[Having now completed the 1,044-page Second Edition of “The Serpent & the Cross”, more than thirty years after the publication of the First Edition, I have been constrained to embark on one final read-through due to my ‘perfectionist’ tendencies,😊 determined to render the text as imperfection-free as possible. Knowing that it will still not be perfect is a bugbear that I have to deal with. 😉 I have just designed the complete cover with its spine, and have 7 more chapters (out of 12) to wade through. I hope to have completed that task during the first days of September. Then I will get a limited number of copies printed for those precious people who love to have an actual physical book in their hands. I am expecting it to have a price of £22 GBP (€25 euros or $30 USD), plus postage. That is at cost price. No profit. The way it should be. If you are one of those people who love to have a real book in your hands, then please now, by email or leaving a comment here, let me know your intention to buy one when they are ready for distribution at the end of September or beginning of October. It will be a very small print-run so do not miss out! Below is my preface for this second edition. It’s an 8-minute read! I hope it whets your appetite to read the whole thing when it is published in about six weeks].

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION:
The Author’s 2025 Thoughts on the Book you Are Reading

The first edition of “The Serpent and the Cross” has long been out of print, especially since the passing of Michael Kimmit, the astute and gentlemanly publisher at K & M Books in Birmingham, UK, who had the courage to publish it in 1994. So here I present a second edition. As the text dates back more than 30 years, having been written in long-obsolete software, I have only been able to retrieve it as a vast block of semi-formatted text, sometimes with no clear paragraph markers, so each chapter has had to be formatted paragraph by paragraph with the 3,278 footnote references needing to be individually reassembled. However, I believe that it has been a worthwhile pursuit, and it has been encouraged by many.

I have been amazed at the extent to which what I wrote about between 1985 and 1993 — often spending many long-hour days doing research (with no internet, so all in hardcopy) in well-stocked libraries such as the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh or the Bodleian Library in Oxford — has all these years later been shown to have developed just as predicted. Nothing has changed for the better and the darkness has only deepened, while this mostly godless world must surely now be ripe for some far-reaching global developments (which will really be Divine judgements in disguise, if those developments are perceived correctly).

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I wrote the first edition. In personal terms, the original publication of “The Serpent and the Cross” cost me a great deal — and I do not mean financially. I was relatively naïve in those days and still had much to learn. In academic circles, the responses to the book ranged from 1) A ‘celebrated’ theology professor pointedly handling my partially-completed manuscript in 1989 with as much disgust as if it were a piece of used toilet paper, to 2) A courageous professor of Greek and New Testament in a Reformed theological seminary in the USA inviting me in 1997 to give a lecture tour over there, purely as a result of the contents of the book. That was a revealing contrast!

Even though I had written a huge tome about the working of the forces of darkness through the ages, I was still so naïve at that stage of my journey that I never anticipated the demonic backlash which would occur in my own life as a result of it — and not only the result of that but also as a result of my determined pulpit-stance denouncing the so-called “Toronto Blessing” which had burst onto the church scene in the same year as the publication of the first edition of “The Serpent and the Cross” and it was plainly a manifestation of the same neo-Gnosticism about which I was writing in the book.

When I first came to Christ and encountered church life, I thought I had entered the ‘suburbs of heaven’; but I had failed sufficiently to discern the difference between the body of Christ and the ‘visible church’. I eventually became disillusioned with the church scene in general, not only because of the backlash and the fallout described above, but also because of my discovery that people calling themselves ‘Christians’ (falsely or not, I do not know) could be so nasty, spreading lies and gossip at the drop of a hat because they disagreed with my teaching, or because I wasn’t a fan of theirs or, in one case, because I referred to myself as a “troubadour”! As a result of all this and more, I entered an acute spiritual crisis and dark night of the soul which took its toll on my spiritual life for a number of years, beginning around 2011.

During the ensuing years of semi-wilderness wandering, I absorbed myself in the world of music composition and performance, mostly in Sweden, which was an educational part of my journey in many ways and through which I learned a great deal about the state and direction of my own heart as well as the ways of the world. However, throughout that time, the underlying thread of faith was always there but with an element of conundrum which was both confusing and debilitating. To overcome this quandary, I had to go right back to the drawing-board of faith and re-establish the building-blocks on which it had its original foundation, independent of any church or humanly-organised setting; and it paid off in many surprising ways. When I got wholly back on track in the year 2017, I began writing again and eventually reestablished my moniker of ‘Diakrisis’ (which is the Greek word for “discernment” — being able to judge between choices) with the establishment of the ‘Diakrisis Project’ website. Interestingly, I found that I was stronger and more determined than ever before in the ground of my now newly bolstered and unfettered faith.

Since that time, no matter what adversity I could possibly encounter in life, I have been in a state of mind in which I know that I have nothing whatsoever left to lose and everything to live and die for. I now experience a freedom in Christ which I never had to this extent before and have become immune to the human foolishness which seems to be so endemic in the ‘visible church’ scene. Having written almost five hundred articles and fourteen books since then (all available on my website at https://diakrisis-project.com ), I further crystalized this renaissance in the fulfilment of a long-desired ambition through the writing of a commentary on the Book of Revelation, completed in its eBook first edition in 2022 and a second edition in 2024, now available in both eBook and physical paperback formats. (This book is available here: https://diakrisis-project.com/2025/03/12/second-edition-of-the-essential-apocalypse-is-now-available-as-an-e-book-in-pdf-format/ .).

I realise now that in one way or another all those books and articles are continuations of everything that I was writing about in “The Serpent and the Cross” which I initially began writing nearly forty years ago using my own huge library of mystical, esoteric, psychological and neo-Gnostic literature from my pre-conversion life as the initial research material. I can honestly say that the first edition of this book and everything else that I have written since its publication are interchangeably linked. The underlying caveat, from that first edition of the book onwards, has been this:

That this present creation is not building up to a euphoric utopia, ‘Golden Age’, ‘global revival’, or one-thousand-year reign of Christ on this present earth, but it is degenerating into a debauched dystopia, just as it was in the days of Noah before the Flood and in the days of Lot in the city of Sodom, as the Lord Jesus revealed that it would be (Matthew 24:37), in which evil masquerading as ‘good’, and chaos masquerading as “peace and safety” (1 Thessalonians 5:3), will come to their inevitable climax so that after a Divine cosmic intervention of cataclysmic proportions, a new creation can finally be inaugurated.

The qualification right now in this present fallen creation for becoming part of that new creation (which will be the kingdom of God in its full consummation) is to renounce being a part of this satanic world-system, to cease leading a godless way of being, to turn one’s life around completely and to pledge oneself wholly to being a disciple of the Christ — God manifested in the flesh, who came to this earth to overthrow the fallen archangel Satan and all his works — primarily, sin, deception and death (1 John 3:7-8; John 8:44), which will be wholly ratified when the Lord Jesus Christ returns. To have all that initiated in your life is the great work of God in the hearts of humans which is known as ‘repentance’, or metanoia in the Greek, when the carpet is pulled out from under one’s old, ignorant and spiritually dead way of life and recarpeted with one fashioned in all the “newness of life” (Romans 6:4; 2 Corinthians 5:17). If you are reading these words out of curiosity but have not yet become a disciple of Christ, I urge you to apply this paragraph to yourself, to call on the name of the Lord and follow its proposed pathway. As a result of that, the rest of this book will mean so much more to you.

Therefore, writing the subject matter of this book, or any of the books and articles I have written, is not merely a gruelling indulgence in exposing darkness but is also an urgent forthtelling to the world about the need to be undeceived by that darkness and to be dedicated to the Source of all Light, the Divine Logos who came to gather in the population of the new creation to come, the true new age which has been hideously counterfeited by the New Gnosticism which you will find copiously revealed within the pages of this book, as manifested in both the secular world and in the ‘visible church’.

The text of the first edition of “The Serpent and the Cross” has mostly been preserved. As far the original research material is concerned, that has been retained; while more recent research material has been inserted where necessary so as to bring the book up-to-date. There has been much additional material weaved into the main text, where appropriate, leading to a 42% increase on the first edition in the number of words in the book.

I commit the new edition of this book to you in the sincere hope that it will either strengthen your current faith and bolster your discernment, or be a human nudge toward the miracle of faith taking root in your heart for the first time.

Alan Morrison,
Somerset, UK,
August 2025.

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2025
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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