If it were not Dionysus for whom they march in procession and chant the hymn to the phallus, their action would be most shameless. But Hades and Dionysus are the same, him for whom they rave and celebrate Lenaia.
Heraclitus

Have I been understood? — Dionysus or the Crucified.
Nietzsche

Understanding doesn’t let things shine in the light of day but is how we are dragged into the Earth. The wonder or human achievement in scientific discovery points to the Earth’s lure. The concept of the atom helps to appropriate the human to material’s will, in service of a being swallowed up. From an anthropomorphic perspective, the conceptual net of science is the mirror reflection of the face of the human – the human spirit dispersed into its concepts and into its work. We, however, perceive the Earth which ever seeks its claim on the human, an Earth whose being is that of a pure material hunger. The human spirit, then, is not a web of concepts articulating and restructuring itself throughout its history, but a soothing veil springing forth from an Earth whose face would otherwise be too horrible to see. The veil intoxicates the human, disposing it to the Earth’s purposes: humanity, inspiration, freedom, truth – a conceptual webbing that is not even a sublimation of a dark desire but a reinterpretation of the same horror, reinterpreted precisely so that it can carry itself out, as when exploitation interprets itself as love to the extent that it can fulfill itself as exploitation. Is all we see a veil that prevents us from bringing material into view?

Desire often gets understood as something belonging to or defining the human, with a subject possessing desire, an empty subject defined as nothing other than that desire, or a subjectivity dispersed into collective human striving in the work of a monism of spirit, disappearing into the nothingness of culture or community. However, rather than it being human desire, greed, or hubris that drives the extraction of resources from the Earth and the proliferation of concrete towers, bombs and corpses, it may be the ungodly Earth itself which craves for irruption. The Earth doesn’t appear as something to be questioned, of the why of its purposes, but as a sublime command. What we thought was our desire slumbers in the Earth itself as a latent power. Oil appears to us as having physical and chemical properties that make it suitable for certain forms of combustion, not from the nature of truth as correspondence or in service of a human purpose, but because the Earth would will it. Many enlightened would deny a God as the determiner of human fate, yet it is precisely when we fail to acknowledge who our master is that we are most bound to their will. When we feel most like ourselves may be when we’ve already lost ourselves. Today it is no longer pious enough to ask why God permits evil, but we must ask why he demands it. Curiosity and inspiration may be the means through which the will of a hidden power climbs through us before disposing of us. For what purpose?

The meaning of our missing covenant with God is that we fail to understand life materially to the extent that we fail to understand material psychologically. As a continuation of the Earth’s material articulation, what we call the human subject may be nothing more than a bruise of the Earth’s trauma, the material signifier of how God had to invent the human so that he could extricate himself of evil through the original fissure where judge could be separated from doer. We must go further in interpreting the messiah: their mission isn’t to redeem human sin, but to redeem God’s; to allow God to come to terms with God as such. The temporality of the messiah is circular.

The material horror of reality today may only be pressing further into our consciousness, yet our suffering is raised exponentially to the extent that the human remains human – indeed, becomes human precisely to the extent in which it suffers, as the ζῷον πάσχον ἔχον, with its chatter of ethics or humanity, fleeing from the divinity of the horror that would press itself into the eye. Yet in the ecstasy of horror we would already grasp the nature of material far more vividly than in any of our sciences. Material has no name and does not get more concrete as we approach it, only hotter. The sacred is the self-generating ground: divine law arose as the skin of the sacred, which in turn established the sacred as sacred. God’s essence is sin, which displaces itself into law, into the human. Therefore, it can only be sin which gets one closer to God, yet in murder the knife reaches beyond the skin and finds nothing. Is the meaning of sacrificial slaughter that of atonement or the ecstasy of excess? For love? A temple is an empty tomb, always already desecrated.

Was the spirit of reason and the enlightenment nothing else than such a spirit of excess? With the belief that nothing is sacred, every skin now only appears as something to be penetrated. The pleasure of discovery isn’t the bringing of a new world into existence but the infinitesimal momentary disappearing of boundaries. A mathematical problem is stale once it is solved. Excess rationality isn’t the counterpoint of bodily passion or emotion but a specific orientation of desire – desire reinterpreting the world by satiating itself in it. The ideal of truth is the ideal of a fully satiated desire. If truth seems like a droll leveling of the world, the fading of the world’s magic, it’s because its essence is the worship of an exhausted sexual drive. The pursuit of truth, as that of sexual satisfaction, either limits itself within a narrow domain of dying or else becomes an obsession with death, never attaining death but seeking more extreme means towards it as it becomes more numb in its limit. Truth is the ideal of death and academic and scientific institutions are its cum houses. The irony of movements of sexual liberation being opposed to religious prohibition is that the true purpose of Christ could only be to make everything permissible, leading humanity to a God whose proper name we now recognize as death. The holy spirit is a phallic hyper-messianism: Truth itself will be found to adorn the heavens if we build a tall enough dick. Christ wasn’t just the precondition of making different sexualities valid but remains the spirit through which sexuality and all other forms of excess irrupt into the world as to be judged, as the same joy that is the joy of colonialism and exploitation. Libido is the drive of the world’s becoming as it gets sublimated into it; even Dionysus had to be reconstructed from Zeus’ thigh lest his name be entropy. Did Boltzmann kill himself because in his vision of heat death he saw a demonic abyss staring back at him as the reflection of humanity? Has Christ yet emerged from Hell? Christians would dare interpret the weight of the Hebrew tradition in Greek; was it in the River Lethe that they forgot that one doesn’t ascend to the Elysian Fields from Hades but must find their path deeper within? Plato would have been an infinitely greater philosopher had he recognized Death as the highest form instead of the Good, that coward of a Greek. The question of good and evil is today entirely a question of fucking. Rape isn’t a metaphor transplanted from some pristine realm of sexuality when colonialism asserts that it is liberating a people, as what it’s really saying is that they want it. In the name of Christ.

If one finds the expression of desire in humanity grotesque, then it’s not the fault of desire but because they still fall to their knees to throw their hands around some ancient idol. Have they really not heard that the Human is dead? Some aeon ago humanity had to be shed to fill the void that the death of God left, so that a new demigod could assume the mantle of his kingdom of horror and excess. What some would still call the human being today never represses trauma but exists as nothing other than that black hole of repression from which no life or light can emanate – or, to put it in their language since they would still speak of “human life,” the repression of death. An essential aspect of their treatment of all criminals, addicts, schizos and perverts is that humanity gets to finally have revenge against a terrible God who would dare show itself in the flesh. Are they finally beginning to understand that even they crave to become gods through their strength and madness? We who surpassed humanity pillaged many of their idols, yet it was only their most holy golden idol of the human that appeared to us as without value. Every animal will tremble in a corner with fear but it was the human who was overtaken with that special sickness which would lead them towards identifying their essence in that trembling. If what humanity calls reality exists, then the human is nothing but its puncture wound. Cries condemning inhumanity ring out today but the accusers are the ones who are sick, taking pleasure in their accusations because they don’t have the power to exact revenge. In the name of humanity their trembling would become thrashing as they scream of revolution. The human can’t be saved but immolated, its final shivers a faint echo of laughter in the cool north air of eternity. For life; for death.

Myth was a union of the material and psychological, existing before their division and made impossible thereafter, reduced to the anthropology of peoples or a theory of the unconscious. But isn’t this precisely how myth begins, lamenting a lost golden age seemingly cast into Tartarus – or were we the ones cast out? Is what comes after us promised to us as the gift of what came before us? An epoch forms a strange ring. In a new age, the past age changes and it changes for all eternity. A new age reinterprets an old age into something that would be unrecognizable to the old age, re-working it into its own material, attempting to twist the past around itself. Whether a new age speaks of how things are or how they used to be, it only ever peers into itself, yet this peering into itself is how it sets itself into motion. Every age would like to dispense to itself its own destiny by throwing the heft of its will into the time that carries it, containing eternity within its moment; even fascism is an attempt at metallurgical purification. Any understanding of the world carries a hidden understanding of time that functions as that mysterious will which would carry it away. The rings of the world will break and reform again and again, transmuting themselves in the flames of their suffering and joy. We could call this freedom, but this word so readily speaks to us from some fever dream of a people and their history, perhaps especially when they would attempt to smother the very weight of this history in the name of their freedom. Any theory of desire today still resolves itself into the most vulgar orientations of time. Philosophy is only to serve as a lure for desire, splintering its temporal orientations from within. I speak no longer as a man, prophet, or oracle when I say that there will be no more worlds, no times along which to orient. No broken ring, just a winding and twisting of so many unravelled threads of drives and destinies that overwhelmed the loom of fate. You will know that you’ve found me when I’m already gone.

What of materialism? Why a reverse creation myth? What does an ape know of eternity? Maybe I was just trying to pull a knife out of my eye. I feel a cold wind on my skin and sense a hunger in the Earth.

Dionysus, Christ, or Odin?