"From his birth in a cradle of sperm to his death on a blood-soaked pillow, Heliogabalus, Emperor from the age of fourteen, embodies the depravity and decay of Rome in the third century. Although steeped in vice and tormented by madness, the deviant tyrant is elevated to a divine status, at the crossroads between the Greco-Latin world and the Orient.

Considered one of the most accomplished and accessible of Artaud's works, while also one of his most imaginative, Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned is a hallucinatory, surreal depiction of a historical figure, as well as a revolutionary founding text from the father of the Theatre of Cruelty."

Translated by: Victor Corti