ŠUM #18
Adam Louis-Klein
This experimental essay takes off from a methodology as
well as a spiritual vision I have developed or resuscitated01
that I call Sky-Earth systems science.02 Sky-Earth systems
science is a method for thinking from the Center of the
Universe, and only the Center of the Universe, alongside
and internal to non-modern myth as much as contemporary science. It provides minimal comparative parameters,
the horizontal and vertical axes, within a kind of complex
plane or phase space, for superposing the multiplicity of
cosmologies within a generic one. These are the animal
and the God which cross in the Human at the Center
between Sky and Earth.
The Sky-Earth system accommodates a variation of
cosmologies, while also offering concrete content to start
off from. It is a disalienating thought that thinks from the
heart of the Universe, as it puts us right in the middle of
it, rather than merely considering it from the outside. The
goal of Sky-Earth systems is to recompose a Universe
01 I say resuscitated because its premises are probably ancient and widespread.
02 LOUIS-KLEIN, Adam, “From Earth-Systems Science to the Sky-Earth System”, in: Oscillations: Non-Standard
Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology, 2021; LOUIS-KLEIN, Adam, “At the Crossing-Place
of Gods and Animals: The Sky-Earth System as Generic Cosmology”, in: Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in
Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology, 2021.
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we can all share, one which does not pass outside of the
Center that we are, and does not dominate us with impersonal academic abstractions, instead being rooted in the
person, or the “I”.
In semiotic terms, the paradigm shift that the Sky-Earth
System proposes is to take the myth of the separation
of the sky and earth literally, and then to unfold our
metaphors within this literal space, what Roy Wagner
calls a literal ground, rather than the constructed figure
of “culture” versus “nature” (a set of conventions split off
from their spontaneous contexts). By taking the literal as
ground and the metaphorical as figure, we focus invention
while also taking responsibility for it.03 Sky-Earth system
gives minimal constraints for the deliberate play of mythic
images, as it situates them within the phase-space of the
Sky-Earth System as a real—though modelized—ground.
It is more and more necessary to face the finitude of the planet, the
limits to depletion and waste, the increasing entropy brought about by
the Modern paradigm, threatening not only the stability of the EarthSystem but the ordinary Humans who live in it. However, the planet is
really a double term: the earth-disc that expands out from any perspectival center, and the orb in the Sky, which takes on the Sky’s curvature.
The very possibility of thinking the earth as orb can start from the
Human at the Center of the Universe, obviating the Moderns’ confusion
of polycentricity with acentricity. To see the planet as a dimension of
the Sky-Earth System is to go where the ancients are, not insisting on
a mere “local”, but creating holographic models scalable to any size.04
How to reverse entropy without denying it, passing it back through the
Center, rebirthing the Human as the crossing-place of the animal and
the God?05 We need to reconcile the finite and the infinite, but through
the World Tree, which reaches from the earth to the stars.
We endow our model with a conformal structure, which means
that it preserves the angles of images even as it shrinks or enlarges
them infinitely. In Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC), this is
the scale-invariant geometry of light that lets us traverse the universes,
as the universe returns to this position at its beginning and end. The
CCC is a compactified geometry that sets the boundary conditions
03 WAGNER, Roy, Symbols that Stand for Themselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; SHAFFNER,
personal communication.
04 LOUIS-KLEIN, “From Earth-Systems Science to the Sky-Earth System”.
05 LOUIS-KLEIN, “At the Crossing-Place of Gods and Animals”.
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of a minimal cosmology.06 The system must take on an event horizon,
a light-cone, a causal limit from the point of view of light itself. The
boundary-surface is the Sky, whose holography centers the Human in a
black hole topology.07
The cardinal poles are the compactified points-at-infinity of the
system. At the horizontal and vertical points, we place the animals and
Gods, acting either as relations or terms. They are the vector basis of
a quantum or Oceanic matrix, stereographically projected onto the
curvature of the Sky. It is the algebra that writes the space in-between
on the surface, and so opens the breathing-space within which Humans
can live.08
Rather than the quasi-Nature of materialist “earthly-immanence”,
it is the Human who is immanent at the crossing-place. The animal is
no less of a transcendence than the God, but simply an inverse one,
when the Human is situated in the middle-place. François Laruelle has
called this the “half-ascending vector”, the ascent as seen from within
the Human.09 The half-ascending vector touches the “lowered Sky,”
without denying the infinity of the Other side of the Sky nor its identity
with the Center. It is the stars close enough that we can almost touch
them, not so much further away than the clouds.10
The Earth is what is interposed between the Ocean and the Sky,
like the turtle onto which Falling Woman falls.11 The Mayans speak of
lifting the Sky from the Ocean and the journey of the Maize God to the
Center where this happens.12 The Milky Way moves from vertical to
horizontal to vertical positions across the Sky—reflecting the geometry
of the elementary subjective positions—becoming the World Tree that
meets at the three stars of Orion, laid out on the turtle’s back.13
We are what Laruelle calls the Water-Fish, who never leaves the
Ocean, through an idempotent relation between the Fish and the Wave,
swimming in the Wave as the Wave.14 It is the play of identities that
myth reveals through continually crossing differences or intersecting
them in the Center. We are at the middle of a Canoe, both its back and
its front, the far and near marriage, warfare, where the poles of the
06 Cf. SIDNEY WRIGHT, Aaron, “The Advantages of Bringing Infinity to a Finite Place: Penrose Diagrams as Objects of
Intuition”, in: Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 44(2), 2014, pp. 99–139.
07 Cf. CAVIA, AA, “Shannon’s Demon”, in: Triple Ampersand, https://tripleampersand.org/shannons-demon/
https://tripleampersand.org/shannons-demon/.
08 The surface provides a minimum of exteriority when space-time collapses to the nonextensional center.
09 LARUELLE, François, En dernière humanité. La nouvelle science écologique, Paris: Éditions du Cer, 2015.
10 HOOPE, Gotz, “When the Shark Bites the Stingray: The Night Sky in the Construction of the Manus World”, in:
Anthropos, 95(1), 2000, pp. 23–36.
11 In the creation myth of the Iroquois.
12 FRIEDEL, David, SCHELE, Linda & PARKER, Joy, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path, New
York: William Morrow and Company, 1993.
13 Ibid.
14 LARUELLE, François, “The Tsunami and the Myth of the Water-Fish: A Short Essay on Fantastic Zoology, to Add to
Borges and Schrödinger” (trans. SMITH, Jeremy R.), in: Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the
Social Sciences, and Cosmology, 2021.
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Others meet, as in the canoe-journey of the Sun and Moon.15 The Canoe
is a Snake full of Fish, and the Snake is simply the expanded Fish, the
holographic or conformal Fish that is each of the stars.16
Laruelle describes a collapse that at the same time creates an
opening and ascent from Earth to the Universe.17 This is the beginning-end of worlds, at the eschatological collapse of Sky and Earth,
precisely where it becomes possible to hold open the space in-between,
a prophet’s discourse from the center of the CCC.18 Laruelle defines
a human Planck’s constant “h”, below which (to the animal) one does
not descend, and above which (the God) becomes proportionate to
the Human. We add a holographic tiling of these Planck units on the
surface of the Black Hole, where the constant “c” comes in, the finitization of light, which crosses the infinity of the conformal diagram in an
instant.19 For “c” is the ground of the event horizon, which reflects the
infalling space upward as the holographic Sky.
The Sky and Earth are not confused, but superposed, holding
open their distinction. As in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, the universal
presence of God in creation is maintained through the distinction
between the terms, in the humanization of God and the divinization
of the Human in Christ.20 But Jesus would not be the only historical
operator of this movement, for functions and persons distinguish
themselves as in Edward Butler’s polycentric polytheism and in the
function/term positions in Lévi-Strauss’s canonical formula of myth.21
Rather, there would be a polycentric symmetry of such Christ figures,
emerging at the hinges of the world ages and aeons, at each Center.
Each Christ would be a humanized form of the World Tree itself,
which otherwise might appear as the animal (the Anaconda for example) or the God (the staff of a demiurge). A decision does not need to be
made, in fact, between the humanization of the God (a secular Christ
and enlightenment realization) and the divinization of the Human (a
supposedly unpalatable transcendence); nor between the animalization
of the Human (in the Earth-System) and the humanization of the animal
(in either the sense of “animal culture”, which Laruelle treats, or the
perspectival sense of Amazonian worlds, described by Viveiros de
Castro22). Need we mention the animalization of the God (the “dark”
15 LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude, L’origine des manières de table, Paris: Plon, 1968.
16 In the creation myth of the Eastern Tukanoans.
17 LARUELLE, En dernière humanité. La nouvelle science écologique.
18 KOPENAWA, Davi & ALBERT, Bruce, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Cambridge: Belknap Press,
2013.
19 Cf. HARAMEIN, Nassim, “The Schwarzschild Proton”, in: AIP Conference Proceedings, 1303(1), Computing
Anticipatory Systems: CASYS ’09: Ninth International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems, 2010, pp. 95–100.
20 FRANCIS, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2015.
21 BUTLER, Edward P., Essays on the Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus, New York: Phaidra Editions, 2014; LÉVISTRAUSS, Claude, “The Structural Study of Myth”, in: The Journal of American Folklore, 68(270), Myth: A Symposium,
1955, pp. 428–444.
22 VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”, in: The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 1998, pp. 469–488.
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God who accounts for finitude) or the divinization of the animal (the
“totemic” Gods of the Egyptians, the animal-ancestors of Amazonians)?
The system emerges as a crystal, or Rubik’s cube, whose discrete
state-transformations exist in complementarity with the unfolding
Wave of the Ocean. It is a transformation group, a canonical formula, a
chiasmus, the form of myth as much as the content it literally posits.
It is its inscription on the writing tablet of the Sky, as an image that
stands for itself.23
The CCC is the conformal invariant that crosses the worlds. We
choose to speak from that invariant, set it up as a model in which the
plurality of cosmologies is superposed in an ancient now. We cross
relations into surfaces and surfaces into points and invent space-time
as nothing but the Center. We take the point of view of light, of black
body radiation, in the instant it passes from one universe to the next.
A Conformally Compactified Geometry (M. C. Escher)
To compactify the universes and time with it solves the problem of
potential and actual infinities, only displaced with Cantor’s transfinite
sets. The Moderns pride themselves on the incompleteness of a
transcendence, of a transitive delay, whether as the endless series of
23 WAGNER, Symbols that Stand for Themselves; ROCHBERG, Francesca, Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and
the History of Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
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sets or as a waiting for the God at the end of History, never thinking
to change the axiom from transitivity to intransitivity. But Sky-Earth
systems science does not wait for the God at the end of “metaphysics”,
but thinks from the God as already here, at the crossing in the Human.
When the time that crosses the universes is compactified within
them, the series of skies is infinite and yet complete. We describe it
as a nested conformal diagram (conformal diagrams inside conformal
diagrams) with infinity meeting at the cardinal points at every scale.
Infinity is Housed in a great Longhouse, a Longhouse made out of
Longhouses, persons made out of persons, what Roy Wagner calls
a fractal person.24 Indeed, it is the crinkling of the boundary that is
itself, a half-integer dimension in which it is each of the halves, put
together as three-dimensional space. The World Tree branching in it
is the tube, the central pole around which the dance of the stars takes
place, expanding in and out as the vertical axis or the gourd of the Sky,
the long and the round, contained in themselves, without any Russel’s
Paradox.25
The mereology of the CCC mirrors the counting system of
Omalyce in the Eastern Highlands of Melanesia, a complete person
made of complete persons.26 The Anaconda is the conformal rescaling
of the animals on its surface, the fractal Animal, a totemic operator,
where wholes are reflected in parts.27 Is it not what Butler calls the
One as each God, each One, a Henad, and so a fractal God, distributed
through the space-time that is its own mask?28 A fractal Human,
Animal, and God, fractalizing each other in perfect conformality.
We prefer C-theory, complete conformal cyclic cosmology of the
center, to D-theory, the displacing, deviating, dispersal of the center
to the periphery, the philosophies of Difference, the ellipse as triumph
over the Sphere. We do not reverse Platonism, which makes everyone a
Second, but replace the Despotic Pyramid with a Polycentric one, build
a Monument in which each is the First and the Last, never Second.
Instead of the micro versus the macro, scale-invariance; instead of the
pure series of time, intransitive eternity. Instead of the non-Modern
nomads of the Earth versus the non-Modern despotics, the generic
Ancient, who is everyone, at the Center of the Sky-Earth System.
When Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa describes the Xapiri
images of the animal-ancestors as luminescent, ornamental skins and
24 WAGNER, Roy, “The Fractal Person”, in: GODELIER, Maurice & STRATHERN, Marilyn (eds.), Big Men and Great Men:
Personifications of Power in Melanesia, 1991, pp. 159–174.
25 KEHÍRI, Tomaru & PAROKUMU, Umüsi, Antes o Mundo Não Existia: Mitologia dos Antigos Desana, São Paulo:
UNIRT/FOIRN, 1995; HUGH-JONES, Stephen, “The Origin of Night and the Dance of Time: Ritual and Material Culture in
Northwest Amazonia”, in: Tipití: Journal for the Society of the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 16(2), 2019.
26 MIMICA, Jadran, Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the Iqwaye Counting and Number Systems,
Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1988.
27 LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude, Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée Sauvage” (trans. MEHLMAN, Jeffery &
LEAVITT, John), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021 [1962].
28 BUTLER, Edward P., Essays on the Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus, New York: Phaidra Editions, 2014.
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simultaneously as the Center and heart of the animals, he thinks with
the holographic principle.29 For it is as if the normal body-surface of
the animal is exchanged for the spiritual surface of the Xapiri at the
moment the Center is accessed. If it is that play of surface and center
that creates the depth of the universe, then the Xapiri will come to
rest both within the breast of the shaman and within the chest of the
Sky, such that the reduced space of the Center and surface creates the
dimensional volume between Sky and Earth, and within the Human, in
which the Xapiri can act, or their effects can be registered.
If the chest of the Sky has its own surface, would it not be the
Other side of the Sky, the Center of the Xapiri themselves, as the Yarori
animal-ancestors? The Xapiri would be a double holography, creating
the internal space between Sky and Earth in order to realize the
original identity between the Human and the God. There has to be, in
a sense, a container within a container, such that the surface is folded
back into the Center, a Black Hole inside a Black Hole.30 Omama, who
created the Mountains that are both Houses for the Xapiri and pillars
between Sky and Earth, would be this container of the container, the
vision from the CCC and from the beginning of the Sky-Earth System.
Intersecting Cosmological Horizons
The Universe is a Black Hole: not a time-symmetric Black Hole, but an
anti-symmetric and intransitive one, where time both continues and
moves backwards at once.31 The Black Holes shed their surface as radiation until it becomes the Universe’s conformal surface, a double twist
29 KOPENAWA & ALBERT, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman.
30 GOOD, Irving J., “Chinese Universes”, in: Physics Today, 25(7), 1972, p. 15.
31 Cf. HAGE, Per & HARARY, Frank, Structural Models in Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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in which they sacrifice themselves to become the Big Bang.32 They
are the act of Purusha in the Vedas, or the Moche spider decapitator,
or Kuwai of the Northwest Amazon.33 The double twist does not twirl
into nowhere, but—exactly as depicted—places an X over the Center,
reflects the poles across each other in intransitive supersymmetry.
The Sky is falling.34 The homeostatic equilibrium of the Sky-Earth
System is breaking down. Sky-Earth systems science tries to reverse
this entropy, to reenter the belly of the Anaconda who sheds his skin
so as to live forever. The Human opens the breathing-space between
Sky and Earth—neither collapsing the vertical into the horizontal nor
debasing the horizontal through it, but learning to live in the Forest of
World Trees, the living breathing forest that is everything.35
When the finite limits of the planet are reconciled with the conformal infinity of the Sky, we will see the Earth as a star without leaving
it. The orb of the Earth will be reconciled with the animals, and we will
see their shapes laid out as the constellations. We will see the God
reflected everywhere, in the simplicity of the person and in the pulse
of the heart. We will travel in a Snake-Canoe to where the ancients are
and have always been, at the Center of the Universe.
Adam Louis-Klein is a PHD student in anthropology at McGill University, studying with Eduardo Kohn. He completed
an MA in anthropology at the University of Chicago, an MA in philosophy at The New School, and a BA in philosophy
at Yale University. He is one of the co-directors of Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social
Sciences, and Cosmology.
32 With its low-entropy initial conditions.
33 MARANDA, Pierre (ed.), The Double Twist: From Ethnography to Morphodynamics, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2021; WRIGHT, Robin, Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2013.
34 KOPENAWA & ALBERT, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman.
35 KOHN, Eduardo & USHIGUA, Manari, “A Reflection on How Forests Think”, in: The Otherwise, 1, 2020, http://
theotherwise.net/articles/article_how_forests_think.html.
theotherwise.net/articles/article_how_forests_think.html
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