BODY FLUIDS - WELCOME TO THE PANGOLIN TRIBE

 

I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I can't drink coffee and the woman won't make no tea
I believe to my soul sweet mama gonna hoodoo me

-                                                -  Blind Lemon Jefferson, ‘Blind Southern Blues’

For me, sexual fluids, blood and piss are sacred. I suggest you treat them the same way.

I have mentioned in previous posts the anthropology around this, but I will recap to make this post more standalone. A valuable take on this is still Mary Douglas’ ‘Purity and Danger’, her seminal (haha) work published in 1966. Following Durkheim, Douglas explores the notion of dirt and its cultural symbols. Two of her ideas are useful here:

1.     Dirt is something out of place. Ketchup is not dirt on your sausages but it is when it falls on the floor. Soil is clean in the garden but not on your shoes.

2.     Dirt is also something that is in between states. Here Douglas cites Sartre’s essay on stickiness. Stickiness is repulsive to us because it is in between a liquid and a solid. It is thus disconcerting because it behaves like neither. We do not know what to expect.

Something can be sacred in its place, when it does what is expected of it, and when it is considered clean. Something can be profane when it is where it shouldn’t be, or it is in between states.

Body fluids are not dirty when they are inside the body. But the body is porous and this is perplexing. Blood, piss and sexual fluids are problematic because they enter and leave the body. Menstrual blood is particularly so, for many cultural reasons but because it leaves the body spontaneously and is associated with other powerful and cultural ideas about fecundity and the traditional magic of women. 

Very problematic things can be both deeply profane and greatly sacred at the same time, or depending on what is done with them. Things of the body often fall into this category. The Aghori, Left Hand Path Sadhus of India, deliberately deal in defilement. They drag the bodies of dead humans from out of the River Ganges, which itself is holy, and eat them or sit on them and meditate. Some of the highest Tantric rituals involve ingesting the substances of the body such as faeces. Thus the Sadhu or Yogi develops a practice where to the pure, all things are pure, and transgression serves as sanctification. This is called antinomianism, and it is sometimes considered a theological ‘out’ for people to behave badly. Like, I am way too spiritual to obey your silly laws. However, true antinomianism is a discipline and involves doing things you don’t want to. It is not your desires that are sacred, but your actions, how you play with the substance of those desires.

It is not only the things of the body that can be problematic. Some things are anomalous in themselves. According to Mary Douglas, avoiding these anomalous things strengthens the definitions to which they do not conform. For the Biblical Hebrews, the codification in Leviticus of what can and cannot be eaten helped to set them apart from others during a time when their identity was under threat. They could eat animals that had cloven hooves and chewed the cud, for example, as these animals were considered wholesome and clean. But what about pigs, which had cloven hooves but did not chew the cud? These animals were to be avoided. Just as it was unclean to mix fabrics in clothes, it was unclean to eat ‘mixed’ animals.

The Lele people of the Congo dealt with the issue of anomalous animals in a different fashion, not simply by avoiding them. Their most problematic animal was the pangolin. It was neither one thing nor another, and in a structural sense it was seen as being in between states in the same manner as stickiness. The pangolin had claws, climbed trees, and had scales. Yet it was not like other animals which had these features. Snakes had scales, and the Lele did not eat things with scales so they did not eat snakes. But they did eat animals that climb and had claws. For them the pangolin was a bit like those body fluids that are both very sacred and very profane. So there existed semi-secret pangolin tribe of very high status men, who had fathered seven sons, and who engaged in certain rituals. They were the only ones allowed to eat the pangolin, and this expressed their power and influence as well as their innate magical ability to manage these dangerous contradictions.

So, welcome to the pangolin tribe. Because that is what we are, we magical hookers and happy bedroom magicians and vampires and Red Goddesses and Gods.  We manage dangerous contradictions and we deal in the sacred and the profane together. We are not disturbed by in-between states because we live there ourselves. We mix up our own weird stuff. We are a rare breed and we are powerful.

Of course we literally do deal with bodily substances and we do it safely so we and others are protected from disease. It is the cultural and symbolic element that makes it magickal. This is why we should respect body fluids. I suspect this is also why, in folk magick and hoodoo, body cast-offs such as hair, and blood, are used in spells. Or why poor Blind Lemon Jefferson couldn’t drink his coffee, because he feared his woman had put menstrual blood in it.

PISS

Urine is generally considered to be weaker magically than other body fluids, but I am mentioning it here first because it is such a common fetish for male clients. In magic, it is often considered along with other body fluids or just as something that might be more convenient or less noticeable than other more powerful things such as blood or sexual fluids. There are few rituals that use it alone. Although of course if you like it you could always make up your own! Notably, the psychoactive ingredients of the mushroom Amanita Muscaria don’t break down in the body and therefore it is possible to trip using the urine from humans or animals (often reindeer) who have ingested the mushrooms. I imagine sharing ‘shroom infused piss could have its magical aspect.

Urine used to be medicine, It was when early scientists discovered bacteria that urine came to be seen as dirty. Urine has been used for sores, burns, infections, nappy rash, ‘the vapours’ and to prep for surgery on battlefields. Science seems to come and go on its medical usefulness even now.

There is a correlation between healing and magic, as evidenced in our language. See above for the use of the Greek word pharmakon, for example. In a time when magic was what you did not who you are, medicine looked like magic and may have carried the same mystery, complexity and intuitive heft. And where there is curing, there is cursing. ‘All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison’ states Paracelsus, who was an alchemist as well as a chemist in the early sixteenth century.

If you treat piss as sacred you will see golden showers in a different light. You could consider it as a libation to a deity. Piss in a special consecrated vessel and offer it up. To yourSelf, your Goddess, the Earth, or your sexual partner or client. The showering aspect can also be treated as a purification rite. Let the piss flow over your body onto your roses!

SEXUAL FLUIDS

For the purposes of this book, sexual fluids are all sacred including yours. Treating them as such will incur the respect of any powers you work with, and does not undermine your safety. Infection control still applies.

In Tantra, the withholding of semen is a vital lesson for those who can produce semen. Cum-less orgasms are considered whole body/soul orgasms and are exercises in total control and self discipline. The metaphysical mixing of red and white, of cum and blood, or of male and female energies, creates the juice by which the kundalini snake rises from the sacral chakra where it lies, curled, and propels the yogi into enlightenment.

This is a lifetime study as I have mentioned before and I know little of it. Sex workers who claim to be tantrika often aren’t. It is worth examining such claims carefully. Learn what you can. Being mindful and intuitive and generically spiritual with your clients or partners is not tantra.

Tantra also falls prey to the binary tradition of male and female energies. I think real life is a lot messier than this, thank the Red Goddess. We are a mixture of energies and of course our first sexual experiences are usually solo. This sort of yoni and lingam stuff also makes no account of any other sexual experience than heterosexual. And traditionally it the male yogi who benefits.

I can say something about the power of sexual fluids and make some suggestions as to their quick and dirty use.

Sexual fluids are essential to anoint or consecrate magical tools, potions or general items. They are an intimate part of you, after all. They breached the body, they are indicative of those dangerous in-between states of things mentioned above. Many cultures consider them to be unclean. Use them to charge sigils (of more later) or place them directly onto your altar to indicate your magical intention. Drinking or eating them empowers you – you are literally empowering yourSelf. Ejaculate into a cup or your hand, or spread vaginal fluid onto a wafer, or lick it off your athame. Then charge it by dedicating it to the powers you work with, as part of a larger ritual or just by making a short punchy magical statement.  Then ingest it.  So mote it be, or whatever.

I have done this with clients, but it is the kind of thing that horrifies many men, and I am surprised who is shocked by this. Choose your partner wisely!

Now the endless debate – spit or swallow. Apart from the issue of infection control, I consider swallowing cum to be taking in a form of spiritual essence. In that sense it is vampiric. During my whoring days I would become empowered by it. If I did it several times a day, by the end of the day I would feel like more than myself. I would have had my share of oxytocin for sure. Take it in your mouth, and then dribble it into your partner’s mouth. If your partner has a penis, using your tongue, or a clean instrument such as a urethral rod, open out the eye of the cock and drip in the cum. Or blow it into their ass (gently, unless you want them hurt).  

These are simpler methods of an old magical practice. In that form of sex magic, the man charges his semen in the vessel of the woman’s cunt. Then he removes it from her, in that charged state, and uses it for his own purposes. It might be to make a magical ‘child’, which is often in more modern times considered to be a creative project rather than a literal child. It may be for his own magical ritual. The cunt (or the ass) is the vessel, but it is the ejaculating partner who takes the active role and is thus in charge of the charging, so to speak.

Austin Osman Spare, an early twentieth century magician who is sometimes considered the founder of chaos magic, developed a solo version. He made clay vessels with narrow necks into which he could ejaculate. He buried the vessels, adding to their contents from time to time. He maintained that these vessels provided effective magical power.

I am suggesting something different. In the examples given above, the woman, or male bottom, or any bottom, is not just the vessel. They have taken the essence of the male, and they do with it as they choose. Receptivity is not passivity. Taking his essence puts you in charge, because you’ve got it and he hasn’t. The other aspect of this is your own fluids are also in magical play here. This is a mixing of fluids, essences or vital forces.

I don’t have experience of this sort of sexual fluid magic from an LGBTQI+ point of view. However I did practise magic with a gay male friend and the sense I had of how he worked was that by alternating topping and bottoming it is possible to get the same sense of balance that is more obviously attainable by people of opposite identifying sex.

BLOOD

Use your blood in magic for anointing precious objects, tools or sigils. Blood is a sacrifice, in that you are giving up part of yourself in order to gain passage to non-ordinary reality. Nightside entities are particularly interested in it. It can also be used in potions and in the folksier types of magic to influence people without consent.

Use only a drop. It’s your blood after all. Don’t give away too much of it. Use a diabetic lancet and just prick a finger.

This sort of blood sacrifice must be distinguished from self-harm. If you harm yourself by cutting, you risk developing an unnecessarily complicated relationship with blood work. Self-harm by cutting changes your state of consciousness by releasing hormones such as dopamine and anandamide. Letting out a drop of blood to anoint a sacred object does not in itself change your state of consciousness. It is the dedication of it to the work at hand that does that. You might say that it is the conscious willingness to make the sacrifice that does it. Blood sacrifice should be self-limiting unless there are particular reasons to give more blood. There are reasons, for example making art or writing, but in general a drop is sufficient. 

OTHER THINGS

Some people use spit as a magical fluid. Blind Lemon Jefferson's woman could have spat in his drink. Think of the associations of contempt we have with spit. 

Some use breath, which contains and symbolizes our life force. Breathing on an object is sometimes done. 

Shit - no. I can imagine this as a great test of the magician's ability to break taboos. It can also be a sexual fetish. But really, no.  

The principle here is that magical toggle between sacred and profane. This is best done with respect, for the deities or powers you work with, the fluid or material itself, and for yourSelf. 

As always, blessings on you, gentle reader.