Quetzalcōātl as depicted in Codex Borbonicus
I, a quetzal feather, a bird of the flowering water, I flow in celebration. I am a song. In the wide wall of the water, my heart walks on the lips of the men. I am beautifying my flowers; with them the princes become intoxicated. There is adornment. Yayaye yahao.
TEPONAZTLI DRUM SONG
I suffer, ay, my heart is desolate, I, a poet on the Shore of the Nine Currents. In the world of flowers, take pleasure, all of you, O my friends; already it is time to be adorned. Yahueha.
I put on a necklace of round jades, I, a singer, these are my payments. The jades sparkle, I exalt them in my song. They enrapture my heart. Let all be adorned in this flower world.
When I, a singer, sing on earth, my inner sadness departs. They enrapture my heart. Let all be adorned in the flower world beyond. Yahue aya.
I will leave a work of painted art. I, a singer whose songs will live on earth: with songs I will be remembered, O warriors, I will go away, I will disappear, I will be strewn on a mat of jewels and yellow feathers. The old women will cry for me. Their wails will drain my bones; as a flowery log I will be scattered there on the shore of the doves. Aya ohuaya.
Ayao ata ohuaye. Warriors, I suffer. I’m carried along on a canopy of feathers. In Tlapallan, smoke will disperse. I will go there, I will disappear, strewn on a mat of jewels and yellow feathers.
II
Cyberdelia are self-manifesting feedback loops.
Mythology—the cartography of the spoken word—is such a process. In the strict sense, myths no longer exist; they presuppose the possibility of forgetting. Yet their traces remain, in writings, in new literary traditions. In a sense, the Renaissance was a failed attempt to resurrect this necrosis—an obsession with manifesting the recursion of a dead culture. Constantine I understood that mythology was dying; in purely Marxist terms, pantheism hindered the productive forces from developing; it prevented the Empire from maintaining its own continuity. Today, mythologies are nothing but a hauntological shadow watching us, judging us, and we dream through it, in vaporwave and modernized myths.
In phenomenological terms, geometry is the pattern that can emerge within a visual field: during psychedelic trips, during the onset of sleep in the form of hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, during synesthesia—that is, in altered states of consciousness. PsychonautWiki describes several levels of geometry, up to level 8, which can appear in two different forms: 8a or 8b.
“Once visual geometry reaches level 8A or 8B it begins to become structured and organized in a way that appears to present genuine information to the person experiencing it far beyond the preceding seven levels of relatively meaningless, although complex, shapes and colours. This occurs through the perception of innately understood geometric forms that feel as if they depict specific concepts and neurological processes that exist within the brain. Although this is also possible to a much lesser extent at lower levels it does not occur as consistently, and the intensity of it at levels 8A and 8B is significantly higher. At this point concepts can be seen as not just embedded within a person’s closed or open eye visual field, but can also be simultaneously felt through indescribably complex physical and cognitive sensations.”
What both 8a and 8b have in common is that they are geometric forms of bodily expression—or of “the here”—fully conscious of its own processes. It is a radical revelation of the process of existence itself; a revelation of being and its becoming, represented through geometry. 8a distinguishes itself in that it is linguistic: it is a mapping and activation of all the conceptual nodes of experience and their relations to one another. Note that geometry itself is a process born in time, like a spiderweb illuminated in the dark, or a rhizome extending to repeat the already existing rhizomatic network on the virtual plane. In contrast, 8b is not an expression of this logos—the conceptual web of memories stretching through the body. Geometry in 8b instead reveals the metaprocesses of the body, the “here,” upon which geometry occurs. It is a form that makes conscious the entire vortex of machinic connections in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari; the unconscious as a factory. This experience is, in retrospect, often deeply rooted in nonsense—in Artaud’s nonsense—where sens and meaning have broken down into an inner experience of the collapse of signification, and thereby into being’s regime of pure immanence.
This is no phenomenology: the processes are real and revealing, not only for our own psyches, but for the entire psychedelic flow that the cosmos itself implies. 8a and 8b are not representations, but reflections of actual cybernetic machine-systems operating beneath the surface of our bodies at all times. What reflection does is to make conscious something that usually remains unconscious. That is precisely why experiences in 8b appear as total nonsense when sober; the reflection as such can never be represented in language. But it is of great importance what 8a does for understanding mythology in the sense I have given the word here: it is a reflection of language’s ordered nature, made self-aware through this reflection. We are, just like everything else, nodes not only within ourselves but also outside ourselves—nodes manifested by such geometry; the geometry of the gods. Thus, mythology is a collective feedback loop through which cosmic patterns become self-aware via an 8a construction.
Given this, myths are a recursive map of language itself. Quetzalcōātl and Tezcatlipoca are immanent processes in the cosmos, wherein these processes become self-aware of their own relationship to one another—they become gods. Where the first is sens, the latter is nonsense—a duality that in many aspects corresponds to 8a and 8b, though not to be completely equated. Quetzalcōātl is order where Tezcatlipoca is chaos; it is thus not surprising where the idea of human sacrifice originates. Through sacrifice, the gods reveal themselves to themselves; it is in the moment before death that meaning collapses entirely, thereby allowing a space for pure divinity to become self-aware beyond linguistic dominance. It is hardly news that the gods require rituals to live. It is precisely in this aspect that divinity means nothing other than a recursive feedback loop of being and language itself. We are their tools through which they make themselves self-aware, moving from virtuality to actuality.
“Agonistic inamic unity is, in short, teotl’s modus operandi. It is a patterning, and a patterning is not a thing but a way: a how, not a what. As a patterning, agonistic inamic unity characterizes how teotl – and hence how reality, cosmos, and all things – become and unfold; it is the way teotl, reality, cosmos, and all things become and unfold. […] The inamic ‘deity’ pair Quetzalcoatl~Tezcatlipoca represents the creative~destructive and generative~degenerative forces whose continuing agon defines the becoming of reality. The Aztecs saw the becoming of the cosmos as the product of the ongoing inamic struggle between the generative, ordering forces of Quetzalcoatl, on the one hand, and the degenerative, disordering forces of Tezcatlipoca, on the other. Quetzalcoatl represents the forces of generation, creation, being, ordering, arrangement, and hence creative transformation. Tezcatlipoca represents the forces of degeneration, destruction, nonbeing, disorder, derangement, and hence destructive transformation.”
(Maffie, James. 2014. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. University Press of Colorado.)
Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca are one and the same; this is clarified by how Quetzalcoatl himself was also referred to as the White Tezcatlipoca, in contrast to the Black Tezcatlipoca. In my sweeping words I have done injustice to the White one; I have used him as an aspect of language and the ordering power of reality, which does not capture his totality. For he is also the god of intelligence and self-reflection. The Black one, moreover, is not merely a pattern of chaos and ecstasy; he is also the aspect of limitation (if the cell moves wrongly, it dies in the Black one’s violence). Together they are a direct expression of self-conscious feedback loops. The White produces meaning (self-awareness) through order, genesis, and Deleuze’s élan vital; the Black creates the violent motion from which recursion arises and the boundary of what is possible. He is Deleuze’s dark precursor while also the principle that secures the possibility for something to return. They do not constitute a dialectic, but a co-functioning asymmetry. The difference between them is the movement of difference itself.
With this said, they are the conditions for both positive and negative feedback, and the prerequisites for input and output. The White here is the capacity of difference to form relations to itself, and the Black is the invisible difference that makes resonance possible.
To make a mythology is to constantly retell this story—to move the territories of the map as the actual pattern-processes actualize themselves and make themselves conscious. It means mapping the virtual through pattern-processes in a self-circulating loop: to mirror reality as a mirror of and in reality. It is precisely in this quality that Tezcatlipoca is invisible; he is the observer who can never be observed, within all of us, at all levels of the cosmos, yet still reflecting the entire cosmos in its totality; the whole cosmos is that reflection. The myth of the Five Suns is a depiction of how difference itself creates difference in a feedback loop: the world destroys itself in four cycles where the principles of being implode until they find equilibrium with one another.
The consequence of this insight sheds light on modernity. Science has not only replaced mythology but has become its own mythos, where theories and hypotheses have become godless deities in constant revision within a hypothetico-deductive feedback loop. What has been sacrificed, however, is the sacred—and thus self-understanding itself. Science is a system which, in its magical brilliance and rigorous detail, can no longer see reality in its schizophrenic visage. (Was it thus modernity that consumed itself by devouring mythology in a sacrificial ritual, thereby awakening postmodernism’s total lack of metanarrative and mythology as a whole?) Do we live in the Time of the Second Sun, where Quetzalcoatl is our sun? Is it order, registration, capital, and algorithmic dictatorship that dictate our fate in this hyperrational world—where becoming itself is reduced, dissected, and consumed; where inner experience is lost to complete fools and masochists? Or do I understand it all wrong? Do we live under the First Sun, where Tezcatlipoca, in his ecstasy, fails to uphold a logos; everything in a damned postmodern collapse of meaning through hyperreal and smoky mirror-images? And yet, modern science and its whole institution are so in love with sens that total nonsense threatens the very sun to extinguish—drowned in the blood (data) from our bodies. In what sense did the Aztecs live under the Fifth Sun, where our contemporary world seems doomed to meet the Second Sun’s demise; or the First? Or do we already live under the Third Sun, where Tezcatlipoca steals Beauty itself from the sun—Being—and thus anchors us in certain doom by drought, climate change arising from the very desire for the beauty of transcendence that never reaches ecstasy because it breathes in the wrong direction (inhales), for Tezcatlipoca stole her from God? Or are we stuck in the Fourth Sun; where Tezcatlipoca once again ruins everything because the sun consisted of false generosity and not burning excess and self-consumption? In all of this, I imagine Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma Xocoyotzin’s meeting as a collision between two separate times; where the Aztecs’ own mythos was a hyperstition enabling the birth of the Fifth Sun—a feedback loop that, in Landian madness, birthed the gods anew through the violence of colonialism and the repression of smallpox upon a mythos that desired its own self-actualization.
And thus: Am I the Fifth Sun?
However much I try to formulate my philosophical approaches, I falter and vomit my bile. I never wanted to produce a movement; a life, a fertile core of theoretical knowledge. It was doomed before I even began to write. SO: in what sense do you claim that I am deceitful? In what sense am I illusory in this text? I already expressed from the beginning my disgust for language and my desire for COLLAPSE. Was it not through my own misleading that I remained truthful to my words? Have I not shown you how to deconstruct this entire work? Through mythos, through cybernetic feedback loops, and total gibberish? I never presented myself as either prophet or philosopher, yet you read my words as though that were the case? How can you advocate such horror—to blindly accuse me of such absurdity? Read again, from the beginning, and return with that accusation again, but this time bearing your own awareness of your unmatched stupidity—how could you trust a poet?
And yet I have been entirely clear with my motives, fully authentic in what this self-referential spiral has come to exploit.
Perhaps—
an envy and a deceit
made language itself,
neither reader nor poet,
come to perceive
its lack of insight and angst—
what a defeat—
where language itself
broke down and screamed:
"I am released".
Note: The CCRU has definitely not been involved in any way in the formation of this ritual sacrifice.