Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded 2020043536, 2020043537, 9780367894412, 9781003019183

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Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded

This book explores politics as a form of alchemy, understood as the transformation of entities through an alteration of their identities. Identifying this process as a common denominator of many political phenomena, such as EU integration, mediatisation, communism or globalisation, the author demonstrates not only the widespread presence of alchemical techniques in politics, but also the acceleration of their deployment. A study of the steady growth of power as it reaches a continuous and permanent stage, thus avoiding the inherent difficulties connected with birth and death of political organisations and institutions, this volume reveals political alchemy to be a form of self-sustaining growth through sterile multiplication, devoid of meaning. Revealing both the integrative and disintegrative nature of a political process that, while appearing to work in the interests of all, in fact produces apathy, desperate mobilisation and despair by crushing concrete entities such as personality and tradition, Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in social theory and political thought. Agnes Horvath is the chief and founding editor of International Political Anthropology. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma, the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology, and coeditor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion, and Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery.

Contemporary Liminality Series editor: Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland. Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland; Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark; and Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, UK.

This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality by now is a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought. While charges of Eurocentrism are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the taken-for-granted foundations of social theory through incorporating ideas from major thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, as well as perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought. Titles in this series 11. China at a Threshold Exploring Social Change in Techno-Social Systems James B. Cuffe 12. Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery Edited by Agnes Horvath, Manussos Marangudakis and Arpad Szakolczai 13. Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded Agnes Horvath 14. Liminality and the Philosophy of Presence: A New Direction in Political Theory Franziska Hoppen For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Contemporary-Liminality/book-series/ASHSER1435

Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded

Agnes Horvath

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Agnes Horvath The right of Agnes Horvath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Horváth, Ágnes, 1957- author. Title: Political alchemy : technology unbounded / Agnes Horvath. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043536 (print) | LCCN 2020043537 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367894412 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003019183 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Philosophy. | Political science--Technological innovations. | Political science--Methodology. | Political sociology. Classification: LCC JA71 .H643 2021 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043536 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043537 ISBN: 978-0-367-89441-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01918-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Preface: The unbounded as infinite

vi

Introduction

1

1 Necromancy

13

2 The fluxed matrix

26

3 Replicators in compositions

51

4 Charis vs the automaton

77

5 The raised power

108

6 Catacombing sensuals

137

7 The multiplicative automatism

158

Conclusion

177

Glossary Bibliography Name index Subject index

179 189 198 200

Preface: The unbounded as infinite

‘We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature.’ Pascal, Thoughts, 233

Why does the infinite matter, if it is irrational and meaningless and unreal? The infinite, in the genuine sense of the term, does not appear, in actual, verifiable existence in social thinking until Newton, when the natural sciences began to use it, around the same time when also Pascal and a little bit earlier John Donne lived. Since then on, with the words of the poet Donne a new philosophy called all in doubt, when the finite of the sun and the earth become lost: ‘The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit/Can well direct him where to look for it’ (John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, Wherein, by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented. The First Anniversary, 1611). Thus, Newtonian science began, for the embellishment of modernity, a science that was inspired by alchemy. Newton summoned up into existence the infinite, in the form of a scientific Leviathan that swallowed up the whole Antique knowledge of the finite time and space, together with its best authors, Plato and Aristotle. From alchemy this new philosophy did learn how to release the infinite – or could it be called the void? – from composed structures, taking into consideration the precious value of their repetitive substance, though never really knowing what they are exactly: the soul, meaning, property, quality, essence, their principle charis, though used and exploited them extensively. In fact, the past 350 years did not produce a very satisfactory form of knowledge on the infinite. We are still at the same level where Newton stopped, that there are inward substances of every livings that are not to be known exactly neither only by our senses, experiences or any other way of experiments (Thayer 1974: 44), nor by knowledge. Such a long period of ignorance results either in insipidity or aggressivity, and modernity produced both of them. It exemplified the foolish sentimentality of the weak or the diluted, whose souls thus became an even more a precious substance for the expansive imperialism against them. Newton’s example is only the most systematic and regulated, but the use of the infinite goes back to the hinterland of humanity with magic and in

Preface: The unbounded as infinite vii particular necromancy. All the divinisation machinery with the end products of subversions are its varieties in different spaces and times, from the Palaeolithic caves to Mesolithic Tassili or to the Neolithic Anatolia, reaching up to Bovelles and Leibniz who examined the loathing, desolate infinite existence that is obscure and abhorrent, yet can successfully break the ability and dynamics of any composite body structure by substituting its appearances, as if a technological device for production. Every machination on the infinite is based on the observation of substitutability, a kind of worm in the apple, that each composite structure contains a replicator infinite, which survives it even in death. Alchemy and so political alchemy are the survivors of this erratic view, that by positioning the infinite replicators ever new versions of life can be produced; even invalid, unreliable and inaccurate lives. This is why now alchemy is regarded with pleasure, wonder, and approval, for reasons which has nothing to do with quality, substance, or any meaning, property or other attributes of the soul, but for reasons of utility (itself a term derived from Aristotle, but abused in its meaning), interest and merchant mind, as infinity results in multiplication and growth with a deadly rapidity of annihilating finite compositions, making them sick and sterile. This book was written against the propaganda that links hope to a kind of alchemic-technological transformation, for example by genetically modifying organisms, which attacks the very basis of nature. This point is of crucial importance, especially in our days, as life makes and needs its own compounds, which assure its undisturbed continuity.

Introduction

The title of this book, Political Alchemy, is bound to evoke strange, even occult preoccupations; an attempt to use the discredited, unscientific methods of alchemy in order to instigate or propose political transformations. However, the concerns of the book are quite different. It perceives the connection between modern science and alchemy quite differently from the standard view, according to which alchemy was a more or less obscure undertaking, in search of impossible results, while modern science is the radical opposite of alchemy, and has successfully demonstrated the uselessness of any alchemic undertakings. Rather, in the footsteps of the works of Frances Yates, the book starts from the recognition that modern science grew out of alchemy; strange as this seems, historically it is nothing other than alchemy made truly scientific. The fact that Newton left behind writings belonging to alchemy amounting to hundreds of thousands of words, and that collecting these fragments was a life-long occupation of John Maynard Keynes, is an illustration of this fact, as are also the tight connections not simply between technologised science and alchemy, but between the economy and alchemy;1 but within the limits of this book it is not possible to go into this point in more detail. The concluding inference is that, strange as it may sound again, modern political science, in so far as it was formulated in the footsteps of Newtonian science, trying to imitate the ‘scientific method’, in particular since Hobbes, is a form of political alchemy; and a kind of science that in contrast to the universalistic natural sciences cannot move beyond the threshold of scientificity,2 for better or worse, as it cannot incorporate central aspects of human behaviour, like meaning, conscience, personality or principles, not to mention such a fundamental term as the ‘soul’. The connection between alchemy and science is particularly visible in their joint entanglement with technology, a connection that will be central for the book. ‘Political alchemy’, as this book understands it, is very much an attempt to lay bare the purely technological aspects of modern politics; that political science, as it is generally considered – an effort to offer advice about how to control and guide people in an efficient way, as if governing other humans were a technological undertaking – is a modality of political alchemy. The book thus could be called political technology, and in this sense it is very close to, and closely relies upon, the path-breaking

2

Introduction

approaches of Lewis Mumford, Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, who argued convincingly that technology is not simply about how to transform things for more efficient human use, but is first of all concerned with the transformation of human beings. It could also be called something like a new political science, meaning a return to classical political science, and in this sense the undertaking is particularly close to Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, which also perceived major problems with modern political science and saw that a return to the classics, in particular to Plato and Aristotle is imperative. The approach followed is also close to those students of Voegelin, like Stephen McKnight (2020), who perceived that Voegelin’s approach about Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and similar occult undertakings lying at the heart of the spirit of modernity implies a joint study of modern politics and modern science. Such an approach requires a particular attention to the meaning of science, and the problems related to the supposed scientific methodology. When substitution, under the cloak of technology, is ennobled as an artistic refinement, honouring the mime as character and giving elevated status to the copied shadow, then science becomes glorified as the chemistry healing the world. Not that we completely deny such a role. Mimicry exalts the imagination, it raises the intensity of the sensuals, all that radiates around us, heightens the arts and deepens feelings, so could be a medicine almost for all ills. Sensuals, as the pulsation of impulses, have no limits, no borders; they are the freedom and liberty of no reality, stimulating the mind, exciting the intensity of the sounds, colours and taste that bring joy and delight for all of us – surely, in a way even healing and curing with the uplifting of spirits. Of course, reasoning has no role in this animated inspiration. The defence of the given properties of the self is transformed into frenzied dreams of enlivening union of all brotherly spirits, and this inspires and invigorates a new version of life, more communal, more lively than ever. Yet, thus, an unreal existence, dwelling in the sphere of the sensuals and best described by the word enchantment is conjured into existence in the sweet magic of free-flowing emotions without borders, though it is also parasitic in the way of an unending desire for possessing composite structures and invasive in another way of getting them, so it is a rather poisonous remedy. Indeed, it is so poisonous that as a result we are living in a voided world, where there is no result, no reason, no rationality and rarely any authentic form; in a world where the senses are lost in a bodily disappearance that has hardly ever occurred in the existence of nature before. Would it be the result of technology, understood as a kind of objective necessity of progress? Not at all; it is rather the result of thinking in the alchemical way of creative destruction, raised into a technicality, ejecting and summoning the infinite of the sensual. This book is written in order to analyse technology as a social, cultural and political phenomenon, using material that mostly belongs to archaeology, anthropology and the history of religions. The book is closely connected to two central questions about technology: what if its rise was not the outcome

Introduction

3

of a clear, inevitable and ultimately beneficial development, rather of a peculiar, problematic turn taken at a certain moment, and in a not very distant history? And, if this is so, is it possible to do something to redress this turn? The answers to both questions are closely connected, if not identical, and concern what I call political alchemy: political, because it has a mass effect, and alchemy, because this effect was produced artificially, by consciously breaking any human – and thus any natural, structural – ties, in a methodical way, strictly following the methodology first experimented in alchemy, in order to empty any composite structure of its soul. For the perfect functioning of technology this is not enough though, as there are other components that are still necessary. One of these is the summoning of the replicators, the accidental souls, who can occupy an empty space from which its rendered soul was chased away. The other is the nature of the replicators, who are creating themselves for production inside the emptied composition. Furthermore, the merchant purpose indicates that these powers of technology will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one, and they have much to do with necromancy – a magical activity closely related to the infinite: the infinite in the sense of a difference from the composed, structured and real world, implicating an entanglement with death. Thus, this study became focused on alchemy, which would imply that enacting an immortal particle from the composed structure would not occur had the soul not shared the quality of the infinite otherworld, which was known by the necromancers. Alchemy is continuously breaking compositions, partly because this technique serves to feed the infinite with subverted souls, partly because this is the way to gain a commanding power not only over the subverted but mainly and most importantly over the infinite itself. These two aspects rightly received the name of magic, which operates without inhibitions, in full complicity with the annihilators as parasitic abusers of sensual desires. Eventually these purposes became joined, and the annihilation of nature thus became all but complete. The social sciences, even the humanities try to imitate, or copy, the natural sciences, and their methods, but this is an enormous fallacy. The reason is very simple, and one can truly wonder why its evidence was not effective in modernity. Science, as it is understood now, works on the basis of universal replicability, and it is OK as far as it goes. However, human life, and not only that, but any form of life, and even not only that, but every single thing that exists works on the basis of concreteness; of concrete contexts and compositions. Its life, and being, is single, concrete and irreplaceable. Human history, and even natural history, truly understood, is not a necessary manifestation of universal laws, but is a single and irreplaceable sequence of concrete events.3 However, if this is so, then the entire sequence of history, and its relation to knowledge, must be radically revalorised. What this means is that history, our history, is not a long wondering in error, at best a set of trials and errors until the universally valid knowledge we possess has been discovered,4 but is a very long effort in trying to make sense of this concreteness; the accumulation of an amount of knowledge, though of course a process that is also marked, and

4

Introduction

marred, by all kind of wonderings and errors, but also solutions. The knowledge that has been accumulated was based on reflected experiences that are worth remembering. A kind of knowledge that tries to imitate the universalising ‘natural’ sciences therefore does not offer an unprecedented new way to understand man, society, nature and everything, but is simply irrelevant. The central issue is not how can a general knowledge-based rule be applied to every concrete individual, but how can a knowledge develop based on a thorough acquaintance with existence, including the otherworld, the way humanity has seen it in the past. Thus, in conclusion, science cannot be reduced to knowledge about processes and entities that are purely material, mass-like, and that can be freely replicated. This method indeed does offer access to a certain general, universalistic and universalising knowledge which, however, remains applicable everywhere, and thus offers no particular advice for us living here; instead, it simply explicitly ignores and implicitly downgrades any knowledge that starts from and stays valid in such real contexts. Even further, such downgrading does not remain an abstract idea but becomes the source of effective destruction. A social science that pretends universality is not only theoretically and methodologically wrong, but – when it is not simply irrelevant, a mere mental game, like the kind of computer simulations increasing numbers are involved in, imaging themselves as the new avantgarde in social science – is in actual fact destructive of our reality. This leads to two basic inferences – before we can move to more specific considerations about the method followed in this book. First, instead of taking the ‘natural’ sciences as models, a central, explicitly outspoken aim of the modern social and human sciences, it argues that such an undertaking is mistaken. However, and at the same time, it will make use of certain findings of modern science that are particularly helpful for the problems discussed in the book, like the question of electromagnetic forces, the structure of atomic particles or the character of waves. Second, and at the same time, as a logical consequence, it also revalorises forms of knowledge dismissed as non-modern, thus irrelevant. However, it will not do so in an indiscriminate manner, which would only proliferate the errors of modernity by offering a reverse mirror image. The measure, however, will not be modern, Newtonian and postNewtonian science, rather classical reason, focusing on Greco-Roman antiquity, including prominently Plato and Aristotle, again close – among others – both to Heidegger and to Voegelin. Furthermore, it will even take seriously forms of knowledge that are extremely problematic, like various forms of magic and shamanism, based on the perception, following some anthropologists like Alfred Gell that – strikingly – modern technological knowledge, in its uses but also character, has striking affinities with magic. Needless to say, this has no affinities with post-modern critics of reason and logocentrism; quite the contrary, the aim is to reassert reason and rationality, though not in the misdirected modern sense.

Introduction

5

Methodology More concretely, the book will rely on a number of methodological approaches, making a joint use of them in so far as possible. It evidently belongs to genealogy, in the manner in which it was explored by Nietzsche and also Weber and Foucault. It means two things in particular: first, that modern knowledge and even science actually and effectively transforms reality, thus needs to be noted as a kind of strange and in a way perverted will to knowledge or will to truth. To repeat, the problem is not with truth, knowledge or reason, but with the particular connotations they gained in Christianity and post-Christian modernity, which for us are almost impossible to see, as they became identified with truth, knowledge, or reason as such, but which are specific, a cancerous growth, as they indeed threaten the survival of human life and nature, like the idea of salvation. The problem is that this identifies knowledge as such with a kind of knowledge that possesses transformative technological power, and which therefore is pernicious, but whose transformative and replicative power is rather considered as proof of its efficiency. The second point is that such an undertaking, an effective analysis of the modern Western will to knowledge, must be technically genealogical, meaning that its actual exact historical path must be unearthed.5 Apart from genealogy, the book also extensively relies on approaches and methods in anthropology. In particular, it will use authors and concepts that belong to the field of ‘political anthropology’, in the sense in which it is championed by the journal International Political Anthropology.6 This means that, first, instead of analysing non-modern people through the methods of the social sciences that follow the universalistic–rationalistic paradigm, it takes up the approach of those anthropologists that tried to renew thinking through information gained through anthropological, ethnological and ethnographic research, like Arnold van Gennep, Marcel Mauss, Paul Radin, Gregory Bateson or René Girard. Second, these approaches will be combined with the classical philosophical anthropology of Antique thinkers, in particular Plato and Aristotle, but also the preSocratics and Roman philosophers. Third, the book will integrate ideas contained in mythologies, especially classical mythologies, and at the same time evidence unearthed by archaeology, as mythology and archaeology, if used together and in the proper manner, are mutually illuminating. The approach of the book will thus be based on the conviction that the shortsightedness of modern universalising rationalism can be compensated by a comprehensive approach that includes ideas and data – in the sense of their given or gift-like character – from such a varied set of sources, overcoming the narrow specialism of modern academic disciplines. It can be illustrated by a passage from the poet Robert Graves (1961: 224), also illustrating the central principle of charis: ‘To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilisation implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought.’

6

Introduction

However, political alchemy has a further, tight and even more problematic connection than technology and technologised science, and this is necromancy. This is a term that is never used in modern political science, and especially not for modern thought, but unfortunately this cannot be left aside, as it is a central aspect of effective modern political alchemy, in the specific sense of not simply conjuring up the souls of the dead, but even of stealing the souls of the living, and thus generating the strange category of the living dead. But the association of modernity with destruction and death, even the living dead, is not so shocking as it first seems to be.

Destruction and modernity, science and death The main way in which this book takes off from the work of Frances Yates and at the same time in part departs from it concerns the puzzling, paradoxical relationship between science and death. The question of what happens after death, of life after death, of what survives from a human being, from us after death, is one of the most intriguing questions of human life in any human culture. It is an all but intractable question, as in order to know something about it one must die; but if one dies one has no way to communicate whatever happens after to those who stay here – if there is anything. Modern science by its constitution can say absolutely nothing about this issue, and any honest scientist would humbly acknowledge such ignorance. However, once the incompetence of universalistic science concerning the question of what happens with the animating force, or the soul, of a living being after death is acknowledged, we need to pose a second question, which concerns the actual relationship between science and the phenomenon of death. This is because, while science cannot penetrate the mystery of life after death, it very much makes use of death, dead bodies and in a broader sense destruction. Let me offer here only one, but quite significant example. It is a triviality that modern medicine is based on anatomy, which is identical to the opening up of dead corpses, which was prohibited in Antiquity. The idea that it means that, technically and strictly speaking, modern science is based on the investigation of death, was central to Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, a key classic work concerning the emergence of modern medicine. However, the entanglement of modern science and death is a much broader issue. Here we have to extend the term death to destruction, implying the knowledge gained not only from dead bodies, but of any object that has been taken apart in any other way, in order to realise that a prior destruction is a central premise of modern scientific and technological knowledge. The connection between death and modern knowledge can be extended from science proper to the broader question of philosophy – and human and political concerns. The rise of modern rationalist philosophy – a close ally of universalistic science – is in most accounts connected to the ideas of Descartes, especially his meditations, where a central role is played by the foundational separation of the body and the mind or soul, spirit: at the time of Descartes, ‘mind’ was

Introduction

7

meant in a much broader sense than today, close to Latin mentis, where it was all but identical to the soul. However, in a pre-Cartesian perspective the indissociable unity of the body and the soul is a central feature of any living being, not just humans. What this means is that a real separation of the body and the soul can only happen in death. Talking about the separation or separateness of the body and the soul as a mental game, thus, is nothing else than a play with death; a kind of magical undertaking where – in line with alchemy, which enjoyed the peak of its cult at the time of Descartes, or at least shortly before – a mental game of separation is closely connected to the actual taking or tearing apart, thus destroying or killing of the compositions or living bodies; and the actual, magical operations with death are called necromancy. This leads to the surprising but inevitable inference that Descartes must be technically considered as a necromancer; and the form of rationalist philosophy inaugurated by him as a mode of necromancy. Modernity, supposedly, is all about development, progress, growth, production. Yet, it is amazing how, and without any forced reading, destruction and even death is at the heart of the modern world, in particular the modern episteme, through the obsession with creative destruction, the importance attributed to sacrifice and the stealing of souls (in Goethe’s Faust). Concerning the inherent and essential destructiveness of modernity, let’s start with the idea of creative destruction. After an initial proposition by Werner Sombart, the idea became better formulated and popularised by Schumpeter, understandably enough based on his reading of Marx and also Nietzsche. While Schumpeter still had some apprehension about the limits of the inherently destructive aspects of capitalism, in the hands of his acolytes the idea of creative destruction has become a most important slogan in the Austrian school of economics, and is now a standard tool of business schools, in defence of markets. Turning from economics, a modern undertaking, to another bastion of the modern episteme, engineering, the idea that in order to build first one must destroy became the difference marking classical and modern architecture, through engineering. Turning to the social and human sciences, one of the main founding figures of both sociology and anthropology, Émile Durkheim, had the idea that the rituals that played a foundational role in social life were bloody sacrifices. The idea was astonishing, as it proposed that human society and culture was not born out of some achievements like language, a recognition like the respect for and burial of the dead, or a supreme contact, but quite the contrary, on a particularly problematic, pre-meditated, wanton act of ritualised killing, making violence outright the most fundamental distinguishing feature of humans. What is even more astonishing is that this idea has been accepted for long as the unquestioned truth about the human condition, the master idea of a founding father. If such an astonishment can be taken further, the next level is reached in contemporary thinking, where suddenly it is now being questioned whether human sacrifices were ever practised. In our reading, the practice of bloody sacrifice, even rituals of human sacrifice, certainly took place in various times and places; however, far from revealing something

8

Introduction

essential about human beings, societies and culture, it is rather a crucial indicator of how and when something has gone fatally wrong in a human culture; an indication that destructiveness has gained an upper hand. In this respect Goethe’s Faust offers a priceless cue, in that technological progress is not only destructive (about this see his take on the story of Philomene and Baucis in the fifth act of Faust Two), but also requires human sacrifice. In this book I’ll try to pursue the question in what way and why Goethe could be literally true here. With the question of how one can destroy one’s own otherwise indestructible soul we return to Goethe’s Faust, and at its very heart, as the main plot of the play is that Faust sells his soul to the devil. The evidently impossible motive of destroying souls will be central to this book, so we need to approach the theme carefully, from a methodological perspective, concerning how Goethe dealt with this impossible subject. Faust made a pact and not a contract with the devil, which one might consider as just a rhetorical difference, but which rather has a key implication for social and political theory: that making a contract, or a deal, is a rather delicate undertaking, moving way beyond the merely legal issue of full consent, and thus cannot be considered as absolutely binding, even less as foundational. Now, Goethe evidently considered the matter so, as – though Faust fully signed the contract, and was not under any evident pressure – the divinity still did not consider it as fully valid and at the end of the play took Faust’s soul to heaven. From the devil’s perspective, his rightful prey was thus stolen – but, evidently, from a divine perspective the opposite happened: it was he, the devil, who somehow tried to steal Faust’s soul, by making promises to him that lured Faust into selling his soul. Which implies, first, and again, that one can be tricked and lured into signing a contract, so the theoretical relevance of any contract-based argument is very limited, thus making the contract, whether social or not, foundational is very scarce reasoning; and second, that the theme of stealing souls must be methodologically explored. And here we indeed immediately discover a soul-thief figure, the Greek god Hermes, the archetypal Greek trickster god. Goethe was evidently much influenced by the Hermes motive, all the more so as Faust was modelled on Prometheus, another Greek trickster figure, who furthermore had manifold contacts to Hermes (see Aeschylus, among others). And if Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from Zeus and was inventor of sacrifice, is widely considered as an emblem-figure of modern thought, in particular technology, then the central concern of the other figure of the pair, Hermes, who by the way is also considered as an inventor of sacrifice – and there is no third such case in Greek mythology – the stealing of souls, should also have its central methodological relevance for modern thought, in tandem with the practice of sacrifice. Indeed, while obviously not pursued in modern social science, the theme of fiddling with souls in Faust had its huge impact on literature. Only one thread will be indicated here, as this methodological discussion cannot cover such a

Introduction

9

theme in depth. One of the most significant classic works of Russian literature is Gogol’s Dead Souls, and though there the theme is considered differently, the broader inspiration and concern is evidently present. Even further, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is widely recognised as being jointly inspired by Goethe and Gogol, and there both the figure of the devil, and certain manipulations with souls, play an explicitly dominant role.

Charis Beyond these concerns, we would like to single out for attention a further element of the taken for granted framework of modern European thought, associated with the legal, administrative, bureaucratic, processual and policyobsessed aspects of state-formation. This is the increased annihilation of compositions associated with the rise of the modern world – where through the presumption of creative destruction the charis of a man is taken away and deposited into the future. While the institution of a proper virtue linked to individuals and to their communities is shared by practically all cultures on earth, modernity captured charis for its own use by encapsulating its virtue into the state, as can be seen in Hobbes’ Leviathan (2012) for instance. Charis stands for grace, kindness and life itself, while its varieties charm, enchantment, beauty and naturalness are embracing not only human creativity but fertility as well. Such golden attributes are making life beautiful and worth living, a mindful struggle for virtue and filling our hearts with a higher presence, a treasure that could not be perceived by contempt. Giving it a last recognition, a farewell to this blessing can be seen even in burials. Love is teaching characters to care primarily for their own souls, though modernity rejects, with exceptional discernment, the alliance of freedom of the character with virtue. The subverted have none of them. Freedom is learned by practising civil virtues, it gives flexibility to its subjects in graceful individual acts of duties, in dignity and reassurance. On this essential point freedom never varies: love yourself if you would like freely to love others. Here we find the origin of an idea of civic virtues connected to the individual characters, so important for the Greeks and the Romans. Charis is social, but it is never matched or fostered to an external force, as defined by the monopoly of violence exercised by the state. The annihilation of character practised by alchemy is at first no more than a hatred for compositions which are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to preserve their character and border themselves from invasions. But alchemy simultaneously chose destruction and creation for body-structures. This double game is deadly successful. It is technically opening up the boundaries of structures, enacting their souls and giving them free passages to enter into other forms. From this moment destruction is accepted, even if only as a replication of nature’s matrix, which works with the same instances of death and birth. The replicators’ lazy, unsocial uselessness as copy-makers has never come into light: they are just parasites exploiting the impulses of sensuals.

10

Introduction

The total submission to destruction by the agents of the replicators leads to shocking cruelties in the midst of world politics, global media and entertainment, as charis became completely forgotten, which gave them possibilities in developing further their unsheltered nihilism, mimicked by boundless promises, absurd judgements and the rejection of cooperation, marching to complete the decomposition of the world. Yet, they create the illusion of impersonal sanctity, as if the power to move and to make things grow would be inherently their own; as if generating hopelessness were a preamble to promote the good. It would be easy to say that this is the stuff of magic, and indeed, scholars like Alfred Gell connect modern technology with magic. But the intensification of magic, the making of life barren, the growing strength of upsetting emptiness indicates another element, the inexhaustible desire of death to catch and annihilate every finite and transform it into the infinite. Could it be that the replicators and their agents are the mediators of death? However, for the purposes of this book perhaps the following methodological perspective is the most important, which can even be called a ‘metamethodological’ principle: the idea that man has been never different, and therefore we can all, from the here and now, understand our distant ancestors, who felt and thought, flourished and declined just like us. This is why, from the first appearance of the technological method of creative destruction, when technology became crucial in order to reach production, a convenient interaction has grown between necromancy, divinisation, metallurgy and alchemy, culminating in modern technologised science.

Chapter structure In so far as the structure of the book is concerned, it is a combination of historical–chronological and reflexive–theoretical considerations. Concerning the first, there is a temporal progression across the book. Chapter 1, ‘Necromancy’, is devoted to the prehistoric and protoscientific origins of the alchemy–technology nexus, much focusing on the Shaft Scene of Lascaux, but extending the investigation about the communication of the dead to similar engraved images in other Palaeolithic decorated caves. Chapter 3, ‘Replicators in compositions’, moves to the most remote place of Tassili, in the Mesolithic, considered by the book as an incubator of the world vision of the magi-operator sorcerers. The next chapter, Chapter 4, ‘Charis vs. the automaton’, the central and longest chapter of the book, moves to the significant, magnitudinal growth in their activities and effects through the emergence of metallurgy, in Anatolia (and the Balkans), and also discusses the probably contemporaneous, man-made underground structures of Cappadocia, in Central Anatolia, as an effort to perpetuate, through connected methods, the same preoccupation with soul snatching. Chapter 6, ‘Catacombing sensuals’ turns to early Christianity and its practice of catacombing the dead, connected to ideas of salvationism, in structures that recall Cappadocian underground structures, and arguably have similar aims.

Introduction

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Finally, Chapter 7, ‘The multiplicative automatism’, turns to modernity, presenting Newtonian science with its universalising focus on the void and the flux, and the contemporaneous, Commedia dell’Arte based engravings of Jacques Callot as mutually enforcing techniques of alchemy-like transformations, generalising their conditions of emergence in liminality, which would eventually culminate in technologised science, the exchange economy, and politics based on the public sphere, or as many central efforts of modernity to substitute the concrete and meaningful, born out of charis, with a fake, imitative, technological product; with mimes that imitate each other and that can safely be exchanged with each other in propagandistic exercises called elections. While in all these five chapters the historical examples are presented in the context of an ample conceptual discussion, they are interlaced with two chapters that, while also discussing concrete, historical cases, are fundamentally conceptual. Chapter 2, ‘The fluxed matrix’, through a number of concrete cases of enclosures and walling, discusses the matrix as the source of generation, through linear transformation, both as a womb of concrete living beings and as the ‘location’ where in the otherworld souls are reassigned, according to charis, central principle of the world; and also presents the fake matrix used through necromancy by trickster–sorcerer–operators. Chapter 5, ‘The raised power’, another conceptual, summarising and connecting chapter, will be devoted to a discussion of power, starting from Weber’s charisma but integrating among others the trickster, or the power of the soul snatcher, and introduces three types of power: first power, or the charis-based inner force that is present in every living being; second power, or the external, institutional kind of force, best represented by the state as monopolising violence, using again a definition from Max Weber; and finally raised power or power2 which is an exponentially growing but fake power, produced by the machinations of the trickster–operators, through their instrumentalisation of the void.

Conclusion The methodology of this book is based on a combined used of a variety of perspectives. What this means is that the book relies on certain approaches within these disciplinary traditions that over time have proved to be helpful in dealing with the rather complex set of problems tackled. The approach followed by the book is to perceive technological progress and economic development as not absolute passes ahead and advances of mankind, rather steps that follow an extremely questionable and problematic path that is many respects, from the perspective of life, clearly regressive, involving depersonalisation, the destruction of nature, culture and traditions, and the restriction of our living space, our enclosure into ever more limited areas, with our connections becoming limited to technological means which incite our sensuals without limitations while at the same time entrap us in them.

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Introduction

Notes 1 The book of the Swiss economist Hans Christoph Binswanger (1994) claimed that Goethe’s Faust renders evident the alchemic character of the modern economy. 2 About this, see Foucault (1972), following Bachelard and Canguilhem. 3 This is the difference between, say, physics and geology. The social sciences try to imitate physics (and actually even a badly conceived physics), and this is wrong. Nietzsche, instead, took inspiration for his genealogy from geology, and this was a right intuition. Archaeology is also quite similar to geology, and it is not by accident that at a certain moment Michel Foucault called his project ‘the archaeology of the human sciences’. 4 This is, for example, the perspective of Bertrand Russell. 5 There is no space here to resume the central aspect of this ‘technical’ genealogical method; for further details, see the writings of Nietzsche and Foucault, and the short summary by Szakolczai (2013). 6 Relevant publications include Horvath and Thomassen (2008); Horvath, Thomassen and Wydra (2015); Horvath and Szakolczai (2018a, 2018b, 2020); Szakolczai and Thomassen (2019); Wydra and Thomassen (2018).

1

Necromancy1

Necromancy, in the real sense of the term, does appear, in recognizable form, in the shaft burials designed to attract the supernatural, or to relate the buried one to the world of the infinite. Necromancy is a replicating act of forcing the infinite supreme to realize the similarity between itself and the deceased, in our case in the hollowed penetration of the earth. For many thousands of years, from the Atapuerca2 shaft burials, the association never faded away between the long, narrow stem and the summoning of the infinite. From then on, its after-effect results came uninterruptedly, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have shaped history, up to our times. Historically speaking, these similarities are the shape of the burrows that are elongated, roughly cylindrical, suggesting something of a tree trunk, similar to the formation of the earth, often cited by Ancient authors, together with its rotating and transmitting power that functions in perfect equilibrium, as it appears in Anaximander, Anaximenes and Plato (Furley 1987: 26). The first coherent description of the matrix is offered by the Greeks (Couprie 2018: 50), who summon this vision into one vast machine of forces, with upward or downward movements that are symmetrical about the central point of the cosmic sphere, the earth, which is hollow and round, like a round trunk and itself in the middle of the cosmos, where we ourselves in nature have our place, inside the hollows of the earth. We live in such hollows (Plato, Phaedo 109c),3 we live in a place that is infinitely matrixing, creating and destroying itself. But it would be surprising to see that matrixing, or linear transformation, could be repeated by necromancy, even though only in a circular and not a linear way. However, hollows are the most extreme forms. Their own equipoise and their homogeneously voided nature can only recall an absolute negative,4 something that is not real. It has no sides, and emptiness does not, in fact, result in a conciliatory form of reality. The nothing is placed in the centre of something which is homogeneous and cannot change its inclination in any direction, but will always remain in the same position, while its solitude exercises power, like a diaphysis,5 that grows and produces its essence continuously. In this respect the hollow is a type, in so far as understanding comprehends it as a nil, an in-betweenness or space holder. Somehow it is similar to the square root (√),6 though it has two sides that do not meet,

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Necromancy

leaving an empty space in between, so it might be treated as diabolical or as divine, or both at the same time, the supreme power. The divine responds accordingly, in the way of the holy to the holy,7 and the diabolical also, meaning in an atrocious manner. The simple shaft hollows of burials are the paths that lead to this otherworld, hollows themselves. The rites and ceremonies practised here on earth are addressing this hollow partly to participate in the infinite power of its fluxing sensuals, partly to gain access to its infinite transformative wealth and growth (as expressed by the square root symbol, √).8 The matrix implies a linearity, while the raising power9 is a circularity, while they are both incommensurable. But the most important is the magic discovered technique itself, which is equal for any sorcery, necromancy or alchemy, being always the same, implying the invitation of the replicator into bodily composition, or for possession. In this manner the difference between the two, the composed and the infinite is annulated, so they have become similar to each other: the replicator has the form of the composed one, and the composed one the image of the replicator. Replicators are agents of the matrixing otherworld. On this essential point replication never varies, as souls, or image rays are transformed into other structural features inside the matrix, but replicators only replicate inside the living bodies of the forms. This is so because replicators are those millions of types of radiations that are found in every ecosystem in the cosmos, and they are the most numerous types of image entities, when the courses of these rays are accumulated in the matrix into another output image form. The study of rays is known as cosmology, including religious, mythological or physical cosmology, from the earlier Babylonian cosmology to the most recent zero entropy cyclic model. When not inside a body form or in the process of possessing a body, replicators exist in the form of independent sensuals, free, liberated and infinite in their variations of image rays, consisting of memory that is coding their inclinations, the vector of their desires, and in some cases a very little matter also, that envelopes their sensuals, which gives their shape, from the range of triangles to the polyhedrons.10 Most importantly, sensuals can be imitated and reproduced, while they also evolve through natural processes, although they have minimal bodily/material form, having little of the key characteristics of bodily forms. They are able to possess bodies, keeping them, and also – when time has matured them – to leave them, at the point of death, and to continue a bodiless existence, so their reproduction is a determining factor that provides access to the understanding of political alchemy. So sensuals are generally considered irrational, infinite, immortal and indivisible, fully occupying the territory of death and partly taking control in life, but not necessarily counted as real. Because they possess some but not all qualities of a composition, sensuals can be described as possessive, replicating, unreal existences: output image forms of the otherworld that all together function as the matrix. Replicators consist of pure sensuals, and sensuals with different formation of rays, which are the images of forms. They do not have a body, although they can have memories. Sensuals make the structure (matrix) move, and thus

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generate the infinite movement of the otherworld. When the operators set up a fake matrix, their intention is to get into or occupy a space in the otherworld, and influence its movements. Sensuals spread in many ways: they can be transmitted by similar feelings, or by pretending to feel similarities. In both cases they open pathways to their invasion, occupation and possession of the desired body. Such invasion can be narrow or wide, depending on the readiness of the body for possession. Here the operators have a significant role: they are able to carry on the readiness of the body–form to accept the possession. One possible pathway is through sending messages, images or other information from one location to another by means of radiating rays of sounds, lights, movements or sensuals. This way sensuals might be transmitted from hollows to hollows by the operators, carried by those who are able to incite and canalize them. Sensuals are passed by contact and enter those bodies that lie in their pathways.

Opening pathways The opening of pathways, a crucial element in the processuality of necromancy can be captured through an alternative image in Lascaux: the unique case of narrative scenery in the entire 25,000 years of Palaeolithic cave painting.11 This is the Shaft Scene in a hidden recess of Lascaux’s painted cave, where a singular, alternative as alternating narrative was captured in the place where otherwise the charis-centred Palaeolithic vision of the world got its central depiction. As the Shaft Scene inflated all the negativity of its participants who were connected in a flexible series of desirous links, a copulating desire that was used for holding them together, the result was an opening of reproductive processuality. We are in a shaft, inside the Lascaux cave hollow itself, as the Shaft Scene can be found – as it was called, after its dramaturgy – at the end of a small recess, on the right of the passageway that connects the nave to the main hall in the prehistoric cave (Aujoulat 2005: 26, 40–2, 158–61). Its access from the passageway is difficult, as one must negotiate a 6-metre drop hollow to reach the bottom level – while the ceiling levels are identical. But it is practically impossible to return from the Shaft to the main cave area, which contains a completely different style of paintings (Ruspoli 1987: 138). Furthermore, it is now widely accepted that there was originally a second entrance to the cave, from which one could get access to the Shaft – though not beyond, firmly indicating the singular importance of the scenery. The Shaft was therefore an authentic alternative sanctuary, outside the main paintings12 and ritual sceneries, yet closely connected to them, to which some people might have been attracted, with the promise of sharing some hidden secrets which the guardians of the ruling cult were unwilling or unable to gain access to. Such hidden secrets might have provided a knowhow about the opening processes discussed above, in a striking difference to the no-man, no-sex, no-violence images in prehistoric cave paintings. They are painted in a rather primitive, anti-evolutionary, anti-Saussure-ian sign language of a

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Necromancy

seduction scenery, where everybody is hurt, and which is still saturated with the same monstrous dream of revenge on forms, with the surprising end-result of abundance. Here the intention of harming in return for a desire-related injury suffered at the presence of the participants turned out to produce richness. The destructive dream turned out to be useful, as it opened up the sources concerning how to give and to take in a way of artificial reproduction. The basic thing concerning the Shaft Scene is that it breaks with the standard distinction between painting animals and humans as only engraved, by enacting a painted image for the human being as well, and that it depicts a phallic man urging for copulation. The novelty of this image, a class in its own, is well defined by the phallus of the masked figure, which has again no equals in cave paintings. It is true that in the caves there were other phallic signs present, but they were only symbols, not a definite member united to a human body. This small figure in the Shaft Scene, with its elementary, vulgar pose entraps and annihilates the whole tiresome effort of a dozen millennia of work and art, reducing magnificent art into one base – rather than basic – gesture. The Shaft Scene changes entanglement with the divine into detachment, thus alternating the process of equal strength to its inverse, to opening up. In opposition to the paintings, where everything is moving together in harmony, being caught firmly by an operational will that has, invisibly, embroiled together the magnificent figures into a charis-inspired world vision, this scenery visibly separates them into three different entities: the phallic figure, the animals of the supreme powers, and the bird, the animal of the soul spirit. Between them a new form of communication is enacted: that of the erotically possessive one. Operators start their action when the structure enters a crisis. At this moment the composed force of the structure is lost, and the replicators can take up the place of the soul, overtaking the structure, and start to reproduce themselves. All three participants in the Shaft Scene image are alienated from their own shape and form: the figure from his human form by the mask, the divine from its divinity by lust, while the dislocated spirit has received a separate entity in the form of the bird on the staff. Furthermore, the pose of the human is in itself contradictory, schismatic, defending and attacking at the same time: the body lying on the ground with wide open arms shows that he is being subjected to external forces to which he gives itself up, while his erect phallus demonstrates his objecting to the perceived violator, but at the same time also that from now on his actions, by becoming violent, only perpetuate the logic of the perpetrator. But the most astonishing thing is the mask, which is worn by a phallic human creature with bird-like claws, clearly already attached to the otherworld by images not its own. He faces on the right side a bison, widely interpreted as a divine appearance, which however also alludes to a broken unity through an arrow-like sign. The bowel-like drawing under the bison expresses a maze symbol13 that has suddenly become visible – as if it fell out of the body of the bison, a supreme power essence. Finally, on the left, as if

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alluding to a narrative – which is again unique for Palaeolithic cave art, as no other such painting has a narrative aspect – there is a rhinoceros and a spectre with a bird on it. They belong to the same scene, shown by the manner in which they are facing each other: the bird’s beak faces the rhino’s anus, which is opened up in a manner opposite to the way the tail of the bison is lifted up. There are also six dots painted next to the anal area, arranged in three pairs – as if the dots were just now being born out of the back part of the rhino.14 The rhino is giving birth to something multiplicative, in definite connection with the bird’s beak, as if this referred to a difference between the digestive system of humans and birds: while in the case of the latter only one orifice serves both for secreting waste and for reproduction, human beings have three, each welldefined and distinct. All three of these anatomic functions are brought into one line, as indicated by the bird’s beak, representing with its phallic, copulative form the cloacae as well, that it is itself the one who is fertilising, excreting waste and laying an egg. Here we enter the unreal dimensions of the magic that is evoking sensual images in order to have communication with the otherworld. Turning back to the language of Goethe, here the soul is already sold, and the result is shown by growth and multiplication. A replication chain is depicted here: from the replicated bison’s bird-like soul to the man’s mask and his bird fingers, and from the man’s bird essence to the rhino’s behind, and then back to the bison, as the rhino and the bison are mirror images of each other. It is not only the circular movement of the replication that is astonishing here – recalling a later development in the circular non-number of the zero – but the presence of the utter hopelessness in the whole movement; not only because the reciprocal links between the bison and the rhino could function perfectly well without their operator. Now the circle contains two equal beings, which are mirror images of each other, the bison and the rhino. The phallic figure of the Shaft Scene is unnecessary in the circle; this is why the operator is using a mask, mimicking the divine, disguising strength and so leaving a hole in the picture like a knife in the wound: a hole, a 0 (zero), which many thousand years later would grow into a mathematical symbol of destruction, but paradoxically also of growth. Such a combination of three figures together does not exist either in Lascaux, or in any other Palaeolithic cave. However, this is not the case with the dots. They are general symbols in the caves, but the particular three pairs of dots are reproduced at the very end of the Southern shaft, just after the Chambers of the Felines and a very enigmatic ‘house on the tree’, though the colours there are different (Eshleman 2003: 188). Given that the Chambers of the Felines are in the area of the main cave of Lascaux that is most difficult to access, and that the images there depict more frightening animals, it might be argued that they represent an alteration to the existing arrangements of the main halls. This lends further credit to the idea that the designers of the Shaft Scene intended it to represent something like a difficult and secret trial. Even if they did not want to undermine completely the master idea of the cave itself, they certainly introduced the key modalities for altering its usage.

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Forcing subversion The interpretation of the Shaft Scene as the decomposition of the reciprocity between the divine, animal and human realms can be supported by a number of further points. According to various scholars, there are only some dozen anthropomorphic figures among all the cave images found so far in Spain and France, a small number compared to the thousands of animal images. They are also mostly engravings, with the single exception of the painting of this Shaft Scene, and these few representations are usually in hidden parts of the caves, far away from the main paintings (Kleiner 2010: 9). These cave engravings deliberately chose to represent something of humans through vague images, which contain few details, or show even outright deformed features (Conkey, in Lock & Peters 1999: 328). Evidently, this is the place where the trickster was born, as the features, including the deformities of these figures recall the anthropological tricksters, or similar, trickster-like figures like mimes or Greco-Roman and Renaissance comedy actors. A contemplation of these engravings about human figures produces the feeling as if one just happened to be in the midst of a puppet show, being surrounded with a bizarre burlesque of mechanical entities, without any strength of their own. As if we could not think at all, just allowing ourselves to be overcome with fantasies, living with the ever opening and closing images of terror: always opening up, always in disintegration, never arriving at a fulfilment, but ever forcing subversion. It is true that in prehistoric caves we have to do with a distorting realism, through the twisting of space and the intensification of fantasy forms, yet they remain in the borders of the beautiful. The engraved human images, however, are strikingly ugly and outright grotesque; they hate and would like to harm. They express emptiness, their vacuity producing a dry, monotonous, metal-cold possession; a penetration evoked by the phallic character of the engravings that provokes fear. There is no remedy whatsoever for this frightening, tormenting state of terror; these eternal wanderers in the bowels of the Earth are neither really alive, nor completely dead, lurking there to catch something. These flattened, disordered figures that only appear in engravings represent the operator’s space of the cave, which is a hallucinatory, outsider automatism, endlessly looping and circling into bizarre images which are entrapped in the dark side of the mind. The phantom engravings represent something different from this, our world, though mirroring it in a distorted way, showing its obscure and ambiguous features that do not tell much about order and delight, and reveal little strength or intensity, just a dark, terrorising fear. They are present in the recesses of the caves, places that represent the real underground inside the underground, the otherworld, where the replicators, its agents, can exist in secrecy, silently preparing their revenge on life. Still, the perfect, high aesthetic standard of the cave paintings, their admirable precision, the intensity of movements and the beauty of animal figures, their astonishing reality, their detail – even drawing the hair in the

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bison’s ear, the horse’s fur – all the different animal characters that were given shape and form in the paintings are in very apparent contrast to the above mentioned amphibious human engravings, though they served the same reason of opening up the soul. They both wanted to give a mirror to the otherworld, going down into its hollows and evoking death in order to participate in the world of images, taking an effect, influencing the replicators. But note that these painted animals are floating in the air, their legs do not reach down to the earth, and their pose does not know gravity, so they have no horizon, no landscape, no orientation to earthly living – they are themselves still from the world of charis and benevolent harmony. Their appearances required the participative help of an orderly net, which is entirely missing in the engravings of the humanoid figures, who by their grotesque ugliness were thrown out into godlessness.15 Were they godless, these operators of the engravings? They indicated so, we believe, by addressing things without measure, as the Greeks said later, the abyss. Here the masked humanoid is reclining, offering his body to violence. The bison is towering over him with his forceful horns as if in the act of raping him. We must be careful here: it is not that such an act effectively took place and was reproduced there, but the Shaft Scene could be imagined as the presumed desire of a god for a man. This is shown by covering the man’s face with a spirit mask, which is a bird mask, representing the spirit–essence of the divine bison that was lured into the mask so that the god could be caught, and their power taken. Is it blasphemy, representation of a kind of ‘primal scene’, or is the representation as such blasphemy itself, a kind of ‘primal image’? We do not know. But certainly, the image speaks of a sacred entity16 in an irreverent, impious manner, where we, the spectators are persuaded, involuntarily and even unknowingly, not to believe in divine benevolence and good order anymore. There is still something else here, to show not only divine lust, but also divine stupidity as well. Mimicking the divine and feigning to be weak and in addition to outwit the divine offers at the same time a perfect hiding place for the interloper. In this way he can divert the attention away from his traps, softening up his divine rival, and luring him easily into his own ways. The masked man successfully (at least according to the narrative represented) plays the martyr and the aggressor at the same time: the bison is shown as hurt, disembowelled by a ‘love arrow’,17 while the mask is also fainting. The mask is lowering and thus humiliating itself by playing the victim and by the same act manages to catch the divine in its grip. For Bataille, this scene is testimony of a crime, or even a sin committed by man against animals, since the separation between animal and human was not totally established at that time (Bataille 2005: ix, Geneste et al 2004: 102). While we agree with Bataille about the crime testimony idea, such a separation, in the sense of distinctness, is as old as their existence: why should there be anything other than two orders, two distinct spheres in a reality where everything has its own distinct place? Finally, and this is the concluding end of the cynical dramaturgy, by

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showing pain and suffering the humanoid figurine empties its soul, and pretends to be suffering until it receives a response from the divine powers embodied by the bison. The divine has thus entered into an eroticised sensual with the man, its rays have fertilised him, as the god’s attention has become focused on the man. Their union is the endpoint of the drama, what’s left is the reproduction.

Enacting wealth One of the most brutal parts is as follows, when they mutually annihilate each other: this happens when the mask identifies himself with the bison, mimicking its phallic appearance, and in this way manages to approach the bison and take its power. The mask is ithyphallic, and by introducing submission into the game, he has become emphatically phallic, as if by the third power: with the sharp beak of the mask, with its erect member, and with his two phallic-form feet. Now, the whole play is turned around: when the mask becomes the agent of rape, he has grown into a multiplicative phallic apparatus, using force to compel the gods to submit to sexual penetration. His feet even have the same shape and size as the hollowed horns of the bison, so they are very much each other’s equals in terms of penetrating power. This is why his self-humiliation is very much a form of attack – the mask is involved in a violent action. There is a broken arrow sign under the human and the bison, joining them and thus signifying the end of their separate existences and the ensuing mutual subjugation to each other. According to the narrative of the Shaft Scene, they both died due to a love wound, which is indicated by the fact that the arrow cuts across the bison’s anus, which is shown open by the raising of its tail.18 Both the ithyphallic man and the bison with the phallic-form horns are indicating that this is an amorous scene, nothing more. They are eager to get more and more from each other, each dragging energy from the other, being involved in a cross-penetration. Historically speaking, murder, rape and violence committed by gods against humans is quite common, a central argument in, e.g. Greek mythology. But the opposite received less voice, or perhaps no voice whatsoever, maybe until Nietzsche. Even more, it is remarkable that, according to the Shaft narrative, not only were the gods raped, but that only the man received gifts for his double act of transgression and subversion: first, through his offering of himself to subjugation, and second, for his raping. Three such gifts are indicated in the image: one is the maze that the bison emanated from his body; the second is the inseminating of the divine, as indicated by the dots next to the rhinoceros, while the third is immortal life, as shown by the bird on the erected sceptre. This can be understood by analysing the connections between the rhino and the bison.19 The bison and the rhino, both emphatically horned animals, are mirror images of each other, though showing some significant asymmetries. The rhino is on the left side of the image, behind the back of the fainting mask, while the bison is on the right. Both have their tail lifted up, and both are

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pointing in the direction of the mask. As the mask is turned towards the bison, it is the bison that is ready to receive the human semen in its anus, while the rhino is giving birth. The beak of the bird at the top of the shaft is pointed directly at the anus of the rhino beside the fainting mask, indicating the final goal and target of the action, assisting the multiplicative birth, as expressed by the two rows of triple dots. They consummated their love together, but the benefits produced are one-sided, being only on the side of the man. The god remained in depravity, robbed and in despair, which is quite a significant change from its previous co-operativity, as manifested by the paintings.

Hollows as matrix When the mask is hiding instead of sharing in the Shaft Scene, his hands and feet are no longer instruments of his own intentions, and he is misusing powers by offering his body to them for penetration, alternating their attention: a passive positionality without mental energy; just a dead, mute, sensual copy. This is even visible, shown by the broken image of the arrow which is the sign of a break. In mathematics, the result of the division of a unit is called a ‘fraction’, which is derived from the Latin fractio, or breaking. But such operation is not valid for everything, as we cannot fraction any existing (concrete) thing:20 where the corporality of a form gets in contact with the irrational through break or division, the result is infinity, just as any natural number divided by zero mathematically yields infinity,21 so instead of a breakage it gives a completely different result. The result is the infinite growth of the set-up captured in the image of the three times two dots under the rhino’s anus, a multiplication of the mask’s semen. Through the insinuation of weakness and emptiness, the man of the image pulls down the divine power and repositions it, focusing it on itself, on its own body, so he has stolen the divine power in the way of fertility, growth, and infinite multiplication. What has happened here? While the mask is hijacking the idea of giving, insinuating himself as equal in sensuals, he is taking away divine power by offering himself, the unstable and drunken, to the divine. Of course, this creates a split at the level of the divine power as well, which was tricked into the affair, then caught and abused, its power being stolen. The reciprocity of beauty and gift relations of the cave images, which is based on the sharing and squaring of qualities, squaring in the sense of a ‘square deal’, in opposition to the irrational diagonal ‘shortcut’, is becoming corrupted by shrewd minds into a technique that is converting the operation into a new kind of infinitely running machine. This technique is based on a very simple idea of passivity – passivity itself being indispensable for the operation of the hollows – offering a body to be subjugated and fractioned, but resulting in a complicated mathematical operation. A simple bodily addition to nothing does not bring any result at all (2+0=2); however, if we break the body with nothing, like 2/0=infinity, the result is surprisingly profitable: it is the infinite growth that is turning around, which is exactly the Latin meaning of the word ‘revolution’. Accordingly, it is

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worth arriving at the completion of the operation: whether digging the trap or hanging the bait, one must always show oneself as feeling low: down and out, weak and enslaved, hurt and suffering. Whoever is offering a gift can be sincere; but whoever wants to take something away must always hide behind a mask. The mask is snarly and wilfully playing the role of the prey, feeding an endless and insatiable monster with the sensation of pain, though the success is guaranteed. The divine bison on the one hand safely recognises its inner image in the bird mask, and on the other considers the fainting man as harmless, consequently infiltrating its body, while the man also penetrates him (2/0 = infinity), thus releasing the secret of the maze, itself the symbol of the bowels of the otherworld, the symbol of infinite mechanical reproduction or growth. The revolution is thus accomplished, with growth being turned over from the bison–god to the technicalised, masked proceduralist.

Conclusion Replicators cause growth, a growth that was caught by the trick of man as early as 15000 BC, but its reward is just as small as its pleasure was. This is the meeting of an inferior god with an inferior man in common consumption, which is aggravated by weakness and by common plundering, whose world despotically closed the man into the mill of a crushing terror under the ever renewed material abundance procured by the new and newest subversions, where every fractioning operation brings ever the same results, never liberating its masked victims from a troglodyte existence, from the labyrinths that lead nowhere but curl around with every curl into a new destruction and a new production. The Shaft Scene brings out three new elements as compared to previous, painted pictures of caves: isolation, as the mask with his abnormal hands, is isolated from humanity but linked to the subhuman, being in-between the two, insinuation and subversion, both the latter discussed in detail before. None of the three points work separately, but taken together produce a frenetic result, on the one hand by enacting the technical know-how of mechanical growth or mathematically speaking starting a matrix, and on the other hand by imprisoning the mind in infinite repetition, stamping it with the evacuation of meaning. Man is reduced to a mere instrument, indicated perhaps by the bird of the staff, a magic one of transformation, yet one reduced for the creation, reproduction and elimination of the same body, a humiliating reduction for anybody, but quite a fruitful position concerning automatized reproduction. But the real loser is the man: he cannot forget any more the sour terror of what he happened to learn during the rite, repeating it infinitely, taking the terror on his own back, recalling Zarathustra’s dwarf, and not being able to comprehend anything anymore other than the dual nature of his own existence, eternal but reduced to the perceptible world of mere sensations (Nietzsche 1976: 268). With them, he only manages to bring to life the powers of the replicators, in the form of an idle beast whom techné

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is fattening endlessly, and whose world is unkindly totalitarian. A salient characteristic of trickster alogos has been growing ever since the unity with nature was broken: trust in reality does not work anymore, and an inferior man and god have become confused, like in the simple geometric sense where the symmetry between the pair of sides in a square become confused if a single line is drawn between them. The two lines, which previously were in a measure or ratio with each other, suddenly lose their self-love, self-support and independence with this action. Their meaning suddenly alternated into another one, they become triangles, and the diagonal line receives an impossible quantity, as it is an irrational number, an arrheton (Szabo 1978: 227), number of the liminal. This counter-factual condition of impossibility gives birth to infinite similar operations, where the result is always the same decomposition. This practical procedure, properly performed, could continue forever, once the recipe was discovered, as the Shaft Scene shows convincingly that one unit might be linked to another one by replication.

Notes 1 This chapter incorporates parts of Chapter 1 of my 2013 book Modernism and Charisma (London, Palgrave). I thank Springer for granting me permission to reproduce them. 2 At Atapuerca, Spain, 28 different individuals were found in a cave burial at the end of a deep vertical shaft. Their age is around 500,000 years. 3 The whole citation is the following: [109c] ‘those who discourse about such matters call the ether; the water, mist and air are the sediment of this and flow together into the hollows of the earth. Now we do not perceive that we live in the hollows, but think we live on the upper surface of the earth, just as if someone who lives in the depth of the ocean should think he lived on the surface of the sea, and, seeing the sun and the stars through the water, should think the sea was the sky, and should, by reason of sluggishness or [109d] feebleness, never have reached the surface of the sea, and should never have seen, by rising and lifting his head out of the sea into our upper world, and should never have heard from anyone who had seen, how much purer and fairer it is than the world he lived in. I believe this is just the case with us; for we dwell in a hollow of the earth and think we dwell on its upper surface; and the air we call the heaven, and think that is the heaven in which the stars move. But the fact is the same, [109e] that by reason of feebleness and sluggishness, we are unable to attain to the upper surface of the air; for if anyone should come to the top of the air or should get wings and fly up, he could lift his head above it and see, as fishes lift their heads out of the water and see the things in our world, so he would see things in that upper world; and, if his nature were strong enough to bear the sight, he would recognize that that is the real heaven [110a] and the real light and the real earth. For this earth of ours, and the stones and the whole region where we live, are injured and corroded, as in the sea things are injured by the brine, and nothing of any account grows in the sea, and there is, one might say, nothing perfect there, but caverns and sand and endless mud and mire, where there is earth also, and there is nothing at all worthy to be compared with the beautiful things of our world. But the things in that world above would be seen to be even more superior to those in this world of ours’ (Plato, Phaedo 109c–110a). 4 But also positive, as the Greeks recognised it in the idea of forms (eidos/idea in Greek), in the principles that are making the world real. So far, our physical world

24

5 6

7

8

9 10

11

Necromancy is real as it is able to correspond with this eidos; reality is static. While eidos is a generative principle in nature but can remain so as long as things are not transformed, without eidos we are just composites, we exist but we are not real. Reality is on account of nothing other than because it partakes of eidos itself, which means that the eidos is the perfect instance of the property it stands for (monoeides). In this respect, the best life for us is the life devoted to virtue and knowledge, for such a life will result in happiness for the character, as reason cognizant of the eidos of the good and the other forms will, with the support and consent of our desire and power, govern all of our pursuits. New Latin, from Greek diaphusis, from diaphuesthai to grow between, from dia- + phuein to produce. A square root is written with a symbol of the shaft √, which has the power of the growth of units, as it belongs to the sphere of the irrational. It is also called the incommensurable, because it lacks the measure typical for reality, so stands opposite to it. Here it is important to note that holiness is not relative but absolute. It is not a given, but is present in every being, where everything has a meaningful role in reflecting and proliferating its own form. Considering that humans’ courage and determination produce a hearty soul, similar to the divine, implying being as kind, considerate, virtuous, sincere and genuine as the charis itself, significates this meaning. The meaning of unity or wholeness is where things belong properly to each other; this is why sociability is a charis value. So, holiness is not a separable entity from nature, but the property of reality. Alchemy is the opposite of reality, as by the alchemical process it is possible to raise up the power of the units by extracting their substance and repositioning them in other units; the units have lost their essences and are suffering deprivation and continuously looking for forms to possess, so this desire causes the multiplication of the original unit in a substance weakened form. This process is expressed in the following way in mathematics: the square root of 2 is 1.41421356237 …, the irrational. √2=1.41421356237 …, never ending falling particles, instead of the compact form of the rational, which by definition reality is. In this way, Alchemy gained a never experienced changing course of being banned and success; any spagyric act in Greece and the Roman world was banned, as well as during the Renaissance (Albertus Magnus, John Scotus and Aquinas practised it secretly under another name), but was always allowed in the Orient, and in Europe from about the 17th century onwards. See Boyle and Newton, until the complete and total infiltration of alchemy into modern science and technology, as the technique for the transmutation of matter. The idea, to be discussed further in Chapter 5, is a type of power oriented towards infinite, exponential growth, through imitation, possession and technology. It can be symbolised as power squared, or power2. In geometry these are called the tetrahedron, with 4 triangular faces, the cube, with 6 square faces, the octahedron, with 8 triangular faces, the dodecahedron, with 12 pentagonal faces, the icosahedron, with 20 triangular faces, each corresponding with the most basic forms, like fire, earth, water, cosmos. The most remarkable point, however, is that they are closed systems, their corners meet strictly and stubbornly, in contrast with the open sign of the irrational: √. Caves are themselves hollows, penetrations into the otherworld and used accordingly in the Palaeolithic, although the burial was not present in them. But the aim was similar, to catch, attach the sensuals of the otherworld. The Shaft Scene (15000–c.13000 BC), in the history of cave paintings, gives a knowhow – cold and cynical – concerning how to use and exploit it, and turn it to the interest of the operators.

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12 The point of this difference is that the main paintings produce a particular effect. They do not end in multiplication, hybridization or growth, but in an entity. They partake in involution in the sense of an operation that results in 1, as we can see in 00 = 1. The main paintings could express sensuals that evoke the sensuals of the otherworld. 13 So often used for the image of Humbaba, entirely made up by entrails. Walter Burkert in his classic The Orientalizing Revolution (1992: 49) recalled the curious magical practice of the examination of entrails, which is the Humbaba face, a grotesque human visage that can be made entirely from the length of intestine going back as far in time as the Mesopotamian divinisation practices. 14 For further information regarding the unique coordinated animation, see LeroiGourhan (1982: 42). 15 This is captured in the idiosyncratic figure of the ‘stalker’ in Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker; a memento mori of communism. 16 It is widely considered that in Palaeolithic times the bison stood for the divine, in particular a female deity, while the rhino, with its long tusk, evidently evokes phallic, male associations. 17 ‘Arrows’, another allusion to the hollows – arrows as weapon were not in use in this period. 18 The same trick of raising the tail can be seen in a Magdalenian bone incision (Laugerie-Basse cave in Dordogne), showing a phallic trickster catching or rather infiltrating an auroch (see http://donsmaps.com/laugeriebasse.html). One side of the bone only shows the auroch, with its tail down; while on the other side the trickster appears behind the auroch, in descent from flying, and the auroch is raising its tail. 19 About female–male animals and signs, see Leroi-Gourhan (1982). 20 For modern mathematics, it does not matter whether we call the sign 2/3 as 2 divided into 3, 2 broken by 3, or the ratio between 2 and 3. For the Greeks, it mattered – and it should matter for us as well, as it does indeed matter. We live our own lives, and are not appendices to universal mathematics, as proponents of Artificial Intelligence would like us to believe. But a good knowledge of mathematics, like of physics and the other sciences, indeed does matter, as it could help us realise the tricks that are played on us, in the name of ‘universal science’. 21 For more details, see Horvath (2010).

2

The fluxed matrix

For me the love of God is, both in a direct and in an inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)

In its original form the binding system of linear transformation, called the matrix, is present in nature. It is a recipient container in which forms are transformed in their progress towards different appearances. This is more the wandering of the soul through the mysteries of the otherworld than something graspable and solid; the journey of the soul goes through the world of images in the otherworld, yet is present in reality as well. Nothing is more revealing in this respect than the Greek word charis, the sense of gratification for the quality of forms infiltrating the whole work, both in reality and in the otherworld. The linear transformative system with its logic and function has been known at least since Antiquity, though under various different names. Hesiod in Works and Days (106) stated that ‘gods and mortal men sprang from one source’, there is only one source for everything, whose marvellous quality never departs. For a better understanding we use the modern, Latin name for linear transformation, which is ‘matrix’. Plato in Timaeus (48e) referred to the matrix with the name of the triton genos, or a ‘third kind’, an in-between space, a material substratum of the void, neither being nor nonbeing, a hollowed vessel that brings forth forms. This vessel could be the Earth or the space where the Earth situated, or even both. It can be best described as an interval between two different appearances of a form, and where formed entities are blending together. It is also present in Aristotle’s discussion of the cube that contains the void – a ‘something’ without its own existence – which only has a place: inside the cube, though having no self-existence. Aristotle used the form of a cube as a pure example to explain better the visual form of the matrix: a walled gap, which displaces its own volume in nature, giving way to any yielding medium. It contains the void, not as a self-existing vacancy, rather, according to Aristotle (2014) (Physics, 213b–214a), as a volume itself. The void as a volume was already there in the cube before the cube was occupied by the ever-entering figures of the matrix, who penetrate

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the cube, and whom the cube should also permeate thoroughly. Most importantly, the matrix has the same volume as the void embodied in it, a volume not separable from the entering figures, however different and thus isolated, bordered by the entering characters: ‘it would still embrace an equal measure of vacancy, and would coincide with a portion of “space” and “vacuity” equal to itself ’ (Aristotle 2014, Physics, 216a–b), in an alliance of great enthusiasm and devotion. This is the way the substantial volume of the matrix comprises in equal volume the void, while also being equal to it in physical properties. The matrix and the void coincide with each other, not exactly in material substratum, but in character. They both form a gap, an interruption, the matrix together with the void: the void is inherent in the essential character of the matrix as they both occupy a place; they are both material substratum in the sense of vibrating sensuals. However, the void is inside the matrix; the matrix is walling the void. The matrix is a vibrating place of adoring sensuals, honestly reciprocating the move of the entering characters from their previous equilibrium into another position of equilibrium, through homology. Their state of equilibrium has been elevated by the initial stage of the matrix, as if transmitting their vibration. The matrix’s middle stage provides that vibration which causes the oscillation of the different characters, the in-between stage of progressing into another character, the feeling of a desire towards unification, a powerful back and forth movement in a linear way on both sides of the centre of the matrix, a diaphysis as we call it, the shaft or tree trunk form of making. Entering into and departing from the matrix is linear, an exhilarating sequential process that works in a transformative way. But by laying down more matrixes in an artificial way, being excessively addicted by wealth and spoilt by the imperative of growth, technicalisation was born. On this essential point necromancers never failed: they used the matrix in a copied way, whether in the way of alchemy or metallurgy, in order to make matter grow longer and wider. Giving a contemporary example, a refined way of using these techniques can be found in Hobbes, who used the matrix for his idea of commonwealth in his political analyses in the sense of a transforming vessel or receptacle, while Foucault analysed in detail Bentham’s Panopticon as a refined power-operation-system of disciplinary closure, a moulding technology. Even Leibniz’s insight corresponds to the description of a matrix: ‘Imagine there were a machine which by its structure produced thought, feeling and perception’ (Leibniz 2014, §17). Foucault’s (1979) analysis was not simply an exploration of a Benthamite idea, but a major insight about the perverted matrix’s controlling and transforming effects on its subjects, which also makes use of the similarities between the Panopticon, the media and the circus, already present in Plato’s khóra (in the Timaeus) and his diagnosis of theatrocracy (in Laws). It also recalls Gell’s theory about technology and magic, which is founded on the enchantment of technology. Here Gell (1999: 166) interprets the magical effect of technological products on its beholders, explicitly identifying the enchanted magical vessels that have power

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The fluxed matrix

over us, which is neither different from the walled tower form of Bentham’s Panopticon or Aristotle’s cube and their continuous, disciplinary and anonymous effect, nor from the specific mechanism of power used by Hobbes and embodied in the god–man–machine, the Leviathan, or Leibniz’s ‘feeling machine’, cited above. Needless to say, the authentic matrix’s essential charis meaning has been forgotten: that it implies genuine kindness and benevolence, a serious wilful desire to promote the welfare of others. In reality, the matrix could be everywhere, anytime, as a generalisable model of a functioning binding and moulding process, which is defined as the intersection of characters, each of which is also characterised by its own liminal state, before entering the matrix. We are matrixed and we are matrixing in so far as we are benevolent contributors to life; the Earth itself is a matrix situated inside another matrix. Hence, and this is the main argument of this chapter, in reality there is just one matrix, the matrix of proper qualities, of tenderness and consideration, of charis, which with its activity in the mode of keeping corrects even limits and borders in thought, as Plato emphasised it (Plato, Timaeus 50c). Every other alteration is a perversion (the term ‘perversion’ was used by Scheler (2014) for falsified knowledge). Any departure from the genuine matrix has no validity, like necromancy and magic, and their sisters: alchemy and technology.

Why and how to produce, or the dilemma of necromancy The statement that the authentic matrix is an autonomous, self-sufficient vessel is our focus now, where everything that enters exposes and produces charis, while receiving a new appearance, corresponding with similar (homologous, like-minded) thinking. The etymology of matrix is itself the mother, implying the uterus, the womb, but also the source and origin of every matter (the word itself is derived from the same root as matrix). It thus has a figurative sense of that which encloses and also which gives an origin to everything, where things are developed, cast or shaped. When the character that entered the matrix finally leaves it, it gains a different shape, and this transformation adds a dynamic movement to the otherwise unmoved matrix. Note that here and everywhere in the book we are dealing with images, with an imaginary, sensual move, with a constancy of benevolence. There is no real alteration from this authenticity, but fake copies could exist. From this shared feeling of charis alterations can occur, a moulding down or forming process that lacks the authenticity of the original matrix. During the stamping and marking period perversion might take place; an erratic instance that is not part of the authentic sequence. Necromancers have studied the matrix automatism and decided to gain the best from it. Recognising that structures are the only rightful and acceptable appearance of the matter, they came to believe that by gaining possession of the structure of entities they could imitate the matrix movement. The operators learned that transcendental forces are escaping from matter during transformation, so transcendentality became a desirable thing (as again

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codified in modern philosophy by Kant, and mistakenly considered as the height of rational thinking). In this way a dilemma was set up concerning what works then in the matrix, but their approach was not complete at all. If, however, their definition concerning materiality was not complete, how did they deal with the transcendental? The answer is that they instrumentalised death (mortalism), while using the indestructibility of the soul. So in their case terms like materialism and metaphysics are relative only in the sense of which relation to an external object is a necessary condition of existence. This perhaps offers some explanation of the dilemma concerning the replacement of the inner cohesion of entities with a relational in-between. In these ways the replicators could slip into a comfortable solution, which is mortalism, saying that matter, even any form of life, especially human life, is really only useful, proper, appropriate after its death. During its life any structured matter, the outcome of the authentic matrix, is just a nil, only its relation to other similarly nil matters is valid, but after its life the nil becomes useful for creating new entities. This same conclusion appeared in Newton’s thinking, which offered an ingenuous solution to the unhappy dilemma about improper materialism and imperfect metaphysics by a kind of void-and-flux-based metaphysical materialism, which then was philosophically codified, after some prior efforts in Locke’s tabula rasa-based sensual–empirical idealism, in Kant’s critical transcendentalism. One of the other perversions is improper change itself. When Aristotle argued that every transformation involves three stages, the stage from which the change proceeds, the stage to which it proceeds, and the object which persists through the transformation, he pointed out the necessary involvement of a proper initiator into the transformation itself – there is no accidental change (Aristotle 2014, Physics, 226a.25). There is always something that initiates the transformation, and so the transformation must be distinct, or else no change has occurred. A transformation might deviate out of its proper course towards perverted ones, if the original intentions are not valid for the linear process of transformation. For the replicators this was evidently the case, as they came up with the idea that the only well-formed matter is a dead one, dead physically or dead spiritually, mentally, economically, socially, morally, as its charis content was killed in the first instance. Destroying the formed matter, liberating its charis-filled soul and taking its place by an accidental one, the replicator, is the solution to the necromancer’s dilemma, which in this way brings the erratic matrix into its circular movement in order to copy structures. The processuality of alchemy is following this perverted way. When a whole matrixing technological enterprise has grown over us, then we should invoke the similar mechanical apparatuses of the past, like alchemy, that were able to neglect charis and developed themselves into new shapes of hatred and violence, an aggressive shafting apparatus which moved in response to the intentional impact of replicating figures. The productions of this machinery are those technological artefacts that are continuously growing, resulting in unbalanced multiplications, building up those monstrous

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The fluxed matrix

absurdities (coined by Plato for false thinking; see Theaetetus 188c), which can be the outcome of matrix machinations. It should be noted that the terms which this book uses for the genuine and the fake or copied matrix are almost identical. Both involve a transformation, have the character of a process, and start working in a situation that is liminal. The difference between them is simply that one is genuine and the other fake. This is not a rhetorical difference, but a very real one, though of course, like every term of language, this distinction can be rhetorically abused. However, there is one crucial difference between the two, that cannot be rhetorically deployed, and this concerns charis, in its original Greek sense. The term ‘divine grace’ can be rhetorically abused, and this is indeed a crucial element in the course of history, but charis as the idea concerning the inherent benevolent kindness and beauty of the entire world is not something that can be easily faked. This is why the operators are using all kinds of justifications to avoid even discussing charis, focusing on pain, suffering and violence in order to justify their furthering violence and denigrate charis as a mere romantic illusion. They use all means at their disposal to destroy charis, so that they could pretend to claim, with hypocritical justification, that charis simply does not exist – it is an illusion. One part of this dysfunctional matrixing machinery is the vessel as it appears in alchemy, and which was never more than the exact opposite of the antique homology notion. Homology (a term of Aristotle) is the quality of agreeing, implying the similarities in thinking shown by every character in life, a mind-set in a measurable likeness between beings, closely connected to charis. In nature the authentic matrix implies homology. The state of being homologous implies a fundamental similarity and is based on common descent from the matrix by filiation, as shown by the word itself: linearity, in linear transformation. This common developmental origin is shown by the similarity of the organic compounds of every being (Darwin successfully established a theory on that), in which each character differs from successive compounds by a fixed mind-set in homology or agreement. Homology is a unifying quality, a correspondence able to form a linear transformation in a matrix, while alchemy divides. Alchemy claims that a proper unity can only be found if we first separate and divide, given that things as they exist are not ‘proper’ – a perception shared by modern thought, with its central categories of ‘doubt’, ‘critique’ and ‘analysis’ (a term whose alchemic origins has simply become forgotten); while Antique thinking starts with the idea that the world is good, as everything in it comes from a proper descent (or tradition). The advocate of alchemy only respects a different message that is conveyed through destruction, by seemingly promoting security, law and order, while violating understanding and homology. Why build a structure on deprivation, the break of continuity, if it only promotes a feeling of being weak, proposes a deficient order distanced from the power of the self ? But this powerful little group of operators perform an extreme and desperate effort at confining and sealing everyone else behind a physical separating device, transforming our

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habitual actions and natural dispositions from self-capability and self-sufficient homology into passive endurance, as will be discussed in the following, through some examples from Palaeolithic caves. Why do replications happen? Can it be shown that the replicators have an interest in separation and in destruction, in building up artificial systems that abuse nature’s moulding down process, interrupting and spying its stamping and marking generations, pervading its binding homology system into a multiplicative absurdity? Is it possible that a falsified transformation is the driving force behind our modernity, which gives a particular autopoietic dynamics to the alchemical designs of creative destruction? That it only incorporates the dissolved, dazzled and upset characters into erratic thinking sets, without offering any way out? Without doubt the matrix even in its authentic forms is absorbing the energies of the entering characters, giving it back to the departed ones; but it is being moved by the entering figures and maintains in this way homology. But what happens if this homology is disturbed, violated or abused? Can the matrix still keep going on, without being disturbed? Evidently not. The consequence is that not only the homology axiom of the matrix will change, but also the entering characters will lose their original property of being in homology, being equal with themselves, together with a similar loss of the departing ones. The erratic matrix will be built up into a parasitic machine that only absorbs energies, without ever giving them back, swallowing resonation and growing into dangerous absurdities in a circle. The appropriate Aristotelian characterisation of the individuum is one that has a solid position, being complete and in comfort with nature, the notion that in nature every individual is in agreement with him/herself, nothing being excluded, has become lost and transformed to the idea of the weakness of the corrupted individual. The replicated matrix thus will become perverted, passing sickening changes on characters, and we are not yet at the end! It is instructive to note that agreement in the matrix and the property of being equal to oneself are interchangeable, as all those characters who enter into the matrix’s receptacle are blended into another shape without harm or violence. Self-sameness is an absolute principle in nature, but it does not imply being in the same state all the time. There is movement without relinquishing the actual character, without changing its essence (mode of thinking, set of mind) through the matrix itself. If a change of essence could occur, then knowledge itself would cease to exist (see Cratylus 440a). Void is there in the matrix, but not the flux; the matrix is not a ‘leaky pot’ (a term coined by Plato in Cratylus 440d, capturing Heraclitus’ notion of flux), unless its homology is disturbed. If one’s mode of thinking is not reconciled with these axioms, the matrix process could lose its measure and with it the agreement, the harmonious property of the characters in being equal with themselves, the peaceful will to coincide with each other, and so the process becomes falsified, and the energy absorbing process of the matrix will turn into perversion. Magnitude will take the place of filiation, and instead of homology incommensurability or ‘no common measure’ will overgrow the perverted matrix.

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Such incommensurable relations are represented by irrational numbers in mathematics (Szabo 1978), and they could also easily be seen in the growth of perverted matrixes, like walling, disciplining and other similar technological arrangements, with their powerful dynamism for occupying forms, places, times. Let’s not be misunderstood: the matrix itself is incommensurable, but as far as it is able to keep the tension between the entering and the departing characters, it is somehow controlled by itself, by homology, which implies a focus on content and the centre, combining genesis and imitation, and not on ‘rigorously defined’ external constraints. But as soon as the whole system becomes violated, materially externalised, the incommensurable too escapes from the general agreement and starts its run into horrid magnitude. Incommensurable magnitude, having no common standard for movement anymore, is the result of growth by division (at the limits, dividing by zero produces infinite growth), the multiplication of departing characters themselves in the perverted moulding process of a forged matrix. In normality, the matrix as linear transformation cannot produce anything other than its own charis nature: linearity, filiation, the disposition to comply the same homologous property as itself. If this condition is not fulfilled, the result is the unbalanced multiplication of the departing characters. If we agree that there is transcendentality in the entities, we talk about the soul. There is a thought, a powerful charis thought, that can become materialised and circulated in objects through the workings of the matrix. Yet, by a significant coincidence, alchemy has also found transcendentality in matrix transformation. It is the paradoxically transcendental idea that everything is physical, that everything can be exhaustively described and explained as material. This became the aim of the alchemical opus, the basis of alchemy’s materialism; a claim that was always hinted at with an implicit allusion to metaphysics. To be sure, not everything can be described and explained exhaustively by physical regularities, but such an idea can serve for setting up and justifying the automatism. But indeed they did not leave the transcendental part either, rather transformed it as well into a sensualproducing megamachine, with a strange mortalism in it, where everything living or dead should serve the earthly, material body of the machine itself. Evidently, this intention left charis simply forgotten. Still, the sensual, the mental phenomenon of every physical object that is a thinking, feeling entity became a problem for physics as molecular vibrations, but without mentioning any quality of the sensual. Not that they considered materialism as false, rather that physics perceived that both metabolism and reproduction are vibrations, that rays are released continuously into the matter, in whatever form it constructed itself as a living organism. But that this vibration could be the moving force on the matrix that gives the mental force a blossomed energy, as the examples of Ancient Egypt and Greece prove, as there could be no living entity without the proper cooperating arrangements of its parts, as expressed by Maat, the Egyptian concept of order, balance and truth and charis for the same norms in nature, in society,

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in the inner and the underworld, as in Greece was another issue. On the other hand, the advocates of weakness really only respect defect or failing, as in this way they are justified to replicate the structure, pretending to respect wholeness, but their replication destroys the proper inner organisation of the sensuals, the feeling of goodness and completeness of the entity, and so it only results in the collapse of the characters’ functional capacities. Replicators reject in any form whatsoever the notion that an inner power exists in living organisms that obey principles. However, being in order and striving for betterment are the principles that direct all our complex functions, indeed the processes working in all entities, from the interaction of molecules to the complex functions of the brain. Not just every living organism but each existing thing strictly follows these principles in every relation among the parts and the whole, until they are not disturbed. The authentic matrix has an intrinsic stability concerning the energetic replenishment and reorganisation of the material form which is constantly flowing through it. The matrix retains its shape by endlessly renewing, organising and imposing the characters which it constitutes into the persistence of a living organism. The matrix is not a structure, not even a protostructure, but the image of an order that never ceases to function; it is the principle of unity, persistence and power that we all bear in our hearts. This principle is probably the key to all creativity, to whatever is able to be created, to set units apart as discrete individual entities that are distinct and never repeatable in their concreteness. In contrast stands the operators’ imitation which gives birth to monsters, hybrids and mutants, unable to live on their own, but sickening into parasites. Therefore, in spite of their materialism that claims that everything is graspable and physical, postulating real, irreducible structures, they reduce entities into a bare nothing, into the non-structured condition of sensuals, into the non-physical entities of impulses, as inevitable consequences of their destructive fight against materialised structures. In this way they do not grasp anything, just the sensuals of the otherworld. Dogmatic materialism leads to the liquification, even vaporisation of solids, where nothing is concrete and material anymore, and of which the increasing use of the internet is a striking example. But does this lead to metaphysics? Religion says yes, but the world is a complex entity, it is not possible to cut it into halves. Its structured characters were born for lived life, and they enable us to describe and explain that structures are properties. They are not machines, but self-maintaining entities in the ecstasy of living.1 Charis is an overall pattern that flows through each individual, whether a stone or a human person. Yet, it is possible to separate them from each other on the basis of their contentment, their satisfaction with themselves, through the form and appearance proper to each. After all, units are separate from each other and can exist without being caught up in the whole, and the whole can exist without a chaotic merging of the different materials.

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The moulding process So far, we gained a certain understanding of the matrix, but now we need to apply this for the copied one, its perversion, including the inevitably disastrous consequences. The infinite is not simply a phenomenon that can gain a selfsustaining, autopoietic growth, but it does so in union with the fluxed matrix, moving itself anarchically through instability, jointly making use of the impulsive interests of the encircled and the excluded, producing an existence that is definitely new in appearance. The incorporation of the infinite into the limited existence of the individual has been a classical philosophical concern since Plato (Philebus 16d). However, the incorporation of the fluxed matrix is a completely different matter. Its unrest springs from the unruly presence of the replicators. The fluxed matrix has a suffocating, controlling presence over the subverted, which is not something to be recognised or acknowledged, as it has become a kind of naturalisation, a given and even pre-given during the course of history. It was Foucault who started to theorise this growing obsession with control, which has become so natural for us that we have to re-naturalise ourselves to be rid of it, suggesting the promotion of ‘new subjectivities’ as a solution. For a less famous contemporary of Foucault, the anthropologist Alfred Gell, such re-subjectivisation did not appear as a solution. Gell looked for a different answer, reconsidering the presence of this mind-set as a dazzling and upsetting influence and so pure magic, a spell inherent in technological procedures and their outcome. Magic is thus the ideal means of technical production (Gell 1998), as it does not require any other presence than an impersonal one, so it could even be nothing. Gell said that the enchantment of technology is the power that technical processes possess by casting a spell over us through their effective operation, so that we see the real world in an enchanted form. But the seductive properties of technology are not the only seduction that the fluxed matrix manifests, we should say. The flux inside the matrix, as every replicator, has an insatiable appetite for possession, filling it with unrest and never with contentment or completion; it is the place for the new appearance of technologies – walling, encirclement, encystation are just some of them – in limitless change, instead of an arrival in fulfilment. Possession is interested, it is the replicators’ basic desire, as they can replicate only inside the structure they have come to possess. When they are not yet inside the structure, they are weak and passive, immobile, but once they have succeeded in weakening it, they gain a position for possessing it entirely. Now the replicator is resonating and stimulating the sensual. Possessiveness evokes the mental state of an interest in gaining form, or in-form (ation), to enter and take control over forms – but interest is a conflicting sensual for the authentic matrix. The interest in gaining in-formation, literally getting inside the forms themselves in the moulding procedure of the matrix, is a dangerous undertaking, considering the quality of the offspring, as they become disturbed and interrupted in their transformative progress, though this corresponds with the replicators’ dream to debilitate them, weakening

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their hold upon their own strength, which otherwise, without the interference of the replicators is making their life complete, and so causing instead sterility, rendering it easier to take their place. Classically, the word ‘information’ always meant the shaping of the mind, a controlling power for the calculative replicators which is quite an alien coagulation from the giving, marvellous generative gratification of the matrix, a disease that came upon it with perversion continuously, bringing anarchy and tyranny with it. Interest in information is a clogging parasitism, which binds the movement of the matrix, obstructing and blocking it, diverting the natural moulding process into artificiality – yet, its binding and controlling force became even bigger due to this fact, thus the raising of powers. Deprived of forms, the raised power has a greater need for formalisation, for external control. Interest in information is a formatting formlessness that suffers from incompleteness, being deprived of homology. Until this point, we can agree with the idea that there was a deliberate effort, rooted in a personal interest to falsify the matrix’s sensual. However, things become different after the accomplishment of the perverted matrixing process, once hybrids are born from the perverted matrix, after the reaggregation, as at this phase the spell of the perverted matrix becomes autonomous, independent of any wish on the part of the participants, whether subjects or spectators. The falsified matrix has an unfinished, uncontrollable, roundabout movement, once escaped from the hands of its generators – a concupiscent, lascivious desire. The matrix is a triton genos, a third factor, a dynamism earned from the forms, but linked by charis to fulfilment, while the perverted matrix is only moved by appetite and produces accidental, artificial, mechanical or grotesque changes. To further support this view, notice that Hobbes regarded appetite (itself due to a deprivation of something, food or anything else) as a source of power between individuals, in line with Plato’s analysis on the nature of dynamos, as something incommensurable (Plato, Theaetetus 148a–b). However, if we start with appetite, which is necessarily unequal, then the result is further incommensurability with others, a matrix multiplication devoid of harmony. The matrix is a kind of third factor, which has the capacity of conjoining two characters. In the conjoining process, here, we can even catch how easily possessive appetite can be confused with the sensual of love. Appetite is an in-between condition of deprivation, like lust, anger, hunger, resentment, pain, interest and so on, wedging a distance between characters whose movement is frozen and thus can only move through the auxiliary motive of appetite. Love and appetite are both preoccupied with the gratification of the senses. But there is a delicate division between the two, which we will illustrate later with the help of the novelist Albert Camus. The appetite is a distance between men that can be satisfied by taking away something from others, a negative conjoining faculty. It is a faculty that is never satisfied: a never bridged gap, that is unable to unite into one. The appetite is not sufficient to unite the moulding process, is never able to join together the entering characters into the properties in the matrix, but instead produces an

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interruption and freezes the process into perversity. As a result, the parasitic matrix is unable to bear offspring, only producing mutants, like various technological enterprises and unlike: love. The authentic matrix denies the existence of any other in-betweenness than the disposition to generate forms in the most harmonious way. While in the matrix the various characters define their respective positions by moving, copying, adopting existent forms, models in continuum, the perverted version produces and reproduce paralyses. Not surprisingly, the characters entering the original matrix always rearrange themselves into different configurations in search of pleased fulfilment, while in the perverted matrix they remain lifeless, lacklustre, anaemic, inert, as their happy composition has gone forever. Yet, the void participates in both cases. In the matrix the void is not the absence of things: it is there so that the matrix can generate forms, which is its own meaning, as for the void one must suppose that some volume is already there, like the agreement inside the vessel. When and before it was occupied by the entering and departing characters, then the matrix itself had its own volume equal to that of the void which now permeates its moving, coinciding with the space and time equal to it, according to Aristotle. This is impossible in the fluxed matrix, which is not like the void. The fluxed matrix is an empty space that has no significance – it is just a mental construct, rendering impossible any agreement. Maybe we are ready to conclude that the way perversity can emerge in the matrix is through inertia, due to the entrance of an intention, of the replicators: a will to possess a structure, which implies the suspension and elimination of the original one. The original structure has fallen into lethargy, its entity is at rest, it is in disinclination to motion, action or change as it is possessed, and is not only unable to change but can do absolutely nothing against the invasion of the replicators, so they enter and become multiplied, using the structure already invaded. This is why closures like walls and encystations are such elementary conditions for their spreading influence, where the replicators perform the moulding process through controlling the matrix interference. We’ll show that if this replication is motivated by possessiveness, then the result is the bringing forth of a perverted matrix, which follows a proto-alchemical processuality in the three stages of separation or dissection, the liminal in-betweenness of the womb and union in rebirth.

Closures for dissection Closure is a device that surrounds a space with a boundary substance within which something new can originate or develop, by changing the characters entering it. It moulds them, alters their entities, resulting in a different mode of thinking. It exists by nature, or could be erected or built up by those who are interested in closures. The interest in closed places is the interest in having an effect, so they are intensive to an extreme degree by their deep or forceful pressure. It can result in the dissection of any entity by its acute, strong force

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to transform, which is an ardent procedure, especially when one’s weakening has been set in motion. Consequently, an infinite sequence of ever concentrated intensities occurs, something so strenuous and earnest that nobody can escape without the anomalies of disastrous developments that befall characters who become incapable of self-governance. What is more, dissection continues with intersections, which is different from concreteness in context, as it starts with a violent break. This is how and why closures are at once the archetype and prototype of all the subsequent ludicrous ideas of social engineering, where purely technical solutions are suggested to overcome weakness, as if such an idea was self-evident – that simply by constructing a solid wall anybody undesired can be kept out, while equalising all those who remain inside. Yet, the solution soon, indeed, ‘naturally’ proves itself insufficient, only leading to further similar technical or procedural abuses, moving further and further away from the kind of power based on firmness of character. Closure is quite a problem on its own: it can produce essences and meanings free of reality, can expand influence technologically, politically and economically, with blocking and sterilising the right impulses and sense perception. Definitely, closure is an emanation (as coined by Meinecke 1972: 70) for the manifestation of the abysses of individuality of a manifold variety of things, through the moulding down of forms, but it is not so evident what for or why. Could it be that any closure is a matrix, or a shaft (√)? Matrixing hardly exists without thinking, though this thinking is about transformation. If this thinking has the quality of the marvellous, as Plato noted, how can the departure from this authenticity be defined? And what is the consequence of this departure, if not growth, raised power? Taking away something and not giving it back is the mode of interestoriented thinking. Only interest based on the evocation of appetite produces effects other than the natural order of homology, as it goes beyond agreement between beings, influencing, transforming and taking away existing arrangements, out of the class of forms. The replicators’ intention of getting into the form of others is a kind of appetite-driven interest on its own, similar to the ‘passionate interests’ introduced by Bruno Latour after Gabriel Tarde (see Latour and Lépinay 2009). But destruction is not very clear at first glance, as at the same time that the replicators are replacing the souls of the entities a curious bookkeeping is taking place in the middle stage of the transformative sequence, a ‘contract with the devil’, as this two-sided legal agreement was named in the archetypal, even unique modern myth, Goethe’s Faust, so the exploited always gain something. This is the fundamental, and thoroughly alchemic, logic behind the ‘mutual benefits’ idea of modern economics: not constraining people by force to collaborate in corruptness through creative destruction, but corrupting them indirectly, by offering them some benefits in the global corruption; in the logic of the operators, by throwing some small coin to the pigs. The Faustian, cool and rational contract combines giving and receiving in a sense, but in reality it is taking advantage of others, the world and especially the world of forms becoming little more than an occasion for

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profitable exchange with the abyss by their destruction. The sad consequence is the evocation of infinitely mutable replica images, boundless and bottomless repetitions: a phantom self-begetting. The power of interest resides in the perverted matrix itself, recalling the input–output matrixes of economic theory, where a stolen property (through a trick) is made to produce for the interested one, whose name and appearance is as insignificant as the fabricated mechanism of the process itself – they both fall into unreality. However, this requires internalisation; it must go through the sensuals, an alternating thinking towards an appetite for profit, reconstructing the world by milling it through the perverted matrix, slowly changing every part, segment and appearance of homology into perversion. Interest brings pain and violence into the magnificent mechanism of the matrix, but the authentic one, the original matrix, the binding system, the transformer of characters is still in the background, and will be there forever in every axiomatic wish for fulfilment: There is no other fulfilment than that of love, in other words of yielding to oneself and dying to the world. Go all the way. Disappear. Dissolve in love. Then the force of love will create without me. Be swallowed up. Break up. Vanish in fulfilment and the passion of truth. (Camus 2010: 243) This sensual of love is the moulding stuff for changing everything: fulfilling; dissolving; yielding; forcing; dying to the world; disappearing; creating; swallowed up; passionate; vanishing – just to illustrate, through the words of Camus, the intensity of the authentic transformation. Camus was the main charis-principle driven writer of the past century and could speak about it as nobody else. Be attentive here, as we have three phases in the paragraph cited: like in every matrix, there is the father, mother and the offspring phase, as Plato stated in the Timaeus. The father gives the design or image to be imitated, thus has a prominent place in the process, though he then disappears, giving up his place for the mother, the generous provider of the seat for the becoming form: ‘Then the force of love will create without me’; the mother who plays the protective role in the dissolution and loss of character captured above: ‘dissolve in love’; and finally the offspring, who is different in attributes, but not in mind-set, from the character which entered and disappeared in the process: ‘Go all the way’ and bring with them copies of the mother (the receptacle) and father (design). These are the components of the matrix, and they are linked together by generous love forever. The matrix is cemented together by love, but desire, as every sensual, is an easy victim of simulations. Hence, similar feelings do not mean similar intentions; the human mind can produce an abundance of relevant feelings, and one of the most significant is the interest in control. Interest can break through the generosity of sensual fulfilment, can alter the copied one, and can produce a perverted matrix.

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Wombs for rebirth The term matrix, as we have already noted, stands for ‘mother’, ‘womb’ or ‘matter’, the transformative container by which something is enclosed or embodied for further change, dissolved in sensuals and made to disappear as a character, as the Camus citation illustrates. The matrix shows something different from a simple transformation. First, there is a linear transformation in the form of regularity: something is growing in that way that is changing its attributes. Second, it can occur with the copy, mark or stamp of the initiated form of the matrixed matter. Authenticity and undisturbed love are able to fill the matrix with the sensual of harmlessness. Any other type of sensual in the copying process makes the whole movement erratic and vain, deconstructing the matrix and resulting in its disruption. An interest is an instability, it is harming the state of homology, it is sneaking and aloof, bringing indifference and unsociability into the forms, make them hostile and unfriendly towards each other, combatting infinitely. By interest we mean a deprived homology, derived from an alien sensual creeping into the matrix; an emptiness with a heavy transitorial and dense emotional charge, as it is an appetite for/after the forms. Closures do not necessarily materialise, but if they happen, as with walling with a vertical structure, which is like a fortified container, then it starts to divide and channel impulses in order to intersect two different some-‘things’: the character (which is an entity) and the sensual (which is a no-thing flux), one being limited, the other unlimited (recall Plato, Philebus 16c). As the replicator would like to possess both, in the first instance it falsifies the sensual, pretending to offer a similar sensual. Since only an emptied character could serve as a ground for multiplication for the replicator, this latter then continuously confuses the character by falsified divisions, while the resulting control is rendered acceptable through the growth and multiplication produced. This growth and multiplication are ever more intensive, as the growth of the fake matrix is devoid of fullness, so the replicator’s dynamism for searching, for hunting down characters is never ending. In this way an incommensurable magnitude is evolving through the stimulations of hostility and violence, with distortion and disfiguration becoming the necessary moving force in the perverted matrix, even though the name ‘matrix’ indicates the opposite: it is the mother, the naturally truthful and peaceful place for the future, the benevolent transformer of matter. Nevertheless, those technical enterprises that grew out of a hostility confined and sealed behind their barriers were thriving on what they confiscated and rendered vulnerable, as Mumford has shown in his excellent analysis of the first, ancient walling that immured and blocked their inhabitants (Mumford 1973). The first walls immured the desire, choice and willingness of the circled ones, thus their sensual of being good with others, so their contentment in living was transformed from homology into submission, casting them into vulnerable masses. Artificial closures are first and foremost the emission of a structure in order to render a new construction physically visible, so every

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closure starts with an interruption. This fact itself enforces the idea of the copied matrix, as the fake matrix itself is an interruption, a √. Even digging a simple furrow breaks and thus multiplies into two, an inside and an outside, but also further on multiplies with an edge driven down into the earth and another one, the stakes or walls, up to the sky endlessly. In this way the hollow, itself a fragment, is ready to assume a divided character between life and death; this is probably the idea of the burial. Furthermore, each doubling edge now could cross over into another one in multiplicity, constituting a matrixed transformation, now in the burial in an artificial way, replicating the authentic one laid down by nature, the original ‘matrix’, mother of matter. Here any enclosure, like for instance walling, operates by artificially assimilating, breaking, dissolving concrete characters, encircling and moulding them into settlers, city dwellers or members of civilisations; in all cases assumed to be interest motivated by its growth. Interest and especially interest-seeking, even vain curiosity, the sensual of wanting to know, to learn, to copy how to mould down forms, are interrupting the authentic matrix. Interest-seeking can only be conscious and strategic: it is a fluxional sensual that alternates homology; a vain power that only regards one’s own advantage or profit, and so it brutalises the matrix, this silent and uninterested one, which is preparing the homology for you, as an unconscious presupposition. But and furthermore, adding an unlimited magnitude to the genuine is an undertaking that is not without its dangers. Placing under control the genuine, formative tissue of the matrix, blocking its own movement is detrimental for the characters inside, and consequently this coagulates or freezes the matrix. The perverted matrix has a detrimental mastery on its creature-products, as they become immobile, paralysed. As we have seen, the matrix as a generator has three phases, corresponding to the three phases of rites of passage and liminality. The first is the fathering phase of the unit. This phase is followed by the phase of liminality or the in-between stage, and finally, in the reaggregation, as in the intersection process, something different develops which has resemblance to the original units, just like a child resembles his parents. Since all three of these phases were of matrix origin, or rather we should say originated in nature, one passage was as binding as the other. The faked matrix is not different, except that now the process will not be finished but prolonged into infinity, in the manner of ‘permanent liminality’, throwing out ever new and newer beings, in ever greater abundance in quantity, but devoid of the capability for cohesive charis in compositions. The question now concerns the consequences of this process. To begin with, the entering characters began resonating, as the emotional impulses of the void moved them inside the matrix. But the characters will respond not only due to these vibrations, but because they have their own impulses as well, a pre-given order of lawful passions, rooted deeply in every entity. When characters are in motion, they will eternally remain in motion, unless something else stops them. This interrupter is the operator itself that, by ejecting a dissociated soul, suddenly blocks the animated world: an emotional substratum infiltrating

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everything that becomes confused. It is animated, but not dissociated: in the world of forms every passion has its proper, ordered target, fundamental, determined in being, with homology providing lawfulness for it, reaching its aim by the means of desire. The question is what happens if there happen to be emitters, like the operators, to be traced to the first enclosures in history, like the settlements in the Natufian, one of the most momentous and mysterious changes in human history, who interrupt and usurp the matrixing process. The result will be definitely erratic, without a proper reason and cause, a blockage oriented against the dynamism of the matrix. Through a search for the distant origins of this process, even beyond the actual building of enclosures, it is still possible to collect and document some characteristic signs of the initial, disturbing steps.2

Disturbing the union This process of disturbance is a secretive action, and the operators are in an alien land not their own. They rather move in a furtive or stealthy way, persistently grabbing or possessing structures that are not fully recognised for what they were, nevertheless taking away something which is not in their own authority. It is an annexation, the gaining of a secret possession over the territory of others, the acquisition of one impulse by another, due to an interest in the proper quality of it. The replicators are approaching something, and certainly not in vain: they must evoke a union, a certain meeting point between themselves and their targets, to be able to accumulate wants/sensuals/ desires by transforming their target. If the union is sealed – when desires intersect – which is a fundamental step in linear transformation, there must appear somewhere a sign for that: a circle, the sign of the uterus, the mother– matrix; or a Maltese cross, also called a cross potent sign. This is why when this connection, this union occurs, it takes the uterus form in its potentiality: the form of an encirclement, the form of a state of enchantment by circles, the form of the matrix itself as an open and not sealed vessel; the form of a tower with its rounded or square form; the form of the tree trunk hollows are all emissions of a conceiving and producing entity: they all are parts of a system of operated transformation.3

Examples for hollows If we look at one of the first emissions made by the operators, the finger flutings from Palaeolithic caves, and if we attend carefully to a particular example from Gargas cave (see the book cover; note that the original image was rotated to the right), we can see nervously growing mechanised sequences in the emerging curving outlines in the illimitable and infinite activities outlined by a bringing forth.4 It shows a particular alertness for influencing in an artificial way, underlined by the uterus form in a corner of the image, capturing the inclination of the emitters to realise a union with the supernatural and bring forth something that never existed before. Showing such an interest

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in something which not yet is needs a further elaboration, posing the question of the matrix: what is this vibrating power? What is this engine of the world? And what is this perversion, which is able to transgress beings and provoke productions? We will now present a few Palaeolithic images that show the intentional alteration of the matrix. The newly found force of the matrix could be a preliminary question to every technological invention: how to divide nature and arrange its dissected elements into new combinations, more compatible with mechanical human exploitation, in contrast to the homology of nature? How to provoke and utilise an artificial uterus by technological means, moving out of the natural process of transformation, bringing forth beings different from nature? Nietzsche came up with the notion of ressentiment as the zeal behind the revaluation of values, which at the same time is secretly miming the achievement of qualities, in a way that revenge, hatred, malice and seductiveness (so characteristic of Agamben’s wolf-man, the bandit or the ‘banned one’)5 became the driving force of actions, hiding the essential physical and mental weakness of the replicators (Agamben 1998: 105; Nietzsche 1967). While it is annihilating whatever moves on its own on Earth, it also implies warfare against nature, overgrowing and dissolving it, blindly advancing into uncertainty, searching to exceed the existing into indeterminate properties, employing more and more means for growth. Can we identify Nietzschean ressentiment in a Palaeolithic setting? In general, while the replicators ‘parasitise’ structures, as they can reproduce and multiply only inside them (they are incapable of independent, virtuous existence), the most significant sign of replication that appears in Palaeolithic settings is their inclusion of the supernatural, as they are able to reduce the most supreme powers as well. Finger fluting can be described as lines drawn with fingers on a soft surface, usually clay (Bednarik 1986). Such incomplete outlines and curved lines exist in many Palaeolithic caves. They may appear figurative or can demonstrate almost no recognisable pattern. The finger is pressed on the clay in order to give enough depth for a new form to appear. In the case of Gargas cave, a uterus-like semicircle was made with corresponding borders in the right side, with lines and barriers indicating the depth of the furrows; several narrow furrows were traced in the clay as a boundary marker, as if walling the uterus. Is this the way in which walling emits banks, which are placed alongside the furrow beds? We do not know, but these straits, trenches or furrows are channels towards passages and were constructed by fluting; they were new artefacts, new resonating inventions for the pulling down of supernatural powers for their sake. The new invention of fluting is without pre-design, the lining is faceless, but it expresses an interest in gaining something, to stir up supreme forces, and by leaping over traditional setups. It is thus a new opening and a new decision, implying a new determination. Somebody had to go down into the darkness and humidity, into the silent empire of the cave, targeting the supreme, reducing all perception to the sensation of touching. Fluting is a technique to

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direct someone by a cut on the surface, to make it react, resonate. It fills the clay with impulses, as the distinguishing feature of man is to activate emotions solely by the will: man can decide to feel – a whole media industry would be built on this simple fact; actors in theatres or films are showing emotions that they as performers do not possess. The void in the cave is a most appropriate place for searching out such reactions, as it is an empty place filled with sensuals, thus is in search of impulses, welcoming those who enter it and show themselves. The term ‘void’ here possesses a special meaning, as a potential for unending joining, for infinite assemblies of infinite combinations. The void can only show itself in the absence of sense perception, but in the intense presence of the sensuals (‘the sore flutter for the Beautiful’, as Plato named Love in the Symposium, 206e), as will be shown through the Brassempouy figurine’s blind eyes and covered ears, but soundness of her mind. Finger fluting captures power, by which one exceeds the supernatural, though not explicitly, but rather as a dormant substance of acquisition. Here the replicator is reduced to a mere comparative measure, where his main feature is conceived as flux which interacts with the host and uses the host machinery for its replication. The character of the finger fluter was thus fading away, ready to become transformed into the fluxed matrix, subverting himself into voluntary similitude with the void. Finger fluting forms are fluid, as if in a dream; only instances competing to enter into each other, until the intersection happens, as indicated by the uterus form in the corner of the Gargas cave’s finger fluting. The dizziness of these outlines expresses an unbalanced loss of connection and yet a dormant will to connect. Here we have a specific example for our postulate: when a clay surface lies still, it will lie still forever unless a finger stirs it, hence such stillness is its character. But the void is different, it is itself able to cause movement; it is unmovable, but able to move others (Aristotle 2014, Physics, 260a). Since Aristotle, we know that the void has no parts, neither extension, shape or divisibility. The void is not nothingness, as it does contain rays inside; it is immoveable, ineffective and indivisible by its own, however sensible for attractions. The immoveable void needs the individual structure to be in movement, as a void cannot move without the reason and cause of the form, so it is not just unreal, it is also incapable of multiplication and magnitude by itself, so the interest of the emitter in the void has a certain actuality in it. It is not a big one, but enough to resonate the clay and to establish connection with the void. Rightly so, as the moulding down can occur only in the out-of-ordinary or liminal, and now we are in the empty depth of the cave, which provides a special condition for the void’s sensible supreme presence. These curved lines in the clay indicate an interest for sensory contact (though they themselves are impulses, as eagerness itself is an impulse) in order to connect and unite themselves with impulses innate in the clay surface of the cave and beyond, the clay transmitting the emotional impulses of the

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replicators towards the compositions, but also transmitting the interest of the emitters towards them. Nevertheless, without doubt not only the emitters, but all those who participate in the actions (the clay and the replicators) are exceeding their limits and expressing interest in each other. Still, the replicator is alone as a flaw that cannot generate an offspring on its own. The replicator therefore is defective, ready to accept the combinations offered by the operators; because it is imperfect and faulty, in comparison to the authentic composition.

Matrix emission: Palaeolithic homology Beyond the numerous artificial matrix emissions, like circles, walls, semicircles, enclosures, together with matrixing rows and columns in sequential order, one of the earliest such emissions is the Brassempouy lady (23000 BC). While she herself is artificial, she is still the most beautiful example of authentic, matrixing homology, still present and intact in this early image. The particular dynamic force that overflows with life is shown by the Brassempouy figure’s hairdo (Lawson 2012), resulting in a regular succession of furrows, with wall-like boundaries. The sequential order of the goddess’ hairdo gives a systematic arrangement, having elements succeeding in a rhythm according to a rule, a kind of dynamic regularity, following one after another in an orderly pattern, evoking filiation that is establishing interrelations through genealogical lineages, like families, tribes or nations do in their finite arrangements, keeping law and order. Linear transformation is present here; the enclosed entities are souls, with the same volume all along the length of the hairdo, showing neither regression nor development: the order is stable and finite, without alteration, offering a stamp for every entering character. This mammoth ivory carving is roughly 3.5 cm in height, 1.9 cm wide, containing clear facial features of forehead, brows, eye lines and nose, but no mouth. It was found in Brassempouy cave, Landes. The top and sides are incised with deeply carved motives, cut into the hairdo of the Brassempouy goddess figurine. A divine emission of lawful regularity, though without the perceptive organs of ears, eyes and mouth is speaking here in the figure of the goddess, whose sensitivity is indicated by the refined beauty of her features, in particular her nose, ready to feel the perfumed sensuality of the world. The basic principle inherent in her godly nature is imprinted in her hair, homology (orienting to preserving shapes and forms) being a distinctive kind of knowledge owned by her godhead, calling for participation. She was loved, as the world is to be loved, and the emitters of this figurine were like many thousand years later the ancient Greeks in their thinking: acknowledging the goddess as a living being, in goodness and truth, who feels like us, who desires a rich and great existence in beauty, wit and agon. The esprit that animated the Greek republics was that of contentment, both with the extent of their territories and with their laws (Montesquieu 1999, Book VIII, Ch 16), about the true union in harmony, in which all the parts, however opposed they may appear, concur in attaining the general good.

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Plato in Theaetetus explained homology in a twofold way: ‘that nothing can ever become more or less in size or number, so long as it remains equal to itself ’; and ‘secondly, that anything to which nothing is added and from which nothing is subtracted, is neither increased nor diminished, but is always equal’ (Plato, Theaetetus 155a). No alteration is present here. For alteration something special/more is required which artificially blocks homology, freezing the moulding process into perversion. This is the way in which an incommensurable, infinite, indestructible mass of impulses can alter form, thus gaining a force and movement of its own, as only forms have movements. For this the operator needs three requirements: a special place, special sensuals, and a special techné. Operators had all three of them; let us now see how. A special place: hollowed caves Caves are innocent of any seductive substance. However, the Greeks had a particular word for the cave, this archetypical matrix with its hollowed-walled cavity, and this is spelaion, which is equivalent to someone’s private part for penetration (see Montelle 2009), for shafting. The word thus stands for union by sinking, submerging, slumping into its gouge or hollow, though in a sexual way: giving up one’s resistance, resigning oneself to a possession and emerging from this as an alternated entity, different from one’s previous self. The Latin word for the cave is ventris, ‘womb’ or ‘fecundity’: not simply an enclosing structure, but also the place of transformation, the place in which a new being is formed, and so it is a container to give place and space to a new formation. Apparently its danger lies in this unconditionality, being able to unite with anyone who possesses the key to awaken it. This union is not without a price; however, it produces a total occupation, as the void literally moves inside the individual which approached it, annihilating the self and nurturing a union. The fruit of this union with the void is a matrixed product, thoroughly intersected, launched into the world. The cave is empty, but at the same time a place-holder, giving comfort to any individual, comforting them once they have lost their significance: giving them a new typeface. Here everything rules out creation; it is not that something new was created from nothing, but that something old was transformed from the entering characters by the void. The precondition for transformation is the actual arrival of a new impulse, effect, thinking, figure, character with a moving faculty; and this is enough, if the receptivity is ready to embrace, enduring it for generations. Special sensual: violent possession The imagining of a violent act as a diversion from the original order or charis and in a particularly violent way is shown on the wounded bear depiction from the Les Trois Frères cave, Ariège. In this image a 60 cm large bear is depicted as wounded and vomiting blood. The bear, this morose and

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incalculable creature has very fine instincts; it senses everything, hears everything, remembers everything, and knows the activities and intentions of humans. It is widely considered as the animal closest to humans, which explains its particularly important role in shamanism. A further interesting feature in this regard is that while a normal brown bear lives for 20–25 years, in captivity it can live for up to 40 years – something to consider concerning the astonishing growth of life expectancy in modern, super-enclosed city societies. The circles on its body, these ring-like closure formations, indicate intentions to catch and keep it – the circles are signs of sorcery – but at the same time are emanations of a divine matrix from the bear’s body. The circle is a connected whole which has no end and no beginning and is thus the sign of the void itself, encapsulated in the matrix. Here the bear-god gives up his godly attributes and is transformed into a suffering, vomiting, low-level being, sinking into nothing without dignity; a fluxing, pure deprivation, emanating its power content. The god is shown attacked and in pain, its paws are erect and its nose is bleeding. Arrow signs are on its body, which suggests the idea that a painful transformation is taking place which transcends the god form. Here in a rare example we can witness the perverted moulding matrix in two phases. In the first the essence of the god is taken away, and it is given a figure, the figure of the god in its bear form; while the second is when it is attacked in order to force the moulding process, indicated by little zeros on the image. Moulding is the process of taking away form and making a new one, making connections with powers, though these words cannot capture the high intensity of the resonations which are and must be present to successfully break it up, dissect and then intersect. We have already discussed how love and the appetite to possess others can coincide, but this is further demonstrated by the arrow signs on the god’s body: they are there to hurt and thus to possess, but also to possess by desire, to strike the god so that it would accept penetration. Actually, the circle, adopted from an Indian sorcery figurine (Kaplan, 2000; Seife, 2000), became the sign for zero (0) in the Middle Ages. The zero as placeholder has a sorcerous character; it takes away the qualities of forms, replaces them with emptiness (zero), thus producing a transformed form. If we do any simple mathematical operation on a natural number with zero, whether addition, subtraction, division or multiplication, the result every time is either the negation of the operation or the negation of the concrete number. The void, or non-being, worried the Greeks, for whom the idea was threatening, as it implied the wholesale renunciation of nature. They claimed that the void is terrifying, as nothing can exist in nothingness, for the simple reason that if man remains alone, he loses his courage, becomes a fearful, trembling being, disfigured and weak. Void produces an active de-realisation of the world, resulting in a leached and synthetic state. For the third attribute of the replicators, we should turn to their techné.

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Special techné The immersion of man into the void is an emanation from finite forms, with the result of letting transgressions ontologically and essentially be. Essentially, here we are talking about death. In a particular image from Cougnac cave (Lot), a wounded man or rather his ghost is presented in a deprived, demonic form (with tail and beak). From its first appearance in the Palaeolithic, sorcery is always connected to hurting and pain, with victims of violence being represented. When tricksters are born, techné must be present, and indeed in the upper corner of the image there are three machine-like triangles (bird-like avi-forms) indicating their working. This famous ‘wounded man’ is rather a beak-headed trickster-demon, recalling the replicators: not complete beings, but rather defective. There is hurting power captured in the image: the flux entered a human form, whether it is the intruder, the emitter or the finger fluter, transforming it into a demon by the assistance of a whole gamut of unreal-mechanical apparatuses, as shown by the triangles. When these actually reached the head of the image, then we are already in another cave, in Pech-Merle. This image shows a wounded man, also present in nearby caves,6 but now his head is more emphatically linked to the dome-like or ‘avi-form’ structure, expressing a newly grown transcendental link or power connected to his bodily pain and suffering for letting sensuals come forth. This form also remarkably evokes the ‘open female’ images, known in Tassili and many other Neolithic sites,7 being particularly close to the single such representation found in Göbekli Tepe, which is even explicitly pornographic (see Schmidt 2010: 246, Figure 13) indicating the spelaion, the place to beget. Metaphysical hollows can be divided and cut as many times as one wishes, but they have no magnitude by themselves, as they are always the same. It is always possible to take something outside from it, so in theory it is able to continue in an unending series of magnitudes by division or by addition, but in practical actuality it always remains the same, it will never change its volume. However, exceeding homology shows another picture. When homology was taken away, it became united with interest, and the results are these tricksterdemons; rather bizarre, grotesque figures. They are melancholic, low, soft and transparent, indifferent and dependent, expressing a kind of submissiveness into infinite modifications and shape-lifting, due to the fake matrixing. They seem placid, yet aggressively possess a space; they must be present, be heard and acknowledged. Their main target is not known, but they grow ad infinitum towards newer and newer coming-forth sensuals, so they are in constant territorial expansion until they dissolve all bonds and annihilate any border or limit. What are the consequences if you change dimensions, add or extract from them; if you bring fear, the trembling awe of living into your very reality, or plainly change contentment into despair: nothing? A nothing, but a particular one, the demonic (Castelli 1952), the hybrid figure of the void: the good for nothing, an existence without merit, virtue and value, which can never die, but which is ever deepening the emission, by the replication of the sensual.

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Wounding a god signifies letting interest as a building tool ontologically and essentially be, as shown in Niaux cave (Ariège), where interest in seduction is shown by the love-arrows on a supernatural wounded bison. Here the bison is not showing weakness, quite the opposite, it has a powerful appearance, in spite of the arrows in its body. Yet, the arrows are indicating break-ups and cuts for penetration. Two arrows indicate a break or a schism; while evoking a sign of death, the wounds are not so serious. The cut, the wound caused by the arrows, the violation of form serves a double purpose: first, to show that the god has an infinite mass and energy, and it can agree with the replicators; and second, to reveal its proud form as an empty sack, ready to be filled by the emitter. The god thus became animated by the replicators, nurturing a new mode of existence inside its divine body. It is always possible to extract something, once the union was realised. Once an operator chooses a suitable techné for approaching the superhuman, all interest can be focused on and fulfilled by it. The royal road for unifying techné with the supernatural is the vibration of feelings, or the sensual. In sensuality each elementary gratification is composed of an enjoyment vibration, an enjoyment that is derived from the senses, from a single string, where all vibrations are identical. Different vibrations could be present in homology, but such difference is not apparent in the intensity of the vibration; it is the same in agreement and in violence: it is intensive.8 Finally, to show how the matrixing phenomenon can be universally explicable in terms of motion, power and intersection, we indexed it to fear and violent sensuals in case of its perversion. The void is behind the matrix that swallows characters and leads them into a new appearance, setting in motion the matrix, through the energy exerted by forms. Yet, altering the matrix’s sensuals of homology destroys the marvellous mechanism of nature into perversity by an infinite absorption of energies out of the dissection of characters, without giving them back their authentic structure. Thus, not only time and space become meaningless, but everything else falls into the fake. Motion becomes confused as well, becoming something not inside but rather outside of individuals, corresponding to an external force, as defined by Hobbes and replicated by Durkheim, implying not an inner dynamism, but the ultimate aim of the transformation process: releasing powers by dissection, absorbing them and then releasing them into various combinations. This new construct will then be that binding surface where all suffering is supposed to be overcome – and yet, which instead makes suffering, in all kinds of different ways – including those beyond physical pain conditions, such as boredom, anxiety, fear, dread, mental disturbances – the now truly ‘universal’ condition. The concrete, real individuum thus becomes the atomised individual of neoclassical economics and rational choice theory, entrapped in trying to satisfy its ever increasing and increasingly elusive desires but incapable of gaining satisfaction, a pure representation (or even a puppet) of the will of the replicators, subject to their control, whether by direct commands or subtle, subliminal influencing, and in an ever more automatic manner. The disfigured individuals no longer possess the virtues necessary to live life in harmony with nature, so an artificial bordering

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as closure must always be there to console for the loss of self-bordering, whether to keep outside the ‘others’ who become increasingly threatening (the ‘other’ as the enemy), or to offer some stability to the self that has lost all its internal coherence and is threatened at every conflict instance with melting away. Closures purport to restore what was lost, but that was lost because of them – a logic that is at the origin of all modern institutional reforms, and that assures their futility.

Conclusion The perverted matrix still and ever functions as an unlimited, unfinished plasticity. So every time a new closure is built up on the original one, following a breakdown of the previous, the process creates a new make-up, installing ever new and supposedly improved institutionalised patterns to place men into an always more deprived state. It is piling liminality upon liminality, proliferating deprivation through a kidnapped process of linear transformation, as it reinforces submission and builds up passivity in fair and equal measure, thus canalising power out of characters, emptying them. Behind walls everybody is equally betrayed, individual needs are becoming routinised, as enclosure procures an unfair advantage for individuals demanding at the expense of divine giving, thus creating societies where the driving force becomes complaining, and in continuous efforts to outdo others – a reverse image of the politics of suffering. When Plato in the Timaeus defined the matrix, he was earnest about its importance for the reality of generation. The matrix is always receiving; it is moulding stuff for everything, moved by the marvellous entering figures who still resemble the ancient archetypes. In this magnificent vision everything is moving and is full of the constant motion of generation, while walling as its alteration is a blockage, freezing the flow of this loving movement, only producing perversions. But perversion only multiplies empty, meaningless places that belong to no one except those who use them to promote their interests by fragmenting space in such a way that the sum of the structured units equals the sum of the linear transformations that were originating in the fluxed void. Thus, we now have the flux as our modern reference point in the place of solidity, an eager volume with extremely little actuality in it. Still, the living world is never silent: it is feeling, gracefully obeying orders, appreciating genuineness, and in fact is quite undisturbed by any perversion.

Notes 1 Such ecstasy of living is not limited to exceptional moments of human life, but can be observed in the flight or the singing of birds, the movement of butterflies, or the rolling around of a house cat or dog. 2 See Horvath and Szakolczai (2018a) for more details. 3 Perhaps this is why the Etruscan city design, source of Roman town planning, combines the circle or square and cross motives. For details, see O’Connor (2018).

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4 Plato in the Symposium (206d) refers to a knowledge made manifest by a sensual in producing something new as ‘bringing forth’. 5 I thank Egor Novikov for calling my attention to this idea of Agamben. 6 Such ‘wounded man’ image is only present in Lascaux, Cougnac and Pech-Merle; furthermore, Pech-Merle is only a few miles from Pergouset cave, with its famous ‘Room of Monsters’, another sign of the Palaeolithic trickster. 7 In China it is also associated with the first written character, connected by Victor H. Mair to the magi. 8 It is this intensity that will be captured in the ‘sublime’, central term of modern aesthetics, since Edmund Burke, Lessing and Kant.

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Replicators in compositions

By composition we mean singularity1 and coherence at the same time – singularity in the sense of being different from everybody else; and coherence as having stability over time. According to one approach, composition is defined by the manner of being composed, a definite arrangement, a concrete combination of parts or elements to form a whole. But it is also the mind or the record of accumulated experiences, the process of separating a whole into its parts to discover their function, their relationship, an intellectual activity relating to the operation of the mind through logical or intuitive thought processes.2 It is clear that without such an activity we simply stop behaving as beings, and become mere automatons who cannot produce one of their own but are dependent on external directing forces. Somewhere here we should situate the replicators as the automaton parasites of the real, living structures. Although replicators have the radiation of sensuals and a somewhat reduced matter content, they do not have a composed structure, so they require a host one to reproduce. Without the envelope of the body structure they are incapable of reproduction by themselves; therefore they need to use a host, through possession, to produce multiple copies of themselves by assembling inside the body, a phenomenon which induces changes in both. Transformation occurs through the loss of the singularity and coherence of the structure, the loss of memory, the loss of self-guidance, and instead an automatised massification occurs. Automatism is the gravest problem any human being can encounter, as without thinking, comprehension, distinction-making and memory we lose any guidance we could have about our lives, becoming at the mercy of our own arbitrary impulses or the guidance of others,3 in particular the operators who set such processes of automatisation and massification in motion, orienting towards transformation to a self-diffusive system. While Leibniz predicted a self-operating machine or rather a machine operating by a pre-programmed set of instructions as a pre-programmed sequence for alternative tasks in his Monadology, this should not be accepted easily because – as a structure which was programmed in advance or (which is the same after all) is genetically biased towards a particular behaviour without thinking – it is a non-existence. The automaton belongs neither to the instinctual animal or plant world, nor to the otherworld, the world of death – as it is

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still thinking of the self and has memory – but, precisely because the automaton stops–restarts–continues at a pre-programmed position upon receiving a command to do so, it is circular. It is a man-made perversion for the assembly, positioning and production of an ever-new version, out of any possible, independently existing thinking structure, thus a mechanical agent that can only replicate itself inside the living. Any automaton is a pathogen, a disease-producing factor of virulence that could be transferred from structure to structure as it is the source of contamination. This book tends to think about it as the living dead, a multiplying existence that is without composition.4 But contamination is not something we are able to deal with, as the alteration of meaning brings mistaken associations and results in the absorption of unfit existences for reality. As an example, memory is so fundamental that this has become in most cultures the single most important identifying feature of communities. However, there exists a radical counter-approach that puts the emphasis on self-consciousness and explicitly considers its realisation as a break, even alienation from memory; a view that can be traced in particular to Hegel (and even further, to Jean Paul, or Johannes Paulus Richter, in both cases closely following Kant and other luminaries of modern ‘rationalism’). In order to be ‘rational’ and ‘mature’, we must break away from our previous selves; we must repudiate everything in our character that was immature and not worthy of serious attention. Thus, it is literally asserted that a rupture at the level of the character, or a self-subversion is required as a precondition of realising selfhood, consequently hailing the future arrival of a ‘community of autonomous, self-conscious individuals’. This is demonstrated particularly well by the ‘negative philosophy’ of Jean-Paul Sartre that forces its adherents to perform this break in order to realise one’s freedom; thus, to commit an irredeemable, destructive act, an atrocity towards oneself, and justify it by the elusive quality of full maturity and rationality (Argyrou 2013). On the one hand, it simply denigrates and devalues, even despises all those who fail to perform such an act of wanton self-destruction, while for those others who consent to it, it irrevocably alters their identity, thus twice making them conform to the assertions of these strange philosophical ideas of the automaton, first explored by Hobbes and Leibniz: first, because it can actually command the individuals who decide to give up themselves; and second, because – in the eventual situation that they come to regret their previous acts – they can only feel a vague and lingering nostalgia for their previous selves, but cannot actually mend the rupture, only replace their fanciful constructs with a risky other. The only way is thus ‘forward’: towards ever new ideologies of progress, eventually formulated – as today – in the ever more ludicrous form of ‘post’ ideas, with the dream of industrialism, communism, secularism and modernism becoming ‘post’-industrialism, ‘post’-communism, ‘post’-modernism or ‘post’-secularism. The list can be continued practically without any limit; in fact, the phrase ‘global’ already alludes to such limitlessness of the automaton. The philosophical underpinnings of such wanton self-destruction are

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offered by theories of ‘otherness’, ‘alterity’ or ‘altruism’ (a schismogenic double of egoism, or of self-consciousness, all these terms circling inside the same non-thinking, whether in the form of modern rationalism or postmodern anti-rationalism), central for key modern and post-modern thinkers like Husserl, Derrida or Levinas, to be traced similarly to Hegel’s obsession with mediation, which is fundamentally a declaration of war against charis, as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset or Camus came to perceive it. The question now concerns the manner in which in the role of the replicators it could be possible to capture and identify the emergence of subversion through representation, especially self-representation, following Plato, according to whom the deepest layers of thinking are non-verbal and consist of ‘forms’, the eidos, a term closer to the image of charis than to the word, though containing both, and explicit as the composed structure of being. The same apprehension about depicting the human form, especially the face, motivates the famous religious prohibition about ‘graven images’, probably due to the fear of becoming something else and losing one’s characteristic property by copying it (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 294),5 and which further characterises the widespread problematisation and prohibition of wearing masks. But the face is referring not only to physical structure, but to the features of the character – it reveals a person’s state of mind; hence, a thoughtful countenance is revealed by the expression on the face. The face is establishing a sudden relationship between what is given as real and the unknown beyond. However, here we must be careful, as such prohibitions about images and masks logically can only come after previous efforts to make such images, while the evident absence of similar efforts is central to Palaeolithic cave art – except, of course, the already discussed Shaft Scene with its human form, an exception perfectly reinforcing the rule. Thus, instead of discussing whether it is rational or not to legislate about paintings with human faces and forms, the real question concerns why become engaged in such a paradoxical and self-defeating activity as capturing the very person who is doing the painting.6 Lascaux’s Shaft Scene is thus not simply an exception, but a strange kind of penetration into representation as representation of the human structure – an incorporation of the human, a dangerous undertaking that must be hidden, as demonstrated by the strange, secret location. Visitation of painted caves stopped around 9700 BC, and soon even their memory faded. This was an enormous cultural change, given that for about 25 millennia the painting and visiting of such caves played a significant role in the lives of not simply the area where they were located, but for the entire cultural horizon in which they exerted their impact, which extended into an area up to Ukraine and down to the Middle East. For a long time, there are no signs of large-scale paintings in the broad region. The practice makes its reappearance in a sudden and striking manner of painting humans in the most unlikely of places possible.

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Defacement The in-between is thus just a word, capturing and describing in words something that occurs. Perversity emerges there, in the between and after concrete beings; then it can be intuited that this in-between exists, that towards it we do have interests, and that such interests do not simply exist, but are central for existing structures, in particular central to our existence, through desire, or Eros for the Greeks, the moving force of the world. So, what is the nature of this ‘in-between’ penetrating knowledge that resembles Eros? How can replicators get inside the structures, taking away faces?7 Faces, we all have – foxes, rocks and margaritas – but the automaton has an empty, cratered one. We humans stand on two feet, with our superior intelligence, articulate speech and erect carriage, but our having faces is not unique, we share faces with every creature of the world, faces that all express a unique character, and which now have become subjected to the hostile snare of the replicator, the predator of faces. Penetrating desire8 appeared in Palaeolithic images, already with its complete attributes, and it never really progressed or changed until our days. Hunchback, phallic, big pointed nose, rounded eyes, protuberances, pointed head are as many mime attributes of the replicators – no modification in the pattern, nor at any rate have any of these faded away during tens of thousands of years, still visible in the Megaran Mime, the Phlyakes actor, or Pulcinella of Commedia dell’Arte. Its figure is far removed from the world of reality, which has its fixed forms and borders; it is something in-between being and nonbeing: misshaped, unformed, miscarried; it is what we called in the Tricksterology book (Horvath and Szakolczai 2020) the living dead. It also often acts in a mute way, a main feature of pantomime up to now. Nevertheless, it became the forerunner of acquisition, driven by an untameable urge to possess others’ properties, a kind of lawless one, outcast and outsider, ever on the margin, as shown in a painted form in the Shaft Scene, and in engraved Palaeolithic images: the transparent, colourless, but ever present desire, like in one incision from the Isturitz cave, Spain (see Saint-Périer 1935). Its beady eyes, long, pointed nose, protruding mouth, receding chins and pointed bald head are bridge about 14,000 years, offering a view of the world as a field of pitiless invasions and terrifying obsessions. The image is submissive yet aggressive, compassionate and tyrannical, whose phallic, alert, oversexualised attentiveness for every kind of union with the world of composite structures is infinite. Over many thousand years the penetrator–replicator image did not vary at all; it is present in Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic and modern images alike. Sometimes it wears skinny outfits, often consisting of stripes, in order to show its hybrid type. It may have an animal profile, with a doggish muse or a bird’s beak, a skinny scalp or fuzzy hair, according to how it desires to show its intact closeness to the bestial world. Whether it is standing up, with an erect phallus, or is running with the phallus hanging on its side, there is always eagerness in its hungry, swift figure, or in its swollen tummy9 – mirrored in its

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hunchback – for demanding more, due to its acquisitive appetite. Its insignificance needs be filled with structures so that it could seem to become existent. It is characterised by a big belly, a long, sensual nose, a doggish muse and standing, doggish ears – to feel and hear in the widest possible way. It is not an accident that the god of death is a dog for the Egyptians, just as the guardian of the gates of Hades is for the Greeks, given that they are unclean, gobbling up any living or dead organism. Its piercing eyes are ever-present as a rogue, a rascal, a disgrace; impostor, ragamuffin, the wretched one, following Radin’s description of the Trickster; but being also highly sensitive, responsive and expansive in its soft, swift appearance. It is strangely colourless, recalling Detienne and Vernant’s (1978) octopus for its readiness to catch the victim from its hide to feed itself. The big belly is not there by accident; digestion indicates absorption, annihilation – not a complete one, rather a transformative one. The threshold does not indicate the elimination of one’s state; rather it indicates the condition of the passing from one world to another. Its belly and phallus are a kind of bridge; they transform one into another existence. We can easily recall here the counter-example of penetration, which is the eunuch, reinforcing the importance of the phallic appearance. As Aristotle (Generation of Animals, 5.7) explained, castration is a transformation that changes the form and character of animals, as well as humans. The multiplicity of transformations is stretching from the different states of realities into their partial or total mixture, or onto an artefact, a process called technology, or rather, a fabrication of resemblances either by penetration or by castration, but in both cases by the total defacement of its victim. The replicator has a phallic penchant, a tantrum-like qualm for possessing and consuming everything, as if to compensate for its sterile insignificance by unlimited inclination – such phallic sterility directly recalling again castration and the eunuch. Amorous inclinations always fill the trickster’s thought; it is full of desire for other kinds of corporality, including food and drink, swelled up by desire and the will to possess, unite and generate. Sometimes it holds a Y-shaped bone,10 the general sign of the transforming matrix, which, while transforming, is making the transformed into a hibernated, paralysed state as if in the immobile uterus, while at the same time the Y is the sign of steresis. We have repeatedly called the trickster replicator a mime, but the mime is only an imperfect replicator. This connection needs to be explored in some detail, as the mime only occasionally integrates into the germline of the host organisms, but the replicator can be passed on vertically to the offspring of the host for many hybrid generations, as can be seen in the following.

Hybridisation In Palaeolithic times hundreds of kilometres of cave insides became places of dizzying drama. They became sites of exuberant, ostentatious displays with richly decorated, resplendent hair-dress, elaborate caps and florid forms, strikingly bold pictures, brilliant engravings, as can be seen in the animal

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profile of the La Marche cave. Here the mime takes the face of a dog, bird or lion, on a human neck and erect pose, thus becoming a hybrid. Such hybridity can be seen particularly well in the flamboyant phallic figure of the last image, with beak-like nose and pointed cap, in excited gestures. Its shortsleeved dress has nothing to do with our clogged, animal-skinned stereotype of Palaeolithic man: he is dashingly theatrical, even showy, just like the left corner image, with extravagant strips of shawl. Be careful, this show has the same purpose as every theatre: it is a transformative play, as the second image shows: the human profile inside the animal face is marked by an outward, extravagant display of the mime. Theatricalised ritual originally was identical to sacrifice, whether in Hinduism, in the Mediterranean or in pre-Columbian America. And just as theatre implies substitution, between the actor and the role the actor plays, a kind of transformation or metamorphosis, the same kind of transformation is alluded at in these images. Metamorphosis and theatre are almost the same things; the Greek mythological figure of metamorphosis, Proteus, was a central figure for actors, even in early-modern England (Agnew 1986: 9, 14). This is further reinforced by the images shown on a bone incision about the Dog–Man hybrid in the Gourdan cave, Dordogne.11 Through their hybrid character, they belong to the same complex, even if no trace of bloody sacrifice has yet been found in the Palaeolithic; signs of a mime mentality of substitutability eating into the body of the real, when the man is absorbed into the head of a dog. The dog–man lower part, with its thighs and arms, retains human features, but the head, with its articulated muzzle and forms of eyes is a dog’s one. Inside the dog’s head, however, the head of a man is drawn, but with the beady eyes of an animal and a big, sensitive nose. This is not a mask, but the reproduction of absorption, which is dangerously close to the act of the replicator. There is no division-line on the body that could indicate that the man is wearing a mask; the body is complete, a dog with a human body. It represents a complete and definite acquisition, where the longnosed, beady-eyed, large-eared man is transformed into a dog: snuffling, tasting and hearing the world with the eyes, ears, mouth and tongue of a dog, thus becoming a hybrid. Man and dog became one body: the man absorbed the dog, the dog absorbed the man; a new power was born, which is separate from reality where both man and dog have a definite space and time, an assigned life and an area where they are the same as themselves. Here and now, all their co-ordination, localisation, function, confirmation and foundation have gone, and it has been transformed into a transcendental man–dog mixture; pushed out of reality, its own, given, inner relatedness. They became servants of another will, separate from their own inner composition, having lost the full capacity of sensory apparatus, but become ready to be automatons. They lost the memory of their own composition – only the voracious appetite remained the same. Here sorcery is at work, which alone could bring forth this metamorphic becoming, to create a third type from two definite structures. Only a transformative show, the magical modality of witchcraft activity, is able to activate this kind of immaterial process of

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merging together separate natural entities, to combine the hunter’s skill of the dog with the skill of the man. All in all, these images of sorcery about the relativity of forms attempt to take up any guise by which victims can be easily captured. The weird gloom of the images renders any benign connotation impossible, but they do not demonstrate the opposite either, rather something mixed. They are not explicitly malignant, though have a somewhat detrimental effect, sometimes not directly harmful, but never really harmless: there is always a definite danger that they will be infective, tending to exert an imitative influence that facilitates looseness, the giving up of measure and boundaries. They are not gentle or kind, but still try to sing to the soul with a certain mildness, or with a relaxed menace, intimating with a wink or a nod that there is nothing to do, this is what we are, trying to provoke a favourable sentiment, with the desire of opening up and embracing everything. This sentiment could only come about when the reality of the depicter became altered, resumed under another existence and especially a new, different idea, the needs of acquisitiveness. The central point is that this sentiment could be threatening to the kindly disposition of reality, to its favourable borders and forms that give proportion and harmony to it, exactly by its context-free universalism. As it drew its life from tension, from confusing the clement and the benign, it can now turn this into a recurrent and evolutive growth, into a new layer of unified development. Now, under its new guise, it is the mime again that promotes peace and masters kindness, set to create a world without conflicts by resolving it into global muteness. Let’s continue the interpretation with the most classic work. At the start of his Poetics Aristotle defined as the central concern of all forms of art a kind of imitation. While much of modern art is characterised by a desperate effort to escape such imitation, and while modern philosophy similarly ignores imitation, recognising the centrality of imitation is also a central part of the contemporary intellectual landscape, among others due to the work of Girard. Without entering a full discussion on the nature of imitation, what Aristotle says and implies, in the footsteps of Plato’s Ion and Republic, is that whoever is engaged in producing and experiencing works of art, and especially the one who is performing them, or is engaged in a kind of miming, takes a step removed from thinking. At the basic level for Aristotle, ‘imitation’ means to follow a form that one is lacking. But Aristotle should be complemented here, using contemporary knowledge in sociology and anthropology, following especially the lead of the Cambridge ritualists, thus returning to the question of rituals. Art imitates real life in an organised and formalised way; and a crucial practice that enacts and thus alters reality through miming activities are the rituals. Various forms of art evidently grew out of rituals, of which theatre is one of the most interesting and beststudied examples, already offering important hints concerning the possible reallife effects of artistic performances. Rituals are set up in order to assist the main crises or other moments of transition in social and human life. They negotiate between different realms of reality and states of being and proceed

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mostly through formalised acts in which individuals go through the motions that were led before them by the example of a practically infinite series of generations; thus, it should not be surprising if ritualistic imitations themselves alter reality. Such a bringing in of rituals immediately leads to two questions. The first concerns the links between ritualised desire and the mime, while the second is the relationship between desire, mime, replicator, and the Palaeolithic trickster images. To the mime, making and mimicry are the same. It mimes the forms, using various signs – always expert in art, or artificial creation, a trickster mechaniota – and stuffing itself with the cosmological order of harmony, saturating geometrical designs, flooding the matrix, packing reality until transforming it, eventually leading to the technological world of today. As a result of its ceaseless mimetic activities, technology became an end in itself, within which the world of forms lost its benign meaning, its kindly disposition, its charis. And to all those who were inside this favourable and propitious nature, existence was lost and there was no return; the little figure of the Isturitz engraving itself demonstrates the awakening of the replicators and the cancelling of a possible continuity, until somebody starts a reverse move of care and mindfulness. There can be no return by itself once the mechanism has started, reaching to the core of geometry. Here we are, in between elements of rituals, or rather Satyr plays, in the terminology of Classical Greece, which for so long were performed outside sacred theatre, as they were not considered part of the festivities and not subjected to general judgement. Satyr plays are based on mere relations, on the various detrimental effects of the satyrs, and on the mockery of the established order, involving nakedness, animal skin, mask, and bristling hair. Changing position by fantastic skipping and jumping were the accustomed rule. Still, the mime is not yet the replicator’s penetration into the desired structure. The mime’s wishes are eating, drinking and bedding, searching for any experience that brings pleasure and enjoyment, though this is always combined with a misgiving or an anxiety that all might not be well, and certainly will not end well. It is in uncertainty about the world, does not really know it, does not really understand it, its knowledge is remorsefully restricted to its desires, but still it has an iron will to enter into the structure itself. And yet, the tightness of such a connection is problematic, even beyond – though not independently of – the rather bleak view of a consuming nature implied by it and poses the question of the exact conditions under which such a connection could be established. It is here that, quite strikingly, rituals of sacrifice come into view, and in an almost exclusive manner. Such a ritual not only perfectly meets the bill, it is also difficult to think about other situations where a similarly tight link could be established between the evocation of passive feelings of terror and an active, erotic desire for union through a self-offering sensual. This assumes the position of a mere spectator of such rituals, not the position of the victim, but only such positions are effective, as the position of the victim disappears with the completion of the sacrificial act. And such a perspective has particular significance, as this is the perspective of not only the spectator, but also of the flux as sensual.

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Mocking Here the careless, thoughtless, ecstatic desire, which indeed recalls a time of the jesters and fools, rogues and clowns, with their mocking and cruelty, become dominant. Mocking aims to hurt; mocking humiliates; mocking is violent – and is anyhow without solution. Mocking is therefore frighteningly close to the sacrificial ritual: it is terroristic, reflecting and perpetuating a sense of helplessness. Ultimately, as Nietzsche was so well aware of it, laughing is a way of ‘killing’; or, according to Baudelaire, laughter is outright satanic. Carnival mocking manages to get around this problem by being strictly mutual – whoever is mocking somebody else can immediately be mocked by others; yet, in any such practice, mocking is the expression of helplessness and uselessness. The second problem, cruelty, is strictly connected to it, and indeed violence can be considered as a modality that can accompany almost any kind of carnivalesque behaviour: whatever begins as good clean fun can spill out of its boundaries – especially because a central aspect of the carnival is to overthrow and question such boundaries, any boundaries – but then, it is evident that some boundaries must be maintained. And here we reach the heart of the problem, which cannot be theoretically solved and at the same time cannot be assumed away: that desire by itself has nothing to do with beings – they are for each other – it is just an assistance for filiation, but has no independent role. In one sense, this concerns assumptions or preconceptions of conditioning, which was Plato’s education for good, the feeling of charis in a social context. In a more sensitive manner, this concerns the exact combination of the survival of genuine forms of sensuals (as Pascal expressed it, the ‘reasons of the heart’) and more corroded, corrupted and depraved forms of desires and inclinations, which are produced by machinations. However, the question also touches upon the irruption of desire into the sterile and useless practices and modes of existence evoked and disseminated by the mime and evocated by the replicators. Even further, in this way we might enter the difficult question concerning the nature of the replicators, as the question now concerns who they were, and how they emerged from the margins of existence – as they are, and were, more dead than living. They were not simply outside the ordinary framework of social life, but – in the logic of the Platonic chain of being – are at a third remove from it. At first remove are out-of-ordinary events, whether natural disasters, social and political crises, or moments of transition in human and natural life, where within a short period the entire framework of life is temporarily altered; and at second remove are those rituals that try to assist humans in responding to such challenges, or easing the strains of transitions. The radical difference is that in their operation their action was the penetration into the structure of beings in order to transform it. The lumpy figurine from the Neolithic Grimes Graves flint mine in Norfolk, England,12 explores the same issue of erotic transformation. While the authenticity of the image is debated, the figure is timeless in its type. The image of the neckless figurine has a

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crudely executed head with rounded, animal eyes, nose and mouth, lumpish breasts, uneven nipples and a protuberant belly. It is a hunchback, with its crude arms oriented towards its intimate part, leaving no doubts about the focus of its inclination. Its message is about the insignificance of generation, as everything can be endlessly reproduced, emphasised both by the hollow void carved into the bottom of the figurine and its huge hunchback, which repeats the uterus form. It is echoed by a cruel, sarcastic smile, dismissing the vanity of everything, as nothing is real, just a repetition. Many of its attributes come back later, with the Pulcinella figures, like the hunchback, pointed head or cap, huge belly, sexual hybridity, while it also recalls the profoundly phallic Mesolithic figurine from Lepinski Vir, Serbia, c. 6000 BC. This figure, even its open mouth, expresses laxity, a desire to be penetrated. Its open, rounded, animal eyes are blank and paralysed by impulses. It is bald and neckless, holding its erect phallus with both hands. The whole rounded figure recalls the uterus form.13 Every aspect of the Lepinski Vir site repeats geometrical patterns, including the circle, the trapezoid and the triangle. Most importantly, the shape and orientation of the entrances are Y-like, matrixing hook forms, indicating intersection or bifurcation. The angle or bifurcation could be in the middle or in the upper or lower left, indicating the matrix where the entering characters meet with the departing characters before their transformation. This angle is a constant of production, of the dynamical equation that accounts for the acceleration of growth, which is the special occupation of the replicator who invaded this central place of the matrix. Most likely it did so by seducing others, or inflicting damages on them in this or in other ways, as it completely lacks attributes or forces that make life ongoing in charis, as we said before. The numerous neonate and infant burials have been variously interpreted, including as a result of sacrificial infanticide at Vlasac and Lepenski Vir, which means offering up their displaced souls for productive potencies.

Sacrifice This is a relatively simple point, but the reverse possibility, that there were no sacrifices in sites similar to Lepenski Vir, also carries a possible implication, which is both very significant for this book and highly troubling: that sacrifice is an enormous mental shift as compared with previous ages, when flesh/ bloody sacrifice was unknown. Consequently, there must be a direct, thinking line which eventually leads to sacrifice, and this can only be by the novelty of the replicators’ willing incorporation into the human body structure. Something has happened, something has been developed during the period that lasted from the end of the Palaeolithic to the beginning of the Neolithic. Sacrificers are violating structures, so the practice of blood sacrifice is not valid, therefore can only be invented by one whose entire life was already devoted to illicit practices like invading structures, so had to follow a life excluded from normality in an absurd, artificial way. As will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4, we argue that these operators were considered as being

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engaged in unacceptable practices, as shown even by their invasion of the underground, or their widespread characterisation as troglodytes. While, contrary to a long-held view, man did not live in caves in Palaeolithic times, with the rise of the Neolithic an enormous mental shift took place and some people in fact decided to use for practices the deep inside underground hollows that they themselves excavated. The troglodyte implies a deviation from normality; and it is this deviation, this transgression, this excess that makes it, beyond rituals, a constant nihilistic presence in everyday life. Thus, the absurd can appear real, even excessively real, even though its existence is radically outside the logic of normal everyday life, even at the Neolithic. And it is here that the troglodyte is caught in-between two opposite excesses, as an outgrowth of absurd rituals: it wants to embrace the productive potencies of the underworld, the world of Tartarus, as it was called by the Greeks, while also making contact with and becoming connected by desire to the supernatural, in order to direct replicators to living structures, if not directly to themselves, the two as if marking the opposite ends of a trapping Y. This implies that on the one hand the troglodytes ended up by infiltrating death, and vice versa they became themselves living dead, while on the other it leads to a growing terror that provoked a desperation that it is unable to resolve and can only transform it, by a strange and genuinely perverted transmogrification into the escalation of soul snatching, best described as blood sacrifice, but equally as the making of an automaton, as the automaton comes to life through a dying body, by enacting the soul of a living one. With the flow of blood from the dying body the soul is escaping, the body is emptied from its soul content. This is how the living dead were born, always in hunger, in desperation for their lost integrity. In the following, we will pursue this incorporation process in detail.

Living dead The first appearance of this strange entity after the Shaft Scene in Lascaux is at the Mesolithic site of Tassili,14 in paintings on rocks identified as the Round Head period, from around 8000 BC. It is widely agreed that the Round Head images represent the single most astonishing aspect of this site, otherwise extraordinary. Their novelty can be best understood by comparing it both to Palaeolithic cave art and Tassili’s earlier Bubaline period. While in Palaeolithic cave art rudimentary human figures were only engraved, the only painting exception being that of the Shaft Scene, and while Bubaline art only contains engravings, no paintings, in the Round Head period painting not only suddenly re-emerges but dominates engravings, and the majority of paintings depict humans. The novelty of the site was immediately recognised, yet, at the same time its perplexing and troubling features are also evident, and this probably explains the fact that up to the present its significance has still not entered general understanding. Even a comprehensive review of the ‘open female’ or ‘sacred

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display’ image ignored Tassili (Dexter and Mair 2010). The Round Head style constitutes an ‘extraordinary world’ on its own (Mori 2000), which corresponds to nothing known (Hachid 1998: 195). The pictures are enigmatic, intense and immense, and seem ‘to appear suddenly, representing an enormous qualitative jump among the traces of human activity’ (Mori 2000: 39). The sensibility of these makers, especially of the older periods, still simply escapes us, as their distant ‘world’ has a striking originality and strangeness (Hachid 1998: 217). It is in this context that we can make sense of the otherwise strange idea of Henri Lhote, one of the discoverers of Tassili and author of the first comprehensive book on it (Lhote 1959), which can easily be misunderstood, that some of the Round Head figures look like ‘Martians’. The expression rightly conveys the experience of total alienness that the image evokes, so the utter uniqueness and estrangement of experiencing the Round Head images of Tassili can indeed be conveyed through the parable of watching Martians (Hachid 1998). Such an experience of distance from the normal and the familiar is so central to the Tassili images that the expression: ‘distancing from nature’, was selected as the subtitle of Mori’s basic work on Tassili (Mori 2000). However, the other part of the subtitle again brings us back from the greatest distance into the greatest proximity, as Mori argues that it was this experience of distancing that represented ‘the birth of anthropomorphic religions’, thus the kind of monotheism which established the most important current world religions. Most interestingly, this view of Mori closely recalls the manner in which another comparative archaeologist, Henri Frankfort, considered the emergence of Hebrew monotheism in the crucial ‘Epilogue’ to his classic comparative work on Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion, similarly identifying the novelty in a radical break with nature (Frankfort 1948); and also brings in the work of Paul Radin, who wrote the classic book on the trickster, but on this basis also ventured a hypothesis about the ‘monotheism of primitive people’. Thus, proper appraisal requires the attention not only of experts, but also of social scientists, as these Round Head figures certainly were made in order to produce an effect. In our understanding, they were made in order to incorporate the human structure into the replicators’ intentions, to establish a relationship between them by absorbing the character of humans into the supernatural in a purposeful and conscious way – however, we dare say, in a tired and cynical manner. The radical peculiarity of Round Head figures stands in the paradoxical appearance of self-presentation, as here the human body structure stands as an emptiness to be filled by the void, transposing man into a superior and foreign territory through inviting and getting the void to be involved in human shape and form. The result is astonishing: a kind of artificial annihilation was fabricated, as man is annihilated in the void, while the void is filling the man, as best seen in the gigantic Great God of Sefar images. But the image itself betrays any possible divine presence, as godly attributes are nil; instead, it suggests a peculiar direction that is senile, tired and infirm in its treacherous ways, to take away from each other

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something valuable. Of course, the comparison is given with the Shaft Scene, but the difference is not only their size and importance – one is a hidden underground recess, the other is a huge open air spectacle – but the dominance of the human form in contrast to the insignificance of the animals in the case of Tassili, in contrast to Lascaux and other Palaeolithic painted cave sites, as if the Shaft’s bird man received an enormous dose of growth elixir and so happened to grow into the monstrosity of Tassili. However, the teaching dramaturgy is intact in both places, as they were both training grounds for witchcraft: the first from around 15000 BC, while the second from around 8000 BC.

Tassili Tassili is in the centre of the Sahara, but as the Sahara is a desert, the greatest desert on Earth, it means that this deeply scattered and fragmented rocky plateau is one of the most remote areas on Earth. In fact, Tassili was among the last places in the Sahara to have been discovered. However, it is not just the climatic conditions, but even the physical outlook of the site is extraordinary. The mountain range was produced by intense geological forces and – due to subsequent and often changing climatic conditions – it was particularly subject to the impact of the elements, especially water and winds, which sculpted incredible replicator image–shapes into the rock. There the image–rays were transformed into human figures, enhancing the structural features with the images. This was magic, and a most serious and dangerous one, necromancy, operations with the dead. These shapes leave two sets of radically different impressions. First, they represent an awful, frightening and radical strangeness, giving the impression of the emptiness of hell; or, perhaps even better, capturing the kind of landscape that appears in nightmares when presence has left us. Second, however, and in a diametrically opposed manner, the landscape looks also strangely familiar, though not so much for us moderns, but from the peculiar perspective of making, creating, of matrixing hollows. This mountain range, and especially those sites where the Round Head paintings are concentrated (the Wadi Djerat, a river bed hollow containing the highest density of images, widely considered as the most important representation area, with their hollows cut deeply into the geological layers of rock and thus clearly revealed to the human eye) offer quite stunning similarities to three regions that each played a fundamental role of ‘bringing forth’ over hundreds of thousands of years of human history. The first is the geological rift that extends from the hollowed Rift Valley in Kenya up to the Levant and includes the Western part of Arabia; the second, Dordogne, not only with its painted caves, but also with the manifold Neanderthal sites, in particular Roque Saint-Christophe, which among others gave the name to Mousterian culture; and finally Cappadocia, including the massive underground troglodyte structures of Kaymakli and Derinkuyu, with air shafts and water tunnels, a kind of upside

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down Çatalhöyük, using negative architecture, carved down into tuff, out of volcanic ash, deeper and deeper into the belly of the earth. Of course, the difference is that these other sites are not situated in an extreme desert area and thus look perhaps more homely and familiar – but, then, in its heyday Tassili also may have looked somewhat similar to them. Thus, the physical features of Tassili epitomise alienness, while at the same resemble the strangest familiarity. Yet, it has a third amazing feature, which furthermore reinforces the familiarity idea, yet, only becomes visible from the present, meaning urban civilisation: that the centre of the plateau, which contains some of the most important paintings, looks like a modern city cut into stone, with its walls, corridors and hidden recesses. As the Tassili paintings were made by non-settled people, they certainly could not have seen a place resembling a stone walled city. This is a coding of our modern eyes; still, anyhow, it is there. Over the millennia climatic conditions even in the Sahara differed. While during the last 10,000 years of the Ice Age the general climate of the Sahara was extremely dry, even drier than in the present, in the last millennia of this period there was abundant rain (or probably snow) in the mountains, creating quite a peculiar weather condition for any visitor to this zone. According to scholars like Mori, this is also the period where the earliest image manifestations, identified as the ‘Wild Fauna’ or ‘Bubaline’ art, can be dated. The definite shift to a more clement climate took place only about 8000 BC here. This is the time around which the second and most important artistic style, the so-called ‘Round Head’ period, can be connected. The two styles are completely different, greatly separated not only in time (most probably), but in space as well, each being extremely significant on its own. However, before analysing the content of these works, we must resume the reconstruction of their context. Cultic activities continued in the region well into historical times. During these long millennia, Tassili became a genuine centre of cultic activities, connecting the Mediterranean with Central and even Southern Africa, and arguably the Near East. Important areas to be connected to the Tassili’s zone of influence include Egypt, the Spanish Levant, the island of Malta (ancient Melite), the Dogon of Mali, or the San/ Khoisan of the South-African Drakensberg Mountains, whose rock art has survived into the present, and whose culture again shows a number of related features, concerning myths about the foundation of the world, the role of trickster deities and figures, and the importance of trance, a central aspect of shamanism (Guenther 1999, Lewis-Williams 2002).15 The key features of Bubaline representations include the exclusive use of engraving (no paintings whatsoever); the dominance of animals; the high quality of art, in style recalling both Palaeolithic caves and rock art in Egypt. This may suggest a certain continuity between Bubaline and Palaeolithic art, indicating that the influence of the Palaeolithic extended even here – though not passing into the Middle East. The arrival of the Round Head style marks

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a radical break. The most singular and significant features of Tassili images are associated with this style, so these have to be reviewed in greater detail in the next section. Here, concerning the general coordinates, it should just be pointed out that this shift seems to coincide both with the end of the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and of the South-East Anatolian cultic activities (in particular Göbekli Tepe). The potential significance of such a line can be understood through a third series of occurrences, between the start of re-desertification around Tassili, the start of pyramid building in Egypt (the first pyramid, Djoser’s, was built around 2630 BC, while the three great pyramids of Giza in the 26th century BC); and the sudden abandonment of the Temples of Malta (this evidently took place before 2500 BC, around which time the island was completely abandoned, and a full century passed before it became populated again, though by an entirely different culture, around 2400 BC). This leaves about five millennia (7500–2500 BC) when Tassili was a major cultic centre, a possible incubator for replicators – though a question remains concerning the exact sense in which it played this role. All this is based solely, as it can only be, on circumstantial evidence. But in the absence of direct written or other testimonies, the very ambition of scientific research involves the need to ask questions and bring together problems and paradoxes, in line with a central principle of Batesonian epistemology (see Bateson 2002): the concern not with analytical separation, but the pattern that connects. Although, it is certainly of the greatest importance that the rise, persistence and eventual fading away of this extremely peculiar and remote place, Tassili, seems to have been closely correlated with some of the most important inventions, even these were negative, as we presume them to have happened through the living dead, or the automaton.16 It is within such broad coordinates that the singular significance of Round Head paintings can be properly assessed, as in them replication became instrumentalised, mechanised in a unique way, rarely seen before, but automatised later.

The Round Head images The laborious procedure that was involved in some of the strangest figures in the whole pantheon of Tassili images is emphatically documented. The most unusual is the 760 x 360 cm fresco of white-and-yellow pigmented outlines (Great God of Sefar, see Hachid, 1998: 164, 192–196), which is lavishly decorated and comprises a dramaturgy of several figures. In the middle stands the God himself, his 3.25 m high shape towering over the head of observers. On his left there are worshippers, female figures with outstretched arms, in a gesture of prayer, a not seen before Y shape of the matrix indicating the begotten ones, recalling the Headless Man of Pergouset cave. A particularly decrepit figure is a woman-like creature with open, short and curved legs, but no feet; her arms are raised, and she has a cylindrical body, as if pregnant; she is an open woman with a swollen tummy. This female figure, lying on her

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back is as if coming out of the figure of the Great God, though her position and her swollen abdomen suggest that she is about to give birth and this birth is due to the Great God. Two mouflons, one white and one black, recalling the alchemical antagonism that creates synthesis or rebirth, accompany her, and she is just between the two, as if her presence were linked to them. The figures on the right are similarly feeble, with a mouflon stretched out and another having a fantastic, unreal shape, which often signifies deformities in witchcraft. Shifting from description to understanding, a possible interpretation of this curious dramaturgy is a newly found design for the replicators’ union with the body structure. The mimetic absorption of human bodies in the projected image of the Great God and the abundance following the act of union is told with surprising cynicism, or better through a deterioration of good sense. Here nothing stands for itself. The purpose of the birth motif, seemingly, is merging together unreal and real substances, and giving birth to new forms, new products. But in this case, in Tassili, birth with divine assistance is just a crude joke. Assuring growth through pregnancy resulting in malformed creatures or to gain benefit from the divine is a vain dream, and the depicters were quite conscious of this. While the Great God’s testicles and his phallic form explicitly show desire, they are quite repulsive, and the desired outcome is also grotesque, shown by the manner in which they are ugly forms, lacking any harmony, confidence and cohesion. They rather accept the blame for their own malformed ridiculousness. The emitters, or the producers of these images assign a sort of acknowledgement for the fault or error that they have caused. Not that they feel guilty; rather, they express their equivalence with the malformations, without caring to see anything wrong with their action. Thus, a particular nihilistic senility is revealed here, through the infantile images: a list of errors is presented through a mass of unshaped and ridiculous figures that divide and grow uncontrollably, invading every part of the whole with deprivation and eagerness, where understanding or comprehension becomes impossible, because those employed in these activities were without any responsibility, in complete deterioration. A twisted animal figure in the background illustrates this point well. Its four legs are on the ground, but its stomach is turned up towards the sky, showing that a gruesome alienation is taking place that breaks entities into pieces and then turns them upside down. Such antagonistic bipolarisation is shown by the black and white coloured mouflons that encircle the pregnant figure, symbolising descriptively what one has done, and showing a clear consciousness not to correct or master it. They have failed toward themselves and this is the biggest failure. But, they did not regret it: the world is now populated by mutants which do not provide any advantage whatsoever to anyone than further production. The Great God productive automatism unleashed unto the world continues its wrongdoing. The conduct of those who have become what they now are sometimes creates laughter and indeed merits ridicule – but rather it is appreciated. At least, this is what the images evoke.

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But if this might not be enough, what is really striking is the high artistic quality of the Tassili Round Head images, as they are skilfully powerful. They use techniques that express an astonishing surrealism and – needless to mention again – we are in the Mesolithic, between 8000 and 5000 BC, with only sporadic settlements and no cities at that time, only at the start of the spread of agriculture and pastoralism, and in pre-metallurgy, just after the Natufian settlements. This expressivity is especially true of the oldest, Round Head paintings, as they are more doubled, duplicitous, complicated, better executed overall than the schematic and mediocre more recent images from the Caballin or Camelin period, except for the Iheren paintings, recalling the similar situation in Göbekli Tepe, where the earliest works show the highest artistic qualities. They are impressive and modern in their suggestive flight from reality. As we have seen, the Great God of Sefar even contains a pictorial narrative, like the Shaft Scene, but in a more surrealistic way, with images around and through the body of the Great God. The open female figure lying on the horned animal is particularly unmeasured – asymmetrical, bizarre – in an already shocking painting. This image has a sad dramaturgy; it tells a story, but does not call for an action to take place; it is following the sequence of the on-going drama in several, layered dimensions, without seeking any solution, instead with a pedantic pedagogy it is teaching horror and the cold acknowledgement of it. All in all, these expanded, dreamy, swollen forms suggest illusionality, a badly formed, disjointed dream, where there is no space for memory, integrity, decency or dignity, and where a morbid fantasy is given signs of life, representing the fertile, bodily depth of lustful impulsivity. Everything is pulsating, the praying figures especially, as their raised arms, showing even their fingers, communicate to us the visual appearance of the idea of ‘conception’: the etymological links between touching, keeping, biting and conceiving.17 Here we are bypassing reality, operating towards an alliance with the void. The second layer in the Great God of Sefar scene illustrates this, as it shows behind the deity the already mentioned deformed pregnancy, with open genitals and legs. The pregnant figure is somehow floating out of the body of the Great God, and if so, it will bring out his unquenchable urge for possession, well indicated by the numerous phalluses growing out of the Great God’s body, coupled with a complete corporal human representation. If this is so, then we get an answer for our quest concerning the binding of replicators to the human body shape. Such a structure matters, as it can be occupied through possession, a central feature of masks as well (Pizzorno 2010), though not without a wilful misguidance to this very action by the operators. The Round Head image depicts a crystal-clear intention concerning what they wanted to do, to be conscious about the advantages that they would gain: they wanted production, although were already bored by their own wants. If Round Head imagery does not correspond to anything known from prehistory, except the Shaft Scene, including the preceding Bubaline period, it

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has strange, genuinely stunning affinities with modern, abstract and especially concept art, sharing a common tired submissiveness. The terms that recur in attempts to capture the character of this painting are ‘abstract’, ‘bizarre’, ‘surrealistic’, or ‘conceptual’. They do not simply ‘represent’ human beings, but decompose the human body to its elements, in order to put them again alchemically together in new combinations. Thus, amazingly, it is in the plateaus of Tassili, in the middle of the Sahara, that the modern idea of l’art pour l’art was first born, but why? Why is there this conscious desire to break and tear into pieces the wholeness of character structure, the frame of the body? Why is all this desired so much? Or, from another angle, given that Palaeolithic paintings lacked the representation of self, how could this be suddenly desirable now, in the Mesolithic? Why is this now the way to reach the void, to offer man for annihilation? The last question is easier to answer; for the presence of the replicators who replicate only inside the structure we only need to recall the special qualities of the void in algebra. The void in the form of zero has the special quality of being unbreakable (in the sense that it cannot be divided through fractioning into numbers smaller than itself), and is also closely connected to infinity (thus, for example, any number divided by nil yields infinity). And both nil or zero and infinity have a special meaning in the occult. Given that the equality between the divine and the human realms is held together by communion and friendship (Meier 2011), by orderliness, temperance and justice, or as we called it charis, a mentality of governing through qualities and ratio, as can be traced back to Plato and Pindar, but we assume is also valid for Palaeolithic societies, the discovery of breakability implies that the same result of infinity and breakability can easily be obtained by physical and not mental equality (the latter is based on shared virtue). But, here at Tassili, we have a brutally different view, and finally get a response to our question, as break, interruption, dissolution is how the annihilation of a structure offered production benefits, through involvement with the void. In order to influence and accommodate the void, a morbid constitution or design was anchored onto the rocks of Tassili, a wilful alienation from reality: first offering then subverting the human image to the void, offering it up for fulfilment, though in the same way changing the void itself. For this action no virtue is required, only sly submissiveness to the lustful forces that are always ready to gain life. Even the emitters of the Tassili paintings captured this new knowledge accurately: it is horrific, disgusting and disappointing, the loss of paradise, as it no longer nurtures virtue and maintains order, as Milton described it.

After Tassili These representations had a particular zeal for gaining this knowledge again and again, repeating a parasitic decomposition, consumption and artificial reconstruction of characters. They worked and functioned quietly for

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thousands of years in the silence of these desert mountains. The central idea is quite similar to alchemy, as it stresses the assimilation of elements not only with each other but also with the supernatural, say ‘cosmic’ (Maxwell-Stuart 2012), while the ‘hieros gamos’ was a very factual undertaking, in a way analogous to sexual reproduction. Here we are hinting at the grossly sexual images all around Tassili, including the widespread open women, called ‘gynaecological position’, and other examples. Similarly, in order to obtain production, some thousand years later alchemy made various abstractions: it emitted images of fire, earth, water or air, in order to capture the divine force by luring it into bodies, oscillating between the cosmic, incommensurable, unlimited sources and the fixed and limited bodily forms, stressing their mutual assimilation into each other. Whenever the zero is present, either the operation itself loses its meaning, or numbers cannot be properly associated with the operation. The required unity or reconciliation of elements is not taking place even in multiplication, where as a result only the nothing is coming out, annihilating the number by itself. While the zero is unbreakable, it manages to dissolve, breaking and taking away the identity of any rational number, which is probably the key to the success of alchemical operations, as alchemy with various projections of limited and unlimited elements merges them together, where the unlimited nil is always used for dissolving the limited one. This has two consequences. First, the limited form is less and less prominent; and second, the unlimited nil gains an ever-greater importance in the structure of the annihilated one and continues to grow. This idea can be illustrated through a characteristic of the zero: with this pseudo-number, by dividing any real number with zero, we obtain infinity. The result is the Bakhtinian cosmic grotesque, which is immeasurable and infinitely powerful, the frightening and terroristic fluxional of Callot and Newton (see Chapter 7 for further details), a swallowing bacchanalia of projections, which uses doubles as receptacle for the erotic images of the jaws of Hell (an opening, like the mouth, extensively analysed by Bakhtin 1984), as it is still visible in Tassili. The nil constructs and denominates (fractions) without losing its non-character; it is pure becoming without being, a passive receptor, but also a replicator at the same time, and even the hunter that violates the borders (intactness, integrity) of others. The nil even has its own architecture, as seen in Tassili, being able to make a real, factual stone triangle or an arch-bridge out of nothing and a continuous filigree from its own motion; the nil is able to conjure up an emerging organism of universal hatred and apocalyptic destruction, where the aim is limited to transformation through contagion. The nil here behaves like the void. However, such transgression could not be completed without incorporating the most important force behind the senses: desire, or – as Newton called it – attraction, or taking it simply as pulsating energies. Only attraction, the pulsation of the arteries could propel the replicator into action; blood sacrifices probably profited from this fact. However, it desires things about which we do not even have concepts. Needs grow out of the void itself, as the void is

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territorial expansion, the long-stated ambition for possession that ferociously attacks and annihilates when mixed with characters, exactly because of its growing deprivation from the full structures of the real world. Here in Tassili, this desire became focused on human bodies, as always happens when strength and virtue deteriorate. In other words, if Tassili was not simply an exotic and remote location, but a crucial transformative centre of its time, comparable to Silicon Valley, that exerted a shocking impact on its surroundings, then what was the force that animated these images? What was the character and combination of void concerns behind such activities? Of course, it is impossible to give a single response to such questions; but exactly for the same reasons nobody can claim singular access to or right for interpretation. In order to understand the possible meaning of the Tassili activities, they must be placed in the broadest possible comparative framework, implying both other historical cases and recourse to the widest possible conceptual and theoretical frameworks in the social sciences, also because Tassili did not end with the Round Head images, and unlike the Palaeolithic images, which had a constancy for approximately 25,000 years, the Tassili paintings changed their appearances over time. One of them, the Iheren murals (Hallier and Hallier 2012), constitutes a particularly intriguing, unique site, concerning the activities of the replicators. Dated about 3000 BC, they are over 3 metres wide and contain a series of minuscule compositions that present curious depictions of small-sized human and animal figures merging together, treated in an admirable and naturalistic way (Muzzolini 1996). Here the projection series of the murals varies increasingly, in which absences are added to absences, whose end result is a transformation that functions as hybridisation. Its mental structure is dominated by destruction and unification that develops automatically, in a never-ending, infinite way. In the Iheren images characters lose all their distinguishing features, becoming mere objects for transformation, converting pulsation into the engine of a generalised, amorphous growth. They are not just merging into each other, rather are becoming part of a common body constructed out of a mutual dependence between the composite elements: stone, water and the flesh and blood of humans and animals. This transformation even received a visual representation in the egg forms, depicted everywhere, even existing in natural rock formations. This is why Tassili’s Iheren does not echo anything other than itself: the pure possibility of endless transformation, the incubation of the replicator and its birth in the body of a human, its production inside the human structure. Notice two things about the empty shaft sockets of the Iheren rocks: that they are filled by mural paintings like a pure shell of a womb and are stamped by signs that are the sum of absent meanings. They are beyond and against time and space; the purpose and reason of their existence has been forgotten, being of uncertain origin and belonging to no known culture that has survived; the only thing left to ascertain is that the surviving images are products of a merging, transformative will. Their images by contrast are very well and skilfully elaborated, as is seen on the representations.

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It is certainly easy to note that directing replicators into structures by operators somehow combines knowledge about both. Character structures have their motion, power, virtue within themselves, so a real problem is how to insert a change inside them, to entice them into passivity. How did the Iheren people know about taking root in characters? The problem is that this exact method or technology is, in general, hard to come by. The idea of metamorphosis, proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is one of the bestknown such methods, but if one does not think exactly about how one got that result, one will just recall the result – that individuals are taking each other’s characters, bringing forth a result which has no cause – without remembering what conditions apply to the result. Conditions for metamorphosis do not simply occur; rather a heedful, calculative, man-made preparation is needed for catching the occasion in order to use it. Such a cautious preparation for transformative metamorphosis and its very result are seen on the Iheren murals.

Metamorphosis and hybridisation The idea of metamorphosis (from the Greek meaning of the after-the-form change, involving an abrupt change in the body structure – it could even be the circle sign as it appears on several parts of the images) even if it does not incorporate the transcendental dimension, has significant explanatory power. For instance, we can apply it for several Iheren scenes, many of which strikingly recall fin-de-siècle Vienna, evoking splendid, classy, slow-paced appearances of phlegmatic consternation in a superbly decadent society passively waiting for transformation, a readiness best captured by Hofmannsthal. Men, animals, demons and natural elements are transformed by the penetration of the replicators in a world that is seemingly so far away both in reason and in time. What must be understood is that these images are the representation of a transgression that was animating not simply some of them, but entire Tassili, and the effect which it exerted on its surroundings, including – without exaggeration – ourselves, our very mode of being, given the method and technology used for this goal. The question concerns the theoretical framework necessary to capture the nature of such after-the-form transformation. The problem with Deleuze and Guattari is that transformation remains ill-defined if the transcendental dimension is neglected. Here their work can be complemented with some ideas from the political sociology of Max Weber, in particular the concept of charismatic power, taken from Protestant theology, but developed in a different direction, relevant for the analysis of political situations. Here Weber’s analysis was also strongly influenced by the work of Nietzsche, especially in Weber’s use of the language of ‘out-of-ordinary’ situations, and the need to overcome them. Given that Deleuze wrote a highly influential book on Nietzsche, the affinities between his work and Weber’s is not surprising.

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Applying contemporary theoretical frameworks for the remote time and place of Iheren also poses its problems. It is a question whether the method of transformation in these murals is stable over time. It might be true that such transformation started with facilitating the penetration of the replicators into different body structures, like goats, humans, stones, but does it have fabricating potential now, so do we have men–god–goats here and now, around us? At any rate, can we say that the power of the void is constant, with only the conditions variable for its application? And what are these conditions: liminality, emptiness, absurdity? Who are they, these operators who recognised this first and learned how to use it, and with what sort of practices? At any rate, transformation was going on there at least mentally, as in the Tassili images, and in particular the nearby Iheren murals men, animals and natural objects like stones are continuously taking up each other’s positions, arms, shades, shapes, implying transformation, the merging of one being into another. Here, absorption altered filiation, which is indicated by the huge eggs merging all these potentials lying around, carried by men dressed as courtiers in one famous Iheren image. These productive eggs are without parents and thus without taking up a heredity, without a correspondence between characters and intentions. The man-size eggs are the end-artefacts of a transformation, which perhaps begins anew every time, fabricating outcomes, hence there is a baby, a baby celebrated and emphatically linked to the egg scenario, that increase exponentially over time, multiplying infinitely. Such unlimited growth is the result of a transgression, which can be captured through division or fracturing by zero. These eggs may just be containers, but as receptors what did they capture, what is the product of the replicators, which can multiply inside the structure (the woman is there, so did she offer her womb for this)? What is the precious egg content offered to the giant goat king? If the picture is unreal, then every element of it is unreal, and so the content of the egg is unreality or the nothing (the void), as even its form demonstrates. But why was unreality pictured more than once on the murals, if it had no importance in reality itself? It is unknown whether this fabrication of a transformative device effectively worked or not. However, the representations are still there, showing the fusing, merging and blending of different entities into each other, by cloning or metamorphosis. Is this method different from the Darwinian, implying a man-made logic inserted into the world of nature, like a replicator jumping into a structure, taking its place and nesting inside it? Is this what absorbs and consumes the structure, until the sources dry out? At any rate, in that moment they die as well, as any parasite, so they are always in search of bodies. But if it is inseparable from destruction, being a harmful outlier in the free flow of nature, how is it that it survives? The replicators’ void appearance neither generates nor produces or creates, rather its urge for elimination negates and liquefies any existence. It lives on other beings, drawing benefits from the deprivation of their structure. It cannot move itself except by destroying others. Its frenetic movements can only be stopped by the sudden emergence of a fixed form that sets insurmountable limits to colonising again.

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The sorcerer is the man of metamorphosis, according to Plato, but here on the Iheren murals it looks like a fancy dandy,18 or a group of dandies occupied with metamorphosis, where every little detail points to a ‘bringing forth’, the birth of a merged existence between different structures. In this image men and goats all look in the same direction, towards the left of the image. There, in the top left corner, there is a uterus-like form, out of which a woman is looking, leaning on her elbow. Beside her, there is a man, holding up a child in his hands. Three beings, with long fair hair and beards, with ornaments that look like horns on their heads, dressed up in tight trousers and frock-like coats, are lined up in front of the uterus-form and the woman. In front of the man with the child there are two figures, one in a gilet and one in a suit. One of these is kissing the hand of the other above another strange, egg-like uterus shape and in fact the whole image is much more the appearance of a maternity ward than anything else. Further down on the left there are two or three women with broad, uterus-formed skirts and covered with fur on their shoulders, dressed up in a way similar to the woman looking out of the womb-like form at the left top. The goats are looking at them, but they somehow belong to the meaning of the image. Strangely enough, the goats are more individualised, with different horns, patches and colours, than the humans. Furthermore, the foreheads of several animals collide with the legs of the humans, while the horn of one goat touches the egg-like uterus form, clearly an indication of their special interest in the happenings. One of these eggs is even offered to an unusually big, man-sized goat, at the top of the image, like a link or even a causal connection. The similarity between humans and goats is also emphasised by the pattern on the goats being similar to the dresses of the humans. But perhaps the most striking similarity is between the profiles of humans and goats. Such goat–men evoke the Kabeiroi of Greek mythology (Blakely, 2006; Kerényi, 1980), inventors of metallurgy as well as demons of winemaking, who are also associated with goats, being goat-like semi-divine men, and who were furthermore born out of eggs. All these figures are among those who parented transformation in civilisation. But the successful metamorphosis, the successful nesting in human forms appear on another Iheren image,19 where the uterus is emphatically transformed into a place of production, now, separated even from the mother and hanging on her arm. Even more striking is that the same mother is linked to a piece of stone, itself with an arm growing from it and the mother is linked to the arm of the stone by a common knot. Furthermore, this same knot is tying together not only the mother and the uterus, but the goat design on the stone as well, and even the father figure in front of her. Those tied together by the knot have a power to transform everything around them into the making of the child (at the back of the image, in his father’s arm). Another goat is towering over the father’s head, but they all (father, baby, group of people) are in-between figures, sorcerers, magi. This is indicated by their animal-like profiles, with different degrees of bestiality – ears, muzzles, fur-like skin, caps, sometimes slanting foreheads. The child is also hybrid, with a marked face; he was born with the same bestial skin

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features as all adults have, except the mother, her clear features lack any signature. In fact, the only ‘normal’ figure is the mother, an outsider to the group. However, she added the most significant instrument to a successful metamorphosis: her uterus. She is holding it outside her body, as mentioned before, together with an arm erected from the slab of stone with a goat head drawn on it. The mother lent her uterus for the fabricated transaction of producing the artefact, imagined as a baby in his sorcerer–father’s hands. Note the circlet form on the mother’s arms, a kind of handcuff that resembles a wrist ornament, indicating that she is under a spell (under pressure or powerful influence), in a bewitched state. This circlet form is also visible on the father and the arm of the stone slab, but also on the very top of them, indicating by the only common sign that a metamorphosis is in progress. In both images the motives are the same: the mother who is greeted by men, a father–figure on her side with a baby in his arms, and animals around. Eggs are missing here, and the whole elegant, fussy, court-like atmosphere of the above-mentioned image is changed to a more didactic and simplified, pastoral scene of sorcerers.

Conclusion One way to reconnect the supposedly separate concerns of penetration and production is through their common evocation of pulsating emotions or impulses. The images of Tassili, even at their most abstract or conceptual, in their sense of a distance from nature, were certainly poised to evoke impulses. Such impulses can be grouped into different categories. The first is astonishment at the bizarre. The bizarre and grotesque pairing of body members or of humans and animals immediately provoke repellent astonishment – of encountering designs that seem to represent something out of reality, and certainly do not correspond to any being we encounter in real life, but an indication of the replicators’ productive activities. The second, and closely related emotion is danger or threat, leading to fear, and being frightened. The unknown always carries a degree of threat; but here the particular ‘unknown’ is a purposeful play with elements of real life, in order to produce creatures that are unreal, mixed and composite, as the result of the replicators’ penetration into their structure. A wild animal can be threatening; but such an animal with a human head, or a human with an animal head, a monster or a demon (hybrid beings by definition) is threatening on a second level, implying – beyond threats of death – utter destruction and annihilation. Yet, such emotions can be raised to a further level, and this is connected to the highly pornographic character of many such Tassili images. This again has several levels, particularly present in the important Wadi Djerat area. The first layer is the representation not simply of naked male and female bodies, or even genital organs (those were already present in the Palaeolithic), but ithyphallic men, and – most prominently – the so-called ‘open women’, or female bodies depicted with their legs spread and raised; a particularly humiliating (and vulgar) pose. Interestingly enough, such representations are also called in the

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literature as ‘gynaecological position’, where the direct, shocking rudeness of the image is hidden under a clearly inappropriate scientific terminology, or even a celebration of female eroticism (Le Quellec 1995). The second layer concerns explicit, numerous allusions to sexual acts. At a third level, such acts are simulated between not simply men and women, but humans and animals; in particular, between figures that combine human and animal features, culminating in shocking scenes of unbridled orgy between hybrid monsters, all infected by penetrating desire.

Notes 1 The term ‘singularity’ is understood in its everyday, normal sense, and not in the sense now used by Ray Kurzweil. The abusive use of important words in a very special sense, thus rendering their use all but impossible, is a standard trickster procedure in contemporary thought. A particularly good example is Lévi-Strauss’s (ab)use of the word ‘structure’ for his lifeless mental constructs, which then gave rise, through Bourdieu, to ‘post-structuralism’, which seems to imply that structures do not exist, or are not important, leading to the eventual celebration of liquidity by Bauman. This is a good example also of perverted linear transformation, as the eventual outcome is to abuse so many words of our language that understanding becomes practically impossible, with one at the same time being forced to follow the ever new politically correct fads in language – with gentle suggestion becoming increasingly altered into universal, even legally enforced coercion. 2 ‘Record’, by the way, is rooted in Latin recordari, meaning remember, rooted in cor ‘heart’; close to an etymology of credere ‘belief ’, traced to cuor dare ‘giving one’s heart’, popular in the Middle Ages, and perhaps not so far from the truth. 3 These two, seemingly so different, are actually the same, as such impulses (desires, whims, wishes, moods, and so on) are not really ours if they are not rooted deeply in our character but are produced by sensual rays, and thus can easily be incited and guided by external sources. Here again, modern-day commercials, spreading through rays and waves, are perfect but not exclusive examples for the phenomenon. 4 The accelerator and multiplier effects of economic theory, so central for Keynesianism and for sealing our own entrapment inside the economy, are perfect examples. 5 ‘Becoming’ here is meant in the sense of Deleuze: establishing a relationship between humans and the supernatural, which is not real but sur-real, in the process of becoming real (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, ‘Memories of a Bergsonian’). It is also linked to Plato’s Timaeus. Deleuze even claimed that ‘Becoming is an antimemory’ (sic; p. 294). 6 For a possible pioneering of such self-representation, see the famous image of Pergouset cave, interpreted by us as a self-portrait of the ‘artist’ (Horvath and Szakolczai 2018a). 7 These sections much rely on Horvath (2013b), and Horvath and Szakolczai (2013). 8 The term can be understood both as a desire for penetration, and for penetration only, not love, passion or anything similar; while also as a kind of desire that is overwhelming, irresistible, thus penetrating. The Hungarian word is again particularly interesting: behatol ‘penetrate’ is derived from hat ‘having an effect’, but with the particular original connotation of forcing a kind of violent entry (see the 1825 Czuczor-Fogarasy Dictionary). It is also the root for hatalom ‘power’, határ ‘limit, border, boundary’, and határoz ‘decide’. 9 Like the Big Belly trickster at Tassili, with tail and hanging phallus; Neolithic mural painting (Lhote 1959, Figure 45).

76 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

Replicators in compositions See the previous note. ‘Les abris sculptés de la Préhistoire’, see www.culture.fr, page 2. See the image on the British Museum website; and also www.gettyimages.ca/. Such a regression to uterus-recalling embryo forms is central for the striking 1979 film of Peter Fleischmann, The Hamburg Syndrome. Tassili n’Ajjer and the surrounding areas of Tadrart, Abacus and Messak are a mountain range in the middle of the Sahara Desert, with heights reaching 1,800 metres and located about 1,500 kms from the Mediterranean Sea, may be the closest place from where it can be reached. The sacred rocks of the region constitute one of the most extraordinary phenomena of figurative representations in human history, not least due to its extreme longevity and continuity of use, with the rocks and walls of Tassili engraved and painted for a period of about 10,000 years. See in particular the famous Linton Panel, extremely close to Tassili imagery. The living dead–automaton connection is central to such key modern myths as Frankenstein and Golem. The link between the activity of hands, teeth and conception is again most comprehensible through Hungarian, where the words for teeth, holding, grabbing and conception are the same (fog, fog, megfog, megfogan). See http://encyclopedieberbere.revues.org/docannexe/image/1556/img-2.png, also in Encyclopédie berbère, 24 | Ida – Issamadanen [online]. See www.rockart-sahara-hallier.de/media/2.jpg.

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Charis vs the automaton

From the charis content of composed structures nothing can be possibly added or taken away anymore. In a literary manner it was captured in The Woman without a Shadow by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This is not the case with the absurd, as it can have unlimited transitions,1 unending processes (an occurrence totally alien to Plato and Aristotle). The absurd is remote, but also transitorial; it can be subdivided as many times as one wishes, an automatism that gained a hybrid existence from magic, and so a third kind of element, falling out of life and death. This erratic perversity is not accepted either in Heaven or on Earth. Artificial making refers to an absurdum in an incessant innovation process by which new production units replace outdated ones in a circularity. Here nobody arrives anywhere. Yet it is exactly this circular logic by which something new brings about the demise of whatever existed before, the given, in rolling eternity. This vacuous dynamism is the exact opposite of genuine, authoritative power – which, from the perspective of such a vacuous dynamism (progress, development, infinite economic growth) is redefined as ‘undemocratic authoritarianism’; and, even worse, indeed is made so, as real authority has already been replaced by its copy (or a copy of the copy, which can continue without any limits, as copying and replacing is an infinite series), which then indeed confirms the diagnosis and conforms to the charge of authoritarianism. It is aligned instead with the concept of (hy)steresis (see below), withdrawal or lagging behind, with the technology of the automaton. Our concern is not to offer a general interpretation about technology, but to explore the particular dynamism gained by involving replicators into the body structures, where such circular adaptation is plunging us further and further inside technicalised automatism. This logic of subordinating the structure for the replicator became codified in transformative rites, but the role of the transformative transcendental agent was never really theorised in the discussions about such rites. The trickster/replicator is a genuine engine of replacing character with adaptivity. Those under its influence do not act by their own will anymore, but are influenced by adaptivity, or adaptive readiness, which is a trait of weakness, the softness of willingness. The liminal elusiveness of the trickster renders it capable of playing the role of both the imitator and the imitated, with quick and confusing switches between the two

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roles. It can take any form, thus can assume a form through which it can be accepted. It is impossible to catch: whenever you feel like you have a hold on it, it is no longer there, as it has changed shape; the trickster defies any definite specification of time, place and character. However, at the same time, it lives for attention, it perceives, absorbs and retransmits emotions, it plays with words and images, miming intentions and deep feelings, and so gradually alters every original. Such a circular play with life-force can be expressed with the Greek word hysteresis, meaning shortcoming, deficiency, or need. It is rooted in the idea of lagging behind, or being too late, and etymologically rooted in hystera ‘womb’,2 together with ‘hysterical’ – at least, that was the opinion of Hippocrates about the suffocative lagging behind of the womb (Gilman et al. 1993: 3). Hysteresis also became used as a term for electromagnetic circular vibration, first conceptualised by the Cambridge natural scientist James Clerk Maxwell, whose theory of electromagnetic radiation gave a scientific base for the existence of an electromagnetic potential between beings. In hysteresis the value of a character lags behind the effects causing changes in it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetising force. In his A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865), Maxwell brought electrical phenomena within the province of such dynamism. It is a ‘force’, but a very particular ‘hysteretic’ or ‘steretic’ one; as it cannot exist by itself, or without mediums, it needs structures to be filled to have a dynamical effect. Magnets are becoming magnets by object structures drawn to themselves. So, vibrations are searching mediums, as they are themselves in steresis in that they are absorbing and causing (now like in a unifying conductor) electric and magnetic phenomena, but are not able to move by themselves.

Steresis Steresis reveals a transitory dynamism that is dissipated due to internal material friction, when weights are attached to the object comparable to projectiles used in the slingshot, so it is a movement that produces waves. The simple and evident question is the following: whether it is the weight that moves and produces the dynamism of the instrument, or it is the mover who changes its current flow by instrumentalising its movement. Or rather the weight, lagging behind by changing its current flow? A small increase in length causes huge transitory dynamism. It will get longer, continuing to extend, and the dynamism is increasing. This nonlinear dynamism is due to steresis, the retardation of an effect from forcing to enforcing, a kind of circling movement. Heinrich von Kleist (1972) explained the laws of the mechanism in a marvellous manner in 1810, a year before his tragic death, when he struggled with the question of giving up his soul voluntarily for the sake of the supreme, who was presumably transposing in the centre of the poet’s soul and caused his suicide.

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I wanted to know how it is possible, without having a maze of strings attached to one’s fingers, to move the separate limbs and extremities in the rhythm of the dance. His answer was that I must not imagine each limb as being individually positioned and moved by the operator in the various phases of the dance. Each movement, he told me, has its centre of gravity; it is enough to control this within the puppet. The limbs, which are only pendulums, then follow mechanically of their own accord, without further help. He added that this movement is very simple. When the centre of gravity is moved in a straight line, the limbs describe curves. Often shaken in a purely haphazard way, the puppet falls into a kind of rhythmic movement which resembles dance. (Kleist 1972, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’) For Kleist, the limbs of the marionette are ‘what they should be … lifeless, pure pendulums governed only by the law of gravity’, like forming a Y. It is nothing other than the direct path taken by the soul of the dancer. The puppeteer can transpose himself into the centre of gravity of the marionette. In other words, the puppeteer dances, as if charged by hypnotic gradients, in a circular manner. This Y form could be seen, for instance, at the ‘Y’ formed entrance of Font-de-Gaume cave, in the valley of Dordogne, in Perigord, a prehistoric site, one of the decorated caves. A cave is often formed by a dissolution of the limestone (there are also other ways). The result is an absence of matter, a hole in the earth, an undermining or collapse of the original matter, with an opening to the surface. This lends it its womb-like, feminine character, as expressed by the Latin world cava, connoted with a container or passive substance of making, the surrender of something to impulses, eager to be embodied, as if in a sleep; a place of contraction, an unending slipping and collapse. It is an effect similar to fluctuation waves, which produce more open damage when the body is relaxed, and the mind is unconscious. Caves radiate energy: they are radioactive hotspots, their magnetism long being measured and acknowledged.3 One entrance into this cavity itself has a double meaning: one is to emphasise the act of dissolution (the authentic cave possessed one entry, the one on the right when facing it), which is an active action, and another passive one, reinforcing the exterior nil, the circular–wavelength–form character of the cave itself. But to produce a ‘Y’ form double entrance must have had a special significance, which is the adding of another, blind opening to the existing one, and thus forming the steresis sign.

Surreality When entering a cave, one is transgressing boundaries. It implies not being in control either of time or space, belonging neither to total darkness, nor to the light; neither to death, nor to life. This subversive experience has been shared by many who were in caves and encountered the presence of a surreality, a

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turbidity, a certain exteriority which is overwhelming us, as the structure of oneness disappears. Dark dimness confiscates the most important part of our body structure, its composed finitude. The void is influencing the delicate balance of our life, the normal functioning of our body, their harmoniously charged parts, that keep in unity on each side of our balance. Nothingness is a disruption of the critical equilibrium of nature, disturbing our own thinking, the way of certainty that is produced by living. And with good reason, as uncertainty gives entrance to pressures of the replicators, whose occupation in the body result in the inner dynamism of the matrix, which functions to absorb characters and change their attributes: an occupation, even if a rather steretic one. Yet, producing a ‘Y’ entrance to a cave required going beyond not only the Maxwellian problematic of a powerful potential between beings, but also the earlier Newtonian one concerning space and time as inertia as permanently existing material products. The hypnotic negativity of the Y necessitated going further on by bringing in the Einsteinian conviction that the very existence is relative, even if this implied the disappearance of matter. It implied a leap into the void, by invoking the void, affecting the void to invade the composition, which was before entering the cave considered as being only outside, with every entity having definite properties and a composition, until this precious moment of void-making in the cave. This recalls the role of replicators, who subvert structures, resulting not only in its steresis, transforming structures into a uterine production, not finished but unfinished, not complete as formed but premature, but also in the dynamism of the unfinished, which would like to gain birth again and again. Furthermore, if we give a second look at the Y form cave entrance, the two entrances will appear as the two starting points of an ‘upsilon’, before they start to develop into one straight line. Y is the sign of any unknown, unspecified, or variable factor in mathematics. The ‘upsilon’ can show the never finished, eternal bringing forth; it is known as Pythagoras’ letter, also the alchemist Dee’s ‘cosmopolitical sign’, as partly a symbol of something lagging behind (see again the etymology of hysteresis) (Dee 2003; also Yates 1972: 58), but also of dynamism. The upsilon form is used in divinisation, in dowsing to locate the unknown, the retarded, hidden effects, like underground water, or buried metals.4 (Hy)steresis is a particular condition. It is not rest, but rather a damping of characters, their gradual reduction at the middle of their progress, where they start to increase their power to grow out from the womb and so their appearance at the end of the process, their dispersed energy, their magnetic frequency is reduced until multiplication. This is like an elastic rubber band, with weights attached to it: when its loading and unloading is done quickly, an internal friction occurs, proportional to the loading, with a steretic lagging behind until the dynamism comes from the friction of the loading. Or the already mentioned slingshot, that plaything consisting of a Y-shaped stick, with an elastic between the arms; by propelling small stones one can even kill

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a Goliath. Inside Palaeolithic caves sacred bull-roarers were also used with similar effect: a small wooden slat attached to a string that makes a roaring noise when whirled, something powerful, more than expected. At Cambridge University, in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, there are goddess figures with ‘upsilon’ marks carved on their necks, indicating divine intensity, a sign of gravity, the transcendental as an exteriority in the realm of forms, in the linearity of power and movement, where each successive change must always be along a definite line, though it might be along any one of the possible lines, including the direct opposite of the one it succeeds.5 The status of the goddess as a transcendental figure with the Y signs indicates how much and how far we can reach unreality here through steresis and the dynamism in the matrix, which is divinisation. Indeed, both divination and technology supply an identical answer: the infinite. The hook sign ‘Y’ has its arms or branches open towards the victims, while its trunk carries the energies taken from the victims towards a new birth. The movement of steresis occupies space and dissolves characters, so that those who invite these waves to take a possession of their own bodily form often become sick, suffocated, as they are bringing sickening impulses inside until they are released in a new form, as seen in Kleist’s puppets and a dynamic movement on the duplicated movement of the cross-legged bison in Lascaux cave (Dordogne), but in all cases the infinite is present.6 The running bison are almost each other’s mirror images, except for their crossed legs. They correspond to each other as running out of a cleavage on the cave wall, their legs curiously crossed in a retardation effect of the ‘Y’. The bison form, the above-mentioned slingshot form, which is the reductive steresis, opened towards the spectator; a steresis that grows into the dynamics of the infinite multiplication inside the particular artificial matrix itself. But, indeed paradoxically the steresis, its hidden, secret, womblike appearance by itself does not fit the category of a movement (interchanging qualities, quantity or place between two positively indicated terms, the homology). Quite the contrary, it is a subversive, absorbing stage: for its dynamism it needs composition, forms to be absorbed. It is a quasi-movement which can produce movement with the help of others. This is why it is represented by the ‘Y’ sign, which opens its two arms towards the outside, for the bearers, for its carriers and, like a fungus infection, or better a virus, it slowly infiltrates its upholders. This is well documented by the famous Herd of Reindeer Palaeolithic painting in the Grotte de la Mairie cave. This image captures the movement of reindeer: their motion in one body is split into two, opened towards us, recalling the cross-legged bison image. But here something more happens: maybe this is the first visual interpretation of the brave Einsteinian postulate, that ‘[a]ll bodies are elastically deformed and alter their volume with changes in temperature’ (Einstein 2001: 146), or that bodies themselves, and all the things revealed to us, are momentarily mutable. They run a wavelength, not for its own sake, but to enable a force to be manifest. Like a divining fork in divination, they are locked in the hook of a movement, in order to induce

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their reindeer bodies to move beyond them. Their sources of power are subverted, directed to an external power, out of their borders; their dematerialised physical images relegate them to steresis. How can there be any enduring identity at all, we should ask? Here, inside the reindeer image, a circularity occurs where linearity is dissolved, objects disappear, and strange events occur to those who venture inside its encircled boundaries.7 They will disappear. Such circles are allegedly haunted. Replicators have a power of their own that wants compositions to be filled, to be their own, subverting structures. Replicators are inside the void, which is annihilating because it needs the lived life to maintain life further on.8

The transversal capacity But this untimely awkwardness is exactly their aim and target, ‘if the body is growing or expanding at every point and can only do so where there is vacuity to grow or expand into’; as Aristotle explained, the significance of the nil is unlimited, untimely immaturity, or the deprivation of form that can be divided, through division by the void, as many times as one wishes (Aristotle 2014, Physics, 214b). The void is sterility, not yet born into forming a structure, instead remaining a uterus being, without substance and character, yet, with the never failing desire to have one.9 In the Tassili metamorphosis between goats–men–stones–gods mentioned before, the circularity that without doubt can multiply energy is not a power in itself, rather a multiplied product of the parasite. It is sterile by itself and causes sterility in the violated structures, only having a transversal capacity to convey the power of others, to pass it from one place to another, as if inside the womb, as this occurs there with the entering of characters and the leaving of the newly born ones. It denotes an eternal displacement through destruction, or as Schumpeter formulated ‘creative destruction’, from one contact to another, never accomplished, never completed, however productive in conveying metamorphosed entities. This endless circularity from one entity to another could even be called a making process.

Imitation Artificial making does not exist in nature, only on its external surface, in the in-between absurdity. Artificiality is restricted to the outmost boundaries of life: it is possible, but it is situated on the outer side of the charis enclosure. Its existence is located away from both life and death, as it is acting, occurring, originating in production by false actors and false places, who never belonged to or originated in the charis content of structures. Simplifying a little, the replicator as the personification of the void is not simply a (non-)entity, the number of nothingness, but that of imitation (a placeholder). So, in fact there are two imitations colliding in the artificial making: taking a structure, or somebody’s place; and the form of the equation.10 The replicator is processing

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two displacements in transition (about imitation, mimesis, ‘mommerie and Mommon’ in divination, see Clark 1997: 21). However, in reality this is one and the same: by imitating the structure, the replicator infiltrates the equation, but by affirming the unity between the structure and the void, one also affirms that they are in union. Steresis starts the moment when the invaded structure ceases to be moved by itself and starts to move the next thing in ‘impotent delirium’ (coined by Albert Camus 2012: 261), the transitory move for production. Imitation is the reproduction of a copy of the original and in this way the copied one resembles, appears as the authentic one; it follows the set or style, the structure of composition by another, it makes the imitator look as the imitated, with all the disposition to deceive with accidental souls instead of the rendered ones. While the expression ‘mercenary logic’ may be wanting,11 it still expresses this transitory process, implying the shrewdness of the mind,12 that employs imitations in order to draw now one influence, effect or induction, and now another, with the evident consequence of encouraging error. And error is sterility, a deficiency in ideas, sentiments or expressions, an insatiable subversion, where ‘the desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself ’ (Camus 2012: 261). Sterility is the most dynamic, as infinite, source of desire, but it is also the most horrid,13 in that it can strip its desired one of its very existence, falsifying all their ties and acknowledgements, destroying values and merits, forcing debasement and subversion at any price. This self-destructive vindictiveness never dies out and is never satisfied, which is not surprising, as its movement is not linear (towards a goal or target),14 but circular. Circularity is based on impulses, and the more varied and frequent the better, in order to motivate a strong spectrum. To be sure, a mercenary logic is beyond the multiplication process, as here sensuals are influenced by greed or desire for gain, otherwise they could not be continuously stimulated. Sensuals have material value, as they are power sources for the sterile dynamism of transitoriness. They are equal to the inverted impulses multiplied by the external wavelength, resulting in dynamical strength, like the frequency of any electromagnetic wave multiplied by its wavelength equals the speed of light.

Sterility This circular figuration has a name in English as well: ‘diabolic circle’. Its dynamic gravity immobilises and controls, this is why it makes sterile any objects. As a circle, its form also emphasises a force outside the structured characters. While we are aware that the ‘circle’ as a symbol has an established role in modern mathematics, still, if the circle is able to transform form into subversion, then the circle can and must be excluded from the real realm of mathematics, which is concerned with forms and not with finalised hypnotic occurrences. Indeed, the circle, 0, the symbol of first the void and later the nil, was only accepted and acknowledged inside the subversive activities of

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various divination practices. It paralyses the caught one and takes away its property. Here appears the 0 as a mutilated Y, which has lost its leg and closed its arms in order to embrace the void content. The nil as the figurative form of the void was used only by occult, secret practices, like alchemy, outside established cultural authorities, and had no legitimacy within the realm of mathematics until the 16th century. Not surprisingly, Newton was an alchemist, and heliocentric cosmology was the achievement of another alchemist, Copernicus. Even Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Robert Boyle applied the alchemical principles of pneumatic (concerning nil, vacuum, emptiness) operations to reality. Yet, the alchemists’ success was amazing, as their prime matter was the same ether (incorporeal pneuma), which captured some hundred years later the imagination of Einstein to such a degree that he considered ether (contra Maxwell) as a form of non-matter (about Einstein’s indifferent and incomprehensive, controversial reception at Cambridge, see Warwick 2003: 399– 401). Einstein said that not even matter is needed in the ether, and that this inertial system in ether is the electromagnetic field (Einstein 1989). But if bodies are not ponderable anymore, if they have no weight and significance, their untimely divisibility becomes unlimited, just as commercial adventures for material gain, which are connected with or engaged in breaking boundaries. Technology is on their side, with its awkward, distillatory ideas about humanity, where humans stand as both the distilling and the distilled ones, to increase the concentration of their sensuals, to separate them from their bodies and purify them by union with cosmic sources of rays. Is this our future now? The unlimited use of sensuals on the Internet, together with the glorification of artificial intelligence, seems to point in this direction, which lies in the direction of Weber’s nullities, ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’, but moves way beyond it, in a way that to be sure was not foreseeable by Weber: to the eventual sterilisation of every living thing. The current COVID mania offers a perfect confirmation of this idea.

Emanation of souls The main and crucial point of any automatism is that the emanation of souls on a spectrum is necessary for completing the opus, replacing the composed soul with an accidental one. They must arouse the passions, strong enough to draw pneumatic waves,15 as argued by the English diviniser, John Dee (1978). In order to create transmitters, more and more members of the populace must be dissected, subverted, becoming incapable of using their own reasoning power, and so the replicators are able to constantly find a place for themselves to bring new dynamism by the flutter of energies of multiplication.16 This alchemical separation or extraction of the sensuals of the souls from their bodily constraint towards a supreme union with an accidental soul is now considered by the modern scientific establishment as a great creative act, but in reality, it was a perversion. Both in alchemy and in technology

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distillation exists in a double sense: a destructive and a preserving functioning, destroying and dissecting the characters’ structure, or subverting it, followed by their intersection, guiding to a new gravity. In the divinisation theory of the alchemist Johann Trithemius,17 the purification of the soul is an ascendency on the ladder of existence toward embodying supreme power – a crucial aspect in the alchemical transformation – the elevation of the earth to heaven, and vice versa, the elevation of external forces to bodily existence, which means impinging the replicators into bodies.

Automatons The living dead, the disturbed compositions are automatons with accidental souls. They are mediated by uterine subverts, those who were already captured by the transformation machinery, who transmit responses, inferences or interpretations. Automatons transmit energy, but they have no power in themselves. They draw energy from destruction,18 the ill, parasitic will that wants the structures of others.19 They produce mimetic pairs of the original character, giving a new synthetic construction above it, a next layer on the top of the ruined. These imitations first appeared on cave walls in prehistory as paintings and engravings, and as was shown above, even by hollowing out from the hollowed cave the double zeros as receptacles in the form of the cave entrance, the imitation of the authentic, womb/matrix meaning of the cave– cavity. A single opening to the cave is already a steresis, imitating and so duplicating the cave’s essential receptacle meaning, but two openings reveal the excess. Such a subversive act brings shapelessness and formlessness in the form of steresis. If Aristotle defined movement, rest and unchangeability not simply in terms of the degree of movement, but as particular responses for arriving at the best character, then movement includes principles and linear forms. Characters have position; in one’s life each successive change must always be along a definite linearity. His example illustrates the point that the healthy might become ill (each final process is resulting from a still earlier process), but then either recovers or dies, except for the peculiar third case, acute illness. This is why between 1 and 2 there is nothing at all, except through the diviniser number, the zero, the placeholder, where our modernity stays, acutely ill, together with the living dead.20 The recognition of subversion was clear for Hobbes, who redefined and challenged motion by ‘fancy appearances’, by appetites and various desires, finally transferring all of them toward subversion by sovereign authority. While Hobbes could not be linked to the notion that all human action is motivated by self-interest, his doctrine that individuals must surrender their rights and so obey an absolute government unconditionally in order to maintain both self-preservation and social order is very close to this formulation. Unless self‐interested individuals fear being punished for their violations of agreements, such agreements will be impossible, and there will exist no foundation for social order. An example is the functional play of

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interest, where it will be in everybody’s own interest to acknowledge a full obligation to the sovereign, the cause of motion being the notion of interest. In this Hobbesian moment, an occasion for the state, the opportunity for the Leviathan to subvert the concrete individual and transform it for its own discipline, the self-moving progress becomes mutilated, as nobody can arrive at a re-aggregation. Subversion is a callous idea, it does not move by itself, it has no position and so no opposition, but a coming into being of something with the union of characters, as the puppets in Kleist’s case. It is this aspect that makes the unchangeable as a non-existent case of the replicators into a kind of existence, a being of its own of the puppets; Plato also noticed it in the Sophist, and so dependent on our life, as it gains life through the union with the compositions. So how can such a state of nothing actually ‘be’? The only answer is absurdity, or the perverse reversal of the real.

Reversal of the real Arguably, Hobbes’s reversal of the classical doctrine on motion is part of the wider, most worrying tendencies of technological thinking. Hobbes applied subversion to human affairs in order to obtain a system, a self-begetting uterine, the sovereign body in the form of a state or commonwealth. In order to construct a self-perpetuating unit, he started from the subverted, and took this liminal state as a reality. But liminality is the playground of the replicators who utilise it to gain an existence on their own, in the place of characters, moving infinitely, being indivisible, having no part and no goal, and no change. This was how the concrete individuum became relative, the ‘rational’ individual, as we have them by now. Or, as Hobbes interpreted it, motion is between entities and relative to them, and not that they are themselves in motion, as Plato and Aristotle claimed (Plato, Phaedrus; Aristotle, Physics). When Hobbes asked what kind of government could maximise the result of their motion, their sense of the right way, the only inevitable answer was the sovereign authority machine, by which technology operates. His work can thus be redefined as a kind of bringing forth, a self-begetting instrument, a mimetic aggregate self-mover. But the state and its subjects do not overlap entirely, as the people who transfer their soul to the technological means are still thinking, while the automaton lacks this quality. However, in the mutual elasticity of transforming and transferring each other, man is definitely the loser, as technology is an infinitely morbid, elastic substance, dissolving every quality, entirely absorbing and possessing even human thinking and appearances into the laws of mechanism by technological means.21

Technology According to the logic of technology, society is so fluid that only appetite forces people to be active, as necessitated by the force of evolutionary progress. It leads to the demand that we each must sacrifice something for the

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22

sake of the divinisation (salvation, health, well-being) of all. This is the way to gain technological progress, the promise of an eternal life whether here or in the otherworld, in a clean, sterile and smooth way. The contemporary political consensus that is dispassionately abolishing social ties and dissociating the concrete individuum from any cultural tradition, redefining it into egoistic libertinism or totalitarian egalitarianism,23 is the extension of the will of a small but vocal group, which we defined as the Magi ideal or archetype, that promotes the divinisation of man, thus the leap into the end of material continuity on Earth. In this plan, sovereignties should combine to find the proper way to solve and explain everything, to be fashioned after technology. However, this combination of technology with divinisation includes a puzzle, a zero set, an unknown element. The puzzle is the sterility of technology, its unchanging and unlimited nature, which renders it impossible to reach a goal, to fulfil a mission, to arrive or to be mature, that forces/condemns us into primitivity and passivity, as Sombart so finely described it in his ‘The influence of technological invention’ (Sombart 2001: 229–247). It is sterile! It is missing the endpoint of every move, the target of every (loco)motion, which is the arrival, the reaching of a sense, the fulfilling of a desire.24 What is missing is the bringing of love to satisfaction, to fulfil it by conceiving a new life. Sterility means having no end, no accomplishment, just a dead end in the number zero. It makes everything sterile and sick with its touch. Replicators are sterile, empty in their accidentality; by this union with the replicators, we became subverted to an increasingly independent and expanding sterility that will never arrive at any domain, except interest-driven production, for exchange, circulating infinitely, and spreading the brutal meaninglessness of mechanisation.

The receptor nature of technology In the automaton, the characters cease to be moved by themselves, but are moved by an exterior dynamism, imparting a process of replacing their own movement with an exterior one, as shown by Camillo’s ‘Memory Theatre’, as described by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (Yates 1992), or the Villa Farnese in Caprarola (Lazio, Italy) with its I camminamenti di ronda (circular walks), or the Ancient Greek peripteros style temples, where a larger circle surrounds the central circle, which contained the steresis or immobility, but at the same time allowed the ‘circular walkers’ to pass round the central place with the purpose of feeling the supreme presence. This central place holds many meanings. It either served as a sanctuary, with its columns ‘standing around’ – literally, as ‘per-i-stasis’ is from Greek stasis ‘standing still’. It also may refer to a state of stasis, or to the universe (cosmos), or both, in which all impulses are uniting, as in a receptacle, one absorbing the other. It recalls the perception of the German political theorist, Heinrich Popitz about the receptor or container nature of technical artefacts, that serve for nothing else than the production of other artefacts (Popitz 2017:

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122–123), which is in fact the description of the fake matrix, whatever its perverted sense of production. But following the description, here the columns themselves are indications of the matrix, being defensive and protective at the same time. This indicates the role they play in the functioning of the centre as a uterus, the womb receptor of all thinking, feeling, intentions, deeds and consequences. This static, unmoved, icebox character recalls Thucydides’ description of stasis, the symptomatic paralysis of the political community, when infectivity and a lack of action occur (Thucydides 2013: 210–213). At any rate peristasis, this womb-like, immobile centre–receptacle–cave–form, is the basis of every generation, heightening the quality of entering and departing characters, as laid down in nature, through the matrix, a uniform, unitary possession on its own that becomes active by absorbing the previous movers. It has no power on its own, but gains power by the characters entering and departing it. In the peripteros example, from the movement of the priests in the room, their emotions and activities such as walking, reading, and sacrificing, the central receptor gains power for production. Their activities are in continuous movement, keeping the peristasis on the move. They are hardly exhausted, because their power is transmitted with intensity to each successive link. But the similarities do not end here. In Camillo’s ‘Theatre of Memory’ which was written in the 1530s the same transitive function is at work, just as in the 16th-century Villa Farnese, mentioned above, which was designed according to the divination qualities of the number sequence 3, 5, 5, as manifest with a pentagonal main building inside three embracing walls with five towers each on the outside fortification. According to my understanding, this castle was inspired by the cubic traiphum cosmology, of great significance in astrology and alchemy, for the elevation and stimulation of the progression of gradients. Most importantly, this was accomplished by walking, as in peristasis, along the corridors in a circle: I camminamenti di ronda. We would argue that this arrangement and mechanism captures a defining characteristic of every automaton, as it replicates the matrix, even if in a perverse way. Perverse, because the transferring process depends heavily on the character structure, while the automaton cannot exist without their annihilation. Once the characters are captured inside its walls, they never get full-born reality, only existence, as they are imprisoned in the suffocating incubator womb forever. An automaton by definition has a mechanical movement on its own, where no independent thinking is accepted by anyone. Thinking characters and the automaton are an unequal pair; and there is no doubt who is the loser. The I camminamenti di ronda is a circular walk that does not lead anywhere. It lacks the process or progress of walking, because it is not going ahead or forward. In other words, it is in steresis, with an infinite, cosmological orientation recalling divination: what was impossible in reality became transformed into possibility by the automaton, because anything finite cannot cause a motion that will occupy an unlimited time. The finite, the characteristic and articulated form,

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exists only in delimited time and space, as claimed Aristotle. This is the meaning of compositions, which can remain one and the same over an extended period of time – except, of course, if automatism occurs, which culminates in the collapse of characters when their soul escapes, for it is something that has never been named and is impossible to name, and which only becomes manifest at such moments as liminality. What mystery lies at the heart of the automatism? Nothing, or, rather, the nothingness of continuous annihilation, the destruction of compositions, the uterine progress, the multiplication of unformed and hybridised matter, as we have seen in the Tassili metamorphoses at Iheren.25 The main effects of subversion are dissolution, absorption and their continuous production of shadow uterine existences, in the absurd embrace of the hook of the ‘Y’, the puppets’ gravity. To return to the I camminamenti, this is shown by the absence of linear movement, where the walking person’s actual essence does not change by his movement, he remains in the same circle until his position changes into the supreme one. While an actual walking person is a character on its own, his soul is still in composition and so dependent on his own life, a sui generis self, he keeps walking until he reaches his aim; this is his process, his journey and continuation, development, progress (here etymologically, not in its modern meaning),26 advancing ahead, going forward to reach his town or other destination: to arrive. The linear walker is in his course or method of action, his power is in his movement to accomplish his goal, unlike the circle walker’s uterine character. Aristotle defined movement, rest and unchangeability not simply in terms of a degree of moving, but as having a particular meaning that defines the concrete individual, more or less as every single human being has a particular gait. Each individual has inside the principle of motion and concreteness with respect to place and growth. This understanding stands in contrast to artificiality, which is received from the outside, and thus remains mechanical. Movement does not exclude the sameness of the individual. Identity can remain stable over time in spite of the processes of growing up and ageing. The concrete individual is the cause of motion, being goal oriented, finite, having a position and a concrete appearance, arriving from one place to another, from A to B. Movement is thus a numerical strength for the Greeks that originates in the self-mover soul, the one that is rendered to the composition, but which also requires noble principles, as in Plato (see Phaedrus 245). The feeling machine This kind of automatism was introduced into political science by Hobbes under the name of ‘Leviathan’. Since then the feeling machine (a term coined by Leibniz in his Monadology) has been expanding, together with the growing inability of real, concrete individuals to defend themselves in the ongoing process of a continuous redefinition of social existence by the infinite growth stipulated by the original doctrine of ‘reason of state’ and its various later

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derivatives (Foucault 1981; Meinecke 1998; Troeltsch 2001). But it must have been no different at an epoch when written records were missing, like at Kaymakli, which is one of Cappadocia’s many troglodyte systems. Its paths lead through several chambers down to about 80 m below, until reaching water level. It contains several shafts that traverse all floors vertically. Kaymakli’s underground structure belongs to no known culture or civilisation. It is empty of meaning and significance. No image, signs or portable objects were found there. The name of its dwellers, troglodyte, is itself a name of surprise, given to those who suddenly enter into and appear from somewhere, and are ‘not like us’. Troglodytes differ from city dwellers or hut builders, the walkers or the settled: the troglodyte is a third kind of category, the secluded outsider. This expression provides a link between their physical appearances, their activities and their reputation. Troglodytes can be found all over the earth, from Egypt and East of the Red Sea,27 through the Balkans and Italy to Northern Spain. However, the trickster troglodyte as a constant mental type is different from a mere troglodyte. The trickster troglodyte is an imposing and sombre villain, who deceives their mother’s hopes, like Hephaestus.28 Tricksters are not simply born, they are rather transformed, multiplying in pernicious and infamous ways, bringing forth new interests through poisonous connections, building networks of debauchery. They are those who ventured into the bowels of hell, occupying underground caves, groping amid shadows performing shameful magic, stealing the sensuals29 of the souls as a way of payment to their demons – at least, this was the opinion about them.

Tartarus These forces of the underground appeared as irresistible and infinite, never dying and never growing old, rather fiercely productive and manifesting themselves in various appearances that made them even more relentless, fearful and strong. When Hesiod (2006) described Tartarus (Theogony, ll.712–818), it seemed to be rather the geometric form of a neck-circlet Y gravity, keeping these forces inside itself, than a natural phenomenon, recalling the way a tunnel gradually lets a liquid through its opening to a jar: [r]ound it runs a fence of bronze, and night spreads in triple line all about it like a neck-circlet, while above grow the roots of the earth and unfruitful sea […] And they may not go out; for Poseidon fixed gates of bronze upon it, and a wall runs all round it on every side. (lines 726–733) This underground is fenced and feared, it has a content with dangerous, destructive potentials, which is at the same time – or perhaps due to the same reason – a generative substance, following the logic of creative destruction; even the origin and destiny, ‘the sources and ends’, of everything on earth and

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even in the sky: ‘And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of gloomy earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea and starry heaven’ (736–738). This generative source is a great abyss underneath, regulated by gates in the unreachable depth of the earth, where human artefacts mean nothing at all, but desired with lust. Whosoever is carried there lies breathless, voiceless and soulless in a mute fluxing, overshadowed by the heavy trance of transformation. From there, there is no escape; once one is seized, one is held fast, with an iron will, and a pitiless want devours anybody trying to go out of the gates. In transformation, when characters are in the process of becoming something other than they are, reality is ruled out, as a new version is continually shaped in the process, ad infinitum, in a place where ‘the awful snake guards the apples all of gold in the secret places of the dark earth at its great bounds’ (334–335), and transforms, matrixes death into life. Troglodytes in Cappadocia can be thought of as acting out the Tartarus. In the soft tuff limestone often several levels of circulating paths were carved, as if snaking around the grim and hideous. Their system is similar to the diffusive Tartarus motive (as seen in Hesiod’s description above), though perhaps even more tortuous, changing direction several times, but its shape is similarly Y like. Replicating Tartarus could reveal its inner strength, maybe. The path leads downward, through several chambers, and then descends to the first level below. Kaymakli has countless low, narrow and sloping passages, distributed on several floors below the ground level, where the hollow receptacles are organised around shafts.30 They reach about 80 meters below ground level, passing through all floors, thus their shape recalls that of the shaft, like a square root.31 Kaymakli should be conceived of as a hollow, modelled after the matrix, which swallows and brings forth everything, after Tartarus.32

Snakes There are volcanoes in the background that give a reminiscence to Typhoeus (Hesiod, Theogony, 820–868), the dark, flickering-tongued snake-headed giant, with a hundred kinds of voices shouting from its several heads, who came to reign over men until Zeus defeated him and buried him under a volcano.33 Imitating Tartarus as a model may sound surprising, but the cautions operation required here in Kaymakli for working in isolation, slowly opening up the earth from level to level until the water level is reached at a depth of 80 metres, while attentively dissecting the structure with canals and vertical shafts is worth notice, and certainly requires some explanation – but originally also a model.34 Furthermore, the original operators certainly searched for something which was emitting signs, having breath and vitality. They wanted to reach and touch it, feeling its vibration in their web that grew thicker with every year of digging down into the earth through ever smaller observing and controlling zones until they reached the water level. When they reached it, the sky and the water were again connected, and anything that was once buried

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under the 80 m high solid layer disappeared through their vertical shaft which brought down the air and the sky to the fluid water level, to their meeting point, in order to meet with Echidna, another monster or just a different name for the same human-headed snake monster of mythology, or the dragon in alchemy: that ‘shines with points of light’ (Browne 1920: 204). This occurrence of the terrible which brings usefulness if skilfully exploited has a reminiscence in alchemical thinking, as the poem of the Byzantine alchemist Theophrastus, from the seventh century AD shows (as in Browne 1920: 204). Evidently this dragon was slain, its black and heavy, acid soul was separated and poured into separate hollows of a ‘gaping urn’ (205), which like a Y gathers the useful liquid and when its stream stops flowing it becomes clean of any impurity, and gains a rebirth of divine substance. The process of purification results in the bright, unspeakable marvel of all its wealth, when ‘Of sacred fluid stops to flow … / So brilliant, clear and wonderfully white’ (205).

Creative destruction The importance of such creative destructive operations for transformation is further confirmed by the already discussed Palaeolithic Shaft Scene. In both cases a shaft was used, recalling the square root sign (√), matrixing the merged materials together into new products. The aim is to rotate the victim rapidly, accelerating the spinning process,35 ‘with all the bands which girdle him around’ (204). This Y gravity, ‘with double edges hot and moist’ encircling the creature until ‘having cleft in twain’ (204), released its soul, so the replicators could occupy its emptied place. Both in the Shaft Scene or here in Kaymakli the hollow system corresponded with this aim. The first floor was the oldest, having a particular gate, that could be closed by a ‘millstone’,36 or a round-form stone, on one side of the closure, which led to the ‘operational theatre’, a chapel-like hollow with a nave and apses. These chamber structures were repeated on the other floors, until at a certain level a huge andesite ‘altar’ was created. Due to its height, it was impossible to bring it from the outside. Its 57 hollows (which could be the ‘gaping urn’ of the poem) each with a diameter of about 10 cm, had a particular operational meaning, either for keeping the ‘sacred fluid’ of the soul, or for any other kind of transformational purpose connected with it: that ‘poureth out to mortals all his wealth’ (205), with strict supervision over the process. This can be seen by the several peepholes for continuous observance of the series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end, one of the most characteristic features of this Troglodyte system. It also closely recalls the alchemical and other experimental laboratories, which perform a series of mechanical operations on beings in order to change them, altering their essence.37 They were assisted by the powers of Tartarus, or rather, by the interplay of two similar wills that filled the gaps inside the process, two aspects of the same attributes to amend wretchedness. Both the punished Titans and the

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troglodytes shared a hunger for acquiring the other, the Titans needing the forms of beings, while the operators wanted fluxes from them. The Titans were locked there by Zeus, while the troglodytes, like an army of blind and ferocious termites in repressed, intractable human forms attacked the earth with mile-long dig-outs to catch something in the damp darkness, unable to escape anymore from the bellies of the earth, earning nothing but losing the meaning of their life there, only spreading merciless violence and imposing terror on beings. From the very beginning their acquisitive position determined their end, but could it be the same as in Tassili, where a similar offering of the human shape was in progress? What was the model that was followed here? Is it possible that the replicators can stimulate action or contact, and what is more, are eager to do so, without having bodies or even a surface, or from the other end is it possible that one can offer one’s body structure for the replicators’ filling engagement? Magic and shamanism say, yes; but if so, in what ways, and with what consequences can one offer one’s body, or enact one’s own body for another soul to live in it, or send one’s own soul to occupy a different body? Birth and death are two possible answers for this question. The first means the entering of the soul into the body, due to the capability of the soul to take all kinds of possible forms, while the second its escaping, but with a distinctive difference between the limit and the unlimited, or what is dying and what is immortal. So, and still, how to infuse a soul, whether dead or living, into a body? And how to do the opposite, to fly the soul out of it?

The penetration of the replicator For the penetration of the replicator the closeness of the effluences of solid bodies in rapid motion that are able to heat up the air around them is necessary – this is why dances and other rhythmic movements like drumming, performed in rituals, are so essential in evoking the replicator’s will to possess. Good examples are Siberian or North-American shamanistic seances, Khoisan trances or possibly the Natufian use of the sound of enormous stone mortars. With the help of sympathising effluences that here serve for the sake of the penetration of the replicator, similar to distillation in alchemy (liquefying and then evaporating), the soul of the bodies38 can be driven out of its solid form, making it die first and then as a second step becoming reanimated into a new being and existence through possession by the replicator. This is the way compositions (including human bodies) can become the thing distilling or the thing distilled. Humans themselves can become the vessels undergoing distillation and so transformation. Still, such an entity becomes nothing other than a living dead, the ghostly image of a living one, evidently losing the sensuals of sympathy and friendship towards life in a distorted, reduced, but also multiplicative existence. The underground system was an automatic organ of transformation, as the movement inside the automaton is the transportation of the effluences from

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the replicator to the body structure. Such transportation is the actual meaning of production, how the enactment of energy influences the whole process first from the bodies to the replicator, and then ultimately to the agents, to the body and other compositions of the troglodytes, from life to death and vice versa. On the one hand, these were the effluences emanating from troglodyte bodies going down into the Tartarus and giving rise to fluxes that played an important role in setting up a correspondence of sensuals between them; on the other, these correspondences between sympathising fluxes also developed into energies for articulating a flow of the supply of sensuals for transformation. This was, as a fluxed matrix, perhaps a phantom movement, not real but still existing, having its own power to destroy or revitalise. Furthermore, this movement had a sterile, circular and not linear nature, requiring always new and new body structures to be involved and digested without the arrival of a proper birth. The troglodytes seem to be fully aware of the desperate nature of this move – why would there be gates everywhere otherwise? They serve to stop or block the exploding energy flow and withdraw the violent accumulation of fluxes.

Effluences In any case, it is precisely the gates and the shafts in the underground system that serve to control the effluences, ‘to change its nature’ (Theophrastus, as in Browne 1920: 204), as the row and column spaces in the matrix construction in mathematics. Through movements we can witness how effluences flow to life, how they in turn transport other effluences into transformation, and how ultimately they come to generate new, desperate, reckless existences: the living dead, as we claim. The living dead live in dissipation, lacking any restraint, engaged in selfindulgence, and – being without inhibitions – giving themselves up to debauchery. Once the structure of the authentic one is violated, its mind and good feeling become sickened and grow strange, which could only be soothed by the excitement of the awful and the exhilarating, as if sucking sensuals from the living, and so actually its survival depends on this parasitism. The one who alters nature, whose way of reaching knowledge is perverse, whose existence in short is an error, is the one who gains their reputation as a trickster: a cunning, degraded, primitive and brutal character, whose attitude is a demanding dissatisfaction, a dull dumbness. The dwellers of these rough-hewn habitations, deprived of light and clear breath, were believed to be enslaved by demons. Thus, they became an anonymous people, where nobody has a name or a self, just a rugged appearance. Yet, they were reckless magicians who transform beings and have the power to be in any guise they wish. For the Greeks, this asphyxiation of underground darkness bore hateful doom and death, bare blame, only we call it the trickster (Hesiod, Theogony, 213–220); painful woe, ruthless, avenging fates, dreaded anger and indignation, parts of a hateful age and a hard-hearted strife. Even in Hesiod’s dry, unromantic description of the

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children of the doomed night we can perceive traces of the abhorrence of his people towards such strangers, who did fearful deeds that bore fearful sorrows, resulting in endless fighting, lawlessness and ruin, as contained in his Theogony, written around 700–650 BC.

Transformation If the troglodytes were involved in specific secret activities of transformation, even metamorphoses, then some of their typical activities could be understood better, as they were the early, first producers of wine, beer, cheese or bread, just as they were involved in metal making or dyeing – the use of dye for changing the colour of something permanently is a transformative manipulation. Of course, this is not the full list, as other activities were done in secret. The simple logic behind them is always the same: how and when to cut short a particular fermentation process or, say, the natural progress of the body, and snatch its soul, the form of a young, virile, virtuous man, destined to live an accomplished life in full, with his own family and children, but instead to become deceived and enslaved in deprived disintegration. In one of their typical activities, in metal or bread or wine making, matter is exposed to heat that makes it lose its constraints and to yield its soul. Then, as a second step, in this death-like state, when its structure is voided, so its death has already started but not yet ended with a complete death, its fermentation is artificially stopped, thus rendered permanent in one way or another, not to allow the dying matter to enter into the otherworld, only to change appearances: to lose the authentic one, but not to reach a real one. The outcome is the living dead state, or fermented beings without borders. The coarse features of their makers, the troglodytes, their unpleasant and cold appearance frightened the people around them, betraying their activities: they are those who take lives away. They looked like seductive reptiles in human form – rife with magic in their dopamine frazzled zombie appearance. They were stained and emptied, vacuous: men of many demons, operators of dark forces, deviated from nature in the underground. Here, at Kaymakli there are several layers in the bowels of the earth, gates for emphasising the closure and the secrecy of the infinite in the transformation process. Their outlook is amazingly similar to the maze type corridors of the Rome catacombs of Domitilia, Priscilla or San Callisco. Most of the passageways were linked to some strategic points in the outside world, or to secret escape routes onto the surface, so the closures were not linked to the troglodytes themselves, except the peepholes carved everywhere, rather to the special content they had liberated and captured, which continuously filled the hollows and cups with its products. These dark burrows hosting a series of honeycomb cups were ‘[a]ll heavy with the weight of earthy bile’ (Theophrastus, as in Browne 1920: 204), big and small, around a number of central pits, providing a place for earthy bile during transformation. Little cubby holes housed receptacles, snug little alcoves that emerged out of the

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transformation process, which also enacted hundreds of other holes in the walls, repeating and imitating the bringing forth generation in nature, strengthening the effects of transformation by the intertwined sneaking passages. This was an effective logic, so well thought out that endless burying chambers repeated it, indicating survival–production, from Egypt to the Etruscans, or from pagan Rome to the Christians. Yet, this Kaymakli troglodyte underground structure is so unspecific, its purpose is so hazy, its paths are drawn into the darkness, into the damp sightlessness, without decorations and ornamental features, with no indication of burial purposes or anything similar, that we need to conclude from the remaining facts, from the ample and empty receptacles all around the walls, ceilings and pavements, and the watched character of every movement inside its structure that it was, as it seemed to be: a nothing-making automaton. Kaymakli’s main source for production is the void; it is channelling supreme essences for productive purposes. A gestation of matter, we should say, following Aristotle’s definition of the soul, who claimed that the soul has such a small matter content that it has no real existence outside the body: just a light pattern of structure, the form which gives a vital cohesion to the body. The gestation of matter is its incubating period before birth, when the body gets its soul, while it is still inside its matrix. Forms are quintessential for the matter, but not in themselves material, and only carry the image pattern from one correspondence to another during their materialisation in effluences. They search for resonance to fit the similarly shaped resonances in others in the receptacle body/matrix. Souls have no real independent existence, rather are sensual, imaginative properties of matter. They manifest themselves in bodies through effluences. The soul gives spiritual cohesion to the body, like the void gives volume and stability to the matrix: a kind of invisible, but sensual property. Characters are born from this unity and can bring their essence from one generation to another, as there is heredity, relating patterns transmitted to the next generation. Heredity is the ability of the soul to transmit into descendants all the substance it has gained during life. It is derived form a line of ancestors, beyond every individual being. When this property of the soul is disturbed, the set of given relations that were inherited, also called tradition,39 existing through a line of resonances, are suspended. But if we consider any concrete being, we understand that neither the body nor the soul is valid without the other. They are non-functional, devoid of any organic development without the other one; body and soul must be in correspondence in nature, in hereditariness and principles, but here in Kaymakli we see an artificial set-up: a factory of soul gestation, invoking the soul out of the body, and using it as if an independent, separable object. Kaymakli is not unlike the sarcophagus-vaults in Pharaonic Egyptian burial labyrinths with their underground chambers, which are connected by passages with stairways and corridors. While behind both these structures there lies the belief that matter gets its substance from the supreme matrix, but does not get its

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significance there, as any cultural tradition is missing. This labyrinth of Kaymakli is just standing alone, without the significance of the divine and human factors relating to the individuum and its inheritance. Burials or any other signs of transmissibility to the other world are according to established rules of divine descent. However, here this is missing, due to the evident lack of coffins or any other indicative sign of burial use. Instead, a kind of knowledge appears here, that can be called a ‘magical science’, concerning the flux (which evidently lost its supreme character) and the soul (in the state of being perverted into trappable matter), a perverse knowledge about their corresponding masses in the pressured wave patterns of the air, one for one – in the way that the flux makes matter filtered with its own substance, the soul, or the specific wave patterns of its faculties. This kind of thinking about the practical graspability of the soul is identical to Socrates’ fear about the Sophists: they only believe and trust in the graspable; for them the soul is a kind of matter, separable from the body.40 For Protagoras nothing is, but is always becoming (Plato, Theaetetus, 157A-C), as nothing exists in itself, but this nothing arises out of motion, in-between objects (which is fundamentally and exclusively a troglodyte experience and practice).

Gestation of the matter Indeed, in this region of Cappadocia, like Göreme for instance, the landscapes have the same soul-as-matter-responding-to-nature character as the one we described about Tassili, with its lunar landscape having a correspondence with its operators’ feeling and thinking. Behind the fluxed matrix, in reality there is a second layer of existence, the enduring, unchanging pattern of the otherworld as capacities for mimicry and for the sensual, something seen and felt in Kaymakli. The idea of gestation–automaton is further reinforced by Kaymakli’s seven rounded millstone forms, and the seven seats in the main ‘operational theatre’, that must owe something to the cosmological tradition of the seven planets that survived in the Sumerian and Egyptian cultures and continued in the ideas of Thales or Pythagoras about the sacred numbers of nature, also in alchemy. As the constellations move gradually across the hemisphere and reappear in the same regular successions, the pattern of the troglodyte activities have become adjusted to it. The varying speed of the planets across the constellations as a kind of nerve bundle again constitutes a different move, which should have been modelled underground in one way or another, if the system indeed happened to copy the matrix, generative model of the universe. Such indications are few, but they are present there in Kaymakli: in the seven millstone gates, in the circling passage-ways and the chambers which – together with the shafts – are perhaps miming the gestation of the universe for every living.

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Constellations In this andesite egg-form stone on the third floor of the Kaymakli, with its 57 hollows dug out, like rings miming the biomechanism of the cosmos, even their number is close to the number of constellations, in various traditions. We moderns know 88 constellations, 52 in the Northern and 36 in the Southern hemisphere, while in the Almagest of Ptolemy, written in 150 AD, there are 48 constellations. Their first, poetic description was given by the Greek poet Aratus in his poem Phaenomena, written about 270 BC on the basis of Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge. It followed the same rolling model, suggesting a matrix where everything is in a circular movement of birth and death, including a rounded cosmos and circular movements inside it that recurred in a cyclical manner:41 ‘All these constellations thou canst mark as the seasons pass, each returning at its appointed time: for all are unchangingly and firmly fixed in the heavens to be the ornaments of the passing night’ (Aratus, l.451). In this dark, damp dig-out in Kaymakli the constellations reappear, and with a mind working behind them, providing man-made models for the flux manifestations of the dead souls of Tartarus. The motion of the planets and the constellations is not and was never a matter known by many, and their cycles were not easily modelled and structured, but in an environment, like in the underground tunnels of Kaymakli where no disturbing factors frustrated one’s work, this could have been done after some initiation into the matter by a learned one. Yet, this is still not the full story. Of course, the constant efficiency of the process is highly questionable, as it is influenced by a number of factors, the constellations being just a minor one. Its vagus nerve is the troglodyte mindset, the stubborn joyless will to get in contact with the fluxed forces of Tartarus. Their underground system is a sensual minefield, developing enough vibrations to get in motion the whole system, for which strangely enough their naked will, combined with a technological know-how was sufficient. However, it needed constant input from various sensing, sensational offerings, sacrifices, pain and pleasure, as only such wild reflexes – should we say, the perverted Eros? – could regulate and sustain the flow of fluxes. Perhaps with increased pressure and stretch on victims it could be maintained for a while – but not forever; the whole system became dehydrated and died out. When and how, we do not know. However, comparing Kaymakli with Tassili and the engraved violated, suffering gods’ manifestations of the Palaeolithic caves discussed in the previous chapters, here at an uncertain time, sometime in the Neolithic or perhaps even the Iron Age, we are witnessing a complete, rapid and mature idea not only about the matrix, but also about its automatised version: how to unleash it into a full-length production process. Of course, the main ideas did not differ. The replicators, when not inside a body structure, exist in the flux form of independent existence. The name of Tartarus is not evoked here by accident. The otherworld has a name, has a character, which is indicated first

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and foremost by its appetite for possessing structured body compositions. Only in compositions can it multiply and replicate. It can possess all kinds of living structures, from plants and stones to animals and humans, as well as their wills and desires, exactly because it lacks an identification structure itself – they are accidental souls.

Eggs In Kaymakli the aim was stealing the souls of compositions and substituting them with the accidental replicators. The artery of the passages has the already mentioned egg form, a soul receptacle in the middle of the ground. Perhaps this was the scope of the whole automaton,42 as the Troglodytes must allow fluxes of sensuals to pass in both directions in order to produce a density difference; a one-way passage of only denser-than-average flux from level to level will cause pressure to develop, resulting in higher or lower density than it was before. The egg as the outside uterus was used at Iheren for merging together differently ordered forms of humans and animals during magic, but in order to see the birth of the whole idea one should turn back to the cave images of the hybrid animal-in-human forms, which always bring with them the sorcery connotation. In Kaymakli the dig-out passages were multiplied in every possible corner of the underground system, extending for many kilometres. For instance in the near distance, at another site in Derinkuyu, deep down, at the bottom of the shaft tunnel the last chamber is a movingly simple retreat, with painstakingly carved arches and niches in the central space for volatilising the flux of the Tartarus and reinvesting its vital energy in matter, as in preparation for gestation, where it is possible for the soul to become slower or quicker, or gain or lose density, as well as taking up another form, together or separately from the previous one. During this transformation process the major part of the density of souls is converted by exploiting the properties of the pressed soul in a move that is gathering and adjusting souls in the ‘gaping urns’ of the central receptacle for a new usage, for new versions, even for hybrids.

Multiplication But how to direct the accumulation of fluxes into multiplication? The aim is a complete living automaton, which is feeling together with its operators. At Kaymakli every little cog of it is carefully designed and checked, from the first to the last piece. The first problem the machinators had to resolve was how to transport the Tartarus flux, ‘to bear away the dragon’ from water to the air, from the tension of the cold to the warm, from the moist to the dry to the fluxed matrix. The text of Theophrastus quoted above is clear enough about the usage of different flux densities, how to operate the air density difference with such intensity that it is able to generate energy. Perhaps to pull the gate before each tunnel tube and then to pull the circuit to release the gate gives

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the automaton its functioning mode, as simply pulling the circuit will force the gate backwards and then release it. The air pressure, the accumulation of fluxes pushes the gate backward. With this play of air depression and condensation one can release a large volume of energy fluxities, which in the case of troglodytes’ dig-outs can presumably serve to animate objects. There is a certain simplicity in the functioning of this, modelled after the heart – it has a similar pumping mechanism. It can be easily fitted together by dig-out designs, with its gates and shafts for changing the flux’s density, which results in a simple and affordable engine–weapon. Fluctuating pressure into the tubes, chambers or shafts, which are like arterial vessels for blood, the replicator can manifest itself in compositions and keep itself alive and productive in them. An easy aurea praxis was needed for pulling up the fluxes of the Tartarus, to become the transformative agents for bringing forth new versions. The appetite of Tartarus was infinite, never dying out, cool and supercilious; this is why the titan name for the buried energy in Tartarus, without measure and limit, abundant was also ‘the joyless land, where are Death and Wrath and troops of Dooms besides; and parching Plagues and Rottennesses and Floods roam in darkness over the meadow of Ate’ (Empedocles, fragm. 121). Tartarus was little more than a Y, a rounded stomach together with the shaft of the throat, just an appetite and a consequence, a liminal chaos, the underground dungeon with the only entrance being a trapdoor in the ceiling for the prisoners to be thrown down, so it was easy to jolt it into action. However, one must be careful, as this is true only from the troglodyte’s point of view, and we have another story to tell. In reality with the sound judgement of the otherworld, Tartarus shut the souls of the dead up in his oubliette, and was resolved that they should stay there until they selected an appearance from among the lot, best suited for their inclinations, at least this is how Plato explained it in Phaedrus. The marvellous golden apple here is the generosity of thinking inside the genuine matrix, the charis rich and noble sensuals inside, during the process of generation for new life. While the troglodytes are stealing the flux property of the Tartarus, at the same time they pay back for the flux gained from Tartarus by feeding it with a supposed equivalent of the stolen fluxities, the souls that they gained from the living, while making living beings almost dead by changing their appearances, covering them with alien flesh: ‘from living creatures he made them dead, changing their forms’, while ‘clothing them with a strange garment of flesh’ (Empedocles, fragm. 125–6). The troglodytes of this joyless land were lonely, yet prosperous in energy for hunting down souls. They were first occupied with stealing the fluxities of the Tartarus, but it soon occurred to them that not only would it be exceedingly difficult to abstract the fluxities from this place, but also that, when Tartarus perceived its loss, it would not leave them in peace until they were punished or eliminated. So then the troglodytes had to compensate with substitutes. The deep force of such a correspondence between effluences was all that could be moved, pushed and forced

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into the shafts of the underground. Idle sensuals and idle troglodytes abounded in pitifulness, embracing each other, as if such mutual commiseration was the root of an exquisitely truthful companionship. Their misery thus led them to a lecherous, aggressive and intolerant dumbness, always being insulted and always wanting to insult, a life that is visibly nothing but a collection of vices, given that they considered themselves as absolved of all responsibility. Consumed by lasting sorrow and profound hopelessness, their tired apathy displayed an uncompromising zeal for catching others in their own misery. Souls as transformative objects must be sealed in their borrowed composition, otherwise they escape. This is well known in Alchemy as a way to capture Mercury so that it would operate, together with Saturn in the transformation processes, producing soft, effeminate, pertinacious objects, subverted by the alchemist operator, but channelled through the body of the alchemist. The operators’ action is a debasement, directing characters – supposedly for their own benefit – by all possible means of disguised power, leading them away from their more credible forms, as characters have been copied in an unscrupulous manner, taking up whatever disguise was readily available in order to fool the senses. The internet functions in the same way, as the algorithms incorporate the sensuals of the viewers into the process. But this process is a blockage, only producing different modalities of cancer and other maladies. Heidegger gave a voice to this danger when he said that the essence of technology is mysterious, lying in the potentially lethal technological process itself, which already ‘afflicted man in his existence’, denying his ability to become a principled being (Heidegger 1978: 309). As Empedocles reveals, and again connected to caves, for effluences to unite, they must share sympathy (fragments 89–94). The troglodytes operated by catering for and abusing sympathetic feelings. Nothing was in place with them, which underscores how substantial the shift towards magic, magical objects and sorcery became during those centuries in the Neolithic. The reason for such activities was likely the troglodytes’ searching for contacts with the replicators, using the souls of the dead to replicate them inside living organisms. In this way they could infect all types of life forms, submitting living structures to a flux that could result in as many applications of hybrids as they wished. But the idea of giving one’s soul to replicators continued in Alchemy, which further adapted these practices to definite mercantile uses. Their union with the void is itself a dynamical property (Atwood, as in Principe and Newman 2006: 390), which they then apply on their material by performing subversion through infinite division.

Technology The replicator is divorced from structures and from bodily senses, without any concern for concrete existence or for anything that is real. It acts by propagating and multiplying, by disturbing characters, invading, penetrating them, all of which produce a movement requisite to the state of steresis, which is

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measured by the increase of dynamical propagation. This is the aim of the process, products that have no roots, meaning and life of their own. In the Neolithic, technical products are starting to spread over increasingly large areas; the replicator serves as the dissemination of technology in the delirium of impotence in the hands of their operators.43 In this process everything wants a structure to fill and every character wants another one to fulfil, thus penetration turns into the furore of circularity. Both the replicator and the presumed structure participate in the circle of the subversive automaton. This is a reductive and bracketing process that cancels any self-perpetuating, independent resistance, border and limit of the body structures. This is how technology functions. In a mechanical way it aims to transform in a furore everything that moves on Earth, everything alive that has a character, or a self-movement. Technology is always there to cut, violate, disturb and enter independent, reasoning and self-moving beings. Sometimes it incites appetite in order to embrace an exterior force, or simply through extracting the life force of characters, as it is characteristic of masks, an original form of technology.44 The fear of compositions to suffer perversion at the presence of technology is not something we should take easily, and is closely related to warnings made by scholars as diverse as Mumford, Heidegger, Foucault and Gell. Heidegger (1978: 287–319) in particular warned about avoiding the autonomous logic of the advancement of technology, while Gell (1998) called attention to the expressive–emulative essence of technology, connecting it to enchantment and magic. We should add to the above a further aspect, the invitation of replicators by the operators into structures. How to cajole any structure into subversion, into union with the replicator, into a circular operational process? Is this the question of masking, deeply buried inside technology?45

Conclusion This ‘0’ sign is highly significant, for its circle conveys the catching, holding and entrapping of a composition. It is the positional number, which subverts (numerical) characters, numbers with name and operational quality for use and utility. With ‘0’ we move into subversive territory, into a new technological world, the world of the penetration and dissolution of all solids, the world which is independent from matter and place, into the voided Einsteinian manifestation of an inertial universe (Einstein, 2001). This is a shift from the linear transformation of the authentic matrix to the circularity of sorcery. The point is not only to focus on numbers, space, time as linear movement, but to identify the problem of steresis: giving validity and significance to inertia, delay, withholding and sterility. However, there is only one definition of forms (bodies): whether they are capable for internally driven linear movement with aim and goal, or not. But Einstein’s idea is meaning or expressing nothing, as characters have no significance in it anymore. Replicators are penetrating compositions for

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production, so there is no movement, no results, no addition, no creativity, no body and no soul anymore; the body structure gives up ponderability in order to replace it by the totality of privations, in line with the indication contained in the ‘Y’ steresis sign, the annihilation of the characters embraced in its arms. Steresis is a gap, something which is not, the nothing, but with a backward, at once delaying and capturing movement. A sterile society is the opposite of a healthy one, being full of blind corridors; a social irresponsibility founded on the maxim of error, where there are no precise laws, no ideas concerning sharply and stably defined bounding surfaces of compositions. Instead, characters are becoming ensnared, and a circled mechanism is ruling life to press out as many sensuals as possible. This is the way we have come to conceive of the world, and so we have gained the representation or reflection of the universe as a place of relativity, a relativity that is produced in an automatic way. Where there is nothing as ruling conduct, the nothing will rule. Only sterility has validity in this upside down turned framework, the sterility of the living and the productivity of the living dead. Steresis is a perversion, as it finalises something about nothing; yet, it is an error, since it lags behind existence, except when it is a preparation for becoming. This error even has a meaning, if it does not take away the quality of the operation. This is the case of the authentic matrix, which keeps such qualities. Matrix is a term of algebra, and with dead entities it is open to many interpretations; this chapter offered one of them, arguing that steresis is sterility, the appetite for possession, to such a point that it can consume even the loved one itself. Sterility is a hysterical state, lacking power and action, fertility and productiveness; it is a retarded state of barrenness, where actions are fruitless, and all intentions are in vain. Still, the charis state of the authentic matrix has to become visible again, in ways that are marvellous, as there is no other way in nature.

Notes 1 The unreal is unlimited, or it implies liminality, where there is vacancy, without top, bottom or middle, and there are undifferentiated directions up and down. This is why Aristotle considered this stage as a ‘mere shortage’ (Aristotle 2014, Physics, 215a). 2 Steresis and hysteresis are not connected etymologically. Steresis ‘deprivation, loss, confiscation, negation’ is rooted in IE *ster ‘steal, rob’, while hysteresis ‘shortcoming, deficiency, need, lack’ in IE *ud-tero ‘womb’. Their derivation is thus quite different: ud-tero became hystera, and thus hysteraios ‘following, next, sequel’ and similar words, meaning a succession of offspring from the same womb, but then ‘coming after’ gained the connotation of coming late, too late, thus of inferior quality. Hysteresis is present in Christian ecclesiastical writings, where it is contrasted with gift-abundance, while the similar term hysteréma means lack of faith or power, or in general needs. The meaning of steresis is simpler on a first look; however, *ster is one of the most prolific Indo-European roots, also standing for ‘solid, fixed’ and ‘infertile’, the three roots being considered separate. These roots

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gave rise to a number of separate words, like the latter to steiros ‘sterile, barren’, the former to stereos ‘firm, solid’, but these occasionally became again joined, like the word steriphos having two meanings: ‘sterile, barren’, derived from steiros, and ‘firm, solid’, derived from stereos. Such extension of the barrenness of infertility to fixity might have contributed to Aristotle giving such a huge emphasis, in his Metaphysics, to the word steresis, present in Plato only in Laws, and without any emphasis. Thus, as the two words already in ancient Greek ‘sounded’ quite similar, their meanings were brought close (‘lack, need’ and ‘deprivation, loss’ are quite similar ideas), and this can be reasonably extended, as this chapter tries to do, following on Heidegger’s (1995: 91–8) reading of steresis as ‘withdrawal’. See the radon level and the radiation accumulation doses in caves. One might even risk the idea that the Y sign recalls the raised arms of ritual priests and magi, well captured in the gesture of Saruman in the Lord of the Rings, when he is literally moving mountains (the Misty Mountain tops) with it, and which was perhaps first depicted in the presumed autobiographical depiction in the ‘Room of Monsters’ engravings of Pergouset, hypothetically dated 31000 BC. See linear change, as coined by Aristotle, Physics, 226a1; the term used is hystera, ‘following’, ‘next’, ‘sequel’, a derivative of the ‘womb’, a clear allusion to ‘linear transformation’. Shamanism arguably offers a better example for this than the priests of established religions. However, this is because in historical religions bloody sacrifice became the main task of priests, a technique that worked more uniformly and predictably than shamanistic seances. This is why we call the performers of such rituals magipriests, with Persian magi serving as archetypal models (see the classic description in Herodotus), the other key examples being the ones discussed extensively by Mauss, the brahmans and the Levites. It again recalls the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a film also centrally focusing on the ambivalence of desire as Hobbesian appetite. This is not something to be taken for granted. Human cultures have been built to erect barriers against the overflow of replicators into their life. Burial ceremonies are one of them. The alarming idea that the nil belongs to the womb is supported by its character that it is incapable of motion on its own, incapable for differentiation, it is not determined and not located of its own, it has no independent value. Equations are central for algebra, an Arabic word, while the origins of algebra are Babylonian. An equation is a rather tricky matter, as it assumes a perfect identity between two sets of entities, which in nature does not exist. Perhaps this is why it is often argued that the Greeks had no algebra; and in fact, in so far as the Greeks have algebra, it was geometrical, and fundamentally concerned with ratios. Mercenary motives are those take advantage of others by dissecting their existence, stripping them of their essence, and then refashioning them for the sake of their advantage. The shrewdness of mind is marked by cunning practices and trickery, as the lack of natural resources, the incapacity of differentiation, the sterility of existence results in a colossal appetite for the property of others. It needs carriers, which they gain by using tricky analogies to draw surprising inferences about subverting meanings and reasons. Sterility is horrid, as it has no inner power, it is unable to move by itself, unless carried by others. It must therefore either be in stasis, or continue its dynamism by subverting all solids, and then posing as power. It is this linear movement that is abusively incorporated in the idea of linear evolutionary progress. ‘The imprinting of heavenly rays upon terrestrial matter’, so crucial for divinisation (Dee 1978: 148).

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16 See the Tabula Smaragdina, ‘whatever is below is above’, like a circle; see also John Dee (2003). 17 Died in 1516; was a student of Reuchlin and teacher of Agrippa, central figures of Christian Cabala (Borchardt 1990: 63; Yates 1964: 145). 18 If somebody needs a concrete example, Sartre with his negative philosophy perfectly fits the bill. But in a more general sense the entire branch of critical thinking belongs here, whether by its desperate urge to criticise everything, or by its permanentisation of judgement in the form of consciousness. 19 Hesiod used this example, as ‘men are angry with a man who lives idle, for in nature he is like the stingless drones who waste the labour of the bees, eating without working; but let it be your care to order your work properly, that in the right season your barns may be full of victual. Through work men grow rich in flocks and substance, and working they are much better loved’ (Hesiod 2006, line 305). 20 The Greeks could not write down 1,5; for them, 3 could not be ‘divided’ or ‘broken’ into two equal parts. They only recognised the legitimacy of the 3:2 as a (harmonious) ratio. ‘Equality’ and ‘equation’ are connected and fundamentally alchemic symbols. 21 This complicity between the absolute state of Hobbes, the rationalist philosophy of Descartes and the disciplinary technology transforming man was centrally brought out by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. 22 Note that Puritanism, in its effort to overcome Renaissance corruption and return to the authentic sources of Christianity, indeed returned to the most questionable aspect of early Christianity, before its impregnation with Greco-Roman thought and culture, and which was the obsession with individual salvation – an oriental, especially Persian idea, centrally present in Gnosticism, apocalyptic thought, the Mithras cult and Manichaeism. 23 The two are ultimately identical, best seen by the smoothness with which so many radical Leninists or Trotskyists became libertarians or rational choice liberals. 24 This is expressed in an unsurpassable manner by Hungarian érkezik, or ér-kez-ik, a derivate of the most important Hungarian root ér, root of central words like value, maturation, reason, senses, reach, merit and many others. As its linguistically explicit form (ér-kez-ik) shows, it means itself a process: to ‘arrive’ is to reach an end, and yet as the suffixes indicate, that ‘arrival’ does not imply complete rest, but becomes repeated again and again. 25 Automatic movements, as it is well known, are attractive for small children, but for this very reason the obsession with automatism characteristic of modernity is a prime example for its infantilism, or the infantile senilism we discussed in some details in our Walking book (Horvath and Szakolczai 2018a). 26 Intriguingly, while both ‘process’ and ‘progress’ are central terms for modernist ideology, they were both hijacked from the terminology of walking; just as ‘method’ (originally meaning ‘according to the way’). 27 ‘Most scholars, indeed, derive the name “Erembian” from eran embainein, a name which later peoples changed to “Troglodytes” for the sake of greater clearness. Now these Troglodytes are that tribe of Arabians who live on the side of the Arabian Gulf next to Egypt and Ethiopia’ (Strabo, Geography, 1.2.34). 28 When Hephaestus was born, he was thrown down by Hera. In revenge he sent as a gift a golden chair with invisible fetters. When Hera sat down, she was held fast, and Hephaestus refused to listen to any other of the gods except Dionysus – in him he reposed the fullest trust – and after making him drunk Dionysus brought him to heaven (Pausanias, 1.20.3). See also the mystery cult of the Kabeiroi, who were also called the Hephaistoi, ‘the Hephaestus-men’ (Kerényi 1991: 57). 29 Sensuals are resonances, or phenomena whereby an oscillating system, such as a swing, will oscillate more strongly when it is exposed to a periodic force that is

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applied with the same frequency as that of the oscillating system. For example, a swing will swing to greater heights if each consecutive push on it is timed to be in rhythm with the initial swing. Shafts are tubes in the form of a voided arrow that rotates and transmits power, as the drive shaft of an engine. Could be an axis of a movement, could be imitated as columns, between the capital and the base: connecting the sky with the earth, bringing down the rays of light and the penetration of the earth into the sky. It forms a movement and transmits motion at any rate, whether it is a sinister or a cheated one: ‘the shafted one’ for the harsh or treacherous manner of the trickster. And shaft as the revolving rod that transmits power or motion, we will discuss later in this chapter. The square root of two is the irrational number, the famous ‘incommensurability’ of the Greeks, that is measurable in common units only by an endless, infinite decimal 1: 4142 …. Here the rock cut into down as far as 80 metres is irrational incommensurability with the purpose of challenging infinity. If the whole rational world conformed with rational principles, so the irrationality of the troglodyte square root would be shaken, its measure, form and harmony threatened. As an example, see ‘la cave aux sculptures’ at Dénezé-sous-Doué, the 16th-century upside-down parody of reality. In doing this, the sculptures are echoing the establishment in trickster mode, shattering its measures. Note that Hesiod was Boeotian, with links to Thessaly, thus Anatolia. See also Pindar, as discussed in Wolpert (2002: 77). Shafts, more than just a vertical space, are present in Atapuerca, where the homo antecessor were found at two sites in northern Spain dated in the Lower Paleolithic, in the Rising Star Cave (South Africa), where the human fossils discovered are 335,000 and 236,000 years old and in the Upper Palaeolithic Lascaux Shaft Scene (France) which indicates a trigger function to the shaft. For more about the shaft as a revolving, transmitting rod, see Horvath (2013a). In our reading the famous clinamen of Lucretius should also be situated here. Note also that here the two rather different senses of the word ‘spin’, to weave, but also to twist around, are joined. It is thus not surprising that the modern media-driven ‘spin doctors’ are so similar to the Zande spider ‘witch doctors’. Millstone is a fantasy name given by the tourist industry, according to a cliché. These rounded forms are at every level, often in the middle of the path randomly. The dominant contemporary currents of social theory, of course, deny that beings have an essence, which on the one hand is non-sensical, on the other reveals the trickster character and orientation of these theories. It is also interesting and revealing how such an idea could have gained a position of dominance. Originally, the critique of ‘essentialism’ was directed – following Nietzsche – against neoKantianism and its way of positing a ‘hidden essence’ behind its artificially conjured abstract categories. From this, however, almost imperceptibly the attack on such ‘essentialism’ was transmuted – in a manner the investigation of which could well be worth a PhD – into a general critique that any being could have an ‘essence’; thus, into a latent justification of alchemical processuality. All sensitive beings are alike in possessing a soul, according to Aristotle. English ‘tradition’ is derived from Latin traditio, meaning ‘give over’, or actively pass it on from one generation to the other. Hungarian ‘hagyomány’ is more passive, as it is derived from hagy ‘leave’, which expresses the importance of leaving this heredity intact. But both the passive and active aspects of tradition are equally important. The problem of this separation is much older than Plato’s thought, and continued to infiltrate philosophy and religion by the Stoics until nowadays. But the Greeks, especially Aristotle, did not accord too much importance to this matter. They did not see an absolute distinction between animated or inanimate matter.

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41 While the spherical universe was widely accepted in Antiquity, where the heavenly bodies move along a circular path (here the earth as well circular, spherical like the sun, moon and the planets) the Babylonian view about the earth was more like a rectangular box. The Pythagoreans located the centre in Fire (the sun itself is moving around this central Fire) and not in the Earth itself. But Plato and Aristotle adhered to a firm geocentric position. 42 Data collections and soul snatching are not as far apart as they seem to be. They both contain sensuals or sensual matters of the composition, the structured body of the individual. 43 Concerning the transmission of metal technology by the same routes as Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam, see Goody (2012: 155). 44 See also the stone masks discovered at PPNA Jericho, dated around 7000 BC. Beholding these masks is comparable to watching a horror movie. They thus illustrate particularly clearly the dramatic increase of fluxes in the Neolithic. 45 See also Norbu and Turnbull (1972: 166) about sensuals being incited by sexual energy or narcotic stimulation, consisting of sound ‘waves’. Of these, only those of a certain length are audible to the human ear. Matter is only visible or tangible within a certain range of wavelengths.

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And Death is demanding; we have much to atone for before little by little we begin to taste of eternity. Yet … the living are wrong when they distinguish so clearly: Angels, it’s said, are often unsure whether they pass among living or dead. Ever-racing, the current whirls each generation through both these kingdoms. In both it outsounds them. (Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy, 1989: 25) … we who rarely progress without mourning … (Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy, 1989: 25)

Power1 What is power? Can an anthropological perspective, understanding the term in the broadest sense, help reconsider the classical conceptualisation offered by Weber as power being either authoritative or coercive or, as for Foucault, that power is in constant flux and negotiation, but in both cases outside of the self ? Navigating between these two positions, the proposition offered here is to carve out a common focus on power in anthropology. This endeavour requires us to delve deeper into aspects of the phenomenon of power that fit neither into a Weberian conception of power as agency or structure, nor into the Foucauldian meta-power that comes from everywhere and pervades everything (Foucault 1988: 63). Rather, it will develop an anthropological perspective following in the footsteps of the German political scientist Heinrich Popitz, a major contemporary Weber scholar whose approach contributes to recasting the ideas of Weber and Foucault by putting major emphasis on the centrality of power inside every being.2 It will furthermore advocate a change of view from decentralisation to centrality, implying that human existence does have a real centre, is not decentred, and it is this kind, thinking charis centre that is the main source of power, while the raised power has no validity.

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The perspective on raised power is closely connected to an interpretation of technology. Though technology is widely considered a mere tool, and technological growth the highway to prosperity and a key to progress, a significant stream in social theory and political philosophy (Foucault 1979, 1988; Heidegger 1967; Mumford 1967) has long argued that technology’s impact on social life is broad and deep, and that the transformation of nature and use of its forces through technological means are often modelled on the similar organisation of human forces. Taking these ideas further, and in a direction not explored previously, I argue not only that technological processes take ‘technologies of the self ’ (Foucault) or the ‘human megamachine’ (Mumford 1967) as models, but that parallels between technological processes and social and human transformations are even stricter, incorporating the idea that technological progress simply destroys whatever structure exists authentically. The hypothesis that a precondition of any technological growth is prior destruction of the inner force of beings – whether inorganic or living, animal or human – that is the core of their resistance against external influencing forces has not yet been properly investigated, and neither have the implications of this destruction been properly drawn, in the sense that the more authentic structures were removed from reality, as if they had never even existed, the more raised power was exponentially growing. Since technology liquidates authentic structures, emptying their properties, reality becomes thinned out, as if blotted out by the disappearance of structures. Most importantly, the world was losing its cohesive force in charis and became instead animated by necromancy. Necromancy (see Greek nekros, ‘dead’, and manteia, ‘divination’) is sorcery by the evocation of the soul of the dead; it relies on the disembodied ghost, the one who has lost its composition.

Command or instruction Any academic work requires prior distancing. Given the complex character of this problem, however, the distancing necessary to render visible the problematic nature of technology, a central value of the modern world, we must proceed with extreme care. It requires a double approach, even a ‘meta’-distancing. Thus, we offer a joint temporal and spatial distancing from current, taken-for-granted practices by way of historical and conceptual analysis. Historically, I propose a genealogy of transformative technology, tracing back such ideas to the practice of necromancy and its two sisters, metallurgy and alchemy, siblings because they are similar techniques for penetrating into structures and producing an exponential growth inside. Conceptually, the chapter suggests that social and political transformations should be seen from the viewpoint of technological processuality, arguing that rites of passage and thus liminality (van Gennep 1960; Szakolczai 2009; Thomassen 2014; Turner 1967, 1969) are themselves technologically inspired.

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In order to achieve this purpose of breaking up structures, technology uses various diluting factors, or tricks. Through them it antagonises and polarises structures, making them undergo high-pitched sensuals, like suffering, pain, violence, hatred and love, doing anything that leads to the desired result of dissolved entities, emptied of resistance. This is done for the purpose of facilitating the entrance of the replicator, by preparing for it a voided place, as the replicator can replicate only inside structures. Technology is attacking all types of life forms, from humans, animals and plants to any structured organism, in order to arrange an empty space inside them for the reproduction of the replicator. The methodical, systematic arrangement that is called technology appeared as early as the Palaeolithic, where the Shaft Scene issued a command or an instruction about how this is to be done, or how entities could be supplied to the replicator.

Technology However, the role of the replicator is less clearly definable, as the replicator functions at multiple levels, creating coherences and meaning that at some levels are easily identifiable, but at others are not. It embodies the sensuals of the living, and as such sensuals are intrinsic to life, they can be easily recognised, but the operations on them are not so easy to perceive. Its role therefore is a non-role, or an in-between position, which is technology as a kind of sorting mechanism, operating the gates on the top of the shaft hollows, placing, arranging sensuals according to class, kind or size, imitating the authentic matrix, classifying feelings into new structures, new matter. The genealogical reconstruction of technology as the source of structure transformation also addresses the question of why awareness is lacking about the transfiguring, even form-destroying, aspect of technology. The assumptions and language of most contemporary theoretical approaches render it impossible to pose the question of the integrity of forms, to deal with identity change as a problematic precondition or requirement for technological growth. In contrast to these perspectives, this book considers power as a result of the perfect freedom of will, which is capable of giving without the need for receiving back. The possession of power is normal and natural; it is the inner capacity of every being to give, receive, return and thus proliferate charis, whilst not only keeping its borders intact and also resisting every external intrusion and so maintaining its own form. This includes the complexity of such inner relations of power, the strength within, which develops in harmonious exchange with the external world, which is taken for granted, accepting the fullness of existence. It appears as an integral and authentic modality of self-articulation.

The first power Such a vision of power was central in classical Greek philosophy, contained in terms such as arche (power as source), charis (power as goodness), and

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dynamis (power as passion), but it has been buried and forgotten with modernity, as captured and expressed in Heidegger’s ‘oblivion’. According to Immanuel Kant and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, human beings are unable to relate their senses to what is happening around them; they cannot know reality.3 Thus, it is impossible to live in harmony with the world, and hence an artificial transformation is needed to overcome this impossibility on both parts – meaning humans and the world. In Cartesian thought, the starting point for Kant, humanity is a production of thinking – understood as doubting. Such thinking would render God humanised or socialised, eventually culminating in Durkheim, whilst man and society become divinised.4 Only from such a transcendental position can humanity fight against the destructive forces of nature. It is in this way that the absolute, eventually ‘transcendental’, self comes into being in a contradictory manner, hence turning around the direction in which man is facing: towards his own obligation to himself, to become master over himself, or accept his destiny to be free, or being free to chose, in the complementary terminology of Milton Friedman and Jean-Paul Sartre. The same is repeated, with some important changes, in the Weberian notion of charisma as a ‘gift of god’ (Weber 1978: 216), once it has been trivialised and ‘democratised’, as in contemporary media and even political science (see Roman 2020). Such uses of the term loosen the occupation with concrete reality and blot out the – effortless – power of arche that operates outside consciousness. It can thus be defined as a second power, or a raised power, one that supports man from the outside, once the inner or first power has evaporated; hence one becomes inoperable for oneself in an easy and natural way.5 Behind the Enlightenment idea of liberating men from the burden and the destructive forces of nature lies a complete and total mistrust in man and nature, a civilisational breakdown in a ‘disenchanted’ (a term coined by Weber) universe populated by unstable and amalgamous elements, led by institutionalised and centrally instigated mistrust of and distance from others (‘and they take no account of their neighbours’; Homer, Odyssey 9.2). Yet, as with all political technologies, any political agent can manufacture resemblances between all things that can be produced, and bring to light the resemblances fabricated and disguised by anyone else, so the emptied structures, their parasitic occupations are not seen anymore: how everything around us has become subverted to the void; how the nothing darkly lurks behind each shred of entities.

The raised power (power2) But we can trace back to Enlightenment thinkers the ‘raised power’ idea as well,6 which took the idea of motion being external to the self from Newton’s Physics. Not only modern natural science and philosophy, but even political philosophy and political science followed Newton’s path of deriving from or

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originating power in in-between spaces, as the entities by themselves supposedly are empty and motionless. Nevertheless, it is one thing to discover the point of origin of the ‘raised power’ idea, and it is another to follow its trail forward. Political science in our days is more about proposing a fitting model for collective political behaviour in the contemporary world, rather than about an idea of that behaviour’s reality or otherwise, so it is not sufficient for measuring individual coherence. Concerning their respective times, the ancient notion of the power as individual strength was always linked to charis,7 to a pious existence, but the Enlightenment’s understanding of power as well as individual strength was largely an impious one. As for the Greeks, power is the pious soul itself, as in Plato (Phaedrus 245c): For the soul which has never seen the truth can never pass into human form. For a human being must understand a general conception formed by collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses; and this is a recollection of those things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with God and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up into real being. The contrast between the Ancient, self-controlled and orderly individuum, which is able to subject that which causes evil in the soul, and is also able to give freedom to that which makes for virtue (see also Meier 2011), and the Enlightenment inspiration that favoured ‘raised power’ has a further consequence. For political science, power is somewhere in-between entities; everything is honeycombed with it. This idea of raised power is an alchemical concept that thoroughly undermines the ancient idea concerning the power of those living in reality, who shared with others a pious life, and which is also called charis. Once you discard the notion that the power of the soul is charis, the centrality and thus the reality of life becomes external to the self. It is just as conceited to postulate that emptiness is existence as to argue that power derives from outside the self. Power is rather the centre of the self, as our power with respect to our dignity has more immediate impact on our reality than anything else. The need for a ‘raised power’ perspective can be understood only through experiences in which our power evaporates, and so we become as if dead. We can learn then about a black emptiness inside us, and life has lost all its charis. Here, in extreme cases, where even the very existence of the self is questioned, an integration with the replicators might happen, which builds into the weakened entities and into their life, and through which they can be passed on to productivity. The great theorists of mass society in the last century, like Le Bon and Tarde, examined the way such external forces might generate power in individuals in large assemblies, where people are most easily led, guided or manipulated from the outside. The difference in our days is only that such influencing is increasingly produced remotely, through electrical waves: radio, cinema, television, internet. We are just being moved to a

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further stage of such remote controlling through the virus pandemic madness, and the technological influencing works so perfectly that this is hardly even perceived anymore. The unlimited trust in institutions or constructions that are supposedly able to keep ‘Leviathan’ under control crowned the process of weakening charis for people who lacked the capacity to protect themselves. Needless to say, the term ‘institution’, like most of the vocabulary of modern politics (authority, representation, minister, clerk, office, to name a few), is a concept with a specific religious origin and meaning, so evidently the genealogy of the ‘raised power’ notion dwells deeper than is commonly accepted (for details, see; Koselleck 1988; Schmitt 2008, 2015; Voegelin 1990, 2000–2001). Institutions absorbs beings, one into the other, in a parasitic way, taking roots in schisms. It does not exactly mean that they have ceased to exist, just that they were transformed into living dead, into an existence without charis, without meaning, without reality – as charis and meaning are not some kind of additional aspects of reality that might appear for and be possessed under special conditions by the privileged, but are indispensable features of reality. Without charis and meaning things might exist, but they are not real. Such transformation unleashes Maxwell’s demon, which is increasing, enhancing while liquidating every structured form, resulting in that perpetual sensual automaton that is operating in a sorting way between high and low pulsations into their ever-moving replacement further toward the troglodyte hole of the irrational. However, conjuring up replicators is not the exclusive feat of technologised science, but it already characterises the dealings of the various protosciences like necromancy, magic, alchemy and metallurgy, called by the Greeks arrheton (unnameable), or ‘a type of knowledge that cannot be uttered’. Knowledge connected with transformation is associated with initiation rites, magic and metallurgy (Gell 1998; Parr 1958), visible in the Kabeiroi, offspring of the smith god Hephaestus, who is also linked to initiation (Kerényi 1980; see Horvath and Szakolczai 2020, Ch 3–4). This knowledge was unnameable: as a violation of the limit, it infringed the intactness of compositions, ruptured identities, and so destroyed reality, starting an accelerating spiralling movement of fragmentation, continuing into infinite reproduction in a catacombed state, an idea that we will develop in the next chapter. Such infinite, automatic processes of growth destroy the very possibility of charis in every type of existence, whether here or in the otherworld.

The sorting machine In contemporary times this is demonstrated in the tight affinity between three characteristics shared by modern thought and the alchemic way of thinking. The first, known as dichotomisation, dualism or bipolarisation, proceeds by breaking any structure to be studied into diametrically opposite poles, and absurdly pretends that the world is simply like this. The second can be called

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‘apocalyptic’, as it insinuates a decisive, conclusive end to history as a process. This is illustrated by the various political utopias, whether liberal (see Fukuyama), or socialist (‘C’est la lutte finale / Groupons-nous et demain / L’Internationale / Sera le genre humain’, as in the revolutionary song The Internationale): once the proposed and inevitable ideal state is effectively realised, history will reach an end. The third is constructivism, which claims that nothing is natural or given, as every aspect of social and human life is socially constructed and thus can be freely altered at will by the autonomous subject. Further, at the level of deconstructionism, the schismogenic twin double of constructivism, any meaningful aspect of social life is to be deconstructed, explicitly propagating an alchemic transformation that results in the dissolution of any given identity and meaning (natural or social),8 and its wilful recomposition through a kind of creative destruction, which liquidates and even vaporises. We argue that technology can be analysed as the proposition, and attempted realisation, of a genuinely alchemical transformative operation for raised power from dying compositions, to gain a power to utilise necromancy, which involves the dead, the death-force of dying souls, who experience an intense, seemingly unbearable pressure that they cannot endure. Another simple technicality is to open further an empty space inside the body structure in order to facilitate the replicator’s penetration, a kind of sorting machine. A series of magical tricks are deployed around these processes: manipulating the dead, resurrecting the dead, promoting evil (etymologically identical with limitlessness) in various ways, communicating with the deceased, summoning their spirit as an apparition or raising them bodily, performing divination/divinisation, foretelling the future, etc., where everything circulates around the division of the self, as implied in the death experience, but now in the hands of techno heads, as technology, after its Palaeolithic invention, is now increasingly occupying the place of the authentic matrix. Operators who are sitting on top of the hollowed shafts, sorting out by cutting or forming material structures, as if using a stamping or forging machine, controlling the entrance to the otherworld, do not allow the passing away, unless to undergo a transformation into a living dead that cannot die and just produces and multiplies endlessly. This perpetual motion automaton makes the world asphyxiated, life stifling and existence suffocating – where charis all but dies from lack of oxygen, becoming progressively weaker and weaker in a condition where every bodily structure is leaving its apportioned physical form, losing the bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain their given order, receiving instead a hybrid one, itself a hollow device of egg forms, with its conical holes, as seen in Iheren, Tassili. Though we certainly do not know how necromancy, the forbidden (secret, arrheton) knowledge escaped from its hide, we can at least perceive its effect mechanism and direction. Indeed, there is even a guiding thread to assist onlookers in this historical investigation, viewing the effective growth through the structure mutilation that comes from the mechanical processuality of the

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technological knowledge of alchemy, metallurgy. However, such evocation could not take place until bodily forms were actually summoned. This also requires a matrix imitation, a favourable position of hollows, pits, caverns, shafts, or similar square-root forms, in the company of containers of fluxing material (water), like lakes, underground rivers or the former sea,9 where the evocation of the ghosts/replicators was thought to be easier. Palaeolithic caves with their underground rivers, Tassili with its valleys and peaks, Thesprotia near the river Acheron, the caves of Laconia, Taenarus, Aornos, Heraclea, or the cavern or Cumae in Campania were all typical sites for calling up souls from the netherworld. In the Odyssey, Ulysses digs a pit, pours libations around it for the dead souls, and sacrifices a black sheep whose blood shades the drink before speaking to him, evidently without denying that souls have an independent existence.

Necromancy In tracking down this tradition of necromancy in metallurgy, the name of the Greek smith god Hephaestus, with his emblematic, problematic smithery skills, inevitably arises. A relevant myth has him spending nine years at the bottom of the sea, mastering metalworking in the company of Thetis (Détienne and Vernant 1978: 300). Several motifs entwine here: gaining a craft out of chaos, with the sea as the primal element, a shapeless yet material essence; the cunning, shape-shifting Thetis/Metis; the character of mimesis. Each left its mark on the ever changing in-betweenness and so formlessness in the bisexual smith figures, often semi-gods associated with metalwork, like the dwarfs of the mountains, the Dactyls, the Telchins, or the Kabeiroi (Blakely 2006; Kerényi 1980; for further details, see again the Tricksterology book). Hephaestus yearns for a transcendental change, approaching compositions with unlimited desire. His escape from reality in order to spend nine years secretly, inventing an unknown, probably forbidden craft extracted from nature has violently parasitic elements that are combined with a possessive, hypnotic, binding and enchanting power. This power is comparable only to that of Aphrodite – not accidentally his wife, though the couple consisting of a lame dwarf smith and the beautiful goddess of love always created consternation for interpreters. His fluid, fungible power works like a net that could paralyse its catch with surprise, as happened in the myth of Ares and Aphrodite.10 Hephaestus keeps a tight control over Aphrodite and outright makes her the final basis of his incantation, according to the interpretation of Yates based on Bruno’s Thirty Seals (Yates 1964: 283). Thus, the name of the ‘Sexsmith’ is not just the chosen name of a contemporary singer, but a fortunate allusion to the lame parasite, who replicates only inside the living cells of his victims, transforming noble desires into a vulgar penetration in order to be productive. His love is as absurd as bizarre, inappropriate, his smithly absurdity being attested by his motley appearance, combining an incongruous mixture of male and female, old and young elements.

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If we have a look at the appearance of the metallurgist, the first thing to be noticed is its eager look to catch the souls of the elements, as seen in the illustrations of De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola, published in 1556 about the state of the art of mining, refining and smelting metals (Agricola 1950). This technically detailed sixteenth-century textbook on metallurgy, with all the naïveté of the images, shows us a distinct type: the smith/metallurgist, a version of the Magi ideal-type. These agents who undertake to search out, find and smelt ores into metals have particular rules and strange customs, but definitely a commanding power over nature. In the images the smith hunts down nature: stones are burnt; things are made to suffer, the void inside them is opened wide by the result of the operations of the portrayed hooded men, with their masked faces, the mutilating sickle in their hand, through their pits dug as hollows of transformation in the earth. The curved legs of the smith allude to magic circles, where things are merging into each other and where matrixing occurs: see also the circle of the furnace and other enclosed spaces, or the conical shape of their Phrygian cap, sign of demons of elimination, annihilation, death (Kerényi 1980, 1986). Mask and hood, the traditional fool’s uniform (Pizzorno 2010), suggest a subhuman dexterity, a sureness of the eyes: feeling the way towards their target for the living soul of the body structures, it must not be left intact and full. Note the smiths’ hood of invisibility (called the cap of Hades), their sickle sword (an aspect of magic) and the mask, attributes that deform or disintegrate entities. Agricola’s book is conscious of its specialised knowledge on disintegration that must be learned, as this is a special craft gained from past masters. Here we can trace the elements of the modern notion of the contrast with the fluxional, chaotic, void-like stage of nature, where something or somebody must be set apart from it to guide participants out of it. To set the effect mechanism in motion, there must be somebody who infringes upon the causes, imitating the creative law and order. The history of metallurgy offers pertinent examples of the alchemical thinking about the irrational black matter – there stands an adept figure: the learned, experienced blacksmith, who has the ‘equipment’ to provide the invaded with guidance and can generate a new form out of the formless liminality for salvation. Yet, the smith does not crave mere possession – to command power over matter, instructing and ordering it to reach the desired form, embodying free will in contrast to the underlying structure of tyrannical holism with its priority of the whole over its parts – for they themselves are servants who have no order, rank or self-discipline, but only a pernicious will to devour and dissipate souls for making place for the replicator. They are themselves the desire, and they desire everything that has a name, a face: a composition. My aim now is to illustrate how these ‘universal soul consumers’ trap, poison and smother their victims in order to deprive them of self-support. The figure of the smith is prominent in this inquiry because it is the one who desires and achieves everything – shaping stones first by hammering, cutting and grinding, and then by using heat to obtain metals that, when molten, can

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be cast – the one who obtains knowledge about the secret manipulation of nature, stones being the registries of the history of nature. Stones are not just senseless objects, but as every thing in nature are sensing, thinking entities. They have sensuality, act and react with the actors as hundreds of landscapes prove it; there is life and death in them. Their soul is neither a brain nor a source of imagination but a sensual that resides in their body structure, including a principle about a life in order and harmony. The smith is a craftsman, but for thousands of years was also an intellectual luminary who knew from his concrete experience and also learned from necromancy that everything in the world has a reflection of and an image analogy in the other world, or a correspondence (using the terminology of Baudelaire); what happens here is registered and replicated over there. Every manipulation here draws a mirror effect of rays over in the other realm. The only difference between the two spheres of existence is ponderability. In this world, things are weighed, structured, visible and tangible, not permeating all space, only everything its own body structure, which is solid and not elastic, without flux, so clothing itself in a body and unifying its properties with matter. In the otherworld, however, existence is in fluxionals, while sensuals are common both in reality and in the otherworld. Yet, the smith does not have an idea concerning the extent of the principles that bind the two spheres together. While his operation on nature is promptly demonstrated and actually works, repeatedly producing wealth, progress and prosperity, finally all this increasing, enhancing and adding only ends up reducing, diminishing and subtracting nature, since he liquidated the soul of the various body structures. When the metallurgical process is broken into automatic sequences, mirroring creation through the iron rules of logic, it is creating the absurd, nonsensical third sphere of the living dead, a sea of dissociated, accidental replicators. Of course, the identity of stones or metals can be changed artificially by recombining or altering the proportion of composing elements, literally making them die and thus suffer by violating their previous proportions, pulling them into a state of desire to escape from deprivation for a new form. Moreover, the whole process can cycle within tightly sealed matrixing pits without any end: more deprivation brings more desire, and more desire results in more deprivation in an automatic way towards a perfectly technologised enterprise.

Divination In other words, necromancy that supposes belief in the survival of the soul after destruction has a mirror image in metallurgy about the possession of a special knowledge by the dismembered soul, and the possibility of its relocation into a different structure. The circumstances and conditions of necromancy and metallurgy could be varied, but very often are the same, like the megaliths on the mining island of Elba in the Mediterranean (see the via del Granito), with its standard circles, stone eggs and other receptacles like standing stones and Y forms, carved and created in the Neolithic. Other

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similar sites exist in Sardinia (Pranu Mutteddu) or in Corsica (Cauria e Palaggiu) and many others – in the Neolithic, necromancy was closely connected with metallurgy.11 Not only the time, place and rites to be followed are connected or the same, but necromancy, divinisation and demonology are in close relation with metallurgy in the technique they followed: offering an empty space for the replicators to be filled for production. The same holds true for alchemy, and still more visibly so, as it merely imitates the invention of necromancy that was traced to the Shaft Scene. The alchemists came to see identity transformation processes as a mere imitation of nature, where matter both disintegrates and is created. The huge difference between the two processes is the charis component of the first one and the mercantile will of the second one. In alchemy, the previously stable quality of the compositions is dissolved by various machinations: heating, burning, sublimation, descent, distillation, calcination. The will of the alchemist is oriented to make matter better by disintegration, and to please the replicators with reintegration. In the alchemical vessel, modelled on hollowed pits, the elements are losing their character, becoming mortified, as all distinctions between them are eliminated; their soul was released and now they have a new form, where anything can be printed on them; they are now occupying a new space, taking up a new appearance, gaining a new character, the noncharacter of an in-between existence, a third one: neither living, nor dead, rather a living dead. The Greek term ‘met’allurgy’ itself, according to one etymological interpretation, means ‘one after one’, alluding to the magical processes to which stones are subjected, in order to be transformed into metals. Should it be an accident of geological peculiarity that all these necromantic and metallurgic places are literally covered by egg-form basalts? This growing imitation of creation was – at least it seems to us – quite efficient: it attempted to assert itself against boundaries and break free of constraints toward new desires and expanding possibilities. Removing entities from the world and adding completely new ones by a technique of causing absence and installing new characters, first by weakening and then by mounting them, means imposing on them a new property that now has an eternal battery for growth in its deprivation of self-support, feeding on permanent self-destruction. Metalworking with smelted stones was a new craft, and especially now that it was talked about openly; it was so new that before Agricola nobody publicly revealed this secret, arrheton knowledge. Gold, the first metal to be recognised and utilised, could be obtained in a pure state without violent operations, and it is also easily shaped, so its manufacture cannot be considered a technical practice. The Bronze Age takes its name from the first metal obtained through violent mechanical techniques, which were obtained probably from necromancy, as our hypothetical idea states it. In order to obtain bronze, copper was first smelted and then mixed with tin. The divinisation element is present both in the liquification of the elements, and in the merging process. This process was first explored in the late 5th millennia BC in

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South-Eastern Turkey (Mersin), and almost contemporaneously in the Balkans.12 The procedure changes the reddish-orange, flexible copper and the soft pale tin into a third substance: the hard, brown, enduring alloy, bronze. The transformation leaves the underlying matter in a way intact, as it remains a metal, but smelting transforms the character of both the copper and the tin into a new metal, bronze – an expanded identity. Copper, like gold, could be found in pure form, but the conversion process of smelting it and mixing it with about 10 per cent tin made the result, bronze, the first metallurgical product. It is certainly no accident that the biggest mercantile centre for bronze, Troy, is associated with the first significant documented example of liminality: the Trojan War, an identifiable world-scale liminal crisis and the origin of ‘world history’; and the travels of Odysseus, the origin of ‘world literature’, with an entire series of trials and testing, including separation, shipwreck and encounters with monsters, titans, nymphs and witches (which are not always easily distinguished from each other), until the hero’s eventual return. Here Paris appears as a thief (a real, word-by-word penetrator (and divider) of the wholeness of Helen, considered even by Goethe as a principle of beauty and as the wife of the king of the Spartans and abducted into exile),13 a parasite on friendship who subsumes the treasure and pride of the Spartans – their queen, the daughter of Zeus – while he is the guest of the Spartan king Menelaus.

Metallurgy The Greeks associated the similarly greedy, lascivious reputation of Crete, another major centre of bronze production (in Greek mythology Talos, the bronze giant of Crete, was created by Hephaestus himself), with the story of Pasiphae’s illicit love for the bull and the resulting offspring: the hybrid, named Minotaur, was hungry for young sacrificial victims, and was famous for its never satisfied hunger for possession, annihilation. Evidently from the very beginnings metallurgy combined possessive, warlike aspects with peculiar, forbidden, sexual connotations: the merging of sexes, ages, parental links, even animals with humans together.14 The sex smith does not simply confuse borders but dissolves resistance of decency and self-control to his superhuman transforming will, invalidating most ideas of charis. Invented in the Neolithic, the new craft of metallurgy was probably a side product of necromancy itself, a way of voiding the structure, and offering the emptied space for the production of replicators. Into this necromantic practice metallurgy itself added two elements, not novel but only alternations. One is to catch the escaping soul, and the other to make it accept a new form, character, structure. Factually, these hybridisation processes brought a new element into necromancy, the ritual significance of dead bodies, giving a frighteningly factual significance to the word nekros, ‘dead’, and manteia, ‘divination’, which before the Neolithic implied magical rituals for enacting the replicators, but without dead bodies involved, without bloody sacrifices.15 Although the technique remained the same in all three cases, it had already

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grown into a perpetually moving sorting automatism during the Neolithic, much before Hobbes and Leibniz elaborated the idea of the feeling machine – though without as yet returning to the idea of sacrifice: this became a reality only with the French and especially the Russian and Chinese revolutions, promptly codified by Durkheim and problematised by Mauss. A sensual is a given substance, a definite wave, just as the soul is characterised by the oscillation of vibrations inside some given space. Any structure, like the body, can contain them, and what is more, they are looking for a composition, a structure to be occupied or possessed, and in fact any structure in nature – stones, animals, humans – contains them in an ordered, pre-given condition, as we all have souls. But they can be chased away, called in elsewhere, or in any other way they can escape from and return into the body. The whole movement can be regulated in an automatic way, in order for the operators to raise up its power, if the knowledge of how to do that is learned, with necromancy, and metallurgy and alchemy, and also sacrificial rituals. These differed greatly from all other arts, as they explicitly solicited sensuals. The man-made invocation of an otherworldly power, its manipulation to achieve a practical effect, was embodied in the technology of metal making, a knowledge that seemed to pass through the eye of a needle, the hole of the arrheton, the forbidden craft. The smith’s art requires forbidden skills, serving demons; its task is to evoke dead spirits and ghosts, and intensify the agency of evil spirits and death interference, and then to command and master it. The smith swears to them, sings songs for their sake, makes prostrations, observes chastity out of invitation for their powers, fasts and macerates the flesh in their favour, and sacrifices beasts and his own blood for their pleasure, so that in the next stage his turn might arrive, and with it the opportunity to gain power over them (Kieckhefer 1998: 71). The connection of smiths with sinister powers is known in many cultures, still much present even in ancient Greece.16 The smith gained knowledge about the disembodied soul, so although they were sometimes despised, they were always feared, as the diviniser was supposed to be the recipient and container of the soul of the dead. Cursing or insulting them was considered unwise, as they could wickedly harm.

Bipolarities Bipolarities direct the smith, who on the one hand commands and exploits the forces, but on the other dedicates himself to the same powers by which he is enslaved. It is this double bind structure that distinguishes circular, mutually enslaving power games from genuine authority, and it is sad that in the name of democracy modernity promotes the former at the expense of the latter. Genuine, authoritative power always implies mutuality – like that between parents and children – but it is never circular, unless abused; it cannot be simply turned around or reversed, as if by another turn of the screw. Despised and outcast, sacred and untouchable, the smith is always a

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dark figure, together with all the other professions that have contact with death, the dead, with dying corpses. In mythology his helpers are all sort of underground people, like dwarfs or the Kabeiroi for instance, both associated with metallurgy.

Ghosts Ghosts are conjured in various ways. First, the smith’s metallurgical operation interferes with the harmonious growth of the elements; second, he steals their properties during an imitative operation that symbolises submission by subordinating properties to each other so that they might imitate each other; third, the prima materia are afflicted with violent passion until they yield to the will of the smith, whose disintegrative energy is now reinforced by the replicators, and thus burns indissolubly, like a storm or a disease. All in all, the smith makes the ordered structure corrupted, inviting the replicator into a space that has no application to ours, but in which and from which the replicator continues hybridisation. The smith builds up terror from the outset, a terror that in a different form – now crushing to unite – necessarily returns at the end, and starts the cycle again, which is never ending. This forceful unity offers neither solution nor solace – indeed, quite the opposite. The smith creates an obscure situation that necessitates his intervention, either because the elements are too weak to survive on their own, or because the overall confusion accelerates in liminality. What is more, the smith’s general practice is to offer a sacrifice (Blakely 2006; Forbes 1950), thus more blood, more corpses, more souls to compensate for the already lost ones in order accelerate the decline, the induced state of flux. The secret manipulations of necromancy, the soul-theft, the dismemberment of compositions, and the wicked, harmful nature of tortuous procedures contributing to the voiding of structures are all attributes of the Trickster – the versatile demigod of both material abundance and disintegration into death. The smith and the Trickster face one another as if playing chess, as in the folktale about the devil who wants to bring the smith to Hell but always fails because the smith manages to outwit him and ultimately remains in his smithy, still able to unleash further wickedness on mankind. As in divination, the crucial overall motive is sacrifice, an act that guarantees the involvement of ghosts and their demons. Summoning up a ghost as an apparition, using the dead as a weapon are the features of necromancy that eventually became spread all around the world, like the invocation of spirits, trances, shamanistic seances and so forth. Rituals of sacrifice evoke this original technique of offering a body in exchange for gaining occult powers (Girard 1977, 1989). When stealing a piece of property, the trickster gives himself up to be possessed, or sometimes offers a third party in exchange. Most often, he is the only survivor, and understandably, as he substituted himself by others through sacrifice. Pleasing ghosts with confusing diversions, from music and dance to the offering of sacrificial victims, the smith uses all things that nourish the replicators and

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help build sufficient strength to compel and channel their energies according to his will. He calls upon their aid and creates space for them, with the guaranteed result of material multiplication (about such growth, see Walker 1958).17 However, as in William Blake’s Milton, where the command ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’, as the ‘New Jerusalem’ will be built ‘among these dark Satanic mills’, these results imply an absolute acceptance of whatever happens to oneself on the voyage toward making gold or toward becoming gold. As alchemy came to imply, not just the transformation of matter but self-transformation, expressing total subordination to events higher than you for the sake of reaching the stage of enlightenment and also, significantly, directly linking the old and new ‘industrial revolutions’, the modern industrial revolution is a direct heir to prehistoric metallurgy. Whether this subservient will is deconstructive, tossing identities into an erratic, wobbly liminal nothingness of the sensuals, or it just intensively cultivates technology as an end and beginning in itself is still open. The point where beginning and end touch is by definition the apocalypse, and maybe technology operates inside the apocalypse, stressing from the start the outlook toward the end, thus implying a necessary return to the beginning, which is in fact the fluxed matrix. It is not often taken for granted that splitting, breaking, denominating or fracturing identities aids the pursuit of growth, multiplication and wealth, except in the belief system of the modern economy. In contrast, classical antiquity considered this knowledge of dividing entities forbidden, for it necessarily launches an infinite reproduction of identity splits in a chain reaction. Actors continue to generate residual splits into identical units, into infinity, or set in motion a schismogenic process, in the contemporary anthropological terminology of Gregory Bateson (1958, 2000), which was strongly Platonic in inspiration. However, as this chain reaction of identity splitting releases more energy than any other action taking place in reality, where lines, borders and constraints exist, it necessarily pushes us away into the absurd. Such a process has already occurred, and in a world-historical scale, in Antiquity itself, has resulted in the formation of the first large multi-cultural empires, called ‘ecumenic’ by Eric Voegelin (1974), and identified as being driven by an internal void, or a ‘leakage of reality’ (Brown 1982: 32–40). The problem is that whereas growth and wealth are at once perceptible, the corresponding sense of dissolution is much less so, and thus can easily be hidden. The technological utilisation of identity split and its sorting machinery first appeared in a systematic way with metallurgy as the first industry, and with alchemy as the first philosophical quasi-religion. The common method for raising energy within a closed sorting system is by means of a fake, duplicated matrix.

Alchemy Since Chinese philosophy from its inception developed in tandem with alchemy (Chikashige 1936; Needham 1983; Sivin 1968), via the connection with concrete performance of a ritual technology, helping to transform matter

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and ignoring the protection of entities that was central for the Greeks, comparable only to the Babylonian case, Chinese thinkers attributed a vast cosmological significance to technology, believing they were purging the natural world of its impurities and thereby redeeming it. Around 600 BC in China alchemists, a peculiar class of soul makers, came to see transformation processes as an imitation of nature. As a new discipline, alchemy later passed through many transformations, but identity change remained at its forefront. Gold was considered a paradisiacal metal, and its successful production, or the artificial creation of a like image, necessarily evoked its connotation with the promised land flowing with milk and honey, the land of youthfulness (*ver, virile, virtue, virgo; see also Hungarian ver [beat], vér [blood], veres [red], férfi [man]), the blossoming green garden full of virtuous men and virgins. As Hesiod (2006) said about the golden race: they ‘lived like gods, with carefree heart / remote from toil and misery’ (Works and Days, 109–13). The alchemic divinisation or rather necromantic operation for achieving this real or metaphoric golden state consists of forcing the participating elements to undergo a repeated cycle of dissolutions and coagulations, leaving the elements to die in solitude and to be reborn in different, productive structures. Such transformation dissolves the original identity, the soul being transformed into the prima materia that alchemy defined as the original chaos. Continuing with the alchemical vocabulary, this material is then ‘coagulated’ into a new, purer form. Each cycle of dissolution and coagulation further purifies or sublimates18 the substance so that opposites are reconciled, or their differences united, through a cycle of separation and conjunction. The addition of alchemy to the discoveries of metallurgy gave this technical enterprise a theoretical underpinning. Not only does the transformative process make the imperfect perfect, in the alchemist’s view, but the inanimate metal also acquires the qualities of growth – a multiplication achieved by marrying male and female ores, whereby new metals are born. Such bipolarities have been an obsession in the sciences, straight inheritors of alchemy and its technology in the last centuries, along with the contemporary fads of deconstructivism and its mate constructionism. In this way a series of antagonisms, opposing the oppressed and the ruling class, the raw and the cooked, the female and male, the savage and the civilised, purity and danger compete for the attention of the scientifically oriented mind, which quantifies and restructures their identities. This mis-cultivation of reason has probably the same efficiency as its metallurgical model source: it diverts attention away from the authentic, proliferating an ‘unreal class of image making craft’ (Plato, Sophist) that comes to prove the absurd, just like Marxism as a scientific method, in that reuniting opposites after their factual or symbolic death only produces beings that are ignorant, deluded and wasteful, and not only in knowledge. The instrumentalisation of pain and suffering by alchemy was a new invention that replaced charis, one that followed necromancy on a mass scale, and eventually culminated in modern instrumental rationality. Its procedures

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were theorised as follows. Alchemy attached a methodological significance to each ore, which was thought to receive its character from a particular planet linked to heat, cold, moisture or dryness: the Sun is linked to gold, the Moon to silver, Jupiter to tin, Venus to copper, Mars to iron. But the most common elements of all metals are Sulphur (male, the planet Saturn – the damp, cold, and slimy, the ringed planet that is furthest away from the sun) and Quicksilver (female, the planet Mercury, closest to the sun), whose union produces a child: the metallic stone. Alchemists speculated on and interpreted the world as something to be consumed19 and refabricated. This is a fairly honest outcome of a state of mind focused on suffering in existence, on alienated living in a fractured world that overwhelms existence with an ever-increasing terror caused by the eliminating of stabilities and identities, and the generating of new, unstable ones. Deception, cheating, lies, hatred, desires and vilification became the customary attributes of initiation rituals that form and transform the senses through incubating enclosure in a nursing bottle. It plays on affects as subservient agents, selling the bogeyman’s sack about the quintessence of being in sensuality, and treacherously reducing the power that maintains the integrity of entities, their structure and wholeness. As the Corpus Hermeticum cynically put it, ‘there is no necessity that every living being should conserve its identity’ (quoted in Yates 1964: 243). Hence it alone will reign as an imperialism, where fabricated harmony and peace are indifferent to self-support. This space recalls the Habermasian public sphere, while recognisable within it are not only Durkheim’s social facts and social solidarity but the alliances of Lévi-Strauss as well, all striving to fulfil the immense potential for that universal union that looks very impressive in a delirious enthusiasm, but only there. Alchemists are embracing the world, would like to marry it, the alchemical marriage of the opposites overwhelms their heart. In the completed opus Hermes/Mercurius stands in the middle, clothed in women’s garments, to reveal the perfect alchemical union: his incarnation as Hermaphrodite. He is surrounded by the planets and thus composing a cosmic order, Hermes in the middle and the planets circling around it. As a planet, Mercury is the closest to the Sun, hence to gold; but as quicksilver, he dissolves gold, extinguishing its sun-like brilliance. Mercurius is also the servant of the opus: servus or cervus fugitivus, the fugitive slave or stag. Mercurius is the lowest as prima materia (chaos), but also the highest as lapis philosophicum (the philosopher’s stone): he is the psychopompos (guide of souls) and the guide for good luck, but also for ruin, being dual-natured (see Goethe’s Faust; Goethe studied Paracelsus). He is aqua permanens (eternal water), or argentus vivum (the water); he is also the serpent mercurialis, as with the help of the caduceus Mercurius unites two natures (male and female, sun and moon) in the alchemical vessel. From this vessel emerges the filius hermaphroditus (their hermaphrodite son). With all of its elements this opus is a creation dramaturgy with its conflicts and reaggregations, so similar to the Iheren image from Tassili, about a new artificial life of metamorphosis. Likewise, the

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alchemical opus of the chemical wedding (Yates 1975) also goes through the same mechanical steps: separation, or sublimation, descent and distillation; liminality, or calcination, solution, coagulation and fixation; and reaggregation, or creation. The process of purifying or refining a precious metal has affinities with the creation of the philosopher’s stone (basanos; see Foucault 2001), that is, the effective gold or divine love essence which in fact even recalls charis in that it transforms mere mortals into divine-like beings through their sensuals. However, there are benefits present here which are absent in charis, something that promotes well-being, enhances the advantage derived from the process or from the acquisition of powers during which or when they were unified with other, which have no meaning in charis, but are present in postclassical Greek terms like anastasis (resurrection), or in Alexandrian hermetic thinking. Alchemists were ultimately concerned with the unification of different substances and how to derive benefit from them, which was often called the marriage between female and masculine qualities, or the reconciliation of opposites, which results in ever growing production. This marriage of opposites would ultimately attain the goal of the opus, namely, the production of gold and its metaphysical equivalent, which through the opus came into the possession of the alchemist. Such a wedding need not always take the form of a direct union. The advantage of the union, the capitalising on the wedding can also occur through a third, mediating principle that brings unreasonable profit. This is mercury, the prima materia or seminal matter (black is melas in Greek; see melancholos for melancholy), again composed of both female and male (androgynous, hermaphrodite). The god Hermes is the personification of the metal mercury, and in fact alchemy catches and imprisons ghosts, it is the raised power intending to make them enter into the transformation process in order to serve the benefiting will of the merchants. The entrance of the replicators into the body structure brings about a new unity, one truth again, participating in an eternal machine based on pure, lucid calculation of offering and tricking away production benefits. On the way to the intended raised power, the god Hermes/Mercurius is caught in the circle, unable to escape. He is often depicted in the egg, in his new existence, ready for production. The god’s mobility is reduced, being enclosed in the closed space of a fluxed matrix, he appears to exist in a state of queasiness, in a tyrannical ‘tower’ for the benefit of mankind, at least this is how it appears in alchemical illustrations. But Hermes/Mercurius is known also as the glue that bonds the female and the male together. Alchemists and neo-Platonists denoted the union, reconciliation, and reaggregation of such basic substances (male and female, fire and water) into an ‘ultimate love’, using a particular word: ‘conversion’, defined as a new interpretation of qualities (Hadot 1993). In conversion, the forces within previously divided properties are reconciled in a new, transformed state that can, through an epiphany, heal all the diseases of the world (Agricola 1950). As shown by the

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encircled god who serves man through his own death, pain and suffering, as in the ‘Hermes in the Egg’ motif, this is not simply an alchemical symbolism, but has become universal. It has further significance in crosscurrents of knowledge, such as the Axial age religions, like Christianity, Buddhism, Gnosis, Manichaeism and Islam, where we encounter the idea of salvation from the tormenting radical dualisms of existence. In salvation, god and man unite through a further turn: the release of the inner divine from the bonds of the world, and his return to his native realm of light. Though already present in Gnostic thinking (Jonas 1963; Voegelin 1987), this idea received its full theoretical statement in Enlightenment philosophy, which proffered morbid mental excitement to the paradoxically irascible and enslaved. Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing and Rousseau offered a new model to follow in the mean-spirited misanthropy of the revolutionary, the sensualist who saves the world. As Koselleck (1988) has shown, their relentless critique undermined the socio-political order and its norms,20 turned the private into the public and, thus out of tune, created a new syncretism, as captured in the concept of ‘passionate interests’, developed from Tarde’s economic ideas (Latour and Lépinay 2009). Sensualists have but one appetite, and we only need to see the alchemical process to realise how effectual their sensuals are. In the alchemist-made encapsulated unity the souls escape from the tormented body structure, yet remain captured in the alchemic vessel, and thus become ready for a new existence. The matter is heated and cooked in an abnormal, timeless, ambiguous, sacred liminal state, until its soul is extracted. At this moment, regarded as liberation and enlightenment in gnosis (Jonas 1963), the soul is left on its own to obtain a new identity that is indifferent to the authentic one, free of prejudice and on the cusp of a new life that is in fact a return to the native realm of light and understanding. There is no perfect conception of the soul, except that we all have it, its sensuals inside every being. The gift of cohesion can only be present when the soul’s image ray is not absorbed into another one, this implying fullness of presence, innocence and purity, self-forgetfulness and decency, excluding the dislocation of the self – the kind of unconsciousness that was emphasised by both Unamuno (1962, 1968) and Camus (1971, 2001, 2002), referring to charis, the social feeling towards others, in contrast to the supposed need for a conscious, explicit form of self-control, characteristic of Kantian and Hegelian maxims.

The absorption of the victim So the only way to prove the unprovable – that the power of the soul is inside and is not something external or ‘raised’ – is by revealing the push factor, which is necromancy in action, when it is able to dislodge the soul from its central position. For this task, we first need to capture and identify the target of such pushing action, to give it a name as the replicator; and, second, we

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must show the dislocation in action itself as metallurgy and alchemy. The weakening cohesion of the self generates a situation in which a peculiar figure or type of power might appear and exert influence, like the ghosts, the evocation of the souls of the dead. The trickster is able to stimulate massive invasions on the location of the first power, on the soul, and cause its dysfunctionality. This figure evidently exists outside time and space, as the myths and legends of practically all people reveal in-depth familiarity with it.21 It is a figure of flux and chaos that can easily change its shape, so it is a perfect mimic, which gives it the ability to fetch the soul from its troubled home. Yet, despite what one might think about the difficulty of their representation, trickster figures, embodying the very essence of living dead, are already present in Palaeolithic images, sporting the exact same features. They also recall the stock masks of ancient Greek and especially Roman theatre, and modern commedia dell’arte. Chapter 1 has already presented the vigorous fetching drive of the trickster replicator in Palaeolithic images. They all have almost the same effect mechanism: first, trickster–replicators incite sensuality, thus transforming their targets into allies; second, they attack and catch their allies, transforming them into victims; and finally, they absorb their victims, after a complete dislocation of their victims’ self. This confiscatory activity could even be called Realpolitik as it is cynical, a technological device for loosening its target–ally–victims from their cohesion, creating power vacuums by dysfunctionality, and finally taking root in security breakdowns. Such activities concern forging a close alliance with the victim by means of an appearance that is squalid and inarticulate yet sensual, with every attribute of hearing, touching, smelling and sexual alertness; sensing and miming expectations and then forging its own way (for example, a phallus is often visible). In this way, it replaces the authority of lordship with its own, in perfect communion with its trickster self, ideally even building networks of support from the already converted. It is either conquering or allying, but always remains a usurper, that is, profiting from people’s misery or any schism at hand, and accelerating the arrival of crisis points. But, as it is taking root in security breakdowns, this fact acts as the basis for the next step of its expansion, because it renders the centre of the self impractical but useful as source of a displaced, extended energy that can be turned to further, externally defined uses. These submissive yet aggressive, compassionate and tyrannical characters are best described as trickster figures, whose phallic, alert, oversexualised attentiveness was already depicted in engravings of Magdalenian caves before 10000 BC, yet they are just the images of the replicators raised up by the operator’s machinations. Each is alert to every mimesis, intersection, symbiosis, metamorphosis or union with people, ideas, events or opportunities. Its desire for union and expansion is infinite. Its beady eyes, pointed nose, protruding mouth, receding chin and bald head span around 14,000 years, offering a view of the world as the field of infinite, pitiless invasions and terrifying obsessions.

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The trickster The Greeks considered the artificial mode of operation, expansion through division and fracturing, as producing a wasteland. They rather looked for charis, for the joyful inner relatedness in life, and Plato at the culmination of Greek thinking named the proponent of the second type the Sophist, a most powerful sorcerer who moves in the arrheton, in the realm of forbidden knowledge, far beyond charis. Sorcery alters the qualities of beings (EvansPritchard 1976; Voegelin 1990; see also Horvath and Szakolczai 2020, Ch. 2), taking them out of their concrete world in order to make them adaptable to an artificial world. Using sorcery was the only way that man could operate against himself, for which he was seduced by the promise of huge gains or advantages through multiplication resulting from this peculiar action. Such seduction works through mimesis, which shows up the copies of accepted and taken-for-granted values, but in actual reality empties them of substance. Imitation operates parasitically, by hunting down, by the consumption of one’s being. Sensuals have a desire for union, when one is ‘magically’ absorbed into another being. What everything boils down to, then, is just points of reference. From the point of reference of the second power, individuals derive power from outside through absorption because they have lost the inner one. But you could also take as a point of reference the concrete individual’s own inner power to realise how the life of each individual in our world revolves around such a centre. With those considerations we might suppose the self as the centre, which derives power from itself and not from absorption – like the ‘rebel’ in contrast to the modern revolt, as was Camus’ point (1971), who steps back to the power of the self, to the strength within us. In saying this, we intended to imply that we must come to an understanding about the mimetic art of the trickster replicator. As for an example, we suggest another Palaeolithic image from La Marche cave, Vienne. Here a trickster mimesis is metamorphosed into a dog form. The image is narrating its own story, with many trickster attributes: caps (all meaning is restricted to its ego); stripes (volatile, super-real power); low forehead (closed mind, at home in the liminal world and also in the super-real); upturned nose/muzzle/beak (alert, animal-like senses open to the exterior); dwarfed appearance (underground); stick (vengeance), phallic; its look (watching for victims); a predator, but of a particular type which does not kill but instead paralyses and lives off the life energies of its victims. Such Palaeolithic images, with their striking and revealing directness, allow us to imagine the replicator, whether in whole or in part. The process itself has a sterilising result and so is against nature, which builds on filiation and not on absorption, so this is why the arrheton-implied prohibition – though this was evidently not sufficient, as the activities (the strange initiation ceremonies) evidently continued to be performed. The reason is that the hybrid combination of human and animal must perpetuate liminality in order to reproduce itself, as its only way for reproduction is replication. The key to sorcery is such situation–creation, which lies

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behind every ritual, rite and artificiality. Sterility requires artificial methods for taking away productivity from concrete individuals by cloning or absorbing them for the purpose of artificial reproduction. It excludes the possibility of genuine charis, as it is taking away fertility, instead of leaving it to beings as a given/gift (gift-giving = charis). Such artificial methods replacing fertility can be called fabrication technology, the trickster’s artefact of soul-fetching. The trickster is not in a hurry.22 The anomalous is in a motion that is stuck, repeating itself as if for eternity and, because of this circular, infinite motion, nothing further develops, except that reality vanishes. In this mimetic concept, the second or raised power represents any type of political transformation. Examples include the various empires of Lewis Mumford’s (1967) ‘Pyramid Age’; the early modern absolutist state; the outcomes of the various modern revolutions, including industrial and social; and most recently the transformation of state power into global market forces, and the almost immediate hijacking of global market power by internet-networks. All these have a resemblance in the extent to which the European Union represents a further extension of this transformative thinking, contributing to the weakening of local political entities by delegitimising the centres of political power and undermining their cultural and moral standing with the population (for more about of transformative thinking, see Poggi (2014), concerning Popitz).

Charis attentive soul These are some of the ways in which the raised power confiscates, without us noticing, the most important, meaningful part of the first power, its self-articulation formed by the charis-attentive soul.23 The raised power transforms nature and man into a mirrored sensual image, into an unreal world without borders, which is in fact its origin in the otherworld. The raised power results in a Newtonian flux of unfounded emotions that is producing energy, a cosmic sea of sensuals through a limitless inciting of desire. In the absence of traditions and the certainties of compositions, the raised power thus represents a morbid chain in the link between the escalation of uncertainty and the channelling of fragments into mimetic self-absorption. If we were not yet persuaded, then the trickster image at Tassili (see Lhote, 1959, fig. 45) which features a big belly, sensual long nose and ears (to feel and hear to the greatest extent), and piercing eyes, would bring us to the point that this image captures a rogue, a rascal, a disgrace, an impostor. The multiplicity of entities evoked is stretching from being a human, an animal, an object, an energy-power on the landscape, and their partial or total mixture to an artefact, through a process that is called technology, or rather a fabrication of resemblances. The raised power, power2, as exemplified in these trickster activities, reframes its surroundings into artefacts. The trickster’s power lacks evolution in time; it is not even regressive. One cannot genealogically trace it back to its

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origin from where it developed. Rather, we can conceive of it as an involution, a rapid, sudden, significant multiplication or growth of a property altered from the original one into an artefact, if an agent is at hand to accelerate the process. The end result is the technological process, an artificial hybridisation which is the modification of being. Thus, the expression ‘liminal’ could represent this change, as only liminality offers favourable conditions for the modification of what is given, which we express by the word charis, a condition of harmonious living and understanding with itself and in itself. The outcome or end product of liminal processes is not the same as what existed before, but something else – a new species that technologically could begin all over again every time.24 This unspecific and generic artefact, this raised power, is occupying and invading the first one by means of a transcendental content, the ‘void’ that urges domination. Today’s explanations are framed in terms of today’s knowledge, discarding what is less useful from their perspective, thus proliferating errors if the perspective fails to correspond to the essence of substantive reality. The Marxists’ approach to power proved its uselessness, as it turned out to be a simple technique to produce and disguise resemblances, or to bring to light resemblances produced and disguised by anyone else – a technological trick that empties everything out of substance and transforms enthusiasm into sterility. The raised power destroys those who use it as well as its victims, as they are losing the most fundamental quality of life, its essence: charis. A thorough study of the role of Marxism in contemporary political thinking belongs to a genealogy in the way of political anthropology, and much of this work belongs to such an effort. Yet, we intend now rather to pursue in more detail the process of soul fetching. For instance, the bone incision mentioned above (see p. 128; Chapter 3, p. 56), shows the trickster absorbed into the head of a dog. Such a canine mask was selected as behind the dog’s skin one could shelter from foreign raids and build up one’s own power until it was able to ravage the goal, turning the target entity into a no-man’s land which is now ready on its own for absorption. Now this new extension will be the next shelter in preparation for future expansion. Without necromancy man could not learn to stimulate a sort of second coming, a transcendental presence in reordering the world. The activation of the dead, the evocation of the souls of the dead can produce resemblances and other replicative products. In this way, following the definition of sorcery offered by Voegelin (1990), the spread of empty generalities over singularities occurred, together with the death of the centre.

First power This book, therefore, shall look back to the ancient idea of first power, which has two basic components: first, the self-articulation of man in co-operation and benevolence, giving without needing to receive, or charis; and second, the stability and solidity of this position, something to fight for. These are not just

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ways to formulate an assumption, but questions that touch the very foundation of any politics, whether pretending to be modern or not. A system focusing on positionality, where the focus is not on individual qualities, but on the general uniformity of exchangeable components is probably unable to do that. While contemporary politics is still conducted within the broad coordinates of the Westphalian system (Salvatore 2007), a well-imposed institutional and normative ordering that was made, strikingly, just three years before Hobbes published his Leviathan, a utilitarian universalism is coming forth under its surface which brings the frightening scenario of an ultima ratio regis, an ever-growing distance from a mode of understanding that still offered an approximation to the real world. Being self-sufficient is remarkably simple and elegant, and allows us to order our lives, accepting decency and self-restraint as clear and stable guidelines for the normality of life, which allows men to participate, with satisfaction, in the given place and time into which they were born.25 Utilitarian universalism, however, is based on an epistemological confusion, and is particularly troublesome if we consider that, while all frames of positivistic mechanism are equally valid, some frames of reference are a lot more valid than others. Not being able to distinguish between usefulness, universalism and empirically evidenced reality, we will always be in trouble without the inner centre that holds us to life in the manner demonstrated by Hofmannsthal (2005, 2008, 2011).26 Overwhelmed by universal generalities, the self does not have the power to hold reality in an orbit, and in fact would be eaten up, dissolved or absorbed into utilitarianism (universally) the instant any concrete charis was dissolved. If the universal mechanism is taken up as a useful model, then concrete individuals in fact will be gobbled up, dissolved into pieces of the machine. Since generalisation knows nothing of the soul, and draws its inspiration not directly from life, but indirectly from life embodied in art/magic/technology, artificiality is a central problem even in the charis-related charisma concept. The central problem is that Weber’s idea of charisma has an unspecified transcendental, and thus generalised, component in the sense that the concrete person, in order to become charismatic in the Weberian sense, needs an external situation of crisis and an external force of the divine. Therefore, the outside has become inside in absorbing the magical necromancy transcendental into the body, where it has become an all-dissolving presence. This is how charis, this most pedestrian and common happiness of living – the feeling of being favoured, of trusting in life and feeling nature, living in grace, of following a graceful life in co-operation, benevolence and encountering – became an abstraction for a liquid state, exemplified by Calvin’s doctrine of predestination where the term ‘liquid’ appears prominently in Book XXI of the Institution of Christian Religion. The next puzzle is where Weberian charisma ends, because everything seems to be fine with the postulation of charismatic authority, except that there are no preferred reference frames for the soul of the self, which received the gift of charisma. That is, we cannot tell anything about political charisma so long as our inner power is not constant, hence our charis/ma is not intact.

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For the Greeks, where charis as a quality was still widely shared, this notion was essential. The supreme takes root in people, invading them during crises or other security breakdowns because the direction of supernatural power, as also seen in the replicators, is intensity oriented towards the unstable. Charisma thus becomes a formula for divine release from crisis situations, except that any political adventurist or institutional engineer can proclaim itself as a carrier of ‘charismatic leadership’. The ‘gift of grace’, as expressed in Weber in a figurative manner, expresses some truth; but as a presumed scientific concept it can become the basis of a slogan to support any political movement or institutional policy. In this way, the Weberian concept stands uncomfortably between gaining support through looking convincing and offering a technological solution through institutional engineering. The notion of charisma, this seemingly innocent social theoretical invention, took a dramatic turn at the very moment of being written down, when this transcendental basis became associated with a completely different figure, the trickster, by Max Weber himself. This had already happened in Economy and Society, as Weber’s own example of the charismata was a trickster figure – the ill-fated, doomed, German Communist revolutionary, Kurt Eisner (Weber 1978). But the peculiar transformation of charis into a purportedly scientific but in fact secularised metaphysical concept is not unique in the history of social sciences. Similar examples include Hobbes, Descartes, Kant’s moral and political philosophy, and Durkheim on social facts. These are all new types of principles that could replace religion, but in fact repeat in a secular guise some of the most problematic claims of dualistic, Gnostic, Manichean religiosity (in a Christian coat) about the dual nature of man, his paradoxical independence from nature and submission to the transcendental whereby he needs transformation in order to reach the desired-for union with the superreal: man transforms himself into its image and likeness. This is the conflict between the dignity of manly conduct and an abstract, universalistic religious ethic, first problematised by Kierkegaard and by Nietzsche. Not that we deny Weber’s charismatic power or charismatic leadership notion, which was one of the most widely used conceptual tools in political sociology or even political science. However, just as in the understanding of modernity, we need to go beyond the mainstream reading of Weber’s ideas and to point out certain inherent limits in Weber’s own perspective. Weber turned the theological term charisma into a sociological concept by intimately connecting it to moments of crisis, and out-of-ordinary situations to the rise of charismatic power or leadership. However, the problems with Weber’s concept also start here, as Greek charis, the root word of Christian charisma, evokes the vital qualities of harmonious, undisturbed life and a benevolent social order where the main source of pleasure is derived from our harmonious cooperation with others in the world, and has nothing to do with situations characterised by uncertainty and insecurity. By attempting to render the term charis sociologically useful, Weber emptied it of its essential Greek sense.

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There were, however, further problems with Weber’s term, and these are connected to his Protestant theological sources. This concerns the narrow connection between charisma and the historical development of Christianity as an individualising salvation religion. What this means is that prophets, lawgivers or mythological-military leaders did not offer individual salvation to their followers, rather attempted, in a perceived situation of utmost need, to save their culture or people as a whole. The spread of Christianity, however, took place in a quite different manner, through the conversion of a single promise of individual salvation, in another world. Thus, while at a worldhistorical theological level, the arrival of Christ was supposed to offer redemption to the entire world, the effectively victorious march of the conversion to Christianity as a religion progressed through belief in securing individual salvation. Charisma as divine grace became manifested through the salvation of concrete individual souls. The introduction of the term charismatic leadership into the study of politics thus not simply secularised this term, but in a way also trivialised it, in the sense that the solution of any political crisis by the rise of a charismatic leader was modelled on the very specific situation and context of world-historical turning points.27 There is still something more – and this concerns the way in which emotions, sentiments or ‘sensuals’ (emotional vibrations) are evoked in the process. The soliciting of certain sensuals for salvation was central for the conversion process to Christianity, through catacombing, erecting a sensual imperialism of the unreal realm of death.28 The certain issue concerns the performance of magical rituals by which the resurrection of the body – something clearly beyond the ways of everyday life and Nature – can be secured by necromancy. Curiously the secular version of such necromantic sensualisation can be perceived in the images spread by advertisement or the campaigns for political elections; central aspects of the secularisation of salvation in modern political democracy and economic wellbeing, developments which are absent in any other culture or civilisation – and, as the reverse side of this happens to be the destruction of Nature, we start to realise that perhaps it is for the better. What remains for us is the incarceration of our principles, the fallen and exiled charis in the absurd bowels of the catacombs.29 But genuine charis, which we must see as a principle in all things, cannot be influenced by events or by producing marvels using hidden natural forces. It is not an art, not even a supernatural art, and especially not an art of transformation, as the goodness of charis can only be found in untransmuted objects, and never in water that tastes like wine. We certainly would not want the charis of objects to start transforming themselves into different substances than they are. It would be against charis, the fundamental principle of life: ‘most great and good and fair and perfect in its generation – even this one Heaven sole of its kind’ (Plato, Timaeus, 92c). Plato leaves no doubt that transformations are not the ways of discerning goodness. This is already there in nature and does not require any alteration. Such alteration, especially death, or the destruction of form (the body), is rather the end of charis’s

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higher life. In fact, a real statesman is nothing other than one who can recognise such innate stability, which at the same time gives the opportunity to the citizens to follow him in perceiving charis, the context of authentic politics in the social pleasure of ancient Greek life.30

Conclusion Proving ‘insideness’ is more difficult than proving the opposite because if we suffer, if we are being victims, if we are oppressed, there is always somebody outside who is profiting from our misery. This is like proving that the 16thcentury heliocentric model (the Earth goes around the Sun) that replaced geocentrism (the Earth is the centre of the universe) is false. It was not until the 16th century that the heliocentric model began to gain acceptance, challenging the Platonic and Aristotelian notion of planets that circled the Earth at a constant speed in epicycles. Copernicus, in his De Revolutionibus, put the sun at the centre of the solar system, and had the Earth (and the rest of the planets) go around the Sun, in this way taking away the importance of the Earth as a superior planet in space. Instead, a new supposition became formulated – that everything is moving through space, even our sun, even our galaxy. Because of that, the entire notion of something being fixed in space no longer holds. However, what you choose as a centre is not of minor importance, especially if the idea that the centre is something fixed no longer holds in actual life, as definitely happened in the 16th century. In this way a genuine scientific discovery, through a series of steps, can become the opportunity not for taking control over the conditions of our existence, but for inducing and justifying the giving up of the very centre of our own lives. The aim of this chapter was to show that this is exactly what happened in modern politics, and especially in thinking about power in modernity, through various trickster modalities; a trap which some of the most important modern social theorists, like Max Weber and Michel Foucault, did not manage to escape fully. In utilitarian and positivistic universalism, dominating modern thinking, powers and power structures are produced by external forces which are not part of the beings themselves, discouraging the use of everybody’s own potential. What therefore remains is a fusion of sensualities that values probabilities more than realities, and so makes small things seem great and great things small by the sole power of the persuasion of imitative images. This fusion plays a continuous game, making new things quickly old, while ancient values are no longer relevant; inventing the fluidity of power, redirecting the worth of concrete human lives into meaningless length in time and futile growth in non-existing space.

Notes 1 The chapter incorporates some parts of the chapter ‘The Genealogy of Political Alchemy: the technological invention of identity change’ I wrote for Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen and Harald Wydra (eds) (2015) Breaking Boundaries:

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Varieties of Liminality, Oxford: Berghahn, and the chapter ‘Charisma/Trickster: On the twofold nature of power’ (2019), published in Bjørn Thomassen and Harald Wydra (eds.), Handbook of Political Anthropology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. I thank Berghahn and Edward Elgar for granting me permission to reproduce them. The 2017/2 and 2018/1 issues of International Political Anthropology contain a series of articles devoted to Popitz’s anthropology of power. This is because Kant takes for granted the externalised, corrupt meanings of terms like knowledge, reality or world, characteristic of modern rationalism, and is simply incapable of conceiving inner certainty. However, without such inner certainty the normal living of any being becomes impossible. Thus, while Kantians think that they are living according to the principles and requirements of universal rationality, they in fact perpetuate absurdities, and destroy the world around them, whose character and meaning simply escapes them. This is the difference, inside their fundamental identity, of neoclassical economics and Durkheimian sociology: the first divinises man (the individual), the second society (the collective). But both are modes of divinisation. See more about the unconscious way of life in Unamuno (1962, 1968). Unamuno was a noted Spanish philosopher whose central idea was to base philosophising on the integrity of the person, in contrast to the focus on consciousness. The book uses the term ‘raising power’ in the following combination of senses: as in mathematics, raising a number to a certain (say, ‘nth’) power, thus a technical means for unlimited multiplication; the idea of ‘raising the dead’, as a standard technical feature of necromancy; and the general idea of interfering with nature, culture or tradition in order to artificially multiply forces for further invasion, possession or similar activities. About this, see in particular Christian Meier (1987), Politics and Grace. The term ‘given’ is usually considered in modern thought, in particular neo-Kantianism, as a burden on the autonomous subject, hindering its free self-constitution, but should be rather understood in the etymological sense as a gift. Thus, starting from the given is not a liability but an asset, a value, a recognition of the character of reality as a gift, or its charis character. Like so many other features of modern necromantic technology, even the sinister potential of enclosed waters was intuited by Goethe; this best in Elective Affinities. Who became paralysed by Hephaestus’ net when they were being intimate, which caught them for the amusements of the gods. On the connection between shamanism and the smith, see Popov (1933), a main expert on Siberian rituals. Living with such processes since many millennia, we simply take them for granted and fail to realise the extent of the violence it inflicts on nature, which after all is our home. Traces of the fear and awe such processes inspired could still be seen in folktales, where smith figures are both fearsome, dangerous, unpredictable and also considered as being engaged in strange proceedings with dark powers. Modern scholars consider these as laughable survivals of primitivism, but anthropologists increasingly realise how the butt of the joke was often on them – though at the opposite extreme even more modern, ‘hyper-modern’ (see Augé’s surmodernité) anthropologists, with their acceptance of shamanist practices at face value, are similarly highly questionable. The descent of Faust into the underworld in order to bring Helen back to life – and the reason why and the manner in which it failed – is another gem in Goethe particularly relevant for this book. It was also the scene that in a way was closest to Goethe’s heart. Interestingly, the apology of Helen is the largest surviving fragment from the ancient Sophists, and certainly relevant as exposing both their treachery, and its closeness to modern ideologies.

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14 Arguably, the various exploits of Zeus, in animal shapes, with nymphs and women, represent a kind of ‘pacification’ of such experiences, which was limited to gods, and was not in any way ‘represented’ by humans (priests and magi). 15 As we argue elsewhere (Horvath and Szakolczai 2020, Ch. 5), the Shaft Scene reinterpreted in a sacrificial key became the founding narrative of Vedic Hinduism. 16 For some details, see the excellent, recent work of Sandra Blakely (2006). 17 However, such ‘material’ multiplication easily turns into the systematic ignorance as destruction of material objects, their fluidification or etherialisation through increasingly immaterial and unreal practices, for which communication technology and the Internet are again prime examples. Lewis Mumford (1967) again strikingly foresaw such developments. 18 Note that the sublime, a term rooted in alchemy, became from the early 16th century onwards, accelerating in the mid-17th to the mid-18th century, a central, foundational term for modern aesthetics, codified by Kant in his third critique. Central to the sublime, in contrast to beauty, a key term in Plato’s philosophy, is the focus on intensity. 19 We invite the reader to ponder upon the fact that the term ‘consumption’, so much taken for granted as the heart of modern economy and society, is also an alchemic term, and it specifically means destruction. 20 Here Koselleck (1988) closely follows the pioneering ideas of Goethe (see especially Poetry and Truth). 21 For details, see Chapter 1 of Horvath and Szakolczai (2020). 22 Weber (1948) beautifully described the untimely aspect of evil in Politics as a Vocation under the analysis of ‘resist no evil’ as it occupies the borders which arrive and pass away in an infinite mode of the anomalous, as coined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). 23 For a similar approach, see Voegelin’s ideas about the progress from compact to differentiated experiences (2000–2001). This is also the heart, in our reading, of the care of the soul/self idea of Foucault, Hadot or Patocˇ ka. 24 This is close to the way Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss metamorphosis. 25 See Hölderlin (1990) on faithfulness to the concrete, historical tradition and nature. 26 Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet and writer, had a philosophical education, was much influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and his ideas about personhood and language have philosophical depth. 27 For a further discussion of Weber’s charisma, see Horvath (2020). 28 In order to avoid any misunderstanding, we need to emphasise that the chapter is not taking up the impossible task of addressing the entire history of Christianity, but rather is focusing on the meaning of the connection between the idea of individualised salvation and the practice of depositing the dead unburied in catacombs. 29 As is only evident, the current worldwide quarantines represent a secular version of this catacombing, only for the purpose of this-worldly naked life, substituting other-worldly salvation; ‘naked life’ in the sense of Agamben (1998). 30 This is discussed extensively in several chapters in Horvath, Szakolczai and Marangudakis (2020).

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In the previous chapter, we saw the operational success of the replicators for both ejecting the charis and its replacement by the summoning sensual of attraction and desire for attraction. Attraction usually includes not only elevated feelings but the negative attributes of possessive parasitism, inhibition and territorialism, though paradoxically expansionism is also present in it. The invasion of Eros is always present wherever attraction invests its legs. Love stirs up sensuals and destroys integrity that is situated in the deep well of the soul by feeding all kinds of fantasising, for conjuring up the dead and divining. Love is charismatic, spellbinding, possessive and also naturally irresistible. But attraction can easily run amok, and through decomposition might place the raw matters of life, like blood, urine, semen and even the corpses – the blind prima materia – at the disposition of the sharp-toothed, melancholic predator, the living dead, which can be called by the name the trickster, indicating evil. In this way, in the name of love, attraction suddenly shifts from among the attributes of the charismata to the trickster, or could it be vice versa? As if Hell itself were wrapping up in a merchant’s ragged parcel all the spell-binding and confusing tricks of life and death: the trickster is fierce and rebellious, attacking in order to quench its burning fever for possession that consumes its days and nights in order to break down living entities and take their forms; an angry, burning rapture that is its essence. At any rate, their fire touches every soul and nerve with terrifying energy, confusing the souls of even the most brilliant minds. This radiating spell is captivating, dissolving and annihilating by clouding judgement and perception – yet, it is all made up. It cannot exist and cannot be brought into existence without machinated evocations, without somebody making it happen by bringing them into life. Magic must be brought into existence by shaping, modifying or putting together sufficient material for blame or desire, preferably combining the two. It is like making an edifice by assembling the forms necessary for its functioning, like preparing clays for the bricks or chopping trees for the beam, except that in this case it implies transporting souls into Hell as a punishment for sinful existence, complete only with salvation in Heaven for the blessed and the glorious ones, yet both being subject to catacombing for salvation.

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In order to capture this totalising procedure, the word ‘catacombing’ is used here as a technical term, an expression for the series of interconnected void pockets created to carry off energy. In the deployment of these formvoiding techniques there was an accelerating spread from 2nd century AD Rome by building catacombs for the dead, in order to secure their resurrection and incorporation into the divinity (MacMullen 2009), that carried off the energy of necrotic radiation to the incommensurable and back from it to the operators. Such results are in good agreement with other observations, as by the time of emperor Decius (249–251) the progress of the Christians in wealth and influence in contrast to the fallen condition of the Romans and the Roman Empire was evident.

Unreality Why does the replicator matter, if it is an unreal existence? Is it true that an unreal existence could be invasive, could have a dwelling in the sphere of the sensual, and more factual than reality itself ? When we describe an action in which an item is removed, when a different item is placed in its stead, it is important to clearly identify which item is taking the place of the other. In so far as the fetching or stealing of the soul is concerned, so far we have described this different, invasive existence as the replicator. The word ‘replacement’ usually stands for a kind of action implying a substitute, which has various associated meanings: if the previous thing has been taken away and a new thing put in its place, the old is replaced with the new, or substituted with a new thing. However, nothing could be substituted if they are not similar in one way or another to each other. Such similarity, however, could be deceptive, as it is best illustrated by the pair of words ‘charisma’ and ‘trickster’. Both exist in the sweet magic of free-flowing emotions, without borders, so one can take the place of another. Both are sensuals that can serve in place of others, replicators that replace by themselves the injured, worn but authentic souls that rendered to their composition. However, such similarity implies an interpretation of the trickster replicator in a charismatic key, through the incommensurable unreality of sensual governance, obsessed by possessing an energy that is divorced from reality. This absurdity has nil value and is void of significance, except the negative meaning of annihilation by accentuating the sensuals and leading one by the hand towards destruction. Such destabilisation of earlier entities is the basis of the energy gained by the absorption of a new entity and acts as a substitute, which also implies the necessity of entering new and newer entities into the annihilation process, which at the same time is also an energy production process, proliferating a profound, insoluble chaos of life. Energy or power, in the sense of dynamos, the Greek word for power, also close to potentiality and steresis, has been prominently discussed recently by Heidegger (1995) and Agamben (2014), and so has become an issue in political science, as this energy presumably,

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magically transmutes society into a fountain of health and progress, enabling everlasting tolerance and universal democracy, at least according to the story told by contemporary politics. However, this entire scenario is also impaired with the most profound despair, as the replicator is that automaton device that makes mere copies of the authentic charis. So, in reality, it brings nothing other than an ever-mechanised form of annihilation, as it first of all destroys, but also, and in line with the presumed potentialities, it indeed conjures up the living dead, in order to exploit them for carrying out the work of unrest. Replicators are despising us, charming the souls of many of the living and the dead, bewitching the underworld with their bloody sacrifices, but also with their techniques of enchantment, so they finally destroy us and our hinterland for their own productive reasons, with the help of the operators. Paradoxically, this power to be gained, economic and also emotional, is derived from the same irrational source, which can also be called the incommensurable, that has already lost its commensurability in the process, so what the replicator produces is just a voided itself, now at a multiplicative stage, in an unending infiniteness and ever decreasing size and presence. It is an alchemic transformation in a circular process, without an end and a beginning, but destroying everything into a liquid, feeling inconsistence. It gains its dynamism from the invaded body structures, which probably helps understand why the Romans called the Christians ‘self-murderers’ who were ‘no longer willing to live a merely human life’, so their contempt for life justified their death. The main aspect of the replicator is the priority assigned to the formless void of the infinite,1 in contrast to actually existing entities and also to the character of formed structures, which is to maintain meaning, without alternating it.2 But the result of summoning the infinite is the tumultuous horror of living dead, captured in Sartre’s (2005) Morts sans sépulture, his drama over the threshold, where the prisoners are all dead unburied even before the interrogation, life gone from them, transformed into mere technical devices of human substitutions. Such continuous magnitude of anxiety is possible only in the unreal, where the ratio is gone between forms and appearances, so a proper charis becomes impossible. But the unreal can be a consistent existence as the otherworld, which shows charis as well. Further on, the real and the unreal can both be right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language. This chapter tries to show how difficult it is to harmonise them. The unreal otherworld, whether perfect (as divine) or horrific (as diabolical), in both ways is annihilating the real if it becomes inserted there improperly by producing a poisonous substance that leads to death, the decomposition of forms in general. So, while it is possible to do justice to both, it is impossible to choose between them, as every concrete, measured structure is in constant danger of annihilation due to the unreal, as authors like Plato, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have seen. The unreal is the irrational domain of all sorts of squint-eyed ambiguities and paradoxes, concerning the torturous twists of the afterlife, the domain of the replicator, therefore it is impossible to summon it up without self-restraint. However, it is possible to incite it in a concrete way,

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which is the way of magic: the irresistible inclination to fetch the souls, transform beings, change the mind.3 It is perfectly captured in the economistic slogan of creative destruction: first destroy and then bring salvation, in this way gaining command through the dying and suffering body structure. The reasons for this danger of the unreal are not clear or explicit, but the vague and diffuse living dead, who in van Gennep’s (1960) words ‘dispose of eternal enemies’, affect forms both in their living stage and in their transformation, involving a potential danger for each. Death is an orphan-hood where nothingness beckons; it is a deprived existence, a time and a land that falls away from compositions. It has the silence of the night that draws inside, just like a black hole, so it is prohibited to look into it, unless one dies. Compositions (structured, existing bodies) must get proper care, both while living and in their farewell from the real world. In both a literal and metaphorical sense this requires pity and conciliation, as was expressed in Tertullian’s (2017) recollection of his city’s revolt against Christian burials,4 as these would-be cemeteries with their accumulated naked bodies did not cross the frontier between life and death properly, securing the – in death – necessary dissociation of the body and the soul.5 If charis is not considered, in a self-evident, taken-for-granted manner, as the guiding principle of both body and the soul, then the whole existence loses its meaning, which offers an easy victory for magic (or technology, which is more or less the same thing), which aims to eject the soul from its rendered body, thus offering an empty space for the reproduction of the replicator, which makes copies of the original structure.

Meaning Without starting with charis, meaning and meaninglessness could lose their distinctive character. Yet, meaning is the guiding principle of human action, according to Max Weber’s sociology. Not considering goodness or meaning essential at all can easily lead to the ‘second reality’ produced by Kant’s queer Newtonian transcendental idealism, where space, time and causation are mere incommensurability, and so the nature of reality and being is becoming unknowable, rootless, except if we are dubiously able to reconnect them to reality again by our own fantasy (or our own watertight, patented, systematic theory, which again is the same thing, similar to magic and technology) alone. This can be seen in the fantasy work of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is trying to reposition goodness into the magic–alchemical sense of solve et coagula, dissolve and congeal, analysis and synthesis, instead of the taken for granted charis. Accordingly, Kant’s method was to first destroy the meaning of forms by words (critique), so that one could then construct a new structure, where all our faculties become absurdly disinterested, forming through ratiocination a fake judgement, where goodness is always ‘out there’, somewhere out of commensurability. So, sublime, which is Kant’ substitute for charis, becomes a

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matter of questionable discovery and comprehension and is not an essence materialised or uniformly invested in every structured body–form for their arête, virtuous excellence. Goodness in charis is a less than perfect definition of any composition, but it is still a definition, though a definition with a very loose ending. It gives reality to existing things through the constancy of an ever-present joy in living, which is the true, non-utilitarian meaning of capability. But at the same time joy, understood in a different sense, is the worst possible diversion from it, as in the case of the doctrine of salvation, which lures us with a certain joy of liberation – a freedom from all care, as the solution, salvation, is assigned to the charismata. Salvation is the pivoting of joy, how could it be otherwise, if we all arrive there independently from our merit in life, our virtue. Here charis has an important difference in individual merit, virtue and responsibility for others, so it is a social value. Instead, salvation is a common denominator after our temporal decline, being certain in rejuvenation and enrichment, like a Swiss bank account.

Mortality Still, the pragmatic mortalism of modernity is an uncomfortable bedfellow of the professed faith in eternal betterment, if there is a way of removing the soul from the body without dying and replacing it in a new body structure, as scientific reasoning claims. But on the other hand, if a doctrine claims that the soul dies with the body, then death means nothing other than just a silent warehouse for corpses, which is entirely at odds with reality. And not only these but the whole paradoxical notion ‘soul dies with the body’, while entering into another form makes even impossible the reasoning of charis on virtue and on understanding of the natural world. Instead, it appears to catch and fixate the mind of the people itself into an obedient energy mass, to establish an instrumentum regni, a term familiar in modern politics from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, by its vain promise of the commonwealth. Consequently, and rebutting its own reasoning, modern politics continuously spirals into sensual governance, signed by the spread of charismata, who focus on changing the minds of people, with excitement being reduced to the vague, illusionary and temporary satisfaction derived from giving up one’s essence. Modern thinking is fixed on transformation and not on the given goodness of structured forms, to be lived through until death. In this frame salvation is the twin thesis of mortalism. According to this, humans are naturally mortal, but incarnate in their nature is an eternal bliss – presumably, as they were conceived in goodness, but now becoming good only through or after their destruction, so the soul was in the body, but it is now gone for other usage. This frightening hostility to nature, called ‘the hatred of mankind’, was an explicit cry by the Romans against the early Christians, apart from the several times mentioned magic used in their affairs.

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The alarming necromantic notion that the inner power does not exist, the body has no identity, was most easily developed methodologically into the process of voiding the body, summoning the replicators to take the empty place and so securing its production as early as the Palaeolithic. But the presence of dead bodies as a technical machine that makes copies of sensuals is a Neolithic invention. This replicators’ device goes back probably to the troglodyte underground settlements, without the dead bodies though. It appeared for us, in an analysable form, only with the first Christian burials in Rome and elsewhere in the Roman Empire. In contrast to the previous examples, like Lascaux’s Shaft Scene or Tassili’s Round Head period, or the underground structures in Anatolia, catacombing sensuals is continuously breaking human ties, partly because this technique serves to feed the replicators with the subverted charis content of the dead (subverted into mere, circulating sensuals), partly because this was the way to gain commanding power not only over the Christian lives, but mainly and most importantly, over Rome itself.

Catacombs In the catacombs, through the presumption of salvation, the charis of a man is taken away and deposited into the future. While the institution of proper funeral rites is shared by practically all cultures on earth, early Christians differed. They captured charis for their own use, by encapsulating the dead into incubation. Their bodies were humiliated, their memory among the living was humbled, with the implication of unmerciful harping and castigation over the mishap of having had a body structure, which was a state of dishonour expressed by the dirt burial, the disgrace of ignominy, a state of shame, of being in the world, where they lost prestige and all respect. Christians withdrew entirely from society. On the other end, charis stands for grace, for kindness and life itself, while its varieties charm, beauty and naturalness are embracing not only human creativity, but also fertility, as well as social pleasure. Such golden attributes are making life beautiful and worth living, making life a mindful struggle for virtue and filling our hearts with higher presence, a treasure that could not be perceived by contempt and without giving it a last recognition, a farewell to this blessing, in burials as well. In contrast, the souls of Christian dead that were laid in hollow catacombs could never leap over the threshold between life and death, firstly because salvation became a bodily (re)existence, and secondly because life itself was not valued. Dead bodies were left alone to carry themselves into salvation, to a fiction, left in ugly deprivation, on their own transformative despair. The catacomb pockets were serving as activating agencies in transportation, intended to bring the soul of the dead into a new corporality, as if into a living dead. Their incubation therefore never ended; they were caught in a circle of incubation. They were entrapped in ghosted mortality, for when they return again and again into existence, without living it, then their sensuals remain alive: being the living dead, ghosts or spirits: the unburied ones.

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This vivid mortalism is questioning their belief in the first power. Probably this is also behind the mentioned recurring blame of the Romans against the Early Christians about their atheism, magic and hostility towards other people; that this belief was a crude materialism, impious.7 Tacitus (Tacitus, Annals, 15.44.2–8) did blame them for hideous and shameful acts, wickedness (Suetonius, Life of Nero, 16: 2), causing natural disasters (Tertullian, Apology, 40), for obstinacy that threatened political order, perversity (Pliny, Epistles, 10.96), without faith, Thyestean banquets, incest (Athenagoras, Plea, 3), foolishness, dishonourableness, stupidity (Origen, 3.44; all as in Ferguson 2003: 593–601). Anyhow, the catacombs, these vertical corridors snaking underneath Rome, shafting and hollowing in their matrixing ways, dug in lava stone alongside the main arteries of Rome, the ancient Roman roads, like via Tiburtina, Nomentana, Appia, Ostiense, Labicana (Stevenson 1978), constituted a many-centred and diffusive net in the all-embracing craters of the souls, reinforced by their many hollows representing the world of death in humiliation. They extend for many kilometres on several levels: San Domitilla catacomb covered four levels, while San Sebastiano and San Callisto, which held up to 500,000 corpses of Christians, are also four floors deep. The bodies of the deceased were shelved in small hollows dug superficially into the rock, two or three rows high, in fact there were many more and in much smaller places than it is possible to imagine. What is now visible as catacombs is the extensive network. Entry to a catacomb is by an access stairway from a chamber that led to a main passageway, intersected by a grid of passages dug 3–8 metres below the surface, maybe in order to confuse the avenging spirits, or perhaps to give enough space for their hunting restlessness. But nothing certain can be said concerning the burial rites that were used, except that the dead were reduced to nothing; corpses were laid there almost naked, without any sign that addressed the status of the dead or to inform the visitors. The dead seem to have become non-existent, in the sense of being completely obliterated from memory, as how would anyone be able to go down into the depths of dark corridors in order to visit the grave of the beloved. A way to interpret this sordid practice is as if some people were crudely mocking the believers in the new faith: if you really are interested in the resurrected life only, then your corpse might as well be thrown into any underground place, why care?! From the first level another stairway goes down to the next level underneath, repeating the same twice over, until a depth of about 20–25 metres is reached, to become a network of passages and hollowed voids either in the gallery walls or even on the floor. These mazes of caverns are interrupted by shafts crossing several levels, which served to lift the corpses down and the horizontal, oblong, rectangular niches carved into the wall, superimposed one above another, functioning as organised units into vertical rows, sometimes a dozen units high or more: smaller niches for infants, larger for adults, sometimes one for one, while other times for more than one individual, who had been cut down from memory by these provisional and inadequate quasi-burials. They were closed or remained open, with or without an epitaph (Mancinelli and Fasola 1981). 6

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Scholars do not agree about the role of the diggers, whether their importance as part of the clergy is due to the fact that the early Christians were originally burial associations. They were named the ‘fossore’, those who deepen the hollows, adjusting the corpses into their resting place.8 Their role was unusually respected with a strange uniqueness as in general all those professions are abhorred which is due to the contact with decomposition; they are supposed to be the recipients and containers of the ghosts, in which the demons represent themselves as the souls of the dead: ‘the houses that he makes last till doomsday’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, V.i.54–5).9 If, as was believed by the Christians, the catacombs were places for transformation, then it was the proper place of exchange between the unburied and the ghosts in terms of salvation, the replacement of the soul from the weakness of material existence into an eternal one. When the souls of the departed may appear to the living, and even manifest things unknown to the latter, then it is the turn of necromancy. While at the same time when the living imitate the dead god who was resurrected into human form on Earth are offering their forms to the divine in order to achieve higher purposes, they are replacing their souls with the replicators. If this is so, then the possibility of the soul staying with the body after death, awaiting its translocation into another bodily existence in a physical and concrete sense was not a Christian invention. The concrete structure of the catacomb was: the structure of the vessel. Thus, the corpses remained in a suspended state, awaiting redemption in a continuous semi-corporeal existence in the invisible church as their catacombed embodiment belonged to the preChristian invention of the alchemical matrix. It has fallen into a general, bland, universal kit, a kind of ‘where everybody is welcomed’ verbal technicality of the underground incantation, as if an early premonition of Keynes’ economic theory, which argues that aggregate consumer demand is the boosting of growth, the primary driving force in economy, so nobody matters as a concrete individuum, just as is the case with Hobbes’ Leviathan. Necromancy implied a unification of the souls of dead corpses, together with their lost form, with the ghost essence of the replicators, a special mode of divination by the evocation of the dead. This claim should be connected to the never proven but widespread rumours about early Christian infanticide and cannibalism which implied physical and concrete acts of soul-replacement from one body into another (Thompson 1912).10 Although we are not in a position to validate this concern, however, this concept of transformation/trans-substantiality existed before Christianity, in the form of metal/glass/terracotta/wine/bread-making technology, a processual exchange between different substances, through a liminal hold on life: annihilation and salvation in a material exchange level, and not as a soul exchange. But the exchange of the soul is just a step further, even on a mass scale like in the catacombs, where the soul behaves like a material entity, capable of transferring energy from the otherworld to the dead and back, by the repercussions of unburied corpses and their effects on the departed souls. Much later in quantum mechanics this notion appeared with a scientific validity, concerning radiations, like impulses that could be gained from matter during its

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annihilation. In fact, the danger of annihilation always contains within itself a spell, an enchantment, together with the fear of elimination: the attacked victim feels attraction as well, which is sometimes called ‘sweet magic’, this pleasant effervescence gained out of losing one’s composition. But this is also contained in the thought of Hobbes, whose Leviathan expressed that everything is mere body in motion, there is no human good as such, there are no immaterial principles in life. Here evidently Plato’s ideas about forms and their composition were already all but forgotten, 2,000 years after they were formulated. So, returning to Weber, Weberian charisma is not so much the inner strength of a charismatic leader, rather it is rooted in the relationship between the leader and his followers. The leader’s charismatic value is founded on their deliverance, recovery or saving something lost through divine help. However, transforming reality into salvation leads to an infiltration of the incommensurable, a realm containing both what is usually called the divine and the diabolical, a pure territory of dreamy sensuals, like salvation. The incommensurable has no common measure: as every infinite, it is imperfect, having a never ceasing annihilating–possessing (‘demonic’) energy for the finite and the formed. Such energy has no actuality, reality or existence; it does rely on factuality, but only in the sense of reducing facts to non-existence. It is invisible like the senses. This is why the incommensurable is set apart from the real world of forms: it is somehow withdrawn and hidden, even concealed and secret. The incommensurable appears to Plato in the form of a secret, not known appearance: ‘Or does anyone, do you think, understand the name of anything when he does not know what the thing is?’ (Plato, Theaetetus, 147b). The incommensurable is a secret and poisonous appearance, like a virus infection or the replicator, whose potential connections are infinite in combinations, which can reduce anything to nothingness, can annihilate in a nick of time those features that give cohesion to a character. But this transformative power of the incommensurable sadly gives commanding power into the hands of its operators with their inexhaustible desire to embrace forms. Divinisers learned to master the investing of an inordinate energy of desire into proper subjects, producing a restlessness that may even be the source of Weberian charismatic authority. It cannot even be otherwise if the inner strength of subjects, as if souls detached from their bodies, are deposited in their leader, transforming charisma into a divinatory category – into a passion to possess and to be possessed by the sensuals. Through the summoning up of their sensuals by devotion to charisma, people are first persuaded of the necessity and desirability of the goodness they are induced to pursue, but which does not bring them closer to goodness at all. Contempt of life, the suspension of social ties, a deliverance from present responsibilities rather results in an immediate, unbounded enthusiasm, where the goodness of charis becomes itself relative, losing its ties to bordered forms, to the social, transforming itself further like any facsimile replicator, as

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once a copy was made of reality, further copies can easily be made, without any limitation, while becoming ever more distant from the original, though still carrying in a way its image. However, the discrepancy and restlessness that stems from the incommensurable ensures a certain power, the power of dissolution, which puts a persuasive spell over us to enjoy its growth and multitude. In the growing void not only are outrageous emotional bonds multiplying between the sensual operators and their followers, but also various networks emerge to monitor every deviation from the new orthodoxy of maintaining the fermentation of sensuals. Such operating by the sensual incommensurable is the secret poison that was recognised by Gibbon as causing the fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon 1994). In this way the charismatic growth, the power, the productivity and multiplication, the instance of the transcendental incommensurable loses its bearer and becomes transformed into magic incantation. In particular, through the strange practice of depositing the dead, unburied, into catacomb pockets, in early Christianity charisma became an institution for escalating the growth of sensuals, which paid less regard to the human ties than to invocating their sensuals, with the simple reason that it must destroy in order to create. Divinisation became a necromantic processuality for changing the mind of people, using the power of a no-man’s land between the two realms, those of the dead and the living, where they both desire the other one: the living by an induced contempt for existence, and the dead by their annihilating zeal for the living.

The technology of catacombing sensuals Therefore, the curious technique invented by the early Christians, which transmitted necrotic energy through the catacombs, the place of the unburied dead, as used by the operators of the sensuals gained a special importance in the history of automatons. The word that is repeated most often in the church is salvation, and the most frequently represented images are those of corpses, but the obstinate institutional usage by catacombing sensuals, or the gathering and monitoring of emotions evoked through the hope of an afterlife, leading to the use of catacombs instead of traditional burials is much less discussed and analysed. This is perhaps due to the complicity of the operators of sensuals, who strongly and without any inhibition desire to command, towards the incommensurable or perhaps by starting a new process of reasoning once we have already lost orientation. At any rate we are here at the birth cradle of the dangerous idea that energy is not linked to life, but could be separated from it in order to recycle it into a new, erratically matrixing coherence, building up a feeling automatism. Without doubt the value gained is enormous, as the lifeless corpses, the painfully broken images of the real ones have an absolute energy for transformation, producing multitudinous sensual growth and productivity or, in one expression, charismatic growth. The corpses are not just declining bones and muscles but their once living souls are still existing in them, claiming

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dominion over life until they succeed in crossing the Acheron. Ghosts are utilised by the necromancers, arrayed for the transformation of dead individuals into self-loathing living corpses, as if stored for divination, and never crossing Acheron. The catacombs that were competing against ancient Roman burial traditions were multi-layered holes for the dead beneath the surface, raw material extractions in millions, opening into the incommensurable in their non-finished, not buried state, but never arriving there. They were the openings and at the same time the closures for the fluctuation of energies between them, operating in obscurity, indifferent to the social, real, family, friend, or any other claims, yet possessive with their ghostly desires for the living world: having a dark, calumnious, separate reasoning. Their moves, impulses rather than thinking, established the foundations in regard to the growth of Christianity. This point could be best illustrated by the contemporary integration of human subjects, whose roots are cut and who mix themselves with rays, feed themselves with sensuals, and no longer comprehend anything, except the desire for new stimulations inside the web of networks. There is a similar poignant will to harm that is difficult to grasp, yet crucial. One can be catacombed in two ways, in both cases by lacking affinity with charis. One is losing self-governance, the other is self-hatred, each defining the void in annihilation. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this mechanism is separating energy from life, transforming every being into an enormous network of energy pulsation, as seen in a little-understood and gory episode in the early genealogy of Christianity.

Separation of charis from charisma In order to understand the separation of charis from charisma as part of the problem, Weber’s perspective should be complemented by the ideas of thinkers focusing on imitation or replication and the psychology of crowds whom he unfortunately but probably not accidentally excluded from his interpretive sociology (Weber 1978: 23–24). By evoking sensuals, we step into the territory of the irrational, unmeasurable infinite of the incommensurable. But this is a step we are forced to take, just as Plato was forced to discuss not-Being due to the activity of the Sophists. Le Bon (2009) introduced the term ‘crowd psychology’ – and indeed what could be more tremendously infinite than emotions, sensuals, enthusiasms, all properties of our soul, pullulating in crowds or ‘masses’, which can generate a transformative enchanting process. So, beyond the contrast between rationalists (the Hobbesian–Kantian approach) and enthusiasts (Le Bon and Weber), proposed by Max Scheler (2014), who is using here an old Platonic concern (see Meno, 99C), we need to re-think the relation between these modalities. The problem is that modern politics, in particular through its fixation on charismatic leadership, a necessary appendix of media power, incorporates jointly the Kantian type of systematic rationalisation and Le Bon-ian mass enthusiasm, focusing on the momentum generated through mass psychology, though the final result is the perversion of both, as neither could exist without drawing the energy from concrete

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characters, taking advantage of their weaknesses, their lack of ability to keep themselves sane and safe in charis. But what were the origins of this combination? Evidently terms like energy, wavelength and emotional vibration describe something very much essential for modern politics, which has quickly turned to ‘spirits’ in order to depict the nature and implications of the changes reflected in the rise of crowd psychology and mass movements. Investigating why Kantian science was cast in terms of magic, where things are altered, forms are transformed, reality enchanted, offers fascinating insights into the boundaries between science, religion and the occult, into the energy mass of people’s mind. Indeed, to understand how the science of politics came to be so tied up with magical tropes and images, we must turn to an apparently unscientific phenomenon: the transubstantiation of matter.11 The principal difference is that the term energy requires a definition that can incorporate spiritual phenomena which of course the natural sciences are lacking. The natural sciences do not have a conceptualisation for the act that changes the form, character or substance of matter. This is indeed not easily comprehensible, but political science in fact possesses such terms – see its major mobilising concepts, like Hegel’s spirit or its derivative, Marx’s ghost, which are set to change the world, where evil capital and private property can eventually be defeated by the spiritual unification of the workers’ power. The ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’ from political science and the energy from the natural sciences are analogous to each other in terms of their essence, substance and usage, as they are contained in every being. This can be illustrated by Sartre’s unburied dead or living dead, at the heart of most of Sartre’s plays written around the Second World War;12 those who could not step over the limit, the threshold between life and death, but are still with us, continuously murdering, destroying themselves: the self-murderers, the painful breakers of human ties, encaged in existence, but forced out from life.13 They are the incommensurable in human flesh, ‘condemned to freedom’ or ‘free to choose’ (in the affiliate terminology of Milton Friedman) as no longer real, concrete beings with their manifold connections to human beings and objects in Nature, but mere ghosts, living dead, as transubstantiation is no different from alchemy or magic; all are concepts of unreal fictionality, derived from a technology of summoning up charismatic energy. A central feature of modern politics, and not just of political science, is the pretence of possessing an effective technology to promote happiness, which is a misapplication, for our life, of the universalistic logic of the exact sciences, under the pretext of betterment. Modern politics, it is taken as an axiom, does not simply search for the public good, but actually promotes this effectively, unfailingly, globally, in a universalistic sense, as individualised wellbeing, presumably using scientific technology to achieve such transformation, in order to make everyone redeemed and happy, living in a blissful this-worldly salvation promoted by adept, sometimes charismatic, leadership. This chapter claims that this is exactly what is erratic with it, and we should not be blinded by the fluid

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effervescence of contemporary political life, due to a sufficient application of modern, scientific methods to politics, but rather we should see it as an enclosure into catacombs, the direct consequence of the summoning of ghosts, in the form of sensuals; a necromantic application of divinisation. The accumulation and the density of sensuals are inevitable for summoning up the incommensurable, so the more pushed the sensuals are into an intermediate status, between life and death, the more effective is the destructive power manifestation enacting the unearthly realm of the catacombs. Certainly, nobody desires to possess something that is bad, and insubstantiality is a weak and shadowy existence. The very desire to possess something shows that it is valued as good, almost tautologically, but modern politics searches goodness in the wrong place and in the wrong way, through uniting aggregates in a fundamentally incommensurable manner, where forms do not correspond with their appearances anymore. Newly versioned or subverted forms hurt ratio and symmetry in the alchemical way of creative destruction which, while trying to promote salvation at a discount price, actually and infallibly further promotes contempt for existence. The ensuing problem with knowledge, the idea that only the capable–powerful can properly gain and possess it, is central in the problematic claims around charisma. Thus without principled charis set up by us, knowledge itself is weak, it spreads and escalates mimetically, fleeing into an unending proliferation of the incommensurable, into various ragged ideas of the transubstantiation or unlimited transformation of matter as the way to realise salvation, whether through the eventual resurrection of the dead, or through a supposed inner-worldly paradise of accumulating sensuals as the road to happiness.

Transubstantiation While transubstantiation seems to offer a way that does no apparent violence to the original character of the forms, just alters commensurability into an eternal subdivision without an end, into a perpetually fluxing incommensurable – it is the transportation of every part into an ever smaller part, which does indeed end their self-reliance and commensurability, so a factual violence. Transubstantiation implies that the incommensurable becomes present physically, and its quantity also starts to grow inside, which is possible only in incommensurability, where the ratio between forms and appearances is gone, so proper knowledge (acquaintance, familiarity) becomes impossible, as if in a void. The bread and wine served at the Eucharist are converted into divine flesh and blood through a process known as transubstantiation, thus becoming incommensurable. The incommensurable belongs to a separate existence, though not real, so everything which gets a place in it, becomes unreal itself. While existing, just like the images of film projections, which can provoke love and hate, thus producing feelings and even mobilising action on our part, they never become real in the sense of being capable of reactions: whatever the charm of Pál

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Jávor, the famous Hungarian actor of the 1930s and 1940s, he will never emerge from the celluloid to respond to our feelings, being a ghostly phantasm. Images forever remain in the fluxing, incommensurable infinite, are mere emaciations. In itself, the incommensurable is reduced to the void: nothing can be known about its shapeless, liquid inconsistence, apart from the sensual images. Such images, however, can be so vivid when connected to the realisation of Christian salvation, driven by the idea of sinful existence. This is why images about the tormenting of St Anthony by demons were so popular time and again, also as if programmatically demonstrating the problematic character of such images, themselves being demonic, and not just the demons actually depicted on them (Castelli 1952). Indeed, salvation is problematic, as it requires first separation, then destruction or permanent transformation; it is the unending creative destruction to dissolve things and then combine them into a new whole, inside the church. At the beginning the images themselves did not give form to anything. So, for hundreds of years, the Church existed only in the minds of Christians, without rituals, without concrete sacral edifices – rather they gave an unreal, quantum reality to the nothing by separative thinking. Then, slowly, even these imperceptibles that exist only in the mind, the so-called invisible church that belongs to the incommensurable, acted through transubstantiation, except that it violated its world, as it proceeded to substitute reality. Similarly, the enchanting magic of modern technology (Gell 1998), was a direct, secular heir to the enchanting necromancy conjured up through catacombing and transubstantiation, and also captured in Nietzsche’s nihilism, Weber’s world-rejection and Voegelin’s Gnosticism, went through these same stages. Sensual governance denotes the technique by which the barriers of forms are dissolved through the artificially forced escalation of emotions, and from the decomposition of forms energy is ejected and transferred. This radiating energy that can be gained over all of us is derived from the incommensurable, sometimes called charismatic or termed trickster. Still, either way, both derive strength from an absence, leading an existence that is not rooted in a concrete life, rather being animated by a spiritual effervescence, as Durkheim coined the term for the sensual that excites individuals and serves to unify them (Durkheim 1965). However, in Durkheim’s hands this seemingly innocent and natural phenomenon has a further turn, towards a peculiar transformativity. This is because by such effervescence individuals reinvest themselves in another body, form or structure, until they become the same in the creation of one body, with god and society becoming one and the same. Incarnation, the bodily manifestation of the divine, may provide a seemingly perfect, wholesome, infinite and self-sustaining solution in incommensurability, an ever-expansive and never-ending power transportation into the void, to its transformative, total source. But what exactly assumes a human form in a supposedly ‘divine’ person, which is a kind of incommensurable become flesh, always remains an uncertainty, after the first alteration of the form itself. And so, during the next

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steps of destruction a new alteration always occurs, in which it becomes more and more doubtful that the excellent outcome that the doctrine promoted will actually be realised –the whole process is full of craft and guile by definition. In a similar way, the resurrection requires nothing but repenting in goodness, resulting in an infinite goodness once one returns and lives in Paradise, but without the ancient belief that righteous men receive rewards during their lives, rather than being postponed into another world. Strangely enough, one could even exist accepting this reasoning about postponement, considering the capacities of the mind. Yet, it creates a biohazard in the sense of its continuous, consistent and permanent annihilation of reality during the entering of the deceitful sensuals into the threshold of understanding. By being present in time and space any sensual can be effective without being valid or real, and can even grow into an organic set of relationships, however fake, and into a mechanical producer of more sensuals, with a peculiar operational success in the void, which can be called the matrix, the receptor of the sensuals. Operational constructions might make existing beings obey and act according to such abstractions by the simple fact that sensuals are the only mischievous substance on Earth that is essential. They can be unlimited in escalation, mixing up colours and voices, exaggerating and patching together everything that is inflated in waves in the void in a complete confusion. It is illegitimate in the realm of forms, an intermediate incommensurable. A child of Poros and Penia, Eros is the offspring of opposites, abundance and poverty. Eros has many attributes (erotic, romantic, artistic), one of which is the Christian agape, the selfless love or caritas/charity. Still, in each of its modalities, Eros possesses a passionate energy, a never-ceasing blind desire to possess, the replicator. All the mediations of Eros are sensual, and as so they could become the subject of governing and operating by means of catacombing or channelling towards the incommensurable. It is for this reason that sensual governance, this demanding freedom for passion became the common denominator between Christianity, globalisation, neoclassical economics, the technologising of society, Communism, managerialism, neoliberalism, mediatisation and the unification promoted by the EU, due to the single common characteristic feature of motivating and governing sensuals through the technological means of enchanting transformation. Thus, an impassioned realm is putting an end to forms and so gaining ever more sensual waves by making things different from what they were – forever destroying the subjects of their previous desire.14

Irrational Incommensurability implies the alteration of substances not linked to authentic forms anymore: it is the irrational itself, and so the appearances of forms lose their borders, solidity and also capability, thus becoming subjected to the fury of infinite subversion and never-ending multiplication, when the tortured entities are trying to return to their elements and are reborn again in their new versions: in the brutal way of salvation.

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This discussion leads to a problem with knowledge. Without a proper capability for justice and reverence, knowledge only produces multiplication, an unending proliferation of bits of information that lack coherent meaning. The detrimental consequences are quite vividly illustrated in Michel Serres’ Thumbelina, about a transformation in which all paradigms are redefined, about a civilisational rupture between the past and the present (Serres 2015), supposedly leading into secular salvation – a sad reversal as compared to Serres’ earlier work about the parasites of communication or the violence done to nature by unbounded technological change. The book is about the inflation of the sensuals that direct their subjects’ fading minds to the voided, infinite incommensurable, which is without doubt energetic, though empty. This idea leads back as far as the 1920s, when quantum mechanics was already experimenting with the transformation of matter into pure energy. This was not just a change from one form of movement into another one (Born 1937), more significant are the grade differences in the decaying process, which is breaking down the forms, while accumulating energy. Not caring for the things that exist in life anymore of course has a decaying effect on perception, present not only in Serres’ Thumbelina, but in a description of the early Christians as people of mere deficiency: they want and are able to convince only the foolish, dishonourable and stupid (Origen 1964: 3.44). We should add that at the same time they were incredibly successful in magnifying the incommensurable; yet, it was practised by a dull, monotonous, drabbled way, for procuring effective utility. Dullness probably explains the misnomer of rational modernity, where boredom and monotony is confused with order, short-term efficiency with utility and function: ignoring the beauty of forms, thus – according to Plato – order itself. The plain and seemingly unpretentious technique of transubstantiation/ transformation can gain a monopoly position, stamping out criticism and homogenising understanding in the sincere, humble yet powerfully radiating sensual nothing. ‘For I am a wheat of God’, as St Ignatius said, the early Christian bishop of Antioch, so ‘let my spirit be counted as nothing’ (Ignatius 1997, emphasis added).15 The growth of contempt toward existence over time has become explosive. Invasive, nihilistic tools are most effective, as their underlying technology makes the system work, covering enough area for obstinate sensual monopolisation through spiritual effervescence, creating an effective ‘critical mass’ for transformation. The sensual is light, overwhelming, but not pretentious. Its rays travel through space with high velocity, embracing all with enchanting easiness, having a simple set of instructions to follow, valid for everybody with minuscule requirements, a simple chore of nothing, ideal for the ne’er-do-wells and for those without inhibitions. The sensual is a single ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in affirming conversion, ‘the light quanta’, a subversion of the real to the presumed universal truth. It lacks ornamentation, complicated and costly rituals; you just need to trust in their bearers or carriers. The sensual requires no elaborate commitment, only a simple trust in the humble feelings of the sweet, illuminating light of eternity, shared with circles of enchanted souls in contrast to the negligent world. The sensual is lowly in

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condition and in matter. The sensual is lightness, does not know inhibitions, is pleasing to the senses, gratifying, seemingly even gracious, as everything can be faked or imitated: it is the pleasant vibrating radiation in our eyes, the sunshine and the sweet breath of the air, the rising sweet sounds of bells; the whole mystery of living occurring in our mind, as if encapsulating inside our skull, catching our attention and even possibly catching and pocketing them in the same place in order to transfer to the incommensurable. Here, trickster and charisma overlap, each wanting the same: to grab our thinking and push it toward the incommensurable. Not that this sweet poison is finished with the end of our life, quite the opposite is true: its necrotic radiation is even stronger just before and just after our death, at the very moment of our real and factual transubstantiation of becoming impulsive rays ourselves; becoming remembering sensuals.

Pacification of the dead The history of death and burials is the history of the encounter with the unknown. The usual manner of burial was the pacification of the dead one, by burying it with pity and remembrance about the qualifications of its lived life: burials ‘designed to win gratitude and remembrance for the deceased’ (Ferguson 2003: 248). There is a reward and there is also punishment in this, according to Plato’s thinking about this matter, as the excellent, virtuous individual evidently possesses the divine whilst the weak one does not. It cannot even be otherwise if the body is the vehicle of the invisible soul, given that Plato shared this idea with Orphic and Pythagorean thought. However, in the Christian framework this notion had a negative tone. Where existence is considered as bad and sinful per se, it is to be destroyed. What is more, Christians were holding the faith that the world is empty of Roman gods, and these two negations – self-denial and impiety – enforced each other into a new world view. The sinful substance is to be broken down in order to build it up into a new existence of eternal perfection in the otherworld, which ‘is a stumbling-block to those that do not believe, but to us salvation and life eternal’ (Ignatius 1997; based on 1 Corinthians 1:18). The result is that death, instead of eliminating it, just prolongs existence on a lower grade, becoming a mere repositioning of the dead from one container into another, from the body into the cup of the after-world, from one receptor into another one. This charis/ma was ascribed to the Christians alone, during their life and also in their afterlife, marking their separation from the rest of mankind, as such possession identified a third kind of man, the pure sensual one: immortal, delivered from death itself, undividable, radiating an infinite incommensurable in a corporal shell. In this manner an essential border, the one that walls life and birth from oblivion and meaninglessness evaporated, resulting in the living dead in a fluxed incommensurable; existing and vengeful dead bodies without death, also called ghosts or spirits. As the anthropologist Katherine Verdery (1999: 27) noted: bodies have the advantage of concreteness that nonetheless

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transcends time. The qualifying position of the bodies’ souls, when they survived their form, is either that they would like to return again, or would like to unite with the divine, but in both cases this sensual desire is an energy, powerful like the changes from life to death and vice versa. By pointing the location of energy, productivity and growth – the content of charisma – downward, problematising them due to the sinful weaknesses of humankind, Christianity constructed catacombs, hollow structures for the bodies of lost souls, bringing down, into the underworld, the commensurable for transformation into the incommensurable. Their dead remained unburied, exploited for transformation, in particular for the enactment of binding their souls to salvation. In their death the catacombed Christians become like the Eucharist cup of Bolsena, a matrixing substance, mixing their souls with the sensuals of the incommensurable for union and transformation into a new, perfected existence in the church. But as Borkenau noted, the materialisation of the spiritual is, incidentally, the essence of magic, where the Eucharist is itself a piece of magic, when those taking the Eucharist eat the body of their saviour in order to give a meaning to incorporation into an infinitely great effectiveness (Borkenau 1981: 407). Magic is needed for this revenge, for the simple reason that now the unburied were unable to cross the border between life and death and thus never arrived at Acheron, remaining in restless in-between, and so became possible subjects for divinisation, the ones who were commended (because they abandoned the perfection of their own soul; see Plato, Apology 29d–30b), or could be called out in divinisation by various offerings, at any time. In necromancy the ones who lack a proper burial can be subverted, subjected to evocation, as if a soul-manipulation of the emotional appeal. When the history of the catacombs ended, the church, maybe because it became embarrassed by the legacy of the pungent places, walled up the catacomb entrances by the end of the 8th and beginning of the 9th century, and changed its funeral methods. After that Christians no longer deposited corpses in catacombs, but left them in the churches,16 a vivid practice until the French Revolution (Ariès 2013), and nobody bothered anymore about the catacombs. But for centuries Christians fed the catacomb structures with bodies, estimated at 6 million by 360 AD, as if evolving the Church into a vertically integrated monopoly firm specialised in salvation that solidified the transformation of dead souls into eternal radiated rays at the very place of the catacombs.

Conclusion Contemporary politics is increasingly based on circular, transformative and multiplicative techniques of sensual governance. The application of the word ‘sensual governance’ to modern politics, in one sense, is of course metaphorical, as modern politicians and political theorists do not often use explicitly sensual expressions and techniques – or do they? Carrying the world’s sensual in one’s baggage, just as travelling merchants carry their samples and patterns,

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and sell the real goods when occasion allows them, forwarding them by carrier wagons to their destination, is not so rare, as Lenin’s famous and ‘charismatic’ April 1917 train trip from Switzerland to Russia shows. Creative destruction is a word commonly used for the modern economy (Schumpeter 2011, but see also Keynes or other similar liquidationist economists like Hayek),17 expressing the technique-trick of forcefully inducing entities into a never-ending movement of destruction and creation, which offers an inventive technological growth, also demonstrated by Hitler’s famous transubstantiation from a nameless soldier (his own words) to the absolute leader of Germany. Creative destruction, also widely associated with the anthropological trickster figure, is thus the perspective from which Lenin or Hitler, among others, could indeed be conceived of as ‘charismatic’ leaders – just as any modern business entrepreneur synthesising in the energy re-distribution of human subjects. In this way, both the specific concerns of concrete individuals and communities, and the question of the common good, thus the central matter of politics, became ignored or excluded, lost in the terminology of a blank, universal salvationism, but gaining vividness as a mode of necromancy. Here the crucial problem is not really that charismatic leaders are in fact tricksters, but that they are figures of the incommensurable, of the better-to-avoid irrational realm of sensuals, which divinise with dead corpses. Destruction is associated with either the raising of dead souls, or the charming of living souls by magic. In both cases their natural progress is interrupted, either by bringing the dead back into existence, or by sucking the charis out of the living. A much-ignored element in modern politics is the fear in classical philosophy of the disintegration of entities, as this would contribute to the growth of the irrational incommensurable. Giving composition to yourself, being an author, had to be cast down into the incommensurable, until such concerns did not seduce minds anymore. No doubt this was a paradoxical undertaking, as on the one side stands the narrow and unsocial zeal of annihilation, but on the other the persuasive promise of Christian universalism, the tolerant spirit of Christianity that could easily be adapted to all climates and every condition, with the promise of divine power offered to anyone, as unity with the divine incommensurable was open to all. But the two are linked by their contempt for composition, for mindfulness, for caution in action and also for repositing reality into an apocalyptic key, through their longing for the incommensurable, by a confidence of immortality: an immortality in a material sense of keeping dead bodies alive by the sensuals. In the language of modern science this is formulated in the following way: your corpse will never die, we can keep it alive by radiation. The waves of radiation absorb body cells and redirect their electromagnetic radiation into other bodies, just as after death the body redistributes energy into the void. Necrotic radiation, the energy of dying matter contains inflammatory and growth factors, but at any rate causes the inflammation of the mind, changes thinking and alters understanding. We notice here the growth of the void, the expansion of the incommensurable around sensuals, where charis/ma – as what remained from charis – grows, in the hollow cavity of liminality.

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Weber’s rationality axiom as a modality of modernity is now questioned by contemporary social theory (Szelenyi 2015). However, such questioning, while now being extended to economic development (through the issue of sustainability) was still not extended to the idea of universal social progress. Modern rationality is first and foremost a breakage of human ties, a main reason why modernity turned away from representing charis and instead became an explicit instrument of the technological destruction and transformation of the real into a fictitious existence, a radiating, image-driven, multiplicative progress into the void, while hiding the violence of the process behind formalised methods and institutions. This chapter turned attention to the devastating impact of this so-called rationality on the integrity of beings, including their charis, fertility, power and goodness in themselves.

Notes 1 Note that in contemporary social and political theory Habermas’ promotion of the public sphere implies such priority assigned to the void, helping to understand why so many Habermas-inspired commentators came to see the Internet and then Facebook as a welcome tool for realising a perfect democracy. 2 In contemporary social theory, such prioritising of the void vs structure can be best seen in such extreme forms of post-structuralism like the works of Alain Badiou. Post-structuralism is just a typical modernist movement, a mistaken reaction to an already mistaken form of thinking, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, that turned Mauss’ important ideas about the need for structures into a lifeless formalism – spinning further meaninglessness and nonsense. 3 Here again, the ideas of Alfred Gell, defining magic through a direct impact on the mind, are most important. 4 ‘Let them have no burial ground’, the people of Carthage used these words against Christian burials (Tertullian 2017: 106). 5 What this implies is that Cartesian rationalism, with its body–mind/soul dualism, is itself a form of necromancy, as such separation only has a meaning in death. As long as we are alive, we have a body and a soul in indissoluble unity. Such Cartesian (and Kantian) rationalism, then, is strictly correlated with the way modern medicine, according to Foucault, is based on the study of dead corpses. 6 See mortalism in Tertullian: ‘The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed – because it is shameful; The Son of God died: it is immediately credible – because it is silly; He was buried, and rose again: it is certain – because it is impossible’ (Tertullian 1956). 7 C. Suetonius Tranquillus on Tiberius: 36; on Nero: 16; ‘Superstitionis novae et maleficae’ are the words of Suetonius; the latter conveying the idea of witchcraft or enchantment. Tacitus calls the Christian religion ‘a foreign and deadly [exitiabiis] superstition’ (Annal., xiii. 32); Pliny, in his celebrated letter to Trajan, ‘a depraved, wicked, and outrageous superstition’ (Epist., x. 97). 8 It is curious to note that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the most famous work of theatre, prominently contains both a living dead (the ghost of his father) and gravediggers. 9 We need to call attention to the tight similarities of catacombs both with the Shaft Scene of Lascaux and the Cappadocia underground structures, though lack of space does not permit exploring the nature of the similarities. 10 Tertullian was the first to disprove the charges that the Christians sacrificed infants at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and committed incest (Tacitus 2013). See the charges also in Tacitus, Annals: 44.2.

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11 The idea that political representation can be traced to the Eucharist is argued by Borkenau (1981) and Pizzorno. 12 Apart from Morts sans sépulture, they include Les mouches and Huis clos. Les mouches, stunningly, even claims that Jupiter was the god of death, which is factually untrue – and Sartre no doubt knew this. 13 See in contrast Arnold van Gennep (1960) on burial rituals for pacifying the dead. 14 One of the most evident forms of contemporary sensual governance is the evocation of victims. Wherever there are victims, they of course should be helped. But sensual governance through victimhood means something quite different: the need for victims in order to justify otherwise unjustifiable political operations. That this was the modus operandi of Communists by now is well known. However, it is much less realised that this is increasingly becoming the modus operandi of ‘democratic’ Western governments and extra-governmental organisations as well, much animating the current widespread malaise about politics, misdiagnosed as ‘populism’ – though of course much used and abused by ‘charismatic’ leaders. This is because reactions against sensual governance are themselves sensuals, thus can lead to a further round of sensual governance – evidently growing, just like economic capitalism, beyond any limits, through different modalities of ‘creative destruction’. 15 Extracts from a letter to the Romans (Cap. 4:1–2; and 6:1–8:3) of Saint Ignatius: ‘I am no longer willing to live a merely human life, and you can bring about my wish if you will.’ It appears in the Roman liturgy on the Feast of St Ignatius on 17 October (Ignatius 1997). 16 As a rule many corpses were not buried in coffins until the French Revolution. Cemeteries established on the outskirts of a town are relatively recent, dating to the 19th century. Except for the elite, everyone was buried somewhere below their church – away from the high altar, which was the most prized location – or, in some cases, around the church (Ariès 2013; Dexeus 2016). 17 While at a trivial level the economic ideas of Keynes or Hayek differ, such differences are ‘no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool’, using an expression of Michel Foucault (1970: 285), as they all assume the same exchange–society utopia, where Paradise can be realised on earth by liquidising every human substance and concrete object.

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The question of the multiplicative automatism that can be derived from the liminal again takes us back to the heart of classical philosophical anthropology, or the very foundations of social and political analysis, in particular the work of Plato, who argued that imitation had become a threatening moving force of the contemporary forms of social and political life, which he identified in several writings as being simulated and stimulated by the Sophists. Rationality or reliance on the power of reason, for Plato – and also for Aristotle – is not a simple anthropological constant; rather, it is a capacity to be acquired and developed in order to see measured relations when confronted with the irrational, fake problematic of artificiality. Ignoring the driving force of imitation, as propagated by a ‘new class of image makers’ in politics (Plato, Sophist 268C-D), implies that the mind will be reduced to the instrumental use and furthering of imitative processes, deployed in order to promote particular political agendas, which is exactly the central problem with the newly emerged public figures of art and science in the 17th–18th centuries, leading the path towards the Enlightenment. One of the most famous of them, the founder of modern science, Isaac Newton (1642–1726) gained fame by the idea of universal gravitation, a property which determines the spatial relations between bodies. Could anything be more solid, serious and real than gravity, where the emphasis is understood as being on massive bodies that move along a straight line until they encounter another body? Composed body structures themselves, with their different, solid individuality, standard and constitution, however, for Newton do not belong to the essential nature of things. The central word in this Newtonian revaluation is not gravity, mass or body, nor even movement, but the void, where things have only to appear for the whole to be triggered into motion. Their being, entity, identity, power and dynamism do not bring any condition to comprehend the whole, they are identified with the void, which entered or slipped into them, the eternal and never changeable. Newton argued about the necessity of granting existence to the void between the constituent particles of solid bodies (Newton, Principia, Book III, Prop. 6, and Cor.4). In this way Newton elevated the void into a primary principle of natural philosophy:2 it is the void that keeps things in infinite movement and assigns them power. All things consist of indivisible particles,

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and thus they can be divided indefinitely, without losing their qualities. With this understanding he shook the world of knowledge, not because the world view that he reformulated was not present before,3 but because in this way he gave a scientific legitimacy to infinite acquisition by extending finite matter into the infinite liminal (Newton, Principia, Book I, Section I, Lemma II).4 Contemporaries5 were much surprised by Newton’s consideration of the unreal, struggling to understand the true depth of its meaning: that, for Newton, the infinite is a sort of total cosmic fact that is contained in everything, thus crucial for describing central terms in Newton’s cosmology like fluxion of time, velocity, or quantities. But Goethe went further than this: he was an outright critic of Newton’s scientific methods, which according to him confused, entangled or pushed aside the opposing facts, thus reducing facts into slavery. The central idea was to procure knowledge of the world which at the same time implied its conquest, in the sense of an ability to influence, manipulate and transforms things, by splitting identities and eventually reconstructing them into a new entity, just as nature generates quantities by continuous flux and increase, without ever exhausting itself.6 The Newtonian view of the world thus discarded the Platonic notion of the form as an eternal ethos, that we also understand as charis, just as the singularity of reality, by liberating void through violating the borders of things. A void liberated from one concrete being will keep dissolving and corrupting, though not by attacking every other object in a general way, rather by searching out their point of weakness, through which another void can be liberated, and thus another solidity is turned into liminal flux. The eventual end-product of such dissolution is stasis, a state of chaos, where further improvement is no longer possible. For human beings, this implies a state of terror, living under the tyranny of disempowering, due to a lack of forms, standards and constitution. The end-product of such accelerated motion into infinity is not only puzzling, but also counterintuitive, as it gains force by dissolving borders, so it parasitically destroys the entity that feeds its own development. The true radicality of the Enlightenment vision of the world, which Newton pioneered, lay in the reversal of the evidence of the inherent ability or the first power of compositions. For this vision, expressed particularly well in Kant’s universalistic transcendentalism, the primary reality is the void; objects only take up a certain position within this empty space, thus literally become placeholders, becoming identical to the zero, as one of the main characteristics of the zero in mathematics is that it is a placeholder. Once this reversal of perspective is accomplished, it only had to be taken to its logical conclusion. The void had to be absolute; and as in such an absolute void any innate force is absent, particles would move continuously all the time, so in his second law of motion Newton moved beyond the Aristotelian vision of the world, where things are stable and complete with their inner force. For Aristotle things need a substantive force to move them out of stasis, while Newton saw the world as permanent movement, thus recalling in his Principles the

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Greek vision of chaos, in opposition to the world as cosmos. What is more, Newton’s third law of motion states that the nature of interaction in this world-as-void, or chaos, is a perpetual fight of the moving particles, as they continuously bump into each other, moving continuously, without any inner strength.

Void For Newton the void itself becomes a sort of container of substance, instead of just being in-between bordered things, or beings put into shape by Forms. In this way he changed the bearer of substance from the composed, structured body to the void. However, the problem of giving substance to void did not appear for him, as he considered matter as the mimetised aspect of the void, where extension, solidity, and gravitation are to be explained by the force of the vacuum, which is alternatively attractive and repulsive. The void could easily mask itself as a wholesome form and generate a huge release of energy by breaking the bonds that held the unity of the bodies together, alongside a chain reaction, with every break generating fragments that can furthermore be broken into ever smaller fractions. ‘Excited sensation’ was Newton’s most significant innovative idea in this context. Its significance lay not simply in rooting sensation in attraction towards forms7 – or, as Gabriel Tarde called them, the ‘passionate interests’ of the Enlightenment that animated the rise of modernity (Latour and Lépinay 2009), and its scientific and social revolutions, but rather in that it implied a turn away from the Socratic principle of knowing oneself, which was the basic task of philosophy, and even of classical culture and life. The introduction of the void, with its desire for impulses, or its eagerness for possession, into the centre of the modern scientific world view involved a basic change in thinking, by posing the question how something that is empty can move things. There can only be one answer to this question: the void can only move if it mimes, if it takes a body as a coat. Newton’s approach implied a radical shift from the form and its concrete constitution as authentic to its mimicry, ending up legitimising the existence of void through imitation.8 Only in so doing could Newton reach into another layer of reality, which from the perspective of the standards of the world of living beings implies an unreality, arriving at the idea of the continuity of matter and the continuity of space. Thus, concrete individual compositions became irrelevant, losing their authentic forms and continually dissolving into the liminal: ‘conceiving things to be continuously diminished without limit’ (Newton, Principia, Book I. Section I, Lemma XI). Taking the void as real could only happen if after decomposition the fragments of the full composition sink into imitation, creating an alternate reality, no longer keeping the borders that bound them originally, but trying to keep the newly acquired fabricated images until a new attraction arrives, given that the loss of the original forms rendered the fragments vulnerable. One of the results is undetermined fluxion, which is a spiralling, perpetual motion that

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keeps things in eternal variation. This idea formed the basis for Newton’s application of dynamics, attraction and vacuum to nature, a phantasm that is still rolling around,9 as an unreal copy image of the real. However, this truly ultimate and fundamental feature of unreality is its mimicry, which leads to the sudden and unlimited reproduction of ghosts, and can only be rendered intelligible, even if not fully explained and analysed, by the characteristics of the zero, this truly enigmatic number, first before the first and last beyond the last. Newton called it the naked point,10 and not without reason; the zero is nullity and nothingness; it does not count, it is indiscriminate; it does not know the difference, being a slave number. If we add the zero to any number, the result is the same; if we subtract the zero from any number, the result is again the same. That addition and subtraction yield identical results is not something to be taken lightly, if we try to reflect on the possible social and human meaning of such operations. Addition implies an increase, an act of giving, to make something more; and subtraction the opposite, to make something less by taking something, or some body away. It is thus not surprising that in several languages the mathematical operation ‘addition’ is connected to the term for giving, while to ‘subtract’ is a synonym for taking away.11 This indicates that a number which produces the same result for addition or subtraction is a number beyond ordinary life, which is based on giving and receiving; it is not a ‘natural number’; it is ‘beyond good and evil’, paraphrasing Nietzsche for things that are without character. There is a further point concerning addition; the adding of a zero after any number. Differently from the case of adding a zero to any number, this makes a difference; even a huge, magnitudinal growth. This game is a typical illusionist technique: adding a zero after all numbers would leave the relationship between them unchanging, thus again, seemingly, not making a difference; but deep in our heart we know that something does not fit. This is not a purely mental game, as it goes into the heart of neoclassical economic theory. The Walrasian general equilibrium is indifferent to the price level. We get the same equilibrium if the unit price is 1 dollar, 10 dollars, 100 dollars, or any other number; and yet in real life, changes in the general price level evidently matter. It took many decades and a series of enormously painful economic crises before economists, with the help of Keynes, started to understand, and even then only dimly, that something was not working with their models; the real world refuses to accept their theories. At the most basic level, however, this simple paradox indicates how profoundly the modern world, driven by the ‘economy’, is entangled in the mimic trickster logic of the zero. Things start to get even more complicated with multiplication. If we multiply any number by zero, the result will be zero; or, in other words, the zero turns every other number into itself. This conclusion is most significant, as multiplication is the generative operation by which, with normal, natural numbers, we get multiplicity, growth or development. Not with the zero, as, if we perform the same operation with it, we get nothing.

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But how did Newton develop such a radically counterintuitive idea, replacing inner movement due to substance and force by the idea of the void? By what method and procedure? He was certainly helped by prior developments in science, in this case most significantly by the air pump experiments of Boyle and Hooke, which were based on the power of the vacuum, or on another emptiness. Anyway, this time was the age when alchemy became justified and its logic of the unreal became more intelligible than the teachings of Plato and Aristotle on principles, qualities and substantial composition of forms. Of course, there was no mention in this new ‘scientific’ talk about the soul and its rendered composition, but even when they talked about matter, they considered it as essentially passive and insensible, lacking any tendencies or dispositions beyond its mechanical properties, so they had an essential alchemical thinking in their mind, with the easy substitutability of everything in Earth with a technological key. Characters lacked the inner, first power to defend their composition, so they can be acted upon, their transformability being a matter of fact. It is most significant in this regard that Boyle published his famous work on the air pump in 1660, countered in 1661 by Hobbes’, which resolutely argued not simply against the concrete findings of Boyle, but against the very vision of the voided world implied by it. It was this debate between Boyle and Hobbes that became the subject matter of the by now classic book of Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), influential in redirecting attention to the social and political correlates of the rise of modern science. Newton’s work fitted into a pattern and a context, giving a scientific significance to the alchemical ideas of voided emptiness, at a particularly liminal moment, thus can also be considered as the positioning of the extraordinary, or the liminal, the coincidence of the void and the flux, or the presence of nothing other than the flux in nowhere else but the void, as the foundational condition not just of human history and politics, but of the world as such. Thus, in the spirit of the analysis of Shapin and Schaffer (1985), it seems to me that, taking a step further, it is worthwhile investigating the condition of the possibility of taking the void as the starting point for a comprehensive vision of the world. The novelty in the view of Shapin and Schaffer was that the link between science and politics concerns not the answers, but a certain commonality in the thematisation of problems. It is in this direction that we must take a further step in order to understand just how radical Newton’s view was concerning ‘nature’. Newton did indeed reflect in a new, radical manner on the nature of this nothingness, arriving ultimately at the void as the principle of the universe; making use of the terminology of Marcel Mauss, the void for Newton represented, in the analogy of a ‘total social fact’, a ‘total cosmic fact’. But what does such reflection mean? Its novelty lies in implying a direction of thinking that is radically different from that of Antique thinking. Newton and his contemporaries discovered the automaton, or the occult qualities of an infinitely divisible matter, by something that is undividable, and which this

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book calls the replicators. These basic replicators interact and combine, infiltrating the finite composition, and in this way the replicators become productive. It now became generally considered that entities were essentially passive and insensible, lacking any tendencies or dispositions beyond their mechanical properties. Characters can be acted upon, as they contain no internal force, source of motion, substantial form, or disposition; they do not have a rendered soul as this same point can be also seen in the case of the images of French etcher Jacques Callot, taking inspiration from the commedia dell’ arte theatre.

The cosmology of Callot Newton chose to pursue alchemy beyond its previous limits, towards full scientificity, by actively reflecting exactly on the nature of disorder, persisting in looking into the abyss of chaos and the void, until he found its organising principles, or its truth, regarded as universal; and thus he ended up reflecting disorder as the foundational layer of the real world. And so the central question of this chapter concerns the significance of their persistence: how can we make sense of this truth of perpetual movement, the force of the ‘void’ that is continuously moving away from reality, by further and further discovering the nature of void? Where does the attractiveness of the void lie? What could have been the path-breaker model in this respect? This book argues that the answer to this dilemma can be found through the images of Jacques Callot, and in particular his cosmic series of the Balls of Sfessania, containing 24 images. These images, it will be argued, represent the vision of a world turned upside down, or literally ‘revolved’, through the lens of the void, as if fallen through a hole. In the frontispiece of the series, in the closed, alchemic space of a page, covered by a curtain, two figures try to force a third one to enter an empty box. The other 23 show two gigantic figures endlessly fighting, in contorted obscene movements, on a completely open and free public space, mimicked by minuscule humanoids in the background predicating revolutions that soon followed. Replicators have no value in themselves, they only gain meaning through a ‘magical marriage’, Callot’s Balls of Sfessania, with compositions; only in this way is the replicator able to significantly and magically alter their value and appearance. This operation is also the source of fertility and thus the basis of reproduction or multiplication or growth, but multiplication by zero as with the replicator results in death of the original composition; or, in other words, through multiplication the replicator turns every composition into its own empty self. The replicator is impotent, it is the otherworld itself, but this does not mean that it has no effect whatsoever; quite the contrary, it does manage to change any other compositions into itself, into nothingness. In the words of Foucault (1980), it has no power over life, only over death. Division as an operation leads to even more tricky results. Normally by this operation natural numbers become smaller, reflecting the fact that division or

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the breaking up of unity or any kind of cohesion is indeed a way to make things smaller, e.g. by halving them. Not so again with the zero as, if we divide any number by zero, the result will be a sudden and enormous, indeed infinite growth. In spite of its impotence, the zero not only manages to turn every other number into itself (by multiplication), but even produces boundless growth as well – by division, or the principle opposite to growth. Yet, this is still not all, as the most powerful operation is involution, or the raising to powers. Involution refers to numbers that are repeatedly multiplied by themselves or are raised by powers; a growth called exponential. The zero even here behaves in a strange way; perhaps the strangest way of all. Any number on the 0th power becomes one; or the zero, this slave number of nothingness, or pure positionality and subordination, suddenly becomes the architect of unity, as it manages, unfailingly, to turn any number into the unity. The culmination of this logic is reached as a genuine, both mathematical and philosophical liminal case, when we realise that asymptotically even zero on the 0th power yields one, or unity. The zero, not when multiplied by itself (which only yields zero), but when taken to its own power, as if by an act of auto-fertilisation, produces unity. Replicators are naked: have no inside, no midst, no centre; but they are all of these themselves (centre, inside and midst) at the same time. The question is how it might exist inside the composition: how to insert it or to pull it out of the form, how it can mime a character, as if taking it into its own power, thus to gain the creation or auto-fertilisation and so multiplication. There was only one answer to the ancient rebus of infinite divisibility, and this was obtaining the form of the thing by mimicry. Nobody gives up their own character, from dignity and morality, easily for the voided replicator; the replicator needs to deceive in order to gain a position inside bodies. This is the only way the replicator could get a position in the composition. The central claim of this chapter is that Newton’s deceptive proposition concerning the void, belonging to the heart of the history of modernity, has an exact counterpart in the history of art; a visual representation advancing the same idea, about half a century before Newton. This is found in the Balls of Sfessania series of Callot who offered a ‘rolling wheels’ vision of monstrous creation, which is generated and moved by mimetic attraction derived from the energy stored in bodies and revealed by the impulse of the void. Attraction takes place when the borders of the body structures are disturbed.12 Normally this should bring compositions into inertia, except when the insulting aggression is masked in order to evade recognition and pre-emptive destruction by the threatened one. By using masks Callot’s figures secure not only their survival, but even proliferation and growth, as this encourages them to behave in ways out of their original, given forms. Breaking the bonds that bind compositions to themselves and to each other by charis causes that chain reaction which repositions the normal constraints of the world, the end result being growth or reproduction. This can be followed through Callot’s figures, as the same type is multiplied and is fighting with itself or struggling for copulation with each other after the initial ‘sacred marriage’ takes place between void and voided compositions.

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Acquisition Callot, just as Newton, is not inventing things, rather capturing the very essence of his liminal times in which the mime play (and of modern theatre) developed, showing mechanical reproductivity as the outcome of the proliferation of insipid characters and trickster figures into life. Above all, he was a cold artist who searched out horror, painting torture, execution and assassination, proving himself a pitiless witness to all the miseries of mankind: never in inertia, but in continuous search for horrific images. Examples of his works include The Miseries and Misfortunes of the War, Massacre of the Innocents, The Temptation of St. Anthony, and Grotesque Hunchbacks – unending reports of a coming final age, where space is homogeneous and time is indifferent, as it ‘flows equally in without regard to anything external’.13 Callot deliberately sets the masks at each other’s throats, with the backstage mirroring the front, thus showing its multiplicative effects among the crowd.14 The fighting masks are shown as giants compared with the size of the back crowds: they are either naked or dressed in loose garments closed with semenlike buttons, but always wearing indicative feathers, on the head or as if grown out of their arms (see No.14).15 This striking similarity with the Ground Head figures in Tassili is worth noticing. Insemination or multiplication is central for Callot and Tassili, as all males – except those in loose fitting garments – wear a phallus enlarged with a cloth wrapped over it, while a row of pompons, representing semen, runs down their clothes, from neck to groin, underlining the generative meaning, not surprisingly recalling the Shaft Scene. Similarly Callot’s Balls scene is about a begetting: it is like a cosmic machine that never stops its generative zeal, a numerical composition of time and eternity, a perpetuum mobile with its gigantic demonic fights and births, which have no winners and no losers, but continue into infinity, swallowing up the old to the subtle generation of the new.16 Callot entertained his audience as nobody else did nor could in his age, pushing excitement to its extreme limit, to the pleasure of ironic macabre, presenting his Balls of Sfessania in the ritualistic–ecstatic form of popular mime-dance.17 At the same time he delivered a fatal judgement on the world as a meaningless place of mechanical vengeance, an eternal spectacle of cruelty, vanity and vengeance, which is moved by a foolish, stupid and inferior absurdity, a vision that became extremely powerful as it was formulated and published in 1621–22, thus in the very first years of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). He executed all this with technical perfection, visible in the virtuosity of his mannerist curvatures, forcing the spectators to take the images presented seriously, by provoking repulsion, attraction and reflection at the same time. The first picture of Callot’s Balls of Sfessania is a mocked hieros gamos, establishing a union with an inferior but powerful spirit, which we called the replicator.18 The consecutive pictures show brilliantly the identical ambiguity of the dancers: their more-than-human ability to change their appearance, their positions, and their mental attitude. For them, cruelty and sexual

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enjoyment is identical (see No. 2);19 they are equally feared and fearing (see No. 6), easily changing identity, clothes or names, and in every way, they have an ambiguous, fluid existence. All parts of the body that are targeted by curse are painfully squeezed: twisted, distorted, cramped or convulsed,20 in the grip of an ecstatic madness caused by the unity established with the replicators, which reveals an erotic character. It is a form of savage spectacle with queer marionettes in a monstrous union. In the Balls Callot’s genius successfully caught the transformation from the initial scenes, with the trap motive of secret marriage into a new transfiguration of the fighting masks (see No. 2; the numbering follows Posner 1977). The pale, trembling central mask of the initial image is turned by Callot into a fighter, a competitor, an invader or an intruder who is chasing the world into transformation. It is well known that there were never any Commedia dell’Arte troupes with this type of dance, or these types of character, with all those names (Posner 1977). Every picture pairs and designs the macrocosm and the microcosm, where the fighters are set up and separated, then lash out at the flesh of the other, fighting for copulation with bulging phalluses and bottoms (see No. 2, 16, 22), miming their unification and re-aggregation, and then starting the same phase again (see No. 5, 9, 12, 21). Their foreground acts are multiplied and mirrored in every case by similar acts in the background, ensnaring the acquisition of every possible person from the audience pictured. Nurturing a profound obsession with brutality and terror, Callot was also fascinated by comedy and popular entertainment, and was among the first important artists to explicitly depict some characters from Commedia dell’Arte, the early modern Italian form of theatre that resurrected the ancient mime play, with its deliberate and routine presentation of a world turned upside down.21 This is Callot’s unrealism, a sign of his being estranged, ek-static (the Greek word means to stand outside of itself or to transcend oneself), and evidently obscene, as showing on scene, in a theatrical, mime spectacle the process of estrangement, demonstrating how one becomes ek-static if one transforms oneself into the vehicle of emptiness.

Cosmology Isaac Newton’s cosmology considered that quantities exist in continued motion (Quadratura Curvarum, 1704), where motion takes place in the void, which brought him to the idea of fluxions or the eternal movement of things, the ultimate ratio; the determination of quantities from the velocities of motion, differing from its theoretical predecessors and sources, Aristotle or the Epicureans. There was no reason for Newton to introduce or deal with forms any more: ‘I was willing to show that, in the Method of Fluxions, there is no necessity to introducing figures infinitely small into geometry’ (Quadratura Curvarum, 1704); instead, the 0 was used to substitute small finite quantity (Cajori 1919: 34), thus giving substance and form to 0. Taking the 0 as the starting point he set up a challenge by identifying the finitely small

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with the zero, which provided Newton with an entire conceptual arsenal concerning gravitation, vacuum, the constant velocity, attraction and repulsion, the theory of light, the laws of motion, the indivisibles, and the relative as the infinite essence that glues matter together, the manner in which bodies act upon each other and thus manage to raise, compress, transfer energy. Transmutability and the conquest of the other’s qualities was a crucial problem for Newton. Already as a young Cambridge theologian it was through pursuing the claim that all matter consists of light (an attribute of the soul) that he arrived at the idea of liberating light from its composing form, a fundamentally alchemical issue.22 This soon led him to the idea of an active exchange of qualities taking place between things,23 in order to raise them into a new significance, just like Callot did earlier. With Callot he shared the importance attributed to surrealistic impulses that served to move things, to pulverise or annihilate their essence by putting them under pressure, forcing them to move and grow. Significantly, both ideas met with resounding and instant success. Newton demonstrated the existence of impulsive forces that reconnect and divide up reality, explaining the nature of attraction between things, an old concern of alchemy that aims to destroy and reconstruct entities. He epitomised the new model of the scientific establisher of the existence of a design in the universe; the one who provided proof for artificial providence, in reality as old as the Shaft Scene.24 The basic problem of the void space is its individuation (how to liberate it, the enslaved, from its original constitution), as, according to Parmenides, the nothing cannot have a position (Parmenides 138B). While every being has a standard, determined through the ordered relations of the whole, the void is missing this quality; it is merely subjected to the entities. Newton solved this discrepancy between the individual form and the enslaved void through a high level of abstraction, when he turned upside down the constitution of our real world and nominated void as the objective standard. However, the concrete unity of things resists change, defending its identity and intactness, becoming unsociable if its concrete existence is threatened. This is the reason why the main problem of Newton’s Hypothesis, and also his Queries, is how to deceive them with mimesis or with mirror images: tricking the water to dissolve copper by melting it with sulphur, or deceiving lead to mix with copper by adding tin or antinomy to it. As is true for every liberation, the liberation of the void – which moves freely and perfectly in its boundless and bottomless fluxional – needs a beginning, a creative initiation. This is shown by the initial picture of Callot’s Balls, which is not so much a composition as a decomposition, and a malicious one at that, with a transparent erotic allusion at the resulting new constitution through a marriage with the void: a hieros gamos, a sacred marriage image, though a rather scoffed one at that, between a possessing, acquisitive spirit and the possessed worshipper who would otherwise not mix.25 So that an interchange between the void and the new entity could take place another requirement must be met as well: that identity is broken, never to become the same as it was before.

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But Callot could give a glance at the growing secret activity, as seen in the frontispiece of Callot’s Balls of Sfessania that depicts five actors on stage in a tense movement, enacting a secret performance. Two are hiding behind the curtain, peering out with a voyeuristic look at the three front figures. The audience is a willing onlooker of the game, standing on the peak of a ladder (on the left), or just gazing as if through a high window (on the right), at the three figures at the front of the stage, who are involved in an obscure activity. The figures on the left and right are wearing masks and are mirroring each other in dress and appearance, tightly encircling the central figure in between them, who is called Bernoualla. The left mask with the guitar frames the action, chasing Bernoualla with rushed, exaggerated steps towards the right mask who displays similar stepgestures, and who has an open box in his hands, and whose ‘sword positioned between his legs serves as a phallus; its proximity to the open box suggests a vulgar meaning’ (Castagno 1994: 207). The vigorously phallic gesture of the stick under the box,26 however, simply mirrors the form and the exaggerated length of the guitar-neck in the hands of the left mask; while both together terrorise the central mask, who shyly tries to turn his head away, covering it by his arms, while still shaking the tambourine. Certainly, the central figure is dancing, his left foot is raised and shows a kind of dancing movement. But the figure does not seem to be enjoying himself much, as his back is curved, which is usually a gesture of fear, and is turning its back to the left mask, often the expression of somebody who is chased (Kahan 1976: 10), so he seems to measure the distance between himself and his pursuer – though this pursuer has a guitar and not a weapon in his hand. The central mask is evidently pushed toward the open mouth of the box.27 This parodic performance of conquest, together with the clearly sexual symbols of the long guitar neck, the sword, the open and empty box, and so on, gains its meaning by Callot’s inscription which gives some instruction about how to interpret the opening scene. This inscription can be read as the names of the three masks, but can also be interpreted as a full sentence: ‘Lucia mia, Bernoualla, Che buona mi sa’, or ‘My Lucie, Bernoualla, I really like it’, as if giving two female names to the two masks orientating themselves toward the box would indicate the substance (female goodness) of the box, kept in the hand of the third one. The words ‘Lucia mia’, handwritten under the picture, allude to a Neapolitan burlesque song, which belonged to the Tarantella dances,28 where Lucia personified the cock, the transition between sexes (Bragaglia 1930: 66). The central mask is pursued towards the frightening slapstick and the box.29 This starting and also initiatory image of Callot’s Balls is by no means a simple call for copulation. It is secretive, pregnant with symbolical and mystical meaning; it is ritualistic, with the peculiar purpose of generating something extraordinary from disintegration, through contrasting opposites. The 23 scenes respond to this initiation in their own identical ways. Nothing is noble in these scenes. They are rather bestial: one cannot help the feeling of witnessing beyond the burlesque style, a mythologised travesty of liminality. The Balls ridicule the divine,

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attributing to it a stupid libido, showing it up as an inordinate and vain god, improvising and unordered: a kind of fool’s god or a divine idiot, a sacred clown that is inferior to man.30 The names of the giant masks are all weird, grossly insulting or vaguely threatening: Franca Trippa (clearly alluding to the French malady), Fritellino (the greasy one), Babeo (the blockhead or baboon), Malagamba (the lame), Cuculo (recalling the seventh dwarf, Dopey, Cucciolo in Italian), Saramuca (the skirmisher), Fricasso (the hubbub), and so on: quite a kind of terminology for images of cosmic giants that are mirrored and imitated in the back stage of every picture. Callot shared with Newton a new conviction about the presence of the effective force of the void in the composition of every concrete being. The central issue for both was conquest, and they both found in the void that indivisible infinity which is able to dissolve cohesive identities, thus breaking the protective borders, unleashing motion and hypnotic gravitation.31 They both agreed that what enabled the void to perform this action is its nothingness, due to which it can imitate any form and magnitude leap or transformation. It was posited that there is no need any more to assume a concrete force that keeps moving the cosmos and the concrete beings inside it. Once the void is liberated from a concrete being or sinks into another one it alters its composition, and so now the fragmented matter that comprises a disruption is able to split infinitely. Therefore, it does not fall into inertia but instead it is able to strive and prosper, breaking and acquiring without any limit, driven by its own innate depravity. Bodies incorporating depravity are in continuous schism; see Callot’s liminal figures as well as Newton’s ‘fluxional’. In this way they perform their actions separately and in isolation, which deepens their void, but the deeper it is, the closer it comes to fulfilling their void essence, the nothingness. In order to maintain this circle, where end and beginning meet, individuals do not need to act further in any way: it is enough to empty themselves, subjugating themselves to the void, which results in a self-begetting circle. Consequently, according to Newton it is impossible to assign individual names to infinite domains and there is no criterion for identity: only relativities obtain. Nothing is final or local; space and time are infinite, implying, as a consequence, the infinity of all conquest. Nothing is nameable, the standard constitution of forms is unimportant. Hence void is liberated from it. In Newtonian empiricism the essential and fundamental property of bodies is their void, not even needing force to maintain position. With this Newtonian science separated itself from Euclidean geometry established a new basis for philosophical comprehension, the new perception of a fluxional world.

The fluxional Once Newton stated that space and time are ontologically independent of their occupants, this suggestion started to work and proved its worth. It came to mean the impossibility of distinguishing between places, specifying the

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conditions in which concrete beings could obtain their identity, and so the relative became for Newton the means for talking about the real. Callot, for his part, shows that things in flux, in the void behave in an unlimited way. How could anything be measured, when there is nothing to compare with it, if things are indistinguishable and cannot be distinct, their nature keeping them inseparable in a meaningless way, being thrown into the mere sensorium of infinite space, into the agitation of vibrating motions which progress, irresistibly and victoriously, towards the annihilation of every form. Once the world is reduced to fluxions and infinite decomposition, we are at a loss concerning how to conduct or know ourselves, so instead keep agitating for more and more attraction. The gigantic, macabre spectacle of the French Revolution, in which the Enlightenment culminated, illustrates this point well, with its secretive art of violence, which captures and encloses, dragging down every form, structure and authority, imposing its binding boundlessness on any existing value, moral and authority. It proclaimed freedom, but ended up coercing, whether by deeds or words. It even presented itself unveiled – in the form of the ‘Supreme Being’ – as non-being itself, a being without any bonds and restraints, the being of ecstasy, accompanied by songs and marches into nothingness. The Revolution was a ritual breaking of the system, the loss of measure for an entire community, the (dis-)organisation of terror, chaos, disorder, confusion, bringing about the havoc of war and disruption, which was not incidental and externally imposed, but the logical outcome of its waging a mortal war against society itself, breaking all its established ties and identities, thus destroying society in the name of the social; a total, inexorable destruction of all social links, a radical change of all forms, evading the surrounding reality in the name of liberation, a release from the self (which is identical to death), establishing a permanent state of struggle as the essence of the human condition, and finally culminating in ecstatic possession, thus passing beyond death, so recreating a unity with the fertile, generative force of the void, at the price of the initial stage of violent, dramatic tremor – slowly or abruptly sliding into the unreal, into ecstasy, into orgiastic mimesis.32 Newton denies even Descartes and introduces space and time as fundamental categories, which are furthermore ‘affections’: ‘Space is an affection of a being just as a being’ (as cited by Stein in Cohen and Smith 2002: 267). Fluxion means that things are divided by the admission of the void (Newton, Questiones 2 88). The void may get entirely inside each of these halves in a critical moment and thus continue their division into eternity; there is infinity in division. The principle of division is the void, which breaks into an unlimited number the parts of the matter, objecting to the wholeness, size and shape of the matter; or the Newtonian supposition that the body is infinite. While the infinity of division, or the fluxional, reduces authentic things to nothingness, there is always a new stage of life that gives them survival in their new, mutated mode of existence, because it could be infinitely extended. Beyond all this exaltation there is an immobile, unchanged and absolute entity, a vast and hideous demonic being.33 Newton widened

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existence over the threshold of life and death and rediscovered the Platonic notion that reality and unreality merge into each other. The material world is not limited to reality; there is a vitalising principle that connects life and death, the existence of the ob-scenic, as it is also present in Callot’s wilfully ugly images. Until Newton, the infinity of division, which would reduce things to death and non-existence, was a territory banned for man. Newton, however, just like Callot, dared to play with the prohibited, as if anticipating Kant’s sapere aude, showing a death/birth that revitalises and leads to the generation of new mutations. In his Optics Newton called it fermentation: the force that confounds into boundless chaos, but then re-aggregates again.

Infinite series or the Axiom of Maria We immediately encounter difficulties if we try to capture this uniform boundlessness in words. Infinity and void are the terms used by modern science, yet they are not quite right. Void is mute, as is the mime, but is present on the stage in indefinite finiteness. Void – as nulla (zero) – only appeared in Arabian mathematics around the 8th century, though not yet with the same sign and name as we know it, rather using a still obscure Indian symbol. The zero only arrived into Europe in the 11th century, with the Crusades, and for a long time it only had a peripheral usage. Its wider application can be traced to the turn of the 16th century, but only the age of the Enlightenment disseminated it as a mathematical device, much connected both to military architecture and the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci – the first European explorer and convert to the ‘philosophy of the nulla’ (Marinoni 1960). But as a numerical extension the void, with the name of nothing, cipher, zephyr, nil, null, nulla, zero – having many names, unknown to the Egyptians or the Sumerians, the Greeks or Romans – only gains power in certain situations when its position in mathematical terms comes into importance. We still do not buy zero bread, and we still count from one. Zero is a slave number, but that particular type which is able to enslave others. Our everyday culture still stubbornly clings to things that lack void, numbers that are sorted from one and not from zero – our desperate efforts to express in familiar terms the frightening alien vision of the world discovered by Newton and proposed as the true nature and the real world. Newton’s unprecedented success lay in this notion. He combined the discontinuity of matter with the continuity of space, by accepting the brokenness of matter itself by putting indivisibility and continuity inside it – through the void. When we divide, multiply or make involution (or raise to powers), the zero alters the normal arithmetical operation, causing growth or unity. According to this philosophy of emptiness, which is moving Callot’s masked dancers, entities become generative due to the void they contain. They are able to divide/multiply infinitely in the nick of time. This is the liminal flux that helped Newton to overcome the vis inertia problem: that things in resistance lose their motion and fall into inertia, so motion is always in

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decay. His question was how to recruit matter through an active principle, which generates endless division without losing motion, attraction or power. Void, this obscure structuring aspect of matter became a solution for Newton, implying the inevitable next step of introducing it into reality by breaking it, as otherwise the remaining problem – how the void sinks into the matter – would not become a problem.34 Consequently the fluxional is connected with acquisitiveness, or the continuous breakage of existing entities, which brings forth the generation of power. In Jung’s The Psychology of Transference there is a citation from a 3rd-century AD Alexandrian alchemist, the so-called axiom of Mary: ‘One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the four’, as this progress through the series of numbers is a formula of the alchemical process (Jung 1989). But this infinitely multiplicative nature of schismatic division is even better illustrated by the infinite series in geometry, first discovered by Archimedes (287–212 BC), about how to break up a number, form or figure into an infinite number of infinitely small parts: 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 +1/32 + 1/64, and so on, through the method of exhaustion; a very telling word. Here void makes a difference, because if you divide by zero, you are not distributing anything anymore with the progression of growth. Nulla means void and emptiness, nihil and non-existence, and Callot’s masks are first and foremost deprived beings, marginals and outcasts, or those who are subjugated, though at the same time also over-human, tyrannically demonic. The void is the condition for strife; it desperately tries to behave like the others, wants to be ‘real’, grab the real, ‘get a bite of the world’, mime it and unite with it and digest it; but at the same time its grabbing ends up annihilating it. This is why these images reproduce, in order to diffuse, only the lowest, most vulgar and obscene aspects of the ‘sacred marriage’ scene of the opening image. Such traits might be termed animalesque, but this would not be correct. Callot’s masks do not behave like animals; at worst, they perform things that animals would never be able to do, demonstrating a genuinely monstrous depravity. We wonder at the masks not because they show up the animal-like vigour of a state of nature, but because they fiddle with the abyss inside of us. These radically contrasting aspects of the sub-human and the superhuman are brought together by a third main characteristic, which is something positive, even the most important feature of the void: its imitative character, its essence as a mime. The mask is a nullity, the embodiment of the zero, but it also has a positive identity: it is miming. It is pure nothingness, a fake, which is unproductive, impotent, unable to complete anything and to be real or true; and yet, at the same time, it is capable of miming in order to gain position, which is instrumental for marriage and so can cause sudden multiplication. At one moment, it is just an obscure, marginal figure, ignored or enslaved by everybody, not taken seriously, an object of laughter and the butt of bad jokes; but in an instant, without any precedent or warning, with a quick and sudden leap it is up to gain possession, hunting down the others, forcing them to copulate with its void and in this way multiplying itself out of all proportion, becoming the dominant character. Copulation can multiply the unreal that would soon rule the scene, and order everyone else to copy it.

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Callot and later Newton both perceived a precious asset for gaining position, exploiting their age in every conceivable manner. The power of the people of their age, their intelligence, energy and wealth became their own: an acquisition they gained as a result of their skills, or their position in art, philosophy and science. But this is not all, as they have both become icons, inexhaustible treasures of imitation and mimesis, thus growing into a generative force35 as well, as if the ‘axiom of Maria’, a formula of the alchemical process that describes germination, would have been realised in them. While the Greeks tried to avoid dividing units,36 the new era inaugurated by the Enlightenment continued to exercise vigorous power over its subjects, promoting subservience to the big structural machine, that came to be realised time and again as incubus, parasitic body or supernatural abstraction. Hobbes and Marx, among others, attempted to consciously build up an artificial construction in order to subordinate the units to its logic of artificial perfection, failing to realise its perversity and intrinsic irrationality. Indeed, this idea is very similar to the alchemical dream of artificially creating man, so it is not surprising that it produced an identically unexpected result. Alchemy searched for the excellence of gold, and discovered instead hydrochloride acid, nitrate and sulphate,37 all kinds of acidic metals suitable for aggression and violence against natural objects, perhaps analogous to the modern states that combine bureaucratic rule and colonisation with ‘pastoral care’.38 Revolutions, however, could not even work their way out of liminality, as they purposefully identified themselves with the void.39

Revolutions as the evocations of the three ‘S’s: seduction, senselessness, sensation Revolutions are guided by definite types of ‘empty’ contents, like seduction,40 senselessness, sensation, or the three ‘S’s: all unstructured, yet at the same time highly structuring emotional forces. Under their influence the basic norms of personal integrity are questioned, terror and fear concerning the meaning and the very existence of the world creep into the mind, propelling a sliding back from harmonious Being to the bare level of the taken for granted. This is produced by the contagious spread of a new social content, as channelled through the three ‘S’s, dissolving accepted norms. Callot was a peculiar but paradigmatic example, the 24 images of the Balls of Sfessania providing a ‘rolling wheels’ vision of human attractions, as generated and moved by seduction, in order to reposition the world. It helps to understand instances where the relationship between structure and agency cannot be easily resolved or understood through the by now classical ‘structural’ or ‘structuration’ theories, as suggested by Pierre Bourdieu or Anthony Giddens, but the central place is taken over by emptiness, covered by a wafer-thin layer of structure network, as organised by the state. Revolution, a phenomenon studied so extensively in sociology and political science, without yielding a result beyond self-complacency, can be understood as a highly problematic

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‘carrier’ of social change, in the original Weberian sense, which reframes the disrupted integrity, as anticipated by Callot.

Conclusion While it is not really clear when the official hostility ended against alchemy and related matters due to multiplication tricks and their alteration of nature, engaging in impiety, falsehood and corruption but already the charge against Socrates shows these contents present in 399 BC: There is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a ponderer over the things in the air and one who has investigated the things beneath the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger. (Plato, Apology, 18b) However, in 1689 Robert Boyle successfully petitioned to have alchemy, this secret science legal again, and so the forbidden practice of alchemy was released. Not that anything banned Boyle from publishing over 40 books even before the annulled Spondent Pariter, as all his books were published while the Act was still in place. But a forbidden practice is still an activity, and eventually, it became accepted through the works of Copernicus, Newton, Boyle, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Cajetani, Callot and many others. Their relevance for the present can perhaps be best expressed though one of the last works of Giandomenico Tiepolo, which seems to have the meaning of a definite farewell. In this a group of figures, including the arch trickster Pulcinella, are going away, crowding, turning their backs, under the rain. They are holding umbrellas, and the sky is full of storm clouds; still, their shadows are clearly visible, so the sun must also be out, evoking Pulcinella’s return in every farewell.

Notes 1 The chapter incorporates some parts of Chapter 4 of my 2013 book Modernism and Charisma (London, Palgrave). I thank Springer for granting me permission to reproduce them. 2 The puzzle of infinite divisibility was posed by Zeno, suggested even by Parmenides and other Presocratics, so has a long pedigree in philosophy. 3 See among others Cardano, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes, Leibniz or Hobbes, as analysed by Cesare Maffioli, Simon Schaffer and Quentin Skinner. The idea of releasing the void from the prison of forms also could be traced back to Sophist thinking (for e.g. Protagoras), or to Gnostic and Cabalistic Monism (see Shoham 1994). About Newton’s liminal world view, see the following: ‘What the real substance of anything is we know not. In bodies we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds … but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses […] much less, then have we any idea of the substance of God.’ (From his God and Natural Philosophy, as in Thayer (1974: 44).

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4 Liminal phenomena as ‘go-betweens’ have been studied most recently by Simon Schaffer and his associates (see Schaffer et al., 2009), in the sense of messengers or agents who draw boundaries and cross them. See also Szakolczai (2009) for the term ‘permanent liminality’. 5 Concerning contemporaries about Newton, see Shank (2008); Durkan (2008); and Fara (2002). 6 ‘Nature may be lasting, the Changes of corporeal Things are to be placed only in the various Separations and new Associations and Motions of these permanent Particles, compound Bodies being apt to break, not in the midst of this Particles, but where those Particles are laid together, and only touch in a few Points.’ (Newton, Queries 1–7 and 31, as in Cohen and Westfall 1995: 53). 7 In 1731 Newton stated the following about contagious attraction for this kind of suction impulse automatism that moves into infinity: ‘If body attracts body contagious to it and is not mutually attracted by the other, the attracted body will drive the other before it and both will go away together with an accelerated motion in infinitum.’ From Newton’s letter to Cotes, as in Cohen and Westfall (1995: 119). 8 ‘Perhaps’, concludes Newton his letter to Oldenburg, ‘the whole frame of nature may be nothing but various contextures of some certain ethereal spirits or vapours’, as in Thayer (1974: 84). 9 ‘If by spirit, how comes the spirit to be so easily united to the body, and not slip through it, and when united to it how comes the spirit to be so cease so soon and the spirit to leave it. Hence, every little atom must have souls in store to cast away upon everybody they meet with. If a quality, then qualitas transmigrate de subject in subjectum […] In a word how can that give a power of moving which itself has not.’ Questiones 52 113; in McGuire and Tamny (1983: 407). 10 See Questiones 63 119. Nakedness, in English, and even more in Italian (see Agamben, 1998, nuda vita), represents vulnerability. 11 For Hesiod, it was self-evident that giving is good, while taking away is bad. 12 ‘The shock of every single ray may generate many thousand vibrations and, by sending them all over the body, move all the parts, and that perhaps with more motion than it could move one single part by an immediate stroke; for the vibrations, by shaking each particle backward and forward, may every time increase its motion,’ in Thayer (1974: 95). 13 Newton, as cited by Voegelin (1990: 165). 14 Newton’s Proposition 57 in the Principia is an example for this: Two bodies attracted to each other mutually describe similar figures about their common centre of gravity, and about each other mutually. 15 In numbering the images I’ll follow Posner (1977). 16 See also Harvie Ferguson’s analysis of the war experience (Ferguson 2004). 17 About Italian satiric–political popular dances, see Bragaglia (1952: 36); as for the many types, see Piedigrotta, La Zingara, La Capricciosa, il Diavolo in Camicia, la Spagnoletta from Naples, a real bacchanalia, a sort of mystery play at the cave where Venus was celebrated. 18 See De Giorgi (2004), on the Tarantella being a marriage dance. 19 See Baudelaire, ‘Mon Coeur mis à nu’, about the desire to torture being a form of sexual repression. 20 These are the exact spots where moresca dancers wore bells, with the explicit apotropaic purpose of chasing away demons; see Brainard (1981: 727). 21 See Tessari (1981), with its particularly telling subtitle The Mask and the Shadow; and also Horvath (2010). 22 In a January 25, 1675 in a letter to Oldenburg Newton formulated his idea on light, saying that it is something very thinly and subtly diffused in every matter; as in Thayer (1974: 87).

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23 ‘Anybody can be transformed into another body of any kind whatsoever, and can assume successively all intermediate degrees of quality’ (Newton, Principia I, Book III, Prop.6, Hypothesis 3). 24 See the excellent book of Patrizia Fara (2002) about how the accomplishment of Newton was understood. 25 On the relation between trance, dance and marriage, and about the sexual nature of the trance dance, see Meier (1967). 26 Similar doubled feminine and masculine sexual meanings can be seen on a Moche jug, in which the vessel is feminine, and the neck masculine, forming a phallus, in Johnson (1992: 121). 27 On the box signifying the receiving female body, see Arasse (2005). 28 About the Tarantella dance as a hieros gamos rite, see De Giorgi (2004: 103–134). 29 See also the open mouth of the box as something that can cause harm or bite, see the tarantella literature about Taranta, the spider, who is always female (Danforth: 1989) to fill it with quite evident sexual activity signed by the semen buttons and the between legs stick of the box holder, seminating and to be seminated: ‘O Lucia, ah Lucia / cocozza da vino bonora mi sa / vide, canella, ca tutto me scolo, / tiente, ca corro, ca roto, ca volo / Cucuricu / Rota me su/’ (Song from the Tarantella, ‘Dance of the Cock’, in Bragaglia 1952: 179). 30 About buffoonish Heracles, the wandering demon and half god, see Kerényi (1959); Welsford (1966). 31 Newton used the word attraction in his Principia in this peculiar way for something centre oriented, promiscuous and indifferent. See his letter An Account of Commercium Epistolicum, in Cohen and Westfall (1995: 162). 32 See the Introduction to del Giudice and Deusen (2004); see also Caillois (1981). 33 Here probably we should refer to Newton’s Arianism. 34 ‘Newton accepts the view that parts are distinct just in case they are separable and, if in fact divided, are divided by the presence of voids between them’ (McGuire and Tamny 1983: 41). 35 Strangely enough, there are other works of art that express exactly this same, reproductive quality of the void, and that bring us back not simply to the mime but outright to pre-history. One of the most striking aspects of the mask is his long, crooked nose, widely recognised as a phallic symbol. But similar figures or masks exist in several parts of the world, beyond Greco-Roman Antiquity, including American Indians, Africans or Melanesians. In some cases the length of the nose is exaggerated out of all proportion, so much so that it reaches, and becomes at one with, the penis. Such statues, of course, leave much room for interpretation; but they clearly allude to the reproductive ‘auto-fertilisation’ of the void. 36 See Arpad Szabo, The Beginning of the Greek Mathematics 1978. It is loathing a desolate existence, obscure and abhorrent: to break the ability and dynamics of form. 37 On Ptolemy (100–178AD), Alexandrian alchemist, see Hutchins (1963). 38 About how under the idea of prosperity and happiness, which identifies the state with its subject, life becomes an object of police, enslaving their own people, see Foucault (1981). 39 See again Szakolczai (2009) about permanent liminality. 40 About seduction, see John Forrester’s genealogy about the spread of psychoanalysis in the 20th century (Forrester 1990).

Conclusion

The modalities and effects of political alchemy as unbounded technology were encapsulated in this little book. But technology is not something that reveals itself with geometrical precision, rather through the modality of its operation, as it can jointly occupy or invade us, while at the same time work on our bodies. It is also hidden, covered, masked, hazy and darkened by many substitutes. At any rate, we are being invaded by it, but at the same time we have become its accomplices, active partners in its operations, as we also feed or aliment them. This is why it is possible, after all, to lay out a description of the effect mechanism of technology, which operates through the voiding, substituting, matrixing and catacombing techniques, and that is set in motion by an automaton technical device, named necromancy in this book. However, this problematic symbiosis with sensuals, the endless circular games between destruction, annihilation and reaggregation have a further end, which accelerates it beyond our comprehension: it makes endless copies of body structures, infinite hybrid compositions for productive multiplication. Here the spinner of the voided matrix is identified as a factorial outcome of the replicators’ agents, who are rocking our enchanted spirits – an expression taken from Baudelaire that contains both the magical word enchantment and also a stunning, rolling charisma. As the result of such irresistible activities, identified as knowledgeable, expert alchemical operations, metallurgists, smiths and other necromancers, including the modern ones, many of which we have outlined in the book, managed to simply vaporise nature’s once iron bordered structures – evoking an annihilation of forms that is even stronger than composition liquidation. The outcome is that step by step we descend into the place of the replicators, entities without composition themselves though – no doubt due to the expert enchantment – we no longer even notice the case; into a striking sensual existence with nil composition. Such destabilisation of compositions is the basis of the energy gained by their absorption, which means the endless necessity of entering always new and newer compositions into the annihilation process, which at the same time is also an energy production process, proliferating a profound, insoluble chaos of reality. Since the time of Newton this raised power or gravity has become an issue in sciences, as this energy, presumably, magically

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transmutes society into a fountain of health and progress, enabling everlasting tolerance and universal democracy, though also impaired with the most profound despair, at least according to the story told by contemporary politics. Something is still missing. Replicators, the accidental souls of the matrix who are replicating in the compositions are consummating authentic souls as part of their transformation process into being a form structure themselves. But their occupation and transformation is provoked and artificial, a process that upsets nature, overturning life and death, bringing the otherworld and all of its ghosts into life, contaminating it with living dead. They violate nature, the harmonious order of reality, and in fact this was the undercurrent of blame against its operators, the alchemists, smiths, cosmologists, magi and sorcerers, who have claimed to multiply, alternate and change life, since Antiquity. Even in Hobbes’ time the infinite fascinated many. We mentioned Newton, but the adventure of the imagination of having an apparatus for transmitting motion to a machine, or from one machine part to another one, into infinite copies, never ceased to dominate the modern imagination. The operating condition of such a mechanism became exclusively the interest, by pushing and pulling together the whole edifice of existence, forever forgetting its charis content. Since charis is present in all that is good in man and in the social, a strong, organized effort has been growing over time and by all means to chase charis away. The alchemical idea of transformation gradually empties the world of its charis principle laid down in the harmony of its formed compositions. This principle is that of the order of the supreme, which unfolds throughout time. Nature is the beautiful setting for this thoughtfulness and care about charis. Charis has a principled quality, to which nothing is possible to add or to take away, as in the forms of compositions time has stopped. The Hungarian words encapsulating charis (‘kegy/kegyes’, ‘kecs/kecses’, and ‘kedv/kedves’) mean kind humour, friendly disposition and favour, enchanting beauty and generous inclination, also belongingness to a benevolent and polite society. They imply a delicate equilibrium between the private and the public by good feelings that need efforts to gain it: it is a decision, a reliance on the first power that is both given and is cultivated in and through life; a serious wilful desire to promote it among others.

Glossary

Absorption: A technique by which concrete entities, once their boundaries were transgressed and integrity removed, are mimetically made to conform to a certain projected image. The other side of the technique is the appropriation of energies from dissected, decomposed bodies. Such absorption alters filiation, as it produces offspring outside the linear transformation characteristic of the authentic matrix. Adaptivity: The manner in which humans are induced to give up their inner power in order to become receptive for external influences and suggestions. Such a transformation is central for producing exponential and infinite growth. Adaptivity (or flexibility) is a more efficient form of power than constraint, as it incorporates the willing contribution of the subject into its own imprisoning. One of its modalities is internalisation (also close to absorption), analysed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Boundaries: Everything that has a concrete body, form, structure, has boundaries, which both concretely and symbolically protect the integrity of this entity. If these boundaries are transgressed or lifted in any way, the entity enters a liminal condition. This can take place either in real life, or during rituals, and can be part of the normal process of growth and growing up, but it can also be artificially induced and manipulated. The worst of such manipulations is the idea of limitlessness, or the claim that entities do not need to respect their given (natural, gift-like) limits and boundaries. Such an idea, that effectively destroys the integrity of entities and takes away their inner force or first power, can be induced by first forcing the entity inside externally imposed artificial limits, and then lifting those limits, but also by implying that any limits infringe the absolute liberty of the entity, which of course is meaningless and absurd. Such recurrent play with limits (successive changes concerning their imposition and subsequent lifting) is a fundamental trick being used in the spread of the modern global world, where excessive liberalisation of movement of goods and people, which destroy concrete integrities and traditions, are followed by the enforcement of universalising limitations and restrictions. Catacombing: The accumulation of sensuals, by operators, through deposing unburied dead bodies inside networks of cavities dug inside the underground.

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This technique came to be used, from about the 2nd to the 8th centuries, in early Christianity, even though there is no scriptural support for such a practice. The practice recalls the underground structures of Cappadocia. Character: Closely connected to Greek ethos, central for both Heraclitus and Plato, and also placed by Gregory Bateson at the heart of his early work, character refers to the singular concreteness and coherence of every genuine living being, their composite nature. It is the inner essence of the principled one, corresponding to the Greek emphasis on the ethos of the genuine and cheerful; the pious; the passionate, who pays homage to beauty; the well developed in mind and spirit, who live unconscious yet in order with goodness. Everything that is alive, that is born out of the genuine matrix, has a character, which implies a form, and which consequently gives a definite shape to everything that being does. Such character resists any external influencing and suggesting, the reason why ‘object’ means ‘resistance’, and therefore the task of every controlling apparatus is to take away or destroy the character of concrete entities, in order to make them subservient to the machinery. Charis: Greek word, whose meaning incorporates grace/gracefulness, social/ communal pleasure, kindness and benevolence. Its meaning is close to the Christian idea of (divine) grace; however, this latter has become as if contaminated with salvationism. Following key figures of Greek thinking and culture like Plato, Aristotle and Pindar, it is assumed that charis is not just an additional feature of nature and of social life, but is simply the most important principle of reality. Everything in nature and society, in so far as it is really real, is permeated and guided by charis, a term close to but stronger than beauty, as it has a more dynamic character: beauty can be conceived of as something static, but charis always assumes movement, whether in the concrete way a human being or an animal moves, or whether in the movement assumed by the giving of gifts, central (according to Marcel Mauss) for social life. Among modern thinkers, the most evident use of charis is Weber’s charisma, though Weber’s term has its ambivalence; and is also present, even more clearly, in the works of Gregory Bateson. Following the spirit of Greek thinking, charis is simply the principle and measure of reality: whatever has no charis, might exist, but is not really real. The term also incorporates the semantic horizon of Hungarian kegy/kecs/kedv, etymologically connected words, where kegy is close in meaning to English grace or favour, kecs to gracefulness, while kedv stands for humour or mood, but – in contrast to the neutral meaning of the English words – originally it had the inherent meaning of a good mood, as for e.g. kedves, the adjective version of the noun does not mean ‘having a mood’, even less ‘being moody’, but being kind and gentle, in the exact Greek sense of demonstrating charis. Charis is the essence of every real being; however, as charis assumes the unity of body and soul, and as modern rational thought starts from the separation of body and soul as a foundational analytical principle, reality is

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inaccessible for this thought, promptly codified by Kant in the maxim that ‘things in themselves’, or as they are, are unavailable for rationalist, critical philosophy. Control: A central term for the operation of technology and second power. Once entities are deprived of their integrity and so are no longer moved by their first, inner power, they become unreliable and erratic, requiring a constant supervision of their behaviour, thus offering a justification of the suspicion and doubt that motivates second power (and modern rationalism) in the first instance. This is also closely related to the idea of senile infantilism, as under normal conditions only the behaviour of children needs to be supervised and ‘controlled’, until they become adults. Absorption and internalisation (see Foucault, Discipline and Punish) are ways in which such controls become automatic in individuals. Fake: The second central, foundational dualism of the book which otherwise avoids dualistic and dichotomising thinking, after the dualism of living and dead, is the radical contrast between the genuine (authentic) and the fake (copy, replacement, substitute, imitate). While such a distinction can be rhetorically abused, everybody knows that in life it is central to be able to distinguish between a genuine friend and one who just fakes it; or between a real flower and its plastic substitute. The call to ignore such difference is one of the most important identifying features of tricksters and sophists (or techno-heads) of all times. Flux: Flux, fluxion or fluxity implies a state of ‘matter’ in which any stable forms or structures are absent. Fluxes can mean waves or radiation, but also can be the results of the decomposition of matter. The flux ‘state’ is identical to a situation of liminal chaos. Gravity: A modality of steresis in which compositions follow mechanically, like puppets but of their own accord a movement not their own, as explained by von Kleist. It generates movement through attraction. Hybridisation: An infraction of linear transformation, which produces not legitimate heirs, but a mixture that is sterile, lacking integrity, incapable of further reproducing itself. Incommensurable: Something which does not have, or does not recognise a common measure. Every entity that comes into being through the operation of the authentic matrix does have a common measure, or a charis, but the matrix itself, or the otherworld, is incommensurable, as it does not have a common measure with its creatures. This is why any disturbance of the world, or of the common measure, might incite the incommensurable into action, which – if such an action is done improperly – instead of a solution might only proliferate disorder. Given that the incommensurable is incommensurable with us, we humans cannot have a proper knowledge of its operation, but there are certain transmitted traditions that possess certain elements of such a knowledge. Furthermore, and on the other side, there is also a more or less secret (arrheton, ‘unspeakable’) knowledge concerning the way

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Glossary

the incommensurable can be manipulated and forced into action. Modern technology is the ultimate heir of such manipulations. Integrity: A central feature of every concrete living being, meaning that that being has both its visible, external and invisible, internal borders which cannot be violated without undermining or destroying the character of the entity. If such borders are violated, and this is not mended or redressed, the charis content will evaporate, and the entity will only survive as a kind of living dead – in the most serious of such cases, as an actual, ‘genuine’ living dead. Intensity: A central concept, and technique, of modernity for the destruction of charis. Charis, incorporating beauty, is a central feature of every entity that is brought forth from the matrix, through linear transformation (except for stamping error), but charis is delicate and vulnerable, it needs to be protected and helped to flourish so that it can be experienced (both internally and by those perceiving it). Intensity, however, through excessive external force (numbers, quantities, loudness, repetition) can produce experiences that can overwhelm and suffocate charis. A central example for the modern preference of intensity over charis is the Kantian aesthetics of the sublime over beauty. Interest: Another central modern concept and technique to destroy charis. The term etymologically means ‘in between’ and was first used in the context of – illicit – money lending, but today it has gained the connotation of being the ‘objective’ centre of both individual and political life. The problematic term ‘in the interest of all’ reveals particularly clearly the centrally trick-ful character of modern politics, in its difference from and radical contrast to terms like ‘maintaining tradition’, which under normal conditions means to keep the charis content of the world, in its concrete setting, intact. Linear transformation: The mode of operation of the authentic matrix, indicating the proper succession of births and deaths. It means that while life and nature are identical to change, they are not compatible with any change, only with those that succeed each other, and where the previous state of the entities has a strong bearing on the successful states or entities. Linear transformation applies both to the bodies and the souls; in fact, it focuses exactly on those moments where the otherwise indissoluble unity of body and soul in the living entities is dissolved – thus, the passage from death to new life. The womb, through the union that takes place there between the male and female components, and their heredities, is a perfect example for such a linear transformation, but in line with various traditions of thought, especially classical Greek philosophy, this book assumes that a similar process is happening with the souls, just when – in death – the body and the soul become separate. Living dead: A very particular and puzzling in-between category, central for this book. The difference between the living and the dead is a fundamental, even foundational dualism. Yet, at least in the case of human

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beings, under certain highly particular conditions it might happen that the soul of a dead or dying person can remain suspended, as if trapped, between living and dying. The ceremony of burial, which is widely considered by anthropologists and archaeologists as the single most important identifying feature of the emergence of human culture, everywhere serves to help this passage. A living dead thus comes into existence, if this word can at all be used for it, when for some reason a dead human being does not receive a proper burial. A possible, prehistoric source of this phenomenon, compatible with the evidence of cave art, can be that some of those who descended into the cave, a genuine womb-like situation, for some reason failed to return to the sun-light. Matrix: Latin word, meaning ‘mother’, and also etymologically connected to ‘matter’. Originally, and literally, the matrix is the womb. However, and following Plato’s Timaeus, in particular the passages on the ‘receptacle’ as the triton genos, but also a series of other Greek and Roman thinkers, the term is applied for the way the souls of living beings are formed, on the basis of the souls that departed from beings that died or whose integrity was destroyed. It is in this way that charis is added to mere material existence, at the moment of birth, in line with the idea of the indissoluble unity of body and soul in every living being. Its perverse alteration is called the fluxed matrix. Mercenary motives: Those that take advantage of others by dissecting their existence, stripping them of their essence, and then refashioning them for the sake of their own advantage. Necromancy: A form of magic that involves various techniques addressing or manipulating the dead, like the evocation of their spirits, for some specific purpose. To the extent that modern rational thought assumes the separation between the body and the soul/mind, which for living beings only takes place after their death, it can be considered as a form of necromancy. Operators: The replicators, or the living dead/ghosts, can only work, or become effective, with the help of operators. The operators are those human beings who either offer their own body for the replicators to penetrate, or who prepare, by entrapping or cajoling, other human beings to let the replicators enter them. This is because every concrete living being is a plenitude, an indissoluble unity of body and soul, and so there is no place there for another soul to enter. For this, the indissoluble unity must be broken and given up, allowing the body to be ruled by external sensuals, and thus the replicator/ghost can enter and possess it. Shamanism offers a good but by no means unique example for such practices, as central for a shamanist seance is the invitation for possession, by drums, music and dancing. Otherworld: The ‘place’ where souls reside temporarily, once they are separated from the body at the moment of death. This ‘place’ is basically the same as the matrix, where such soul ‘particles’ are recombined and assigned to different bodies. Various religious and spiritual traditions transmit different ideas about

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how this is going on, but as such processes are incommensurable for us, it is impossible for us to have proper knowledge about them, and so all such traditions are subject to corruption and decay – and probably it is better this way. For the same reason the otherworld and the matrix are inaccessible to modern science; they are not even ‘real’, as they are not present ‘physically’ in our world; but this does not mean that they are mere figments of the imagination. Their manipulation, or evocation, can bring them in an improper manner into our reality, producing a certain unreality in the world. Technology, magic and art are closely related but different modalities of such an unreality, and their enchanting effects, in various ways, can be seen, at least for a time, as being more real than the real. Political alchemy: The use of alchemic or alchemy-like technique in politics; or to use separation, dissolution and destruction as a precondition for a future, supposedly better unity or unification. The clearest, most self-evident example for such political alchemy is communism, or the other historical totalitarian systems, but paradoxically the end of totalitarianism meant that by the present day almost all political systems are versions of political alchemy. This is not even surprising, as the archetypal theorist of political alchemy is Hobbes. Thus, given the links between modern, technologised science and alchemy, one could even argue that ‘political alchemy’ is an expression all but identical to ‘political technology’ or even ‘modern political science’ – in contrast to classical political science, following Voegelin. Possession: The manner in which an external entity might gain a hold over the inner forces of a concrete being. This always assumes a certain separation of the body/soul unity, thus resulting in charis death. Power: The book makes a distinction between three senses of power. First power is the force inherent in everything, by which it is able to move itself, according to its own inner essence. Second power is a force that is external to concrete beings, residing in institutions, apparatuses, or rituals, and by which concrete beings are forced to perform certain actions – a practice often justified by the ‘interest of all’. Under certain chaotic, liminal conditions, such a power might even be required, as uncertainties undermine the ability of concrete beings to move themselves, and instead of relying on their own inner force they start to imitate others, with devastating consequences. Under normal conditions such second powers are not necessary, as any being, like e.g. any human after the age of about three, learns how to rely on its own inner force and reasoning power. Finally, the book uses the term ‘raised power’, or power2 in the following combination of senses: as in mathematics, raising a number to a certain (say, ‘nth’) power, thus a technical means for unlimited multiplication; the idea of ‘raising the dead’, as a standard technical feature of necromancy; and the general idea of interfering with nature, culture or tradition in order to artificially multiply forces for further invasion, possession, or similar activities.

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Processuality: A central element in the alchemic/technological world vision and corresponding world transformation. According to this, concrete living beings should not be allowed to move and act in their concrete, given context, following established, given rules and traditions, but should be ordered to move following a prescribed, mechanical routine, a supposed ‘best practice’, slavishly performing every single prescribed step, in the supposed ‘interest of all’. Reality: According to this book, ‘reality’ lies beyond the separation of, say, ‘facts’ and ‘norms’. In order to be real, something of course must exist, in this world; but apart from mere existence, to be really real means that entity must have a meaningful existence, and so – which is almost the same thing – it must possess charis. Mere existence is unreal existence, in a manner that is close to the way Agamben distinguishes between life (bios) and mere or naked life (zoé). Reason: Greek phronesis, mindfulness/mindedness, is the capacity of man to keep integrity, or the intactness of his first power, to live in charis. This can be undermined by the combination of imitation and the second power, whether by imposing direct control or by inducing the human being to comply with algorithms (explicit rules or policies) which set a prescribed rules of action to be followed. Reason is to be distinguished from the modern view of ‘rationality’, a form of necromancy which – through the trick of self-consciousness – induces man to impose on oneself a mechanical algorithm, a good example being Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’. Replicators: Also called in this book living dead, ghosts, tricksters, agents of the otherworld, they exist in secrecy, and take revenge on life. Not all ghosts are, or become, replicators; for becoming so ghosts need operators, or living human beings who invite them into their own bodies or assist them in taking possession of other bodies. While modern social science ignores the phenomenon, films are a perfect medium to represent it. A particularly good example is Murnau’s Nosferatu; one only needs to recall the scene in which the imprisoned agent of Nosferatu is evoking his master (the replicator– operator relationship is indeed a perfect example for Hegel’s master–serf dialectic, which is valid for modern life in so far as it has become penetrated with replicators). Among modern directors, the problem of possession, and in particular the figure of the vampire (and its assistant) is central for Herzog and Polanski, who both had a take on the Nosferatu/Dracula motive – in Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers the main, unwitting agent of spreading the replicator is even a clearly Kant-like figure (no doubt also inspired by Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita). Salvationism: A specifically Christian idea, rooted in Judaism and also present in Islam, according to which the ‘world-historical purpose’ of divine action on Earth, in particular the First Coming of Christ, was to offer individualised salvation to every single person who believes in him. This salvation means an eternal life, after death. The token of salvation is not connected to the character or even the acts of the

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person, rather to a faith in the uniqueness of the deity, and a scrupulous following of its commands/laws. This idea became taken up in a particular accentuated manner through Protestantism, by its focus on ‘faith alone’, and the idea that such salvation is purely a matter of divine will (predestination), and therefore any efforts by the individual cannot influence one’s own salvation, except for offering ‘signs’ concerning whether one will be saved or damned. Such Puritan ideas on the one hand rendered evident the absurdity of salvationism, but on the other, through secularised searches of salvation by modern institutions and movements, in particular the ‘welfare’ state (see État Providence) and the modern ‘market’ economy, spread absurdity in the world. Sensuals: Sensuals are not identical to emotions. An emotion is strictly concrete and individual, due to something that moves the soul of a concrete being. A sensual, however, can be spread by rays and waves. Such waves include voices and images, which can be magnified or spread by telecommunication networks, but figures and agents of the otherworld evidently use waves that are not accessible for human science. Such phenomena are evident, as their effects can be perceived; and their inaccessibility for human knowledge is central for avoiding the possibility of the kind of total control that certain figures of government, industry and media would evidently like to possess (evidenced particularly with the current lockdown), but fortunately cannot have (except through possession, a particularly good illustration for the closeness of the two different meanings of possession, both being central for the replicators and their agents, the operators). Soul: In line with classical and archaic thought, it is assumed that the soul is the animating inner force of every living being. Aristotle, in particular, claimed that the soul is infinitely small, and is part of the void. At the moment of death, the unity of the body and the soul is severed: the body decays, no longer capable of living on, and so the soul leaves the body, and returns to the authentic matrix (the otherworld). Under highly specific and exceptional conditions the soul of a living person might leave its body, and return there. This eventuality is used and even exploited by shamanism, and is one of the reasons why this phenomenon is so exceptionally interesting (see Clottes and Lewis-Williams, 1998), but also controversial – even unnecessarily and in a way inexplicably so (see in particular the controversies around the efforts of Clottes and Lewis-Williams to use the term in prehistory). Substitution: A central operation for technology, by which one entity is replaced by another. Given that every single thing in the world is singular and unique, strictly speaking the operation makes no sense, as nothing can be really substituted with anything; if something dies, or is destroyed, it must be laid to rest, and new relations must be established, that however are never the same. Still, the presumption of substitutability became central for the operations of technology and of institutions, and in the present day the

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absurd phrase ‘nobody is unsubstitutable’ has become a commonplace in politics, for Human Resources and Business Schools. Technology: The production, through various manipulations, or forbidden/ arrheton crafts, a series of identical and substitutable objects. Such objects violate the basic principles of singularity and concreteness, so are devoid of charis, but as they can be produced, through imitative procedures, almost without any limitation, this can result in apparent productivity or growth. However, given that such objects are devoid of charis, they do not produce satisfaction or happiness, and so the reliance on technological production inevitably results in conflicts, ultimately warfare, while also dumbness and intolerable boredom. Technology is thus all but identical to magic and art (in Alfred Gell’s sense of artificiality and effect-producing). However, the more technology gains ascendancy, the more art can also take up the character of an effort to focus on the indestructible concreteness of living entities, and thus can help to restore the focus on charis. Trickster: A term introduced into anthropology mostly by Paul Radin, based on his fieldwork among the Winnebago Indians, before WWI. In ethnological stories, folktales and mythologies, the trickster is a wandering outsider, not belonging to any community, who becomes accepted as a harmless prankster, but can gain influence, even power in situations of crisis. This is because the trickster, not participating, is not touched by emotional involvement, thus can insinuate itself at the centre of attention, pretending to offer a solution while being only interested in proliferating confusion, as his power is conditional upon the rest of the population being kept in a state of limbo. Such figures include Hermes and Prometheus in Greek mythology, Loki in Scandinavian mythology, the leprechaun of Irish folktales, Reineke the fox in medieval stories, the coyote of the prairie, or various Western African spider, rabbit or monkey quasideities. Troglodytes: Troglodytes are those (human) beings that live or at least spend a long time inside caves. While for a certain time in past centuries it was thought that in prehistoric times all humans lived inside caves, this proved to be a misconception, as it was not deep caves, rather only large, open cave entries that were used as occasional shelters (see for e.g. Mas d’Azil). However, probably due to the frequentation of painted caves, evidently some people came to be stuck inside the cave, which gave rise to the practice that a long time spent in caves with particularly difficult access, through the repeated encounter with rays or sensuals, could become the source of a secret, hidden, manipulative knowledge. Unreality: The term has two different senses. In one, merely negative sense it means the opposite of our worldly reality. In this sense the otherworld, and the authentic matrix, are unreal, as they are not part of our world, cannot be perceived, are incompatible with our concrete existence. In the other sense, elements of our worldly reality, which evidently exist,

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are unreal, as they are not compatible with, or do not correspond to, our genuine, real lives. The unreal in this sense means the intrusion of aspects of the otherworld into our reality, falsifying it. The most evident aspects of such unreality are imitation, substitution and faking, by which the unique concreteness of some or other aspects of our lives are taken away, or stolen. In the form of the absurd, unreality is a central feature of modern life, as recognised by a series of key artists. Void: The void does not mean complete emptiness, but the absence of matter at a particular area or place. This can be in between entities, or – as we know it from modern physics – inside entities. The absence of matter as solid bodies or structure means that in the area radiation or rays can spread without resistance. As sensuals, or the inspiration that can arrive from the otherworld, are spread by waves, this means that the void can be filled by them. This is recognised by most spiritual traditions of mankind, which assigns special importance to caves (see, e.g. the birthplaces of gods like Zeus, or the places of Marian apparitions), deserts and mountain tops.

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Name index

Aeschylus 8 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 105 Agricola, Georgius 116, 118, 125 Anaximander 13 Anaximenes 13 Aratus 98 Archimedes 172 Aristotle vi, vii, 2, 4, 5, 26, 29, 30, 36, 43, 57, 77, 82, 85, 86, 89, 103, 106, 107, 158, 159, 162, 166, 180, 186 Augé, Marc 135 Bachelard, Gaston 12 Bakhtin, Mikhail 69 Bateson, Gregory 5, 65, 122, 180 Baudelaire, Charles 59, 117, 175, 177 Bentham, Jeremy 27, 28 Binswanger, Hans Christoph 12 Blake, William 122 Blakely, Sandra 73, 115, 121, 136 Boyle, Robert 24, 84, 162, 174 Bruno, Giordano 115 Bulgakov, Mikhail 9, 185 Burke, Edmund 50 Callot, Jacques 11, 69, 163–74 Calvin, Jean 131 Camus, Albert 35, 38, 39, 53, 83, 126, 128 Canguilhem, Georges 12 Castelli, Enrico 47, 150 Copernicus, Nicolaus 84, 134, 174 Darwin, Charles 30, 72 Dee, John 80, 84, 104, 105 Deleuze, Gilles 53, 71, 75, 136 Derrida, Jacques 53 Détienne, Marcel 55, 115 Donne, John vi Durkheim, Émile 7, 48, 111, 120, 132, 150

Empedocles 100, 101 Foucault, Michel 2, 5, 12, 27, 34, 90, 102, 105, 108, 109, 125, 134, 136, 156, 157, 163, 176, 179, 181 Frankfort, Henri 62 Friedman, Milton 111, 148 Gell, Alfred 4, 10, 27, 34, 102, 113, 150, 156 Gibbon, Edward 146 Girard, René 5, 57, 121 Goethe, Johann W. 8, 9, 17, 119, 124, 136, 137, 159 Gogol, Nikolai 9 Graves, Robert 5 Guattari, Félix 53, 71, 75, 136 Habermas, Jürgen 124, 156 Hayek, Friedrich von 155, 157 Hegel, Georg W.F. 52, 53, 126, 148, 185 Heidegger, Martin 2, 4, 101, 102, 109, 138 Heraclitus 31, 180 Herodotus 104 Hesiod 26, 90, 91, 94, 105, 106, 123, 175 Hitler, Adolf 155 Hobbes, Thomas 1, 9, 27, 28, 35, 48, 52, 85, 86, 89, 105, 120, 131, 132, 144, 145, 162, 173, 174, 178, 184 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 53, 71, 77, 131, 136 Husserl, Edmund 53 Ignatius, St 152, 153, 157 Jean Paul (Johannes Paulus Richter) 52 Jung, Carl G. 172

Name index Kant, Immanuel 29, 50, 52, 111, 126, 132, 135, 136, 140, 147, 148, 156, 159, 171, 181, 182, 185 Kerényi, Károly 73, 105, 113, 115, 116, 176 Keynes, John M. 1, 144, 155, 157, 161 Kierkegaard, Søren 26, 53, 132, 139 Kleist, Heinrich von 78–9, 81, 86, 181 Koselleck, Reinhart 113, 126, 136 Latour, Bruno 37, 126, 160 Le Bon, Gustave 112, 147 Leibniz, Gottfried vii, 27, 51, 52, 89, 120, 174 Lenin, Vladimir I. 155 Leonardo da Vinci 171 Lessing, Gotthold E. 50, 126 Levinas, Emmanuel 53 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 75, 124, 156 Locke, John Lucretius 106 McKnight, Stephen 2 Mair, Victor H. 50, 62 Marx, Karl 7, 173 Mauss, Marcel 5, 104, 120, 156, 162, 180 Maxwell, James Clerk 78, 84 Meier, Christian 68, 112, 135 Meinecke, Friedrich 37, 90 Milton, John 68 Mori, Fabrizio 62, 64 Newton, Isaac vi, 1, 24, 69, 84, 158–76, 177, 178 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 7, 12, 20, 22, 42, 53, 59, 71, 106, 132, 136, 139, 161

199

Patocˇ ka, Jan 136 Pindar 68, 106, 180 Pizzorno, Alessandro 67, 116, 157 Plato vi, 2, 4, 5, 11, 28, 30, 35, 37, 53, 59, 68, 72, 77, 86, 106, 107, 128, 136, 139, 145, 147, 152, 153, 158, 162, 180 Pliny the elder 143, 156 Popitz, Heinrich 87, 108, 129 Protagoras 97, 174 Ptolemy 98, 176 Pythagoras 80, 97 Radin, Paul 5, 55, 62, 187 Rilke, Rainer Maria 108 Russell, Bertrand 12 Sartre, Jean-Paul 52, 105, 111, 139, 148, 157 Serres, Michel 152 Shakespeare, William 144, 156 Socrates 97, 174 Sombart, Werner 7, 87 Strabo 105 Tacitus 143, 156 Tarde, Gabriel 37, 112, 126, 160 Tarkovsky, Andrey 25, 104 Tertullian 143, 156 Theophrastus 92, 94, 95, 99 Thucydides 88 Unamuno, Miguel de 53, 126, 135 van Gennep, Arnold 5, 109, 140, 157 Verdery, Katherine 153 Voegelin, Eric 2, 4, 113, 122, 126, 128, 130, 175, 184

Ortega y Gasset, José 53

Weber, Max 5, 11, 71, 84, 108, 111, 132, 134, 136, 145, 147

Parmenides 167, 174 Pascal, Blaise vi, 59

Yates, Frances 1, 6, 80, 87, 105, 115, 124, 125

Subject index

absence 36, 79, 118, 150, 188 absorption 31, 48, 52, 55, 56, 62, 66, 72, 78, 81, 86–9, 126, 128–30, 138, 177, 179, 181 absurd/ity 10, 30, 31, 60, 61, 72, 77, 82, 86, 89, 115, 117, 122, 123, 133, 135, 138, 165, 179, 186, 188 abyss 19, 38, 91, 163, 172 Acheron 115, 147, 154 accumulation 3, 94, 99, 100, 104, 149, 179 acquisition 41, 43, 54, 56, 125, 159, 165–6, 173 adaptivity 77, 179 age(s): axial 126; Bronze 118; of Enlightenment 171; Ice 64; Iron 98; Pyramid (Mumford) 129 agent(s) 10, 14, 18, 20, 52, 94, 111, 116, 124, 130, 175, 177, 185, 186; transformative 77, 100; see also operators Alchemical Studies (Jung) 173 alienation 16, 52, 62, 64, 66, 68, 124 Alexandria 125, 172, 176 algorithm 101, 185 alteration 17, 28, 42, 44, 45, 49, 60, 133, 150–1, 174, 183 ambiguity 18, 126, 139, 165, 166 ambivalence 104, 180 Anatolia vii, 10, 106, 142 ‘Anatomy of the World, An’ (Donne) vi annihilation vii, 3, 9, 42, 45, 55, 62, 68, 69, 74, 82, 88, 89, 103, 116, 119, 137, 138, 139, 144–5, 146, 147, 151, 155, 170, 172, 177; see also voiding Antiquity, classical 4, 6, 26, 107, 122, 176, 178 anxiety 48, 58, 139 apathy 101 Aphrodite 115 apocalypse/tic 69, 105, 114, 122, 155

Apology (Plato) apparition 114, 121, 188 appetite 34–5, 37, 38, 39, 46, 55, 56, 86, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 126; see also eagerness archaeology 2, 5, 12, 81 Ares 115 arrheton (unspeakable) 23, 113, 114, 118, 120, 128, 181, 187 Art of Memory, The (Yates) 87 artificiality 27, 31, 35, 39–44, 60, 77, 82, 89, 128–31, 158, 187 artificial intelligence 25, 84 Atapuerca cave 13, 23, 106 atheism 143 authenticity 28, 37, 39, 59 auto-fertilisation 164, 176 automatism 18, 28, 32, 51, 66, 77, 84, 89, 105, 120, 146, 158, 175 automaton 51–2, 54, 56, 61, 65, 76, 77, 85, 86–8, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 113, 114, 139, 146, 162, 177 Babylonia 14, 98, 104, 107, 123 Balkans 10, 90, 119 bear 45–6 beauty 9, 18, 21, 30, 44, 119, 136, 142, 152, 178, 180, 182 becoming 56, 69, 75, 97, 103 benevolence 19, 28, 130, 131, 180 bifurcation 60 bipolarity 120–1, 123 Birth of the Clinic (Foucault) 6 bison 16–22, 25, 48, 81 Boeotia 106 border 47, 75, 102, 153, 154 boundaries 9, 36, 42, 44, 57, 59, 75, 79, 82, 84, 118, 148, 175, 179; see also limit, border

Subject index Brahman(s) 104 Brassempouy cave 44 Brassempouy lady 43–4 bringing forth 36, 41, 42, 50, 63, 71, 73, 80, 86, 90, 96, 100 burial(s) 7, 23, 24, 40, 96, 97, 104, 142, 143, 144, 147, 153, 154, 156, 167, 183 Cambridge ritualists 57 Cappadocia 10, 63, 91, 97, 156, 180 carnival 59 castration 55 catacomb(s) 95, 133, 135, 138, 142–6, 147, 149, 154, 156 catacombing 133, 136, 137, 138, 142, 146, 150, 151, 157, 179–80 Çatalhöyük 64 cave(s) 15–8, 23, 42, 43, 45, 56, 61, 63, 79, 80, 81,85, 88, 106, 175, 187; art 15–8, 21, 24, 99, 183; see also individual caves character 9, 27–8, 30–1, 38–9, 43–4, 52– 4, 85, 88–9, 102, 118, 139, 140, 145, 148, 149, 164, 180, 182 charis: in composition 9–10, 40, 109, 113, 141, 178; as principle of reality 24, 26, 28, 58, 109, 112–3, 129–31, 135, 140, 141, 159, 178, 180, 184, 185; see also first power, inner force China 50, 123 Christianity 5, 10, 105, 126, 133, 136, 138–157, 180 Church 146, 150, 154 circle/circularity 14, 17, 31, 41, 46, 49, 60, 71, 77, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 102, 105, 115, 125, 142, 169; diabolic 83 closure 27, 36–8, 39, 40, 46, 49, 92, 95, 147 Commedia dell’Arte 11, 54, 127, 163, 166 communication 10, 16, 17, 136, 152 communism 25, 52, 151, 184 complicity 3, 105, 146 composition 3, 14, 36, 51, 52, 56, 80, 81, 83, 89, 101, 102, 107, 109, 116, 120, 138, 141, 145, 155, 161–4, 165, 167, 169, 177 concreteness 3, 33, 37, 89, 153, 180, 187, 188 consciousness 66, 105, 111, 135; self- 52, 53, 185 consent 8, 24, 52 constructivism 114, 123 control 1, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 48, 79, 94, 113, 115, 134, 181, 185, 186; self119, 126

201

consumption 22, 68, 128, 136 contentment 33, 34, 39, 44, 47; see also fullness corpse(s) 6, 121, 137, 141, 143–7, 154, 155, 156, 157 corruptness/corruption 37, 105, 159, 174, 184 cosmology 14, 84, 88, 159, 163–4, 166–9 Cougnac cave 47, 50 Cratylus (Plato) 31 Crete 119 crisis 117; see also liminality critique 30, 108, 126, 136, 140 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 140 cross potent sign 41 crowd(s) 147, 165; psychology 147, 148 cruelty 10, 59, 165 cunning 94, 104, 115 dance 79, 121, 165, 166, 175, 176 Dead Souls (Gogol) 9 death 6–7, 10, 61, 95, 108, 114, 121, 130, 133, 140–2, 153–5, 163, 170–1, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186; entanglement with 3; see also mortalism, necromancy debauchery 90, 94 deceit/deceiving/deception 124, 138, 151, 164 decomposition 10, 18, 23, 68, 137, 139, 144, 150, 160, 167, 170, 181 deconstruction/deconstructivism 114, 123 defacement 54–5 deformity 18, 66, 67, 81 deity(ies) 67, 186; female 25; trickster 64; see also gods demon(s) 47, 71, 73, 74, 90, 94, 95, 116, 120, 121, 144, 150, 165, 170, 172, 175, 176; Maxwell’s 113 density, 63, 99–100, 149; difference 99 depravity 21, 169, 172 deprivation 24, 30, 35, 46, 49, 66, 70, 72, 82, 103, 104, 117, 118, 142 Derinkuyu 63, 99 desire 2, 10, 15, 16, 19, 24, 27, 28, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 46, 54, 55, 57–70 passim, 75, 82, 83, 87, 104, 116, 117, 127, 129, 137, 145, 146, 147, 149, 151, 154, 160, 175, 178; penetrating 54, 60, 75; for possession 83; unlimited 115, 129; for union 41, 57, 127, 128, 132 despair 21, 47, 139, 142, 178 destabilisation 138, 177 destruction 4, 6–9, 10, 11, 17, 22, 30, 37, 38, 69, 70, 72, 74, 82, 85, 89, 109, 117,

202

Subject index

133, 136, 138, 141, 150, 151, 155–6, 164, 170, 177, 182, 184; creative 2, 9, 10, 31, 37, 82, 90, 92–3, 114, 140, 149, 150, 155, 157; self- 52, 118 devil 8–9, 121, pact with 8–9, 37 diaphysis 13, 24, 27 dichotomy/sation 113, 181 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 105, 179, 181 disintegration 18, 95, 116, 118, 121, 155, 168 dissolution 38, 68, 79, 89, 102, 114, 122, 123, 146, 159, 184 distillation 85, 93, 118, 125 divination/divinisation vii, 10, 25, 80–8, 109, 104, 114, 117–9, 121, 123, 135, 144, 146, 147, 149 divinity 8, 16, 138; see also deity, god(s) division 21, 32, 46, 47, 72, 82, 101, 114, 128, 163–4, 170–2 Dogon (Mali) 64 doubt/ing 30, 111, 181 Drakensberg Mountains (South-Africa) 64 dream(s) 2, 3, 16, 34, 67 dualism 113, 126, 132, 156, 181, 182 dynamos 35, 138; see also power eagerness 43, 54, 66, 160 economics 7, 37; neoclassical 48, 135, 151 economy 11, 12, 75, 122, 136, 144, 155, 161, 186; alchemic 1; political Economy and Society (Weber) 132 ecstasy 170; of living 33, 49 efficiency 5, 98, 123, 152 effluences 93–6, 100, 101 egg (motive) 17, 70, 72–3, 74, 98, 99, 114, 117, 118, 125, 126 Egypt 32, 64, 65, 90, 96, 105 eidos 23–4, 53 elasticity 80, 86, 98 electromagnetism 4, 78, 83, 84, 155 elusiveness 48, 52, 77 empire(s) 42, 122, 129; Ecumenic 122; Roman 138, 142, 146 emptiness 10, 13, 18, 21, 39, 46, 62, 63, 72, 84, 112, 162, 166, 171–3, 188; see also nothingness, vacuum, void, Enlightenment 111, 112, 126, 158, 159, 160, 170, 171, 173 emitting/emission 39, 41–4, 47–8, 66–9, 91 enact/ing 3, 9, 16, 20–1, 22, 57, 93, 96, 119, 149, 168

enchanting/ment 2, 9, 27, 34, 41, 102, 115, 139, 145, 147, 150, 151, 156, 177, 178, 184 encystation(s) 34, 36 energy 20, 31, 32, 48, 79, 80, 82, 85, 94, 99–100, 107, 121–2, 127, 129, 137, 138, 141, 144–55 passim, 160, 164, 167, 173, 177; demonic 145, 175; mental 21; necrotic 138, 146 entrapping/ment 11, 18, 48, 72, 102, 142, 183 episteme (Foucault) 7 Eros 54, 137, 151; perverted 98 eroticism 16, 20, 58, 59, 69, 75, 151, 166, 167 etymology 28, 67, 75, 78, 80, 89, 103–4, 114, 118, 135, 180, 182, 183; Hungarian 75, 76, 105, 106, 123, 178, 180 Eucharist 149, 154, 157 eunuch 55 Europe 9, 24, 171 European Integration 129, 151 evil 112, 114, 120, 136, 137, 148, 161 experience 58, 62, 79, 97, 117 exteriority 79, 80, 81, 87, 102, 128 fantasy 18, 67, 140 Faust (Goethe) 7, 8, 12, 34, 124, 135, feeling machine (Leibniz) 28, 89–90, 120 fermentation 95, 146, 171 fertile/ity 9, 21, 67, 103, 129, 142, 156, 163, 170 filiation 30–2, 44, 59, 72, 128, 179 finger fluting 41–3, 47 fire 24, 69, 107, 125, 137; stealing 8 fluctuation 79, 100, 147 fluidity 43, 86, 92, 115, 134, 166 flux 11, 29, 30, 34, 39, 43, 47, 49, 58, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99–101, 107, 108, 117, 121, 127, 129, 159, 162, 170, 171, 181; accumulation 99 fluxion/al 40, 69, 116, 117, 159, 160, 166–71, 172, 181 folktale(s) 121, 135, 187 Font-de-Gaume cave 79 force(s) 20, 32, 35, 36, 37, 42, 44, 45, 46, 69, 78, 81, 83, 86, 90, 100, 105–6, 109, 111, 159, 162, 169, 171, 173, 184; animating 6, 70, 186 (see also soul); composed/cohesive 16, 109; dark 95; death 114; divine 69; driving 31, 42, 49, 144, 159; external 9, 11, 48, 85, 102, 112, 131, 134, 182, 184 (see also second power); inner 11, 109, 159,

Subject index 163, 179, 184, 186 (see also first power); life 78, 102; of love 38; magnetising 78; market 129; moving 32, 39, 54, 158; natural 133; underground 90, 98; vacuum/void 160, 163, 169, 170; see also power formlessness 35, 85, 115, 116, 139 Frankenstein 76; see also automaton frequency 80, 83, 106 friendship 68, 93, 119 fullness 39, 110, 126 Gargas cave 41, 42, 43 genealogy 5, 12, 109, 110, 113, 130, 147, 176 Generation of Animals (Aristotle) 55 geology 12 geometry 24, 58, 166, 169, 172 gestation 96–7, 99 ghost(s) 47, 109, 115, 120, 121–2, 125, 127, 142, 144, 147–9, 153, 156, 161, 178, 183, 185; see also living dead, replicator gift relations (Mauss) 5, 21, 22, 103, 129, 135, 179; see also charis, charisma Gnosticism 2, 105, 126, 132, 150, 174 Göbekli Tepe 47, 65, 67 god(s) 19–23, 26, 28, 46–8, 62, 72, 82, 98, 105, 111, 112, 115, 123, 126, 135, 136, 144, 150, 153, 156, 169, 174, 176, 188; of death 55, 157; of Sefar 65–7; smith god (Hephaestus) 113, 115; trickster (Hermes) 8, 125–6; see also deities, divinity Golem 76; see also automaton goodness 33, 44, 110, 133, 140–1, 145, 149, 151, 156, 168, 180 Gourdan cave 56 grace 9, 131, 135, 142, 180; divine 30, 133; gift of 132 (see also charisma); see also charis gravity 19, 79, 81, 83, 85, 89, 90, 92, 158, 175, 177, 181 Greece (classical) 24, 32, 33, 58, 120 Grimes Graves flint mine 59 grotesque 18, 19, 25, 35, 47, 66, 69, 74, 165 Grotte de la Mairie cave 81 growth vii, 5, 7, 10, 14, 17, 21–2, 24, 25, 27, 32, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46, 57, 60, 63, 66, 70, 72, 77, 89, 109, 110, 113, 114, 118, 121, 122, 123, 130, 134, 114, 146–7, 152, 154, 155, 161, 163–4, 171, 172, 170, 187; infinite 21, 32, 89, 164, 179

203

Hades 55, 116 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 144, 156 Hamburg Syndrome, The (Fleischmann) 76 harmony 16, 19, 35, 44, 48, 57, 58, 66, 106, 111, 117, 124, 178 hatred 9, 29, 42, 69, 110, 124, 141, 147 heart 2, 7, 9, 33, 75, 84, 100, 123, 124, 142, 161; reasons of (Pascal) 59 Heaven 8, 23, 77, 85, 91, 98, 104, 105, 107, 133, 137 Helen (of Troy) 119, 135 Hell 63, 69, 90, 121, 137 Hephaestus 90, 105, 113, 115, 119, 135 Hera 105 Heracles 176 hermaphrodite 124, 125 Hermes 8, 101, 124–6, 187 Hermeticism 2, 125 hollow(s) 13–5, 19, 21–2, 23, 24, 25, 41–2, 47, 61, 63, 92, 95, 98, 110, 115, 116, 143, 144; see also shaft(s) homology 27, 30–1, 32, 35, 37–42 passim, 44–5, 47, 48, 81 hook symbol 60, 81, 89; see also Y-shape hostility to nature 141 hubris 27, 30–2, 35, 37–42, 44–8, 81 hybridisation 55–8, 70–1, 119, 121, 130, 181 hybridity 33, 35, 47, 54, 55, 56, 60, 99, 101 hypnosis 79, 80, 83, 115, 169 hysteresis 78–80, 103–4 Iheren (Tassili) 67, 70–3, 89, 99, 114, 124 imitation 24, 32, 33, 57 immortality 14, 20, 93, 153, 155 impiety 19, 112, 143, 153, 174 in-betweenness 13, 22, 26, 27, 29, 35, 36, 40, 54, 61, 73, 82, 97, 110, 112, 115, 118, 154, 160, 182; see also liminality incommensurability 14, 24, 24, 31, 35, 39, 45, 69, 106, 138, 139, 140, 145–55, 181–2, 184; see also liminality incubation 70, 96, 124, 142 incubator 10, 65, 88 indestructible 45, 187; soul 8, 29 individuum 31, 48, 86–7, 97, 112, 144 infiltration 22, 24, 25, 26, 40, 61, 81, 83, 145, 163 information 15, 34–5, 152 inhibition(s) (being without) 3, 97, 137, 146, 152, 153 initiation 98, 113, 167, 168; rites 113, 124, 128; see also rites of passage

204

Subject index

intention 15, 16, 21, 29, 32, 36, 37, 38, 46, 62, 67, 72, 78, 88, 103 integrity 61, 67, 69, 110, 124, 135, 137, 156, 173, 174, 179, 181, 182, 183, 185 intensity 2, 18, 37, 38, 46, 48, 50, 81, 88, 99, 132, 136, 182 interest 7, 24, 31, 34–44, 47, 48, 49, 54, 73, 85–7, 90, 126, 160, 178, 182, 184, 185; self- 85 internet 33, 84, 101, 112, 129, 136, 156 intrusion 44, 110, 166, 188 invasion 9, 11, 36, 54, 61, 127, 135, 137, 184 involution 25, 130, 164, 171 Ion (Plato) 57 irrational/ity vi, 14, 21, 24, 106, 113, 116, 139, 147, 151–3, 155, 158, 173; numbers 21, 23, 24, 32, 106; see also incommensurable Isturitz cave 54, 58 joy 2, 141 joyless/ness 98, 100 Kabeiroi 73, 105, 113, 115, 121 Kaymakli 63, 90–9 La Marche cave 56, 128 Lascaux cave 10, 15–23, 50, 53, 61, 63, 81, 106, 142, 156 Laugerie-Basse cave 25 laughter 59, 66, 172 Laws (Plato) 27, 104 Lepinski Vir 60 Les Trois Frères cave 45 Leviathan (Hobbes) vi, 9, 28, 86, 89, 113, 131, 141, 144, 145, 162 liminality 11, 40, 49, 72, 86, 89, 103, 109, 116, 119, 121, 125, 128, 130, 155, 168, 173; permanent 40, 175, 176 limit 47, 52, 75, 93, 100, 102, 113, 148, 160, 165, 169; see also measure limitlessness 34, 52, 114, 129, 179 links: birth-death 9, 93, 94, 98, 171, 182; flux-void 11, 29, 31, 36, 43, 49, 116, 159, 162, 166, 170; infinity-zero 21, 32, 68, 69, 72, 164, 171, 172; life and death 29, 40, 77, 79, 82, 91, 117, 137, 148, 149, 178; limit-unlimited 39, 69, 93; magic-art-technology (Gell) 10, 34, 102, 113, 131, 140, 148, 150, 184, 187; science and death 6–8; substitutabilityconcreteness 11, 187, 188 liquidation 109, 113, 114, 117, 155, 177

liquification 33, 118 living dead 75, 131, 157; see also ghost, replicator, trickster love 9, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 46, 48, 75, 83, 87, 110, 115, 119, 125, 137, 149, 151; see also Eros Maat 32 machination vii, 11, 30, 59, 99, 118 Magi 10, 50, 73, 87, 104, 116, 136, 178 magic vi, 2, 3, 4, 10, 14, 17, 22, 27, 28, 34, 63, 77, 90, 93, 95, 99, 101, 102, 113, 117, 131, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 154, 155, 156, 183, 187 magician(s) 94; see also sorcerer, witch doctor magnetism 78–80 Maltese cross 41 managerialism 151 Manichaeism 105, 127 manipulation 9, 95, 117, 120, 121, 154, 159, 179, 182, 183, 184, 187 marionette(s) 79, 166 ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (Kleist) 79 Marxism 123, 130 mask 16–22, 56, 58, 116, 130, 160, 166, 168, 172, 176 master-serf dialectic (Hegel) 186 Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 9, 185 materialism 29, 32, 33, 143 mathematics 21, 24, 25, 32, 80, 83, 84, 94, 135, 159, 171, 184 matrix 11, 13–5, 21–2, 26–50, 58–60, 80–1, 88, 94–103, 110, 114–7, 151, 154, 177, 181, 182, 183–4, 187; fluxed 34, 36, 43, 94, 97, 99, 122, 125, 183; perverted 27, 31, 32, 35–40, 49 Maxwell’s demon 113 measure 4, 19, 23, 24, 31, 49, 57, 100, 106, 145, 170, 180, 181; see also limit meaning vi, vii, 1, 22, 23, 93, 102, 110, 113, 114, 139, 140–1, 173 meaninglessness 49, 87, 140, 153, 156 media 10, 27, 43, 106, 111, 147, 186 mediation 53, 85, 125, 151 mediatisation 151 megamachine (Mumford) 32, 109 memory 14, 51–2, 53, 56, 67, 142, 143 ‘Memory Theatre’ (Camillo) 87, 88 Meno (Plato) 147 mercenary 83, 104, 183 Mercury see Hermes Mesolithic vii, 10, 54, 60, 61, 64, 68

Subject index Mesopotamia 25, 62 metallurgy 10, 27, 67, 73, 109, 113, 115–22, 123, 127 metamorphosis 56, 71–4, 82, 89, 95, 124, 127, 136; see also transformation Middle Ages 46, 75 Middle East 53, 64 ‘millstone’ gate 92, 97, 106 Milton (William Blake) 122 mime 2, 11, 18, 54–9, 160, 165, 166, 171, 172, 176 mimesis 83, 115, 127, 128, 167, 170, 173; see also imitation mindedness/mindfulness (phronesis) 58, 155, 185 mimicry 2, 58, 97, 160, 161, 164; see also imitation mistrust 111 Mithras cult 105 mocking/ery 58, 59–60, 143, modernity vi, 1–11, 31, 85, 105, 111, 120, 132, 134, 141, 152, 156, 160, 164, 182 Monadology (Leibniz) 51, 89 monster(s) 22, 33, 74, 75, 92, 119 Mousterian culture 63 mortality/mortalism 29, 32, 141–3, 156 Morts sans sépulture (Sartre) 139, 157 multiplication vii, 17, 21, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 43, 46, 69, 80, 81, 83, 84, 89, 99–101, 122, 123, 128, 130, 135, 136, 146, 151, 152, 161, 163–5, 172, 174, 177, 184 myth(s) 37, 64, 76, 115, 127 mythology 5, 92, 121, 187; Greek 8, 20, 73, 119, 187 necromancy vi, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13–5, 27, 28, 63, 109, 113, 114, 115–23, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 154, 155, 156, 177, 183, 184, 185 negativity 15, 80 neoliberalism 151 Neolithic vii, 47, 57, 59, 60, 61, 75, 98, 101, 102, 107, 117, 118, 119, 120, 142 netherworld 115; see also underworld Niaux cave 48 nihilism (Nietzsche) 10, 61, 66, 150, 152 nil 13, 29, 62, 68–9, 79, 82, 83, 84, 104, 138, 171, 177; see also zero Nosferatu (Murnau) 185 Nosferatu the Vampyre (Herzog) 185 nothingness 13, 43, 46, 69, 72, 80, 82, 89, 103, 111, 122, 140, 145, 150, 161–4, 167, 169–70, 172; see also emptiness, nil, void

205

oblivion (Heidegger) 111, 153 obsession 7, 34, 53, 54, 105, 123, 127, 138, 166 occult 1, 2, 68, 84, 121, 148, 162 Odyssey (Homer) 111, 115 open female image 47, 61, 67 operator(s) 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 17, 19, 24, 28, 30, 33, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 51, 60, 67, 71, 72, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 102, 114, 120, 127, 138, 139, 145, 146, 178, 179, 183, 185, 186 opposite(s) 123–5, 151, 168 otherworld 3, 4, 11, 14–9, 22, 24, 25, 26, 33, 51, 87, 95, 97, 98, 100, 113, 114, 117, 129, 139, 144, 153, 163, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188; see also netherworld outcast 54, 120, 172 outsider 18, 54, 74, 90, 187 Palaeolithic vii, 10, 15, 17, 24, 25, 31, 41–2, 47, 50, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 67, 68, 70, 74, 81, 98, 106, 114, 115, 128, 142 Panopticon 27, 28 paralysis 36, 84, 88 parasite(s) 9, 33, 35, 51, 72, 82, 94, 115, 119, 137, 152 passage(s) 9, 15, 40, 42, 91, 96, 97, 99, 143, 182, 183 Pech-Merle cave 47, 50 penetration 13, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26–7, 45, 46, 48, 53, 55, 58, 59, 71, 72, 74, 75, 93–4, 101, 102, 106, 109, 114, 115, 183, 185 Pergouset cave 50, 65, 75, 104; ‘Room of Monsters’ 50, 104 Persia 104, 105 perversion/perversity 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 42, 45, 48, 49, 52, 54, 77, 84, 86, 88, 94, 97, 102, 103, 143, 147, 173, 183 Phaedo (Plato) 13, 23 Phaedrus (Plato) 86, 89, 100, 112 phallic/phallus 16–8, 20, 25, 54, 55, 60, 66, 67, 75, 127, 128, 165, 166, 168, 176 Philebus (Plato) 34, 39 physics 12, 25, 32, 188 Physics (Aristotle) 26, 27, 29, 43, 82, 86, 103, 104 Physics (Newton) 111 Phlyakes actor 54 planet(s) 97, 98, 107, 124, 134 Poetics (Aristotle) 57 Poetry and Truth (Goethe) 136

206

Subject index

ponderability 84, 103, 117 possession 14, 15, 18, 24, 28, 34, 41, 45, 51, 67, 70, 81, 83, 88, 93, 103, 110, 116, 117, 119, 125, 135, 137, 153, 160, 170, 172, 183, 184, 185, 186 power: first 11, 110–1, 127, 129, 130–4, 143, 159, 162, 178, 179, 184, 185 (see also inner); inner 33, 104, 128, 131, 142, 179, 181 (see also first); second 11, 111, 128, 181, 184; raised 11, 35, 37, 108–14, 125, 129–30, 177, 184 (see also power2); see also force power2 11, 24, 129, 184; see also raised predator 54, 128, 137 prehistory 67, 85, 186; see also Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic presence 34, 43, 61, 63, 79, 126, 130, 131, 142, 162, 169, 176; higher/supreme/ divine 9, 43, 62, 87, 142 prima materia (alchemy) 121, 123, 124, 125, 137 Prometheus 8, 187 processuality 15, 185; alchemic 29, 36, 106; necromantic 15, 146; technological 109, 114–5 Proteus 56 public sphere 11, 124, 156 Pulcinella 54, 60, 163, 174 pulsation 2, 67, 69, 70, 74, 113, 147 puppet(s) 18, 48, 79, 81, 86, 89, 181 Puritanism 105, 186 pyramid(s) 65, 129 radiation 14, 51, 104, 144, 153, 155, 181,188; electromagnetic 78, 155; necrotic 138, 153, 155 rationalism 5, 6, 7, 52, 53, 108, 135, 156, 181; as necromancy (body-soul dualism) 7, 156, 180, 183 rationality 2, 4, 52, 156, 158, 185; instrumental 123; universal 135 rebel (Camus) 128 receptacle 27, 31, 38, 69, 85, 87, 88, 96, 99, 183; see also matrix reindeer 81–2 religion 33, 62, 106, 122, 132, 148, 156; salvation 133 Renaissance 18, 24, 105 replicator vii, 14, 29, 34, 39, 43, 44, 54–60, 63, 69, 70, 72, 77, 82–3, 93–4, 100–2, 110, 116, 121, 126–8, 138–40, 145, 151, 163–5, 183, 185

representation 19, 47, 48, 53, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 103, 113, 127, 157, 164; self- 53, 75 Republic (Plato) 57 resistance 45, 102, 109, 110, 119, 171, 180, 188 resonance 96, 105 ressentiment (Nietzsche) 42 revolution(s) 21, 22, 120, 129, 160, 163, 173; French 120, 154, 157, 170; industrial 122 Rift Valley (Kenya) 63 rites of passage 40, 109; see also initiation rites ritual(s) 7, 57–61, 119–21 Roque Saint-Christophe cave 63 Rome 95, 96, 138, 142, 143 sacrifice 7–8, 56, 58, 60–1, 86, 104, 120, 121; human 8 Sahara 63, 64, 68, 76 salvation 5, 87, 105, 116, 126, 133, 136, 137, 140–54, 185–6 salvationism 10, 155, 180, 185–6 Saturn 101, 124 satyrs 58 schismogenesis 53, 114, 122 science: and death 6–9, 155; Kantian 148; magical 97, 148; Newtonian vi, 1–2, 11, 24, 158, 169; secret 174; technologised 1, 6, 10, 11, 113, 184 second reality 140 secrecy 18, 95, 185 seducing/seduction 15–6, 34, 45, 48, 60, 95, 128, 155, 173, 176 self-consciousness see consciousness self-governance 37, 147 self-interest see interest sensual(s) 2, 14–5, 27, 33, 47–8, 83–4, 93–4, 110, 133, 138, 142, 145–9, 151, 155, 186, 187, 188 sensual governance 138, 141, 150, 151, 154, 157 sexual/ity 20, 45, 60, 69, 75, 107, 119, 127, 165 shaft(s) 14, 15, 17, 23, 24, 27, 37, 70, 91–2, 99, 100, 106, 110; burial 13 Shaft Scene (Lascaux) 15–23, 24, 53, 54, 61, 63, 67, 92, 106, 110, 118, 136, 142, 156, 165, 167, 168, 175, 176 shamanism 4, 46, 64, 93, 104, 121, 130, 135, 183, 186 singularity 51, 75, 130, 159, 180, 186, 187

Subject index slingshot 78, 80, 81 smith(s) 113, 115–21, 135; sex- 115 Sophist(s) 97, 128, 135, 147, 158, 174, 181 Sophist, The (Plato) 86, 123, 158 sorcerer 10, 11, 73, 74, 128, 178; see also magician, witch doctor sorcery 14, 46, 47, 56, 57, 99, 101, 102, 109, 128, 130 soul(s) vi, vii, 1, 3, 6–8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26, 32, 40, 57, 61, 78, 79, 84–6, 89, 92–3, 95–7, 99, 101, 109, 112, 116, 117–20, 123, 126–7, 129–31, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 153, 154, 156, 162, 163, 167, 180, 182, 183, 184, 186; Aristotle’s definition 96, 106; density 99; indestructibility 29; pact with devil (Faust, selling soul) 8, 17; self-moving 89, 186; stealing/snatching 8, 10, 11, 78, 95, 103, 107, 121, 129, 130; see also inner force, power spectacle 63, 165, 166, 170 spectator(s) 19, 35, 58, 81, 165 spider 106, 176, 187 spiral 113, 141, 160 square root symbol 13, 14, 24, 91, 92, 106, 115; see also shaft Stalker (Tarkovsky) 142 steresis 55, 77, 78–83, 85, 87, 88, 101–3, 104, 138, 181 sterility 35, 55, 82, 83–4, 87, 102, 103, 104, 129, 130 stripes 54, 128; see also hybridity structure vii, 3, 14, 16, 33, 34, 36, 48, 51–3, 60, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 93, 94, 99, 102, 103, 110, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 150, 170, 173, 178, 188 sublimation 118, 123, 125 sublime 50, 136, 140, 182 substitutability vii, 56, 162, 186 substitution 2, 3, 7, 9, 34, 56, 99, 136, 138, 150, 177, 181, 186, 188 subversion vii, 18, 20, 22, 52, 53, 79, 81–7, 89, 101, 102, 111, 142, 149, 151, 152, 154 Sumerian 97, 98, 171 supernatural 13, 41, 42, 43, 48, 61, 62, 69, 75, 132, 133, 173 supreme 7, 13, 14, 16, 42, 43, 78, 84, 85, 87, 89, 96, 97, 132, 170, 178 surmodernité (Augé) 135 Symposium (Plato) 43, 50, 179

207

tabula rasa (Locke) 29 Tartarus 61, 90–2, 94, 98–100 Tassili Desert Mountains 7, 10, 47, 61–76, 82, 89, 93, 97, 98, 114, 115, 124, 129, 165 technologising 1, 6, 10, 11, 113, 117, 184, society 151 technology 1, 2, 3, 71, 84, 86–8, 101–2, 109–11, 114, 122, 129, 140, 146–8, 177, 186, 187 terror 18, 22, 58, 61, 93, 121, 124, 159, 166, 170, 173 theatre 56, 57, 58, 92, 97, 127, 156, 162, 165, 166 Theaetetus (Plato) 30, 35, 45, 97, 145 Theogony (Hesiod) 90, 91, 94, 95 Thessaly 106 Timaeus (Plato) 26, 27, 28, 38, 49, 75, 133, 183 Titan(s) 8, 92, 93, 100, 119 transformation 2, 22, 28–32, 37–42 passim, 45, 46, 48, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60, 69–73 passim, 85, 91–4 passim, 95–7, 99, 101, 109–19 passim, 122, 123, 125, 129, 132, 133, 139–54 passim, 156, 166, 169, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185; linear 11, 13, 26, 30, 32, 39, 41, 44, 49, 75, 102, 104, 179, 181, 182 (perverted 123); self- 122; see also metamorphosis transcendental 28, 29, 32, 47, 56, 71, 77, 81, 111, 115, 130–2, 140, 146; Kant’s 29, 159 transition 57, 59, 65, 77, 83, 168 transubstantiation 148–53, 155 trick 22, 25, 38, 130, 155, 179, 182, 185 trickster 8, 18, 23, 25, 55, 58, 62, 75, 77, 78, 90, 94, 106, 121, 127, 128–9, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 150, 153, 155, 165, 174, 187; demon 47; god(s) 11, 64; logic 161; Palaeolithic 50, 58 Tricksterology (Horvath and Szakolczai) 54, 113, 115, 128, 136 triton genos 26, 35, 183; see also matrix, receptacle troglodyte(s) 22, 61, 63, 90–101, 105, 106, 113, 142, 187 trust 23, 97, 105, 113, 152 Typhoeus 91 unburied 135, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 154, 179 uncertainty 42, 58, 80, 129, 132, 150 unconscious 40, 79, 126, 135, 180

208

Subject index

underground 18, 61, 90, 95, 97, 115, 128, 144; people 121; structures 10, 61, 63, 80, 90, 93, 94, 96, 98–101, 142, 143, 156, 179–80 underworld 33, 61, 135, 139, 154 universalism 4, 5, 11, 57, 131, 134, 155, 179 unlimited 39, 40, 49, 55, 69, 72, 77, 82, 84, 87, 88, 93, 103, 113, 115, 135, 149, 151, 161, 170, 184; see also limitlessness unreality vi, 2, 14, 17, 38, 43, 47, 66, 72, 74, 81, 103, 123, 129, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 148, 149, 150, 159, 160, 161, 162, 170, 171, 172, 184, 185, 187, 188 uterus 28, 41–3, 55, 60, 73–4, 76, 80, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 99; see also womb utilitarianism 131, 134 vacuum 84, 160, 161, 162, 167 vaporisation 33, 114, 177 Vedic Hinduism 136 vibration(s) 27, 32, 40, 48, 78, 91, 98, 120, 133, 148, 175 Villa Farnese (Caprarola) 87, 88 virtue 9, 24, 47, 68, 70, 71, 112, 123, 141, 142

void 26–31, 36, 43–9, 62, 67–9, 72, 80–4, 138–90, 148–51, 155–73, 188 voiding 119, 121, 142, 177 vulgarity 16, 74, 115, 168, 172 walking 87, 88, 89, 90, 105 wave(s) 4, 75, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 97, 107, 112, 120, 151, 155, 181, 186, 188 wavelength 79, 81, 83, 107, 148 wealth 14, 20, 27, 92, 117, 122, 138, 173 witch doctors 106; see also magician, sorcerer womb 11, 28, 36, 39, 45, 70, 72, 73, 78–82, 85, 88, 103, 104, 182, 183; see also matrix, receptacle, uterus Works and Days (Hesiod) 26, 123 world-rejection (Weber) 150 Y-shape 61, 65, 79–81, 103, 117 Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 22 zero 14, 17, 21, 32, 46, 68–9, 72, 85, 87, 159, 161–4, 167, 171–1; see also nil, nothingness Zeus 8, 91, 93, 119, 136, 188