Antonin Artaud’s novelised biography of the third-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence – the divine upstart Heliogabalus ends his reign hacked to pieces by his own guards in the latrines of his imperial palace.

Reflecting its author’s preoccupations of the time with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, the book shows Artaud at his most lucid as he assembles an entire world-view from raw material of insanity, sexual obsession and anger. Heliogabalus was Rome’s Emperor from the ages of fourteen to eighteen; his reign was characterized by murder, incest, sodomy, debauchery and an anarchic ridicule for the powers of government. Artaud arranges his account of Heliogabalus’s life around the breaking of corporeal borders and the expulsion of fluids, notably blood and sperm: “round the corpse of Heliogabalus there is an intense circulation of blood and excrement, while around his cradle, there is an intense circulation of sperm.” Artaud often invents incidents from Heliogabalus’s life in order to make more explicit his own passionate denunciations of modern life – as Artaud’s lover Anaïs Nin wrote at the time: “Artaud sat in the Coupole cafe pouring out poetry, talking of magic, ‘I am Heliogabalus, the mad Roman emperor’, because he becomes everything he writes about. In the taxi, he pushed back his hair from a ravaged face. The beauty of the summer day did not touch him. He stood up in the taxi and, stretching out his arms, he pointed to the crowded streets: ‘The revolution will come soon. All this will be destroyed. The world must be destroyed.’ No reader of Artaud’s most inflammatory work – translated into English here for the first time – will emerge unscathed from the experience.

With an introduction by Stephen Barber (author, Artaud: The Screaming Body and Artaud: Blows & Bombs).

“Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and that of Artaud himself.”
–Stephen Barber

NEW EDITION PUBLISHED BY
SOLAR BOOKS