—Victor Pelevin
As oil goes, so goes the world. We have become excruciatingly dependent on the stuff, politicians liken it to a drug addiction, it’s utterly transformed both the earth and humanity in unfathomable ways.
How should we think about it ? What is the spiritual significance, or meaning, of oil’s physical manifestation ? How has it effected our unconsciousness, how we frame the world ?
The great Sufi Scholar Henry Corbin talked about the “Imaginal World,” not an individual’s private imaginary fantasies, but the realm where invisible realities become visible and where corporeal things are spiritualized. An intermediate between the sensory world and the intelligible world that communicates via symbols and images.
This is the realm where we can poetically image oil and its influence.
The philosopher of Satanism Reza Negarestani is right I believe, the study and extraction of oil truly is a kind of planetary demonology. Look into the burning water of Hades itself and see only man's addictions, its possession *by* rather than *of* petroleum.
I often imagine these decayed bodies we drill int, when burned, as almost releasing their evil spirt, now earth bound, and which now animates and gives life and motion to our machines. This spirit, in the guise of technocracy, is slowly remaking the world and overtaking the planet to better incarnate these spirts. Who knows, perhaps readying the world to accept some Anti-Christ spirit by making an environment that suits him.
This is my mythic, imaginative take on technology.
"They believe that the Unlife of War feeds on oil or (as they put it) the 'black corpse of the Sun'. Petroleum makes warmachines slide towards itself. Radical War originally comes from the other side of the oil pipeline."
- Reza Negarestani
Rudolf Steiner considered electricity, especially electric light, a manifestation of the zoroastrian force of evil Ahriman, who also, in some Jewish folklore, is associated with leading the angels to rebell, where Michael ties him up places him deep in the earth so that his blood should be a source of creativity and fruitfulness of the Earth. It's odd. Also he is often described as a dragon. I often think of our dependence on oil, which comes of course from the ancient dragon like reptiles dinosaurs, and how it's fueled our Madness.
In the book of Enoch God told the angels what to do, and to Azazel in particular, he said, "Bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness, and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him in it, and place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever, and cover his face that he may not see light. On the great day of judgement, he shall be cast into the lake of fire.
-Enoch 10:4-6
And here is God's statement in the Book of Enoch that explains the command God gave in Leviticus 16:10: "The whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel; so to him ascribe all sin."
- Enoch 10:8
It’s almost as if Oil is the blood, the substance , of demonic sin.
Pluto, of course, is the god of the underworld, and the discovery of "his" planet was a synchronistic harbinger of the unleashing of the sub-material "powers of the pit" upon earth: later transits of Saturn and Uranus to Pluto's discovery position marked the bombing of Hiroshima and the explosion of the first "H-bomb".
“The Black Corpse of the Sun” is one of the names the philosopher Rezi Negarestani gives to oil in his book Cyclonopedia. He calls it a Necro-ontology.
Sam Mendez writes,
“Our Traditionalist model sees the world as opened from the bottom. Guénon had the idea that the society of Tradition is the opening of the world egg from above, where the spirit of the transcendental principle penetrates the world. In the era of materialism and modernity, the world egg is closed to these energies.
Then the world egg is open to the bottom, and the world is penetrated by the Gogs and Magogs, the sub-corporeal entities which create the civilization of the Antichrist. According to Guénon, the opening of the world egg from the bottom is the final stage of the cycle. Thusly also thought Evola, Russian Orthodox eschatologists, and the Elders - that the coming of the Antichrist is the demonic invasion of the world. This is the position of Traditionalists.."
From Cyclonopedia:
“According to the classic theory of fossil fuels, petroleum was formed as a tellurian entity” — Tellurian means, Of the earth, or Chthonic — “under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata, in absolute isolation. A typical, Oedipal case, then, a typical case of repression.
Petroleum’s Hadean formation” — Hadean as in Hades — “developed a satanic sentience through the polytics of in-between which invariably wells up through a God-complex deposited in the strata.”
And then he cites something from Deleuze and Guattari :
Maybe oil is the return of the repressed, using humanity, using the capitalist economy, as a parasite uses its host, to get free from the earth and to exert power within the atmosphere, to hasten the “tellurian omega” (when the earth is finally consumed within a dying, expanding sun). To hasten the warming of the earth to make the earth a bit more like the sun, and to move the earth beyond this chapter of its history — the anthropocene — via the extinction of its host-animals.
We are all members of a secret cult of oil, but especially our politicians and economic leaders.
On the symbolism of Oil The philosopher Christian Roy once told me,
“The Satanic symbolism of the "black gold" that drives our society should speak for itself, but the organ to hear it is safely lacking, protecting us from a realization that would surely drive us mad.
Oil is the sun's heavenly life-giving energy turned into its opposite: chthonic black death from the earth's depths, the nether realms of hell that make all ore suspect in world mythology, as an abortive form of life that never saw the light of day (hence the taboo on metal-working smiths).
This malignancy was never so blatant as with the reverse "black gold", the zombie juice of living-dead prediluvian plants that frees up in potent toxic form the sun's captured, denatured energy, literally obscuring and replacing the original sun as ordering principle: oil reserves are the paradigm of the "standing-reserve" to which Technique reduces all Being according to Heidegger.
Opaque protean (plastic!) fluidity overpowers and obscures the polar solar light of primordial space's form-bestowing clarity. Everything around us is made of or runs on this demonic substance undermining all essence. We are but intestinal flora in the belly of the Beast devouring all of Creation as it rushes to its own inevitable extinction from attrition, leaving nothing but its rotting black corpse on the soiled moonscape of sterile seas and stinking junkyards that will be post-human Earth. No Satanic cult will ever be as scary and triumphantly wicked as the all-pervasive consumer society of limitless plasticity we all take as the standard of everyday normalcy.”
“Oil is the life-blood throbbing through the arteries of war,” says a fictional Hitler in Julian Semyonov’s famous novel Seventeen Moments of Spring.
No one can seriously dispute this today. Oxana Timofeeva writes how in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia :
“…it is oil that allows us to understand war as a machine, or rather two machines: on the one side there is an Abrahamic monotheism, or jihadist war; and on the other, “Technocapitalist” war, or the War on Terror.
In Cyclonopedia, Negarestani demands a blobjective perspective on geopolitics: “Collapse all manifest policies and ideologies onto the Tellurian narratives of oil seepage.”
To grasp war as a machine, or in other words, to inquire into the Abrahamic war machine in its relation to the Technocapitalist war machine, we must first realize which components allow Technocapitalism and Abrahamic monotheism to reciprocate at all, even on a synergistically hostile level.
The answer is oil: War on Terror cannot be radically and technically grasped as a machine without consideration of the oil that greases its parts and recomposes its flows; such consideration must begin with the twilight of hydrocarbon and the very dawn of the Earth.
Negarestani presents a set of ideas about the nature and origin of oil and its representations. He touches upon a popular comparison between oil and blood and relates it to a theory "according to which hydrocarbons constitute the origin of petroleum.”
Both oil and blood contain porphyrin, an organic compound that serves as “evidence of a common lineage, the hydrocarbon,” and, in the eyes of the “advocates of the myth of fossil fuels,” porphyrin proves that oil as the blood of the Earth is not just a metaphor.
A politico-economic explication of the theory of fossil fuels states that the sources of oil are finite, and in the petroleum wars, blood is the price of oil. To put it very simply, the fossil-fuel theory suggests that oil was produced from organic matter—from the decomposition of various living or dead organisms, from bacteria to dinosaurs.
Negarestani notes very briefly that, “according to the classic theory of fossil fuels … petroleum was formed as a Tellurian entity under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata, in absolute isolation,” which, from his perspective, comprises “a typical Freudian Oedipal case.”
In contrast, Negarestani outlines, in a post-Deleuzian vein, a theory of the non-oedipal, inorganic unconscious, or inorganic demons that, in a parasitic way, “infiltrate an anthropomorphic agency” and “embed their inorganic sentience within the human host.”24 Negarestani’s oil is part of a sort of diabolic cosmic conspiracy that underlies the planetary economy and world military politics and brings together all existing narrations. But the very link between oil and the unconscious is what I find important.
Negarestani writes :
“War machines are dissolved in oil. The role of the oil pipeline is not military defense but life support. The pipeline provides oil as a strategic lube and a neutral vehicle of war machines with a mobile and diffusive effectivity. Oil reaches the crusading fronts through the pipeline.
Once oil reaches its destination, the crusading war machines, whose first disposition is to be dynamic, will fuel up and assemble themselves with the oil and its derivatives. As the machines of the western enlightenment consume oil either by bruning the blob or fattening up on the blob, the smuggled war machines start to activate and are chemically unbound.
The nervous system and the chemistry of war machines smuggled through oil infuse with the western machines feasting on oil unnotices, as petroleum has already dissolved or refinedly emulsifided them in itself, as its chemical elements or its essential derivatives (Islamic ideologies, ambitions, implicit policies, socio-religious entities and formations, etc.).”
Mendez adds,
“….the descent into the world of demonic, infernal forces which live off of the extraction of oil, like the blood of the Titans - Ichor, the black substance, the organism that gives birth to objects. For Negarestani, the earth is a sub-human, sub-corporeal object at the center of which is a demon. This demon strives to break out, to attack, and to seize the sun. In order to awake this demon, Negarestani says, our civilization engages in the extraction of oil and the drilling of a tunnel for this demon.
Oil is the first manifestation; the second, more terrifying phenomenon is gas. The core, which Negarestani calls the flesh of a dead god, tries to be brought up to the surface. The prototypes of such were the Babylonian plague gods, which strive to enter and to devour humanity, just as humans devour a chicken from the supermarket or a salad. These plague gods, infernal powers which have been dormant for some time underground, are now emerging by means of technology to eat mankind.
Just as humans devour others, so do these gods seek to live off of eating humans. They are the beneficiaries of humanity as food.
Here we end up with a picture of what is virtually an Aristotelian world inverted. According to Aristotle, the world under the moon consists of two spheres: fire and air which strive upwards, and the two spheres of the elements of water and earth which are downwards. This pyramid is inverted: on top is earth, then water - the rivers of Hell which Negarestani interprets as streams of oil, then there is gas which is underground air, and in the center is the infernal, devilish fire that is the corpse of god, in Negarestani’s account of Ahriman. The latter strives to reach the surface and move through humanity, through machines and through demonic infiltrations, to capture the sun.”
Jordan Peterson has written that unconsciously we are in the age of the Devouring Mother; similarly, Negarestani writes of the ‘Mother of Abominations,’ the horrific black origin of multiplicity and pestilence:
She is the blackening Mother who ruthlessly opens up (epidemic lines, contaminations, contagious machineries, alliances, etc.) … through a strategic epidemic which is nothing but the ungrounding depths of openness, openness as the plague. [Cata, Remarks on Depth and Darkness]
He offers an analysis of the ancient Persian Satanists in order to illustrate his idea of an unground. These Satanists discovered they had to think strategically about darkness. In order to truly affirm Satan, they needed to lure his wrath by strategically make themselves targets. In order to make good meals for Satan, they had to purify themselves, to become decoys. In short, you have to “take a quotidian and in the same degree extremely systematic and institutionalized life as your own life-style (living), [you] both physically and mentally attempt to be away from defilement.” Negarestani is quick to point out that these are not nihilist-Satanists, like their modern Western counterparts. Rather, by becoming good meals they release themselves to Satanic ecstasy; they summon Satan through Asiatic peace, through pure horror. It is only in this way that:
“You strategically lure the life-Satan to tear you to shreds; in this case, the intensity of life-Satan you experience is unthinkable … you become an unground to all defilements, horrors, and darkness which life-satan pours into the systems and organizations. According to Yazidian, the Satan, always lands on those who live and we must live (in the most organizational aspect of this process) to affirm such a catastrophic intensity of upheaval. It’s war and we must think both strategically and pestilentially.
Now, you see the irony of the food chain which traverses not only theism, but also liberal politics, and socio-political survivals, angelic wings, etc. Every yang you drop in your pocket means accumulating more excitation for the life-satan.” (Reza Negarestani, A Good Meal)
BLACK GOO
Interestingly, the New Agee Lara Faye claims Black goo accumulates in your Sacral chakra when you’ve been plugging into a distorted feminine template….you need to to dissolve this with Light and restore your free flowing Creativity, Inspiration and Passion
Many Occultists believe Black Goo is programmable Matter - an intelligent, self-aware, self-organizing liquid crystal. In the esoteric occultic belief, it is considered as the elusive philosopher's stone
According to Harald Kautz Vella, a German biologist, this black goo is the remnants of a race of spider beings who had no choice but to integrate with A.I. and travel interstellar space in liquid form. He says they can still be seen in their original form in the astral plane.
This is interesting, Rudolf Steiner wrote :
"And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.
This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom.
These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science.
All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.
The earth will be surrounded — as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts — with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent.
And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures.
He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter."
Whatever the truth, there’s plenty of imaginative ways to perceive the evil oil has done to our planet.
From Cyclonopedia:
“According to the classic theory of fossil fuels, petroleum was formed as a tellurian entity” — Tellurian means, Of the earth, or Chthonic — “under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata, in absolute isolation. A typical, Oedipal case, then, a typical case of repression.
Petroleum’s Hadean formation” — Hadean as in Hades — “developed a satanic sentience through the polytics of in-between which invariably wells up through a God-complex deposited in the strata.”
And then he cites something from Deleuze and Guattari :
Maybe oil is the return of the repressed, using humanity, using the capitalist economy, as a parasite uses its host, to get free from the earth and to exert power within the atmosphere, to hasten the “tellurian omega” (when the earth is finally consumed within a dying, expanding sun). To hasten the warming of the earth to make the earth a bit more like the sun, and to move the earth beyond this chapter of its history — the anthropocene — via the extinction of its host-animals.
We are all members of a secret cult of oil, but especially our politicians and economic leaders.
On the symbolism of Oil The philosopher Christian Roy once told me,
“The Satanic symbolism of the "black gold" that drives our society should speak for itself, but the organ to hear it is safely lacking, protecting us from a realization that would surely drive us mad.
Oil is the sun's heavenly life-giving energy turned into its opposite: chthonic black death from the earth's depths, the nether realms of hell that make all ore suspect in world mythology, as an abortive form of life that never saw the light of day (hence the taboo on metal-working smiths).
This malignancy was never so blatant as with the reverse "black gold", the zombie juice of living-dead prediluvian plants that frees up in potent toxic form the sun's captured, denatured energy, literally obscuring and replacing the original sun as ordering principle: oil reserves are the paradigm of the "standing-reserve" to which Technique reduces all Being according to Heidegger.
Opaque protean (plastic!) fluidity overpowers and obscures the polar solar light of primordial space's form-bestowing clarity. Everything around us is made of or runs on this demonic substance undermining all essence. We are but intestinal flora in the belly of the Beast devouring all of Creation as it rushes to its own inevitable extinction from attrition, leaving nothing but its rotting black corpse on the soiled moonscape of sterile seas and stinking junkyards that will be post-human Earth. No Satanic cult will ever be as scary and triumphantly wicked as the all-pervasive consumer society of limitless plasticity we all take as the standard of everyday normalcy.”
“Oil is the life-blood throbbing through the arteries of war,” says a fictional Hitler in Julian Semyonov’s famous novel Seventeen Moments of Spring.
No one can seriously dispute this today. Oxana Timofeeva writes how in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia :
“…it is oil that allows us to understand war as a machine, or rather two machines: on the one side there is an Abrahamic monotheism, or jihadist war; and on the other, “Technocapitalist” war, or the War on Terror.
In Cyclonopedia, Negarestani demands a blobjective perspective on geopolitics: “Collapse all manifest policies and ideologies onto the Tellurian narratives of oil seepage.”
To grasp war as a machine, or in other words, to inquire into the Abrahamic war machine in its relation to the Technocapitalist war machine, we must first realize which components allow Technocapitalism and Abrahamic monotheism to reciprocate at all, even on a synergistically hostile level.
The answer is oil: War on Terror cannot be radically and technically grasped as a machine without consideration of the oil that greases its parts and recomposes its flows; such consideration must begin with the twilight of hydrocarbon and the very dawn of the Earth.
Negarestani presents a set of ideas about the nature and origin of oil and its representations. He touches upon a popular comparison between oil and blood and relates it to a theory "according to which hydrocarbons constitute the origin of petroleum.”
Both oil and blood contain porphyrin, an organic compound that serves as “evidence of a common lineage, the hydrocarbon,” and, in the eyes of the “advocates of the myth of fossil fuels,” porphyrin proves that oil as the blood of the Earth is not just a metaphor.
A politico-economic explication of the theory of fossil fuels states that the sources of oil are finite, and in the petroleum wars, blood is the price of oil. To put it very simply, the fossil-fuel theory suggests that oil was produced from organic matter—from the decomposition of various living or dead organisms, from bacteria to dinosaurs.
Negarestani notes very briefly that, “according to the classic theory of fossil fuels … petroleum was formed as a Tellurian entity under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata, in absolute isolation,” which, from his perspective, comprises “a typical Freudian Oedipal case.”
In contrast, Negarestani outlines, in a post-Deleuzian vein, a theory of the non-oedipal, inorganic unconscious, or inorganic demons that, in a parasitic way, “infiltrate an anthropomorphic agency” and “embed their inorganic sentience within the human host.”24 Negarestani’s oil is part of a sort of diabolic cosmic conspiracy that underlies the planetary economy and world military politics and brings together all existing narrations. But the very link between oil and the unconscious is what I find important.
Negarestani writes :
“War machines are dissolved in oil. The role of the oil pipeline is not military defense but life support. The pipeline provides oil as a strategic lube and a neutral vehicle of war machines with a mobile and diffusive effectivity. Oil reaches the crusading fronts through the pipeline.
Once oil reaches its destination, the crusading war machines, whose first disposition is to be dynamic, will fuel up and assemble themselves with the oil and its derivatives. As the machines of the western enlightenment consume oil either by bruning the blob or fattening up on the blob, the smuggled war machines start to activate and are chemically unbound.
The nervous system and the chemistry of war machines smuggled through oil infuse with the western machines feasting on oil unnotices, as petroleum has already dissolved or refinedly emulsifided them in itself, as its chemical elements or its essential derivatives (Islamic ideologies, ambitions, implicit policies, socio-religious entities and formations, etc.).”
Mendez adds,
“….the descent into the world of demonic, infernal forces which live off of the extraction of oil, like the blood of the Titans - Ichor, the black substance, the organism that gives birth to objects. For Negarestani, the earth is a sub-human, sub-corporeal object at the center of which is a demon. This demon strives to break out, to attack, and to seize the sun. In order to awake this demon, Negarestani says, our civilization engages in the extraction of oil and the drilling of a tunnel for this demon.
Oil is the first manifestation; the second, more terrifying phenomenon is gas. The core, which Negarestani calls the flesh of a dead god, tries to be brought up to the surface. The prototypes of such were the Babylonian plague gods, which strive to enter and to devour humanity, just as humans devour a chicken from the supermarket or a salad. These plague gods, infernal powers which have been dormant for some time underground, are now emerging by means of technology to eat mankind.
Just as humans devour others, so do these gods seek to live off of eating humans. They are the beneficiaries of humanity as food.
Here we end up with a picture of what is virtually an Aristotelian world inverted. According to Aristotle, the world under the moon consists of two spheres: fire and air which strive upwards, and the two spheres of the elements of water and earth which are downwards. This pyramid is inverted: on top is earth, then water - the rivers of Hell which Negarestani interprets as streams of oil, then there is gas which is underground air, and in the center is the infernal, devilish fire that is the corpse of god, in Negarestani’s account of Ahriman. The latter strives to reach the surface and move through humanity, through machines and through demonic infiltrations, to capture the sun.”
Jordan Peterson has written that unconsciously we are in the age of the Devouring Mother; similarly, Negarestani writes of the ‘Mother of Abominations,’ the horrific black origin of multiplicity and pestilence:
She is the blackening Mother who ruthlessly opens up (epidemic lines, contaminations, contagious machineries, alliances, etc.) … through a strategic epidemic which is nothing but the ungrounding depths of openness, openness as the plague. [Cata, Remarks on Depth and Darkness]
He offers an analysis of the ancient Persian Satanists in order to illustrate his idea of an unground. These Satanists discovered they had to think strategically about darkness. In order to truly affirm Satan, they needed to lure his wrath by strategically make themselves targets. In order to make good meals for Satan, they had to purify themselves, to become decoys. In short, you have to “take a quotidian and in the same degree extremely systematic and institutionalized life as your own life-style (living), [you] both physically and mentally attempt to be away from defilement.” Negarestani is quick to point out that these are not nihilist-Satanists, like their modern Western counterparts. Rather, by becoming good meals they release themselves to Satanic ecstasy; they summon Satan through Asiatic peace, through pure horror. It is only in this way that:
“You strategically lure the life-Satan to tear you to shreds; in this case, the intensity of life-Satan you experience is unthinkable … you become an unground to all defilements, horrors, and darkness which life-satan pours into the systems and organizations. According to Yazidian, the Satan, always lands on those who live and we must live (in the most organizational aspect of this process) to affirm such a catastrophic intensity of upheaval. It’s war and we must think both strategically and pestilentially.
Now, you see the irony of the food chain which traverses not only theism, but also liberal politics, and socio-political survivals, angelic wings, etc. Every yang you drop in your pocket means accumulating more excitation for the life-satan.” (Reza Negarestani, A Good Meal)
BLACK GOO
Interestingly, the New Agee Lara Faye claims Black goo accumulates in your Sacral chakra when you’ve been plugging into a distorted feminine template….you need to to dissolve this with Light and restore your free flowing Creativity, Inspiration and Passion
Many Occultists believe Black Goo is programmable Matter - an intelligent, self-aware, self-organizing liquid crystal. In the esoteric occultic belief, it is considered as the elusive philosopher's stone
According to Harald Kautz Vella, a German biologist, this black goo is the remnants of a race of spider beings who had no choice but to integrate with A.I. and travel interstellar space in liquid form. He says they can still be seen in their original form in the astral plane.
This is interesting, Rudolf Steiner wrote :
"And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.
This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom.
These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science.
All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.
The earth will be surrounded — as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts — with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent.
And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures.
He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter."
Whatever the truth, there’s plenty of imaginative ways to perceive the evil oil has done to our planet.
