MUTABOR

A Journey into the Goêtic Flesh

*
Frater Acher
 Copyright 2024 © Frater Acher

Paralibrum Press, MMXXIV

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All images © Rafael Pascuale Zamora

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and published by Frater Acher

Copy edited by Frater U∴D∴

Typeset in Lucifer by Nguyen Gobber

and Guglia by Leo Colalillo
For all you are,
Harper Feist.
 ‘There is no reason to think that any
philosophical statement has an inherently
closer relationship with reality than its
opposite, since reality is not made of
statements.’

— Graham Harman

‘Lose your mind and come

to your senses’

— Fritz Perls
MUTABOR
A Journey into the Goêtic Flesh

Text

Frater Acher

Artwork

Rafael Pascuale Zamora

Preface 7
Content
CONTENT

Introduction 10

Part I • Readying the Mind

I. Filthy Fat 18

II. Kaloskagathos 28

III. Scythian Scare 42

IV. Scythian Shamans and Greek Goês 49

V. Julius Evola and the Hard Body 67

VI. Cthulhu is Conan in Reverse 80

Part II • Readying the Flesh

VII. Becoming All Flesh 99

VIII. The Vision of Tsar Smiulan 106

Appendix: Herodotus on the Scythians 117

Bibliography 123
 Preface
PREFACE

What is Great Cthulhu? An arrangement of electrons, like us.1

The background is where the action is.2

I
n the world of Conan the Barbarian, everything is alive
with pulsating flesh, muscle, wounds and blood. In the
realm of Chtulhu, things appear in non-Euclidean outlines,
murmurings of the open abyss between what we sense and what
we can see. Somewhere between these two extremes lies your
own world, your own flesh – or perhaps it flickers, every now and
then, from here to there?

Positively relating to the bodies we are born inside – these shape-

shifting hives of daimonic cells – is something Western Ritual
Magic does not have a history in. In our tradition’s halls, we
find ourselves in an endless archive of recipes for healing, love-
making, virility, or discovering the North-East passage through

1 Michel Houellebecq, “H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life”. In:
Believer Magazine, 2005, p. 1.
2 Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Washington: Zero
Books, 2012, p. 18.

7
the Arctic Ocean, all mediated by daimonic assistance, provided
the operation can be coerced according to the operator’s intent.
Yet, we return almost empty handed from these archives when it
comes to understanding the nature of our own human flesh. How
do daemons, deities and devils perceive our skin and hair, our
eyelashes and lips, our livers and lungs? We may still recall the
ancient speech of the human heart as a seat of divine immanence
– but what if in actuality every cell in our body was a seat of
daimonic immanence?

Lou Reed once remarked that between thought and expression

lies a lifetime. Similarly, we might say that between the end of
thoughts and pure sensation lies either a lifetime or merely a
single breath. Fritz Perls encouraged us to lose our mind and come
to our senses. Yet, how much do we truly understand about the
primal art of ecstasy or the depths of animalistic trance? Consider
this, nothing arcane but just a small gesture: who of us can lick
their own fingers and get goose bumps from the eroticism and
awe of the mystery of the flesh?

The following pages are densely packed with stories aimed at

offering partisan support in reclaiming our goêtic flesh. The
eclectic array of tools provided here – ranging from filthy flesh to
Scythian scare, from Conan to Cthulhu – serves as an inoculation
against the mundane, immersing you in Radical Otherness. I
hope these words will infect your mind and, if you delve deeply
enough, resonate with your very own flesh through the practical
explorations presented in the second part.

This piece is intended as an unconventional publication.

It is deliberately positioned at the crossroads of historic-
anthropological observation and the resonances of deep ritual

8
practice. My aspiration is that it will lead you into the field of
perceptual distortion that I have voyaged in for many years now,
where shapes remain nameless and no reference points exist
beyond the voices in our own flesh.

Beyond the influences of my own goêtic practice, a major

inspiration for this essay was the art of Rafael Pascale Zamora.
I am profoundly grateful to this artist for generously permitting
the inclusion of his work here. Rafael’s magnificent iconographic
representation of the human body far surpasses my ability to
convey it through words. It is my hope though that the fusion of
text and image on these pages will aid in making our own bodies
deeply uncanny once more. This, I believe, is a crucial step toward
shedding the human gaze and reconnecting with our daimonic
flesh.

Hold fast, may your steps be as shaky and uncertain as mine.

LVX,

Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.

9
 Introduction
INTRODUCTION

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in

itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.3

Fast jeder hat die Welt geliebt,

Wenn man ihm zwei Hände Erde gibt.4

N
ight and caves swallow our bodies whole. We sit in
endless dark, in a world without outlines, with no more
boundaries from here to there. Our bodies are ashen,
nocturnal, shadowy. At last, we unclench fists and shoulders, relax
jaw and forehead, loosen underbelly and anus. Form begins to
leak. Mould begins to crack. Bodily contours begin to melt. Flesh
flickers beyond the boundary of skin. Possibilities shoot forth.
Openness expands. Void. The voyage commences.

3 Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in

Modern Science, New York: Harper & Row, 1958, p. 58.
4 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), „Von der Freundlichkeit der Welt“,
in: Hauspostille. München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1927, p. 72. The German quote
translates as: “Almost everyone has loved the world, When given two handfuls
of earth.”

10
The way we use our bodies in goêtic magic is radically at odds with
the predominant body images and realities of the 21st century.
Our practice requires explanation. The following text, therefore,
is written not only as the outline of a possible answer, but also as
an antidote to the prevailing 21st century notion of what and how
a human body should be. All my work is phenomenological and
experiential in its approach. As such, the following reflections
relate primarily to the experience of the male body in everyday life
and in goêteia. By way of an introductory preface, the following
should be pointed out.

The consideration and function of the human body in magic is

not a static matter but a dynamic one; it is best compared to the
changing territories of an open landscape exposed to different
geological and climatic conditions. Accordingly, prudent use of
the human body in magic looks different in the early stages of a
magical career than it does in its advanced stages or within the
magical encounters of an adept. What we are looking for is not
a single set of rules that can be practiced stubbornly and rigidly
for years, but a dynamic understanding of the forces and beings
around us, within us, and how we want to relate to them with, and
within, our own bodies. For this is the crucial aspect of all magical
work that is conducted in human form: from the vantage point
of the spirits, there is no such thing as an “inside” and “outside” of
our bodies. Most of them do not perceive or acknowledge the thin
line of demarcation that is drawn by the boundary of the human
skin. The elements are always ubiquitous elements, regardless
of whether they reside inside or outside our bodies. The same
is true of most other non-human persons with whom we come
into contact. In an ironic reversal, one could assert that the spirits
perceive our human existence in the way we often imagine a

11
ghost in popular culture: as a gestalt-like cloud that one can pass
through physically, but which nevertheless possesses a strange
form of individual consciousness and corporeal imagination.

So what we will work towards here is accepting and studying both

the ghostly and golem-like nature of our human bodies. As part of
this journey, the following pages intentionally will not cover several
things: they are not a medical guide. Nor are they a substitute for
the highly recommended study of Josephine McCarthy’s Magical
Healing.5 Also, the following pages are not a grimoire i.e. they
will not feature recipes that suggest obvious solutions to highly
complex problems. Instead, the following pages attempt to be a
poke, a jab, and an attack on what we have learned to accept as
normal in relation to our human bodies. We will be going on a hunt
for cognitive dissonance in the perception of our own flesh. We
will essay to free ourselves from Western body images – and the
best way to do this is to deliberately knock ourselves off balance
in how we experience them. So as we journey from filthy fat to the
ancient Greeks via the savage Scythians to Conan the Barbarian
and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, this is all happening for a well-
considered purpose. Each of these chapters delivers a different
flavour of attack on our common perceptions of the (male) body.
Over the course of each chapter, we are attempting to derail the
train of our culturally conditioned body perception – so that we
can get off track and discover our own sensual experience of the
flesh, instead of following culturally prescribed expectations.

We are not doing this for the sheer joy of wallowing in

counterculture, nor because so many people are currently talking
about the fluidity of body images. We are doing this because an

5 Josephine McCarthy, Magical Healing, Exeter: TaDehent Books, 2020.

12
autochthonous, purely sensory perception of our bodies is an
essential basis for all advanced forms of magic. These refer to
magical practices involving non-human beings whose centre of
being is no longer anchored in proximity to the human realm but
in cosmic realms such as the deep underworld or the celestial
sphere of the stars. Such beings, whose agency far exceeds the
human sphere in terms of time and space, can have extremely
stressful, corrosive, and destructive effects on the human
organism. I am not writing here with a raised index finger, but
simply from personal experience. In no small way, the following
pages are part of the book I myself would have liked to have held
in hand thirty years ago. It could have contributed to saving me
from a few unwelcome surgeries. Certainly it would have helped
me to prepare more profoundly for them.

Let us conclude these reflections with a warning. In Katarina

Pejovíc’s wonderful booklet about the dragon in Balkan folk
magic6, we read about the magical-shamanic abilities of those
people who were considered to be the children of dragons. As we
will meet the dragon again in the chapter on Scythian magic, let
us read a short passage of it here. It should be noted that one can
be both born as a child of a dragon as well as be baptised to turn
into one at a later point in life.

The children born from zmaj [dragon] marriages are known

as ‘zmajevit’ men – meaning dragon men, draconic men,
or men who have the properties of dragons. Inheriting their
father’s immense strength, wisdom, and cunning, zmajevit
children were natural sorcerers, bestowed with incredible

6 Katarina Pejovíc, Balkan Folk Magic: Zmaj. A Guide to the Underworld from
Hadean Press. s.l.: Hadean Press, 2020.

13
 magical abilities. In addition to their intelligence, physical
prowess, and myriad talents, the children of zmajs could be
identified through numerous characteristics. Oftentimes,
they would be born with scales or small, wing-like flaps
under their armpits. Other such markers included being
born in a leathery caul, having a protruding tailbone, and/
or a full set of teeth at birth. Such a child could also “shed
their human skin” by falling into a trance, flying out their
bodies in spirit form as a zmaj, and doing battle against the
ala [female weather demons] themselves.7

Obviously, such inventory of strength, wisdom, cunning, and

“incredible magical abilities” reads like the outline of a superhero
or supervillain straight out of a comic book. It seems important to
point out that what we encounter here is the warped folk-magic
echo of an actual magical phenomenon from the perspective
of a largely illiterate village population. Like modern audiences
today, so our forefathers were always on the lookout for the next
scandal, scapegoat, or hero/ine. Such a distorted description of
magical skills can have an almost magnetic effect on our own
broken, perhaps half-failed and certainly very vulnerable human
identities. If only we could become as super- as these mythical
figures, by kissing the dragon, by its nocturnal embrace, by
heading headlong into its cave. What we tend to overlook is that
these descriptions represent a highly deformed etic i.e. external
perspective. If we turned the page and looked at the reality of
the life of a son or daughter of the dragon from their inner, emic
viewpoint, we would perceive an entirely different picture. What
is adored from the outside is often agonised over on the inside.

7 Pejovíc, 2020, p. 15.

14
The dragon’s touch is a venom to the human organism. Its effect
must constantly be constrained and limited within our bodies.
Whenever such a draconic influence bypasses these thresholds
and produces seemingly magical phenomena, it usually constitutes
a defeat, a failure of the appropriate protective mechanisms,
a stumbling into the alien nature, rather than a conscious
undertaking of a performative heroic deed. Such moments are
sure to be at an exceedingly high cost in the form of emotional
tension, physical ailments, and social isolation. All outward heroes
are inward sufferers. It turns out that Michael Moorcock’s Elric is
a far more nuanced mythological representation of such a lived
reality than the dreamlike admiring and shuddering fears of our
village ancestors.

Whether it be the black or the white dragon, Cthulhu, Tiamat, or

Kronos, or merely that stubborn flap of fat defying our efforts to
overlap obsession with objectivity, we have much to learn from
our flesh and the darkness within which it sleeps underneath our
skin. After all, we might discover that R’lyeh, with its dreaming
tower, is neither a castle in the sky nor sunken on the ocean
ground, but a Radical Otherness waiting to resound from within
ourselves.

These profoundly alien experiences breaking through the cracks

of our own skins are neither to be feared nor glorified, they should
neither be belittled nor romanticised. Equally, they should not be
suburbanised into an artificial sense of identity nor rejected as
an attack thereupon. Perhaps we should simply decide to sit with
them for a while instead: head bowed, sword lowered, visor open,
armour brittle. Their presence alone may bring us closer to the
conviction that not only will we never win this battle, but that in
the presence of such formidable Otherness fighting itself may not

15
be a particularly prudent way of life anyhow?

If this leads us to a point where we grow weary of polarities, then

this brief piece of writing has more than fulfilled its purpose.
Perhaps we can then envision a place where we do not need to
be manly or womanly, or to draw a stringent line between any
such constructs. A place where we don’t have to embody one-
dimensional echoes of Conan or Cthulhu or Tiamat or Marduk or
Epsu or Anu. When we begin to sensually feel the vast expanse of
our flesh, it suddenly becomes clear that there is room enough in
this ocean for chaos and order, for decline and ascent, for hard
brawn and plenty of supple fat.

16
 Filthy Fat
PART I • READYING THE MIND

I. FILTHY FAT

I
f you read today’s pedagogical writings on physicality,
especially those of younger authors, it quickly becomes clear
that one’s own body is perceived as a stage for conducting
productions of identity. The body as an individually available
field of experience and adventure seems to promise staging, self-
assurance, experience of risk, retreat, security etc. The more
difficult our lives become and the more social norms break down,
the more intensely our own bodies come to the fore as the last
bastion of self-awareness and self-exploration. This can lead to all
sorts of problems – from violence and drug abuse to self-harm.
But whether it is loved, adorned, pierced, pumped, cut, or starved:
modern literature always knows the human body as the gateway
to the world. Somehow we seem to look first at ourselves and then
at the world. Who am I here? Where is the boundary between me
and the world? And how should the contours of my body be shaped
to be fitting and beautiful? How do I gain sovereignty over the
space that my skin defines? Whether we come across as subject or
sovereign in the endeavour of civilisation is first expressed by the
appearance of our bodies. Thus, the body is the realm and we are
its colonising conquerors.

This is one plausible way of describing the outlines of modern

human corporeality in the West. At best it is a play of staging

18
various identity proposals. Usually, though, it turns into an
aggressive, endless pursuit of externally prescribed body norms
that are highly artificial and far removed from any intrinsic
organic form of expression.

In a world where the sharp contours of our bodies are so fiercely

contested – as constituting part of a one-on-one battle of Us-
against-Us – nothing defines the adversary as distinctly as the
concept of smut. Whatever the body shape we strive for in our
claim to hegemony over flesh, nothing undermines it as much as
the fraying, the blurring, the unravelling form. The shapes of our
bodies must be tight, marked by the blades of lifestyle and fashion
as they carve ideas of a sharply delineated beauty into our selves.
Smut, dirt, filth, defined as matter in the wrong place, thus turns
into the eternal adversary. Christian Enzensberger described this
notion congenially in his 1968 book:

In the first place dirt is anything that threatens the proper

separateness of the individual, his anxiously guarded
isolation; which is why he is unwilling to let anything
approach him or escape from him. Apart from the dirt
produced by contact and excretion, he also avoids anything
that belongs to him only equivocally, and by analogy has a
horror of intermingling. That is to say, in any confrontation
he is afraid of succumbing to the ambiguity and mishmash,
of flowing apart, losing himself, suffering injury through
processes like amalgamation infiltration supplementation
effluence effusion and excavation. Consequently he also
feels slightly uneasy about such things as pumps, funnels,
nozzles, and tubes, and this is why when asked for examples
of dirt he includes so many compound substances and
intermediate states. This must also be the reason for the

19
 ineradicable association with dirt in the case of the prime
example of intermingling, which is sex. Thirdly, after the
intermingling pollution, the individual fears decay and
shrinks away in horror when things are topsy-turvy, when
the normal order breaks down or is reversed: a rotting
mushroom, a nose appearing on a knee. Finally, beside decay,
there is pollution by mass; because as a separate entity the
individual detests everything teeming and swarming, any
mass situation where he risks going under and disappearing
irretrievably.8

Things become particularly insane when such perception of dirt

extends not only to our surroundings, but also to our own bodies
themselves. In other words: fat, skin, hair, muscles that do not
correspond to the desired shape, quantity and location, that resist
conformity to our will, but instead droop flabbily, protrude thinly
or resist unruly, are perceived as dirty, spoilt and soiled. In their
deviation from, not, as might be assumed, the Platonic idea, but
our ill-reflected narcissistic ideals, our bodies become polluted
with filth before we even set out to live in them.

Bodies with ”excess” body fat9 then are understood as “explicit

moral and ethical failures that are positioned as unethical and
unwilling to assume a ‘proper’ responsibility for their own health
and the health of society more generally.”10 Here we encounter
a Protestant-Calvinist work ethic in the final stage of its social

8 Christian Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy Of Dirt . London: Calder and

Boyars, 1972, p. 20-21.
9 ”Excess” according to whose definition, one immediately has to inquire?
10 Samantha Murray, The ›Fat‹ Female Body. New York: Basingstoke, 2008, p. 71.

20
decay.11 Performance – i.e. the mental and physical effort to work
– has turned into the sole instrument of salvation: no work, no
salvation. The more work, the more salvation. Equally: the more
weight loss and the more muscle gain, the more social recognition.
The conscious (de)formation of the individual’s body becomes
the narcissistic currency of its contribution to the collective.
The slim body prevents burdening the health care system. The
athletically toned body can work harder and thus increase the
supply of salvation, if not for society as a whole, then at least for
its immediate family.

Performance then becomes the freely available antidote to the

omnipresent venom of filth. And the visible proof of a body
soaked in this antidote are hard-defined contours. The taut,
smooth stomach, the protruding cheekbones, the veined forearm,
the pumped-up pectoral muscle. Only a human with such a
performant body shows evidence of the never-ending, Sisyphean
obsession to cut themselves out of the impending wave of fat
and deformity, of age and infirmity, every day anew. Only such a
person is sufficient proof that our species can mould itself into its
own cultured golem.12

Historically, the definition of body fat as an ethical and moral

11 Steffen Loick Molina, Kosmetische Chirurgie im Online-Diskurs- Alter,

Geschlecht und Fitness im Fokus ärztlicher Websites. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag,
2021, p. 325.
12 For a pointed formulation of the failing in this undertaking, see: “The working-
class body which is signalled through fat is one that has given up the hope of
ever ‘improving’, of becoming middle-class. It is the body which is recognised
for what it is: a working-class body that is beyond the regulation and disciplines
required to be part of social and cultural exchanges.” Beverly Skeggs, Formations
of Class and Gender. London: Thousand Oaks, 1997, p. 82.

21
failing is still very young. It dates back less than two hundred years
to industrialisation and specifically the beginning of the 20th
century. Physical exertion – and its formative effect on the body
– was suddenly transformed from an unquestioned agricultural
necessity into a Protestant symbol of moderation and control.

Scientificisation, industrialisation and urbanisation

changed the living conditions in Western societies and thus
also the bodies: relative to the total populations of many
countries, more people became wealthy, the food supply
exceeded demand and became cheaper as well as more
calorific. In turn, new labour processes required less and
less intensive physical exertion than agricultural production
had demanded previously. Taken together, these economic
and social changes paved the way for a changed conception
of body fat, which initially had little to do with health: body
control and the slim body were interpreted as an expression
of the responsible and sensible use of new resources, which
went hand in hand with the upward mobility of many people
and the associated social demarcation dynamics.13

At the beginning of the 20th century, therefore, ”excess” body fat

was stereotyped in two opposing ways: either as a symbol of the
weak-willed lower class unable to cope with the new demands
of an industrialised society; or as an expression of greed and
deceit, symbolised by the fat cat image of wealthy political donors
and oligarchs in the US from the 1920s onwards. In both cases,
however, body fat was understood “as a materialised grotesque on
an actually slim body.”14

13 Molina, 2021, p. 325, translation by author.

14 Molina, 2021, p. 331, translation by author. Also see: “The common notion that

22
The athletic, healthy body stands in perfect balance between the
fat grotesque bodies of the plebs and the affluent debauched. The
slim female and the toned male body came to symbolise individual
willpower, performance and social commitment. They were,
and still are, the self-assurance of a society that its diseases of
civilisation are indeed not epidemics but rather the twin failings
– internal in an ethical and external in an aesthetic sense – of
political exploiters, economic losers, and social parasites.

In such a society body fat takes on a vitality and character of its

own. It is not merely a foreign object under the skin of an otherwise
slim body – it manifests the actual filthy flesh that spoils the
purity of a naturally taut muscle tone. Worse still, body fat seems
strangely alive, imbued with an uncanny kind of living resistance.
Cosmetic surgeons describe it as unruly, stubborn and obstinate.
These strange problem areas with a life of their own both limit and
challenge the human desire for self-transformation. The process
of inner and outer conversion from mere victim of civilisation to
its glorious victor finds its adversary in the unruly fat. Filthy fat,
thus, becomes the corporeal daemonic presence of modernity
par excellence – an evil intruder into the sacred confines of
human bodies in need of radical exorcism. The daemonic legions
of sagging skin, rippling fat pads and curling hair are the true

‘inside every fat person there is a thin person trying to get out’ implies that fat
flesh imprisons the ‘authentic’ subject within. Fat flesh is viewed as inauthentic, a
kind of disguise for the real self.” Deborah Lupton, Fat. New York: Routledge, 2012,
p. 54. – To avoid a one-sided US focus in this depiction, it should be noted that
we find pejorative images of the fat body as early as the 19th century, especially
in France, in satirical depictions of the bourgeoisie, financiers, rentiers, tycoons,
the leisured classes, etc., and of course in everyday anti-Semitic caricatures
throughout Europe, including Tsarist Russia.

23
enemy host against which naked modern heroes and heroines
fight wielding the sword and shield of civilisation.

All this would be much easier to smile at and shrug off if the slim
and athletic body were not so symbolically overloaded in today’s
society. It is not just an aesthetic mania reflecting itself in the effort
to control the human body. Rather, it’s over a hundred and twenty
years of the cruel Protestant ethics imbued in our own flesh: self-
control, discipline, frugality, but likewise interest in the common
good, social compatibility and prosperity are all centrally codified
in the image of the athletic body. To escape from this addiction,
it is necessary to wean oneself from society: a rather Saturnian
cure.

We are, in a sense, ”haunted” by a ”norm” that is nowhere

concretely to be found. Despite its concrete ”absence”, the
epistemological force of the ”normative” weighs on us heavily,
effecting a range of behaviors such as self-surveillance, and
an acute awareness of the coding of certain behaviors as
indicative of a tacit agreement to aspire to this normative
body.15

Hence, we propose here the opposite gait that underlies the self-
preservation of the social body. The latter requires that individuals
fulfil prescribed norms and functions so that its collective body
can emerge and sustain itself from their totality. From the point
of view of goêtic practice, however, we consciously withdraw from
the appropriation of human culture and turn to the counter- or
micro-cultures in which we can participate with spirits.16

15 Samantha Murray, “Corporeal Knowledges and Deviant Bodies: Perceiving

the Fat Body”. In: Social Semiotics, Vol. 17 (3), 2007, p. 366.
16 To fulfil both at the same time the productive participation in human and

26
In the presence of the spirits we are freed from the social norms
and identity constraints of modern civilisation. Here, we sit in the
darkness mentioned at the beginning and lose the boundaries
of our own bodies. Self coagulates into We, the community of We
fragments into vast multiplicity, the Other and the Strange; and in
the midst of it all we find ourselves surrounded by the light and
wonder of creation. Awakening from these nocturnal journeys,
we recognise the impetuous beauty of the bulky fat body as well
as that of the gaunt and aged one. We sense vibrant life behind
perfectly tamed hair just as much as underneath bristly beards
and wild manes. We inhale, chew and swallow, filling our bodies
with alien life-forms and toxins. We eat and breathe filth. Deep
in our blood and down to our bones we are filth: boundlessly
interwoven in a world that does not tolerate isolation. All identity
is but a strand in the rhizomatic web of embodiment, nothing in
and of itself, and yet vibrating with intent when viewed in the
context of its environment.

Then we realise: Golems we are and will be. We cannot escape the
process of constant creation and of being created. We can choose
to participate in whichever way we deem proper, or we can opt
out and throw ourselves into the impending chaos with reckless
joy. But we cannot resist it, withdraw from it, escape or confine it.
Our body is a plantation of death and life and all the glory days in
between. We neither own this plantation nor do we slave away on
it. We participate in it. We are the soil and the hands in it. We are
the root and the rain pouring upon it. We are the leaf and the light
around it.

daemonic community is an art that at least I for my part have not yet fully
mastered.

27
 Kaloskagathos
II. KALOSKAGATHOS

B
ut I am reaching ahead. I guess some things need to be
read several times before they hit the bottom of our mind.
So I’ll let the previous few paragraphs stand, even though
they do foreshadow where this journey will lead us. For now,
however, let’s travel in the opposite direction and jump way back
in time. Much further back than the beginning of urbanisation
and large-scale industrialisation. Like the fisherman casting his
net, let us cast our gaze far out into the past and try to catch a
few clear glimpses of the naked body in the time of the archaic
Greeks. Let’s see what comes up in our net.

As we turn from a Protestantism that has become a social

epidemic to Ancient Greek antiquity, a particular point must be
highlighted. When we peer so far back into the past of Western
culture-creation, we do not do so with the aim of discovering
some ”origination narrative”. Rather, even after more than two
thousand five hundred years, the reference point of the naked
Greek (male) body is still so ostentatiously obvious in our modern
society that it demands consideration.17 This is not, however, a

17 For a wonderful and freely accessible summary of the current state of

research, see: Jan Meister, Jonas Borsch, “Idealisiert, sexualisiert, materialisiert,
politisiert: Antike Körper und ihre Geschichte(n)”. In: H-Soz-Kult 08.02.2022,

28
question of the authenticity, the genuineness and the origin of
an original phenotype. On the contrary, the aim of these brief
reflections is to help us better understand our own present-day
perception.

When the view of 21st century Western man turns to the white
marble statues of perfectly sculpted male bodies, many of them
seem to see in them a blueprint for their own ideal appearance.
Associations emerge: to proper nutrition, to the perfect sequence
of training routines and the tremendous inner discipline required
to achieve the training goal of the divine body. To the modern
male gaze, the ancient Greek statue may become a call to personal
appropriation. Their white marble can turn into a narcissistic
projection surface and a point of attack for fervent competition.18

Here we encounter a timeless dimension of the ideal. As soon as

we see it embodied before us, we make a decision about how to
relate to it. We can adore it or we can aspire to it. We can try to
possess or strive to embody it. The corporeal ideal can become a
temple or a template, depending on our choice of relationship to it.

So let us return to the aforementioned (male) 21st century view

http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/2022-02-001. Accessed: 2024-

08-06.
18 “One article provides an image that may encourage the Adonis Complex.
’How to Become a Greek God,’ two pages long, is in the form of a centerfold
playmate. A photograph of the statue of Doryphoros from the Minneapolis
Institute of Arts serves as the male centerfold. Box inserts appear to the left and
right of the statue, each pointing to an area of the body. The boxes tell the reader
the Greek god’s measurements and offers exercises to help the real man measure
up.” Susan M. Alexander, “Stylish Hard Bodies: Branded Masculinity in Men’s
Health Magazine”. In: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 2003), pp.
545.

29
of the Greek statues. Viewing them as templates for our own
physical transformation is only one level on which we might
decide to emulate them. For the perfect figure symbolises beauty
not only outwardly, but also in its existence in the world, that is in
its actions with and in its stance towards the world.

A brief exercise to illustrate this point is in order here. Let us look

together at the statue of the so-called “praying boy”19 found on
Rhodes whose creation dates back to 300 B.C. and who arrived in
Venice in 1503, from where he took an extremely colourful tour
of stately palaces and state rooms over the next three hundred
years.20 To this day, we do not know who the statue originally
depicted. The broken arms were added later in the classic ancient
pose of prayer, but there is no evidence that this was the original
intention of the bronze’s creator. Nor is it definitely established to
be a boy praying in front of a divine image, it could also depict the
young god Apollo himself.

Be that as it may, let us indulge for a moment in contemplating his

magnificent posture, his limbs, and the play of light on his bronze
skin. With our eyes still fixed on the praying boy, after the pure joy
of his perfect form has left room for clear thinking, let us consider
this question: When was the last time we performed an action with
such elegance? Whether it is brewing our morning coffee, closing

19 © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Bronzestatue eines jungen Mannes (sog.

Betender Knabe), Antikensammlung, Ident. Nr.: SK 2, https://id.smb.museum/
object/698594. Accessed: 2024-08-06. Available for reproduction under
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.
20 The original of the statue, whose image is given here, can be visited in Berlin
in the Altes Museum For more information see https://recherche.smb.museum/
detail/698594/bronzestatue-eines-jungen-mannes-sog--betender-knabe.
Accessed: 2024-08-06.

30
the car door, petting our cat, or the movements we performed to
get dressed this morning. When was the last time we came close
to experiencing such grace? – I am not asking whether a secret
observer from the outside would have considered us as elegant
or graceful. I am only concerned here with our personal, inward
experience of the world: When did we last sense such perfection
in ourselves as we see embodied in his bronze stance, in his turning
towards the world of the divine? Let memory roll back all the
movements we experienced as effortless ourselves: the opening
of a window in the morning light, the lighting of a candle on the
altar, the first sip of a perfect wine. A kiss maybe, or the cut of a
sword through clean air. When was the last time we encountered
the world the praying boy reminds us of, the world that can appear
to us at any moment? Whether this happens or not depends
solely on our chosen stance. Now posture here is not a question
of muscle tone versus fat pads; posture here is a question of how
fully we are able to lean into each moment. To enter into it like a
pearl of uniqueness. The praying boy stands entirely absorbed in
his adoration, frozen in bronze, a perfect moment of veneration of
life. How do we choose to respond to such majesty from within the
skin of our own body?

Whether the embodied ideal becomes an icon to which we

submit and bow, certain that we will never reach its expression
of perfection ourselves, or whether we take it as a calling and
demand to elevate our own lives to the same majesty of elegance
and concinnity, is a choice entirely up to us.

Between personal appeal and divine adoration lies a third way

of encountering the ancient marble bodies. Such third way
of perceiving them is usually presented in modern academic
literature as the central meaning of ancient Greek sculptures.

32
They are regarded as carriers of the collective memory of a
culture. At the same time, they were the external embodiment and
substantial symbol of central collective values of a community of
people in their own time and place.

In a nutshell, we can observe the following evolution. The Greeks

were influenced by the Egyptians in their art of sculpture. Similar
to the depiction of Persian kings, the archaic period of sculpture
was not about resemblance to a once living person, but about
the representation of a certain divine or social office.21 What was
captured in stone was the idealised function of an individual.
The human body taken from the stone served to illustrate this
function.22 A series of kings or queens could therefore be depicted
in the same way, just as the familiar youthful kouroi and korai
resembled each other in their schematic outlines. It was only
in the classical period that individual traits and characteristics
came to the fore; the personified individual found its way into

21 “Frustratingly, we do not have the Old Persian vocabulary for what they
might have referred to as ‘the royal image’, but Akkadian terminology might
be of help. The expression used is ṣalam-šarrūtia – ’the image of my office of
kingship’, a clear demonstration that ancient Near Eastern kings promoted
the official image of the institution of rulership, a portrait of the ideal and able
king, in royal garments and with royal insignia, fashioned by the gods and in
the likeness of the gods.’” Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, “‘That My Body Is Strong’: The
Physique and Appearance of Achaemenid Monarchy”. In: Dietrich Boschung, Alan
Shapiro, Frank Wascheck (eds.), Bodies in Transition – Dissolving Boundaries of
Embodied Knowledge, Morphomata, Vol. 23, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015, p.
218.
22 The German word Würdenträger ,(dignitary, literally: “bearer of dignity/
dignities”) illustrates this idea very well. A person who holds a particular office
becomes the bearer of these dignities as well as their burdens. What was depicted
in the statues was the ideal of these dignities, not the individual bearer.

33
the collective memory and thus into the stone of the statues of a
community. Nothing illustrates this better than the statue of the
Athenian tyrannicides.

Particularly revealing in this context is the statue of

the ”Tyrannicides”, which was the first and for a long
time the only monument to Athenian citizens in the city
state’s marketplace (agora). Although the tyranny in
Athens continued for another four years after the killing
of Hipparchus in 514 BC, the two assassins soon gained
the fame of liberators. The statue from 477/6 BC shows
Harmodios and Aristogeiton in an attack pose, naked like
athletes. Athletic nudity thus now provided the model for
the highest civic attitude. The monument symbolizes the
collective action of autonomous and equal citizens. Nudity
illustrates the function of the body as an instrument of
glorious activity.23

In the naked bodies of Harmodios and Aristogeiton we encounter

the iconic turn in which the naked male body became the ikon of
civic attitude per se: vigour, courage, capability and performance
were all symbolically condensed in their athletic naked bodies.24
Their bodies were thus deliberately used as containers of
memory: they were filled not only with historical memory but,
above all, with a collective ideal. To aspire to it was not (only) a
call for physical equality, but primarily for equality in action.25 It

23 Lukas Thommen, Antike Körpergeschichte,. Zurich: vdf Hochschulverlag,

2007, p. 70, translation by author.
24 The German word Tüchtigkeit (“proficiency”) encompasses this notion
wonderfully. Ref. Thommen, 2007, p. 31.
25 It seems relevant here to recall the concept of orthopraxy which was so

34
was about the actions of the citizens, addressed here and linked
to the valorous murder of the tyrant in a commemorative loop set
in marble. Just as Harmodios and Aristogeiton set an example, we
have a duty to continue to live it. Each of us in our bodies, each of
us in our deeds.

This brings us to the Greek concept of kaloskagathos. It strives for

beauty not only in appearance but especially in attitude towards
and action in the world. As such, the image of a perfect body is
also the physical embodiment of a perfect attitude to and action in
the world. Kaloskagathos was a sophisticated ideal captured in the
longest-lasting substance in the world at the time, marble. It tried
to grasp in physical shape “the chivalrous ideal of the complete
human personality, harmonious in mind and body, foursquare
in battle and speech, song and action”.26 We find a more detailed
description of it in Werner Jaeger’s 1939 book on the ideals of the
Greeks:

That ideal was inspired by a clear and delicate perception of

correct and appropriate behaviour in every situation, which,
despite its precise rules for speech and conduct and its perfect
sense of proportion and control, was in effect a new spiritual
freedom. Entirely without effort or affectation, it was an easy
and unconstrained way of life, appreciated and admired by
all – and, as Isocrates wrote some years later, imitable by
none. It existed only in Athens. It meant an abandonment
of the exaggerated violence of emotion and expression that

essential to Greek culture. In opposition to the Christian value placed on inner

piety and faith, it emphasises the importance of correct action and conduct.
26 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals Of Greek Culture, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1945, p. 62.

35
 characterized Aeschylus, for the miraculously natural poise
and proportion which we feel and enjoy in the sculptured
frieze of the Parthenon as well as in the language of the men
and women of Sophocles. An open secret, it can only be
described, not defined […]
[…].. It is the radiance of a life that has
found the final peace and final harmony with itself which are
expressed in Aristophanes’ description of Sophocles: a life
which even the passage through death cannot affect, which
remains both ”there” and ”here,” content. It would be trivial
and unworthy to interpret this way of life as purely aesthetic,
a complex of elegant attitudes, or as purely psychological,
a harmony of consonant spiritual powers, and thereby to
mistake its symptoms for its essence.27

We have arrived here at a point in Greek culture, in the 6th

century B.C., when the narrow, normative, chitinous shell of
aristocratic and royal families, their trappings and culture-
defining behaviours, was shed. Instead, a broad middle class
came to the fore which at that time still had no original ethics
and no classical self-image. In their sudden ascent to the Athenian
bourgeoisie, they appropriated elements of the previously
aristocratically privileged lifestyle and expanded it with their
own novel and sometimes radically democratic ideas. This fresh
attitude, embodied in the ideal of kaloskagathos, is by no means
limited to aesthetic categories but adopts and uses them to create
icons of virtue for an entire new society.

A life-form that has hitherto been given form and shape by a

chitinous shell, and that suddenly discards it, requires new organic
methods to give itself support and shape. With the shedding of

27 Jaeger, 1945, p. 276-277.

36
the exoskeleton of hegemonic constraints and tyrannical rule,
the individual faced the necessity of creating their own internal
skeleton of ethics and conduct, of proper action and contribution
to the polis. The newly won freedom also brought with it new
constraints, and a very decisive one of these was to achieve
collective clarity about and personal alignment with the new civic
ideal.

This description of the Athenian kaloskagathos is a brief glimpse

into a highly diverse culture of 2600 years ago that we otherwise
understand only in broad outline. In addition to the subtlety of the
ideal of such an “unconstrained way of life” for men, there is, it
needs to be mentioned, the blatantly unequal treatment of married
women who were confined to the home and subject to strict
rules of dressing and behaviour. Similarly, the oft-cited sexual
openness of ancient Greek culture stands in stark contrast to the
contempt for homosexuality and the strict social regulations to
which widespread pederasty was subjected.28 The disparity in this
culture to our own ideals is even sharper when we consider the
treatment of damaged or seemingly defective bodies: they offered
the archetypical icons of ridicule and mockery. Just as the perfect
body was the expression of the perfect citizen in the fulfilment of
their duties and display of their achievements, so the deformed
body was considered a reflection of ethical deficiencies, vices, and
the personal failure to proceed towards the ideal.29

From today’s point of view, a fair reaction to such a culture is not

a romantic admiration for the purportedly pure Greek antiquity
but rather one of cognitive dissonance. How could such beauty in

28 Thommen, 2007, pp. 79.

29 Thommen, 2007, pp. 83.

37
ideal and expression go hand in hand with such cruelty towards
minorities within their own society? Furthermore, we must not
be lulled into supposed certainty that the written evidence from
Athens and Sparta provides an accurate picture of the entire
Greek culture of the period. Cultural boundaries were even
sharper and tighter than they are today. What was celebrated
as an achievement in Athens in the 6th century B.C. might have
been ridiculed or simply never known on the islands near today’s
Turkish coast. Sarah C. Murray describes this asynchronicity very
well in her study on male nudity in the Greek Iron Age.

I suggest these uneven patterns in nude iconography may

relate to the presence of competing ideologies concerning
the appropriate role of nudity in society that were contested
over time and regionally distinctive.30

[…] it helps us to see the untidy and complicated society

of the [Early Iron Age] as one that was probably largely
distinct from and surely mostly indifferent to the Classical
world and the world of Bronze Age states.31

[…] my reconstruction of [Early Iron Age] worship at rural

sanctuaries is one that might seem dissonant with our ideas
about Greek culture – it is a shady world of dark places,
powerful magicians, and strange cultural inversions in
which craftspeople hold ritual power rather than sitting at
the margins of society and serving the whims of the elite.32

30 Sarah C. Murray, Male Nudity in the Greek Iron Age: Representation and
Ritual Context in Aegean Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2022, p. 228.
31 Murray, 2022, p. 231.
32 Murray, 2022, p, 239.

38
In our brief review of the ancient Greek view of the naked male
body we certainly do not find an original narrative. On the
contrary, we are confronted with a variety of interpretations
that are in many ways intertwined with today’s view of the naked
(male) body: the muscular and toned male physique, set in marble,
capable of attack, defence, worship, and poetic song, was and is
an unparalleled bearer of symbolic meaning, an iconic vessel
for collective expectations of the individual’s contribution to the
community, as well as a pictorial assurance of one’s own history
and agency in the creation of one’s personal future.

Finally, we should give a thought or two to the importance of

the context in which these bodies appear. Today, we see them
on magazine covers, movie posters and, of course, in a flood of
still and moving (self ) portraits within social media channels.
Two and a half millennia ago, in the time of the ancient Greeks,
each statue appeared in a much less fluid reading context, but in
a firmly anchored place and time which were also charged with
social significance.

Let’s consider this. The original Greek viewer saw these statues
of motionless naked men in a certain light and in a certain
surrounding. There was a particular scent in the air, and the statue
was embedded in a specific environment of architectural and
natural features. Today, we would never examine a tree without
considering the earth in which its roots are buried, nor without
appraising the sunlight that raised it upwards to the sky. Similarly,
the Greek statues deserve to be understood as just one feature in
a complex ecology of traditions, rituals, power, performances
and other artefacts. Specifically, they were not the forerunners of
those works of modern art that we like to misunderstand as being
born solely of the artist’s discrete ingenuity. Instead, a thousand

39
different influences flushed into their creation and through the
mind and hand of their sculptors. After their completion, they
were placed in locations with unique meaning – in temples,
cemeteries and agoras. Here they were seen again not isolated by
themselves but surrounded by walls and draperies, flowers and
herbs, clouds and rain, shadows and, most of all, other people. All
of these ecological nodes provided cues to the way these statues
were obviously understood at the time of their origin.

The dazzling diversity of such contextual components points us to

a conundrum that can be asserted for all cultures at all times: they
are and were confusing, messy, convoluted and highly ephemeral
constructs.33 Change is omnipresent, and the precise relationship
between cause and effect invited intellectual play then as now.
Only the nature of these speculations and the type of sensations
they triggered differed from ours – sometimes slightly, often
greatly – due to what is best described as culturally conditioned
common sense.

Pliny in his Natural History (XXXII.2) penned the phrase corpua

sua inscribunt, referring to the tattooed bodies of the Dacians and
Sarmatians. Their bodies are inscribed. We would like to propose
this simple epithet as a statement about the goêtic condition of man
as such: our bodies are inscribed with meaning from the inside and
the outside, by the blood below our skin and by the glances of the
people around us. Our bodies are vessels of significance, whether
they be filled with blood or carved out of marble. Our bodies are
filled with language. Some of these carnal words we co-create, but

33 Even Socrates, it turns out, did not know exactly how it came about that
athletes from the 6th century B.C. onwards appeared completely naked in
competitions. Ref. Thommen, 2007, p. 65.

40
most of them are written upon us by the people and culture into
which we are born.

The goês now ventures beyond such given complexity and invites
the spirits to put pen to skin and add new hieroglyphs into our
entangled flesh. Understanding the words that our bodies form
is an eternal aspiration. Consciously participating in inscribing
them into ourselves is the undertaking of a lifetime. Realising all
substance as utterance, finally, is the work of the adept.

41
 Scythian Scare
III. SCYTHIAN SCARE

This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them. I have
not done so in times past, nor do I now fly from thee. There is
nothing new or strange in what I do; I only follow my common
mode of life in peaceful years. Now I will tell thee why I do not
at once join battle with thee. We Scythians have neither towns
nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of
their being taken or ravaged, to be in a hurry to fight with you.
If, however, you must needs to come to blows with us speedily,
look, you know there are our fathers’ tombs – seek them out,
and attempt to meddle with them. Till ye do this, be sure we
shall not join battle, unless it pleases us. This is my answer to
the challenge to fight. As for lords, I acknowledge only Jove, my
ancestor, and Hestia, the Scythian queen. “‘Earth and water”, the
tribute thou askedst, I do not send, but thou shalt receive soon
more suitable gifts. Last of all, in return for thy calling thyself
my lord, I say to thee, ”Go weep”.34

34 The Scythian king Idanthyrsus responds to the Persian king Darius’ request
to either fight or submit and negotiate in: The History Of Herodotus, Book IV, 127,
translated by George Rawlinson, Chicago: William Benton, 1952, p. 146.

42
G
o weep, Herodotus informs us at the end of this exchange
between the Persian and Scythian kings, was a common
saying amongst the latter.35

As reverently as the ancient Greeks described Egyptian culture,

they depicted the Scythians just as fearsomely. This “symmetry of
extremes”36 in their representation of these cultures illustrates the
dynamics of identity and alterity in full play. While the Egyptians
were considered worthy of positively enriching the Greeks’ own
culture, the Scythians were used as a boundary marker beyond
which one should expect barbarism and otherness.

However, the Ancient Greek ambivalence towards the Scythians

stems from the fact that they were at once worthy of fear – even
admiration for their uncompromising warfare and nomadic
lifestyle – and yet seemed to lack any sophistication in culture
or education. They carried all their possessions with them, spent
most of their lives on horseback, had no temples or statues of
gods, only war axes, dreaded arrows and the dried scalps of their
enemies tied in thick bundles around their belts. They drank
blood and wine from skulls serving as bowls, never washed with
water, were heavily tattooed, smeared their bodies with clay, and
had learned to cultivate hemp. They were merciless to those of
other faiths and offered human sacrifices from their own ranks to
their dead kings. No one attacked them without being destroyed,
and no one found them unless they wanted to be found.37

35 The History Of Herodotus, Book IV, 127, p. 146.

36 Charlotte Schubert, „Konstruktionsprinzipien des Weltbildes: Die
Hippokratische Schrift De aeribus und die Suche nach der Mitte der Welt.“, In:
Medizinhistorisches Journal, Bd. 35, H. 3/4, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000, p. 206.
37 For Herodotus’ detailed description of the Scythian culture see: The History

43
We will return to what little knowledge we have of Scythian
magic later. For now, let us stay with our observations of the
human body. In the previous chapter, we described how the
Greeks primarily used the nobly shaped, fat-free, naked male
body, taut with unbroken muscle tone, as a symbolic container for
their most central communal values. Now, in our encounter with
the Scythians through the stories of Herodotus and especially
Hippocrates, we encounter a radically different body. Not the
deformed one as in the Greek interpretation of the cripple or the
dwarf, but the body that is wrong in and of itself. In other words,
a vessel for alien values and a foreign way of life that were so
antipodal to their own that even the body itself had to appear as a
radical other. It comes therefore with little surprise that everything
the Greeks would have despised about their own bodies can
be found in Hippocrates’ description of the Scythian physique.
Whether this was factually true or whether it merely manifested
his own projections and fantasies is not of primary concern here.
What is of interest, however, is the pseudo-medical devaluation of
a body whose appearance constituted a confrontational attack on
the Ancient Greek ideals.

So, through the eyes of Hippocrates, let us look at the fleshly

appearance of this savage people.

The Scythian body could not diverge more from the Egyptian,
which is “well nourished, of very fine physique and very tall.”38 In
stark contrast, the body of the Scythians is fat and flabby. This is

Of Herodotus, Book IV, 46-127 and in particular sections 65-75 (see Appendix).
38 Hippocrates, Airs Waters Places, XII. In: Hippocrates. Volume 1, with an
English translation by W.H.S. Jones, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962,
p. 107.

44
mainly due to the constant climate in the steppe, because without
strong changes in temperature during the seasons, no enduring
and strong constitution can develop.

For these causes their physiques are gross, fleshy, showing no

joints, moist and flabby, and the lower bowels are as moist39
as bowels can be. For the belly cannot possibly dry up in a land
like this, with such a nature and such a climate, but because
of their fat and the smoothness of their flesh their physiques
are similar, men’s to men’s and women’s to women’s.40

Where the Greeks benefit from a climate linked to seasonal

changes and their constitution is fiery-dry, these foreign bodies
are characterised by an excess of moisture. Of course, Hippocrates
also offers a pseudo-medical explanation as to how these people
are capable of being such feared warriors despite their fat and
perceived weak constitution:

You will find the greater part of the Scythians, and all the
Nomades, with marks of the cautery on their shoulders, arms,
wrists, breasts, hip-joints, and loins, and that for no other
reason but the humidity and flabbiness of their constitution,
for they can neither strain with their bows, nor launch the
javelin from their shoulder owing to their humidity and atony:
but when they are burnt, much of the humidity in their joints
is dried up, and they become better braced, better fed, and
their joints get into a more suitable condition.41

39 The terms moist and humid are to be understood in this context as medical
indications within the framework of a theory of humours for the medical
application of which Hippocrates was to become famous.
40 Hippocrates, Airs Waters Places, XIX, 1962, p. 123.
41 Hippocrates, Airs Waters Places, XX. 1962, p. 125.

45
The bodies of their women, in particular, are “astonishingly flabby
and lumbering”.42 The general effeminacy of this people is further
enhanced by the fact that they are constantly on the move, sitting
in wagons and seldom walking on their own feet. In addition, their
skin is ruddy from the cold which dries and discolours it.43

All these circumstances mean that Scythian men do not have a

strong procreative drive and are often even impotent due to all
their horseback riding. The women also suffer from the excess
moisture in their bodies, which leads to the fact that “neither is
their monthly purging as it should be, but scanty and late, while
the mouth of the womb is closed by fat and does not admit the
seed.”44

So we are dealing with wet, fat, lazy and barren bodies. What
Hippocrates may have actually observed was a people reminiscent
in their physical appearance of Mongolian ethnic features:
distinguished by rounder body contours, smoother facial features,
sparse beard hair, and the intensified difficulty for foreigners to
distinguish men from women at first glance, as is still known from
anthropological reports of early modern times.45

Social efficiency, martial prowess, male fertility – the body as the

successful end product of the rough interplay of nature’s forces,
equal in endurance, strength, and elegance – these were the

42 ibid.
43 ibid.
44 ibid.
45 Karl Neumann, Die Hellenen im Skythenlande. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1855, pp.
166. Such a racially distorted description is, of course, set in a different historical
context in the 6th century B.C. as compared to when it occurs in the colonial era
of the 19th century.

46
attributes that bestowed the Greek body not only with beauty but
with value as such. In all these respects the Scythian is ominously
other. Hippocrates’ descriptions insinuate an atmosphere of
disgust and angst that the feminisation of the masculine ideal
might spread to his own people if clear borders in terms of location
and land, culture and time are not to be maintained.

Corpua sua inscribunt, their bodies are inscribed, we quoted Pliny

earlier on. Here we now encounter the body of the Scythians
being inscribed with fears of alterity, social vices, and organic
weakness. We have mentioned the postmodern observer’s view
of the perfectly formed bodies of white marble statues – and how
in their gaze an entire program of lifestyle is reflected, from diet
to exercise to sleep patterns, only to approximate their own body
to this ancient template. In the encounter with the Scythians, we
find ourselves at the other end of this field of vision. This glance
speaks no longer about the greatest possible assimilation but
about the greatest conceivable demarcation. Even 2500 years
ago, the filthy fat under the Scythian skins seems to have filled the
ancient Greeks with the same existential dread as the sight of their
battle axes and captured scalps.

Is this not an invitation then, we might ask, to view pads of body fat,
a generally androgynous appearance, or a transgender lifestyle as
just as dangerous a device as the actual war tools of the Scythians?
What if transgressive culture were to cut as sharply as a polished
blade of steel?

47
 Scythian Shamans
IV. SCYTHIAN SHAMANS
AND GREEK GOÊS

L
et us now turn to Scythian magic in whose contours we
will find one of the central models for the Greek concept
of the goês.

Evidently, the obvious problem we face in looking back at the

time before the 6th century B.C. is that the Scythians never fixated
their expert knowledge in writing. As such, we have to rely on
the scarce testimonies of Greek historians. These, however, agree
that it was precisely this barbaric north, which represented the
borderland between the habitable world and the neighbouring
anecumene, from which the shamanic arts had reached the Greeks.
Such evidence includes the story of Aristeas from the 7th century
B.C. as well as that of Abaris the Hyperborean. Both were known
for their goêtic arts and their extensive travels to the foreign lands
of the north. We hear of their riding on arrows (i.e. the shamanic
flight), healing by conjuring daemons, the gift of prophecy, and
their profound mastership of the arts of divination.46

A culture that builds no temples and erects no statues to its gods,

that places no value on writing and that constantly moves around
in the vast steppes, the grasslands, but also in mountainous regions

46 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 388.

49
and by the sea, learns to make do with the bare necessities. All their
belongings had to fit on a wooden cart and in the saddlebags or,
even better, they had to be able to carry them on their own bodies.
The endless accumulation of cultural artefacts – in parchment,
stone, wood, pottery etc. – was, to them, not an expression of
refinement or sophistication, but one of decadence.

In such a culture, where would we best look for manifestations

of its magical ways? Exactly there: in the everyday objects that
proved important enough to be carried as indispensable items
on their long journeys. The magic of the Scythians, then, is not
to be found in a separate, detached realm, but in the midst of
life. The sacred and the profane were inextricably intertwined,
overlapping and fertilising each other, as each object existed in
layers of meaning and agency.

Let us examine a few striking examples from the descriptions of

Herodotus.

Oaths among the Scyths are accompanied with the following

ceremonies: a large earthen bowl is filled with wine, and
the parties to the oath, wounding themselves slightly with
a knife or an awl, drop some of their blood into the wine;
then they plunge into the mixture a scymitar, some arrows,
a battle-axe, and a javelin, all the while repeating prayers;
lastly the two contracting parties drink each a draught from
the bowl, as do also the chief men among their followers.47

Sword, axe, arrow, and spear contained the same vitality as

one’s own blood. They were not merely objects of war but the

47 The History Of Herodotus, Book IV, 70, translated by George Rawlinson,

Chicago: William Benton, 1952, p. 136.

50
materialised arms, hands and bodies of the spirits themselves. The
bodies of familiar daemons and tutelary deities were brought in
as witnesses to the ritual act. More than mere observers, however,
their flesh was invited to participate and physically alter and affect
the wine that was transformed into a daemonic hive-body.

This hybrid body, in the form of wine, blood and the presence of
daemonically charged metals, was then imbibed and incorporated
into the humans’ flesh. In this way, the flesh of the gods was mixed
with their own in the oath and an indissoluble bond was forged.
Just as blood can never again be drawn from wine, so the presence
of the spirits – as judges of the oath – had entered the bodies of
the humans forever. The oath was therefore not only a social
obligation but also an organic transformation of the flesh. The
body, in turn, was considered a composite being as it was shared
with kin of man and daemons alike.

From here we proceed to the second example for which Herodotus

provides us with a solid point of reference, the oracle of linden
bark.

Scythia has an abundance of soothsayers, who foretell

the future by means of a number of willow wands. A large
bundle of these wands is brought and laid on the ground.
The soothsayer unties the bundle, and places each wand by
itself, at the same time uttering his prophecy: then, while he is
still speaking, he gathers the rods together again, and makes
them up once more into a bundle. This mode of divination
is of home growth in Scythia. The enarees, or woman-like
men, have another method, which they say Venus taught
them. It is done with the inner bark of the linden tree. They
take a piece of this bark, and, splitting it into three strips,

51
 keep twining the strips about their fingers, and untwining
them, while they prophesy.48

As a backdrop to Herodotus’ oracular observation, the entire

cultural and historical significance of the linden tree as a sacred
being in Eurasian cultures unfolds before us. Most centrally,
we recall the linden tree as a vårdträd or warden tree in Norse
mythology.49 These tribes not only considered the linden tree an
important nature spirit, but a protective life-long guardian spirit
to humans in particular. Once a person had achieved communion
with them, these arboreal companions remained close to them
throughout their lives, quite similar to the Zoroastrian fravashis.50

48 The History Of Herodotus, Book IV, 67, translated by George Rawlinson,

Chicago: William Benton, 1952, p. 135.
49 Wilhelm Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme:
Mythologische Untersuchungen. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1875, p. 51.
Mannhardt gives us the mythological and historical background to the linden
tree as a guardian tree. Moreover, he also offers accounts from modern times
of how this belief and the corresponding magical techniques were still found
in 19th century Central Europe. Let’s just peruse this short report and take note
of the specialised magical techniques required to perform the corresponding
operations: “It will now be easy to understand why ghosts and knocking spirits
are banished to hollow trees, willow trees or the like. To get rid of them, they
are given the tree to live in. The ghost of an evil innkeeper haunting the wine
cellar has been banished to the Ruckfelder Linde near Zurzach. There he lived
in a hole in the branch. At night, he often sat on a branch and played the violin
and the sharper the snowflakes fluttered over the Ruckfeld in winter, the more
beautifully and sharply he played it. A farmer who danced to these notes until
he fell over became the best dancer in the country from that very hour. This
magical violin playing is the music of the forest, the song of the storm that makes
everything move and dance.” Mannhardt, 1851, p. 42f., translation by author.
50 For more detail on the fravashi please see my book Holy Daimon. London:
Scarlet Imprint, 2023.

52
 The Värd corresponds exactly to the concept that the ancient
Norwegians and Icelanders associated with the name Fylgja
[…].. The fylgja (i.e. the following spirit) is the life, the genius
[…]
of man himself personified as a special daimon and as such
has become a companion, herald of destiny and author of
fate. From there it was only an imperceptible step and the
fylgja became a warning or helping guardian spirit, lovingly
caring for the person assigned to it. The tree soul, conceived
as the image or double of an individual human life or the life
of a human community, is equally connected with both the
tree and the human, and at the same time hypostasised by
both as independent, then as a protective, helping genius, is
the Värd.51

Along the same line, we recall the power of the linden tree among
the Anglo-Saxons, who also knew it as a potent guardian spirit.
Its wood was used to make magical spears that could drive away
daemons and other nature spirits.52 Finally, we should not forget
the story that the linden tree was the dwelling of no other than the
telluric dragon itself during a particular stage of its growth. Jacob
Grimm recounts this lore as follows:

The dragon lives 90 years as a worm in the earth, then 90

years in the linden tree, then 90 years in the desert, this
development is obviously intended to follow the life of the
caterpillar and the butterfly.53

51 Mannhardt, 1875. p. 52, translation by author.

52 Felix Grendon, “The Anglo-Saxon Charms”. In: The Journal of American
Folklore, Vol. 22, No. 84, 1909, p. 165.
53 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie. Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1875, p. 199. Grimm’s
reference here is Laurent Philippe Charles van den Bergh’s Dutch book of 1836,

53
Thus, when the Scythian shaman wraps rings of lime bark around
their fingers to sense the answer of the magical oracle, we do
not encounter them performing a mechanical technique alone.
Rather, we see them in communion and conversation with a non-
human person that according to their experience had residence
in the flesh of the linden tree, and from whom they were seeking
daemonic counsel.

The third example also refers to the practice of the Scythian

shamans. Herodotus informs us that there were many of these.
A special group amongst them were the aforementioned enarees
(Ενάρεες), whose name means the Unmanly.54 These were male
shamans who radically transgressed the usual gender boundaries
both in their appearance and in their chosen way of life.

They put on women’s clothes, take on a woman’s being and

do women’s work; but in all this they are highly honoured

where we find the following section below. This in turn refers to a natural history
treatise by one Brother Thomas which I have not been able to locate. It remains
unclear whether the first phase of the dragon’s life took place in the earth or
inside an alder tree. An error in copying is likely, as the words Erde (earth) and
Erle (alder tree) are almost the same in German: ”On the belief in dragons, of
which there is a remarkable account preserved to us in the work of Brother
Thomas on Natural Science, which thus reads: Among the worms that live in
the alder tree, there is one that grows larger than the others and devours them
all. After ninety years it is no longer allowed to feed on the alder, so it moves to a
lime tree, where it lives for another ninety years, and then it settles in the desert,
where it is fed for another ninety years. Within thirty years it grows wings and
flies and is dangerous to all birds, just as Lucifer is more dangerous than all the
devils. This worm is called a dragon, meaning our Lucifer.” Laurent Philippe
Charles van den Bergh, Nederlandsche Volksoverleveringen en Godenleer. Utrecht:
Johannes Altheer, 1836, p. 73, translation by author.
54 Karl Meuli, “Scythia”, in: Hermes, 70. Band., Heft 2, 1935, p. 131.

54
 and greatly feared – apparently, of course, because of their
gift of sight.55

According to Herodotus,56 the enarees are the descendants of

those Scythians who had plundered the sanctuary of Aphrodite
of Ascalon during the campaign against Egypt, whereupon
the goddess inflicted the female sickness on them and their
descendants. This interpretation of the feminine appearance
of this particular group of shamans seems rather dubious since
it mainly affirms the power of the Greek gods and presents the
threatening condition of the feminisation of men as an affliction.
In the same light, Hippocrates offers an alternative explanation for
the condition of the enarees as caused by the imbalanced Scythian
culture: the amount of time they spent in the saddle was to blame
for their infertility, as it precipitated swellings and inflammations
in the male genitals. Once this occurred repeatedly, the men were
forced to submit to the consequences of their impotence, put on
women’s clothing, and walked amongst them.57

In contrast to these ancient sources, Karl Meuli’s interpretation

from 1936 is much more empathetic and open to behold forms
of alterity without implied judgement. In his groundbreaking
observations on Scythian shamanism he observed profound
possible ties between the enarees’ transgressive sexuality and
their role as shamans.

The Paleo-Siberians and the Asian Inuits are also known to

have shamans of transformed sex, who have a reputation

55 Meuli, 1935, p. 129, translation by author.

56 The History Of Herodotus. Book I, 105, translated by George Rawlinson,
Chicago: William Benton, 1952, p. 25.
57 Hippocrates, Airs Waters Places, XXII, 1962, pp. 127-131.

55
 for very special power and are therefore generally feared,
even by the ordinary, non-transformed shamans. […] The
”transformation” usually begins at the behest of a spirit
at the beginning of sexual maturity, when the first visions
and intuitions tend to come to the shaman-to-be. [The
gender transformation] can be of very different degrees, for
example it may only extend to the hairstyle or, which is very
common, only to the clothing. One of the Chukchi shamans
who became known in Bogora had overcome an illness as
a young man through [gender] transformation and then
continued to practice the shaman profession. He then
continued to practice the shaman profession, of course in
women’s clothing, but this did not prevent him from marrying
and fathering four children with his wife. Obviously, this is
a temporary disturbance of normal sexual sensation, which
is not caused or followed by any physical change; according
to Bogoras, the latter is also completely absent in the most
complete degree of ”transformation”. In this, the shaman not
only completely abandons the costume, manner of speech
and occupation of men in order to exchange them for those of
the female sex; he also feels completely female and can even
enter into a permanent union with a man in the usual forms
of marriage and establish an outwardly entirely normal
household. Tribes where such cases could not be observed
in actuality, nevertheless have commensurate stories to tell;
in other tribes the shamans at least still officiate in female
costume. Traces indicate that a female spirit, in certain
cases the earth goddess, appointed these men to their service
and imposed the transformation on them. The similarity
between these shamans and the enarees is so striking that
there is no need to juxtapose the points of comparison;

56
 the enarees were clearly Scythian professional shamans
whose influence was great and respected. They especially
worshipped their great sky goddess, who had given them
the art of prophesying from linden bast; she may also have
demanded transformation from them.58

In the course of his analysis, Meuli distinguishes the enarees

as professional shamans from lay forms of popular family
shamanism. This means that cultural techniques which we today
classify as shamanic may well have been widespread in Scythian
culture and freely available to all members of the tribe. However,
it was the specialised enarees – and possibly other shamans with
diverse sets of specialisations – who formed a powerful and
feared class of their own, within which they pursued shamanic
techniques professionally.59

This in turn casts new light on Herodotus’ account that the

Scythians built sweat baths in which they poured hot stones into
a bowl and then scattered hemp seeds on top, the smoke of which
filled the wooden structure which was sealed with furs and mats.
The Scythians would sit there, naked, sweating, intoxicated by the
hemp and howling like wolves.60 Herodotus mentions this practice
directly in connection with their burial rites.

Here we encounter not merely an account of the Scythians’

58 Meuli, 1935, p. 129f., translation by author.

59 Meuli, 1935, p. 125f..
60 The History Of Herodotus. Book IV, 73-75, translated by George Rawlinson,
Chicago: William Benton, 1952, p. 136-137. It should be noted that the English
translation of the Scythians’ delighted“shout for joy” has already been corrected
by Karl Meuli. The Greek term used by Herodotus clearly refers to the howling
of wild animals, primarily wolves. Meuli, 1935, p. 122.

57
fondness for sweat lodges, according to Meuli. Rather, this
description should be understood as part of a shamanic ritual.
After the burial, the rite of purification follows. The shamans
first rub their heads with a kind of soap and wash them. Then
they enter the sweat tent, naked with heavily tattooed bodies,
inhale the thick hemp smoke and commence the shamanic flight
to guide the soul of the deceased into the otherworld.61 This act
was accompanied by chants that sounded to Herodotus like the
howling of wild animals.62

As such, the actual ritual performed here was of central importance

to the tribal community. The psychopompic task of escorting
the journey of souls into the realm of the dead, of balancing the
communities of the living and the dead, and of organising the
concerns of the dead in relation to the care of the living, is one
of the central tasks of shamanic practice as we experience it
enduringly across time and geographical landscapes. Amongst
the ancient Scythians, this task apparently fell to the transgender
enarees.63

It is significant that archaeological evidence of Scythian

shamanism can be traced forward in time from Herodotus’ report
at least to the 5th century A.D., which speaks to the high persistence
of the corresponding cultural techniques. A prime example of this
is a complete sweat lodge from the Pazyryk kurgan, where it was

61 Meuli, 1935, p. 125.

62 Meuli, 1935, p. 131.
63 H.-J. Diesner, „Skythische Religion und Geschichte bei Herodot“. In: Rheinisches
Museum für Philologie. Neue Folge, 104. Band, 3. Heft, 1961, p. 210. Also see: Alois
Closs, „Interdisziplinäre Schamanismusforschung an der indogermanischen
Völkergruppe“. In: Anthropos, Band 63/64, Heft 5./6., 1968/1969, p. 970.

58
excavated from 1927 to 1949. It was found in an entirely unaltered
state.

The Pazyryk hemp tent consisted of six tent poles, a leather

covering, a censer, one of the type of a small Scythian
cauldron with heat-protected handles, filled with once
glowing stones and burnt hemp grains strewn on top.64

Moreover, Mircea Eliade, in his seminal study of shamanism, has

already informed us of the amazing permanence of shamanic
practices in a world otherwise marked by perpetual change. His
reference to the survival of Scythian shamanic traditions amongst
the mountain tribes of Georgia is particularly interesting.65 Eliade
refers to Robert Blechsteiner’s 1936 essay on the consecration of
horses in the death cult of the Caucasian peoples.66 Bechsteiner’s
relevant paragraphs are given and translated here for the first
time in English. They shed important light on the intersection of
the permanence of shamanic practice and the critical role of the
female sex in particular.

1. Khadagi ”herald, seer”. The khadagi proclaim the will of the

chati [tribal shrine and its genius] and advise the community
on all important matters, formerly also on matters of war
and peace. They are usually psychologically peculiar people

64 Franz Hančar, „’Altai-Skythen’ und Schamanismus“. In: Actes du IV Congres

International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethologiques. Tome III, Wien:
Verlag Adolf Holzhausen, 1956, p. 189, translation by author.
65 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 396.
66 Robert Bleichsteiner, „Roßweihe und Pferderennen im Totenkult der
kaukasischen Völker“. In: Wiener Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik,
Band 4, Salzburg and Vienna, 1936, pp. 413-95.

59
 who easily fall into ecstasy and often suffer from nervous
disorders and convulsions. Women are particularly suited to
this profession, often running into the mountains in fanatical
rapture, beating their breasts with stones and screaming
and raving until they faint. The selection as a khadagi often
takes place on the festival of chati or on New Year’s morning.
The chosen person begins to tremble, loses her memory, and
announces through confused speech that she is destined to
serve chati. There is an account of a girl who climbed into
the river in the harshest winter and proclaimed the will of
the shrine from there. Not all such people are considered
seers by the people. It often happens that young girls fall into
ecstasy, but the people consider them mad and think that the
chati is only ”holding” or ”tormenting” them […]
[…]..

2. If the khadagi deal with the public affairs of the community,

the business of the fortune-tellers has a private character.
The latter probably exist or existed amongst all Caucasian
peoples. The Georgians call them mk’it’hawi ”questioners”
from the term k’it’hwa ”to ask”. The ”questioners” divine
from water, grains, or threads that are wound and unwound
on a small board. Their most important task in cases of
illness is to find out why the chati who sent the illness is
angry and what atonement it demands. Sick people who are
”demanded” by the chati are dressed in a white robe, their hair
is allowed to grow for a longer period of time, or talismans
are tied around them; sacrifices are made for them, or they
are consecrated as ”slaves” to the shrine. If the sick person
dies, it is a sign that the saint could not be appeased.

3. The last group, particularly important for our context,

are the mesulthane or messulethe (as they are called among

60
the Khevsur), who have a relationship with the souls (suli) of
the deceased and convey their wishes. They are exclusively
women or girls, the latter must be at least nine years old. The
messulethe perform sulši c’ aswla, the ”going to the souls”;
they describe their journey to the underworld, the meeting
with the deceased, their condition, the sacrifices they
demand etc.. Often they also announce future misfortunes
that the deceased will foretell. When the messulethe wants
to visit the souls, she lies down on the floor at home, turns
pale and falls asleep. From time to time she mumbles words,
she ”speaks” to the souls. This is most likely to happen after
a recent death, especially if the nishani is still in the house.
When you invite a messulethe to your home, you must place
an odd number of loaves of bread on the table and a cup of
arak next to them. The fortune teller walks around the table
three times, drinks, and sits in silence until the deceased
speaks from her mouth. If a child under the age of two
falls ill, the Khevsur calls the messulethe to find out which
deceased person is sending the illness. The child must then
be renamed after the deceased. Once the child reaches the
age of three, it is no longer renamed. The messulethe must
always maintain their purity and sacrifice animals to the
chati two or three times a year. They take no money for their
services but are highly honoured and take first place among
women at memorial services.

The office of the seers, diviners, and soul-seekers amongst

the Georgian mountain peoples is in some respects similar
to that of the Siberian shamans, but there are also great
differences, due to different living conditions, the influence
of higher religions over many centuries, and, in detail,

61
 probably also to our meagre research material.67

With the study of the Scythian enarees and their distant echo in
the Caucasian khadagi and messulethe we have established the
central historical context for goês in ancient Greek culture. I have
already discussed the figure of goês in detail, but its origins beyond
the Greek culture area have remained ambiguous. Now we see
the central connection: in all cases, the task of contacting and
mediating with the dead falls to women or men who have adopted
a feminine habitus and lifestyle. A central element of their art is
the creation of a state that “falls out of normality”68 i.e. to establish a
sensually perceptible threshold between humans and no-longer-
humans through wild wolf-like howling, drug-infused frenzy,
bodies disfigured from sweat, clay, ashes and bloody scratches or
the beating of their chests with rocks.

When the Greeks first observed such practices amongst the

Scythian peoples, their horror must have been heightened by the
”fat” and ”misshapen” bodies that performed these savage rites
in which the boundaries between man and woman, human and
spirit, seemed to vanish. Not only was this an explicitly unmanly
practice, but an uncanny and unhuman one as well.

The Greek term goês was originally derived from the wild
howling of women during funeral ceremonies, but it eventually
came to mean any taboo-breaking, especially necromantic magic
practiced by individuals outside of the official cults. Finally, from
the 5th century B.C. on, it degenerated fully and became a term

67 Bleichsteiner, 1936, p. 471-472, translation by author.

68 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, Harvard University Press, 1985, p.192.

62
of derision for idiots and the uneducated.69 In retrospect, this is a
prime example of the historical type of radical exclusion of lived
spirituality that threatened to undermine the power structure
of collective institutions. Furthermore, and more importantly
for our research, we see in the decline of the concept of goês
the devaluation and marginalisation of shamanism as it was
encountered by the Greeks which simply could not gain a foothold
in their new polis-centred societies. We witness here and not, as
is often assumed, in the much later triumph of Christianity, the
beginnings of the decline of the shamanic West.

Before we return to the magical exploration of the flesh and the

human body, one last misunderstanding should be pointed out.
This is to comprehend the ecstasy experienced in the Greek
mystery cults as an expression of professional shamanism.

The Greek ecstatic rituals were communally inclusive in nature i.e.

all participants, including women, were united in the temporary
ecstasy and divine frenzy of their rite. This underscores the
societal function and importance of specifically the Dionysian cult
in Greek culture: it offered a powerful framework within which
collective identity and community was experienced and cyclically
renewed. However, according to our Greek sources on Scythian
culture, this was exactly the opposite of the latter’s approach to the
experience of mantic-ecstatic divinity. Amongst the Scythians,
devotion to divine ecstasy was not deployed to emphasise the
identity of the collective but that of individuals within their
community. Here, it was a small and unique group who possessed
the skills and who had adopted the lifestyles prescribed to master

69 Walter Burkert, „ΓΟΗΣ. Zum Griechischen ‘Schamanismus“. In: Rheinisches

Museum für Philologie . Neue Folge 105, Band 1, 1962, p. 50.

63
ecstatic flight as shamans and to serve their community in this
manner.70

Expanding on Eliade’s observation that Bacchic enthusiasm is

in no way comparable to shamanic ecstasy,71 we can venture the
following contrasting juxtaposition which is admittedly perhaps a
little too polarising. Yet, it illustrates an important nuance which
is particularly evident when we look not at the seers of the well-
known Greek oracles, but at the Dionysian cult specifically. Here,
it appears that the bacchanalian ecstasy predominantly served
the communal experience within a strongly religious context. In
contrast to this, the ecstasy of the Scythian enarees seemed to serve
individual specialisation in an evidently magical context. This
would be unsurprising in so far as, in all areas of human culture,
specialisation enables a deeper penetration and a better grasp of
any given subject. It produces the expert and alongside with them
the cultural knowledge and techniques of the professional. Hence,
it seems not unlikely that Ancient Greek culture had developed
deep expertise in socially domesticating the experience of ecstasy
in such a manner that it became accessible to everyone i.e.
including laypeople, taking on a community-generating social
function.72 The Scythian culture, on the other hand, seems to

70 Irmgard Männlein-Robert, „Wilde Skythen - weise Griechen?“. In: Jörg

Robert, Friederike Felicitas Günther (eds.), Poetik des Wilden .Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2012, p. 130.
71 “We may note that the healers, diviners, or ecstatics who might be connected
with shamanism have no relation to Dionysus. The Dionysiac mystical current
appears to have an entirely different structure; Bacchic enthusiasm does not
resemble shamanic ecstasy.” Mircea Eliade, Shamanism - Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 388.
72 Sarah Iles Johnston underlines this point when remarking that the ancient

64
have been more inclined to develop the profound expertise of
individual members in the precise application of ecstasy and
shamanic trance for specific communal purposes. Greek culture
thus enabled permissiveness in ecstasy, whereas Scythian culture
enabled reinforced depth of its application for magical purposes.

Greeks precisely did not “purposefully [seek] to train themselves, cognitively or

emotionally, to encounter the gods and heroes”. Sarah Iles Johnston, “Narrating
Myths”. In: Arethusa, Spring 2015, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2015, p. 200.

65
 The Hard Body
V. JULIUS EVOLA AND
THE HARD BODY

She said: ”Then tell me about the statement of the sage: ‘Indeed,
the beginning of this work, its end, and its perfection, after God,
is this stone which is not a stone.’” He said: ”I explained to you
that it is something honourable-despised, venerated-vulgar,
known-unknown, desirable-rejected.” She said: ”Explain it
without confusing my mind.” He said: ”Your mind will not be
confused by this.”73

I
n the previous chapters we examined the dynamics at work
when groups differentiate their collective identity from the
Radical Other. We encountered two main axes to consider. First,
the proximity to the centre of collective values and institutions,
and second, the poignancy of the contour of the figure in question.
The closer to the centre and the keener the contour, the more the
figure can be used to generate social cohesion. The farther from
the centre and the more frayed and fluid the contours, the more
the figure becomes charged with notions of the disturbingly alien,
the radical other, and the otherworldly uncanny.

73 Zosimos of Panopolis, The Book of Pictures: Mushaf as-suwar. Zurich: Living

Human Heritage, 2011, p. 171f.

67
From the point of view of the ancient Greeks, the fat body of the
transgender enarees, disfigured by ash and clay, howling wildly in
the darkness of the sweat lodge after the burial, is a prime example
of life in the anecumene. From the point of view of the Scythians,
the reverse may have been equally true: the marble stone body,
emaciated and marked by paper-smooth, taut muscles, alienated
from any elemental connection, to them may have been an image
equally horrifying, bearing witness to social decay and an outright
wrong life. The Scythians summed up their contempt for such
otherness in the laconic response “go weep”. Meaning: Run while
you can and wail before you meet my blade. Drawing the border
between Us and the Other with a battle axe seems to be an almost
universal constant, and traversing it in either direction had to be
paid for in blood.

The same dynamic of aggressive demarcation of the self from the

other, however, also occurs within cultures, as we have already
seen in the example of the goês in ancient Greece. Social classes
themselves are such boundaries of collective identity; the noble
and superior cannot exist without demarcation from the profane
and common. Again, we find, identity requires sharp contrasts,
clear contours.

In the following, we will consider the contours of early twentieth-

century Traditionalism. We are particularly interested in how
essential tenets of its philosophy are incorporated in the male
body image as we find it still stereotyped in social and mass
media in the 21st century. In fact, in the dark philosophical-occult
niche of Traditionalism we discover the high-dose poison that
most males are still inoculated with during their socialisation
today. The prominent authors of Traditionalism, such as Julius
Evola and Arturo Reghini, did not, of course, view themselves as

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poisoners but as restorators of a perennial inner alchemy.74 They
understood themselves as revivers of collective memories, as
cultural archaeologists as it were, who offered the counter-image
of a pure and glorious past to an increasingly decaying civilisation.
As such, they aimed to revive a heroic cult of masculinity familiar
to us from ancient Greece and Rome. However, to them, the
Other from whom one had to distance oneself was no longer the
barbarian in the north but the effeminate and degenerate within
one’s own cultural circle. Whereas the Ancient Greek could rely
on the collective good of the polis, Evola’s masculine hero can
only rely on himself. As such, a heroic achievement is required
of each individual: to cut the core of the absolute individual from
the turf of raw instincts, to wrest the gold of unbridled human will
from the black earth of animal flesh.

In a profoundly gnostic attitude towards the flesh as adversary,

Evola viewed man’s task as freeing himself from the dross, the
ashes and the sleep of animal existence. In an anti-body stance,
which was by no means new but had, on the contrary, characterised
Western magic for centuries, the essential assignment was to
overcome the untamed, feral human body as an obstacle to the
practice of magic and the unbridled application of free will.
The flesh as wilderness required cultivation, or more precisely
colonisation by the iron will of the magician. Only then, guided by
hard discipline and years of effort, could the mysterious “organ of
theophany”75 be activated and developed.

74 For a detailed examination of Italian Traditionalism see: Christian Giudice,

Occult Imperium – Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, and the Anti-Modern
Reaction in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
75 Gregory Shaw, “Theurgy and the Platonist’s Luminous Body” . In: April
DeConick, Gregory Shaw, and John D. Turner (eds.), Practicing Gnosis: Ritual,

69
Julius Evola emphasises this in his interpretation of the Hermetic
Tradition76 when he speaks of the required “perfect balance
between all the purified and powerful principles of being […] a
balance that makes it possible to reach that centre within oneself
from which the operation can be effective for all.”77 And his notion
of such corporeal cultivation becomes even more explicit a few
lines later when he writes:

Eliphas Levi points out that we have before us an exercise to

be performed at all hours and at all moments, and repeats
what it is all about: freeing the will from all dependence and
accustoming it to exercise dominion; becoming the absolute
master of itself; overcoming the temptations of pleasure,
hunger, and sleep, and allowing itself to be impressed
neither by success nor by failure. Life must be a will guided
by one thought, to which all nature must be subordinated,
which must be subject to the spirit in its own organs and,
in sympathetic action, in all the other universal forces
corresponding to them.

All the faculties and all the senses must participate in

the work, and nothing must remain inactive. One must
have wounded one’s own spirit through all the dangers of
hallucination and fear, and thus purified oneself inwardly
and outwardly.78

Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichaean and Other Ancient
Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2013, p. 541.
76 Julius Evola, Die Hermetische Tradition . Interlaken: Ansata Verlag, 1990
[1971.]
77 Evola, 1990, p. 148, translation by author.
78 ibid., translation by author.

70
 [Then] that which was in a state of slavery and confinement
as Mercury or life, fixed and enclosed in the body, is brought
into a state of absolute freedom through separation.79

In a patently fascist turn, we find here the ideal of Enlightenment

perverting the Great Work. The iron human will alone becomes
the herald of salvation and the saviour of the spirit immersed in the
filthy flesh. The latter is stripped of all positive qualities and is now
nothing but the seat of hunger, sleep, temptations, hallucinations,
and fears. In a one-dimensional misinterpretation of alchemical
processes, Evola equates the human will with fire and sulphur80
which must separate the dross from the contaminated body,
leaving nothing but pure ash and pure spirit.81 Thus, according to
Evola, in the pursuit of complete dominion of human agency, in
the creation of the “Absolute Individual”,82 we have permission to
burn down all of nature and ourselves along with it. In an extreme
condensation, we recognise here a seemingly occult world view,
which unfortunately has spread like a venom in Western magic
since at least the late 17th century and displays one of its many toxic
blooms in Evola’s distorted interpretations. Not only humanness,
but more explicitly “masculinity” becomes a heroic achievement
by transforming one’s body from a “nature that enjoys itself ” into
a man-made “nature that dominates itself ”.83

What distinguishes the Royal Art is its coercive character.84

79 Evola, 1990, p. 141, translation by author.

80 Evola, 1990, p. 69.
81 Evola, 1990, p. 93.
82 Evola, 1990, p. 101, translation by author.
83 Evola, 1990, p. 99, translation by author.
84 Evola, 1990, p. 35, translation by author, highlight in the original. In

71
It is, of course, no secret that for Evola both the hermetic art
and the art of war were deeply interwoven and stood together in
service of a single ideal: to resurrect the notion of masculinity to
spiritual meaning and virile life again. His aim was to escape as
far as possible from a dual kind of “triviality”85: on the one hand,
the triviality of industrial, business-driven, modern everyday life,
and on the other hand, the honourless, cannon-fodder devouring
triviality he had experienced in the First World War. He noted that
a proper war would always have a dual function: it would serve
the nation in the acquisition of material ends; and it should also
serve the individual in the attainment of heroism – dead or alive
– on the battlefield. A proper war – unlike the First World War –
would thus create conditions by which „the majority cannot but

narcissistic self-aggrandisement, Evola relies on the gnostic interpretation

of a passage in Homer’s Odyssey (Odyssey, XXXIV, 9-12). In The Refutation of
All Heresies (Book V, Chapter II) by Hippolytus. We learn about a supposedly
Naassene interpretation of the Cliff of Leukas, which was already interpreted
in Homer’s time as a threshold between the living and the dead, guarded by
the god Oceanus. There we read: “This, he says, is ocean, ”generation of gods
and generation of men” ever whirled round by the eddies of water, at one time
upwards, at another time downwards. But he says there ensues a generation
of men when the ocean flows downwards; but when upwards to the wall and
fortress and the cliff of Leucas, a generation of gods takes place.” Such an
upward movement of the divine waters, an explicit counter-current against the
course of nature, according to Evola, is now the goal of the alchemical process
for the self-genesis of the Absolute Individual. We are witnessing here not only
the distortion of allegedly gnostic doctrines, but the complete replacement of
divine providence by the compulsion of human will. Evola, 1990, p. 86. For the
quote see: Hippolytus, “The Refutation of All Heresies”. In: Ante Nicene Christian
Library. Volume VI, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1868, p. 137.
85 Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory and Death in the World of
Tradition. s.l.: Arktos, 2011 [three essays written before 1940], p. 21.

72
collectively undergo an awakening”.86

We do not need to delve deeper into Evola’s work here in order to

emphasise what is essential for us.87 In the writings of this radical
right-wing traditionalist, we encounter an idea of masculinity that
is as unnatural and monstrous as the Minotaur in its labyrinth:
lonely and disfigured, devoid of light, and without community.
With Evola, man is an object that can only be found on the
battlefield. Man is an idea that must first be imposed on Nature
and then cut out of her womb. Accordingly, no such man is ever
born naturally like a tree, a stream, a pebble or a bird. Instead, one
must bend and disfigure the entire hermetic art to create a sunlit
ideal from Evola’s numb war-golem.

But why at all take the space here to touch on Evola’s philosophy
of (toxic) masculinity? His core ideas are by no means new; after
all, their basic features can be traced back to the famous Spartan
valour and further into archaic history.88 Although Evola’s
account of alchemy is distorted by his extreme notions of gender,
his description of Traditionalism is accurate in that the baneful
masculinity we find in his works runs like a red ribbon through
centuries of Western culture.

86 Evola, 2011, p. 25.

87 The study of his writings should be approached with caution as it requires
a significant amount of historical reference knowledge. Overall, however, it will
trace the same image that Evola drew of the warrior” who recognises no higher
authority. Evola’s writings are “tragic: insolent, steel-tempered, but without light.”
Evola, 2011, p. 26.
88 For a succinct introduction see: Andrew G. Scott, “Spartan courage and the
social function of Plutarch’s Laconian apophthegms”. In: Museum Helveticum,
Juni 2017, Vol. 74, pp. 34-53.

73
The answer lies not in what Evola said, but more precisely when
he began to say it. The 1920s were in many ways a turning point,
the foldline of a new abyss with no bridge back to the past:
World War I had brought home for the first time the horrors of
modern warfare, with its bestial chemical agents, war trenches,
and hundreds of thousands of nameless dead. At the same
time, industrialisation raged in the cities, uprooting village
communities and breaking an ancient, mainly agricultural social
contract in the West.89 Oil was bubbling to the earth’s surface and
became the new black gold; the financial markets were booming
and on a seemingly unstoppable upswing. At the same time, the
farmer finally made way for the factory worker. And with it, the
human body disappeared into the smoke of chimneys, behind
conveyor belts and in cacophonous factory halls. Labour was no
longer manifestly visible in strong calves and shoulders that could
carry tools up a mountain pasture, but in hours and minutes
during which people silently and incessantly performed the same
mechanical motions to the beat of the machines. Just as the face
of the ancient hero disappeared under clouds of toxic chemical
agents, so man’s physical agency disappeared in the fumes of the
factories.

‘The Cult of Muscularity’ was formed in the last decade of

the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century
in a reaction to the perceived effeminisation of heterosexual
masculinity. Sporting and war heroes became national
icons. Muscle proved the ‘masculinity’ of men, fit for power,

89 For an impressive study of this upheaval in the 19th century, which in

many rural areas of Europe was only completed towards the beginning of the
20th century, read Will-Erich Peuckert, Die Große Wende . 2 Bände, Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 1966.

74
 fit to dominate women and less powerful men. The ‘ideal’ of
the perfect masculine body can be linked to a concern for the
position and power of men in an industrialised world. The
position of the active, heroic hetero-male was under attack
from the passivity of industrialisation, from the expansion
of women’s rights and their ability to become breadwinners,
and through the naming of deviant sexualities that were
seen as a threat to the stability of society.90

Charged with the pathos of the warrior cult, Evola wanted to

revive a racially and spiritually legitimised form of aristocracy.
The same blueprint, projected into the war zone of the male body,
produced the ideal of the muscled hard body. That is, a body
which, in an exaggeration of the ancient Greek statues, had to be
so extensively muscled that it looked like a shield, hammer, and
anvil made of flesh: a male body that had extinguished softness
and suppleness from its landscape and had turned itself into stone
instead.

The claim to absoluteness that we encountered in Evola’s work

above turns here to the control of one’s own flesh. Both Evola’s
distorted hermetic art and the beginnings of body building
in the early 20th century are characterised by a performative
compulsion i.e. an obsession with performance at will. When Evola
speaks of the need to free oneself from all dependence, that only
unbridled free will must remain and that all of nature must submit

90 Marcus Bunyan, Bench Press, from: Marcus Bunyan, Pressing the Flesh: Sex,
Body Image and the Gay Male. PhD dissertation, RMIT University, Melbourne,
2001, separate digital self-publication, 2022, p. 4. – Furthermore, a note to refer
to the concurrent „Muscular Christianity“ movement might help to underline
the religio-spiritual impact this specific flavour of fin-de-siécle vitalism effected
way beyond the purely materialist physical focus on virile masculinity.

75
to this will, this ideal adopts a profoundly pornographic character.
Evola’s male will takes on the role of the pornographic phallus
which subsumes the entirety of the human body: always on duty
to get hard, to perform on command, the phallic will has become
the central organ of the soldierly community of limbs, sinews and
muscles that now form the male hard body.

With Evola, masculinity and human will take on maximum

objecthood.91 Both are turned into an existential experiment in
discipline and dominance, command and violence. Like a golem,
the magician creates himself out of the clay of his flesh with the
knife of his will. That all this is inanimate, barren, and constitutes
nothing but fantasies of narcissistic youthfulness did not bother
Evola, nor the legions of magical teachers who built their doctrinal
edifice around the same fantasies of male performance.92

Become unmoved by good and evil, righteous, absolute,

unveiled. Learn to want without coveting, without fear,

91 For the parallelism of the re-interpretation of male will and body at the
beginning of the 20th century, please also read this section in combination
with Evola’s own works: ”In the Victorian and Edwardian eras the knowledge
of science, such as the science of physical fitness for example, allowed the body
to become an object that was subject to technical expertise. Physical fitness
was taken up by governments and their armies to enforce standards of fitness
for recruits, the medical examination ensuring suitability for service and the
fitness regime ensuring that all bodies were interchangeable and replaceable
in the event of death on the battlefield. The body became a site of intervention;
it became malleable and plastic, subject to the demands of the self and State.”.
Bunyan, 2022, p. 13.
92 An extreme but highly influential case would be the early 20th century
works by Franz Bardon. His technician’s approach and perfectionist’s demands
for each stage of his magical training are in deep congruence with Julius Evola’s
ideas of the absolute will and the individual as a function of war.

76
 without remorse. Create an active force that never tires.
Without ceasing, cold, hard and yet at the same time
yielding, malleable. Want firmly, want long, always want
without stopping, and never desire; that is The Secret of
Power. Cut off from yourself the vines of lust, intoxication
and passion; shrink to a simplicity that wants.93

Now we have arrived at the central point which originally drew

me to this exploration into the male flesh. We find ourselves at
the tripartite intersection of Ancient Greek historic masculinity,
traditionally disfigured hermetic masculinity, and modern day
hard masculinity. Before us we see the marbled statues of fat-free
athletes whose heroic shadows swallowed the common man. We
see the bitter countenance of the male mage who clung to the life-
long illusion of iron discipline and utter disgust for Apollonian
lust, who would endow his will with dragon wings. And we finally
see Conan the Barbarian, adorned with the body of a better, of a
pure nature, that eventually gifted man what should have always
been his: a giant, hard body, impenetrable by the world, knotted
with muscles from scalp to feet.

Let’s face it: in our historical past, philosophy and pulp culture we
are surrounded by men who can only exist in antagonism to fat, to
fun and to females. Masculinity in those worlds is not a given but
hard earned and easily lost. More specifically, it can only be gained
in the singular setting of the battlefield of war and conquest, of
performance and competition. According to these ancestors of
ours, not to fight is to no longer be a man. Equally, becoming a man

93 Abraxas, „Das Wissen um die Wasser, aka Ercole Quadrelli“ . In: Julius Evola
(ed.), Gruppe von UR: Magie als Wissenschaft vom Ich . Interlaken: Ansata Verlag,
1985, pp. 37-42, translation by author.

77
by necessity of contrast requires a loser who does not. To them,
the contour of masculinity becomes visible only in counterpoint
to the weak and fat, to the feeble and effeminate. Manliness in their
worlds is an insignia earned by freeing oneself from one’s own
carnal nature that is constantly threatening and all-devouring –
like the darkness of the maternal womb in which we lose sight of
ourselves. For in utter darkness there are no more contours, no
more hard lines that separate muscle from fat, male from female,
and us ourselves from the Other.

78
 Conan in Reverse
VI. Cthulhu is Conan in Reverse

Oh my friend, what time is this

To trade a handshake for the fist?94

By the side of the caravan road a heavy cross had been planted,
and on this grim tree a man hung, nailed there by iron spikes
through his hands and feet. Naked but for a loin-cloth, the man
was almost a giant in stature, and his muscles stood out in
thick corded ridges on limbs and body, which the sun had long
ago burned brown. The perspiration of agony beaded his face
and his mighty breast, but from under the tangled black mane
that fell over his low, broad forehead, his blue eyes blazed with
an unquenched fire. Blood oozed sluggishly from the lacerations
in his hands and feet. […] The man hanging on the cross was the
one touch of sentient life in a landscape that seemed desolate
and deserted in the late evening.95

94 A Perfect Circle, Fiddle and Drum, on the album Emotive, 2004.

95 Robert E. Howard, “A Witch Shall Be Born”. In: Conan the Barbarian – The
Definitive Collection. Raleigh: Wanderlust Books, 2023, p. 202f.

80
L
et’s try on a more recent blueprint of the male body.
Neither Greek Adonis nor Scythian Other, neither Absolute
Individual nor pornographic phallus. Instead, a rather
distorted echo of all of the former, embalmed into steel sheaths of
muscles: Conan the Barbarian.

In this literary pulp figure created by Robert E. Howard (1906-

1936) in the 1920s, we encounter the ultimate Anti-Gnostic Warrior.
Conan is personified carnal agency; nothing can resist his will put
to work with raging fists, nothing usurps his corporeal ability to
dominate. All antagonisms of the flesh have finally been resolved
in the body of Conan: gifted by race and DNA, his towering
muscles are not earned by adamant training or even on the
battlefield. Instead, they grow naturally and instinctively over his
giant bones. This super-man can feast for days and nights, drink
barrels of mead, eat mountains of flesh, and yet maintain a slender
waistline below a berserk triangle of muscles. He embodies not
only the proverbial hard body but nature conquered and colonised
to produce the hero all by itself. Conan is the single-man-army
Anthropocene, creating a clearance with the battle-axe between
the polar forces of dull animalistic past and degenerate civilising
future.

Conan is a one-man atavistic utopia. His unique bodily physique

is an entire fantastical program pumped below the epidermis of a
giant. He signals purity versus dilution, instinct versus decadence,
freedom versus civilisation, masculinity versus effeminacy, and of
course the absolute I versus the ubiquitous Other.

Red jets of agony shot through Conan’s brain, yet he held

himself immovable; not by the twitching of a muscle or the
flicker of an eyelash did he betray the pain of the hurt that

81
 left a scar he bore to the day of his death. […] He braced his
knotted legs like ebon columns and swung up the massive
sword in both hands, his great black muscles rolling and
cracking in the torchlight.96

And yet, Conan’s body is full of contradictions. In his radical

attempt to dominate, both wilderness and civilisation is uprooted
and isolated in the end, the entirely singular and solitary
individual. Reading his original stories, we quickly witness his
carnal perfection collapse into violent perversion. And of course
we don’t find a trace of the quintessential asceticism required to
uphold a genuine hard body. Instead, our barbaric hero emerges
in his steeled carnal vessel from waves of excess and hedonism.
Thus, upon second glance we recognise Conan not only as a
broken hero but as a sickly one. His impenetrable body is the
precise counter image of the anorexic physique. Conan is the
typified bigorexic fantasy i.e. the body obsessed with the morbid
accumulation of muscle mass.

In the figure of Conan his creator R.E. Howard attempted to

escape that modern identity which is negotiated between the
industrial poles of production (or performance) and consumption.
The barbaric colossus was his attempt to take possession of
an imaginary body liberated by the unadulterated pursuit of
libido. And yet, his vision got stuck in one of libido’s most primal
expressions: the aggressive impulse to conquer and destroy. As
such, it served generations of men as an icon of atavistic self-
assertion. From the 1970s onwards the male gender identity,
threatened by industrialisation, nuclear conflict and traumatic

96 Robert E. Howard, “The Scarlet Citadel”. In: Conan the Barbarian – The
Definitive Collection. Raleigh: Wanderlust Books, 2023, p. 68f.

82
experiences such as the Vietnam war, only too willingly took
refuge in the fantasy that is Conan the Barbarian. Roaming
somewhere in the wildlands between man and machine, Conan
offered a sword-and-sorcery sanctuary for a gender-species
that felt not only fragile but on the verge of extinction. Thus, as
the generation born during the Second World War approached
mid-life crisis and their own children’s adolescence, Conan’s
story experienced a consequential transformation: first, Conan’s
body transitioned from a literary fantasy into one drawn by the
brush and pen of Frank Frazetta, and subsequently into the actual
human physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger.97 At last, Conan had
fully turned flesh. He had fulfilled his anti-gnostic hero’s journey.
His ferocious bodily stature – now iconically captured on book
covers and on celluloid – had freed itself from its literary ballast
and contextual roots. There the giant barbarian stood and still
stands, finally on equal footing with his naked Greek ancestors
in white marble: all body, all icon, all surface, all open to the male
gaze.

Conan put his back against the wall and lifted his ax. He
stood like an image of the unconquerable primordial–– legs
braced far apart, head thrust forward, one hand clutching
the wall for support, the other gripping the ax on high, with
the great corded muscles standing out in iron ridges, and his
features frozen in a death snarl of fury–– his eyes blazing
terribly through the mist of blood which veiled them. The
men faltered–– wild, criminal and dissolute though they

97 For further reference see: David Hinckley, “Conan the Oxymoron: The
Civilised Savage of Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta”. Iin: Gary Westfahl
et al. (eds.), Unearthly Visions, - Approaches to Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 141-155.

83
 were, yet they came of a breed men called civilized, with a
civilized background; here was the barbarian –– the natural
killer. They shrank back –– the dying tiger could still deal
death.98

Howard E. Robert’s Conan as an atavistic one-man utopia finds

his ultimate antagonist in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.99 Cthulhu
in fact can be considered Conan in reverse. Let me show you.

As mentioned, in Conan we encounter the anti-gnostic self-

saviour. That is, the hero who holds no interest in rescuing
civilisation, society or anyone but himself. With Conan it is one’s
own muscle and flesh, the core of embodiment, where salvation
roots and from where it springs. Such salvation then is anything
but a sublimation or celestial ascent. Instead, it is a wild, raging
celebration of the sensual realm, stomping through the fires of
pain, destruction, lust and love. Conan is hope turned flesh, the
aspiration that our embodied existence has no need for divine
redemption or daemonic protection. All that Conan’s flesh

98 Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword”. In: Conan the Barbarian –
The Definitive Collection, Raleigh: Wanderlust Books, 2023, p. 51.
99 It should be pointed out that the antagonism in question exists between the
literary figures of Conan and Cthulhu, not between the overall oeuvres of Robert
and Lovecraft. The latter essentially shared a similarly bleak pessimism with
his pen friend as the following excerpt from a 1932 letter by Robert to Lovecraft
illustrates: “There is to me a terrible pathos in a man’s vain wanderings on occult
paths, and clutching at non-existent things, as a refuge from the soul-crushing
realities of life. […] [A human being is left] writhing feebly on the jagged rocks
of materiality, dying as any other insect dies, and knowing that he is no divine
spirit in tune with some mystic infinity, but only a faint spark of material light,
to be extinguished forever in the blackness of the ultimate abyss.” Quoted after:
Price, 1989, p. 12.

84
requires to fulfil itself is a lush feast, two strong fists, and a world
with a never-ending supply of adversaries.

Lovecraft’s cosmology is utterly antagonistic to the world of Conan.

As with Howard, in HPL’s novels we return to an ancient, archaic
past. However, in the character of Conan Howard found a point of
perfect equilibrium – between the destructive, animalistic tribes
of the Picts and the degenerate urban civilisations. In constant
war with what came before and what comes after, with the people
of the wilderness and the kingdoms of the cities, Conan becomes
his own fixed star of hope. Lovecraft’s narratives, on the other
hand, step much further back into archaic atavism. In fact, HPL
deliberately takes us so far back in time that we touch the bottom
of non-existence, the abyss of the unknown.

We all fear only one thing more than the loss of what we love, and
that is the loss of what we believe to be fundamentally true. In the
end, being alone is still more bearable than living in a world that
offers no hope at all.100

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-

Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to
stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore,
and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional
reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the
wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect
to be wholly free from mental tension.101

100 For further reference compare: Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark. Will
Murray, The Dunwich Chimera and Others – Correlating the Cthulhu Mythos”.
In: S.T. Joshi (ed.), Lovecraft Studies, Volume III, No.1, s.l.: Necronomicon Press,
1984, p. 21.
101 Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House, 1932, https://hplovecraft.com/

85
Lovecraft described himself as a follower of the materialistic
sciences. As a rationalist with a fondness for the romantically
stylised culture of the 18th century and the world of ancient
myths, he created his own nihilist worldview with his Cthulhu
mythos. Here, the human species is a mere byproduct of chance,
an irrelevant minor matter poured into vessels of flesh and blood
by extraterrestrial entities, who themselves have no interest in
preserving, giving meaning to, or having any kind of contact with
their creation. The indiscriminate nature of chaos, the inability to
make logical sense of life’s foundations, the utter isolation of man
in a world that has no interest in him, was the original source of
HPL’s cult of horror.

To capture this in his narratives, he deployed mythical elements

from Babylonian, Sumerian, ancient Egyptian and Greek
traditions and often inverted them into their very opposite so that
their origin escapes the notice of the non-expert reader.102 In many
of these cultures – notably the Babylonian and Greek mythologies
– we learn of primordial battles between the older and younger
gods, with the older gods symbolising the primordial forces of the
unformed earth and the hostile cacophony of chaos untamed. The
latter must be reined in, mastered and chained, or bound either in
the underworld or in the heights of the firmament. This original
task falls to the culture-creating primeval hero who himself
becomes the prime deity amongst subsequent generations. We
know him as Ea, Marduk, or Zeus103, the primordial god of the
human race who prepared the cosmic ground for our species.

writings/texts/fiction/dwh.aspx. Accessed 2024-08-06.

102 See Robert M. Price, “Demythologizing Cthulhu”. In: S.T. Joshi (ed.), Lovecraft
Studies. Volume III, No.1, s.l.: Necronomicon Press, 1984, pp 3-9.
103 The respective primordial counterparts are Apsu, Tiamat, and Cronos.

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In Lovecraft’s cosmos, these later order-creating generations of
gods have long left the earth again. Their temples now are empty,
decaying and crumbling, or at best parasitically occupied. Man has
long lost his divine-demonic allies. What remains is worse than a
trembling wait for the reawakening of the titanic primordial gods
to whom our species is defencelessly exposed. What remains is
the realisation that under our own skin, in our own bodies, the
voices of these Great Old Ones still resonate. Lovecraft confronts
us with a primordial atavism that offers neither escape nor hope.
Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu dream not only in the tower of the
sunken city of R’lyh, but also in our own chimerian bodies as we
will see further below.

“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably

a survival … a survival of hugely remote period when …
consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms
since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity …
forms which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying
memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of
all sorts and kinds….”104

What we encounter in HPL’s Cthulhu mythos then is a horror of

a world that does not pass from cosmic chaos into cosmic order,
but of a creation that – below a thin veneer of logic and rational
clarity – is equally enlivened and poisoned by essential hostility
to human life.105

Lovecraft skilfully weaves the mythological tapestry of his Yog-

104 Algernon Blackwood, quoted in Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, here after:
Murray, 1984, p. 11.
105 “Lovecraft’s schema is entirely pessimistic with no redemptive element.” Price,
1984, p. 6.

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Sothery: where the idea of the primordial ground (German:
Urgrund) in late medieval mysticism becomes an image of
existential safety and rootedness in creation, Lovecraft locates in
it the centre of his mythical horror. Where in Christian theology
we are soothed by the primordial love of God, or in Jewish
Kabbalism encounter theories of divine catharsis, Lovecraft
confronts us with the exact opposite: a cosmology in which man
is neither meant to take a leading nor even a peripheral role. At
its essence, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos presents a world that has
not been abandoned by the gods but, worse, by their recognition
of and relatedness to the human species.106 The radical chaotic
entanglement within themselves, the inability to form any kind
of sensible relation to these primordial gods, is emphasised by
Lovecraft in their formation through parthenogenesis i.e. self-
fertilisation as found amongst nematodes, certain types of snails
and various species of sharks and lizards.107 The Great Old Ones
are the end of Copernican logic, of the Anthropocene and of the
ecosystem as we know it.

It is critical to point out that the existential dread materialised

in human encounter with the Great Old Ones is not the result of
a depressed creative mind but of a keen historic and scientific

106 “Lovecraft’s [myth] is one of inevitable, and pointless, catastrophe. […]

Lovecraft’s fiction (i.e. pessimistic materialism) would seem to be much more
terrible than that envisioned by occultists like Grant and Turner!” Price, 1984,
p. 7.
107 “It is very significant that in his 1933 genealogy, Lovecraft set Azathoth
as the progenitor of the Great Old Ones. He gave birth, without benefit of a
mate, to Nyarlathotep, the Nameless Mist, and Darkness. The Nameless Mist
spontaneously begat Yog-Sothoth and Darkness begat Shub-Niggurath, who in
turn begat the other gods.” Murray, 1984, p. 19.

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observer. Anyone who genuinely considers the immense
dimensions of the cosmos all around us, the consistently hostile
conditions beyond our thin, fragile atmosphere, the airless black
expanse of interstellar space in whose shadow human history from
its dawn to its distant future appears like a brief flicker – would
they not begin to doubt the Christian doctrine that man is the
crown of creation? Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is an apocalyptic
hymn. It was written by a scientific mind driven towards the
edge of madness by the results of his inquiry. This hymn then,
celebrating the omnipresent cosmic hostility to life, conjures up a
primordial threat, an atavistic angst with which Lovecraft himself
wrestled his entire life and which came to form the foundation of
his Cthulhu mythos.

From an animistic perspective, it would be shortsighted to consider

Azathoth – who the Necronomicon describes as “monstrous,
nuclear chaos beyond angled space” – as nothing but a “cipher
for the much more frightening revelations of science”.108 Reading
Lovecraft’s work from a goêtic worldview opens up a third way
of understanding that does not get stuck in the antagonistic
juxtaposition of nightmarish fantasy and apocalyptic vision of
the future. Such exploration also brings us back to our central
theme, the nature of the human body. From a goêtic perspective,
our bodies are on the one hand amalgamated media, covered
with skin, fused into a whole, composed of the most diverse
material and ethereal substances, in constant exchange with their
environment. Simultaneously, our bodies are also rhythms and
melodies, points of origin and transit for complex vibrations that
we usher out into the environment in wait for response.

108 Price, 1984, p. 8.

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Such animistic bodies indeed can talk to most other objects of
and forces in creation. Because their language is by no means
constrained to utterances but encompasses all manners of
exchange of meaning via any kind of medium. Yet, unsurprisingly,
our human bodies are anything but unique in this design. Most
forms in creation entail the same capabilities: being composite
beings, both sending and receiving melodies and rhythms in
accordance with their own selves.109

Let us now imagine Lovecraft tormented by atavistic nightmares,

plagued by the groundbreaking scientific discoveries of his time
that were literally pulling the Copernican rug out from under
humanity. Lovecraft’s melody that he whispered into the night
sky was precisely the apocalyptic hymn mentioned above – and
this was indeed long before he had created the Cthulhu mythos
in its cancerously proliferating corpus. This hymn of his then did
not simply vanish into the cosmos but instead found a suitable
resonating body. For just as energy is never lost in nature, no call
goes unanswered in the goêtic realm; only we’d often be surprised
if we actually knew who exactly is answering us.

The beings who responded to Lovecraft’s hymn need not have

been flesh and blood creatures armed with tentacles and covered
in scaly skins. The cosmos is a wide ocean full of lost souls and

109 This might sound disconcerting and alien to people unfamiliar with an
animistic or goêtic worldview. It should be pointed out though that if, according
to these paradigms, a mountain, a valley or an ancient river hold their own kind
of consciousness we can actually talk with – how much more consciousness
would an interstellar nebula, a black hole or even a single planet incorporate?
Their physical proximity or distance to our own bodies should not be considered
a factor as critical as our (unconscious) ability to call out to them through the
rhythms and melodies which our skins will intone.

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parasites. Beyond such necromantic krill, however, we can also
encounter large, atavistic creatures that are fairly hostile to the
human species. Their bodies are often not bound by skin but can
appear misty like a cloud, geometrical like the patterns we see in
snowflakes, or akin to the rhythms and thunderings that penetrate
our consciousness effortlessly. Beings below the Copernican
plane appear differently. As diverse as the encounter with them
may be, at its core, at its very heart it is always terrifying and
frightening. For the Radical Otherness of these beings – their
richness in power and evasiveness of embodiment – coupled
with our inability to bind them neither with poetic metaphors nor
descriptions – induces a deep seated angst about our own erratic
position in the cosmos.

As such, a goêtic reading of Lovecraft’s oeuvre neither needs

to belittle his vision as nightmarish fantasy, nor hype it as a
new theology. Rather, we can read it as a normal function of the
omnipresent conscious cosmos we all form a microscopic part
of: one calls and the call is answered. Whether or not our humble
human minds are able to decipher the signal or even the nature
of its sender is of no relevance. For the cosmos is not a class in
school and neither is it a scientific laboratory. Whether our human
species can keep pace intellectually, cognitively and logically with
what is going on around and within it is of no significance to the
tides and currents we are deeply intertwined in. Or as Lovecraft
observed himself in the opening lines of The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability

of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on
a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of
infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have

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 hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together
of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly
light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.110

As such, Lovecraft’s main intent was not the occultist’s charter to

decipher the actual origins of the nightmarish melodies he picked
up in response to his own black hymn. Rather, he took his own
frightened existential condition as the creative fuel “to hit the
reader directly between the eyes with his bleak vision of cosmic
isolation.”111

However, whereas the human mind is sanctified with the mercy

of its inability to correlate the horror, the human body is not. It is
only a few of Lovecraft’s stories in which the narrator experiences
the Radical Otherness of the atavism directly breaking forth
from the human body. More often the horror takes shape in
ancient artefacts, books, landscapes, or most notoriously in
extraterrestrial ancient beings. Here the daemonic atavism, as
terrifying and madness-inducing as it might be, at least appears
beyond the ultimate threshold of human self-assertion, our skins.

Most famously this threshold is crossed and torn down in the

death of Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror. In an inversion
of the Greek civilising hero myth, here we encounter Wilbur and
his brother as the twin sons of Yog-Sothoth, sent to earth not to
deliver mankind from primordial chaos but to plunge the entire

110 Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu . Quoted after: Robert M. Price, “Robert E.
Howard and the Cthulhu Mythos”, in: S.T. Joshi (ed.), Lovecraft Studies 18. Volume
8, Number 1, s.l.: Necronomicon Press, 1989, p. 11.
111 Price, 1984, p. 8.

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human species back into it. The apocalyptical acceleration plan,
however, fails in the jaw of a guard dog who had never liked Wilbur
and kills him during his attempt at stealing the Necronomicon.
Only then is Wilbur’s chimeral bodily form revealed:

It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike

hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the
stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower
parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only
generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on
earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its

chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully,
had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator.
The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly
suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below
the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human
resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin
was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the
abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red
sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was
odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic
geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each
of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was
what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a
tail there developed a kind of trunk or feeler with purple
annular markings, and with many evidences of being an
undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black
fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s
giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that
were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed,

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 its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if
from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human
side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as
a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was
manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a
sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings.
Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-
yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor.112

Wilbur’s body is deliberately staged by Lovecraft as the epiphany of

the embodied atavism: long forgotten primordial states suddenly
break through and return in the here now. What was overcome
and tamed millennia ago, what was sublimated and sophisticated
over many thousands of generations, suddenly falls back into its
raw original state, partly bestial, partly fungal, all savage. Worse
still, what the reader encounters in Wilbur’s carcass is not a
singular relapse into primordial times, but an entire entangled
mass of unbridled atavisms. His semi-anthropomorphic dead
hull still shows some human resemblance in the upper half; the
lower half, however, has given way to an ecumene of raw Radical
Otherness. The polymorphism of his torso transcends the terror
of each reptilian or molluscan limp into an even greater horror:
that of being fleshly flushed through with Radical Otherness of
unknown proportions, of chaotic consequences and in a wild
cancerous variety.

Here then we encounter Cthulhu as Conan in reverse. For the

former is an offspring of Yog-Sothoth just like Wilbur Whateley
and his twin brothers are. What we encounter in Wilbur’s body
therefore is Cthulhu embalmed in at least partly human flesh. Just

112 Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror . Quoted after: Murray, 1984, p. 13f.

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like Conan is a one-man utopia of the kind of male body that would
bring salvation to the flesh, so the hive being of Wilbur-Cthulhu
portrays the opposite: a dystopian human body that has become
one in the flesh with the cosmic horrors that threaten to annihilate
our species and the world as we know it. Where Conan represents
the juvenile dream of the grown man’s body, Cthulhu epitomises
the nightmare of Radical Otherness turned flesh below our own
waistline.113 It is with Cthulhu – especially in its hybrid hive form
of sharing a body with Wilbur Whateley – that the Greek dream
of the male body as the embodiment of civilisation ends. Inverted
in opposition, the male body becomes terror turned flesh. Worse
than the heroic death of Evola’s predilection, man has descended
the evolutionary ladder to sleep and slither amongst gorgons,
hydras and chimaeras.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras –– dire stories of

Celaeno and the Harpies –– may reproduce themselves
in the brain of superstition –– but they were there before.
They are transcripts, types –– the archetypes are in us, and
eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in
a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that
we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in
their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?
O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date
beyond body ––– or with the body, they would have been the
same.114

113 For reference compare Lovecraft’s own explanation that “Yog-Sothothery

[…] is […] fixed dream patterns of the natural organism [that] are given an
embodiment & crystallisation.” Murray, 1984, p. 24.
114 Charles Lamb, Witches And Other Night Fears, London: J.M. Dents & Sons,
1929, quoted by Lovecraft at the beginning of The Dunwich Horror, quoted here

95
As a final note, it should be emphasised that the Cthulhu mythos
is decidedly anti-magical. Magic, as a classic occult technique
of nature control and crisis intervention, is not only absent
from Lovecraft’s work but profoundly alien to his apocalyptic
cosmology. The human race is simply not important enough to
warrant the favour of the gods. In this context, the legendary
Necronomicon must not be misunderstood as a grimoire but rather
as a unique apocalyptic accelerator. Its pages hold the ritualistic
key to summoning the Last Judgement which will no longer be
presided over by the Mosaic God but by the Great Old Ones.

With Lovecraft, the blood of the old gods that eventually will touch
the human flesh no longer is an all-healing panacea or heroic
birth serum of Greek proportions. Rather, it has turned into a
black goo,115 infectious and corrosive by nature, breaking apart
the unity we hoped to be, and birthing underneath our own skins
legions of bestial and fungal forms, all intoning their own breed
of life-ending hymns. For the ancient Babylonians Tiamat never
was a myth. She was a living reality, dormant and bound in the
underworld. Her name was remembered as an existential threat
of the fragility of human existence, of our utter dependence on
both divine and mutual human assistance. The fleshly subjection
and helplessness our ancestors felt when faced with primordial
forces is an experience that unfortunately escapes most modern
readers. No wonder the historic interpretation of Lovecraft’s
oeuvre is abundant with devious abstractions and misses this most

after: Murray, 1984, p.13.

115 This allusion to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and the black goo discovered
in the extraterrestrial arsenal of the engineers is quite deliberate. The parallels
between Lovecraft’s dystopia and the Alien universe makes for fascinating pop-
cultural explorations.

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essential point. Apsu was the end, until Ea gave us a beginning.
Chronos devoured all forms of emergent life, until Zeus opened a
path. Below these culture-creating divinities, the ancient old gods
still slumber. And they should not be envisioned in the fictional-
literary bodies that Lovecraft shaped for them in the Cthulhu
mythos. Instead, they should be searched for with prudence, and
with respect and from a good distance seen in vision.

These antagonistic primordial forces that every now and then tip
their fingers from below against our Euclidian floor boards, must
be offered a place whenever we aim to conceive the world we
live in – and the bodies we inhabit. They will shatter not only our
human fantasy of supremacy but that of essential bodily integrity.
Yet, an old adage goes: the enemy at the table is less dangerous than
the one in the shadows. Consciously creating proximity to what we
fear most – not fuelled by recklessness but by respect – might in
the end even transform the meaning Lovecraft associated with
Yog-Sothoth. In the Necronomicon he calls her “the gate”, “the key
and the guardian of fate”.116 If we were to make peace with the
presence of our enemy at our table – that is, with the cancerous
polymorphism under our skin, with the primordial gods sleeping
and singing in our blood – what new vision of a more humble, a
more balanced Anthropocene might unfold from within us?

Apocalypse is easy – just like creating all kind of drama is. The
letting go of it all is a particularly narcissistic genus of tension
release. Staying with the frail, broken, and disfigured, remaining
peaceful at the side of our own inner Wilbur Whateley is a much
harder challenge. Maybe one of heroic proportions even?

116 Murray, 1984, p. 15.

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 Becoming All Flesh
PART II • READYING THE FLESH

VII. BECOMING ALL FLESH

That is not dead which can eternal lie

And with strange aeons, even death may die.117

So the body rejoices when the spirit enters into it, and the body
preserves the spirit. Every body, when finding a spirit, takes it
quickly.118

T
he most important media theorist of the 20th century,
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) once said, “the content or
message of any particular medium has about as much
importance as the stencilling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”119

117 Abdul Alhazred in Lovecraft’s The Nameless City. Quoted after: Price, 1989,
p. 13.
118 Zosimos of Panopolis, The Book of Pictures: Mushaf as-suwar, Zurich: Living
Human Heritage, 2011, p. 235.
119 McLuhan made this statement in an interview with Playboy Magazine in
March 1969. It was meant to underline the immanent brisance of any given
medium compared to the ephemeral insignificance of its momentary messages.
The book, the radio, the television, the internet – each of these reshaped societies
around the globe, wild and woolly. What was printed on any particular page, aired
on a particular day, captured on celluloid in a particular studio or uploaded on

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Now, I would like to suggest we apply this expression to magic,
and to the goêtic flesh in particular. It would then read somewhat
like this: “The human intention within any particular magical act
has about as much importance as the stencilling on the casing of
an atomic bomb.”

Let’s break this down. Over millennia the intention of magic

has been the (re)empowerment of humans when faced with
seemingly insurmountable adversity. Deities, daemons, and
divine messengers often appeared in interchangeable positions
as mediums of supra-human agency. Certainly since the times
of the Greek Magical Papyri,120 around the 3rd to 4th century
CE, the technological aspects of magic became dominant. Non-
human beings increasingly adopted the role of mechanical lock
and key systems – broken down into their components of secret
names and sigils, hours and epitaphs, as well as their associated
materia magica. The human meddling with the medium became
the magic. Like any other late medieval craft, magic attempted
to exert human mastership in its materialistic domain. For that
purpose, it simply switched the medium of its matter from stone

a particular server is not only secondary but actually vanishes altogether when
viewed through a lens of socio-historic change. It is not its actors and agents
but the clout and punch of the medium itself that encompasses the preeminent
socio-cultural potency. The myriad voices who all regard themselves as using
the utility of a medium are in actuality serving its influence to rip asunder a
society they themselves are a part of. The medium is the message, [It’s generally
quoted as “The medium is the message” and that’s how I recall it as well –if
memory serves…] is how McLuhan summarised his radical proposition. For
further reference see: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
120 Preisendanz, K., Henrichs, A., Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die Griechischen
Zauberpapyri.2 Bände, Stuttgart: Teubner, 1974.

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to spirit, from fields to fate, from mead to might…

Now, what we lost during this historic evolution is no less than

anyone loses when they exchange personal relationships for
profit and production. We have dealt with the dire consequences
– and our attempt to reverse these – in prior publications.121 Here
we are uniquely focussed on illuminating the impact this has had
on our human body when engaged in magic.

First, let’s sharpen our understanding of what the medium of

magic is. From my more than twenty years of experience in the
field, this is relatively easy to define: the medium of magic is spirit
contact.122 That is, the medium is not any particular materia magica
or physical objects per se, it is also not any immaterial expression
such as hymns, prayers, conjurations etc. All of these already
engage us in the content of our craft. The medium, instead, is the
temporary or permanent contacting and intermingling of human
with non-human flesh.

To further highlight the practical relevance of this approach to

magic, we must establish agreement on what human flesh actually

121 Frater Acher, INGENIUM - Alchemy of the Magical Mind, Exeter: Tadehent
Books, 2022.
122 I should stress that alternative responses are possible of course. The best
general reference here is still Frater U∴D∴’s “Models of Magic”, which outline the
essential ways of understanding one’s own magic. Here we find, for example, the
mechanistic view of (subtle) energies (manas, heka, prana, chi, od, astral light,
etc. etc.), which leads to a definition of magic as “the choreography of energy”.
Many alternative frameworks (e.g. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Psychomagic”) are
perfectly fine without any spirits or other non-human, even non-terrestrial,
entities. So “spirit contact” is far from being the only possible answer to the
question of the medium of magic, but it is the chosen perspective of my own
goêtic practice.

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is. For our purpose here, we do not merely equate it with the bio-
medical definition of flesh. Instead, we favour a considerably
more holistic approach. To begin with, let’s expand the term to its
poetic reality in which it entails any human corporeal substance
and matter. Now we acknowledge hair, saliva, skin cells, our guts
and lungs i.e. all aspects of our flesh as constituting our human
corporeality. However, new problems arise as we contemplate
where this body truly begins and ends.

To this end, imagine us having taken a walk through a forest

together. Over the course of our journey we stopped here and
there, we smelled some flowers, washed our faces in a river, walked
barefooted over moss, and briefly dozed in a cave. Following this
expedition, someone unleashed a pair of track hounds at the
starting spot of our excursion. Within no time at all, these canines
would have traced the fleshly imprints of our bodies throughout
the expanse of the forest’s body. So, in terms of our definition, not
only do we endorse a poetic approach to human flesh, but we
extend it to include any imprint our bodies have left in the world.
The signet and the seal, the hoof and the track, the nest and the
egg, the ripple and its rings, all of them count into the same body.
For what is it that the track hounds would have scented on the
flowers, the moss and in the cave other than scattered cells of our
own flesh? Even the river has become contacted with us and we
with her, for some cells of our face are now afloat, swarm-like, in
its waters…

A simple series of exercises to consider our goêtic body will be to

examine ourselves through the lens of the four elements.
* As earth we have to consider the cracks and crevices within
us and whatever slithers through these. Can we sense the
million different beings to whom we are a home?

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* As water we should take time to dream of all the bodies and
beings we touch and wash from our shores into rivers and
lakes and oceans. Can we feel the innumerable echoes that fill
our effervescent body?

* As fire we have to consider by whom we are fed and without

whom we are nothing. We might also reexamine here the
nature of death as nobody knows whether the same candle lit
twice still holds the same flame.

* As air, finally, we want to soar and explore all the cavities and
hollows we fill in other beings’ bodies. From lungs to caves,
from dreaming air in Antarctic glaciers to the oxygen in the
body of a deep-sea kraken, or the wind streaming through the
eagle’s plumage.
Indeed I’d recommend you take some time, find a quiet place,
lie down and envision your body in these four states of constant
interdependence and permeability. Because the reality of our
embodied experience is that we are all of these four states at once,
and more. Such meditations can help break down the culturally
conditioned illusion that our body ends with the circumference of
its skin. Nothing could be less authentic when we scrutinise our
body’s actual place in the world. A daemon’s body is not confined
by the triangle of the art but only breaking through a momentary
surface within it. Similarly, our own bodies are constantly
entangled in the space beyond.

Terms like male or female, hard or soft, savage or civilised are

no more or no less relevant in such context as is the blurring of
a human body with an octopus, or children born with dragon
scales. For everything is chimera in the goêtic world.

Now that we can see how fluid and porous, how fleeting and

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permeable our goêtic bodies are, all that is left is to open our eyes
to the reality that all the spirits’ bodies are created from the exact
same raw materials. Imagine two flames, born from different
sparks, in momentary embrace. Imagine rain falling into a river,
and then both flowing into the ocean. Imagine two gusts of wind
getting caught in a cave. See before you the swarming life within
a handful of topsoil, dropped on the earth in a foreign land. The
medium of magic is spirit contact, and as such it is omnipresent
i.e. everywhere.

Next, let’s follow the hand of a magician who intends to perform

a particular rite. Can you see how many new micro-cultures she
creates long before the operation proper begins: ink from bone-
ashes is applied on papyrus by human hand, fresh linen is spread
on an old wooden floor, sprinkled with holy water nicked from a
church, windows are shut and a room lies in darkness, an altar is
established with candles and coals, with a sigil papyrus and sacred
names. All of these preparations not only involve countless spirit
bodies in their own right, but they attract the attention of a myriad
more: now the dead are gazing up from underneath the house, the
Mother begins to listen far below the groundwater table, further
down even a dragon is stirring. Up along the house’s walls the
land spirits convene in fretful anticipation of their offerings, high
above a wind gust wafts in circles.

What the human sees in all of this is personal wish fulfilment of a

grandiose kind. He or she sees success or love or health or wealth,
the defeat of enemies, or a combination thereof. The eyes of the
Others, however, are not fixated on the ostensible human message
but on the establishment of a new channel in the ubiquitous
medium. They don’t gaze at the centre of the circle but towards
the dance at its periphery. What is happening there has little to do

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with sigils drawn and conjurations uttered. For there, momentarily
at least, death can dance with living, land spirits are fed, wind
inhales new lore, mother takes its toll and dragons deepen their
dream. And all of this happens while countless bodies mingle,
cross over and cross pollinate. The world after such a rite, literally,
is no longer the same as before. Countless seeds have changed
their flesh and new connections have been woven. Whether the
job is acquired, the lover won or the cancer overcome, is void
and redundant in comparison to the new corpora created in this
rite. The impact of the unintended collateral fertilisation by far
outshines in relevance and impact the puny human’s agenda. All
they did was to turn a key, to open a door, to invite everyone in.
For the one single, exclusive thing he or she holds, the one that all
the other non-human beings don’t, is the ability to act in the flesh.
A bag of bones and blood filled with free will. The human marvel.

105
 Tsar Smiulan
VIII. THE VISION
OF TSAR SMIULAN123

T
sar Smiulan is a powerful, wingless, dragon-like daemonic creature
in Slavic mythology. Some believe him to be the patron saint of dark
clouds, and he is known to dwell in the hollow of an ancient, giant tree.
Smiulan is an essentially chthonic force which in some legends slowly grows out
of the telluric depth into the body of the tree. Other records tell of his marital
union with human women, bringing wealth and fortune (hidden in the earth) to
the respective household. Folk tales refer to Smiulan as a “Tsar”, which indicates
his high position in the chthonic spirit hierarchy, where he is also known as the
“serpent tyrant”.

I deliberately do not include here a detailed historical interpretation of this

daemonic figure, but invite each reader to make their own experiences in
approaching Tsar Smiulan – and to draw their personal conclusions about the
nature of their own goêtic flesh.

The following visions, thus, should be pursued in the spirit of the above reflections
on the goêtic flesh: as a starting point for magically experiencing firsthand the
permeability, interconnectedness and ultimately Radical Otherness of our own
flesh and carnal existence. Where is the boundary between me, the alabaster
stone and the dragon? What separates my own from the other when neither
my thoughts nor my skin do? In this sense, this second part is not meant to

123 The following content is adopted from: Anon., „Beschwörungen bei den
sibirischen Russen“. In: A. Erman (ed.), Archiv für wissenschaftliche Kunde von
Russland. Volume VIII. Berlin: Verlag von G. Reimer, 1850, pp. 622-628.

106
be a curriculum, but an invitation to venture into the darkness. More detailed
practical instructions will follow in the future.124

(1) The Original Conjuration

“I, N.N., say the blessing,125 draw the cross upon myself, bow
to all four corners of the sky, and go into the dense and dark
forest. I come to the middle of the dense forest and find there
a very old man, like a grey hawk. I bow down before him
and say: Hail to you, o old man like a grey hawk! Tell me
the whole pure truth, where does Tsar Smiulan live? – You
go to Tsar Smiulan with your right hand. – And I will go
to Tsar Smiulan on the right hand: where there is no oak
tree, there sits Smiulan; where no wind howls, there speaks
Smiulan. Welcome, o Tsar! Command your faithful servants
to lead me out of this dark forest and set me on the right
path. Let my words stand firm for all eternity. The lock is in
my mouth, but the key is in the water.”126

124 Frater Acher, Collectanea Goêtica. London: Scarlet Imprint, 2025.

125 The blessing mentioned here is probably the one that precedes many other
invocations in the same collection and reads as follows: “I servant of God arise
and go from court to court, from gate to gate, to the eastern region, under the
bright moon, under the moon of the Lord, to that blue sea, to the blue ocean.
On that blue sea lies a white alabaster stone and on the stone rest the heavenly
powers. I approach and bow low: you heavenly powers, send me your strength
and help.” Anon., „Beschwörungen bei den sibirischen Russen“. In: A. Erman (ed.),
Archiv für wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland, Volume VIII, Berlin: Verlag von
G. Reimer, 1850, p. 622, translation by author.
126 Anon., 1850, p. 627f., translation by author.

107
 (2) The Vision of Tsar Smiulan
Find a calm space, lie down, calm your breath, close your eyes.

After a while rise from your bedstead. Before you now hangs a
black sphere in the room. It shimmers as if made of fluid black
obsidian. You step inside this sphere. The world around you falls
away into nothingness. All that remains is the blackness of the
sphere that embalms and holds you.

When you are ready, you step through this sphere and out again
on the other side.

You find yourself in a large royal hall. Sunlight shines through

the high windows, illuminating them in festive golden hue. You
are all alone.

You walk through the large room. The air is pleasantly cool and a
little stale, as if no one had been here for a long time. On the other
side, you arrive at a tall double door. You open it and see another
hall beyond.

Here the sunlight casts a deep shade of green over the walls. You
walk calmly forward and cross through this hall too. You look
around, and still find yourself alone. The wide planks of the floor
are dusty, or is it sand? Your footsteps leave traces on them.

As you reach the opposite side of the green hall, you see another
tall double door, it is unlocked and you open it.

Behind it lies a third hall, its windows tinted blue. You walk through
it with the feeling of being underwater. Spores or dust flakes drift
through this space, giving the impression of weightlessness.

As you reach the other end of the blue room, you find the tall

108
double door locked. You stand in front of the closed door. Then
you remember that you are wearing an iron key on a lanyard
around your neck. You take it in your hand, insert the key into the
lock, it fits, and the door opens.

Behind it extends a long corridor. This place is no longer adorned

with sumptuous furnishings but resembles a cellar corridor. You
step out into it, the door slams shut behind you.

The corridor is lit by torches. The rough walls are covered with
lichen and cobwebs that shimmer in the torchlight. Here and
there, water drips from the tunnel ceiling in shallow puddles. You
keep on walking.

After a while you reach an iron grille. You try the key you are still
holding and it fits here too. However, as you turn it in the lock, it
breaks off. The gate still opens, you pass through it and continue
along the torch-lit corridor.

The torches are now spaced further apart on the walls and it is
getting darker in the tunnel.

After a while, you come to a second gate. Intuitively, you spit into
your hands and rub your wet palms over the lock. It springs open
and you continue on your way through the corridor.

It is now so gloomy that you step in some of the puddles and the
cobwebs blow in your face. Also, the air has turned cold. Your skin
feels tight, as if someone had rubbed you with salt.

You arrive at a third iron gate. There is an awl sticking out of the
bars next to the lock.

You prick your hands on it, one after the other, rub the blood into
your palms and then place your bloody hands over the lock. The

109
gate opens and you pass through.

On the other side you no longer find yourself in the dark corridor.
Instead, you are suddenly standing in a silver, nocturnal landscape.

You look up at the moon, full and white, appearing between the
clouds and disappearing again. You nod to her and thank her for
bringing you here.

Then, ahead of you, you see the shore of a huge lake, or perhaps it
is a sea. In the silver light gentle waves break on the embankment.
In the middle of the shallow waves lies a huge white boulder. It
shines bright like alabaster in the moonlight. Somehow it seems
to be alive like a sea creature caught in deep sleep.

You walk towards it, down the shallow beach, until your feet are
ankle-deep in the fresh and black saltwater. You drop to your
knees, bow and speak to the alabaster stone:

“You powers of the seas, sovereigns of life, and queens of death,

hallow my body with the might of your own. Lo, I have unbarred the
three gates for you and kneel in humble prayer upon your shores.
May my body be your body. May my flesh shine as brightly as yours
and be ever immersed in the waters of life. I offer the light of the
human spark to you.”

You rise and make the sign of the cross over your chest. Then you
bow in all four directions. You look once more at the alabaster
stone, then close your eyes and take a deep breath.

You stand in blindness and hear the sound of the waves receding.
The saltwater scent is falling away. Your feet no longer feel cold
waters. Instead, you hear a twig crackling somewhere and a night
bird calling…

110
As you open your eyes, you are standing in the middle of a dense
dark forest.

You can still see the full moon shining through the treetops, but the
shore and alabaster boulder have disappeared. The deep shadows
of trees surround you. The air smells of moss and moist earth.

There is no path anywhere around you. All there is, is dense trees
and ground as soft as cushions.

Slowly you begin to walk straight ahead. You choose your steps
carefully so as not to trip over any roots in the twilight.

You duck under a thick, fallen tree trunk.

On the other side, a man suddenly appears before you. He is very

old and hunched over. He stands completely still, gazing intently
at you, like a grey hawk that has just settled in the forest.

You get down on your knees, bow to him and say: “Greetings, old
man, who stands like a grey hawk! Tell me the whole truth: where
does Tsar Smiulan live?”

The old man’s voice sounds rough as if he hadn’t used it for a long
time: “With your right hand,” he says, “you go to Tsar Smiulan.
Where no linden tree stands, there stands Smiulan; where no wind
howls, there speaks Smiulan.”

You want to thank him, but the old man has already disappeared.
His words echo in your mind and with dreamlike clarity you
realise what has to be done. You turn to the left where a thick
bramble bush stands in the moonlight. On one of its thorns you
prick your right palm until it is bloody.

Next, you turn to your right and spot a long sturdy branch. You

111
pick it up and hold it upright as if it were the central pole of a tent.
You smear its surface with your blood before driving it forcefully
into the ground. Gripping it tightly with your right hand, you
quickly spin around it three times.

When you stop, you find yourself no longer in the forest. You are
now on a grassy hill, surrounded by the darkness of night.

Right ahead of you a huge linden tree towers in the night sky. Its
crown is majestic and you can see the stars shining around it. A
cool breeze blows up the hill, hitting your back and stirring the
small branches of the old tree.

You walk towards the tree. You come closer to it, enter under the
canopy of its crown, still moving towards its mighty trunk. There
you spot a crack in its bark, just large enough for you to squeeze
yourself through. You press your body through the gap in the
wood and disappear inside the majestic linden tree.

Everything is silent and black in here.

You ease down and sit on the soft wood on the ground. Above
you, around you, is nothing but warm wooden darkness. You no
longer hear the wind. Everything has become silent, the world
has vanished.

You allow yourself to come to rest. You feel how your breath
adapts to the rhythm of the tree. Roots seem to sprout from your
body into the soil of living wood, and small branches emerge from
your skin and grow into the old wood of the lime tree. Then you
too are completely still, completely one with the here and now of
the old tree.

Finally you ask the tree, which now is no longer a tree but a

112
dragon: “What be the nature of mine flesh, Tsar Smiulan, and who
am I to bear it?”

You hover, nestled within the tree trunk, listening to the dragon’s
response. – This is where you can take your time.

The dragon’s voice will resonate through your flesh, through

wood and blood. Just as a tree draws water from the earth, so
too do you allow the dragon’s words to rise within you. As a tree
strengthens its wood, so the dragon’s words grow strong within
you. As a tree ripens its fruit, so the dragon’s words ripen within
you. The dragon’s words blossom within you, as a tree brings forth
its fruit in bloom.

(Do not strain yourself to hear or comprehend the dragon’s reply.

This is an act of impregnation. Just sense when the dragon has
touched you in response to your question. Once you feel that a
response was given, you may proceed.)

Begin to orientate yourself again and recall where you are. You
are sitting in the hollow trunk of the ancient linden tree. Your
body is one with the body of the dragon. You and the dragon have
seen each other. You and the dragon have touched each other. You
and the dragon have held communion.

Take a deep breath or several. Feel how your body is both still
inside the old linden tree as well as here in this room. At once, you
are in the old tree and in this room in your physical body. Take
your time until you can feel your body in both places at the same
time.

Then offer your thanks to Tsar Smiulan. Now you can open your
eyes and record your vision.

113
 (3) A Dream-Vision of Tsar Smiulan127
The door closes behind me. I stand in cold damp air. A gust of wind
pushes me forward. I am in old walls, in the deep underground,
no sound reaches me. Is it a wine cellar, the entrance to a tunnel
or just an old food storage chamber? I smell the old air and see
nothing but darkness around me. I carefully feel my way forward
with my foot and sense a footstep; my left hand finds a wall, thick,
old stones; my right hand finds the rounded back of a wide stone
handrail.

Carefully I feel my way forward, step by step, down the damp

stone. The air is getting cooler, and I still can’t see a thing. The
stairs are high enough so that I don’t hit my head, but I can’t see if
it ends in an arch or if there are wooden planks.

Finally, with a slight start, I reach the end of the stairs. They don’t
go down any further. In front of me there seems to be a floor of
large stone tiles, scattered with pieces of straw that make my
steps slippery. I feel my way into the darkness which is open and
wide, like the belly of a whale, I think. After a few steps I sit down
on the floor. In the total darkness I don’t even know where my
retina ends and the retina behind it begins. I sit like this for a long
time until I notice a slight glow. There, where I came down the
stairs, I think. There, without a glimmer of light falling into the
cellar or a crack allowing daylight to seep in, I see the banister

127 This is a vision I dreamed the night before finishing this essay on 24th
of August 2024. It was only after concluding the rest of this manuscript that I
realised this dream wanted to be part of this book. I’m writing it here in the first
person, from the perspective I experienced it in my dream tonight. I’m adding
nothing and leaving nothing out. I hand this vision over to you so that you can
make it your own – or be inspired by it to find your own dream of Tsar Smiulan.

114
slowly emerging from the darkness. It begins to glow faintly, as if
a star were shining on it. Again I see the broad back of the railing,
unusually thick, as wide as the trunk of a five-year-old ash tree.
Made entirely of stone, it seems, because I can’t see any cracks or
fissures in the curved arch of the handrail. And at the bottom, at
the very end, the handrail forms a curved dragon’s head. The style
is gothic, simple and solid. The dragon’s head curls around its own
neck.

I am sitting in the dark looking at this stair-like dragon or dragon-

like stair. The light, I realise now, seems to soften the stone. Like
skin that warms to the touch. I slide across the cold floor, through
the straw remnants, towards the dragon. Intuitively, I place my
hands on its back and pull its head onto my chest. Or am I just
pulling myself towards it? Movement is blurred in this dark room.

We sit like this, entwined, the stair-dragon and I. My heart beats

against his heart and his stone begins to warm further. No words
are needed, no prayer, not even a chant. Time is slipping away.
Have I just dozed off? The dragon and I still sit intertwined at the
bottom of the stairs.

Then suddenly I hear a rustling behind me. I turn around and

see a big silver dog stepping towards me out of the darkness. I
turn to face him, feeling no fear, and the dog comes up to me and
licks my cheek warmly and gently. I turn back to the stairway
dragon, but the light has disappeared, everything is in darkness
again. Instinctively I know that this dog, shining in the same silver
light as the stone handrail a moment ago, is the dragon, only in a
different form. This dog has come alive from the caress between
the dragon and me. This dog will follow me now, will be with me,
a faithful companion for the rest of my life. This dog is part of the

115
dragon, a living cell of its body, expulsed, thrown into my life.

The dog, big and strong, curls up on the floor and presses into my
lap. I put my hands on his neck and chest and feel his breath. This
is home. I have arrived.

116
 Appendix
APPENDIX • HERODOTUS ON THE
SCYTHIANS128

Vol1, 105. […] The Scythians who plundered the temple [of
Celestial Venus] were punished by the goddess with the
female sickness, which still attaches to their posterity. They
themselves confess that they are afflicted with the disease
for this reason, and travellers who visit Scythia can see what
sort of a disease it is. Those who suffer from it are called
enarees.

Vol IV, 46. […] they make it impossible for the enemy who
invades them to escape destruction, while they themselves
are entirely out of his reach, unless it please them to engage
with him.

Vol IV, 64. In what concerns war, their customs arc the
following. The Scythian soldier drinks the blood of the first
man he overthrows in battle. Whatever number he slays, he
cuts off all their heads, and carries them to the king; since
he is thus entitled to a share of the booty, whereto he forfeits
all claim if he does not produce a head. In order to strip the
skull of its coverings he makes a cut round the head above

128 Quoted after: Herodotus, The History Of Herodotus. In four volumes (here
Vol.I and Vol. IV), translated by George Rawlinson, London: John Murray, 1875.

117
 the ears, and, laying hold of the scalp, shakes the skull out;
then with the rib of an ox he scrapes the scalp clean of
flesh, and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it
thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps,
and hangs them from his bridle-rein; the greater the number
of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he
esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks, like
the capotes of our peasants, by sewing a quantity of these
scalps together. Others flay the right arms of their dead
enemies, and make of the skin, which is stripped off with
the nails hanging to it, a covering for their quivers. Now the
skin of a man is thick and glossy, and would in whiteness
surpass almost all other hides. Some even flay the entire
body of their enemy, and stretching it upon a frame carry it
about with them wherever they ride. Such are the Scythian
customs with respect to scalps and skins.

Vol IV, 65. The skulls of their enemies, not indeed of all, but of
those whom they most detest, they treat as follows. Having
sawn off the portion below the eyebrows, and cleaned out
the inside, they cover the outside with leather. When a man
is poor, this is all that he does; but if he is rich, he also lines
the inside with gold: in either case the skull is used as a
drinking-cup. They do the same with the skulls of their own
kith and kin if they have been at feud with them, and have
vanquished them in the presence of the king. When strangers
whom they deem of any account come to visit them, these
skulls are handed round, and the host tells how that these
were his relations who made war upon him, and how that
he got the better of them; all this being looked upon as proof
of bravery.

118
Vol IV, 66. Scythia has an abundance of soothsayers, who
foretell the future by means of a number of willow wands.
A large bundle of these wands is brought and laid on the
ground. The soothsayer unties the bundle, and places each
wand by itself, at the same time uttering his prophecy: then,
while he is still speaking, he gathers the rods together again,
and makes them up once more into a bundle. This mode
of divination is of home growth in Scythia. The enarees,
or woman-like men, have another method, which they say
Venus taught them. It is done with the inner bark of the
linden tree. They take a piece of this bark, and, splitting it
into three strips, keep twining the strips about their fingers,
and untwining them, while they prophesy.

Vol IV, 67. The mode of their execution is the following: a

waggon is loaded with brushwood, and oxen are harnessed
to it; the soothsayers, with their feet tied together, their
hands bound behind their backs, and their mouths gagged,
are thrust into the midst of the brushwood; finally the wood
is set alight, and the oxen, being startled, are made to rush
off with the waggon. It often happens that the oxen and the
soothsayers are both consumed together, but sometimes the
pole of the waggon is burnt through, and the oxen escape
with a scorching. Diviners – lying diviners, they call them –
are burnt in the way described, for other causes besides the
one here spoken of. When the king puts one of them to death,
he takes care not to let any of his sons survive: all the male
offspring are slain with the father, only the females being
allowed to live.

Vol IV, 68. Oaths among the Scyths are accompanied with
the following ceremonies: a large earthen bowl is filled with

119
 wine, and the parties to the oath, wounding themselves
slightly with a knife or an awl, drop some of their blood into
the wine; then they plunge into the mixture a scymitar, some
arrows, a battle-axe, and a Javelin, all the while repeating
prayers; lastly the two contracting parties drink each a
draught from the bowl, as do also the chief men among their
followers.

Vol IV, 69. […] in order to cleanse their bodies, they act as
follows: they make a booth by fixing in the ground three
sticks inclined towards one another, and stretching around
them woollen felts, which they arrange so as to fit as close as
possible: inside the booth a dish is placed upon the ground,
into which they put a number of red-hot stones, and then
add some hemp-seed.

Vol IV, 70. The Scythians, as I said, take some of this hemp-
seed, and, creeping under the felt coverings, throw it upon the
red-hot stones; immediately it smokes, and gives out such a
vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scyths,
delighted, shout for joy, and this vapour serves them instead
of a water-bath; for they never by any chance wash their
bodies with water. Their women make a mixture of cypress,
cedar, and frankincense wood, which they pound into a
paste upon a rough piece of stone, adding a little water to
it. With this substance, which is of a thick consistency, they
plaster their faces all over, and indeed their whole bodies.
A sweet odour is thereby imparted to them, and when they
take off the plaster on the day following, their skin is clean
and glossy.

120
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