Among the most surprising figures in Jean Cocteau’s windows for Saint-Maximin Church in Metz, the praying mantis particularly commands attention. Its presence is not entirely unexpected, for this insect embodies the principle of alteration that runs through the whole stained-glass ensemble.
In his final masterpiece, Cocteau continually tells us that life is inseparable from death and that death can even lead to immortality. This duality lies at the root of things. The praying mantis crosses the boundaries between life and death through procreation and the death of its mate.
Cocteau knew the creature well enough to describe it in his poem Requiem:
Give me back that murderess, that companion, that praying mantis, that love which devoured me with its beak; its long green Amazon legs, its eye of Pallas deep within the slits of its helmet.
This belongs to the logic of high and low, the ignoble and the sacred. Georges Bataille repeatedly demonstrated that violence always lies at the heart of the sacred. The same is true for Cocteau, whose creative thought is inseparable from an experience of death.
Bataille, more than anyone, insisted on the violence of sacred celebrations in Africa, Oceania and the Americas, even invoking the Marquis de Sade to describe this culture of delirium. He wrote of continuous crimes committed in broad daylight to satisfy deified nightmares, terrifying phantasms, cannibal feasts of priests, ceremonies of corpses and streams of blood — scenes resembling the dazzling excesses imagined by Sade (Complete Works, Gallimard, 1970, vol. I, p. 152).