Black Holes and Revelations

On hyperobjects, participatory consciousness, and enchantment.

Everybody’s favorite fictional manifestation of a hyperobject.

There’s been an influx of new subscribers here over the past couple of months (most recently thanks to

Sam Kriss

, who very graciously bumped up my recent critique of his post) so it seems like a good time for some housekeeping.

First off, a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m a part-time stay-at-home dad with a day job, and after eighteen months of writing on here, I’m still figuring out what I’m doing¹. I’ve been on a hot streak lately—but the quality and quantity of my posts might drop off as we head into the summer months, with the kids home from school and my other work picking up. Because of my chaotic approach, I’ve been keeping my posts free for everybody; if you like what you’re reading, you can always throw me some change at my Ko-Fi page.

As far as what subscribers can expect—my standard disclaimer is that I’m not an expert on anything I’m writing about. I went to school for journalism, and have been plying my trade in the Dark Arts (as a marketing consultant) for about a decade. I got started on Substack as a way to write fiction; although I’m still interested in writing stories, my focus has shifted over the past year.

Lately, my big motivation is helping my kids navigate the psychospiritual threshing machine our society has turned itself into. They’re both still under seven years old, but the job of preparing them for the future has already started; the stakes seem increasingly high, with All This Mess compounded by the chaos still coming down the floodways toward us. The number of institutions I trust with my kids’ wellbeing is rapidly approaching zero. I can’t help them answer the Big Questions if I can’t answer them for myself.

Working through this stuff requires a scattershot approach to subjects in which I’m functionally illiterate.

I’ve been an intractable student my whole life. Didn’t make the most of the educational opportunities I had available, which were a mixed bag to begin with. My high school was a great place for customized Honda Civics and unplanned pregnancies. “Jesus is the only team to root for in the Big Game” could have been the motto for the nominally Lutheran church my family attended. I don’t have the time or the money to go back for a degree in philosophy or religious studies. If I’d anticipated such a need for these tools, I would have done things differently; as things stand, I’m doing my best to catch up on the required reading in my spare time, while operating terms like “ontological” and “epistemological” without a license.

Nevertheless, here I am: undereducated, poorly catechized, and unwilling to leave my kids to figure things out for themselves in the sucking void of nihilism that seems to define our contemporary culture.

So let’s talk about enchantment.

What Is Enchantment?

Here’s my working hypothesis:

Enchantment is the process of creating and sustaining a symbolic interface that corresponds to one or more hyperobjects, in order to generate participatory consciousness.

We’ll get to the why later; for now, let’s try to break down some of those terms, starting with the cosmic and working down to the practical.

Hyperobjects

I’ll be using the definition that Timothy Morton developed in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. According to this definition, a hyperobject is a metaphysical object that is too weird and too massive for humans to easily wrap their minds around. While they can manifest in physical space, they can’t be reduced to just their physicality. Morton identifies five characteristics of hyperobjects:

1. Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation.

2. Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. They “overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes.”

3. Molten: They’re so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent.

4. Phased: They occupy a higher-dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive; they appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently from a multidimensional (nonhuman) perspective.

5. Interobjective: They're formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, entities are only able to perceive the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information.

One example of a mundane hyperobject would be gravity. Gravity is everywhere, and everywhen; it’s inescapable, operates differently across the expanses of spacetime, and influences everything in the physical universe.

I would add a sixth characteristic to the list: hyperobjects at their full scale are fucking terrifying.

When we hear the word “gravity,” we usually think about the invisible force that keeps us from flying off into space—gently holding us onto the Earth—or about Isaac Newton wondering at the apple in his hand. This kind of gravity is our friend. At a stretch, we’ll think about cases of violent terrestrial gravity: things crashing down to Earth, or science-fiction scenarios where something gets caught in our planetary orbit.

What the commonplace definition tends to leave out is all the really freaky stuff that gravity does, like bending light, forming black holes², and whipping our galaxy around at unimaginably fast speeds. Outside of a mathematical model, any one of these individual phenomena will make you nauseous if you spend too much time thinking about it.

For example: try to imagine what it means to be shooting through space at 130 miles per second: your whole life smeared in a streak across the black canvas of the universe, a comet-trail of moments stripped away as you hurtle through the void. Fun, right?

Now try to think of the universal experience of gravity happening simultaneously, everywhere throughout time, from some theoretical beginning to some imaginary end. You can’t do it. At least not with what we consider “ordinary” consciousness.

Trying to comprehend the totality of gravity would shatter our little monkey brains. Recognizing that we can’t do it produces a kind of cosmic megalophobia: gravity is just too goddamn much. But we can’t escape it. We don’t want to think about all of it, but we need to wrestle with some of it in order to describe existence in the physical universe.

In other words—while we can’t deal with the whole hyperobject, because that would be impossible, we need a way to relate to one little piece of its local, physical manifestation.

This brings us around to a symbolic interface.

Symbolic Interfaces

Sticking with the gravity example—in addition to that cosmic megalophobia, without even getting into the wild astrophysics, you can wrestle with the paradox that gravity doesn’t really exist.

Gravity is a hyperobject that can’t be directly observed. We can look at what gravity does, but we can’t completely apprehend it with any of our senses. Gravity phases in from another dimension; it’s interobjective—we can only perceive its “footprint”—and its local effects on time and space make it impossible to fully comprehend. So “gravity” is a word we invented, referring to a force we can’t perceive, to describe effects that are complex enough by themselves to drive most people slightly insane.

But we need it. We need the word to understand, analyze, and communicate the local effects of gravity in our dimension. And we need the word to have some elasticity: it needs to be accessible enough for me to explain to my 6-year-old why a rock falls to the ground, while also retaining the incomprehensible aspects that allow us to talk about high-level astrophysics. We can’t have two different words, because it’s the same force. The symbolic interface—that seven-letter string in the English language—needs to be dynamic enough to stretch into all those applications.

There’s a maintenance aspect to that dynamism. We can’t let “gravity” get stuck in one mode or the other: it can’t be reduced down to just the kid dropping a rock to the ground, or just the warp of spacetime around a black hole. We need to be reminded that it’s all that and more, in order to retain its full meaning and maximize its usefulness.

From that perspective, education isn’t just a mechanical process of taking a set of facts from one brain and inserting them into another: it’s an ongoing, ritualized process of affirming that gravity is this and also this, the cosmic and the local, the big and the little all at once. The hyperobject that “gravity” refers to is unaffected by this symbolic maintenance—but our relationship to the hyperobject is affected by these affirmations.

Our technology grows around these symbolic interfaces. Having a word for “gravity” allows us to develop the science of physics; from there, we get astrodynamics, and suddenly we’re able to send humans to the moon. This suggests the tantalizing possibility that we can improve our technology by refining our symbolic interfaces³⁴.

We can do this with gravity in a scientific setting. We can also use symbolic interfaces to relate to hyperobjects that feel more like conscious entities. And this (I think) gets on to the concept of participatory consciousness.

(Dis)enchantment and Participatory Consciousness

I’ll be honest: this is one of those concepts that I haven’t fully wrapped my mind around, and probably shouldn’t be using. But in keeping with my piratical approach to academia⁵—let’s see what we can do, and if I get it wrong, let me know in the comments.

From what I understand so far, participatory consciousness is the human experience of identifying with our environment in a way that overrides the artificial subject-object divide of modernity. “Participation” is crucial. It’s not just a way of passively accumulating knowledge by observing the universe; it’s acting as if we have some influence on our world, beyond our physical capacities. Intentionally or not, when we engage in participatory consciousness, we are identifying with the hyperobject of consciousness—acting as if we are hyperobjects ourselves.

The experience of participatory consciousness aligns with all the characteristics of hyperobjects. In these states, human consciousness (or “imagination,” if that feels safer) can become molten, nonlocal, interobjective, phased, and entangled with all other forms of consciousness. This allows people to gain understanding—about themselves as individuals, about the nature of the cosmos and other entities within it—and exercise agency that would be inaccessible to them through ordinary awareness. (This connects directly to the concept of orenda that I wrote about last year.)

Symbolic interfaces make this possible. They’re a human technology, constructed to mediate our relationship with hyperobjects that would otherwise be too massive and terrifying for us to identify with. And they require upkeep in order to maintain the right balance of power. If the symbolic interface becomes too potent—too saturated with raw experience, too much inhumanness—then the hyperobject it’s designed to mediate will overwhelm the operator⁶. If it becomes too weak, too abstracted from the real presence of the hyperobject, then the operator will be relating to an inert aesthetic object. In either case, the override of the subject-object divide won’t obtain, and participatory consciousness won’t be possible.

Disenchantment is the opposite of participatory consciousness. We find ourselves stranded on the wrong side of the subject-object divide, in an indifferent universe: no participation, at the mercy of the hyperobjects that we intuitively recognize but can’t control—can’t escape from, but can’t relate to. This alienation tends towards nihilism, or scrabbling attempts to dominate those aspects of reality over which we can exert some temporary power. Draw your own conclusions about how many of our current crises are the result of this disenchantment.

In order to avoid disenchantment and its toxic effects on the human psyche, we can do three things:

• First, recognize that these hyperobjects are undeniable. We don’t need to believe in Gravity, or Death, or Consciousness itself for these things to periodically slam into our awareness. So we might as well find a way to relate to them in a participatory way, where we’re neither the masters nor the victims.

• That means, second of all, we need to develop the symbolic interfaces that make participatory consciousness possible. We need to (artificially) humanize some of the local manifestations of these hyperobjects in order to relate to them, by creating dynamic symbolic representations at a human scale—otherwise known as “making art⁷.”

• Finally, we need to remind ourselves that those symbolic interfaces require maintenance to be effective: we need to be periodically acid-testing our symbol sets to make sure that we’re not erring too much on the side of safety (otherwise known as “tradition”) and letting them degrade into lifeless props. Ritual engagement—itself a symbolic interface that needs to be kept current in order to stay vital—is, historically, the best way to do this.

Keeping that in mind, let’s see if we can Tokyo Drift this essay all the way back around to the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green.

Going Back to Hastings

Before we apply this model to the Jack in the Green celebration, I’ll offer three caveats:

1. This is all purely speculative.

2. There’s a good chance that many participants would articulate what they’re doing in very different terms. Odds are, if asked to account for their involvement, they might describe something close to what Sam Kriss saw: having a bit of fun, playing dress-up, “just doing stuff.” Apart from the sincere pagans, most people—especially modern people who might be embarrassed by association with New Age beliefs—gravitate toward participatory consciousness at an intuitive level, and then camouflage their attraction with ironic distancing. (Maybe even Kriss himself?)

3. Self-generating phenomena (a form of cryptomnesia) can look like fakery. This might be getting too far into the weeds for this post, but briefly—if we allow for something like Jung’s collective unconscious (if not full-on psy capabilities) then the archetypal imagery used in this symbolic interface might feel like it was an ahistorical invention of the organizers—even to the organizers themselves. This doesn’t preclude the possibility of “creativity” being a screen for something much weirder. (Paging

   Matt Cardin
   .)

Alright. So. If this is a valid way of interpreting the Jack in the Green celebration—which may not be a historical survival of an ancient pagan ritual, but may still be a legitimate form of participatory consciousness (i.e. magic)—we should be able to detect a hyperobject lurking underneath all the fake leaves. Ideally, this will track cross-culturally with other symbolic interfaces; these won’t necessarily reflect a linear transmission, but will probably rhyme with one another, since they’re referencing a similar hyperobject.

Ready?

Growth is a hyperobject⁸. It’s non-local, molten, phased, inter-objective, and viscous. Like gravity, Growth is familiar and necessary at human scale—but becomes horrifying and monstrous in its totality. We recognize that life depends on Growth at a measured pace; when it tips into a blind force, we instinctively recoil from it. Growth brings the corn up in the fields. Growth is also cancer. Growth is the visceral unease of being in the dense jungle, surrounded by a billion grasping mouths, all indifferent to anything but the pursuit of more. Our own Growth as a species keeps our children alive and safe, while cutting a broad swathe of murder and destruction across the planet. Time-bound humans have a hard time experiencing Growth as anything other than an acceleration toward Decay, its terminal opposite. And depending on which physicists you believe—Growth will eventually tear apart the fabric of the universe.

Something like the Green Man could be seen as a symbolic interface that enables participatory consciousness with the hyperobject of Growth. The symbolic representation of the Green Man is, at once, a human face consumed by vegetal growth⁹ and vegetal growth itself, anthropomorphized. Growth expressed through the Plant Kingdom creates some interesting tensions:

• Plants are one of the most inhuman forms of biological growth that we can recognize.

• They’re the foundation of the food web on our planet.

• They’re the beings that our bodies will nourish after we die.

• Many elder cultures revere plants as teachers because they’re some of the most ancient lifeforms on the planet—and also, coincidentally (or not?) the ones that reliably produce entheogens.

• The Tree of Life is a related cross-cultural symbolic interface, another archetypal figure from the Plant Kingdom.

Establishing a participatory consciousness with the Green Man allows us to relate to Growth at a human scale: by understanding some of what it wants (its telos), forgiving its excesses, and finding ways of cooperating with it. This type of entangled consciousness can have some immediate practical benefits:

• It can remind us of the bigger lifecycles outside of our linear perspective, and ease our fear of death and decay.

• It can make us better stewards of the natural world—a role in which humans are uniquely positioned to serve.

• “Thinking like a plant” can help us gain practical knowledge about how to better cultivate symbiotic relationships with the Plant Kingdom—for food, medicine, and renewable resources—as interspecies creative partners¹⁰.

Maybe, then, we can look at all those foliate figures across time and space as doorways into the same form of participatory consciousness: not as historical evidence of some mysterious cult worshipping the same hidden god, but as recurring attempts to grapple with the same universal force—the same hyperobject, maybe—and wrestle it down to human size.

Were the aims of the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green that grandiose, necessarily? Probably not. At least not consciously. But there’s a reason the human imagination is repeatedly drawn toward these same forms. It’s not a straight-line evolution; it’s something that periodically phases into our reality from another dimension, unaffected by linear time or spatial distance. It’s part of something much bigger, and we’re only looking at its metaphysical footprints across human culture.

And that’s without getting into the possibility that some of those things do behave like deities, can somehow suggest the form of their own symbolic interfaces, and take some kind of interest in human affairs.

But that’s another post for another day.

1. Maybe one of these days I’ll link up with one of the Power Users™ from the honking flock of Extra-Turbo-Boost-Your-Substack coaches on here. Drop me a DM if you or somebody you know actually has something worthwhile to share about optimizing this thing.

2. Never pass up an opportunity to remind people that spaghettification is both a real scientific term and a thing that could theoretically happen to them.

3. This explains the modern mania for defining every facet of existence: if some is good, more is better. However, it doesn’t account for the conflation of complexity with efficacy. There’s a point of diminishing returns, beyond which slicing apart the tissue of reality only produces complexity for its own sake, with only marginal gains in utility. That’s the point at which we go from improving our technology to building the Tower.

4. Also worth noting that technological innovation isn’t dependent on linguistic complexity. Spear-throwers like the atlatl were developed at least as far back as the Paleolithic—long before the terminology to describe their mechanics was invented—and are still one of the most efficient and powerful devices for launching a simple projectile.

5. “Take what you can, give nothing back!”

6. The imaginal snapback of cosmic megalophobia—that “GAH!” feeling—is a protective reflex, the psychic equivalent of the blink-duck-flinch response when something is thrown at your face. Exploring the effects of overpowered symbolic interfaces, and the consequences of ignoring or overruling that protective response, is what makes Lovecraftian horror so awesome.

7. But not the kind that gets hung up in a gallery. See Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice by J.F. Martel. I might get around to my own analysis of this in a future post; we’ll see.

8. I realize I’m inserting myself into the turf war between Object Oriented Ontology and Process Philosophy here. As stated in the disclaimer above—I’m not doing Responsible Philosophy: I’m building the cognitive equivalent of a Mad Max turbocar out of spare parts and madness. Don’t yell at me.

9. Like that one scene from The Fountain. [Warning: graphic violence, body horror, spoilers.]

10. There are plenty of reports about Western scientists experiencing unexpected breakthroughs while under the influence of psychedelics. All of them are put to absolute shame by the encyclopedic knowledge that traditional healers can learn, retain, and synthesize while communing with their plant allies. The classic example, which I’ve cited before, is ayahuasca: how did hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, with no technical knowledge of biochemistry, figure out how to combine two very specific chemical compounds—from two different plants out of the many thousands in the jungle—in order to create a brew that would allow DMT to pass through the blood-brain barrier at sufficiently psychoactive levels? Easy: as they say, the plants taught them how to do it.