I extrapolated my own system of metaphors by suggesting that Buddhism had outlasted Christianity because the weaponry its items of faith offered for use in the war against death was more intimate and more personal, more akin to swords than cannon.

The furtherance of this analysis did not please contemporary Buddhists at all. They objected to my judgment that the doctrine of dukkha—the “ill fare” that rendered life itself inherently unsatisfactory—was a last-ditch defense all but equivalent to capitulation with the great enemy. They also disliked my account of Maya, the symbolic embodiment of the temptations and allurements that stand in the way of nirvana, and they interpreted my careful comparison of the Tibetan Book of the Deadwith its Egyptian equivalent as a disparagement. Mercifully, there were no Jains around to object to my lukewarm account of the attempt to fight death with death, seeking liberation in self-mortification and the slow saintly suicide of calculated starvation.

The surviving Hindus were no better disposed than the surviving Buddhists toward my elaborate analysis of the Advaita Vedanta and the three key figures bearing on the problem of death: Shiva, Kali, and Yama. I received several personal communications suggesting that it was a great pity that I had not made better use of the opportunities of my childhood. Had I only been prepared to listen and learn, they argued, my neighbors in the valley could have helped me to a far better understanding of the invaluable notion of the Brahman-Atman and the illusion of the world. I received other communications complaining bitterly that I had not paid due homage to Vishnu, and a further series offering to help me along the path of Yoga to a truly splendid isolation from matter.

I will freely admit that my text was incomplete and that it focused on the examples most helpful to my argument. I could not agree with the not-very-numerous contemporary practitioners of “natural magick” and shamanism that I had unjustly neglected their traditions, which had never been associated with anything remotely resembling an empire of faith, but I have to admit now that I was probably wrong to represent both Taoism and Confucianism as mere “defensive formulations” institutionalized in opposition to the spread of Buddhism. I regarded the Tao merely as a variant of the Buddhist Way, despite that it had not taught rebirth and karma, but it seems to me now that the aim of wu-wei was interestingly different from nirvana.

At the time, I was deflected from deeper analysis by the fact that later Taoism had replaced the mystic quest for eternity with a very mundane desire for longevity and postmortem security in legends of the search for the elixir of immortality and the heavenly Pure Land—although the importance of the Pure Land in the mythology of Imperial Japan, alongside the Zen-based disciplines of satori and bushido, should have made me far more attentive. In my own defense, I should point out that I did pay slightly more attention to the Confucian ideas of Yin and Yang, but only in the context of a typology of different images of the “divided individual.”

In spite of all these defects, however, I thought The Empires of Faithto be an interesting work and a useful contribution to humankind’s attempt to understand our own past.

It may seem strange to the modern reader that I had no inkling of the way in which the third part of my Historywould be read and reinterpreted by readers who had no affiliation to any préexistent religious tradition, but I simply was not thinking in those terms. I was blinkered by my preconceptions, taking it for granted that the vast majority of Earth-bound humans who did not belong to any of the eccentric minorities on whose metaphorical toes I might be trampling could all be reckoned as dispassionate rationalists much like myself.

Given that I have taken so much trouble to record the gist of my conversations with Ziru Majumdar, this may seem foolish—but even though I realized at the time that Majumdar’s philosophy must have some kind of movement behind it I had no idea how widespread that movement was. I had not the faintest idea that it was capable of exerting such a grip on the imagination of millions that it could and would be extrapolated to extremes that I can only call insane. I feel obliged to say, however, that even if I hadanticipated the uses to which the now-notorious sections of The Empires of Faithwould be put, I would not have left them out or ameliorated their tone. I was a historian in search of understanding, and those chapters of my commentary were a significant step on my intellectual journey.

No one is infallible, and I accept that there is a possibility that my analysis of Christianity may have been utterly misconceived, but I do not think that it was—and even if it had been, I would still have been justified in stating my case. I meant what I wrote, and I meant no more by what I wrote than what I intended to mean. It is not my fault that other readers imported a very different meaning into my observations or that they used the trails which I had patiently laid down in the Labyrinth to track down data for their own dark and nasty purposes. I do not regret that part three of my History of Deathbegan the work of making me famous, but I do regret that it first made me notorious, and that it did so by linking my name—firmly and, it seems, forever—with Thanaticism.

PART THREE Notoriety

We know that as a human embryo develops—and the development of the Helier womb and the Zaman transformation has done nothing to alter thisfact—its form is sculpted by death. It is shaped by the selective killing of superfluous elements of the developing cell mass. We know too that it is the permanent withering of synaptic connections in the brain that creates the preferred pathways which provide the electrical foundations of the personality. Bodily and mentally, we are etched by death. Death is the lens that focuses the potential ubiquity of DNA into the precise definition of a species and the potential ubiquity of Everyman into the precise definition of a person. Death may threaten each of us with the prospect of becoming nothing, but without the everpresence and relentless activity of death none of us could ever have become anyone.

—Hellward Lucifer Nyxson

The Thanaticist Manifesto, 2717

THIRTY-NINE

Shortly after Emily blasted off on the first leg of her journey to the outer reaches of the Oikumene I was thrown out of my hermitage by the landlord. He’d had a purchase offer he couldn’t refuse from some Bright Young Thing who wanted to demolish it and build yet another ultimate ice castle. I didn’t mind; I’d already told Emily that I intended to move, and since voicing the intention I’d begun to hunger for the color, spontaneity, and sultry abandonment of warmer climes. I decided that there would be time enough to celebrate the advent of the new Ice Age when the glaciers had reached the full extent of their reclaimed empire and that I might as well make what use I could of Gaea’s temporary fever before it cooled.

As soon as the twenty-eighth century got under way I moved to Venezuela, resolved to dwell in the gloriously restored jungles of the Orinoco, amid their teeming wildlife.,

Following the destruction of the southern part of the continent in the second nuclear war, Venezuela and Colombia had attained a cultural hegemony in South America that they had never surrendered. Brazil and Argentina had long since recovered, both economically and ecologically, from their disastrous fit of ill temper, but the upstart rivals that had overtaken them in the meantime were still considered to be the home of the avant garde of all the Americas. There was then no place on Earth that contrasted more sharply with the ice fields of Antarctica than Venezuela, and it was virtually untouched by the new legion of gantzing artists; the notorious and still-extending House of Usher had been raised out of the Orinoco mud with the aid of techniques that now seemed primeval.