Text by Sam Kriss
LIKE THE DINOSAUR OF THE LAST SPLIT-SECOND, rearing up from a half-chewed swamp to watch a falling star skid down through the sky, like any other heavy thing on the edge of extinction, Steve Bannon falls under the shadow of the eclipse.
He does not look well, but did he ever? Steve Bannon’s eyes seep, weep, and rheum between their heavy folding triple-parenthesis bags, blinking labiae, lonely dunes of flaking skin. His nose dimples out like some peak of rubble in the crags of a bomb-blasted city. His lips vanish into the puffy slit-scar of his mouth. His cheeks blotch and billow; you could pinch one of them out, mold it like plasticine between your fingertips, and when you let go it would take half a day for his flesh to squelch back to its ordinary shape. His forehead is unspeakable. His hair flops like dead reeds after an oil spill. His neck is like a frog’s. His breasts pucker. His pale belly aches. His hams scrawn, greased pistons, spiky with little hairs they shiver. His feet are bleeding. He has come to this hilltop. Around him the scraggly grass, and the senseless tinfoil trees, and the darkening sky. Like everyone else, he has come to watch the eclipse.
Steve Bannon is alone now, waiting for the black sun, trapped on a planet with one billion Chinese.
The White House never suited him anyway, he’s decided. It’s full of people who think small, jumped-up boys oil-wrestling for their promotions, journo nerds who can’t see beyond the next Senate vote, old lifers staggering through the halls of power in search of one last fuck before they die. Their plans stretch for six weeks or six months, an eight-year double term at the most. Steve Bannon thinks big; he plans for the next ten thousand years. The final war with China is only the beginning. Next there’s the Hyperborean utopia: digital gigastructures cybernetically generating the forbidden name of God, moon stations parsing the happy songs of the dead from fluctuations in the quantum foam, astral humanity threading white picket fences between galaxies. He was always a Teiresias, a hag prophet from outside the city walls. He could advise his shining idiot king, but he should never have made himself a courtier. Now he’s alone, pushed out by all those petty bureaucrats and strutting generals and Jews, and the Empire of Agartha lies in ruins before it was even founded. Trump, his beautiful, simple little child, will become just another presidential cuck, fiddling with budgets and waging minor wars—while the big war, the race war, is lost. Trump will abandon his duties to the world of shadows.
But the shadows must have had other plans. Could it be a coincidence that Steve Bannon was finally pushed out of his White House job just three days before the first total solar eclipse to cross the United States in a generation? Doesn’t the word eclipse come from the Greek ékleipsis, desertion, abandonment? In a total eclipse, isn’t the sun said to be occulted? On the temples of Akkad it was written: “There is a black sun which is not visible to the human eye. It is our beacon and its fire burns within us.” In the castle of Wewelsburg, where the SS housed their centre for Volkstumskunde that would become the navel of a new world, a vast floor mosaic depicted a sun-wheel with crooked rays, and nobody knows who built it. The mystic traditions of countless societies describe the sun’s shadow and twin: not the flimsy, barren moon, but a black sun burning with invisible light, the source of incredible power and infinite catastrophe. How can you tap its oceans of magic? Only during an eclipse. This is why Steve Bannon has come to this place, why he has climbed naked up this hill until his toes bled, in the middle of America, under the path of the eclipse. He has come to bathe in the light of Sol niger. He has come to be reborn.
It won’t be long now. Something terrifying is happening: a void is gnawing at the sun; the circular unity of the world is cracking open. Any moment now: under the eerie unlight of the hollow corona, Steve Bannon will change. Its pallor will nourish his putrefaction and his disease, it will harden his inhumanity, it will make of him a new thing. When the tedious sun of daylight shines on him again, Steve Bannon will stand tall and straight, his greased splat of hair suddenly shining in gold, his face dragged up out from years of bloat into masterful relief, his old dugs melting into muscle and masculinity. When he returns to Washington, the world-empire will be his; the new blond beast will guide America to its destiny.
Totality approaches. The sky is dark now, the wind whips up colder against Steve Bannon’s rotting skin. Birds and insects fall suddenly quiet, terrified in the presence of the true god. The sun is not a sphere. The sun was never a sphere. The sun is a tunnel. Steve Bannon stares with naked eyes down the solar passage, he peers up the black sun’s asshole to feast on what’s hiding within. Something is changing inside his body. The corona is the Qliphoth—the husk of evil, the other side, the inverted mockery of the Kabbalah. Steve Bannon pushes himself through Da’at, the sephirah of knowledge and the false head of the tree, to die. But with the black sun blazing in the sky, he still doesn’t feel any stronger. He knows that in the Splendor Solis of Salomon Trismosin, the black sun illuminates the truth of the soul and brings it into being—but his body still feels so heavy and so weak. It’s still incomplete. He needs to grasp his self. He needs to turn himself into a wheel, self-contained and perfect, to match the wheel in the sky above him.
Down from Bannon’s hillside, vast fields of corn shimmer in the eclipse’s gloom, and not far away, a town. The people there are also watching the eclipse; they’ve bought gas-station glasses for the kids, they’re filming it on their phones, there are beers in their hands and hotdogs on the grill. If they voted, these people voted for Trump: they’ve always voted Republican, they admire his big houses and good business sense, and they want America to be great again. They’re sick of everyone picking on middle-class white people, small business owners with traditional values, people like them. They don’t know it, but they can do alchemy too: see what they’ve conjured, see what ruling-class power and racial spite made. As the moon finally slides on past a wounded sun, the prophecy has been realized, and Bannon is transformed. The sunlight finds his bones collapsed into jelly—a human puddle, slopping over gravel and weeds, diligent in the great transcendental work that will bring about the perfect society, humming with joy as he completes his ritual. Steve Bannon bends down over melted ribs, and furiously sucks his own cock.