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.