DIRT: HONOURED IN THE BREACH

 I am writing a lot about transgression, in different ways. because sex magic is mostly transgressive. I am repeating information, because I am making links between ideas that are not exactly linear.

Transgression means carrying across. It means a breach. Here I want to lead into some ideas about breaching the body. It is in the breach that the gnosis comes. 

Transgressive space is especially difficult when it comes to the body. My North or western cultures attempts to decouple mind from body, and yet we retain an intuitive sense of clean/unclean, sacred/profane and decent/indecent. There are things you don't do. 

 Ketchup is dirt when it is on the floor, but not when it is on your plate. Things are dirty or wrong when they are in the wrong place. Putting something in the wrong place is transgressive. Cum is right and proper in the vagina or ass, but possibly not in the mouth and definitely not in your glass of wine. 

A substance is dirty when it is between states. John-Paul Sartre wrote an essay about stickiness which is quoted in Mary Douglass' excellent 'Purity and Danger'. Stickiness makes us uncomfortable because it is neither a solid nor a liquid. We don't have a neat place in our minds to put it. I can put my hand in something sticky, but I have to overcome a sense of disgust first. Managing disgust is transgressive. Extending aesthetic or sensual appreciations is the kind of transgression that leads to a greater understanding of the self. The strength of our sense of disgust is an important psychological indicator of our boundaries, to the point where it governs our politics. We are less likely to accept people or ideas that are different if we have a strong sense of disgust. It is worth exploring this in magic. 

So if dirt is about things being in between states, or being where they shouldn't be, let us think about how the body is breached. There are strong ideas in most cultures about body fluids staying where they should. Blood is fine in the body, but a wound is a risky thing. It is dangerous to health and perhaps spiritually dangerous as well. Bad entities can get into a wound. Life energy can leave the body through a wound. The things of the body should stay in the body. Things outside the body should stay outside the body. Ingesting something inedible, for example, is a source of disgust even if it is harmless. We have strong feelings about what is edible. We also have strong feelings about things from other people's bodies getting inside our own, often for good rational reasons.

And yet the body is breached so often. We bleed and excrete and eat and share all sorts of things such as tiny flakes of skin. We breathe the breath of millions of others, human and non human persons alike. 

Among the Lele people, who live in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was a strict taxonomy about what it is permissible to eat, reminiscent of the Abominations of Leviticus in the Old Testament. When the Hebrews became captive in Babylon, they used laws to distinguish themselves from others and to mark themselves as people of their God. This was the setting for the laws against pork, shellfish and so on. The Lele have a similarly elaborate taxonomy, for example it is permissible to eat animals with fur but not with scales. It all works based on careful observation of animal appearances and behaviours - until you get to the pangolin. 

Pangolins don't fit the categories. Pangolins have scales, so they should belong in the water like fish, but they climb trees and give birth to one offspring at a time. They are anomalous animals. It was forbidden to eat the pangolin and would have been as The only people who were allowed to eat the pangolin were male members of a special pangolin cult, who had fathered a girl and a boy by the same wife. The eating of the pangolin was a ritual activity, linked to sacrifice and fertility. 

The pangolin is a great example of anomaly, and also of an animal that is so powerful that it is both very sacred and very profane at the same time. Here is the idea the other way around - something that is both very sacred and very profane is anomalous, and powerful. 

When you manage those things that are both sacred and profane, when you consciously breach boundaries and work with things that are in in-between states, you are a Pangolin person. Welcome to a life of anomaly. You may soon find you don't belong anywhere else. 

Blessings on you, gentle reader.

CURIOSITY WITHOUT WONDER. VOYEURISM WITHOUT TRANSGRESSION: THE BODY WORLDS EXHIBITION

 Art criticism is not for me as a rule. I lack the knowledge. However I am interested in the intersections between art and other things, such as science and politics and activism. And I do enjoy things that make me feel uneasy, if it is for the right reasons.

 This was all the wrong reasons. 

 Here is a link: https://bodyworlds.com/

The Body Worlds exhibition is famous and has travelled the world.  It consists of several real human bodies which have been donated by their previous owners, and which have undergone a process of plastiination. Doctors have preserved and sterilised them so that their inner workings are in full and detailed view. You can see one in a swimming pose, cut lengthwise in half, so that some organs are on one side and some on the other.  Another is the body of an elderly man, showing how his body parts have weakened and slackened over time. There are also on display many real body parts such as bones, organs and systems displayed in order to show the processes of disease and decay. An example which intrigued the crowds was the cross section of a blackened and cancerous lung. 

 All of this sounds somewhat confronting and this is my point. It’s not. Not at all. The exhibition was held at a hotel, and it was crowded. There was a wait list to get in. There were many families and children. It was a much more varied crowd than you would get at an exhibition at an art gallery, a ‘proper’ art exhibition.  Everyone was intrigued and thoughtful. People read the information and discussed it among themselves. Children asked questions. Nobody was disrespectful or rude.  The plastinated bodies were vivid with colour, which was slightly ironic. They were posed in glass cases where you could move right around them, to be drawn in by the details of tendon and nerve and the elaborate plait of muscle.  Around the walls and in other display cases, were videos and posters about health and disease. Adjacent to the displays of brains, there was a well-produced film about dementia. A large wall poster illustrated the dangers of sugar in the diet. The message was clear; this was an exhortation to health and physical wellbeing.. This was made more obvious by the fact that the exhibition was sponsored by a life insurance company. And - at the end we were invited to drop a token into a container to symbolise a pledge to a particular lifestyle change such as cutting down on alcohol or exercising more.

I didn’t like it at all. I left early. I did not want to drop my token into a container and make a pledge. I did not do it. 

The new friend I was with asked if I was a bit squeamish. Actually, I thought at the time, I am not squeamish enough. I could not fathom my discomfort. 

 Now I can, a bit. 

Here is an analogous exhibition, another populist works that straddles art and science. As an example it may generate more heat than light, but that is my intent. 

The first ever neonatal unit was at Coney Island, and it was essentially a freakshow. Tiny premature babies were displayed for the public to gaze at and wonder. The doctor who ran this, invented the incubator. He would hear of a preemie baby, and take his big black car and go and get it. He employed only the strictest of standards of hygiene and only the strictest of nurses, whose moral behaviour was monitored. It was a seriously innovative business, and the babies survived and thrived from a state of prematurity that has not really been surpassed. It was also, as I said, a freakshow. The public got to look at the tiny little hands and marvel and learn. In its day it was considered slightly tasteless, as freakshows are of course, and it would never happen now. But this was how the first ever neonatal unit funded itself in the land of the free. In the few accounts I have read about it, the public were invited not to participate or interact or study, but frankly, to gawk. To wonder. 

Transgressive space is necessarily difficult, but even more intuitively so when it comes to the body. The Body Worlds exhibition has been criticised by indigenous people and I can see why. It is not that it is disrespectful exactly.  Its fault is that it simply makes no account of what we know to be true – that the body is the site of the sacred and the profane all at once. Things that are inside the body should stay inside the body. Body fluids particularly are both sacred and profane once they leave the body; they are unclean and magical and curative and just plain dangerous. Things that are outside the body should be dealt with carefully before they go inside the body. We must not eat unclean food or take body fluids inside us once they have left someone’s insides. 

At Body Worlds, the bodies are beautiful, sanitised and somehow unreal. In the past, when body parts have been preserved, there has been the incipient threat of decay. Kick the jar over or make the solution too weak and nature takes its course. Plastination not only preserves, it perfects and perpetuates. Thus we are distanced from the real human bodies on display. We are voyeurs, we look and become curious and then we get to consider our health and our life styles and the take home message is something as specious as ‘Well I saw that black lung and I think I will quit smoking’. A message I can receive passively many times a day if I smoked.  We are never invited to wonder or to become passionate or shocked. Despite all the dire health warnings, we are never invited to see our bodies as the stinking, appalling, wonderful, ridiculous , exquisite, sensuous, dignified, changeable things they might be.

 

MUSIC FOR FUCKING AND FIGHTING: AN ANTINOMIAN PLAYLIST

 At fetish or BDSM parties they play a lot of drum and bass, I guess. I am not sure what it is but it seems to be designed to be seamless, bass heavy and driving. I have no time for it myself. 

I have been known to play Sibelius. 

Here is a playlist which is very much my own. You may not like it. Some of the artists are problematic.

In no particular order. 

Puscifer 'Rev22-20 Dry Martini Mix'

Brian 'Hacksaw' Williams 'I Wanna Do Bad things with You'

HIM 'Wicked Game'

Coil 'Tainted Love'

Marilyn Manson 'Third Day of a Seven Day binge'

Nine Inch Nails 'Closer'

Portishead 'Roads'

Otep 'Apex Predator'

No Doubt 'Hella Good'

The Black Keys 'Gold on the Ceiling'

Grace Jones 'Pull Up to the Bumper'

Puscifer 'The Rapture (Fear is a Mind Killa Mix)'

Nine Inch Nails 'Reptile'

King Dude 'Who Taught You How to Love Like That'

London After Midnight 'The Bondage Song'

Portishead 'Only You'

King Dude 'Velvet Rope'

Anything by the wonderful Twin Temple, Satanic Doo-wop

Beherit 'Drawing Down the Moon' album, especially the track 'The Gate of Nanna'. This is not for sex magic per se but for sheer raw Black Metal power it is probably my favourite album of all time. 

GLAMOUR AND TRANS-FORMATION

    'Look-don't look is the nexus of eroticism'

                    - Conner Habib 'Against Everyone with Conner Habib' 

Hollywood is a long way from the careful and intentional parsing of the written word, which is what glamour used to mean. It was related to the word grammar. It was how you spoke, and how you spelled. Yes, spell-ing. How you used words in powerful ways, at a time when reading was for the elite and writing even more so. Hollywood style glamour has its own magic, the magic of revealing and concealing, the conjuring of image in order to tell stories or simply to deceive. 

Glamour is thus the perfect example of what Anton LaVey would call lesser black magic. It is everyday magic with practical application. Glamour by itself won't make you enlightened but it might make you rich. It will also give you some versatile magical tools. 

I take a booking by phone and there is a knock on the door. I greet my client as usual, and then my heart sinks. I know this man. He is a taxi driver and he has driven me several times when I worked in a previous vanilla occupation. Fuck fuck fuck, what do I do? He is bound to recognize me. Except he doesn't. He greets me as if he has no idea. He becomes a regular client and he never twigs. That's because of glamour. 

I worked with a sex worker who did a lot of touring, and stayed in motels. I found motel touring kinda stressful because of the need to keep a professional look. Clients do not need to see the dishes in the sink and open suitcases. When I worked, I was mortified if a client saw something that was outside of the scene. Once a client came back to get his wallet and I was changing the sheets and I was truly shocked. Lots of sex workers are more relaxed. When I said I was worried about the motel rooms she laughed and said that once the clients saw her in her flash clothes they didn't notice the mess. That's because of glamour. 

Glamour enhances some things and makes other things almost invisible. When you understand a bit about glamour, you naturally work to your best look. More, you control what is revealed and what is concealed. Look-not look is an important part of eroticism. Frank nudity is often less arousing than partial nudity. A slow reveal tells a story, perhaps about desire and fulfillment, perhaps about a special part of the body that is fetishized. You are the magician. You see, but you control how you are seen, and even how the scene is seen. 

Lust leans into glamour - I have mentioned before about how it changes consciousness and makes clients highly focused and motivated in one direction, and therefore less focused on other things. 

Glamour also changes the consciousness of the magician. Dressing up in my whore's drawers changed me each time. I put on my magical persona. A persona is a little more than a role; it is more like method acting. Glamour means I could greet a man, walk towards him and wrap my leg around him and whisper in his ear, being perfectly genuine, without fancying him at all. You can be ritualistic about this. You can put sigils or spells in your makeup bag. You can say an incantation or a prayer to your Red Goddess. Each item can be meaningful, such as lipstick for sexy speech, and eye liner for a clear and steady glance. Invest your clothes with meaning. My high heels did a heap of work for me, as I have done ball kicking and trample play with them, and they made me walk differently and gave me height of course. After months of wearing them, simply putting them on altered my state of consciousness. If you Speak about these things as you prepare for your sexual encounter, you are doing magic already. You are lining yourself up with what you want to be. You are soaking your actions in your intention. 

I have known several cross dressers, and they understand glamour intuitively. Dressing was an event in itself. Hiring a motel, dressing in a group together, and going out in that group, was such a buzz. The act of transformation is a piece of magic. You walk into the motel as one thing, and come out another. What happens in between is a rite of passage. It is fun because only you know what you were to start with. So, are you a different person when you are dressed? When you have gone from Paul to the Lady Paulina? This is the same question the shaman might ask when he puts the leopard mask on and does the leopard dance, and the people drumming and singing around him see the leopard, not the man. Glamour is the first piece of the work of transformation. It is perhaps at that point that the lesser magic described by LaVey becomes something greater. 

 

We are creatures of artifice, I discovered, when a client asked to see me first thing in the morning, au naturel, as if I had just got out of bed. It took me a while to prepare to be so unprepared. My natural look was as unnatural as the heels and makeup I usually employed. So, I greeted him, tousled and sweet, and he was delighted as my silk dressing gown fell from me, a victim of gravity, as I glided away from the open door. 

 

Here is an exercise to develop your sense of glamour. It is from Anton LaVey's appalling book 'The Complete Witch'. This book does not reflect well on Anton I am afraid. It is a sexist mess and I took one for you all simply by reading it. However, this is a fun exercise for those who identify as women particularly.

 

Wear only stockings and shoes, and a long coat. Go out walking. Go into shops. Go into buildings, elevators, cafes. Interact with people as you usually would. If you have a moment of privacy, in an alley way or elevator, you can open your coat and admire yourSelf. Only you know the secret of your nakedness. Only you know how cute you feel right now. After a while, go home. Take the coat off, slowly, in front of the mirror. See how beautiful you are. Masturbate gloriously. 

 

And as always, blessings on you, gentle reader. 

 

 

 

SETTING UP IN FORMAL MAGIC

 

Setting up a temple as a working space can be simple or elaborate. I have used whole rooms, and once a nightclub. I have also set up tiny altars behind doors where they were virtually invisible to flatmates who did not know what I was up to. 

You may have fun finding things that feel like magic to you. Your space might become more built up over time. But as Terry Pratchett’s wonderful witch Granny Weatherwax says, any girl can be a witch with a lot of magical paraphernalia. It takes a really good witch to do magic with an egg and an apple corer. This seems to be true, as after a while ritual becomes more internalized and less generally noisy in the head.

Consider this. The very first emperors of China were considered to have divine powers, and they needed to throw their weight about in order to keep the divine stuff working for the land and their subjects. Every year, they needed to ride the boundaries of the empire in person, to the North, South, East and West, to keep in the favour of the gods and to keep the people in line. Over time, the empire became bigger, and riding its boundaries became impractical. And thus one of the great discoveries of the Axial Age came out of practical need. At some point the ritual of riding the boundaries became internalised. The emperor no longer needed to ride to the North, South, East and West. He could stand in a room, and simply turn to face the four directions. His mind was doing the magical work. Magic was beginning to become psychological.

We might do the same. We might have tools to represent things. It would be great to have a real snake or stag or star, but we manage just fine with a statue of one. Make tools yourself if you can. My wand is badly made because craft of the physical type is not my forte, but I put blood, hair, runes, my magical name, a copper bangle belonging to my dead father, and my own carved wood into it. However, if I lost my wand, I would use something else. People who are incarcerated manage with no tools at all. Damien Echols, of the West Memphis Three, was wrongly imprisoned for murder in his teens during the Satanic Panic in the 1990’s. Damien practiced High Magick in his cell for hours a day with nothing but books and his mind. Be thoughtful and cherish what you use, consecrate things regularly with moonlight or natural running water or by burying in salt. But in the end, it is all about You.

Set up an altar where you have some privacy. Take out the smoke alarm if you need to, just temporarily. Altars in nature add extra heft, I think. If you have a special place, go there.

I tend to the traditional, with the cardinal points and the elements represented. Air, fire, earth and water. I get water from places I consider magickal, such as high country streams. You can also put a bowl of water out overnight during a full moon in order to consecrate it. I use rye or oats for the earth element; salt is traditional but it is not good for the earth. (Remember your history, how the Romans salted the land when they conquered Carthage so that nothing could grow there). I seldom do circle work, but when I do I make the circle with alcohol, grains or consecrated water.

Offerings to the powers you work with are important to me. It is a gift for a gift. Some beings like alcohol as an offering, and you can make this appropriate. For example, you can use mead for the Norse goddesses and whiskey for Celtic goddesses. Absinthe is a great symbol for poison or anything green and nasty. Port, being sweet and sticky, is a good Red Goddess/Babalon form of alcohol. You can drink some, or just use it on an altar or as a libation. If you are not able to drink alcohol, substitute with rich cordial or juice. Use candles that are an appropriate colour, like green for Arachne or red for Lilith. With regard to incense, Dragon’s Blood is great for almost anything but it is good to consider the culture you are playing in. Myrrh and Frankincense for Egyptian or Coptic deities for example, rose or jasmine for the sex goddesses. I don't use a lot of music, but I have used drumming tracks, rattles and bells. For recorded music, I find it best not to be too literal but evoking an atmosphere is best. For truly Satanic rituals, I really recommend Beherit's second album Drawing Down the Moon. In short, try to line up all the senses in the direction of the power or deity you wish to work with.  In the end, it is up to you and you will find your way. 

Here are two examples of formal magic that were my own work:

THE COURT HOUSE WORKINGS

This was a piece of magic aimed at making a friend invisible from the criminal justice system. It had a definite Chaos Magic flavour. My friend made four sigils with their intent on them, expressed in four different ways, and charged the sigils with the ashes of burnt money, semen, vodka and blood. We then buried them at the north, south, east and west sides of the court house, Speaking to powers that governed those cardinal points as we went. When my friend went to the court house to change bail address, the officer could not find them in the system and consequently their curfew ended as well, by default. We were jubilant. It had worked in the most literal way! Unfortunately this friend went on to be a dick about it and committed a further offence, so it goes to show that the best magic is not worth anything if you undermine yourself. Magic is for real life. 

ROBIGALIA CEREMONY

Robigo was a Roman deity of grain rust or mildew. Robigalia was a festival in Rome involving a procession and animal sacrifice. I hadn't actually read anything about that festival, but I was intrigued by the idea of a deity of mildew. I am interested in dead energy. There must be thousands of powers, deities and wights who were once known to human people. Some of them are known only in a fragment of text. One of the rituals I did that had a great influence on me, was with the deity Baktiotha, who was a kind of star deity known to the Egyptians and related to the Christ child. Baktiotha is known only in fragment of recently discovered text. When you work with dead energy, you are bringing it back into the human world in a manner that is entirely yours. You have no idea what it will teach you, and you need to be a bit careful of what it might bring back with it. Robigo was dead energy in that way. Robigo also hearkened back to a genuinely animistic deep history, a spirit of small but significant things, a spirit who hinted of ruin, but who also might just tell me something about harvest and grain and bread and beer and the cooling of the seasons. I prepared an altar the colour of waving wheat, and put on it things a deity of mildew might like. Three different grains, beer, consecrated water, some berries. I wrote a ceremony and Spoke to Robigo respectfully, and drank some of the beer. 

As always, blessings on you, gentle reader.