Ecstasy and Annihilation: Four Artists at the Eros-Thanatos Nexus

There is a quality that some art possesses - you recognise it immediately. Not transgression as performance, but work that demonstrates actual sacrifice. Art that explores the conjunction of sex and death – symbolic immortality that can only be achieved through the unification of opposites. 

The ugly ecstasy of Austin Osman Spare comes to mind immediately, contorting his body into impossible positions until consciousness fractured. HR Giger's obsessive biomechanical temples, sexually charged and eerily unnerving, tap into our most primal and intimate parts. Musician Carl McCoy weaving sex magick and apocalypse into sonic rituals where orgasm and annihilation merge, forcing us to confront our darkest thoughts and deepest desires. These artists share something unique: they are not just depicting sex and death, they are immersed in this nexus, working consistently with these living forces.

What separates the work of Giger, McCoy, and similar artists like Tim Vigil, Michael Ford, Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, Rosaleen Norton and Grant Morrison is that their exploration of the intersection of sex and death is authentic praxis, rather than an aesthetic exploration. Instead of choosing Eros and Thanatos as merely interesting concepts, they’ve undertaken a pilgrimage into this sacred space. Utilising functional frameworks continually across decades, their art aims to transform - not only themselves, but everyone it touches. 

The Nephilim mythos itself embodies this intersection: the forbidden desire of the Watchers, a union of human and divine that resulted in monstrous offspring, leading to apocalyptic destruction. Ecstasy and annihilation, humanity and divinity, are woven together in this myth - they are inextricably linked, and the exploration of these forces are not undertaken lightly. It demands sacrifice, commitment and visionary talents that only the few possess.

HR Giger: Where ecstasy meets extinction

One of my favourite artists, HR Giger, spent a lifetime exploring the complex interplay of sex and death, combining it with creatures so familiar and yet so alien, his art touches us on a deep, visceral level. Giger’s biomechanical landscapes merge human and machine elements to create dark, disturbing visions that reveal our collective anxieties around technology, overpopulation and mortality.  Sensual, organic flesh penetrated by cold, hard machines, Giger viewed the uterus as a “death-delivering” machine. Pain and mechanisation signalling the start of life for humans, something echoed by women who have given birth in hospitals. What should be a beautiful experience for mother and baby morphs into trauma for both. Having visited the amazing Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland, I can honestly say it is an intense space–surrounded by provocative images that fuse sex and death. Alluring and disturbing in equal measure, you cannot help feeling repulsed and enraptured at the same time.

Giger maintained his vision until his death in 2014, but the cost was living completely within that biomechanical nightmare-world he'd created. 

Necronom V (Giger, 1977)

Austin Osman Spare: Fracturing consciousness

Austin Osman Spare artistically and magically explored the intersection where Eros and Thanatos become indistinguishable, where the body's limits became thresholds. What's remarkable is how Spare saw death as parallel to orgasm -- both are moments of ego-death, of total surrender where the ego temporarily dissolves. He believed these liminal states (whether reached through exhaustion, sexual climax, or other means) opened gateways to the unconscious where magical will could be implanted.

His Book of Ugly Ecstasy captures this perfectly - filled with grotesque, writhing figures, visualisations of consciousness in extremis, where beauty and horror, pleasure and pain, become indistinguishable. The "ugliness" is the raw truth beneath social masks, accessed through these boundary states.

The death posture is one of Spare's most distinctive magical techniques - a profound intersection of sexuality, trance, and symbolic death that he used to achieve gnosis and charge magical sigils. Assuming an extremely uncomfortable, contorted physical position that cannot be maintained for long - often standing on tiptoes with the body twisted, arms extended awkwardly, head thrown back - the practitioner concentrates intensely on a sigil or magical intention. 

As muscles begin to tremor and physical agony escalates, he pushes past the point where the body demands release. At the moment of total physical exhaustion - when you feel you might literally collapse or die - there's a sudden shift: the mind empties, ego dissolves, and you enter a state that Spare called the "neither-neither" consciousness.

Another of Spare’s methods involved constructing an urn that conformed with the dimensions of an erect penis, leaving sufficient space–but no more–to form a vacuum when the phallus was inserted. The sigil to be charged was placed at the bottom of the urn, and after a prolonged orgasm caused by the vacuum suction of the opening, the urn would be sealed and buried, or filled with Earth and buried in a casket, thus linking sex and death. 

Spare’s refusal to compromise, and his promiscuous lifestyle (according to Fulgur Press), led to real hardships. Yet he found success even into his sixties, despite failing health and his studio being destroyed in the Blitz. His legacy, much like that of HP Lovecraft, has inspired generations of artists, magicians and musicians to explore liminal spaces in new ways.

Ascension of the Ego from Ecstasy to Ecstasy from The Book of Pleasure, 1913.

Carl McCoy: Sonic transformation through transgression

Where many bands treat occult imagery as aesthetic window dressing, Carl McCoy has spent decades immersed in the liminal zone between ecstasy and destruction. The consistency of vision - from Dawnrazor through Mourning Sun, and the incredible Nefilim release Zoon  - shows a man genuinely working within the Eros/Thanatos current rather than just referencing it.

Exploring transformation through transgression, Carl’s lyrics embrace darkness and horror alongside lust and love, often in the same song, blurring the lines between liberation and annihilation. 

There are whispers of the Eros/Thanatos current on Dawnrazor, songs that touch on destruction-as-transformation, the beginning of the journey. Recorded in Somerset in an old courthouse where those found guilty were hung, The Nephilim encapsulates the nexus of destruction and creation - “Shiva”, the seduction of violence as transformation, “Chord of Souls” beckoning the apocalypse, and the penultimate Eros/Thanatos ritual, “Psychonaut”. 

Carl McCoy once said in an interview that Elizium was difficult to perform live, and this is not surprising. Elizium exists in a sustained liminal state - suspended in the moment between death and transformation. It is the plateau between ecstasies, a tantric ritual enticing you into continuous trance. It is beautiful, but without that needed cathartic release, it could potentially become unbearable to inhabit that space live night after night. 

Where Elizium is the opiate dissolution, Zoon is the orgone maelstrom, the explosive violent descent that could have only followed the suspended dreamstate of Elizium. Zoon is a sonic grimoire - not just portraying the themes of sex and death, but invoking them. 

Oh forgive me 

Now have your place with god

Innocence can be hell

Of the perfumed and penetrated flesh

She's melting, melting away

“Shine”, Zoon, Nefilim 1996

Mourning Sun sees the cold light of day, the melancholy recognition of what was sacrificed in Zoon - the profound emptiness after transcendence fades. Touched by grief, Mourning Sun is a deep calling for ascension, the needed anabasis after the fall of Zoon -  yearning for the heaven of Elizium. The album expresses the emptiness of the void left by the absence of both heaven and hell. 

McCoy didn't just visit this nexus for artistic effect - he lived in it. The silence after Mourning Sun isn't creative drought; it's the cost of genuine transformation. Which way from here? His fans still wonder, and yet FoTN commands sell-out crowds when they do play.

See more about the journey Fields of the Nephilim have taken here. 

Tim Vigil: Ecstasy of the Damned

I first encountered Tim Vigil’s Faust while managing a comic book store in Houston Texas. His work stood clearly outside the mainstream space of superheroes and the romanticism of Sandman and more “grown up” comics. An unflinching blend of extreme violence, sexuality and damnation, Tim’s work operates in the same territory as Giger’s biomechanics, or Spare’s grotesque creations, but with a raw, pulp energy that is uniquely its own. Faust is primal, a sex magic ritual gone apocalyptic. It is not gore for gore’s sake, the writing of Dave Quinn is dramatic and philosophical, illustrating mankind’s control over his own destiny. Tim’s intensely detailed pen and ink style, reminiscent of masters like Wrightson and Frazetta, complements the writing perfectly.

Where Faust leaned more towards the classic superhero comic style, EO was the opposite. Loosely based on Wilhelm Reich’s theory of orgone energy, Franz Henkel’s thought-provoking writing is inspired, and Vigil’s unnervingly disturbing visuals leave nothing to the imagination, causing dark ripples inside your mind that may take a lifetime to subdue.

Possibly my favourite work, though, is the collaboration between Tim, his brother Joe, and writer Dave Barbour - Gunfighters in Hell. A battle for humanity’s soul, but presented as light-hearted rather than dark and heavy - a spaghetti western with demons, set in Hades. The art and story were both superb in this series, so much so that you actually questioned whether humanity should be saved!

Tim still actively works in this space, and is an artist’s artist, inspiring a new generation to push their own boundaries. He is considered by many as one of the greatest comic artists of our time.

Splash page from Faust: Love of the Damned

These four artists - Giger building his biomechanical temples until death, Spare fracturing consciousness to manifest sigils, McCoy weaving sonic rituals where orgasm and apocalypse merge into transformative gnosis, Vigil unflinchingly depicting the infernal marriage of flesh and damnation - demonstrate what authentic immersion in the Eros-Thanatos nexus demands. Their work isn't metaphor. It is praxis, ritual, sacrifice. They didn't choose this territory; it called to  them, and they answered that call knowing the cost. The spaces they've opened remain active thresholds for those willing to follow, but the journey asks a heavy price. As the Nephilim mythos itself warns us: the union of opposites births both transcendence and destruction. There is no safe passage through this liminal territory, only transformation or annihilation - and for these artists, that was always the point.