Georges Bataille – Tears of Eros: In the beginning, in Greece, as far as we can tell, the practice of the Bacchanalia had on the contrary the sense of a surpassing of sensualist eroticism. Dionysiac practices were at first violently religious; it was en enflamed movement, on the whole, is so poorly known that the links between the Greek theatre and the cult of Dionysos are difficult to locate. But it would not be surprising if the origin of tragedy is in some way linked to this violent cult. The cult of Dionysos was in essence tragic. At the same time it was erotic, it was so in its frenzied disorder, but we know that to the extent that the cult of Dionysos was erotic, it was tragic. Tragic, moreover, above all, and eroticism ended up bringing it into a domain of tragic horror.
Lampridius – Heliogabalus: For who could tolerate an emperor who indulged in unnatural lusts of every kind, when not even a beast of this sort would be tolerated? And even at Rome he did nothing but send out agents to search for those who had particularly large organs and bring them to the palace in order that he might enjoy their vigour. Moreover, he used to have the story of Paris played in his house, and he himself would take the role of Venus, and suddenly drop his clothing to the ground and fall naked on his knees, one hand on his breast, the other before his private parts, his buttocks projecting meanwhile and thrust back in front of his partner in depravity. He would likewise model the expression of his face on that with which Venus is usually painted, and he had his whole body depilated, deeming it to be the chief enjoyment of life to appear fit and worthy to arouse the lusts of the greatest number.
Charles Baudelaire – A Heroic Death: The Prince was no better and no worse than anyone else, but an excessive sensibility made him, in many cases, more cruel and more despotic than any of his peers. A passionate lover of the fine arts, and indeed a real connoisseur, he had a truly insatiable appetite for sensual enjoyments. Uninterested in men and morals, a true artist himself, the only enemy he recognized as dangerous was Boredom, and the bizarre efforts he made to flee or conquer this world's tyrant would certainly have drawn down upon him, on the part of a severe historian, the epithet "monster," if he had allowed anyone in his domain to write anything that was not intended to produce either pleasure or astonishment, which is one of the most delicate forms of pleasure. The great misfortune of this Prince was that he never found a theater vast enough for his genius. There are young Neros who suffocate in too narrow limits, and whose names and good intentions will always remain unknown to the centuries to come. Improvident Providence gave them abilities greater than their States.
Karl Menninger – Man Against Himself: There are numerous legends about the cult of Cybele and Attis which originated in Phrygia after the sixth century B.C. (…) The gist of several of them is that the Mother-Goddess Cybele (or in some legends, Agdistis) was originally hermaphroditic and that the gods performed a surgical operation, cutting off the creature’s external, i.e., male, genitals and leaving the female genitals. She is represented as being related to Attis, either directly or indirectly representing his mother. Attis grows to manhood and is beloved by Cybele, but is persuaded by his friends to marry a king’s daughter. At the wedding the mother-lover appears and drives Attis mad with frenzy. He castrates himself and his bride kills herself. Cybele mourns the deed and obtains from Jupiter the promise that Attis’s body shall not decompose but that his hair shall continue to grow and his little finger to move.
Antonin Artaud – Heliogabalus or, the crowned Anarchist:Heliogabalus was a born anarchist, and one who ill bore with kingship, and all his acts as king were acts of the born anarchist, the public enemy of order, who is an enemy to public order; but he practised his anarchy on himself and against himself, and as for the anarchy he brought to the government of Rome, he might be said to have practised what preached and to have paid the required rate for it.
When Gallus cut off his member and was tossed a woman’s garment, I perceive in this ritual the desire to have done with a certain contradiction, reuniting man and woman at a stroke, combining and merging them into one, in and through the male. The male being Initiator. According to the historians, Heliogabalus also came within an inch of having his member cut off.
If that were so, it would have been a grave error on Heliogabalus´s part; and I think the historians of the day, who understood nothing of poetry and still less of metaphysics, must have mistaken the false for the true, ritual simulation of this act for the actual deed.
Robert Hughes – The Fall and Decline of the Avant-garde (Times Magazine, Dec 18 1972): Those interested in the fate of the avant-garde should reflect on a Viennese artist named Rudolf Schwarzkogler. His achievement (and limited though it may be, it cannot be taken from him; he died, a martyr to his art, in 1969 at the age of 29) was to become the Vincent Van Gogh of body art. As every moviegoer knows, Van Gogh once cut off his ear and presented it to a whore. Schwarzkogler seem to have deduced that what really counts is not the application of paint, but the removal of surplus flesh. So, he proceeded, inch by inch, to amputate his own penis, while a photographer recorded the act as an art event. In 1972, the resulting prints were reverently exhibited in that biennial motor show of Western art, Documenta V at Kassel. Successive acts of self-amputation finally did Schwarzkogler in. That the man was clearly mad as a hatter, sick beyond rebuke, is not though important: wasn’t Van Gogh crazy to? But Schwarzkogler’s gesture has a certain emblematic value. Having nothing to say and nowhere to go but further out, he lopped himself and called it art. The politics of experience give way to the poetics of impotence. Farwell Jasper, hullo Rudolf!
Antonin Artaud – Heliogabalus or, the crowned Anarchist:To restore poetry and order to a world whose very existence is a threat to order, is to bring back war and the permanence of war; it is to bring in a state of enforced cruelty, to arouse a nameless anarchy, anarchy of things and appearances which awaken before sinking anew and melting into unity. But he who arouses this dangerous anarchy is always its first victim. And Heliogabalus is a diligent anarchist who begins be devouring himself, and ends by devouring his excrement.
Lampridius – Heliogabalus: The soldiers, however, and particularly the members of the guard, either because they knew what evils were in store for Elagabalus, or because they foresaw his hatred for themselves, formed a conspiracy to set the state free. First they attacked the accomplices in his plan of murdering Alexander, killing some by tearing out their vital organs and others by piercing the anus, so that their deaths were as evil as their lives. Next they fell upon Elagabalus himself and slew him in a latrine in which he had taken refuge. Then his body was dragged through the streets, and the soldiers further insulted it by thrusting it into a sewer. But since the sewer chanced to be too small to admit the corpse, they attached a weight to it to keep it from floating, and hurled it from the Aemilian Bridge into the Tiber, in order that it might never be buried. The body was also dragged around the Circus before it was thrown into the Tiber. His name, that is to say the name Antoninus, was erased from the public records by order of the senate, -- though the name Varius Elagabalus was left --, for he had used the name Antoninus without valid claim, wishing to be thought the son of Antoninus. After his death he was dubbed the "Tiberine," the "Dragged," the "Filthy," and many other such names, all of which were to signify what seemed to have been done during his rule. And he was the only one of all the emperors whose body was dragged through the streets, thrust into a sewer, and hurled into the Tiber. This befell him as the result of the general hatred of all, against which particularly emperors must be on their guard, since those who do not win the love of the senate, the people, and the soldiers do not win the right of burial.
Sigmund Freud - Civilisation and its Discontents: And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure tous. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of…
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