Background I: Reading Undercurrent’s translation of Houllebecq’s work on Lovecraft, I suggested a minor correction about a misspelled word which I suspected should be actually a French modification to the original name: Rûb-al-Khâlie instead of Rûb-al-Khâlid (the original spelling in the book which is not correct); following this correction I asked Undercurrent about the motives behind Lovecraft’s unique selection of Rûb-al-Khâlie (excluding its exotic desert-ness and the rumor of being inhabited by Jinn and Jnun) as the region where Al Azif has been revealed to Abdul Al-Hazred, its related hyperstitions, etc. He recommended this fascinating page.
This article is teeming with ‘wrong’ Arabic / Aramaic information, but they are all hyperstitionally interesting in the following ways:
Background II: The Post-911 THING has imported an entire Arabic or more precisely Middle Eastern vocabulary to western countries; one can protest and claim it is just like what happened during Vietnam War. No, Vietnam War merely unloaded its vocabulary into the battlefield; it was exposed to American soldiers or those who were in contact with the War. Only soldiers or perhaps their families knew the meaning of phrases such as caca dau, choi oi, mama-san or Gung Ho. Besides, the Post-911 Thing (as an entity in a Deleuzian term) did not expose western countries to a culture of a country but an Islamic continent with multiple, convoluting, still-emerging cultures, lines of communication; and since civilians were the first people who witnessed the emergence of the post-911 Thing, the tide of Islamic (Arabic/Farsi) vocabularies hit ordinary (non-military) people first. Interested people enthusiastically started to learn Arabic language and people in general tried to learn several Arabic words at least to be on the front line. Moreover, since Islamic culture has already contaminated the West as its viral adversary, enthusiasm for diving into the Islamic Orientalism of the 18th and 19th centuries revived in a more convoluted, viral and multiplying form -- exclusive to the 21st century -- in the presence of the post-911 Thing. However, the fundamentally rebellious / alien Arabic alphabet for western readers soon started to dissipate its traumatizing tendrils via the Post-911 Thing within western (Latin/Greek/Anglo/German-based languages) phonetic, vocal, linguistic, writing systems; slightly cankered each throat speaking a Western Indo-European language (a process which is progressing and shows no sign of termination); but among English speakers who were in a direct contact with the Post-911 Entity, its sabotage was more complex, more contagious; it produced amazing hyperstitions based on the fusion of the diseased Arabic alphabet with the user-friendly English language, a fusion still giving birth to mutants, and rootless hybrids. Westernized or fanatic Farsi / Arabic intellectuals take the panorama as a menacing installation of a new and totally sophisticated cultural invasion or as here called: cultural ambush. None of them realized that it is the western civilization exposing itself to the virus. Beside the fact that Eastern cultures have developed an artificial nervous system capable of participating with viral agencies whose infection is lethal for the west, one should keep in mind that the germ-cell of these plagues have developed in the Middle East. From Jan Potocki to William Beckford to Burroughs, all adventurers of hardcore Orientalism (as discussed in the coming essay on sorcery / necromancy) know that Orientalism is not about the East, it is the interzone of the East and the West, emerging from an eastern-infested but genetically obscured germ-cell. As Burroughs shows, Westerners are more prone to the anthropophagic diseases of the Interzone rather than local Arabs.
The post-911 Thing has triggered interesting hyperstitions by importing Arabic vocabulary to Western languages especially English language which can never afford the alphabetic (phonetic/writing) systems of Arabic language; its nervous system engineers extraordinary anomalies which are symptoms of this radical inability to digest (or interlock with) an entirely different language and culture. We discussed a few of these examples in the past.
Some examples from old posts to elucidate the discussion, and prerequisite for following the discussion:
Mark paraphrasing Burroughs: “But when it comes to Oriental languages you are using a whole different set of muscles and neural patterns... so you're bound to have a sore throat, just like your legs are sore after riding a horse for the first time... And Arabic is frankly the worst.. It literally cuts an English-speaking throat... Spitting blood is one of the first symptoms, though not necessarily the worst.. It is the stutter of neural response - remember when you first tried to row a gondola? The way you couldn't possibly get it, and you r muscles knotted up and you were making spastic gestures with the oar and the feeling in your stomach and groin, that sort of packing dream tension almost sexual...? And then suddenly you could do it? Well it's like that, only worse... And there is the gap between languages that can be terrifying... the great silences... And erotic frenzies when the patient feels himself sexually attacked by Arab demons...
"About ten days in the hospital... You realize that you don't talk with your mouth and throat and lungs and vocal cords, you talk with your whole body... And the body keeps reaching back for the old language - it's rather like junk withdrawal in a way.. The erotic manifestations always occur... It's like the subject is being raped by the language, shouting out obscenities in the injected idiom.”
---
Me: Jay frequently reminds Col. West that Delta Force simply failed in its anti-Al-Qaeda operations because it never grasped what Al-Qaeda really is: It is not Al-Qaeda. It is Al-Ghaedeh, included a letter unknown to all Indo-European languages (Latin/German/Greek, etc) and is almost impossible to be pronounced correctly (let aside fluency) by Latin speakers; it is the pharyngeal letter ‘Qaf’ (i.e. Ghaaf) oversimplified as ‘Q’ in English.
Nick: [...] Also, Ghaaf issue reminds me of a bizarre episode when Condi Rice and Powell began talking about "Gutter" rather than "Cararrh" when referring to Qatar - just triggered media snickers at the time, but guess it was exactly the same translational nexus you're pointing to here.
Me: Excellent! (Once again, you probed right into the core) ... yes, it is. Qatar also is another symptom of the Ghaaf (or Qaaf?)-Complex.
Me: It has strange letters whose vocalization processes are not linear at all. The letter Ghaaf, letters Ha and Haa, letters Ayn and Ghain, etc. As I’ve previously discussed it with Nick, these letters are the curses of Arabic pronunciation system for speakers of other languages. Even Farsi speakers usually have difficulties.
One should be a crazed wolf and at the same time breathe as a lycanthrope to discharge the sound of the letter Ha. To vocalize 'Ghaaf', one should be a partly blocked tube attached to nothing.
To initiate as a Jay’s disciple, Col. West must be able to pronounce the letters Ha and Ghaaf; this ensures Jay that he has finally kicked the Delta-Force Qaaf-Complex out of his mind and mouth.
Lovecraft like Potocki and Beckford but in a far more rigorous and profound approach realized the way that Arabic or Semitic-based languages generate hyperstitional anomalies when they are implanted within English language. He used this hyperstition technique to engineer names, absolutely alien to English readers but in a way vaguely very familiar to all Hebrew/Arabic/Farsi speakers (the most famous of which is Cthulhu).
What is interesting here (including the page that Robin Undercurrent suggested) are the attempts to decipher these names in recent years through methods which are also based on the hyperstitional panorama which we already discussed i.e. the inability of English language to digest Semitic-based languages (not only languages but also their cultures, viro-occultism and hyperstitions) and thus pathologically giving rise to symptoms and anomalies which soon are sucked into other hyperstition vortices.
Now, the article that Robin Undercurrent suggested (a few examples):
1. Cthulhu not in fiction: Possibly similar to the Arabic Khadhulu. The word occurs in the Koran, meaning "forsaker" or "abandoner."
This is truly worth pursuing:
I wondered what really this word is since I had never heard this Arabic word before; especially a word that occurs in Koran should not be a completely obsolete word. I searched the web and found many references to this word in texts about Lovecraft and Necronomicon. The word is from Sura Furghan (or Furqân, The Criterion, The Standard):
(25:29): Laghad azallanee AAani althzikri baAAda ith jaanee wakana alshshaytanu lil-insani khazoolan
Translation: "He did lead me astray from the Message (of Allah) after it had come to me! Ah! the Evil One (Shaytân, Satan) is but a traitor to man!"
The word that has been referred as Khadhulu or sometimes Khad-hulu (in other texts about Necronomicon) corresponding to Cthulhu is in fact, Khazoola or as it has taken ‘Tanvin’ in the Quran, it is pronounced Khazoolan. The letter that has lead English writers to imagine this word is similar to Cthulhu is the letter Zal (ABJAD = 700); like letter Ghaaf (the western Qaaf-complex) it cannot be pronounced by an English speaker. For Farsi-speakers who read the Quran, it is also relatively hard to pronounce this letter correctly despite the fact that the letter Zal IS in Farsi alphabet. The phonetic construction of this letter is the result of an anomalous alliance of three sounds: d, h and z (dhz); however, the emphatic sound is Z; therefore, in Farsi it is pronounced just like the letters Za and Zoin. When the letter Zal is imported to English language; it can only be pronounced and oversimplified as a sound oscillating between d and h, and loses its central sound that is ‘Z’. This oversimplification which of course is hyperstitionally intriguing is extended to English writing system in the same way. Letter Zal is written as dh instead of Z which is the most correct and acceptable sound of the letter Zal. Khazoola, Khazula or as in the Quran Khazulan (from Khazala meaning to discontinue assisting one in reaching a goal, abandoning and sometimes betraying, becoming traitor) is the correct spelling and pronunciation of this word. The information presented in the article is based on the following oversimplification (superficially reductionist but hyperstitionally complex):
There is nothing in Arabic as Khadhulu: the English appropriation transforms the original word in this way: the letter Zal in ‘Khazulan’ is disintegrated to only two marginal sounds of the letter Zal i.e. d&h; therefore, dh is actually the mangled form of the letter Zal as a symptom of the vocal incapacity of English speakers to pronounce Zal. The tanvin at the end of original word is also simply replaced by ‘u’ (‘oo’) sound.
Kazoolan ---> Kha[dh][i.e. zal]oolu ---> Now, the writer(s) has imagined that ‘d’ is separated from ‘h’ in the word Khadhulu and has directly connected it to Cthulhu like this: Khad-hulu.
The fascinating point is that most of critiques and texts on Necronomicon and Lovecraft's name-anomalies are based on this ridiculously wrong but hyperstitionally absorbing mis-understanding. Just type Khadhulu or Khad-hulu in the Google search box and see how many texts have been propagated based on this technical mis-understanding and virally mutating oversimplifications (not oversimplification as a negative reduction) and follow all hyperstitions and thrilling extravagant conclusions based on this fusion-anomaly and its associated interpretations (Khad-hulu or Khadhulu for Cthulhu); to this extent, I don’t see it as the dissemination of a wrong piece of information but an artificialized viral hyperstition ovum which has been mobilized by numerous transmitting vectors, sucked into hyperstition vortices which engineer new hyperstitions, new radically artificial beliefs, all autonomously generating new Cthulhuoid hyperstitions.
2. “Also note that in Aramiac Ketul-hu means, "he who is imprisoned.”
I contacted my friend who is one of the most erudite researchers in ancient Semitic-based languages and assisted me to learn Pahlavi (of ancient Persia) language. He answered there is no such a word or phrase in the Aramaic language, in none of its three periods of development. So this must be another anomaly artificialized by the phonetic virulence of Aramaic imported to English language.
3. “Also R'lyeh is an acceptable transcription of the Arabic Galiyah or r'allyah since the "g" is a glottal "r" sometimes rendered by an "r" or "r'" and galiyah means boiling.)”
There is no such a word as Galiyah in Arabic language; the original word is from Ghalayan (boiling) beginning with the letter Ghaaf. Sometimes Letter Ghaaf is appropriated as ‘G’ instead of ‘Q’ (it is another symptom of the famous Qaf-Complex as we discussed in conversations). Consequently, the hint about the vocal connection between ‘g’ and ‘r’ is symptomatically narrating another anomaly triggered by the familiar hyperstition of ‘Qaaf-complex’, a rootless connection which has given rise to many hyperstitions about R’lyeh. Again, use Google to see the results.
4. “ Chennghiz Khan [Chinngis Khan was a title, his actual name was Temujin], and was considered a "Mongol Hercules," half bestial, half divine, endowed with superhuman strength. ”
These fictional characteristics (based on orientalistic fascination of the West by Chengiz khan as a paranormal fictional figure and western legends around him) render Chengiz khan as an exceptionally hyperstitional character much like a hyperfictional / hyperstitional character in Comic Books capable of coming out of / entering to a book simultaneously with no trace, an inter-dimensional entity.
5. “Carter would not change something Smith wrote; ergo Xoth is another place. Since Carter, in the story "Curse of the Black Pharaoh" chose to write the Arabic word "Djinn" or "Jinn" like this: "Xin," I assume then that Xoth is pronounced similarly as Djoth (the "dj" said as in the word jar) or Joth, using a soft "J" sound in the word or using Joth, such as the soft "J" sound in the word "de jure" or as the "z" is pronounced in the word "azure." ”
The widely known word ‘Djinn’ -- which has also used by CCRU, diagramming the Outside (Zones 6:3 or Djynxx) in the Numogran or Decimal Labyrinth -- is another phonetic anomaly emerged within English language. The Arabic word Jin (or Jinn) refers to a race created by God before human, made out of fire thus capable of shape-shifting (unlike human which was created from Dust and Water: the bacterial mess of Dust-Soap). In the Quran and Islamic stories, unlike in Christianity, Shaytan (Satan) is not a fallen angel but the first Jinn (the Man’s nemesis) created by Allah. According to the Quran, Angels have no Will; as a result, they have no ability to disobey or choose. But Jinns as experimental anti-humans with unfathomable intelligence can choose their paths, they have the Will to disobey or obey, be loyal or traitor (Khazoola). Jinn or Djinn is male, the female side of this race is called Jnun (in plural form), a rich word which also means delirium, maddening love and terminal madness. In Persian mythology, Jnun are descended from Jeh or Jay or Jahi (also Jehika), the first anti-creationist agent engineered by Ahriman’s own body, the daughter of Ahriman who awakened his father from ten thousand years of sleep to spawn a pest-legion, Jahi is the first woman whose mission was to undo the entire pro-creationist / survivalist project of Ahura Mazda. In Arabic folklore, Jnun are daughters of Lilith. Rûb-al-Khâlie, in which Al-Hazred settled for ten years, was inhabited by Jnun (a female legion) not Jinn (Male ones); so following CCRU’s suggestion that Djynxx diagrams the Outside (zones 6:3 or the warp region of the numogram), Abdul Al-Hazred has communicated with the female side of the Outside (Jnun) for writing his nocturnally enciphered Necronomicon. The other side of the Outside, is ‘It’, the epidemic, the ungrounded becoming, the cosmodrome. Jnun possess not to take over but to make open -- lay, crack, butcher open (As in the case of the Moroccan jinniya, Aisha Qandisha, or Aiesheh Ghediseh who is also called the Opener). 'Being possessed by Jnun' (things that never rest), this was the only solution Abdul Al-Hazred found to communicate with the Cosmodrome of the outside. Becoming woman via Jnun is a direct link to ‘It’, the cosmodromic current of the Outside. There is another fascinating hyperstition here: Why does Lovecraft frequently call Al-Hazred, the ‘mad’ poet or the ‘mad’ Arab? Because while communicating with Jnun (who in Arabic / Farsi folklore narrate untold stories to the one who becomes open to them, as in the case of Lilith who tells forbidden stories to travelers before devouring them) as the female current / agencies of the Outside, radical madness is inevitable; for Jnun, once again, means delirium, maddening love, terminal madness as the result of being laid open by the Outside. Jnun is not compatible with the western definition of Madness. It cannot be translated properly, but suffice to say that it is mainly constituted by three elements and is developed through their compositions: Possession, Love and utter Openness. Abdul Al-Hazrad is a majnun, a man laid open by Jnun and at the same time, a majnun man, a madman (majnun) who immediately reminds us of Leili and Majnun, their love story which is converged upon madness, openness, and a delirious love -- the Forbidden.
ATTN CCRU: maybe you should rename Djynxx (male jinns) and engineer a Jnun(female side)-derived name which is highly connected to the Outside (6:3, also Jay=63); or compose them with each other.
7. Irem is very important to Arab magick. 'Irem Zhat al Imad' (Irem of the Pillars) is the city's name in Arabic. [...] The 'Pillars' in 'Irem of the Pillars' has a hidden meaning. Among Arab mystics, 'pillar' is a code name for 'elder' or 'old one'. Thus 'Irem of the Pillars' is really 'Irem of the Old Ones'."
Imâd or Emâd, this time, is an Arabic word; meaning pillar, any tall building or verticals; but there is no such a mystic aura around the word pillar (Imâd). There is a famous reference to pillars in the Quran as mentioned in the text (Erama Zate al-Imâd) [89:7] (Sura Al-Fajr, Dawn)
“Eram on (erected or positioned on) pillars: Eram or Iram has been frequently mentioned in Arabic / Farsi stories and Hadith. It can be translated as Heaven. Eram means both the skies (heavens) and Paradise (Heaven). Islamic scholars consider pillars sometimes as hidden forces of the universe in the absence of which the Earth and cosmos will collapse (according to the Quran, in Qyiamah or Ghiamat, the skies collapse as a result of falling pillars [1]), and sometimes as the force of gravity, similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of this word for “the verticals of gravity” (“The Space of Pillars”) [A Thousand Plateaus, p. 370]
The reference to ‘elder’ or ‘old one’ is also incorrect: Imâd simply means an old wise man, a pious man, or a man with dignity (not necessarily old).
These are just a few examples of many twisted pieces of information (esp. on the Arabic front) presented in the text. All symptoms of the viral Arabic culture(s) / language oozing into the nervous system of English language / culture(s) and producing cryptogenic diseases, anomalies and mutants which are instantly pinpointed by hyperstition probe-heads. They should not be regarded as baseless, invalid or valueless information but anomalies generated by certain fusions between viral agencies of one language and its associated space and the immune or nervous system of another language -- involuntary fugues which violently traverse both languages; off-channel communications cross-contaminating two different spaces, facilitating and triggering the emergence of new entities, poly-hybrids, uncontrollable minorities and hyperstitions; enmeshing worlds with their own spaces of the virtual, the actual and the real.
In trade with Islamic countries, the axial role does not belong to imported Arabic warmachines but the ways, they fuse with Western systems and how they breed cryptogenic unnamable hybrids, entities which are always anonymous until Now.
NOTE
[1] See Sura Al-Takwir [The Overthrowing] (Sura 81) which begins with the most poetical, mysteriously rhythmic and passionately musical verses of the Quran, scenes of collapsing universe, or according to the text on Lovecraft, the Return of the Old Ones.
For all its superficial silliness, the news that the British navy is to admit a practising Satanist into its ranks is a cultural event of some magnitude.
At one level, this is simply yet another sign - after the ridiculous vampire example I cited over at k-punk - that, so far as the Secumenical west is concerned, nothing is beyond the pale. (Except Christianity of course, which, as some - though, praise Uttunul, not all of the responses to my Passion of the Christ post confirmed, is embarrassingly unacceptable to the postmodern, post-Enlightenment, patholiberalized west.)
The RN Satanist episode could seem simply comic, and indeed it is uproariously funny. What next? An al Qaeda operative being welcomed into the US military? A Nazi claiming political asylum in Israel? Given that it can only be fear of litigation that has prompted the Navy's tolerance, this incident is further confirmation that in the west, Lawyer Plague has long since gone virulently endemic, a sick and sickening cultural virus eroding all personal responsibility and ethical accountability in a kind of perverse fusion of corporatism, Derridean deconstruction and Clintonian equivocation ('it depends what you mean by "is"'). In the lair of the blurred, the lawyer-liar is king. (Or Prime Minister).
At another level - and this perhaps amounts to the same point differently put - the sublime hilarity that the Royal Navy Satanist evokes indicates that the Wittgensteinian logic of mystagogic 'tolerance' has reached its inevitable, absurd conclusion. Repudiating the Logical Positivist philosophy to which his early work had contributed, Wittgenstein famously argued that religions were 'language games', 'forms of life' which could not be rationally analysed or assessed by those not participating in the 'way of living'. Logical Positivists were wrong to demand that religion (or any other discourse) be subject to logic or empirical verifiability because both logic and science were themselves only language games, no more - or less - valid than any other. There was no meta-language game, no transcendent perspective 'outside' the play of different discourses which could legitimately claim to arbitrate them. It's a short step from this to the now widely accepted postmodern 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'; no surprise, then, to reflect that Lyotard leant so heavily on Wittgenstein in The Postmodern Condition.
Now, as we are all well aware, for Wittgenstein, as for his postmodern successors, there would always turn out to be a meta-language after all - the meta-language of language games itself, with its implicit, unworkably paradoxical ethics of obligatory tolerance towards all cultural groups. The incredulity towards meta-narratives wasn't itself a religious conviction, just as cultural relativism isn't a cultural position. It is - in the unstated view of its adherents in the Secumenon - just 'normal', a state of disbelief those not fortunate enough to be members of the Western elite can look forward to one day attaining.
One of the many virtues of John Gray's work is to expose the appalling hubris of the Secumenon's unstated presuppositions about the superiority of their vacuous quasi-scientistic anti-theism. In Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, Gray demonstrates that the positivist cult of science is in effect a religion, with its own unargued assumptions, priests and observances. This could sound like language games all over again, but Gray is no postmodern relativist. Rather, he is an anti-modernist Schopenhauerian pessimist, gleefully-gloomily eviscerating what he identifies as the West's deepest religious commitment: faith in Progress.
Yes, everything is religious - especially the militant atheism of the White Euroisie - but some religions are more dangerous, more pernicious than others. Hence Gray's paralleling of Islamofascism with the CrUSaders is not a banal gesture of moral equivalence ('they are both as bad as each other'), it is a recognition that al Qaeda and Bush are both fundamentally modern, both fundamentally modern(ist). For Gray, the way out therefore seems to lie in a rejection of the disastrous modernist myth of Progress and a qualified return to the pre-theistic cyclical time in which history is without any meaning, redemptive or otherwise.
Gray is rigorously Schopenhauerian in his belief that the problem is the Western subject's belief in itself. It is precisely Ego that is the problem, the hell in which we are trapped, burning. But this Ego is merely maya, appearance, phenomena: the task for human beings is to suspend these mirages in order to flee the Burroughs' 'penny arcade peep show', the endlessly turning ferris wheel of desolate hedonic repetition, the Garden of Delights.
All of which brings us back to Chris Cranmer, the Navy's Satanist. Cranmer is a member of LaVey's Church of Satan, which holds that 'Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence' and 'Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification.'
What could be more drearily banal than this weary black candle-lighting for egoistic carnality? It might be uh tempting to decry Cranmer and LaVey's version of Satanism as a sad travesty of 'true' Satanism, but isn't the uncomfortable reality for the transgressive Marilyn Manson panto crew that Cranmer and LaVey's tawdry cult of Self is a kind of fundamentalist Satanism, a pure Satanism stripped of all extraneous stage-setting histrionic devices?
Satan is well known to the prince of Lies. With this in mind, we must concede that Blair and Clinton, in this respect if no other, are much more Satanic than Bush who, as s The Economist has long argued, is at least honest about what he is. Devil's Advocate was an atrocious film, but its premiss - that today's Satan would be the head of firm of lawyers - was compelling and provocative, because it appreciated that the postmodern - the cultural logic of late Kapitalism, Jameson was right to insist - might be defined as the moment in which ubiquitous Law displaces - or, to use Kafka's terms - indefinitely postpones, Justice. And postmodern Law is precisely not some transcendent absolute but the bad immanence of a Kafkaesque legal abgrund, a self-supporting, literally interminable, bureau-labyrinth.
Yes, Satan's dominion is the realm of the worldly. Hence the crucial scene of temptation in the desert:
'Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus turned back from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert, where for forty days and for forty nights he was put to the test by the Devil. During that time he ate nothing, and by the end of it he was hungry. "If you are the son of God, command this stone to become a loaf." But Jesus replied, "Scripture says, 'Man does not live by bread alone'."
Then, leading him to a height, the Devil showed him in a moment of time all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, "To you will I give all this power and their glory, for it has been handed over to me, for me to give to whom I choose. Worship me, and it shall all be yours." But Jesus answered him, "Scripture says, 'You must worship the Lord your God; him alone must you serve.'"
Then he led him to Jerusalem and set him on the highest parapet of the Temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said to him, "cast yourself down from here, for scripture says, 'He has commanded his angels to guard you,' and again, 'They will bear you in their arms lest you strike your foot against a stone.'"
But Jesus answered him, "Scripture says, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"
Having run through every way of tempting him, the Devil left him, until the opportune moment. (Luke 4:1-13)
As Jack Miles observes in Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God:
'In this episode, which gave rise to the proverb "Even the Devil can quote scripture," Jesus and the Devil confront each other as duelling Jewish intellectuals.' The issue is: what kind of power do Jesus and Satan have?
It is clear that Satan's dominion extends to everything in the world, including Jesus' own organism (which he is able to physically transport). The temptation, here as in the Passion later, would be to submit to the carnal cravings of the organism, to take the easy option offered by the pleasure principle, and therefore to grant credence to the worldly.
Yet, here as later, Jesus is impassive. He is precisely not Passionate; his strength lies in quieting the relentless demands of his own organs, in overcoming the default human tendency towards Spinozist passivity.
As The Passion of the Christ makes clear, the Devil, however, preys upon the passive. Not only the militantly psychotic Roman soldiers who gleefully beat the upstart Messiah, but also the apathetic passers by, the crowd who either participate in the baiting, sneering and humiliation or else stand by quietely and permit it to occur.
What then, are the 21C equivalents of the Romans and the passive Crowd? Well, for the moment, if not for that much longer, Amerikkka is the Spectacular-Optical Kapital of the carnal-worldly. Military might and the power of the $ and the degraded hyperstitions they generate - there's no point doing anything, global Kapital is inevitable, unstoppable - these are the means by which Wordly passivity weighs upon us, inducing us to wall ourselves up further in our the luxury padded cells of our Oed-I-pod Hells.
Satanism is not aberrant, transgressive, dangerous.
It is normality in person.
The third part of Houllebecq's Contre le monde, contre la vie, translated by Robin is available at Undercurrent. Thanks.
half-man-half-scorpion, Halaf mound, Syria
(Craig and Thistle’s avatar of holey space, the guardian of the Gate to the Outside in the Epic of Gilgamesh)
Scorpions are burrowers not architects, they do not build upon the compositions of solid and void, they devour volumes and snatch spaces; for them the holey space is not merely a dwelling place, a place to reside (a niche for occupation) but more than that, it is the abode of war (dâr al-harb), the holey space of unselective hunting.
Undercurrent: Remarkable posts at Undercurrent.
(a) Adventures in Solipsism: A long and intentionally inconclusive post on various subjects among which I can point to Hollow Earth theories and related hyperstitions.
This post intrigued me to write some irrelevant comments and mix them with a piece I was writing on Doom 3. Has anyone played Doom3?
(b) Undercurrent has started an excellent project on his blog and it is translating Michel Houellebecq’s work on H.P. Lovecraft (Contre le monde, contre la vie: Against the world, against life). I’ve already read a part of this long essay in Farsi, a friend of mine translated a part of it along with Gabrielle Wittkop’s controversial novel Le nécrophile and 50-60 pages of Pierre Guyotat’s tour de force Eden Eden Eden (which was better than the English translation), of course these translations were not supposed to be published in Iran. I read Lovecraft very late; well, because the monstrosities in his stories have been always too inspiring for Hollywood superpowers. Finally some essays on Lovecraft (including Houellebecq’s essay) and Nick’s intriguing and as always exciting comments on Lovecraft overcame my resistance.
As Undercurrent mentions, what Houellebecq suggests is some kind of nihilism on/of life. I think like many writers with similar trends, Houellebecq has mistaken the process of survival or live-ing (libban, liffan: leaving life) or what we generally call life with Life as a germinal space in which survival should be appropriated as a fluxional and at the same time grounding process to simultaneously feed on Life and simply endure or survive from its unlife (a process of appropriating based on an economical openness towards life). The unlife of life as a radical abyss of openness is external to survival economy. Therefore, all communications of survival process or live-ing to Life are confined within the sphere of affordance and capacity since survival cannot digest radical openness unless through appropriation or filtering processes, it can only transform openness to affordance, the process from which it guarantees its survival, and eventually death. The communication of survival economy (again, what commonly believed as life) with Life should essentially be channeled through capacity which is the foundation of survivalism (the so-called pro-life). The functioning of capacity or boundary as horizon does not narrate the closure of Survival Economy, on the contrary it depicts the economical openness of boundary: boundary (horismos) starts from the edge to the outside not to communicate with the outside but to accommodate it. In the same way, pro-life is actually a pro-survival position, a pacified and passive position to conservatively interact with the (Un)life itself. Anti-Life, predictably, falls in the same trap; it becomes an agent of survival economy and economical openness as soon as it mistakes live-ing with Life. I’ll discuss all this soon in a long essay on Sorcery and Necromancy.
The other issue, I think Houellebecq’s view on Lovecraft’s racism (it is too visible to be ignored) is arguable. I have discussed it in the fully updated version of A Good Meal which will be posted here before I make it online again or publish it in an anthology.
Undercurrent also talks about the necromantic invocations of the Old Ones when he speaks about the consequence of Lovecraftian cosmic nihilism; this will be also discussed in the essay about Necromancy and Sorcery. Does necromantic call is the consequence of this cosmic nihilism or it is an entirely different undercurrent which is too complex to be demarcated as sorcery and narrated through the dynamism of lines of flight? (Will be discussed in the essay)
Anyway, many thanks for this great project … I know that free translations always need encouragements (let aside donations) so I ask other bloggers to encourage Robin Undercurrent. The process of translating must be exhausting so only warm encouragements can fuel the translator.
(c) A very funny post on Norwejian Ommellete and D&G
Wandering among many emails I have received during the last month, I encountered a note from a fellow countryman and Hyperstition reader: he has pointed out that the man I’m speaking about as Ibn Maymun is not Persian and is not an occultist so I have given wrong information. He has added Ibn Maymun is a Spanish philosopher and physician.
Answer: well, it depends … there are many Ibn Maymuns in history but two of them are very famous.
1. Abu Imran Musa ibn Maymun ibn 'Ubayd Allah (or as simplified in the west: Maimonides), the Jewish philosopher and physician born in Cordoba (1135-1204), famous for his scholarly and influential studies, he is also known as the Second Musa (Moses).
2. Abdallah ibn Maymun, Iranian occultist, occult-saboteur, Hyperstition engineer, the founder of Batiniyya whose main activity was concentrating militarism and religion through collective occultism (later, Batiniyya completely dissolved into Isma'ili sect, leaded by Hasan I-Sabah), one of the hidden Imams of Isma'ilis and a disobedient conspiracist. There are few texts on Ibn Maymun and they are mostly in Farsi and Arabic, I couldn’t find important English texts on his life especially because his thoughts and occult theories are entirely unknown to the western tradition of occultism and Hyperstition engineering (Attn CCRU Shanghai). Suffice to say, he has been called the faceless man, infamous for his thirst to rebel and undermine all institutions, religions and schools of thought. His theories are so complex and deeply rooted in eastern thought that western occultists can hardly understand. However, this enigmatic person changed the history of the Middle East. It is not an exaggeration if I say that the perplexing contemporary polytics of the Middle East is highly connected to his cultural / religious sabotages in the region during the most sensitive times in the history of Islam and the Middle East (he has messed with Middle Eastern religions and cultures too much).
Attn Undercurrent: Studying Ibn Maymun is also important for he was a Muslim/Jewish/ Zoroastrian /Yazidi (or Yezidi) who turned syncretic Yazidi beliefs into practical military / political strategies and theories.
I am not sure; I may translate a collection of his remarks and fragmentary texts in the future.
For now: I could find two articles about Ibn Maymun and his activities on the net; I should warn they are based on incomplete or sometimes wrong information scrambled by western interpretations and personal oversimplifications but they can give you a clue about this advocator of the Z. crowd and Hyperstition puppetism.
+ ADHERENTS OF THE HIDDEN DIMENSION: The Batiniyya of ‘Abdallah ibn Maimun’
Relevant Hyperstition Links
+ Relic
I just realized there is something wrong with this blog ... some of recent comments have been deleted including mine, Nick's latest coment and Aisha's comment on Abjad. Does anyone know anything about this problem? Nick, Aisha could you repost your comments?
oops, Osa's interesting comment has gone too.
minutes later: had problems to recover and repost Nick and Osa's post (i use firefox) but mine and Aisha's have been lost.
Again: I see many posts have been deleted (some kind of comment-phage virus?) including Thistle and Nick’s but I recovered them. Anyone can help?
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” (John 6:53-54)
I saw the movie two times; first time, just one week after it released. I was expecting a Baconian surgery of the crucifixion (the diffusion and slow melting of Cross into spinal cord, gradually gnawing at the root of the brain as a bio-occult prosthesis programmed to introduce body to forces and intensities, ungrounding the face from within) due to all propaganda about the movie that it has a brilliant anatomical narration on the event of Crucifixion -- Event-as-Entity in a Deleuze-Guattarian term -- but I was rather disappointed (should confess enjoyed the movie though), it was too Brave Heartish; plus, found it corresponding to this version of crucifixion (cross as a flying machine set to eat the body, chewing its meat, and consume enough flesh to give the body a lightness capable of handling the process of religious levitation, making it much more easier to fly and reach its idealist lightness). And the second time, nearly two months ago, I watched it in cinema at 11:00 pm, a perfect time to taste Golgothic Materialism. I was with a friend, we knew what expects us but a small group of moviegoers apparently had no clue about the notorious scenes. Everyone had a pocket of popcorn and chips, enthusiastically talking about the movie and the fact that such a blockbuster movie has come to Iran with no delay and no resistance from authorities. When lights turned off, I could hear them eating, cracking sounds made the atmosphere too noisy, but as soon as the notorious scourging scenes started all sounds faded. People moved in their seats in discomfort. Step by step, it made them more nervous but no one left. The edgy mood continued until the last breath of the Crucified, when his eye closed. A child loudly and with so much curiosity asked his parents, “Did he finally die?” it echoed in the salon as the perfect climax of the movie, the utter subversion of Crucifixion as a horror story. A question which is always asked at the end of a monster movie, the final death of the last Boss in videogames, the last breath of an undying demon whose death signals hundreds or perhaps thousands of sequels (The Christ Resurrection, The Christ: Genesis Project, The Calvary Massacre, …).
He told his cult: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” The act of self-mutilation to spawn and creates, to breed little Sons (little christs) and seed a cult only correspond with the demonic passion to spread a vast progeny, a snide and bloody answer to God’s creation engine. Did anyone remember the article, The AOE and the Brotherhood of Nine’ and its opening image?
It was Angra.minuy or as linguistically oversimplified Ahriman (the supreme deity of Xrafstra (Khrafstra), the pest-legion). I asked Robin undercurrent if he knows why his face is bizarrely twisted, ridiculously disfigured and he has funny big ears. The question went unanswered from my side. In mythologies, Gods or Titans are mostly self-fertilizing or fertilize each other to create but there is an exception, Ahriman’s method for creation is to turn his own body into a bloody slaughterhouse factory of creation (an ironic answer to clean pro-creationist dimension of cosmogony); whenever he desires to spawn a legion, to create, he cuts a part of his body, lacerates an organ, rips a piece of his flesh, mutilates his body and from that piece of flesh (nasu) he creates a legion, a cult, a religion devoted to himself. The wounds are cured in time, but scars remain, everywhere a machinery of fibrosis and mal-healing is at work, hordes of collagen molecules integrating in the regions of malefaction (criminal creation), new meat over wounds but always in the form cicatrix (more meat than is needed to heal the wounds): Ahriman as the traumatic Redeemer or the other way around.
The fungal resistance of the Christ (prolonged dying without climax or Did he finally die?) suffers no pesticide or anti-fungal solution, in the presence of pesticide or heat, it mutates, developing a new mode of endurance, living stealth and quiet, moving under wraps. If Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ looks as an anti-catholic movie, it is because Catholicism has been mutated long ago to what Gibson slyly maps in his work. Reversing the panorama from the bricks of a catholic Church to the flying pieces of the Christ’s flesh when he is scourged, it is the same old but hideously mutated politic of Catholicism. The demonic endurance of the Christ in Gibson’s movie is the bloodless heart of Catolicism itself: the beast never dies. (This is a fact that a Christian involuntarily misses.)
This is why Ibn Maymun, the ultimate occult-saboteur and Hyperstition engineer, recommends that the best solution is to sabotage Catholicism and all other modes of monotheism from within, poisoning them with their own toxin. Direct use of pesticide is too dangerous.
However, I have no hatred for the Crucified, simply because I am a Muslim. If I’m right, Robin Undercurrent wrote a piece on the movie and discussed that the hatred for the Crucified is much based on the duration and intensity of being exposed to its corruptive radiations; fortunately, as an Iranian I have not been exposed too much to its radiations. Besides, following Quran, if I take the islamic version of the story, I can say that the whole story of crucifixion is a lie; consequently, Gibson’s movie can be regarded as another stealth political maneuver of Catholicism (or in a more general sense, the Cult of the Crucified, the traumatic Redeemer).
“I do not look into monotheistic religions as Serat-o-al-Mostaghim (the direct path), nor do I curse them as ghouls of repression. I simply see them as generous mothers pregnant of their minorities, thousands, millions of them; a female scorpion devoured by its own children, ripped apart from the belly. This is what Ibn Maymun taught us.” (From Jay’s correspondences to Col. West)
Watch the Passion of the Christ as a stimulating carnographic horror movie (swarmed with sequels).
PS. I’m with Osa who finds strong snuff elements in the Gibson’s movie. As a movie-addict, I have followed necro-snuff movies for a long time. Yes, he is right. If you have a strong stomach and you can find this very hard-to-find title (Aftermath - 1994), watch it and see the similarities of this brilliant necro-snuff movie (full of references to Xianity and the flesh of the Christ) with The Passion of the Christ -- directed by another whacky Spaniard, Nacho Cerda.
Extracts from an unpublished interview with the late Martin Bergmann by Theresa Delaney, 1996
TD: Is it true you were abused, Reverend Bergmann?
Bergmann: No more so than anyone else.
TD: How so?
It's all a matter of degree. The reason why hypnotherapists can so easily 'recover' abuse traces is not, as we are led to believe, that they have implanted them; but neither is it the case that they are 'real' empirical memories either.
They are what Freud calls trauma, and what Templeton calls a Transcendental Occurrence. When It happens, there is no-One to experience It - The event is precisely too overwhelming to be processed within the time-space-causality frame of human experience and cognition - and therefore there is no memory.
Or: there is only memory. Memory stands in for what could not be experienced. Think of alien abduction narratives. We all know that they concern time anomalies. What is registered initially is precisely a gap in time. For the cogito, that is to say, there is an awareness only of a gap in the 'I Think'. An ellipsis in the illusion of seamless consciousness. This rupture first of all consists only of a question: 'What happened'?
The answer is of course that what happened is a disruption of the empirical-phenomenal by an Outside. Since this can't be experienced - it is literally too intense - it can only be encountered via post hoc neuronic narrativization that is not 'false' but artificial. Anything would be 'false', is the point. Again, the event is perceptible only in the gaps in the narrative mesh.
We need to remember Freud's point that trauma is originary; it is trauma that is constitutive of identity as such. To be introduced into the symbolic order always involves violence. Obviously the child 'experiences' socialization as an unbearable horror. So it isn't going too far to say that the relationship between the child and abuse is analytic: the child is the one that is abused.
What this means is that there is a delirial field underlying all subjectivity that is dripping with abuse signal.
Take something like Cathy O'Brien's recent book [Trance-Formation of America]. Should we believe that O'Brien's claims about CIA-organized trauma-based mind control systems are genuine? Or, alternatively, should we believe that she constructed them as a monstrously elaborate fabrication? Neither hypothesis seems remotely satisfactory.
TD: So what is the explanation?
B: That O'Brien is drawing upon the real 'collective' unconscious of the USA. Of course, her narrative of systematic abuse by the powers-that-be is true, there's no question of that. It just might not be empirically true.
TD: How does all this relate to Christianity?
B: Once we've left behind Paul's child abuse cult, you can see that Christ is about a cut, a break in the cycle of abuse. Instead of being the abuse victim of Catholic iconography, Christ is a child abductor - 'only he who hates his father and mother can follow me' - the one who snatches the child from the cycle of time, from the grips of Kronos, 'the most honest of fathers'.
TD: So, speaking in terms of Stillwell's Lemurian system, Christ would be an avatar of Djynxx?
B: Yes. Absolutely. The cutter. Desert spirit of dust clouds. All of sudden... there they were... gone....
I finally saw The Passion of the Christ this week. I watched it at work with the A-level Religious Studies students. They like me were moved to tears and beyond. (Tip for any teacher out there: show the film at 9 in the morning, that'll wake up any students still yawning their way into the day).
Whilst agreeing with much of what Zizek says about Gibson's film in his brilliant essay Passion in the Era of Decaffeinated Belief, I think that he doesn't go nearly far enough.
Zizek is right to challenge the smug and lazy culturalist consensus that religious conviction is inherently pathological and dangerous. But he is wrong to suggest that what is most important about Passion is belief. Gibson's Gnostic vision - which is simply Christ's ethical Example rescued from the institutionalized religion that has systematically distorted it in his name - makes the two traditional supports of religious belief irrelevant. Astonishingly, The Passion of the Christ demonstrates that neither Revelation nor Tradition are important for those seeking to become-Christ(ian). What matters is not so much whether the events described in the film really happened - and there is no reason to doubt that that something resembling them did - but the life-practice which the Christ story narrates.
Life as parable.
Let's dismiss first of all the idea that the film is anti-semitic. Certainly, the first half of the film threatens to invite this interpretation. In the run-up to Jesus' arrest, the film appears to depict the Jewish religious authorities as near-subhuman monsters, while the Roman imperial powers are viewed sympathetically, as benign and puzzled observers of a distasteful local conflict amongst the people they have colonized. (In this respect, Gibson appears to buy into the anti-Jewish narrative retrospectively imposed by the RCC once it had come to its concordat with the Roman Empire and was keen to excuse its new Masters of any responsibility for the crucifixion).
But once the notorious beating scene happens, the film goes through an intensive threshold. Here, the Roman soldiers are seen to be gratuitiously cruel psychopaths, whose excessive zeal in punishing Jesus exceeds any 'duty'. It is clear by now that The Passion has no ethnic axe to grind: it is about the stupidity and cruelty of the human species, but more importantly, about an escape route from the otherwise meaningless and nihilistic cycle of abuse begetting abuse that is human History.
The Gnostic flashes that surface in the Gospels are given full weight in Gibson's film. 'My kingdom is not of this world'. But Gibson refuses to give any comfort to those life-deniers and body-haters that Nietzsche rightly exoriates in his many attacks on Christianity. There is little supernatural or transcendent dimension to The Passion's vision. If Christ's kingdom is not of this world, Gibson gives us few reasons to assume that this kingdom will be the Platonic heaven of which those tired of the body dream.
The World which Christ rejects is the World of lies, the consensual hallucination of established power and authority. By contrast, Christ's Kingdom only subsists whenever there is an Affectionate Collectivity. In other words, it exists not as some deferred supernatural reward, but in the Ethical actions of those, who in becoming-Christ, keep his spirit alive. Again, it is important to stress that this spirit is not some metaphysical substance, but a strictly material abstract machine that can be instantiated only through actions and practices. Loving God and loving others more than yourself are preconditions for dissolving your ego and gaining deliverance from the Hell of Self.
What, from one perspective, is the utter humiliation and degradation of Jesus's body is on the other a coldly ruthless vision of the body liberated from the 'wisdom and limits of the organism'.
Masochristianity.
Christ's Example is simply this: it is better to die than to pass on abuse virus or to in any way vindicate the idiot vacuity and stupidity of the World of authority.
Power depends upon the weakness of the organism. When authority is seriously challenged, when its tolerance is tested to the limit, it has the ultimate recourse of torture. The slow, graphic scenes of mindless physical degradation in The Passion of the Christ are necessary for revealing the horrors to which Jesus' organism was subject. It is made clear that he could have escaped the excruciating agony simply by renouncing his Truth and by assenting to the Authority of the World. Christ's Example insists: better to let the organism be tortured to death ('If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out') than to bow, bent-headed, to Authority.
This is what is perhaps most astonishing about Gibson's film. Far from being a statement of Catholic bigotry, it can only be read as an anti-authoritarian AND THEREFORE anti-Catholic film. For the Pharisees of two millennia ago, puffed up in their absurd finery, substitute the child-abuser apologists of today's gilt-laden, guilt-ridden Vatican. Against all the odds, against two thousand years of cover-ups and dissimulation, The Passion of the Christ recovers the original Christ, the anti-Wordly but not otherwordly Christ of Liberation Theology: the Gnostic herald of Apocalypse Now.