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 comp