I was going to save this subject for when I finally got around to writing about the demonological polytheism of esoteric Japanese Buddhism as presented by the work of Bernard Faure, but since I’ve been publishing a shitload of my notes on Georges Bataille as it is already, there’s at least one more subject that I thought deserved to be explored on its own: Bataille’s treatment of Gnosticism. Therefore, I decided to present this subject as its own article, at least one more article for now on my Bataille notes. I believe there’s also plenty of applications for both Satanism and Paganism, and their syncretic fusion, to be derived from this as well. In this respect, the essay Base Materialism and Gnosticism remains indispensible.
For that effort, though, we have to establish immediately that Bataille is interpreting Gnosticism primarily from a certain psychiatric or psychological standpoint, and on this basis treats Gnosticism as a religion or religious psychology that is inherently fixated on pantheon of “provocative” and “indecent” beings, whose figures allegedly survive in ancient magical amulets while their textual sources were destroyed by Christian orthodoxy. The crudity of these beings, Bataille argues, reflects the crude myths from which they originates, though he really doesn’t seem to go into any detail about these myths. Bataille also makes a bold and bizarre claim about Gnosticism: that its real origins are not in Neoplatonism or in Christianity, despite the fact that the Gnostic sects all revolve around the premise of Jesus Christ being the God-sent saviour of the human soul, but must instead be sought in Zoroastrian dualism. This dualism, should we take it to be a real philosophical phenomenon at least, was sometimes “disfigured” from certain influences, including Christianity, but it was also not beholden to any need to adapt to social necessities, and it also contained the conception that matter was an active principle of darkness defined not by the absence of light but rather by the demonic powers – the archontes – that absence reveals. In this setting, evil was not defined as the absence of good, but instead a creative action.
The first real lead in the investigation of Bataille’s constructed Gnosticism is the ass-headed god.
Thus the adoration of an ass-headed god (the ass being the most hideously comic animal, and at the same time the most humanly virile) seems to me capable of taking on even today a crucial value: the severed ass’s head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly , one of materialism’s most virulent manifestations.
Georges Bataille, Base Materialism and Gnosticism
The ass-headed god is surely Seth Typhon, or rather the ancient Egyptian god Set, who at a certain point in time came to be depicted with the head of a donkey. The ass, according to Bataille, is both the most hideously comic animal and the most humanly virile animal. That is exactly the reputation the ass as an animal symbol had in antiquity, in the eyes of both pre-Christian polytheists and early Christians. Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans sometimes accused Jews of worshipping a donkey-headed deity, who was in turn identified with Set or Typhon. Plutarch argued that Typhon was depicted as an ass because the ass was the “stupidest” of domestic creatures and therefore a natural fit for the irrationality of Typhon. Pre-Christian Romans and Greeks sometimes referred to the Christians as “onocoetes”, as in the conjugal bed of a donkey, or ass’ manger, to insinuate that they worshipped the product of some lewd or illicit intercourse. This may have influenced the graffito depicting a man named Alexamenos worshipping a donkey-headed Jesus Christ on the cross. Donkey was also a term used by Romans to refer to someone with a large penis.
Ancient Egyptians also interpreted the loud brays and large phalluses of donkeys as an affront to social decorum and morality. The donkey phallus itself was interpreted as a symbol of base materiality, by which is meant sexual lust and therefore the base earthly existence of humans, and yet also somehow the promise of that this existence can be transcended. The concept of union between human and donkey was also liminally symbolic, in that it conveyed either the dual nature of the human being as both elevated and base or even a transcendence of the earthly human form. In some ancient Egyptian texts, Set was represented by a phallus that threatened to penetrate enemies, and was also warded off by a phallus. A very similar significance is associated with the god Priapus, who apparently both promoted fertility and threatened criminals with his giant erection, and to whom donkeys were also sometimes sacrificed. But, in Greek myth, a donkey spoiled one of Priapus’ sexual encounters with his loud bray. Of course, the donkey was also depicted as a mount for various gods, but even in this context it also appears as a symbol for unbridled lasciviousness or some malevolent aspect of divine power. The donkey was for instance a companion of both Dionysus and Silenus. In Hinduism, the Gardabha, or donkey mount, is traditionally interpreted as the mount of “impure beings”. The Christian theologian Jerome compared the bray of the donkey to the singing of the Devil. In Egyptian texts, it was said that you could hear the donkey’s voice in the underworld.
For Bataille, the head of the ass is the severed head of the ass which is an acephalic personification of the sun. This in turn is a representation of one of materialism’s most virulent manifestations. The ass-headed god could well have been considered a sun god in some contexts. As Jake Stratton Kent has pointed out, the Seth Typhon that appears in the Greek Magical Papyri was probably a solar-pantheistic deity or one of several manifestations of a larger solar-pantheistic cult. Plutarch had already established an identification of Typhon with the sun, as in the sun whose heat and light seem to dry up the world and make it very difficult for life to flourish. The value that Bataille associates with the figure of the ass-headed god comes from his perception of familiarity between modernity and antiquity, in that both ancient and modern societies have principles which have become the dead letter of a society that must question and overturn itself in order to discover the motives of force and aggression. Seth Typhon is a figure who appears frequently in Greco-Egyptian magical texts, and donkey-headed figures also appear frequently in Egyptian magical amulets. Some amulets also feature ithyphallic donkey beings, or anthropomorphic donkey figures with conspicuously large phalluses. Even in the modern age, there are magical charms that use different parts of a donkey’s body (ears, tongue, liver, even brains) for attraction spells, often attraction of a man by a woman. This actually lines up well with how several spells in the Greek Magical Papyri that invoke Typhon Seth (or Seth Typhon) are either attraction spells or separation spells. In fact, the donkey shares an extremely similar lascivious reputation with satyrs, rams, and goats (and by extension the Goat of Mendes). Magical stones depicting donkeys were also widely used in medieval India, particularly in Maharashtra, where donkeys were depicted as having sex with women. These stones apparently were used to threaten people or their mothers if they violated the terms of some land grant, but they were also used in apotropaic magic as protection from “the evil eye”.
There is something very important to note about the transformation of Lucius into a donkey in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. This transformation hints at the donkey as a Setian symbol of both lustful and magical curiosity as well as magical transgression, which leads all manner of unfortunate consequences, and which the goddess Isis ultimately directs Lucius away from. This perhaps also conveys the idea that the ascent of humanity (perhaps to “true humanity”) cannot be achieved until you overcome the earthliness of worldly life and its “polluting pleasures”. The implication of this idea is that donkey is a representation of base materiality of worldly life, symbolised by lust. But it’s also more than that. According to a Demotic Egyptian dream interpretation manual dated to 100 CE, dreams in which a woman has sex with a donkey are signs that a woman will be punished for some grave sin or crime. Donkeys were apparently seen as a match for the “excessive carnality” of women (a theme that Heinrich Kramer would repeatedly focus on in his notoriously misogynistic Malleus Maleficarum). A similar association appears in Arabic literature, such as The Perfumed Garden by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi, in which a donkey tells the male reader that if he does not satisfy his wife she will satisfy herself with a donkey. Similar stories are found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Juan Ruiz’s Book of Good Love, and the Talmudic Ketubot. The donkey was sometimes interpreted as a symbol of the “fallen” state of human beings. This idea is reflected in an apocryphal New Testament story of a man who is turned into a mule by a jealous sorceress and is then saved by Mary, who could be understood as the holy opposite of the lustful sorceress or witch. In fact, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum actually incorporated stories about sorceresses or witches turning men into donkeys with their magic as part of its argument about witchcraft. In multiple cultures, the donkey was used to parade a condemned criminal through the streets as a form of punishment for some crimes. The fact that sex with donkeys appears as a symbolic theme in homophobic satires against men who practice passive homosexual sex suggests that the donkey developed into a symbolic link with some notion of sin or abomination. Yet, at the same time as Apuleius’ donkey represented the earthliness and its “pollution” that had to be overcome, Lucius only became a holy man by acquiring the experience of the earthly realm in the form of the donkey, its basest animal symbol. Such is a Neoplatonist message, and perhaps it can be turned into a message of downward ascent.
We must also note the role of the donkey or donkey-headed figure in medieval Arabic and Islamicate magic. The donkey in this context was interpreted as a demonic symbol and also a phallic symbol, which is in many ways the same association it acquired in Western antiquity for both early Christians and pre-Christian polytheists. In the Arabic context, the donkey was frequently associated with Satan or Iblis, often in a comical context. In al-Jahiz’s prose, the donkey is presented as an animal whose stubbornness and gluttony makes it a means of conveyance for the power of Satan/Iblis, and thus the demons and the damned. Islamic law, like Jewish law, considers the donkey to be an “unclean” animal, and so donkey meat is non-halal meat, while some Islamic hadiths argue that the mere presence of a donkey can somehow invalidate an Islamic prayer. Jinns sometimes ride on donkeys or walk on donkey-hooves, just non-Islamic demons such as the Greek empousa or the Solomonic demon Onoskelig. The “king of the jinn” is also a donkey. Jalal al-Din Rumi, the famed Sufi mystic and poet, explicitly associated donkeys with what he called the “beast-like soul” in his Mathnawi. Rumi argued that God gave the fleshly or bestial soul the form of an ass, and regarded the “ass-like body” as something to escape from. A similar opinion can be found within Christianity, particularly via Francis of Assisi, who referred to his body as “Brother Ass” before scourging it, whereas Giordano Bruno interpreted the donkey as an agent of metempsychosis. A polite donkey that refrains from rampant sex is supposed to represent the “reformed” human body. Rumi also interpreted Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad being seated on donkeys as representing the rulership of intellect over the base nature of the ass. There is also a story of a young magician’s sexual encounter with a jinn/demon in the form of a donkeys that is meant as a revelation of his own youthful folly, but also represents an educational encounter with the unknown, possibly leading to a “higher path”. In the Qu’ran, the donkey’s bray is compared to the hateful voice of a loud-mouthed boaster, unloved by God, and for this reason Islamic dream interpretation manuals interpret the voice of the donkey as a sign that you have seen a devil. The bray of a donkey was interpreted as a sign of the arrival of Satan or the demons, in contrast to the crow of a rooster, which was thought to herald the presence of angels. But the donkey’s voice was also believed to convey knowledge of hidden truths despite its apparent ignorance. The donkey perceived hidden things, and so it was a worthy companion despite being the animal symbol of baseness and lust.
The point for Bataille is that figures such as that of the ass-headed god are representations of a particular subversion of the ideal and the religious order of classical antiquity. Gnosticism, for Bataille, represents the introduction of a certain “impure fermentation” into Greco-Roman religion, one that he claims was synthesized from ancient Egyptian tradition, Persian dualism (presumably meaning Zoroastrianism), and Jewish heterodoxy, all elements that Bataille says were least conforming to the intellectual establishment of the era, and added its own dreams and obsessions into that mixture.
The notion of matter as an active principle with its own autonomous existence in the form of demonic darkness and evil as a creative action is something that Bataille interprets as having been completely at odds with the broad trend of Hellenistic philosophy, which he saw as being based on a principally monistic worldview in which matter and evil were merely degradations of superior principles. The idea that the earth, home to all of our human derision and agitation, could have been created by a horrible and perfectly illegitimate principle, was quite simply inconceivable to the Greek philosophers and the Greek intellectual establishment. In their eyes it had to have been just a disgusting and inadmissible pessimism, invalid on both ontological and moral grounds. Plotinus would certainly have agreed with that assessment. I would contradict Bataille on this point in one respect: it was actually barely conceivable for the actually existing Gnostics. Even they sometimes thought that even the world of matter was secretly being guided and animated towards its redemption by God and/or Jesus Christ. The Valentinian Gnostics are a good example, especially in that they believed that the Demiurge actually wasn’t evil and instead just ignorant but nonetheless unwittingly carrying out the mission of Christ and Sophia to redeem matter. So, from a certain point of view, even the Gnostics did not necessarily align with the kind of philosophy that Bataille is talking about. And even the Gnostics, being Christians, had to establish a supreme god of Good, in their case the (“true”) Christian God, as being worthy of the complete confidence of the human soul which might be extricated or redeemed from matter. Bataille such an establishment, in its opposition to an equally evil power, doesn’t matter if the divinity of the evil power cannot be reduced to the divinity of God.
Nonetheless, Bataille argues that the Gnostics manifested above all a sinister love of darkness, a taste for obscene and lawless deities (the archontes), and the head of the solar ass (Seth Typhon).
It is difficult to believe that on the whole Gnosticism does not manifest above all a sinister love of darkness, a monstrous taste for obscene and lawless archontes, for the head of the solar ass (whose comic and desperate braying would be the signal for a shameless revolt against idealism in power). The existence of a sect of licentious Gnostics and of certain sexual rites fulfills this obscure demand for a baseness that would not be reducible, which would be owed the most indecent respect: black magic has continued this tradition to the present day .
Georges Bataille, Base Materialism and Gnosticism
Again, from a historical viewpoint this can be treated as a strange inversion, since the last thing the Gnostics, again being Christians, wanted to do was worship the archons. The braying of the solar ass is interpreted as the signal for a “shameless” revolt against idealism in power. This idea certainly imparts a real satanic significance to the figure of Seth Typhon. Bataille argues that the existence of a sect of licentious Gnostics and certain sexual rites fulfils an obscure demand for a kind of irreducible baseness to which the most indecent respect is owed. Bataille argues that this tradition is continued in “black magic” to the present day, which also means it is relevant to modern Satanism at least in practice. Bataille also argues that the Gnostics and the Manichaeans implicitly abandoned idealism, despite idealism being the precise content of their religious doctrine and the fact that, as Bataille admits, the constant supreme object of these systems was the Good and the Perfect. But if we do abandon idealism, the attitude that attends the belief in the creative action of evil can even appear radically optimistic. If evil does not have to answer before God, it is possible in all freedom to be a plaything of evil, somehow. This seems strange, but, for Bataille, recourse to the archontes means not desiring the submission of things to a greater (ideal) authority. The name archon denotes a reference to worldly powers or authorities, and so the conventional interpretation of Gnosticism is that the archons are an authority that has to be overcome through gnosis, but instead Bataille interprets the archons/archontes as a demonic presence that stuns all notions of ideal authority with their eternally bestial nature. Such is the demonic, and such is the road of a truly Satanic take on Gnosticism.
Bataille treats Gnosticism in terms of psychological process, and, in this respect, he treats it as being not so different from contemporary materialism, but by this Bataille does not mean materialism as in implying an ontology of matter as thing-in-itself. Instead Bataille focuses on a question of not submitting oneself or one’s reason to whatever is elevated, or to whatever can provide a borrowed sense of authority to one’s own being, or to the Reason that supports such a being. For Bataille, that still means submitting yourself to something, but instead submitting entirely to matter, because matter or base matter is that which exists outside of yourself and outside of the idea. Bataille does not accept that one’s reason should become the limit of what he establishes here, because that would mean matter becomes limited by human reason and therefore reason would be established as a superior principle. Base matter is, at least in theory, external and foreign to idealised human aspirations, and denies any reduction to the great ontological machines that these aspirations create. For Bataille, Gnosticism brings to light a process that poses a question of disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before something base, and the recognition of the helplessness of the superior principles before base matter. That juxtaposition is apparently augmented by the fact that the reactions of Gnosticism produced forms that radically contradicted the ancient academic style. These forms are undoubtedly the figures of the archons, or archontes.
For Bataille, the figures of the archontes make it possible to represent base matter, whose incongruity and lack of respect allows the intellect to escape the constraints of idealism. This intransigent materialism is a recourse to everything that compromises the powers that be in terms of forms. From there we can start to patch together the association with Satanism, particularly through Stanislaw Przybyszewski. In his book, The Synagogue of Satan, Przybyszewski establishes a dualistic premise from the outset while also turning dualism on its head. There is Satan, the creator of the world and the lord of matter and all of its pleasures and pains, and then there is God, the opponent of Satan and the ruler of an invisible kingdom of spirit and moral law, but Satan is the god of “evil” who is really “good”, and God is the lord of “good” who is really “evil”. This basic theme is reflected later in Przybyszewski’s attempted historiography of Satanism, particularly while discussing the so-called “Manichaeans”. According to Pryzybyszewski, “Manichaeanism” believed that “Good” and “Evil” were both equally substantial and essential in the universe, that in their mutual opposition they can both be traced back to the source of all existence, and, most importantly, that in this sense “Evil” possesses its own “positive” existence and is not merely the self-incrimination or privation of “Good”. Then Pryzybyszewski establishes a schism between two supposed “Manichaean” sects: those who worshipped the “Light God” on the one hand, and those who worshipped the “Black God” on the other hand. Those who worshipped the “Light God” practiced asceticism, followed a strict moral code, spread their beliefs through zealotry, and believed in saints who had the power to purify a person after their death, while those who worshipped the “Black God” gathered in secret to worship him and celebrate his mysteries in forests, caves, and mountaintops through orgiastic and nocturnal rites. The “Black God” is practically treated as being identical to Satan, and so has to be understood in Pryzybyszewski’s terms as the author of sin and the father of corporeal life, representing the active principle of “Evil”.
Pryzybyszewski’s Satan is the supreme deity of Bataille’s “base matter”, and both Bataille and Pryzybyszewski use a generalised formula of Gnostic/Manichaean dualism as a starting point for establishing the primacy of “Evil” as an active-creative force in the cosmos. What’s more, both Bataille and Pryzybyszewski in their own way position base matter as being more fundamental and more powerful than spirit, and both portray the “superior” principles of light and good as being powerless before base matter, helpless before it, unable to overcome and dominate it. With that having been established, interpreting Bataille’s version of Gnosticism as Satanism, or synthesizing it into a form of Satanism, or simply using it as an interpretation of Satanism, can be quite made a simple matter indeed.
There is another point to be made about the demonic archontes as gods of base matter. If they are the deific representations base matter, which in Bataille’s terms allow base matter to be intelligible to human consciousness, then there also room to connect the archontic cult with another aspect of Pryzybyszewski’s Satanism and, in addition, Jake Stratton Kent’s treatment of goetia, or for that matter early modern Swedish cases of (alleged) devil worship. Jake Stratton Kent argued that, in classical antiquity, goetia was a term for rituals of an earlier cultural phase which focused on the gods of the underworld as opposed to the celestial or Ouranian deities. Kent incorporates aspects of African traditional religions in his idea that God is a remote and unapproachable figure who is unconcerned with the material universe (in this respect there is something in common with deism), whereas the chthonic spirits are approachable enough that magical relationships can be formed with them.
As far as Pryzybyszewski was concerned, one of the reasons to worship or invoke Satan at all is his worldiness, in that, because he is the father of flesh and the material cosmos, humans could turn to Satan to help them satisfy their various desires, not only lust and revenge but also curiosity, greed, even love for another person. By contrast, God, according to Pryzybyszewski, rules a spiritual kingdom almost utterly distant from the human world, God is either unable or unwilling to answer the prayers of humans, and God’s only real interest in the material world is in expanding his spiritual kingdom upon the world by bringing as many souls into the fold as possible, and controlling the world by instilling obedience to God into human beings and eliminating the desires of flesh and the pride of Satan. Swedish devil worshippers had a similar idea. In some accounts, the devil worshipper believed that God could not and would not help them, because he either too far away or too weak to help them, and so they pray to and form pacts with the Devil to help them attain their desires. As one alleged Satanist apparently said, “God isn’t here, best talk to the Devil”.
Funny enough, you can even find a similar idea in Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible. In it, LaVey makes the argument that, if God exists, then the Satanist’s God is simply a powerful force of balance in nature, too powerful and too distant from human beings to care about us or our suffering, misery, or happiness. The point then is that if God exists he is a being so impersonal and fundamentally alienated from the world of human life, or indeed all life, that he cannot do any good for humans. Of course, LaVey de-emphasizes prayer or to worship of Satan, because he prefers to fall back on “positive thinking” as much as ritual psychodrama, but if Satan represents Man’s carnal nature, then Satan would necessarily be the one who is closer to humanity than God, and therefore the one to whom humans can turn to in order to fulfil their desires.
If the archontes are meant to be understood as gods of base matter, it’s possible to apply the same logic to the archontic cult. They are after all already the authors and masters of the material cosmos, so they are right there. If the Gnostics really did invoke these beings, it stands to reason to ask why. Of course, the Peratai for instance did believe that it was necessary to gain knowledge these beings in order to ascend out of the material universe. But there’s a point to be made for how the Christian God in Gnosticism is also radically distant from human beings. He has to be: the act of creation has alienated humanity from the Pleroma, and by extension from God, and so the soul has to achieve gnosis in order to reunite with God. And some human beings might even be completely incapable of doing this, if we go from some sects and their concepts of the hylic vs psychic vs pneumatic. God never fails to be fundamentally alien from human beings. Why else would Christians develop a detestation for the human being and denounce it, scourge it, or practice asceticism to bring themselves closer to God, unless they thought that their souls were impossibly alienated from God by their bodies. But the archontes are not so alien, even though they are “monstrous”, “obscene”, or inhuman deities, and nor, for that matter, is Bataillean base matter.
The whole pantheon of Bataille’s “Gnostic base materialism” being discussed deserves some attention. The solar ass is obviously Seth Typhon. Then there is the Gnostic Iao, then there is Bes, then perhaps there is Abraxas. To this we presumably must add Yaldabaoth/Samael. Several of these can be counted as solar gods. Plutarch interpreted Typhon as a solar deity, representing the solar world, while in the Greek Magical Papyri Seth Typhon can be interpreted either as a solar deity or as having the attributes of solar deities. Jake Stratton Kent certainly argues that Seth Typhon was representative of a larger solar-pantheistic cult. Abraxas/Abrasax was also almost certainly a sun god or solar deity. In the spells dedicated to him, his name is supposed to form the number 365, which represents the complete solar cycle of the year. Iao is probably not a sun god, but the Panmorphic Iao presented by Bataille seems to resemble Helios on his solar chariot. Bes is usually not regarded as a sun god, but there are texts which present Bes as the old/aging sun god who is rejuvenated in the solar child. The Headless One can be interpreted as a solar form of Osiris syncretised with Bes and/or YHWH. Yaldabaoth was depicted in the form of Chnoubis, the lion-headed serpent, who was himself an Egyptian sun god or solar deity, possibly shaped like phallus. There can be no doubt that the gods of the “Gnostic” amulets were typically derived from Egyptian tradition. The fact that we deal with a lot of probably solar deities in this tradition might be used to support Bataille’s theme of the sun as representing what he interprets as the most virulent aspect of materialism. But I think from there it would be easier to extend into Crowleyan solar myth in conjunction with that, perhaps augmented with a deeper aspect of what Bataille takes to be the creative power and principle of “Evil”.
The Sethian myth of Sophia giving birth to Yaldabaoth perhaps presents a clue to this possibility, in that they both distort the order of things into a new shape, first by Sophia trying to imitate God by attempting to reproduce without a male partner, thus giving rise to Yaldabaoth and matter, and then by Yaldbaoth creating the physical universe and ensouling it. These processes have fundamentally disrupted the order of the Pleroma, divided the divine, and produced a reality totally unrecognisable from the original state, which after all was nothing more than the repetitive emanation of God consisting of the ceaseless replication of syzygy (repeated male-female pairings of the Aeons that progressively emanate from God). Even if by accident, Sophia and Yaldabaoth wound up creating a world other than the world of God. That is profoundly relevant to Bataille’s suggestion of evil creation. And for both Satan and Yaldabaoth this always involves death or the introduction of death.
Hopefully I have gone some ways to presenting a kind of Satanic “anti-Gnosticism” with some foundation on ancient pagan polytheism and Bataillean metaphysics, in which the point is to derive jouissance from life in a world animated by an “evil” creative power.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 