“O Lion-Serpent Sun, the beast that whirlest forth
A thunder-bolt, begetter of life
Thou that flowest, thou that goest
Thou Satan-Sun, Hadith, that goest without will
Thou air, breath, spirit, thou without bound or bond
Thou essence, air swift-streaming, elasticity
Thou wanderer, father of all
Thou wanderer, spirit of all”
This is the blog for a currently unformed print project: Akephalos: A Journal of Anarchy, Ecstasy, and Eros (working title). I didn’t want the project to keep running ahead of me so I threw out a snare and caught it by its ankle to at least show you part of the beast for now; even if it is merely its bloody ankle that I reveal.
Akephalos is inspired by an earlier publication of the same name, one titled in French rather than Greek, Acéphale. Acéphale was a public review created by Georges Bataille. It was also a separate secret society formed by Bataille and others. Its name is derived from the Greek ἀκέφαλος (literally “headless”). It numbered five issues and lasted from 1936 to 1939.
In the first issue of Acéphale Bataille wrote: “Human life is exasperated by having served as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes this head and this reason, insofar as it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts serfdom.”
The poet William Blake put forth that humans are composed of reason and energy, which elsewhere he called desire. His philosophy attacked the dominant form of Western thought: that reason, or the head, controls our desires and seeks to conquer all life and non-life on Earth, and even, one day, the cosmos.
“Those who restrain Desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.
And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of Desire.”
Nietzsche, of whom much of Acéphale’s first issue dealt with gave us the Dionysian vision of the world. Dionysus and Apollo represent two archetypes of the “Western” spirit. Dionysus is Akephalos. Apollo represents the Sun, rationality, order, logic, and purity. Dionysus represents the vine, irrationality, disorder, chaos, and filth. Dionysus was a foreign God, often accompanied by foreign women, who wandered from the east into the rational patriarchal city-states of Greece and later Rome.
Western civilization is Apollonian to the extreme. While the Greek poleis tried to recuperate the Dionysian spirit, Rome banned the Dionysian cult. The West continues to reap the bitter spiritual fruit of such a Puritanical pruning job. We will see pruner’s heart pierced with shears. Let howls of mad women and clash of cymbals haunt dark night again!
-Ocean Mniaros