Despite the overlays of Anglo-American logical analysis and Kierkegaardian/Diogenean existential cynicism a dark undercurrent runs through Luno's writing that, while finding points of consonance in the European philosophical canon, is distinctly Mesoamerican. Recall his early studies were anthropological and focused on historic clashes between European and indigenous peoples in Australia, North America and Medieval North Africa. His undergraduate thesis was on the bloody demise of the North American Plains Indian culture and the use made of it by a subsequent white American mindset to define itself. "it was history," he once said, "not philosophy that made me distrust everything human." And though a close student of Kant's moral legacy he comes to it from as far away as possible from any sort of idealism.

Luno has described himself as "spiritual terrorist", likened himself to an "aztec heart surgeon". On more than one occasion he has threatened his reader with murder. It should be needless to say—though I suspect for more readers than I care to imagine—it is not: that the violence in Luno's writing is not literal. It is a taunting intellectual violence arising out of a long-standing intellectual suppression. But, though not simply literal, even the most abstract, blue-blooded aggression must pack a real physical threat to achieve the moral effect he intends. It is only not literal in the sense that there is slight probability that Luno could ever succumb to the concrete act of violence (its having been bred out of him, let's hope). The fact that this requires stating at all is already an indictment of the toe-deep understanding of violence (rhetorical and material alike) endemic to presumably civilized, otherwise thoughtful and well-meaning people whose insight into the subject extends no deeper than the desire not to have it meted out to themselves or the ones they love when it is these, Luno contends, that most deserve it... Why should this thought be mysterious?

He seldom refers directly to Pre-Columbian thought and culture, but he accompanied this essay with this extensive quote from This Tree Grows Out of Hell, Ptolemy Tompkins, Harper: San Francisco, 1990, pp. 35-7. (Emphasis is Luno's.)

At some point in the hazy stretch of centuries between the collapse of the coastal Olmecs and the rise of the Maya in the lands to the south and inland—some time around or before the year one in our calendar—the airborne version of the Olmec serpent began to be represented in a sumptuous coat of feathers. This strange combination of elements created a religious symbol of incredible power: whether as Gukumatz, Kukulkan, or Quetzalcoatl, as he was variously known to the peoples of Guatemala, Yucatan, and Mexico, the feathered serpent became Mesoamerica’s most oft-produced image. It has proven attractive to outsiders as well, and has been widely interpreted by writers in our own century. People have seen in Quetzalcoatl a transparent metaphor for divinely sublimated sexuality, a Mexican equivalent of the Chinese Yin-Yang, and countless other things besides. Yet to those who first developed it, the feathered serpent was probably most closely connected with a group of ideas not about sexuality or cosmic unity per se, but about an activity that in those times was believed to embrace these concepts: ingestion.

The fate of most things in the natural world is to be eaten. This fact was not lost upon the ancient Mesoamericans, who, because of their ability to see not only plants and animals but the entire body of earth and the planets wheeling above it as living and thoughtful entities, imagined the process of ingestion going on in places that we no longer consider. People, plants, planets, even the span of day itself—the earth had only to hold still and eventually all of these things, along with everything else on its surface and in the sky above it, would pass into its depths. Some of these bodies, like the sun, descended and returned frequently and regularly from earth’s interior. Others, like corn, descended less often but took a much longer time to come back. Still others, like the planet Venus, had complex and seemingly irregular schedules of descent and return, whose secret logic was known and discussed only by an elite few.

All of these entities and everything else besides descended into the belly of the earth; yet only the individual and particular human soul appeared to descend and stay. It was this strange refusal on earth’s part to give back only this of all her varied foods that first indicated to the Mesoamerican mind that there was something distinctly different about the human position in the cosmos.

Snakes live in the earth and have the profoundly unsettling habit of ingesting their victims alive. Even in the hard-headed twentieth century, the sight of a snake’s distended jaws closing over its wide-awake and often warm-blooded prey seems almost intentionally creepy. In ancient Mesoamerica, where the shapes and habits of all the beings with which mortals shared the earth had something to say about the intentions of that world toward them, the effect of such a sight must have been infinitely more direct and powerful.

Yet because they were determined to engage the devouring world beneath them in a conversation that might give answers to the riddles of suffering and death, these early watchers of the earth and its creatures did not turn away from the serpent and its horrible habits but instead performed upon them the first in a series of mythic elevations that became something of a tradition in Mesoamerica, and of which the Aztecs became the undisputed masters. These elevations consisted in finding the worst, most repellent, and frightening phenomena possible and then focusing on them relentlessly in the intellectual explorations of myth and sculpture. By doing so, these thinkers ensured that their picture of the universe was an honest one, cognizant of all the cruel and frightening contradictions that life on earth entailed…