Demonic Geography: Part 6 — The Conqueror Worm
In the books Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál of the Prose Edda, the father of Jörmungandr, Loki, is found hiding from the gods after causing the death of the agent of Ragnarök, Baldr, in the form of salmon swimming within the waterfalls of the mysterious Franangrsfors. This was after he had tricked the blind god Hödr into giving Baldr the one animate object in the world that could harm him: Mistletoe. While in hiding, Loki dwelled within a stead atop a mountain with doors carved into it mimicking the cardinal directions. He subsisted off the abundance of fish through this localized invention of the fishing net, a creation of his own device meant to imitate what he could be caught with in his salmon form. But, when the vengeful gods were searching for him, he quickly burned his creation at the fireplace in the house’s center. Unfortunately for him, the wise god Kvasir was present with the other Æsir, and he could deduce the creation through the imprint its ashes left on the floor, letting the gods catch Loki with the technology that he himself knew was capable of defeating him. As punishment, Loki was brutally bound to the bottom of the world with the entrails of his own Jötunn offspring, with the fangs of mighty serpents above him dripping venom onto his skin so that he writhes in agony, creatively imitative of the dripping that birthed Ymir. He was to remain there, writhing in torture, until the coming of Ragnarök, with his only reprieve being his wife placing a dish underneath the serpent’s mouth to collect the venom. On the other side of the world, a very similar attempt to evade justice unfolded between two distant but somewhat similar mythological figures.
It was between Kunkunqulii’kya (the Thunderbird) and Maxinuxw (Whale), and it occurred through a call from the people to the heavens. Maxinuxw was a ravenous monster who killed other whales of smaller stature, depriving the people of the meat and blubber they desperately needed. Not only did he hunger for meals of equivalent size, he also deprived the people of salmon by lounging at the mouths of rivers and gorging on the flow of fish. Initially, the people rowed out with their canoes and attempted to beat Maxinuxw away with their oars, but it was hopeless, as he had unmatched strength and would swat away the people with his tail like they were gnats. Having no other options, the people began a four-day-long ceremony where they called upon Kunkunqulii’kya to help them get rid of Maxinuxw. Upon hearing this distress call, Kunkunqulii’kya soared over the sea and plunged into the waters and seized Maxinuxw in his claws, but the Whale was slippery, so he often found himself escaping from the crushing grip of the Thunderbird. This would incur frequent retries at securing Whale, each of which so violently shaped the planet that oceans rose and receded over the sheer amount of water that was displaced. Other geologic scars witnessed was the pulling of soil from the ground where the Thunderbird dropped Whale, making it so that no trees could grow where he landed and entire villages razed off the surface of the land. Some stories tell of a victory for the Thunderbird while others give no solid conclusion, implying that the battle is perpetual and that men occasionally grace by it every now and then.
If it’s not obvious, these are stories are explanations for seismic activity from two areas of the world where similar geologic phenomena occurred. In the Norse sense, it was when the ancient Baltic Plate collided against Siberia to form the Ural Mountains about 280mya, and in the Kwakiutl sense when the Juan de Fuca plate, a remnant of the ancient oceanic Farallon Plate, slides underneath the North American Plate at the Cascadia subduction zone about 50mya. Both are attempts at conveying the scale of deep time in metaphor that is punctual, epic in scale, and transmittable across generations. But above all, they are a painful reminder that, even something as seemingly eternal as the ground beneath one’s feet, is alive and can change irreversibly. Normally, we are wholly immune to the lurching beneath our feet, and any thought given to it renders the human psyche in a state of distraught that I believe is wholly unique to the concept of deep time; and mythology is merely the ability to conceptualize this encounter with incalculable time.
In Mexico City, there is a group of people called tocado (literally meaning “touched”) who report symptoms of physical and mental illness that has no traceable origin. The only constant among them is that the experience of being in an earthquake or reeling from the trauma of it. It seems the only thing that can really trigger it is the deep past intruding onto the present where it’s been instilled otherwise that such a thing is impossible, but with every rumbling of the annals of cosmic history beneath our feet, there is an irreversibly sobering reminder that Gaia still acts on her own time regardless of our technocratic makeup that adorns her current face. To better understand it, think of each vibration of a fault line as being the emergence of a portal into time, and to be traumatized by a seismic event is to momentarily grace with one of these portals. All of the sudden, one’s entire sense of place in the world is violently rearranged in a manner similar to how radiation rearranges our genetic code, and it induces a nigh incurable sickness through repositioning us into a completely different world, all without humanitarian influence. It proves one thing for certain: Deep time can happen.
In the case of Mexico City, while earthquakes are a natural phenomenon due to its geology, the common cause of becoming a tocado there is entirely man-made, and it stems to when Hernán Cortés and his men destroyed the delicate drainage and dike systems that kept Tenochtitlan, the ancestor of Mexico City, miraculously afloat on Lake Texcoco. This obviously had disastrous consequences, the most relevant of which was establishing the new foundation of the Spanish Empire’s capitol city on the soft soil of a lakebed. There is a Shakespearean irony to this event, with Cortés praising what he originally saw as a work of dreams and then promptly and ruthlessly disillusioning himself by destroying the delicacies that made such a dreamlike impression possible. The dream of civilization, to endure past the torturous depths of time, had been destroyed not by any natural forces but by deliberate and very human politicking that utilized the forces of deep time to its advantage. Cortés, despite how comparable his intelligence was to a contemporary investment nepo baby, subconsciously understood that, by crossing the spine of Ymir in the Atlantic, he understood cities as a mineralization of humanity, much like how the exoskeletons of early invertebrates developed into bones through layering over eons. The city is an evolutionary expression of the gradual congealing of sedentary human settlements.
This may sound like a stretch, but I believe that what Cortés was thinking when he laid ecological ruin to Tenochtitlan was that he was reenacting the myth of a slain giant, killing Ymir and draining all the blood from his corpse to leave what amounts to a sigil in the Earth for portals to begin emerging that peer into the primordial void from which he was birthed. All of this history now results in a certain number of inhabitants of Mexico City purporting symptoms of having being graced by these portals into deep time: Cracks in the walls, buildings leaning at odd angles, and monuments sinking into the ground. To walk around a building touched by one of these portals is to feel the future weighing down on oneself much like how the building will inevitably collapse into the deep future. This induces a feeling of dread unlike a normal anxiety disorder where one speculates of doors to the future that aren’t actually there, as these doors are very real and they are made more ominous by their distance in time. “Se acerca el día” is all that can be repeated in the subconscious.
Despite how well documented the arc of deep time is in Mexico, it is decidedly ignored in the United States and Canada, where even its most scientifically minded inhabitants were unaware that the Pacific Northwest was a seismic zone until the 1980s. Academics had known of the existence of the Juan de Fuca plate — one of the remnants of the ancient Farallon plate that existed during the Cenozoic 180mya — but they assumed it was inactive, incapable of producing large earthquakes. The Indigenous peoples knew better, recounting stories of giant tsunamis that wiped away whole villages off the map through the aforementioned depiction of Kunkunqulii’kya tussling with Maxinuxw. At any moment in the near future, they could wrestle once more and unleash unprecedented destruction and scars on the settler psyche and its perceived dominion over the North American continent. This is the future event that provides the biggest anticipation of North America’s geologic spectacle: On the forefront of the thriving industry of stone whisperers serviced to fill the void of naturalist civilization left in Manifest Destiny. Long suppressed had the days of shepherded Blackfeet using the magic properties of Iniskimak — ancient ammonites within the Montana dirt — been. Now, the ancient power of the deep past has been re-engineered by the United States to sabotage human consciousness for that of minerals: Of carbonized life.
And what do we see when we attempt to gauge the lived experience of the rock beneath our feet? We see the act of devouring: Cannibalism all the way down. Having to cover up the writhing traumatic core of the Earth enforces the competitive baseline needed to begin devouring the skin, as lighter oceanic crust is devoured in the maw beneath heavier continental crust. As you read, the Farallon plate is still being digested over the course of an eon of crustal cannibalization, occasionally buckling as a last resort to cry out for a type of help it can never receive. And settlers have ensured they have front row seats to this macrocosm of colonial agitation. But how do they ensure they’re nurtured with refreshments for the geologic phenomena that’ll naturalize their cannibalization? The repurposing of the Iniskimak is the key: Deep within the crust are hallows of water that resides there, practically waiting to be siphoned as it slipped between the tectonic trenches over gradual slippages. Water gets into the mantle’s lithosphere when it bends to begin its descent into the molten maw beneath the crust. The brittleness of the lithosphere forms faults that ocean water can diffuse into to hydrate ultramafic rock.
How much water is a certain portion of crust can be determined by the number of bending faults, with the most effective way of determining this being the presence of serpentinite rock in an analysis of seismic records from subduction zone, named such because the pattern they create is similar to snake skin. On the other side of the world in Japan, records from the West Pacific subduction zone had recorded a serpentinite ratio of 17 to 31% in the subducted mantle. This implies that there was a transfer of anywhere between 170 to 318 billion tons of water into the mantle over the course of a million years.
In a million years each kilometre along the length of this subduction zone would therefore transfer between 170 to 318 billion tonnes of water into the mantle; an estimate more than ten times previous estimates. The authors observe that at such a rate a subduction zone equivalent to the existing, 3400 km long Kuril and Izu-Bonin arcs that affect Japan would have transferred sufficient water to fill the present world oceans 3.5 times over the history of the Earth. Had the entire rate of modern subduction along a length of 55 thousand kilometres been maintained over 4.5 billion years, the world’s oceans would have been recycled through the mantle once every 80 million years.
When environmentalists of the New Age variety use language that equates fresh water to the Earth’s veins, we have the evidence to now prove it’s not hyperbole: Recycling of ocean and subsequently fresh water is an essential process to geologic activity on Earth where apt comparisons to human bodily functions can be made. Much like the blue veins of an aging parent’s legs, the aquifers cracking into the crust are the dead veins of Cthelll. The dripping of ocean water into the upper mantle causes the overlying rock to melt and create the very magma plumes that gave western North America its unique shape as volcanoes pimpled its surface. So nearly complete is this devouring that it now even causes Appalachia to rise up gradually on the other side of the continent. These massive aquifers underneath the deserts drive settlers to create an artifice of the cycle of rebirth in the Four Directions, digging themselves to the where the deceased travel to in the West so as to plunder what was buried there to bring life to their machination, siphoning the geologic meals underneath the North American plate like a tapeworm. Little do most of them know that this is transcendentally a portal between the spiritual subterranean realm and the living world, connected only by serpentine infrastructure.
Along the ancient cave walls of the American Southwest, there are zigzagging indentations within the stone that foretell of an eternal recurrence. It is the guardian of waterways and a harbinger of storms: Both protector and aggressor. And those who admonished it carried its manifestations in the mouth in hopes of engendering rainfall and fecundity. These Snake men would baptize specifically chosen snakes — as in they were colored according to the Four Directions — in yucca-root suds before being carried in the mouth, symbolizing purification of spermatic vessels containing the prayers from the middle world to the subterranean realm of the ancestors. This conduction is performed in kiva, which are subterranean chambers built by Antelope men — a complementary society — intricately designed with multicolored sand representing the Four Directions and subsequently different types of maize. It’s believed here that the blessed snakes travel into the underworld and bring that which perpetuates life in the middle world from the subterranean realm of the dead, typically in the form of rainclouds and their subsequent floods to nourish the desolate landscape.
A thousand miles away in a land marked by its vast wetness, this deity still lives, but no longer resides within the Western waters buried deep beneath the ground. In the East, it is instead directly underneath one’s feet as it stretches across one of the largest river basin’s in the world. Here, the serpent has lost its original ceremonial context as a unification of the Antelope and Serpent societies, roaming instead as the fully matured offspring, boasting horns like a stag and glistening with its crystalline scales. In this land — one of magnificently uniform climactic conditions and agricultural yield — the Serpent is a life-weaver, bringing the subterranean waters to the surface; peeled away from the landscape after the retreating of the Laurentian glacier in the Deep Time. A Muscogee informant to American anthropologist John R. Swanton described this nature as “seem[ing] to have a magnetic power over game.” The language is evident: Wherever the Serpent slithered, it brought unprecedented bounty not just to man but to all lifeforms, limited only by the range of sumac: It’s main food source.
However, it is a grave disservice to the history of this land to attribute only positive qualities to this Serpent, as it has also been attributed to stories of serpentine forces from the unknowably deep attempting to terrorize Midgard. The Lakota, who inhabited the tail-end of the Serpent’s faucet, had stories of a feminine force that emerged from the icy waters of the Northeastern Atlantic Ocean and infiltrated herself all the way into the heart of the North American continent. She was called Unk Chekula (Uŋkčéǧila), and she “had eyes of fire, and a fanged mouth that was shrouded in a smoky or cloudy mass… Her eyes burned with wrathful hunger, her claws were like iron, and her voice raged like thunder rolling in the clouds.” Accounts differ as to what havoc she wrought: They range from claims of being able to flood the land with primordial waters recycled from deep within the mantle — angering the Wakíŋyaŋ into drying the land with great winds — to slaying a giant bear and having its body transform into the towering butte Matȟó Pahá. In her most important story, her relationship with the Lakota was peaceful in the beginning when she had settled in the Black Hills, but had quickly soured as she reproduced with her mate Unk Tehi. Her offspring posed a serious threat to the maintenance of the ecosystem and the survival of the Lakota, as they would eat people if given the opportunity to. Over many years, she was challenged by numerous Lakota warriors, but it was the Hero Twins that put a stop to her by penetrating the seventh point on her body, injuring her to the point of retreat. As she retreated, the power of the Sun scorched her body into the rock formations that make up Makȟóšiča, or the Badlands.
It was assumed that Unk Chekula had ceased as a threat to the Lakota, but a new oil field was rediscovered in 2006 near the town of Parshall in Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara lands in so-called North Dakota. Deep in the subsurface of the Williston Basin underlying North Dakota is the Bakken Formation, which had sufficient source rock for petroleum production, enough to host 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels, but the number constantly shifts as geologic sorcerers continue to guess at the size of the untapped reserves: The USGS now believes it to be at a staggering 7.4 billion barrels worth. Advancements in fracking and drilling technologies caused a boom in the total production that could be squeezed out of the Bakken, overbearing the capacity of existing pipelines and demanding the construction of a new pipeline. Existing serpentine infrastructure, such as rail lines to Quebec, were not sufficient enough catalysts of the gluttonous nature of this boom. As of 2013, the Bakken has proven to compose 10% of America’s total oil production: So powerful this shift in market-share that it practically made California and Alaska, the previous giants for petroleum extraction, seem irrelevant. And with only one refinery in the whole area, the price of crude was much lower than normal North American index prices for Texan oil. All of this because it was made recoverable to drill for unconventional tight oil deposits: The margins of oilbeds that nestled between confining layers of sandstone and shale, the hatchling offspring of the subterranean Serpent.
The Lakota were disturbed because they were in the sight-line of petroleum-hungry cannibals debating with them that they should resurrect Unk Chekula from her submerged grave in the Bakken. They insisted that discussion of it revolve around where it should be rerouted if it were to bother the Indians, not that its mere proposition is an act of conjuring danger and evil. No matter where they repositioned it, it would run through Lake Oahe and eventually end up at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, connecting the subterranean corpse of the Serpent to its primary artery in Midgard. Its original route through the city of Bismarck was rejected precisely because it would upset Her peons, so it had to have been the people of Standing Rock Reservation who were made to be retraumatized multi-millennia later by another broken treaty and another serpentine layer of infrastructure being prodded through Gaia’s veins, bulldozing and unearthing the burial sites of ancestors just as settlers had unearthed it from its deep chamber. And it’s not as if awareness of this being the return of Unk Chekula is kept secret: Her likeness is featured predominantly throughout protest art, often accompanied by the Thunderbird tussling with her.
Prophetic experiences with Serpentine deities wasn’t just limited westwards of the Mississippi nor was it coincided with Manifest Destiny. The signs of every mythical serpent within the North American continent coalescing its head into an oil rig long preceded even the first European settler. Three centuries before the life of Christ, a culture existed in present-day Adams County, Ohio who constructed a massive earthen effigy beside a creekbed in the shape of a snake. It’s quite abstract however, resembling more of a primordial scene of a sperm inseminating an egg. On its tail is a spiral, on its tail three distinct humps, and its head is a pair of jaws grasping around a large ovaloid object. Long considered to just be an abstract representation of a mythological scene, its practical function wasn’t noticed until observing it over the course of an entire year. There, it’s revealed that each hump, rather than being purely stylistic, would perfectly align with the rising of the year’s two solstices and equinoxes. The first hump closest to the tail’s end aligned with the Winter Solstice, the second to the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, and the last hump to the Summer Solstice.
On its own, this isn’t impressive as ancient peoples all over the world were capable of marking sunrise positions with great precision. But, the pointers of each event are rounded, which may just seem like an aesthetic limitation, but there’s an even deeper meaning present. These humps accurately cover the range of full moon risings at each solstice and equinox by covering both their minimum and maximum rising positions. This means that the sun is not the sole celestial object of focus; the moon’s peak reflection of it is also integrated, but why is importance given to the reflection of the sun rather than just itself? In oral tradition, Unk Chekula was described as having a diamond crest adorned on her head called ᎤᎸᏌᏘ (Ulvsuti) by Cherokee peoples — literally meaning “transparent” — and, however could win it over from her, would be considered a miracle worker amongst their tribe. However, obtaining it takes the lives of many men, as simply looking at it drives men towards her instead of retreating. This diamond was said to blaze with the brightness of the sun, as if she contained a bit of its essence within herself. Perhaps this is why the Serpent Mound is so intimate with moon’s relationship with the sun, seeing as she is also a reflection of its essence onto Midgard. There is only one thing that can solve the contradiction of a subterranean deity coming out of its lair to consume the sun: Petrol.
Unk Chekula’s breath — described as so pestilential that no living creature could survive should they inhale the tiniest bit of it — is the perfectly distilled essence of ancient life over the Deep Time, taking the stored actant energy of millions of years worth of life as it had experienced under the sun of infinitely many moon’s ago and unleashing it from the same waters that provide all the abundance for present life. What other substance could simultaneously emerge in the depths as the networked water deep underground while being so viciously opposed to it? Thousands of years ago, in the land where every Indian in the Dawnland says their ancestors travel to upon departure with the living, — or as some call it: California — ancient peoples created woven baskets that were waterproofed using bitumen. Its soft variant seeped up from the musings of the Ring of Fire along the ocean floor, washing ashore, being collected, and then reinforced with its harder variant found in tar pits on land. The essential ectoplasm of accumulated, non-human ancestors had created the productive glue that connects Midgard together in the same way the waters connect the subterranean pockets of Niflheim together. Could you imagine what would happen in invasive Settlers were driven to find this land at the end of the world in a case of world-historical psychosis? What if they were exposed to the idea that bitumen should envelope all of Midgard’s water?
Obviously, we don’t have to imagine, because the past century has been dedicated entirely to retrofitting the world’s aquapolitics to revolve around its flow around the petroleum blockades constructed all along Midgard. Nowadays, the realm of geopolitics is defined entirely by which countries can excrete the most bitumen from squeezing the veins of Gaia they claimed. The most powerful imperial armies ape the story of the Thunderbird and Whale through increasingly earth-shaking bombardments from the heavens, all in the name of securing more bitumen bottles than others. Speculation and the capital attached to it move around the world at a semiconductor’s pace as Unk Chekula moves her Ulvsuti around her many-times-over wrapped body, creating an ecumenopolis that drives the game wherever sends it. But why? Do we see the sun set at the end of the day and become sad that the time for the hunt is over? No, we embody the stirgiformes that possess most of our populace and we beg of Unk Chekula to arise from our writers’ stations that send long-form letters to her, all so we can see the glorious explosion of a Petrol geyser, like the birth of a miniature star. We want to see the sun envelop the moon and subsequently the earth, devouring us sun-bleached megafauna alongside our geologic eon.
More importantly to our heads of state, they want Unk Chekula to pollute across geopolitically important targets, therefore making them worthy of the weaponized Thunderbird. As whirlpools of pestilence dig into “military targets”, the urge to commence ever-destructive ophiophagy becomes undeniable: More and more dust must congregate in the air from the char of carpet bombs, like dried sweat and ejaculate from Pazuzu’s serpentine member inseminating artificial pestilence into the air to compensate for the W-d-go’s removal of natural limits on productive forces. How beautifully does this mimic the story of the Lacandon Maya, where their witness of the Serpent, K’uk’ulkan, acts as the pet of the sun god Kʼinich Ajaw. While theirs is a masculine take on the core myth, he has a more applicable ability to construct the boundaries of nations from its emergence and autocannibalization. As it straddles the journey between life and death, where his body fell became the borders in which citizens would live or die, all because a stupid boy dared feed the Serpent. Did he not know that K’uk’ulkan was destined to eat his own tail? Did he not appreciate how he follows Chaahk and moves the winds with his tail to sweep the Earth clean in preparation of new torrents? Does it not know that’s why the Thunderbird seeks to devour it to the point of turning us all into cannibals?
But this begs the question: Why build it in Ohio? Aside from it being the Hopewell Culture’s epicenter, the site itself is special even into the Deep Time. To keep it simple, it invokes the trauma of Chicxulub. Serpent Mound is the site of an ancient impact structure, nine miles in diameter, from an asteroid that struck the landmass between 256 and 330 million years ago. Before technology advanced enough to determine this, it was speculated that the geologic profile was that of an inverted mountain or perhaps a collapsed volcano. Yet, paleo-Americans were somehow able to sense this geologic oddity out of all the surrounding land, and it drew them into making a monument to whatever was unearthed by the asteroid’s impact. It drew them to create an intricate, highly sophisticated solar calendar built in the remembrance of when it had tried to fly to and speak to the sun. This cracking of the terrestrial shell of the adolescent Laurentia was a glimpse of the Horned Serpent, and it anguished. It anguished because it could not claim another eon’s worth of life in a mass terrestrial extinction. It would not gain this chance until many millions of years later, where the young Maya homeland would be bombarded by Chicxulub: The tail end of the Conquering Serpent, obliterating the dinosaurs with a glimpse of the essence of Cthelll and resigning their position to the subterranean waters. Perhaps Ohio is where the tsunamis breached the furthest.
We shouldn’t despise the Horned Serpent for what it did, but rather fear and admire it. For if it didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs by revealing itself 66 million years ago, our mammalian kin would not be the dominant life on this planet, and we would still be lamenting in our weak consciousnesses the overstayed welcome of the Fourth Sun. But it’s okay, for here in Asgard we can watch the play of fractal puppets chase a phantom. In this instance, the phantom is a series of demonic transfer from pestilence to abundance and a renewed interest in reintroduction of pestilence. But what have they really captured in their entire existence of each generation pointing their rocking chairs to the West? They have found a crawling shape, emerging from the dark through the same circular patterns these phantom chasers have underwent their whole lives. And what does it do? It eats them, completing the other half of the great Ophiphagic story of the Americas and inching closer to bringing about the next sun cycle. Should it be considered a villain in their story if there was no heroic journey to begin with? The asphalt has already been laid, and it started from the Ohio River, and some day it’ll end the tragedy of man and become its only hero. No matter how many wars against terror they launch to fill that heroic void, the Horned Serpent will soon put an end to their game, cementing itself as the end of the food chain several thousand feet below. This play is the tragedy of America, and its hero is the Horned Serpent.
