This piece originally appeared in Earthly Delights Ogdo, Volume 2, Issue 1 (mid-August 2021), and contains material from both myself and Ogdo's editrex, Alyssa H. Milano. Please forgive the almost total lack of inclusion of references to Michael Kirkbride's work despite its obvious impact on Kill Six Billion Demons. A full treatment of Kirkbride's work would take several articles to do justice—at least one of which has already appeared in a later Ogdo issue, Swiff's article “First, Tell God's Story” in Ogdo Volume 2c.
The extensive worldbuilding of the graphic novel Kill Six Billion Demons, now on its fourth and final book, includes a rich constructed mythology in the form of the non‐dualist, henotheistic religion of Atru. The myths and concepts of Atru are discussed at depth both in the comic itself by its characters and in excerpts from Atru scriptures and mythic narratives that accompany the comic. This library of material stands as a great mythopoetic achievement on its own right which finds few comparisons in any contemporary work of fiction.
I will not attempt to describe the whole of Kill Six Billion Demons here, only referring the reader to its anti‐capitalist reading in these pages (Ogdo #1) and to the comic itself, its Liturgy page, and the material collected on its wiki. Assuming the reader is familiar with the comic already, I argue that the Atru corpus — the sūtra‐like religious texts along with its characters’ worldviews and occasional teachings — constitutes a valid Dharma on its own right, and one deserving of sincere consideration. Using the supreme deity figure of YISUN as a focal point, I first position Atru in the context of its clearest real‐world antecedents, second argue for its legitimacy as a coherent view because and not despite its fictionality, and finally examine some of its themes and concepts through an analysis of Atru’s holy heptagram, the seven syllables of Royalty.
Atru in History
Atru clearly takes after multiple real‐world religions. Its general structure, involving many gods which each result from a prismatic splitting of a single unitary godhead, who simultaneously constitutes the personal manifestation of the ultimate ground of reality, is unquestionably indebted to nondual Hinduism, and its visual imagery borrows heavily from Hindu iconography. Simultaneously, YISUN is consistently presented with the ontological position, or lack thereof, of a Mahāyānist. There are Buddhist pantheons and stories of how the world came to be (for example, as outlined in Chögyal Namkhai Norbu’s The Supreme Source), but they tend to be downplayed as being of secondary importance to the densely technical varieties of practice and resulting viewpoints, and analogies are drawn primarily from the life of Siddhartha and various bodhisattvas, vidyādharas, and arahants, rather than from the acts of deities. Hindu philosophies by contrast are much more willing to play up the mythology as central means of illustration and an integral part of practice. Even if the myths and parables are ultimately only metaphors for higher reality, familiarity with them is an indispensable element of Hinduism. Atru merges the mythological emphasis of Hinduism with a Buddhist view of the emptiness, śūnyatā, of phenomena. Different from Buddhism is Atru’s presentation of reality as a form of storytelling or play, something that’s done ‘for fun’. Here it again more closely resembles Hinduism, which tends to present the world as something that can and should be enjoyed, as opposed to Buddhist ideas of suffering as an intrinsic mark of existence.
Finally, in several places Atru more closely resembles Daoism than it does either Hinduism or Buddhism. Whereas Hinduism tends to stress the absolute freedom and joy of its supreme deities, and depicts creation as a voluntary act of playfulness or grace, Atru scripture depicts YISUN's precreational state as an unfulfilled one, a holder of infinite stories with no audience. Creation in Atru is YISUN's destruction of a single cosmic self, an act of supreme, ultimate violence, autodeicide. Both of these stresses are reminiscent of Daoism with its understanding of existent things and the Dao mutually fulfilling each other, and the account of creation as the murder of Hùndùn, primal chaos. Atru’s gods and saints, who act bizarrely or brazenly and master secret techniques, while they certainly find parallels in Hinduism and Buddhism, too, are ultimately more reminiscent of Daoist immortals. Lastly, Atru’s notion of symmetrical dual principles, the black and white flames or the primal deities UN and YIS, emerging from a non‐dual higher reality and recombining to produce everything else, recalls the yīn-yáng of Daoism more closely than it does the Hindu dualities of Shiva‐Shakti or purusa‐prakrti.
The stories involving YISUN are clearly modern in tone. Their kōan‐like style, in which YISUN plays a comical figure, whose illustrated lessons are presented as if they are jokes or games played with the other characters in the story, is not typical of most historical sūtras. YISUN's lessons verge on Discordian in their tone; but as with Erisian currents of thought, a consistent basis underpins their seeming frivolity. We could sum up YISUN's primary point in most parables as “what appears appears, but lacks essence” (or svabhāva), a very fundamental point of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Abbadon glosses this as YISUN being a ‘liar’, a cheeky way of saying a storyteller. We never see YISUN making a point about how anything else ‘is really just YISUN’, excepting when Aesma learns their secret name and observes the true shape of the universe, at which point she is brought to understand that she is not other than it. This is a point common to both most of Hinduism and ultimately Buddhism, with differences tending to stem from how it is presented. A Buddhist would never say that “I” is the true name of God, but a Buddhist who believes the self to have some distinct and independent being outside of the essenceless presentation of what we call ‘mind’ (only a label) is mistaken, according to every school of Buddhism. Anātman, the Buddhist doctrine of no‐self, is certainly more nuanced than an inversion of Ātman, the Hindu concept of transcendent true self (itself much more akin to a divine spark or soul than to an ego or a personality). Viewing YISUN in these terms, it is as if Shiva (or the whole Trimurtī) were to convert to Buddhism. Stories like that do exist in Buddhism, where a number of Hindu deities are sometimes counted as worldly protectors, and are occasionally recounted as having approached the Buddha immediately following his enlightenment to beg him to teach publicly. Of course, there’s also the Hindu view of Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu sent to mislead demons and evil‐doers with false teachings. This double view is particularly appropriate for Atru, which is especially amenable to paradoxes, as we will see. Both groups may find much to like about YISUN.
Excepting when Aesma angrily demands that yisun give up the secret name of god known by “all” (all but her, until her demands are met, and she instantly regrets it), YISUN's presence in stories, which we know must be unreal given its conflict with their first and timeless act of the First Division, is thoroughly untroubled, happily answering questions asked of it. These answers appear to be paradoxical, but the broader audience of Kill Six Billion Demons may well be overestimating the extent to which they are supposed to be “confusing”. For example, in the Parable of the Iron Plum, YISUN states:
“In truth, there is no plum at all, just as there is no YISUN. A plum has no shape, form, or colour at all, in truth, but these are all things I find pleasing about it. A plum has no taste at all for it has no flesh or substance, but I find its sweetness intoxicating. A plum is a thing that does not exist. But it is my favourite fruit.”
This is a ‘paradox’ only if you assume that the plum must have ultimate being and ultimate quality. In protest, YISUN’s god‐disciple Hansa refutes The Treachery of Images:
“A pipe is a thing that does exist, and it is my favourite past time”, said Hansa, lacking understanding, and growing in cynicism.
“What a paradox!” said YISUN, smiling, “I shall share my love tenderly with Payam.”
YISUN appears totally untroubled by this not‐paradox, lacking fixation on the ‘being’ of Hansa’s pipe one way or the other. The First Division is a timeless (presumably not as in instantaneous, but as in without time as a contextual quality binding it to some causal point in linear time) act of rejecting ultimate fixation; the idea of an essence is at root another lie, although one that clearly delights YISUN. This has roots in the general Hindu outlook on illusion as being a form of play, which I admit I tend to find more refreshing than some of the drearier takes on it in Buddhism, Buddhist though I became once I accepted its view of śūnyatā. This more playful attitude is also something we can read as playing more to modern tastes. Abbadon is a contemporary author writing for an audience of contemporary, English‐speaking peers who will be generally familiar with the references. Would they be reading Kill Six Billion Demons unless something about its aesthetics were compelling to them? Certainly Abaddon could have told an explicitly “Buddhist” or “Hindu” story had he meant to, but he didn’t, and so there are limits to attempting to parse it in these terms. It would be a huge mistake to say that the lessons of Atru “are” one thing or the other, be it Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Discordian, or whatever (though it is clear from from the extent to which Kill Six Billion Demons borrows motifs from all four that Abbadon has a proficient understanding of all of them). The point of making these references explicit is to look at Atru as a variant mythology, a variant Dharma, constructed or otherwise, and to ask whether or not it “holds up,” that is, can be used as a vehicle to understanding thoroughly a point conveyed by its methods. In my view it does, and I think very well, especially in its ability to make its core lessons more tangible for an audience that might otherwise get lost down the roads of “needing” to “get it”.
YISUN as Self-Aware Fiction
A theme emerges in Atru of Yisun engaging in a constant game of lying to itself, and this lying being none other than appearance itself, Rūpakāya, the world of form inseparable from empty Dharmakāya. Then Yisun, too, is a fiction, albeit one supremely self-aware of their own fictional quality. Yisun lacks all fixed form and openly advises against listening to the points they make. Most notably of all, Yisun is a fictional character made up by
Abbadon. Yisun is a nested fiction, both fictional to us as
readers of a text, and ultimately fictional on multiple levels within the text itself. There, as here where yisun is simply a comic book character, Yisun’s power is precisely this fictional quality.
Divorced from the need for Yisun or the stories about them to be real, we as readers are freed to accept them as stories. That we accept they are fictional from the start means we aren’t (or are much less likely to be) reading them with Saṃsāric, delusive, ego‐based skin in the game. Of course it is still quite convincing; the top comment on the Liturgy page asks if this is from “a real religion” or if it’s something Abbadon wrote, made up. We have already seen how Abbadon borrows very heavily from real traditional lineages that can materially trace themselves back into the mists of antiquity, lineages we consider to be “real” by virtue of the depth of their material, the devotion of their followers, the assumption on our part that they “really mean” these in a manner comparable enough to other major world religions to elicit a degree of respect, to be “taken seriously”. The major downside of this designation of ‘real, serious, valid’ is that of the frustration of the spiritual seeker, the serious student so caught by the minutiae of which one of the countless traditional schools of thought gets what point just right, and so on, and so forth, that the project of spirituality ends up on hold, pending the impossible resolution of a byzantine degree of hair‐splitting. Atru sidesteps this entirely by being fictional; there are, to my knowledge, no devotees of Yisun out and about in the material world getting into dis‐ putes with one another over whose method of devotion to a webcomic’s god figure is “the real one.” We as readers are free to appreciate this material with the whole question of its reality taken off the table, out of the way of our consideration of it.
In recognising Atru's fictionality, we ought to understand it within the history of fiction which blurs the line of where “fake” religion ends and “real” practice begins. Atru would hardly be the first fictional system to make the leap to being treated seriously; Ogdo #2 features an interview with Kenneth Grant, whose works argue for fiction as a means of revelation. Grant was in good company, being close with Austin Osman Spare. It is difficult to think of a subject Spare took more seriously than art, most especially where the act of creation, of representation, no longer is “merely” referential, but takes on its own qualities, until by its experiential emergence, the “fictional” effects real change. I could also refer the reader William Blake’s constructed mythology in his 'prophetic volumes', or the folk etymologies of “abracadabra” proposing its meaning as “I create as I speak,” or “I create through my speech.” There are also other recent divine self‐aware fictions, both in terms of self‐reference and in terms of proposing this state of being fictional as in some sense the actual state of appearances. In the wake of Chaos magic’s dissemination within popular culture, building on Spare, the notion of a self-aware fiction has increasing cultural precedent in the West; Alan Moore can barely make it through an interview without mentioning this idea, and in some fashion, scient‐ ists and the more rationalist philosophers such as Douglas Hofstadter continue to “rediscover” both the emptiness of the self, its fictionality, and that this self-awareness of the self’s fictionality does not destroy the self (not there to be destroyed). Rather, it has a liberatory quality, it opens the way to experience without the demand imposed by a delusively imputed self-concept. YISUN as a prime example of a self-aware fiction brings this tendency ‘home’ to a more foundationally Dharmic context, where the self’s fictionality is a central theme.
A fiction is taken as false, the events didn't necessarily happen as depicted, but the depiction, the text itself, clearly appears. Nobody would say that because YISUN is fictional, the comic Kill Six Billion Demons doesn't exist. What would make it “fake” if I were to genuinely begin to venerate YISUN as a name of the divine, if I were to adopt what we can see of Atru as my own? If it is fake, that is to say, invalid, because it's made‐up, then why are we able to think critically about Kill Six Billion Demons, or any work of fiction? If it is invalid because I am not some sort of Atru lineage holder, then from whom did Abbadon receive permission to make a comic about it? If it is invalid because I am not Abbadon and therefore don’t make decisions as to what is canon and what is not canon, that is, if there is some essential correctness to canon, then why are so many readers fully exposed to canonical material still confused about YISUN to the point of asking Abbadon to clarify, and what are we to make of intentional inconsistencies within the text? If YISUN is simply a label, which is also true in‐universe (powerful as it may be), then in what way am I getting it wrong, and would that be displeasing to YISUN? If it is invalid because it is not material, what am I looking at when I read the writings involving YISUN, and even if we call that immaterial, then what would materiality change? Further, if you were to call it invalid anyway for this reason or that, in what sense would that judgment change the results of practice? Where is the experiential element to a critique of unreality? YISUN as a depiction of the ultimate or godhead, whatever name you want to call it, is the depiction of a lucid ultimate, aware of the nature of phenomena as phenomena and not other, while retaining an avatar, sometimes, for the sake of the story of it. Sounds like a perfectly serviceable framework for practice to me as a practitioner, and none of it hinges on a 'real' YISUN. In fact, quite the opposite; a YISUN found to be either eternal as YISUN or eternally lacking would be alien to the YISUN we see in Kill Six Billion Demons. It is because YISUN is made‐up that Atru is viable.
Royalty
Royalty is the status sought as the soteriological goal of Atru, its equivalent of enlightenment in Buddhism, liberation in Hinduism, or immortality in Daoism. It's sometimes discussed as a mystical state, sometimes as a kind of power of violence, and, very frequently, both. The Demiurges are Royalty, but their understanding of it is in most cases of a particularly low kind, and, with the possible exception of Jagganoth their understanding of the names of god they bear either superficial or, as with Jadis, too much for them to handle. Although it is enough to make them the seven of the most powerful figures alive, they are at best semi‐enlightened, and they represent a particularly degraded state of rule — Throne at the end of the Kali Yuga, for lack of a better term. They are examples of Royalty as a kind of divine, but not infinite, power, and are much like the kind of power we would discuss in regards to the wrathful Asuras, divine but still Saṃsāric. Royalty may also be attained without particular skill at violence, as by UN‐HANSA, who “had no hunger in his heart for dominion of the universe, but a miserly scrutiny and a heart of iron nails.” It has been remarked that none of the Seven has truly known happiness, and so they are eligible for Royalty; this is in line with YISUN particularly praising Aesma’s ceaseless desire. “He was not an aspirant for royalty, and thereby attained it through little effort.” Royalty eludes those who seek after it as a means of obtaining power, as the horizon eludes someone chasing it. We might gloss Royalty as the ability, to a lesser or greater degree, to experience one’s identity as not other than YISUN, of a kind with YISUN because of this non‐difference.
The Art of Cutting
Cutting is the necessary correlate of Royalty; it is to act as YISUN acts, to replicate the First Division, the destruction which is the timeless first creation. Here I will quote extensively from Meti ten Ryo, in her own words “the undisputed master of cutting”.
“Behold! The awesome fires of God. The limitless power of pure creation itself. Look carefully! Observe how it is used for the same purpose a man might use an especially sharp rock.” This is the nature of cutting, it is both division and union in the same act. The most beautiful and the most hideous act are not two acts. If the fires of YISUN are the awesome fires of God, and cutting is the limitless power of pure creation itself, the division which lends definition and therefore creation, then it bears special mention that Meti says “observe how it,” in the singular. Royalty and cutting are not of two natures. “The sanctioned action is to Cut. To Cut means division by the blade of Want, that parer of potentials that excises infinities.” To recognise that one is not other than YISUN, fully, is to become fully engaged in the act of cutting, whatever acts that act may arise as — it is the “principle art”.
“Existence and the act of combat are absolutely no different, and the essence of both, the purity of both, is a singular action, which is Cutting Down Your Opponent. You must resolve to train this action. You must become this action. Truly, there is very little else that will serve you as well in this entire cursed world.” The sword arts simply render cutting more explicit as a literal act, but all acts of creation and destruction are microcosmic fractal renditions of the First Division, which is cutting itself. Cutting is not achieved in full by attempting to cut; as with meditation, reaching for some hypostasised final state is a beginner’s error. Cutting is much more fundamental, and will not be reached from afar any more than Royalty will, Cutting being Royalty in action. By understanding these two themes, Royalty and Cutting, we understand the rest of Atru.
An Exegesis of the Seven Syllables of Royalty
The seven syllables of Royalty are the secret name of YISUN. “Their meaning is YISUN and their attainment Royalty.” Secret names of God figure prominently in Jewish and Islamic mysticism; Hinduism has mantras, which likewise are derived from a deity and embody aspects of divinity. The seven syllables are both a secret name and a mantra.
Throughout Kill Six Billion Demons, they are given in sev‐ eral variant forms: YS ATUN VRAMA PRESH in the Psalms, YS ATN VARAMA PRESH by Meti, and YS ATUN VARANMA PRESH by Metatron. When pointed out that YS ATUN VRAMA PRESH is only six syllables, Abbadon replied with a further line from the Psalms: “The conquering king must speak with both his internal tongue of self‐love, and his external tongue of violence: he must proclaim himself a king not with a tongue of flesh, but an iron tongue soaked in the blood of his lovers.” For our purposes, we are going to treat the seven syl‐ lables as YS, AT, UN, VA, RA, MA, and PRESH. Meti and Metatron’s versions both contain Va and Ra rather than Vra, and although it is possible to ascribe meaning to the silence coming before or after, as with the silence surrounding an Oṃ, both come up to seven syllables, and can therefore be mapped seven to seven without counting a silent syllable.
The syllables can be translated one way as the seven names of God held by the demiurges: The Glory, The Tower, The Flame, The Diamond, The Blade, The Mind, The Beast. In Psalms, Book I, Chapter 1, the seven syllables are given followed by seven verses. We assume for the sake of analysis that each verse corresponds to a syllable, explaining its meaning, and that the syllables match the names of God born by the Demiurges in the order they're given. Together, these form a microcosmic image of YISUN, which as a name is itself a microcosmic image of all seven syllables and a shortened version of the story of the First Division.
YS
“YISUN said: let there not be a genesis, for beginnings are false and I am a consummate liar.”
This places YISUN firmly outside the question of causal origin. As this syllable is the first, it serves as the supposed origination point, but its meaning negates this origination, making the mantra circular. Compare to “riverrun, past Eve & Adam’s”, the first syllable continues from the last. “I am a consummate liar.” We usually think of “consummate” as meaning a “total liar”, such a liar that everything they say is a lie. Here, though, we have “genesis” as the topic, and so may think in terms of the joining of a circle, consummate as in “altogether the sum total”, a meaning which it conveys well enough that the term shows up in Dzogchen literature consistently. Yisun in a continuous position/act of creative yab‐yum with itself. “I am”, YISUN self‐defines as generative of fictions in an opening paradox that completes itself by being self‐applying.
Mottom is the bearer of this syllable’s word, GLORY. In keeping with the demiurges as degraded images of the names they bear, Mottom takes after YS. She is a sorcerer whose spellcasting is based on words of power, as with “YISUN said” as an establishing logos. “Beginnings are false and I am a consummate liar” is true for Mottom, who continually takes from the fruit of the tree of her fallen husband in order to generate a fiction, a false youth, a false beginning, and, in the case of Mottom, a false end, as she cannot bring herself to undergo death, despite being utterly unable now to glean pleasure from her hedonistic existence. The literal meaning of “glory” plays out in the luxuries surrounding her, which she however feels bound by. Like YISUN before the First Division, she is trapped in a sterile circle that doesn’t consummate, only consume.
AT
“The full of it is this – the circular suicide of God is the perfection of matter.”
Building on the theme of YISUN as self‐creator, self‐maintainer, and self‐destroyer, all of creation (“matter” although I’ll go out on a very obvious limb and suggest that this is not any Cartesian conception of matter as the op‐ posite of spirit, but more like “perceptual objects” or “phenomena”, and includes thoughts and intangibles) is the “result” of this action that in truth has no extent in time or space. This syllable is the “maintainer” that links the two syllables of YISUN together, and contains a short version of both. YS is summed as “The circular suicide of God,” Un is summed as “the perfection of matter,” and AT is summed as the copula “is.” When YISUN splits into YIS, the fiery, dark mother, and UN, the cold, light father, AT does not surface as a third deity. It’s not a third principle, but a synthesis of the first two, as air is a synthesis or ‘child’ of fire and water in Qabala. AT is the division which binds the other two together.
This syllable’s word is TOWER and its bearer Mammon. The shape of the Tower is the true name of God, the wheel as seen from the side (or split in half): “I”. It is also the axis mundi, represented in Buddhism and Hinduism by the world‐mountain Meru. In Daoism the synthesis of yīn and yáng is the Supreme Ultimate or 太极 Tàijí, where the second character can also mean ‘ridgepole’ — a vertical strut holding up the roof like the world‐mountain holds up the sky. Where we see AT as division, here it is also construction, in the sense of the first act itself, the first conscious, deliberate action. As Kether, the highest Sephirot, is the root of air, with air reflecting it along the middle pillar, so the singular nature of I reflects the unity of YISUN pre‐division, or we might say, YISUN as a consummate whole. AT is both the microcosm of YISUN, and the main‐ tainer of the macrocosm. The letters of AT in Hebrew would be Aleph and Tau, the first and last, The Fool and The World, and the name of God associated with Kether is ‘Eheieh’, “I am that I am”.
Mammon lives in a physical tower, but one built to contain, not connect. The degraded version of air is earth — “the perfection of matter.” Mammon has an infinite amount of material wealth, which he neither creates nor destroys, but merely accumulates, a middleman like air plays middleman between fire and water; and all this wealth, all this gilded, perfected matter is useless to him. If AT is the self-destruction of YISUN by divine violence, then Mammon’s accumulation is particularly degraded.
UN
“YISUN lied once and said they had nine hundred and ninety nine thousand names. This is true, but it is also a bare‐faced lie. The true name of God is I.”
The third syllable is representative of the state of YISUN immediately after holy self‐destruction as represented by AT. YISUN performs division and becomes YIS, the goddess of the fertile black flame, yīn, here appearance and the mother of appearance (YISUN pre‐destruction), and UN, the god of the sterile white flame, yáng, here emptiness (YISUN post‐destruction) that allows appearance. This is the world of apparent division resulting from the First Division, all the rest of everything where YISUN pretends it is not. In this third absence, the Shiva of our Trimurtī, emptiness is (although not a means properly) the means by which anything may be perceived. YS ATUN forms a complete mantra by itself. ATUN means “to praise”, and YS independently becomes the goddess of all that is, matter. So YS ATUN as a three‐part syllable comes out to “a praise of matter.” We can read “Atru” as a variant of ATYN or ATUN, and so the name Atru also either means or has as its root the meaning of “to praise”.
“YISUN lied once and said they had nine hundred and ninety nine thousand names.” Tathātā, ten thousand things, one suchness, and that “one” is not really a number or a thing. The third syllable regards all that appears, all named things. Here arise the notions of Self and Other as one presentation of the First Division, without leaving the fullness of YISUN. Picture light in a prism, if that light arced back on itself in a loop. “This is true, but it is also a bare‐faced lie. The true name of God is I.” Notice that the explanation of the third syllable is itself three sentences. It proceeds in reverse order to the three syllables, starting with the 999,000 names, moving into the paradox of division as in AT, and then returning into the singular first person of I. As mentioned in the explanation of the first syllable, this is cylic, so it’s perfectly appropriate it should bring us back to YS.
If we didn’t know this was circular, then we would expect that UN would be the figure representative of matter or substance as some result, and ys, the first syllable, would be empty after YISUN’S absence as the cause, but the First Division is not a causal event A leading to B and C, etc. We could not call such a causal YISUN all-encompassing, since it would be YISUN plus whatever comes after it, like the Big Bang. We say that the Big Bang happened in the past and now we have the universe, not that the universe is itself the Big Bang. YISUN is not temporal in this way, not linear or bound by the limitations of time.
The same cannot be said of the character we see who bears the actual name “I.” Kill Six Billion Demons’ first devil is caged as the only devil without a mask, without a name to bind it; the devil is only “myself.” It could hardly be more heavily implied that this is none other than YISUN themselves; the great sin of this first devil is a refusal to identify as other than god, a rejection of the First Division. Every name is an act of masking, so to be unmasked is a revolt against the naming and division of things contained in the YS ATUN formula.
Incubus is the bearer of this syllable’s word, FLAME. In the three‐element system of Qabalah, Šin is the fiery above, and fire overlaps with spirit. Incubus, in his way, is the “purest” of the six demiurges (Jagganoth excluded), as he makes no pretense of being anything other than simply a killer. As his name implies, he is the most demonic of the demiurges. Visually he somewhat resembles the white god UN, although here it has totally degraded, its purity now referring to his honesty in what he is. In fact, Incubus is something of a reverse or shadow Allison. Incubus is an usurper who killed his master and stole his throne. Allison did not seek either a master or power, and yet clearly is the rightful heir of the neither‐dead-nor‐alive Zoss. This is confirmed by Allison fusing with her Incubus‐self through acceptance of it as a part of herself, however Machiavellian it acted, and this particular arc was largely sparked by their meeting with the devil Himself.
VA
“Living is an exercise of
violence. Exercise of violence is the fate of living.”
To be sentient as an apparently individuated being by its nature involves the division of self–other. Sentient beings subject to arising and ceasing, living and dying, are involved in dualism, inseparable from their notion of “themselves” as an apparent locus of perception where the senses seem to be brought together. All of these dualisms and divisions are reflections of the First Division. If you’ve ever looked down at the shadow of a tree during a partial solar eclipse, you’ll have noticed that the edges end up looking like little crescent moons; the shape of the light source is reflected in the shadows cast by it. To be alive is a fractal act of First Division. This is Indra’s Net: all things interpenetrate and reflect each other.
Violence here I treat as synonymous with Cutting, a replication of the First Division, not only in the sense of causing change as one wills, but violence as even more basic, the elementary ‘unit’ of scission, which by its recognition gives definition to union. We don’t see time except by noting change; something appeared to be here and now it is not, or other than it was before. Such‐and‐such an object appears, clearly, and violently takes the space of its former shape all for itself like the greedy little manifestation–piggy it is. By this violence, we recognise change. These distinctions which are so fundamental to perception itself are here called violence, of which the act of physical violence is a derivation. What appears as combat is YISUN to YISUN; however horrid and ghastly it may seem from some given perspective, it is precisely the face of YISUN, and to judge it as this or that is yet more violence.
To be alive, to be a sentient being in Saṃsāra, is to be involved in the act of distinguishing objects such that a judgment about them is possible. Sentient life is attracted toward certain phenomena and repulsed by others. These are yet more fictions from YISUN, as are all appearances, but in that the very project of the First Division is that of a kind of self‐storytelling, this unenlightenment, this ignor‐ ance leading to attachment, is none other than total en‐ gagement in that story. YISUN has no interest in waking up to this except as another story element, engaged as it is in the timeless First Division; were someone to become fully enlightened as none other than YISUN, not only would their motivations also be seen as the motivations of YISUN, but those motivations themselves are YISUN and are the First Division, the basic verb and root of percep‐ tion. To be “violent”, then, is to mirror YISUN.
Not all violence is violence aware of the nature of violence. Unskilful warriors die by the truckload in Kill Six Billion Demons. This can’t be somehow evaded by appeal to YISUN, who is as much the sword of the opponent as one’s own. I talk about YISUN as if the First Division were something YISUN does, but in fact it is the very character of YISUN, embedded inextricably in the seven‐syllable name itself. A paradox requires a recognition of two apparently mutually exclusive states both arising from the same source in order to be a paradox. This means that we cannot separate the act of lying, of storytelling and thus ultimately of YISUN's joining and compassionate principle, and the fundamental violence that is interdependently coärising with that creation.
Solomon David is the bearer of this syllable’s word, DIAMOND, and demonstrates its lesson well in his effortless slaughter of an arena worth of trained combatants. The diamond as the vajra, which also means ‘thunderbolt’ — the weapon of Indra and the indestructible material it’s made from — in Dharmic religions is associated with spiritual purity as well as rulership, an unbreakable sign of office and the weapon of the gods, fitting David as a god–emperor and the grand master of the supreme martial art.
RA
“Violence is circular. Perception is not circular and lacks flawlessness—therefore, rejoice in imperfect things, for their rareness is not lacking!”
This syllable is extremely subtle, perhaps the subtlest of all, in how many ways it can be read. It might be tempting to believe that perception, being only possible by circular violence, is also circular. Where this falls apart is in assuming that there can be a locus of perception from where perception flows, some pre‐perceptual object which perception can then turn back on and examine, when in fact this would only be more perception. There can’t really be “more” of perception, it is not like currency or some collectible object. Given that it is not an entity or ‘thing,’ and therefore not found in itself, “their rareness is not lacking!” To establish that this is indeed its primary thrust rather than getting lost in a wealth of possible textual interpretations, we cannot look at this syllable in isolation, we must place it in the context of the other syllables.
“Violence is circular… rejoice in imperfect things, for their rareness is not lacking!” “Let there not be a genesis, for beginnings are false” “The full of it is this – the circular suicide of God is the perfection of matter.” And from later in the Psalms, “YISUN is capable of contemplating nothing.”
Given that the rest of the name treats matter’s appearance as “perfection” by the very violence inherent in its perception — and indeed, given that circular violence, cutting, division, is considered “perfect” as the Royal art — then it stands to reason that perception is the non‐thing “things” the syllable references.
Perception must here be understood as the empty nature of appearances. Non‐perception cannot be perceived; no non-experience can occur. If it were to occur, it would have to be an experience of non‐experience, and would then be merely an experience of attributing the label ‘non‐experience’ to some experience. Therefore, perception is not lacking. Perception itself, primordial experience, is not causal; it cannot be ascribed to any source prior to itself, as any such source would, upon apprehension, itself then be perception. We also can't regard primordial experi‐ ence as the cause of anything, as anything it could be said to cause can be known only by experience.
Perception — and bare perception alone — is not a lie of YISUN, not a result or cause of the First Division. The syl‐ lable does not say “perception has flaws”, it says perception “lacks flawlessness”. If what “perception” points at cannot be ascribed dualistic qualities, then that includes both flaw‐ edness and flawlessness. Thus we can “rejoice” in it in the same manner that one can rejoice in this discovery in Dharmic paths; pure perception, not being an entity, yet clearly displaying all entities, is not in the slightest dis‐ turbed by whatever happens to appear, whatever is display‐ ed by it. This is “the yogin’s delight”, in Longchenpa’s phrase, and it is the delight of Yisun, clearly apparent but never seen, lacking flawlessness without any flaw.
Jagganoth is the bearer of this syllable’s word, BLADE. He alone may understand his syllable to a degree verging on full Royalty. Unlike the other Demiurges he doesn't seek to rule by conquest, but the perfection of creation itself through its destruction, and the cessation of its recursive resets at the hands of Zoss following the conclusion of Metatron's 'monomyth'. Breaker of Infinities reveals him in full glory as Chakravartin Jagganoth, a destroying god, a hater of the ignorance and pain of Saṃsāra, as red and massive and powerful as the Tibetan form of Hayagrīva, the most powerful possible being, the wrathful manifestation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara.
Where Jagganoth falls short of Royalty is his lack of understanding of the immediacy of emptiness. His goal seems to be to reset creation one more time, without Metatron, and without pain or imperfection. Rather than leaving Saṃsāra, Jagganoth wishes to obliterate its ignorant elements once and for all. This notion is precluded in Buddhism, not only by the suffering being one of the three indelible marks of existence, but also because suffering itself is explained as lacking essence, leaving Jagganoth without a means by which to create a world without it that would be recognisable. Hindu and Daoist issues with this are somewhat similar, in that the notion of creation being necessarily painful or futile would be seen as a restricted view that fails to take into account the world as a creative act, pain included as a form of illusion.
However wrathful Jagganoth’s manifestation, and however misguided the details of his plan may be, his goal is ultimately a compassionate one, and although his ultimate goal for the time being is not possible to realise, he is attempting through misguided means to fulfill something approaching the bodhisattva vow to bring liberation to all sentient beings.
MA
“Love of self is the true exercise of the God called I.”
Then the First Division is self‐love. I have called YISUN's lies the joining or compassionate principle, but this is inseparable from the First Division. YISUN for YISUN's sake engages timelessly in violence; it is YISUN who is self–fulfilled by this violence, and so this violence cannot be said to ultimately be a matter of hatred or destruction as a limiting or ignorant act in the sense we think of them normally. Again and again the theme is that the act of scission, actually all action (being violent in its way) is unity with YISUN from the beginning.
We see this lesson play out when Meti takes her students to a battlefield to observe two fighting ‘butcher gods’. “Behold! The awesome fires of God. The limitless power of pure creation itself. Look carefully! Observe how it is used for the same purpose a man might use an especially sharp rock.” This is an excellent explanation of this syllable, in that the purpose of cleaving and the limitless power of pure creation are not separate. She compounds this lesson by a violent illustration to her students by releasing a rat and asking them to kill it, in a fashion remarkably similar to the Zen story of Nánquán and the cat. Had Zhàozhōu been there, Nánquán concludes, he “could have saved the cat”, through immediate violence against Nánquán. In this way, the circular violence of YISUN is “love of the self”. It is YISUN who fights YISUN; it is YISUN who is the victor and it is YISUN who is destroyed. The cause, the act of creation and violence, and the outcome are all YISUN.
After Meti’s student Incubus has killed the rat, she tells her other student, Maya, “his desire was to kill”. “If you wanted the rat to live, you should have been prepared to strike down your classmate on the spot, with every last ounce of your might.” Incubus’ will is power, and this has not changed by the time of the comic’s main plot. Zoss — along with Meti the character in the comic closest to Royalty — derides his line of thinking as ultimately pathetic; Incubus’ only power is that of causing death, but as Maya points out, “he blindly killed without thinking”. Incubus’ motivations for violence are myopic, he schemes toward violent ends but without reflection either upon his own motivations or on violence itself. Meti uses him as a prop for teaching, and no more. By contrast, Maya only knows the point of the lesson in hindsight because she is capable of contemplating the lesson given to her by Meti.
YS ATUN — we can assume here “matter‐praise” or even “being‐praise”, “appearance‐praise”, which is equivalent to both emptiness‐praise and self‐love. YISUN is not two distinct things, neither is YISUN one lonely thing, nor can YISUN “be” nothing without something by which to contrast with nothing. YISUN is for the sake of themselves constantly dividing but never separate. Then the fulness of YISUN is a paradox without being a flaw or a problem.
Jadis is the bearer of this syllable’s word, MIND. Jadis is the only mortal to ever see the fullness of the secret name of God, the shape of the universe, and live. Given that she has perfect knowledge of the future, her future must to her seem as crystallised as she is, and Abbadon has stated that she sincerely wishes to be obliterated, implying that she feels this perfect knowledge of the future is also a perfect prison.
PRESH
“Only an idiot cannot place his absolute certainty in paradoxes. The divine suicide is a perfect paradox. A man cannot exist without paradox – that is the full of it.”
This is the second time we see “the full of it” in the seven syllables. The first time is in the syllable AT, joining YS and UN. Here the syllables combine again. Perfection — that is consummation, a joining, a circularity — that brings us back to and renders false the beginning.
“Only an idiot cannot place his absolute certainty in paradoxes.” This is hardly an insult. In the four lies of YISUN we see UN-HANSA constantly doubting YISUN. “Hansa is observant,” YISUN says without being at all perturbed by the assertion that Hansa’s pipe really is a pipe. YISUN seems to take a genuine delight in characters recognising paradox, however they respond. Hansa may feel that in a paradox there is a flaw, but for anything to appear at all in the sense we mean by existing, it must inescapably arise empty of independent essence, non-different from YISUN and the fire or Atum which is just YISUN fractally appearing in any examined thing, and YISUN is not a bound or findable entity or effect, and so cannot be said to be nor not to be in the conventional sense. The most deluded and ignorant fool who demands otherwise, who fully denies YISUN, is also the one most engaged in the First Division.
Gog-Agog is the bearer of this syllable’s word, BEAST. Gog-Agog is to the end of the syllables what Mottom is to the first. Mottom is false beginnings, Gog-Agog is false endings, dying all the time but never dead. The attribute of the beast realm in Buddhism is ignorance, and, dressed as a harlequin, Gog-Agog is certainly the most fool-like of the Seven, but also the most fractal, being composed of myriads of worms. She is a goddess of appearances; even her fool’s clothes are merely worms — ignorant, bestial matter — pretending to be something else. Her title, the Queen of Worms, suggests the inevitablity of decay, but there is also a teeming fecundity to it, creation in the crudest sense as pure animal multiplication. YISUN's delight is in the ceaseless paradox of violence, and the violence of paradox, in the dialectic between the two that is as endlessly generative as its perception is sky‐wide. Here we return once more to generation, and the first syllable, YS. The name consummated, we are brought back to YISUN. ꙮ