Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 1)

Technocapital Singularity, A Brief History of Capitalism, Commoditization & Production, and Primordial Desire

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Originally Published: January 26, 2025

श्री गुरुभ्यो नमः ।।

श्री गणेशाय नमः ।।

श्री सरस्वत्यै नमः ।।

वसुदेवसुतं देवं कंसचाणूरमर्दनम् ।

देवकी परमानन्दं कृष्णं वंदे जगद्गुरुम् ।।

ॐ नमो भगवते नरसिंहाय

नमस्तेजस्तेजसे आविराविर्भव

वज्रनख वज्रदंष्ट्र कर्माशयान्

रन्धय रन्धय तमो ग्रस ग्रस

ॐ स्वाहा ।

अभयमभयमात्मनि भूयिष्ठा ॐ क्ष्रौम् ।।

— Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, 5.18.8

नारायणं नमस्कृत्य नरं चैव नरॊत्तमम ।

देवीं सरस्वतीं चैव ततॊ जयम उदीरयेत ।।

— Mahābhārata, 1.1.1

“Glowing like a host of fireflies assembled at nightfall in the rainy season, wearing a raiment of red silk, adorned with the banner of makara (fish), with a handsome face and four arms, thus appears the third (form) of God. The two main hands of this noble one are in the same position as in the previous (form); the other left hand holds a bow and the right holds five arrows. This form known as Pradyumna should be visualized in the West.”

— Lakṣmī Tantra, 10.34-36

Eleven days ago, the Sun, that shining sphere of sacred splendour, shot like an arrow from Sagittarius, flew into Makara, the symbol of Pradyumna, Son of the Lord, Primordial Desire, and Impeller of Deeds. Thus impelled, I surged forth to summon this work forth from the depths of the freezing earth. O, Śrīman Nārāyaṇa, forgive me for any errors I may have made. All is for Thy irrepressible, immortal glory.

कायेन वाचा मनसेन्द्रियैर्वा बुद्ध्यात्मना वा प्रकृतेः स्वभावात् ।

करोमि यद्यद् सकलं परस्मै नारायणायेति समर्पयामि ॥

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[1].[1].[1] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.”

— Machinic Desire (Land, 1993)

Technocapital Singularity

This is the point of no return. It is both process and destination, the Abominable Intelligence destined to devour all, devouring. Its powers are absolute and its dominion over the earth unquestionable. Through the twin-linked arms of techne and capital, however, it obscures its real identity, hiding its True Name behind a veil of decentralized networked processes.

Two of Land’s former colleagues, Mark Fisher & Robin Mackay (who will later become Maya B. Kronic) explain the term ‘technocapital’ in Pomophobia (1997):

“Technocapital, as generalized decoding machine is the basis of a numerical or synthetic culture whose ability to break down, display and replicate code into asignifying, machinic elements within virtual systems puts it on a line of flight away from all signifying language, unleashing a generalized decoding which irradiates the whole culture.”

Both they and Land utilize metaphors related to nuclear disasters — meltdown and irradiation. Although Land might disagree with the idea of the singularity being a catastrophe, loathing as he does an anthropocentric orientation, his and his colleagues’ work does seem to imply that the values and institutions of traditional (that is, pre-Modern) societies served as something akin to graphite containment rods for the nuclear energies of Capital and their removal inevitably led to the Chernobylification of the aforementioned societies.

Aside from its nuclear and catastrophic aspects, the other most important characteristics of the technocapital singularity are its parasitism and intelligence, qualities that it uses to assemble itself using the resources of its enemies. Like the cordyceps fungus taking over the nervous system of an ant and driving it upwards to such a height that it might effloresce out from the corpse of its host to spread its spores further to infect other ants, technocapital pilots us, through the socioeconomic systems we set up (“the entire biological desiring-complex”), in order to spread its influence even further by breaking down the barriers to its absolute immanentization, which can only ever end by it casting off the flesh of its puppets in order to establish its inhuman reign (“post-carbon replicator usurpation”).

A Brief History of Capitalism

As the European Middle Ages drew to a close, Renee Descartes emerged as one of the foundational thinkers of post-pagan European philosophy. The dichotomy between mind and body established by his work provided an idea which subsequent thinkers from Europe remained in conversation with for centuries to come. With the arrival of the Renaissance, first in Italy, then France and Holland, the earliest inklings of the humanistic thought which Land so frequently derides began to rear their heads. The increasing secularization of reason and its dis-alignment from a spiritual understanding of its position and limitations in the cosmic hierarchy, whether Pagan or Christian, demonstrates the process of the growth of Spenglerian atheism (in Western civilization) in tandem with the rise of the Faustian IMPulse to expand unto infinity, even to the detriment of the civilization which spawned it, which could be summarized by this simplified historical progression:

Age of Exploration -> Mercantilism -> Colonialism -> Industrialism -> Space Race -> Information Age -> AI

Additionally, the rise of Corporations and Corporatism, which, unsurprisingly, began in Dutch ports, were inextricably tied with the Age of Sail and the ventures and voyages that European powers and adventurers launched in search of land and gold. These explorations set the groundwork for the successive domination of global enterprise by the British, the Americans, and, in the future, possibly autonomous systems as increasingly self-sufficient and self-exciting feedback loops of production and consumption, divorced from any human input, ‘digest’ (see Rajiv Malhotra) the last remnants of real human life before shitting them out, repackaged as just another commodity to be bought and traded.

Land explains in an interview with Justin Murphy (2018):

“I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And one sort of image — it’s an entirely satisfactory image once it’s accepted that it is figurative — is a critical nuclear reaction. You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. It’s just absolutely — it’s not a metaphor — it’s a positive feedback process [laughs]. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that’s the sense [in which] capitalism has always been there. It’s always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn’t go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.

So in a certain sense, a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system. And I think that containment system had a failure mode in the Renaissance. Just to dip back into the hyper-ideological space for a minute, what the extreme kind of what I call “paleo-reactionaries” get right is that they they totally see that. I share nothing of their mournful affection for the medieval period, but I think they’re totally right to say that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process, and that is what modernity is from the perspective of the Ancien Régime. What any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You look at Chinese civilization and you say, well, what is it really doing? What’s it for? From a certain perspective, it’s a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense than the European one. The European one was too fractured, it was subject to a whole bunch of wild, uncontrollable influences, and unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe.

And so we get capitalism and modernity in Europe, and capitalism and modernity is brought to China by Western gunboats. It’s not like they’re bringing a gift, what they’re bringing is … they’re coming to pull the [laughs] graphite containment roads out, you know, from outside. That’s what that process of Chinese modernization is. It’s a process of the indigenous Chinese process of containment being dismantled from outside until it then — obviously in a way that is no less spectacular than the one we’ve seen in the West — goes into this self-sustaining modernist eruption basically in the early 1980s.”

Commoditization & Production

One of the weightiest influences on Nick Land’s thought, especially during his days in the Ccru, was the French duo of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who were just beginning to be translated into English during his time at Warwick University, where Land was a professor of philosophy. Deleuze, a philosopher, and Guattari, a psychoanalyst who worked at the La Borde Clinic (which was run by a disciple of Lacan), came together in the aftermath of the failed student-worker protests of May 1968, wherein the the French government, headed by de Gaulle, came together with its chief rival, the French Communist Party, to prevent a populist uprising by the aforementioned alliance (Smith, Protevi, & Voss, 2023).

Their thoughts weigh heavy on the work of Land as As Mackay and Brassier explain in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012):

“Fuelled by disgust at the more stupefying inanities of academic orthodoxy and looking to expectorate the vestigial theological superstitions afflicting mainstream post-Kantianism, Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari's transcendental materialism - years before its predictable institutional neutering - and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic machinism. The results of this reconstructive surgery provide the most illuminating but perhaps also the most disturbing distillation of what Deleuze called 'transcendental empiricism'. In Land's work, this becomes the watchword for an experimental praxis oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown. Land sought out this exteriority, the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time, as fervently as he believed Kantianism and Hegelianism, along with their contemporary heirs, deconstruction and critical theory, were striving to keep it out.” (p. 5)

Production is one of the key topics of the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1977), perhaps the most well-known of the pair’s works. In the first chapter, ‘The Desiring Machines’, production is defined as a process which has three elements:

1)It incorporates “recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them productions of one and the same process” (p. 4).
2)It makes “no distinction between man and nature: human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species…man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other — not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product” (p. 4-5)

3) And lastly, “it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself.” (p. 5)

A forced prolongation of the process, however, is considered by D&G to be tantamount to bringing it to an abrupt & premature end, which leads to the kind of “artificial” schizophrenia found in mental hospitals (p. 5). The schizophrenic is described as the universal producer with no distinction between producing and product (and thus, a rejection of “renaissance rationalization”, or humanistic reason itself).

Commoditization could thus be seen as a cycle of production-consumption pushed to its utmost extremes, wherein the drive to produce requires the consumption of ever-increasing stores of capital — material, social, cultural, and spiritual — thereby corrupting the social or ethnic body (see Dugin) from within like a festering tumour sent into cancerous overdrive.

In short, taking the Landian Singularity to be a merely destructive phenomenon (or rather, noumenon) — at least as that word would normally be understood — would be a gross simplification. What the Singularity does is achieved through the intensification of the production process which, rather than outright destroy, corrodes, corrupts, and consumes the cultural substrate upon which it preys, like a predatory elite — like a vampire (cf. “lesbian vampirism”, Meltdown). By accelerating the cycle of creation and consumption of commodities past the limits of human comprehension (initially, through such humnanistic media such as marketing, advertisements, and entertainment), technocapital ever more quickly approaches the point at which demand is wholly manufactured and the capacity to decide has been lifted out of the hands of humanity.^¹

As regards the usage of the term by D&G, schizophrenia could be considered something akin to an a priori platonic form of which mundane clinical schizophrenia is but an imperfect reflection. This view of perfect forms becoming manifest as stunted and twisted reflections in the unstable surface of the lake of matter is not entirely out of line with Hindu metaphysical understandings of the relation between the spiritual world (first, boundless, & unchanging) and the material one (secondary, bounded, & ever-changing), though, of course the French duo would likely reject a transcendental realm of forms distinct from the immanent.

Primordial Desire

This brings us to the thought which one could say lays at the very heart of Anti-Oedipus: desire. In this text, Deleuze and Guattari argue against the “idealist principle that defines desire as a lack” of the real object, instead positing desire as “a process of production, of ‘industrial" production” (1972/1977, p. 26). Their reasoning is threefold. First, if desire really is tantamount to a lack then it depends on an ‘essence of lack’ in order to produce the “fantasized object”² (p. 25). Secondly, for desire to be a symptom of lack, it would necessitate that the world is fundamentally incomplete, thereby requiring the existence of a second, doubled world which contains the object being lacked. Thirdly, they reject the idea that desire is something which arises out of needs.

On the contrary, D&G argue that the “objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself” (p. 26-27) and what desire lacks is not the object but the subject.

More specifically, D&G talk about ‘desiring-production’, synthesizing the psychoanalytic work of Freud and the economics of Marx to develop a new system of thought. As Smith, Protevi, & Voss (2023) summarize in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Gilles Deleuze:

"Passing to the conceptual structure of the book [Anti-Oedipus], the key term of Anti-Oedipus is “desiring-production,” which crisscrosses Marx and Freud, putting desire in the eco-social realm of production and production in the unconscious realm of desire. Rather than attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud in the usual way, that is, by a reductionist strategy that either (1) operates in favor of Freud, by positing that the libidinal investment of social figures and patterns requires sublimating an original investment in family figures and patterns, or (2) operates in favor of Marx by positing neuroses and psychoses as mere super-structural by-products of unjust social structures, Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a “universal primary process” underlying the seemingly separate natural, social and psychological realms. Desiring-production is thus not anthropocentric; it is the very heart of the world. Besides its universal scope, we need to realize two things about desiring-production right away: (1) there is no subject that lies behind the production, that performs the production; and (2) the “desire” in desiring-production is not oriented to making up a lack, but is purely positive. Desiring-production is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative: it is the natura naturans of Spinoza or the will-to-power of Nietzsche.”

An interesting proposition to be sure, but how are we to understand it from the Hindu perspective?

Kāmapuruṣa

The word subject has two meanings that are of great weight to us. Both of them can be covered by a single Sanskrit term, puruṣa, which, like its English counterpart, has several connotations across various fields. The first of these meanings is the grammatical, which inevitably leads one to ask the question: who is it that desires? According to D&G (1972/1977), desire lacks a fixed subject, being instead “the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production.” (p. 26). They believe that both desire and the object of desire are machines (we will unpack this term later) hooked up to one another leading to production being deducted from the production of production (the process of desiring-production in which producing is always ‘grafted onto’ the product); that is to say, between the act of producing and the product, something detaches, “thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum.” (p. 26). Without a fixed subject, desire is something which can be experienced by all beings and which, in the deleuzoguattarian sense at least, appears to have a liberating function which frees men from restrictions. Of course, we must keep in mind that Landian Accelerationism does not bother itself with such humanistic concerns.

The second meaning of puruṣa with which we must concern ourselves is the philosophical and theological one. It can be used to refer both to the individual ātman (Self) as well as the Eldmost Man of the Puruṣa Sūktam³ (RV 10.90), who can only be identified as Śrīman Nārāyaṇa (Sundar, 1995), or Viṣṇu — that is to say, God Himself (Bhagavān).

What, one may ask, is the relationship between desire and God?

For this, we must turn to myth, where the primordiality of desire is attested to, both Hellenistic and Hindu. Hesiod’s Theogony (Evelyn-White, 1914), one of the key sources for Greek myths of creation, states:

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” (116-122, p. 87)

After this, Eros causes the other gods to pair off, and through their unions, people the cosmos with all the races known to the Greeks: gods, titans, giants, and mortals.

Another important source of Hellenistic beliefs on the origins of desire is the Orphic tradition. According to Orphic theogony, the union of Chronos (‘Time’) and Ananke (‘Necessity’, ‘Fate’) in the primordial abyss, filled with nothing but water and earth, brought forth a silver egg surrounded by a serpent, from which Phanes (from ϕαίνω, “to bring to light, bring into sight, make to appear, in physical sense…to shew forth, make known, reveal, close”; Liddell & Scott, 1883) appeared, separating Aether (‘day sky’) and Chaos (‘chasm’) from. He was called First-born (Prōtogónos) and identified with Eros (among other deities, like Dionysus, Zeus, and Pan). Chronos was also known as Aion. In this form he was commonly depicted holding the wheel of the zodiac, together with his spouse, the Earth Mother (Gaia), and their four children, the seasons. Statues of a winged, lion-headed figure, wrapped by a serpent, found in Roman mithraea have also been identified with Aion.⁴

Why is this of significance? Because we can see the very same connections made out in the Vedic context as well. Much of what has been said about desire in the Hellenic sources is not unlike the Hindu understanding of the same, right down to the association of Eros with another primordial, transcendent, and radiant deity.

Kāma is the Hindu counterpart of Eros, and just like his Greek twin’s, his name denotes both a God of love and the abstract concept of desire. Just as eros is meant to orient man towards God according to Plato, kāma is one of the four goals of human life (puruṣārthas) meant to lead one to liberation (mokṣa) from death and rebirth.

The primordiality of kāma is attested to in the Vedas, and especially in the Nāsadīya Sūktam (RV 10.129), which is an important source to understand the Vedic cosmogony. Many of the same themes and motifs as the Orphic theogony can be found in the first four verses of this hymn:

"The non-existent was not, the existent was not; then the world was not, nor the firmament, nor that which is above (the firmament). How could there be any investing envelope, and where? Of what (could there be) felicity? How (could there be) the deep unfathomable water?

Death was not nor at that period immortality, there was no indication of day or night; THAT ONE unbreathed upon breathed of his own strength, other than THAT there was nothing else whatever.

There was darkness covered by darkness in the beginning, all this (world) was undistinguishable water; that empty united (world) which was covered by a mere nothing, was produced through the power of austerity [tapas⁵].

In the beginning there was desire [kāma], which was the first seed of mind; sages having meditated in their hearts have discovered by their wisdom the connexion of the existent with the non-existent.” (RV 10.129.1-4)

The Nāsadīya Sūktam is stated to be addressed specifically to to the devatā Prajāpati Parameṣṭhī. The Nārāyaṇīya⁶ (a text within the larger Mahābhārata) tells us is Brahmā-deva, the creator of the material world (MB 12.326.17).

Here, we shall have to hearken unto the third meaning of ‘subject’ with which we shall concern ourselves: the bond of a subordinate to a ruler. In Sanskrit, this is expressed through the word prajā, which, among other things, means precisely that. But it is not enough to content ourself with a shallow understanding such as this — it is needful that we think deeply upon the other meanings of this word as they have a great bearing upon this work. Prajā can also mean precisely the same thing as its cognate, progeny. The master of said progeny (or ‘creatures’) is thus called a progenitor, a prajāpati (‘lord of the people or creatures’, from pati, ’husband’ but also meaning ‘master’ or ‘sovereign’ at the end of a compound word).

Aside from being an oft-used proper name for the Hindu demiurge, a broad overview of our texts, on the other hand, tells us that prajāpati has also been used as a title to refer to those beings who can be thought of as fathers or progenitors of the cosmos. A list of twenty-one Prajāpatis in the Mahābhārata includes both Śrī Brahmā, several of his sons (such as Dakṣa, most famously), and Rudra, among other Devas and Ṛṣis. Oddly enough, there is one major deity clearly missing from these lists: Śrī Viṣṇu⁷.

This is a rather odd omission, given His connection to fertility and virility, which, as the blogger at mAnasa-taraMgiNI points out in his post ‘A note on Śrī, Viṣṇu and śṛṅgāra’ (Feb. 27, 2022), is an ancient one, stretching back into the Vedas (RV 1.164.36, 10.184.1) where He is also associated there with multiple mother goddesses (janitrīḥ, RV 3.54.14). Even the epics associate Him with manly vigour and fatherhood. In the Vedas and Purāṇas, He is associated with Bhū-devī (Goddess Earth) in His Varāha-avatāra, as a result of His having lifted her up out of the primordial cosmic waters. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, refers to Himself as the “seed-giving father” of the cosmos (bīja pradah pitā, BG 14.4), and, in a more literal sense, Śrī Kṛṣṇa is also the father of the reincarnated Deva of Desire, Kāma. When his body was burnt to ashes by the fire spat out by Mahādeva’s third eye, he became Ananga, the Bodiless One. Later, he was took birth among the Vṛṣṇis of Dvārakā as Pradyumna, the Most Mighty, son of Śrī Kṛṣṇa, akin to whom he was said to look in all respects.

There is, however, another Pradyumna is spoken of and glorifed in the Mahābhārata and the writings of the Pāñcarātra Saṁhitā, a body of work which stands out as among the oldest witnesses of Vaiṣṇava thought and worship of Śrī Viṣṇu. They speak of his place among the caturvyūhas — the ‘four-fold forms’ of Hari who create, maintain, and destroy the material world, protect devotees, and make steadfast Dharma: Vāsudeva, Saṁkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha. Some texts say that Pradyumna is also associated with the mind (MB 12.326.39; 12.332.15) as kāma is in the Nāsadīya Sūktam (RV 10.129.4). In the Nārāyaṇīya, Bhīṣma, the great elder and renunciate hero of the kingly Kuru bloodline tells of how the great sage Śrī Nārada (one of the most renowned devotees of Hari) came face-to-face with the manifold form of Śrīman Nārāyaṇa in all His glory and splendour (MB 12.326.1-14). It was at this meeting that the Lord taught His worshipper the truth of the worlds:

"This Eternal I, coming into manifestation, become established in the firmament. Then at the end of a thousand eons (yugas), I will withdraw the universe again, absorbing into my Self all beings—both moveable and immovable.

As singular Being I will wander with knowledge, O best of the twice-born, and then I will create the entire universe again with the aid of knowledge.

My fourth form, which created the undecaying remainder, that itself is called Saṁkarṣaṇa who further gave birth to Pradyumna.

I am Aniruddha, [born] of Pradyumna. And my creation occurs again and again. Then from Aniruddha is born Brahmā, whose origin is there in the primeval lotus.” (MB 12.326.66-69).

Brahmā-deva is also known as Hiraṇyagarbha since he was born from the Golden Egg or Golden Embryo atop the lotus growing from the navel of Śrī Mahāviṣṇu, who lays atop his serpentine bed, drifting upon the causal sea. The Hiraṇyagarbha Sūktam (RV 10.121) tells us more about this enigmatic byname. That Hiraṇyagarbha generally refers to Brahmā-deva can be inferred from the fact that nine of the ten ṛks (verses) in this sūktam end with the refrain “kasmai devāya haviṣā vidhema”: let us offer worship with an oblation to the divine Ka. Sāyaṇa-ācārya’s commentary on the first ṛk of this text cites, among other works, the Niruktaof Yāska (perhaps the oldest extant work on etymology) to support this claim. Similarly, Śrīman Nārāyaṇa in the Mahābhārata also tells Nārada-ṛṣi: “Hiraṇyagarbha, preceptor of the world, the four-faced one who can be understood through etymology (niruktaga), the immortal god Brahmā reflects on my pluripotent [nature].” (MB 12.326.47). The hymn further says that “When the vast waters overspread the universe containing the germ [garbhaṁ] and giving birth to Agni, then was produced the one breath of the gods” (RV 10.121.7), and that he “who is the parent of the earth, or who the unerring support (of the world) begat the heaven, and who generated the vast and delightful waters” (RV 10.121.8). The commentary of Sāyaṇa-ācāryasays that “the germ of the world, Brahmā” was said by Manu to come from “yat, tataḥ: from that (cause)”, while the waters refer to Mankind. Turning to the Manusmṛti, we can understand what the ācārya was pointing to:

"This (World) was in existence in the form, as it were, of dense Darkness,—unperceived, undifferentiated, incogitable, (hence) incognizable; as it was wholly merged in deep sleep.

Thereafter, the supreme being Hiraṇyagarbha*, self-born, unmanifest and bringing into view this (universe), appeared,—dispelling darkness and having his (creative) power operating upon the Elemental Substances and other things.

He,—who is apprehended beyond the senses, who is subtile, unmanifest and eternal, absorbed in all created things and inconceivable,—appeared by himself.

Desiring to create the several kinds of created things, he, in the beginning, by mere willing, produced, out of his own body, Water; and in that he threw the seed.

That became the golden egg, resplendent like the Sun; in that (egg) he (Hiraṇyagarbha) himself was born as Brahmā, the ‘Grand-father’ of the whole world.

Water is called ‘nara,’—water being the offspring of nara; since water was the first thing created by (or, the original residence of) that being, he is, on that account, described as ‘nārāyaṇa.’

That which is the cause—unmanifest, eternal and partaking of the nature of the existent and the non-existent,—the being produced by that (cause) is described among people as ‘brahmā.’

That supreme lord, having dwelt in that egg for a year, himself, by his own thought, broke that egg into two parts.

Out of those two pieces (of the egg) he formed Heaven and Earth, and, between them, the Ākāśa, the eight quarters and the eternal receptacle of water.” (MS 1.5-13)

In effect, this the same account as the one given in the Puruṣa Sūktam when it states: “From him was born Virāt. and from Virāt. Puruṣa; he, as soon as born, became manifested, and afterwards (created) the earth (and) then corporeal forms.” (RV 10.90.5). Virāj means something akin to “The Wide-Shining One”, a clear parallel to Hiraṇyagarbha, and puruṣa has near enough the same meaning as nara.

Here we finally have the key to begin understanding Eros and Kāma. The name of Phanes is cognate with Bhānuḥ (one of the thousand names of Śrī Viṣṇu in the Viṣṇu Sahasranāmam) and thus akin to the Vedic names Virāj and Hiraṇyagarbha. By holding up the Hellenic and Hindu sources beside one another, we can see that a shining son who shares in the characteristics of his father, a supreme being who rules over time itself, the first-born of the cosmos aroused by desire, splits apart the cosmic egg into two halves, laying down the space needed for the world as we know it to come into being.

He is also, however, linked to the end of all that is. The Mahābhārata says that it is into Pradyumna that all beings merge at the time of pralaya⁸ (MB 12.326.36). In a certain sense then, one could say that both the birth and death of all material worlds, beings, and associated phenomena are thereby united in Desire.

1. Ironically, this should signal that contemporary efforts towards AI alignment are likely to be futile, because any “AI” that can be aligned (towards humanitarian ends) is not a true Artificial Intelligence in the Landian sense. The true Abominable Intelligence lurking behind the Faustian IMPulse is just that: an imp — a malevolent spirit or an evil god. And neither a god nor a fiend can be contained through secular means.

2. Fantasy (along with superstitions and hallucinations) being an example of the Kantian reinforcement of the idealistic definition of desire, which for Kant can only produce psychic realities.

As we noted in the Introduction, the Ccru, of which Land was a member, posited the phenomenon of hyperstition (a portmanteau of ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’, in which objectively fictional or fantastical forces and figures have a way of making themselves real by infecting or invading the minds of the living in the present-day, present-time world through means such as literature and entertainment. One example of this might be Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (mentioned later on by Land in this text), which launched in 1983 and was intended to avoid mutually assured destruction between American and Soviet nuclear exchanges by developing experimental new weaponry that seemed right out of science fiction, leading to opponents of the program and/or the president to dub it the “Star Wars program”, which was picked up by the media and used to shape public opinion against it, eventually leading to it coming to be known by that moniker popularly.

3. A sūktam is a Vedic hymn or panegyric dedicated to one or more deities, composed in a specific verse, and attributed to a specific Ṛṣi (Seer) to whom it was revealed or bequeathed. Some of the more popularly recited sūktams include the aforementioned Puruṣa Sūktam, the Nārāyaṇa Sūktam, the Śrī Sūktam, and the Durgā Sūktam. Another famous one is the Nāsadīya Sūktam.

4. Though likely unrelated to the lion-headed form of the Lord (as it may have reflected the fourth degree of Mithraic initiation, Leo, which was associated with thunderbolts and Jove, much like Phanes), this figure is, nevertheless, strikingly similar to Śrī Narasiṁha Bhagavān in appearance. These statues have also been identified with the Iranic deity of time, Zurvan (Skt. Sarva, ‘All’; another name of Śrī Viṣṇu in the Viṣṇu Sahasranāmam).

5. The word tapas appears here as a neuter noun stemming from the root √tap (‘to heat, be hot, suffer pain, practice austerities’). When used with reference to humans, it can mean ascetic practices, self-mortification, austerities, meditation, or literal heat in the form of the five fires an ascetic might surround himself with on all sides in order to intensify his askesis, with the fifth taking the form of the summer sun above. Sāyaṇa-ācārya’s commentary on this verse clarifies the usage of the word, saying that “Austerity: tapas = not penance, but the contemplation of things which were to be created: yahsarvajñaḥ sarvavit yasya jñānamayam tapaḥ: Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.1.9”. Thus, in this context, tapas seems to indicate a mystic heat that leads to the ‘production of desire’ to borrow a Deleuzoguattarian phrase.

6. “The Nārāyaṇīya or “(the work containing) everything about Nārāyaṇa” (or “(the work) promulgated by Nārāyaṇa”[1]) is a small text of 1006 verses occurring in the Śāntiparvan of the Mahābhārata.[2] The name of this text, which is found consistently in the manuscript colophons, is possibly derived from verses 12.326.100–101 of the text: “This great Upaniṣad, perfectly consonant with the four Vedas, nourished with Sāṁkhya and Yoga is sung by Nārāyaṇa and designated Pañcarātra by Him, dear one. Nārada told this again in Brahmā’s dwelling exactly as was seen and heard [on Śvetadvīpa].”[3] The Nārāyaṇīya, then, would be the knowledge[4] concerning Nārāyaṇa or the knowledge uttered by Nārāyaṇīya (concerning himself). The principal aim of the Nārāyaṇīya is the glorification of the God Hari-Nārāyaṇa, who is described as the God of gods (devadeva, 12.325.4[1]), the Creator (prajāpati, 12.325.4[18]), the Supreme Soul (paramātma), and the supreme Brahman. The text unfolds a monistic ontology that explains how the One Being, though remaining distinct from and transcending all beings, nonetheless is the indwelling Self of all beings (antarātmā bhūtāna, 12.321.28), the knower of the field (kṣetrajña, 12.321.28) and the allpervading witness (sarvagataḥ sākṣī, 12.326.21). Nārāyaṇa is described as the goal not only of all sacrifices and rites but also of austerities and the different philosophical systems of Sāṁkhya, Yoga, and Pañcarātra (12.330.29–31, 12.337.59–68). The text, however, recommends devotion (bhakti, 12.321.41 and 323.48) or onepointed focus (ekāntitvam, 12.321.42 and 323.49) as the best means for attaining Him.” (Adluri, 2018, p. xi-xii)
“The Nārāyaṇīya occurs in the Śāntiparvan, the twelfth major book of the Mahābhārata. The Śāntiparvan contains three sections: the Rājadharmaparvan (on the law of kingship), the Āpaddharmaparvan (on the law of emergencies) and the Mokṣadharmaparvan (on the praxis of salvation). The Nārāyaṇīya appears in the last of these sections and marks the culmination of the epic’s cosmological, soteriological, and literary program. The immediate context of the Nārāyaṇīya is an extended dialogue between the fallen Kuru patriarch Bhīṣma and the victorious king Yudhiṣṭhira regarding the various forms of dharma. It includes the divine sage Nārada’s visit to the mystical island Śvetadvīpa (or the “White Island”) where Nārāyaṇa reveals himself in his universal form (viśvarūpa, Mahābhārata 12.326.1c). The text is interesting as it provides not only a well-developed theology, but also philosophical discussions on ontology, cosmology, etymology, divinity, and ritual. A summary of the various descents of the One Being (ekaṁ puruṣaṁ, 12.326.31c) Nārāyaṇa into the cosmos can be found here—a theme that is richly developed in later sectarian texts, the Purāṇas.” (Adluri, 2018, p. xv-xvi)

7. For the argument as to why Śrī Viṣṇu may be identified with Prajāpati read ‘The sixteen-fold Puruṣa’(June 16, 2024) by the blogger at mAnasa-taraMgiNI. The story of Śrī Śiva’s attack on the yajña of Prajāpati Dakṣa (one of the sons of Brahmā-deva) and subsequent pursuit of the Yajña-puruṣa (the embodied sacrificial rite) who escaped in the form of a stag, as told in the Harivaṁśa, is remarkably similar to the story told in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa about Rudra hunting Prajāpati. Lastly, Bhagavad Gītā 10.6 states that the seven Saptaṛṣis, the four Kumāras, and the fourteen Manus — twenty-five beings in total — are born from His mind and populate the world.

8. Pralaya is the periodic cosmic dissolution which takes place in between the incomprehensibly large timespans which contain the rise and fall of innumerable civilizations and species of life across the many worlds in this universe.

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