Demonic Geography: Part 3 —Literally Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
For all these tales of heartless Ymir birthing the world from his chaotic flailing — only ceased through an ordered violence — what do we make of those the Norse encountered in their failed voyages to Vinland? What was their impression on the other side of Ginnungagap? Like the Norse, the Algonquian peoples inhabiting the vertebrae on the other side of the great expanse too believed their world was created through a mythical giant, with theirs possessed the name Glooscap. Much unlike Ymir, Glooscap did not emerge through the assemblage of Cthelll’s psychotraumatic sealing; rather he came down from a heavenly dimension towards a primordial world of endless ocean with his twin Malsumis on the first Platonic object: A canoe. So cataclysmic was this spermatogenetic episode that the physical impact alone brought up the earth beneath the ocean to create the land now called Unama’ki. This motion was so fast that varying interpretations have likened it to a lightning strike, and it was volcanic lightning during the Hadean epoch that created the mineralizing conditions for bountiful phosphorous, allowing ample fueling of the initial machinic recreations that animated life. However, Glooscap only appeared in the middle of genesis in the fourth level of connection out of seven total, meaning he was not primordial but instrumental.
Before Glooscap emerged from the first pangs of life’s abiogenesis, he was beholden to the Gisoolg, the eternal sky that contains everything and is within everything. It’s the most important because it establishes that, in the beginning, there was no meaningful distinction between inside and outside, rejecting the dichotomy established within Ymir’s existence of organic rime flesh animated by an inorganic hearth. And afterwards, he was still beholden to Nisgam, the creator and subsequent dignifier of life, granting individuation through the shadow: The first imprint of individuation through the mere act of existing in the sunlight, with the fossil functioning as a shadow that cemented itself. Each layer of the earth’s surface is a permanent shadow hidden beneath different patches of ground that have all, at one point, bathed in the sun. One’s shadow links them to their ancestors through connection with the Earth illuminated through the imprint the shadow leaves, and each rumination upon them is to be reminded that we share the same lungs as bottom-feeders that once prowled the ancient oceans. Finally before actancy, Glooscap was beholden to Wesgit, the great container of all ancestral spirits, and each movement upon it would be registered as the creation of rhythm reverberating deep within the drum skin that is believed to compose the surface.
Each subsequent lightning strike greater animated Glooscap from the surface much like how each drip from the rime of Élivágar slowly animated Ymir. From his birth, the world recognized as being ordered on the cyclical principle of the Four Directions, with his arms outstretched to the north and south and his head towards the rising sun and his feet towards its setting. And he would remain in this position for an entire cycle of the Earth around the sun, ensuring that he is also reconfigured to a great circular assemblage of space-time. Upon the completion of the cycle, he was struck yet with another bout of creative lightning, carving into his body the sacred facial features necessary for total individuation. Upon standing without even evolved legs, he does not respond to his birth with a howling but rather thankfulness towards both Nisgam for individuating him through basking in the sun and Wesgit for providing the materials necessary for his body to be animate. From there, he wanders the planet with reasoned purpose, contrasting Ymir’s insect consciousness, as he expects additional family members to join and combat him in the episode of genesis, each sparing their own contributions and cementing Glooscap’s purpose in the world.
His attempts at considerately designing the natural world were always at odds with Malsumis who operated against any favoritism in natural ontology, preferring to design rivers to be crooked and mountains to be impassable. But this was not an evil act as was assumed by settler folklorists documenting Malsumis’ story. Rather, it’s more appropriately thought of as means testing for what preconditions are right for life to flourish, with various stories told of Glooscap putting an extreme solution to a problem of excess and unorganized energy; like binding the wings of a great mountaintop bird whose incessant flapping generated countless natural disasters. Because this stopped all refreshing processes, the air became too stale to breathe, forcing Glooscap to readjust his perimeters just enough so that he and subsequent life could prosper. It is even said that, when he was creating the first animals, he had made them too large, possibly invoking a buried remnant of the deep past of the Americas.
All while these events take place, Glooscap is continually granted a guideline for the orientation of ecology on Earth by Nogami, who adopts him as kin from her origination as carved out from stone. Eventually learning the unfortunate truth that living things must sacrifice themselves so that other life may prosper by the marten Abistanooj offering his essence — both made up of equal essence from Wesgit and Nisgam — through a form of mutual exchange rather than unannounced assassination. It’s evident that his creation was one of constant cooperative and meditative process with discourse and refinement over a cyclical period of time, which is far more indicative of the forces that shaped our world. Why is it then that we’re ruled by a cosmology that indicated the ancient giant that birthed the world was unintelligent and whose unmediated destruction birthed the world? How is it that on one side of the Atlantic that their giant can artistically sculpt the landscape they reside on while the other’s thrashes and wails about, blindly creating and destroying with unconscionable recklessness?
From his creation of lightning striking the young Wesgit, Glooscap’s anthropomorphized geoengineering was done through a process of constructive and communicative creation. Geotrauma, the latest iteration of the Western obsession with tying every behavior back to a primordial trauma, is a constructed thought-loop proliferated by the egregores of economic assemblages that trick one into assuming that they are in fact the protagonists of material history: That they had won the competition for sapience among all other buried minerals within the Earth’s vast archives. All of it hinging on the myth of the Frontier: That there is yet to be discovered a new outside that can be impregnated and the new world can be imploded from its envelopment, forever submitting oneself to a Promethean repeat. Accelerationist thought is the last dying breath of the promise of the Frontier to remake the world and save us from the drudgery of Old World thought continually attempting to solve that which never needed to be in the first place by advertising fantastical images of posthuman flourish of libidinal flow as it erodes rationality in the maw of the outside Real. Teleological faith in the deep time of the technological singularity is the ultimate settler cope when faced with the historical stagnation that is the present world: That Prometheanism enacted on a world scale failed to adequately bolster a new world despite all the bloodshed for it to have the room to occur.
Materialism has found itself wrestling with the role of reason and its relation to the deep time history where it appeared to have been absent for an unfathomable long time, leaving it at the extreme periphery of creation where its ephemerality is so frighteningly poignant to us. And without reason, it’s naturally assumed that violence precedes and follows, which gives all the more credence to the Norse postulation that the giant that arose from Ginnungagap was indeed like an insect: As would be expected for a being older than bones. But Glooscap, another figure from Pleistoscene thought, purportedly older than legs, was able to create the world through means testing, cooperation, and transfer of ancient knowledge. As long as we’re still under the assumption of materialist ontology, then it seems undeniable that reason is reactive instead of proactive, being a coping mechanism in response to the Outside frequently intruding into whatever faculty rewriting the norms for a given society at the time are whether that be the primitive desires of phytoplankton or the complex desires of whole nations. Much in the same vein that Europeans assumed the role of the Outside upon their contact with the Americas by crossing Ginnungagap. So great was the trauma they inflicted upon millennia of ontological construction for entire societies by seemingly natural forces that the idea of revering the natural world — equating its intelligence with ours — seemed ludicrous.
Like how psychoanalytic tradition refuses to address the root of problems so profusely due to settler-colonialism’s nature to nip sustainability, geotraumatists and neuronics alike replicate the creation of elaborate schematics that perform an elegant dance of projection instead of trying to bridge their patients. The core of trauma that supposedly animates the physicality of every individual cannot be breached directly too by this same principle. This translates further into the Western philosophical conundrum that humans are both fundamentally desiring-machines entrenched in material-energetic flows and large scale processes; and are capable of revisable and normative rationality that intervenes and partially guides those very processes and flows. This three-discourses model imitates the layer structure of Yggdrasil, with the throes of Western philosophy reigning high in Asgard, the disasterous consequences of psychoanalysis on our mundane lives residing in Midgard, and the disturbing existentialist reminiscing of the fundamental nature of sapience in Hel. And it is the god who hung himself from this ash, Óðinn, who best exemplifies how to classify the relation between the Outside and the rational in a way that inverts Negarestani’s top-down cognitive processes by the presupposition of Norns who decide the fate of every being by inscribing runes with intention on the base of Yggdrasil in the fathomless Well of Urd it arises from. The root system’s of the tree carry these intentions throughout all the worlds it branches to.
Óðinn, somehow possessing the insight to understand that the ultimate continuity resided in death as Bataille would suggest millennia later, hung himself from the ash to the point of near death gazing into the Norse equivalent of the Outside in neo-rationalist philosophy. It was here that he gained insight into the forms of the runes and the secrets they held within their design. Once learning these through a synthesis of letting the Outside deliberately bleed into his self now made part ecosystem, he was able to gain a rationality that far exceeded the capabilities of thought that resided in the ineffective safety of coddled interior. Óðinn’s ordeal was sacrifice of himself to himself, and is the ultimate Óðinnic sacrifice — for who could be a nobler offering to the god than the god himself? He survived the sacrifice in order to be the recipient of it, turning the process of inflicting trauma into a productive and magical exercise in a macrocosm of how pain is deliberately repurposed into exercise. This is problematic for Western philosophy to fully embrace because it has largely abandoned the idea that one can still remain recognizable after giving up their lower self for a higher self, or rejecting the concept entirely. Yet, it’s this refusal to use a recalibrated process of traumatic genesis into a societal adaptation tool that leads to the stagnation we see in our capitalist present.
Then I was fertilized and became wise;
I truly grew and thrived.
From a word to a word I was led to a word,
From a work to a work I was led to a work.
Truly, the crossing of Ginnungagap and witnessing a world that was birthed through dialogue destroyed the European consciousness that had envisioned the deep past as Werner Herzog had described. But it should be noted that I don’t personally believe this was not a deliberately inflicted maladaptation, as the transformation of European consciousness into one that actively sought to term humanity into an Outside developed through the trauma of failed diplomacy turning into rampant and uncontrollable death. Death on such a scale that kicked self-soothing rationalization into gear and created the most abominable ideologies that, through such immense acquisition of biopower after a biblical loss of biomass, turned the backwater of the Old World into humanity’s first example of an incarnation of the Outside: An ecosystem destroyer, that modern man. If Freudian analysis still holds water, this adaptation struck deep seismic waves into the core of Germanic consciousness and triggered primordial memories of a foretelling of something cataclysmic. To be honest, I’ve been disfavoring the idea of “immanence with the sun” to explain the eschatological goal of Petroleum as an avatar of Druj, partly because it feels like the only thing extrapolated rationalist thought could muster when it came to explaining the goals of mineral consciousness. I dislike it because it doesn’t think ecologically, preferring to think of encounters with mineral consciousness as totally overriding all human counteraction on psychoagentive terms.
No, I believe what the eschatological implications of climate change are — outside of the Tellurian Omega’s conveniently unaccountable support — to bring about Ragnarök, just as it was rekindled in the repressed memories of the Germanics who sought to remake the world upon seeing the cascade of death they unleashed with no immediately opposite reaction. Nascent arrival before the Columbian era granted them a timid glimpse into the other end of Ymir’s spine, and upon encountering the descendants of Glooscap, they labelled them as skræling, deriving from the verb skrækja, meaning “to bawl”, indicating that they saw them at least in some way as being imitative of the land they considered of Ymir, the primordial screamer. As more and more children of Midgard died, the summer sun of Baldur diminished as the atmosphere cooled from the loss of life and subsequent carbon release, invoking merely a taste of the Fimbulvetr that could’ve been unleashed. But the air of it constantly loomed over the entire world over the formation of the American state, prompting them to begin burning more of Ymir’s remains to warm the atmosphere in anticipation of the coming great winter, practically undoing all the progress Glooscap made in tuning the Americas for human habitation.
The third sign of Ragnarök would not appear until the atomic age when nuclear warfare threatened to quite literally remove the sun and moon from the sky with the soot from the bombs blocking out the atmosphere. Having fully repurposed most of pre-Columbian civilization to its ends and on route to remake Europe in its image, the American state made a point to be the great demonstrator of nuclear power by using it to annihilate an entire city and then utterly disregarding it to still service Druj as the protagonist of material history, all so that the cooling properties of nuclear energy could be downsized and reduce the forces pushing against the warming of the atmosphere via deeper excision into Ymir’s remains. Yet, despite all the thrashing, it was an elaborate trick, as Petrol will bring about world-devouring serpents like Níðhöggr from the underbelly of the planet, carrying with it a ship bringing the soldiers of the underworld to fight alongside the living for the fate of the world: A very elaborate retelling of the game of petropolitics. If Mississippian prophecies of black serpents emerging from deep underground and poisoning water and sacred sites among the Lakota in response to increasingly intrusive pipeline infrastructure aren’t reflective of the anxieties over coming Ragnarök, then there is nothing more that can convince you.
