Capitalism is violently imploding. The biosphere is in distress. Partisan factions inch us closer to societal collapse through culture wars over a system that’s failing at every level.
Fear and anxiety are part of our daily lives. Sorry to say, that probably isn’t going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean you have to live a fearful life while the creatures who made things this way push you around and manipulate the levers of power they’ve had over you for your entire life.
We can help you, as long as you believe three things:
1. That the time we have matters.
Nobody knows for sure what the future holds, what’s going to happen, or on what kind of timeline. Scientists can make very educated guesses, and while there is plenty of consensus about the state of things, there’s much less certainty about what’s going to happen, though we can agree that it’s going to be very difficult. That’s why it’s important that we enter this circle with a painfully clear understanding of how things are, and why, but hold space for hope – because we believe that providing comfort and dignity to our friends and loved ones matters, regardless of the big picture. We believe that providing safety and reassurance to targeted people matters, full stop. We believe that preserving and protecting the physical world around us – our Dominion – is vital to our human existence. These things are true in a 1.5°C world and a 4°C world.
2. That you can do something meaningful to help.
The discourse surrounding survival, preparation and communal living is largely trash. Let’s begin there. We believe that everyone has something they can do to contribute to the wellbeing of their fellows, because we expand our definition of what’s helpful beyond the handful of gardening and water treatment skills the Facebook warriors of the apocalypse are aware of. Being a kind person is helpful. Being an unskilled helper is helpful. You can use your depreciating capitalism skills to help us reach our goals since we still have to operate within capitalism until we don’t anymore. None of this is anything like any of these people think it’s going to be. We are going to need comedians, caretakers and artists just as much as we’re going to need farmers and protectors. Very few people in life only do, or can do, just one thing, and that goes double for living on a commune.
3. That help isn’t coming from anywhere else.
We’re going to have to make choices and sacrifices we never would have dreamed of a few years ago. While we believe that mental health is a big part of climate realism, Delusion is the enemy. We aren’t going to be saved by Big Tech, by sweeping government reforms (just look at the tech sector and the US government and what they’re doing and how dysfunctional they already are). Tens of thousands of scientists, who have studied these complex systems for their entire professional careers have arrived at the same answer, and have given us that answer: things are fucked up, and they’re only going to get more fucked up. It isn’t important that you agree with Dominion leadership about the specifics of a given issue or timeline; we rarely make those kind of firm forecasts, anyway. What is important, for you to participate in a meaningful way that’s for everyone’s benefit, is that you are not still half-clinging to the delusion that someone or something is going to save us. They aren’t. It’s us, you and me, right here and now, with what we have in our pockets.
In the Name of Lucifer
Icarus. Etona. Athtar, Gilgamesh, Prometheus. Phaethon. Bellerophon.
We see the spirit of this elusive figure streak through time and space, across pantheons before he finally comes back to earth, in a furious jumble at our feet here at the death knell of Christianity. An iconoclastic artifact jumped the host once more, just ahead of extinction. Lucifer is a spiritual ideal, a meme, a suite of primal human impulses made flesh and contemporary Luciferians probably know the least about him out of any group.
The detangling of the Luciferian mythos was a daunting enough task to necessitate the foundation of an entire academic ministry, so I won’t do so here.
Why Lucifer is central to us and our work:
It’s a fool who wants to steal the crown of a dying kingdom. Rather, we recognize the handwriting on the wall: the old world is ending, and a new one is beginning. Lucifer’s aim was not overthrow, but apotheosis.
We can make a safer, better, bountiful world for ourselves and anyone else who cares to learn. But we have to be willing to assert ourselves, to take what we need, and to do the hard work of showing up for vulnerable people. We have to learn when to follow, when to lead, and to fight for righteousness no matter how overwhelming, petulant, and entitled our enemies might be.
Lucifer is the sword of truth. Lucifer is courage for our friends. Lucifer is, as King Dude put it, the light of the world.
In the Name of Lilith
Lilith said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and Adam said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ – Lilith, The Alphabet of ben Sirach
Lilith is such a misconceptualized figure that we have to wipe the slate clean of what has filtered through to us from pop culture, and begin as Lilith did upon her ouster from the Garden: with a clean slate.
Our concept of Lilith is rooted in the The Alphabet of ben Sirach, a subversive and even heretical early Hebrew story existing outside the Jewish canon, but very loosely attached to midrash (ancient Jewish exegetical practice).
We too believe that we are equal to each other inasmuch as we were all created from the earth. It is that to which our nutrients return, and from which we derive our gnosis while alive. We recognize Lilith as the First Woman and the First Virgin. She is an emblem of body autonomy, righteous discernment, and life on one’s own terms. Lilith had rather be hunted by vengeful angels than submit to Adam or her creator, and so we hail her, perhaps above even Lucifer himself, for Lilith was always one of us.
Lilith was not a great leader of armies or fighter of wars. She didn’t storm the Garden and burn it down. Instead, Lilith did what she had to do to maintain a peaceful life by the Red Sea. The earth gave up her secrets under Lilith’s gentle touch and bestowed on her all the power of green and growing things. To nourish, to heal, to kill. So Lilith achieved her own apotheosis and rather than become a breeding vessel for Adam, took into herself power that once belonged only to God. She could nurture. She could soothe. She could destroy.
Lilith is both the stoic virgin and the wild witch. She is categorically untameable, but possessed of painfully deep empathy. She lives a peaceful life on her terms and God help anyone who tries to stop her.
In the Name of Leviathan
Hail Lotan! Hail Tiamat! Hail Leviathan!
Eater of the damned, bringer of chaos, demonic embodiment of the wild, natural world. Leviathan is a single figure that emerges through a continuity of mythologies and to us, represents the ferocity of climate chaos, the firmament of the world, and the coming violence of the Anthropocene. Leviathan isn’t a monster to be feared, however, but a primal force to be embraced, ridden even, for Leviathan is righteous in its fury.
We love the Great Dragon as it is a canonically Christian monster slithered directly from Ugaritic mythology and into the “infallible” word of God. Its mere existence is an affront to Christian theosophy, and yet there it is, the same indomitable dragon that priests and scholars created to embody their deepest fears, and yet fail to truly defeat or contain even when they control the narrative.
Leviathan is the rage of a dying planet. It is the burning blood of those who stand in its defense. It is the fierce protection of community and retribution upon those who harm Dominion. Leviathan is the Devouring Serpent, and we its humble servants.
Dominion
Where fire really burns and the light itself burns your eyes, where songs are the most beautiful songs you have ever heard, and emotions passed over in daily life take on a horrifying, uncanny hue.
― Timothy Morton
We are entering a new strangeness. Hurtling toward self-inflicted extinction, our world an inferno of hate, and love, and the crushing, desperate needs of fundamentally opposed forces. We are a people being strangled and seeing the stars burst in our eyes as we wake up to our own mortality.
Dominion is the rage against the dying of the light. It is the earth under our feet, the wind, the waves, the water table. Dominion is our world, by right of living in it. It is our stewardship of the biological world to the extent of our ability to enforce it. Dominion is the time where we are able to live as we will, harm no one, and fear no harm.
Dominion is the Garden, the Gate and the Gardener.
Human civilization has become untenable. Capitalism is collapsing and taking everything it can with it. To move toward Dominion is to move out of its grasp, to cut away the levers of oppression. We cannot stop the collapse, we can only brace ourselves, and prepare to protect what we love, and the most vulnerable people.
Dominion exists for no other reason than a framework for the continued survival and peaceful integration of human life into the natural world. It is the Human Path.
Sacred Humanity
It is our belief that tribal living was always the best and most natural way for humans to live, and that as we’ve moved away from it over millennia, we’ve entered an ever-destructive arms race of problems and solutions that have left us isolated, trapped within complex systems from which we can’t escape, and held there by people who benefit from both the stagnation and destruction. It is our intention to form tribes with strong bonds for mutual benefit and protection, to live as humans do, while bringing the benefit of progress we’ve enjoyed. Sacred Humanity isn’t so much a return to primitivism as it is a moving forward without the idea that things have to be as they are and have always been. We have the benefit of choosing what to carry forward with us, and plenty of academic and practical information to find value in where we came from.