Echthrós (first draft)

To determine the power of evil we must first attempt to define it, sense its meaning, situate its purpose. One can start by opposing two definitions, those of Nietzsche and Socrates: that which is opposed to human power and vitality; and that which is a total corruption of the Good.

For Nietzsche, evil is situated against the linear opposition of Christian Good and Evil. One might say, further, that the eternal and necessity are set against the line of good and evil, a boundary which must be defended at all costs and to the last man. In a strategic sense, this is not a gentlemanly war of static defense, but a defense-in-depth as Germans developed it in the First World War. Men do not fight in the line itself, but for it. This prevented casualties, allowed for hidden defenses, and opened the space for incredible tactical development. In the end, men could survive where nothing else could. Within this definition Evil itself remains hidden, camouflaged by the very territory in which it appears. It is strange that Nietzsche was so obsessed with the enduring, the eternal, but never considered the form of Evil which may endure beyond all human efforts; much like the German strategy, which was the key to victory but then abandoned without consideration of the greater enemy.

For Socrates, evil is similarly non-linear, but exists through the form of the good. He tells us that pure evil cannot exist as a representation of the form, because those who wield it will only turn against one another. In this sense, evil is self-defeating, it betrays its own laws. Those who seek evil must instead rely on the good in order to organise the space through which their acts may endure in time. One might consider the Trojan Horse: an evil act within the known laws of war, yet reliant upon forces of good to make it a possibility. Or Zeus, in opposition to the gods participation in the Trojan War when that is its very purpose, and then again lifting the ban. Instead of a disappearing linearity it is a mobilised column, with opposing poles of good and evil returning against each other, until the collision of a single space doubles the force of time. Just as Paris was too late in understanding the line of dominion which divided him from the judgement of the gods, Zeus does not realise that his attempt to destroy humanity is the origin of his own defeat - the moment where he crosses into another dominion and must be brought before the judgement of greater gods. Otherwise, Zeus must endure where no other god can while not tempting Fate.

Following this, we might ask, 'Is evil hated by the gods because it is evil, or is it evil because it is hated by the gods?' Or, 'Can Zeus ever become worthy of the Death of Man?' The Socratic form of Evil lacks a sense of dominion beyond itself while the Nietzschean opposes all laws of time within a powerful fetish for eternity. We must instead cultivate that question where each part is whole, all while being determined by the force which gives rise to it. What is willless evil? What is the Evil which exists beyond the laws of dominion and eternity?

The greatest moment of this cosmological stillness, at least for human understanding, is the binding of Prometheus. He for whom eternal punishment cannot be enough; he for whom time becomes a void within his eternally regenerating liver; he for whom Tartarus appears as a deepening of all foresight and essence. Zeus mobilises the entirety of ethereal forces against the will of Prometheus, and all descends as the brutality of acquiescence - to which Prometheus resists until the very end. The Titans who live beyond Tartarus destroy all conception of Eternity, thus confinement has no meaning for them. And so Zeus appears here, for the first time, as an end of his own power - at once the ossification and dissolution of heavenly dominion.

Within this timeless form we hear the laments of earthly nature, the chorus of Oceanids. But Prometheus recognises that the crying out of the Oceanids - both in horror of their song of capitulation and pleading for it as a sacrifice against earthly devastation - are not of themselves, they occur in a turning of their nature within an unknown dominion - as if they rise from an outside element, where nature forms and returns in opposition to all laws of genealogy. In this we see the true power of Evil: a force which turns opposing dominions into an Antistrophe.

But here we must ask ourselves whether or not the sensual power of evil is Evil in its total form, as any true Evil would oppose any recognition of its being - at least by anyone outside the immediate Promethean family. Beyond this, we can say that the loss of nature and the elements is a force of necessity, Ananke presupposes that the Oceanids will lose dominion within this fight, but also, in the end, Zeus will lose his own sovereignty after his marriage to Thetis. Prometheus knows this, he senses necessity in its future form, and thus we are compelled by necessity to sacrifice all Good to him if we are to cultivate a knowledge of Evil. Here we can form a definition: Evil would be the void dominion in its eternal form, where all forces are mobilised against primordial will. Or further, Evil is the end of the dominion of those gods who reside in time beyond eternity.

Yet, in opposition to definitions and the end of time we must try to catch a glimpse of how these laws impose themselves through nature and its moving image of stillness. The Evil Figure is not what he seems. We worship Zeus not as law but as will, and in opposition to moral law where the forces in opposition to his dominion are the completion of time; he is a figure to which total being is formed, and any human efforts against this eternal presence are doomed to destruction. He is a figure of innocence, divine exile, heavenly brutality, and, finally, the end of ethereal sovereignty. In Christianity we see all of this reduced to moral will, the hardened stones of law which can never be conceived in idols. The strophes and antistrophes over a dead God, to which all funeral rites are postponed.

With the death of religion humanity turns itself as the Leviathan, circling forever and ever sunwise, then widdershins and back, against the corpse of God. Evil is the eternal law of a collapsing sovereignty, total opposition to the laws of dominion and form, a Pyrrhic victory of the soul and the heavens.

In humanist terms, we can say that transcendence and nihilism are simultaneously subsumed. And from this perspective we see that the Nietzschean humanists and Christians each played their part, even turning together, left hand to right at times, weaving the theological law of Eruv into desire set against myth. Even before this, early religions lost their purpose, their dominion in relation to cosmic will. Christianity is merely an apotheosis of these theological failings, neither weakness nor strength - but a fall akin to the catastrophe of civilisation itself and the desecration of the cemeteries of the Golden-Souled.

Is this not the very sense of the cathedral? That last place, that tiniest dominion, where the ruin of the world may disappear in ablution. As the wasteland consumes itself the temple must appear ever more as entry to another world - physical laws of material rites to which creation itself is exhumed, desecrated, and then buried again. A sanctum in complete opposition to all true religious rites: the place where the absolute law of Christianity and Humanism succeed one another. It expands and rises towards heaven in complete opposition to its own foundational laws: faith in defeat of knowledge, the columns of heaven opposed to the Tower of Babel. Where Zeus seeks the devastation of humanity in coldness and cruelty God desires that mankind romanticise His own destruction, build up ever greater monuments to that which will only reduce them further into perverse law. Only through absolute endurance of the Bronze Age, and the Love of Depravity within it, does a new Golden Age arrive. And yet this betrays the very conception of Christianity's linear time.

Modernity does not introduce these theological laws of desecration, it apprehends them, follows the architectural eschatology set out before it: if the tower is built to heaven in the form of ruins then God will not be able to knock it down, and so we become One with Him. Where the Old World is consumed by its war of mobilised churches the New World becomes the stillness of a second creation born of Fate, Pestilence, and the end of Sanctuary. Each apostasy fulfils its purpose in the encirclement of the world by a form-without-place existing between God and Man. The state without dominion becomes dominion without a state, to which only a final war of humanity can resolve theological attrition.

The cenotaph spreads where churches are laid to waste, yet they are of a single necessity and form of law. It is humanity which is dead and beyond our worth, the entire form of Christianity is the madness of telling these spectres what they have become. Humanism is merely the return to nihilism at a total level, the moment of apprehension, of the more destructive laws of the Book. Just as total war mobilises all forces into collective defeat within an unknown land, the Total Man automates himself into the form of the Leviathan - mobilisation against everything non-human, a mythic defeat. An Invisible Colossus is the final judgement to which Christianity presents itself, each Church setting before some greater god the sacrifice of its material accumulations of moral will. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit as physical laws of their own elemental subterfuge. A Second Judgement of Paris appears as a Fata Morgana within the smouldering ruins of Notre Dame.

Yet a greater destruction resides within the abandonment of the Church itself, and one must ask whether it is divine or human forces behind this. Even more significant would be the lack of recognition that this is even occurring. In the Age of Reconstruction which religion will best situate itself amidst the ruins and be able to give sense and meaning to invisible forces of devastation? It would be evil to not ask this question.

The technical laws of science give us an image of the retribution enacted by gods who bring devastation from beyond eternity. And the sundering world of justice in the Book of Revelations begins to appear quaint where the industrial forces of humanity consecrate greater laws of chaos and destruction; where the very possibility of peace disappears; where ruination rises as the laughter at the end of being; where Colossal Man rises as the Depleted-Elemental-Soul; and where Man joyfully descends into the Bottomless Pit begging for his eleventh-hour wages and even more black smoke. Evil is the Christian God's eternal incurring of debt within a Temple reduced to Money-Changing, where He prays, kisses the Invisible Hand of Talos, and waits passively in line with the Mark of the Beast on His forehead. The Christian God is the Logos of One set within its very opposition, the Civil War of Heaven reduced to technical and bestial law.

And yet, it would also be evil to refuse all sympathy towards the Christian question - for what it revealed it may have only failed to apprehend.

Which gods, then, must we follow if we are to escape the retribution of a similar fate? Evil is hated by the gods because it divides them from the One, and hated by the One because it turns the gods to hatred. For the human, in its dominion, Evil is the turning of religion in opposition to these laws - a hubris before the sovereignty of the cosmos.

The human quest to understand evil can only end in paradox: Zeus accepts the false sacrifice of bones covered in fat, and then ensures humanity will come to accept an equal false sacrifice within its own territory. Greater gods would not even acknowledge such an offering of hubris, for human dominion occurs within an insignificant realm, where necessity is terminated. We must have sympathy for Zeus even as he wages war against us in his eternal becoming, for even in his weakest moments he is greater than us, and the end of his dominion can only turn us towards a worse fate. And we must also continue in our false sacrifices, as to wage war against realms beyond the heavens can only lead to annihilation.

To oppose Evil is to reconcile nihilism and transcendence, to find peace where revelation and apprehension are One.

Total desecration of dominion.