
Dionysian Cult Centre with 1911 Renault 2-Seater
(297 × 420mm, pencil, coloured pencil, acrylics on paper, © 2013 by the Tellurian Society)
The title and conceptual framework of this drawing ought to be understood before the background of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s work on matriarchy and gynaecocracy, Das Mutterrecht. According to Bachofen, human civilisation went through three stages: a wild nomadic, tellurian stage, the “lunar” period of female supremacy, then the backlash of the Dionysian period, worshipping the phallus, favouring the anus over the vagina, favouring intoxicating masculine wine over female milk and honey, followed by the Apollonian period, modernity, the age of reason and necrophilia (now in a process of dissolution, entering the enigmatic, presumably female, Aquarian stage).
The depicted cult centre is of the Dionysian-Apollonian type*. It offers safe outlets for the Dionysian impulses of domesticated Apollonian Males. Wild, intoxicated, sex-crazed orgies are not to be expected here, these are relegated to Bacchantian cult centres, the dance-clubs, as opposed to the model railway, antique car, or life steam clubs, which are all part of the Dionysian-Apollonian category. This Dionysian Cult Centre is a place where playful, supposedly harmless necrophilia is taking place. Necrophilia is the supremacy-oriented form of sexuality ascribed to men by the combined forces of Dionysus and Apollo. We ought to bear in mind that quartz watches, pocket calculators, microcomputers, laptop computers, tablet computers, cell phones, “smart” phones, and many types of cars and mechanical devices (also child pornography and tame popular music) are all part of the large necrophiliac outlet device network for Dionysian impulses. Soon these cult centres will be demolished all over the world, relegated to the dust heap of history, as we enter a new age which will put an end to the ill-regulated sun-worshipping** Apollonian rationality so inseparably tied to frenzied Dionysus, and bring forth the real, biophile rationality of the well-regulated, tellurian woman-god-serving era of the moon and the atom again.Illustrative sketch and explanatory note © 2013 by Torsten Slama
*In fact, the author is struggling here with the drawing’s title. It seems that what is depicted is clearly an Apollonian-Dionysian cult centre.