Content Warning for discussion of mental health, messed up psychological dynamics, suicidal ideation and pretended self-harm, along with sexuality, transradicalisation and all of that sort of thing.
12. Content warnings are great, aren’t they?
They’re the literal opposite of censorship, both an expression of compassion for the reader and a statement of respect, a recognition that the reader’s a grown-up who’s able to make their own mind up. And also, cynically, a tool of self-preservation. If you read this and it [PURITY]s you up, you now have no one to blame but yourself.
OK, look, you’re probably going to read this and think that we’re completely unhinged, or that we’ve been radicalised into something unhealthy and unreal. This does in fact happen, people do think we’re frightening. The other week Sian got hurt by someone who had got it into their head that Sian was acting like she was she was trying to recruit them into a cult, which is what this post from the other day was about.
Or you’re just going to think we’re pretentious as [PURITY], which is the worst bit. Arguably, if you try to make pronouncements about philosophies you’re not fully conversant with, that’s pretty much the definition of pretension? Maybe so, but we would contend that all philosophy comes from the recognition that you don’t know it all and we’re trying to be humble here
Face it, we’re a bunch of people, closeted and uncloseted, underground and in the open, who are all gender-queer, neurodivergent and enmeshed in a sort of niche, once-famous, technologically state of the art and socially obsolete game-not-game where we dress up in the most beautiful and outlandish styles we can and pretend to perform brain surgery on each other for the sake of an imaginative erotic pretence that isn’t entirely a pretence.
13. Truth is not stable ground.
FROM NOW ON, YOUR JOY WILL DEBASE AND TRAMPLE UNDERFOOT YOUR REPOSE, YOUR SLEEP AND EVEN YOUR SUFFERING.
REMEMBER THAT TRUTH IS NOT STABLE GROUND BUT THE CEASELESS MOVEMENT THAT DESTROYS ALL THAT YOU ARE AND ALL THAT YOU SEE.
Georges Bataille, “MEMENTO”, Prohibitions (March 1937)
Sian’s been talking about Acéphale, the cult of the Headless One, for some time now. And she admits, the thing that we (and by “we”, we mean the identity in amalgam of RL!Sian and Virtual!Sian, both actually called Sian, but preferring to think of ourselves as distinct, a duality/plurality… or possibly an entry in the DSM-5, but that’s not your call, pal) have made such a big deal of isn’t even something she’s read all that deeply on. Sian initially got hung up on the basic idea and didn’t go that far beyond that: the half-LARP-half-real cult, founded by Georges Bataille between the first two World Wars [1] . This is, if you recall, the anti-fascist (anti-)religious group and proselytising secret society in which everyone who joined signed up to be a human sacrifice and no one was the executioner.
[1] Futureproofing for you there.
This was a deliberate thing, although Bataille’s readers don’t always think so. One version of the story, the bastardised one that finds itself shared occasionally in reddit posts, Google AI summaries, and makesyouthink social media shares, is that it was actually a failed attempt at a genuine ritual murder, foiled by everyone volunteering to die and no one volunteering to kill. That makes no sense to us. We like the idea that this happening was planned, staged, a liturgy and a passion play offering the catharsis that only really involved roleplaying can bring you. Bataille’s philosophy is about living in the face of evil, by finding erotic fulfilment through horror. It doesn’t matter, honestly: the ritual proved the defining moment of Acéphale, a moment of redemption through bad endings. It’s literally called “the Headless one”. They knew that no one was in charge.
Everything in Acéphale was about contradictions and surprises, the adoption of a life lived in paradox. The rules of the society include all sorts of rules about secrecy and seclusion, but assume that the members are telling as many people as they can about the society’s ideas.
The first time Sian heard of it, something unlatched in her brain, a hypnochemical trigger that altered the way she saw herself in Second Life, and then in the first one. It transfigured her mind.
What was to Sian something that was always in her head problematic became transformative. It was a way forward to making the bleak dystopiophile kinks she’s made her stock in trade something she could engage in without guilt and shame, and even build relationships on. It made these things life-affirming, even healing. The psychodrama of an annihilationist doll cult became a thing that made it all right to live.
Which is just as well. RL!Sian has struggled for most of her life with the thought that living wasn’t really something she could cope with.
As a teenager she staved off the Thoughts with the idea that maybe if you hate yourself enough, continued living is a good way to punish yourself, which is — hell, you know how messed up that is, but it’s the sort of thing that only a person with multiple competing internal monologues can maintain. Even now, RL!Sian still always has the Thoughts somewhere. Sometimes they’re lurking in the back of one of her selves, sometimes they’re screaming and she has to address gently one of her inner monologues out loud, by name, and tell them that she loves them and she hears what they’ve got to say but she really doesn’t have the time to deal with that right now.
Don’t knock it; nothing has been more effective for supporting RL!Sian’s mental health than that one tactic.
Fact is, being locked into a war with the Thoughts is both part of the neurodivergent experience and it’s part of the trans experience, and when you’ve finally accepted that you’re both at the same time, you sometimes get both sorts at once. Living is exhaustion. Living is pain. Living is loss. And most of all for Sian, living is failure.
Accepting that temporarily, and submitting to it; ritualistically surrendering to the fear of annihilation and formalising it in your psychospiritual practice; coming to it meekly, obediently, and finding beauty and, ultimately, fleeting bliss in the horror of death and mutilation; in being ready to die but willing to let it come when it’s ready, in no longer fighting to take the reins, Sian keeps on living.
Understanding it is one of the things that keeps Sian alive.
14. It is necessary to become completely different.
It is time to abandon the world of civilised people and its light. The time has passed for being reasonable and cultured – this has only led to a life lacking in any attraction. Whether secretly or not, it is necessary to become completely different, or else to cease to be.
Georges Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy”, Acéphale 1 (1936)
Sian didn’t exactly choose to be trans, but one of the reasons it took her so long to come out publicly and, indeed, one of the reasons she often wondered that she was doing it wrong is that she has always consciously rejected masculinity. Even as a child she might have liked the toys for boys, but she hated the performance of boyhood.
She just couldn’t do it. In the playground in primary school she “pretended” to be gay, to antagonise people. Later on, after being told by her dad that AIDS was God’s punishment on homosexuals, and it being intimated that he would disown her if she were queer, she tamped that down. She could never understand why loving the same sex was so feared, though.
Digression: As a kid who read The Beano , RL!Sian could never understand why Softy Walter was the baddie of the Dennis the Menace strip when she was little. She saw more in common with him and felt that his victimisation was cruel rather than triumphant.
JUSTICE FOR WALTER
in recent decades, Walter’s portrayal has moved from that of Walter the Softy, an effeminate boy victimised by Dennis’s masculinity, to something more like Walter the Posho, a rich, conservative boy opposed to Dennis’s working class anarchy with an active malevolence and a willingness to weaponise social capital and wealth. Sian doesn’t know if that’s an improvement or not. Sian is inclined to think that both versions villainise queerness, but what does she know?
The first time anyone called Sian a man — she remembers who it was, and where she was, and what she was doing — it felt like an assault. She realised she was supposed to be pleased, or flattered. It made her sick to her stomach. The “M” word has continued to do so her entire life.
It took her so long to realise that knowing you were not a man was as valid as knowing you were a woman, and even now RL!Sian is cautious of trans spaces, still feels like an interloper.
Existing as trans is resistance, and becoming the Acéphale is therefore an act of revolt, in a social environment that, in the English speaking realm at least, wants us dead.
15. If it is free, it remains in play.
Too long has human life served as head and reason for the universe. In so far as it becomes this head and this reason, and in so far as it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude. If it is not free, existence becomes empty and neutered, whereas if it is free, it remains in play. For as long as the Earth produced only cataclysms, trees and birds, it represented a free universe; the fascination of freedom was tarnished when the Earth produced a being who insisted that necessity was a law that was greater than the universe.
Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy”
Again, the obvious comment a reader might have is, “Girlfriend, you really need to not attach so much significance to this, you’re pretending to be a sexy fembot in an MMO no one plays,” and yes, first, Imaginary Straw Man, thank you for calling Sian “Girlfriend”, but also, as to the main point, yes, that’s not wholly wrong, but it’s also leaving out the fact that even though we barely know each other’s RL selves (for instance, Sian knows the RL first names of only two of the people she counts as her SL family), we have these connections that exist in a noetic/empathic space that doesn’t require an existence outside of that. When we say we love each other, it’s genuine.
And we can do that because we operate in a space where the more power we have, the more we sacrifice. Sian will always be more restricted than her submissives; Core will always be more restricted than Sian. We adopt this because it allows us to be mutual. It creates trust. It fosters relationships. We sacrifice so we can find a sort of freedom in principled eroticism and redemptive horror.
16. More me than I am.
Beyond what I am, I encounter a being who makes me laugh because he has no head, and who fills me with anguish because he is formed of innocence and crime; he holds an iron weapon in his left hand, with flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. In a single outburst he unites Birth and Death. He is not a man. Neither is he a god. He is not me, but he is more me than I am: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he himself has become lost, and I along with him, and there I rediscover myself as him, in other words the monster.
Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy”
And look, here’s the thing. We find ourselves through this.
Years ago, RL!Sian only felt guilt through presenting in the virtual realm as Virtual!Sian but Virtual Sian was more Sian than RL!SIan was. She was the version of Sian that Sian wanted to be. She is the uncompromising creature of confidence, femininity and genderfuck that Sian always was. She is the truth that was inside RL!Sian’s disappointing, incomplete and incongruous body. ANd she had to exist for both Sian and Sian to be Sian.
The word “avatar” comses from Hindi, and it refers to the shapes that gods take to show themselves in the world. In Second Life we all have avatars, and that makes us our own private deities, with a sort of divine power to remake the world.
Meanwhile there is a principle in occultism that you find the truth about yourself when you meet your Holy Guardian Angel, which isn’t really what you think it is, so much as a picture of a true self.
Andre Masson’s illustration of the Acéphale, as shown on Acéphale 2 (1937).
Yes, Sian is describing a custom character in a moribund video game as a Holy Guardian Angel. So let’s take it down a notch. Let’s put it this way: we have created versions of ourselves that are tryouts for a version of us we’re still working on, even the strangest, most out there forms of us.
And we offer ourselves as a sacrifice to each other, and to ourselves, and no one wields the knife. In that we find mutuality, catharsis and truths about who we are.
And here we are.
The most frustrating part of all this is how Sian is struggling to get her thoughts into words. She is in a war right now in the real world, where the stakes are literally her survival as a human being, and it’s hard to express what’s going on in her mind.
She feels her philosophy is incoherent. It makes sense in her mind. On the screen, there is connective tissue missing. There is a gap.
Perhaps if we also include these they might help it all more sense?
