The Church of the Dead God

Holy Trinity of the Dead God: Coal, Oil, and Methane

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March 4, 2022, Edited 3/13/2023

The Trinity of the Dead God: Coal, Oil, and Methane.

The [fictional] Church of the Dead God holds this trinity of avatars sacred. Separate beings, with separate agendas, that are all yet avatars of one thing, Fuel. Avatara, Sanskrit meaning “to descend”, naming the direction, or vector, of a god. Katabasis, chthonic descent, the process by which energy, in the form of the accumulated organic matter of the Carboniferous Period descends into the earth in order to putrefy in an oxygen-free environment into liquid energy stored in carbon bonds. The inverse of apotheosis. That this god started as material and descended into the depths makes it more powerful than a purely spiritual god, because all material possesses something that gods do not: the ability to exert direct influence over other objects.

We acknowledge that these objects, Coal/Oil/Methane, have tremendous force within their substance. A force entirely unlike the exertions of animals and plants — which are much more easily comprehensible — but very real, and able to replace and expand the exertions of animals.

The Dead God can be called such at least within a polytheistic context that defines godhood as a tremendously super-human ability to control societies, to shape subjective existence. The Dead God is an actant in the realm of politics, but its power encompasses politics by shaping the surface of the earth through a parasitic relationship to humans called industrialization. One only has to imagine the reaction a pre-industrial person would have to the technologies of today: our powers of mobility, of communication, of consumption are Godlike. The great acceleration is quite recent. This dead god is perhaps king among other such gods — nitrogen and phosphorous leap to mind, but any mined resource is in its pantheon. But this dead god has a massive capability to make its will a reality, and to make us subjects of that will, both as subjects in an industrial society, and as animals living through a time of climate catastrophe.

Which is the very point, the very purpose, of the Church of the Dead God: to recreate the climate of the Carboniferous Period, when it was last alive, which lasted 60 million years, or ten times longer than the human species has been on the earth. During this time in earth’s history, three million years after the earth formed, average global temperatures were 68 degrees F (it’s 58 degrees now), and sea levels 120 meters higher than current sea levels. Not all humans will be killed by this, not even all humans will be hurt by it: a global elite will continue to profit off of it, and will bring the newly available oil and gas reserves in the arctic to market. And this elite, members of the Church of the Dead God, don’t care how many people it will kill.

This is where the Church of the Dead God becomes fanatically monotheistic as it politically welds together American Christian theocracy and Sunni Islamism. For this, you need to read Cyclonopedia.

If we can say The Dead God instead of Fossil Fuels, essays about climate change will be much more fun both to write and to read, and such shifts have the potential to wrest some of the discourse away from the scientists. Liberal rationality has failed us thus far to check the power of the dead god.

Druj

Reprinted from within the APOCON essay:

In the Zoroastrian Vendidad, Druj is “The greatest polluter of Ahura Mazda’s world.” Ahura Mazda is the creator, so his world is our world. Druj is The Dead Mother of All Contagions (genderless). Druj is the decay that takes over a corpse (nasu) upon death, the catalyst for its decomposition, the inevitable returning underground. It would not be hard to imagine that Druj has even more power beneath, in the layers of putrefaction buried for eons, in the product of the long term process of anaerobic metabolism; it is not such a leap from believing in the scientific reality of organic metabolism to see that oil could be the distilled essence of Druj, an energetic being with much more potential actancy than the chemically inert rock it is buried among. Druj has utterly remade the human experience from what it was before industrialization—indeed it has remade humanity itself into lords of the earth, destroyers of nature itself. Lifted us from animalism—from living like animals, in the colonizer’s tongue. And in the process, added energy and warmth to the atmosphere, creating this world of constant cataclysm, of constant cataclysmic opportunity (markets).