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Meziane’s magisterial The States of the Earth ends with a somewhat mysterious subterranean provocation. “This work,” the final sentences read, “…calls for another…work that doubles its lines by its subterranean presence, a presence irreducible to that of the fossil states of the earth.” If the Secularocene and the “sacrifice of heaven” “overturn[ed] the earth” through the colonial dissemination of empire, as Meziane insists, then what was exposed when the earth was turned over? While drill bits penetrate the depths of the earth to fuel modernity, no one has traveled to these realms of intense pressure and temperature. If the heavens were “sacrificed” as a realm of divine difference, becoming instead a material realm that mortals could investigate and (eventually) travel to, then the same sacrifice has yet to occur for the realms below the earth. Even as speculation on the heavens continues to bring science close to religion, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein has suggested, speculation on the realms below the earth has received no comparable scientific/religious rituals. -cont-