Book excerpt: The Gnostic revival of the Enlightenment witnessed the erection of what could be called the “Kantian Rift,” an epistemological barrier between external reality and the mind of the percipient. Arbitrarily proclaimed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, this barrier rendered the world as a terra incognita. Suddenly, the world “out there” was deemed imperceptible and unknowable. In addition to the outer world, the cherished metaphysical certainties of antiquity—the soul, a transcendent order, and God—swiftly evaporated. The way was paved for a new set of modern mythmakers who would populate the world “out there” with their own surrogates for the Divine. Collectively, these surrogates could be referred to as the Beyond because they epistemologically and ontologically overwhelm humanity. In recent years, the Beyond has been invoked by theoreticians, literary figures, intelligence circles, and deep state operatives who share some variant of a technocratic vision for the world. In turn, these mythmakers have either directly or indirectly served elitist interests that have been working toward the establishment of a global government and the creation of a New Man. Their hegemony has been legitimized through the invocation of a wrathful earth goddess, a technological Singularity, a superweapon, and extraterrestrial “gods.” All of these are merely masks for the same counterfeit divinity... the Beyond.