Know Me To Be Your Superior In Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor

INBOUND FALL / WINTER 2025 

In 1892, Erik Satie was at a crossroads. Despite having already composed some of the finest works ever written for piano, the 26-year-old was still penniless and unappreciated. His artistic ethos—a paradoxical mix of reactionary Medievalism and avant-garde absurdism—could find no quarter in fin-de-siècle Paris. And so, with his musical aspirations dashed and nowhere left to turn, Satie would turn to himself.

His subsequent revolt was as shocking as it was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Satie announced himself to be “the Parcener,” the head of a new religious order. It was, in fact, a church of his own founding—The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor.

Transforming his dilapidated apartment into an “Abbatial Church,” Satie began issuing scathing letters to prominent cultural figures who had sought to render judgment upon his Art. Targets of the Parcener’s screeds ranged from the cape-clad mystagogue, Joséphin Péladan, to the pompous composer, Camille Saint-Saëns; from the novelist Octave Mirbeau, who had dared to lampoon the Parcener, to the theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, whose unintentionally nude stage production had offended the Parcener’s moral sensibilities. The fiercest feud was reserved for music critic Henry Gauthier-Villars, whom the Parcener battled in the press for years, until the spat culminated in a physical altercation at a concert. Throughout the 1890s, luminaries, such as these, found themselves excommunicated from a church to which they had not even known they once belonged.

Inscrutable as the author himself, Satie’s writings from this brief period strike a tone that lies somewhere between fervent Catholicism, anarchistic satire, and the righteous rage of the true Artist—leaving readers befuddled as to the composer’s true intent. Yet, despite the impenetrability of his writings, the Parcener’s missives took the Parisian art scene by storm and, as Satie’s crusade grew in intensity, so too did his reputation, making this era as historically crucial as it is bewildering. Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Church was ultimately a solitary undertaking. Despite certain documents indicating that the Church expected to have more than a billion members, history would show that its congregation never grew beyond one: Erik Satie himself.

Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything is the first book dedicated exclusively to the story of Erik Satie’s Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilic translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions. 

Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything was written by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19th century Symbolist literature. Previous to this book, Kunkel has also provided translations for Echoes of a Natural World—Tales of the Strange & Estranged (First To Knock, 2020); A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest—Mystical Prose Works by Édouard Schuré (First To Knock, 2021); as well as The Solar Circus by Gustave Kahn (First To Knock, 2022). Kunkel has also written extensively in French, covering topics such as Joséphin Péladan and religion in fin-de-siècle Paris. His critical reedition of Péladan’s notorious novel, Istar, was published by Éditions du Lérot in 2024, and his book, L’Orphisme et le roman post-romantique, a comparative study of the mystical novel, was released by Éditions Otrante in 2023.

180 pages (replete with photography, ephemera, and facsimilic reproductions) / 7.75" x 10.25" / Softcover

ISBN: 978-1-7349060-8-0