Super Hans and The Fate of Civilisation

These are normal conditions, actually.

One of the most evocative aspects of Western magic for me is that it is a ruin. A crashed spaceship. Already post-collapse.

After the fall of Egypt, the fall of Rome, the centuries-long game of ecclesiastical whack-a-mole with various heresies, the rise of the Enlightenment, the rise of Positivism and all its silly children like communism and socialism, and now the last gambit of technocratic managerialism, very little could have survived intact.

It’s fine. The shattered remains are rather awesome. All the more so for being so incongruous with their surroundings. By way of example of that, let me share the entire story of Hans from BP, shared with me a few months ago by Jay Springett from a random user on X.

I very briefly worked at a petroleum engineering ‘AI’ startup right out of college because I wanted to see if I would like non-healthcare/biology work.

It sucked.

But what I *did* learn was that picking well locations for oil companies is an incredibly challenging problem. To the point where ML models and fluid dynamics simulations alike were both bad at the problem.

But you know what was really good at it?

An old dude named ‘Hans’ who was paid exorbitant amounts by BP to come in every now and then to the office, pick some points off a map, and go back home. Those points would be drilled down into and usually yielded pretty decent results in oil yield, often better than simulations alone.

He worked for less than 5 hours a week, amortized over a year. Hans, as I understood it, was just some person at BP who’d worked there for decades and had an intuitive sense of what was and wasn’t a good place to drill down into.

He wasn’t alone, multiple, but less than a dozen, employees at BP existed just like him. He wasn’t unique to BP either, apparently all major oil companies had a team of Hans-esque figures that helped pick the wells. It was just widely agreed upon that human intuition is really important in well picking and story was left at that.

The whole thing really weirded me out and it felt like a ghost story told amongst petroleum engineers, because literally nobody knew more information about him or other people like him beyond what I’ve said here. Multiple people corroborated the story of these figures existing, but nobody had actual details.

What were their backgrounds? Were the accuracies actually *that* high? What were they picking up on? Never found out the answer to any of these.

Oil is such a bizarre field. Source.

I have a couple of these stories. One to do with things that Google found with its ocean mapping project that was run out of London. Another -actually, this was in the oil industry, but I heard it at a telecoms conference- had to do with enormous tunnels and rectilinear voids (vastly ancient mines, basically) almost a mile underground in South Africa. If you have had corporate jobs you probably have some of these stories too. There are whole businesses built around the Hanses of the world outside the Western imprint: Russian remote viewing companies, African dowsers, etc.

And, you know, with respect to that anonymous X user sharing their story, I’m not sure that oil is such a bizarre field. I mean, I guess it is if you factor in the industry’s vicissitudes having defined macro-politics for the last seventy years. But I don’t think Hans makes oil weird. I think he makes oil normal.

Western magic is just a string of Hanses stretching back to Archaic Greece. A Hanseatic League, if you will.

It is a LeGuinist carrier bag of Charles Fort’s ‘Damned Facts’ and always has been. That is precisely what the technical hermetica become as they crash into the woodlands of Europe and the coastlines of Mediterranean and transform into the beginnings of our herbalism. Consider what Western magic contains within it now. Yes, ooky-spooky things like demons and spirits. But also just like… Reiki and vortexed water. Things that shouldn’t work but do and basically everybody knows it now.

Normalise Hansing, you cowards. Be the Hans you want to see in the world. If you can’t Hans yourself, how in the hell are you going to Hans somebody else?

I joke, but only partially. One of the things I am very sure you are here on earth to do is (apologies in advance for this) to help people find the rich oilfields of their souls. In the 90s, we might have assumed that the purpose of magic was to add a promising little sparkle to people’s lives, like a wink from Santa at the end of a department store TV advertisement, that would serve to remind them that there might just be a hint of real magic left in the slacker ennui of capitalism’s triumph over world history.

Given that we are instead facing down multiple apocalypses the way the American southeast is facing down hurricanes, it is probably more likely you are here to offer, as a form of triage, the embodied sense that there is an implicate order, a purpose, a meaning, occluded under all this awfulness -just enough to keep your neighbour or co-worker sane for one more day. It’s less about whimsy now and more about life jackets.

The method is still the same.

In your carrier-bag are murky jewels from a different, stranger world. An energy healing technique. An accurate cartomantic session. A means of offering closure between the land of the living and the land of the dead. A line from Rumi. The right herbal anti-inflammatory for a sore throat. Just the right astrological talisman. Water from a holy well.

Probably, for most of your life, these things were seen as quirky, even slightly derided. There are centuries where things just sort of Hans along. And then, one day, those jewels in your bag start to glow.

The method is still the same but the mission changes. Before, it was search. Now, it’s rescue.