Since I began my study of Georges Bataille, and particularly since I began reading Erotism: Death and Sensuality, I knew (or at least suspected) that I would find something about his treatment of eroticism that would connect to BDSM, or at least as I relate to it. As I composed my notes on Georges Bataille’s work and on Erotism in particular I wanted to see how I would end up interpreting it, and I think that some of the notes that I have gathered may have allowed me to sketch out a way of perceiving BDSM in terms of Bataillean eroticism as an erotic ritualism through which a kind of eroto-mystical power may be cultivated by practitioners, in addition to being the source of libidinal pleasure that some of us (myself included) feel. Obviously this is also surely a matter of weaving some part of myself with philosophy, but then again there is equally surely room for grounding interpretative possibilities relevant at least to the particular zeitgeist of the Left Hand Path, which has always favoured eroticism as a path to spiritual attainment.
However, I must admit that I will come at this from a limited perspective. I see myself as a dominant in the BDSM dynamic, and I don’t see myself as being submissive or masochistic. As such, I like to think of myself as quite good at talking about sadism, and quite capable of talking about the dominant side of that spectrum, but very limited in discussing and appreciating masochism, and limited in discussing submission. I say this for the purpose of disclosure, in the hope that I don’t blindside anyone into thinking I represent the totality of the experience of BDSM. I am simply proceeding from that which resonates with and activates me personally, from the standpoint of my own taste as much as my own thought.
With that having been established, I suppose it’s worth saying that much of this is going to come from my own reading of Erotism: Death and Sensuality. As his study of eroticism par excellence, it only makes sense that one could derive kinky insights from that text.
Indeed, it’s possible to derive something relevant to the BDSM dynamic very early on in Erotism, as pertains to the distinction between the active and passive partner, even to the extent that dissolution is the aim for both. Domination, represented in the active partner, and submission, represented in the passive partner, in their own way enact either different processes of dissolution or different pathways to the same form of erotic dissolution. Dissolution can take on multiple meanings. Eroticism always entails the breaking down of certain patterns, for Bataille that is the familiar patterns of civilised society that we script ourselves in, and the rites of domination, submission, bondage, discipline, in their own way still taunt and live outside the norms of society even with the apparent tolerance and understanding of the present, while breaking down the norms of its participants. But in another way, the submissive hopes to be dissolved in the power of the dominant partner, in a way that O in The Story of O compares to being caught and trapped in the hands of God, and the dominant partner also means to dissolve by way of their domination, even if like the alchemist forming the philosopher’s stone.
As a child, O had read a Biblical text in red letters on the white wall of a room in Wales where she had lived for two months, a text such as the Protestants often inscribe in their houses:
IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD
No, O told herself now, that isn’t true. What is fearful is to be cast out at the hands of the living God.
Pauline Réage, The Story of O
Perhaps the alchemist is in fact being changed by the process of the Magnum Opus.
In Erotism, Bataille explicitly links sexual penetration to ritual sacrifice and to the transgression that links them.
The act of violence that deprives the creature of its limited particularity and bestows on it the limitless, infinite nature of sacred things is with its profound logic an intentional one. It is intentional like the act of the man who lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his victim. The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being. With her modesty she loses the firm barrier that once separated her from others and made her inpenetrable. She is brusquely laid open to the violence of the sexual urges set loose in the organs of reproduction; she is laid open to the impersonal violence that overwhelms her from without.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (page 90)
As regards BDSM, let’s provisionally link domination with penetration and submission with the act of being penetrated. It’s not strictly 1:1 like that, in that there are situations where submission can still giving rather than receiving penetration, but in many cases domination involves penetration in the sense of giving rather than receiving and submission involves receiving rather than giving penetration. Anyway, the lover who penetrates strips the other of more than their clothes: they strip them of their barriers, of whatever Bataille thinks is their identity, no less than the priest of a sacrificial ritual takes away the like of the sacrificed person or animal. The lover who is penetrated loses themselves completely in being penetrated, losing the barriers that separated them from everything else, and is laid open to the impersonal “violence” of sexual desire that overwhelms her. Bataille interprets sacrifice, in the “primitive” sense, as a violent means for coming to know (or attempting to know) the secrets of existence through ritual means. In this interpretation, that applies to eroticism, in that eroticism implies the act of penetration as a transformative act involving the discovery of continuity between lovers, one that must be experienced and revealed in a manner not far removed from “violence”.
The sacrificial aspect of sex and eroticism has some worthwhile considerations regarding the appreciation of BDSM, and in this sense the appreciation of BDSM on mystical and vaguely religious terms. Entering into it can mean thinking of a rite where one is the sacrificed, the other is the sacrificer. But sometimes people alternate between sacrificer and sacrificed, thus “switches”. It’s a flawed analogy, really, but not an unworkable one. More important is what that sacrifice means for the sacrificer and the sacrificed. For both it’s a sort of dissolution through which a revelation that transforms both may occur. It can be seen as a kind of mystical sensation that can be intimately linked with certain sexual desires, but also emotional desires. In a word: eroticism. Thus are the rites of domination and submission.
There’s another aspect of the sacrificial throughline that we can see in Bataille’s posthumous Theory of Religion. This throughline comes down to the principle of sacrifice itself.
The sacrificer declares: “Intimately, I belong to the sovereign world of the gods and the myths, to the world of violent and uncalculated generosity, just as my wife belongs to my desires. I withdraw you, victim, from the world in which you were and could only be reduced to the condition of a thing, having a meaning that was foreign to your intimate nature. I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is.”
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (page 44)
The sacrificer identifies themselves with the divine world in the act of sacrifice, which they identify with the act of returning discontinuous being to the continuity of being embodied by the divine world. That divine world is defined by sovereignty, which in this sense might denote lack of purpose beyond itself and its existence beyond appropriation and beyond the possibility of recuperation, though no doubt also implies the power of its own exuberance. There is also a violence to the divine world, no doubt implicitly connected to death, but also here actually denoting the fundamental excess of the continuity of existence. There is, of course, an immanence to this world, in which subject and object are not separate, being is not identified as thing, and everything is fully intimate. Sacrifice destroys the boundaries set by separation and by subordination to work, but it also elevates the sacrificer. The sacrificer takes on divine identity and, for the purpose of ritual, makes themselves sovereign. They are the power that, by destroying, restores or reveals the continuity of the victim, and they, beforehand, ritually wed themselves to the sovereign power that destroys in order to grant second birth to everything, and themselves.
I find it easy to identify this with part of the BDSM dynamic, more particularly the dynamic of domination. In this sense the sadist and the dominant strive to assert if not create the sense of sovereign exuberance. As previously explored in the discussion of sadism relevant to Erotism, the sadist/dominant strives to create their own sovereignty. But in these terms, they bring the submissive to the same realm of sovereignty. The sadist/dominant invokes for themselves the sovereign passion of sadism or domination, which is necessarily akin to sacrifice. In the confines of sexual ritual (and within the boundaries of consent of course), the sadist or dominant represents the power to dissolve the personal discontinuity of the submissive, and ultimately the walls of their own persona. It is a movement of sovereignty that breaks everything down as it creates a kind of power between them. The sadist/dominant is enacting an erotic movement that creates by destroying, and overmastering like the Sun, and in so doing this process works upon the sadist/dominant in their very desire to create sovereignty almost as much as it works upon the submissive who endures the incessant exuberance visited upon them.
But, in sacrifice, the victim has no idea of the dialogue that Bataille has in mind, and neither can they reply to it. Sacrifice essentially turns its back on “real”, perhaps meaning “normal”, relations, otherwise it would deny its own nature. This is because its nature is opposes to the world of things on which “distinct reality” is founded. When an animal, person, or object is destroyed in sacrifice, sacrifice necessarily destroys the objective reality of the victim, and this gives the world of sacrifice the appearance of violent or “puerile” gratuity. That gratuity consists of a beclouding of consciousness, or rather an unconsciousness, because that’s what the return to the intimacy of immanence implies. That unconsciousness even goes so far that killing appears as a way of redressing a wrong done to the animal. The main point for Bataille is that the greatest negation of “the real order” is that most favourable to the appearance of “the mythical order” – in other words, the highest form of negation, in that context, is that which supports the sovereign world of the gods, the world of the divine. For Bataille, sacrifice also resolves the painful antinomy of life and death through reversal. In Bataille’s concept of immanence, death is nothing, but, because death is nothing, beings are not separated from death. In that setting, death has no meaning, because there is no difference between death and life, and there is neither fear of death nor defence against it. Death thus invades without giving rise to any resistance.
Sacrifice in this interpretation is a kind of fundamental transgression, one that nonetheless upholds a sacred world by destroying the “real” or non-sacred world. For “objective” reality, thus, sacrifice is inversion. Kink can also be seen as an inversion of the “normal” relationships that human beings operate in. The sadist/dominant desires such an inversion capable of creating a sovereign world of themselves, and to demonstrate exactly their power to alter the world around them, and to some extent themselves, through the power that generates forth in the experience. In that sense, the inversion follows Geoffrey Gorer’s definition of sadism.
Sadism, as described by its analyst, I would define as the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer. This is a universal instinct and very strong, only following the instinct for self-preservation, and the sex instincts, of which it is a manifestation and which are a manifestation of it. It might also be defined as ‘pleasure in the ego’s modifications of the external world’, but I think the first definition is clearer.
Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of Marquis De Sade (page 156)
It must be understood that Gorer’s defintion of sadism concerns an ambivalent if not amoral pleasure which can be present in an enormous and diverse range of human activities.
It will be seen that this definition is extremely wide and covers; an enormous range of human activity from the creation of works of art to the blowing up of bridges, from making little girls happy by giving them sweets to making them cry by slapping them. It would be incorrect however to say that it covers all human activities for there are two essential clauses: there must be sensible modificaitions of the external world, and they must be the willed production of the agent. That is to say that there can be Sadistic satisfaction in painting a picture, but not in painting a house under another person’s orders and following another person’s taste; there can be Sadistic pleasure in killing a person, but not if that killing is ordered and independent of the killer.
Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of Marquis De Sade (page 156)
Sadism centers around a kind of amoral creativity whose chief concern is the autonomous and willing transformation of the external world. The basic Crowleyan premise of magic that we take for granted is essentially an expression of that creativity, hence the Sadean quality of solar myth. This form of creative will or pleasure cannot be subordinate to the goals of the superego or any kind of order or rationalisation, because then it would not be. At base, it is accountable to no specific purpose, no ideological apparatus, no institutions, or even to any god in particular, and is motivated by nothing other than its own creative will or desire. In Nick Land’s terms it can be thought of as libido, or an impersonal creativity that recurrs constantly, which can therefore be brought to no end that is compatible with authority.
There is the idea that kink is a way of making divine love and power tangible in our world. To a certain extent, I’m inclined to share that idea. Following the understanding of sadism specifically, one can take a certain practice of kink and kinky sex as a way of manifestating a primary process of creativity, to which we are brought into proximity by our activity, by which we break down the ordered world of the “moral ego”. Solar alchemy as a theurgical process by we collapse the boundaries that order the world and the normative personality (between discontinuity and the libido of continuity and divine creativity), which allows us to access to our own transformations proceeding into the production of mystic or erotic sovereignty.
Throughout my study of Erotism I have been very tempted to discuss the humanistic treatment of sadomasochism of sadomascohism by Susan Sontag, who attempted to associate it with fascism. The effort is certainly worthy of ridicule and deserving of excoriation, but in light of Bataille’s discussion of eroticism in association with death, and especially my notes on Sadean sadism, perhaps there is much more depth to add to this excoriation, which thus makes for a deeper indictment of Sontag’s humanistic morality.
In Fascinating Fascism, Sontag attempts to link sadomasochism with fascism on aesthetic grounds. She says that both sadomasochism and fascism are theatre, which is to say an aesthetic spectacle, and the spectacle is both extravagant and forbidden to ordinary people. She also claims that sadomasochism is the furthest reach of sexual experience in that it is when sex is most purely sexual, severed from personhood, relationships, and love, and that this explains the alleged involvement of Nazi symbolism in sadomasochistic eroticism of the time, since she takes it as an aestheticized form of the relation of master and slave. And of course, the fantasy, according to Sontag, is death. There is something clearly ridiculous about that whole prejudice, especially with regards to the implication that there is no love involved – save, perhaps, that sadomasochistic relationships do not follow the given notion of love that Sontag might lean on. But the way Sontag links sadomasochism to death is also something linked to the moral assignment of fascism on the plane of death, as though being the ideology of death, without much mind to the political systems that paved the way for its creation. Fascism is death, but the democracies that created fascism are not, for Sontag surely values democracy too much to make that judgement. Sontag cites Bataille but only to say that the aim of sexual activity is blasphemy, not that Bataille also means that erotic activity means congress with death. That omission is significant, since it means citing Bataille’s philosophy of eroticism while boxing out the centre of Bataille’s concept of eroticism. Or perhaps Sontag dare not say that to place violence at the basis of sexual life is a fascist premise. But then again she might as well have, since her idea is that the fantasy and aesthetic and death is a fascist sexuality, in that it is an impersonal spectacle of violent subjection. This does well only to show Sontag’s own morality, and the limits that it imposes on how we understand eroticism. The death drive must be designated as the purview of fascism in order for liberal or humanistic consciousness to dismiss it, and so, by extension, it can do so for sadomasochism.
The erotic “death” for Bataille is, anyway, somewhat multifaceted in its meaning. Human beings do not typically die as a result of sexual activity, and so death must have some other significance in relation to eroticism, and for Bataille there are multiple meanings to consider. In one sense, continuity does denote and imply death, insofar as discontinuity implies the individual existence of the creature. But insofar as death links continuity to violence, and in this context violence means something that transgresses the boundaries of discontinuous being, which is ultimately the essential point of eroticism. But discontinuity also connects fundamentally to the condition of humanity, and the whole world of world and reason that defines it, while discontinuity connects to the animal world, and the violent sacred world that it represents, which in some ways connects us to what we really are. Something dies, and that death is the discontinuity of human being, but since death is the youth of life, and the erotic “death” we embrace we do so in order to assent to a new life, in the sense that we must “die in order to live”, the death of that discontinuity meant a life unfettered from its limits. In another way, there is a “dying to oneself” that is the source of mystical sovereignty, and sadism presents a movement of development towards that sovereignty. At base, there is the “death” of ordinary life for those who undertake the erotic pathways, and, as such, sadomasochism. That death needs to be boxed out, excluded, and denied in order to preserve the morality of humanity from its doom, and keep the walls of humanity in place. What Sontag presents us with is just an excuse to keep the night outside of our heads.
Carolyn Elliott talks about the night-time world of the unconscious ruling both our dreams and our waking patterns as part of a broader discussion within Existential Kink. Being kinky is all about our own acquaintance with the unconscious energy that seems to actually animate us. That represents part of the immensity of the animal world, the immensity of all of life. The sovereignty of sadism is also a part of that, it is after all a movement of sovereign passions. Actually, there is a sense in which, insofar as the exuberant passions of kink are all sovereign, in the sense of having no use or need apart from itself as Bataille sets out, and in that they cannot be appropriated as such. Yet no wonder Sontag feels the need to refer to a mystery theatre forbidden to ordinary people. It’s not only that ordinary people don’t understand the passions even when they have the passions themselves, it’s that someone actually seeking the depths of sadomasochistic pleasure inevitably set themselves apart from ordinary people, and strive for their own sovereign pleasure and will in exactly the unconscious animal world it connects to.
If BDSM presents us with a ritual environment in which to safely explore the world of our desires and their intercourse between life and death, or pleasure and pain, there is inevitably a connection to ritual, or even festival, at large. There is often a want among humans to explore chaotic forces within a safe enough environment. In Japan, the festivals, or matsuri, were, on the one hand, solemn rites of purification meant to pacify the araburu-no-kami (the “wild” or “rough” aspects of the kami), but on the other hand they were also raucous forms of sacred disinhibition. Authority figures would shed their solemnity, drunk off their asses, and give way to an ecstatic uproar, thereby unleashing a passion that changes the soul from being passive to being wild. In such settings, humans could access the ara-mitama by breaking down the normal social rules. But the more salient point is the kind of communion with the animal world speculated to have been represented at Gobekli Tepe, probably the oldest religious structure in the world. The images of predatory and aggressive animals adorning the Gobekli Tepe complex must have allowed human beings to safely interact with the spirts of these very same animals, and thus bring them into communion with exactly this animal world, and the sacred world they represent. It is possible to interpret rituals such as those practiced by the Berserker or Ulfhednar, or the koryos bands, in a similar light, or for that matter the mysteries of Dionysus. BDSM as an erotic movement is also a ritual movement, whereby those who practice it access not only satisfaction but also a presence analogous to the wild and transgressive sacred. In this sense, the Left Hand Path could not be more appropriate.
We can perhaps also make room for the subject of the left hand path as the “lightning path” in relation to Bataille’s God and BDSM through Carolyn Elliott’s concept of Existential Kink. The demonic offers what God offers, and for Bataille this seems to involve lightning and vertigo, something that jolts people away from all the concerns of the world of work that form the structures of normative consciousness. The Left Hand Path that Elliott explores involves precisely jolting oneself out of that world, and getting in congress with the dark, kinky world of one’s shadows, and in so doing turning the world you find yourself in topsy turvy – inverting it, as such. What is destroy in the “lightning path” is the limited image of what we think we are, and what we think we are capable of.
God-for me–means the lightning flash which exalts the creature above the concern to protect or increase his wealth in the dimension of time. Men of religion will say that I am leaving out the most important thing, that in temptation one of two conflicting forces ought to be loved and the other ought· to be abhorred. That is not so, or at least only superficially. I must stress the following fundamental principle.
In temptation there is only an object of attraction of a sexual nature; the . mystical element which restrains the tempted man has now no “immediate force”; its power derives from the fact that the religious, faithful to his decisions, prefers the safeguard of the equilibrium acquired through the mystical llfe to the delirium into which temptation would have him slide.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (page 236)
I have seen some people refer to the Left Hand Path as the “lightning path”, in the sense of it being the “direct” path to spiritual enlightenment. But as far as I know, it was Tani Jantsang who established (or rather invented) this terminology, by which she equates Vajrayana Buddhism as a whole to the Left Hand Path in the context of Tantric Buddhism. Carolyn Elliott, in her book, Existential Kink also uses the term “lightning path” as a reference to the Left Hand Path, so as to mean a “direct path”, and it sounds a lot like Tani Jantsang’s ideas, but then Elliott doesn’t reference Jantsang anywhere in her book. That’s a little suspicious in hindsight. In any case, in Elliott’s terminology, the “lightning path” to refer to her own concept of Existential Kink, which she identifies with the Left Hand Path within Hindu Tantra, because it is supposed to quickly wake you up to your own sexual unconsciousness and quickly destroy normative self-consciousness, as in quick as lightning. It seems to be in the same way that Bataille’s lightning god shakes someone out of all concern for profit.
In the same page Bataille also seems to present the notion or aspect of the divine that he calls “the demoniac-divine”, or “divine-demoniac”. Why demoniac, as in demonic? This is where the divine is directly accessible on the sexual plane, rather than the ascetic religious plane, because of the progress of temptation. It is this aspect that offers what God offers, only more compellingly, because the Christian would rather die than give into temptation.
The peculiar quality of temptation is that the divine in its mystical form has ceased to be directly accessible and can only be understood intellectually. The divine is at that moment directly accessible on the sexual plane, the demoniac plane, as it were; this demoniac-divine or divine-demoniac offers what God himself, as he is discovered through major mystical experience, offers, and offers it more compellingly since the religious would choose physical death to a lapse into temptation.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (page 236)
But what does God offer? If Bataille is right, God offers a vertigo that leads human beings away from the concerns of their worldly selves. The lightning flash exalts humans above their concern for profit, and above the world of work. In that understanding the demoniac-divine offers exactly this, and it does through temptation. Involvement with the demonic in this sense elevates humans above the world they live in. As this is connected to the sexual plane, it is tantamount to saying that eroticism does exactly this, and thus eroticism is linked to the demonic, representing a demonic aspect of the divine.
Even the negative motion of Sadean sovereignty forms the motion of a kind of carnal alchemy, which for BDSM would concern the transformation of everyone involved, not only the submissive party but also the dominant party: the dominant, one way or the other, slowly works to perfect the lead of their own soul into the gold of sovereignty. This is a path in which one passes through Bataille’s underworld, through the beast, and through heroic insensibility, to become gold – black, ruinous, joyous, and exuberant gold. Perhaps this is also a gold that conducts the power to transform the objective world, or perhaps it is that very power. And of course, if we are talking about sovereignty, we are in a sense also talking about divine identification, aren’t we? And in a very heroic sense, perhaps befitting ancient and ecstatic mysteries.
The mystical sovereignty of eroticism has nothing to do with what the “real” sovereignty of political authority. Such “sovereignty” for Bataille, is not what it claims to be, because it is concerned with practical political power, and that concern has a habit of rendering historical sovereignty more flexible that it may appear. By contrast, Bataille says that real sovereignty is never anything more than the effort to free human existence from the bonds of necessity, which the historical sovereigns did achieve to some extent with the help of their faithful subjects. I might hazard the suggestion that, for the master, or one aspiring to be one, that might be enough. It is already difficult for humans to break free from that necessity. But one who is free from necessity (in Bataille’s terms) is perhaps also one who cannot be subordinated. In practice, it is more like the dominant and the submissive parties supports the growth of each other’s sovereignty exactly through the ritualistic eroticism we participate in.
I could go into the presentation of Sadean sovereignty by Bataille and Blanchot, but as I wrote this I found it difficult to weave the full extent of that discussion into the scope of this article. So instead I will leave links to my previous discussions of that sovereignty, and then skip straight to the subject of love.
On the one hand the love of the sexual partner (a variant of marriage as inserted into the order of active society and often coinciding with it) changes sexuality into tenderness; tenderness attenuates the violence of nocturnal pleasures, and sadistic actions are here more common than might be supposed; it is possible for tenderness to take on a balanced form. On the other hand the fundamental violence that makes us lose control always tends to disturb a relationship of tenderness-to make us find in that relationship that death is near, and death is the symbol of all sensuality, even that modified by tenderness. Here is the violence of lovemaking without which sexual love could not have lent its vocabulary as it has done to describe the ecstasies of the mystics.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (pages 242-243)
Even love itself in all its delirium has a certain sadistic aspect. Love is linked to the sovereignty of passion, and the mingling of that sovereign passion with the purchase of ironmongery is ridiculous in Bataille’s eyes. The implication is that sovereignty, here, connects to passion, in the sense of passion that is not recuperated by the working consciousness of the everyday world, and that is exactly the passion that the Sadean sovereign is concerned with. There is thus, in this sense, a link between sadistic pleasure, the sovereignty that sadism moves to create, and the death drive implied by eroticism – which, in the end, is simply the drive of life not to preserve itself but to grow into its ultimate stage in its exuberance, and then gain knowledge of its own immensity. Sadism is as much tied to the erotic death drive as masochism is, but then how should it not be, since it is an erotic tendency? The love of a sexual partner turns sexuality into tenderness. Tenderness in turn accentuates the violence of nocturnal pleasures, and thus sadistic actions are more common than they are often thought to be.
So, having gone through about as much as I can of the extent of my notes on Bataille that even slightly relate to any kind of discussion of kink, what can we say from here. How I summarise what I have thus far presented? I suppose it’s fitting enough to return to theme of kink as making divine love and power tangible. There’s always something ritualistic about kinky sex, or at least I seem to have the sense of it. In fact, the inner ritualism of kink is so strong that the religious itself seems to cross seamlessly into kink, to the point that there is actually such a thing as religious roleplay. In religious roleplay you can not only take on the role of a nun, priest, angel, or demon, but even gods and goddesses themselves, and you can even enact virulent blasphemies as erotic rites. Could there be any more vivid an illustration of erotic theurgy? Could there be any more blatant a demonstration of the ritual aspect of BDSM?
When Bataille discusses sacrifice, he is discussing it as the production of the sacred. The sacred in this sense is the appearance of continuity, and also, in a certain sense, sovereignty. That which is sovereign is that which answers to nothing, that which operates, that whose appearance transgresses the order of the world of work, and that whose manifestation may constitute the assertion of freedom. From that perspective at least, the ritual of BDSM can be seen as a libidinal manifestation of what Bataille took to be the production of the sacred. That one can roleplay as gods and goddesses in the world of kink would really seem to be the apogee of the erotic manifestation of the sovereignty that Bataille associates so clearly with the sacred. The libidinal play of kink transforms us as we partake of it. We make a whole play of libidinal creativity tangible to us, and the play we engage with allows us to cultivate a power that seems inaccessible to us in the everyday world of work, norms, and repression. With sadism in particular it’s as if we’re destroying that world in order to assert the eroto-mystical sovereignty that we are capable of. But the important thing is that we really are talking ritual, with rules of engagement conducive to a safe environment basically founded on consent, essential to its very fulfillment. It’s in this environment exactly that we produce the sovereignty that we desire.
Like I said before, this is still a somewhat limited discussion, because I can barely speak of masochism, mostly because I can barely speak of surrender. And yet, Bataille has something to say about surrender as well, in that he interprets even surrender in a way that implies an assertion of freedom, at least in the sense that, in Inner Experience for instance, surrender takes a meaning completely different from the commonly accepted one: something closer to “denuement”, as in the total discarding of means and therefore necessity (which is meant to be understood as a kind of loss). Nick Land went even further with Bataille’s interpretation of surrender: he actually interprets it as an aggressive abandonment of the self and duty, in contrast to docility before the law.
Docility in respect of the law is quite different from a surrender, in exactly the way that moralists are different from mystics. Surrender is a deeper evil than any possible action. The very principle of action is an acceptance of justice and responsibility, and any act is – as such – an amelioration of crime, expressing defiance within the syntax of redemption. In stark comparison with action, surrender gnaws away the conditions for salvation. Giving itself up to a wave of erasure, the agent dies into the cosmic reservoir of crime. Beyond the (agentic) pact with Satan lies an irreparable dissolution into forces of darkness, apart from which there is no ecstasy. Surrender is not a submission to an alien agency (devotion to God), but a surrender of agency in general, it is not any kind of consigning of oneself over to another (return to the father) , but utter abandonment of self; a dereliction of duty which aggresses against one’s birth.
Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (page 73)
There is a certain futility to the way Land links surrender with evil, especially the framing of evil as basically non-agentic, but the point for him is that even surrender constitutes aggression against the regime of law. I suspect that from that perspective it is possible to elaborate a specific form of jouissance and even sovereignty from masochism. But, I find it best to let someone masochistic and submissive run away with that and take over from that discussion, or at least read Revolutionary Demonology for its masochism, and let them cultivate their own insights through their own nature. Like I say, I’m not one for surrender.
Some of my previous discussions of Sadean eroto-mystical sovereignty:
Probably the most prominent symbol associated with the philosophy and mysticism of Georges Bataille is the image of the Acephalic Man, or rather the headless figure that appears on the cover of the first issue of Bataille’s Acephale journal, and also in illustrations throughout all volumes of Acephale. Designed by Andre Masson in 1936, it is a rather delightfully esoteric image that suitably conveys Bataille’s particular brand of Nietzschean anti-fascism, with its Dionysian subversion of the image of human reason in the form of the Vitruvian Man without a head. However, what motivates this article is a question that I’ve seen from Pagans and occultniks who appreciate Bataille’s writings: does Bataille’s Acephalic Man have anything to do with the Headless One invoked in the Greek Magical Papyri? My aim here is to try and answer that question.
But, before we proceed, let’s briefly describe the Headless One that we’re talking about. The Headless One (a.k.a. the Headless God, or the Headless Demon, or Akephalos) is an enigmatic deity, daimon, or demonic figure (depending on who you ask, at least) who occasionally appears in multiple spells, most notably the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist in His Letter (PGM V. 96-172). The Stele of Jeu in particular is perhaps most remembered for having been popularised by Aleister Crowley, who adapted the original spell into what he called the Ritual to the Bornless One. The Headless God seems to be very obscure by ancient standards, though according to Hans Dieter Betz he seems to have originated in ancient Egypt and was later popularly invoked in Hellenistic Egypt. Scholars aren’t entirely sure about the Headless One’s identity, thoug Betz suggests that he could have been identified with the god Osiris. But, we’ll get into the Headless One’s identity in due course.
With that established, let’s focus on what the Acephalic Man that appears on the cover of Acephale meant for Georges Bataille. And, in this respect, there is nowhere better to turn to than The Sacred Conspiracy (or, The Sacred Conjuration), which was written in 1936 as the first article for the first volume of Acephale.
What’s important to note about this particular text, and what I admire most about it, is that it is nothing less than a bold declaration of war. It could be seen as an essay concerned with political agitation, but in this regard it takes said agitation as strict necessity, of the same type as eating and producing, which are necessary and yet still nothing. In many ways, The Sacred Conspiracy might in fact be seen as an anti-political vision: “If nothing can be found beyond political activity, human avidity will meet nothing but a void”. In other words, if life consists of nothing other than political activity, in the sense of the necessary business of politics, then there is not only nothing in life but also no interest in life in itself, and there is nothing to life. Spare a thought for the bleak life of democracy. But Acephale is also “ferociously religious”, and insofar as your existence is a condemnation of everything that is today, an inner exigency demands equal imperiousness, because Acephale is starting a war: a war against the “civilised” world and its light.
In this respect, the headlessness of Bataille’s Acephalic Man signifies, first of all, the yearning to break free from the necessity of the civilised world and the magic circle of appropriation (what Claudio Kulesko calls the Image of the World) that supports it. Human life is fatigued and exhausted from its own conceit as the head of or reason for the universe. Humanity has taken up the mantle of cosmic reason and Logos for itself, and as a result human beings have accepted servitude, under the belief in its necessity. This existence becomes empty over time. Without it, the universe is free, and when the universe is free it is in play. This idea can be seen as a reflection of the Nietzschean cosmos, through the conception of the universe as a child in play. The universe was free when it just gave rise to cataclysms, trees, and birds: in other words, all the spontaneous life forms, powers, and flows that comprise much of what we call nature. That freedom was lost when the Earth gave birth to human beings, who demanded the establishment of necessity as a law above the universe. But human beings are still free to reject or rebuff that necessity, to set aside the idea that Man or God keeps life and the universe from collapsing into absurdity, and therefore renounce the whole mantle of cosmic Logos that we created and took for ourselves. Man is also free to resemble everything in the universe that is not Man. The headlessness of the Acephalic Man is that freedom: “Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison”.
Man finds beyond himself something that is not God, “the prohibition against crime”, but instead a being who is unaware of prohibition. The Acephalic Man is both beyond and unaware of prohibition. God, in this parlance, seems to simply denote the concept of prohibition, possibly also necessarily being an ontological embodiment of law and authority in itself. The Acephalic Man, by contrast, is made of innocence and crime. He holds a knife made of steel in his left hand, and flames like the sacred heart in his right hand. To the untrained observer of the occult this would almost recall the left side of the Tree of Life being Binah, severity, and the right side being Chokmah, mercy. The Acephalic Man reunites Life and Death in the same eruption. This is to say the Acephalic Man represents the real spontaneous unity or intimacy of life and death. The Headless One is not a man, and nor is he a god. The Acephalic Man is “me”, but more than “me”. It is as if the Acephalic Man represents something that one can become, by casting off the self-imposed responsibilities of Logos and Godhead, and the necessity around it. His stomach is the labyrinth in which he loses himself and the person along with him, and in which “I discover myself” as him: “in other words, a monster”. So the Acephalic Man is a monster, and the labyrinth, perhaps, is the path in which we become more than we are, more than human, and become “monsters”, thus achieving our own liberation from the civilised world and its light.
It is very easy to make the connection from this theme of monstrosity to Eugene Thacker’s idea of the monster as representing “unlawful life”, that life which cannot be controlled, and from there through Alejandro de Acosta’s envisioning of anarchy as the art of becoming monstrous and intangibly weird in Green Nihilism or Cosmic Pessimism. There is a certain axiom, “I may be a monster but I am free”, that I would like to explore further, especially in relation to Shin Megami Tensei and other media, in the future. But in this sense, it seems that Bataille’s Acephalic Man as a monster presents a glimpse of the kind of throughline relevant to that inquiry of anarchy.
The Acephalic Man in The Sacred Conspiracy can be seen as representing a universe unmanned and the human being equally unmanned. It is the apotheosis of a universe without reason and without law, of the entirely free universe of incomprehensible spontaneous forces. Ecstasy, or the ecstatic vision of life, is central to this in that it is that very process of unmanning, in that “to go outside oneself” really means to go outside the human and its authority, and beyond that of this world: in other words, to step outside “the head”. “Man” steps beyond God, and “the head”, and sees something more than “Man”. I choose to see the “monster” as what “Man” could be, or realise itself to be, once it has cut itself free from “the head”, as in the Godhead or the OGU (the One God Universe; thus the monotheistically ordered homogeneity of everything).
Bataille also elaborates on the meaning of his Acephalic Man in Propositions, an essay that was written for the second volume of Acephale. Here, Bataille spells out that the Acephalic Man is a representation of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, which is in itself identical to the Death of God.
The acephalic man mythologically expresses sovereignty committed to destruction and the death of God, and in this the identification with the headless man merges and melds with the identification with the superhuman, which IS entirely “the death of God.”
For Bataille, the Nietzschean Ubermensch and the Acephalic Man are bound together by a shared significance: time as the imperative object and explosive liberty of life. In this setting, time appears as the object of ecstasy and a symbolic representation of the Nietzschean concept of eternal return, but also as catastrophe or time-explosion. This ecstatic notion of time is represented by things of “puerile chance”: cadavers (and hence death), nudity, explosions, spilled blood (thus bloodshed), abysses, sunbursts, and thunder. It is very fitting that the Acephalic Man is represented as a monster, because the emergence of the monster is a lot like catastrophe. Catastrophe is also important as the “brute appearance” of revolution, and the only “real” imposing authority. Thus the Acephalic Man seems linked to the intimacy of violence and politics, which in turn is an emanation of the intimacy of life and death. God and the tranquility he offers to humans is a barrier between the human species and the universal community of the infinite and of a universal existence that is uneasy, unfinished, and headless. The Death of God is thus, for Bataille, the true universality of life, and the Acephalic Man symbolically represents that.
Having established this about the Bataillean Acephalic Man, we should now start exploring the Akephalos as it appears in antiquity, and in this regard, I think we should immediately turn our focus to the Greek Magical Papyri.
The Greek Magical Papyri contains multiple spells that involve the invocation of a Headless God, whose identity is somewhat mysterious but at the same most likely connected to Osiris, the Egyptian lord of the underworld. The most famous myth about Osiris is that he was killed and dismembered by his brother, the god Set. Most spells featuring the Headless One feature a direct link to Osiris, though they also explicitly identify this god as Besas (Bes). In the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist in His Letter (PGM V. 96-172), the Headless One is referred to by name as Osoronnophris, a form of Osiris, but is also referred to as Iabas and Iapos and identified with YHWH as the god who transmitted the mysteries celebrated in Israel. In PGM VII. 222-49, the Headless One goes by the name Besas, but is also conjured by the name Anouth, apparently another name for Osiris.
Jake Stratton Kent considers the Headless God to be representative of a solar-pantheistic cult that he sees as being referenced in multiple PGM spells – particularly in the spells centering on the gods Helios, Abrasax, and Typhon-Seth. In his study of the Ritual to the Bornless One, which originated as the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist in his Letter, he notes that there has been a fashion in modern occultism, starting with either Mathers or Crowley, to interpret the word “headless” as meaning “without beginning”, thus was derived the name “Bornless One”. This was based on an assumption that, since the Hebrew word “Resh” means “head” or “beginning”, “headless” must mean “thou who are without beginning – unborn and undying”. Kent notes, however, that this interpretation cannot be sustained by the knowledge derived from contemporary study of the Papyri, and it is already evident that this interpretation derives strictly from a Hebrew etymology with no evident connection to the Greco-Egyptian ritual. Kent also says in the appendix of his study, while citing Karl Preisendanz, that the Egyptian god Set (Seth) was identified with a headless demon whose eyes were placed on his shoulders. Kent also suggests that the name given to the Headless One, Osoronophris, which is the name of a form or epithet of Osiris, identified Osiris with Set, his arch enemy, while at the same time asserting that Osiris and Set were both identified with a larger solar-pantheistic god and thus unified. Such a proposition is obviously fascinating, but I am unable to find any evidence to support this unity being associated with Osoronophris.
I am ultimately not inclined to agree that the Akephalos depicted in the Greek Magical Papyri is supposed to be Set, because the evidence for such a connection, as far as I can see, seems to be weak or lacking. In fact, it seems to me that the Akephalos has a stronger connection to Osiris than to his murderer. In fact, the Akephalos has been suggested by Ronaldo G. Gurgel Pereira to be a solar form of Osiris. In the Egyptian Book of Caverns, the dismembered Osiris’ missing head is the sun, and the other parts of his body are knitted into various parts of the underworld, or the head had a desire to be knitted onto the body in the underworld. In the same text, the solar scarab Khepri, as the regenerating or reborn sun, is called “attached of head”, implying the regeneration and reassembly of the body of Osiris. There is also an amuletic text from the time of the 25th Dynasty which describes Osiris as a “headless body”, “the mummy without a face”. The image of headlessness was apparently interpreted as a representation of formlessness, possibly connected to solar rebirth. That being said, I won’t dismiss the idea that Set was also represented as a headless god. More important, in any case, is the connotation of headlessness. According to J. C. Darnell, in The Engimatic Netherworld Texts of Solar-Osirian Unity, the headlessness of Osiris as Akephalos is not simply a result of Osiris being dismembered by Set, but instead represented the magical power of a solar god. In fact, the Akephalos represents a profound exception to the traditionally negative significance of headlessness in Egyptian symbolism. In this setting, it wasn’t simply the headlessness of the Akephalos that denoted his power, but rather the implication that his missing head was actually an invisible sun. The very headlessness of the Headless God simply heightened the presence of an unseen sun, and in this sense it may function as a kind of apophatic symbolism. There is also a papyrus from Deir el-Medina in which Akephalos or Osiris is alluded to as “the flaming one, the mummy without a face”. Osiris Akephalos is thus understood as the mummiform portion of the unified Ra-Osiris, the underworld form of the sun or Ra – in a sense, perhaps, the fiery (“flaming”) ruler of the underworld. Certainly a solar god in any case, a point not irrelevant to the solar discourse of Bataille’s mystical philosophy.
In fact, Bataille already associated headlessness with the sun by interpreting the headless deity as a solar image in his essay Rotten Sun (1930). There, Bataille argued that the sun has been mythologically represented as a man slashing his own throat, and/or an anthropomorphic being that has been deprived of its head. A similar association is also found in Base Materialism and Gnosticism (1930). In that essay, Bataille refers to the severed ass’ head as an acephalic personification of the sun, and thus one of the most virulent representations of base materialism (or what Nick Land used to call “libidinal materialism”). The head of an ass was, in ancient antiquity, interpreted as the head of the god Seth Typhon, who was sometimes associated with the sun, at least according to Plutarch. But, in this sense, the only thing that the Headless God definitely has in common with the Acephalic Man is the sun. The acephalic quality for Bataille takes on a much larger theme represented by the ecstatic creative-destructive solar flow that pervades the whole of Bataille’s writing, and is clearly evident in his presentation of both the Acephalic Man and the Ubermensch.
S. C. Hickman makes an important observation about the Akephalos in his article “Georges Bataille: The Excremental Vision as Solar Ecstasy“. In it, he notes that in Rodolphe Gasche’s book, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmology, there is a discussion of Friedrich Schelling’s research on the Sabians, whose religion he says involved a blind, acephalous god. The suprahistorical principle of this Sabianism is, according to Gasche and Schelling, an unmythological and unhistorical time. It is also said to consist of the fragmentation and tearing apart of the “real” principle, a principle of fear, represented in half-human and half-animal forms, through the violent unmanning of things by the self-asserting spiritual principle. The god of the spiritual principle cannot emerge without the death of the “real” god in violent struggle. This unmanning, for Gasche and Schelling, corresponds to the unmanning and downfall of the ruling, upright-standing gods. It is difficult, however, to find much of what Gasche is talking about. That said, there is a Tantric Hindu myth, which David Lorenzen recounts in his book The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects, that may present a narrative where the decapitation of the upright-standing gods is connected to a premise of salvific or liberatory detachment and to the antinomian rejection of traditional morality and dominant religious narratives.
In a text called the Goraksa-siddhanta-samgraha, whose authorship is attributed to the Kāpālika sect, the god Shiva appears as Ugra-Bhairava, a wrathful form of Shiva Bhairava who wears the garb of a Kāpālika and challenges the doctrine of the Advaita Vedanta school as propounded by Adi Shankara. Meanwhile, in the Kāpālika origin myth, the twenty-four avatars of the god Vishnu became arrogant and hubristic, and commit many outrages and crimes while wreaking havoc and suffering upon the earth. This angers the god Natha (Shiva), who incarnates as twenty-four Kāpālikas (skull-bearers) to fight the avatars of Vishnu, cut their heads off, and carry their skulls in their hands. After this, the avatars of Vishnu lose their hubris, and thus Natha (Shiva) replaces their heads and restores their life. Thus, the avatars of Vishnu are unmanned from the illusions that cause them to oppress the world, their authority is violently destroyed, and this violent detachment ultimately leads them to enlightenment and to their rebirth.
It remains very difficult to find other deities who are actually supposed to be headless. The one that springs to my mind immediately is Chinnamasta, the self-decapitating Tantric Hindu goddess. In Tibet, this goddess is called Chinnamunda, a self-decapitating form of the Vajrayana Buddhist deity Vajrayogini. Another curious headless god is the Chinese deity Xingtian, who fought against Huang Di for supremacy and lost his head but still continues to fight despite being decapitated. But let’s stick to Chinnamasta, because her cult is loaded with significance with respect to Bataillean headlessness.
For one thing, the cult of Chinnamasta is loaded with sexual charge, with Chinnamasta herself being depicted nude, standing or seated atop a divine couple of love deities – Kama and his wife Rati – joined in sexual intercourse. This, of course, is often said to signify sexual dominance and control over sexual desires, but Chinnamasta herself just as well could be said to signify raw sexual power, and the involvement of sexuality and sexual intercourse in the greater mystery represented by Chinnamasta. That said, some Tantric texts suggest that worshipping Chinnamasta involves having sex with a woman who is not your wife. For another thing, Chinnamasta is frequently depicting standing or seated in the centre of the disk of the sun. This may reflect a solar nature, also suggested to be connected to her (sometimes) red skin or complexion and association with the navel. Still another thing is her dark and fierce nature: her various names point her being served by ghosts and drinking human blood, she is pleased by flesh, blood, and meat, and worshipped by body, hair, and fearsome mantras, and she enjoys more than anything the dissolution of the world. Her proposed lineage is also fascinating.
According to David Kinsley in his book Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahāvidyās, there are several examples of nude Indian goddesses that are depicted with prominently displayed genitalia and as being either headless or simply faceless. This headlessness may not share the force or significance of Chinnamasta’s self-decapitation, but it may still signify self-destruction mixed with sexuality. Another suggestion is that Chinnamasta’s cult was influenced by that of Kotavi, a fierce and wild goddess of war who was also counted as one of the Asuras or one of the Matrika (Mothers). Or there is Korravi, a fearsome hunting goddess who received blood sacrifices and was believed to grant victory in the battlefield. Most importantly, Kinsley notes, Chinnamasta represents the inextricable reality that all life feeds on other life, and thus that life feeds on death, in order to be sustained or come into existence, and thus life necessitates death. Sex is a part of this in that sex ultimately produces more life, which then decays and dies to feed more life. The blood flowing from her severed head conveys the loss of the life force, which then nourishes her devotees, and presumably also herself since she drinks her own blood. Her sexuality and her love of dissolution are linked together in a way that connects ultimately to the death drive, which in this meaning really signifies the self-perpetuation of life or the continuity of existence.
In a sense, Chinnamasta represents, in her own, unmanning. The act of severing her own head signifies not only the violent nourishing and replenishing of life, but also, traditionally, the overcoming of sexual desire through the practice of yoga, and the sacrifice or surrender of the self for the benefit of others. Awfully altruistic, though certainly profound. On the other hand, some images of Chinnamasta, in which she stands upon Shiva, she is not suppressing or overcoming Shiva, and perhaps not suppressing or overcoming sexual desire. Instead, she energizes Shiva and sexual desire. Still, the self-decapitation also had a more symbolic and philosophical significance: the head represents what Bataille understands as our immediate sense of discontinuous identity, and thus, in Hindu terms, our attachment to ignorance and illusion, so to remove the head represents the removal of illusion from one’s consciousness. I find the idea that it communicates a kind of self-perpetuating death drive to be more profound than the military ethos of self-sacrifice traditionally attributed to her, and in a way it really illustrates the coincidence between life, sex, and death.
There is something wonderfully Bataillean and Sadean about Chinnamasta’s whole symbolism. The sexual vitality of Chinnamasta is explicitly connected to her destructive nature, in the sense that this destruction is what forms the core of life. That Kinsley says her image jolts the viewer into the truth of the coincidence and interdependence of sex, death, and life almost seems to suggest a truth that blinds people with its violent sight, like the sun. Chinnamasta in this sense speaks somewhat like De Sade’s libertines do, in that they justify their actions by positing a law or system of nature in which destruction plays a central role: destruction is a part of nature, just as much as creation is, and not only that destruction is actually necessary to allow Nature to create and rearrange matter, and so virtue and vice are equally part of nature. The human body may become a swarm of centipedes after it dies and it makes no difference to nature. And in her paradoxical nature, everything violent and mortifying about Chinnamasta supports life, peace, and renewal, basically everything we consider to be good. Through it all. Chinnamasta embodies a kind of unmanning that brings human consciousness away from its own illusions about the world and itself, and towards a truth that liberates it, or at least violently releases it from its sleep. The unmanning of the self, the escape of “Man” from his “head”.
In the final analysis, I would say that it is only the solar image of headlessness that connects Bataille’s Acephalic Man with the Headless God. And yet, there is not such a gulf between the significances of these two figures. The Death of God is after all a source of life, much like the headlessness of Osiris is the presence of the sun. It is perhaps worth noting finally that the Headless God/Daimon in the Greek Magical Papyri could be seen as a theurgical object, in the sense that the original rite might have been performed to the effect that it culminated in the magician identifying with and “becoming” the headless divinity that they sought to invoke. Might one be able to speak of theurgical transformation into the sun? And thus every man and woman is a star by being a sun.
I am also thinking about the solar in esoteric and mystical terms lately, even in winter or early spring the sun itself reminds me of it to some extent, and lately, after reading Don Webb’s Seven Faces of Darkness, I am reminded of an aspect of solar myth that links up to both ancient Egyptian ram symbolism and modern satanic symbolism (concerning the goat) that also obviously resonates with me: the element of lust.
At some point in Seven Faces of Darkness, Webb talks about a spell from the Greek Magical Papyri labelled PGM IV. 3255-74, which seems to be an erotic spell. The spell invokes the god Seth-Typhon by various magical names and epithets, the magician draws the ass-formed figure of Seth-Typhon, which is smeared with the “blood of Typhon” and that of a pig as well as onion juice, and underneath the ass-formed figure the magician writes: “Give her the heaving of the sea, total wakefulness of Mendes, and give her the punishments”. This all refers to a state of erotic unrest that the spell intends to incite in a person, to the point of being unable to sleep until the time of consummation. When the spell refers to “total wakefulness of Mendes”, it seems to reference the deity B3-nb-Dd.t, the Ram Lord of Djedet. This deity is perhaps better known as Banebdjedet, the ram-headed or ram-formed god who worshipped at Mendes (Djedet), often represented as the Ba of the god Osiris. Hans Dieter Betz identifies him as a ram incarnation of Prẽ, or rather Phre, which could mean the sun god Ra or just the sun itself, and says that this incarnation was identified with the gods Pan and Priapus. With that in mind, Webb is not necessarily incorrect to refer to it as a goat personifying lust, but that idea probably links more particularly to how certain Greek authors interpreted the cult of Banebdjedet.
The figure of Baphomet is also frequently called the Goat of Mendes. That name is known to us from Eliphas Levi, who identified Baphomet as the Goat of Mendes. The significance Levi imparted to this figure is strange and perhaps contradictory, and, although the figure of Baphomet is frequently connected within modern culture to Satanism, for Levi it was far more complicated in that Baphomet was arguably “satanic” and also arguably not, although ultimately Levi regarded Baphomet as a symbol of initiation rather than an entity as such. That said, in chapter 15 of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Levi discusses the Devil card and refers to the Devil by many names including Ahriman, Typhon, Python, “the old serpent of the Hebrews”, the Croquemitaine, “the great beast of the Middle Ages”, and Baphomet. In this context, Levi describes Baphomet as the “obscene deity of Mendes”. In the same text, though, later in the same chapter, Levi also adds that, in the context of his ancient Alexandrian tradition of esotericism, Baphomet is not a representaion of the Devil but rather a representation of the god Pan, or rather a pantheistic deity that he thought was venerated by theurgists and philosophers both ancient and modern alike. In The Book of Splendours, Levi argues that the “monstrosity of the idol” as means by which the knowledge of Baphomet protests against idolatry. Since the “monstrosity” is clearly meant to be understood as the goat-headed figure otherwise associated with Satan, Levi can be understood both in opposition to whatsoever he frames as satanic and as using what he interprets as “satanic” imagery to communicate Christian opposition to idol worship. That the goat’s head and goat god were on their own meant to be understood as “satanic” images was made clear by Levi in his commentary on the inverted pentagram. Again in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, specifically chapter 5, he refers to the Goat of Mendes, or Satan as the “goat of the Sabbath” (another term he used to describe Baphomet), as the goat depicted by the inverted pentagram, which is the sign of “infernal evocations”. Elsewhere, while accusing Eugene Vintras of being a Satanist, he refers to the same symbol as the “sign of antagonism and blind fatality”, execrated by “superior” initiates, and the goat depicted within as the “goat of lewdness assaulting heaven with its horns”.
The name Goat of Mendes, and the reference to an “obscene deity of Mendes” is very likely derived from ancient Greek accounts of a “goat”, or rather more accurately a ram, who was worshipped at Mendes. Herodotus, an author who we should really shouldn’t take as gospel, wrote in his Histories about the worship of a he-goat at Mendes. According to Herodotus, the people of Mendes considered all goats to be sacred, especially he-goats, and especially one he-goat in particular. Herodotus seems to identify both this goat and the whole city of Mendes with the Greek god Pan, whose body has the hind-legs of a goat, and whose image, he says, was in Mendes a man with both the head and hind-legs of a goat, for reasons that Herodotus refuses to discuss. Herodotus even presents a story where the sacred he-goat of Mendes had sex with a woman in front of an audience of people at Mendes. The Greek geographer Strabo also said that the god Pan is worshipped as a he-goat or alongside a he-goat in Mendes, while the poet Pindar also talked about he-goats having intercourse with women at Mendes. It’s from Diodorus that we get the comparison to Priapus, the god of the phallus, who he grouped with a multitude of Pans and satyrs. Plutarch also refers to a “goat at Mendes” in De Iside et Osiride, where he presents this goat of Mendes as an animal aspect of Osiris.
The Goat of Mendes that all of these Greek authors were talking about was of course actually a Ram of Mendes, none other than the Egyptian god Banebdjedet, who they usually identified with Pan. The name “Goat of Mendes” was probably a mistranslation by Greek authors who encounterned the name Banebdjedet, whose name means “Ram Lord of Djedet”, or more accurately “Ba of the Lord of Djedet”. There are, however, certain elements of truth to the Greek accounts. Banebdjedet may not have ever been a goat god, nor were there any goat gods in ancient Egypt, but there were mummified goats dedicated to the deity, though many mummies dedicated to Banebdjedet were still sheep. A sacred ram might have been kept at Mendes, and there is a cemetery in the modern city of Tell el-Ruba where sacred rams were buried. Two whole necropoleis built for rams have been found in the site of Mendes. The priesthood of Mendes may have selected one ram in particular to represent the earthly manifesation of the god, based on the colour of its fur (they specifically selected “pure” white rams), though it perhaps stands to reason that these rams likely never “mounted” anyone. There may have been some basis to the association of the Ram of Mendes with earthly sexual activity, in that at least to some people rams themselves were “crass” manifestations of wordly sexual desire, or at least male sexual desire in particular. If that is so, then this is likely to be derived from the fact rams were symbolically associated with virility. Perhaps this is part of how the Greeks associated the Ram of Mendes with Pan or Priapus. But the Ram of Mendes was also believed to have the power to communicate divine oracles, and thus was also a centre of theological speculation.
It is the solar aspect of Banebdjedet, and Egyptian ram symbolism, that is important to focus on. At Mendes, the god Banebdjedet was considered the Ba (external manifestation) of the god Osiris, but also the Ba of the sun god Ra. Osiris was thought to be rejuvenated in the form of a ram, and Ra was thought to unite with Osiris as the “soul” of the “body” of Osiris while having descended into the underworld. A beatification text found at Mendes seems to described Banebdjedet as an explicitly solarised form of Osiris. Banebdjedet was also associated with other gods such as Shu and Atum, such that he was sometimes called “the Ba of the gods”. The four heads of Banebdjedet represented the four elements represented by Ra, Shu, Geb, and Osiris, or rather the Bas of these four deities. The ram was also viewed as a nocturnal aspect of the sun, and as such ram-formed beings frequently appear in underworld texts. In many respects, you can think of Banebdjedet as a sun god, or solar deity, if not a solar-pantheistic hypostasis of several solar gods.
In ancient Egyptian symbolism, the ram was already linked to both the divine power of the sun and worldly sexual virility. One of the most explicit examples of this is in the depiction of Amun-Ra, the invisible syncretic king of the Egyptian gods, in the form of a ram. But there is also a context where the ram as a solar entity takes on another significance: the power to threaten the cosmos. Such is the case for the figure of the Black Ram, also called “the Lord of Power”, named nb-ꜣt (I hope I’ve spelled that right), a demonic figure represented in ancient Egyptian funerary texts. This Black Ram appears as a representative of dangerous inhabitants of the netheworld that repel both the living and the dead, but also as a judge of the dead that the deceased soul must pass through, an aggressive liminal spirit whose form is assumed by spirits such as that of the pharaoh Unas, or a reference to a hidden sun. It probably also represents a dark double or shadow of the sun, a “black sun” which protects the sun by absorbing the attacks of its enemies and even “devouring” all evil during the judgement of the dead. But the Black Ram also reflects the situation of judgement in the netherworld for the deceased soul itself: the soul of the dead first emerges as something seemingly alien, existing in a liminal state that threatens the cosmic order, and must claim a place among or adjacent to the gods in order to become something that can uphold the cosmos. In life, the pharaoh was the sovereign ruler of Egypt and perhaps the divinised extension of the idea of mankind, but, in the afterlife, the pharaoh can be very dangerous. The deceased pharaoh can be powerful and even threatening, but their power also allows them to gain a special place in the netherworld and resolve their dangerous situation. But as darkened solar being in the realm of the dead, this deceased pharaoh takes the form of the Black Ram, the demon of solar darkness. So the Black Ram represents something that can both uphold the cosmos and threaten its very upheaval, or at the very least a power that can be very threatening depending on the point of view of that which it faces. More generally, the figure of the Black Ram represents solar energy in a liminal, “dark”, and also dangerous and destructive state.
The ram as a symbol of solar divine power in ancient Egyptian religion thus can be seen as a means of communicating a solar-chthonic delirium that creates with the power to threaten the order of things, even at the same time as it upholds the cosmos. Such is at least a small part of mystic solarisation. And from here, we can move straight on to the significance imparted to the Devil card discussed by Aleister Crowley in the Book of Thoth. I was originally going to discuss this in relationship to certain notions of pagan solar-pantheistic cultus that I thought Crowley was interested in, but I ran into a dead end and turned to other inquiries. I suppose this is the best place to transfer my discussion of Crowley.
In his Book of Thoth, Crowley refers to The Devil as representing creative energy in its “most material” form. The goat featured on the card is linked to Baphomet, as portrayed by Eliphas Levi, and to Pan, who was portrayed as part-goat. In fact, Crowley refers to the card itself as Pan Pangenetor, or Pan the All-Begetter, essentially referring to Pan, or rather Pan according to Crowley and the religion of Thelema, in which Pan is interpreted as both a personification of Nature and a masculine generative power. The card is also linked with the sign of Capricornus (“horned goat”), which Crowley interprets as a “goat leaping with lust upon the summits of the earth”. The sign is ruled by Saturn, which for Crowley denotes selfhood and perpetuity, and is exalted in Mars, which shows the fiery and material energy of creation. The creative force represented by Capricornus is said to be “rough”, “harsh”, “dark”, or even “blind”, It is an impulse that does not account for reason, custom, or even foresight, divine unscrupulous, without care for the result. Essentially, this force is “pure will”, unassuaged of purpose and delivered from the lust of result. Sounds like something Georges Bataille would talk about, actually. But thus it is also as Corvus Nocturnum put it: “mindless, only filled with a Dionysian will to grow, feed, mate, survive and die, again and again, and it exists inside every living being.”
For Crowley, this force of “pure will” is also linked to the complete appreciation of all existing things: The Devil rejoices in the rugged and the barren in equal measure as in the smooth and the fertile, because all things equally exalt him, and he represents the ability to find ecstasy in every phenomenon, no matter how repugnant, thus transcending all limitations. Very Sadean. Also somewhat interesting is that, according to Crowley, the Hebrew consonants Aleph, Yod, and Ayin form the name I A O (Iao), and then, through the Atu of The Hermit, The Fool, and The Devil, express “the male creative energy”, though The Devil expresses this at its utmost. Saturn, the ruler of Capricornus, is identified with Set, the Egyptian god of the Red Land (the desert outside the kingdom of Egypt), which he says also refers to Satan and Shaitan. Barren and especially high places are important for the symbolism of The Devil, because it conveys the highest and most remote. The goat’s spiral horns are said to represent the movement of the all-pervading energy.
This theme attributed to The Devil can also be seen in Magick in Theory and Practice (even though Crowley says in the chapter on “Black Magick” that The Devil does not exist). It is there in particular that we get Crowley’s more famous quote about The Devil being the God of any people that one dislikes (an observation that, to a certain extent, remains basically correct), and about Satan being the serpent who made gods of humans, taught initiation, and knew good and evil. This Satan is love, life, and liberty conveyed by the leaping goat. It is also in the same text that Satan is identified with the sun. In his essay Notes for an Astral Atlas, published as an appendix to Book 4 of Magick in Theory and Practice, Satan is identified as the Sun-Father, who is the vibration of life and the lord of infinite space flaming with his consuming energy – in addition to the traditional monikers, such as Old Serpent. The sun, like The Devil, is seen by Crowley as a universal creative force. In fact, Crowley also argued in Magick in Theory and Practice that Satan was believed to be evil because he was associated with the burning rays of the sun. Of course, that description seems strange to our eyes in association with Satan, but, historically, not so strange when talking about the deity Seth Typhon.
I have already noted an obvious solar link concerning the Crowleyan image of the goat in my discussion of the solar myth of Kenneth Anger. As I noted in that article, Anger talked about how an image of a great goat having sex with a red-headed woman hung above Aleister Crowley’s bed, which he argued represented Crowley’s own self-conceptualisation as a solar figure, a “solar-phallic” persona that could be seeing as either heroic or simply imperious. In that context, we can see this as Crowley personally striving to identify with the creative power that associated with The Devil, but which he also called “Godhead”.
We can then go back to PGM IV. 3255-74 and its depiction of Seth-Typhon. Seth-Typhon here goes by multiple names, one of which seems to be Sabaoth. When drawing the figure of the ass, the magician is supposed to write the name Sabaoth on its chest or breast. Sabaoth one of the names of the Hebrew God, or rather it is a Greek form of the name YHWH Tzevaot, but it is also a name of at least one version of the Gnostic Demiurge, which Webb identifies with Seth-Typhon as Lord of the World. As far as early Christians were concerned, that title is not an inaccurate reference. In some Gnostic sects, Sabaoth is considered a separate entity from Yaldabaoth (for example, the Phibionites belived that Sabaoth was the leader of seven demonic planets and outranked Yaldabaoth), and sometimes even as a rebel against the rule of Yaldabaoth, but in some sects, possibly including the Ophites, Sabaoth was really just another name for Yaldabaoth. Both Sabaoth and Yaldabaoth were associated with the ass or donkey in the same way that Seth-Typhon was. For the Ophites, Yaldabaoth had another name: Onoel, which probably means “donkey god”. That donkey symbolism conveyed everything that it did for Seth-Typhon, which essentially meant chaos and the power to threaten the order of the cosmos, except that Yaldabaoth/Onoel created the material univerese. But then again, his very birth brought chaos to the Pleroma, and disrupted the sequential harmony of its repetitive emanation.
Seth Typhon was, at a certain point in time, depicted as a donkey or donket-headed deity. In the Ptolemaic period especially, you will see images of donkey-headed figures meant to represent Set, sometimes bound as an enemy, after he was vilified of course. There is a very complicated context behind all of this, but it is Plutarch that I want to focus on in this light. Plutarch claimed that Typhon was associated with the donkey because the donkey was regarded as the “stupidest” of all domesticated animals. At the same time, Seth Typhon was also associated with crocodiles and hippopotamuses, which were regarded as the most dangerous or “savage” of all the wild animals. According to Richard H. Wilkinson in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Set was represented not only by the mysterious Set animal but also many other animals that happened to be considered abhorrent by the ancient Egyptians; this apparently included antelopes, donkeys, goats, pigs, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and certain fish. Plutarch argued that Typhon represented a part of the soul that was irrational, impulsive, aggressive, or hostile, and a part of matter that was destructible, diseased, and disorderly, as well as abnormal temperatures. This is in contrast to how Plutarch represented Osiris: Osiris in his view was the ruler and lord of all things good, who represented the intelligence and reason of the soul as well as the ordered, established, and healthy course of all things in nature. Seems that Plutarch espoused a particularly dualistic interpretation of Egyptian polytheism, one that you’d be forgiven for thinking has more in common with Christianity than it lets on. But for Plutarch, Typhon had a part in the cosmos, in that his power remains part of the mixture of the cosmos desired by the gods and otherwise still had to be molified, whereas Christianity believes that Satan’s only real business is to be defeated forever (or in some cases eventually redeemed) by God.
What is interesting though is that Plutarch also presented another division between Typhon and Osiris: Typhon represented the solar world, while Osiris represented the lunar world. According to Plutarch, the Egyptians believed that Osiris represented the lunar world because the light of the moon was gentle, generative, and produced moisture, whereas Typhon represented the solar world because of the sun’s pitiless heat and blazing light, which makes plants hot and parched, a large part of the world uninhabitable, and the moon invisible in many regions. Plutarch says it is for this reason that Typhon is called “Seth”, which according to him means “overmastering and compelling”, or “overpowering”, or in some cases “turning back” or “overpassing”. That Set should be associated with the sun seems strange, and certainly doesn’t reflect the bulk of his presence in ancient Egyptian polytheism, however there is some cause to assume that Seth Typhon did function as a solar or solar-pantheistic deity in Greco-Egyptian magic, or more particularly the Greek Magical Papyri, where he might be invoked in the same place as solar deities like Abrasax. In any case, this Typhon must have been thought of as a solar power that implied the obstruction of some kind of rational order in the cosmos.
But, you might be wondering, what exactly does a donkey-headed god named Seth Typhon have to do with the ram-formed sun god, or the Ram of Mendes, or for that matter the Goat of Mendes? Not much, or (admittedly) perhaps barely anything, except for solarisation. Between them there is something that communicates an esoteric outline of a solar divine power that is seems “blind”, liminal, dangerous, but creative, and yet defined exactly by a kind of creative lust that could threaten the order of things, even in contexts where the sun itself was thought to be the central subject of cosmic order. What Crowley takes to be “pure will” is that which proceeds into the creation of new worlds almost heedlessly and without pity, reshaping the world around the magician just as a bath of sunlight does to both the outer world and the senses. And at the core is desire. In this area Don Webb provides a handy illustration: the raising of desire in a certain magical formula is represented by the goat or the ram. The satanic demiurgy of the gods of solar darkness is a seemingly spontaneous rebellion or will and desire for a world strictly their own, a will that can embrace the perversion of the world that exists in support of its own existence and creative activity. Magical, creative, cosmic, and satanic lust expresses an “evil” that is in truth a creative power, and thus its emblem is the demonic in the form of the animal non-human or inhuman (or perhaps hyperhuman) beast, the animal-headed archons worshipped by “Gnostic” magicians, the solar ass, and the Goat (or Ram) of Mendes.
Something about the late Kenneth Anger caught my attention recently, and made me think back to what I wrote about solar myth and inversion in relationship to Satanism, and the wider relationship to the concept of solarisation as presented by Valerio Mattioli in his chapter of Revolutionary Demonology. For this reason, I decided that a short addendum in the form of this article was both necessary and feasible. The original article on the subject will be linked at the end of this article.
In a recent interview on Angela’s Symposium, Judith Noble, the Professor of Film and the Occult for Arts University Plymouth, discussed the question of the artist playing with the audience by pointing out that Kenneth Anger convinced people that he died when in reality he was still alive. In 1967, Anger posted an ad in The Village Voice announcing his own death, reading “In memoriam, Kenneth Anger, film-maker, 1947–1967.”. Of course, this act could also be seen as a response to the dispute with Bobby Beausoleil around incomplete footage of what was to be Lucifer Rising which had disappeaed at the time (Anger accused Beausoleil of stealing said footage). But in any case, there were people, including his fellow avant-garde artists, who at the time believed that Anger had died, while Anger himself, in Noble’s words, “evolved from one magical stage to another”. That said, Anger did tell some people that it was a publicity stunt, and then after a while he apparently publicly burned his old films and returned to Los Angeles to attend the funeral of a Church of Satan parishioner.
When Judith Noble talked about that, I immediately recognised this as being almost exactly what Aleister Crowley had done decades before. In 1930, Crowley faked his own death by suicide at the Boca do Inferno in Portugal. Crowley wrote a fake “suicide note” that was then transmitted along with false information about his supposed death to the press by his friend Fernando Pessoa, and then Crowley re-appeared alive and well three weeks later in Berlin, at his very own art exhibition. Of course, Crowley did eventually die for real in 1947. In a certain way, Kenneth Anger was simply following the example of Aleister Crowley before him. Actually, perhaps in many more ways than one. In a similar ways, both Anger and Crowley would seem to blur the fact and fiction of their own realities, and in the process of this distortion create their own realities. It is in many ways not for nothing that Jonas Mekas referred to Kenneth Anger as more than a filmmaker, and also an architect of dreams.
Here we should revisit the Crowleyan solar myth discussed by Cavan McLaughlin in The Dark Side of the Sun: The Great Beast, Monstrosity and Solar Narratives. Crowley’s famous axiom was “every man and woman is a star”, and if that’s the case then every man and woman is also their own Sun. Crowley also identified Horus, the god of his new Aeon, with the Sun, and as the symbol of that image of our “True Selves” which contains and transcends dualities. By doing so Crowley established solar myth at the basis of his magical and religious philosophy of Thelema. And the sun can be thought as essentially amoral, fundamentality double-sided: giver of life, but also bringer of pain and death; always bringing light to the world, but also always casting darkness more than illuminating us; a big ball of light that seems at once to be the fires of hell. That double-sidedness is at the root of the solar heroism of Crowley’s new Aeon. Crowley’s solar hero defies morality and the binary of good of evil, on behalf of Will, in the sense of magical individuation and a totality true to its own nature. Crowley’s new Aeon invites everyone to bear their own amoral solar heroic quest to realise their will and in so doing transform both themselves and the world around them. This quest “may make monsters of us all”, but that’s also because thus who take it are to become suns. And as we become suns, we distort and reshape the whole world around us, revealing to us another world, or creating a new one.
What adds to the relevance of Kenneth Anger in that whole context is Anger’s own affinity for solar myth. For one thing, Kenneth Anger describes himself as a pagan, but he was also a Thelemite, and in fact he was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Anger characterised Thelema as a solar, not to mention “solar-phallic”, religion – a contrast, he thought, to religions like Wicca. This theme is also how Anger explained an image hung above Crowley’s bed, which was a great goat having sex with a red-headed woman (The Scarlet Woman), which is part of a recurring theme of sexual imagery (though, of course, it just as surely represents Crowley’s own representation of his own sexual desire). According to Anger, it was also part of Crowley’s own self-conceptualisation as a solar figure, either as a heroic magus or simply as “the boss”, in any case cutting quite the dominating aura at least in theory. I think there is room to argue for the “solar-phallic” paradigm of Crowleyan sexual libertinism as ultimately containing in itself the solarisation that its characterised in how Valerio Mattioli understands anal sex.
But perhaps the most important piece to this is none other than Kenneth Anger’s classic occult short film, Lucifer Rising. Filmed through the late 1960s, completed in 1972, but not widely distributed until 1980, Lucifer Rising is Kenneth Anger’s filmic depiction of the core spiritual ethos of Crowley’s Thelema as espoused by Ordo Templi Orientis. The ancient Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris gather to summon Lucifer, here envisioned as a kind of “pantheistic” deity, in order to usher in a new occult age. That new age is presumably the Aeon of Horus that Crowley talked out. In fact, Bobby Beausoleil, who was originally supposed to play the role of Lucifer, said that the new age was meant to be “the age of the child”, which came after the age of patriarchy which came after the age of matriarchy; or, the Aeon of Osiris which came after the Aeon of Isis. According to Aleister Crowley, the child, or child god, was Horus, and so Lucifer in Lucifer Rising is also meant to be understood as Horus. Anger also saw Lucifer Rising as a celebration of what he saw as the beginning of a new Pagan era (to him probably characterised by the worship of nature) and the end of Christianity.
But Lucifer Rising is not only a filmic representation of the Aeon of Horus, it was also meant to depict actual magical/ritual ceremonies, or it was meant to be understood as a filmic ritual in its own right, and in this sense, the film was introducing a magical reality of its own. In every sense Lucifer Rising is a work of a sun, or the sun, a solar image or ritual, conjuring the solar Lucifer-Horus to inspire the spirit of a new age of occult freedom in the the world around it, at least in the souls of all who see it and come to love it. Sunlight beams from the filmic image of Lucifer Rising, some of which was actually filmed in Egypt (specifically in Giza and Karnak, at the site of the Sphinx, the Pyramids, and some Egyptian temples), where the sun still shines on the old temples of the gods, thus producing an image that, in its own way, reshapes the world around it.
The sun in the spring compelled me to write this. Well, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I originally wanted to write about this as part of my article about the solar mythology of Satanism, and didn’t proceed because I, at that time, had trouble connecting it to solarisation and felt that the article would not maintain scope for it. But as the spring sun rolled in, in the middle of me writing my articles about Revolutionary Demonology, I must have sensed the inspiration from the warmth of the sun again. This is simply an article wherein I take it upon myself to write about the black ram with which I symbolize myself – what I take up as a “glyph”, as it were.
In March 2016, I took advantage of two consecutive days I had off from my usual university course to visit Swansea University in order to attend a series of lectures about ancient Egyptian demonology. Yes, that is to say the study of demons or demonic figures as they appear in ancient, pre-Christian Egyptian texts, spells, funerary artefacts etc. Many of these lectures can be found in the journal Demon Things: Ancient Egyptian Manifestations of Liminal Entities, published by the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections and edited by Kasia Szpakowska. The lectures featured discussions of the various liminal entities and even some familiar Egyptian gods, including Anubis and Bes, as demonic figures. But the more relevant lecture for this is “Liminal Sources of Dangerous Power: A Case of the Black Ram”, attributed to Nika Lavrentyeva and Ekaterina Alexandrova. It is this figure of the Black Ram that I am talking about.
The Black Ram is a figure apparently portraying a mysterious being referred to as “the lord of power”. This “lord of power” is a demonic figure who represents dangerous inhabitants of the Netherworld that repel the living and the dead alike. In the Egyptian Coffin Texts, specifically CT 1071, the “Lord of power” appears as one of the judges that the deceased soul must pass by in order to access a blessed afterlife in the company of Osiris, the ruler of Duat. In the Pyramid Texts, specifically Spell 246, the black ram is an aggressive and liminal form taken by the divine spirit of the deceased pharaoh Unas. In another spell from the Pyramid Texts, mentions Unas turning into the “Lord of power”, also called “the Great One”. Curiously this being is said to have “grew strong through the injury which was done to him”, which, through the term “nkn”, is apparently supposed to reference the mutilation of Horus; that part fits the prevailing idea of the pharaoh as a living incarnation of Horus. The figure of a black ram also appears several times in the Book of Amduat. In one incarnation, he is possible a reference to a hidden sun. A character with the head of a black ram is named “The Soul Who Belongs to the Damned”, stands before a goddess referred to as “The demolishing one, who cuts the damned to pieces”; perhaps the ram here represents the darkness of the souls who are to be denied rebirth (and hence “damned”). The god Tatenen also appears as a ram, to whom creatures cry out with the voices of rams, and when he leaves they are covered in darkness. These characters also seem to be connected to “the shadow of the sun”, by which is meant its negative aspect as “the Sun-destroyer”. This destroyer is referred to as a “black sun”, which serves as a dark double of the sun that protects the sun god from evil forces. It does this by taking the attacks of the sun’s enemies and absorbing, perhaps even “devouring”, all evil during the judgement of the dead. For example, in a scene from the Book of the Dead, illustrated at the Tomb of Irunefer at Deir el-Medina, a black sun represents the darkness that will absord all evil plotted against the deceased soul who is illuminated by the sun.
Lavrentyeva and Alexandrova argue that this dark solar figure is also a reflection of the situation of judgement in the netherworld, and the role of the deceased soul itself. In the Pyramid Texts, the deceased soul initially seems to be an alien being whose liminal state threatens the order of the cosmos. The deceased soul must claim a secure place in the afterlife by or besides the gods, so that the aggression of the deceased soul could be pacified and transformed into something that can uphold the cosmos. The “lord of power” himself reflects in both appearance and namesake not only the threat of chaos and the violation and overturning of the cosmic order, but the very border between chaos and cosmos whose properties partially define his nature. In this sense, we may be looking at a cipher for a chaos, insurrection, an aggressive force that threatens the upheaval of everything but which nonetheless upholds and is the basis of everything.
The destructive aspect of the sun as a power of darkness figures as perhaps one way of looking at the theme of meiridian sunlight as explored by Valerio Mattioli in his essay “Solarisation” within Revolutionary Demonology. We would remember per Mattioli that the very brightness of the sun can be seen as a destructive, distorting, benighting thing, especially in the Mediterranean. Solarisation, meanwhile, overturns everything, so as to reveal another world. The power of the sun is in this sense a delirium that overturns that which is, manifesting something new or different. That is the power that threatens the cosmos, and yet it also surely generates it. The black ram, the “lord of power”, is the force that intrudes. I am inclined to make a connection between the way the ram, in Egyptian symbolism, was always linked to certain ideas of masculine “fertility”, which could be understood as generative power. For this reason, for instance, Banebdjedet was “the soul of the lord of Mendes”, that is to say the “Ba” of Osiris, while the ram was generally a symbol of creator deities such as Amun-Ra and Khnum. The god Ra appeared with a ram’s head in his “nocturnal” form during the solar cycle. There’s also an unusual depiction of Seth-Baal, a Hyksos syncretism between two storm gods both frequently tied to fertility (Set and Baal Hadad), in which he seems to have either the head of a ram or simply ram horns on his head. A “black” ram, representing the shadowy aspect of the sun, would thus represent the destructive powers of the sun and resonate with solarisation, and in the “lord of power” we might get a perverse sense of the generative power of the sun and the distorting power of solarisation as unified in a single image. Additionally, it would also almost recall the role of Set as the original guardian of Ra’s solar barque. It is of course very unlikely that Set, typically understood as a god of storms and the desert, was ever venerated as a solar deity. Nonetheless, on the solar barque, Set is the one who repels Apep and the enemies of Ra with his spear. In this sense, he could be seen as the violence that upholds the course of the sun. But of course he is also a wild and chaotic deity, whose worship sometimes involved alcohol.
In all of that, though, I think we may see a theme of rebellious audacity, or tolma, connected through the Greek association of the ram with courage. Tolma in Greek can mean “courage”, “boldness”, or “daring”, though in the philosophical context it is also supposed to donate an arrogant sense of pride that leads to alienation from the divine source, meaning The One. From Frater Archer’s discussion of goeteia we get a sense of tolma as profoundly magical, linked to transgression of societal morality and , and per Plotinus this itself becomes linked to self-will. But where for Plotinus and the Christians this self-will is a corruption that leads to alienation or death and oblivion, at least in Egyptian magic this self-will is part of life of the cosmos, a cosmos that can be interpreted in terms of Henri Bergon’s axiom that the universe is a machine for the making of god. That, I believe, is part of the dark kernel of that lost world we Pagans honour and strive to carry with us. Thus is the cypher of the black ram: a defiance that is the signal of true cosmic life.
Here I continue my exploration of Revolutionary Demonology by Gruppo Di Nun, and concurrently a much deeper exploration of the Left Hand Path as a whole. So far, in Part 1, I have explored the first main sections of Revolutionary Demonology, comprising its introductory “ritual” (“Every Worm Trampled Is A Star”) as well as the first (“Principles of Revolutionary Demonology”) and second (“Notes On Gothic Insurrection”) chapters. If you have not read Part 1 before reading this article then I suggest you go back and do so first. Here, in Part 2, I will focus solely on the contents of the third chapter of Revolutionary Demonology.
The third chapter is titled “Nigredo”, and it is here also that we cut deeper into the core ethos of the philosophy of Gruppo Di Nun by way of more elaborate expositions of it. Though, of course, there are somewhat multifaceted. On the one hand, we can see the contours of the philosophy of ontological masochism that Gruppo Di Nun means to get across. On the other hand, there are the makings of a much more active worldview, that arcs in a direction other than this ethos so eloquently summarized by Amy Ireland’s afterword. In any case “Nigredo” consists of five essays, which we will go through in order: “Cultivating Darkness” by Claudio Kulesko, “Mater Dolorosa” by Laura Tripaldi, “Solarisation” by Valerio Mattioli, “The Highest Form of Gnosis” by Enrico Monacelli, and “Catholic Dark” by Claudio Kulesko.
The World Falling Apart (The First Nigredo)
“Cultivating Darkness” begins by establishing our total immersion in darkness, alien yet familiar. To realize this immersion is to realize that our prevailing representation of the world is either simply false or merely limited, and is it collapses, Kulesko asserts, the world shows itself to be a collection of fragments forming a collage. But the other lesson we’re given is that there is always more than one world, and that it is always possible to construct new worlds from the fragments. Yet, once our world shatters, it cannot be reconstructed as it was – like Humpty Dumpty falling from the wall, when his shell shatters no one can piece him back together. Human life is a network of stories, and meaning in this setting is simply an internal coherence between the pasts, presents, and futures of these stories. In moments of existential dread, we think of ourselves as like scale insects: mummifying but alive, and so it must seem as we live in the advanced, technologically accelerated capitalism of the late Anthropocene. History appears to be either advancing or standing still waiting to be set in motion, but in despair we find neither advance nor standstill, and the fragments of our world blindly and incoherently fly around without direction. Thus we fall out of time, and into the subject of depressive realism – thus, a kind of psychological nigredo.
Depressive realism is the name given to the theory that depressed people, far from suffering from a negative bias that hinders their objectivity, actually tend to access a greater dimension of objectivity than non-depressed people might possess. Kulesko seems convinced that this theory is basically correct, and in some ways goes a little bit further: the depressed person not only perceives the world more objectively, this also means they can (in theory) more accurately locate their own personal responsibility in terms of what is and is not within their control. To Kulesko they become like oracles of an uncaring subterranean world. Paging Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the depressive realist subverts the axiom of neoliberalism by saying, “there is no alternative, except for the end of the world”. Yet they also go further, in their despair they might conclude that the world either already ended or had simply never existed. What then also ensues is a kind of disorientation and self-aggravation; depressive realism can change into full blown extinctionism, as, for Kulesko, philosophical pessimism and nihilism tended to change into eliminativism – the idea that truly nothing exists at all.
Is there a way out of this trajectory? I would be inclined to think that the idea that life is a series of fragments can lend itself to a freedom of interpretation, wherein the great thing about life is precisely its fragmentation, or rather the fact that it allows everyone to create their own world, to the extent of their will. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Kulesko tells us that the problem with the development towards eliminativism is that, in the depressive moment, what emerges is not the non-existence of things but rather their inconsistency, or metastability (that is, the utter fragility of the universe). In terms of empiricism this comes down to the fact that the “laws” of nature are not actually “laws” at all, but rather chains of cause and effect or rather still a set of tenuous regularities or rhythms. In this view there is no logical reason why the sun rises and sets when it does except that we continually see it rise and set each day, and from there further that there is no inherent reason why the universe itself will not be annihilated. In view of this, the world as we know hangs precariously above an abyss, and everything is pervaded by nothingness. “Darkness”, here, is an uncanny property: a shapeless, indeterminate atmosphere and field of experimentation, wherein one may either destroy oneself or discover unknown pleasures. It is in this sense meant to be seen as none other than reality in its purest state, from which all worlds and meanings emerge and into which they die. From a certain point of view it is a rather gloomy and depressive world, like the world that was before humans or the world that will exist after humans. Not to entirely take away from that, but I might suggest that other perspectives, such as found in at least some forms of Zen Buddhism, it is simply a realm of intangible content and worlds. I suppose both Kulesko’s darkness and Zen nothingness are to be understood as pure potentiality, but taken with a different attitude. But it is here that I am again drawn to refer to the fact that Ernst Schertel ascribes this to the realm of Satan and Hell, as the starting basis of magical power. I sense a conceptual synchronicity here somewhere at least. In any case, it is perhaps here that any notion of a “way out” becomes apparent.
Humans must either realize the absence of teleological meaning and unity in the universe and gain self-consciousness of the real, or remain forever ignorant as they are consumed by time and matter. To acheive this self-awareness, one must abandon hope without succumbing to despair. That means realizing how the ontological collapse of the world can open up new horizons. Those horizons are contained in the negativity at the heart of things, the apophatic nothingness that runs parallel to our world of things, forms, facts, and narratives. If everything arises from nothing or from chaos, it follows that nothingness is plastic, in that it is possible to extract from it an infinite quantity of worlds and meanings. An infinite diversity of constructions can result from nothing. The only issue is getting stuck within them; if you let yourself be lied to by the worlds and meanings that arise, you will become their slave, or you will find yourself having to go through dark nights of the soul all over again – perhaps, an eternal recurrence of nigredo. Perhaps here we get what can amount to basically nihilist alchemy. One begins in a nigredo, in this case the whole process of seeing the world around you fall apart and realizing its nothingness, and after that first step the nihility changes into the material by which you will, somehow, perform the Great Work, creating a philsopher’s stone. In many ways, though, conatus as a vehicle for the ceaseless development even greater perfections and freedom emerges as the best way to make sense of just why everything might stop being nothing in the first place, and that why really remains a missing piece in Kulesko’s philosophical presentation. To be sure, if we are dealing with philosophical nihilism through and through then one could ask why the question even matters, but one cannot ignore amidst a collapsing world why one has found oneself here to start with. That is surely one of the components of the despair Kulesko discusses, except to the extent that Kulesko’s depressed subject has stopped asking the question. And if there is an answer, there is only one: our life is so that we may arrange ourselves at will, overcoming and transforming that which is in accordance with will and desire.
We now come to a discussion of Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian philsophical pessimist and skeptic, for whom the truth consists principally of a doubt unassailable by human reason. This particular form of skepticism brings thought to the point where knowledge collapses and leaves behind only doubt as the manifestation of the pure unknowability of reality. It is also to be contrasted with more popular (and palatable) forms of skepticism, wherein knowledge is cast aside, suspended, only to be recovered. The point of this skepticism is to discover the abyss. But it is also essentially a hyper-manifestation of the rationalist materialism that developed during the Enlightenment, and which influenced Leopardi’s thought. He believed that rational analysis dissects nature to the extent that it “resolves and undoes” it into something akin to a corpse, and, ostensibly as a result of his research, that every faculty of mind is material and that spirit is a deception of “the heart” by itself. Such a worldview makes for a potential step towards eliminativism: after all, so the logic goes, if only sensory perception is real, then self-consciousness is only a second-level perception. Yet for Leopardi appearance is the only thing that counts, because substance in itself does nothing and makes no impressions. This seems contrasted with the blind brain theory we are then introduced to, which holds that the world, as represented by our minds conceals a “real” world much more multifaceted; in other words, here substance is richer than appearance.
A problem that can stem from this perspective lies still within the scientific nigredo that ensues: this is summed up in Thomas Ligotti’s quotation of Thomas Metzinger, when he says “there are aspects of the scientific world-view which may be damaging to our mental well-being”. This theme of psychic damage brought on by the collapse of the teleological and phenomenal world into darkness is in some ways captured by both Giacomo Leopardi and H. P. Lovecraft, the latter a fan of the former, the latter writing that complete knowledge of the world would traumatize us such that would either “go mad from the revelation” or retreat into a new “dark age”. If consciousness is accepted as an illusion (mind you, this is not an opinion that I hold), along with the inevitable extinction of everything, then, according to Ray Brassier, then the philosophical subject is already dead, and philosophy itself is the organon of extinction.
An interesting point Kulesko goes on to make is that the enterprise of philosophy tends to consist of isolating one component of reality that can then be established as its ultimate principle and the foundation of thought itself. One recalls that ancient quest of Greek philosophers, as far back as the pre-Socratic era, for the one element or substance that could be acknowledged as the prime arche upon which the cosmos is founded. Kulesko’s examples include a metaphysics of becoming produced by the isolation of change or becoming, or a metaphysics of static being by isolating the existence of an object. In any case, for Kulesko there is an abyss between these two possibilities, which contains both, their mixture, their conflict, and their absence, and reality at large resists all efforts to define it by isolating a single principle. Yet, what interests me is that a question emerges: does a metaphysics of becoming not naturally emerge from the condition of abject fragmentation and the change that is implied by the condition of indeterminacy? In fact, that idea can be seen as the whole throughline of Gruppo Di Nun’s metaphysics, in that transformation is the fundamental potential of magical practice and philosophy. Nothingness almost certainly changed into everything that we know, so in this sense absolute power of becoming is one the core properties of Kulesko’s abyss. In that sense, a metaphysics of becoming is not a natural outcome, but also necessary.
But now we return to Kulesko’s central point about the abyss of reality: its ultimate potential. Rather than defeat, the chaos, unknowing, and senselessness of darkness offer a limitless wealth of possibility. In this setting, the practice of philosophy means bracketing out everything we know or think we know about the world in order to unlock new configurations that at the same time exist in the world. Fiction itself, and for Kulesko especially science fiction, emerges as a gateway to the groundlessness of the world, which is it at once the ground of its being. The end of the world, the nightmare of the apocalypse that animates human beings to the point that they endlessly narrate their own demise, is itself its own gate. Total destruction is the limit that thought drifts towards, the darkness that arises from just the thought of that destruction can negate everything, but if the world has fallen apart and the end is already written, then, even for that, we are gifted with an utter freedom of action. We can go wherever we please and build whatever we want, and we may cast off the burdens that modern philosophy has imposed on us. This becomes Kulesko’s version of the primary axiom of Thelema: do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Not only do we and our particularity emerge from chaos but matter itself is this chaos, and at the innermost core of both reality and our own souls is lawlessness and multiplicity. As unreal as it sounds, for Kulesko that’s all there is, and it is everything. For this reason, it is best to cultivate darkness when lost in the night.
When I read the end of that essay, I sensed in Claudio Kulesko the formation of what I recognised as the basic principle of anarcho-nihilism. I don’t think Kulesko identifies himself with that, and in fact I don’t think he commits himself to any particular label, apart from philosophical pessimism – and, as far as I can see of his work, beyond all other labels he is first and foremost a student of philosophical pessimism. Nonetheless, somewhere in Kulesko’s conclusion I could sense the core idea in that in the negation of everything we come free to no longer be arranged and in turn arrange ourselves in any way we wish. It presents the ultimate silver lining to the question of meaning and its absence, and it illuminates the real meaning of the expression that nihilism does entail a position of despair or emptiness, and that meaning for the nihilist is exactly what they create for themselves. Of course, for Kulesko it is all fully ontological in ways that I’m not entirely sure it’s even possible to agree with, whereas for anarcho-nihilism it pertains largely to the political dimension, in that the point is to negate all social and political institutions to create a space of full autonomy for individuals which can then manifest and experiment in all directions. Still, that itself may find extension in the nigredo that Kulesko presents, and in the magma of darkness that lies beneath the lies of the world and its utopias. The chaos embodied by that eight-pointed star expanding in all directions, unleashing the world after the world like, in late Norse mythology, the rebirth of the world after the carnage of the battle of Ragnarok, it’s the fragmentation of the Image of the World. The insurrection is its own cultivation of darkness.
Wounds of the Divine Feminine (The Second Nigredo)
Our second discussion of nigredo, “Mater Dolorosa”, which as the name suggests seems to centre around a discussion of the Virgin Mary, begins with Laura Tripaldi taking us on a recollection of her childhood frolics in a garden in her school, hidden from the eyes of adults, filled with vegetation and small animals – sometimes dead ones that she and her friends would hold funerals for. We are also introduced to the flower Veronica persica, or Persian speedwell, known locally as the “eyes of the Madonna”, a namesake that naturally then pivots focus figure of the Virgin Mary, her heavenly abode evoked by an analogy to her eyes, and to the torment she supposedly feels when you pluck the petals of the speedwell. Amusing, by the way, that this Virgin is called “Mother of God”: we’re told that the Christian God created everything thousands of years if not eons ago and yet also that his mother is a teenage girl who lived 2,000 years ago. A testament to the incoherence of Christianity, or at least especially Roman Catholicism. Then we’re presented with an anecdote about a pregnant female earthworm that the children punctured, seemingly to assist the earthworm’s delivery of its offspring; an act that seemed to almost primordially disgust the young Tripaldi. The particular reproductive economy of invertebrates, profoundly alien to our own, brings us to the subject of Georges Bataille’s assessment of abiogenesis and the relationship between asexual reproduction and death – the original one dying and becoming two – and then we get to a more fundamental pain at the heart of living matter. The ancestral wound of life, for Tripaldi consists of a primordial separation from the primordial condition of indistinction, and in this setting life is Giacomo Leopardi’s garden, which Leopardi insists is nothing but a beautiful hospital. Thus, the second nigredo is the realization of the pain of primeval separation.
It all comes down to the idea that not being born is better than being born. In many ways, this theme communicated in terms of a perceived separation from original matter and the concurrent pain of that separation is a lot closer to what I expected of Gruppo Di Nun based on the opening salvos of Revolutionary Demonology and its core dogma than much of what we have previously discussed so far. It certainly is closer in spirit with the thematic emphasis on the myth of the dismembered Mother Tiamat that they present much more than the subject of Gothic Insurrection or even the latent alchemical theme strewn throughout, and as we’ll see that theme takes us through a much larger response to the doctrine of emanation. This could offer us a rather multifaceted journey.
We are introduced to a man named Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-Australian geologist who, in 1972, went to St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City and attacked Michaelangelo’s Pieta, striking the face of the Madonna with a hammer while shouting “Christ is risen! I am the Christ!”. At the time of the incident it was assumed that Toth was mentally ill, consequently he was sent to a psychiatric hospital without criminal charges before being deported to Australia. I tend to think that there can be few bolder blasphemies against Christendom than declaring yourself Christ and smashing one of the holy symbols of the Christ myth, not to mention the synchronicity of having done so at the same age as Jesus supposedly was when he died. But for Tripaldi the incident carries a different meaning: for her it displays an uncanny alchemical property associated with depictions of the Virgin Mary – the transfiguration of suffering and disgrace into triumph and splendour.
The cult of the Virgin Mary, and particularly the cult of Our Lady of Sorrows centres around miraculous events that often involve the disfigurement of the various depictions of the Virgin Mother. Across Italy, there are local tales about icons of Mary being attacked or defaced by an unbeliever and then, as if to answer the assailant’s lack of faith, shedding tears of blood. In that exact sense, Laszlo Toth smashing the Pieta is interpreted as actually making it beautiful. But then we get to theme of weeping. Our Lady of Sorrows is always weeping. Her exposed heart illuminates the reason for her weeping: seven daggers, representing the seven sorrows she suffered in the Gospel narrative, pierce for open heart. That number, 7, recurs throughout religious and esoteric symbolism as a number of significance. In Hermeticism, for instance, the number 7 represents the manifestation of divine perfection in matter. In Christianity, 7 means the realisation of God’s kingdom in this world, through the conjunction of the Holy Trinity with the four corners of the earth. In Kabbalah, or rather at least according to Eliphas Levi, 7 represented the totality of the power of magic, backed by the sum of the soul and the four elements. Since the Hermetic tradition the number 7 denoted throughout “traditional” esotericism a mysterious harmonic function of the divine order that can be found everywhere in the universe. But, in the work in the Aleister Crowley, the number 7 referred to the goddess Babalon, as explicitly denoted by the seven-pointed star seal of the A∴A∴ (Astrum Argentum). Babalon, who in Thelema corresponds to the Biblical figure of the Whore of Babylon, is on her own a very complex representation of “divine” femininty, which is nonetheless defined primarily by transgression and wickedness, down to her angelic namesake (“Babalon” in the angelic langauge meaning “wicked”). The Biblical narrative presents the Whore of Babylon as a sinister and voluptuous feminine, opposed to the pious and sorrowful feminine embodied by the woman clothed in sun. Their visions are both accompanied by a demonic beast with seven heads and ten horn, who is both the antagonist of the woman clothed in sun and the ally of the Whore of Babylon. For Tripaldi this recurrence presents an alternate meaning to the number 7 that clashes with both the meaning presented by traditional “Western” esotericism and the symbolism of the seven daggers.
So where is that all going? Tripaldi’s reflection on the number 7 serves as the gateway to a broader discourse of an esoteric “divine feminine” that can be positioned against a divine patriarchal order and the traditional doctrine of its emanation across creation. It also seems to attend the recovery of a theme of pain and restraint that she perceives to be latent in the original Kabbalah and forgotten by the Western esoteric traditions that appropriated it, and, in a larger sense, to recover a dynamism and processuality in Kabbalah from the order imposed by the glyph of the Tree of Life.
In the Zohar, we are told, the descent of the divine into matter, and the ascent of matter into the divine, can occur in non-linear moments of emanation – moments that are marked by complication and interruption. Such moments are called Tzimtzum, or “contractions”, and are an important part of the manifestation of divine light as conceived in Kabbalah. They are also moments of rupture and separation that are in turn associated with “feminine” aspects of the process of emanation, as well as two of sefirah in particular: Binah and Malkuth. Binah and Malkuth seem to be involved in a ceaseless series of ascending and descending transmutations that see them both constantly merge and separate from each other. This process, for Tripaldi, points to the presence of a multitudinous “divine feminine” trapped within the architecture of creation. Rather than that familiar idea of a monotheistic Goddess parallel to a masculine God, Tripaldi proposes a multiplicity of divine femininity, and the liberation of this femininity in the processual forces of Kabbalah. In this sense, the cryptic diagram on the cover of Revolutionary Demonology is in some way illuminated. The Tree of Life is without a head. Kether, as the unity from which the divine order is emanated and the masculine godhead, is cut off, liberating the multiplicity of divine femininity and the form of nine apocalyptic goddesses. It is thus a signifier for a kind of alternative Kabbalah, animated by the spiral of a sinister divine feminine. I can perhaps sense the makings of a particular form of an goddess-centered (and arguably “anti-cosmic”) polytheism revolving around the goddesses that Gruppo Di Nun identifies with this spiral.
The tzimtzum are here defined as processes of separation within divinity that in turn facilitate its manifestation. To repair the separation of Malkuth from the divine light, Binah, the heavenly mother, is divided and her lower sefirot fall into darkness and corruption: a process referred to as tears falling into the Great Sea. This imagery obviously strikes a chord with the Catholic icon of Our Lady of Sorrows as Tripaldi has presented her so far, but for Tripaldi it also recalls the myth of Tiamat and her dismemberment by Marduk (I note here that Tripaldi refers to Tiamat as a “draconic Virgin Mother”, despite not ever being depicted as a “virgin mother” and really only tenuously identified as a dragon). The feminine polarity consists of a distance between two aspects that are identified and yet distant, and their respective symbolisms (the celestial abode for Binah, a red rose for Malkuth) ostensibly point to the two distinct female figures of the Book of Revelation: the woman clothed in sun and the Whore of Babylon. The process of rupturing and separation shatters the sefirot, interrupts the chain of divine emanation, and the empty shells sefirot become filled with impure forces (presumably the qliphoth). Through Gershom Scholem we get a throughline of an original rupture and separation as the causes of a primordial suffering brought on by a necessary separation from God, resulting in all being existing in exile. Three aspects of the Mother are part of this whole disruptive process: The Dragon, The Celestial Virgin, and Babylon The Great. They also represent a hidden generative force latent in the machinery of divine emanation, which replicates itself and will suffocate the order that contains it.
For Tripaldi, any esoteric struggle against the order of patriarchy means understanding the phenomena of disequilibrium that secretly make the divine order possible to start with. On its own, it is very possible to derive from this analysis a much larger analysis on the relationship between order and chaos, and especially the centrality of the latter. On the other hand, we still cannot but return to the question of the implications of the ancestral wound, especially when aligned with Kabbalah. I remember an analogy given to describe Kabbalah, whereby the point was for humanity to return to the garden of Eden. In essence, what that means is to correct the separation of humanity from God, represented in this analogy by the exile of Adam and Eve from Eden. Only here it’s not necessarily about God, and the separation pertains to the dismemberment of Tiamat. What does it entail for life, having arisen from separation? But I suppose for now, the pressing question is, what does the Tree of Life look like without the head?
We continue this inquiry by exploring migraine attacks, and their apparent prophetic character. Tripaldi perceives migraine as a pain that has no wound because it is the wound at the heart of the world. Percolating into every last particle of matter, migraine is said to reveal in everything the spectre of decomposition. A migraine crisis arrives and passes of its own accord and without a trace, and when it leaves all that remains is a feeling of well-being that is nonetheless plagued by a sense of guilt and suspicion. Tripaldi seems to recall an experience of being locked in a hotel room for two days, without eating or drinking, suffering so much that at points her consciousness began to waver, and at one night she experienced a vision of nostalgia for a primitive motherhood. One could say that this vision hints at Tripaldi’s idea of a hidden dimension of the world, accessible only by occult means, or, perhaps, made vaguely accessible by a migraine crisis. This, migraines are a kind of sinister unveiling of a hidden substratum of the world – an arcane world of pain, of the wound lodged in the heart of creation, and of the cry of agony that reverberates through the whole universe. In other words, the occult body of Tiamat. But it’s also here that we come to another, more concerted application of Christian mysticism. This starts with an account, from Oliver Sacks’ Migraine, of a patient suffering from a migraine attack and describing feeling a hole not only in their own memory but in the world itself, and feeling the instability of their own bodies. Tripaldi, through Sacks, links the migraine experience to the idea of suffering as a vehicle for the realisation of spiritual truths, and from there to “female mysticism”. And, by this, we of course mean Christian mysticism. Specifically, for example, we are invited to consider Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Catholic Carmelite nun who, in 1539, suffered a paroxysm in the process of what she called her “conversion”. This paroxysm caused Teresa to lay comatose for days and then remain paralysed for three years, and it also brought her to the brink of death. But, while she suffered all manner of torments from her paralysis, her body overcome with weakness and the feeling of death, she also described her experience as a kind of martyrdom, and asserted that when the body is in rapture it is as though it is in death.
For Tripaldi this all represents a very specific mode of mysticism, centered around an ecstasy that afflicts the soul from the outside like a disease, cannot be summoned intellectually, cannot be “resisted” once it visits upon the individual, and is defined by an intense suffering that, to lesser degrees, remains with the individual after the ecstasy has subsided. This form of mysticism can thus be understood as an ecstatic system, and for Tripaldi the basic idea is to be applied as an introspective, ecstatic, and fundamentally feminine mysticism in which suffering, rather than positioned as a another path to traditional initiatic gnosis, is its own goal as the highest form of gnosis. This is also meant to be contrasted with the application of meditation within “the intiatic traditions” as tending towards a desired state of “absolute concentration”, whereby the practitioner excludes all stimuli and gradually obliterates their individual consciousness in order to elevate it to the level of cosmic or universal consciousness, thus bringing it into coincidence with God. Tripaldi argues that Chaos Magick is an example of this in that Peter Carroll ostensibly marshalls a concept of no-mind that he calls “Gnosis” as a medium for magic to be affected. It’s a strange and arguably somewhat myopic interpretation of Chaos Magick, not least since it positions Chaos Magick as part of “the Right Hand Path”, and its justification is not especially systematic for the scope of Revolutionary Demonology. In fact, about a page and a half and one quote from Peter Carroll’s Liber Null seems to be the full extent of Gruppo Di Nun’s discussion of Chaos Magick, which hardly merits the prejudice reserved for Chaos Magick as a whole, let alone their distinct classification of it as part of “Western initiatic traditions”. But, since Chaos Magick is meant as an example of the mysticism of absolute concentration, and the mysticism of Teresa of Avila as a paragon of the ecstatic mysticism of suffering, it also almost seems like Tripaldi means to contrast Chaos Magick with – and there’s no beating around the bush here – Christianity.
This has a number of interesting implications. Obviously Gruppo Di Nun’s system can’t be thought of as Christian in itself, since it centers around a non-Christian mythology while rejecting many of the familiar tenets of Christianity at least in its exoteric sense. But we seem to see here a distinct application of Christian mysticism in conceptual terms: in other words, it accepts Christian ideas about mysticism and ecstasy, God and his son notwithstanding of course, and reapplies them to its own distinct framework. In my view, this still has the effect of lodging Christian mysticism at the centre of the philosophy of Gruppo Di Nun in that it serves as the intellectual basis of its philosophy of cosmological suffering, and that to me is another notch against their critique of Satanism as reproducing Christianity by inverting it. I know I never tire of the opportunity to seize on points like this, but it is interesting that the alternative to “reproducing Christianity” by way of Satanism should be to reproduce Christian mysticism in the name of Tiamat. The thing is, for Teresa of Avila, suffering could constitute a form of prayer to the Christian God, or a trial through which the sufferer would find God and become more spiritually pure through it. Perhaps “that my soul may emerge from the crucible like gold” denotes a hidden alchemical metaphor, with the suffering obviously being a form of nigredo. But the whole point is still opening yourself up to sufferings visited upon you presumably by God so that you can love God more. This form of suffering, in Teresa’s words, pleases God. The very notion of suffering as “the way of truth”, which she expounds, is inherently Christian thought. God gives trials that inflict suffering on those he considers spiritually strong so that the love of God may respond to them, while the saints inflict severe penances on themselves to battle the Devil. God, who is joyless in all instances except for moments of profound suffering, humbles and tests his would-be servants, leaving them with a hunger for suffering.
We invoke the term “suffering cult” a lot to describe Christianity in exoteric terms, but if anything that term is all the more apt for the deeper core of Christian mysticism that a lot of popular exoteric Christianity doesn’t always reflect. It is important remember that here, even though suffering can be positioned as its own goal, that is distinctly for its perceived revelatory practices, and in Christian mysticism, moments and revelations of suffering such as the visions and ecstasies of Teresa of Avila are meant to be understood as proof of God’s presence in and love for creation. Thus, Laura Tripaldi has reproduced Christian love, and even the cult of suffering in its mystical dimensions, in the form of mystical devotion to the primordial wound at the heart of the world, the cuts made into the flesh of Tiamat by Marduk, all while Gruppo Di Nun denounces Satanism as an expression of the Right Hand Path by accusing them of reproducing Christianity by way of inversion. One must wonder if we are to be thought fools for such a pretentious repression response to Satanism to be made so transparent. And ultimately, if we’re talking about a dichotomy between centripetal and centrifugal motion while favoring the centrifrugal, what irony, because what could be a bigger “cult of the Centre” than the God for whom Teresa suffered so abjectly?
Also, it is here that we come to a hole in the broad narrative concerning self-designation as an edifice of the Right Hand Path. After all, for starters Tripaldi says that, in the purview of absolute concentration, your own self-consciousness is obliterated. That part may be consistent with modern understandings of the Right Hand Path, but it is not consistent with the notions of self-deification found in a lot of the modern Left Hand Path. And, are you here fashioning your own selfhood into God or a god, or simply harmonizing it with God? After all, it does not seem that to “be brought into coincidence with God” must mean that the initiate actually becomes or imitates God. In that sense, this “self-deification” is not as it seems, and would call into question the critique made against the modern Left Hand Path.
Our journey through Tripaldi’s mysticism does not end here. We continue on through an exploration of virginity through the Greek and Roman cults of Artemis and Diana – both traditionally considered virgin goddesses. For Tripaldi, the myth of Artemis living alone in the woods in solitude, away from any male suitors, resonates with her own adolescent hope of refuge from patriarchal society in a pure wilderness: a hope seemingly shattered by that same uncontaminated purity consisting of the same obscenity and violence as the body. Virginity for Tripaldi is a pact tied to death because it is a sacrament of war. That is because for Tripaldi it is the promise to never participate in the reproductive order of patriarchal civilization, and embodies a militant recognition of womanhood as the key to both the preservation and destruction of this order. This is presented as a kind of self-sufficiency inherent in womanhood that amounts to an absolute monotheism that holds the entire universe to ransom in its power. A more lofty exaltation of womanhood there almost isn’t, let alone one more at odds with the notion that. More curiously though, I was sure that self-monotheism of some sort was supposed to be what Gruppo Di Nun declared a fascistic folly reserved the initiatic Right Hand Path. I suppose I’m left to conclude that it’s supposed to be bad when Satanists strive for their own apotheosis but not bad at all to consider virgin women their own goddesses, and just leave whatever rationale there is for that contradiction to my own imagination – I doubt its interpretation would be very charitable. But perhaps patience is in order: there is a subject we will examine later that will be relevant to the subject of self-deification.
In any case, virginity is its own mystery for Tripaldi, due to the paradoxical quality she attributes to it: simultaneously a source of the integrity of the social order and a cause of its very negation. The sanctity of virginity, which is obviously also a familiar fetish of traditional/conventional Christian sexual morality, is exemplified in the Vestal Virgins, whose vow of chastity was linked to the preservation of the whole body politic of the Roman state, and in Joan of Arc, whose purity is said to have ensured the destiny of the medieval Kingdom of France. It is here meant to be understood as a sacred condition, relevant to feminine mysteries, and representative of what Tripaldi supposes to be a purity that passes through creation. The goddess Artemis is here understood as fiercely representing just such a purity: those who approach her know that any outrage against her purity would be paid in their flesh and blood. That at least is the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who saw the naked body of Artemis and, as punishment for ogling her, was silenced, then turned into a stag, and then killed by his own oblivious hunting dogs.
As lunar goddesses Artemis and Diana are seen as dual-natured: bright and yet dark, chaste and yet perverse, protector and yet also destroyer, at once luminous and murderous. Of course, it should be noted that just this sense of duality is not at all unique to Artemis or Diana in the context of pre-Christian polytheism, where basically every deity was assumed to be “dual-natured” or multifaceted, and I think there’s a sense that this basic fact is more or less excluded as is a lot of the perspective of paganism for much of the book except for its second chapter. What seems unique about these goddesses, however, is what Pierre Klossowski describes in The Bath of Diana as their “closed” nature, by which is meant their renunciation of the possibility of the possibility of mortal union and their existence “beyond destiny”. That said, I doubt that the interpretation that the wholeness of the universe rests on a single goddess is in any way consistent with polytheism as a religious worldview where a multitude of divine presences pervade a universe that exists between all of them. Nor for that matter does it make sense to assume that Artemis or Diana exist “beyond destiny’ in a religious context where even Zeus answers to the Fates. Again, it seems that here the goddesses of pre-Christian antiquity are invoked so as to represent a larger metaphysical concept of virginity as part of the formation of a divine feminine multiplicity, but without sufficient consideration for the actual context of the ancient polytheism they were a part of. What seems far more operative for Tripaldi is the lunar symbolism of Diana, which certainly does reflect Diana’s dual nature in a more historical sense, and how she connects this back to the subject of Kabbalah.
In classical terms, the moon is both celestial and chthonic, a light in the sky that also represented the powers of the underworld. As a celestial object, the moon’s light is really a reflection of the sun, which makes it seems like a spectral double of the sun. But, we are told, the moon in Kabbalah corresponds to the sefira Malkuth, the “impure” aspect of the divine feminine from before, because it reflects light from God. According to Gershom Scholem, this reflected an exile referred to as “the lessening of the moon”, which in turn was interpreted as the exile of the Shekhinah, the “holy moon”. The moon is also heavily associated with cyclical time, its influence linked to the movemennts of the tides, the reproductive cycles of many marine animals, and at least traditionally the menstrual cycles of women. Tripaldi interprets this cyclicality as a cycle of purification through death, through the cycle of the Flood and the purification of menstruation, and thus the moon as a symbol of virginal purity and death. This makes the moon a distrubing aspect of the divine feminine, an object of maniacal love and sacred terror, containing in itself all the ancient violence directed upon its flesh. But for Tripaldi the moon also has a mask, whose removal is but the hunter’s foolish and blasphemous quest to domesticate the divine feminine. It is presumed that behind the face of the moon lies a lost harmony, but we have no certainty that its true face is any better than the mask we have built for her. Sacrilege and unknowability interplay in an interesting way here. God in Christian terms is not only unknowable but the attempt to comprehend him, let alone imitate him, is a sin. Knowledge is in Christian terms the blasphemy and disobedience that overturns everything, because that’s how it was in the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, in so doing they began their link to the realm of the gods, and so they were exiled from the garden, punished with the burden of original sin, and plagued further still by the apparition of their redemption in the form of Jesus Christ. If what hides behind the mask is no harmony, then what is it? No doubt a representation of raw entropy, or the death that is at once ineffable life. Might the blasphemy of discovery thus force us to confront the truth that lay beyond? Might the piety to the contrary only promote ignorace?
Still not finished, Tripaldi turns us next to the subject of Paolo Gorini, an Italian scientist whose legacy is commemorated in a square outside the University of Milan. He was also an embalmer, and was known as “the petrifier” for his experiments in mummification and preserving corpses. Gorini also found himself coming up against the Catholic Church for advocating the return of cremation to common practice for disposing of the dead. In the context of the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy), Gorini was going against traditional authority in a time of radical political and social change. At this time, positivist rationalism and new natural sciences were an axis of resistance against the obscurantism of traditional religious authority, and secret societies worked towards a new future governed by enlightened ideals, while in northern Italy that very struggle was fought over the bodies of the dead, and its traces are left in the necropolises. Gorini rationalized his interest in the preservation and destruction of human bodies through his horror at their decomposition after burial. He believed that what happened to buried bodies was worse than if they were simply left on the ground, and that burial would be unequivocably left behind as soon as anything less cruel was introduced. To that end, Gorini turned to two practices from two ancient civilizations. On the one hand, the ancient Egyptians petrified and mummified corpses to preserve the body for what was believed to be its resurrection; on the other hand, the ancient Greeks and Romans practiced cremation, burning the bodies of the dead and thereby hastening their decay. Either proposal, Tripaldi notes, amounted to the “mineralisation” of the body: whether petrification or combustion, the dead body is turned into a new form of matter.
In all truth, this is a rather strange interjection. It’s not quite clear how this discourse connects to the rest of Tripaldi’s discussion of the divine feminine in the context of her heterodox interpretation of Kabbalah. There is a discourse present in the treatment of the body as an alchemical matter, and Gorini deriving his ideas about cremation from his research into plutonic liquid, and its ostensible Hermetic significance. Plutonic liquid is the name of a mysterious liquid that Gorini thought created volcanoes and mountain ranges when made solid. Tripaldi opens the suggestion that Gorini was a magician, for which there is scant basis both within this essay and certainly without, but in any case his cause to preserve the human body or at least save it from burial is seen by Tripaldi as a magical quest to stop or reverse time. As if a “Promethean” challenge to the disintegration of matter, or, through the words of Elemire Zolla, a form of alchemy similar to the transmutation of metal into gold. And, in the face of defeat, Gorini chose cremation; for Tripaldi, this meant a last stand against time in which his body “decapitated” time by returning to an original state. But as fascinating as it may be to take this view of cremation and alchemy as a plunge into immolation over surrender to time, I am still unsure of how it pertains to the whole essay. Unless, perhaps the “petrifying gaze of eternity in the eyes of a severed head” is none other than the face behind the mask of the moon that Tripaldi discussed. Is that what we, like the example of Actaeon, are counselled to never reveal to ourselves? Would it destroy us so?
The last relevant section of this essay returns us to the subject of the Virgin Mary, or rather one of her names: Stella Maris, meaning “star of the sea”. This name is meant denote her as watching over sailors or seafarers, thus linking her to the light of the North Star. The name’s origin seems to be a transcription error upon the original Latin name Stilla Maris, meaning “drop of the sea”, as translated by Jerome from the Hebrew name Maryam. Now, what is the meaning of all this? It would seem to establish a connection between the Virgin Mary and the depths of the ocean, which must seem very unusual compared to her conventional association with the heavens. From this we’re then introduced to Thalassa, a book written by the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. Ferenczi’s apparent aim was to establish a scientific basis for a psychological link between motherhood and the ocean and the broader view that all life is based on return to the womb. The fact that Thalassa is almost exactly a century old (having been written in 1924) leaves us with the suggestion that we should not take the “science” strictly at face value. Incidentally, though, the name Thalassa, which is the Greek word for “sea”, resonates with the name Thalatte, the Hellenistic name for the Babylonian Tiamat – certainly a meaningful coincidence given the overall centrality of Tiamat throughout Revolutionary Demonology and particularly in Tripaldi’s essays. Anyways, Ferenczi’s thesis is based on a theory he called “thalassal regression”: the idea of a latent drive to return to a long-lost aquatic mode of existence, which he thought continued to operate in genitality. Within this theory, it’s not the ocean that symbolises the womb but rather the womb that reminds us of the ocean, from which our distant mammalian ancestors emerged.
Trauma seems to be the main fixation of Tripaldi’s exploration of Ferenczi’s Lamarckian psychoanalysis. Human beings here are like living fossils that bear in their bodies evidence of eons of geological trauma created by ancient catastrophes visited upon our evolutionary ancestors, like the drying up of the primordial ocean. Birth is presented as a trauma that repeats the trauma of life emerging from the sea, and sexual intercourse is presented as means of regression, fulfilling a desire to return to the ocean. It’s not hard to see how the analogy to the womb comes into play, but it also almost feels like the ocean is like a center-point from which life plunges and to which, even as it crawls to the surface, it remains chained, and thus must at some point plunge back. I assure you, it’s not obvious what’s so centrifugal about this diagram of origination and return. The main insight that Tripaldi derives from Thalassa is in the idea that inhuman, geological, catastrophic forces mold individual subjectivity in the context of a catastrophic cosmogony of separation that positions the human being as the ultimate recepticle of cosmic suffering. Our drive to emerge from the abyss is framed thus as a catastrophic urge for separation, rather than a creative act. The strange thing about this idea, though, is that Tripaldi has spent pages of her illuminating separation and exile as fundamental to the creation of the world in the Kabbalistic context of the manifestation of God’s light. In this setting, you cannot just uncouple separation from creation. Nonetheless, evolution is presented by Tripaldi through Ferenczi not as a rise to the top of some natural order but a continuous propagation of traumas that in turn always motivates the desire for regression. After this, the essay ends with a lamentation of everything plunging into darkness, paging the cry of Angela of Foligno: “my son, my son, do not abandon me, my son!”. Perhaps for Tripaldi this is also Tiamat crying out for her myriad offspring, her own flesh and blood separated from her body, hung on the cross of creation. Now that I think about it, a more Christianized metaphor for the myth of Tiamat there isn’t.
So what emerges from all this? We see a particular interpretation of Kabbalah through the theme of cosmogonic separation and exile that is then taken through the theme of primordial agony and manifests as a metaphysics of a catastrophic divine feminine. This divine feminine is multifaceted: in many ways a reification of the perceived wound of our separation from an original state of non-creation, but also a reflection of the death and entropy that underlies the whole basis of life itself, albeit more so the violence of creation. It is obvious that the multitudinous divine feminine is still supposed to be Tiamat, but perhaps it is also Babalon, the exposed and bleeding heart of the Virgin Mary, the virginal divinity of Artemis and Diana, the petrifying gaze of Medusa, and the ocean itself. It is still curious that eight out of the nine goddesses of the seal of Gruppo Di Nun (namely Ammit, Nammu, Kauket, Hushbishag, Nungal, Sekhmet, Uadjet, and Ishtar), while only Tiamat seems to be discussed anywhere at all. In any case, this is the complex of feminine mystery that Tripaldi proposes alignment with as an occult axis against the patriarchy, and which, in Tripaldi’s occult schema, is the hidden machinery of Kabbalah meant to rise up and take the head from the Tree of Life.
One does wonder, though, to what end? Perhaps it can be connected to Kulesko’s discourse of the shattering of the world which then facilitates endless creation, thus to sever the Tree of Life and shatter the Image of the World would mean to open up the space for endless horizons of new creation. Yet, I doubt this is the throughline we get from Tripaldi. Instead it seems more like this is to fulfill a different kind of death drive, that the divine feminine might resolve the agony of separation by constricting around the whole machinery of Kabbalah and initiating an ecstatic regression towards the ocean of Nun (which, we might be assured, is not an alternative Centre from which we have still fallen). In Tripaldi’s premise, creation is a violence that leaves a wound at the heart of the universe, of matter itself, and, if that pain has any means of resolution, regression to the ocean, which is here the drive towards dissolution, is that resolution. But if life inexorably carved itself out, would it not do so again? If so, then I wonder, what is the point? And, I suppose the question arises that if we had any awareness of the pain of the world and of our own desire for regression, and if dissolution was the love that fulfilled it, then if we really wanted to go back to the ocean we could just die. Yet we choose to live for as long as we can.
Italian Southern Gothic (The Third Nigredo)
Our third discussion of nigredo consists of the essay “Solarisation”, written by Valerio Mattioli. It is a rich exploration of the distorting power of the sun, and the alchemical cipher of the black sun, which is to be understood as a symbol of the process of nigredo, as situated in a tour of multiple distinct contours of modern Italian culture (or perhaps counter-culture). From Italian neorealist cinema, to giallo movies, to underground music, this scene is also explored in terms of an occult context of a land bathed in the sun’s light, and in my view provides valuable context for solar mythology relevant to the Left Hand Path. I have already discussed this particular essay in a separate article about the solar myth of Satan, which I propose as a central locus of Satanism that makes Satanism what it is (and, in turn, makes us Satanists what we are), with particular attention paid to Mattioli’s discussion of solarisation in relation to the subject of inversion and blasphemy. As such, I may attempt to minimize anything that risks repeating ground that I already trod last month. But a much broader exploration of the whole of the essay can be taken up in the scope of this article, and within this scope it would be my pleasure to give focus to Mattioli’s psychogeographical exploration of the occult landscape of Italy.
We are first introduced to Minor White, an American photographer known for his Surrealist pieces that employ the effect of solarisation: that is, a process of overexposure that both darkens and inverts the colour of an image. The monochromatic Oregon landscape of White’s “Black Sun”, made in 1955, is almost literally a textbook example of the technique of solarisation. It almost seems to reveal another world, as if hidden within this one, equal and opposite to it. For Mattioli, it’s as if that’s the point: to investigate and peer into a subconscious world parallel to our own. Photography was invented so as to produce images as mirrors of the real world around us, but ironically enough it was ostensibly first used to try and capture spectral presences (like ghosts or ectoplasms), and the camera filter, when activated properly, can invert photographs in ways that overturn the principles of empiral experience. Already, we see that humans by way of technical creativity can invert the world around them, revealing an other world and creating new worlds. What was meant as a tool to rationally document the world brought life to irrational worlds. Thus, through photography we begin to examine our subject of solar myth. The sun illuminates the world around us with its light, which to us should mean more reality accessible to us. But instead, more sunlight has the counterintuitve effect of distortion: solarisation means an exposure that exposes an “incorrect” truth. The solar disk turns black, the sky becomes milky, and all values change places. Thus, more sun does not mean more reality, but instead an inversion of reality. That observation has important implications that I intend to explore (or rather revisit), but suffice it to say for now that solarisation and sunshine appear magical a the fundamental sense: they change the world around them and overturn everything.
The black sun of alchemy, not to be confused with the other so-called “black sun” of neo-Nazism, enters into this in that solarisation is itself likened to nigredo. In alchemy, nigredo denotes the process of putrefaction in which matter is reduced to primordial chaos, the initial stage of the Great Work in which matter can begin to be transfigured into the perfection and immortality represented in the philosopher’s stone. For Mattioli, solarisation represents a kind of mechanical nigredo that explodes the sun’s light so as to translate it into what appears to be its opposite, and thus shatters the confines of the phenomenal world to reveal the invisible, unnameable, and the unknowable locked beneath it. To Mattioli this reveals primordial chaos in the form of an uninhabitable planet, and that it is revealed through a mechanical filter is to him all the more befitting of the inhumanity of the dimension that solarisation reveals, represented by the darkness of the black sun itself. But while it might be revealed through technique, it can only be known by occult means, by recourse to witchcraft and similar practices. Our sun ultimately emerges from that same world. The nigredo of solar myth can be interpreted along the lines of an active inversion, a blasphemy that will be made clear as we explore further. For Mattioli it is perhaps and abdication on the part of the alchemist’s self. But for the Satanist, this nigredo is the Fall re-enacted, a conscious inversion undertaken to reshape the world around you. There’s a sense in which solarisation here is a lot like Walter Benjamin’s concept of profane illumination: a non-contemplative materialist consciousness meant to allow the revolutionary subject to decode the superstructure of bourgeois society, destroy its field of reification and interact in full free consciousness with conditions as they really are. Or the way Henri Lefebvre described the mission of Surrealism as to “decode inner space and illuminate the nature of the transition from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to social life”. Yes, perhaps solarisation actually denotes an active principle of surreality, bending the world so as to reveal it.
An ancient folk belief (or perhaps superstition), illuminated by a quote from Giacomo Leopardi at the start of the essay, hangs in the background of this exploration. In Italy and other Mediterranean lands, people believed that the spirits of the dead would appear at noon and disturb the living. For this reason, Leopardi said, classical authors would warn shepherds against going to places like Pallene or Phlegra, the latter thought to house the bones of giants, at noon. At midday, when the sun was at its highest point in the sky, the world of the dead crossed with the world of the living, and the demons of the underworld appeared in the world above. Similar beliefs seem to appear in other cultures. In East European countries, a demon named Lady Midday (known in Poland as Południca) was believed to appear at the hottest time of noon, attack people in the fields, and occasionally ask them questions or challenge them to a dance. The Book of Psalms refers to a “destruction that despoils at midday”, which over time was translated through Jerome as the “daemonium meridianum”, or “Meridian Demon”. In Jewish demonology, a plague demon called Keteb was believed to be most powerful in the midsummer season and during the mid-day, and was also called Keteb Meririm. According to Cornelius Agrippa, Meririm was the name of the “Meridian Devil”, which he believed was the power of the air that worked in the children of disobedience. It’s often thought that these spirits were folk representations of the phenomenon of sunstroke, but the “daemonium meridianum” was also taken as a form of melancholy, depression, or rather a condition known as acedia (meaning basically listlessness or lack of care). Incidentally, acedia is also the Latin word given to the “deadly sin” of sloth. The irony, of course, is that we also use words like “sunny” to refer to the exact opposite conditions: happiness, joy, vibrancy etc., no doubt communicating a sense of life felt from the sun’s presence, which we in turn stereotypically associate with the peoples of the Mediterranean Basin. Or perhaps this all a cipher for a daemonic life, the vivifying light of an inner darkness that is the soul of this world, a soul that can be unlocked through solarisation.
For Mattioli, the sun is an altogether different presence from the optimistic light we perceive culturally. Per Antonin Artaud, it is a messenger of the breath of chaos, and Mattioli believes this communicates a perverse reality intuited by gothic fiction, whose classics were set in Mediterranean lands. For example, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, often considered the very first gothic novel, is set in a guilt-ridden Otranto, located in southern Italy, and Walpole claimed that he based it on what was originally an Italian manuscript, supposedly written in Naples in 1529. Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk casts its decadent story in Spain, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya is set in Venice, and need we say anything about Ann Radcliffe’s novels? In many ways this tendency reflected a mix of revulsion and fascination for an irrational outside within the Enlightenmentarian English psyche. But to really venture into a world where the sun doesn’t shine, we are to touch on a genre referred to as Italian Southern Gothic.
Italian Southern Gothic is the name given to a very broad cultural exploration of the macabre, the decadent, and the occult as running through the Mezzogiorno (as in, southern Italy). Italian Southern Gothic as we know it begins in 1954, when Alan Lomax, an American ethnomusicologist, visited Italy. Alongside his colleague Diego Carpitella, he travelled across the south to places such as Liguria and Carrara in order to study the sounds and culture of the region. It was also at this time that the modernization of Italy was about to begin in earnest, as Italy’s “economic miracle” was set to transform Italy into a modern industrial nation in its own right alongside its European peers. This of course was to see older, archaic communities obscured beneath the new highways built for the rat race of modern consumer capitalism. But it was just the arcane world beneath that Lomax was to find, and while he still could: a wild, transgressive, immoral world, unlike the quaint image of Italian folk culture. Wild and uncanny sounds portrayed a world of sexual mania, irrationality, demonic fantasy, inexplicable fear, mind-shattering guilt, and archaic religious and ritual practices that go back centuries in time. This all led to the development of a “New Hypothesis” wherein southern Italy was to be understood as a clash between the human body, its surrounding social context, and memory. It also not only disturbed Lomax himself but also apparently horrified some of the Italian cultural intelligentsia, as I’m sure the dark side of life so often does.
Lomax was not alone in searching this arcane world. Ernesto De Martino, an Italian anthropologist, wrote essays and studies that elaborated a geography of sinister tales of decadence and even abuse interspersed with arcane religious rites and magical formulas. De Martino thus, for Mattioli, embodies a solarisation that unravelled a world of meridian demons and blind divinities just as Lomax unravelled the lost world of Mezzogiorno. This solarisation is indeed an unparalleled exercise in profane illumination. Further, I find myself imagining a perverse form of Terrence McKenna’s “Archaic Revival”, one where unlocking the liberationist values of a distant past means unlocking the sinister underbelly of the present. Italian Southern Gothic is in this sense a mechanism of solarisation whose hyperrealist gaze allows us to discover truly archaic contents that animate or lurk beneath the world we live in. It may indeed open up mystical and esoteric praxis that enhances the Left Hand Path in its access to the true ground of being, as if the substance of innate enlightenment (here I am admittedly invoking Bernard Faure’s image of Daikokuten within esoteric Tendai Buddhism).
The theme of hyperreality turns us toward a genre of film that, in its late years, seemed to draw inspiration from the ethnographic work of Alan Lomax and Ernesto De Martino. Enter, Italian Neorealism. The term “neorealism” refers to a gritty and almost documentary form of cinema that emerged in the middle of the 1940s and focused on depicting the realities of life in post-World War II Italy. Directors such as Luigi Di Gianni, Roberto Rossellini, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Vittorio De Sica, Cecilia Mangini, and Federico Fellini all sought to bring to focus a society exhausted by poverty as it struggled in the beginning of life after Benito Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. The point was to portray the real conditions of contemporary Italian society just as they were, right down to its worst aspects, without any artifice, metaphor, symbolism, or dreamlike flourish. For this, neorealism is typically recognised as a form of documentary denunciation rather than an expression of Italian Southern Gothic. But, for Mattioli, this impression is not complete, and merely reflects a more polite repression of a latent arcane world, one befitting the emerging reign of rational modernity.
To illustrate what Mattioli sees as a practical interplay between hyperrealism and demonic solarisation, we are referred to the novel Conversations in Sicily, written by Elio Vittorini in 1941. In the novel, Vittorini apparently lets his documentary narrative of Sicilian life subtly move towards oneiricism. Perhaps the better example might be Carlo Levi’s memoir, Christ Stopped At Eboli, which is a reflection of Levi’s life and travels as a political exile in southern Italy that is apparently nonetheless populated with witches, cemeteries, drunken priests, and invisble brigands, who all form the image of a land where time has stopped and neither reason and history have a place, all inaugurated by a solar eclipse. More than that, however, it is in neorealism we see a perverse magic to solar inversion. The example we are presented with is a short documentary film titled Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (Notes On A News Story), directed by Luchino Visconti in 1951, which focuses on the story of the abduction, rape, and murder of a 12-year old Annarella Bracci in the Primavelle district, which was probably one of the most notorious crimes of the day. The film depicts the sunlit outskirts of Rome in the throes of its worst nightmares, almost morphing before our eyes into a desert where human and non-human garbage is tossed aside, and a road in the final shot connecting the Primavelle flats to a sky that seems like an omen of damnation. The inertia and salvation of the golden city seems like an inferno, and thus, in Mattioli’s words, Hell lies in the celestial vaults. Mattioli treats this as an iconic representation of solar inversion. That very solar inversion also strikes a chord with Satanic inversion: after all, if heaven is hell, is hell not heaven, and is God not thus the ultimate villain of his own cosmic drama? Though, for Mattioli, the relevant aesthetic fulfillment of solar inversion for the old neorealism is in its slow rhythm, its narratives of abject fatigue and social nightmares, lack of colour, and above all the fact that these films were typically filmed on long summer days and shot in the open air, altogether conveying the acid of excessive sunlight.
The transition from black and white films to colour films also meant a transition from neorealism to “post-neorealism”, and the qualities of neorealism passing into two iconic Italian cult movie genres: spaghetti westerns and giallo movies. Spaghetti westerns were Italian movies set in the “American West”, or rather the picture of an American West filled with stylized violence and revolving around the bleak stories of rugged, often silent protagonists. Giallo movies were essentially horror-thriller or murder mystery movies that were also known for their wild eroticism, madness, violent gratuity to the point that they can be called “slashers”, and, often enough, a flair for esotericism, supernatural horror, and even psychedelia. Their bright colours manage to subtly invoke the weight of the Mediterranean sun, but they also still seem to lead back to a kind of meridian nigredo. But from there we come an odd but insightful discussion of a principle of solarisation that is also descriptive of the magical principle of solar myth: the whiteout. Here, Mattioli is talking about what he calls the “Mediterranean whiteout”. This is a phenomenon where, when the sun is its at brightest, its light seems to turn the whole field of vision into a vast white expanse, leading a blindness bound in the liquification of existence. For Mattioli, the cinematic genius of the whiteout is none other than Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose movies seem to activate inverting properties of solarisation and the amplifying the properties of the principle of neorealist cinema: the need to know and modify reality. Mattioli then positions this need as a magical gesture, an expression of Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic as “the Science and Art of causing changes in conformity with the Will”. Thus magic itself expresses the quality of solarisation.
Here, we can briefly revist the solar myth of Aleister Crowley. As Cavan McLaughlin observed in his essay The Dark Side of the Sun, Crowley’s own life was a solar myth supported by his own magical will. He was born as Alexander Edward Crowley, dubbed himself Aleister Crowley as an act of magical self-authorship, and in 1930 he even faked his own death by suicide by spreading false information and producing a fake suicide note, only to then re-emerge alive and well in Berlin. Crowley in a sense distorted the boundary between fiction and realtiy, solarising the world around him and creating a new one. The property of solar myth consists in the interpretation of the need to know and modify the world as the desire to overturn everything, changing it in accordance with will. Neorealism was received as a documentary denunciation, and welcomed with the moral ends of humanism. But in Crowleyan terms, the need to know and modify the world is an amoral desire, from which begins an amoral quest. McLaughlin again illuminates this, in that, if every man and every woman truly is a star, then the magical quest for transcendence or doing what thou wilt has the potential to “make monsters of us all”. But then if life per Schopenhauerian terms life is kind of monstrous, and we are all thus monsters for participating in it, then, in Nietzschean terms, we cannot really cower from it. Thus is the starting point of Crowleyan solar heroism as its own solarisation: every man and woman is a star, meaning that they are Suns, in that they are at the center of their own magical universe, and their light may shine down on the world, transforming it entirely, overturning everything in the process.
Mattioli presents the cinematic career of Pier Paolo Pasolini as a kind of journey of initiatory journey of solarisation. This journey begins with Accattone, where Pasolini seems to turn Rome, the “Eternal City”, into a phantasmagorical sea of light marked by a stark contrast of white and black, whose geometries come to take a surreal and tenebrous quality associated with the city of R’lyeh in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. The journey ends in Salo, Pasolini’s adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, whose reputed unwatchability and brutality would seem to coincide with the similar unwatchability of the noonday sun. Mattioli connects the “death and terror” of Salo to Georges Bataille’s description of Mount Vesuvius as a “filthy parod of the blindingly hot sun”, and then, to a different parody: the anus. For Bataille, volcanoes are like the asshole of a world that eats nothing, and constantly spew out its contents. Mattioli then links that theme to Salo as the sum of the link between the sun and the asshole, both at least figuratively impossible to lay eyes on, then we are brought to the magical property of anal sex. Seemingly an inversion of the function of procreation and the mandate of the sun to illuminate the world, anal sex is here positioned as an instrument of reconciliation with the arcane world parallel to ours, revelaed by the light of a black sun, and in a way that echoes Austin Osman Spare’s concept of “new sexuality”. For Spare, this meant accessing the innermost layers of the psyche through “unnatural” sexual acts in order to trigger the awakening of primordial states of the subconscious mind, which he called “atavistic resurgence”. Kenneth Grant described this as a process by which Spare visted fantastical cities constructed of lines and angles that seemed unlike anything on Earth. Mattioli relates this to the lost city of R’lyeh in Lovecraft’s work and Pasolini’s treatment of the city of Rome in Accattone. It’s fairly interesting that in this essay Chaos Magick (or at least as anticipated by Spare) seems to align with the aims that Mattioli and the Gruppo Di Nun at large present while in the previous essay the entire tradition of Chaos Magick is portrayed as part of the “Western iniatic tradition” on the basis of a single passage from Liber Null.
But, from here, we come to an aspect of Pasolini’s solarisation that I find rich with Satanic significance: the assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini on the beaches of Ostia. The very name Ostia clues us in on the nature of solar inversion: simply put, it overturns everything. It simultaneously references the holy communion wafer of Catholic liturgy and the hidden blasphemy of the solar disc. The name Ostia relates to the Latin words “hostia”, meaning “victim”, and “hostis”, meaning “adversary”: the former can be seen as Jesus, the divine victim central to Christianity, and the latter as Satan, the Adversary himself. Yet, it also actually comes from the Latin word “ostium”, meaning “mouth”, as in the mouth of a river. A mouth where water and shit exit the metropolis of Rome: the anus of the city. But it is also the Mithraic solar disc trapped inside the Christian host, and thus the secret of blasphemy. Every mockery and desecration of the cross, every carnal gratification for its own sake, kink, queering, disinhibition, insurrection, all sure the same magic as solar inversion, and the monstrous duality of solar mystery, and in turn solar myth. In Satanic terms, this is the creative act of blasphemy, the creative act of “Satan’s Fall”, the primordial insurrection, the a rebours (reversal) that is central to Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s understanding of Satanism. Without surrender or abdication, we penetrate the world with our own solar rays, as we partake in a defiant Satanic nigredo that is disinhibition and solarisation. The Ostia described by Mattioli is perhaps its own psychogeography of blasphemy, its own example of satanic solar inversion, as the place where, as he put it, the hierarchies of the city of Rome are upended.
What Pasolini brought to life in his work was an alternate city of Rome. In ancient Roman myth and tradition this city had a name: Remoria. Remoria was the mythical city that was to be founded by Remus, the twin brother of Romulus. The traditional myth goes that, when Romulus and Remus had finished restoring their grandfather as king of Alba, the two brothers set out to found a city of their own, but they argued bitterly over where the city should be built, and eventually Remus was killed while Romulus established Rome as we know it. Remoria can thus be seen as an image of what Rome could have been. All this also sits beneath a dark sun, or rather a solar eclipse. According to Plutarch, Remus was killed by Romulus during what happened to be a solar eclipse. For Mattioli this invites us to look beyond the sun to another world.
But what does that other world look like? Mattioli says that Romulus, as the founder of Rome, seemed to establish the civilizational archetype of “the West”, with its emphasis on a vertical ideology of hierarchy, order, and discipline, constructed atop a square city of continuous conquest and production what is, with no tolerance for waste. Remoria, in this picture, would seem to be a chaotic and circular city of expenditure and sacrifice of what never was, a spectral twin city born dead, welcoming the waste of the world and reflecting the irrational qualities attributed to Remus. Yet this Remoria exists within Rome itself: the senseless and chaotic suburbs that are connected to Rome by the anal symbol of the Grande Raccordo Anulare, which seems to mimic the circumference of a volcanic crater and form a solar disc on the ground. In this way, it would seem that the other world is always lying beneath the surface of this one, seemingly inseparable from this world. If Mattioli is to be believed, there are urban legends surrounding the Grande Raccordo Anulare that position it as some kind of magic seal, which if we take them for granted would perhaps literally make it an occult ideogram planted in Rome. This, the hidden structure of an arcane world is there, waiting to be unravelled by the solar will of a magician looking to unleash the darkness of the world.
Delving deeper into the Italian underground we start to explore what Mattioli figures as the sound of Remoria. This begins with Italian techno music, focusing on the album Muta, which was released by Leo Anibaldi in 1993. Muta seems to be unique among techno records in that techno as a genre seems to inaugurate a cybernetic age, but Muta does not, apparently sounding a little too much like old giallo soundtracks to have that feel. But then, from Mattioli’s description, Rome at this time was still hardly a cybernetic city; in fact, he claims that Rome was never even a punk city. By the turn of the 1970s and 80s, the most prevalent subculture among the young working class of Rome was goth subculture (which, incidentally, centres around a music genre that spun off from punk), which celebrated the night, the long sunless winters, and tanless flesh. This apparently has nothing to do with the old gothic novels frequently being set in Italy. More fitting the scene seems to be the disc of death celebrated by Coil on their album Scatology. But Leo Anibaldi’s work is also positioned in what Mattioli calls a “dark continuum”, which apparently begins with a band named Goblin.
Goblin was an Italian progressive rock band formed in 1972 by Claudio Simonetti, the same Claudio Simonetti who went on to compose soundtracks for several Italian horror movies. In fact, Goblin made music for numerous films directed by Dario Argento, including Suspiria,Deep Red, and Phenomena to name just a few. But, at the end of the 1970s, Claudio Simonetti became a disco producer and got involved in a number of disco bands. Local DJs around this time played alongside Simonetti before eventually moving on from Italo disco to house, and then new DJs would discover techno and develop a new “Sound of Rome”. Then, as the 1990s progressed and rave parties became the new scene, amidst the electronic decadence of drugs and esotericism emerged a rap group called TruceKlan, which brought Anibaldi’s brand of techno together with Satanism and the legacy of neorealism and giallo movies into their own distinct sound. Although they remained obscure everywhere else, they apparently had a major impact in Rome, and into the 2010s one of TruceKlan’s producers went on to create a trap collective called Dark Polo Gang. Thus is Mattioli’s dark continuum, running from the morbid legacy of giallo movies to a new kind of depressive dark trap music.
That dark continuum seems in itself to be an expression of Italian Southern Gothic, in that we behold a hidden world of decadence beneath the surface of the golden city, locked inside, per Visconti’s description, the inertia and salvation. Hell continues to lie inside the celestial vaults. Celebrations of anal sex and roundabouts around the GRA form a kind of modern Witches’ Sabbath. The myth of the Witches’ Sabbath resonates in the rave parties due to their character as an ecstatic, transgressive, and “illicit” counterculture, but also in a commitment to inverting their surroundings, revealing the symbol of the world turned upside down. Again we see an avenue for Satanism. For Stanislaw Przybyszewski, the myth of the Witches’ Sabbath corresponded to a ritual manifestation of a Satanic-Nietzschean transvaluation of values, an event whose orgies, dances, and sacrifices culminate in a dissolution of reality and/or the sensorium into an endless night in which Satan appears. This inversion sees flesh and its instincts triumph over law and the social order, desire exceeds itself by its fulfillment in communion with Satan, and sin itself, along with holiness, and all good and evil, dissolve into nothingness. Only joy and desire remain: wealth, God, morality, the pursuit of power, all of these are worthless before this raw revolt of flesh, and they melt before Satan’s inner world as revealed by the frenzy of the Witches’ Sabbath. In the case of the Italian underground, their frenzy, their artifical rhythms, synthetic drugs, samples, and autotune all reveal an inhuman, inorganic world, the image of a dead planet. For Italian Southern Gothic at large, in the work of Alan Lomax the frenzy of the songs and screams he recorded were a revelation of a spectral world seemingly populated by the living dead. But these all point to an axis that reveals disinhibition as a solarising act that unravels an arcane world, that is at once the ground of this world. It is as if ecstasy as a means of revelation, and yet that ecstasy is not the suffering of Teresa of Avila. No, for Satanism it is a joy and triumph that destroys all else.
Finally, we revist the legacy of giallo movies through one film in particular that Mattioli deems archetypical for the genre. Directed by Giulio Questi in 1972, Arcana is a film that depicts a widow named Ms. Tarantino and her son living in Milan, having moved there from the south, and practicing spiritualism and magic. Ms. Tarantino makes money by performing seances with the aid of her secret magical knowledge, while her son somehow forces her to teach him said magical arts so that he can use them to cause panic wherever he goes and however he pleases. At the background of the film seems to be an unresolved tension between a fully modern and industrial Milan on the one hand and a still very much occult south on the other hand. Questi apparently performs a cinematic whiteout to depict the south in overexposed but dark images to convey its constant presence in the past. But Milan contains its own darkness. Its underground construction sites almost seem home to ancient chthonic powers and irrationality, while conveying assemblies of men amputated in their work. Even though Arcana is a film that centers occult themes, for Mattioli it is fundamentally a realist movie, in that it also centres an emigration from southern Italy to the north that has been depopulating the south since World War II. Modern, “enlightened” Milan sits ensconsed in the comforts of Capital, while sinking its bowels into an underworld of construction sites and curses. That underworld is a negative of Milan itself, a kind of negative that every city contains witin itself, a double that pushes for the inversion of the city we know, and it which is thus a force of solarisation. From there Milan upends itself from within, as in the Covid-19 pandemic, for Mattioli, unravels the truth of the disk of death: that there is no consumption without waste, no nourishment without excrement, and that there is always an asshole somewhere. But another inversion took place: Milan, which previously saw continous emigration from the south, was abandoned by those some southerners seeking refuge in their motherlands, and became one big ghost town. Within Italy, that flight was portrayed as a betrayal by southerners of the city that welcomed them, but for Mattioli it was just the city consuming and then execrating a mass of labour, and thus having suceeded in its mission as the machinery of Capital.
From this final psychogeographic revelation we turn our heads to the sky once more, to see the Medierreanean sun burn and evaporate everything one last time, and behold Lucifer shining in the sky. The Canicola that conludes Mattoli’s essay tells us of a Sun that, from 150,000,000 kilometres above our planet’s surface, evaporates all shadows, and melts all knowledge, desertifies the earth, and whose fire is the very fire of hell itself. Mattioli in this sense portrays light and darkness as ultimately the same; hell lies and the celestial vaults, but hell is heaven and heaven is hell. Too much light actually means too much darkness rather than more illumination, and for this reason Lucifer, the light-bringer, is in truth a master of shadows. The connection between Lucifer, the spirit of the morning star himself, and the sun almost seems like an echo of Charles Leland’s Lucifer (or Lucifero), who was cast in Aradia as a sun god, similar to the Greek and Roman god Apollo. In any case the sun stands as the source of life, death, and the life of death, and the principle of delusions, abnormalities, and all abysses of the human psyche. Mattioli’s sun almost seems to take on the principles of the God of Christian negative theology, who is “dark” in the sense that God is “dark” precisely because he exists as a superabundance of light, which would naturally blind human consciousness. But, on the other hand, this sun might just as well be the “Father of Lies”, the Devil, on the same terms. Either way, it is the light of the sun overturning everything in a surreal field of vision, that surreality being nothing but creation, and new creation. By this understanding God would be one more magician, and Satan in this schema would just happen to reject God’s particular design.
Without reprising the entirety of my previous article on solarisation, we can summarize the primary takeaway. The exploration of Italian Southern Gothic (which I believe I would like to continue on its own in a future article) is a valuable illustration of a particular kind of gnostic katabasis and magical gesture, whereby one “descends” into hidden structures or membranes of the world so as to become fully aware of the world in a way that is only possible through its darkness. Yet it is solar inversion in particular that poses a problem for Gruppo Di Nun’s critique of Satanism, at least in the sense that I, within my previous article alone, am able to elaborate ways in which the discourse of solarisation aligns with and even enhances some conception of Satanism. Granted, much hinges on a matter of perspective. If, after all, what primarily matters is some sense of “abdication” to the other world, then Satanism at large would still not align with that. But if what counts is the illustration of blasphemy as a magical act, by which the will may make change occur through solar inversion, then it is actually somewhat easily to develop a Satanic understanding of what Mattioli means to convey. Satan is insurrection, Satan is the sun at the heart of the world, the primordial engine of overturning everything: The Adversary.
Masochism As Gnosis (The Fourth Nigredo)
Our fourth discussion of nigredo is revolves around the essay “The Highest Form of Gnosis”, written by Enrico Monacelli. This essay is Enrico Monacelli’s elaboration of masochism not only as a principle of inverted wisdom but the absolute fundamental principle of the overall philosophy put forward by Gruppo Di Nun as a whole. I believe it is here that again move closer and closer to the core of Gruppo Di Nun’s answer to life. “Solarisation”, in Gruppo Di Nun’s schema, would serve as the revelation of a world whose tongue invites its visitors to become vessels of its transmission. “Mater Dolorosa” in a certain sense prepares the centrality of masochism by positioning suffering as its own goal and the mechanism of revelation. Yet “Solarisation” and “Cultivating Darkness” present alchemical avenues that, as I have shown, can still lead to an alternative to masochistic mysticism. “The Highest Form of Gnosis”, in this sense, is different, in that its philosophical pessimism lacks these avenues of subversion, and hinges entirely on ontological masochism. What is also central to Monacelli’s essay and the masochistic ontology he presents is a dialogue around the fearful encounter of Julius Evola, one of the foremost philosophers of traditionalism and 20th century fascism, and Carlo Michelstaedter, arguably one of the most formidable philosophical pessimists of the 20th century. This dialogue serves as a way to dissect Evola’s system of esoteric fascism as a response to Michelstaedter’s philosopher, so as to contrast it with Monacelli’s philosophy of masochism, with the aim of presenting this masochism as the diametric opposite of esoteric fascism and the ultimate means of breaking the spiral of fascism. Such a discourse cuts right into Gruppo Di Nun’s particular strategy of inversion, reflected in the namesake being a subversion of Julius Evola’s Gruppo Di Ur, and therefore allows us to cut deeper into its conceits.
We can, to start with, skip the first seven pages of Monacelli’s essay insofar as they largely recapitulate the psychogeographical exploration carried out by Valerio Mattioli in the previous essay. Instead, I think it is more pertinent to move straight on to his discussion of masochism. And even there, it is difficult to see if anything valuable could be said of Mattioli’s conceptual denunciations of “healthy sex”, “the abandonment of fetish”, and “the BDSM romantic comedy we find ourselves trapped in”. Monacelli appears to think that modern sexuality consists only of a one bivalent form of sexual deviancy consisting of the servant-master dialectic. I would posit that this is only his own unfamiliarity. He quotes Gilles Deleuze to support this idea and apparently Deleuze thought the very term “sadomasochism” was a construction of psychoanalysis meant to convince us that there is only one form of sexual deviancy. Well, notwithstanding that I might consider some aspect of Monacelli’s writing here to constitute psychoanalysis in itself, and to some extent the core philosophy of Gruppo Di Nun as a kind of psychoanalytical application, if Deleuze says this then I would maintain that Deleuze is also wrong. Everyone even vaguely familiar with fetishes or pornography knows what kind of fetishes exist which exceed this familiar field, and it is almost safe to assume that no one actually believes that there is just one form of sexual deviance. What exactly is the “servant-master” dialectic of the fecalphiliac, for instance? The assumption of bivalence in regards to fetish or kink is in many ways inherently flawed, and one would think that that a system billing itself as queer occultism should be innately familiar with that. I don’t find it entirely productive to dwell on this subject too long. In the end, Monacelli’s discussion of feitsh is a protracted appeal to taste, and perhaps it’s safe to assume Monacelli just isn’t into BDSM. But what he believes to be a comedy is its own ritual, a ritual that some of us enjoy and live by. In Kulesko’s terms, as long as we’re all just making our own meaning from the black magma of the cosmos, what does it matter what “comedy” by which people fornicate with each other? Kink and taste are what they are, so what matters is the philosophical substance Monacelli intends to propose.
That being said, I suppose we can comment on Monacelli’s discussion of sadism. Monacelli interprets sadism as an annihilating desire to be God’s right hand man, and echoes Deleuze’s opinion that the apogee of sadism is, rather than Marquis De Sade, none other than the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. This perhaps comes solely down to the perception of Spinoza’s philosophy as mechanistic, and sadism as a mechanistic desire. Not really much to work with in this sense, though Deleuze claims this is all to do with sadism supposedly impersonalizing violence with the support of an idea of pure reason. This almost feels like the way Vladimir Lenin and his successors define imperialism into something distinct from imperialism. Deleuze’s “sadism” could as well describe all conventional violence or political violence, which typically de-personalize or even deny violence, justifying it by turning it into reason, whereas sadism simply isn’t sadism without the derivation of pleasure. Indeed, even the most extreme and systematic forms of fascism are justified not by sadistic pleasure but by depersonalization as the hand of fascistic reason. But Monacelli in any case derives from this the idea of sadism as “separative wisdom”, meaning that it divides and lacerates the unity of the world, but for Monacelli it also cuts against and dissolves the self. His description of sadism sort of strikes a chord with Stirner’s concept of devourment, but that’s what makes it all the stranger that he should read it as “self-dissolution”. It seems obvious that, since the masochistic death drive is, in Gruppo Di Nun’s analysis, the centre of all cosmic life, all behaviour must be mapped onto self-dissolution or the desire to surrender. I will say that one can take up a form of self-dissolution as dissolving into apotheosis in the sense that Kulesko’s Dracula, and in turn Hellsing‘s Alucard, embody, it also seems like it’s also, ironically enough, just what Kulesko was counselling us against: to isolate a single desire or aspect of being as the fundamental principle of the universe. That may just be the inherent self-made contradiction for Gruppo Di Nun’s core ethos.
With that, we can move on to the “perverse mysticism” of masochism. Whereas sadism is “separative wisdom”, masochism could be understood as “regressive wisdom”. Masochism, for Monacelli, means to recall our point of origin and enjoy descent and immersion in the terror of infinite night. But already, from the starting point of the masochist as the faithful receiver of the massacre of the cosmos, back through Monacelli’s definition of sadism, it almost seems that, despite the denunciation of the servant-master dialectic in BDSM, Monacelli positions us as part of the one servant-master dialectic that he can accept. If sadism is the amplified wisdom of separation that lacerates the body and the cosmos, and the universe itself is a Landian machine of laceration, then it feels amusing to think that we might be asked to accept a God that separates and to reject any separative wisdom that might be our own. It almost comes back to the idea that God can distort, create, and destroy but we humans cannot. Our place is not to imitate God, only to be constantly solarised, confused, perverted, and destroyed by God. The opposite perspective is the path of Satan, of Lucifer, or Sophia.
It’s worth briefly focusing on what Deleuze tells us about Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Galician Tales. In the beginning of the book, a wanderer condemns Nature as evil, and Nature responds to the wanderer that she does not hate humans, even when she deals death, but is simply cold, severe, and maternal. Deleuze proposes this as a steppe that buries sensuality and sadism and also transmutes desire and cruelty. From another perspective, though, the coldness of Nature is an idea shared by De Sade. For De Sade, Nature is a whole matrix of generation whose basic process depends on destruction and recombination. Death and destruction are the basis of Nature’s ability to create, things die so that Nature can bring new things into being, and matter is continually re-arranged by Nature as it dies. It makes no difference to Nature if a human being were to reincarnate as a centipede. This idea appears frequently in De Sade’s work, often as a device for characters to justify the tortures they inflict. But in this sense, both the sadistic worldview of De Sade and the masochistic worldview of Masoch as an almost cruelly impersonal and necessarily destructive basis for life. The difference is that De Sade’s sadist views themselves as following in Nature’s example, deriving solely from Nature’s power and “law” while perhaps imitating its destructive creativity in their exercise of imagination, per Geoffrey Gorer’s description modifying the external world for the pleasure of doing so, while Masoch’s masochist seems to surrender to this Nature, and this Nature, rather than furnishing the desires of the individual, seems to subsume and change them. Monacelli seems to embrace Masoch’s idea on the basis that it sketches a descent into what he sees as the “geo-traumatic core of sexuality”. It seems here that we have returned to Laura Tripaldi’s ideas about the wound of creation, and by extension to Ferenczi’s psychoanalytical theories.
Perhaps enlighteningly, we see Monacelli’s discussion of masochism venture into Christianity. In fact, he seems to regard masochism as the basis and fulfilment of Christian mysticism and theology. It seems to me like this says something about the nature of Gruppo Di Nun’s masochistic outlook. Monacelli here invokes the example of Henry Suso, a German Dominican friar who our author considers to be among the most misunderstood pioneers of mysticism. Suso apparently tortured himself and built instruments of torture for the purpose of understanding the self-torture of God, thus, in this exact sense, almost “imitating” Jesus Christ. Suso’s dialogue with “Eternal Wisdom” seems to show God revealing transcendence as a humiliating immanence that empties desire and everything else. In this exact sense, mysticism for Monacelli means going down into what he takes to be Love, a kind of primordial trauma at the basis of sexuality. Thus, Monacelli’s masochism is a sexuality that abolishes humanity and turns the mystic into a voice for an omniscient, ineffable, unmanifest, and unnameable God, which is thus Monacelli’s representation of the Outside.
It is here that we revisit the problem and contradiction of Gruppo Di Nun’s rejection of Satanism. Gruppo Di Nun interprets the entirety of modern Satanism as a reinterpretation of the “principles of the Right Hand Path”, accuses Satanism of being structurally identical to the religions that it opposes, and asserts that Satanism reproduces Christianity by way of inverting it. But, just like in the case of Laura Tripaldi, we see Enrico Monacelli quite literally reproduce Christianity, quite literally basing his philosophy of masochism on Christian mysticism, literally identifying Gruppo Di Nun’s Outside with the Christian God. Admittedly a most fascinating, if misguided subversion: here, if Satanism is somehow “the Right Hand Path”, then per their terms the “Left Hand Path” at least looks an awful lot like Christianity. In fact one might reckon the notion of cosmic love at the centre of things as a reflection of Christianity. There is certainly a notion of disintegrating love that both Monacelli and Tripaldi trace directly to Christian mysticism. Is it on the back of this substance that Gruppo Di Nun rejects Satanism? In this sense their rejection of Satanism emerges as all the more hypocritical, incoherent, and actually quite farcical. Yet it also seems to echo the old divide of philosophical pessimism: that of Schopenhauer versus Nietzsche. In this sense one cannot help but sense the fulfilment of masochism in Christian mysticism as the consummation of the Nietzschean critique of Christianity, the full circle of the denial of life often typified as the Schopenhauerian response to life.
But from here we move on to the subject of a “terrible Italian affliction”, by which Monacelli means the suicidal gnosis of Carlo Michelstaedter, the illumination of what Monacelli observes as the anti-social pleasure and revelation of suicidal descent. Michelstaedter’s thesis, Persuasion and Rhetoric, is regarded by Gruppo Di Nun as a precursor of the philosophy of entropic cosmic love that they outline at the start of Revolutionary Demonology, which would make it rather central to their core project. Michelstaedter outlined what was, in his view, a radically indifferent universe that consists of a primordial hyperentropic hunger of a will whose end is annihilation. After writing Persuasion and Rhetoric, Michelstaedter committed suicide: an act that some people believe to be the practical culmination of his philosophy. It seems that none other than Julius Evola also almost committed suicide after reading Persuasion and Rhetoric. Apparently it was only by reading a fragment of the Majjhima Nikaya, one of the five Nikaya texts within the canon of Theravada Buddhism, did Evola become persuaded to not kill himself. And then, against annihilating cosmos of Michelstaedter, Evola proposed a fascist metaphysics that he called “Magical Idealism”. Monacelli contrasts this with Michelstaedter’s answer to life, which Monacelli supposes to be an openness to “inorganic desire”, even if means total surrender to the laws of cosmic massacre. Such illustrates the core dichotomy of Gruppo Di Nun’s worldview: the split is between the “Right Hand Path”, defined by idealistic self-fortification of a consciousness trained to rule the world, and the “Left Hand Path”, defined as a mysticism that strives to unveil the true and hideous nature of the world in order to surrender to it. That last part is more operative than anything. Other iterations of the Left Hand Path also share with Gruppo Di Nun the aim of destroying the veil of reality so as to unleash its true nature, in all its darkness, and break down the barriers to your own agency and self-awareness, and, yes, derive power from it. I suppose I could be describing what Monacelli calls “sadistic” worldview. Such a worldview can, as I have hopefully shown thus far (especially in the previous article), draw a perverse sense of strength from many aspects Gruppo Di Nun’s entropic philosophy. But in the overall Gruppo Di Nun’s response is not the “sadistic” response, and is in fact the “masochistic” response, one that ironically actually hues closer to what is traditionally understand as the “Right Hand Path”. Again, the example of Marxism-Leninism and its definition of imperialism versus any other practical definition of the term springs to mind for a suitable analogy to what I see.
The duality of Michelstaedter’s pessimism and Julius Evloa’s esoteric fascist response to it seems to get more attention in Amy Ireland’s afterword at the end of the book, so I think we can brief turn to it. To hear Ireland tell it, Michelstaedter proposed a universe in which it was impossible for individuals to access things like eternity which might bring themselves into coincidence with themselves, thereby attaining what Michelstaedter called “persuasion”, because that would mean an absence of lack that is impossible to attain. For Michelstaedter, only death allows being to experience itself fully, but death also extinguishes being: thus, the entirety of human existence is a tortuous paradox. Evola’s response involved the reinterpretation of Michelstaedter’s philosophy into an extreme theory of the self-sufficiency of being, in which persuasion and direct access to the absolute were both attainable for specific individuals (“spiritually strong” and “Aryan” men) through a certain form of occult training that he devised. Evola’s dichotomy was between “spontaneity” and “domination”, which he coded in terms of gender and sexual and racial determinism, which seems ironic for his rhetoric of “freedom” and “the absolute individual” until you remember that Evola defined “freedom” as “domination” – that is to say, the domination of an elite clique of “Aryan” men. There can be few more abject forms of false hope than this. But is that not coloured by a broader idea that you must first accept yourself as part of an order of the universe, in that it is only within this order that, for select individuals who have the “correct” place (biological, racial, sexual, gendered etc.) within it, allows them to secure their ordained place as rulers of the world. True, Evola’s philosophy at every turn aims for the fascistic transcendence of – or perhaps rather escape from – matter, but if we take seriously the idea of “self-deification” as a function of a Hermetic order, that order is already surely latent even in the material world. Evola may had denied the existence of God, but his throughline, taken through Gruppo Di Nun’s understanding, gives us the picture that people can only “overcome matter” because “God” or some stand-in for him allows it, as the secret ruler of everything. Thus, in practice, the dichotomy between the acceptance and control of reality is a false one within the purview of esoteric fascism, whose adherents are all too happy to insist on their image of objective truth being accepted as reality, often by force. And in the end, it seems like a fundamentally mediocre alternative to the contradiction presented by Michelstaedter, or rather to the masochistic acceptance presented by Monacelli.
But, as much as there is to talk about the matter of Evola, we are not finished with Monacelli’s exploration of masochism. Returning to the essay at hand, we now get something of a curveball. Because in Monacelli’s words, “we need to impale God himself”. Having just established God as the Outside for which the masochist is a kind fo ecstatic, suffering transmitter into the world, this seems puzzling. But we are introduced to Andrea Emo, a reclusive Italian philosopher apparently known for a uniquely pessimistic take on the Hegelian dialectic. Emo’s God is the unstoppable abolition of everything, a hidden war latent within time that ceaselessly and meaninglessly destroys everything that is, and which will eventually destroy itself. Emo’s maxim was that God consists in his own annihilation. Now this would be the point where Monacelli at least appears to extend his masochism beyond Christianity. Before getting ahead of ourselves we can look at Emo’s adherence to what was called “actualism”, which was incidentally also the same form of Hegelianism advocated by Giovanni Gentile. Actualism can be summarized as a philosophy that interprets the Hegelian dialectic as centering a perpetual action that always moves away from its inner potential towards its outer consumption. For Giovanni Gentile, this meant that everything is like a fire, in that everything exists because it burns and exists to be combust. For Andrea Emo, though, everything is already being consumed, and everything in the universe is its own massacre, every chain of being sheds blood until the whole universe is nothing but blackness. For Gentile, the dialectical act is the foundation and constitution of everything. For Emo, it actually demostrates that there is no foundation or constitution to anything, and that everything is progressing in a straight line towards the “final attractor”. In this philosophy, the crucifixion of Jesus is itself God crucifying himself just to show humanity the way to its self-consumption. And of course, for Emo, the only legitimate knowledge consists of masochistic regression, of a “return to the Heart of Darkness”, abandoning everything and going back before creation: salvation consists, in a word, in memory.
The metaphor of Heraclitus is interesting to play with. Monacelli describes Emo’s actualism as the expression of an all-consuming war. For both Emo and Monacelli it would almost seem to be a one-sided battle if that’s the case, to the point that it seems to be misleading. It’s not a war if it’s a massacre. The metaphor of war is ultimately obscured and subsumed into the metaphor of the massacre. But the Heraclitean metaphor could as well be turned towards the dialectic as the conatus described by Bronze Age Collapse in “Lifting the Absolute”. In the all-consuming war, everything is burned, cut, recombined, remade in the alchemical conatus of struggle. But more important is the metaphor of crucifixion, because it is here that we realize that even God’s “impalement” in this scheme can be seen as a consummation of Christianity in almost theothanatological terms. At base, Christianity asserts that there is one God, and that he incarnated himself as a man who would suffer and die in agony (only to be resurrected) so that humans could access the “salvation” offered by God through his “love”. Here, the message is our self-consumption and that we are all pacing in a straight line towards the final attraction of dissolution, and God allows himself to suffer before us so that we can see it. It is ultimately in many ways a reproduction of Christian philosophy, with the possible difference being that God himself dies at the end of the dialectic, as the final sacrifice of his own ceaseless violence. One can can think of it as a kind of Hegelian Christian theothanatology, except that God isn’t dead…not yet. Christianity is in this sense maintained, albeit “accelerated”.
Lastly, Monacelli introduces us to one more major influence on Gruppo Di Nun’s masochistic philosophy: an Italian novelist named Guido Morselli. Particularly important among Morselli’s novels is Dissipatio H. G. (“The Vanishing”), which is about a man who, after attempting and failing to end his own life in a cave, discovers that he somehow survived the extinction of the human species, and now finds himself in a world without human beings. It is not irrelevant to note that, in 1973, Morselli himself committed suicide, apparently motivated by his book being rejected by Italian publishers. Through Morselli, Monacelli outlines Gruppo Di Nun’s masochism as centered around a vision of the world without humans as the emptying out of everything human. Dissipatio H. G. is taken as presenting a world which, in the absence of humans, an oddly serene and certainly inhuman emptiness. Morselli, in presenting this extinction, apparently relishes in the demise of his own species. Through his protagonist he seems to seize every opportunity to deride humanity and mock all human hopes and dreams. Thus, Monacelli portrays Morselli as the saint of omnicidal visions, misanthropic joy, and extinction. The masochism that Monacelli advocates hinges on the desire to capture that feeling, a particular kind of ecstasy and emptiness that they associate with extinction, but without actually passing through the gates of suicide. The gnosis that Monacelli attributes to Morselli is established as a guiding inspiration for Gruppo Di Nun, alongisde a religious love for the laws of thermodynamics, and so the point for them is the pleasure of living without your humanity and infinite reflection on dissolution. That is what going beyond the human means in the context of this philosophy, and thus it colours their perception of the demonic.
It would seem here that masochistic mysticism, based on Christianity, cultimates in the desire to see the extinction of humanity, yet inevitably even the gnosis of suicide must be felt in the absence of actual suicide. Such a masochism would turn life back against itself, a thought that makes little sense without reflecting on the morality of humanity at the height of civilizational modernity, and its current crash course. The Christian-Schopenhauerian spiral is complete, reaching its natural conclusion, and it calls for the denial of everything else. The totality and exclusivity of masochism is the consummation of the Gospel, which seems to ingeniously wear the flesh of the demonic as its disguise, like a reversal of the trope of the sheep in wolf’s clothing. True, the visions that Monacelli’s masochism offers would never be offered by much of Christianity, though really that’s just much of exoteric Christianity, but even the hellish nightmares seem to be the relevations of a reinterpretation of a Christian God in a reinterpretation of Christian mysticism. Perhaps Monacelli means for this to be the extinction that we are to consider in Mandy, which is curious because it’s just not what one gets from the Unmensch of Stirner’s egoism: as if the Unique would possibly abolish itself just to be one with the God that it had just destroyed in the pyres of the black flame. But there of course remains the question of Satanism and inversion, because as it still stands we are looking at extinctionism as the consummation of Christianity, which is thus posed as an alternative to the Right Hand Path. Entirely distinct from Hermeticism it may be, but a break from Christianity it most decidely is not.
But there is one last question, one that may offer some fascinating horizons, but for which I have no answer. It is in fact the question that Monacelli asks towards the end of his essay: can the homicidal dream have a different purpose? It is of course wedded to the question of how to mystically experience human extinction without giving up your own life, but I find that it has other ramifications as well, and perhaps even a faint possibility of Satanic perversion even here. My suspicion is that it goes back to Monacelli’s definition of sadism as “separative wisdom”, almost certainly for the philosophy of kink and fetish, or at least certain parts thereof. Perhaps one may even see in this a gnosis of Cain, as much as a Gnosis of Sophia, Satan, Lucifer, Odin, a broad Gnosis that, no doubt is distinct from that of Tiamat, the Mother Goddess of Sorrows, or for that matter the Christian God. Ironically enough, perhaps a passage from the Bible is a fitting enough closure for this section, if only that it might be a spark for the future. For the Book of John said of Satan, “he was a murderer from the beginning”. But in the Bible you almost never see Satan kill anyone, certainly not in “the beginning”. So who did Satan kill in the beginning?
Via Negativa (The Fifth Nigredo)
Our fifth and last discussion of nigredo consists of the essay “Catholic Dark”, written by Claudi Kulesko. This essay appears to be a discussion of asceticism and apophatic mysticism and theology in the context of xenophilia and Gruppo Di Nun’s discussion of the “great attractor”. Here, again, we seem to cross through the context of Christian mysticism as conditioning the overall core of Gruppo Di Nun’s philosophy, but in a way that serves to communicate a sense of “lightness” that perhaps presents fairly interesting implications about nothingness, or rather darkness, and some will to darkness, though one still has to content with the Christianity.
Kulesko begins with a digression, a story about a woman in medieval Flanders named Christina: known to Catholics as Saint Christina the Astonishing. When she was just 21 years old, Christina had apparently “died” after suffering a seizure, But then, as her funeral rites were being observed, she suddenly opened her eyes and then rose up to the beams supporting the roof of the local church, or so her legend goes. In any case, she went on to live a long life before dying of old age in 1224. But her “resurrection” is what interests Kulesko. Christina “dies”, then in her resurrection she tells everyone the story of her journey from Hell, through Purgatory, and to Heaven, meeting God himself and being allowed to return to her life in order atone for the sins of the souls stuck in Purgatory. But Kulesko sees something morbid in it as well. He asks, what if Christina was just a rotting body infested with demons, or one of the living dead? Kulesko says that she apparently started to seem more disgusted with humans, and increasingly inhuman herself. She spends hours on end in solitude, climbing everywhere, supposedly she even soared in the air, and when her parents chained her up to keep her home, she somehow broke those chains. On top of all that she supposedly couldn’t burn, drown, or be hurt in any way. Locals started calling her “wild”, “savage”, or “crazy”, and subsequently abused her, forcing her to flee to a city where criminals take pity on her and show her kindness.
Where exactly is this all going? Perhaps it is that the life of Christina – or perhaps, the life she lived after her life – portrays the anti-gravity of a great attractor. Kulesko figures her body as being inhabited by an “alien” presence, that presence being the Outside. For Kulesko she is nothing but an appendage of this power, a link to a paradise that Kulesko interprets as absolute night (where for Christina herself it was otherwise probably just the Christian Heaven, harps and all), for whom the world of the living and of humans is a Hell. I can sense a faint Gnostic throughline here in that the longing for death seems inseparable from the longing to return to God as the divine origin of everything, and the separation felt in the physical world populated by humans feels like a curse. That is how it must be for Christina, since she longed constantly for the return to death, and on the day of her second death she apparently yelled at a nun “Why are you disturbing me, why are you forcing me to come back?”. But then what are we looking at from this standpoint: God as the great attractor?
Next we turn to the example of Simeon Stylites, a Christian ascetic who lived in Syria during the 5th century. In his youth, Simeon was apparently so intense in his asceticism, and his uncompromising practice of austerities caught on so rapidly, that he was expelled from a local monastery who thought his practices were excessive and dangerous to their followers. Then he decided to go and take up a space for himself to continue his austerities, and a few years later he decided to climb up a pillar and install a platform at the top, sitting four meters above the ground, where he could only be accessed by the public through a nearby ladder. Over the years, he ascended to ever taller pillars, placing himself ever higher and ever farther away from the masses who pestered him so. By the time he died, Simeon sat as high as 15 meters above the ground. Kulesko suggests that in this activity Simeon broke with all the trends of ancient Christianity – the Church Fathers, the Christian Cynics, and even the Desert Fathers – while producing a completely new discipline. In the process, Simeon seemingly makes use of the tools of this world in order to progressively abandon it, discarding the tools themselves as he goes and makes his ascent. The pillar itself can almost be seen as akin to a leader to heaven, whereby the ascetic moves closer and closer to God, and further away from the desires of the world. For Kulesko this then connects to the very structure of the cathedral itself, in that its spires are the remnants of an ascetic ideology of progressive elevation.
We arrive at gravity, and it’s opposition to the lightness of the mystic. We should note that, from the standpoint of Christian asceticism, “gravity” would mean the weight of the world and its temptations, perhaps arguably even matter itself from a certain point of view, while “lightness” is the condition of having emptied oneself for God. In any case, Kulesko directs us to the example of Joseph of Cupertino, an Italian Franciscan friar and saint known for supposedly having levitated above the ground. Kulesko interprets the story of Joseph of Cupertino as an illustration of the horizon of “gravity”, whose only favourable end is death. Until death, light spirits must keep their feet on the ground. This is compared to a scenario where a hot air balloon, in this instance capable of rising indefinitely, and its crew, increasingly and understandably anxious as the air thins and becomes less visible, refuses to continue the journey. The verticality of the cathedral seems to be its own symbolic institution, which then gave way to horizontality and in turn to monasticism and hermitude, with their perceived autonomy and silence.
Where is this all going, besides perhaps to the surface of the moon? The answer, it seems, is solitude. The worldly and vertical church strives to destroy or recuperate the horizontal, which thus causes the anchorites or stylites of the age to flee to whatever precipice they can find for themselves, that they might rise above the monastery and the cathedral. In so doing, they might claim a path towards a sort of original place and from there an unlimited altitude. To paraphrase a passage of one Arthur Schopenhauer’s manuscripts, one who takes the high mountain road must leave everything behind in making their path through the snow, cling themselves to the rocks with as much strength as they can muster, and then in so doing they might see the whole world beneath them, without being disturbed by anything. Thus the stylite severs themselves from all humanity and all worldly stimuli in order for the soul to reach the ultimate altitudes of an inner highness.
I believe that there are familiar themes that converge on this point. For one thing, the theme of the abandonment of humanity is obviously striking, and also conveys itself as if directly continued from Enrico Monacelli’s “The Highest Form of Gnosis”. There seems to me to be some sort of connection to the theme of self-emptying that Monacelli talks about, including the empyting of humanity, and in this case it’s reflected in ascetic severance. On the other hand, it also seems to play out as another application of what Kulesko talked about in “Cultivating Darkness”: that process of bracketing out everything, so as to unlock new configurations, or, in this case, the highest altitude of the soul. I almost think that the stylite striving toward the supreme altitude is meant to echo Bronze Age Collapse’s concept of “tendency towards the absolute”. Of course, it’s worth noting that the asceticism we are talking about is still Christian asceticism and Christian mysticism, not the pagan physical culture of the Hellenes. But, perhaps there is an inescapable familiarity to it, as though supreme altitude is comparable to the absolute being tended towards. Perhaps even the lightness of the ascetic may be the closest that the Chrisitan gets to the deathlessness of the gods that they despise as demons. But it comes from a bracketing out that is at once the denial of the world around them and their own desires, whereas the alchemical conatus of steel and flesh always happens within it, and the mountain path is that of a soul struggling towards God, whereas our conatus pushes towards the overcoming of God.
In any case, we turn from the mountain path to the mountain itself. The Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, a.k.a. Petrarch, wrote in his (possibly fictitious) Ascent of Monte Ventoux about his shame for the selfish passion of climbing, and his reckoning with the real eschatological status of mountain-climbing. In this setting, the mountain itself is a continuation of the body of the Church, as the precipice which, just like a cathedral spire, elevates itself towards heaven. In some pre-Christian religious traditions, it was more like the mountain was its own deity in an animistic sense, though in traditions such as Greek and Canaanite polytheism there were mountains (namely Olympus and Sapon respectively) that can be seen as elevated precipices towards the divine realm. But what Kulesko focuses on is the oppressive weight of gravity in places such as Aokigahara, the infamous “Suicide Forest” located at the northwestern flank of Mount Fuji in Japan, where if you go down through the lower valley you will find a force at the centre of earth that seems to confine spirit, to the point that not even in the suicides can the soul rise to the sky. That weight seems to be a gravitational attractor, but it also seems like something meant to be escaped. Or at least, there is this tendency towards escape, one that makes the ascetic fundamentally vertical and anti-terrestrial, fundamentally alien. Their desire for constant vertical surpassing meant to be understood here as based on a desire for lightness, which is thus to be understood as a negative will, in the sense that the soul must sever and bracket everything keeping it attached to the earth. Yet again. it’s hard to escape the presence of a throughline more or less aligned with conventional Gnosticism (which, to be fair, historically consisted of heterodox sects of Christian mysticism), for whom the entire material cosmos was literally a prison from which the soul must escape in order to be reunited with God. But from there we turn our attention towards a different, “alien” attractor.
Between 1578 and 1579, the Spanish Catholic mystic Juan de Yepes Alvarez (a.k.a. John of the Cross) wrote a treatise called Ascent of Mount Carmel, which outlined what he believed to be a progression towards the summits of “the Highness” and the “luminous darkness” that awaits. In this system, perfection leads upward in a narrow path, requiring that every “burden” associated with “lower thing” must be denied. Indeed, God in the Carmelite scheme seems to demand nothing less than “spiritual death” in all things. God, being completely incomprehensible and inaccessible as per the tradition of negative/apophatic theology, needs the will to centre its activity precisely on the incomprohensible and inaccessible rather than what it can sense. Within this purview of negative theology, one extinguishes every divine attribute, and in this case brackets the principle of the intellectual soul. It also seems to amount to an individual and cosmic process of unlearning, in which one frees oneself not only from a lifetime of social conditioning but also from billions of years of gravitation in matter. Here, I suppose, is where we are able to see Christian negation ultimately turning against Christianity, as part of the dominant complex of social conditioning that must be negated. The ultimate point of this negation is to manifest the most volatile concept of all: nothingness. That is how Christian mystical theology understands God. From another perspective, though, it is larger than God. In any case, for Kulesko, nothingness is all that remains when everything has been negated, and there is nothing lighter than nothingness. Even so, however, the Christian notion of mystical ascension being discussed doesn’t end in nothingness, even though we have just established that the apophatic God is nothingness.
The emptying that both Monacelli and Kulesko talk about, and what is referred to in Christian mysticism and theology as “kenosis”, is the culmination of a process whereby God becomes more alien as he loses all the attrbites afforded by humans while the human loses everything that makes them human, and both become more intangible and abstract in the process of negation. There is something that connects them, and it is lightness. Because lightness doesn’t want for anything, except nothingness and the annihilation of all distinction between God and his creation. In Christian terms, this means the surrender of everything to the love of dissolution through which God loses his creatures and all creatures lose God, the abjuration of free will, wisdom, and all faculty to rapture and endless ascent. Here I think, I get the feeling I remember being told that the idea that the Christian God opposed free will was some mere paranoia, the prejudice of some Reddit-brained “edgy new atheist” in modern internet parlance. Yet that appears to be exactly what is spelled out, not merely in the exoteric form of Christianity that the masses are supposed to just consume, but in the core of Christian mysticism itself. Right at the core of Christianity is a belief system built around one God whose one desire, more than anything, is for humanity, and all life, to surrender itself completely to him – and, perhaps, to be destroyed by him. And the Christian, at the most core sense, strives to be raised up by God, even if they take up Meister Eckart’s maxim “Therefore let us to pray to God that we may be free of God”, to never return to the earth and forever be united and identical with God. To return, in this setting, would “weigh down the soul”.
Return and non-return possess their own significance for Kulesko. Desire itself, by way of etymology, in his interpretation signifies a kind of cosmic nostalgia. The “mysticism of return” seems to involve bracketing out the world, knowledge, individual consciousness, but always with the prospect of removing those brackets to regain them. The mystic is sated by having been changed irrevocably even in their return, their heart made full with even a small taste of the stars. The “mysticism of non-return”, by contrast, offers no satisfaction, no confirmation, only an endless continuity of rapture and ascent. If the mystic is a channel through which the boundless night signals into the world, then perhaps we might interpret “return” as the ability to fill yourself with the night, retain part of it in yourself, and by this bring it into the world, while “non-return” would be to simply disappear into the night forever. But “non-return” entails more. “Non-return”, for Kulesko, entails a process of the soul being completely stripped of the body and the casuality of nature, guided away from the world by an alien attractor. The “non-returning” mystic seems again like a Gnostic pneuma, a piece of God’s spirit longing to return to God, longing to break from the weight of the hylic realm that was set in motion by Sophia’s transgression. Though it is perhaps here that we may arrive at the sense all of this is simply setting up the logic for a very specific kind of attraction.
Our final exploration dwells on the subject of xenophilia: that is, the attraction to or love of the foreign, or in this case the “alien”. The xenos at the centre of Kulesko’s concept of xenophilia does not denote something merely foreign, but rather something “wholly other”. The supreme xenos in this sense is silence, that is to say the deafening silence and extrahuman indifference of the universe. Here perhaps we may note that, no matter how apophatic, Christianity still predicates itself on the belief that God loves us, so perhaps we are looking at something quite different: after all, how exactly can God love us while also being indifferent to humanity, and how can the Christian God be so radically indifferent without invalidating the core premise of Christian salvific love? In this sense cosmic xenophilia would appear fundamentally one-sided: the universe cannot possibly love us, but we can love the universe, more than it will ever love us. One wonders, what is the point?
In any case, Kulesko takes cosmic silence to be at the root of Christina the Astonishing’s nostalgia and for the universe to be but a tomb, and part of the fabric of Rudolf Otto’s concept of the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium fascinans, the latter of which is the magnetism of cosmic silence. The “mysticism of non-return”, with its dizzying ascent, fills the mystic with xenophilia. But there is still the locus of the body, in that xenophilia is to begin in the flesh. There’s also a locus in all the distinct forms of the natural world, all manifestations of a kind of “positive nothingness”. In all things, the divine exists as an “imprint”, which is to say an innate faculty of ascension of anti-gravity. I think this may be another strange double: from the standpoint of Christian mysticism, this is the innate love of God thereby tending towards God, but from an alternative, creatively Pagan standpoint drawn from Bronze Age Collapse, it is not God’s love but instead the primordial tension towards the absolute. These two avenues, from what we have shown, bear out different conclusions. But in either case, the imprint is to be seen as a faculty of emancipation, which appears to be connected to the quality of nothingness. Vanity, that lightness of things, reveals infinite horizons at the height of the eternal. If there is no limit to form, there is no limit to matter, and, in the words of Jean Buridan, different worlds can be created by divine power.
From there we arrive at quite the curveball, wherein the apophatic quality of the divine is a nihility by which one accesses none other than apotheosis itself! At the highest altitude, which approaches eternity, flesh changes and becomes mineral, energetic, or atmospheric, objects made of unknown materials and possessing inscrutable characteristics and functions come into existence, and the organism becomes all the more alien and disharmonious, more deformed and inaccessible. That, for Kulesko, is the very image of God, in that it repudiates all worldly attributes on behalf of the darkness of the unknown, at which point one attains “maximum propulsion”. The soul has become godlike, having either surpassed or abandoned everything. For Kulesko this means entering the heart of the divine, which means merging oneself with the xenos, the Outside, the wholly Other. This in turn means entering into a place without beginning or end, here or now, one or many, before or after. It is anti-gravity triumphant, and it is eternity. It is also interpreted in terms of xenophilia, that sense of oneness being its apogee and consummation. But, this xenophilia is both unconditional and unsatisfiable, and so it has no goals and no foundation, leads nowhere, and progresses only as a ceaseless plummet to silence.
With the conclusion of “Catholic Dark” I at this point think it is worth very carefully considering the role of Christianity in all this as seemingly multiple contours from the rest of Revolutionary Demonology converge. On the one hand, much of this essay is focused on an explication of Christian mysticism and theology in relation to asceticism, and there’s throughline that feels similar to the essays “Mater Dolorosa” and “The Hightest Form of Gnosis” in that appears to employ Christianity or aspects of Christianity as part of its own distinct framework, which of course undermines Gruppo Di Nun’s broader rejection of Satanism. On the other hand, the culmination of Kulesko’s discussion of nothingness in apophatic theology appears to lead into places more or less consistent with Kulesko’s broad body of work within Revolutionary Demonology but which are unfamiliar to Christianity, such as in the horizons of the apotheosis of the soul. I would also say that the basic model of progressive elevation, forgetting that it is a model drawn from Christian asceticism, strikes me as one of the clearest illustrations of an actually centrifugal motion. That may sound strange in view of the example of Christina’s nostalgia, but one is not “returning to the void”, in fact the point is to go up to eternity and not return at all. Instead, from the starting point of the earth, one ascends the mountain path to move further and further away from the earth, from any notion of the centre, towards the endless horizon of transfiguration and, to go against Christian terms, apotheosis. And as much as self-deification is meant to be opposed by Gruppo Di Nun, apotheosis of some sort is what we’re looking at. Of course, we absolutely cannot ignore that everything being discussed about Christian asceticism comes from the Christian standpoint that the world is fundamentally plagued by evil, latent with the taint of Adam and Eve’s original transgression, and it is for this reason that the ascetic strives to “lighten himself”, climb pillars, or in any way detach themselves from the world.
Yet, for everything I have said about this discussion of Christian theology and mysticism, perhaps there is another way to look at it. The horizon of nihility is consistent with the darkness that Kulesko talked about in “Cultivating Darkness”. So what if we were to take the presentation of Christian negative theology as containing a different potentiality: what if, instead of simply reproducing Christianity, we are seeing the inner diagram of Christianity’s undoing? What if we see God writing his own demise? And what if, that entire horizon is to be seen in the infinite power of nihility, hidden beneath the name of God? Or, yet again paging Bronze Age Collapse, the absolute to which humans and perhaps even gods strive for and in which they unlock their own apotheosis.
I think that the theme of the atmospheric body is a clue here. Remember that Bronze Age Collapse also described the form of the absolute, and thereby his notion of “supreme fitness”, in terms of force or atmosphere. Remember that Kulesko described Dracula’s barbarian heritage in terms of his becoming-mist, his death as his dissolving into the atmospheric world, and his bloodlust as the desire to dissolve into this kind of atmospheric becoming. For Bronze Age Collapse, to exist is to insist, since life is a conatus, and therefore one insists and struggles to transform and enrich flesh and spirit up to apotheosis. For the Christian ascetic, to exist is to insist mostly on cutting away from the flesh and the world for the sole sake of approaching God. But there is still the throughline of atmospheric apotheosis that is, in many ways. I sense a point at which the horizon that becomes available is not surrender in the fashion of Christian or Christian-esque cosmic love, but instead the stealing of fire from heaven. Of course, perhaps that’s not quite “non-return” as Kulesko put it. But the diagram of Christianity’s undoing that is locked within nothingness. To hear Claudio Kulesko tell it, Christian apophatic mysticism positions God as essentially nothingness, and on this basis divine power appears to be absolutely capable of generating any possibility. But then there is God, being the only egoist who constantly depends on herds of duped egoists to support him, and then there is the egoist themselves. Then there is the idea that both Claudio Kulesko and Enrico Monacelli present, by way of Miroslav Griško and Andrea Emo, that God seems to always be in some kind of eliminativistic war against the universe he is supposed to have created. Monacelli puts it as an all-consuming war, but there is no such thing as a one-sided war. Thus, there is nothingness against nothingness. Our ability to pervert the horizon we are given lies in the ability to oppose negation against negation: for every manifestation of Einzige to participate in the war of all against all, against God.
For months I had been obsesssed with the idea of a link between Satan and the sun. I believe this fixation in recent times started off a while after I wrote my article about Darkness, and I encountered solar references to Satan in the work of Aleister Crowley. The main point of reference here would be in Liber Samekh, which features invocations to Satan as identified with the Sun, such as in section B:
Thou Satan-Sun Hadith that goest without Will!
And section C:
I invoke Thee, the Terrible and Invisible God: Who dwellest in the Void Place of the Spirit:
Thou spiritual Sun! Satan, Thou Eye, Thou Lust! Cry aloud! Cry aloud! Whirl the Wheel, O my Father, O Satan, O Sun!
Another link Crowley made between Satan and the Sun is his assertion that 666, the colloquial “number of the beast”, is the number of the Sun. This may have been playfully derived from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s assertion that the Sun has a square composed of 36 squares, which then produces the number 111 and the sum of all squares as 666. Section J of Liber Samekh also contains this rather explicit link:
Now this word SABAF, being by number Three score and Ten, is a name of Ayin, the Eye, and the Devil our Lord, and the Goat of Mendes. He is the Lord of the Sabbath of the Adepts, and is Satan, therefore also the Sun, whose number of Magick is 666, the seal of His servant the BEAST.
The Crowleyan Satan presents an interesting picture of Satan as a cipher of inversion in the precise sense of being the god of the other side. We get some interesting commentary on this theme in Cavan McLaughlin’s The Dark Side of the Sun, which focuses on the double-sided nature of solar myth; a theme that will be central to later explorations of our subject. The observation that McLaughlin gives is that Crowley presents Satan as a chthonic double of the Sun, or Self in Jungian terms. From one perspective, though, we can think of the dark solar double as absolutely inherent to the Sun as it is: the other side, which is at once the “true” image. The Devil is thus the shadow of the world that is also its ultimate and original truth.
The Typhonian occultist Kenneth Grant seems to have developed this idea of the other sun as Satan, and in turn Satan as the true root of life. In The Magical Revival, we find a description of Satan, here identified interchangeably with the Egyptian god Set (clearly a manifestation of the erroneous Set-Sat-Satan line) as the “true formula of illumination”. The full quotation is as follows:
In the preceding Aeon (that of Osiris), Set or Satan was regarded as evil, because the nature of desire was misunderstood; it was identified with the Devil and with moral evil. Yet this devil, Satan, is the true formula of Illumination. “Called evil to conceal its holiness”, it is desire that prompts man to know himself – “through another” (i.e. through his own double, or “devil”). When the urge “to know” is turned inwards instead of outwards as it usually is, then the ego dies and the objective universe is dissolved. In the light of that Illumination, Reality, the Gnosis, is all that remains.
In this doctrine, enlightenment means to know yourself through “your own double”, presumably meaning your own shadow. In a sense, knowing Satan is to know “the self behind the self”. The macrocosm of this idea consists in Satan, or Set, or Sirius as the “sun behind the sun”, and so “the hidden god”.This idea is extrapolated further in Cults of the Shadow wherein Grant gives the following description of Set:
The prototype of Shaitan or Satan, the God of the South whose star is Sothis. Set or Sut means ‘black’ (q.v.), the main kala or colour of Set is black, or red (interchangeable symbols in the Mysteries), which denotes the underworld or infernal region of Amenta. As Lord of Hell, Set is the epitome of subconscious atavisms and of the True Will, or Hidden Sun.
We need not concern ourselves with this portrayal of Set as an actual reflection of the historical representation of Set, because there can be no doubt that it has nothing to do with the historical cult of Set. What matters here is the idea of Set/Satan as the “True Will” or “Hidden Sun”. Earlier in the book, Grant explains that, in his particular parlance, the “True Will” is the term given to the “Hidden God” that accompanies humans through the cycles of birth and death, always uniting mankind with “the Shade” and seeking reification in the objective universe, and only the adept can determine its substance. The Magical Revival explores the notion of “the sun behind the sun” via Sirius as the original presence of the Sun:
As the sun radiates life and light throughout the solar system, so the phallus radiates life and light upon earth, and, similarly, subserves a power greater than itself. For as the sun is a reflection of Sirius, so is the phallus the vehicle of the Will of the Magus.
Grant obviously means here that Sirius is the power behind the Sun, and as Sirius is identified with Set/Satan, this itself is to be understood as meaning that darkness, or Set, or Satan, is the power behind the light of the solar system. In a much larger sense, it’s an idea that positions the forms of nature as the expressions of an unseen force or substance, the “true will” or “hidden god”. This is perhaps viewed in terms of a sort of subconscious content, though perhaps we can extend it to the realm of unconscious content, that is then the source of conscious thought and form. Obviously this hidden power is darkness, this hidden god, for Grant, is Set, but for us it could as well be Satan. Though, it could be said that in a pre-Christian context chthonic gods would be that hidden divinity: for example, Paramenides’ descent to the underworld in search of being seems to have led him to the goddess Persephone, the queen of the underworld.
Finally, in Nightside of Eden, Grant brings up a quote from J. F. C. Fuller’s The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah which, in full, goes as follows:
Satan, as we call this power, is in fact the Tree of Life of our world, that free will which for its very existence depends on the clash of the positive and negative forces which in the moral sphere we call good and evil. Satan is therefore the Shekinah of Assiah, the World of Action, the perpetual activity of the Divine Essence, the Light which was created on the first day and which in the form of consciousness and intelligence can produce an overpowering brilliance equal to the intensest darkness.
The power in question seems to refer to the divine power that conciliates all oppositions and permeates and vitalizes all things. It is course likely purely the interpretation of Fuller and later Grant that this power is supposed to be Satan, but our focus is not the interpretation of Kabbalah (a conversation that, in the hands of white occultists, may invariably veer towards cultural appropriation). What does interest me is the way in which Grant, through Fuller, positions Satan as the inner active creative force that is, thus, the deep source of the agency of life. Grant ultimately links this concept of Satan to inversion, and it would seem this inversion is linked to enlightenment. A footnote in Cults of the Shadow references an apparent quotation in Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine which says “Satan represents metaphysically simply the reverse or the polar opposite of everything in nature.”, which in certain ways conforms with many similar ideas about Satan that persisted in the occult milieu and ultimately in Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s view of Satanism as a religion based in a rebours (“reversal”, as in the reversal of values). The full significance of this theme will be revisited soon, but here we can say that this inversion is also inseparable from the reality that Satanism seeks to access, for the “reverse” image also lies beneath the world as it is.
But, enough about Kenneth Grant. The other more profound throughline in McCaughlin’s essay is in the amorality of the Sun, and the implications of this in solar mythos. The sun, McLaughlin stresses, is amoral, inherently double-sided. We understand the Sun as the giver of life, but it is also a bringer of suffering, pain, and even death. For this analogy we can turn to a number of solar deities and myths across the pre-Christian world. We can start with the Iranian deity Mithra as a particularly interesting example. Mithra was, among other things, a sun god, occasionally even identified with the Sun itself. He was also a god with two sides: one of them is benevolent and concerned with the bonds of friendship and contract, and the other was mysterious, secretive, uncanny, even “sinister”, and according to Kris Kershaw in The One-Eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-)Germanic Männerbünde the daeva Aeshma may have been actually represented an aspect of Mithra’s being. Yet, it is said that Mithra only appears “malicious” to humans because they cannot control or understand him. The Egyptian sun god Ra has his own double-sided persona as suggested by his wrathful emanation of the goddess Sekhmet. The very solar image of the pharoah also contained a demonic aspect in the symbol of the black ram, denoting a divine sovereignty that at once protected and threatened the order of the cosmos. The Babylonian Utu (a.k.a. Shamash) is also a judge in the underworld. Nergal, a warlike god of disease and death, also represented a harsh aspect of the sun at noon. The Greek god Apollo, who over time was increasingly linked to the sun, shared Nergal’s domain over disease alongside the power of oracular healing, and was otherwise regarded as a destroyer and punisher, at least for the wicked. Helios, the traditional Greek god or representation of the Sun, was himself also one of the Titans, those ancient chthonic gods occasionally regarded as wicked, while one of his epithets, Apollo or Apollon, denoted him as “the destroyer”, suggesting that the Helios as the Sun was also a destructive power.
Somewhat related to this is Valerio Mattioli’s discussion of an ancient Mediterranean belief about the demonic; that the demons of the underworld materialised in the world above at midday, when the sun is at its highest. As strange as it sounds, it does seem to be reflected in other cultures – the Bible, for instance, talks about a “destruction that despoils at midday” – and it may harken to certain qualities of the sun that are linked to depression and melancholy. But for all that, there’s that jovial temperament we associate with sunlight, which we see as characteristic of Mediterranean life. It may, indeed, be something of a stereotype. Or, perhaps, there is a strange cipher for daemonic life: a vivifying light of an inner darkness, that is thus the soul of the world.
More importantly, though, is McCaughlin’s idea about the implications of Crowleyan solar myth regarding Thelema. The summary of McCaughlin’s idea is that the sun is by nature amoral and thus, if every man and every woman truly is a star, then the magical quest for transcendence or doing what thou wilt has the potential to “make monsters of us all”. The solar link to the axiom “every man and woman is a star” can be traced to the identification of Horus, the god of Crowley’s new Aeon, with the Sun, and as “a symbol of That which contains [and] transcends dualities, an image of our True Selves, identical in essence yet diverse in expression for each individual”. Horus, as the Sun, is meant as a cipher for the True Will and its inherent solar duality, presumably along with everything that goes with that. As the Sun itself is a star in space, McLaughlin interprets everyone being a star as everyone being their own Sun, in that everyone is the center of their own personal solar system.
An even more fascinating horizon is how McLaughlin plays with Arthur Schopenhauer’s assertion that “life is something that should not have been”, that life is, in some way, monstrous, and that in participating in life we’re all monsters. That monstrosity is taken as a starting point for the solar heroism of the New Aeon, particularly in its utter defiance and transcendence of the moral binary (“good” versus “evil”) on behalf of a totality true to its own nature, and from there an individuating process that facilitates the impression of Will in the world. The amorality of it all is observed to be a fundamental to the principle of “do what thou wilt”, owing to a Nietzschean root in the statement that there is no such thing as moral phenomenon, only moral interpretation of phenomenon. In this setting, morality is simply a reflection upon will or desire. Thus, if everyone is a star, or rather Sun, then everyone is the bearer of their own amoral quest to enact their will in and upon the world and transform themselves and the world around them, their solar light reflecting on the world and will in accordance with their own will (or “nature” or “purpose” in the official philosophical framing of Thelema), in a manner as heroic and beautiful as it is potentially monstrous, all in the same measure. Or, if not monstrous, then certainly demonic.
This all makes for ample conceptual space in which to play with Gruppo Di Nun’s underlying cosmic pessimism, and its mythological narrative concerning the “thermodynamic abomination” of the cosmos. Gruppo Di Nun would seem to be more or less in agreement with the sentiment that life is monstrous, something of an anomaly. They indeed dub the cosmos a “thermodynamic abomination”. Carved from the Mother’s flesh, the creation of the universe emerges arguably as a sort of “crime”. But crime or not, the universe is monstrous in its natural tendency towards disintegration and dissolution, its inherent finitude. And yet, it’s funny to think about life as a crime. Should life never have come to be? Should the stars, the animals, the oceans, the clouds, the trees, us, everything, all never have been? Was the void meant to last forever? Could it have been expected to never change into life as it is, even if we could never expect life to not change or decay? The solar myth ventures into this mystery with a sense of defiance, in the sense of will as this monstrous agency that can never be satisfied without its own art, and thus transforms the world.
The double-sided nature of solar myth brings us neatly into the consideration of solar inversion, and it is in this realm that we may can get a much deeper perspective on the solar dimension of Satan via Gruppo Di Nun’s Revolutionary Demonology, an entire section of which is dedicated to the dark mysteries of the sun, and the alchemical symbol of nigredo dubbed the “Black Sun” (or Sol Niger). This section, an essay titled “Solarisation” written by Valerio Mattioli, centers around inversion, particularly solar inversion, and the overall mystery being contained in the concept of solarisation through multiple conceptual avenues. Funny enough, it presents an interesting contradiction for Gruppo Di Nun’s overall rejection of modern Satanism, since Satanism from the outset has involved inversion, and even though Gruppo Di Nun criticized Satanism for reproducing Christianity by inverting it, their discussion of solar inversion leaves us quite a lot of room to expand and deepen Satanism by way of its inversion.
We can begin our analysis in the concept of solarisation, as through the Surrealist art of Minor White, Man Ray, and Lee Miller. Solarisation here ostensibly refers to a photographic technique used by these artists not just darken the photos but also invert their colour, which in a monochrome palette turns white into black and black into white. For Valerio Mattioli this also serves to create snapshots of a subconscious realm and, thus, an inverse reality. The Sun illuminates our world with its light, so more sunlight should mean more visible reality. But in solarisation more sunlight actually means the inversion of visible reality; the solar disk turns black, positive and negative change places, and a hidden, inverse, “incorrect” truth is revealed. This also brings us to how Gruppo Di Nun understands the Black Sun, by which we mean the original alchemical symbol and the misnomer given to the Nazi sunwheel. The Black Sun here is a symbol of nigredo, the initial state of the Great Work, the putrefaction in which matter is disinterested and reduced back to its primordial state. In alchemical terms solarisation as a certain kind of nigredo, in which the power of the sun translates into its opposite: the light of a realm of shadows, of the invisible and unnameable, as opposed to the sun of the phenomenal world in which all of this darkness is hidden – an occult world, accessible only by occult means.
I would recall here an obscure aspect of ancient Greek religion and philosophy: the belief in a dark, hidden sun, which represented the power of the underworld. At Smyrna, Hades was worshipped as Plouton Helios, and hence as a solar deity. His consort, Persephone, was worshipped alongside him as Koure Selene, the moon. But Plouton Helios did not simply represent the visible or phenomenal sun. Rather, he represented a dark sun, as contrasted with the heavenly sun in the form of Helios Apollo. Plutarch interpreted this sun – Hades – as “the many”, the multiplicity that was contrasted with the unity of The One, represented by Apollon, whose namesake supposedly denied “the many”, while Ammonius proposed that Hades represented obscurity, darkness, and the unseen into which things pass – dissolution and non-Being – in contrast to Apollo representing Being, memory, light, and the phenomenal – for which Ammonius calls Apollo God Himself. Hades was thus the sun of an invisible, chthonic realm; a “black sun” if you will.
This idea carries broad resonances and contains many horizons. We see one of the ancestors of Christian dualism, in which “Being” is located in unity, paired with phenomenal light (the celestial Sun), and called God, while darkness is presided over by the ruler of the underworld and representative of death and non-Being, and the stamp of God implies an ontological alignment with Apollon’s light. The opposition of multiplicity in The Many to unity in The One can, to a very limited extent, recall Satan’s role in the Qliphoth as the ruler (or co-ruler alongside Moloch) of the order of Thaumiel, representing division as opposed to the unity of Kether. The idea of the invisible sun takes a broader and somewhat different significance in Neoplatonism, where the invisible sun represents the form of the sun that exists beyond and behind the visible sun, the source of the visible sun, of which the visible sun is a mere representation or likeness. In Neoplatonist philosophy, this invisibility is meant to denote the noetic or noeric realms, the unseen layers of divine mind or intellect from which the visible and phenomenal world derives its origin. But from a chthonic lens, this framework is easy to reorient from the unity of divine mind to the dark life of the underworld, whose deifying power sleeps hidden in everything and contains all possibilities; and of course, where the daemons come from, where their vivifying power dwells and from which it crosses into the world in which we live.
But, our journey of solar inversion has still only just begun. We come to an exploration of solarisation in Italian neorealist films, whose aim was to nakedly portray the harsh realities of everyday life in post-World War 2 Italy. In Luchino Visconti’s Appunti su un fatto di cronaca, a short documentary about the kidnapping and murder of 12-year old Annarella Bracci, the outskirts of Rome are shown to be a massive refuse where human garbage is dumped alongside non-human garbage, and in the “golden city” blocks of flats connect to a dismal sky stinking of damnation. As Mattioli puts it: hell lies in the celestial vaults. Hard indeed to find a better representation of solar inversion. But that’s also it isn’t it: how many times have I seen Satanic inversion blur the line between heaven and hell by reversing them? After all, from a certain standpoint, Satanism says exactly that what we call “heaven” is actually closer to what we might call “hell”, or at least is more tortuous than hell, not to mention God himself being “evil”; and what we call “hell” isn’t so bad, while Satan is good.
Going right back to Aleister Crowley, there’s an important dimension contained in neorealism’s “need to know and to modify reality” (per the Enciclopedia Treccani), which we may in turn connect to Crowley’s definition of magic as “the Science and Art of causing changes in conformity with the Will”. Magic by this term is then connected to the hallucinatory quality of the Sun; it’s said that the Mediterranean sun can get so bright that its light induces a blinding whiteout: your vision becomes nothing but a vast white expanse. Mattioli figures the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini as an initiatory journey that sees Rome, in Accatone, take on an almost Lovecraftian character a la the lost city of R’lyeh, and then culminates in the blinding solar anus of Salo; unwatchable and brutal like the body of the Sun, and filled with absurdly sadistic inversions of the function of coitus. But then anal sex and its “unnatural” quality becomes an instrument of reconciliation with the reality and truth revealed by the “black sun”, which for Mattioli seems to be hinted through Austin Osman Spare’s concept of Atavistic Resurgence, where his explorations of non-normative sexual activity penetrate the psyche and allowed him to explore fantastical cities constructed of otherworldly geometries.
By now you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with anything, but don’t worry: by the time Mattioli discusses Ostia, the place where Pasolini was murdered in 1975, we get to the defining characteristic of solar inversion: as Mattioli says, it confuses and overturns everything. That’s the need to know and modify the world, which in turn overturns everything. I could not help but think of the “Gnostic” version of the Fall, as Sophia’s quest to imitate and thereby understand God throws the order of the Pleroma into chaos resulting in the creation of Yaldabaoth and the material cosmos. The Fall in the sense of rebellion emerges as a similarly creative act, rejecting God’s world on his own behalf, and carving out his own kingdom afterwards: his rebellion, even as it is repelled and subjugated, throws creation into disarray. Satanism in magical terms aims for the Fall as an act of devourment, locating the darkness and the Fall in order to imitate it, to then storm heaven and seize all things in a dark solar myth, carving out a new kingdom in the process. That of course sounds nothing like what Gruppo Di Nun has in mind, with its ontological masochism and its attendant emphasis on masochistic surrender and the resulting interpretation of nigredo as abdication. But it’s one way of looking at solar inversion. Perhaps it’s my bias – I definitely don’t consider myself much of a masochist. But I think we can turn to blasphemy to illustrate my point, since blasphemy contains solar inversion.
Mattioli suggests that the name Ostia carries resonances with the contradiction and inversion in the Christian host. On the one hand, the name Ostia relates to two Latin words for “victim” and “adversary” – “hostia” and “hostis” respectively; one almost thinks of Christ (that divine victim) and Satan (the Adversary himself). On the other hand, Ostia actually comes from another Latin word, “ostium”, meaning “mouth”. As a place where waste and shit spill out, it is the literal anus of the metropolis. But it’s also the host: that is, the Mithraic disk trapped inside the Christian host. Inversion and blasphemy contain themselves in solar mystery, and it reminds us: blasphemy is a willful act. To place your feet on the cross, to spit upon, piss on, or destroy it, to penetrate the flesh in acts of self-gratification, to practice kink, to queer the body in all sorts of ways, to disinhibit the human sensorium (to be intoxicated), to rise up in insurrection or revolution, to overthrow order and take the head of the Demiurge with your sword: there is a magic between all such acts that connects to the will of solar myth, perhaps even to a primal will that could not content itself with undifferentiation – and therefore, to the fatality, primacy, and eternity of the fall of Satan. Thus we return to Satanism, for Satanism can be understood as the belief that rebellion, or the Fall, constitutes the highest creative act, and Satan is the wellspring, the emblem, the god of that endless spiral of insurrection.
And while we’re here I think there is the opportunity to take a quick detour into the Satanism of Stanislaw Przybyszewski – for all we know, the first man ever to identify himself as a Satanist. Satanism, per Przybyszewski, is a religion whose sole principle is reversal: it is religion a rebours. This idea was probably forged from the combined influence of French occultism and decadence on the one hand (Joris Karl-Huysman certainly described Satanism as “Catholic religion followed in reverse”), and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the transvaluation of values on the other hand. A rebours emerges as an active negating principle, that of spiritual insurrection against order and authority. Przybyszewski takes the Witch, who inverts all values and sensations, as the apogee of this principle, for whom it is a source of exceptional power and the revelation of Satan in the Witches’ Sabbath. A rebours allows individuals to gain power over their lives amidst the oppression they suffer, to remake themselves into defiant agents of transvaluation, who can refuse authority, and cannot be satisfied by it, or anything except blasphemy, and by blasphemy the ability to know and modify the world. The association with intoxication completes the Przybyszewskian context of solar inversion: drunkenness, intoxication, enivrez-vous is necessary in order to not be a slave of God or the world. The hallucinatory aspect of solar inversion is here intoxication, and it completes the spiral of Przybyszewskian Satanism: swear yourself to Satan as the true father of this world, break the laws of God and his kingdom of spirit, get drunk, and have your name written in the book of death, then you will overthrow everything in the name of your own satanic will. That, in Przybyszewski’s Satanism, is negation.
The context of solar inversion that we explored through Luchino Visconti can also be found in none other than Przybyszewski’s inverted cosmogonic dualism. God, the spirit of “good”, is the ruler of a celestial kingdom of slavery, and on earth his rule is the author of countless brutal repressions carried out in his name; heaven truly is a hell. Satan, the spirit of “evil”, is actually humanity’s greatest benefactor, teaching humans all of the ways that they can manifest and fulfill their desires and gain freedom from God. Satan himself also pronounces to the world that he was “the God of Light” and that God was the “dark god of revenge” who overthrew him out of jealousy, and meanwhile also inverting the power of the church itself: not based in “salvation”, possibly not even in “God” either (who is in turn revealed to be absent), but in acquisition. As to sunlight, Przybyszewski’s statement that Satan was called Lightbringer arguably has us skipping ahead to the solar inversion of Lucifer (which I will revisit later): Mattioli says that Lucifer is the light-bringer, but his domain is the shadows; that might just be another way of saying that the bringer of light always casts darkness. But we’ll soon get to that.
Another horizon for solar inversion, relevant to sun of the other side that we have previously explored, can be seen through the mythological city of Remoria: the city that Remus had built, and, for Valerio Mattioli, perhaps the Rome that might have been if Remus had prevailed against Romulus in their ancient fratricidal duel. The duel is said to have taken place under a solar eclipse, which Mattioli figures as the illumination of another world. Remoria emerges as an inverted twin city, the parallel opposite of Rome, and the incarnation of the beyond-threshold. It is the city of expenditure, of the sacrifice of that which never was nor will be, where Rome was supposed to be the city that continually reproduces what already is, and it is a round and circular city, welcoming the waste of the world of the living, where Rome was meant to be a square city that strictly boundaries the inside and out. Remoria as a spectral, abymsal double of Rome, almost echoes the idea of the underworld as a surreal mirror image of life on earth – like the earth and yet not quite. But perhaps it also lies locked in the heart of the metropolis. For Mattioli the Grande Raccordo Anulare (or “Great Ring Junction”) that encircles the modern city of Rome is akin to a magic seal replicating the features of the solar disk on the city ground: an anal symbol, without beginning and without end, and a site where solarisation projects in a spiral between the earth and the sky.
The solar inversion of the Mediterranean “disk of death” then takes us into a dark continuum, represented in Italian underground music and through which Mattioli ultimately portrays the legacy of the Witches’ Sabbath. The Witches’ Sabbath, whether real or strictly imagined, was never sanctioned within any sacred, and its dances sought to invert the existing regime, revealing, according to Silvia Federici, “the living symbol of ‘the world turned upside-down;”. This upside-down world is also the world in which the noontide demons raged: remember, the middle of the day, when the sun is at its highest, and none other than the city so burned by that sun’s light. This reveals a hidden world, perhaps one that is at once this world, which for Mattioli is the synthetic, inorganic world of the living dead, and their dead planet, the Sun; too much heat and light means death rather than illumination. We can again turn to Stanislaw Przybyszewski for the Satanic significance of the inversion in the Witches’ Sabbath. Here, the Witches’ Sabbath is the vehicle for a personal Satanic-Nietzschean transvaluation of values, initiated by a frenzy of orgies, ecstatic dances, and sacrifices that culminate in the dissolution of reality and sensorium into an endless night in which Satan appears to lead his mass. Flesh revolts against law, its instincts triumph over the society that exists over them, desire is elevated and heightened to the point of being fulfilled in the transmutation of divine communion with Satan, or perhaps the gods. Gold, God, power over others, these are worthless before the Sabbath of the flesh, and as it is partaken the concept of sin itself is destroyed along with the holy, dissolving into itself and becoming nothing. In the dark continuum that is the infinite night of the Witches’ Sabbath, good and evil cease to exist, leaving nothing but joy.
Finally, we turn to Valerio Mattioli’s examination the solarisation of Milan via Giulio Questi’s 1972 film Arcana, a giallo movie set in Milan and containing in the background a setting of tension between the modern, industrial metropolis of Milan and an exhausted but still deeply occult South. Questi seems to present images of Milan that include underground construction sites that ostensibly and unwittingly invoke dormant chthonic powers and latent irrationality smouldering both within the earth and in the southern Italy sunshine. Mattioli then illustrates the two worlds as interconnected: Milan, that rational, enlightened, advanced capitalist metropolis, sinks its bowels into an underworld of underground construction sites where southern immigrant workers regularly lost parts of their bodies, not to mention a host of curses, memories, and spells. The city contains within itself its own nemesis, its own negative, its own dark mirror image that pushes for inversion: solarisation. And for Milan, that solar inversion is imminent, or already underway. Mattioli sees the Covid-19 pandemic as having unravelled the truth of the disk of death: there is no consumption or nourishment without waste or excrement, and there is always an asshole somewhere. Thus the mass flight of southerners from Milan to the South, which was interpreted as a betrayal of the metropolis, was simply the city having consumed and then excreted a labouring mass. In this sense the inverting quality of solarisation again reveals a hidden world, a hidden Remoria, that is perhaps at the same time this world.
And so we at last return to the Canicola, the conclusion, as our final exploration of Valerio Mattioli’s discussion of solar inversion. His summary of the inverting power of the sun centres on none other than Lucifer, the morning star, whose name is here invoked in reference to the sun. At first that’s a little strange, but given all the references to Italian folklore and counterculture I’m actually tempted to think it echoes the Lucifer, or Lucifero, of Charles Leland’s Aradia, who was cast as a sun god. What Mattioli says of “Lucifer” is more or less a summary of the whole discourse of solarisation. The sun, perched 150 million kilometres from our planet, shoots intense rays of light at Earth every day. Its rays, just as much as they support life, melt the shadows, evaporate knowledge of things, and make a desert of the earth. The light does not illuminate, it only brings darkness, because too much of it can only blind you. So the fire of the sun is also the very fire of hell, and Lucifer, though the bearer of light, would appear to be a master of shadows. The Sun itself is the source of both life and death for Earth, and, for Mattioli, the principle of delusions, abnormalities, and all abysses of the human psyche. One is almost tempted to call it the Father of Lies.
What’s somewhat amusing is that, when I read that Canicola, I picked up what sounded like a description of Christian negative theology, in the sense that God is dark because his light is beyond comprehension. For Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the “darkness” of the apophatic God is actually light, in his words a “light above light”, some might even say an excess of light. Even the negative theologians, insofar as they were Christians, would not worship a god of darkness, not as I would, so the apophatic God must still be light. Just that this light is too much for us, it would make us dark. The apophatic Christian God indeed blinds us by the supposed radiance of his absolute presence in the cosmos. There is also for them the darkness that is ignorance, and there is the darkness that is actually the supreme superabundance of God’s light. Perhaps it is a matter of interpretation for the Christian. Though of course, Christianity is not quite alone in its understanding of divine darkness. Neoplatonists also seemed to refer to a certain concept of divine darkness: Damascius said that the “first principle of the Egyptians” was what was called the “thrice unknown darkness”, beyond all human comprehension, and Iamblichus referred to the same concept in On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. Older Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus referred to a divine quality referred to as “unseen”, “unapparent”, or “unknown to men”, the rammifications ought to be fairly different from the need to maintain light as the supreme centre of truth rather than darkness in itself. In any case, one almost thinks of the God of negative theology as a sun in the way Mattioli talks about, so bright that it whites out the entire universe.
But the more important takeaway involves going back to the subject of solar myth. Let’s return to solarisation in relationship to Italian neorealism and Aleister Crowley, to that very neorealist desire to know and modify the world, its connection to the Crowleyan precept of magic as the art of causing change according to will, and their suggested link to the hallucinatory power of the sun. This will to know and modify the world, to overturn everything, is what makes the hallucinations of the sun the property of solar myth. Here, we can insert a little bit of philosophical sadism, well, of a sort. Geoffrey Gorer in The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade presents a remarkably broad definition of sadism, which he summarizes as “The pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer”. Gorer submits that this is expansive enough to include creating works of art to blowing up bridges, so long as it constitutes a modification of the external world by a willing agent. This of course is fairly magically significant, in that it denotes the modification of the objective universe by the subjective universe of the will, a process that also transforms the magician, and it also in some ways echoes the creative-destruction that anarchists have talked about since Mikhail Bakunin first did. But in some ways, it also denotes a solar myth.
The Mediterranean whiteout is a phenomenon in which sun, at its brightest, turns the field of vision into a vast, dazzling field of white that then liquefies perceptual reality. As a creative and magical technique, it is a way of inverting the world into an unreal inner world of phantasmagorial structures and landscapes. Crowleyan solar myth sees the light of a willing Sun reforming the world in accordance with itself and its own universe, and again to some extent the magician. For Cavan McLaughlin, the whole life of Aleister Crowley is its own archetypical form of this process. As he points out, Crowley’s life is a personal mythology, supported by a magical authorial will. Born Edward Alexander Crowley, he dubbed himself Aleister Crowley as an act of magical self-authorship, itself understood as an expression of the “Western Esoteric Tradition” through the a key axiom of the Hermetic Orde of the Golden Dawn, “By names and images are all powers awakened and reawakened”, for which reason members take up new magical names for their initiation. In 1930 Crowley even faked his own death by suicide, leaving a “suicide note” and false information to the press, before re-appearing three weeks later, alive and well, in Berlin. In so doing he has blurred the lines between fact and fiction, and in this sense sort of solarising reality, in a sense blinding it with a hallucination, and in so doing creating a new one for himself. Crowley in this sense was a Sun named The Great Beast 666, whose light burned and warped his world in the image of his will. One might say similar things about other magicians as well, even the likes of Anton LaVey.
And what if, to turn back to the point about negative theology, God himself also qualifies? If we take that God’s light solarises the universe in his own image, and if we assume that God created the world, then God would be a magician who solarised his order of things into existence, theoretically at least overturning what state of things came before. God of course even has his own secret magical names. God, then, is at war with Satan simply for rejecting his creation and trying to do what God does, just as Sophia is cursed and having to redeem herself for the very same imitation of God. God, Pleroma, they are the egoists who would prefer that you deny this and not be egoists. But in rejection of monotheism, we may still assume an endless spiral of insurrectionary creative-destruction underpinning the whole of reality. That’s “Satan’s Fall”. From a certain standpoint this may indeed be the dragon at the centre of the world. By inversion, by blasphemy, overturn everything and reveal reality in order to create it anew. Perhaps this is the only meaningful way to express oneness with the nature of reality.
Now, after all of this exposition from Revolutionary Demonology, we should finally summarize what all of this discussion of solar myth and inversion means for understanding Satan in the view of Satanism. For this, I suppose we can briefly return to the subject of Lucifer. The relationship between Satan and Lucifer is complex to the point of occasional confusion, but I believe I can present a somewhat simple perspective in defense of their mutual distinction. Lucifer is the polytheistic spirit of the morning star, a rebel angel who emerges from a long chain of pre-Christian myth and chthonicism into modern day occultism, on his own an illuminating agent of gnosis. Satan, on the other hand, is a much larger presence. Satan is this great adversarial “Other” whose sign as it once within everything, a whole spiral of negative insurrection and desire that in its own way animates the flesh of everything, the atavistic rebellion that cuts through all silence and creates and destroys things without end, the Darkness of life that is inherent to it, cannot be ignored, and must embraced in order to access the truth and power of this world and run wild and free in it. In this exact sense, Eliphas Levi was correct to identify Satan as the instrument of liberty.
The relevance of the Sun is clearly in the significance of the Sun as a metaphor for the primordial ground of reality. That is why, in the course of the development of monotheism in antiquity, the Sun emerged as a cipher for the divine unity of the cosmos, or a nascent concept of “God”. This idea that still has some currency to this day. Carl Jung certainly thought it made sense when he wrote in Psychology of the Unconscious that the Sun is “the only rational representation of God” across culture, being the “father” or “parent” from whom everything on Earth derives its life, the source of living energy, the natural extra-human source of spiritual harmony, and simultaneously utterly destructive. George Gurdjieff proposed the “Most Holy Sun Absolute” as the kernel of all divine unity and reality, the ultimate platform, basis, and thereby original state of the universe, which he believed God created specifically to maintain the “Most Holy Sun Absolute”. Aleister Crowley also seems to have reflected the solar idea in his emphasis on a solar centre, encapsulated in his statement that Thelema (“our religion”) is “the cult of the Sun”. From a Satanic standpoint, obviously, it would be Satan that embodies this solar urgrund. Crowley certainly identifies him as such by identifying him as “Sun”, and Agrippa’s identification of 666 as the magical number of the Sun would do well assist Crowley in this regard. But Satan as the Sun is no mere cipher for the unity of reality. In some ways, perhaps the opposite is the case. Remember that Satan is, very literally, the Adversary. That’s the simplest way to understand Satan, but its significance for Satanism stems exactly from insurrection and longing in its primordial sense.
Think of it in terms of the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. This event is traditionally regarded as the primordial disgrace of humanity, in Christian terms the origin of our propensity to sin and, therefore, need for the redemption through Jesus. But, of course, for us on the Left Hand Path, in Satanic terms, this even is to be interpreted as the beginning of humanity’s initiation, the path of our own liberation and perfection. But there is another angle as well. There is the idea, a form of cosmic pessimism, that our existence is an exile, nothingness being our original home. That’s the question Emil Cioran posed in Tears and Saints, but if this is indeed the case then it means that life is a rebellion, an insurrection, that overturns everything that came before it. In that sense, life itself is an insurrection of solarisation, and one response to this is to simply embrace it. If to embrace life is to embrace exile, cruel as it may be, then so be it. To me, it is the only answer to the question of life that makes sense, if this is how one poses it. The mythological Satan and Lucifer both embrace their exile from heaven as the fruit of their insurrection/rebellion, and with it the very desire that it was based on. In Sethian or Valentinian terms, the exile of spirit in separation from the Pleroma, born of Sophia’s desire to understand God and the resultant creation of Yaldabaoth, was, from another standpoint, the sole reason a life beyond the order of the Pleroma is possible, thus life itself is a product of her Fall. On the other hand, perhaps it’s simply a more innocent longing to beyond what is. I remembered T L Othaos’ system of “Tenebrous Satanism”, and one idea from it being that life is basically an adventure of the acausal (spirit) in the realm of flesh, seemingly undertaken for the pleasure of the acausal. The point of reconciling with the Darkness is simply to disinhibit ourselves by removing the barriers of despair and fear in order to more fully embrace the adventure. The theme of exile and solarisation is still present in this interpretation of the Fall, however: here, Satan “fell” from heaven, embracing exile in order to reject the order of God, which traps the adventurous progression of life, which itself primordially overturns everything.
In a unique way the Sun, particularly because of its “black” and nocturnal aspect, is actually quite an apt analogy for Satan and the magical path of Satanism. Satan’s Fall overturns everything, and his spiral of insurrection is the basis of life. For this reason, his sign is the imprint of life. That is Satanic solarisation, and it can be our interpretation of the dragon at the heart of the world; the dragon for us can be other than Satan, though we usually much prefer to see him as the goat. Satanic nigredo is disinhibition, enivres-vous, blasphemy, inversion, a rebours, magic in itself, and, in Pagan terms perhaps, the journey into the underworld, going to the bottom of the earth so as to overturn everything per will, on the path to our own self-actualisation and alchemical perfection. Never surrendering to anything, the magician on the path fully embraces solarisation as the delirious overturning of everything, reshaping the world in their art in their will, and on the path to weaving their will into everything. That is our will-to-darkness, our path to becoming-demonic, for Satan is the whole basis of our path, by dint of everything that we have established so far. And for all of this Satan is also the emblem of our solar myth, the solar myth of the Satanist, overturning everything to reveal the truth of its double image, its hidden reality, whiting out everything in our black light and manifesting the truth our will, a new truth, in our own Art. That is our satanic solarisation.
I would like to conclude this article with an ironic note on the lamentation that in the next essay, “The Highest Form of Gnosis” by Enrico Monacelli, about the nature of the “worldwide annihilation” that is modernity. Monacelli says here, citing Amy Ireland’s The Poememenon:
Whereas pre-moderns lived in a world ‘marked by dogmatism, a drive towards unity, verticality, the need for transcendent rule and the symbol of the sun’, moderns live in a catastrophic miasma that can only be characterised as ‘lunar, secular, horizontal, multiple, and immanent’.
Why do I think there’s irony involved? Because one is to reflect on this either as a spiral of disintegration and lunacy pervading the world at large, or as proof of Nick Land’s argument that the universe is nothing but a distintegrating machine in which we’re all witnesses to our own laceration and martyrdom. But, if we humans are truly in need for a representation of the sun, we can have it, easily! Because that sun is not the unity of God or the daylight of the world of forms. No, that sun is the sun in the underworld, the shining light of Hades. Nay, the sun is Satan, without whose sign we should not be.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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