Three types of Beauty: Dionysian, Apollonian, Cybelian
Three types of Beauty
Wanting to get closer to the essence of Beauty, we preferred to avoid the expected appeal to the Dialogues of Plato. We paid all our attention to the mysterious essay by a Russian philosopher and poet Eugene Golovin called “A New Understanding of Beauty.” In this essay, the author compares two poems by Charles Baudelaire, which we will quote here and compare them.
The first poem is known as “Beauty.”
La Beauté
Je suis belle, ô mortels ! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poëte un amour
Éternel et muet ainsi que la matière.
Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris ;
J’unis un cœur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes ;
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.
Les poëtes, devant mes grandes attitudes,
Que j’ai l’air d’emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,
Consumeront leurs jours en d’austères études ;
Car j’ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles :
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles !
(Translated into English by Frank Pearce Sturm)
I am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,
My throne is in the heaven’s azure deep;
I hate all movements that disturb my pose,
I smile not ever, neither do I weep.
Before my monumental attitudes,
That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,
My poets pray in austere studious moods,
For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.
This Beauty is unattainable, monumental in its inaccessibility and splendor. Rejecting any movement, she freezes in one of the hypnotic poses. In absolute silence, it strikes with its unspeakable mystery. This Beauty is moderate and calm, solemn, and fatal. It is alien to the expression of gestures and charming curves of the body; it does not drive you crazy and does not deprive you of peace. And yet it inspires its beholders by presenting itself to them as a heavenly Muse who has risen above the world’s vanity. So beautiful is the Mysterious Sphinx by Charles van der Stappen, so beautiful is the Athena Giustiniani at the Lower Gardens of Peterhof. This is an Apollonian Beauty, supersensible, perfect, ideal; at the same time, it is a “Beauty of measure,” it is alien to metamorphoses that bring it an inevitable change, this Beauty does not go beyond its “limits,” being canonical. This is how J. J. Winkelman imagined the ideal of Beauty (“The History of Ancient Art”), speaking of its “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.”
However, in Baudelaire’s Hymn to Beauty, we find a description of a different type of Beauty.
Hymne à la Beauté
Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,
O Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin,
Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime,
Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin.
Tu contiens dans ton oeil le couchant et l’aurore;
Tu répands des parfums comme un soir orageux;
Tes baisers sont un philtre et ta bouche une amphore
Qui font le héros lâche et l’enfant courageux.
Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres?
Le Destin charmé suit tes jupons comme un chien;
Tu sèmes au hasard la joie et les désastres,
Et tu gouvernes tout et ne réponds de rien.
Tu marches sur des morts, Beauté, dont tu te moques;
De tes bijoux l’Horreur n’est pas le moins charmant,
Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus chères breloques,
Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement.
L’éphémère ébloui vole vers toi, chandelle,
Crépite, flambe et dit: Bénissons ce flambeau!
L’amoureux pantelant incliné sur sa belle
A l’air d’un moribond caressant son tombeau.
Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe,
Ô Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!
Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte
D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?
De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène,
Qu’importe, si tu rends, — fée aux yeux de velours,
Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! —
L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?
Hymn to Beauty
Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss,
Beauty? Your gaze, divine and infernal,
Pours out confusedly benevolence and crime,
And one may for that, compare you to wine.
You contain in your eyes the sunset and the dawn;
You scatter perfumes like a stormy night;
Your kisses are a philtre, your mouth an amphora,
Which make the hero weak and the child courageous.
Do you come from the stars or rise from the black pit?
Destiny, bewitched, follows your skirts like a dog;
You sow at random joy and disaster,
And you govern all things but answer for nothing.
You walk upon corpses which you mock, O Beauty!
Of your jewels Horror is not the least charming,
And Murder, among your dearest trinkets,
Dances amorously upon your proud belly.
The dazzled moth flies toward you, O candle!
Crepitates, flames and says: “Blessed be this flambeau!”
The panting lover bending o’er his fair one
Looks like a dying man caressing his own tomb,
Whether you come from heaven or from hell, who cares,
O Beauty! Huge, fearful, ingenuous monster!
If your regard, your smile, your foot, open for me
An Infinite I love but have not ever known?
From God or Satan, who cares? Angel or Siren,
Who cares, if you make, — fay with the velvet eyes,
Rhythm, perfume, glimmer; my one and only queen!
The world less hideous, the minutes less leaden?
(William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954))
This Beauty is dangerous and intoxicating; rising above the opposites of good and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan reunites the peak and the abyss (remember: “Peak and abyss — they are now merged as one!” by Nietzsche). This Beauty is genuinely sacred, for by combining the spiritual and the nasty, the angelic and the unholy, the innocent and the criminal (often this Beauty is destructive and brings death), it draws the contemplator into a magical dance and invokes fauns and cherubims. The femme fatale has such Beauty: it is Helen of Troy who caused the war, and Salome, who asked Herod for the head of John the Baptist. This Beauty is the Beauty of the Dionysian.
Here is how the difference between these two types of Beauty is described in the History of Beauty book by Umberto Eco: “Serene harmony, understood as order and measure, is expressed in a beauty that Nietzsche called Apollonian Beauty. But this Beauty was at the same time a screen that attempted to conceal the presence of a disquieting, Dionysiac Beauty, which was not expressed in apparent forms, but over and above appearances. This was a joyous and dangerous Beauty, antithetical to reason and often depicted as possession and madness: it is the nocturnal side of the mild Attic sky, populated by initiation mysteries and obscure sacrificial rites, like the Eleusinian Mysteries and Dionysiac rites. This disturbing nocturnal Beauty was to remain concealed until the modern age, only to emerge as the secret and vital reservoir of contemporary expressions of Beauty, thus revenging itself on the beautiful harmony of the Classical world. “ An exhaustive explanation, with which we are inclined to agree, except, perhaps, the idea of the inexpressibility of Dionysian Beauty in visible forms — the entire history of European symbolism serves as proof of the opposite conclusion. The fatal women of Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Fernand Khnopff (this artist painted both the Apollonian and Dionysian types of Beauty with equal skill), Arnold Becklin, Max Klinger, Aubrey Beardsley…can be continued for a long time.
The Dionysian Beauty of Klimt’s Pallas Athene contrasts sharply with Athena’s image perpetrated by Greek and Roman masters who revered only the Apollonian Beauty. One of the art lovers wrote about Klimt’s femmes fatales, the “demonesses of the Secession,” “Athena” and “Judith,” as follows: “Both are … deadly, both are impressive in their archaic and exotic luxury of body and surroundings, so you start to think about the time when it was still customary to sacrifice people.”
Dionysian Beauty can poison the blood like poison and turn even the ruler into a court buffoon, but what paralyzes one’s will can become the nectar of the gods for another. Nietzsche wondered: “What measure of truth can a man bear?” We’re asking: “What is the measure of Beauty…?”
Another example of Dionysian Beauty is the legendary Luisa Casati, whose mad and hypnotic gaze delighted famous artists, poets, and fashion designers. She had demonic Beauty. To make her eyes, painted with charcoal, even more bottomless and alluring, Kasati resorted to the help of drops consisting of poisonous plant belladonna. A red-haired Maenad in a leopard mantle surrounded herself not only with admiring fans but also with exotic and wild animals. The same type of Beauty can be confidently attributed to the silent movie star Theda Bara, thanks to which the expression “woman vamp” appeared. Her name was an anagram of the phrase Arab Death.
Trying to approach a new understanding of Beauty, we turn to the poems of Charles Baudelaire. And what type of Beauty made the poet’s heartbeat? Baudelaire knew what a dangerous combination of Cherub and Sphinx was. What’s that woman’s name? Jeanne Duval, or perhaps Apollonie Sabatier? In “The Flowers of Evil,” Baudelaire appears as the new Actaeon. Pierre Klossowski’s text on the myth of Diana and Actaeon refers to Semele’s interrelation, the mother of Dionysus with Actaeon. According to the author, “there were gods in their blood,” so both Semele and Actaeon are drowned in the Divine: Semele wants to die from contemplating the true appearance of the Zeus (she wants him to possess her completely), Actaeon is just as reckless in his desire to witness the Epiphany of Diana.
Baudelaire, as the new Actaeon, is drawn to a female goddess with terrifyingly insidious eyes that pierce the twilight and “attract…conquer…devour the gaze of the unwary who contemplates them.” A refined rebel, intoxicated by the moon’s charms. Even when Baudelaire writes about the icy Majesty of women (no, this is not about the Apollonian beginning!), he is as close to Dionysus as anyone else. Walter F. Otto wrote about the maenads who heard the deity’s call about “motionless contemplators” immersed in concentrated silence, divine numbness, absolute detachment, and icy equanimity. Actaeon, according to Klossowski, is the “cousin of the God” Dionysus. Was Baudelaire, who sought “pleasures sharper than glass and ice,” his son?
In the prose poem ”Le Désir de peindre,” Baudelaire, like his spiritual brother Actaeon, is under the suggestive influence of the charming Diana, the Roman Hortense (or Orthanc), whose cruel gestures were known to Arthur Rimbaud:
«Je brûle de peindre celle qui m’est apparue si rarement et qui a fui si vite, comme une belle chose regrettable derrière le voyageur emporté dans la nuit. Comme il y a longtemps déjà qu’elle a disparu !
Elle est belle, et plus que belle ; elle est surprenante. En elle le noir abonde : et tout ce qu’elle inspire est nocturne et profond. Ses yeux sont deux antres où scintille vaguement le mystère, et son regard illumine comme l’éclair : c’est une explosion dans les ténèbres.
Je la comparerais à un soleil noir, si l’on pouvait concevoir un astre noir versant la lumière et le bonheur.»
«I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.
She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness.
I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness.»
The flowing silk that barely touched the skin, the pleasant weight of the rings, the cold Shine of the bracelets that encircled the wrists-Yes, a woman always sculpts her image, perfecting the work of the Creator. By decorating herself, she releases the inner Athena, Leda, Cora, Aphrodite, Diana…Beauty craves metamorphosis and does not tolerate rest; it seeks to reflect the inner in the outer; turning lead into gold, Beauty makes a goddess out of a woman, revealing to her the art of spiritualizing the body and materializing the spirit. Become a work of art yourself. Oh, only a few people have ever been able to do that. “Everything that adorns a woman and emphasizes her Beauty is made part of her being, and therefore artists who depict this mysterious creature with special zeal are as fond of mundus muliebris as they are of the woman herself. “There is no doubt that a woman is a light, a look, a call to happiness, sometimes a word; it is a General harmony, not only in posture and movements but also in silks, in the air, shimmering cloud enveloping her fabrics, components like the attributes and the pedestal of the deity… What poet, describing the pleasure he experienced at the appearance of a Beauty, will decide to separate a woman from her outfit?» Baudelaire, who always rejected the natural, wanted to see Beauty as an effort and a challenge. We know his statement: “A woman is natural, that is, disgusting.” However, the poet turned his admiring gaze to a woman who can rise above nature, to a woman who is “super-natural” and “magical.” In short, to the superwoman.
Baudelaire’s theory of Beauty speaks of this category’s duality: the beautiful invariably combines two elements — the eternal and the relative (due to the epoch, norms of behavior, fashion trends, etc.). The revealed duality of the beautiful is only a consequence of man’s dual nature (soul and body). The beautiful, deprived of its temporary, relative element, according to Baudelaire, becomes inaccessible to man. Any sample of Beauty is revealed to us as containing both elements. The passionate Luisa Casati, the delightful Ida Rubinstein, the inscrutable Theda Bara, the charming Maud Allan…Were they superwomen who became a “living myth” or the daughters of Pandora who captured the sons of Epimetheus?
There is another type of Beauty, thinking that it is best to use the prefix “anti.” The third type of Beauty — the Beauty Cybelian (named after the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele) or the Titanic. In the novel” Apollo the Ugly,” Boris Poplavsky mentions the” un-spiritual Beauty”. Un-spiritual Beauty is the exact definition of the third type of Beauty. Here we find no spirituality, no grandeur, no suggestive gestures, no intoxicating power of the beautiful, no daimonic mediation between the earthly and the divine. Titanic anti-Beauty is always characterized by deprivation — it is the earth/matter on which the heavenly moisture never descends, it is the womb that is not animated by the spermatic Logos; birth here always means “multiplication of the flesh” and not the achievement of primordial androgyny (“and the two shall become one flesh”).
The Apollonian and Dionysian types of Beauty are always spiritual (Dionysian Beauty is spiritually erotic), the Beauty of Cybelian, the Titanic Beauty is material and spiritless. She does not know Klimt’s Judith sensuous pose or the modest nobleness of Aphrodite of Cnidus. She remains equally indifferent to the God-intoxicated maenad’s dance and the heavenly greatness of Botticelli’s Venus. Beauty “not of this world” is the enemy of Titanic Beauty. The Titanic anti-Beauty lives on the artist’s canvases of Odd Nerdrum (even his “Maenads” are absolutely Titanic). Devoid of any grace or refinement, this Beauty is massive, as the element of the earth. The only metamorphoses that change its appearance are the metamorphoses of old age.
Eugene Golovin taught that every woman’s temperament is directly related to the four cosmic elements: earth, water, air, or fire. “In this sense, women correspond to the elementals that inhabit the elements — Chthons, Undines-Nereids, Sylphids, Salamanders. Women of earth, obedient to Gaia, Demeter, Cybele, are aimed at conception, birth, and upbringing of offspring. Men — “meliorators,” rural workers, useful equipment. During the great mothers’ bloody cults, men sacrificed their genitals on the goddess’s altar, their severed bodies fertilizing the soil. Herodotus mentions that in Thrace, pregnant women used to eat their husbands ‘ hearts. A woman of the earth, “Chthona,” has no idea of beauty, since her self-sufficient expediency does not need it. Yes, the man is her tool, but he is only the tool of the Chthonids, the great goddesses of fertility: behind them, the shadows of ancient, ancient old women wander in protohistorical mists, commanding a rigidly determined fate.”
The Odd Nerdrum can be called the only artist in the history of painting who devoted all his work to perpetuating the Titanic world. Nerdrum sees everything through the eyes of a Titan, and accordingly, his pictures are magnificent examples of “Titanic painting,” which has no equal.
Apollo and Dionysus: Harmony of the Spheres and Poetry of Horror
Reflections on Goya’s work led the symbolist poet Constantin Balmont to define the two poles of Beauty — “Harmony of the Spheres” and “Poetry of Horror.” There is no doubt that we can see a correspondence between two principles — the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Balmont says nothing about the Titanic principle, and this is quite significant since this beginning cannot be the third pole of Beauty, being essentially anti-Beauty. We will take the liberty of quoting an excerpt from the article “The Poetry of Horror,” subtitled “Francisco Goya, as the author of etchings, 1746–1828”, in which Balmont describes Dionysian Beauty, which we refer to as the second pole of Beauty, i.e., “Poetry of Horror.”
“Running through the multicolored fabric of life with a careful glance, the contemplator stops with agony at contradictions — he sees not the unity of the Supreme, but the infinity of hostile-clashing heterogeneous entities, not the friendly correctness of patterns, but the sharp breakage of lines. And then, instead of hymns of prayerful harmony, curses and cries of despair burst from the soul. Instead of the sweetest sweetness of Gloria in excelsis, you can hear the moans of the Schumann’s Manfred and the music of Wagner, full of screams; is marble the visions created by the Hellenic imagination, and, illuminated by skies, Catholic Madonnas — there are Chaldean demons with the head of a lion, ears of a Jackal, and talons of a bird of prey — a Chinese dragon that can embrace the immensity of the sky — an ugly monster guarding the entrance to Indian temples; instead of modesties services — affectation of the Sabbath; instead the dances of the Sylphides — Danse Macabre; instead of a gentle Elegy — Swift’s laughter; instead of the gentle pastoral — Dostoevsky’s novel; instead of the plain — the abyss; instead of the divine harmony of the spheres, there is irresistible poetry of horror.”
In “Dionysus the Persecuted,” I have already quoted Friedrich Nietzsche’s powerful words about the divine Graces, which appear in the thinker’s visions as one of the names/images of Furies (“What do you know about Furies? Furies are only an evil name for Graces!”). So the terrifying hides under the mask of the beautiful. Thus the Dionysian Beauty is hidden under the Apollonian Beauty. In those moments when the Dionysus still breaks into the Apollonian peace, the beholder experiences a collision with the “dark,” gloomy, disastrous, and deadly — beautiful subsoil of Apollonian Beauty. The Muses are replaced by menacing Maenads, hungry, not for men, but for God (which is why Dionysian Beauty can be deadly for men), the sounds of the Orphic lyre give way to the flute of Pan, Medusa, the youngest daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, in competition with Athena, turns into a serpent-haired Gorgon, sacrificed to Perseus. The Dionysian Principle, which exposes another — mysterious, destructive, dangerous — pole of Beauty, gives the beholder an absolute, complete knowledge of the world, but the most important thing is that the invasion of Dionysus shows not only that there is something other than the Apollonian, but Dionysus shows us the last depths — the depths of Tartarus, where the opponents of the gods and his murderers, the Titans, the children of the great Mother, were overthrown. “Poetry of Horror,” hidden behind the “Harmony of the Spheres,” in turn masks “hubris (Greek. ὕβρις “audacity,” “unrestrained,” “outrage”) of the first ancestors.”
The power of the Great Mother (Gaia, Cybele, Rhea), the “black” Logos, is the Earth’s power. In the battle of the gods with the titans, as we know from ancient sources, the Great Mother always takes the side of the children, and never the side of the Husband/Father (and Friedrich Georg Jünger rightly notes that Gaia “incites the titans not against Uranus the son, but Uranus the father”). She is the Mother whose power extends to the entire Titanic/Chthonic realm. The famous relief of the Pergamon Altar, which commemorates the Gigantomachy, shows us the mournful image of Gaia, the Mother, who rose to her chest from the ground, but powerless to decide the outcome of the battle in her favor. The influence of the Great Mother is always secret/not explicit; the power of “black” Gaia is nothing but the force of inertia, gravity. This power is entirely chthonic; the Great Mother gives birth without a father, without a male principle, generating from herself. It is the power of the Earth, which does not know the power of the sky. It is the power of the Earth, which greedily reaches for the sky, which is why the Titans are so obsessed with absorbing a part of the Father’s fire seed and tear apart his son Dionysus; this is why they rise against Olympus, wanting to overthrow its lords, possess the goddesses and take the place of the defeated. Their suffering is the legacy of Gaia, “rooted” in the ground (in itself). The Titanic Principle, like the Logos of the Great Mother, is always distinguished by a total lack, while an excess always distinguishes the gods.
A woman who “drinks” a man and devastates him, as well as a woman who “castrates” (“domesticates,” makes her “son”) a man, both are under the protection of the Logos of the Great Mother. In the story “In Sarah’s House,” Stephan Grabinski describes the history of a woman who destroys her lovers like a vampire. Drinking their life force, it was filled with power and eternal youth, prolonging its existence. This woman’s magical attraction is exclusively carnal; she is a hot body that craves immediate coitus. Her “earthly,” one might say “animal” Beauty, as befits a Titanic Beauty, is unspiritual. It is also essential that the Beauty of Sarah (who does not use cosmetics and does not tolerate any jewelry) is no more than a mask” made up” of the ardent hearts of men “castrated” by her.
Valentine de Saint-Point’s Super-woman.
The Nakedness of the Abyss, or “Dance of the Seven Veils»
The hostess of the Paris literary salon, whose frequent guests were such personalities as Auguste Rodin, Paul Faure, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alphonse Mucha, Gabriel Tard, and others, Valentine de Saint-Point, is known not only as of the interlocutor of Rene Guenon, poet, playwright and art critic, but also as the Creator of the concept of “super-women” (sur-femme). It was a development of the Nietzschean idea of Superman and bold response from Marinetti. His “The Futurist Manifesto “generated a reaction in the form of the” Manifeste de la Femme Futuriste,” in which de Saint-Point proclaimed the equality of male and female principles and also justified her view of the “other” Female, which goes beyond the established template of the “good mother.” At first glance, it may seem that the concept of de Saint-Point is nothing more than an attempt to formulate a theory of feminism, but such a conclusion would be too hasty, and therefore erroneous. Instead, de Saint-Pointe should be called the first anti-feminist.
In” The Metaphysics of Sex,” Julius Evola (by the way, mistakenly classified as a misogynist) writes that every person has, in addition to the physical gender, an internal gender that exists as a thing-in-itself, an archetype, “absolute man,” or “absolute woman”. The inner gender is primary, Evola argues, and “a woman can only be judged by the degree to which she approaches or moves away from the ‘absolute woman,’ and the same can be said of a man.” Therefore, the question of who is higher in position — a man or a woman — Evola considers meaningless, just as the question of which is better- water or fire will be empty. One gender cannot serve as a measure of the other. As we have already noted, the Italian thinker is often criticized for disrespecting the feminine principle. Still, he rightly criticized only the physical gender, i.e., “human, too human,” or, more precisely, “female, too female.” The concept of “super-woman” by Valentine de Saint-Point — is an act of rebellion against “too feminine”; it is a proclamation of the idea of “absolute woman,” which can be neither better nor worse, neither higher nor lower than the “absolute man,” because it represents the truly inner gender and the secret mystery of gender.
Like Valentine de Saint-Point, Julius Evola identifies two main female archetypes — Demetric and Aphrodite, or the archetypes of Mother (Wife) and Lover. Without considering the third archetype, we will always “merge” two different archetypes, searching for eidetic correspondences between them. In “Dionysus the Persecuted,” I have devoted a small Chapter to the feminine aspects of the Logos, identifying precisely the triad: the female Apollonian, the female Dionysian, and the female Titanic (Cybelian, maternal) Principles. To avoid repetition, we will only emphasize the relation of the feminine to the masculine in each of the three archetypes:
- For the Apollonian woman, a man is a brother or father, but not a lover or husband. Accordingly, the Apollonian woman is a sister (also in the sense of an alchemical sister; for example, Zosima’s alchemical sister was Theosebia) and a daughter (for example, Zeus ‘ daughter Athena).
- For the Dionysian woman, man is the beloved, the God (Dionysus), which intoxicates her. A man is not her father, son, or brother, but a divine lover. Their relationship is thoroughly erotic. She is not a mother; she is a Mistress, an intoxicated priestess, a maenad. In Evola, it appears as an anti-maternal Epiphany — Kali, Bhairavi, Karala, Durga, the spouses/mistresses of the “divine husband.” However, he classifies them as Aphroditian, thus confounding the Apollonian woman with the Dionysian (and he does not stop talking about the “Durgian aspect”).
- For the Titanic woman, who is under the protection of the Great Mother (Gaia, Cybele), the man is only a “subordinate principle”, the son, incestuous Union with whom occurs in telluric space. The Titanic woman is always just a Mother whose secret is solved in pregnancy. Nietzsche’s words,” ‘Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution — it is called pregnancy.” A man is only a means for a Titanic woman: her goal is a child. In a relationship with her, a man is always not self-sufficient, subordinate, “castrated,” depressed.
Evola highlights the difference between the divine female in her Doric aspect and of nudity Demetro-parent. If the first is of the abyss nakedness, the second is no more than the fertility nakedness. For example, he cites the ancient Dance of the Seven Veils, which we can undoubtedly associate with Wilde’s Salome, a truly Dionysian woman.
So, “Salome” By Oscar Wilde. The Princess admires the virgin moon, which never gave itself to people and did not know earthly love. The beauty of the moon, that silver flower, cold and chaste thrills Salome. She does not like the tetrarch voluptuous look — he is just a man who defiles her purity with his thoughts. Salome wants something different. She hears the voice of Jokanaan, whom the tetrarch himself fears, and orders the soldiers to bring the prophet to her. Like the black caves of Egypt, his eyes inspire the Princess with horror; his emaciated body, like a thin ray of the moon, excites her. “I am sure he is chaste as the moon is,” says Salome. The voice of the prophet, uttering curses of the daughter of Babylon, intoxicates the Princess. In a frenzy, she tells the prophet about his beauty, about his body, which she is in love with and wants to touch. Rejected by Jokanaan, she alternately curses and praises him, admiring his hair, neck, and mouth. “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.” Salome does not need words or the hugs of earthly men who lavish praise. She is intoxicated only by this prophet, who knows nothing perishable, who speaks through the mouth of God, who prepares his coming. All Salome wants is to touch the prophet’s lips, to drink the Divine Logos, even if it costs her her life. Herodias, her profligate mother, says that Jokanaan is drunk, to which Herod responds: “He may be drunk on God’s wine!» After the Dance of the Seven Veils, in which the Princess s dances before the tetrarch on the ground, stained with blood, Salome asks to bring her the head of the prophet on a silver platter. As if mad, she repeats “Give me the head of Jokanaan”, as she repeats too, “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.”
Life for a single of death’s kiss. Salome dies under the blows of the soldiers ‘ shields, having satisfied her Dionysian passion. In the Dance of the Seven Veils, she revealed to the tetrarch the nakedness of the abyss. According to Evola, this dance reproduces the symbolism of the seven planetary circles of life, through which the soul. If Jokanaan himself had seen Salome’s nakedness, he would have died before the silver dish was prepared, having suffered the fate of Actaeon or Tiresias. Perhaps this is why Herod, who saw the Seven Veils’ Dance, ordered Salome to be killed. The nakedness of the abyss brings death to those who dare to see it.
The image of Salome that captivated the sophisticated des Esseintes from the novel “À rebours” by Huysmans — in the creation of Gustave Moreau. Here the Evangelical idea is no longer discernible-Salome appears in Moreau as the goddess of eternal ecstasy, femme fatale, whose magnetism is deadly and ruthless. Huysmans calls her a soulless, mad, and insensitive monster that brings death to anyone who touches her. Is she a “Dionysian monster”? Nietzsche calls his Zarathustra — “die dionysische Unholde” — who taught that a man wants only two things — danger and play. Gustave Moreau’s Salome is a Dionysian woman. Huysmans not for nothing rejects the image created by Rubens, “the poet of the flesh”, seeing in it the “Flemish butcher”, who joined the gallery of “Venus” of the Paleolithic, and therefore close to Cybele. Can the Apollonian images of Salome by Guido Reni, Titian Vecellio, Bartolomeo Veneto, and Bernardino Luini compare with the bacchanalian grace and dangerous audacity of Salome by Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Moreau, Franz von Stuck, and Federico Beltran Masses?
Does the tempter and the tempted, the tormentor and the victim, the intoxicated and intoxicated Salome, who longed to touch the prophet’s lips, remain indifferent, and will not her bloodshot eyes light up with the flame of Dionysian ecstasy when the head of Jokanaan is offered to her on a silver platter? Looking at the “Apollonian Salome,” you can not help thinking that it is impossible to imagine them exposing the last mysteries in the Dance of the Seven Veils. So peaceful is their countenance, so pale are their lips as if the kisses of death did not wear them out. The Apollonian and Dionysian images’ antipode is the Cybelian creations of the Czech photographer of the XX century Frantisek Drtikol. His Salome is truly ugly in its animal triumph. He was probably inspired by the Dionysian Salome von Stuka, in whose playful curve the music sounds, Drticol, vainly trying to hear its motive, conveyed to his Salome, the repulsive ungraciousness of the female, so little resembling the creation of a German painter.
