Eating the empires of the sun.
It’s also an occult symbol that is still in vogue among alchemists - and far-right activists - today.
You may know Wewelsburg as the inspiration for Castle Wolfenstein.
The Nazis, naturally, are trying to succeed where those long-dead aliens failed.
Tyrants in every place and era have courted the power of the sun.
Napoleon Boneparte called it the universal giver, the one god truly deserving of the title.
These imperial yearnings rest, I think, on a more fundamental and widely-shared ambivalence.
The sun has always been a little dark, as far as carbon-based lifeforms are concerned.
The obvious practical obstacle is scale.
Other games take inspiration from more recent technological efforts to somehow conquer and ingest the sun.
The Thule’s doomed sun-harvesting apparatus, for instance, has a real-life precedent in speculative science.
Grand hypotheses like this are shaded by the solar imagery and rhetoric of fascism.
Dyson Spheres are prominent in games about building empires.
The two games offer mixed opinions about the implications of swallowing suns.
Dyson Sphere Program, however, is oddly without violence.
But gods can be replaced.
In its place, the Empire has assembled a dysfunctional clockwork star.
It is a livid contradiction, a holy fake, both god and machine.
This is the sun of emperors: tortured and objectifying and insane.
It’s even been used toadvertise yoghurt.
Where solar promises to bestow energy anywhere, fusion is centralised.
Unsurprisingly, videogames also deal in the possibile military value of solar and fusion energy.
These bizarre wartime experiments are, of course, catnip to the creators of Wolfenstein.
The Nazi death mirror also features in the MachineGames reboots.
The suns tyranny breeds tyranny below.
Could its image prove a door to another and perhaps healthier dimension?
I don’t hold out a lot of hope, myself.
But in bleak times, there is something invigorating about the sun’s intransigence.
The Star is more than just a deadly obstacle, bigger than Disc and Turtle rolled together.
It’s one reality swamping another.
The dream nears collapse under the brutal insistence of solar gravity.
