Future Notes on Orphism | Covidian Æsthetics
Another crossover, first published as War and Theatre #005 in Covidian Æsthetics on Jun 27, that is directly relevant to Aide-mémoires in Power past and imminent. Includes two new postscripts.
“The thing we have undertaken must not be confused with anything else; it cannot be limited to the expression of an idea and still less to what is considered art […] What we are starting is a war.”
—Georges Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy”, Acéphale IIn Prudence in Hell 030, I wrote:
I have brought up Orphism a number of times and I want to dwell a little further on it. As I first hinted at “In Art Considered as a Non-State Actor”, it strikes me as a viable synthesis in aesthetic theory, perhaps even a missing link.
Orphism is the future –what I think of as the marriage of the Dionysian and the Apollonian– but it’s of all the aesthetic inclinations also the most dangerous.
It is not a belief system. It’s like Freud missed the drive for stealing from heaven and stealing from hell.
So I’m trying to delimit Orphism, and my roadmap goes something like this
—it’s very rough—
The Apollonian is order.
The Dionysian is exuberance.
The Orphic is transgression.
These are the three aesthetic Beatitudes; another isosceles to ponder.
So what is Orphism?
Answers by Bataille and Co., Girard1 and Sewell present both incongruities and convergences. I have a few thoughts of my own to add.
The first is that Orphism juxtaposes Gnosticism2 in a pre-Christian way.3 Its concern is with the sacred in all of its manifestations4; its intent is deicidal, being specialised in ‘gods who die’ (including kings). It is politically archaic, and can be anti-fascist, anti-communist, anti-democratic or all of the above, its purpose ‘existential’ (Bataille) or ‘conspiratorial’ (Caillois),5 although arguably not both, or not both at once. It is also infectious, as its subject —the sacred— is a contagious one, which accounts for the acute awareness Orphism has always had of mimetic desire (and for why the potlatch ceremony holds such a sway in the Bataillian imaginary: here is expenditure, all the way down).6
So this is not exactly a ‘religion’ in the modern sense. It is a fundamental understanding of sacrality. It corresponds to the mythological plane.
Orpheus turns to divination after his beheading. He picks up the mysteries while in the Underworld. He charms Hecate in Tartarus, which is his initiation into the Mysteries. There is forbidden knowledge involved —isn’t there always— but what matters isn’t that: it is that Orphism, like Gnosticism, is prereligiously and fully on the same initiatory spectrum. Gnosticism craves mastery; Orphism is, in a very literal sense, about liberation. The Orphic is to answer not to knowledge, but to death.
The relics of Orpheus —his head, his lyre— wind up in respective temples of Dionysus and Apollo. The Orphic is the intersection of the two, body and prop.
One last thing: Orpheus is one of the very rare characters, in fact or fiction, to have had the epiphany of conversion to monotheism; as presumably occurred with Akhenaten. This is, in Girard’s words, a:
notion[…] of conversion which [is not] Christian, but [which is] true in the sense that [it is] against violent mimetic desire, and [has] other positive religious aspects which we can recognize.
According to Diodorus Siculus, Orpheus visited Egypt, where he became acquainted with the doctrine of a future life.
Orpheus surrounded by animals. Ancient Roman floor mosaic, from Palermo, now in the Museo archeologico regionale di Palermo. Picture by Giovanni Dall’Orto.
Georges Bataille. The Sacred Conspiracy. The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology. London: Atlas Press, 2017.
Cynthia Haven. Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
In his conversations with Cynthia Haven, Girard says:
‘When Paul speaks of the “powers,” he says that they are legitimate religiously, and that they can be a vehicle of the truth: in all the great religions, the Orphic traditions, you have notions of conversion which are not Christian, but are true in the sense that they are against violent mimetic desire, and have other positive religious aspects which we can recognize. The idea that other religions are “satanic” does not mean that they should be destroyed by force…’ (the italics are mine).
In fact, the first overt Bataillian mention of the acephal dates from a 1930 article in Documents, entitled, of all things: “Base Materialism and Gnosticism”. Masson and Artaud were already onto the headless bea(s)t half a decade earlier.
To connect with our earlier writing on AI art generators and automatism, Masson first conceived of the Acéphale as an automatic drawing that ‘depicted a beheaded man, standing with legs apart, with the instrument of sacrifice and self-mutilation in his left hand, and in his right, “the flaming heart of the Christians; or a grenade; or even the plucked-out heart of Dionysus, a grenade born of the blood of this same god (…) there are two stars on his chest and on the stomach a spiral (…), that special example of a maze that can only be followed in one direction and which is only found in archaeological sites in Ancient Babylonia, where it represents the use of the intestines for reading omens.” In place of the genitalia was a skull.’
I should not close this footnote without some words on the divinatory gut instinct that Masson is referring to, a unicursal, or one-way, labyrinth; another trope to which Bataille dedicated an essay.
Initiation is a unicursal labyrinth. The point of being initiated is you cannot be uninitiated. You have been irreversibly transformed. (Nymphification).
There are several more things to say for the Acéphale figure: is the spiral stomach a pataphysical gidouille? If the figure is furthermore a self-mutilator, he recalls the Baudelairian trope of the Heautontimōroumenos or self-tormentor, after Terence’s play.
In Dionysos mis à mort, Détienne describes Orphism in anabatic terms, wherein if “Dionysism makes it possible to escape the human condition from below by becoming bestial (…), Orphism allows a similar escape from above towards the divine”. What is key is to escape. In The Sacred Conspiracy, Marina Galleti affirms a katabatic inflection for Acéphale by stating that “it was intended to operate specifically from the Orphic to the Dionysiac, from the celestial world to base matter”. Both definitions share a range, but their directions are opposed, with Détienne’s geared toward ascent and Galleti’s towards descent.
My position on this point is oblique, complementary and intermediate, in that I think of katabasis and anabasis as the same diagonal. A lot will depend on the direction one is moving in. As in our previous footnote: the labyrinth is, again, unicursal, but it does have an exit/escape, if afforded enough time. The sacred, of course, can provoke the suspension in time, and so exit can only be secured through above, or below. The only way forward in such matters is, thus, not through, but through initiation (the start of the course), adeptness (the understanding of the course) and transgression (the destruction/overriding of the course).
The rites at Acéphale distinguished between periods of ‘tension’ and ‘licence’—between a sacred right and left where the first is, in Durkheimian terms, linked to ‘social cohesion, guaranteeing rules and taboos’ (let’s call it the Apollonian sacred), and a more sinister one “that consists in outbursts of violation of the rules of life” (for our purposes, the Dionysian sacred).
Nor were the virtues of Dionysus vis-à-vis Christ lost on Acéphale 3/4, a celebration of his power as conjurer. It was the last issue of the journal, immediately prior to the establishment of the secret society.
Acéphale recoiled from direct political action and invested itself in “reinforcing the initiatory structure (…) inherited from Surrealism”. This is central to my definition of the Orphic as initiatory [infra]structure: theatre.
Consider, for example, the relationship between the Orphic and the menadic.
PS1: Apropos footnote 4, dealing with the sacred right and left, has already been initially addressed in Prudence in Hell 043, with an explicit nod to Tantrism.
Earlier, the role of tension was addressed in War and Theatre #002 at Covidian Æsthetics, “On Difficult Beauty”. As has become increasingly apparent, I am connecting dots at augmenting speeds for the benefit of my broader thesis on hyperbaroque, and in the hope of more precisely charting both my themes and my obsessions, which do not always follow from the rational part of writing.
PS2: The monotheistic impulse will be important to bear in mind as we prepare to introduce Klossowski, who will not only show himself soon in the Aide-mémoires in Power, but also feature prominently in our next piece on AI art generators at Covidian Æsthetics, when discussing simulation vis-à-vis Caillois.
Klossowski is not just a thinker of utter importance to me; he is part of a complex, involving his family romance, that is helping inspire my own decision-taking at a difficult moment. One can only hew to great, cursed precedents sometimes.