Aarseth Watching Video pt. 1 - Euronymous, Saint of the Pit

"La sainte de l’abîme est plus sainte à mes yeux!"

Gérard de Nerval, Artémis


From this interview with Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth (conducted probably shortly after Per Yngve Ohlin's suicide on April 8th, 1991):

"And now over to something more humouristic...yes... snuff-movies. Who had been the perfect actor for a snuff-movie, and why the hell aren't they legalized? Don't you think that every video-store should have its own section with snuff-movies?

EURO: Actually I think it's great that movies like that are forbidden. If they were legal and easily accessible, all the small trend children would be watching them, and then it would not be something extreme anymore. It's just the same what happened to death metal it became something everyone could buy in every store, something normal and accessible for everyone. All the mystic and evil atmosphere is GONE. I do not think snuff-movies are funny, I think they are DARK. I've seen people laugh at them, but that's probably because they will not be themselves. That is the best way to watch such a movie to try to FEEL the actual pain of the victims. It becomes much more gruesome then, and that's great. One must be alone in the darkness and suffer with the victims. If you watch it with other people, they will often talk, laugh and so on, and then you get more distanced from it. It's not supposed to be funny (death to fun), it's much better when it's depressive."

In the early nineties, the Norwegian state practiced a severe system of censorship. Horror films were either heavily cut or banned outright. Even relatively innocuous British horror films such as British horror films such as House of Whipcord and Twins of Evil were forbidden.

In all probability, Aarseth was bluffing when he claimed he had seen snuff movies. Snuff movies, films which depict the actual killing of a human being, are nothing more than an urban legend. In the (thoroughly researched) 1994 book "Killing For Culture. An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff" film journalists David Kerekes and David Slater concluded that no such films have existed anywhere, at any time. Probably, Aarseth made the common error of mistaking notorious gore films such as Man Behind The Sun, Cannibal Holocaust and Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood for actual snuff movies; another possibility is that Aarseth categorized films from the Faces of Death series as snuff films.

Kerekes and Slater made some useful observations with regards to the social function of the myth of the snuff movie:

"Snuff is the ultimate debase, a monster that must exist because it cannot be proven not to exist. As such it is exploited by campaigners fighting 'Satanism', pornography and 'video nasties'. For bureaucrats seeking publicity and missionaries seeking funds, it is a tool - the demonized apotheosis that necessitates their crusade. It is what the public must fear and what these bodies will serve to protect the public from (and in recognizing it, will themselves remain untouched and immune). For the 'transgressives', on the other hand, it is the next inevitable step down the slippery slope - like all marijuana smokers will become crack addicts; like all beer drinkers will turn to hard spirits; like all porn viewers will resort to sex crime."

The myth of the snuff film, constructed by ".. bureaucrats seeking publicity and missionaries seeking funds..." was appropriated and used by Aarseth. This imaginary terror, this demented obsession of modern-day inquisitors, inspired Aarseth to wrest the demonic power of the snuff movie from his contemporary media landscape to cast that image back at Norwegian society. By publicly, ostentatiously claiming to consume snuff movies, Aarseth desired to become Norwegian society's "...ultimate debase...".

"Actually I think it's great that movies like that are forbidden." Aarseth's words illustrate the observation that transgression is a 'dual operation', an interplay between interdiction and transgression. Neither transgression nor interdiction can take place or have meaning without the other. Transgression does not deny the interdiction: on the contrary, it reaffirms the interdiction. For Aarseth, if snuff movies wouldn't be forbidden, if they would be legal and easily accessible, they would be meaningless. Aarseth needed his bureaucrats, missionaries and inquisitors. Aarseth was not only an artist who desperately desired to ruin that staid Christian society of which he was a part; he also was an artist who longed for a society that would deny his right to exist.

Where (inquisitorial?) criticism and theory regard the consumer of horror films to be in a sadistic-voyeuristic collusion with the camera, Aarseth "...suffer[ed] with the victims", as if he attempted to open up the boundary of the silver screen to feel "...the actual pain of the victims." Rather than assaultive, Aarseth's gaze is receptive, introjective, opening up to the pain of the victims. Carol Clover's classic 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws. Gender in the Modern Horror Film suggests that Aarseth's reception of snuff films is structured similarly to the reception of horror films:

"The evidence suggests that the first and central aim of horror cinema is to play to masochistic fears and desires in its audiences - fears and desires that are repeatedly figured as 'feminine.' It may play on other fears and desires too, but dealing out pain is its defining characteristic; sadism, by definition, plays at best a supporting role. To the extent that a movie succeeds in 'hurting' its viewers in this way, it is horror; to the extent that it does not try, it is not horror but something else."

Even if Clover is wrong to simply identify the consumption of horror films with sadomasochistic practices, she is right in the sense that both masochism and the consumption of horror films foreground an intimate sensation of corporeal suffering. With Karmen MacKendrick, both masochism and the consumption of horror films can be described as a 'counterpleasure', which are "...pleasures which queer our notion of pleasure, consisting in or coming through pain, frustration, refusal. (...) They are pleasures that refuse the sturdy subjective center, defying one's own survival, promising the death not of the body but, for an impossible moment, of the subject..." (sourced here).

Aarseth's approach to the consumption of snuff movies was solitary and contemplative: "One must be alone in the darkness and suffer with the victims. If you watch it with other people, they will often talk, laugh and so on, and then you get more distanced from it." Rather than consuming these films in a gregarious manner, Aarseth experienced the agony of the victims in solitude. For Aarseth, the consumption of these films must take place outside the banalities of ordinary life, cut off from the normal communication of emotions.

In the citation above, Aarseth expressly linked his ideal way of consuming these film to the experience of a "mystic and evil atmosphere": i.e. to mysticism and the left-handed sacred. This is particularly interesting in connection to the consumption of horror films as a counterpleasure which threatens the death of the subject. It would seem that the experience of corporeal suffering through the contemplative consumption of horror films is not only close to eroticism, but also to (left-handed) sanctity. Bataille: "The Saint is not after efficiency. He is prompted by desire and desire alone and in this resembles the erotic man." (sourced here).

In the white light of the desert, Christian hermit Saints identied ecstatically with a tortured and crucified Christ. In the pit-like darkness of his room, illuminated only by the somber blue light of the cathode tube, an enraptured Aarseth identified with the tortured and murdered victims of snuff films.

Euronymous's Epistles (pt. 3) - the political economy of DSP

The letters which Chagrynn sent me, allow analysis of the economic side of Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth's independent record label, Deathlike Silence Productions (DSP). An analysis of the economic side of Aarseth's work is relevant for the understanding of Black Metal, as Black Metal should be seen as a Maussian 'total social phenomenon' rather than only a musical one. Black Metal is a aesthetic, religious, mythological, (counter-)juridical, economical and social phenomenon. Black Metal is bound up with all kinds of sociological institutions. The letters which Chagrynn sent me allow me to understand the way Aarseth conducted DSP in the socio-cultural context of that record label.

In the first letter to Morgan "Evil" Håkansson, DSP is still in a very early stage: "Yeah, we're distributing some records, we'll make a list when we get more. We must get DSP registered as a firm first also. But we quit the idea of making it non profit, because this takes so much time - I'm working 15 hours at least each day, so it'd just kill us." DSP's working methods were rather informal: "I don't know if you are interested in sending money first, that helps us a LOT in the process of starting up this label, we are really low on cash, but if you also are, I'm sending you the records first, and you can send cash when they're sold. It's up to you."

Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind in their 1998 book Lords of Chaos see this way of running DSP as evidence of Aarseth's ineptitude as a businessman.

What strikes me about this letter is the level of trust, the cooperative character of the behavior. Following Francis Fukuyama's 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, I'd argue that this level of trust not only point to a set of norms shared within music-oriented youth subcultures, but to a high level of trust in Scandinavian society in general. High-trust societies, like Norway and Sweden, do not have the need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, that low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea) have. From this perspective, Moynihan's disparaging remarks on Aarseth's business acumen might well reflect his American background, the USA being a relatively individualistic, low-trust (cynical) society compared to Scandinavia. Furthermore, one might hypothesize that Moynihan's view of Aarseth's naive or trusting way of doing bussiness also reflect Moynihan's LaVeyan Satanist ideology. This ideology promotes egoism in the form of an Ayn Randian agonistic capitalism with religious trappings. Aarseth opposed LaVeyan Satanism on theological and ideological grounds: "I can also say that I will NEVER accept any band which preaches CHURCH OF SATAN ideas, as they are just a bunch of freedom, and life-loving atheists, and they stand exactly the opposite of me." (sourced here)

By the time the second letter is written, Aarseth's ambitions have grown considerably. He hopes to expand DSP's operations by recruiting Håkansson as a representative of DSP in Sweden. "The plan is to organize a network of concert arrangers under the name Deathlike Silence also, so that a lot of bands can keep touring in different countries without problems. The idea is (to explain shortly) to get a guy to start up DEATHLIKE SILENCE SWEDEN, and manage the whole network with record distribution, concert arranging, promotion, etc etc, and even start up a shop only for underground stuff. He'll start up all those things as different departments, and get a guy to be the chief of record distribution, one for concert arranging and so on. In the end we'd have a great network for death metal which would be totally independent of the commercial market which is controlled by the big labels. So I was wandering if you'd like to join in as the chief of the DSP concert arranging department in Sweden or something?"

Aarseth's dreams of DSP as an multinational underground organization are a little grandiose, the type of fantasy inexperienced young people often have (Aarseth was only 21 at the time). I'm reminded of a friend, in his early twenties, one night proposed to start an tv station with a small group of friends - long before the Internet started to make such plans even remotely feasible. Nevertheless, this friend now runs a film production company, which proves that even the most unrealistic dreams can provide the impetus for very real businesses. Rather than proof of a lack of entrepreneurial skill, these dreams betray ambition.

Furthermore, one does not need to stretch the imagination to see residual traces of Socialist ideals in Aarseth's proposal. In effect, Aarseth proposes that DSP should become a musicians' cooperative, a business organization owned and operated by a group of Black Metal musicians and concert arrangers for their mutual benefit. Such cooperatives have their roots in Socialism. It should be borne in mind that Aarseth at the time was a member of a radical left wing political group called Rød Ungdom ("Red Youth"). A hammer and sickle (☭), symbol of Communism, are carefully drawn under each and every letter as part of Aarseth's signature, underlining the importance of Socialist ideas for Aarseth's personal identity.

The letters to Pocho Metallica, as well as the letters to Morgan "Evil" Håkansson, make clear how important the international underground network of Metal aficionados was for the functioning of DSP. "Now I have a big request for you, if you know any DEATH METAL bands from ARGENTINA, URUGUAY, BOLIVIA, PARAGUAY, or VENEZUELA, could you please tell them to write or give me their adress? I'm dying to get in touch with people from there! (...) Do you think that there would be any chance of setting up a Mayhem gig in ARGENTINA one day? It'd be a fucking dream coming true to play in South America! We have got great contacts in COLOMBIA now, at the end of this letter I will give you a couple of adresses! I suppose that you remember that I had my own record label (DEATHLIKE SILENCE), well now I'm looking for distributors all over the world, and I was wondering if you were interested in helping me! Everybody who sell [sic] at least 10 copies (or preferably more) of one album, will receive one free copy, + they can sell it for as much as they want. (...) You'll of course pay when you've sold them."

What is conspicuous about the relationships which the letters describe, is the absence of bargaining and negotiation. The relationships which were set up under the sign of DSP appear to be closer to the spirit of gift exchange than that of trade. Unlike 'normal' capitalistic relationships, the objects which Aarseth distributed through DSP were inseparable from the concrete relations in which they were exchanged, they were inseparable from the transferential pact which they sealed between Aarseth and the Metal aficionados with whom he exchanged letters. DSP can be seen as a ceremonial exchange system, as Black Metal Kula Ring. The DSP records had a value which exceeded (and, in a sense, undermined) their economic exchange value: a symbolic exchange value. Undermined? Yes, symbolic exchange should be primarily seen as a giving-away, as a loss.




The band members of Mayhem were as poor as church rats. The first letter explains: "And we'd like to at least get our expenses paid, we wont charge anything, but if you have the possibility to get us some cash for the gig(s), we won't mind too much... we're really broke, and it's great to get some money to help us to survive." From the second letter: "We didn't have places to stay for a while, Dead even had to live in a car." From the third letter: "We are fucking broke, else we might have afforded to pay some ourselves, we don't even have food here, sorry!" From the eighth letter: "Concerning the money you mentioned in your last letter to the goat, (for Merciless), take all the time you need. But we ARE very broke..."

If we relate Aarseth's grinding poverty to the 15 hour work day mentioned in the first letter, we are inevitably led to the conclusion that (regardless of Aarseth's entrepreneurial acumen) DSP wasn't successful from a commercial point of view. From an economic perspective, it was a waste of time. However, from a broader perspective however, the expenditure of the energy required for a 15 hour work day for an commercially unfeasible goal reveals DSP to be a 'labor of love', which does not answer the need for profit.

In an interview, Aarseth mentions dreaming of becoming rich: "I’d just like to have extremely much money. Then DSP would be a big company, we would all have the POWER in this part of the music business, and I would live in luxury with a harem and watch the children in Africa starve to death on video." However, I see these nauseating statements merely as attempts to shock the audiences of the interviews by transgressing the humanitarian, social-democrat ideals which dominated Norway at the time. They can not be interpreted as a genuine desire to accumulate capital - if it had been, Aarseth would have chosen a more remunerative line of work than Black Metal musician!

If DSP doesn't answer the need for profit, to what does it answer? To examine this, I turn to the Black Metal content of DSP's products - music recordings and concerts.

Mayhem's Black Metal is a music which aims to provoke dread and horror through symbolic representations of tragic loss (degradation and death). It would go too far beyond the scope of the present post to analyze thoroughly the many ways in which unproductive expenditure is thematized in Mayhem's music: war, Satanic cultism, spectacles, cannibalism, and perverse sexual activity (sodomy, which deflects sexuality from genital finality) are perhaps the most important. All these represent activities which - at least in the primitive culture of Black Metal - have no end beyond themselves. They are not meant to be productive, but on the contrary waste utilitarian objects and human bodies.

As for the concerts: Mayhem may well be seen as a Satanic cult which requires a bloody wasting of animals in sacrifice - pigs specifically, whose putrescent heads are displayed on stakes during Mayhem concerts. As Aarseth warned Morgan "Evil" Håkansson in the first letter : "But be aware that we're having a pretty disgusting show, which includes pig heads on stakes, stench of corpses/rotting meat on stage, and some cool effects like that. And if the gig is very good, Dead will cut himself up and bleed on the audience." And from the third letter: "What more? Yeah, the stage show! If we had a car, we could bring some pig heads and stuff ourselves, but that's not possible in a plane. So if you can get some heads for us, it would be fucking great, it's hard to get the right concert feeling without. The best would be to have 4 heads on each gig, they will be destroyed during the gig! Tell me what you think! If you have to order from a butcher, you'd better do it pretty fast, as it probably takes some time for him to get them. Heads from pigs, goats, cows, horses and oxen are great. It's pretty important! Fuck, would I like to see that show with the butchery of a goat!"

These wasteful practices provide a symbolic context from which to analyze Aarseth's activities under the banner of DSP. They provide us with a background which helps us understand why Aarseth would work at least fifteen hours a day for no profit to speak of; and why DSP's practices resemble gift exchange rather than 'normal' business strategies.

DSP's activities cannot be reduced entirely to processes of capitalistic production and accumulation. DSP also answers a need to lose and squander. It presents us not so much with a for-profit enterprise, but primarily with a means for unproductive expenditure. The economic functioning of DSP is not so much the result of Aarseth's possible ineptitude as a businessman, but of the fact that DSP aimed at limitless expenditure.

Interpreted this way, it be becomes clear that DSP was a 'total social phenomenon' rather than merely a capitalistic one. DSP was bound up inextricably with the aesthetic, religious, mythological, and social phenomenon that is Black Metal. To paraphrase Bataille, Black Metal condemns the musician to "...the most disappointing form of activity, to misery, to despair, to the pursuit of inconsistent shadows that provide nothing but vertigo or rage." The Black Metal musician can use his music only for his own loss.






Post scriptum

Scanned versions of any of Aarseth's letters are still extremely welcome! Please send them to surrealdocuments [at] hotmail.com.

Here is a YouTube video which compiles songs from albums that were released by Deathlike Silence Productions.




Here (link) is a page with the DSP discography.

Alice Coltrane - Lord of Lords

"228. Against mediators. - Those who want to mediate between two resolute thinkers show that they are mediocre; they lack eyes for seeing what is unique. Seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes." Friedrich Nietzche, The Gay Science.

Alice Coltrane had weak eyes. Her 1972 album Lord of Lords was her third and final album for the Impulse! label. The music on the album was made to match her New Age spirituality - a spirituality which sought the universal, which was "...determined to deny that which opposes the sannyasi to the Roman prelate, or the Sufi to the Kierkegaardian pastor..." (Bataille). The insipid mediocrity of her beliefs carried over into her music, which attempted to mediate Jazz, Western Classical music, Indian Classical Music, Delta Blues, Gospel. The result can be heard as a synthesis which is so sentimental and saccharine, that it positively cloys.

Alice Coltrane had weak eyes. She did not see that her New Age spirituality was servile. Her search for deliverance, salvation, and possession of the 'supreme goal of life', expressed the will to straitjacket herself within an authoritarian religious ideal. At the time of the making of 'Lord of Lords' the religious authority was that of Swami Satchidananda; and after that Swami's death, the religious authority was that of the controversial South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. Called 'a divine being and a sacred embodiment' on the website of Alice Coltrane's own Vedantic temple, this guru deified himself in order to sexually abuse young followers. The authoritarian aspect of Alice Coltrane's spirituality also carried over into her musical praxis. The title of the album itself refers to authority. Furthermore, I see her work as the continuation of nineteenth-century Western Classical Music, in which the composer was viewed as an artist-prophet, as a spiritual authority, while the orchestra musician was passive, a servile follower of the dictates of composer. With the central track titled 'Excerpts from The Firebird', Alice Coltrane places 'Lord of Lords' squarely in this Western Classical Music tradition. On the album as a whole, improvisation is at a minimum; Alice Coltrane leads a 16-piece string orchestra as an artist-prophet, with only herself, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Ben Riley being allowed some improvisatory freedom.

Alice Coltrane may have had weak eyes - but what if we listen to her music with sharp ears?

Listening to the album with sharp ears, we can hear the music in many different ways.

We can attempt to discern the various musical strata of 'Lord of Lords', we can try to differentiate between Jazz, Western Classical music, Indian Classical Music, Delta Blues and Gospel, we can seek multiplicity in the synthesis, we can try to find forms in the universal. Here, we break down the unified into a plethora of significant unities. We hear many unique things, and marvel at the luminescent abysses that divide and connect them. Listening with sharp ears, we make things different again.

We can employ another listening technique and desublimate the universal into formlessness. When we listen this way, the corniness of her spirituality becomes a pleasurable infraction of the laws of good taste. The celestial character of the harps and violins only serves to underscore the feverish lowness of the drones. Instead of ascending to the heavens, we descend into compository chaos. The Firebird falls into the Icarian Sea. Free Jazz, Western Classical music, Indian Classical Music, Delta Blues and Gospel all collapse. Drones drown compositions. The saccharine melts and becomes syrupy. 'Lord of Lords' turns out to be fascinating; something that cannot be tamed by any concept. Listening with sharp ears, we hear the measureless and incomparable.

Those who hear only the universal in Alice Coltrane's music show that they are mediocre; they lack eyes for seeing what is heterogeneous in her work. Hearing her music as a synthesis and reducing her music to universal nature is the sign of weak ears.

Georges Sorel - Reflections On Violence (pt. 2)

Reading Sorel's 'Reflections On Violence' I found myself wondering whether Mayhem's Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth was aware of Sorel's thought. After all, Aarseth was a member of Rød Ungdom, a Marxist-Leninist youth movement. It is not impossible that Aarseth made acqaintance with Sorel's work, which was a formative influence on Lenin's doctrines.

Did Aarseth envisage the Black Metal Inner Circle as a revolutionary vanguard? Did he see the Inner Circle as a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity? As an elite locked in a Manichaean struggle with modern Norwegian society? Wasn't his Satanism a violent, mythology which extolled fire-raising as adventurous, glorious, superior?

Perhaps a closer examination of Rød Ungdom is in order.

Rød Ungdom had its origins in the protest movements of the 1960s. Rød Ungdom was intended be a recruitment source for the radical Arbeidarklassen Party (Working Class Party). In the 1960s, Rød Ungdom organized student strikes, squats and study circles. They produced a daily newspaper, and ran a publishing house and a record company. Furthermore, the youth movement organized solidarity work for Vietnam, Palestine and Afghanistan. In the 1970s, Rød Ungdom radicalized ideologically, coming under the influence of Maoism as practiced in tyrannies such as China, Albania and Cambodia. Under this influence, the youth movement came to resemble a political sect in which assent to the party line was enforced with an iron fist. The party line decreed that homosexuality would disappear under Socialism. Rød Ungdom was suspected of being involved in terrorist attacks. Certainly, Rød Ungdom was a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity and locked in a violent, Manichaean struggle with contemporary Norwegian society.

However, when Aarseth joined Rød Ungdom in the 1980s, the organization had begun to lose its ideological faith. China, Albania and Cambodia were not anymore inspiring examples, but were gradually coming to be seen as the depressing bureaucratic, tyrannies that they were; and masculine domination in the party was coming under feminist critique. What's more the party organization itself had become sclerotic, and the cadre demoralized and out of touch with the Zeitgeist. When the youth movement celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1983, the leader of Rød Ungdom declared: "A correct line for a development of Red Youth in 1980s has to take into account that the situation around Marxist-Leninist movement has changed. The youth revolts of the 1970s are a matter of the past past. The optimistic view of the future that characterized the 1970s has evaporated. The new situation forms the basis for pessimism and individualization among teenagers. To recruit young people to a revolutionary movement is far more difficult than before. To win support for socialism is the way much more difficult than in the early 1970s. "

Interestingly, the demoralization of Rød Ungdom was inspiring for Aarseth. He seized on the bleak, repressive nature of the Chinese, Albanian and Cambodian regimes and transvaluated them in a perverse manner. From an interview with Aarseth:

"I know you’re interested in communism. Have you been to any communist countries, if yes, what have been your emotions about it?

I’ve been very interested in communism for a while, especially the extreme countries like Albania, Kampuchea, North Korea and so on. I have to say that I have studied so much that I know that real communism would be the best possible system, BUT as I HATE people I don’t want them to have a good time, I’d like to see them rot under communist dictatorship. Ceausescu was great, we need more people like him, Stalin, Pol Pot too. I’ve been to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the (good) old days, and was about to go to Albania, although it didn’t turn out. Poland was quite all right, but it could have been even MORE gray and depressing. I like secret police, cold war and worshiping of dictators. I like bugging and spying on people, torture chambers in police stations and that people suddenly “disappear”."

Here, Aarseth seems to exalt the absence of those Socialist myths which present life in Leninist tyrannies as adventurous, glorious and superior; and for Aarseth this decisive absence of myth is more perversely joyful than the Socialist myth itself. The absence of Socialist myth is presented as a superior coldness, an adventurous grayness, a glorious depression. Aarseth's transvaluation of the withered Leninist ideology echoes Bataille, who wrote in 1947: "... the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth."

Notwithstanding Aarseth's perverse transvaluation of bleakness and repression, it seems likely that the withered husk of Socialist myth did not have a lasting allure for him. With his Black Metal band Mayhem, he replaced that husk by another myth, a violent, joyful mythology which extolled fire-raising, cannibalism and sodomy as adventurous, glorious, superior: Satanism.

What the general strike was to Sorel's vicious Socialism, images of burning churches were for Black Metal. Specifically, the photographic images on Fantoft stave church in ashes were, to paraphrase Sorel "... a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of war undertaken by [Black Metal] against modern society." Wikipedia mentions that members and fans of the Norwegian black metal scene claimed responsibility for inspiring (and perpetrating) over 50 arsons directed at Christian churches between 1992–1996.

The so-called Black Metal Inner Circle functioned as a revolutionary vanguard for Aarseth Satanist myth, as an organization of the most vigorous elements of the nascent Black Metal scene bound together in fervent solidarity. Like a Sorelian, Leninist elite, the Black Metal Inner Circle hoped to provoke the staid Norwegian society to engage in a brutal Manichaean struggle.

And like Sorel, Aarseth wanted his enemies to be self-confident, unashamed, brutal:

"From what we have heard there are extreme, fundamentalist Christians planning actions against us, which we think is great. We want to see Christians become militant. We hate to see the born again Christians going around being nice to the whole world. That's extremely annoying. We want so see Christians with weapons coming here to kill us. That's what we want."

However, where Sorel was passionately confident in Socialism's ultimate triumph in the cataclysmic war on the bourgeoisie, Aarseth was under no such illusions. On the contrary, Aarseth appears to have been passionately confident that his Black Metal insurrection would meet a tragic end. As I have written before (here, here and here), much of Aarseth's extremism can be understood as a desire to provoke the Norwegian social-democrat utopia into denying him the right to exist.

In this tragic desire, Aarseth's Satanism reveals itself as a myth which points towards death, which is the absence - the deathlike silence - of all myths.

Georges Sorel - Reflections On Violence

I

Georges Sorel's 1908 book 'Reflections On Violence' is an ugly, hate-filled book.

The author was a socialist war monger. He harbored a ferocious desire for violent class warfare and apocalyptic revolution. In fact, Sorel was so belligerent that he consistently used the word 'peacemaker' in a pejorative sense. 'Reflections On Violence' is seething with vituperative rhetoric against those social democrat politicians who wanted to decrease socio-political tensions in pre-WWI France.

The terrorist doctrines expounded in 'Reflections On Violence' were a decisive influence on the two most bloodthirsty ideologies of human history: fascism and Leninism. Mussolini said: 'I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts.' Thus, the author bears a part of the responsibility for the millions of deaths caused by the totalitarian regimes of the interbellum which were based on these ideology. Even if Sorel's part of the responsibility is small, it is still too great.

Thankfully, the historical role of these murderous regimes is played out. Why not consign Sorel's book to the place where it belongs - the dustheap of history? Why read the book at all?

I myself read the Sorel's 'Reflections On Violence' because its theory of social renewal brought about by an vanguard through the use of a violent myth formed an antecedent to the activities of dissident Surrealists in the mid-nineteenthirties. Sorel's thought contributed to the formation of Acéphale, a secret society created by Georges Bataille and others.


II

For Sorel, the highest good is aggressive action performed with a sense of impersonal consecration to the ends of a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity and impelled by a passionate confidence in its ultimate triumph in some cataclysmic encounter.

Sorel wanted society to be a Manichaean struggle between the poor and rich classes. In his view, a socialist revolution could only be brought about by instilling into the working class a hatred of the bourgeoisie, not just hidden rancor and bitterness but open aggression. And rather than a middle class willing to compromise and negotiate, Sorel wanted the bourgeoisie to be self-confident and unashamed of their privileged situation. Why? Because only if the ruling class was unafraid to govern brutally, could the social tensions be maintained which instill vengeful revolutionary fervor in the proletariat. Parliamentarian democracy, philanthropy and humanitarianism were dangerous because they might pacify the proletariat and thereby prevent socialism fulfilling its historical role.

To inspire revolutionary passion in the proletariat, Sorel proposed that "...use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of war undertaken by Socialism against modern society." In order for socialism to succeed, it was necessary to inspire the proletariat with a mythology which extolled revolutionary violence as adventurous, glorious, superior. For Sorel, the myth which which was to enthrall the working class, was the general strike. The general strike, which Sorel conceived of as a complete catastrophe of violence, enclosed all the strongest inclinations of the working class and all its anticipations of the future; it gave "...an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity."

These myths were to be inspired in the proletarian masses by an revolutionary ideological elite. Basing himself on the history of the Catholic church, 'Reflections On Violence' had declared that "... the syndicates must search less for the greatest number of adherents than for the organization of vigorous elements; revolutionary strikes are excellent for effecting a selection by weeding out the pacifists who would spoil the elite troops."

From Edward A. Shils' excellent introduction: "Sorel's ethic is the ethic of a political sect living in the midst of a continuous crisis, with all the stress on purity and all the fear of contamination by the affairs of this world which mark the sect. It is the ethic of crisis, and it is of a piece with the expectation of an ever deepening crisis which is resolved ultimately only by an apocalyptic transformation in which everything is totally changed."


III

In 1936 Georges Bataille created a secret society called "Acéphale" - Headless. Members were Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Klossowski, Patrick Waldberg. Probable members were Michel Leiris, Jacques Chavy (a sociologist, translator of Max Weber), René Chenon, Henri Dubief (a historian), Pierre Dugan, Dussat, Jean Dautry and Colette Peignot. Whether Roger Caillois was a member is disputed. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was aware of Acéphale's existence and purposes, but in all probability not a member. Acéphale's members were well aware of Sorel's doctrines. Both Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois mention 'Reflections On Violence'.

Like Sorel's mythico-political sects, Acéphale was a restricted, delimited group, into which one one was ritually initiated and whose members were sworn to secrecy. The group was bound together by the performance of rituals, such as the commemoration of the beheading of Louis XVI on the Place De La Concorde on the 21st of January.

Acéphale is most notorious for a violent ritual, albeit a ritual that was never performed. Acéphale's ultimate goal was to enact a sacrifice of one of it's members. "There was another idea, hatched by Bataille, that the action of a group could be fully efficacious only if the initial pact of alliance among it's members was truly irremediable. And he was convinced that to bind their energies together, it was necessary to perform a human sacrifice. (...) I am not at all sure what transpired with regard to this projected human sacrifice. What is clear, though, is that it was easier to find a volunteer victim than a sacrificer, and so things went no further" (Caillois). The activities of Acéphale were directed towards a total transformation of society. Through the mediation of the sacrificial victim a means of communication would be established through not only between the members of the secret society, but also with society. Through this mythico-political act, social life would be stimulated and society reinvigorated. Human desires, passions, and mental activity would be reborn.

The activism of Acéphale must be seen in the light of the great political crisis of the interwar period: the rise of fascism. A fanatic struggle against fascism dominated Bataille's political life from the mid-nineteenthirties onwards. In September-October 1935, Bataille instigated Contre-Attaque, which can be seen as an anti-fascist movement related to Surrealism. Contre-Attaque was "virulently hostile to any tendency, whatever form it takes, that harnesses the Revolution to the advantage of ideas of nation or country." Acéphale was created when the Contre-Attaque fell apart, in the spring of 1936. The sacrifice that was at the center of Acéphale, should be seen as a strategy which was to bring about the triumph of Bataille's sacrificial Surrealism over National Socialist and fascist Caesarisms. Bataille's conception of sacrificial death as a tragedy was opposed politically to fascism, which denies what death is, turning it into a glamorous patriotic solution. Acéphale was a revolutionary ideological elite - but an elite of Surrealism, not of Socialism.

Like the political sects of Sorel, Acéphale was focused on violent action performed with a sense of impersonal consecration to the ends of a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity and impelled by a passionate confidence in its ultimate triumph in some cataclysmic encounter.

When Surrealism proved to be unable to stem the tide of fascism and the triumph turned into a debacle, Bataille turned inwards. Mytho-political activism was replaced by inner experience.

Dostoevsky - Notes From The Underground

"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!"

I've just finished reading Dostoevsky's terrifying 1864 book Notes From The Underground. The book was a decisive influence on Georges Bataille. From Michel Surya's excellent biography of Bataille:

"Chestov not only guided Bataille in his reading of Nietzsche, he initiated him into reading Dostoevsky. Everything suggests that this discovery was decisive. The young Bataille might be seen as 'Dostoevskian'; not only because of the explicit reference he made to the great Russian novelist in the sole remaining fragment of his first book W.C.; it may also be inferred by accounts from Métraux, according to whom Bataille wanted to follow the maxim 'everything is permitted' (echoing Dostoevsky's famous axiom 'nothing is true'), and Leiris. He first persuaded Leiris to read Notes From The Underground; in addition, Leiris depicts him at the time as 'frequenting dives and the company of prostitutes like so many heroes of Russian literature'. Leiris also suggests that the hero of Notes From The Underground influenced Bataille 'by his obstinacy in being what in popular terms one calls an "impossible" man, ridiculous and odious beyond limit'. Finally, Leiris portrayed the Bataille of 1924-5 as: 'impossible' certainly, debauched beyond a doubt, and a gambler like many of the heroes of Russian literature in general and Dostoevsky's in particular. Bataille gambled - often with money, and sometimes with his life at Russian roulette."

Deviations From Nature

"Among all things that can be contemplated under the concavity of the heavens, nothing is seen that arouses the human spirit more, that ravishes the senses more, that horrifies more, that provokes more terror or admiration to a greater extent among creatures than the monsters, prodigies, and abominations through which we see the work of nature inverted, mutilated, and truncated.

This remark by Pierre Boaistuau can be found at the beginning of his Histoires Prodigieuses, a work published in 1561, in other words during a period of public calamities. Prodigies and monsters were regarded in the past as presages and, most often, as such, as birds of ill omen. Boaistuau had the merit of devoting his book to monsters without worrying about augury, and of recognizing to what extent men are eager for stupefaction."

The foregoing words open an short essay by Georges Bataille, published in 1930 in Documents, the dissident Surrealist journal which inspired this blog.

The images which accompany this post are from Boaistuau's book; more can be found here, at the Wellcome Collection.

I found more information about Boaistuau's book in Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park's 1998 book 'Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750'. There I read:

"Perhaps the clearest index of the sensitivity of the literature of monsters to external political and religious circumstances was the much reprinted six-volume French series of Histoires prodigieuses. Although the first two volumes, by Pierre Boaistuau (1560) and Claude Tesserant (1567), linked monsters and other prodigies to divine punishment, they suggested other, less ominous interpretations as well. According to Boaistuau, the main cause of monstrous births was divine judgment, swift and terrible, visited upon the sexually incontinent or bestial as a visible sign of "the horror of their sin". Yet he mentioned in the next breath the natural causes of the maternal imagination, excess of deficiency of seed, and indisposition of the uterus. Thus a child with four arms and legs, born on the day the Genoan and Venetian forces made peace, was at once the divine sign of brotherly reconciliation and the result of a narrow womb.

Tesserant thought monsters born in 1487 in Padua and Venice might have been the fearful presages of the misfortunes soon to be visited upon Italy, but he remarked concerning conjoined twins born near Heidelberg in 1486 ('very wondrous, for the rarity of the example') that no misfortunes and indeed 'almost nothing remarkable' had happened in Germany during that year. The Histoires prodigieuses' third, fourth, and fifth volumes, on the other hand, appeared between 1575 and 1582, at the height of the French wars of religion; they insisted unequivocally that all monsters were prodigies, sent directly by God to admonish Christians to 'repentance and penitence.' In contrast, the anonymous author of the sixth volume, published in 1594, during a lull in the hostilities, worried that earlier volumes might have bored their audience and promised to 'give more pleasure to readers for the most part curious about stories of wondrous things.' Although he indicated that the years between 1567 and 1573 had been particularly fertile in monsters, because of God's righteous indignation against Protestant heretics who had risen up against the true faith, he construed the word 'prodigious' in his title to mean not only portents but also all things that are 'not ordinary and ... have caused great wonder [grande admiration].

Thus, in addition to signaling the sensitivity of the horror complex to political and religious circumstances, the volumes of the Histoires Prodigieuses indicate that monsters could excite pleasure as well."

Night and Black Metal

From Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1945 book Phenomenology of Perception:

"When [...] the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in the night.

Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity. I am no longer withdrawn into my perceptual look-out from which I watch the outlines of objects moving by at a distance. Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me and its unity is the mystical union of the mana. Even shouts or a distant light people it only vaguely, and then it comes to life in its entirety; it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surface and without any distance separating it from me."

If we interpret this text from a Bataillan perspective, Merleau-Ponty's night is a formlessness that is homogenous.

These last few days I've been thinking a lot about this extremely interesting text, and about how it relates to the trope of 'night' in Black Metal, and how that trope relates to the sense perception of Black Metal music itself. I've published this post fully aware that my thoughts on this subject still lack definite shape and form - but than again, in night "the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished".

'Night' is a fairly prominent trope in Black Metal. Just search for the word 'night' in blogs like 'Dunkelheit' and the search results will display dozens of albums which employ the word in its album or song titles. The way Black Metal uses the trope of 'night' can easily be related to Merleau-Ponty's text. Many titles relate night to destruction: "Cut, with the Night, into Mine Heart", "Night Of Retribution", "Night of Pagan Wrath", "Midnight Mutilation". Some even specifically relate night to the destruction of personal identity: "Black Night Of Soul". Where Merleau-Ponty relates night to the sacred (mana), so does Black Metal: "Night of Shadow Magic", "Satan, Eye of the Night", "Black Night Astral Projection", "Temple of Eternal Night". Some titles ascribe to night a life of its own, echoing Merleau-Ponty ("... it comes to life..."): "Summon The Night", "The Will of Night", "The Dark Spirit of the Night". Other titles link 'night' to depth: "Journey Into The Depths Of Night". I could go on and on, and I haven't even touched upon night-related tropes such as 'darkness', 'black', etc. The titles can be read as (often childish and clumsily formulated) metaphors for the embodied perception of night.

How does the perception of night as formulated by Merleau-Ponty relate to Black Metal production style?

Depth is rarely associated with Black Metal production. Depth in music is generally associated with bass: Dark Ambient and Dubstep are genres which are often described using tropes of 'depth'. Black Metal music distinguishes itself from other musics by the absence of bass's fathomless depths. I recall the production of French Black Metal Haemoth's excellent 2006 'Kontamination' album being called 'wafer thin': pure surface without foreground or background, without depth - the polar opposite of Merleau-Ponty's night.

Furthermore, Black Metal in the style of Mayhem, Darkthrone and Satyricon is a sharp object, an object which does not enwrap but which pierces, an object which does not infiltrate but which penetrates. From a review on the Invisible Oranges blog: "The music is plenty scathing, but the sound is an icepick in the ear. (...) This shit is painful." Despite the poor production of Black Metal, the riffs have relatively clear and articulate outlines.

Nevertheless, an album like Mayhem's 1994 classic De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is unremittingly dark. The only sensory perceptions that album provokes are those of touch and smell: the album is cold, and stinks of vomit and dust. Beyond these perceptions, only darkness. How does the music achieve the effect of darkness without mimicking the embodied perception of night? Or should one conclude that Merleau-Ponty's description of the experience of night is somehow flawed or lacking? Or did I not listen carefully enough to the music? Should I listen to what lies beyond the wafer thin surface?

Perhaps the clear and articulate outlines are only there to be subsumed in raw and primitive buzz, abolished by thick roiling blackness, destroyed by murky ambience that enwraps and infiltrates, smothered in guitardrone... "Even shouts or a distant light people it only vaguely..."

De Sade and Music

From Maurice Blanchot's 1947 essay 'A la recontre de Sade' (translated here as 'Sade's Reason'):

"La nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, suivi de l'Histoire de Juliette sa soeur appeared in Holland 150 years ago. It was a monumental work of nearly 4000 pages. The author had rewritten it several times, greatly increasing its size. Overwhelming and almost endless, it immediately threw the world into a panic. If there is a department of forbidden books in every library, it is for such a book. We may as well admit that no literature of any epoch has ever produced so outrageous a work and that no other volume has ever wounded people's thoughts and feelings more deeply. In our age, which shudders at Henry Miller, who would dare to compete in license with Sade? Yes, we can safely say that here we have the most scandalous book that has ever been written, and surely this is a reason for taking interest in it. (...)

It is an outrageous book because it is hard to get at and cannot be made public. But it is also a book that proves that there is no outrage where there is no respect, and that were the outrage is immense the respect is proportionate. Who is more respected than Sade? Even today many people still believe that they would only need to have this accursed work in their hands for a few minutes to make Rousseau's boast - that any virgin who reads a single page of it will be undone - come true. Certainly such respect is a trophy for a literature and a civilization. And we can hardly resist a longing to whisper to all his present and future critics and editors: when dealing with Sade, at least be respectful to the outrage."

Reading Blanchot's essay, I was struck by the question why there is no composer or musician comparable to De Sade's? Why is there no composer or musician whose Evil is of the same stature?

Sure enough, there have have been many highly controversial composers and musicians. Stravinsky, whose Le Sacre du Printemps was scandalous at the time, springs to mind as one example; more recent examples include The Beatles, Throbbing Gristle and Burzum. And there have been many musicians who identified with Evil - this blog is full of them.

But no piece of music has ever wounded people's thoughts and feelings as deeply as the writings of De Sade. No piece of music has been regarded as an outrage for as long as De Sade's work.

Le Sacre du Printemps is now regarded as Classical music. The Beatles have been knighted. Throbbing Gristle, once deemed "wreckers of civilization", now play at Tate Modern. Even Burzum is in the process of becoming legitimate - the fact that his music is reviewed in The Wire is surely a sign of that. The outrage over these musics has lasted only a comparatively short time.

Why? Why can't music claim such a trophy of Evil?

It is tempting to hypothesize that the reason for this is that music and literature are essentially different, that music - exactly because it is music and not literature - can impossibly cause a moral panic on the scale of De Sade's literary work. In such an hypothesis, music would be an innocent art form, compared to literature. Nonetheless, I feel I should first try and find a socio-historical reason for the absence of a musical Marquis.

Blanchot notes, "...no literature of any epoch has ever produced so outrageous a work...", thus implicitly suggesting that only the epoch in which De Sade lived could have produced such a work. Indeed, the numerous theories De Sade produces are indelibly connected to the moral, legal and political ideals of Enlightenment. Even if De Sade's theoretical though is elusive, chameleontic, inconstant and contradictory, it is more than merely a sardonic perversion of these ideals. In a strange way, his work is still loyal to Enlightenment. Surely this is the reason why the work of De Sade has stayed so unnerving for such a long time: the moral, legal and political ideals of Enlightenment form the foundation for our current liberal democracy. De Sade corrupts these foundations from the inside out. Thus, he is more effective than his heirs, the Romanticists and the Decadents: they had already become disloyal to Enlightenment and could therefore not anymore infect Enlightenment at the root. Such Evil as De Sade created, could only be created when our present society was still in its formative stage.

During this formative stage, music was not in a position to produce such Evil as De Sade created.

The literature produced by De Sade was not only informed by Enlightenment. More ambiguous than that, it was just as much informed by Absolutism, and especially by the despotic tendencies in that form of government. The protagonists of De Sade's writings are Absolutist despots, even if they speak the language of Enlightenment. In this, they are phantasmatic proxies for the aristocratic author himself - even if De Sade was very different from his protagonists and (unlike his heroes) capable of displaying human feelings. While writing literature was an acceptable passtime for the aristocrats of the Absolutist era, making music was not. Music was made by servants, not by masters. Classical music of the era could speak the language of servants exalting the masters; it could not yet speak the language of the masters themselves. De Sade's heroes were no and could be no musicians. And where the writings of De Sade could speak from the perspective of the despot, music could not.

Furthermore, De Sade's writings are the product of a profound loneliness. As Blanchot notes, the censors and judges who claimed to have immured De Sade are really in his service, and are in fact fulfilling the liveliest wish of his libertinism. "For Sade always longed for the solitude of the Earth's entrails, for the mysteries of a hidden and solitary life. Time after time he formulated the idea that man's greatest excesses demand secrecy, the darkness of the pit and the inviolable solitude of the cell." Secrecy, darkness and solitude may well be circumstances under which a Sadean literature can flower; but these circumstances did not at the time favor the production of music. Though is it not entirely inconceivable that one would compose music in secrecy, darkness and solitude, certainly orchestration and the actual playing of music demand interaction with musicians. Today, of course, technological developments permit music to be made in secret, in the pit, in the cell: the legions of one-man Black Metal bands testify to that.

In this post, I've concentrated on the circumstances in which De Sade's oeuvre was produced, and in which a comparable musical work was not produced; while perhaps I should have focused on the circumstances in which De Sade's oeuvre was received and in which music did not get the same same reception. What is needed to answer the question posed in this post is historical-comparative research into the reception of transgressive music and literature, based on reception theory. Of course, such research presents immense theoretical problems, not to speak of the practical difficulties one would face.

In the mean time, only our imaginations can create a music which a composer comparable to De Sade might have created. I imagine it to be created by a vast orchestra, consisting of hundreds or even thousands of musician slaves; I imagine it to be at once repetitive to the point of boredom, and as frenziedly festive as the storming of the Bastille. De Sade: “How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination!... [where] the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate.”

Filled with a Strange Frenzy

"The Hindu Mantramahodadhi of Mahidhara, a 1558 c.e. work, describes a rite in which the practitioner worships the Goddess while sitting on a corpse with flowers sprinkled with the practitioners own semen."

This is a quote from the book I've just finished reading - David Gordon White's highly interesting book on medieval Tantra, 'Kiss of the Yogini. "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts'.

The quote put one of the most scandalous and disgusting episodes of George Bataille's oeuvre in my mind: he masturbated naked, in the night, before his mother's corpse, which lay on her bed, alone, stretched out between two candles for her vigil. Both scenes evince the same disturbing assemblage of necrophilia, aesthetics and religious devotion to a motherfigure.

Thus, the quote from White's book prompted some internet research.

In another book by White, 'Tantra In Practice', he describes the Mantramahodadhi as a Sanskrit text that prescribes the mantras of different deities and ritual practices connected with them. "Mahidara wrote the work with the intention of gathering all significant information on the topic in a single book. Because of the clarity of its presentation, the Mantramahodadhi - along with the Nauka (The Boat) , the author's commentary written to enable practitioners to cross the "Great Ocean of Mantras" - has enjoyed great popularity in all parts of India up to the present day." Indeed, the Mantramahodadhi can easily be orderered through the internet (here, for example). Sadly, I could not find the book on Google Books or Project Gutenberg.

In the 1861 book 'The Literary Remains of the Late Professor Theodore Goldstucker' I did find the following:

"The Vamacharins [followers of the left-hand ritual] ... and amongst these especially that branch called Kaula or Kulina, adopt a ritual of the grossest impurities. Their object is, by reverencing Devi, who is one with S'iva, to obtain supernatural powers in this life, and to be identified after death with S'iva and his consort. 'According to the immediate object of the worshipper,' Professor Wilson says, ' is the particular form of worship ; but all the forms require the use of some or all of the five letters M viz., Mansa, Matsya, Madya, Maithuna, and Mudra i. e., flesh, fish, wine, women, and certain mystical gesticulations. Suitable mantras (or formulas) are also indispensable, according to the end proposed, consisting of various unmeaning monosyllabic combinations of letters, of great imaginary efficacy. Where the object of the ceremony is to acquire an interview with, and control over, impure spirits, a dead body is necessary. The adept is also to be alone, at midnight, in a cemetery or place where bodies are burned or buried, or criminals executed ; seated on the corpse, he is to perform the usual offerings, and if he does so without fear, the Bhutas, the Yoginis, and other male or female goblins, become his slaves.

In this, and many of the observances practised, solitude is enjoined ; but all the principal ceremonies comprehend the worship of S'akti, and require for that purpose the presence of a female as the living representative and type of the goddess. This worship is mostly celebrated in a mixed society, the men of which represent Bhairava (or S'iva as the Terrific), and the women, Bhairavi (S'akti or Devi as the Terrific). The S'akti is personated by a naked female, to whom meat and wine are offered, and then distributed amongst the assistants ; the recitation of various Mantras and texts, and the performance of the Mudra, or gesticulations with the fingers, accompanying the different stages of the ceremony ; and it is terminated with the most scandalous orgies amongst the votaries.'

The same author adds that, "in justice to the doctrines of the sect, it is to be observed, that these practices, if instituted merely for sensual gratification, are held to be as illicit and reprehensible as in any other branch of the Hindu faith"; but full assent must be given to his remark which follows a text quoted by him in support of this view, for he says: " It is only to be added that if the promulgators of these doctrines were sincere, which is far from impossible, they must have been filled with a strange frenzy, and have been strangely ignorant of human nature."

Filled with a strange frenzy! But are they really so 'strangely ignorant of human nature'?

W.B. Seabrook - The Magic Island

At a second-hand bookstore - for a mere € 15 - I found a beautiful hardcover edition of W.B. Seabrook's 1929 book 'The Magic Island', published by The Literary Guild Of America in 1929, in New York. It is illustrated with (politically very incorrect!) quasi-expressionist drawings by Alexander King, and with photographs by the author. Some of these are reproduced below (click to enlarge).

Seabrook was an exceptional figure: he was a Great War veteran, a journalist and a traveller, a friend to both the Surrealists and to the notorious sorcerer Aleister Crowley, an alcoholic and a sadist. He had supposedly eaten human flesh ("like good, fully developed veal"). The Surrealist photographer Man Ray was inspired by Seabrook's sadist practices to create pornographic photographs such as "The Fantasies of Mr. Seabrook", "Lee Miller and William Seabrook" and "Homage to D. A. F. Sade", all with Lee Miller as a protagonist. In 1933 Seabrook was voluntarily committed in order to cure his alcoholism, and he documented the experience in his 1935 book "Asylum". Despite the treatment, Seabrook remained an alcoholic. He committed suicide by a drug overdose on September 20, 1945.

The illustrator, Alexander King, was a rake also, described "as a thief, morphine addict, failing playwright and painter, a man of iconoclastic observations and caustic humor who began his career as a painter of human figures, focused primarily on the face. Then he became an art thief, stealing fifty prints from the Metropolitan Museum." King, who claimed to have been married five times, published anecdotes on his life in a series of humorous books, such as May This House Be Safe from Tigers, Mine Enemy Grows Older, I Should Have Kissed Her More, and Is There Life After Birth. King was a frequent guest on on TV talkshows from roughly the mid-1950s until his death in 1965.

Georges Bataille's Surrealist journal Documents published an appreciative article on Seabrook's 'The Magic Island', written by Michel Leiris and Bataille himself. Even if Seabrook's reputation amongst anthropologists is quite bad (his account of Voodoo is often regarded as crypto-racist), Leiris credited Seabrook with being a "conscientious observer and the first man of the white race initiated into the mysteries of voodoo" and praised him for his "humane attitude" toward his subject. Bataille was especially appreciative of the final paragraph quoted below - it echoes Bataille's philosophical attempt to harness the forces of a dis-enchanted sacred to revitalize Western society.

From 'The Magic Island':

"And now the literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, had such a one lurked near by, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified: in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.

Thus also my unspying eyes beheld this scene in actuality, but I did not experience the revulsion which literary tradition prescribes. It was savage and abandoned, but it seemed to me magnificent and not devoid of a certain beauty. Something inside myself awoke and responded to it. These, of course, were very individual emotional reactions, perhaps deplorable in a supposedly civilized person. But I believe that the thing itself - their thing, I mean - is rationally defensible. Of what use is any life without its emotional moments or hours of ecstasy? They were reaching collective ecstasy by paths which were not intrinsically peculiar to their jungle ancestors, but which have been followed by many peoples, some highly civilized, from the earliest ages, and will be followed to the end of time or until we all become mechanical, soulless robots. It is not necessary to look backward to the Dionysian orgies, the bacchanalia, the rites of Adonis, or frenzied David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. What, after all, were they doing here in these final scenes, when formal ritual had ended, that was so different from things which occur in our own fashionable and expensive night clubs, except that they were doing it with the sanction of their gods and were doing it more succesfully? Savage rhythm, alcohol, and sex excitement - yet there was an essential difference, for here was a mysterious something superadded. Lasciviousness became lust, which is a cleaner thing, and neurotic excitement became authentic ecstasy, the 'divine frenzy' of the ancients.

There us nothing quite as stupid and pathetic as an orgy that doesn't quite come off. Perhaps there is a deep mystical truth in the saying attributed to a much-misunderstood voice, 'Whatever ye do, do it in my name.' Perhaps if we mixed a little true sacrificial blood in our synthetic cocktails and flavored them prayerfully with holy fire, our night clubs would be more orgiastically succesful and become sacred as temples were in the days of Priapus and Aphrodite."

Georges Bataille's House in Vézelay

When I took William S. Burrough's "Ah Pook Is Here" out of my book cupboard to write the post about the Ghäst/Yoga Split, a photograph that I had forgotten about fell out. It is a photograph of Georges Bataille's house in the village of Vézelay, France.

In Le Coupable, Bataille describes his first night in the house:

"Arriving from Paris we entered the house, net curtains of black crêpe were drying on the trees in the sunny garden. This gloomy 'omen' was heart rending (reminding me of the long black streamers of [Innsbruck] presaging my misfortune). The first day we slept at the house, there was a lack of light in the kitchen were we dined. As night fell, the wind accompanying the storm reached an unprecedented violence, the trees in the garden were shaken like rags and twisted in the roaring of the wind. Night finally fell and the lights went out in the whole house. In the darkness I found a Christmas candle and some matches. After a while in the darkness, light finally returned.
These slight difficulties comforted and even seduced me. The calm in the storm had the strongest meaning in my life: the torment coming from the outside had calmed me down. I was afraid of nothing, it seemed to me, which might come from my deep depression."

In Michel Surya's excellent biography of Bataille, we find a description of the interior of the house:

"The house was basic and falling to pieces: a dark, narrow corridor crossed its whole depth. It first led to a dining room, then to a kitchen with a stone sink. Between them, a steep staircase led to the first and only upper floor. The landing led to two bedrooms, which were directly above and the same size as the rooms on the ground floor. One looked onto the road and the other Bataille later made his office, since the view was magnificent, overlooking a narrow terraced garden (through lack of space, Vézelay was constructed by superimposition) and, beyond it, the valley. No stove (only fireplaces), no running water (a pump), no bathroom".

Bataille first moved to the Vézelay house in March 1943, staying there until October. He moved to that house again in 1945 until 1949, when he moved to Carpentras. He was also buried in Vézelay, in 1962, in a small cemetery at the summit of Vézelay hill.