Heliogabalus

or, the Crowned Anarchist

Antonin Artaud Infinity Land Press 2019

In AD 218, a 14-year-old Syrian lad called Varius Avitus Bassianus arrived in Rome as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius Felix Augustus, known to history by the name of his god, Elagabalus (“Greekified” as Heliogabalus). He brought with him the black phallic stone from Emesa in Syria, the cult symbol of his god, “worshipped as though it were sent from heaven”. A great new temple to house it – the so-called Elagaballium – was built on the Palatine Hill. Every day at dawn, the teenage emperor would sacrifice large numbers of cattle and sheep at the temple’s altars.

He aimed to impose monotheism, with all other gods merely slaves or attendants of his Sun god. A huge temple of the Sun was built on Rome’s outskirts.

Each year at midsummer, the black stone was conveyed here from the Elagaballum, borne in a chariot drawn by six white horses, the emperor running backwards in front of the chariot holding the reins, so as not to turn his back on the god.

He was a bisexual transvestite, and a pioneer of gender reassignment – he tried to get doctors to “contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision”. Gibbon said he “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury”. After four years spent deriding and dismantling the empire’s power structures, he was slaughtered by his own guards, fed up with his capricious rule. His headless body, and that of his mother, Julia Soaemias, were thrown in the Tiber.

Stephen Barber tells us that the dissident surrealist poet Antonin Artaud, instigator of the Theatre of Cruelty, “effortlessly out-imagined and out-hallucinated André Breton, while ridiculing his political affiliations.” In the ominous year of 1933, which began with a mad Austrian corporal elected German Führer, Artaud’s publisher proposed he write about Heliogabalus. The result was this book, translated by Alexis Lykiard and published in an elegant edition by Infinity Land Press. “The life of Heliogabalus is theatrical,” Artaud wrote. “But his theatrical way of conceiving existence strives to create a true magic of the real. Indeed, I do not conceive of theatre as separate from existence.” He said he had written the book “to unlearn history a little; but, all the same, to find its thread.” It reflects his preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan and a range of esoteric religions. It’s an embodiment of himself and of his own insurgency in art. Three years after its publication, he was locked up as a lunatic, emerging only shortly before his death in 1948. As the book’s blurb says, “Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most extreme, revolutionary and deranged book”.

Paul Sieveking

★★★