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THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
VEGETABLE GARDENING
The History of Sugar
To be zero is to be both nothing and everything, a unified totality. From this state, creation occurs via differentiation of original binary - the formless void is divided - fire brings light and dark, annihilating the grey. What remains is one and zero, and with these two, motion, as boundaries between shift, prompting all extrapolations - the ten thousand things.
In Genesis 1:11, we have the origin of the vegetable, after a duality has been created. Evola identifies the duality pre-existing the vegetable, as that of Saturn and Sun - the two poles of the alchemical planets. The black Earth and the golden Heaven. God creates grasses to spring upwards from below.
From God’s urging, life is divinely created in the saturnine earth, where it reaches upwards, towards the sun. It’s from this that numbers two through six of the planets come in, as life journeys back upwards, towards the highest degree, towards divinity.
Through this body solar light descends as mineral material ascends. The vegetable middle body grows upwards as it consumes both, synthesizing the two sources into the middle substance - sugar - the body of the plant. The plant, as it lives, then both ascends and descends, the living, saccharine body forming the ladder between Heaven and Earth, higher animal and lower detritivore - Life.
The bridge between the saturnine and the solar via sugar is then given as man’s dominion by God. Adam named the plants of the world while in Eden and after being cast out into the wilderness was forced to live a life of toil, where the vegetable no longer sprung up as a garden by divine inspiration, but as a product of labor, as agriculture.
We see an alternate version of this mythic template in Gilgamesh, where the wild man must be domesticated from his life of consumption, as a woodsman, via a prostitute, into a man of civilization. For Enkidu, his bounty in the wilderness was the same as Adam’s in Eden, and the story of his exile, as a one-way door brought about by sin, is told from a different angle.
It’s important that in both stories, it was sex that caused the fracture of mankind from the forest. Enkidu is civilized by the seductions of a prostitute while Adam and Eve are cast out for their succumbing to temptation. This exile can be seen in this light not as a loss, but also as a gain, as mankind has the torch passed downwards of creation - made in God’s image, mankind is then set forth onto the wilderness, where their role against the chaos of the world is that of God against the abyss of the waters.
Mankind’s toil is then is a commandment to recreate the same sparks of creation, where God implanted life into the world, so too, must man develop agriculture, and bring forth the same kingdom of life by the divine spark mankind is capable of summoning.
The vegetable kingdom then underwent a process where mankind’s ends shaped it anew. A diagram that appears countless times, of the development of various crops over thousands of years - from the barely edible seeds atop wild grasses and cereals, to the plump bounty we see in crops today.
What mankind did, in regards to their biology, was shape their internal sugar production to the higher end of feeding man, breeding plants to select against the indigestible sugars and select towards the digestible, thinner, weaker stalks, larger and more plentiful grains.
This can be seen most dramatically in fruits, where the seed-bearing attachment at the end of the plant’s life, destined to be consumed by an animal or fall off on its own weight, is selected for at the expense of all else. The banana went from a relatively small pod filled with rather large black seeds to the plump yellow crescent filled with seeds almost impossible to see.
In replanting too, beyond the mere breeding of the plant, the very reproduction and ecosystem is controlled. The farm must be maintained through a variety of unnatural impositions upon the plant, from planting to harvest, eliminating pests, weeds to ensure monoculture, reproducing the organism through artificial seeding of the earth, petroleum-derived fertilizers to create a hypersoil, even up to the point of total efficiency as in the exploding industry of urban gardening, using machines to create a hyperreal version of the water cycle, mineral nutrients, sun, and atmosphere.
This obsession with sugar is what fueled the technologies of politics - the economic apparatus’ required to bring these transformations about developed in a double helix with the shaping of the organisms.
From the model of agriculture emerged all other extractive industries - from mining to hunting, in varying degrees of deviation from the exact middlepoint between the solar and saturnine.
And downstream, the origin of secondary, productive industries, craftsmen and artisans, which developed the extracted goods into higher ends. For sugar, this was the creation of bread and alcohol.
In these two processes, the grain was taken from the technology of creation to the technology of refinement. The alchemist’s work goes from coagula, where the energies of the world are brought to the field - the loan, the irrigation ditch, the seed, the sunlight, to solve, where the coagulated material, the harvested sugar, is processed through an extraction of vital material and a transmutation of this minority of material into the higher form of sugar - a loaf of bread, a gourd of wine.
And fittingly, as society developed, so does its technologies of processing for its fuel, sugar. Wine became raw material for aqua ardens, which reached prominence as Europe industrialized, where the political technology existed to profitably run the distillation process. Bread too, underwent a similar pattern, in another level of industrial development, where plant sugars were harvested to the end of products that now make the backbone for industrially produced food, corn syrup and its cousins.
Male Fantasies
The other half of agriculture, besides extraction itself (embodied in the mineral half of things, with other industries taking its template, mining, fishing, logging), is that of control - the alchemist’s work.
The technology of agriculture requires recourse to Enkidu, always - something both above and below the middle - the force that has its relationship to man as the Golden and the Leaden have to the middle ladder of the plant.
The same barbell graph of the planets exists, in the technology of agriculture. Civilization is raised between, society constructed as a corpus-ego between the saturnine bestial and the solar priestly. For the magician, these poles are seen as technologies, solve et coagula, the twin techniques of the manipulation of flow.
It’s flow, of various fluids through the middle-corpus, that the magician is busied with, repeated again and again in the various one-fluid theories of anthropology - Oriental Despotism and its hydrology, Primitive Accumulation and its labor-value, both of which operate from the same fundamental analysis, putting a colored tracer in one or another energetic flow through humanity’s corpus. Human blood and agricultural water are both identical for the wands of the magician, both make up the same flows from without that create the middle vegetable ladder.
The manipulation carried out then requires recourse to those things saturnine and golden, beyond the middle stratum the social corpus occupies. The technologies of power operate by harnessing the energies flowing about the middle towards the maintenance of that middle. Water, the chthonic chaos below the soil, is harnessed in the despotic oriental society to bring the soil into a higher degree, and its management becomes the key technology undergirding society. The human body is harnessed via control of its inflows and outflows, designing dwellings, food distribution, culture, in order to ensure the body can be properly sublimated towards agrarian ends. For Enkidu, the sharp end of the spear of coercion is found, where his harnessing was what in ATP is termed state capture - the nomadic animal of man harnessed into political ends, as soldiers, as law enforcement. Violence, like water, like the laborbody, becomes the tool of social shaping.
This becomes literal at the far end of the chain of production, where aqua ardens is formed, and where the elite begins to construct new forms of external force from within. Libidinal force, in addition to ascending from the Earthly as in the warmachine, descends from the Heavenly, as in liquor. After grain passes through its higher and higher stages of development, it then descends again as a poison, a form of violent solve.
Liquor’s association with sexual hedonism comes from this, as the sexual hedonism emerges from the same place liquor does. Solar hedonism is a perversion - sugar ascends up the production latter, bypasses its nourishing development as staple food and becomes a destroying development, aqua ardens. Sexuality too, controlled like sugar is, from the blunt saturnine its middle, vegetable position is in family reproduction, a directly oriented geometric impulse towards procreation, the creation of new cells within the social corpus. The perversion of sexuality is a solvent sent downwards, a perversion from the original flow-direction as being towards simple reproduction, now towards more magical ends.
To drink is to ingest a potent solvent, as to commit sodomy is to engage in the liquor of sexuality with no conduit except to itself. Sex no longer becomes the tool of cell replacement, but violence, a spiritual solve used for ends more solar and saturnine than vegetable reproduction.
It’s through this liquor-nature that sex becomes the basis for so much of spiritual action. No other force is so capable of harnessing the same potency that can be seen in violence, yet capable of being directed to total circular ends. While a firearm can only fire and harm, sodomy is entirely circular - it exists and importantly acts solely in the name of itself - allowing sex to become a self-referential theatre, the acts within pieces to be moved about, the movement of those pieces allowing the movement of flows like few other things.
Scream Like a Baby
The addict is an assemblage, a series of organs put together in relation to various inputs of their superiors. Those who live their being around consumption are obsessed with the technologies of input into themselves. Gooners detail their elaborate setups, mechanical apparatuses to stimulate the body, cave-like rooms adorned in screens, projectors, and posters, a built environment made to plug into all possible erotic inputs. Every erogenous zone, physical or mental is plugged into the machine, organs floating in a suspension tank with tubes and plugs connected to each and every one of them, careful control of inflow and outflow, the obsession that of a switchboard operator.
Like most limit-experience machines, this is wholly self inflicted. Every addict has the same pathology, rituals of control around every possible part of their addiction. The addiction becomes a totality of the world, as the addict becomes a machine purpose-built to slot into the addiction. The addict is reworked into a being that only exists in relation to the superior, the addiction.
Scorched Earth Policy had a short thread on this, where human civilization devises their civilization to be a permanent womb-state, nothing but brains in jars exposed to endless, heavenly bliss without end. An alien race comes along and sees humanity - one of countless examples to fall to this fate - and vaporizes it coldly, putting the wretch out of its misery.
The state of the addict is a reduction, the human reduced to more of a vegetable than a person. The final state of all addictions is the same, to be made less than human. In sobriety, forced to resort to a feral, animal-state, and while high, a vegetable, organs in a jar fed by superior input.
To govern, in business, in law, in any field where one wields the solve and coagula of power, the task is to manage the apparatuses of addiction, managing the systems of the garden from afar. The image of the magician in the 21st century is that of the gardener, the builder of a fenced-in system controlled from above to produce the fat fruits, cash flowing in from the pathetic wretches parodying their former humanity, jing and qi poured out like the blood of a slaughtered animal in neat little buckets for the drinking of the butcher.
The Whore of Babylon
Cardi B has made three splashes in popular culture, all of which rely on the same concept. Bodak Yellow showed her in the desert, slow motion shots amidst the whipping sands and luxury cars, an orgy of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Money showcases Cardi as an object. Encased in glass while wealthy spectators look on, covered in gold behind a bank vault, she herself is the object of exchange. WAP has Cardi and her costar speak in third person, about their bodies as units of exchange, the pussy acting less as an extension of the body and more as a transactable asset.
Oil, gold, and pussy. Three fungible goods, as good if not better than currency. Cardi stands as the Goddess of the OnlyFans era of the sex trade, speaking to a capitalistic impulse to fulfill demands via commodities - her pussy, after all, is nothing but a fungible good to fulfill a market appetite. It’s novel, perhaps in that today women are selling themselves instead of having pimps or slavers do it, but aside from that, it’s a form of commodifying the human body’s sexuality as old as street corners.
It’s on this level, that the magicians compete. Cardi sells herself as a commodity, while at the same time selling all underneath that commodity. In one body, the whole process is completed, from feral pussy to crafted experience to drip upon the addict’s organs. Such is the empowerment of a scarlet woman, an encapsulation of the entire vegetable process, raising the pussy from saturnine substratum to solar goddess. Men bow before it, drinking of the fruit in utter submission as addicts before their superior.
Yet the magician always has to remain one step behind to sustain the avatar created here, if they have any attachment to it at all. Cardi B will never have the immortality of a Hendrix or Winehouse, as Cardi B - the intellect behind the character - is too entrapped with her own life. The persona is too close to the intellect behind, and the intellect behind is too grounded and refined to self-combust the way gods must. A god built upon libido is a trajectory to sacrifice.
The body of a god is the body of their church, their ribs the cathedral, their breath the air, their gut the dogmas and scriptures. The body sustains itself by festering growth within, growth that must always kill the body. As the worshippers graft themselves upon the organs, as they mutate into cancers and infections, as the natural decay of the body is exploited in the small secret places, the corpse, the god will fall as growth only intensifies, worshippers consuming the body and blood not everlasting at all, like maggots on meat. The end of Ziggy was the end of Orpheus, torn to shreds in an orgy of passion and life, desperation intensifying as the God dies a second time.
Ziggy had to die - as a god, Ziggy was born to die. The church decayed to bones-enduring, the bones remaining as the hollow cathedral, the ruins of pilgrimage, secret, magical places to midwife Ziggy’s successors.
Behind Ziggy, we find the Duke. Station to Station and Scary Monsters & Super Creeps are both behind the curtain reflections of the magicians. Both end in defeat. Every god must be born from something real and sustained by something real. A god must be born from the magician, and must be fed as the magician nurtures the structures of its bones, worshipped with real blood, the magician soaked with the viscera of every offering, exhausted with morning sickness every day the god lives, dying a real death as the god dies.
For the Duke, the ladder is falling away as he desperately struggles to climb it. It was already too late, leaving him small and pathetic from the start. His fall was a return, as he watched the world crumble about him and leave only what was real. Without Ziggy, little of anything remained, the death of that god left its impoverished magician without a thing, despairing in the darkness leftover. Ziggy’s power was in large part due to this, the Duke’s every last ounce of strength was exhausted into Ziggy’s birth and it shows, the enduring angelic aura of that god remaining even in subtle vibration, the bones hot to the touch as the Duke journeys to the cemetery of his everything, sobbing, begging to God for answers, looking back to distant golden ages, trying without success to embrace hedonism, before finally accepting emptiness.
The cover art of Scary Monsters & Super Creeps shows the performer after Ziggy, the red hair and white face messed up, eyes shocked towards the viewer, a shadow performance behind. The man behind the curtain is pictured in full-flash frontal portrait. Hints of the Duke, a desperation, to use the tools of birthing Ziggy to connect, reaching out with the sceptres and swords behind the altar, hoping one could grab onto it, hoping the god created could be anything else. The Duke fails again, by getting everything he thought he wanted, while the man behind fell ill with the growing realization of the impossibility of his request. It’s No Game reprises with defeat, as the singer realizes it is a game, initiated.
While We Sleep, They Go To Work
The magician only comes to Earth in sorrow. To be human is to be vegetable, the middle stratum prodded between the saturnine and solar by the sword and wand, cup and and coin. Midas looked over the completion of his transmutative work in despair. The magician must be excluded, for the same reason as a gardener cannot be a plant. “Don’t get high on your own supply” isn’t advice as much as it is a tautology. Magic by its very practice excludes the practitioner from humanity, and is only developed in exclusion.
To be human is to be the vegetable, manipulated, addicted, given everything from upon high and down below. To sell liquor is to never drink with friends. To master sex is to never make love. To be human is to submit, to be governed, to work within the confines of those who stand beyond, the vegetables relating to their gardeners.
People often speak of their favorite artists in this way, “how did they come up with this?” looking upon the canvas, the radio. There is something in this, that artist did come up with via some source not accessible by the common consumer, the separation from the consumer. The artist is by virtue of the medium (from creator to reader) already in an outside position compared to the consumer within it - to say nothing of the propensity of artists to be of a magician’s disposition in the first place.
The question of magic is, choice or destiny? The majority of traditions came from exclusion not of choice, the origins of modern financial markets in jewish exclusion from the regular economics of the christian and islamic world, the magicians developing their new art in isolation. As humanity cannot be vegetable or animal, by the very means through which humanity dominates and controls those things, the magician cannot be of humanity, nor can they ever return to it. The magician is made so totally inhuman by their practice, that their practice in many cases originates from an inborn inhumanity pre-existing any choice or will.
Bibliography
Dao De Jing - Laozi
Genesis - King James Version
The Hermetic Tradition - Julius Evola
The Epic of Gilgamesh
@Scearpo
Thirst - Steven Mithen
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
Treatise on Nomadology, A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze & Guattari
Money, Bodak Yellow, WAP music videos - Cardi B
Scary Monsters & Super Creeps, Station to Station, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Aladdin Sane - David Bowie