Read Time: 6 Minutes, 42 Seconds
Is it possible that ancient entities known as “the gods” have returned to our world?
Could these gods actually be the unseen movers and catalysts of what’s happening in America and the world today? Could they lie behind the current events, news, and movements of our times, and behind the evils now influencing our society?
And could one of these gods actually manifest in America as it did in ancient Israel—in the physical form of a molten beast?
Author Jonathan Cahn answers “yes” to these chilling questions and more in his explosive new book, “The Return of the Gods,” released in September 2022 by Charisma Media.
In “The Return of the Gods,” Cahn opens up a two-thousand-year-old mystery that warns how the gods of the ancient mystery have come into our world and changed our culture—especially one of those gods known as the Possessor.
How Did They Return?
According to Cahn, these ancient gods were exiled from the earth by the introduction of Christianity. So how did they come back into modern times?
“The gods could only return if there had been a falling away from the Christian faith and a biblical worldview,” he writes. “No single event or date can be pinpointed as the beginning of that falling away. It was a process. But in the mid- to late twentieth century, America’s departure from God became increasingly discernable.”
In “The Return of the Gods,” Cahn focuses on three specific gods of prominence, which he refers to as the dark trinity. He exposes the leader of this dark trinity: the Possessor. His name appears many times in the Bible. He was the god of fertility. His worshippers prayed to him to make fertile the soil and cause their crops to grow. They called him Lord of Rain, master of the waters that caused the earth to bear fruit.
The Possessor was the god of prosperity. As the lord of rains and fertility, he represented increase, gain, and profit.
The Almighty Dollar
The lure of the Possessor has always been a present danger in American culture, Cahn writes. “For any nation so blessed with material prosperity as was America, there would always be the risk that its prosperity would become an idol and that it would turn to the god of increase and gain,” he says. “But with America’s departure from God in the late twentieth century, the spirit of the Possessor became ascendant.”
Unlike the ancient apostasy in Israel, Cahn says that today the Possessor would be centered not on the fruit of the earth but on financial seeding and yield, monetary profit, increase, and gain. “It had the trappings of a new religion, a cult of success, materialism and greed,” he writes. “In the Scriptures, God is called the Almighty. In a revealing choice of words, America dubbed its own currency the almighty dollar.”
Cahn notes that the spirit of the Possessor even went to church. As in ancient times, when the Possessor worship was added to the worship of God, so now the pursuit of material prosperity and personal gain and success invaded the sanctuary. And so what could have been a protection and antidote against the invasion was compromised.
The Bull God
One of the Possessor’s preeminent symbols was the bull, which embodied his power and his connection to fertility. So his idols came in the form of a bull of metal or clay.
It was America’s financial realm, and Wall Street in particular, that epitomized the unadulterated pursuit of money. “The prosperity of the stock market had long been tied to the prosperity of America as a whole,” Cahn writes. “It was therefore striking that the symbol that embodied the prosperity of the stock market and America was the bull.”
If the American stock market appeared to be heading toward increase, gain, and prosperity, it was called a bull market. So, Cahn points out, the Possessor’s ancient symbol became not only an American symbol but one that embodied the same realm and dynamic as it had in ancient times.
But not only that. “The appearance of the bull in ancient Israel was a symbol of something else—a nation’s apostasy from God,” Cahn writes. “The bull was the symbol of a nation that had once known God but now had forgotten Him—rejected Him to follow other gods. So it was in ancient Israel, and so it would be again in America.”
In a further startling revelation, Cahn illustrates how a young bull was also critical in Israel’s history. The Hebrew word egel refers specifically to a male calf, also known as a bull calf. In Israel’s apostasy from God at Mount Sinai the people created a golden egel, a bull calf (Exodus 32). So the young bull became the symbol of national apostasy.
Centuries later Jeroboam, leader of the rebellion that split the kingdom of Israel in two, erected two golden calves and called his people to worship them as their gods. The bull again became the sign of a nation’s fall from God.
Both the apostasy at Sinai and of Jeroboam involved an image of molten metal. So too the worship of the Possessor involved the making of molten bulls for the purpose of worship. So Israel, in its fall from God, worshipped bulls and calves of molten metal. After the destruction of Jeroboam’s kingdom, the writer of 2 Kings 17 would write: “So they left all the commandments of the Lord their God, made for themselves a [molten] image…and served Baal [the Possessor]” (v. 16, NKJV).
Thus, the sign of a nation that had left God’s ways was the appearance of the molten image of a bull. Cahn says, “If America was now the nation that was departing from God and if the spirit of the Possessor had now come to indwell it, is it possible that the sign of the Possessor would follow?”
Materialization
The sign appeared.
“The site of its materialization was the financial district of New York City, just outside the Stock Exchange on Wall Street,” Cahn writes. “It appeared in December of 1989. It was massive, eleven feet tall and sixteen feet long. It weighed seventy-one hundred pounds. It was a molten image in the form of a bull—the sign of the Possessor.”
And, Cahn notes, on the day the bull appeared, there was another image overlooking it—the statue of George Washington. The bull appeared on the very ground where America came into existence and where Washington was sworn in as the first president.
“After being sworn in, Washington delivered a prophetic warning,” writes Cahn. “He said, in effect, if America ever turned away from God, its blessings would be removed. And now, standing across from the statue that commemorated the day which Washington gave that prophetic warning, was the sign that the nation had turned away from God.”
This massive bull was the American incarnation of the Possessor. It was, as well, the American version of the golden calf, the ancient biblical sign of a nation that had once known God and had fallen away, and that another god had mastered it.
Cahn writes that while the molten bull constituted a tangible image and sign in ancient Israel, his impact and effect upon the nation was much deeper. And now, he asks, what about the return of the Possessor to the modern world? What was his deeper impact on America and the West?
“The Return of the Gods” investigates these questions and more as Cahn reveals how the Possessor and even more gods are working and moving in all that is taking place around us. How they are initiating social upheavals and cultural revolutions, indwelling our politics, and transforming our world—and even our lives.
Finally, “The Return of the Gods” opens up the meaning and significance of it all, what it portends, what it will lead to, and what we need to know and do in light of it. It’s a must-read book for every Christian living in today’s tumultuous times. {eoa}
The preceding was excerpted from Jonathan Cahn’s New York Times best-selling book, “The Return of the Gods” (Frontline, 2022). For more information, or to order the book, visit BooksByJonathanCahn.com.
Bring Charisma magazine home with a subscription today!
Charisma Staff 
Abby Trivett 
James Lasher 
