ABSTRACT
Following on from the last sections of the previous chapter, Chapter 6 returns to the historical narrative. Focusing on the emergence of Christianity, it argues that the early Christian practice of placing the dead without burial into catacombs, which was in line with the doctrine of individualised salvation, can be considered as a direct continuation of the manipulation of the souls of the dead that was practised in the underground structures of Cappadocia, itself closely connected with the rise of summoning dead souls in metallurgy and alchemy. The consequence was a combination of salvationism and mortalism in Christianity that in a secularised version became the central driving force of modernity as well, including its three main driving forces, technologised science, the interest- and merchant mind-based exchange economy animated by ‘creative destruction’, and interest- and appetite-based politics that follows Hobbesian ideas, adjusted by the Habermasian public sphere with its celebration of the void and the flux. As a result, modern mass-technologised politics can be considered as a modernised version of necromancy.
