Writer: Alephskotienos
Subject: Nature Enjoys Nature
Link: Tumblr / 18.11.2025
Nature Enjoys Nature
Thinking about Chumbley’s talk of the Design to which the Sorcerer must ally themselves in order to walk beyond this world. That Design is Nature, which partakes of its own iconoclasm and desire to break its own laws and desires.
The Design of the Devil. I think that the Marquis De Sade’s libertines talk about something like this all the time: Nature is basically “evil”, being that it creates only by destroying, possibly ruled by an Evil God or Supreme Being, and being a libertine is all about allying oneself with Nature’s wicked design.
Some of them talk about this with the idea that it is the only way to overcome nature. Simone de Beauvoir ultimately emphasizes this idea as an aspect of De Sade’s thought in Must We Burn De Sade. I think about it and suspect a resonance with some hermetic alchemist ideas.
After all, Nature enjoys nature (NATVRA NATURAE GAVDET CONTINET SVPERAT QVAE).
But it may also just be a kind of dark reflection or parody of these ideas. Perhaps there is something “gnostic” about it: the Peratai, for instance, believed that by traversing the regions of corruption and going all the way through to the constellation of Draco, the revolving snake (which they thought to be a symbol of Jesus Christ), they would achieve an exit from the universe itself, and “free” themselves from matter.
Still, this dark design idea is something that I think one can take seriously when thinking of the machines of the universe referred to in the prefaces of Anti-Oedipus.