Most of us are so busy living our lives that our gaze gets caught on the surface of our civilization, enamored of its gadgetry and technical innovation, and our time gets spent conducting the business of our lives. And yet, within this, there is some part of us that cannot not see the polycrisis of modernity, and that the ecological, political, social, family, and mental health crises of our times are not separate.

What if, lurking deeper, where the heart of modernity would be if it had a heart, is something much darker than we know, something spawned millennia ago by empire, something self-perpetuating that in fact generates death rather than life?

What if part of the function of civilization is to obscure this, to keep our attention trained on the surface, on the fight for survival, rather than seeing through to the depths?

What if our survival depends on clear seeing, cutting through to the source of the European thoughtforms of domination that undergird the foundation assumptions of the modern world?

In this penetrating volume of essays, connection phenomenologist Natureza Gabriel, trained in neurophysiology and Indigenous Lifeways, divines the thoughtforms of empire lurking beneath modernity. He explores Supremacy Mind, the annihilation of animacy, the transmogrification of darkness into evil, the migration of notions of Enclosure from land to psyche, and the metaphor of the mine, all with intent to unmask the taproots of alienation ushering us collectively in the direction of death.