Heliogabalus was a Roman emperor from a line of priests of the sun in Syria. She reigned for just four years between the ages of fourteen and eighteen in the early third century AD. Among the stories told about her are that she prostituted herself in the Roman streets and enacted tableaux of the Judgement of Paris in the role of the goddess Venus. In the end she was stabbed to death by soldiers of the emperor’s guard in the palace latrines. Her body was thrown into the Tiber.

 

It was through the person – the body, even – of Heliogabalus that new ideas of the sun came to Rome. The form of the sun god known as the Sol Invictus, whose iconography includes a spiked crown of solar rays and who is sometimes identified with Apollo, appeared shortly after her death, to be taken as the personal god of Constantine not long afterwards, prefiguring the adoption of Christianity throughout the empire. Desire and pain are bound together in the body of Heliogabalus, twin strands of a double helix, as they will come to be in all emblems of youth, androgyny, and violence: Rimbaud, Byron, Mishima, Joan of Arc, the Christ, James Dean, Ziggy Stardust… all the solar children, all the rock n roll suicides…

 

The works on paper that form part of this project (Codex Heliogabalus) expound the constellation of ideas that circulate around this figure: youth and the youthful body, femininity, androgyny and death, the substances that make up the body and the world, the sun and sun worship, the intrusion of the divine into the human world, and the demarcation of (sacred) space and the deictic and demarcatory functions of writing and language. They form part of a wider project which takes a work by the Surrealist poet Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist, as a starting point for an exploration of this character. Artaud situates Heliogabalus in a field of ideas that relate polytheism to monotheism, a conception of polytheism as a war between cosmic principles, and a vision of theatre as a convulsive, alchemical force.

 

These images are landmarks in the landscape of the mind, icons, diagrams, advertisements, enigmata. They are the surface layer of an archive of found images, annotations, and scrapbook pages whose circulation constitutes thought. They are therefore a machine for thinking. They are also an interface between you and whatever exceeds the image, whatever it demarcates or indicates, wherever it happens to lead you.