André Masson - Acéphale, 1936. The drawing of the Acephal, a potent expression of the totality of Bataille’s thought, embodies his reversed Hermeticism in the form of a parody or anti-idealist version of Renaissance depictions of the harmonic arrangement of the human body (Leonardo, Fludd etc.). The celebrated aphorism of Hermetic Philosophy “As Above, so Below” situated man in a Universe designed by God in which the structure of the Microcosm reflected that of the Macrocosm. Bataille exactly reversed this formula, for him - a heretic exalting the base over the Spiritual in a Universe in which “man can set aside the thought that it is he or God who keeps the rest of things from being absurd” - the body is projected onto the world: as below, so above. The Acephal is headless, not only man escaping his thoughts, but a headless organisation, one abjuring hierarchy. Andre Masson made the drawing: “I saw him immediately as headless, as becomes him, but what to do with this cumbersome and doubting head? Irresistibly it finds itself displaced to the sex, which it masks with a ‘Death’s Head’. Left hand flourishes a dagger; while the other kneads a blazing heart (a heart that does not belong to the Crucified, but to master Dionysus). Stomach is symbolized by the Labyrinth. The drawing inspired Bataille’s text “The Sacred Conspiracy”, where he described it in these terms: “Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison, he has found beyond himself not God, who is prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He is not a man. He is not a God either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.”
