Demonic Geography: Part 5 — The Ongoing Cannibal Holocaust
Much like how an exorcism isn’t really a process of the power of Christ overcoming the hideous polytheisms of the frightening and otherworldly past, the colonization of the New World was not the final victory over heathenism that many post-hoc historians rationalized it as to control the flows of the deeper Outside. More accurately, it was the uncontrollable surge — one of atheistic and amoral overflowing of nonlinear narratives centering on fictionalizing pasts and secrets of the Americas — then using that as an excuse to pilfer them. The need to pilfer came into being because of the sheer prosperity of the Americas, up until the point of Columbian contact, was unfathomable to the minds of those adjusted to the seasonal famines of Middle East driving the course of migrations and populations in the Old World. Europe, used to the three-fields model of agriculture, was utterly failed by its ability to adapt to brief climate change, whereas the Three Sisters crop cycle of the Mississippians soared and was remarked as the most productive agricultural systems the world ever knew of. Yet, the vast majority of European arrivals to the continent did not see this in action, as they instead saw the cool whispers of dead winds on the remains of once expansive fields of maize, squash, and beans. And before they could fully appropriate this system, they had entered a new phase of the Little Ice Age where the Earth cooled even further from the sheer amount of human biomass that had perished. Sensing their power to end Pazuzu’s cycle of famine and pestilence ,— and observing that they were present with barely any living humans left to have political sway against such thievery — the Europeans readily stole such a divine nutritional gift to the world out of giddy.
In fact, the genesis of the United States appears to be a narrative of Europeans conveniently receiving solutions to all of the problems they had faced living in the Old World: All at the expense of the overkill of millennia-old social and political ecologies that the overwhelming majority of settlers never even saw or would care even if they did; for they had been born and molded in pestilence. Many were uncaring, even supportive of the fact that they were harbingers of unprecedented plague to the New World. For they were finally relieved to have a supposed promised land to renew their spirits as the Westward winds surged and made wet the land that was dried from exposure to the unrelenting sun of Eastwards European encroachment. What this was in actuality was the rupturing of Christian promise through the nonlinear, cyclical flows they had made contact with upon crossing Ginnungagap and encountering animals like the opossum, raccoon, and turkey; or crops like maize, peppers, and potatoes, all of which were never mentioned in the Word of God directly. Having to now sustain themselves in the same world as these un-biblical creations, while the survivors of the plague desperately fought to defend what little they had left, created the condition of the Frontier: That, if there are such abundant gifts in the East, there must be even more abundant ones further inland.
Unbeknownst to them, in curing themselves of Pazuzu’s dominion, they had brought in another demon, equally as ancient. But, this one was from a set of circumstances they could not understand, as they had lost such insight upon the dissipation of Pagan religions in Europe. It is theorized to reside in the ancient trauma of the sudden and dramatic extinction of the megafauna of the Americas: All from a time where seemingly uncaring universal cycles had usurped the niches fulfilled by the mammalian giants of the land, enabling their slow, climatic die-off and extinction as the Holocene emerged. Such trauma — that of having the life you were used to never show up again one day — instilled the presence of a force of the Outside fixated with overconsumption upon being presented with ecological vacuums, whether those be from tens of thousands of years ago, in a time where there was no geographic barrier between the Old and New Worlds, or several centuries ago in the so-called Age of Discovery that violently united them. This demon was known by many names, but to the Dawnlanders, it was called Wendigo: A name even I am scared to utter lest it takes over my consciousness memetically, just like it had taken over half the world. The Americas did not fall through traditional conquest like Iberians or Anglos would have the world’s listeners believe, but rather they fell to a rapid demonic vacuum that replaced a demon of pestilence with a demon of consumption. The Americas fell not to the sword of empire, but to a meme of Capital.
According to oral tradition, the W-d-go (stylized so as to avoid reifying its presence anymore than I already have), is a demonic force that corrupts individuals, or any larger organisms made up of individuals, to bring about feelings of insatiable hunger, eventually culminating in cannibalization of other human beings. Despite the bastardized image they have today of being a werewolf-like creature composed of either cervidae or canid skulls, they were originally associated with owls in etymology and symbolism. aping nature’s most efficient consumer of woodland creatures. Whoever was under control of the W-d-go was said to possess eyes that were not quite human, having sight of desire that was far beyond the scope of what this world could offer, yet they would still search for it in spite of all human and ecological limitations. But its eyes are merely an asset to aid in its most prized appendage, the maw.
In the ancient Algonquian homeland of the interior Northwest, there are cultural fears among the peoples of Vancouver Island over the primordial destructiveness babies are thought to possess. Not only do they demand constant nurturing, an attribute superstitiously indicative of an unsocialized and thus amoral greed, but they do so without proper reciprocal obligation: The child does not reciprocate until they possess the socialized capacity to do so, so the meantime is ample room for primordial hunger to foster into insatiable greed that characterized the elite of Northwestern societies. Characteristically, they would perform potlatches that conflagrated valuables (including human life via enslavement) just to boast and renew a cycle of shame found in lacking adequate material reciprocation. Spiritually conscious child-rearing in Northwest societies thus required that a child be swaddled until the age of three, with breastfeeding being curt and followed by chastening rituals to suppress the growth of demonic hunger thought to prey on developing children. All of this emerging from the trauma that demons like Pazuzu are supposed to protect mothers from, like the fear of miscarriage: Of the child gorging themselves to death on placenta or, if surviving, would not cease his desire for his mother’s flesh until she was killed by the same birth.
The world of the Interior Northwest is that of mouths: All ecological processes can be explained as processes of speaking, and all speaking requires a maw that can make peace as much as it can grind and consume. The symbolic order of this world constantly betrays a mauling core at the heart of every living being, and the task of ecological maneuvering is to instruct mouths to learn to accept zero desire lest it accelerates into self-destabilizing rupturing of the innards. The cannibal is the ultimate consumer: One whose spiritual architecture has been so thoroughly rearranged towards a single, unyielding maniacal drive that every other desire is overridden for daring to center anything other than the maw. With sunken eyes honing on the next target to become the victim of the gaping bottom line — a vermiform ideal — at a certain point, famine drives otherwise oratory beings into eating the inedible and the forbidden, even their own kin. The first catalyst for the unleashing of W-d-go was not actually with any settler state but rather with the Indigenous polity that was set up as being the most effective counter to Atlantic colonization: The Hodínöhšö:ni:h (Anglicized as Haudenosaunee).
The dominant mode of militarism in Ohio Valley cultures was a practice called a mourning war, which facilitated the purpose of avenging fallen warriors by kidnapping and assimilating a stranger (often from another tribe) into the grieving family. Cosmologically, this was a balancing act inspired partially by the ferocious anger of a matriarch and also a way to restore the spiritual mass of the community after it was thrown off following a fatal raid. It’s important to emphasize that these wars weren’t fought to expand territory or gather more resources: They were wholly unique to settler consciousness because of their focus on equalization and accepting the destructive mediation that a strive for harmony seemingly necessitates. That’s why there was much semantic confusion when colonial founder of Quebec Samuel de Champlain had instructed to his coalition of Indigenous allies — who themselves were rivals of the Hodínöhšö:ni:h — that he intended to kill their captains. When he shot and killed one with his arquebus, he was dumbfounded when the men reacted with utter fright and retreated into the woods away from the scene.
He made note to mention that their screams upon seeing their deaths were loud enough to overtake the sound of ongoing thunder. This wasn’t simply the scream of shock upon seeing what you’re used to turned over, but rather screams of primordial unearthing and insemination: The Dawnlander’s social ecology cracked open by French grapeshot and formalities of expansionist conflict as the expected entered into the Mississippian cultural ecology. In truth, the Europeans brought two forms of opportunistic niche-fulfillment with them on a biological and memetic scale, and it was the profound effects these two processes would have on the political ecology of the Americas that would render engineering problems in the same caliber as political ones and set the stage for Manifest Destiny to actualize. The Revolutionary War is incorrectly assumed to be the foundational conflict for the United States, but this is wrong because it assumes the United States derived its political ingenuity from nothing (or divine providence) rather than siphoning the centuries of Indigenous structure that was still partially in place upon initial colonization.
Every barrier between the United States and its territorial expansion was the result of other colonial powers ceding to and treating Indigenous presences and concerns as matters of political reasoning. It was Pontiac’s war against British imposition in the Midwest that hastened the Appalachian mountains being turned into a dividing line between English settlement and Indigenous lands that forbade the swarming tide of land investors; and it was the earlier Natchez rebellion that had returned control of Louisiana to the French Crown from the Company of the Indies; and it was the much earlier Pueblo Revolt that made Spain kneel to Popé and the Tewa’s demands and cease their attempts to eradicate their traditional religion and become major influences in shaping the balance of power in the Southwest.
The oft-forgotten Beaver Wars were far more instrumental because, by possessing and overriding what were otherwise stable political processes, essentially cleansed what is now known as the Midwest, and lands West of the Mississippi, of their remaining Indigenous populations; reifying the divine ordinance settlers believed they had. This memetic contagion is defined by settler-led academia through what they were used to, which were wars fought over lands to expand trade and capital accumulation. But this is a projection onto the Hodínöhšö:ni:h who were witnessing the application of their traditional tactics on a desperate scale, attempting to seal the increasingly widening gaps for the Eurasian Outside infiltrating and usurping them for the unconscious desire of rupture. Primitive accumulation as reasoning was ironically an elaborate justification for what was actually occurring. The mourning wars simply could not make up for the amount of spiritual virility being lost to the fury of Pazuzu’s trauma, and before it could even be noticed, a new pathway had opened up for the pathogen to further inseminate into the great dust that would soon await it in the Heartland.
The beaver, wanted by settlers for the novelty of its pelts in hat manufacture, was the perfect mammal to orientate this traumatic history around. His kin were the first and last to dive into the opening made into Midgard from Asgard by cracking open the world tree Tekanawí:ta, with each hoping to be the one to return with the substance of creation at the bottom of the ocean Earth. The beaver went first, never to be seen again in the waters, while the muskrat was the only successful one after a slew of birds failed, and it was from his suggestion that the turtle volunteered as the foundation on which the crust would be built, slowly swimming betwixt in the flows of pyroclastic rock. It would be here that the Atsi’tsiaka:ion, the sky goddess, would fall down to the Earth to give birth to life in Midgard. And it was from her mortal pregnancy that she gave birth to Glooscap and Malsumis, with the latter causing a miscarriage and killing her.
Like Ymir, her body was repurposed to create various elements of the natural world, with Glooscap creating it with benevolent intent and Malsumis with either malicious or dissident intent. Glooscap was in an age old enough to when beavers were giant, a time reflected in the Pleistoscene where they genuinely were as tall as men. There are many ancient stories among the Dawnlanders that describe Glooscap being called to deal with these beavers building dams so massive that they blocked entire river systems, preventing the flow of Atlantic salmon to tributaries. By the conditions of early capitalism, the Hodínöhšö:ni:h and their downfall were made synonymous with the inelegant explanation of commodity fetishism towards makers of infrastructure that prevent natural flows, capping the transformative potential of their society to the constricting flows of developmental mercantile desire that had defined European history.
In a way, uprooting the Americas of its political ecology is what, in turn, allowed for the disavowal of the otherwise unassuming thought process that individuals are enmeshed into a balanced environment. The lack of pressure from Indigenous political conscience is what led to settler consciousness growing to unprecedented proportions, being able to foresee its destiny ahead of it from the sheer warping of space–time it had underwent through such inflation: All of it a compensatory response to mass extinction and subsequent biodiversity loss. The Hodínöhšö:ni:h, intended to be made formidable to incoming outside forces by the musings of the Thunderbird, had their greatest diplomatic and military strengths repurposed, entirely without direct control, by settlers in an act of sabotage unprecedented in world history. After the Ohio Valley was flushed of people, the last bastions of the Mississippian world remained the chiefdoms primarily inhabiting the south of the river’s tributaries, namely the Muskogean peoples of the Tennessee and the Caddoan peoples of the Red and Arkansas: Both of which were still crippled after fending off Spanish and French incursions acting as rebound from de Soto’s march of death. From then on, they would be remade in the image of the growing monstrosity of Old World anxieties. No longer would they be defining political ecologies from their very different origins but rather through a violently universalizing lens that made it easier for the United States to justify its genesis.
Rationally fearing the unfolding colossus in front of them, their desires were rewritten into seeking cooperation with it in hopes that they could stave the worst of its hunger. The Muskogean peoples adopted a style of imitation, abandoning their highly productive agricultural societies in favor of destructive yeoman farming methods that greatly exhausted the land for aggressive profit–driven monoculture. Part of this adoption even included racialized chattel slavery of Africans and the subsequent division of the Creek nation that it incurred: Afeature that made them “civilized” in the eyes of the traumatic Euro–escapist state ever slowly bringing the pestilence of the Old World into the New. But going as far as to adopt one of the most heinously foreign abilities of your predator in hope they don’t consume you wasn’t enough, as Muskogean peoples were still betrayed in their assimilation process. The hunger incurred by W-d-go psychosis insisted that simply swamping and assimilating peoples wasn’t good enough: They needed to be vacated entirely so that any barriers between remaining Indigenous ecology and gratuitous feasting would be completely eliminated. An uninterrupted line from the plantation to the maw of Europe’s frantic elite would be the only thing that could suffice.
The Caddoan peoples went with indecisiveness despite them having one of the richest archaeological sites north of Mesoamerica in present-day Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma, and they largely stayed passive as they provided geographic information to settlers salivating at territories west of the Mississippi. Any cultural legacy they had as being the facilitators of the Mesoamerican and Aridoamerican worlds into the East was buried under the obnoxiousness of a territory as audacious as Texas. For this passivity, they were bestowed the honor of being the concentration camp in which all remaining fighters of the Mississippian world were taken and imprisoned in geopolitical irrelevancy as the cannibal state set its eyes on making it to the West in vain search of something to satiate itself with. This is not an exaggeration either, as Caddoan peoples served as a political middle man between the United States and Spanish America that led to negotiations that allowed some Southeastern tribes like the Alabama and Koasati to settle in lands in the Piney Woods before their lands were overwhelmed by previously faraway chiefdoms.
American historians tell dignifying tales of grand conquests against formidable Indigenous enemies to comfort themselves against the horrifying truth that the “conquest” of the Americas was a series of shifting incomes as an existential wedge against all those who opposed or (in the case of the Indian) stood in the way of the W-d-go host’s fruitlessly consume the world in hopes of finally satiating its hunger. It did not come in and claim control through victory in combat but rather by simply consuming more until the competition had nothing left to eat: This is how the segmented process of devouring went from the British protectorates for remaining eastern Indians to the acquisition of Louisiana and the Santa Fe and Alta California territories. Every major victory the United States has had in the course of the creation of its current form has been won by starving the enemy of sources, as was necessitated by the environmental conditions of the 18th century. Britain’s supply lines had become so waned that they could no longer sufficiently put pressure on their Atlantic colonies against the combined economic will of America and France. France was equally stretched thin when its own institution of slavery in Hispaniola reacted violently against its continued imposition, almost single-handedly foiling Napoleon’s plans for establishing a Franco-American empire, prompting him to give the rest of the Mississippian watershed to the U.S. who was just done slurping the crumbs of the English protectorates. This decisively ended any remaining squabbling between Atlantic European powers over control of the heartland of North America. Texas was the last barrier of Spanish control against the jaws now opening themselves up wider than ever before, and there was virtually no competition after being given a quarter of the North American continent against a state that only recently became independent and had no strong rallying cause like Manifest Destiny. Mexico lost because they did not hunger strongly enough, and the consequence of that was the territorial door of Texas was opened up to the still-growing colossus.
Despite the immense resistance this hunger would face in its expansion, it already had its eyes on finding its satiation in the West and completing the death drive: In the mythical land of California; where many of the Dawnlanders said their ancestors traveled to when they passed on. The meme of Manifest Destiny had been wielded thoroughly so as to lurch the beast to gobble up its own rear after it had ideologically freed itself from the parasitic underbelly of chattel slavery. It had accompanied its host’s expansion across vastly differing biomes to the exceptionally uniform and fertile climate of eastern North America, and it accomplished this soothing while barring Africans from the prized Oregon territory. All of this was in the background as the productive underbelly, underneath the beast, expanded across the Texan territory to supply the cannibal colossus with the aggressive enslavement: What it needed to keep its engines of ecological and social exploitation functioning. After all, compensation is not on the dinner table of a cannibal.
As the manipulative side of W-d-go psychosis, the northern half of the beast remained as the ideological head that projected a self-reifying construct of egalitarianism and democracy to its progenitors across Ginnungagap. The conflict between the Whigs and the Democrats over the importance of Manifest Destiny to the identity of the United States was merely intellectual backdrop to the continual feasting and further vermiform burrowing into the continental shell. Monologues about a “shining city on a hill” are the Northern ideological image painted over a horrific cannibalizing process of a ruthless parasite consuming the innards of — and then bursting out of — the collapsing shell of Turtle Island, spewing speckles of ancestral Indian blood across the rest of the world as the yawns of Ginnungagap are bellowed across the seas. The Monroe Doctrine embodied the utter disgust European powers had at witnessing the monster they had birthed from Demonic transfer continually swallow and expand its stomach in the formation of tellurocracy, directing the same metabolic actors that had decided the war between the beast’s hunger and self-image to go on and feast on surgically divided lands exploited on a mathematical basis.
Like every other territorial expansion in America’s history, the acquisition of the Northern Pacific came as a result of the other colonial owner simply not having enough resources to compete with the hunger of the colossus, with Russia placing all of its efforts into Crimea and fearing a potential British annexation of the Alaskan territory. The 49th parallel had to remain as a reminder to the colossus that it had failed to initially consume its closest prey, Quebec, to keep the maw of British interests away at the turn of the 19th century, and this was the same line that would divide up the Oregon territory and subsequently the Indigenous world of the Pacific Northwest, and it was there, and the last frontier, that the US had found an Indigenous epitome of manipulation over the very forces that have infiltrated and controlled the settler consciousness, for the last continental frontier they had set their eyes on was the land where the W-d-go had originated. The condition it was spotted in was one after Russian meddling had brought the otter population down tremendously for the same fur frenzy that had led to the evacuation of the Ohio Valley also led to evacuation of Western Siberia. The northern beast, that yearned for the perpetual slaughter of fur-bearing mammals; known as the Hudson Bay Company, had terrified Russia, fearing that it would inevitably stretch across the entirety of lands above the dreaded parallel, with the extinction of the beaver and otter both fulfilling its cyclical dependency on sun-graced death in the East and fermented and buried death in the West.
The serpentine tellurocratic expansion of the Hudson Bay Company was not a separate line of desire for completion of the economic Ouroboros as Anglo-America’s Manifest Destiny was, but rather they’re both attempts to complete the enveloping of the world’s maritime faculties, as spearheaded by the W-d-go’s drive for the ultimate cannibalization of its host. Claiming the primordial rivers of Élivágar approximated in the drainage basin of so-called Hudson Bay as a retroactive response to the claims of the great serpentine Mississippi drainage basin by France as Louisiana, Rupert’s Land promoted itself as the closest to defying the balancing act of the Thunderbird atop the northern pole that infamously denied European entry into a Northwest passage. Echoes of the Laurentide ice sheet reverberated throughout all British attempts to feed on the scraps left over to them after the cannibal colossus had tossed them to Gesig’s land to fight amongst themselves with the newly impoverished French. Russia — attempting to subvert the completion of the Canadian Ouroboros and Britain’s complete control of lands most hallowed out by the maniacal hunt for profitable fur — had ended up completing the American one on accident, fusing it with the fledgling other in a grand display of colonial futility. It calls to mind another iconic image in Norse legend: That of the thunder god Þórr battling against the unfathomably large serpent Jörmungandr, bastard child of Loki, who was cast into the depths of Midgard’s oceans by Óðinn who banished them both from Asgard. There, he slowly began swallowing the sea until he grew large enough to surround the planet and grasp its own tail. It can be appropriately assessed that the intimidation of other colonial powers, to give up claims to prevent further British domination in the great North, are reflective of a desire to prevent Jörmungandr from finally biting his own tail and securing the deadlock that, if broken, will trigger Ragnarök. The implication is that, upon the ceasing of endless devouring, will the world finally come to an end: No more mouths to feed, and no more egos to nourish.
…we must not deceive ourselves and must foresee that the United States, aiming constantly to round out their possessions and desiring to dominate undividedly the whole of North America will take the aforementioned colonies from us and we shall not be able to regain them.
— Grand Duke Konstantin, brother of the Tsar writing to then foreign minister Alexander Gorchakov
