Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1: In the Dust of This Planet

Three Quæstio on Demonology

Three scholastic-style inquiries use demonology as a philosophical lens to argue that the ‘demonic’ is not merely a theological or anthropological concept but a limit-concept pointing toward an impersonal, non-human world indifferent to humanity—what Thacker calls ‘Cosmic Pessimism’ and ‘demontology.’

• The ‘black’ in black metal encodes three distinct philosophical orientations: Satanism (opposition and inversion), paganism (exclusion and alterity), and Cosmic Pessimism (dark metaphysics of negation and the non-human), with the third being implicit in even the first two.
  • Medieval Satanism operates through structural opposition (black vs. light, demon vs. God) and functions as a dark technics—magic as an instrument wielding darkness against light.
  • Paganism, by contrast, relates to Christianity via exclusion and alterity rather than inversion, with the magician as conduit for natural forces rather than their manipulator.
  • Keiji Haino’s album So, Black is Myself—using only a tone generator and voice for 70 minutes—exemplifies Cosmic Pessimism’s radically unhuman affect, dissolving the individual performer into a meshwork of tones.
• Schopenhauer’s distinction between the nihil privativum (the world as representation, darkness as absence of light) and the nihil negativum (nothingness without any positive value) provides the philosophical core of Cosmic Pessimism, a metaphysics in which the world-in-itself is indifferent and ultimately ’nothing.’
  • “what remains after the complete abolition of the Will is, for all who are full of the Will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the Will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Lovecraft’s fiction is the literary equivalent of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, evoking ‘cosmic outsideness’ through stories premised on humanity’s terrifying insignificance in an incomprehensible cosmos.
• The demon has passed through four historical phases in Western culture—classical (elemental helper/hinderer), Medieval (supernatural tempter), modern (psychoanalytic projection of the unconscious), and contemporary (sociopolitical demonization of the Other)—each reflecting the human-centric limits of the concept.
  • Freud’s 1923 analysis of Christoph Haitzmann’s possession recasts the demon as a ‘father-substitute’—an externalized projection of trauma—reducing the supernatural to a therapeutic metaphor for internal psychological conflict.
  • Elaine Pagels’s The Origin of Satan demonstrates that the demon is inseparable from a process of political demonization, whether applied to pagans (outside threat), non-Christian Jews (boundary), or heretics (inside threat).
• The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism.
• The parable of the Gerasene demon (‘Legion’) in the Gospels presents the demon as a limit-concept that transgresses the relation between One and Many, refuses discrete embodiment, and manifests only as contagion—making it a ‘meontological’ entity defined by non-being rather than being.
  • The demons called ‘Legion’ are never present in themselves but only via earthly embodiment (the old man, herd of pigs, wind, sea), making their embodiment simultaneously a disembodiment—a form of immediate absence.
  • Dante’s Inferno stratifies three types of demon: the counter-sovereign Dis (transcendent, immobilized), the Malebranche (roving torturers), and the ‘black wind’ of the Lustful—the last being the most philosophically radical, as pure immanent force that is everywhere and nowhere.
• Historical demonology—from the Malleus Maleficarum to debates between Weyer, Bodin, and Scot—developed a new discourse on the supernatural by interweaving theology, medicine, and law, with each thinker staking out different positions on the knowability and reality of demonic agency.
  • The Malleus Maleficarum (1486) uniquely combined theology (Part I: witches exist), medicine (Part II: how to detect them), and law (Part III: protocols for trial and execution), creating an instruction manual that both identified and constituted the threat it sought to eliminate.
  • Johann Weyer argued that real demons do not need humans to carry out their ill will—‘it is the height of vanity to suppose that we as human beings are in any way necessary for them’—while Reginald Scot went further, questioning the entire supernatural framework altogether.
• A philosophical demonology—what Thacker terms ‘demontology’—would be distinct from both anthropology (demon as metaphor for the human) and metaphysics (demon as being/non-being), requiring instead thought of the world-without-us and a nothingness that is neither privative nor simply non-being.
  • Demontology collapses the personal/impersonal distinction into paradoxical pairings (impersonal affects, cosmic suffering) and undertakes thought of nothingness as neither a negation of something nor a simple void, following Schopenhauer’s distinction between nihil privativum and nihil negativum.
  • Any such demontology faces the Nietzschean challenge: how to rethink the world as unthinkable, in the absence of a human-centric point of view and without over-reliance on the metaphysics of being—a problem for which philosophy currently has no solution.

Six Lectio on Occult Philosophy

Beginning with Agrippa’s Renaissance occult philosophy as a framework, six informal readings trace the motif of the magic circle through literature, horror, and science fiction, arguing that the boundary between the natural and supernatural progressively dissolves until what remains is the ‘hiddenness of the world’—an impersonal, non-human reality that resists both theological and scientific assimilation.

• Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia introduces a distinction between the world-for-us and the world’s ‘occult virtues’—qualities that remain hidden not because we haven’t looked hard enough, but because they are constitutively inaccessible to human intellect, making the hidden world a foundational concept for a new, anti-humanist occult philosophy.
  • Agrippa divides reality into three worlds—elemental (nature), celestial (stars and planets), and intellectual (angels, demons, and the divine One)—a hierarchy inherited from Neoplatonism and Cabbalistic mysticism, filtered through Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
  • The ‘hiddenness of the world’ is not relative (secrets we could reveal with effort) but absolute: the world presents its hiddenness to us without ever becoming fully accessible, producing ’the world-in-itself-for-us’—a Schopenhauerian formulation.
• In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust I, the magic circle functions as a boundary and mediation between the natural and supernatural, temporarily revealing the hidden world while ultimately leaving the cosmological order intact—its primary philosophical significance being not power but epistemology.
  • Marlowe’s Faustus abandons philosophy (‘On kai me on farewell’), medicine, and religion in sequence, finding that only the ‘metaphysics of magicians’ with their ’lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters’ seem adequate to his desire for knowledge beyond the human-accessible world.
  • Goethe abstracts the magic circle into contemplative symbols—the macrocosm diagram and the earth spirit (Erdgeist)—so that the circle’s revelatory function is transferred from physical ritual to philosophical meditation, paradoxically revealing only the hiddenness of the world-in-itself.
• Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and James Blish’s Black Easter modernize the magic circle motif in opposite directions: Wheatley uses it to maintain a conventional moral framework (white magic vs. black magic), while Blish’s arms-manufacturer premise reveals the paradox of instrumentalizing the hidden world—turning the incomprehensible into a weapon.
  • In Wheatley’s novel, the circle’s protective function is demonstrated through three escalating phases of supernatural attack—psychological disturbance, elemental anomalies, and abject ‘ab-human’ creatures—culminating in the figure of death itself as a shadowy black stallion.
  • “Blish’s arms manufacturer Baines treats demonic evocation as equivalent to weapons development: ‘Demons, saucers, fallout – what’s the difference? Those are just signs in the equation, parameters we can fill any way that makes the most immediate sense to us.’” —Baines
  • Black Easter’s conclusion—in which Baphomet announces ‘MEN HAVE ALWAYS LED THEMSELVES UNTO ME’—suggests not a supernatural invasion but the natural culmination of human instrumentality, making the magical and the technological indistinguishable.
• Whereas traditional occult philosophy is a hidden knowledge of the open world, occult philosophy today is an open knowledge of the hiddenness of the world.
• William Hope Hodgson’s Electric Pentacle in the Carnacki stories and the Outer Limits episode ‘The Borderlands’ represent the magic circle being hybridized with science and technology, until in ‘The Hog’ the circle inverts its function entirely—becoming a portal that intensifies rather than containing the intrusion of the hidden world.
  • Carnacki’s Electric Pentacle layers vacuum tube technology over a traditional drawn pentacle, materializing the implicit combination of science and magic found in Marlowe and Goethe—but in ‘The Hog,’ the center of the circle becomes a bottomless pit to another dimension rather than a protective enclosure.
  • The Outer Limits episode stages the lab itself as magic circle, with electromagnetic chamber replacing the drawn pentagram and experimental protocols replacing grimoires, asserting that bleeding-edge science is the new occultism.
• Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ and Ito’s Uzumaki mark the disappearance of the magic circle altogether: the hidden world is revealed as already omnipresent, requiring no ritual boundary, so that the ‘cosmic horror’ consists precisely in discovering that natural and supernatural were never separate, and that the world-in-itself is absolutely non-human.
  • In ‘From Beyond,’ Tillinghast’s device does not open a portal to another dimension but dissolves the boundary between dimensions entirely, until the characters realize they are already swimming in invisible extra-dimensional entities—‘seen as well as seeing’—eliminating the spectator/spectacle distinction of the traditional circle.
  • Uzumaki extends this dissolution from space to thought itself: the spiral is neither purely geometric symbol nor purely natural pattern but is ’thought’ understood as unhuman—’thought as equivalent to the world-without-us’—making the Absolute itself horrific.
  • “now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.” —H.P. Lovecraft
• Mists and ooze—in Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, Ballard’s The Wind From Nowhere, Caltiki the Immortal Monster, X: the Unknown, and Leiber’s ‘Black Gondolier’—represent the hidden world manifesting without any magic circle, as an anonymous, unhuman intrusion that challenges all inside/outside and surface/depth distinctions.
  • Leiber’s ‘Black Gondolier’ most radically inverts the ooze-as-monster scenario: oil is not an anomaly but the continuous, sentient substratum of modern industrial civilization itself, so that ‘man hadn’t discovered oil, but oil had found man’—making thought itself unhuman.
  • Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is invoked to ask what a ‘political theology of the hiddenness of the world’ would look like—but Schmitt’s analogical framework presupposes an accessible, revealed world and an anthropocentric politics that cannot accommodate a radically indifferent planet.

Nine Disputatio on the Horror of Theology

Nine short disputations argue that horror—as a genre—mediates between biology and theology through a concept of ’life’ that is constitutively non-conceptual, revealing that ‘Life’ (as distinct from ’the living’) functions as a negative theology: always receding, never available to thought, and ultimately isomorphic with non-being rather than being.

• The after-life in Dante’s Inferno is not a passive state but a vitalistic life-negation—a living contradiction in which sovereignty simultaneously ‘shuts down’ and ’lets flow,’ producing a Medieval biopolitics of multiplicity that challenges any simple equation of life with being.
  • Capaneus’s declaration ‘What I was once, alive, I still am, dead!’ encodes a living contradiction: not merely defiance persisting after death, but the assertion that one is ‘still living, even in death’—a phrase that recurs throughout the Inferno.
  • The Inferno’s circles feature not just individual shades but masses—cyclones of bodies, seas of the wrathful, fields of lepers—suggesting that the life-after-life is constituted by a ‘vitalistic life-negation’ in which the very concept of life continually negates itself.
• Lovecraft’s Shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness represent a form of blasphemous life that is non-anthropomorphic and misanthropic—not the human asserting living contradiction (as in Dante), but the absolute inability to think ’life’ at all, rendering blasphemy as the unthinkable.
  • The Shoggoths are described as ‘viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile,’ alternately formless black ooze, mathematical patterns of organic ‘dots,’ and a hurling mass of viscous eyes—the species-of-no-species, the biological empty set.
  • In logical terms, Lovecraft’s blasphemous biology is ‘dialetheic’: the Shoggoths are living precisely because they are contradictory—their existence would require not just accommodating contradictions but making contradiction foundational to any ontology.
• The pre-modern concept of plague and pestilence blurs biology and theology in a way that reveals a deeper problem: a divine sovereign who weaponizes life itself—miasmatic, diffuse, animate decay—against creaturely life, creating an ‘ambient plague’ that makes pestilence indissociable from sovereignty.
  • Medieval chroniclers of the Black Death describe plague as simultaneously a separate quasi-vitalized ’thing’ and something that spreads in the air, in breath, on clothing, even in glances—one chronicler noting that ‘one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone.’
  • The motif of the divine as plague-sender has roots in antiquity—Zeus sends plague-ridden Pandora; Apollo sends ‘arrows’ of plague in the Iliad—and reaches a political extreme in the 14th-century practice of catapulting plague corpses over fortress walls at Caffa.
• The concept of nekros oscillates between the corpse (body-minus-life) and ’the dead’ (an ambivalent vitalism)—and Pauline resurrection theology, rather than resolving this ambiguity, intensifies it through debates over material continuity, bodily reassembly, and the paradox of what kind of life returns after death.
  • Patristic debates over the ‘chain consumption’ problem—if corpses are eaten by worms and those worms by men, how can particles be reassembled for resurrection?—led Tertullian to shift emphasis from matter to form, so that continuity could exist through change and even the eaten dead can be resurrected.
  • Rudolph Otto’s concept of the ’numinous’—the mysterium tremendum of the human confronting the world as ‘wholly other’—combined with Kantian noumena produces what Thacker calls a ’nouminous life’: a life that indifferently lives on, eliciting not comfort but horror.
• What if ‘horror’ has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?
• Genre horror’s classic monsters—zombie, vampire, demon, phantasm—each embody a distinct metaphysical principle (flesh, blood, meat, spirit) and together constitute a modern bestiary of ’living contradictions,’ expressing the logic of incommensurability between Life as principle and the living as its instantiation.
  • The zombie’s allegory is the uprising of underclasses (Romero), manifesting as multitude or contagion; the vampire allegorizes decaying aristocracy and manifests through metamorphosis between organic and inorganic; the demon allegorizes bourgeois crisis and manifests as human-beast hybrid; the ghost allegorizes memory and manifests through materialization of immateriality.
  • Each horror figure is a ’life-minus-something’: Aristotelian concepts of flesh, blood, meat, and spirit are paradoxically living but without life—making horror the cultural form that expresses the fissure between Life (capital L) and the particular living.
• Aquinas’s solution of analogy between Creator and creature—between divine Life and creaturely living—structures the Western ontology of life along two axes: an ontological difference between Life and the living, and a principle-of-life with its corresponding ‘boundaries of articulation’ (living/non-living, organic/inorganic, human/animal).
  • Aristotle’s De Anima posits psukhē as a general life-principle, then immediately differentiates it into plant (nutritive), animal (sensory/motile), and human (intellective) forms—creating a structure in which Life can only be known through its particular instances, never as such.
  • For Aquinas, between the equivocity of no-relation (divine remains forever unthought) and the univocity of pure relation (divine flattened onto nature), analogy provides a ‘partial relation’ through degrees of perfection—but this also means Life is always ‘more than’ the living, making it functionally a negative concept.
• Extinction is not death (which concerns the organism) nor simply the non-existence of a species category, but a ‘biological void’—a null set of biology—that can only be thought speculatively and whose very possibility presupposes the absolute negation of all thought, making it the limit-concept for any ontology of life.
  • Cuvier’s catastrophism—the theory that the Earth is periodically visited by sudden cataclysms that alter both geology and organisms—established extinction as scientific reality and opened a gap between the ‘revolutions of nations’ and the deeper ‘revolutions of the planet.’
  • Kant notes in ‘The End of All Things’ that any speculation about extinction is inevitably human-centric, since any postulation about the world after the end can only be based on moral assumptions that presuppose the human—extinction is ‘real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience.’
• Life as a concept functions structurally like negative theology: it is always receding behind the living, never available to thought as such, and its negative value is superlative rather than privative—Life is ’nothing’ because it exceeds any particular instance of the living, not because it is absent.
  • Eriugena’s Periphyseon applies apophatic theology to the divine, declaring ’everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated’—a formulation Thacker extends to Life itself.
  • Levinas’s concept of the ’there is’ (il y a)—‘an impersonal, anonymous, yet indistinguishable consummation of being’—describes the horror of a something whose thingness is under question, and Thacker identifies this as the structure of Life itself: ‘horror turns the subjectivity of the subject inside out.’
• Horror film’s ‘anonymous’ monster—It, The Entity, The Thing, The Blob—represents a subtle subversion of the creature-feature by shifting the monster’s horror from aberration of nature to aberration of thought, pointing toward a ’terato-logical noosphere’ in which Life-without-Being is the ultimate unthinkable.
  • Named monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, Wolf-Man) can be included within moral and theological law and thus destroyed; unnamed creatures (‘The Being,’ ‘It,’ ‘The Stuff’) cannot be named or destroyed because they are aberrations of ontology—form-without-matter or matter-without-form.
  • The structure of the concept of life can be summarized in four propositions: (1) Life/living distinction; (2) deployed along principle-of-life and boundaries-of-articulation axes; (3) oscillating between natural philosophy of creatures and onto-theology of the divine; (4) structurally identical to negative theology.

“The Subharmonic Murmur of Black Tentacular Voids”

An extended commentary on an anonymous circulating poem uses the mystical traditions of darkness (John of the Cross), unground (Jakob Böhme), planetary economy (Georges Bataille), and absolute nothingness (Keiji Nishitani and Dōgen) to argue for a new ‘climatological mysticism’—a mysticism of the unhuman that, after the death of God, confronts the world’s radical indifference to humanity.

• John of the Cross’s Dark Night articulates three definitions of darkness—the divine exceeds human conceptual capacity; darkness affects both senses and spirit as purgation; and the divine’s ’lightning strike’ leaves the soul not just dark but empty—together constituting a paradox in which mystical union is described precisely through the vocabulary of its impossibility.
  • John’s first definition: ‘divine wisdom exceeds the capacity of the soul’—the divine is dark because we have no concept of it, not because it is absent.
  • “The ’lightning theory of darkness’: ‘In striking the soul with its divine light, it surpasses the natural light and thereby darkens and deprives individuals of all the natural affections and apprehensions they perceive by means of their natural light. It leaves their spiritual and natural faculties not only in darkness but in emptiness too.’” —John of the Cross
• Jakob Böhme’s concept of God as Ungrund (divine Abyss or unground) introduces the divine as neutral, anonymous, and indifferent to human moral categories—but Böhme ultimately compromises this radical insight by recuperating it into a beneficent creation narrative, a failure that Schopenhauer’s Will corrects by insisting the world literally has no sufficient reason.
  • Böhme’s Ungrund means the divine is ’neither light, nor darkness, neither love nor wrath, evil nor good’—neutral with respect to all human-centric moral and metaphysical attributes—but his Trinitarian emanationism eventually grounds this abyss in divine goodness.
  • Schopenhauer’s correction: ’there will always remain, as an insoluble residuum, a content of the phenomenon which cannot be referred to its form, and which thus cannot be explained from something else in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason’—the world, in itself, has no ground.
  • “Dōgen’s formulation of ’nonthinking’—‘I’m thinking of not thinking / How do you think of not thinking? / Nonthinking’—provides the Zen corollary to the Western mystical unground, where the ground of mystical experience is precisely the ground of the unground.” —Dōgen
• Bataille’s distinction between the ‘restricted economy’ (human-centric production and consumption) and the ‘general economy’ (the deep-time tectonic and atmospheric movements of the planet itself) proposes that genuine mystical awareness today is climatological—an awareness of the radical indifference of the planet to all human activity.
  • In ‘The Congested Planet,’ Bataille attempts a non-human mysticism: ‘knowledge is the agreement of the organism and the environment from which it emerges,’ but the planet’s deep time reveals that ’the ground itself is the illusion of an assurance’—a groundlessness that Bataille can only call mystical.
  • The Accursed Share’s opening claim—‘Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe’—reframes political economy as cosmic phenomenon, but Bataille’s failure was to hope that awareness of the general economy could transform the restricted one.
• Nishitani’s interpretation of śūnyatā (absolute nothingness/emptiness) as an ‘abyss even for the abyss of nihility’ provides the most rigorous formulation of what a contemporary unhuman mysticism would require: not overcoming nihilism through new grounds (religious or scientific), but passing through nihilism into an absolute nothingness that is paradoxically the ground of universal encounter.
  • ‘Emptiness in the sense of śūnyatā is emptiness only when it empties itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some thing that is emptiness’—a formulation that mirrors negative theology’s apophatic movement but without any theological content.
  • The contemporary context of climate change instantiates this dilemma concretely: humans are both the problem (restricted economy) and utterly insignificant at the level of planetary deep time (general economy)—making the indifference of the world not a philosophical abstraction but a geopolitical reality.
• A ‘mysticism of the unhuman’ differs from all historical mysticism in three key ways: it targets radical disjunction rather than union of self and world; it is premised on the impossibility of experience rather than its intensification; and its highest principle is not God but the climatological—the planet’s indifference to all human concern.
  • Darkness mysticism—from Dionysius the Areopagite through John of the Cross to the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing—says ’no’ to the recuperative habit of seeing the world as world-for-us, and is therefore structurally better suited to contemporary cosmic pessimism than ’light mysticism’s’ affirmative theology.
  • Rudolph Otto’s third mode of negative mystical thought—beyond silence and darkness—is ’emptiness and empty distances,’ the void, in which ‘void’ is a negation that does away with every ’this’ and ‘here’ in order that the ‘wholly other’ may become actual: precisely what Nishitani’s śūnyatā provides.