Recently, I’ve been reading Taschen’s H.R. Giger, and I’ve really been enjoying it! I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on it, as a writer and worldbuilder.
My first encounter with H.R. Giger came in high school, when my friend Joel (the same person that created the artwork of body modification styles in the world of OROBORO) introduced him as the creator of the xenomorph in Alien and one of the inspirations for Monocyte, a graphic novel by the artist Menton3.
At the time, both Giger and Menton3 seemed like these strange, obscure artists whose work sat at the fringes of fantasy and sci-fi art. In my head, they took on a kind of mythical quality, and even after I bought Joel a collection of Giger’s artwork (the Necronomicon), I still felt like I had only scratched the surface.
One of the things that struck me while reading this Taschen book was that Giger’s repetition of elements and motifs–such as phallic and yonic imagery, the merging of biological and mechanical, and nightmarish landscapes–throughout his career didn’t represent an artist who kept returning to the same subject because it was popular, lucrative, or comfortable. Instead, this was an artist who was consciously trying to build a mythology.
I’m not using the word ‘mythology’ in the sense of a personal mystique—I mean it in terms of worldbuilding. It’s pretty normal for artists to create a series of works that tell a story or explore a theme, but Giger often seemed to approach his artworks as different windows into a single, unified world.
One of the works that I was most enamored with was Passagen-Temple, a three-dimensional space crafted by Giger to be entered like a building. The interior and exterior are filled with depictions of his biomechanical beings, motifs of skulls and tubes, and images of malformed babies. A centerpiece of the Temple seems to be a mural of an empty throne, surrounded by biomechanical beings, titled Way of the Magician.
Looking at the intricacies of Passagen-Temple, I was reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s descriptions of the ruins of the city in At the Mountains of Madness, which was inhabited by extraterrestrial beings and decorated with murals depicting their history. The characters in Mountains divined a lot about this lost, eldritch society from the actual events depicted in these murals, but also from the style of the art itself—it was intricate, minute, and later became decadent and overwrought, reflecting the decline of the Elder Things.
Looking at Passagen-Temple, I’m amazed with how closely you can treat the artworks as archeological artifacts from another world—there seems to be a conscious, consistent language of symbols, figures, and concepts at work there that are both intelligible and profoundly unsettling.
And it turns out that this language of symbols and ideas isn’t just surface-level—Giger was consciously inspired by Symbolist artists and ascribed symbolic meanings to elements of his work: hoses and tubes are connected to snakes and worms, which are associated with primal fears. Passagen-Temple itself is connected to a series of Giger’s artworks called Passages that depict the traumatic transition of a baby from the womb to the world. Meanwhile, the biomechanical beings are residents of a world wracked by ecological destruction and overpopulation (as I understand it). A number of Giger’s artworks dealing ‘biomechanoids’ are titled “Under the Earth,” establishing the idea that these beings retreated from an uninhabitable world above.
All of this creates a sense of a unified ‘secondary world’ to be unearthed, but also a deeper, symbolic and psychological layer to that world that has to be unraveled not as an anthropologist or encyclopedist, but as a human being delving into their own psyche.
This idea, that Giger’s work is both a window into an outer world and the inner world, reflects a lot of occult traditions, and it’s not a coincidence—The Way of the Magician, for example, is connected to alchemical and occultism. In most esoteric traditions, the Magician, analogous to the sage or alchemist, is a figure who represents the height of spiritual achievement—transcendence, enlightenment, or perfection. Giger features the Magician in a number of his works, but never directly—instead, an empty space is left where they would appear, or they are represented symbolically, as in Aleph.
This reminded me of a quote by Alan Watts:
“…truly speaking, nothingness is what we want to talk about when we talk about the spiritual.”
I think what attracts me to Giger’s work is how beauty and horror are balanced in it—much of the work is grotesque or uncomfortable, but has a symmetry and grace to it. It makes me think of the Cenobites, whose conception of beauty, pleasure, and pain was divorced from most humans, and yet there was a kind of unity and elegance in their mutilated forms.
To me, the magic of Giger lies in how alien it seems at first glance. However, the more one gazes at and learns about it, the more one realizes that it’s a warped reflection of life, in all its horror and beauty, and that warped, new perspective ends up expanding one’s mind.
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