“Nothing could persuade me that this world is not the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.”
— E.M. Cioran, The New Gods
The rulers of the longhouse sat around the table in quiet peace, deliberating. It was a Chinese century, in the old days, when wishing still held power. A cruel general they called „the tumor with a human face“ took the word: A rather reticent man and an avid collector of memories, whose gruesome deeds were passed down all the way through the folklore of the Göktürks and generations later formed the foundation for the Germanic epos of Derjenige, der die Tiefe sah, whose vile hero was dubbed “Quidam”; a name that continues to evoke unease when spoken.
“Sea and fire and woman: three evils.”, he said, lighting the pipe in the arms of his mistress, gazing into the waters of the South Chinese Sea. He dwelled in old memories of the early gatherings of the cabal that their enemies had sneeringly named “the white lotus school” and how they had waged war upon the emperor for centuries and centuries in order to enforce their radical dualistic ideas: The great opponents of Imperiogenesis who longed to end the material world by physical and philosophical confrontation, foreshadowing and anticipating the infamous skopzy and their eerie child-like “white doves”. He reminisced fondly of how they ridiculed the great Greek philosophers; how they tormented and killed; how they sent a mocking letter to the king of the Tres Daciae and how they humbled and humiliated the proud Mohammedan worshippers of Termagant, who stoically endured their torturing: Quidam remembered how his militia had, after listening to the Hindu-Brahmans speak of the Kali Yuga in deep sincerity, laughed and urinated over their holy scriptures and spun their Samsara-wheel so hard and ruthlessly that it broke into two, while on another day they all silently and devoutly dwelled over a Christian pamphlet of Saint Helen that postulated that the entire world was scattered with fragments of the Holy Cross of the Kyrios.
Quidam briefly leaned to the side and enjoyed a few glimpses of the hortus deliciarum and of the face of his mistress that pleased him because her features reminded him of Saint Helen, whose brother had endured the 11 pains of hell under Quidams own hands …Scanning through the anatomy of the poppy, dwelling through the genome of his queen, now remembering the cruel squeals surrounding their Causeway Bay Abductions a peculiar expression came to his mind: “The mystery of preference; or the enigma of desire” he sighed and immediately thought of his first wife, whom they had kidnapped from the steppes of Mongolia or from the Kazakh Kaganate; a round-faced horse-meat-eater whose appetite and preferences he would never fully comprehend and who spent all her nights crying until she concluded to blind herself with a pair of glowing needles, for her dreadful screams to haunt the halls of the longhouse ever since. That memory now sparked in him the deep desire to amplify the eternal suffering and the pain, and to multiply the crying that his ears have grown so accustomed to: By the end of the night, under the dim light of the lampshade, the rulers of the longhouse had decided to incite yet another rebellion that would throw the country into an inferno of extinction and turn many happy families into human soap.
The events that followed this last Great Rebellion would remain an enigma in the chronicles of the white lotus school and later capture the collective imagination of Gweilo-philosophers of many lands and centuries alike to leave dozens of brilliant scholars puzzled, who – just like their ancestors – ended up getting soaked into the thrilling triangle of tea, opium, and perfumes for the rest of their miserable lives. This scholarly tradition would later give rise to years of endless and dull research that would make minds as bright as Alfred Döblin’s and Martin Buber’s lose all academic self-respect and leave them in a state of mental derangement, miserably failing in their quest to understand what verily happened to the white lotus after the Great Rebellion and how they had ceased to exist.
In some gnostic circles of the southern Chinese provinces, it is said that – as the white lotus cabal marched towards the city of darkness – Quidam and his conclave, suddenly struck by the eternal melancholy of the rebel, grew tired of the endless riots, the killings and the torturing, the beheadings and the lingchi, the burned villages and the raped women, the crying children with their self-exiting mothers, etc., so they collectively set foot on a different path in their mission to subjugate the world to their dualism: In the following weeks, a group of Quidam’s closest counselors are said to have gone underground to reform under a series of secret names of obscure and dark meaning like Wukong jiao (“Aware of the Voidness”), Luodao jiao (“Arhet”) and Wenxiang jiao (“Sensing perfume”), where the geography of thought lead them to adopt an idea that they had picked up from the orthodox hesychasts centuries before and that is sometimes referred to as theosis: They would now strive to extract people from the shackles of the miserable material realm in the best tradition of Nanjing decadence – Mixing the essences of a delicate plant they called “Buddha’s hand citrus”, the sanguine red tea of their cruel rituals and their holy dry Amber woods, the group added the burial water of their ancestors to create a dark liquid that they filled into Hetian jade flacons marked with their secret dragon-emblem to quietly circulate among the people in order to shroud the entire world in a mist of uncertainty…
When opened, these initial flacons emanated a scent that would haunt the protectors of the universal order until today: An olfactory rejection of the material world, a single spritz to cause turmoil in the inside world, just like in the outside; and – once briefly inhaled by an unfortunate soul – capable of turning loyal citizens into perennial enemies of the empire and its rulers. The effects of this maneuver were vast, impacting substantial aspects of existence and daily life until the present day but after years of re-examination throughout all of the 19th century it still remained a mystery how that infamous scent would initially be known under the very trivial name of “Winter Palace”.
Many years later a pale Gweilo-scholar leaving a sanatorium-bar in Vienna, gently sighing with the same longing for the beautiful dark and thrilling mysteries of China that had once corrupted his ancestors, and with a whiff of Winter Palace clinging to his neck, will finally offer a reasonable answer to this long-debated question to his anguished, unfortunate interlocutor: “It is very simple,” he said, “they were rebels,…thugs nonetheless, who operate mainly in the dark;… and do keep in mind, that in winter the sun sets early.”
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