Fighting The Dragon at the time of The Black Jaguar

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Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox

Fighting the Dragon at the Time of the Black Jaguar

By Gianluigi Gugliermetto

5/24/2025

In the Preface that he wrote ten years ago to the revised edition of Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, Matthew makes reference to an ancient Andean teaching regarding “the time of Black Jaguar,” which is the same to him as the dark night of our species.

Quoting Arkan Lushwala, he describes such a time as a purifying chaos in which lies are seen for what they are, and there is a collective craving for returning to the simplest truth.

Such a time of chaos is, by definition, very dark. It seems to me that Arkan and Matthew were preparing us, ten years ago, for what we are living through now: an incredible amount of lies and cruelty, on one side, and an absolute clarity about them being exactly what they are.

A melanistic jaguar. Photo by Ron Singer. Wikimedia Commons.

Of course evil may come to believe its own lies, and many people abdicate from their moral duties at such a time, preferring to believe absurdities. We need to be aware that evil is smart and knows how to permeate human realities. But we see through its wiles, and many other people do too.

Seeing the lies and the cruelty for what they are automatically places one in a position of responsibility. It may feel strange to live at such a turn of human history, but here we are.

Ernest Becker was already invoking several decades ago the “responsible dissent,” which he described as “the continued review of the ends of actions.”

That alone — in his view — could prevent human institutions to run amok and inflict all sorts of evils on the very same people who created them (E. Becker, The Structure of Evil, 1968, p. 142).

Hundreds of protests planned as Trump’s abuses generate wide array of grievances

Hundreds of protests planned as Trump’s abuses generate wide array of grievances. Video by MSNBC from April 4, 2025; hundreds more demonstrations have happened since, with many more on the way.

It seems to me that we have learned this lesson in large numbers, as is evident for example in the mass demonstrations all over the world against Trump and the genocide in Gaza, or in the calls at the highest levels for an ethical control of “artificial intelligence.”

In the Preface, Matthew quotes the same Ernest Becker saying that one of the major problems of modernity consists in “refusing to acknowledge that evil and death are constantly with us.

With medical science, we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our consciousness.” Thus, our strategy must start from the stark reality, staying clear of power fantasies. Becker then goes on praising the “cosmic rituals” of ancient times, despite him being a staunch ally of the Enlightenment, because through them people could feel to be “creators of life” and overcome their fear of death.

This kind of heroism — says Becker — is what will save humanity again, through a merger of science and authentic religion: “In science, as in authentic religion, there is no easy refuge for empty-headed patriotism, or for putting off to some future date the exposure of large-scale social lies” (E. Becker, Escape from Evil, 1975,

A fragile origami dragon made of newspapers, crafted by epSos.de. Wikimedia Commons.

p.17, p.166). This, then, is the gist of our strategy: the merger of science and authentic religion — that is, the marriage of logic and rationality with spirituality, intuition, and creative imagination.

All of which, as we know, is under suspicion under Trump’s regime.

In my view, Trump’s lies and deceit are not an anomaly; they are instead the extreme product of a desperate system. The evil social dragon, made at its core of extreme inequality and greed, and garlanded with consumerism, envy, repression of dissent, and sheer violence, is fighting for its survival. But we know that this dragon is made of paper.

That is, just as people made it, people may dismantle it. We might not live to see its demise, until too many people believe in it and adore it, but that should not refrain us from facing it as the lovers and warriors that we truly are.

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Quotations from Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, pp. xix, xx, xxv, and xlii (revised edition, 2016).

See also Fox, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times.

And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.

And Fox, Trump and the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.

Banner Image: St. Michael fighting the dragon, detail from The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Neri di Bicci, circa 1480. Wikimedia Commons.