(Note: I do not discuss chemical weapons or Eugene Thacker’s pagan take on black metal here as neither are particularly relevant to the point I am attempting to make—although I do wonder if some connection could be made between the two. This is in part because nuclear weapons seem to be the armament of choice in the 20th and early 21st century narrative. But with the emergence of 3D bioprinting and similar technologies biological weaponry may take a more prominent role in the cultural mythos. I may be guilty of superficiality in this take though.)

In the first volume of his Horror of Philosophy series In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker explores the theological/philosophical essence of black metal. He draws out three possible “blackness-es” that black metal could evoke: satanism, paganism, and cosmic pessimism—but for the purpose of this article we need only consider the first and last. Thacker explains that satanism, although subversive, is still positioned within the Judeo-Christian paradigm or “conceptual structure of opposition… …and inversion.” He writes that when taken in the satanic sense this blackness is “almost like a technology, or a dark technics. Black magic in particular is predicated on the ability of the sorcerer to utilize dark forces against light”. To sum this up, “heresy [satanism] was viewed by the Church primarily as an internal threat”. In contrast the blackness of black metal in the sense of cosmic pessimism—which I will refer to by the Lovecraftian term cosmicism—is harshly external to both Christianity and humanity as a whole. Thacker describes it as “the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups.” It is with this understanding of these two terms in mind that I make the following assertion: nuclear weapons are satanic, biological weapons are cosmic.

It must be admitted that Thacker himself talks of nuclear war as being part of the cosmic paradigm. However, it is in the sense that “popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change” are representations to us of cosmicism’s absolute nothingness. I agree with this particular take, but my argument is more about the notions of internal and external than directly about human extinction. I argue that nuclear weapons are a deal with the devil. In the classic Faustian manner, mankind asks for power and gets what it desires. Humanity has yet to destroy itself so perhaps we will outwit Satan or maybe the contractual fine-print/twisting of our request’s semantics will end us someday as often happens in these tales. Regardless, it is human desire and human agency that does or does not carry out the apocalypse. In this way, the devil/nuclear weapons are still safely internal to the Christian/anthropocentric paradigms respectively.

Biological weapons are fundamentally different, being neither satanic nor demonic but cosmic. The allegory around them bears less of a resemblance to that of a traditional hellish bargain and more to one of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories such as “From Beyond”. In that particular tale, the unnamed narrator’s best friend Crawford Tillinghast constructs a machine that allows contact with zones and aspects of space inaccessible to the normal human senses. However, the contraption also works in the opposite direction, giving a portal into our world to nightmarish entities. Biological weaponry is cosmic because, like the aforementioned fictional machine, they call upon forces that are inhuman and outside.

The esoteric beings summoned do not stem fundamentally from humans—although certainly they can be grown, altered, and even produced synthetically. Bacteria, both deadly and otherwise, do not owe their general existence to human presence or acknowledgment. They exist within us and all around us as if in some invisible intersecting dimension or “what Tillinghast called ‘beyond.’” We hope that—to quote Lovecraft’s mad scientist himself—these “things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life”, or at least the darker and more powerful of them, will grant us access to the same power Satan doles out. But these forces are indifferent to both mankind and its intentions/desires. Bacillus anthracis, Clostridium botulinum, Francisella tularensis—these are not lifeless energies to be harnessed like nuclear power but, as the notion of microbial intelligence entails, agential beings in themselves. The weaponization of emerging biotechnologies is a ritual to Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young or perhaps Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos or whatever cosmic deity you prefer for this analogy. In our all-too-human hubris we speak the forbidden words and summon something whose only use for us is our function as a doorway.