Book Sample: Demons Module Opening

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World (module opening)

“Who needs chicks when you got demons?” [They not mutually exclusive, my dudes.]

—John and Moe, The Gate II: Trespassers (1992)

(source: Austin Vashaw’s “Forgotten Sequel GATE II,” 2018)

Note: I wanted to release this on Friday the 13th, but had to rush it a little. I’ll proofread it more over the next day or so. —Perse

This module focuses on forbidden knowledge and transformation through demons, but especially creation/poiesis through such things and their materials. Clay, for instance, is the classic tool of the gods, who create from it all manner of entities. Demons, then, constitute power exchange through knowledge as a forbidden creative act; i.e., they are an incredibly broad category of monster that—famously shown during Satanic Panic, in the 1980s—showcases beings (thus knowledge) as literally fashioned from clay (an analog of human flesh)! Doing so constitutes an act of power-as-creation, showcasing knowledge through limitless poetry that we’ll explore in the pages ahead.

Demonic “claymation” has occult origins dating back to the Golem of Prague (and older examples), but have been reinvoked with John Carmack’s own Martian variety in Doom (1993) as also being fashioned from clay before being digitized (a common ’90s technique; Blizzard originally intended their 1996 flagship game, Diablo 1, to be digitized claymation). Apart from clay, however, demons are embodied and invoked by various materials and methods reanimating dead things, being made of dark hellish materials, summoned from dark hellish zones, or sensed through the imbibing of dark hellish substances:

  • posthuman mad science, composite demons and Cartesian thought leading to modern-day fascism and xenophobia (the Promethean Quest)
  • the liminal expression of occult language, black-magic symbols, and BDSM rituals
  • and drug-fueled ecstasies and xenophilic knowledge tied closely to nature, sexuality and gender expression as alienated from the modern world

As with the undead we have already examined, remember Weber’s maxim (and in connection to it, Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism vis-à-vis the Neo-Gothic mode); it applies to any demon whether the iconoclast is of mad science, occult magic or nature, or has undead elements to it (e.g., the xenomorph). Made to prey on nature as monstrous-feminine, the state has an intrinsic police character that will double and weaponize Gothic poetics against pro-worker forms of counterterror seeking liberation:

  • “Forbidden Sight and the Promethean Quest” parts zero, one and two consider the Cartesian history of making demons to punish, or otherwise summon through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the process of abjection (inheritance anxiety inside the Imperial Core continuing Capitalist Realism as a “fear of the outside, of the dark, of nature[1], etc”)—i.e., both a) the unironic persecution of composite-demonic bodies through mad science in defense of capital, weaponizing both against marginalized communities presented as degenerate and infantile forces that threaten the colonial binary established by white, European, heteronormative civilization during the Enlightenment; and b) summoned, supernatural (occult) demons and their own giving and receiving of canonical punishment during oppositional praxis.
  • “Exploring the Derelict Past” considers the dialectical-material tensions between the demonic trifecta of damsels, detectives and demons; i.e., as something to enjoy on either side of oppositional praxis, while endorsing pro-state or pro-worker functions (their appropriative dogma or appreciative ironies) according to those expressing and investigating demons and their shape-shifting trauma/catharsis.
  • “Call of the Wild” considers the natural world as a hellish, demonic site of animals as monstrous; i.e., demonic or undead to varying degrees, which the state will exploit per the Cartesian model and its profit motive. Parts one and two considers the revolutionary potential of monster-fucking and the sex-positive education of the monstrous-feminine animalized; i.e., both a) how naturalistic demons/composites have previously attempted to avoid persecution altogether—by first reuniting workers with ironic, sex-positive forms of “punishment,” specifically monster-fucking in anthropomorphized, shape-shifting forms (furries)—and b) by introducing a xenophilic sex education that is closer to nature as a chaotic force, supplying a natural-material approach of queerly subverting the Enlightenment and its torturous “natural” order/genocidal exploitation of nature through magic, drug-use and nigh-surreal anthropomorphism like Giger’s xenomorph.

Again, demons are classically made as an act of creating something out of clay or summoning it into a clay-like substance (or dead flesh, possessed victims, etc) to deal/treat with power in all its forms. I’d like to consider this through an extended exhibit containing some different ideas to keep in mind; i.e., insofar as this creative process is a) normally monopolized to serve state forces, and b) reclaimed in the same exploitative boundaries by us to achieve liberation, developing Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM to hug the alien: “Life’s fantasy—to be locked away and still to think you’re free!” (Black Sabbath’s “Die Young,” 1980).

(exhibit 43e2a: Artist: Mugiwara Art. My drawing of Mugi as a dark visitor trapped between their devastated homeworld and ours; i.e., built on the fatal, Orientalist nostalgia of the 1980s Egyptian counterfeit: the return of the demon, demanding submission of the [canonically white] slave, the white Indian: “Frozen eyes stare deep in your eyes as you die!” From Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) to Slayer’s “Season in the Abyss” (1990), you’ll have seen and heard such abjection everywhere, and multiple times in this book [re: Castlevania‘s Countess, Jojo‘s Pillar Men, Samus Aran and Skeletor, etc]. Here, it serves a vital theatrical role: “antiquity” in decay delivering calculated risk with a Numinous, beyond-the-realms-of-death traveling flavor we can reclaim from the elite; i.e., as neurodivergent personas challenging their bad demon BDSM—reversing abjection! To that, Mugi and I are both neurodivergent, but Mugi is also plural [and unless stated up front is seamless within a system]. Younger plurals tend to be more open about their condition as a matter of Gothic poetics.

For example, my friend Mavis likes to be underestimated, operating more like a chameleon. They are plural like Mugi is and can agree and disagree with me seamlessly within a position of survival. Once taught, they can’t turn it off, and like all demons, they are made by capital exerting its will on them. Similar to the nightmare scenario of the skeleton lord coming home to roost, plurality is often a consequence of trauma; i.e., demons are made, but as the entire following module will expose, they can be used for different aims, to represent different things; e.g., plural people, queer persons, and/or Communists to varying degrees: medical conditions, social practices, class attitudes, often as things to summon and offer as paradoxes of forbidden knowledge and unequal power exchange.

Except the state doesn’t need to be the only ones making demons and using them to advertise, “other cultures are savage, not us!”; we can place “rape” in quotes using the same faux-Egyptian counterfeit, albeit for sex-positive reasons that aren’t unironically seeking revenge or capitalizing on such inherited anxieties [re: “white people disease”]: a funeral procession making the planet dead as an Orientalist metaphor for fascism and moral panic. The eclipse, here, equals the rising of the black, “ancient,” faraway castle as a projection of all the usual bourgeoise abuses onto: fear and dogma, an opportunity to cash in as so many did, during the ’80s; i.e., move money through nature while dressing everything up as alien [the Stargate Egyptology trick: ancient aliens tied to Biblical reinventions, specifically Exodus] and metal. The black pyramid is simply the West diminished, apologizing for Ra [and the sun-like Imperium] as merely decayed, unstable like a volcano during the dialectical of the alien and needing a Walpole-style facelift: it’s abject pacification, mid-consumerism—the worship of power-in-decay displaced to an other time, a liminal space, a Gothic castle.

[source] 

When I was living this lie, fear was my game
People would worship and fall
Drop to their knees
So bring me the blood and red wine
For the one to succeed me
For he is a man and a god
And he will die too 

[…] Now I am cold but a ghost lives in my veins
Silent the terror that reigned
Marbled in stone
A shell of a man God preserved
For a thousand ages
But open the gates of my hell
I’ll strike from the grave

Tell me why I had to be a Powerslave
I don’t wanna die, I’m a god
Why can’t I live on?
When the Life Giver dies
All around is laid waste
And in my last hour
I’m a slave to the Power of Death [source: Genius].

This power is neoliberal Capitalism in decay as something to camp; i.e., to shout “kneel before your master!” and own the stage [as Langella does, the sassy lich] during a given, profoundly intense instance of the grim harvest/Grim Reaper as exotic, magical, straight-up stylish and cool: summon the night’s black boner champion, resident catgirl[2a] or death god, then rape it through police violence before banishing it again; rinse and repeat. In the classic neoliberal refrain, Capitalism Realism strengthens by virtue of a presence of corruption and decay darkening the city scape as coming—per the “black Egyptian” classic displacement—out of the imaginary past to threaten the present with the ghost of the counterfeit: the pimp-like Great Destroyer traveling from older decayed empires into the Imperial Core as weakened and using garden variety obfuscation and DARVO to deflect criticism and project violence onto the same-old victims.

To this, a Nazi-Communist skeleton king or Medusa [a dark Cleopatra] conveniently shows up, displacing current system harm back onto the same imperiled world; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang and military urbanism. In response, a white knight is summoned to whitewash the Imperial Core through a false promise of restoration that banishes the angry foreigner/Wandering Jew [and his global conspiracy/cabal—the titular “Masters of the Universe”] whence they came [from the glossary]:

The Ghost of the Counterfeit 

Coined by Jerrold Hogle, this abject reality or hidden barbarity is a hauntological process of abjection that, according to David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (source). I would add that it is a privileged, liminal position that endears a sheltered consumer to the barbaric past as reinvented as consumable.

In other words, it’s the usual summoning of the Radcliffean castle during the liminal hauntology of war to enact Red Scare, except we can reclaim such devices to wage our own destinies with the self-same demonic language of the imaginary past. The state doesn’t monopolize that shit, and Langella’s performance [and Silvestri’s sweeping score] become things to camp the ghost of “Caesar” and Marx with in equal measure: “A battle fought in the stars…now comes to Earth.”

As such, it’s Star Wars’ billionaire Marxism, but Gothic like Alien was while cycling profit through an endless series of centrist, neoliberal wars, battles, heroes and villains: an Americanized temple of “ancient” war traveling to and fro along with its conspicuously swole deities/avatars thereof [carried into shooter-style videogames, especially Doom‘s unironically hypermasculine Doomguy as a profoundly stupid and violence protagonist]. It’s gibberish, made-up demonic nonsense settled through force; i.e, not archaeological respect for the actual past as something to learn from, but to administer dogmatically and sell over and over to maintain Capitalist Realism by glorifying police violence as “timeless,” eternal. It’s an old war-film tactic, and one that translates to pretty much anything violent; e.g., gangster films and Westerns like Heat’s [1995] infamous bank robbery scene and the ending shoot-out to The Wild Bunch [1969]: cops and robbers, but also dragon slayers; i.e., one-man armies whose hauntological worship under capital ignores the regular victims of those exchanges—nature and workers.

 [artist: Drew Struzan] 

Knowledge is power. So is Gothic poetics. Like printing money or monopolizing violence, the state wants to monopolize terror and bodily expression using their arrangement of demons: a canonical flow of power and knowledge to serve the state by pacifying workers with moral panics and their demonic codes under heteronormative, settler-colonial rule: more targets of state violence.

Banishing a demon back to Hell is functionally no different than slaying a dragon/evil, Jewish-coded wizard or shooting a zombie insofar as the endless bullets, beams, missiles and bombs all equal profit in the eyes of capitalists; i.e., by having soldiers, mercenaries and cops use them on the requisite victims dressed up as monsters to be destroyed by other monsters during canonically escapist “empowerment” fantasies: videogames as monomythic war simulators meant to turn people into cops [of media, childhoods] from an early age: us-versus-them against nature-as monstrous-feminine married to anti-Semitic, Orientalist and otherwise xenophobic stories framing nature as “ancient,” dark, and unruly! Antagonize nature, then tokenize it; e.g., Amazons like Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran. Betrayal is betrayal and cops are cops according to how they attack and drain nature-as-alien: summoned by state necromancers to induce a police, us-versus-them function. Canonically speaking, monsters are made to uphold and disseminate this device; i.e., to learn its ins and outs by playing with it through state-sanctioned toys [classically made from wood, clay and metal, etc—with L.A. Beast even attempting to make a sword out of Casein plastic: spoiled milk[2b]]. Canon makes worlds and populates them with cops and victims.

[artist: Xavier Garcia]

In the eyes of the state, each is already dead. For cops, the state cannibalizes its enforcers per the euthanasia affect [re: tokens first]. Until then, a cop’s victims wait to be destroyed by said enforcers, marginalized traitors playing token subjugate Amazons [the monstrous-feminine] and status-quo knights; i.e., triangulating against state victims by playing victims themselves: supermen impossibly threatened [“the enemy is both weak and strong”] and damsels-in-distress [the usual TERF gimmick] tokenizing feminism-in-decay set to a Gothic liminal space isolating the hero between childhood and adulthood as oddly colorful and toy-like reflected in the hero’s vision, literally heads-up display [an effect shared with other videogames we’ve examined, like Metroid and Castlevania as giving the hero, per Cartesian thought, quantifiable means of mapping and destroying a built world; i.e., with a numbered, arcade-style element per what can be taken from the world and absorbed into the hero, or thrust by the hero into the world—a health bar and ammo counter as they kill the state’s enemies in vampiric fashion]

but also curiously set to equally hauntological music communicating the same fatal nostalgia to gamer culture as trapped in the Man Box, coded to defend the state by colonizing said fantasies [any and all of them, across all media forms]. As I write in, “Spectating FPS Speedruns: Potential Pitfalls Exemplified by Doom Eternal” [2021]: 

Classic Doom is a curious mix, and takes its visual cues from actual gargoyles, toy guns, and clay demons; its music is MIDI metal, but also post-punk, ’70s prog and ’90s grunge. Doom 3 features elegant, nefarious concept art and dark, industrial levels, but minimal music (the opening track is pretty great, but rips off Tool’s “Lateralus“; it also features Chris Vrenna, a former NIN drummer). Doom 2016 had a giant corporation being re-colonialized by the demonic oppressed, underpinned by some desaturated visuals (inspired by late dystopian surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński) and excellent level music (re: “Rip and Tear,” “BFG Division”). This music was composed by Nu-Industrial auteur Mick Gordon.  

As observed in my original review, Doom Eternal‘s music isn’t bad. Parts of it come alive, though especially when making obscure nods to older games (Diablo) and movies (Predator). Nonetheless, it’s fairly journeyman and rote; or, as [one of my exes] once said, Doom Eternal‘s OST feels like “industrial lite”—music written for people who have never listened to industrial before. For my partner, the music builds, but never climaxes. It hints at NIN, Rabbit Junk or Front Line Assembly but doesn’t go anywhere with it. You’d be better off listening to those bands instead (see, also: Reznor’s soundtrack for The Vietnam War).

For me, Doom Eternal’s checkered music production history leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Originally the story (from id Software Studio Director Marty Stratton) involved an open letter on Reddit in 2020, detailing how Mick’s unprofessional music for the second game was delivered late, forcing Chad Mossholder, id’s lead audio engineer, to have to piece everything together himself; later, Chad and id really got a lot of hate from fans, and Mick seemingly stayed quiet about it. Except after two years, Mick came forward with a ton of receipts, saying 

Marty lied about the circumstances surrounding the DOOM Eternal Soundtrack and used disinformation and innuendo to blame me entirely for its failure. Afterwards, he offered me a six-figure settlement to never speak about it. As far as I’m concerned, the truth is more important (source).

As Greg Kennelty writes in “Mick Gordon Publishes Massive Statement over Allegations Surrounding Doom Eternal Soundtrack” (2022):

All told, Gordon‘s post runs about an hour in length and is long enough to warrant a table of contents. In the Summary of Facts section, Gordon alleges the following against Stratton:

      • He was not paid for over half of the DOOM Eternal soundtrack
      • He received a contract for the soundtrack 48 hours prior to the release of the game, and was not told the entire truth about the scope of his work
      • He was cut out of the process at the end of the soundtrack
      • Stratton never reached out to him about the controversy, and instead published the open letter
      • He received torrents of abuse and harassment from fans afterward
      • His reputation has been damaged because of this situation

Read the full letter here.

I don’t care if the guy is an artist that “everybody” loves; compared to famous FPS OSTs from artists like Bobby Prince, Trent Reznor or Sonic Mayhem—hell, even Mick himself—the OST for Doom Eternal just isn’t that great. It doesn’t break any new ground, and it feels like a double CD release that could’ve been trimmed down to just the “combat” tracks. You know, the ones with an actual pulse (source). 

Furthermore, old monsters can start to feel adrift as time goes on, like soldiers without countries or wars to fight. Sometimes there’s a punk element, as Richard Ray remarks in “Doom, Coronavirus, the Mancubus and Me” [2020]: 

id Software’s Doom was made by a band of dropouts and misfits led by gaming pioneers John Romero and John Carmack. It is widely considered the grandfather of the First Person Shooter genre. It’s also been aptly described as gaming’s “punk moment.” It was loud, fast, violent and didn’t give a shit about your feelings. It glorified the sound effect of pumping a shotgun and blasting away at fire-spewing Imps, vile Cacodemons, unholy Hell Knights and zombified employees of the Union Aerospace Corporation [source].

 

Except, of course, this gamer-style history of “rebellion”—from Tolkien to Cameron to Romero and Carmack, to speedrunners and content creators at large as weird canonical nerds [seriously, just look at these two dweebs, left]—is all at once incredibly dumb, self-serving and largely false, from a revolutionary standpoint; i.e., aimed squarely at gamer culture as something largely white, cis-het and male[3] to rebel against a cartoon idea of evil corporations… by soldiering against “evil” as a positions of settler-colonial violence to administer as cops do. “Demon,” then, is really code for all the usual things white boys [and token recruits] shoot in the name of state/corporate preservation as coded into them to achieve, for all intents and purposes, an unironic, middle-class clubbism/gang-style revenge of the nerds; re [from Volume Two, part one]:

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual [source]. 

Back them, white boys “rebelled” as a matter of having the means to do so on ’90s computers [and other home entertainment systems] evolving into a business they go jumpstart on for themselves as extensions of capital; i.e., what they created, as such. Their creations—our aforementioned heroes, if they were punk in a proletarian sense—quickly became witch hunters once recuperated amid fairly stupid debates between fighting gangs circle-jerking it[4]; they invent enemies to feel useful while seeking payment as capital decays like always. It’s vital, then, to court such persons and offer them a better path than the state does [refer to Volume One for some good examples of this; i.e., the subchapter “An Uphill Battle, part one: ‘Predators and Prey,’ or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror”].)

As the above exhibit shows, poetics, imagination and creativity aren’t divorced from history and politics; they compose and define them, hence dictate the direction that power flows and the forms that it takes. As we’ve already covered in relation to trauma, egregores take two basic forms: undead and demonic (with animal qualities to each, often overlapping in chimeric fashion; e.g., the xenomorph). There isn’t a fine line between the composite undead and demons, as far as that goes; both are figuratively manmade in the poetic sense. However, demons can be literally manmade, summoned/supernatural, or linked to nature, the modules of which we shall explore in order—during part one and part two of this chapter and in the “Rabbit Hole” and “Call of the Wild” chapters after them.

This being said, we’ve already explored the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain in Volume Zero; and unpacked police violence, rememory and apocalypses extensively in the Undead Module. Here, the infinite variety and limitless potential of demons and nature require me to take a more survey-style approach (future editions can always include more close-reads). I’m adopting it to be more playful, thus true to demons and their psychosexual torture games, so expect a bit of eclectic messiness and fun to this module!

To summarize, demons transform and exchange power as forbidden knowledge (not ordinary knowledge, then, but knowledge with the power to change things), but this only sets the stage for infinite variety that occurs in terms of what these things actually are in practice: they don’t take like the undead do when the undead feed, but rather give forbidden knowledge back that—once received—turns the recipient into a demon, which can happen over and over again! “She turned me into a newt” can just be followed by anything else the demon desires. Hell is a place of forbidden knowledge, populated by demons who—knowing things—can magically transform because of said knowledge. The more they know, the more they can transform—are beings of voluntary contrast.

In other words (indented for emphasis, a demonic thesis for the rest of the module):

(source: Reddit)

whereas zombies are more one-note (despite being a hybrid monster, in modern settings) and vampires—despite their own historical prolificity and ontological/complexities—tend to look fairly similar across the board, demons and nature are entirely defined by their morphological, sex-to-gender variety and ludic complexity. “Demons” can be whatever you want them to be; they communicate through sex and force as generally uneven, torturous, raw. For instance, the Medusa or succubus/monstrous-feminine sex demon (arguably the most ubiquitous and famous demon to come out of the West) classically and thus regularly plays out in this way in BDSM pastiche (above). She disrobes timidity to expose her furious and febrile darkness.

To know is to (ex)change; to change is to adopt a state of mind as a perform one can play out. To it, the more power given through knowledge, pain or anything else exchanged, the greater the transformation generally is; e.g., Skeletor in Masters of the Universe declaring “And now, I, Skeletor, am master of the universe!” when he receives the fire of the gods, becomes a god in ways that are perceived as “fatal.” His body and his mind—already twisted in pursuit of such things (“It is my destiny!”)—explode in delusions of grandeur: “playing god.” A Faustian bargain canonically finger wags, saying “be careful what you ask for” to curious minds; but it also reminds us that knowledge can give us the ability to change our stars in ways that will see us excommunicated from state realms. This isn’t a fate worse than death, but a mercy exiting Plato’s cave: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Same idea with the Promethean Quest—the searching for power than leads to us being punished by false gods telling us we can’t be gods, too. “Death” becomes a state of change, then, one pursuant to our own building of better worlds using the Gothic aesthetic/poetics of power and death, sex and force (all the fun things). Poetry is cool; power and death are cool; and anyone who poo poos the Gothic’s ability to create through them is terminally lame/a cop defending private property (thus poetics) for the state.

In this sense, Skeletor is basically Prometheus and Faust, making a deal with Hell/stealing the fire of the gods (and transforming like Loki would, from Norse myth) to become less and less human, or conversely posthuman in ways that return him to lost states of existence those under capital see as dead; re: Capitalist Realism. As such, he’s also Satan/Frankenstein’s monster, challenging God—either in ways whose rebellion is false, thus in defense of the state, or legitimate in ways that, as vice characters so often do, promote the joys of basic human rights demonized as non-Christian, foreign, alien. Any way you slice it, knowledge and power alienate in ways that distance the state from workers and from each other. But also, liberated workers exit normal states of existence to become increasingly demonic, thus drawn to other demons who know things, too! Knowledge is power because it gives us the ability to (ex)change not just ourselves, but the ordering of the universe as ordained by bourgeois forces. If state proponents ultimately look down at such Melmothian wanderers (or monopolize them in strictly fascist interpretations), then, we fags ultimately look up to them (though Mark Hamill still sucks): to mold ourselves like clay!

As such, unequal power—as something to play with, negotiate and exchange during ludo-Gothic BDSM—is likewise notoriously diffuse, illusory and nebulously subjective; i.e., formally presented as a deal, bargain or negotiation (often of fatal knowledge, through Faust), “power” can be whatever you want, can flower in either direction (Faustian bargains are one way and expression in game theory as zero-sum) can arrange however you want (e.g., demon monarchs or servants/imps, circles of Hell and other tiered/concentric torture dungeons, “white devils” and other foreigner classifications such as “barbarian” or “savage,” kayfabe heels/babyfaces, etc) as an aesthetic or metric (re: Foucault, bio-power)—can be guided by impulse, mood, urgency/detachment and individual preference. Milton aside, one person’s Heaven is another’s Hell, and vice versa. The orgasm (skin or otherwise) is all in the mind!

Furthermore, apart from elemental demons, or some of nature that have an elemental or inhuman quality to them, demons are nearly all of them sexual, or concern sexuality discussed in asexual, social-centric ways through BDSM-style pain, fetishes and kink, as well as power imbalance, public nudism, and survived and inherited/generational trauma voyeuristically exhibited. But natural demons, as we shall see in the “Call of the Wild Chapter,” often concern sexuality linked to nature-as-abject, hunted or otherwise pursued and caged/dominated by Cartesian forces. These kinds are—pardon the expression—breeding grounds for intense psychosexual expression with asexual elements.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Simply put, there’s a million-and-one ways to combine, give and instruct with sex and force through pain (non-harmful or not), but also to marry it educationally with erogenous pleasure, medieval aesthetics, mil spec, time periods, (a)sexual fetishes and clichés, masks, costumes, alter egos, herbos and himbos, Biblical allusions, castle parentage/disputes, fatal homecomings and bread-and-circus trials by combat (e.g., Ornstein and Smough, the black-knight-style demons from Dark Souls, or Marcellus and similar oni-style Yokai from Onimusha and similar Asia-themed survival horror and Metroidvania), kink and BDSM rituals/implements (whips, chains, leather and so on), muscle and fat, doms and subs, gender and body euphoria, and various taboos, stigmas—and biases, anxieties, phobias, what-have-you—while likewise arranging and exchanging power imbalance in ironic/unironic BDSM for demons.

With vampires, for example, the poetic emphasis leans more on fluid exchange/giving and taking essence as fluid. Though “essence” translates easily enough to power and knowledge through BDSM rituals, “demons” make for an incredibly broad umbrella category—can enjoy or express power and forbidden knowledge (about power, essence, or anything else) in any shape or size, vestige or portrayal; and they and their poetics don’t need to be red and/or black (often, green or purple works, too, but really any color scheme[5]). Indeed, they could drink blood as a liquid, breathe spirit as gaseous, or eat a solid shiny red apple;

(artist: Judith Meets Salome)

the apple, in turn, can represent pretty much anything (cum, power, cum as power, etc) and Eve can be phallic/serpentine through Biblical symbolism, or through allusory stand-ins for stand-ins, dead metaphors out-of-joint with canon, classic-to-Freudian-to-postmodern interpretations/umbilicals, and so on.

The presentational idea is generally visual immediacy and in language most people understand/relate to in some shape or form: sex and force. Exceptions aside, western whores tend to classically (in the Gothic mode) dress/appear in black and maidens in white; collars, gloves, corsets, stilettos, stockings and lingerie are popular, as whips, feather dusters and maid outfits, and various dichotomies like leather/lace, angel/devil, dom/sub and virgin/whore.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

All of these can hybridize, mid-aesthetic (all women are virgins and whores), but whores are property first, people second; both something to call and relegate afterwards, they are visually obvious—marked in society for being a particular kind of criminalized servant/forbidden merchandise that cops, as pimps, “protect” (versus the legalized variant of woman’s work: the bride/wife, who is relegated to broodmare of “legitimate” bloodlines thanks to virgin/whore syndrome; i.e., the husband getting his jollies with his mistress/paying for her abortions to avoid bastard, illegitimate bloodlines).

We don’t have time to unpack the universal whore’s wardrobe, here. Just know the sky’s truly the limit regarding what’s “on tap” and how you want to respond to it (darlings can be killed and authors die): to draw your own conclusions/make your own connections beyond what dogma and the Imperialism of theory (re: Norton) affords! Dogma forces singular interpretation, hence police violence; for us and Gothic Communism, speculation and critical potentiation/prolific interpretation is the name of the game! “Eat the fucking apple! They’re going blame you anyway!” Rock those fishnets, girl!

Hermeneutics aside, Demons essentially and creativity have carte blanche, affording users a limitless, infinite potential and creativity in how they themselves perform, present/perceive and play power out through demonic avatars and their doubled, darkness-visible paradoxes; i.e., power is an illusion, and a transient, dualistic, liminal one; e.g., knowledge is power, and power is terror, violence, and morphological expression, etc, under dialectical-material dispute during oppositional praxis. Original Sin makes for the classic, recursive, dogmatic example. Satan tempts Eve with the apple, which is knowledge, but also power performed between different players casting blame and owning up to/casting off responsibility in the face of state structures (and punishment): it’s a lie but true through state force as something to administer (often through the soul and purity arguments tied to glory and eternal salvation translating, under capital, to a Protestant ethic). Faced with total power, people aren’t afraid to point fingers to escape damnation/excommunication; desperation marries with convenience to encourage paranoia betrayal (which, in turn, amounts to more power for the state)! A witch hunt is a blame game where no one wins but the state; it’s a lie, both everywhere and nowhere. Sex is everywhere in ways that, through these excuses to coerce workers, cannot be avoided.

(artist: Domenichino)

Paradise, per law and order under state rule, is generally threatened by shapeshifting devilry (queerness) and nature as monstrous-feminine (classically female parties, really anything that isn’t white cis-het European Christian men); i.e., Eve, per Original Sin, corrupts under Satanic influence (which God allows), opening the door for degeneracy and decay of the state, hence moral panics/states of exception, hence profit during police abuse/tokenization when Imperialism comes home to empire (and when the state preys on the Global South until that point): antagonize nature-as-monstrous-feminine (alien) and put it to work under capital/settler colonialism as informed by older power structures like Imperialism, organized religion and feudalism. It’s women’s fault, and the Gays, the fall of Eden comparable to the fall of Rome insofar as white male fragility is “threatened” by the collusion of dark forces against that biggest of “victims”: cis-het men and their DARVO schemes (which lead to betrayal/triangulation during Man Box/”prison sex mentalities, and really assimilation of all kinds [e.g., black skin, white masks] inside embedded persecution networks/rungs of preferential mistreatment).

So what is power? Power is infinite and finite, tremendously figurative and objective; e.g., “heaven in a windflower” vis-à-vis labor value (which has infinite value, the state wishing to steal our power [whatever the shape] through Faustian bargains). Since power can literally take any form—and often manifests as much through theatre, acting and disguise in good or bath faith versus object forms, like material conditions—the simplest way to conceptualize it is, “power is exchange” as a matter of context, regarding forbidden knowledge in terms of gender, sex and anything else; re (from “Notes on Power” in Volume Zero):

Banquo got it wrong: Lies and the language of darkness aren’t inherently bad, meaning harmful or deserving of capital punishment; while he exclaims, “Can the devil speak true?” to himself and Macbeth, the devilish workers of Communism can speak true—i.e., in order to help each other survive the real dangers of a structure evolved to deceive us through harmful forgery (the irony being Banquo was killed by his own friend, not the witches—all for the same status inside the same power structure they lived inside together and which Shakespeare relayed through a stage play whose name people [specifically thespians] don’t like to say).

Language, like the devil, is plastic and can change shape (only following the Cartesian Revolution and Capitalism’s rise of mapping and dominating the world through doubles inside and outside of “pure” fiction [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] did language solidify and binarize in service of the profit motive). Paradox is an essential component of human language in its natural and material forms; i.e., the immensely popular idea of theatre and duels told through heroes and their monstrous contradictions to ascribe meaning through staged conflict. Within this broader dialogic, the Gothic is mired in mimetic paradox through the communication of “deathly” appetites” (indented for clarity):

Death is the ultimate feeling of a lack of control, to be out of control. To face it as codified according to stigmas and biases, theatre is a tremendous, psychosexual device for calculated risk/informed consent (which operates to give agency through performance as a negotiated, heavily controlled affair). For Gothic Communists, these praxial contraptions are built around the profit motive as something to face and challenge through its praxial doubles: Gothic Communism’s monsters and their poetic, liminal extensions versus Capitalism’s, communicating in shared struggle and language as paradoxical on various registers simultaneously.

calculated risk/risk reduction exercise

A calculated risk minimizes harm but mimics the feeling of being out of control; e.g., consent-non-consent/informed consent.

consent-non-consent

Negotiated social-sexual scenarios through informed consent, consent-non-consent where one party surrenders total control over to the other party trusting that party to not betray said agreement or trust; aka “RACK” (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) in relation to risky BDSM; i.e., bodily harm; e.g., public beatings, rape scenarios, whippings, knife play and blood-letting.

In essence, power is paradox during liminal expression through doubles (two or more things existing at once). From Paradise Lost onwards, then, power and its exchange (again, often through/with forbidden knowledge) becomes something to disguise, then tempt ignorant parties with; i.e., Original Sin (though, in defense of or from the state, this performative notion [and the epistemological freight it offers each side] goes both ways): canon vs iconoclasm using the same aesthetics in duality. Lies are simply enough form of language, begging the question: which lies anisotropically serve workers!

At their most basic, devils are splendide mendax sullying Paradise with lies; i.e., as something to dirty or corrupt through forbidden exchange by Satanic forces. “Canon” being the strict, rigid control of information (thus power flow) by state paradigms, a devil is a whore, a tramp, a broker iconoclast of so many different things that earn them backhanded compliments by police agents (applicable to men/queer parties at large, but classically to white cis-het women in a heteronormative scheme): a dirty, naughty and/or bad girl, etc. Whores aren’t just demons, but criminals. While iconoclasm takes and delights in that fact, Gothic Communism is more selective than simply offering sex to the uninitiated! It uses any expression of power imaginable to foster sex positivity as antithetic to state aims (namely profit and rape).

A “devil,” then, becomes someone—usually a charming or brute-force tempter of this or that—to deal with in some imposturous degree of disguise and bald face (the paradox of shifting shape through affect versus literal appearance). But such cryptonymy’s ludic/ontological flexibility further owes to demons being performative/poetic in a highly staged way that goes on and off said stage; e.g., serial killers, vigilantes and again, dominatrixes, subs, and switches, horny college professors taking advantage of their students through a structural power imbalance (above), etc; i.e., BDSM isn’t just for the bedroom (re: Foucault) and it isn’t purely sexual, combining asexual interrogations of sex and force through power displays and public nudism, amongst other things!

From Plato’s Academy to modern universities, schools are sites of knowledge exchange that classically are ruled by patriarchal agents. Except, anywhere can be a classroom/dealing space to exchange with devilish things. Demon sex (commonly framed as “the whore”) becomes a weapon to levy in devilish ways against the state, which they cannot monopolize. Revolution or critical analysis, then—labor action and mutual consent established through gender and sex, parody and pastiche—can suitably manifest anywhere, through theatrical articulations of forbidden knowledge and power exchange: deals with the devil as a costume, a mask to put on or remove as needed (often in a dungeon, closet or false/inverted “church” of some kind; e.g., a bathroom stall where forbidden “exchanges” and “worship” take place: prayer and predation, internment and instruction, education and reeducation, etc)!

In short, demons are pragmatic in the linguistic sense; i.e., defined by sarcasm, innuendo, play and mood. To it, a good dom/sex worker can take any language on Earth—regardless of where it is written (e.g., in a Bible or graffiti on a bathroom stall door)—and make it powerful/suggestive/subversive, generally through conscious anticipation of various responses, mid-tension-and-release: “I’ll eat your ‘apple’!” Nothing is sacred (except basic human, animal and environmental rights) and anything goes. We whores fuck to metal, on the first date—in short, we just love to fuck, period—all in spite naysayers and prudes; they’re hypocrites/desperately starved of good connect, missing out on what makes life worth living! Learning is fun, is sex, is wicked, cumming and bad! I don’t always cum when I learn, but when I cum I’m always learning!” Yeah, baby! Everyone loves whores, demons and sluts; the idea is to learn not to hate them, too (e.g., Kim Petras, certified transsexual and slut pop star extraordinaire, below)!

In genderqueer terms, it’s less about hating on ourselves (though self-hatred/internalized bigotry are an ongoing problem for those in the closet) and more how we gay devils incessantly delight in fucking with normies’ perceived, pre-determined ideas of sin and salvation; re: green eggs and ham that, once tasted, turn their tiny little worlds upside-down: the sinner being the person in the closet, acting holier-than-thou and for whom “sin” is both a guilty pleasure and a death sentence! Though queerphobia isn’t a joke (token or not), most jokes play with phobia to phobias to some extent.

To it, we live for any theatrical tensions doing so creates in ways we can control; i.e., watching weird canonical nerds clutch their pearls, fearing our dark suggestions of damnation and delight making them sweat bullets. Trouble in paradise? That’s just our game! We live for it, but also camp canon to survive; re: watching them crap their pants something of a special treat, but likewise entirely necessary when reading the room to sus out who’s good and bad faith using our Aegis. Furthermore, torturously disabusing them of such harmful notions—i.e., by radicalizing them through sex and ludo-Gothic BDSM—is, unto itself, tremendously validating. Sex and force, pain and pleasure, metal and pulp media—modular and united, each works like a charm, the whore using her bag of tricks to heat their client up and strike while the metal’s hot. Pent up, we release tension, fight stress, and having fun on top of catharsis. This house is clean, babes!

To that, we don’t owe chudwads personal instruction, be that roleplay or sex, but people are seldom black-and-white. The state, being straight, enforces straightness in its own image, meaning we can corrupt that. Any work-in-progress, then, can promote its own potential to improve, and if we see that potential on someone’s surface and choose to act on it—to mold it like clay into something better than before—well, that’s our choice, isn’t it? “I like them. Let’s put in the work; but regardless of what happens, I’ll have fun!”

So while demons constantly transform, pushing towards a “final form,” they generally shift forever and always towards new growth and understanding under perpetual evolution.  Furnished by competing natural and socio-material forces, revolution is a journey and a cycle, not a destination (the state will always resist development), and relationships don’t exist in vacuums; workers must adapt and, as REO Speedwagon puts it, need to “Keep pushing!” To learn is to keep learning regarding labor and sex, gender and activism. Like a birthday party with friends, one happens followed by another amid fresh growth and maturity! Applying that to Gothic, so many breakthroughs, “cakes” and splashes of wet rapture await!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, any teacher who passes sex-positive knowledge to a former dumbass is going to love seeing their work bear fruit; i.e., making the world better according to what we put in—through what we give back to workers and the world (versus taking endlessly from workers as the state does). The gift is both an item and a lesson, fighting alienation with alienation: to promote reunion with the never-was to engender what could be.

This goes for sex, but also social practices tied to power exchange through sex work and gender expression; i.e., applying to “devils” among sex workers, lovers, and drag queens all trying like Sisyphus to get people to abandon harmful ideas. Few things are as uphill as rewiring dogma to regain meaningful connection through alien, fetishized things (re: Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything pursuant to profit, thus rape and genocide). So when it actually happens, that frankly feels amazing! “You’re doing it, babe! We’re doing it!” Sex is forbidden/anathema under capital, but also sold in ways we can recreate, abjuring privatization and breaking Capitalist Realism through praise, scorn, or anything else we want to roleplay on and offstage. It’s not something to fear, but overcome fear about and welcome accordingly:

(artist: In Case)

That’s good praxis, and ideally it should mobilize workers into loving the exchange of bad knowledge and lies for good knowledge and lies. In true demonic fashion, these translate to any form of exchange you could dream up; i.e., any relationship or fantasy thereof that can be had between two or more workers; e.g., me meeting Zeuhl and them delighting at the power we shared (often at my expense, though I learned a lot, and savored their fat, hairy “deli-cut” pussy—similar to the one in the illustration, above). Sex is power and power takes work to, well, work; you have to juggle this with that and while its generally a lot of fun, it doesn’t always last. And it, as power always does, takes many different forms from cycle to cycle. In BDSM, this is called “a scene” or “a negotiation,” and combines imagination with playfulness in ways that marry fun and invention; i.e., to make us not just horny/cum, but able to navigate/negotiate power out in the real world: as half-real, trapped between the fiction and rules, the fantasy and the reality as forever in flux! For workers or the state, the aesthetic (and chiastic dualism) of dealings with the devil remain largely unchanged: in punitive systems that would seem to both discourage and encourage said behaviors! To form boundaries, you must break old ones done and learn what works and what doesn’t. Short of total genocide, this eventually becomes second-nature on a community level.

(artist: In Case)

In Case, for instance, specializes in demonic art, but expresses it in earthly to hellish forms, with a variety of costumes (above); i.e., tied to different institutions of power and knowledge exchange whose barriers demon(strate) in disguise: exchanging tit for tat. All constitute opportunities to subvert and transgress against canonical, thus police forms of power exchange; i.e., through heretical instruction playing with things we shouldn’t, speaking to the delight of iconoclastic liberation; e.g., “Suck on him like this! Learn what he likes and respond to each other!” In doing so, you learn how to relate as people do, but in sex-positive versions thereof: through rituals of sex and force, thus power exchange on a two-way street.

Making people “come” to earth-shattering revelations—e.g., about sex and gender unrooted from biology but able to play with it anyways—is one of a sex worker’s biggest joys: to “see the light” by playing with “darkness.” Good sex and BDSM can radically change your perception of things; i.e., “My work here is done!” And per my arguments, such tutelage and the power it affords remain rooted entirely in performance and play dressed up in the abject language of power and death; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM! We’re all toys to play with, lesson to learn! So assume whatever form is required to pass good instruction/flexibility along inside the inescapable show of state rule (necessity is the mother of invention, worker counterterror challenging the state’s throttling of creativity); expand your horizons, minds (and other things)!

To that, there’s certainly some old iconic standbys—e.g., the red devil with a pitchfork, pointy tail and horns, or the phallic-woman dominatrix succubus whipping naughty boys inside her retro-future dungeon infringingly liminally on holier grounds (two images back, but also see: the cackling, histrionic and leather-clad dark mistresses from the Dungeon Keeper franchise, below… which really aren’t all that different functionally from xenomorphs or cenobites)—but the holistic demands of Gothic Communism and sheer poetic multiplicity and potential of demons all but requires me to paint in broad strokes: if something is a demon, it emphasizes power/forbidden knowledge exchange and transformation (which basically makes the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers quintessential demons, per a neoliberal power trip; re: “teenagers with attitude!”). We’ll cover all our bases, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, but there won’t be as many close-reads (at least, not for the first edition, v1.0)!

(source)

As usual, our aim is intersectional solidarity during a pedagogy of the oppressed—one meant to raise the degree of public knowledge and power, expressed liminally as emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during praxial synthesis (class war is race war, race war is culture war, etc); i.e., to locate the expression of queer trauma and subvert its canonical, punitive forms, reversing abjection along the ghost of the counterfeit felt through our daily lives—the rules and games we install and play out. By examining zombies, vampires and ghosts, then, we’ve already looked at different ways that monstrous persecution and creation go hand-in-hand with conditional monsters—i.e., monsters that imply a status or affliction assigned to them by Cartesian powers; we’ve also examined the “feeding” vector of each monster type relative to this condition. It also applies to demons through forbidden knowledge (thus power) exchange often being sexual: “flow” something to go with and induce/indulge in!

(exhibit 43e2b: Artist: Mugiwara Art. “I want you to cum all over me!” Commands are powerful insofar they consider power through sex as, from the French Revolution onwards, relegated to the bedroom [re: Foucault]; i.e., as a side of power exchanges/knowledge checks and gaps both forbidden outside of such areas and canonically advertised everywhere. Amateur porn showcases that in ways that stress ways we can transform through knowledge exchange; e.g., angel in the streets, demon in the sheets. It becomes power through knowledge as something to share: through globs and globs on one’s fuzzy mound and squishy body as delicious—not just forbidden sodomy-style knowledge, but delicious fruit as darkly Satanic as a revolutionary practice during the summoning of “rape”; i.e., establishing boundaries independent of state dogma.)

To that, specifically keep the previously modular thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as demonic (re: our modular thesis):

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same Satanic, darkness-visible aesthetics/pandemonium.

As such, transformation and knowledge/power exchange is anisotropic;

(artist: In Case)

trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop demonic habits that are to some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive inside and outside the bedroom as canonically abjecting such things. Said flow of power is seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd, spicy and grey liminal area of the theatre stage, the monster costumes viewed there hardly exclusive to neoliberal Capitalism; re: with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways we’re alienated from now (save in fetishized forms that serve profit inside the state of exception). Persephone, once in Hell, can stay there if it please her (dualities in effect, of course).

Fortunately, hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism; i.e., as canonically aborted by capital/the process of abjection (and other Gothic theories). Exploitation and liberation sit in the same spaces, as do pro-state and pro-worker apocalypse arguments fend off or expand the state of exception (and state forces will use DARVO and obscurantism to muddy the waters): the state is incompatible with life and with workers, and we are with it! We must hug Medusa, not fear her, but there can still be Gothic thrills/doubles; e.g., the xenomorph is basically a sex demon threatening alien rape[6] against token Amazonian maidens, but whose immortal design ditches the red for all waspy[7] black: pure death that sometimes covers itself in human blood and gore!

This speaks to an honorary third quality of demons (though it relates to unequal power): desire. From Radcliffe’s demon lovers and Black Veil (re: Wolff’s “Radcliffean Gothic Model,” which came out the same year as Alien, 1979), we can see the pursuit of a vulnerable party (classically framed as white, cis-het and female, in Neo-Gothic literature) by a dark, arrested/Oedipal, wholly murderous slasher to, if not outright overcome, then at least survive: a killer’s reputation that permeates the dark out-of-doors and castled, , churchly and/or graveyard environments to equal measure! Nigh elemental, these are deeply ingrained, well-established-if-partly-founded/unfounded fears with tell-tale classic embodiments (usually big men with dick-like knives; e.g., Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, below) predicated on concealment and revelation occupying the same infernal, golem-esque bodies:

Historically within Gothic, a dialectic of the alien and of shelter orbit around a privilege liminal group, white women; i.e., going from property to proprietor while in a state of transition, speaking to the only idea of “affection” they’re ever known—pursuit and abuse from someone for whom restraint is a myth, rape is automatic, and for which sex and harm overlap (rape being an act of total domination): a transient, regressive/reductive violator-inflictor of harmful, psychosexual pain Doing so, the class character is one of white, middle-class women demonizing poor people/immigrants/slaves through liminal expression since Radcliffe’s Italian (or Lewis’ The Monk, minus that story’s camp)—as abject, hulking maulers, invaders, trespassers in alien likenesses to their homes instead of their husbands and actual houses: getting their knickers in a twist over supernatural-tinged highwaymen (or castle knight) ravishing them.

Though it’s a toy-like, evocative simulation of mutilative, life-or-death exchanges—and Freudian analysis isn’t something Gothic Communism endorses (favoring dialectical-material analysis)—the fact remains that genuine feelings of fight, flight, fawn, freeze and flop regularly leap to mind when facing slashers (and the Halloween-grade, mad-science-meets-black-magic holiday superstitions associated with them and their haunted lands). That’s arguably the point, but these human, or at least humanoid, bugbears sit alongside fearful sightings of state enemies; re (from Volume One):

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects (source).

In short, these poetics are cathartic and criminogenic, educating and agitating to pacify as much as to rebel (re: controlled opposition). They’re chilling and dogmatic, praxially inert in canonical forms that see white women fetishizing those they commodify and police (re: Jameson’s “boring and exhausted paradigm“): the help as outsider but also strong-thighed bargeman, lycanthrope, sperm donor.

As far as demons more broadly go, though, mortal combat is a huge part of medieval theatre (the duel, Beowulf-style). Obviously this carries over into the adrenaline and ambrosia of modern-day BDSM/vice theatre; i.e., playing for laughs, thrills and cryptomimetic, legitimate-to-illegitimate boundary-breaking and setting exercises; e.g., Mortal Kombat‘s dark ’90s rock ‘n roll aesthetic—its arcade-style forces of darkness, outworld shenanigans, and the passing of order into chaos, videogames into celluloid. It’s a place to play and preach in equal measure, for the state or against it using the same demonic, hitman/assassin’s stabby-stabby language; re: courtly love.

At their most basic, then, demons of all kinds operate sex-dungeon clubs/novelties replete with music, action and gory theatrics laden an important asexual element: investigating all of the things listed above, granting them an artistic, social, campy/gallows humor component that concerns healing from trauma versus simply getting off to this or that; i.e., interrogating our confused predator/prey responses, seeking death/the void in ways that speak to our rapturous survival: seeking control during feelings lacking control, generally on the cusp of almost-certain temptation, doom, delight and ecstasy! Part of that denial and indulgence (a mentality that embodies the West), the dominatrix is all-at-once inaccessible and forbidden, and very front-and-center! “You want this ‘rape,’ don’t you, slut?”

Do we? It’s complicated, but excluding battered housewives and other comorbidities during ongoing abuse, survivors of abuse like to be put “harm” in quotes; e.g., be spit-roasted by masked men provided there’s an element of control merged with the self-destructive theatrics (and no harm takes place)! Humans are messy and trauma only makes us messier (then there’s paradox of Gothic oxymorons; e.g., Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition threatening people with comfy chairs to make them confess)!

This extends to world politics, on and offstage. From Israel to America’s Vietnam or any other settler colony project, the problem of demons remains one of police violence; i.e., the deliberate and systemic abuse of demonic language to serve state aims; re: raping nature as monstrous-feminine to harvest it through settler-colonial means. But, to reiterate, they have to essentialize these monopolizes to hold onto these territories, which is impossible.

Indeed, as Asprey writes, “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source). State monopolies seek to decay rebellious forces and present them, vis-à-vis Parenti, as false versions of themselves: as open fascists, but also moderate, disguised forms of the same police agents (often playing as “guerillas,” themselves). We are devils in disguises versus the state’s devils in disguise. There’s no avoiding that duality. The sooner we accept that and modify our cryptonymy accordingly during the dialectic of the alien, the better!

(artist: Homare Works)

Keep that in mind through this module, as I won’t overly stress it (we’ll rehash it, but won’t discuss police abuse to nearly the same extent as the Undead Module did; e.g., the “Bad Dreams” chapter). But also keep in mind that, like all monsters, the paradox of class, culture and race war through demonic poetics owes to how all demons use the same basic aesthetics of power and knowledge, but also transformation hovering nakedly on the cusp of Great Destruction (the maiden/sub threading the labyrinthine castle while avoiding/seeking the demon lover); i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual flow that power and knowledge travel in, often through transformation/the presentation of something standing transformatively in for something else; e.g., xenomorphs for Communists; re (from Volume One):

I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: […] subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord (source).

Demons—in all their shapes, sizes and colors—obey the same basic principles for or against the state as straight, putting nature-as-monstrous-feminine to work. Those who shift power towards the state will be seen as “counterterrorists” (cops or deputized forces); those who don’t will be seen as “terrorists” (re: Crawford’s “Invention of Gothic Terrorism“) or criminals for cops to punish and victimize per the Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial process, mid-abjection. The same is true for us in reverse, our doubles and their paradoxes illustrating duality mid-opposition and inviting troubling comparisons that, for us, break Capitalist Realism and reclaim our lost humanity in the eyes of state forces; e.g., David in Alien: Covenant being a terrorist in the eyes of the company but also occupying that shadowy space between Nazi and Communist.

As such, we shall now consider composite undead and demonic egregores, including how they feed on anger and gossip (from the basics), but also how they sublimate and subvert state torture and trauma through revolutionary reassignment by taking hold of canonical, demonizing language for their own purposes of enrichment and self-defense: reversing the role of terror and counterterror during oppositional dialogs through the flow of power and knowledge, but also by changing shape. They change shape, often through elicit, occult forms of sex as a psychosexual, oft-violence summoning ritual: to summon knowledge as the poetic focus, not eating. Demons are already alien, displaced, but—as we shall see—have an intersectional element on top of a modular one; i.e., in relation to nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine in ways that feel hellish and undead (re: Skeletor), a cradle for release and resentment, alike.

Something bigger to bear in mind, then, is that demons, whatever their form, generally constitute a pact, often a corporal, even sexual one during calculated risk: “flesh and the power it holds.” There’s a sense of conjuring mischief to a Mephistophelean degree; i.e., of being up to no good in the sense that one is breaking state rules to free one’s mind from state dogma and illusions, thus interrogate state trauma through similarity amid difference strung together by willing allies playing games of a restorative, debriding sort: the pedagogy of the oppressed a shared, oft-naked activity—gettin’ down with the devil in us as abjected by state forces!

(artist: Mugiwara Art)

Subverting their conventions—their fetishes and clichés—should feel “dangerous,” hence intimate, intimidating and most importantly, fun; i.e., hooking up free of judgement, delivering the goods for two (or more) people indulging and sharing in deep (bottomless) appetites of all shapes and sizes! To see how the other side lives! We Gothic Communists aggregate and solidarize, exchanging holistic tit for tat through ludo-Gothic BDSM! Like demons, Hell and true rebellion are what you make of them! So exchange all the essence that you can, use all the toys you can; i.e., the larger ones giving you an element of control that often has an enormous size/alien element to its design, for calculated-risk purposes; e.g., less “murder dick (what my ex and I would call period sex) and more freaky toys for cuties of all walks seeking to regain agency through infernal, demonic play! Both loose and tight, erogenous and painful, closeness to power can be incredibly medicinal, but also revolutionary! “Oh god, it’s growing bigger!” Our sleeves hunger for God’s rod and Satan’s shaft (“I can be your angel or your devil!”)!

(artist: Ashley Yelhsa)

Onto “Knowledge and Power Exchange (opening and part zero: vampires, goblins and demon sex)“!

Footnotes

[1] Nature is demonized by Cartesian forces, becoming something to fear to the point of ridicule. This includes the ultimate weapon of counterterror against occupying armies: their own fear. Think of a twig snapping in a Vietnam jungle, sending the brave occupiers into a shooting spree with their surroundings. They think themselves invincible, but also spook easy. This also happens at home, during military urbanism—e.g., acorns, as this Florida deputy discovered (The Guardian’s “US Officer Fired at Handcuffed Man in SUV After Mistaking Acorn for Gunshot,” 2024); i.e., when he mistook an acorn falling on the roof of his own patrol car for a gunshot, proceeding to run and then roll away from it like Link from Ocarina of Time (1998) while shouting “shots fired!” before eventually turning around and shooting at the handcuffed person inside the car.

Demons generally aren’t tied to the land, undead are, except demons are tied to a Cartesian othering which demonizes nature and conjures it up as a curse of “the past” to attack the inhabitants of a settler-colony from within; e.g., animals, pagans, ritual sacrifice as of “somewhere else”; i.e., as within according to a forged division of sovereignty whose “historical” counterfeits are haunted by the ghosts of historical atrocities viewed as “past,” abjecting systemic abuse then and now to an imaginary place dug back up: demonic dead. To that, Sam Raimi’s titular Evil Dead possess the civilized persons on home turf with a spirit of childlike black revenge that mortifies the flesh (a melding of torture and rot) according to a demon of nature-as-undead, of Cartesian enemies ferried into the present through Gothic invention. It’s Capitalist Realism suspended through Gothic animations—of various stolen myths, language, monsters. The pact is the colonizer’s; i.e., with a world they are born into as inherited according to a system that distracts, overwhelms and confuses them. Like Evil Dead, it’s paradoxical: silly and serious, inside-outside, secular and superstitious, fearful and fascinating. Moreover, it cannot be killed, only used for specific aims (re: “Bushnell’s Requiem“). Victor, the man of science, is hunted by the ghosts of the dead he stitches together and calls “demon” (something to fear and enslave). Except, he made what he feared to maintain his own sense of power. We can reverse all of that to serve our own aims, dismantling the state instead of it conjuring us up, Radcliffe-style, before ripping us apart to serve profit.

[2a] I.e., graveyard sex in “ancient” ways; e.g., Capcom’s Menat as a catgirl and mummy (with cats being holy guardians of the Ancient Egyptian underworld, and mummies generally being important figures wealthy enough to have tombs and have their legacy preserved into the afterlife). Such antiquated abjections imaginary forms work similar to European progressions, merging sex, rapture, sacrifice and death into similar spaces/bodies “from elsewhere” as, to some extent, dating back to Biblical times and Ancient Egypt, but generally reimagined to a hauntological degree. In short, it’s a gimmick, and a lucrative one; i.e., calculated risk to uphold the status quo during Capitalism in decay and tokenism!

[2b] L.A. Beast’s “Best of The Worst (Failed Video Ideas),” (2024); timestamp: 11:48.

[3] I.e., Bill Gates syndrome, such privilege having fascist components when the punk elements, if ever they even existed, decay into pro-state forms playing the rebel/victim; e.g., Tool’s Maynard James Keenan (from Volume Two, part one):

capitalizing on being a cynic, as Maynard from Tool does in “Ænema” (1996) should be wholly discouraged:

Some say the end is near

Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon

I certainly hope we will

I sure could use a vacation from this (source: Genius)

This is fascist rhetoric delivered by white priviliged men, seeing the “end times” as a “vacation” that is anything but a natural disaster (though Capitalism profits off manmade interference assisting in so-called “natural disasters”); it’s an apocalypse to shoot “zombies” with until things “go back to normal.” Except they won’t during state shift, and the fascists and moderates will eat each other (unable to farm or tend the land around them, much like the original American colonists/so-called “Pioneers” were unable to). The only imbeciles who would say this is a self-centered cunt who paradoxically thinks it doesn’t apply to them; i.e., a white boy’s charmed life posturing as doomsayer and preacher cashing in on their own Kool-Aid to sell to the kiddies (source).

It’s white people disease, specifically that of violent, disingenuous white boys who never quite grow up, save to kill state enemies in their own victimized hero complexes. It’s not just dumb for its own sake (re: “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020), but complicit in the face of genocide as something to turn you back on and blind eyes towards while raking in money through the usual mechanisms geared towards weird canonical nerds to begin with (a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three when critiquing said nerds). There is no win condition, just necrometrics and lies committed by whitey playing the victim time and time again. Until then, it’s business-as-usual, shutting anyone out who doesn’t conform/toe the line.

I’m speaking from experience here; i.e., I used to work with white cis-het male streamers in my different interview series about Doom and FPS in general; e.g., the “Hell-Blazers” series (2020) with Byte Me, Under the Mayo, Your Mate Devo and others. However, the moment I began to research the games these men played in ways that critiqued them in a genderqueer/postcolonial manner (as I slowly left the closet and challenged Capitalism in the process), they ghosted me. It was like a cone of silence, an omerta, had been enacted upon me when I said the quiet part out loud (from a now-defunct 2020 piece, “Postcolonialism in Doom,” featured on Marilyn Roxie’s also-defunct blog, Video Hookups):

Like Ripley, the Slayer unwillingly serves a powerful, corporate employer—in his case the slippery Dr. Hayden, head of the UAC corporation. Faced with an energy crisis “the world had no answer for,” Hayden has colonized Hell to harvest its energy. Who inhabits this unlucky 4th world? Demons, of course—monsters, whose only purpose is to be slain. Of course, it’s entirely possible to see the demons of 2016/2020 as an extension of their 1993 forebears: heavy metal piñatas. Smash them; have fun. However, it’s hardly the sole interpretation, even if the makers intended otherwise. It’s even possible for the player to see his enemies in-game as piñatas, but for this to reflect a parallel viewpoint held by him outside of the game.

In this video at AGDQ for example, the livestreamer Byte Me pauses Doom 2016 to thank United States military members for their service. When I heard this, I found myself unable to view his words as neutral praise; an army has orders, after all. This remains true despite AGDQ being a charity fund-raiser where Doom is just another game being played to generate cash. Soldiers, or people who support them, still play Doom to revel in its slaughter and jingoistic camaraderie. It might pale against the reality of military service, but it still reflects said service through a videogame made for a larger audience. Not all members of this audience are soldiers, but those who are can revel in the game for their own reasons.

Perhaps it’s better for those who benefit from Doom Eternal’s gregarious qualities to avoid having it stamped as a military recruiting tool, a la America’s Army: Proving Grounds (2015). Even if Doom Eternal wasn’t built strictly as a recruiting tool, its imagery can, at the very least, be adopted laterally for this purpose. People with similar views can arguably flock to the same banner and say it belongs to them, not unlike a national flag. Already there’s a sense of division, wherein someone like myself who enjoys Doom feels divided from its more warlike customers. I’m against war, so politically we’re already of two opposing camps going in. Doom is still being marketed to a larger, heterogenous group: the old-school shooter crowd. Not all shooters shoot things in real life, but when gamers openly support the military “slaying demons” around the globe, the door for postcolonialism gets thrown wider than the gates of hell.

This cold shoulder extended to anyone in the industry—from John Romero to Nick Newhard (the former whose wife answered my emails but never followed up, the latter who acted interested until I mentioned my left-leaning political lens).

A similar thing happened with British Brat, who expressed an interest in being interviewed… until I mentioned my genderqueer politics. Like Byte Me, Brat was a military man and acted friendly to my face (as white moderates generally will do), but ceased all contact the moment he released I was who I was: queer and against war in videogames—in short, an encapsulation of Gamergate attacking anyone who wasn’t “neutral/apolitical” by icing them out, isolating dissidents to enforce said neutrality in service to profit. It becomes all about them—their music, their toys, their guns, their land—taking it all for granted as Man Box thinking enslaves them to the same-old cruel grind; i.e., violence always being the solution, graduating from kiddie violence to grown-up forms per soldier, per generation.

[4] E.g., Clerks 2: “There’s only one “Return” and it’s not of the King, it’s of the Jedi!” A cop’s a cop, Kevin Smith (also, you’re a giant homophobe and Mark Hamill’s a Zionist cunt, regardless of how he plays out in your stupid He-man reboot).

[5] E.g., Uriah Heep’s “Rainbow Demon” (1972).

[6] We’ve already discussed the chimeric, “ancient” qualities of the xenomorph in the Undead Module (e.g., the tokophobic, queerphobic, and racist elements to the monster); but will return to examine it even more moving forwards (especially tokenism/witch cops attacking nature, in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph“).

[7] Arguably a Protestant ethic pun as much as an insect life cycle metaphor.