Georges Bataille’s chthonic god

Way back in high school I encountered an essay about the chthonic written by Vadge Moore, an occultist who just happened to also be the drummer of a punk rock band called The Dwarves. The essay was called Chthonic: From Beast to Godhead, and as the title suggests it implies that the chthonic is the basic layer from which the process of “awakening” can begin and then develop. It was written in 2004, and all these years later you can still read it on his website. I like to think of my encounter with it in those days in high school as part of the early roots of my interest in basically all things chthonic about paganism and the religious world as a whole, and I suppose it was easy for me to relate to because he was clearly very interested in the chthonic himself. Many years after I first read that essay, I still think about it, I still look for it, and then, when I began studying the work of Georges Bataille, I was reminded of Vadge Moore, who mentioned Bataille in his own essay.

French decadent-writer Georges Bataille is another author that explores chthonic themes. His philosophy and his works of fiction contain themes that relate to the bowels, the guts, and the intestines. All things earthly as opposed to heavenly. In opposition to the ancient sky and sun gods, Bataille proposes a worship of the gods of darkness and of the earth: Demeter, Hecate, and Dionysus. Although these authors are known for exploring the dark, hidden depths of fear and depravity, we must not forget that it is just this sinking into the underworld of the id and the dark unconscious that helps to plant the roots for our ascent.

When I remembered this, I resolved to find the chthonic god(s) that Bataille, according to Vadge, sought to worship. And after a lengthy study of Bataille’s work, I think that there is at least one deity who Bataille seems to focus on at least as a mythological representation the tragic mystery of life and its intimacy with death: Dionysus.

Known to us by multiple names, Dionysus is the god most known to modern audiences as a god of wine and all the intoxication brought on by alcohol consumption. But this was always just one aspect of his cult. In the most ancient form of his cult especially, Dionysus was worshipped as god of death and rebirth, and more specifically the mysteries of death and rebirth. Dionysus was a chthonic deity, arguably the most important chthonic deity in ancient Greece. He was also the patron of divine madness, and his most ancient mysteries involved a state of mania brought about by being possessed by the god, a state that may have been facilitated through the intoxication that came from drinking wine. There are several traditional contexts in which Dionysus was identified or conflated with Hades, the king of the underworld, and in turn Serapis, a fusion of Osiris and Apis who often served as a stand-in for Hades himself. Thus, Dionysus was indeed classically chthonic.

So how does Dionysus figure in Bataille’s writings. Probably the clearest sense in which Dionysus can be seen as “Bataille’s chthonic god” is in his essay Nietzschean Chronicle (1937). In Nietzschean Chronicle, Bataille presents what he frames as a religious response to the inherent tendency of civilisation towards crisis, and at that an alternative to the fascist response (in which the totalitarian state is presented as the way to restore some lost “sacred” values). That response is set up by a single opposition that Bataille takes to be the truest of all oppositions that maintains human existence: the opposition between the earth and the heavens. This is naturally a restatement of the classical Greek division between the ouranic (celestial/heavenly) and the chthonic (that which is beneath the earth), but Bataille also presents it as a conflict between different kinds of social forms. On the side of heaven, there is moral purity (consisting of aversion to “sin”), military repression, imprescriptible rigity, and a constituion of communal forces aligned with narrow familial and racial tradition and which form a monarchy erected against life. On the side of earth, there is nocturnal grandieur, avid passions, obscure dreams, and fraternal bond between people that has nothing to do with blood, whose constitution is decided by the people themselves, and whose goal is nothing other than life – and therefore tragedy.

The religious response to the decomposition of civilisation and its values is not Christianity, but instead a “Dionysian” response. In this sense, Bataille naturally invokes Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzschean Dionysianism is a religious affirmation of tragic liberty. Nietzsche’s demand was for the creation of a sacred power that bows before nothing and would break down the old “sovereign” order and its prohibitions. Nietzsche’s Kinderland, or land of children, is a place where every “Fatherland” is challenged in a way that doesn’t merely negate them. Nietzsche’s message springs from the realms of dream and intoxication, and is expressed by the name DIONYSOS. Dionysus is the deity who represents the destructive exuberance of life, and it is exactly this deity that Nietzsche takes up as a symbol of the will to power.

Bataille understands Dionysus as the “god of the earth”, his mother Semele as “the earth”, and Zeus as the “god of the heavens”. Dionysus was born “of a lightning-torn womb”. Nietzsche wanted to be Dionysus to the point of madness, and in his image Nietzsche was born of the earth torn open by the fire of the heavens. The fire of Dionysian domination is the fire of the earth. That is the sovereignty of the chthonic cult. The Nietzschean Dionysus is a sacred figure who is to release life from servitude, by which Bataille means the punishment of the past, and therefore also releases it from religious humility and romantic torpor. The Nietzschean Dionysus demands that a certain kind of divine will returns the earth to the accuracy of dreams.

Bataille’s opposition between the earth and the heavens is then extended into a discussion of a play called The Siege of Numantia. As the titlte suggests, the play is based on the ancient Roman siege of Numantia, in which the Roman and Numidian armies conquered and destroyed the whole city as part of a campaign to subdue the rebellion of Celtiberian tribes. By the end of the siege, the rebelling Numantines killed themselves and each other rather than surrender to the Romans. Bataille interprets The Siege of Numantia as a tragedy centered around a tragic religious conflict between implacable celestial authority and a people without a leader, without a head, and located in the realm of Night and Earth haunted by the phantoms of a tragic mother. What is at stake is not just the fall of a city, but the loss of an entire people and the obscuration of a way of life. This presents a religious truth that rejects the inertia of modern humanity and dwarves the concept of “the fatherland” in significance. Ultimately, the fatherland is the sworn enemy of what Bataille calls “the true unity” of life, which can only consist of a particular communal awareness of a profound existence which consists of play between life and death.

Thus is the tragedy of Numantia:

CAESARIAN UNITY, ESTABLISHED BY A LEADER-A HEAD-IS OPPOSED BY THE HEADLESS COMMUNITY, BOUND TOGETHER BY THE OBSESSIVE IMAGE OF A TRAGEDY. Life demands that men gather together, and men are only gathered together by a leader or by a tragedy. To look for a HEADLESS human community is to look for tragedy: putting the leader to death is itself tragedy, it remains a requirement of tragedy. A truth that will change the appearance of human things starts here: THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT THAT GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO COMMUNAL LIFE IS DEATH.

The non-recuperable truth that changes the human world, once grasped, is that death is what gives communal life its obsessive value. Such a theme is consistent with the premise of eroticism that Bataille later studies, but we have also necessarily stumbled upon something chthonic. The play between life and death is made explicit. Actually, Bataille calls this Dionysian. By its own movement it calls forth power, and thus it gives meaning to any organisation revolving around profound mysteries. It is in this sense that Bataille refers to the Dionysian Mysteries. Bataille refers to the mysteries as something distinct from “vague esotericism”. The mysteries are a question of “lacerating” truths, truths that absorb those that belong to them, and which move away from the mob, who do not seek them anyway. Only crafty deliberation, at that one that ultimately revolves around figures of death, can counter the movement of the mob.

Bataille also seems to connect these mysteries to the work of the Marquis De Sade, in that it is only in the open route of the mysteries, where everything is disorienting to the point of drunkenness, do De Sade’s paradoxical assertions cease to be mockery and judgement for those who accept them. Those who do not want to follow a consistent and difficult path can never understand the bloody and inhumane assertions of De Sade, much less apprehend their meaning. “Killing for pleasure”, for instance, can only be an inadmissible expression of hypocrisy, were it not that consciousness was driven to it by some extreme lucidity. The “truth” of the pleasure of killing (and it does remain questionable) cannot remain obscure or tranquil, and thus brings life to place where it is torn apart. For Bataille, this is the meaning of, according to him, the fact that gifted intellectuals committed all of their resources to the goal of destroying their own intellects, so that they might explode. Nietzsche’s glance into the abyss, and even his madness, are also relevant to that destruction.

So then, Dionysus has been located at the centre of a tragic, Sadean worldview, whose concern is the sacred mystery of death’s intimacy with life. The power of this mystery is linked to the destruction of the “sovereignty” of authority, and the tragic nature of this death, and it affords those noble individuals who face it, and are absorbed by it, to be liberated from all servility. So it is that this is the chthonic mystery of freedom. That Dionysus is the emblem of tragic freedom is hardly a surprise. In a culture that is still, to this day, almost deified for its legacy of tragedy, the gods themselves can be said to be tragic figures, but perhaps it could be said that none were more tragic than Dionysus. To understand this, we only have to look at the mythology of his birth. In some myths, more particularly the Orphic myths, Dionysus was born, destined to suceed Zeus on the throne of Olympus, ripped to shreds and devoured by the Titans, and then revived by Zeus, who managed to save his heart.

Then there is an essay literally titled Dionysos Redivivus (1946), which is entirely focused on Dionysus and his apparent revival. Here, Bataille explicitly connects Dionysus with Satan by way of both positive and negative comparison.

This Satan, with his goat’s head and feet, with his stinking cowshed rear, as a now fleeting imagination shows him in the gloomy, glimmering light of witches’ Sabbaths (in this hideous form begotten by the sickly nervousness of the Christians) – is he not, so close to us, the emanation of Dionysus. Unlike creatures of flesh and blood, myths are not limited as individuals are, and there are many sense in which Dionysus lives on in the guise of the Archfiend.

Satan leads the round of the witches in the so-called “Witches Sabbath”, whereas Dionysus led the round of the Bacchantes in the ancient orgies, and in both cases the rounds might be characterised by a kind of ecstatic lust and even intoxication. Both Satan and Dionysus, not unlike Pan, seem to have been associated with the image of the goat: the goat was a disguise of Dionysus, goats were sacrificed in honour of Dionysus, and one of his epithets is “black goatskin”. And if Satan was that devil most obstinately opposed to divine order, Bataille regards Dionysus as the god least concerned, at least within the ancient Greek religious world, with the burden of authority – here apparently meaning the function of converting immediate religious experience into programmatic ethics. In that sense, Dionysus was the purest state of divinity, completely unconcerned the desire for eternal fixity, and in this sense we find a conception of divinity opposed to the Christian concept of God the Father as presented in the Gospels. Somewhat different from Satan, though, Dionysus, according to Bataille, represented not the isolated individual but instead the crowd, which makes sense for the god of ecstatic orgies in which people collectively identified with Dionysus. And, more than sin, Dionysus embodied a sort of blind innocence in the exact sense implied by his omnipotence: the absence of reason, the instantaneity of the thunderbolt and of tragedy, blindness to consequences, and the cry without hope. People tend to typecast Dionysus as the god of wine, but the wine itself, while very important to the cult of Dionysus, was not the all-important element: the innocent fury of Dionysus was represented not so much by the wine but rather by the intoxication that was associated with wine. Dionysus is tragedy incarnated and completely unrestrained. He is also poetry, but his poetry is not really melancholy. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Satan, if understood in heroic terms, must necessarily be seen as a tragic figure, everything about him being defined by loss in the form of being cast out of the divine world, and in the fact that his rebellion brought death into the world.

One interesting thing to think about is that Bataille seems to figure that Dionysus lacks the individualisation of the hero. But if we go from the work of Jake Stratton Kent, we might actually say that, in view of the context of Thracian Orphism, Dionysus is the Hero! The Hero, that is to say the solar-chthonic warrior god and/or divine king, was often explicitly identified with Dionysus, at least by certain names (including Sabazios). In fact, Dionysus could be said to represent a chthonic aspect of the Hero, which took the form of the serpent. This serpent was the chthonic god that the Hero was to become in death, wherein he is united forever with the great goddess as lord of the underworld, just as he was united in sacred marriage with the great goddess as the king of Thrace. Dionysus was depicted in the form of a serpent many times, including in Euripides’ Bacchae, where the Maenads invoked Dionysus in the form of a many-headed serpent, among other forms (including the bull and the fire-breathing lion). This was the chthonic aspect of the Hero, and it was bound up in the heroic eroticism of the Thracian king, who ritually united with the great goddess in life and then finally in death and in the underworld.

Bataille seems to regard Satan as an “aged Dionysus”. Satan, unlike Dionysus, is aware of his own guilt. As we will see in our discussion of Erotism, that guilt can only actually refer to the knowledge of the transgression embodied by Satan, because guilt is essential for the world of the sacred and that’s because sacredness requires the violation of taboo, and thus transgression and the knowledge of transgression. For that reason, Satan lost his innocent fury and adolescent laughter, replaced rather by a sniggering spite. He is shrewd, calculating, not at all given to impersonal ecstasy, thus “old”. Something about that feels very at odds with the erotic nature of the Satan we recognise throughout modern representations of Satan, focused particularly on the notion of Satan as the tempter or seducer. Nonetheless, the Devil is divine, and both Satan and Dionysus embody the same kind of rites: orgiastic nocturnal frenzies, regardless of historical continuity or relation. In this sense Bataille sees Dionysus in the Devil, even if he thinks the modern rites of the Devil are poorer than the ancient rites of Dionysus and that Satan is a divinity suited to a guilty humanity. In fact, Bataille regards Satan as just one half of Dionysus.

The other half, strangely enough, is very strongly implied to be the crucified Jesus Christ. As strange as that sounds, it’s not unlike something I thought about and discussed back in 2018 or 2019 after reading Gyrus’ article about Satanism and Dionysus. And what’s more, the connection is admittedly very obvious. After all, Dionysus was a god who died and was reborn or resurrected, much like Jesus and so many other dying and rising gods (including the Egyptian god Osiris who was often identified as Dionysus by the ancient Greeks). This personifies both the erotic sacred and the tragic sense of sacrifice. In the Orphic narrative, the infant Dionysus was dismembered to death and eaten by the Titans, the Titans were then destroyed by Zeus with his divine lightning, who then saved Dionysus’ heart so that he could be reborn. In that sense, Dionysus was reborn only after being literally torn apart to death, just as the Maenads went on to tear the tyrannical Theban king Pentheus limb from limb, and the do the same to Orpheus. The mysteries of Dionysus were in this sense understood as the principle of life regenerated, which, Bataille argues, was continued in the passion and resurrection of Jesus according to Christianity. Although the idea that Jesus was simply a copy-paste of older dying and rising gods is simply false and misleading, it is true that Jesus, as the divinity who dies and then resurrects, enters a long history of gods who also died and resurrected. One difference, though, is that Jesus only died and resurrected once, while many more gods die and resurrect all the time. Among them, none other than the Sun, who was also sometimes called Bacchus or Dionysus. But then again, as far as we know, Dionysus only had to be resurrected once: unless, of course, he was also understood as the dying and rising wine grapes themselves!

In any case, this interpretation of Dionysus actually leads us to a much larger theme pervading Bataille’s work. Bataille interprets both the image of the goat demon and the image of the crucified body of Jesus Christ as emanations of the lost Dionysus within Christian culture. This links to two images of the impure world of the sacred: the sacred cadaver on the one hand, which has already been discussed, and the dying animal, which will soon be discussed. The cadaver is obviously the crucified Jesus, but also the dismembered body of Dionysus. The goat demon is an animal spirit, and as one of the sacred animals of Dionysus, which was both sacrificed to and slain by Dionysus, the goat demon represents the “primitive” spirit of transgression in the form of the dying animal god. The cadaver already represents the shared identity of the divine and the impure, the god and the corpse or shit, and in a more abstract sense the almost inaccessible or apophatic nature of the sacred world and excretory quality of the divine. For this reason, Bataille uses the image of a cadaver fleeing in a luminous shroud as a symbol of this aspect of the sacred in earlier essays. In Erotism, as we will see later, the “primitive” spirit of transgression is a dying animal god whose death unleashes violence and who exists outside all taboos. That image represents an idea of animal life as being sacred, either because animals were seen as essentially the same as humans or because they were not bound by taboo the way humans are (and thus, not the same as humans). But both images seem to point to an aspect of the sacred, defined in some ways by transgression and orgy, whose god, as far as Bataille is concerned, might well have been Dionysus. In that case, perhaps Bataille’s chthonic god really is none other than Dionysus.

In that sense, though, I would note Dionysus’ destiny to succeed Zeus on the throne of the gods has a strange and loose link to the possibility of the overthrow of the old order, even though, in the Orphic myth, Dionysus was to be granted the right of succession of power by Zeus himself, who favoured Dionysus as his son, rather than having to fight and overthrow Zeus in order to seize the throne from him. There is, however, still an implicit connection to the prophecy that one day Zeus, though now king of the gods, will be removed from his throne and replaced by another god, just as Zeus himself had previously replaced Kronos and Kronos himself had previously replaced Ouranos. That prophecy reminds us of the whole chain of rebellion in which the Greek pagan cosmos has existed. If Satan remains the angel or god of transgression and revolt, could there be anything more fitting? There is, at least, a microcosm of this theme in the story of Dionysus’ encounter with Pentheus, the king of Thebes. In Greek myth, Pentheus banned the worship of Dionysus and forbade women from practicing his holy mysteries. Dionysus responded by inspiring the women of Thebes to rush towards Mount Cithaeron in ritual frenzy, and then ultimately by luring Pentheus to his death at the hands of Bacchic revellers, who in their frenzied delirium mistook him for a wild animal and dismembered him in the ritual of sparagmos. Dionysus, suspicious to authority, responded to repression with violent and insidious rebellion and transgression.

Dionysus also figures strongly in Bataille’s book Inner Experience (1943), in which Dionysus is also strongly connected to Nietzsche. In fact, in Inner Experience, Bataille alludes to a figure he calls “Dionysos philosophos”.

1 have spoken of community as existing: Nietzsche related his affirmations to it but remained alone.

ln relation to him I am burning, as through a tunic of Nessus, with a feeling of anxious fidelity. That in the path of inner experience, he only advanced inspired, undecided, does not stop me – if it is true that, as a philosopher he had as a goal not knowledge but, without separating its operations, life, its extreme limit, in a word experience itself, Dionysos philosophos. lt is from a feeling of community binding me to Nietzsche that the desire to communicate arises in me, not from an isolated originality.

“Dionysos philosophos” implies Dionysus as a philosopher, which is relevant to Nietzsche’s work. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche refers to himself as a disciple of Dionysus. In fact, he says that it was the Dionysian orgy that gave him understanding of both tragedy and eternal recurrence, and that it was in the Dionysian mysteries that the fundamental instinct of the will to life expressed itself within Hellenic psychology: for the Hellene, according to Nietzsche, gained eternal life in these mysteries, at least in the sense of the eternal recurrence of life. The Greek received an affirmation of life beyond death and change, survival through reproduction in the mystery of sexuality, a future promised and made sacred in the past, a yes to life that is given even to the pains that attended it, and therefore the eternal will of creation and the will of life to affirm itself eternally: all of this, Nietzsche said, is signified by Dionysus, which in turn means it is also signified by the Thracian mysteries of the Hero, who was represented as the warlike and solar-chthonic Dionysus. What Nietzsche called Dionysian is the will to affirm life even in its strangest and most intractable problems, and the celebration of the will to life by sacrificing its highest types. Thus Nietzsche calls himself the “last” disciple of Dionysus, the teacher of eternal return.

From this standpoint, Dionysus is the god who inspired eternal return, and it’s in this sense that Bataille shows Nietzsche to be the mystic, whose eternal return was the mystic insight of Dionysus Philosophos. For another thing, though, Bataille refers to a fragment of Nietzsche which says that there is an ocean into which all the torrents of what makes “man” great and sublime flow out, and that the individual must “be this ocean”. To “be this ocean” means experience and the extreme limit it leads to, which then makes a multitude and a desert of a man. This is where there is no longer a limited existence, but according to Bataille that’s because a man is not distinguished from the others, and what is torrential in him is lost in the others. The ocean is thus the multitude of all things, though perhaps not in the sense of The All or Unity. It’s interesting to think of Bataille’s own form of “hardening” in light of Nietzsche, in that Nietzsche said that the Dionysian task involves the command, “harden yourselves”, the necessity of which is linked to the necessity of joy even in destruction. Bataille frames it as following the theophantic example of Juan de Yepes Alvarez (St. John of the Cross), but there’s room to argue that really it’s the example of Nietzsche’s “Dionysian task”.

All in all, I think there’s a sense in which Vadge Moore was right, in that Bataille called for a mystical experience, consistent with his mystical philosophy of death and immanence, whose sacredness and mystery are supported by a tragic, chthonic divinity. This is predominantly Dionysus, of course, being the figure most closely identified with Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power and therefore the sort of raw, impersonal creativity that the will to power seems to convey. But Bataille also speaks of “figures of death” that are important to the tragic mystery, who guard it from the mob. Bataille also similar employs gruesome figures of death such as the cadaver as symbolic of an impure, excretory sacrendess. Even the Sun, whose flow is the central embodiment of Bataille’s notions of expenditure and excretion, is chthonic. There is a sense in which Bataille’s mystery, though basically atheological, calls forth chthonic gods.