Who is King Gila? A Deeper Meaning to Petro-Dragonic Apocalypse

We’re coming up on a half a year since Petro-Dragonic Apocalypse released, it has proven to be, in my opinion, one of the best albums in their massive discography. As a followup in the exploration of thrash metal from my other favorite of theirs, Infest the Rat’s Nest, it adds to the saga of occult sci-fi environmentalism. From a dystopian tale of the transhumanist elites building Elysium on mars and leaving struggling humans on a suicide trip to Venus prompted by rapidly mutating superbugs, we see humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels and petroleum personified as the worship of them, which concludes in a world-ending climate crisis. Witches try to use their magic to stop the destructive storms, only for it to turn on them when a lizard intrudes on their spell and transforms into a dragon that then kills them all. It is a very wild premise that manages to work so well despite its campiness, likely because the threat of the damage that climate change incurs looms over us enough to be comparable to a fictional kaiju. Its uniqueness also owes itself to this characterization, with each track dedicated to anticipating or announcing its presence and gleefully describing the irreversible destruction it unleashes when it comes.

I find it all very clever and innovative, like a sort of modern mythology that puts into human terms the machinic inhuman conditions of modernity and industrialism; specifically honing in on petroleum as a sort of Faustian bargain, where our bond to the natural world is forfeited for the transformative power of petrochemicals and their endless products. But at the end of the day, in sunset’s witness, it is just a creative metaphor, right? It’s ridiculous to assign some beastly sentience to petroleum, but it makes a lot of sense to describe our relationship to it as attempting to tame an animal that refuses to be, and that’s it. I do not think so, and so do a lot of others in a school of philosophy called new materialism, of which the entire ethos is to reject anthropocentrism and begin attributing humanlike qualities to non-human objects in rationalist argument. One prominent thinker in this school of thought is contemporayr philosopher Reza Negarestani, who elaborates greatly on the relatively new concept of “inhumanism”, which seeks to take the philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment’s humanism and stretch it to its logical limits. Where humanism uses rationality to center the human species and its material existence as the prime subject in the world, as opposed to supernatural matters, inhumanism goes even further to undermine even the primacy of humanity, especially in the face of scientific proof of our supposed irrelevance on a cosmic scale. Essentially, inhumanism says that humans are just one object among many others and their say in the world and its history are not even approximating primary concern, and that searching for this may cause the human itself to be displaced.

Now, what does this have to do with petroleum? Well, Negarestani, being of Iranian heritage, writes extensively about the geopolitics of the Middle East, especially with regards to the perpetual oil wars that plague the region. Instead of reveling in traditional answers to understand these grand machinations of modernity found in the human, the erroneous, he looks towards that which humans lust after for truth. He attributes “agency,” as one would call it, towards supposedly non-conscious materials, acknowledging their priority over human affairs. This view is not inherently wrong, as it questions what exactly the boundary is between biotic and abiotic: Abiogenesis creates the recipe for simple organic life forms from non-living elements, and in parallel so does abiotic sand and rare earth minerals approximate intelligence when refined into computer electronics. Hell, even within our judicial systems we lend the same legal rights of human beings to nonhuman and even non-mammalian agents such as forests and lakes. What then is to be made of petroleum? The assemblage between biology and geology over the course of deep time: Organic material pressurized into a fine paste of potential energy idling for repurpose. If we consider ecosystems to be legal actors that are protected under law, can materials that have caused unprecedented harm in the human world be held accountable?

The lust for petroleum in particular is harrowing because news of its whereabouts anywhere is a reminder over just how little control a person has in modern politics. Negarestani attributes this powerlessness as the cause of teleological friction between human and mineral “timescales.” Much like how trees operate on a sense of time that would be considerably more encompassing than humans due to their inactivity and preservation (in centuries), petrol and other deep-earth substances operate on timescales unimaginable to any biological life (hundreds of thousands to millions of years.) Thus, when the laughable impermanence of mammalian lifespans encounter the nigh immortality of oil, it creates a catastrophic friction from which conscious humans can never recover from. In the philosopher’s seminal work Cyclonopedia, the fictional character Colonel West describes it as follows:

“alien time, [exposure to] which carries the risk of chronic side effects or something even worse, something irrecoverable and beyond our bloodiest dreams of frenzy, smoke and ash, which in comparison will come to seem like the harmless daydreams of unsophisticated, naïve innocents.”[1]

By virtue of once being alive, petroleum seemingly has the power to, not necessarily engage in conscious decision-making, but persist as if it was still animated. And it does so by pushing itself through stratigraphic layers of rock up to interact with the surface biosphere. It is an energy gradient, one powered by zigzagging flows that push lubricating potentiality through an ejaculative, combustive endpoint in the refinery. Its unspent residue amasses within the atmosphere, with nowhere outside of planetary boundaries to go towards. Humanity, within this scheme, is merely a parasitized agent that does its bidding by constructing the ignitions for its exhumation. This is what is meant by the concept of “Motor Spirit”: A recognition and appropriately religious conceptualization of the necromancing power of petroleum. Whether it is explained supernaturally through Jurassic ghosts, scientifically through a thorough understanding of geoengineering, or philosophically through Spinozist metaphysics.

Negarestani conveys this realization through examples in ancient history. In pursuit of his theory, he recognizes a manifestation of this Spirit in the long history of Zoroastrianism. In the Vendidad, an ecclesiastical manuscript for the faith, Nasu is considered to be the Daeva (“demon” to approximate) of decomposition. Traditionally, it is believed that upon death, Nasu rapidly possesses the corpse and starts its decomposition process, recollecting it back into the ground. So seriously was this believed that it greatly influenced mortuary rituals in ancient Persia, with contacting any corpse believed to permanently taint one as unclean or polluted. To rid Nasu from an infected corpse, a sacred dog is made to observe the corpse in the rite of Sagdid to determine the officiality of its death. Because exhumation was considered greatly frowned upon, mortuary structures, called Towers of Silence, were erected with the intent of stranding corpses to be picked apart by vultures: All of this was in an attempt to prevent subsumption with the earth. This is because any decay was believed to empower Nasu, and that she was already unimaginably strong from the eons of decomposition that preceded her identification. Petroleum, in this sense, is the “distilled essence of [Nasu]”[1], possessing far more potential energy than any living being and, in the suppression of her existence over millennia, has been far more able to intertwine herself with the material plane to assume control of historical trajectory.

And petroleum truly is the victor of not just human politics but all human achievement: Almost every constructed thing seen that is not made of metal, wood, stone, glass, or cotton, is made from it. So omnipotent it is that the process of modernization can be accurately surmised as the mission to secrete oil into everything. Graphs and charts drawn to showcase “human progress” over millennia reveals little more than just how severely exposure to alien intelligence has irreversibly accelerated constructive and economic potential into the hyperbolic. Market trends, wartime spending, and consumer habits all enshapen this hyperbolic curve in attainment of escape velocity, with the mechanisms of production seemingly detaching themselves free and becoming rogue. I think this is a sentiment that accurately describes capitalism’s operations: “A radical and pandemic horror, the horror of the outside emerging from within as an autonomous xeno-chemical insider and from without as the unmasterable outsider.”[1] In other words, it is a horrifying unearthing of a dark, chthonic evil deep within the terrestrial that erupts into biological space as a spermatic zit. And the worst part is that we apparently cannot do anything as it begins cracking through the faults: All with the authority to change it are totally enraptured by its demonic power.

Alright, so that explains the Motor Spirit and all, but why in hell is there a giant lizard? I mean, the connection does not seem all that apparent outside of simply having an eldritch monster to accompany an interesting cosmological view (and to fit the brand.) The handsome reptile on the cover is believed to be the one called King Gila: Proclaimed to be the “one true God” that is accidentally summoned by a cohort of witches aboard the International Space Station, all attempting to stop the massive supercell storms spurred by a runaway greenhouse effect. A cat named Beowulf interrupts the ritual, causing a skink in the way to be transformed into a biosphere-wrecking dragon. Now, this is definitely a total sci-fi fantasy with no possible parallels to real-world mythology: There has never been a set of ethnic belief systems that directly correlated draconic creatures with not just geomagnetism and water cycles but also have a class of clergy especially devoted to them in precipitating the biochemical basis of crude…

Across nearly every traditional culture, there is bound to be some type of deity that has these key characteristics: 1) It is serpentine in form, often explicitly stated to be a snake; 2) It is believed to dwell in a sort of underworld, and thus has power over the Earth’s tectonic movements as well its waters as it pertains to it; 3) It possesses a desire to devour celestial bodies like the Moon and Sun, with belief systems implying that this is a process that is cyclical or has to be stopped via sacrifice; and 4) It is forever in mortal battle with a sky deity, usually representing thunder. Some examples include Apep, the Ancient Egyptian deity who embodied chaos, stood against Ma’at, and was the mortal enemy of Ra as he attempted to claim his life each sunset; Jörmungandr, the bastard son of the Norse god Loki who encircled the oceans of Midgard until biting his own tail and must be defeated by Thor at the coming of Ragnarök; and Bakunawa, a Visayan serpent deity that caused eclipses and earthquakes, and was once believed to swallow the original seven moons that encircled the earth, greatly angering the creator god Kaptan.

King Gila is simply a fantastical, pop culture-infused variant of a long line of attempts at grasping at this archetype that transpires across humanity. He in particular is inspired by Biblical Seraphim, who in contemporary Christendom are depicted as humanoid angels in such a way that obscures their etymological ties to snakes (as from Hebrew שְׂרַף sraf “to burn.”) However, in early Christianity, their reptilian characteristics were celebrated and honored, even being elevated in angelic hierarchies to the highest order of angel, in spite of Jewish records that proclaim them only being in fifth place. Frequent references are made to the Book of Isaiah throughout the album, which is pulled from in the manuscript Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an early Christian theologian who transcribed Christian concepts in Platonic terms so as to better link it with earlier Greek paganism. According to his interpretation:

“The name seraphim clearly indicates their ceaseless and eternal revolution about Divine Principles, their heat and keenness, the exuberance of their intense, perpetual, tireless activity, and their elevative and energetic assimilation of those below, kindling them and firing them to their own heat, and wholly purifying them by a burning and all-consuming flame; and by the unhidden, unquenchable, changeless, radiant and enlightening power, dispelling and destroying the shadows of darkness.”[2]

Here, certain shared language between the two works can be identified, such as “all-consuming flame” or “radiant and enlightening power.” I would not be surprised if this directly influenced the lyrics on the album, as they imply that the powers of Seraphim operate on a cyclical, thermokinetic basis: Functioning like a primordial heat that penetrates all materials and elevates that which is adapted while recycling that which is ill-equipped. This was not interpreted as a cruel force though, as later Christian writers, such as Thomas Aquinas, described the Seraphic power as characteristic of smothering. He argues in Summa Theologiae that their nature is one of an abundance of charitous will, containing a destructive excess of enlightenment in the same way a fire contains an excess of heat that has no choice but to violently erupt. This is because their fire is associated with devotion, rising upwards because it is in their nature to inflexibly tend towards the divine; and rousing all things to do as them from their fervor and inextinguishable light.

In the Renaissance, Seraphim assumed a metaphorical role, with Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola equating the self-captured Age of Enlightenment to their eternal light in his seminal work Oration on the Dignity of Man:

“they burn with the fire of charity” — as the highest models of human aspiration: “impatient of any second place, let us emulate dignity and glory. And, if we will it, we shall be inferior to them in nothing”

This has some rather disturbing implications if it is conjoined with major historical events that encapsulated the Renaissance, such as the colonization of the Americas afterwards and the Crusades with a ransacking of Constantinople prior. It implies that all of these horrific acts are elevated to the divine precisely so as to be beyond human ethical concerns: A mere consequence of inheriting such an intense source of heat. Perhaps there is a larger allusion here in that the Dragon represents a collective punishment from the heavens but additionally a creeping force that has accompanied every civilizational development prior to the mass exploitation of petrol. All byproducts of the Renaissance — humanism, Protestantism, liberalism, modernity — are such because they have been forged from the complementary Seraphic power of absolute enlightenment and total damnation. A mortifying realization is made: The seizing and exploitation of Seraphic power is what has enabled the century of European enlightenment to also be one of monumental destruction for the peoples who were deemed unworthy, either as converts or by theological disposition. Throughout the album’s latter half, the Dragon is attributed narratively as a form of divine correction, framing his omnicidal wrath as a final justice that erases all inequities through total absence of life.

Does that mean the Dragon is a brazen metaphor for capitalism, subtly rooted in the very religio-ideological foundations of the Enlightenment? No, not at all, for it appears across non-Abrahamic religions too, often being a crucial feature. The lyrics to the song Supercell imply that the narrative of the album is an Americentric one, primarily referencing its effects relative to North America and the United States. Across the Western Hemisphere, a similar deity occurs regardless of the vast differences in cultures: It is known by many names from numerous languages, so 19th century anthropologists had to devise a unifying, secular name to allude to its many incarnations. It is hesitantly called the Horned Serpent, and it appears everywhere throughout the pre-Columbian world; whether in excavated pottery, cave art, surviving rituals, or etched in structures. Despite thousands of stories detailing its roles across different cosmologies and mythologies, almost all contain the recurring motifs I mentioned prior. I believe it is this serpent in wisdom that draws the most parallels with King Gila.

To begin with, the name King Gila and track Gila Monster references the real-world animal of the same name. Gila monsters are venomous lizards indigenous to the Southwestern United States, the largest in the whole continent in fact. The band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, choosing this animal as a candidate for monstrosity is peculiar to me, as there is no shortage of large lizards native to their home country of Australia to choose from. Their country is also no stranger to glimpses of climactic apocalypses, so why does the United States hog narrative cruciality? While there are little documented Indigenous stories that pertain to that lizard specifically, there is a prominent Horned figure that resides in many Pueblo communities amongst the Rio Grande watershed: Tewa-speaking peoples uniquely call it Awanyu (pronounced uh-VAHN-yoo), and it is found etched into rocks high above canyon rivers, as if the lighting itself scarred its image onto the surface. Awanyu is revered as guardian over all the planet’s waters, with its abode being its own colossal body tangled in between the vast interconnected series of pockets and tubes underneath the Earth that underlie the water process. Further, it is attested that springs are where it emerges onto the surface world — our world — from its chthonic abode, which is why pluvial divination prayers are always performed near them.

Intricate, ritualistic, and theatrical performances are undergone for the blessings of Awanyu to nourish a village’s reservoirs and grant their crop fields fecundity. As part of a ritual called the Snake Dance among Hopi peoples (a neighboring pueblo ethnicity), designated priests called Snake Men would baptize specifically chosen snakes — as in they were colored according to the spiritual guidance of the cardinal directions — in yucca-root suds before being carried in the mouth[3], symbolizing purification of spermatic vessels containing the prayers from the middle world to the subterranean realm of both aquifers and ancestral spirits. This conduction is performed in kiva, which are subterranean chambers built by ritual-dependent Antelope Men — a complementary society — intricately designed with multicolored sand representing those same directions and aligned with different types of maize. It is purported here that the blessed snakes travel into the underworld and bring that which perpetuates life in the middle-world biosphere from the subterranean realm of the dead, often in the form of rain clouds and their eventual floods to nourish the desolate landscape of the American Southwest.

If the great serpent is angered, it is speculated that it manipulates the control it deeds over the planet’s water table — and subsequently its geology — to incur natural disasters like earthquakes and floods. This presents us with a distinct omnipotent power over water systems and all the other solid materials that depend upon them: Whether it is elevating rain clouds into unleashing a devastating maelstrom along a desert valley, or secreting ocean water into the mantle to lubricate the subduction of old oceanic crust. Rivers, in this cosmology, can be conceived of as surface monuments to a subterranean flow, slithering over the course of decades to deform and reallocate land uphill where it extracts from to deposit in alluvial antlers at its delta.

Speaking of rivers, far to the east of the Southwestern U.S. is the Mississippi River watershed, which shares a similar ancient reverence for a blessed serpent over a much wetter, more pregnant land. Eastern North America was populated and developed by millennia-long traditions of civilizational projects, the most recent of which was the Mississippian phase that lasted from ~800 AD to the dawn of first European contact, which kicked off by the adoption of maize agriculture from Mesoamerica. Among the chief characteristics of Mississippian societies such as large earthworks, rich pottery culture, and elaborate religious organization, is a slew of motivic similarities found throughout various iconographies. The most prevalent of these is the tired Horned Serpent, which has appeared consistently throughout recovered pottery fragments, gorgets, and even ruins. While few serpentine monuments have been rediscovered in select locations across the great temperate mass, there is one prominent exception.

Deep in the Appalachian mountains, along a small creek that feeds into the Ohio River, is a large earthwork of serpentine shape. Archaeological investigation has dated the initial building of the structure to as old as 300 BC, placing it to the middle of the Adena culture that flourished in the river valley and formed some of its first complex, settled societies. The effigy — the largest of its kind ever encountered — starts with a spiral where the serpent unravels from and then features three distinct coils that make up the serpent’s body. Once it reaches the head, the figure is seen wrapping its jaws around an ovular object, which for centuries its identity was the subject of archaeological debate. That was until it was found out that the oval likely represents the Sun, suggesting that the serpent is devouring it like a natural snake would a bird’s egg. Additionally, each coil, once thought purely aesthetic, were revealed to be alignments of each solar solstice and equinox.

In excess addition, the curved shape of the alignments approximated the position of full moons relative to sunsets[4], meaning that Serpent Mound’s ancient designers were able to predict the average rising positions of the full moon despite great variation in its celestial position over its orbit. All of this speculation has led many to believe that it was constructed as a monumental solar calendar of sorts, with its form harkening back to begotten tales of the Horned Serpent trying to devour the Sun. In present-day Tennessee, medieval Cherokees — whose ancestors possibly helped construct Serpent Mound — revered and recounted stories of a legendary creature called ᎤᎧᏖᎾ, or Uktena (pronounced ook-TEN-uh), who was slain once to great renown in the mythic past.

The story goes that, in an inconceivably long time ago, the Sun had become dissatisfied with the first race of people it had populated the young Earth with. Such, it sent a great plague to destroy the Yvwi Tsunsdii (yon-wee CHOONS-dee), but they retaliated by turning an ordinary copperhead into the powerful Uktena and sending him to stop the Sun. However, in spite of the vast cosmic distance he was able to cross to grace it, he failed once he had opened his mouth, with the Sun’s mighty heat burning his tongue and whatever else was fleshy and mystified in saliva. Seeing his failure, the Yvwi Tsunsdii had to desperately send an empowered rattlesnake to finish the job. This angered Uktena to the point where he initiated a wonton attack against them in grave jealousy, prompting them to capture and banish him away in the great ranges beyond civilization: In the deep valleys and high mountains. From here, Uktena held an eldritch status among Cherokee, being described as bearing scars from his heliophagic dates: A series of illuminating, crystallic ogees adorning his length, with the one bedazzling his crown, Ulunsuti (oo-lun-SOO-tee) said to blaze as bright as a star to serve as the most painful reminder of all.

Uktena was described as the most fearsome creature that any warrior would dare to hunt, with even seeing him asleep meaning certain death: Not to the hunter, but his family. Yet, many still dared because his Ulunsuti was legended to grant unprecedented renewal and abundance to the village of any hunter who claimed it, but only on the condition that it be continually fed the sacrificial blood of game animals, lest Uktena reanimates from his chthonic crypt. One warrior was able to accomplish such a task. His name was Aganunitsi (uh-gah-nuh-NEE-chee), and he was a Shawnee medicine man captured as a prisoner in warfare. Originally, he was planned for torture in revenge for his soldiery, but he pleaded for mercy with the promise that he could bring the Ulunsuti to the village if freed. At first, he was mocked for this, with the matriarchs retorting that there was no way any man could slay Uktena unless they anticipated certain death. Yet, Aganunitsi felt quite determined in this endeavor, and predicting that he would die regardless, he was spared on the ridiculous improbability that he could retrieve it and return alive.

On his journey, Aganunitsi had encountered giant serpents of many different types, but none were the mythical sun-scarred regardless of how badly they had terrified local peoples. Soon, he became bored and distraught, thinking that his death from either another creature or by execution was immanent, but at last in the south, he had found Uktena asleep atop Mt. Gahuti (guh-HOO-tee.) There, he speedily erected a firepit of pinecones that would service as a shield later on in combat. Once he finished, he hauled up the mountain top again, and he shot his arrow straight into the Serpent’s weak point — the seventh ogee from his head — which rudely awakened him as he ruthlessly sought the warrior who dared to slay him. No matter, Aganunitsi’s swiftness ensured he had already leaped into the bonfire’s bounds, with Uktena unable to pursue as he immediately succumbed to his mortal wound and spewed his poisonous, stark-black blood across the mountainside. As the droplets sprayed towards the hunter, they avoided him as they sputtered and boomed in the surrounding flamy pillars. From his wounds, the toxic excretion had filled an entire lake that shouldered the detritus of trees and rocks swept in from his tumbling corpse. Upon his decay, all the carrion had come to invade and feast upon his remnants, and Aganunitsi smiled as he had won favor from the village with his securing of the precious Ulunsuti: Blessing them with abundant rains, protection from floods, and no infant mortality in return for routine blood sacrifice.[5]

Here, we observe that the story retains a sense of continuity between the scene depicted in Serpent Mound and the details obtained. Archetypal similarities to the Wiccan Horned God—as alluded to in the song Witchcraft — are also found, in that Uktena is suspected to have magnetic properties over both agricultural yield and abundance of wild game, functioning as an intermediary between the living and spirit worlds that interact with one another. Now, this is all well and an unfurling machinations of a profound theriocephalic truth, telling us that a draconic deity is, in fact, a draconic deity, but what does that have to do with petroleum? Ancient Americans surely did not fear a snake monster, especially storied to have already been defeated and his perseverance cared for in monument and myth. Well, well, well, far more than you would ever wish to know.

If you were politically sentient, and lived in North America during 2016–2017, you probably remember the monumentality of Indigenous-led protests against an aggressive energy infrastructure project dubbed the Dakota Access Pipeline: A recent, government-backed investment that transports light sweet crude oil barrels from the freshly exploited Bakken formation in North Dakota all the way to a terminal near St. Louis. It was controversial, not just because it was a general expansion of the still-dominance of fossil fuel chugging, but particularly because the pipeline was originally planned to burrow underneath Lake Oahe and the Missouri River as a whole, both of which provide freshwater to the Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ (‘Standing Rock Reservation’ in English) and other communities. This prompted a series of confrontational protests against pipeline workers and law enforcement (who were later revealed to be in collaboration for intentional counterterrorist measures), snowballing into the #NoDAPL movement which trended on social media and caused informal camps at Standing Rock to amass thousands of Indigenous peoples and allies to protest its construction. This exploded overnight into one of the biggest environmental protests in recent American history, with police increasingly using militarized tactics such as attack dogs and water cannons to crush resistance. Eventually, the U.N. Human Rights Council was addressed directly, with Indigenous leaders calling upon the United States to cease its use of weaponized force against peaceful protest, invoking tribal sovereignty to resist the unwanted infrastructure and violation of community wish.

Against all the spirit behind its resistance, the pipeline did get built (and leaked several times) with former presidential approval, now gushing ~750k barrels of crude a day directly to the Mississippi River crossroads. But throughout its detestment, a recurring figure was used to not just characterize the pipeline itself but all ideological underpinnings that drove its conjuring. It was called the Zuzéča Sápa (zoo-ZETCH-uh SAH-puh), or Black Snake as translated by some activists, and covertly did an alternative sentiment of “kill the Black Snake”[6] emerge from it to complement “#NoDAPL.” It gave a sense of fantastical urgency to the affair, reframing the bias that this was not another group of know-nothing hippies “hurting” the economy but instead a spiritual battle for the health of the world. A retroactive prophecy was murmured to narrativize the Black Snake, stating that the serpent would crop up from the subterranean to slither across the land, desecrating sacred sites and poisoning waterways before eventually destroying the planet. Now, this prophecy has no searchable reference for its validity in documented colonial history, but one look back into Lakota mythology reveals that this “prophecy” is in fact a retelling of an ancient encounter modified to fit its present return. The Black Snake’s real name is Uŋkčéǧila (pronounced unk-chih-HEE-luh; sometimes alternatively referred to as Unk Tehi), and its story is strikingly similar to the one Cherokees tell.

As told by holy man Tháčha Hušté (Lame Deer), the ancestors of the Lakota had heard rumors from neighboring tribes that two great serpents had emerged from Northeastern waters and that they were making their way to the Black Hills in modern-day South Dakota to procreate. Once arrived, they had feigned a peaceful image to all the land’s animals and peoples, but this was merely a disguise so Uŋkčéǧila could breed unprovoked. Over many years, her offspring had wreaked havoc in the Black Hills, being challenged by many unworthy warriors during such, but two mythical Hero Twins (another popular figure found across the Americas) stood up to her and mortally wounded her with arrows gifted to them by a medicine woman.[7][8] In her dying moments, she writhed away from the Sun as it scorched her flailing body into the land, drawing her carcass into the Badlands formation. It seems that the DAPL is a traumatic reminder of this ancient enemy: A long-defeated foe reanimated by the machinations of those unequally intertwined with the sentience of alien biology, electrifying its components through sabotaging existing riverine flows.

Yet, pipelines almost certainly were not the first time the American government has utilized serpentine infrastructure to further disenfranchise marginalized peoples within its borders. If you spend a lot of time in urbanist circles (I know, I ask a lot), you might be well aware of the fact that American cities, outside of certain metropolises, are designed in a way that almost requires one to use an automobile to efficiently navigate them. This is in contrast to cities all across the world, which retain a pedestrian-first design standard that renders them inconvenient or impossible to traverse by car. This ‘innovation’ was largely a byproduct of needing to expend from an energized economy bolstered for wartime production in massive excess: More guns, more tanks, more jeeps; with the last fostering an individualistic reconsideration to transportation as vehicles of war were turned against their own producers. Manufacturers, who switched to consumer from military goods, had all the war-profits in the world to lobby against well-established public transit systems to demand their removal and replacement with a mandate of personal vehicle ownership. These political forces had coalesced with newfound resentment returning veterans had towards racially diverse cities — and the gutted state their housing markets were left in — to build sprawling expanses of low-density suburbs, which made acquisition of a Platonic home unit as consumer-friendly as possible with federally insured mortgages.

Due to the United States still lacking the sheer amount of human history, that preceded its colonization, to properly develop abandoned lands outside of cities, there appeared an abundance of space to roll out mass-produced housing units at the expense of wildlife and farmland. Population in these external communities ballooned rapidly, as if they were rows of corn that popped up just in harvest’s time by those deemed deserving enough to yield first and finally. However, non-whites were explicitly excluded from this development rush, and if civil terrorism did not prevent them from cashing in mortgages, then weaponized petrol did the job far better. Suburbia — the ideological synthesis between petrol-dependency and no outside force to say ‘no’ — was explicitly asphalted in convoluted, labyrinthine layouts that lowered the frequency of pedestrianism and deterred through-traffic from the denser inner city. Such designs made automobiles non-optional, but that was not an issue for homeowners as they expected a subsidized vehicle as part of a complete package of this gifted lifestyle. This makes all forms of mobility, including that which is crucial for economic growth, dependent upon continued availability of petrofuel, creating a culture where use of public transit, or any avoidance of petrol, is looked down upon as a lower class or racially inherited disposition. A problem lingered however, as suburbs were not economically productive by themselves, servicing more as contained living pods entirely dependent on business within urban cores to sustain them. Suburbanites would still have to commute into cities for work that paid enough to support their consumption habits, but the inefficiency of car travel when going through dense cities created a class conflict of steel and rubber, as post-war privilege literally ran over the undeserving left behind, feeling an immense predatory power as those they deemed inferior had to tremble under the ravenous might of their petro-beasts.

It was obvious that an urban renewal, one where cities would be remodeled to better fit the incoming new world, was necessary. With the proposal of the Interstate Highway System at the halfway mark of the century, large trails of burning asphalt would be paved to establish a more effective military transportation system in the event of a foreign invasion. Suburbia had entangled itself into this great ouroboros to build a direct line of uninterrupted car travel from petrol-dependent communities to productive city centers, but at the cost of needing to perform large-scale residential sacrifice to let cement burrows successfully bore themselves through neighborhoods. And just like that, eminent domain was abused and property rights were violated en masse to seize and destroy non-white neighborhoods who seemingly stood in the way of a reengineered manifest destiny. To these (mostly Black) people and their descendants, this was as if a weaponized icon of Uŋkčéǧila had violated their livelihoods in one fell swoop, creepily stalking them in their northwards journey towards freedom up the Ohio River and sunk its fangs into them at their most exhausted and vulnerable. Its trunk remained in the wake as numerous proxies of itself had sought their reconnection eternally elsewhere, leaving a transient, liminal zone of pollution that festers where there was once thriving life.

Cincinnati, OH: Aerial photos of before and after Interstate construction

The Interstate is not a static infrastructure project: If we correctly apply the sentience of petrol to its manufactured product, such as asphalt, and identify engineered human dependence on it, then a clear image of a habitat-shaping superorganism develops. Aside from its capacity towards constant emission of pollutants from the sheer amount of tire particulate that fills the air around it, it also grows in size proportionally to the car traffic that feeds it. As suburbia sprawls out further into depopulated lands, the total amount of cars requiring access into urban cores creates congestion and long-term swelling within its esophagi. This prompts its human hosts to seek and harvest more asphalt to widen its bowels, allowing for smoother gastric flow… but, if you are still somehow in those aforementioned urban circles, you are likely aware of the meme “just one more lane bro,” which references the undying persistence city transportation boards have to rally federal support for highway expansion projects. The logic goes that, if too many cars are inducing congestion, the solution is to simply widen highways until it clears. This may work fine for leaky pipes, but it does not make sense for vehicles, which are predictably always going from a wide expanse in suburbia to narrow urban corridors to facilitate economic motion. And as more opportunistic despots see the prioritization of car travel, they will take car trips they never would have previously, rendering gastric expansion null within a year. A real-world example of this tarmac terror is the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, which since it completed a widening renovation in 2008, has been crowned one of the widest highways in the world: Boasting a depressing 26 lanes in total. And did this solve Houston’s notoriously awful traffic? No, the Katy Freeway actually increased morning commutes by 25 minutes and afternoon ones by 23 minutes[9], which anyone with knowledge of city planning could have predicted.

This is engineered venom: As more vehicles pile up on widening roads, the amount of carbon monoxide emitted from their exhaust pipes serve as literal poisoning to the destruction already wrought by plowing Black Snakes through communities of those deemed unworthy. But where do the cars go once they finally rupture their way through urban arterials? They prepared for such a thing, and it involves spewing even more roadbed from highways into formerly developed land, paving over rubble with a fine coat of sun-baked petrochemical carpet. Swiftly did cities initiate an orchestral gutting of their organ systems, rationing off the presumably least productive or “undesirable” locations towards petro-vomit substitute, gradually increasing the heat content of cities as Stygian pavement soaked in solar energy and held it in tightly. And to ring a death knell to any future attempts at subterfuge towards this operation, viral code was injected into humans called “parking minimums” that ensured no new human-based infrastructure could be built unless it also came coupled with a mutually beneficial swath of pavement: Bile that hastened a greenhouse agenda where humans ultimately lost. Look at any satellite image of a given American city and you will a massive highway encircling what was once a refuge from the troubles of the ‘Old World’, practically suffocating it in a tightening grip, while attempts to prod its trunk only spews its toxic blood onto infrastructure, turning homes, businesses, and hangouts into stomping grounds for disgorged beasts to rut. And what are you to do if you are without a vehicle, if you perhaps are a descendant of the “unworthy?” Quite frankly, you are marked for death. At any moment you are out walking, you are considered to bear the potential of utilitarian sacrifice for the Black Snake if four tons of steel were to crash into you, rendering your body either in an unrecoverable state or assembled with tar. You are at the mercy of symbols of overwhelming and vacuous abundance, upchucking heat-raising pollution everywhere they go, in hopes you are not made into another statistic for the sin of not partaking. The vehicles only get bigger and the pedestrian infrastructure only gets more lacking, practically nudging for uninfected humans to be made an example of if they assume they are free from its coiling.

If they are not punished from faraway country, then they are punished from ocean afar, all in an attempt for this Serpent to assert divinity over its territory. Neighboring the demonic state of Texas is an equally demonic state: Louisiana, which despite its known poverty, is one of the most powerful in the nation, for within its borders is the Mississippi River delta. This Pleistocene buildup of alluvial deposits hosts the largest shipping port in the Western Hemisphere, and from there domestic goods are shipped throughout the continental interior in arguably the most navigable river system in the world. It is not an exaggeration to state that, without the Mississippi, the United States would have never become a superpower, let alone a functioning nation, and the concept of America as a whole would be rendered nominally powerless. This river is not just a powerful economic engine, it is also a geologic one that has shown its terrifying power as not just an undead, uncaring flow of water but an agent of catastrophic destruction. In the summer of 1926, heavy rainfall in the river’s tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen far past capacity, with it finally tipping over in the Lower Mississippi Valley, causing the alluvial lining to burst open and rupture with unprecedented force. It quickly escalated into the worst flooding event in American history, covering nearly a fifth of Arkansas in floodwater and ripping open an overflow as wide as 80 miles below Nashville. Black farmers in the delta were so devastated by this that it acted as a catalyst to convince many of them to move to Northern states for better employment opportunities. Since then, the United States has invested heavily in flood prevention, erecting the largest system of levees in the world that encase the river’s flow south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

For a century, massive economic growth, especially that of petrochemical industries, was dependent on this giant earthwork, larger than anything the Hopewell culture could have dreamt of making, forcing the Mississippi stay as it is. All would be mostly at ease, if it were not for the ticking time-bomb that the state had accidentally made for itself a century prior. About every millennium, the river switches course from its current bank towards a new, faster route to the Gulf of Mexico, with its current one having been forged sometime around 1000 CE. Signs of divergence were creeping in the 19th century, but it was the actions of one steamboat captain, Henry Shreve, who issued the clearing of a miles-long logjam along the Red River, which had flowed parallelly to the Lower Mississippi since the 12th century, that compressed this timespan into countable years. In an effort to make more of North America’s waterways accessible by interior travel, the clearing caused the two arms to meander and fuse, pumping even more sediment into the delta. This had accelerated the rate of divergence at full tilt, with each potential flood eroding the marshy ait lonely preventing total overtaking. And in 1973, this apocalypse nearly occurred when much more rain than usual overwhelmed floodplain saturation and pushed the flood-control infrastructure to its limits.

“James Barnett Jr.’s fantastically detailed 2017 book Beyond Control: The Mississippi River’s New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico tells the story of how on April 14, 1973, the Old River Control Structure foreman walked out on the Low Sill Structure for an inspection, and witnessed the collapse of a 67-foot-long wall along the south side of the intake channel, facing the Mississippi. The six Niagara Falls’ worth of water pouring through the channel pulverized the wall’s fragments and rammed them through the structure. A giant whirlpool replaced the missing wall and began attacking the structure, scouring away at the 90-foot deep steel pilings that supported it. The foreman reported that you could drive out onto the highway that crossed the structure, open your car door, and the vibration from the water hammering through the structure would close the door for you.”[10]

Even with all taming measures in place, the U.S. economy still has a looming foible in one of the most neglected and exploited regions within its borders, and it is long overdue for an avulsion: One that will completely invalidate the fourth largest shipping port in the world, depriving a critical commercial artery of easy passage, safe drinking water, and adequate irrigation. All it would take is one massive storm to completely cripple the United States, storms which are now guaranteed to happen as the Eastern Gulf Coast hosts the largest concentration of petrochemical plants in North America. There is so much industrial activity in fact that the stretch of riverbank between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is nicknamed “Cancer Alley” for the massive spike in cancer deaths seen in residents of these parishes, with East Baton Rouge Parish itself dedicating a sizable chunk of its land to a giant Exxon refinery. Aside from the sheer amount of petroleum reserves that lie in the Gulf due to the eons of sediment dumping from archaic Mississippian flows, this stretch of land was perfect because it was littered with abandoned plantation properties, whose hereditary owners eagerly waited to sell them to company investors.

Mt. Olive cemetery next to Dow Chemical plant in the background: Plaquemine, LA

Had it not been the use of brutal, unprecedented, and racialized slave labor that cleared the land for rice and sugarcane production, the petrochemical industry would not have the adequate geological conditions to run their operations at the profitable margins that they do. And it is the descendants of those slaves who suffer the most from this repurposing, with their health and wellbeing practically sacrificed by uncaring governments towards the purpose of petrol extraction and total ecological flattening: A dirty blessing received at the cost of continual blood sacrifice. And the nation as a whole dispelled any debate over this intention in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The same levees, built with the hope that they could hold back a power as thoughtless as the Mississippi’s, were utterly pimpled through as relentless winds and storm surge broke into the delicate, dried out bowl-island the city of New Orleans rests uneasily in. What simmered was the near total inundation of a major American city — one integral to the country’s history — with a fourth of South Louisiana’s population evacuating the area in advance. This was so massive that another hurricane the same year, Rita, caused an even larger exodus of millions out of Texas, which is a number only really seen throughout the world during times of extreme conflict; all out of fear. What was made of those who did not possess the financial blessings to have the proper petrol-assets to evacuate in time? They were left to drown in a great sacrifice zone that saved those with petrolic infestation while damning those coiled and strangled within its serpentine borders with merciless supercells.

The descendants of slaves, artificially denied economic mobility into the refuge of suburbia to be dumped alongside industrial waste, were left to be devoured by empowered storms of chthonic agenda. What else can you call that but a human sacrifice? It would surely be an odd coincidence if the Americas were storied with places where human lives were offered as sacrifices to chthonic, serpentine machinations…

At Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wuh-kon), the ruins of an ancient civilizational center just a couple miles north of Mexico City, there exists the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. It lies almost directly southwards from the Pyramid of the Moon and parallel to the Pyramid of the Sun, the third largest pyramid in the world, and is surrounded by a formidable citadel. Two-thousand years ago, the temple would have had three more stories to its dilapidated peak, and it would have been lavishly painted all over too, including among the 260 serpent heads that adorn its sides. Accompanying these serpent heads is the face of what archaeologists have assumed to be an ancient form of Tlāloc (chah-LOKE), the pan-Mesoamerican god of rain and terrestrial fertility, often interpreted as an embodiment of Gaia. The temple was constructed in the southeast of the main arterial road that runs through the site, the Avenue of the Dead, and the grimmest detail it contained was not known until decades later: “More than a 100 warriors, kneeling with their hands bound behind their backs, are believed to have died there.”[11] Prisoners of war were not the only offering, as copious remnants of wolves, eagles, big cats, and even snakes ironically were found. It is evident that these vessels are being offered to the Feathered Serpent that envelopes the temple, insinuating that the deity demands a hefty and meaningful tribute. Throughout Mesoamerica, it has been speculated that tiered sacrificial rites were used as a showcase of the sovereign potential of a polity, with grander displays of theatrical destruction equating to a more legitimate sovereign claim over territory. Due to the attested limited-destructive nature of warfare throughout the Americas, sacrificial rites assumed the cyclically transformative function that total warfare would have fulfilled otherwise. Thus explains the theatrics of brutality.

Cosmological views throughout the vast expanses of time this region was inhabited — from the Olmecs to the Mexica — had justified what appears to modern society as cruel superstition with a much more expansive definition of violence and human life than Euro-Modernity. Indeed, even the cooking of corn and chilis was considered to be a violent act whereby the vegetables sacrificed their former ontology to be renewed into a meal after a heavily humiliating process of spicing, searing, and dressing. Such casual violence against soulful beings necessitated a ritualization and ascetic moderation as if every act of food preparation was a funeral. This was because Mesoamerican societies generally were far less anthropocentric than any post-industrial one, not necessarily placing humans on a privileged pedestal in a biological hierarchy just because they possess spoken language and advanced technology. But because humans also live subjective lives, and can obtain the power to steer transcendental bodies like nations, it makes sense that most revered of infrastructure also functions as a grand sanctifying temple: One for the inevitable political sacrifices made for the sake of a given civilizational era. When this is tied back to an evolutionary understanding of life, it begins to posit that all biology is the result of an overwhelming abundance of Solar energy gracing the Earth with its Genetic potentiality. The goal of such sensationalist sacrifice in turn is to somehow reciprocate this abundance on a worldly scale, with warfare — a consequence of conflicting political sovereignty — being the main secretor of victims, or fallen sovereigns to undergo Nextlahualli (or ‘debt repayment.’)

Once one finds themselves in a process of Nextlahualli (nesh-chuh-WALL-ee), through either falling in battle or going into debt slavery, they become commodities to repay a primordial debt to the Sun, with the rupture and secretion of all vital essence — stored in-vessel upon execution — being hotly desired for its ability to briefly conjoin individuality of living beings with the decoupling of death. In preparation of this, they become Teixiptla[12]: Costumed to not just represent but temporarily operate as if they were gods manifested into the material world through the infiltration of Teotl, or universal life-force, into the pre-executed vessel. Once pampered in attire and symbols that personify a particular deity, a Teixiptla (tay-ish-EEP-cha) would parade through plazas adored and worshiped by citizens, obscuring any boundaries between representation and possession. This secured one’s ‘assimilation’ into Teotl (tay-OTE) through ritual affirmation, securing an honorable position in the afterworld through conditioned submission. During the sacrifice itself, a priest would use an obsidian dagger to plunge into the abdomen of the Teixiptla, intricately gutting their internals as they carefully severed the heart from its arteries and raised it high to the beaming Sun as a supreme offering. The heart was specifically dissected because it was believed to hold within it Tonalli, or a microcosmic essence of the very star it was raised to. This was not just limited to the heart but encompassed all blood within the body and its circulation. The blood of Teixiptlas would also be offered as a fructifying force alongside the instrument of its circulation. Outside of sacrificial ritual, minor bloodletting was a common private practice among Mexicas as a way to give thanks or request favors to the gods. To excrete Tonalli can be metaphorically considered a spiritual alluvial deposit, as it exists within the human body as a co-essence of the person’s individuation and the context of their birth that rushed into them from the outside. To undergo Nextlahualli is to destroy this delicate balance with overwhelming flow, letting the fragment star within gurgle out to its creator: For a river to change course.

Speaking of the water cycle, in the 21st century, heavy rains opened up a sinkhole near the Temple of the Feathered Serpent that led to the discovery of an underground chamber beneath it, deep enough to hit the water table.[13] On first speculation, this was thought to recreate the watery depths of the cosmological underworld. Pyrite decorated its ceilings to imitate the splendor of a night sky, while pools of liquid mercury would collect in artificial canals to replicate what the dying possibly perceive on their journey. Here, there were likely bloodletting rituals performed which mimicked Maya contemporaries, with sufficient enough blood loss inducing visions of a great chthonic serpent arising from the realm of the deceased to communicate wisdom from the buried ancestors. Often, they would directly emerge from its maw to briefly rush into the de-individuating initiate as clouds of smoke take viscous shape. This begs the question, if the blood of historical, and perhaps living humans, invokes temporary invasion from the gods, what power would the ancient, pressurized blood found in oil reserves have? Perhaps it is the sweet ground meat that the chthonic serpent subsists upon in the same way our cars require refined gasoline to operate. If a single beating heart contains a fragment of solar grace, what power does the billions of pulverized hearts underneath geographic strata contain? Snapshots of epochs, filed down into long-term geologic data storage. In the titular track Motor Spirit, a litany of titles are given to this sensed sun-drive, some of which are of interest: “Grave robber,” “sun mortar,” “un-water.” These are all allusions I would suggest fit a fantastical beastliness of petroleum as much as they do the most well-known form of the Feathered Serpent that graced the long history of Mesoamerica.

Quetzalcoatl in his two forms as he appears in the Codex Laud.

The God of Life, Light and Wisdom, Lord of the Day and the Winds, and Ruler of the West: Quetzalcoatl (ketsel-koh-WAT) is a supreme deity in the Mexica pantheon and the patron god of their priesthood. He is one of the four Tezcatlipocas created from the first god, Ometeotl, and he ruled in the cardinal direction of the West among his siblings Huitzilopochtli, Xipe Totec, and the Black Tezcatlipoca who was only known tautologically. They were tasked with the responsibility of genesis, but each time they had made a mistake in creation, they had to destroy and remake it in cycles called Suns. The first attempt — ”Four Jaguar” — involved the spawning of all lesser deities, including Tlaloc, but the world was still a nigh primordial void of darkness, just now filled with water and earth. One of the Tezcatlipocas (tez-kat-lee-POKE-uh) would have to offer themselves to become a star and give light to the world. Initially, Black Tezcatlipoca was chosen, but because he was designated as the god of darkness and chaos, he shone poorly. Still, his haphazard light was serviceable enough to function for some time before a bitter sibling rivalry between him and Quetzalcoatl unfolded, culminating in the latter knocking the star from the cosmos, leaving the world in total darkness. The first peoples to inhabit this world were thus destroyed by B. Tezcatlipoca’s anger as he transformed into a mighty jaguar and ate them all; their bones being used to create the next race with no survivors. The second attempt — ”Four Wind” — had a different approach, this time creating normal-sized humans as opposed to giants, and Quetzalcoatl would serve as the Sun for this new trial of civilization. In passing, he was described as a suitable vessel, but due to his moral ambiguity and favoritism, he let his prodigies degenerate into greed and corruption against proper worship of the gods. B. Tezcatlipoca, again angered that such a thing was allowed to happen, uses his magic to turn the humanoids into monkeys, which distresses Quetzalcoatl to the point of summoning a powerful hurricane that swept all of his defiled creations into the primordial seas where they survived as other animals.

For the time, he stepped down to experiment once more to hopefully create the perfect subjects, and the lesser deity Tlaloc had assumed the role as the third Sun — ”Four Rain.” Yet, B. Tezcatlipoca in his zealotry had deceived the impressionable rain god, kidnapping the love of his life and crushing him into a ravenous grief that prevented him from continuing his duties. Yet, the new people were unable to grasp that this had happened, only seeing great drought from their perspective, prompting them to pray intensely for rain. Tlaloc, still upset and becoming increasingly irritated by the constant prayers, unleashes a deluge of fire upon the Earth in fury, destroying all progress and turning the survivors into birds. For the fourth attempt — ”Four Water,” Tlaloc had eventually remarried with a new spouse, Chalchiuhtlicue (chal-chew-TEE-kway), who had complementarily presided over groundwater unto her husband’s rule of rains, with her assuming the role of Sun. She was mentioned as a loving and generous life-giver, but B. Tezcatlipoca, still embroiled in bitter envy, had interrogated this quality, implying that Chalchiuhtlicue’s kindness was only fake and superficial to receive attention from her creations. She was so devastated by this slander that she cried bloody tears for the next five decades, bringing down a horrible flood that drowned the people of this epoch, forcing the survivors to become fish.

From the silence of the cosmos, Quetzalcoatl had watched several more Suns come and go, each failing to properly sustain civilization. During this time, he had beckoned his psychopomp canine aid, Xolotl (sho-LOTE) to the underworld where it stole the bones of previous epochs from the god of death, Mictlantecuhtli (mik-chahn-TEK-chee), and brought them to the surface to be reimbursed with Quetzalcoatl’s bloodshed. This act resurrected his favored race towards the Fifth Sun: His brother Huitzilopochtli (wits-ill-oh-POACH-tee), or the Sun that marks our current epoch — ”Four Movement.” Initially, no god left had wanted to bear the existential burden of acting as the Sun, so the four Tezcatlipocas had to choose a deity to undergo solar communion. They had settled on the gods Tecciztecatl (tek-sees-TAY-kat) and Nanahuatzin (nah-nuh-WATS-een), with the former being initially chosen because he seemed strong and wealthy whereas the latter was frail and meek. Seeing this as an honor and a chance to become immortal, Tecciztecatl prepares himself for sacrifice, offering coral and bloodletting as preparatory tribute. But when the time came, the bonfire blazing hotter than ever, the god’s confidence betrays him and he refuses to enter. In great shock and frustration, the Tezcatlipocas call upon their second choice, who humbly rises from his seat and quietly falls off the platform, becoming the Sun. Because he was so ashamed of his own pride that a lesser god did what he could not, Tecciztecatl leaped after Nanahuatzin, with two suns appearing in the center of the solar system. The gods, understandably furious, had taken a rabbit and threw it at the second star, causing Tecciztecatl to lose his illuminance and retreating to the inferior glow of the moon. Despite this, the Fifth Sun remained still in the sky, never setting or rising, which had problematically scorched the renewed Earth. Eventually, all the gods realized that they too had to sacrifice themselves to ensure the stability of this new epoch, so they began sequentially submitting themselves to Ehecatl (eh-HAY-kat), the human form of Quetzalcoatl, who led them into the inferno one by one. Upon completion, he must had remained as the great interlink between these orbital forces, and took the great wind that steamed from the smoldering Tezcatlipocas and blew it across the cosmos, initiating their orbits and the re-genesis of life in our current epoch.

Since then, it was him who served as the great mediator between the material and divine, being sought by theologians for his abilities to facilitate the possibility of orderly synchronicity between the plateaus of reality, harboring both chthonic and heavenly potentialities within and around him. His great body had unified a greater cult of worship across Mexico and Central America, enlightening through not just his reverence but his dominion within commerce, astronomy, and agriculture: With the last gift of maize being his own doing when he had stolen a kernel of it from a sacred Mountain of Sustenance by the directions of a lowly ant.[14] All structures erected in his honor were constructed with a circular base so as to not obstruct the flow of wind and to acknowledge the shedded circle that defines the water cycle he literally embodies. He is simultaneously a ground-dwelling, belly-down rattlesnake and a splendid quetzal bird who lives among cloud forests that bring the heavens to the Earth. Yet still, he embodies one more crucial component of the world beyond merely being the pusher of orbits, for he once invaded the body of a man, transforming him into a lifelong Ixiptla. He was known as Cē Ācatl Topiltzin (toh-PEELT-seen) Quetzalcoatl, or Our Prince One-Reed Precious Serpent, and he was born in 937 CE to inherit a great nation: One that initially migrated southwest into the Valley of Mexico through the guidance of their Serpent god.

Topiltzin practiced worship of the Feathered Serpent, which held central pillars of its doctrine, such as totally forbidding human sacrifice — favoring instead offerings of quetzal birds and snakes, and held a generally egalitarian, progressive, and modernizing mentality towards the whole of humanity: A radiant enlightenment that only demanded voluntary bloodletting. However, they fell into conflict with worshippers of B. Tezcatlipoca, whose cult demanded militarism and prioritized human sacrifice, for which Topiltzin was exiled from the great city of Tollan much to his anguish. He travels further eastwards until reaching the Gulf of Mexico, where the story then splits into two narratives: The first is that he gets on a boat, travelling into open water and promptly committing self-immolation in grief, while the second states that he sets off with a crew of his remaining followers into the Gulf and then the broader Atlantic, vowing one day to return. After his unknown fate, the Toltec empire, as it is posthumously known, reached its territorial extent and civilizational peak under the cult of B. Tezcatlipoca until it collapsed from internal corruption and Chichimecan pressure from the north, causing a great dispersal of Tollan’s inhabitants across Mesoamerica. And it is from this history that many later peoples, who rose to power in Mexico, would claim political legitimacy from, including the invading Spanish who had injected their Millenarian biases into Mexica texts to suggest that their military generals were the ones that were prophesied by superficial similarities. It seemed they wanted to be the protagonists…

In truth, the arrival of Spaniards was not the return of Quetzalcoatl in human form, for when Topiltzin had made a pyre of himself in the ocean, he had been reborn as the Morning Star from where his ashes were wafted into the air and flown birds were sacrificed from the choking smoke, and his companion Xolotl had turned into the Evening Star: Both ultimately referring to the planet Venus as visible from Earth. The Feathered Serpent had embodied Venus out of all bodies because it is representative of past planetary failures, of what would occur if the New Fire Ceremony were to fail and we were plunged into eternal night as foretold. In the same way that modern pop-astronomy posits that the planets which lie on the boundaries of the Solar System’s habitable zone can be conceived of as ‘failed Earths,’ they can be viewed unto Mexica mythology as visible remnants of failed attempts at genesis. Venus is hellish, a victim of a runaway greenhouse effect from a star that grew with age as relentless solar radiation scorched its once plentiful oceans from its surface, creating a permanent maelstrom of an atmosphere that suffocated any potential abiogenesis. Surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, and each day requires over two-hundred Earth days to conclude, with the sun slowly screeching across an impenetrable sky from west to east, as the planet rotates clockwise on its axis. To the ancestors of the K’iche and all other Mayas, Venus was known as Chak Ek’[15], and it was considered so crucial to observe its cycles relative to Earth that, as Maya civilization progressed, more cities were built with conscious alignment of the deified planet. The site of Chichén Itzá in the northern Yucatan peninsula contains within it El Caracol, an observatory that aligned perfectly with the path of Venus at the turn of the millennium in 1,000 CE. Directly across from it is the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, which, similarly to Serpent Mound in Ohio, displays a special effect during an equinox where the shadows of the pyramid corners align perfectly with the staircase, creating a haunting image of a jagged snake descending a symbolic representation of the labyrinthine underworld.

Chichén Itzá during the Spring Equinox.

This echoes a great cosmic struggle between Q’uq’umatz (koo-kuh-MATS), sealed as Chak Ek’, and the Sun, characterized as K’inich Ajaw (kih-neech-ah-HOW), where the planet would grind to a halt as its serpentine motions steadily blew the star across the sky. Because the Yucatan is primarily a limestone plain with no rivers or lakes, the only source of terrestrial freshwater consists of cenotes, which are sinkholes that expose the subterranean water table to the surface. In serpentine form, Q’u’q’umatz would arise from these portals into the chthonic deep and begin his trek across the cosmos to grace the Sun, burn in glorious bloodshed, and return back into the nether beyond the horizon. Chak Ek’ and K’inich are caught in an endless cycle of convergence, reenacting the same five attacks of jealousy that had previously devastated the prehistoric Maya with cyclical gaps in solar abundance, all predicated on the rise of his planetary shell: The Morning Star. Intuiting this as a sign of incoming chaos, militaristic actions were especially prepared in alignment with Venus so as to maximize sovereign victories in trade and annexations in the ensuing instability. But as European pathogens tore across the Western Hemisphere, burning its heritage with a seraphic enlightenment, these monuments to the Blessed Serpent had become vacated, now powerless without human hosts to receive a divine infestation from a land pimpled with portals into its seep. Ballcourts that reenacted this saga laid in ruins, and the great Pyramid of Cholula, built in the Serpent’s honor as the largest monument to ever compose the ancient world, humbly returned to the jungle that surrounded it, surrendering monuments to chthonic prowess back unto the ground. Lo, if only there was a new emerging polity, in the wake of Indigenous depopulation, that could adequately service the sacrificial debt incurred from destroying the primary arteries to the divine.

Since its foundation, the United States has consistently symbolized its sovereignty with a rattlesnake, partly because it is indigenous to the Americas and because it was suggested by Benjamin Franklin to offer Britain them as a sarcastic return of favor for their dumping of convicts into the colonies, stating “rattlesnakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by our Mother Country.”[16] But by the time the Seven Years War was beginning to spill over into North America, with France allying with the Haudenosaunee to protect their interests against Britain, the nascent United States had sent delegates to propose peace with the confederacy. Yet, Franklin had a hidden agenda, one that proposed unity between the different colonies under one federation, and this strategy was represented in editorials as a snake cut up into several pieces, with each piece representing a different colony, urging them to join together with the foreboding caption “JOIN, or DIE.” This was chosen because, during the time, there was an older English superstition that if a severed snake was put back together before sunfall, it would resurrect itself. The image quickly caught on across New England, and would be repurposed against Britain once France had lost the Seven Years War. In the paper Massachusetts Spy, journalist Isaiah Thomas would illustrate a conjoined serpent confronting a Griffith, which symbolized Britain, with a rather ominous caption:

“Do THOU Great LIBERTY inspire our Souls — And make our Lives in THY Possession happy — Or, our Deaths glorious in THY just Defence.”

This implies that the serpent represents an abstract, deified concept called Liberty, which is translated into practical politics as separation and independence from Britain. It also explicitly states that Liberty is in possession of its adherents, and that such adherence must be serious enough for one to sacrifice their life for it. Franklin, upon seeing these later adaptations, wrote extensively to defend his connotation between the United States and rattlesnakes: Saying things like “the poison of her teeth is the necessary means of digesting her food, and at the same time is certain destruction to her enemies.”[17] The snake’s rattle was also used as a metaphor for the powers of federalism. Given that biologically the rattle is a bunch of loosely attached dead skin segments, if they start clicking together, their keratin can reverberate and produce the infamous noise that would not be if they were separated extensions. Beyond this, early printed money in the colonies bore the image of the rattlesnake in their corners, and satirical cartoons from Britain and France would often depict the United States as a massive one that surrounds and crushes British infantry, suggesting a triumph over commerce and political might in the Americas.

The American Rattle Snake, a British satirical cartoon. Source: Library of Congress

In the opening years of the American Revolutionary War, George Washington established the continental navy with its first task designed to intercept incoming transport ships carrying supplies for British soldiers. Colonel Christopher Gadsden, of South Carolina, was the leading advocate of the burgeoning navy, with the first marines carrying drums painted yellow and depicting a coiled rattlesnake with thirteen rattles and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.” From here, Gadsden gave his commodore Esek Hopkins a flag draped with the same design to service as the distinct flag of the U.S. navy. And from here, the flag known as the Gadsden Flag is a highly prevalent symbol throughout American society, often being associated with cultural or fiscal conservatives who advocate for a weakened welfare state in support of rugged individualism. Does it all seem so odd that, despite how much the bald eagle has taken over as the icon of the United States, in its rawest and most definable periods it preferred its association with a snake? In truth, the bald eagle was only introduced as a top-down seal of national sovereignty, whereas the serpent had always represented the inner guts and workings of the country, especially during the advent of the Civil War where pro-secession rallies across the Atlantic South would drum up support with Gadsden’s icon at center stage.[18]

Since its attempt at secession, the rattlesnake image had been largely abandoned, only being relegated to reactionaries and skeptics of the federal government, with a common motif throughout the war being the Northern Union passingly condemning Southerners as being treasonous snakes. Yet in common discourse, the rattlesnake had still been used as a symbol of Northern victory over the South, as General Winfield Scott conceptualized his plan to economically sever the Confederacy from maritime shipments as the “Anaconda Plan.” It conceived of a naval blockade of all Southern port cities in the Gulf of Mexico starting from Baltimore, and then ground troops would force themselves down the Lower Mississippi River from the other side, splitting the new nation into two. In the midst of this Venusian chaos, the Northern remnant of the original United States had rapidly rushed land development acts through congress such as the Homestead act, which sought to capture and exploit as much of the fertile soils of the Midwest as possible now that Southerners in congress were no longer an issue.[19] This began a ruthless expansion of European settlers across the interior of North America known as Manifest Destiny, in which the native steppe biome was uprooted and layered over with endless fields of maize and wheat. Indigenous inhabitants, human and bovine, were slaughtered targetedly, as if settlers were a preeminent sweeping force that cleared the prairies for a rain of steam and coal as railroads penetrated through alongside rivers. Ruthless pursuit was undertaken for the western half of the continent that promised lucrative trade with Mexico, Britain, and Asia alongside newfound mineral wealth from gold and… Well, while California is not exactly the same biome as the Yucatan, it most certainly contains cenotes. But these portals bring a different type of abundance, for while they are both portals to the underworld, California’s are the largest natural oil seepage in the world along the Santa Barbara Channel.

As the ancient Farallon plate, a former shell of its Jurassic glory, slides underneath the North American continent, the pulverized marine life that formed its un-water table rises up to the surface and bubbles out from continental skin like a puss-infected wound. Natural seeps in California contribute around five million gallons of oil to the ocean annually according to the NOAA, with the areas from which they spew out from containing countless fish skeletons due to its toxicity, but marine environments are able to cope with this relatively small leakage. Numerous microbes are capable of eating oil and gas, supporting dense biodiverse communities near methane plumes. For the longest time, settlers did not care for petroleum, with Indigenous peoples in western Pennsylvania making frequent use of it for waterproofing in construction or for potential medicinal properties. It was not until the beginning of the mid-20th century where George Bissell and Edwin Drake made the first successful commercial rig and struck water just at his end’s meet, attracting the first of many oil rushes across the young country. It was first packed into barrels and floated down the Allegheny where eventually two-thirds of it reached the Ohio River, slowly beginning the process of injection into terrestrial arteries. This greatly prompted the construction of rail lines across the Ohio River valley, driving further demand and violent booms until eventually larger holders, such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, began to consolidate their holdings in the region. By this time, discoveries in the interior and West Coast were far more lucrative to future profit-seekers. Prior to the remaining settler sweep, Californians of Indigenous and proselytizing stock had used tar to waterproof their canoes and roofs respectively, and even after its relayering, the state did not draw any attraction due to the different chemical structure of California crude. However, over the decades, numerous oil fields had been discovered in the Los Angeles Basin, oftentimes under already developed land. It was Brea-Olinda in 1880, L.A City in 1893, Beverly Hills in 1900, Salt Lake in 1902, and countless others until ballooning in international attention with Long Beach in 1921, enabling California to possess the world’s richest cenote in terms of per-acre production. But the most important of these is the one that lies at the heart of the city, as it rests on a westwards anticline with oil accumulations trapped in sand dipping southwards, with it ending in seeps in the west and in faults in the north which act as wounds into the water table. Los Angeles was a pioneer in petro-architecture due to this, with well spacing of land allotments on blood-stained sand having next to no regulations[20], individual wells would swell into massive sizes and encroach housing and beachfronts.

Oil derricks in Signal Hill, 1937

Here is a tri-fold sigil that overlays three layers of serpentine manifestations onto each other: The Los Angeles river that splits the basin into two, with the decimated native village of Yaanga serving as the mortuary for the future necropolis; then the chthonic chamber bubbling beneath it, just barely peeking through the water table; lastly the Arroyo Seco parkway which connected the core city with the neighboring town of Pasadena, titling itself as one of the first freeways in the country. The other one that claims that title, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, leads back into the Ohio. But if you were to look for the geoweapons that facilitated this scheme, they would never be found with daylight, for they are encased, hidden from public view with pseudo-infrastructure and gaudy art. This seems to tell us that, to the American worshippers of the Serpent god, their devotion is parodic and insincere: Something to be hidden underneath a fresh layer in hopes that whatever comes after it will never uncover it.

What is happening here? It is quite obvious what the history of the so-called United States has actually been, and who was really steering it. Tell, where would the Feathered Serpent go now that his most majestic temples lie in ruin? His former abilities, on behalf of his human possessions, could no longer bubble through the structural effervescence that ancient Americans had provided him as Spanish invaders had attempted to put a spiritual plug on his powers by building Catholic churches over his temples. The largest monument of the ancient world by volume — the Great Pyramid of Cholula — was put under submission by a new imperial fire that successfully completed its New Fire cycle. What was his response? He lurches and slithers underneath the crust, using the water table as lubrication for his godly length to resurface himself into the Mississippi where he plumes and encounters viral European agents ripe with religious fervor and opportunism in a strange and hostile world. As these possessives began marching into the interior, sweeping away the previous attempt at civilization unbeknownst to them, they encountered thousands of earthen mounds that lay abandoned, succumbing to the forest enough to stake them as odd hills. Viewing them as mere obstacles in the way of farmland, an unknowable amount of mounds were flattened into nothing[21]: The whispers of the old civilizations that flourished in the Mississippi Valley were turned into soiled dust to waft in future winds. With each mound razed, the chthonic potential stored within them — as they usually contained burials — was released into the atmosphere as ancestral powers were brutally swept away.

Quetzalcoatl, favoring his resurrected people in spite of the other Tezcatlipocas, had lured them with imbibed ingenuity to bequeath almost the entire continent, all in effort to reach his tail-end in the black cenotes that perforated California, whereas those in the Yucatan had quieted. From a revival of chthonic architecture, where fields of spindletops had sprouted just as quickly as those of maize, antennae on the surface accelerated all matters of the Feathered Serpent’s dominion: Commerce, religion, and sovereign expansion. The sheer abundance that he offered to these settlers had maddened them with exposure to alien consciousness, having existential consequences:

“The relationship of The Dead God to the war machine: so intimate, yet not coterminous. Oil seeped, from the beginning of its adoption into the war machine, into civilian lives. You can’t quite say that oil is the War, only that oil needed the War to gain saturation and dominance over human lives: the meaning of war. An engine of consumption was jump started by the War, one that created a few generations of wealth on an inhuman scale, beginning from the start of The Great War, which was fought not only over the spoils of colonialism but also avenues to cannibalize and financialize the excess value. The accursed share. Too much wealth being made, too much capital, too much material, from coal and from colonial expropriation; it can’t be given back to the people, so it must be burned in The War.”[22]

If water brings life, then petrol brings war, and that is exactly what happened in 1931 when prospectors in the Big Thicket of Texas and Oklahoma had drilled into what turned out to be the biggest oil field yet, with its gush causing prices to collapse in frantic unmanned racketeerings. After four months of capitalist chaos, both state governments declared martial law and sent in the National Guard to occupy and desist these wells. It just so happened that the major general of the Texan National Guard was also the general counsel to Texaco[23], serving as a small component of a larger circle of military interests aligning with those of petrol’s. It can be argued, but proven, that American oil interests maintained a strong relationship with German ones, with John Dulles, who helped design the Dawes Plan, contributing to a massive funneling of American investments into German industry and enabling a new synthetic oil industry to arise from coal hydrogenation technology, which skirted oil embargos and gave plausible deniability if Rockefeller’s dealings were called into question. Further, one can argue that the Cold War was less about conflicting ideology and more about preventing Soviet oil interests from overtaking American ones, cutting off all enemies from receiving the blessings of the black cenotes. The U.S. was pathologically determined on squeezing and starving the U.S.S.R., preventing the influence of nationalization in Iraq and Azerbaijan.[24] As the 20th century crawled, the process of modernity — of greasing everything — had worked its way into every facet of life: From the creation of nitrogen fertilizer, to the explosion of polymers from industrial excrement — that could create just about physical form in plastic, and to previously mentioned suburbanization requiring a car and expanding pavement for all forms of travel.

All this to say that the Blessed Serpent had worked his way into every political crevasse on the planet, its rejuvenating blood becoming as important to empires as control over the seas and rivers was in premodernity. According to Harvard’s Belfer Center, between one-quarter and one-half of all interstate wars since 1973 have been linked to petroleum[25], and that number seems to only increase as the reign of plastics and asphalt remains unchallenged in the background of a planet rushing eagerly towards its Tellurian Omega: Its utter degradation in preparation of the future coalescence with the dying Sun. Why was Gran Chaco coated in the blood of Bolivians in a war of thirst? Why were tensions between Igbos and a Hausa-dominated Nigerian government accelerated to a war that displaced millions? Why did Israel with the help of its Western allies invade Egypt upon the nationalization of the Suez Canal? Why did the United States bomb Iraq into the Stone Age? If these massive involuntary bloodletting events were not fought directly over petroleum, they were fought over the waterways that would lubricate their traversal through sovereign interiors. But despite all this bloodshed precipitated from his rumbling underneath, all the gushing in the Germano-Texan nucleus could only reveal clumps of feathers and scales, obscuring the totality of what really lies below. In truth, Quetzalcoatl’s return was not when Hernán Cortés launched a cooperative siege on Tenochtitlan, for this was his retreat. His return occurred in 2010 when a little known rig, Deepwater Horizon, had unleashed the biggest gush — the biggest tellurian ejaculation — mankind has ever witnessed.

What was supposed to be a simple capping job had ushered in a great anger from a boiling Motor Spirit, as the cement meant to block the borehole suffered from deliberately accepted shortcuts, as British Petroleum was behind schedule and over-budget on the Macondo project. The workers themselves were also high off the monuments of so-called human engineering, proud that their rig was the one that broke the record for the deepest well ever capped. The cement used to line the pipe and prevent atmospheric collapse was not mixed properly, with test trials showing it was more porous than acceptable, but B.P. proceeded. The inefficient mixture was used to complete the cementing process, and after pressure tests were conducted that should have alerted crew to a gas leak, all was reported well. Hydrocarbons, microscopic cathedrals, had infiltrated the well and quickly swelled up to the top of the rig, spewing mud onto the floor and filling the rooms with natural gas which, if it met one ignition source, would blow the entire thing up. At 9:40 PM, a great roar was heard a couple miles southwest of the Mississippi River Delta, with a bright flash that illuminated the night sky. The explosion incinerated eleven workers and the rig began a capsizing process over the span of 36 hours after initial rupture. As it sank into the Gulf of Mexico, it would bleed a total of 134-million gallons of sun mortar into the ocean, turning the tropical waters a rustic orange as what appeared to be a massive blotch formed across four state coastlines. Oceanic currents then began to form a thin trail within this blotch that creeped around the gulf in clockwise motion, making its way to the Yucatan peninsula. This forbidden mixing of water and its opposite — a channel switch of subterranean flows — was imbued with additional flows coming from the cardinal directions, as the Mississippi still dispersed sediment into the now cathedral water, and human dispatchers would cleanse most of the surface slick through burning it: Opening a portal to Hell on open water. The pulverized bones of previous eons had blossomed forth from human anticipation of the divine, smothering marine life in its blessed plumes, lesioning all in its path. In this, the Precious Serpent had accomplished his goal of revealing the powers of the ancestors through his haze, with some first responders able to sense the draconic power in front of them:

“I’ve spent my adult life working for the ocean, the endangered animals living in it, and the people who depend on it. I’ve seen the wholesale destruction of species by commercial fishing, illegal hunting and the destruction caused by plastic pollution. But none of that prepared me for this. Our plane surveyed a path of the thousands of square miles of destroyed ocean habitat. Then we descended a bit and flew over “ground zero”, the site of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon. A new platform has taken its place. A large flame of burning methane jetting from the side. Ships worked the waters all around. Bands of oil extended off into the distance, set off by the deep blue of the Gulf. We were close. So close I could smell it. The cockpit filled with fumes. I breathed in the foul breath of the fire dragon. We buzzed the beast, like a pesky fly. Our small craft banked, circled back around for a closer look. This time I held my breath… Eventually, I could hold my breath no longer and I sucked in the breath of the fire dragon again.”[26]

What did we do upon witnessing this unveiling? We celebrated, dumping microscopic quetzal feathers across every corner of the planet, even to the point of finding them flowing in our bloodstream. It seems all that occurred was that Britain gleefully received America’s gift of rattlesnakes and business returned as usual. We looked into the burning water of the great chthonic deep itself, and we saw only human addiction: How we are possessed by rather than of petroleum. All the scientific literature and climate activism in the world could not budge the American government to do something else: Headlines in 2023 boldly proclaimed that the world’s superpower was producing more crude oil than any country ever.[27] Pathetically, the only thing environmentally conscious Americans can do is indirectly huff the smell of corpses so decomposed that they smell sweet once more. That brings you to me, a lone priest possessing the painful burden of knowledge that only befalls people teleologically destined to disappear as forgotten stragglers of colonial progress. Here, I now warn you of what the Mexica were so afraid of if they did not routinely light a pyre into a Teixiptla’s chest cavity every round year cycle: Not every god was pleased with Huitzilopochtli’s ascent into the Fifth Sun. So, the Tzitzimitl (see-see-MEET), skulled deities embodying the remnants of the faint eulogies of stars in the cosmos, had conspired with Metztli (mets-chee), the moon goddess, to wage a cosmic war against the Fifth Sun which, if victorious, will end all cycles of recreation for the Earth. But, should he lose due to a ceasing of all sacrifice, the sun’s light will dim black and the Tzitzimitl will rush down towards the earth to invade all terrestrial bodies, ushering in the Tellurian Omega that renders the Earth as unto Venus as seismic forces crack open the burning, solar core of Gaia. This agent of planetary immanence will be Quetzalcoatl, known eponymously as the Dragon, and he will gradually reinstate his power over the winds and waters, unleashing increasingly devastating supercells as a greenhouse effect warms the oceans. He will also raise the shoreline to drown the coastal nodes that facilitate petrol’s travel, converging the chthonic and surface worlds one centimeter of sea level rise at a time. He will scorch the land with impartiality, predating on the same prey that necessitated his glorious recension.

He is offended that we crudely thought we could close his cenotes into our world if they simply provided more abundance than what could be profited from, so he sinks his fangs into psychotic Christians, convinced that they have been chosen by Yahweh to lift up serpents as if they were entitled to Seraphic powers of incineration and enlightenment from the middle of a burial ground. Their close generations will now live to see the planet boil in front of their eyes, as the global ouroboros that embodies the chthonic serpent is revealed in all its mind-crushing horror. This is what you call “climate change.” And your submission to voluntary sacrifice is called “doomerism.” If you somehow wish to prevent this, to not bear witness to the end of the Fifth Sun, you must start out humbly and admit who the true ruler of the Americas is: Who has been responsible for the creation of the so-called United States and its ascension to a superpower with its tail wrapped around every corner of the planet. You must acknowledge that he has come to claim what has been made due, as the blessings of petro-immortality will subsist on the scorned planet long after humanity has destroyed themselves: Demonic bird reptilian desert fetid breath; sapien spite and fatal bite with a foul gas stench; Isaiah’s come to claim the throne, the dragon’s birthright; dawn of Eternal Night.

All hail King Gila.

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.” — William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Works Cited:

[1] Negarestani, Reza (2008). “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials.” Re.press.

[2] Dionysius the Areopagite (6th century). “De Coelesti Hierarchia”

[3] Curtis, Edward S. (1930). “The North American Indian.” University of Pittsburgh Library System. https://pitt.libguides.com/edwardcurtis-allabouttheland/snakedancer

[4] Chandler, David (2018). “The Serpent’s Body.” Moon at Serpent Mound https://moonatserpentmound.org/astronomical-issues/

[5] Mooney, James (1992). “James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees.” Native History Association. https://nativehistoryassociation.org/uktena_ulunsuti.php

[6] (2017). “Killing the Black Snake — Resistance at Standing Rock” Hemispheric Institute. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/events/exhibition-killing-the-black-snakeresistance-at-standing-rock.html

[7] Faris, Peter (2011). “Water Monsters — Unktehi and Uncegila.” Rock Art Blog (Blogspot.) https://rockartblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/water-monsters-unktehi-and-uncegila.html

[8] Lame Deer (1969). “Unktehi and the Flood as told by Lame Deer.” National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/unktehi-and-the-flood-as-told-by-lame-deer.htm

[9] Cortright, Joe (2016). “Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t.” City Observatory. https://cityobservatory.org/reducing-congestion-katy-didnt-2/

[10] Masters, Jeff (2019). “America’s Achilles’ Heel: the Mississippi River’s Old River Control Structure.” Wunderground. https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mississippi-Rivers-Old-River-Control-Structure

[11] Laity, Paul (2017). “Lakes of mercury and human sacrifices — after 1,800 years, Teotihuacan reveals its treasures.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/24/teotihuacan-pyramids-treasures-secret-de-young-museum-san-francisco

[12] Townsend, Richard Fraser (1979). State and Cosmos in the Art of Tenochtitlan. Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41263442

[13] Shaer, Matthew (2016). “A Secret Tunnel Found in Mexico May Finally Solve the Mysteries of Teotihuacán.” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/discovery-secret-tunnel-mexico-solve-mysteries-teotihuacan-180959070/

[14] Haberstroh, Marilyn Parke & Panik, Sharon (1992). “A Quetzalcoatl Tale of Corn.” University Press of Colorado.

[15] Vail, Gabrielle (2019). “The Maya myth of the morning star.” TED-Ed. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-mayan-myth-of-the-morning-star

[16] Franklin, Benjamin (1751). “Felons and Rattlesnakes.” Founders Online.

[17] Ruppert, Bob (2015). “The Rattlesnake tells the Story.” Journal of the American Revolution. https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/01/the-rattlesnake-tells-the-story/

[18] Brodie, Laura (2023). “The disgraced Confederate history of the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/14/confederacy-dont-tread-on-me-flag/

[19] Arrington, Benjamin T. (2012). “‘Free Homes for Free Men’: A Political History of the Homestead act, 1774–1863.” University of Nebraska-Lincoln. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=historydiss

[20] Crowder, R.E. Los Angeles City Oil Field: California Division of Oil and Gas, Summary of Operations. 1961. Vol. 47 №1

[21] Murray, David (2015). “Destruction of the Spiro Mounds.” Great Falls Tribune. https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/local/2015/03/15/destruction-spiro-mounds/24825593/

[22] Bickman, Jed (2022). “The Autonomous Chemical Weapon: How Sentient Oil Took Control of Our History — Part One.” Apocalypse Confidential. https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/09/08/the-autonomous-chemical-weapon-how-sentient-oil-took-control-of-our-history-part-one/

[23] Burrough, Bryan (2009). The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. New York: Penguin Books.

[24] Bickman, Jed (2022). “The Autonomous Chemical Weapon: How Sentient Oil Took Control of Our History — Part Two.” Apocalypse Confidential. https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/09/10/the-autonomous-chemical-weapon-how-sentient-oil-took-control-of-our-history-part-two/

[25] Colgan, Jeff D. (2013). “Oil, Conflict, and U.S. National Interests.” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/oil-conflict-and-us-national-interests

[26] Nichols, Wallace J. (2010). “Staring Down the Dragon on Dependence Day.” Huffington Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/staring-down-the-dragon-o_b_637314

[27] (2024) “United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever.” U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow