles a woman she calls “Simone,” a top investor in Artificial Intelligence and other tech fields. One thing that might startle you (it did me) in coming to the UFO and related fields is that most of those involved in it at a high level do not believe these are beings from other planets. Rather, they believe that these are some kind of discarnate superior intelligences from another dimension. I mentioned this in London this week to an investor from California, who said yes, everybody he knows in Silicon Valley thinks that, and some even hold rituals to summon these intelligences.
Simone believes that AI is one way that these entities are opening up to communicate with us — and she’s excited about it. . . .
The “he” is a top figure in this field, a guy Pasulka has called “Tyler D.,” but who has been identified elsewhere on the Internet as Tim Taylor. “Tyler D.” claims to be able to “download” information from these beings — information that has led to the creation of new biotechnologies. If Tim Taylor really is Tyler D., then yes, the former NASA star has become rich as head of an innovative biotech firm. . . .
Last week, I sent Dr. Pasulka some interview questions about Encounters. In them, I posed a query about Simone’s view, and described AI as a “high-tech Ouija board.” Dr. Pasulka said she hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes, that’s pretty much what Simone (and many others in that field) are talking about: that AI is a vector that allows for the exchange of information with discarnate higher beings.
More than three decades after raising the subject, the ‘fiction’ of MT is now revealed as reality by the scientific elite.
A similar theme emerges in the 1990 entry of the series – using a nuclear blast to open a portal between our world and the realm of demons: ‘The story is set in “20XX”, 35 years after a nuclear apocalypse which devastates the world and permanently opens a portal to the demon world of Atziluth.”
And once again, a leading scientist, years later (2009), confirms that his kind are interested in using destructive acts to peak into other dimensions or allow something from them to come into ours:
A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or “unknown unknowns” – for instance “an extra dimension”.
“Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it,” said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.
The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons – typically either protons or lead ions.
The differences are, firstly, that the streams of particles are moving at velocities within a whisker of light speed – such that each stream has as much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent head-on collisions.
The possibility of a ‘nuclear apocalypse’ between the West and Russia and/or China, because of Western interference in the Ukraine and Taiwan, is also closer than ever.
Another idea presented in the MT series is demonic attacks on people inhabiting the cyberworld of virtual reality (Shin Megami Tensei: Nine, 2002 release date):
Nine is set in the year “202X”, taking place during the latter half of Shin Megami Tensei and in the time leading up to its sequel Shin Megami Tensei II.[6][8] In the wake of the ICBM attack on Tokyo, communities of survivors now live in underground cities. In the face of their predicament, the underground inhabitants create “Idea Space”, a virtual world based on Tokyo from the 1990s. The protagonist, named Kei Azuma by default, is exploring the virtual world when “Noise”, digitized demons hostile to humans, appear and begin attacking Idea Space players through their avatars.
In this same entry, virtual reality is nearly indistinguishable from Gnosticism, complete with messiah, Sophia, and demiurge (Yaldabaoth) figures:
In the “Neutral” routes, Azuma performs tasks for a mysterious woman minding a store in Idea Space: the woman is the goddess Sophia, who was forced to reincarnate as a human for the sin of birthing Yaldabaoth: she has been helping Azuma towards defeating Yaldabaoth to atone for her sin and ascend. Azuma defeats both Yaldabaoth and Maria, allowing Sophia to become her true self and ascend, leaving the fate of those within Idea Space ambiguous.
In 2009’s Strange Journey, gamers are served a heavy dose of Gaia worship, as mankind is punished for abusing the environment with a destructive vortex that opens over Antarctica (a continent that is no stranger in the real world to weirdness):
In ancient times, humans were controlled by the forces of God. His rule over them was broken when the Mother Goddess Mem Aleph destroyed him, breaking his hold on Earth. Residing within the Schwarzwelt, Mem Aleph saw humans abusing Earth’s environment and consequently corrupting her dimension. Determined to remove those humans responsible for the corruption and return the world to its ancient state, Mem Aleph unleashed the Schwarzwelt.
Other entries like SMT IV: Apocalypse (2016) go so far as to have players commit deicide (and not so subtle anti-Christian deicide at that):
Stephen appears and reveals that there is one more enemy standing between humanity and true freedom: YHVH, the creator god. Stephen opens a portal to YHVH’s universe, and Nanashi and Flynn invade his realm. They undergo a trial from YHVH’s second-in-command Satan, and are deemed worthy to confront YHVH. Satan temporarily resurrects Flynn’s old friends Walter and Jonathan to aid them, and the group battles and destroys YHVH once and for all. Afterwards, humanity is finally freed from the gods and a new peace is forged by Tokyo, Mikado, and the demons.
Not to mention others that involve the artificial creation of a messiah and anti-messiah, a new Eden on a UFO, a millennial paradise, etc.
The Megami Tensei video games give us a glimpse of the mindset of the Elite and the direction they wish to take humanity. Putting large numbers of us under demonic control via technology, promoting Gnosticism and Mother Earth worship, implanting blasphemous thoughts about God-murder and absolute human autonomy in our minds – that games featuring such themes as these have sold tens of millions of copies shows us clearly the spiritual state of the world (or, more accurately, the state of the wealthy, technologically advanced, Westernized countries where this sort of media is regularly consumed).
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Quite obviously, this sort of ‘entertainment’ is unacceptable for Orthodox Christians, and we must mount a resistance against it.
One way to do that is by developing a proper approach to technology. Robin Phillips has done an excellent job of that in a lengthy essay here. Restraint and selectiveness in what we create and use are essential.
More importantly is to inculcate the Orthodox understanding of the world within ourselves and those in our families, parishes, etc., so no one will be enticed by the allure of the atheistic, evolutionary paradigm of a self-subsisting yet never-settled universe, or of Luciferianism, etc. The sublime beauty and orderliness of the Christocentric/Logos-centric cosmos will help accomplish this. St. Maximos the Confessor draws some of the major lineaments of it in his writings. On the unity of all in the Logos, for instance, there is this passage of St. Maximos:
It is he who encloses in himself all beings by the unique, simple, and infinitely wise power of his goodness. As the center of straight lines that radiate from him he does not allow by his unique, simple, and single cause and power that the principles of beings become disjoined at the periphery but rather he circumscribes their extension in a circle and brings back to himself the distinctive elements of beings which he himself brought into existence. The purpose of this is so that the creations and products of the one God be in no way strangers and enemies to one another by having no reason or center for which they might show each other any friendly or peaceful sentiment or identity, and not run the risk of their being separated from God to dissolve into nonbeing.[27]
Similarly, the wonderful harmony and the deep, delightful mystery of God’s creation are shown here, in words prefaced by Vincent Rossi:
As we have seen, the relationship of the Logos to all created beings through their logoi is the key to Maximos’ cosmology, the ontological basis of unity in difference, and the solution to the perennial problem of the one and the many. The logoi define both the essence (ousia) and the coming into existence of things. The differentiated logoi pre-exist in God and are firmly fixed in Him.[29] These logoi, as the inner essences of created beings, are the differentiated images of the one Logos in creation. Created beings may exist in or out of harmony with their logoi, but when they are in harmony, they will move according to the fixed purpose (prothesis) of God. The one Logos is incarnated in the many logoi and the logoi are transfigured in their movement toward the Logos. To the vision of Christian contemplation (theoria), the one Logos will be seen in the many logoi and the many logoi in the one Logos,[30] yet the Logos retains His superessential character.
The logoi are part of the intelligible world and link that world with its alter image, the sensible world. A beautiful passage in the Mystagogia describes the reciprocal relationship between the two worlds, and shows again the signature of Chalcedon—the hologram of unconfused unity in duality—as the key to both conceiving and perceiving the sacred image of the cosmos:
The entire world of beings produced by God in creation is divided into a spiritual world filled with intelligible and incorporeal essences and into this sensible and bodily world which is ingeniously woven together of many forms and natures … it encloses the differences of the parts arising from their natural properties by their relationship to what is one and indivisible in itself. Moreover, it shows that both are the same thing with it and alternately with each other in an unconfused way and that the whole of one enters into the whole of the other, and both fill the same whole as parts fill a unity … for the whole spiritual world seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible world in symbolic forms, for those who are capable of seeing this, and conversely the whole sensible world is spiritually explained in the mind in the principles which it contains. In the spiritual world it is in principles, in the sensible world it is in figures.[31]
St. Maximos, via Mr. Rossi, delivers a tremendous blow to the ugly, blasphemous theories of folks like Charles Darwin and Teilhard de Chardin:
The relevance of the cosmological vision of St. Maximos the Confessor for our time is significant precisely because it is refractory to the all-pervasive doctrine of evolution. It offers a hope of overcoming the hypnosis of rationalism and relativism in which the world at present languishes. The cosmology of St. Maximos reveals a world grounded in the Sacred, in which everything that happens is spirit motivating matter through form, a world in which everything created lives and moves and has its being in the uncreated being of the Logos. Finally, it is a vision of the world in which the universe is transfigured as a sacrament of love. In the sacred cosmology of St. Maximos the Confessor, the world is truly a cosmic liturgy in which the inner essences of all things may be heard to sing the words of the faithful at the consecration of the Eucharist in the Orthodox divine liturgy: “Only One is holy, only One is Lord, Christ in the glory of God the Father.”
Liturgy, love, Logos – if properly understood and lived and proclaimed by Orthodox Christians, these would dispel the smoggy falsehoods arising from pop culture products like Megami Tensei and polluting the spiritual atmosphere of our own communities, and would help enlighten those outside of the Church as well.
–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
YOOO THIS IS BASED