As I ended up stalling halfway through series 3 of Battlestar Galactica, I skipped over Amy Kind’s discussion of Cylon identity when I heard her spoiler warning—straight to Erik Davis‘ discussion of “the Imaginal”.

This term was coined (or, at least, popularized—if even that is the right word) by the French scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, in an attempt to distinguish the realm of visionary reality that holds its own between the worlds of pure matter and pure spirit, from the “merely imaginary”.

I’ve become aware of Corbin’s work via James Hillman, but I’ve yet to dive into what I gather are the immense depths of his writings. The Imaginal is a slippery concept, and I suppose getting any kind of grasp on it involves either the arcane, discursive tactics of complex intellectual perspectives, or a form of mirroring it in allusive artistic expressions.

Characteristically, Erik manages to hold his own between these two, conducting an engagingly loquacious trip through the term’s ramifications in philosophy, rooted in psychedelic encounters and his “tactical skepticism”. It’s as thorough and sophisticated a refutation of the fundamentalist materialism of Dawkins et al. as I’ve heard of late, all the more potent for its pointed yet light embrace of doubt and disbelief. An excellent primer in the Mundus Imaginalis that can be imbibed on the way to work. Do check it out.

Another recently posted Davis fix worth checking out is his talk from last year’s Burning Man festival on ‘The Imagination and the Environment’. Vital issues, discussed by Erik & audience with aplomb.

Betty, the hook-making crow in a lab in Oxford, probably got the ball rolling, easily out-performing the rudimentary tool skills of chimps:

Then we saw the crows from Osaka, not directly fashioning tools, but demonstrating a kind of planning ingenuity that will drop the jaw of anyone who’s grown up with the word “animal” having connotations of “dumb and brutish”:

But while such tricks make great web distractions, they only breach the crumbling wall between humans and animals in the science-friendly realm of functional, practical behaviour. What about those shiftier areas, such as emotion, with all its attendant complexities and pathologies?

Our culture has a see-saw relationship with perception of emotions in animals. Sometimes it seems like the debate is divided cleanly in two, with criticisms of sentimental anthropomorphism flying one way, and protests about the species-centric, Christian-Cartesian separation of humans from nature going the other.

We don’t find “truth” at some magical fulcrum point between the two, though. Both sides have validity, but they’re just like kids hooked on the simple back-and-forth fun of the see-saw rocking. (OK, the metaphor breaks down badly here, as this sort of polarized debate is usually anything but simple fun…) Truths start to emerge when bums get sore, they get off the ride, and have a chat.

Then they slowly discover that “reductionist” science’s view of humans’ place in nature, based ostensibly on the Darwinian revolution, has indeed retained a few too many prejudices from Christianity and Cartesian proto-science. As Stephen Jay Gould often maintains, Darwin’s revolution has not been completed. Our evolution introduced some hugely important variations and complexities into the animal world, but we really haven’t fully embraced the idea of our place in an evolutionary continuum with animals.

The see-saw opponents also start to realize as they converse that touchy-feely sentimentality about animals has been one of the only refuges for perception of this continuum in our deeply Christian world. As an increasingly repressive society makes extremists out of its moderates, the lack of real appreciation for the resonance that the deeper levels of our emotional and psychic make-up find with other life-forms have distorted this resonance badly, dulling it to nothing here, leaving it to ramp up uncontrollably there.

How have the vestiges of the Christian-Cartesian split between humans and other animals distorted our self-image? In ways too numerous to mention here; I’ll narrow things down to one example that’s come up twice for me recently: chimp violence.

I’m a great admirer of Howard Bloom, especially his ability to see clearly through sentimental images of nature when the evidence of science demands it. However, in his book The Lucifer Principle, in his chapter titled ‘Mother Nature, The Bloody Bitch’, he makes blunders as he tries to demolish any resistance we may have built up to the image of nature as “red in tooth and claw”.

First off, he makes the embarrassing mistake of conflating and confusing “violence” and “war”. He tries to debunk Richard Leakey’s claim that southern Africa’s !Kung demonstrate the absence of war in non-agricultural societies by rallying evidence that they have a relatively high murder rate. He neglects to mention whether the situation that yielded this murder rate in the study he cites might have been affected by the influence of agricultural societies. Even so, homicide and war are, in the terms of Bloom’s own argument, different kettles of fish altogether.

Regarding violence among chimps, he naturally brings to bear Jane Goodall‘s famed studies, where she “discovered war among the chimpanzees, a discovery she hoped she would never make.” The implicit message of this, and most such use of primate studies (especially studies of violence), is that in looking at chimps, because they’re 99% genetically identical to us, we’re looking at our own hard-wired nature. As Bloom’s colourful language has it, “our biological legacy weaves evil into the substrate of even the most ‘unspoiled’ society.”

However, all may not be as it seems. For starters, Jason Godesky at Anthropik.com recently posted an extract from a review of Margaret Power’s book The Egalitarians – Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization, which is worth re-quoting in full here:

Essentially, Power argues that because human hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees in the wild share the same ecological niche, their social organization is remarkably similar. The qualifier, in the wild, is significant, inasmuch as the dominant paradigm in chimpanzee studies today derives from the later work of Jane Goodall, who reports that the animals are strongly territorial, aggressive, and dominance-seeking. Whereas Goodall’s analysis might support a theory of phylogenetic continuity for similar, biologically inherent, agonistic qualities in humans, Power’s important contribution is to show that Goodall’s conclusions may rest principally on the “unnatural” environment that Goodall herself created for the apes in order to facilitate observation of their behavior.

When Goodall began her naturalistic studies of chimpanzees in 1960 in the Gombe National Park area of Tanzania, she was a distinctly non-participant observer. After some years of patiently tracking apes over large areas, Goodall discovered that she could lure animals into a more or less permanent presence around her camp, thereby improving opportunities to observe social interaction, by baiting the camp with supplies of bananas. Indeed, this was an inspired notion. According to Power, it worked too well.

Power maintains that the change that Goodall engineered in the food supply warped the chimpanzees’ conduct and social organization more or less permanently. Power pursues the argument by examining the differences between Goodall’s observations prior to the artificial feeding regimen and the subsequent findings. Goodall herself does not rely much on the results of her early work.

Power argues that, like human hunter-gatherers, chimpanzees in the wild roam widely, rarely confronting each other in direct competition over food. Goodall’s artificial feeding, practiced from 1964 to 1968, introduced direct competition among the apes for the first time. Bunched around the feeding boxes and often frustrated by not obtaining the bananas (which were doled out according to specific schedules), the animals began to engage in more intense forms of competitive, aggressive, and threatening behavior than was known to occur in the wild.

A couple of days after reading this, I was reading the recent “Psyche & Nature”-themed Spring Journal, specifically an essay called ‘Trans-Species Psychology’ by G. A. Bradshaw & Mary Watkins. In arguing for the extension of psyche outside the human realm that we’ve habitually confined it in, they note that “humans alone have been considered to possess the capacity to be un-natural.” We possess mind, psyche, or soul, which gives us our ability to behave in ways that respond in a much more sophisticated way to the environment than the “hard-wired” genetics of “mere nature”.

If we avoid the hard-line behaviourism that seeks to overcome this dualism by erasing psyche from the map completely, we might admit that in observing chimpanzee behaviour, we aren’t necessarily looking at some image of what our biological nature is “in itself”. We would realize that we need to be sensitive to psyche’s role in the scene – with its inevitable corollary, psychopathology. Obviously Goodall’s apparent artificial distortion of “natural” chimp behaviour is an extreme instance of this. But even genuine observations in the field may not be revelations of our encoded genetic inheritance; they may be contingent psychological aberrations, influenced by a complex network of forces in the immediate environment.

Of course, this isn’t to argue that our genetic inheritance is “clean”, wholly bereft of unfortunate traits. In fact, it means that as we open our emotional identities to the animal kingdom, we’ll find resonance with instances of cruelty and pathology as well as with instincts to love and nurture.

Humans are plainly the most deviant, pathologized creature around. But finding cruelty in nature may not always be a cue to justify human foibles as “natural”; it may indicate that our struggles with the tumultuous difficulties of psychic life are not ours alone.

I just had an enquiry about doing an interview on the C-Realm Podcast site. A current wave of research – my enthusiasm for the ideas finding each other before me and transforming as I simmer them – overcame my initial trepidation about doing a spoken interview.

And then I stopped. I realized that this is exactly the wrong time to let that enthusiasm loose; it needs to be held close, protected, gestated, cooked. I’m hoping to get some writing out of it. So, no interview. Hopefully someone will be interested in interviewing me when I’ve got all these churning thoughts pinned down with words, and before I get bored with the whole thing!

This all got me thinking about the discrepancy I find between my writing and my speech. Most people have it, I suppose. Some people don’t have it much, and some carefully craft their writing to follow their speech patterns; some (usually academics and scientists) allow their speech to get taken over by the formalities of the written word, and others accept or even encourage the split.

Is it a split? Allen Ginsberg used to say that the voice is the link between the body and the spirit; the neck is the bridge between torso and head, channeling the breath, the living spirit, to work with material vibrations in a sonic union. (I’m not even paraphrasing here, just my words spinning off from his idea…) It’s certainly a view I’ve a lot of time for, and one that’s fruitful to keep close by when studying the use of voice in spiritual traditions.

But what about the hands? When writing and speech are placed in opposition, it seems intuitive that speech is more of the body, more spontaneous and connected to our physical animality. Whereas writing is more intellectual, more minded, reflective and “civilized”. And yet the mouth sits right up there in our head; while the hands, the vehicles of writing, are way away from the brain, that organ which conventionally carries “mind” in our culture.

Writing has its isolation, allowing a retraction from the world into psychic reflection. But perhaps there’s something in this bodily symbolism which helps turn our conventional conceptions upside-down, to break down this oppositional “split” idea. We can begin to see in speech less groundedness, more flighty airiness, perhaps a little vulnerable to being seized by passing breezes of thought. And in writing we can see the tool-wielding craft of handiwork, sentences wrought on the keyboard or pressed in thick dark ink onto the pulped remains of trees.

Each mode has its own blend of elemental forces, and discerning these starts to break down those tired oppositional perceptions.

After seeing Werner Herzog’s brilliant documentary Grizzly Man, about zealous environmentalist Timothy Treadwell and his eventual death in the jaws of the bears he became obsessed with, I could write a lot about it. I’m immersed in studying the history of our conceptions of wilderness, and how civilization has positioned itself with regard to nature, and this film is a vital meditation on the whole subject. I’ll try and just throw out some ideas that have come to me in its wake.

The film’s tagline, “nature has boundaries”, is a strong theme in a book I’m reading called Nature & Psyche by David W. Kidner (review coming soon). Kidner sees nature and culture as inextricably intertwined, and would probably add to this tagline the observation that “culture is alive”. There are distinctions to be made between the two, but it’s a destructive mistake to create a dualism out of them.

Treadwell’s fixation with trying to immerse himself in the bears’ world is plainly, as Herzog observes, a fear of civilization (not to mention a deathwish). It’s deluded and fated because he has absorbed the dualism of nature/culture so deeply that he can only run from one to the other, missing their interactions as well as their uniquenesses along the way. Treadwell romanticizes nature in ways that make rednecks and science-worshippers froth at the mouth, and intelligent environmentalists cringe; it’s all love, tear-filled rushes of sentiment and breathless wonder (until you get eaten). But then, Herzog stakes his claim at the opposite end. For him, nature is “chaos, hostility, and murder”. He’s plainly as bad an ecological thinker as Treadwell, with an equally one-dimensional view.

But then, the film is wonderfully pitched, with compassion, curiosity and admiration mixed seamlessly with hard criticism. Treadwell is painfully easy to ridicule, as a trawl through YouTube reveals. I’m fascinated by how Herzog, armed with such a blinkered view of nature on the one hand, can craft such a sophisticated portrait of such a flawed human on the other. Given his strong opposition to Treadwell’s take on the wild, his tolerance and compassionate vision are something to learn from.

The interview with Alutiiq Museum director Sven Haakanson revealed how the lack of connection to nature in our culture was the root of Treadwell’s fatal obsession with “becoming a bear”. This native Alaskan observes that, “Where I grew up, bears avoid us and we avoid them.” I don’t know the cultural specifics of Alutiiq culture; but it’s hard not to also think in this context of the widespread permeation of animal images and figures in the lore and rituals of traditional cultures—not to mention the frequent transitions between animal and human forms in shamanic visions and world mythology. In Animal Spirits, Piers Vitebsky notes:

In North American mythology the grizzly bear was believed to have once walked on two legs like a human and to have killed its prey with a club. Brown bears are uncannily like humans in their ability to stand and walk upright. Even on all fours, the bear walks like a human on the soles of its feet, instead of on its toes like a dog. To this day, the startling appearance of a standing grizzly evokes ancient beliefs of the close identity between man and bear. (p. 76)

No doubt such myths fed Treadwell’s obsession. But, unlike the native cultures, whose close engagement with both the exterior world of nature and the interior nature of the spirit feeds a sophisticated cultural understanding of connections and boundaries, Treadwell’s background in a literalist monotheistic-scientistic culture—and his unhinged stupidity—doomed him to a disrespectful, ultimately fatal transgression into the wild.

Is there a difference delineated here between animism and anthropomorphism? The former is the belief that nature is sentient and alive, and the latter is the attribution of human characteristics to non-humans. As our natural animistic tendencies have been gradually repressed, the first part of the concept to go was the idea that there is any kind of intelligence and awareness other than human intelligence and awareness. Thus denied a free play among nature, our animism came to be distorted and squeezed into simplistic anthropomorphism, popping out here and there in confused projections of humanness onto creatures that have their own intrinsic nature.

Treadwell couldn’t see that yes, bears are intelligent and aware, but they are not human-hearted. His culture failed to integrate animism, leaving this evolved response to the world to fester in the sentimentality of Disney. I don’t agree with Herzog’s cold view of the natural world, but Grizzly Man is a potent and necessary antidote to the excesses of anthropomorphism in our crass, polarized culture.

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 24th-26th June 2004
• Venue: The Forum, Bath

It emerged on the last day of this eclectic 3-day conference that its genesis lay in Christian Rätsch’s observation at Psychoactivity several years ago that the UK seemed to lack the kind of coherence in its psychedelic scene that resulted in conferences. A brave attempt to address this curious deficiency, and simultaneously to broaden the agenda, to embrace other perspectives, avoid any psychedelic ghetto – to learn from diversity – Exploring Consciousness could have resulted in much more conflict and confusion than was evident. What resulted was surprisingly fruitful and wonderfully stimulating: a heady, convivial mixture of days spent mainlining information in half-hour bursts, and evenings spent allowing this new data to percolate and recombine amidst socialising, beer, boating and dancing. Speakers may have disagreed violently about whether gods and spirits reside in our brains or in some hyperdimensional otherworld; but wherever they were, they were fully behind this event.

The first morning wasn’t too auspicious, finding William Bloom and Susan Blackmore arguing the toss over various dualistic cat-fights about mind, body, reality and causality. Talking later to fellow occultural dilettante Mark Pilkington about Nicholas Mann (a speaker on the third day who pitched into the same muddled scrap), he pegged this arena of philosophy as the domain of teenage acid-heads. There’s truth in that, and perhaps less time and paper would be wasted in academic philosophy if the more professors had once been teenage acid-heads—you know, been through the stage where it seems crucial to really know whether the chicken or the egg came first, and emerged into the maturity of seeing the conundrum as a playful cycle, or a mystery to be respectfully left alone. That’s not to say I think we should all ape some earthy mystic stereotype and dismiss all such debate as so much verbiage; we may apply Hakim Bey’s position on the apparently anchorless nature of language to these specific topics, and allow a sense of overflowing play into proceedings, letting these essentially groundless but fascinating old philosophical chestnuts loose in the world without the kind of gravity that traps us in their infuriating orbits. Each of these speakers had something to say, but fundamentalisms such as Blackmore’s strident Darwinism (rivalled in the conference only by Christian Rätsch’s claim that LSD is "the Holy Grail of western civilisation") often crush valuable ideas in the dualistic clashes they engender.

My own reaction was that these people haven’t read enough Alan Watts. When Susan Blackmore related a reductionist view of the mind to the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, she was incredily engaging as a speaker; but at the conceptual level she was, in a way, treading very old ground, revisiting (presumably unwittingly) Watts’ lecture ‘The Individual As Man/World‘ from 40 years ago – with far less elegant conclusions. Max Velmans fared a little better, with his "reflexive monism" critique of the "Cartesian theatre" model of consciousness, but there was the sense that perhaps his linguistic toolbox, from the professional disciplines of psychology and philosophy, wasn’t equipped to vividly express the subtleties of his approach—certainly not within his allotted half-hour.

On this first day I also caught Sheri Ritchlin, who fell foul of the half-hour limit in a different sense, and didn’t really get to talk much about her ideas regarding 2012. She was the first, but not the last person I heard mentioning the 2012 date—this confluence of McKenna-motivated trippers and broad-minded astrologers was bound to bring this "end-date" to the fore, especially given the very recent Venus Transit, and its partner in this rare temporal region, the Venus Transit in June 2012. Even more interesting was the fact that Ritchlin’s theories pointed towards 2012 with both Mesoamerican and Chinese evidence, apparently independent of Terence McKenna (whose mushroom-fuelled imagination fashioned a signpost to 2012 from the I Ching before he encountered the Mayan calendar). I’ll certainly be tracking down Ritchlin’s book on her I Ching studies, One-Ing, and her Venus Transits study, Fields of Light: The Heart of Quetzalcoatl Becomes One with the Heart of Heaven (she advised people to email her if interested in this study).

Next I intended to go to a talk about MDMA research, but ended up in the wrong seminar room listening to astrologer Bernadette Brady expounding Complexity Theory. Deciding to go with the flow, I was very pleasantly surprised. I’ve never had much time for astrology—more out of a lack of personal resonance with it than any reasoned dismissal. But Brady’s entertaining and stimulating talk, while obviously not able to fully unravel her theories, certainly went some way to framing it with concepts that make it more attractive to my mind. The gist of her position seemed to be that anti-entropic phenomena occur in the slim "phase transitions" between systemic stability and systemic chaos, and from these evolve patterns, cycles and rhythms, in both physical and psychic systems, that mediate between "structure" and "surprise" in the life of these systems. Hence emerges an information model of myths and archetypes, and possibly a more sophisticated framework for astrology’s pluralism. It seems that that other woolly pseudo-science with a bad rep—economics—is getting wiser through Complexity Theory, with a major difference: economics has money. If astrology piggy-backs on this research, with eloquent proponents like Brady, I might be spreading zodiacal memes before long.

Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, gave a succinct overview of his work with MAPS and their vision for the future. It’s easy to forget that something similar to Doblin’s model of worldwide clinics distributing licenses to use psychedelics was originally propounded by the chemical trickster himself, Tim Leary. Of course, his excited, expanded consciousness got bored with this idea and he opted for mass proselytizing. Doblin—with sound reasons—advocates a return to a steady chipping-away at monolithic opposition to psychedelics, and "change from within the system". He naturally got heckled by the more extremely libertarian psychonauts, but once he reassured them he was advocating his current model as a cultural stop-gap, not as some "ideal" situation of state-sanctioned altered states, the audience united in applauding his obviously groundbreaking efforts to integrate these substances into our society.

Serena Roney-Dougal spoke lucidly enough on her "yogic parapsychological perspective on consciousness", but not with enough novelty of approach to leave much of an impression in my mind. The final speaker, author, lecturer and architect Charles Jencks, was another kettle of fish altogether. His blazing, effortless intellect was (when I wasn’t having trouble keeping up with it) a joy to behold, as he unravelled the ideas embedded in the project he details in his book, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. From the slides he shared with us, this conceptual landscape (located in Dumfries, Scotland) looked stunning, a magnificent balance between earthy expression and abstracted refinements. Conceived as "a landscape that celebrates the new sciences of complexity and chaos theory", its sculptured installations and moulded topography form a series of meditations on our conceptions of the origins and destiny of the cosmos. My notebook from that day bears no trace from his talk; I was totally occupied with following his ideas. I’m just left with a clear mental Post-It note: "Look further into this guy’s work".

That evening some of us gathered for a leisurely boat trip on the River Avon, a great chance to break any remaining first-day social ice, and to eat, drink, and merrily dodge low bridges. I ended up chatting to one of the speakers whose talk I missed, Reverend Kevin Tingay, whose open-minded faith was as refreshing as the night air. Considering that the wonderful Art Deco venue for the conference, The Forum, is owned by the Bath Christian Trust, and that many speakers dealt unashamedly with the occult, the conference added greatly to my sense of health in west country Christianity, a sense initiated a while ago by the Bishop of Bath and Wells’ traditional, and usually well-received sermon at Glastonbury Festival.

The next morning, Ann Shulgin regaled us with a frank discussion of her highly bizarre, non-drug altered states—or, more precisely, state—that recurred throughout her early life, until the age of 25. The singular visionary experience of embracing infinite space, which she came to call "The Spiral", obviously affected her profoundly, and bore witness to the strangeness of human consciousness as well as any of the trip stories that emerged through the conference. The subsequent presentation, Philippa Berry’s exploration of recent continental philosophy and its conception of "the event" (Heidegger’s Ereignis) couldn’t have formed a sharper contrast to Shulgin’s personal anecdotes. Looking at mass (rather than personal) consciousness, and approaching it academically (rather than informally), I have to admit that I was left at the end with not much more than "9/11 was a shocking event". Another half-hour victim, Berry’s obvious intelligence couldn’t give any real background to those like me who have yet to wrestle with any philosophers (in the strict sense of the word) past Wittgenstein, and subtleties that other people explained to me later were lost.

Next up was Julian Vayne on "The Magickal Art of Drugs". I’ve always harboured regret for encountering psychedelics in a profane context, one with some concessions to seeing past the "just for kicks" paradigm, but essentially providing no real framework for processing the psychic materials they fish out of the mind’s depths. Vayne was luckier, experiencing his first acid trip—one of scarily/hilariously misjudged dosage—after 4 years of occult practice and meditation, and was able to navigate the ensuing chaos using the Qabalistic Tree of Life. This synergy of energy and form could be sensed underpinning his talking style, which is both enthused and clear. He gave a good potted history of magickal models for the uninitiated—from Levi’s Will to the Golden Dawn’s Imagination, to the Belief and Trance that comprise the toolbox of Chaos. He made a compelling case for occult techniques and chemical aids being fruitful partners, pointing out, for instance, that the discerning mind fostered by occult training is of great use in dealing with the tricksterish "plant teachers" that one may meet in mushroom or ayahuasca visions.

Chas Clifton‘s subsequent rummage through the minefield of European witchcraft scholarship in search of the fabled "flying ointments" gave us a good critical baseline: you will find what you want in this arena. Obviously Clifton’s own conclusions—that these ointments had other more mundane medicinal uses, and that their use as psychoactives was probably more analagous to contemporary recreational codeine abuse than any form of organised religious sacrament—need to be subject to his own caveat, but he came across as an engaged, honest inquirer, one who had been through a period of "believing" in the reality of the Old Religion, but had emerged with a more reserved, critical appraisal.

As I learned through accidentally catching Bernadette Brady, it’s often wise to go for talks you might not be immediately interested in. It’s learning, remember? But I sorely regret missing both David Luke and Andy Letcher on various psychedelic topics in favour of Nicholas Mann. At the end of this day, down the pub, a Tasmanian guy piped up with an idea I’ve cherished for a while now: getting rid of the word "just", when used in the sense of "Consciousness is just a product of the brain". At this level, nothing is just anything. I chipped in with my observation that this kind of linguistic avoidance of complexity is usually only encountered in materialist reductionism. Spiritual reductionism is equally philosophically repugnant to me, but there seems to be a healthier attitude involved. People who reduce the world to matter very often belittle matter—and thus reveal their contempt for the world—with "just". Those for whom the non-material is the fundamental ground of being usually, at least, have some sense of awe and respect towards the world they (mistakenly, I think) apprehend. Nicholas Mann falls clearly into the latter group; but as his focus was directly on his spiritual ontological foundations, his reverence for spirit came across to me as an annoying exaggeration of his fallacy. The dynamic of his argument would be familiar to anyone who’s taken the several milliseconds necessary to see through the "two-party" political system. He rightly and ably demolished the opposition’s stance, ridiculing it as "Frankensteinian": put all the bits of matter together, jam loads of energy through it, and hey presto! Consciousness! Demonstrating the absurdity of this extreme segues swiftly (and deceptively) into advocating its rival, expressed with deliberate, awed tones that connote authority, appealing to people’s dualistic pleasure in finding the exact opposite of an established position to be true. "Don’t you see?! Not the chicken, the egg!" (For me, George Clinton settled the debate a while ago: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Depends on who’s gettin’ laid.")

The bona fide psychedelic luminary Alexander Shulgin—just closing in on his eightieth year—injected some much-needed verve and colour into the afternoon, and although he struggled throughout with his dentures, he was entertaining enough for everyone to give him plenty of leeway as he intermittently cursed and fumed. A true explorer, he raised questions rather than offered answers. He related a fascinating incident where a schizophrenic identified his own brain’s PET scan from the patterns formed by the trace substance (he knew the shape from his hallucinations). And naturally tales of his famed self-experimentation emerged, detailing bizarre experiments in using psychedelic consciousness to manipulate matter and time. Then Amanda Fielding, famed for her self-trepanation, presented her overview of human evolution. She took a prudently diverse approach to the origins of consciousness, citing the "Aquatic Ape theory" (the idea that human ancestors once adopted a semi-aquatic lifestyle, accounting for attributes such as our lack of hair and upright posture), dietary factors involving fish oils that are especially nutritious to neural tissues, and psychedelic plants, as all contributing to our current capacities for awareness. Her grand arc across the development of consciousness led to her introducing The Beckley Foundation, a charity set up to promote research into the neurophysiology of consciousness. This, along with Rick Doblin’s mention of American pot-head billionaires putting good amounts of financial backing towards psychedelic research, and the small but significant "corporate training" contingent at the conference, gave the encouraging impression of vital issues around consciousness getting at least some of the attention they deserve from the sectors of society with tangible leveraging power. The anarchist in us will leap around wildly with impassioned words of caution at this prospect, but the picture painted here was cause for some optimism.

TechGnosis author Erik Davis rounded off the second day with a compelling update on his ongoing investigations into the convergence between consciousness and technology. Psychedelics are frequently envisioned as technology, as tools, but Davis advocated a slight but significant shift in viewpoint, to see them as media—information tools. He related chats with experienced 20 year-old psychonauts from the west coast rave scene, who, he was fascinated to discover, talked of their experiences with new designer compounds with unselfconscious audio-visual tech metaphors. They seemed fascinated by the "gimmicky" surface sheen of the visionary realm, and related it to their experiences of manipulating sound and light with technology. Many people would turn off at this point, dismayed at the banalisation of gnosis. But Davis held true to his generous vision of the ambiguity of both spirit and technology—their Trickster nature—and, looking back to Baroque theatre, with its lavish use of "special effects" to convey the supernatural, suggested that postmodern culture’s collision of styles and techniques, with the gnostic rush of Hollywood f/x, multimedia psychedelic events and vital borderlands between the sacred and profane, maybe be seen as a development of "neo-Baroque". Further, he reminded us that the earliest forms of art, palaeolithic cave art, contain various geometric motifs (zig-zags, dots and grids) that many believe signify the pre-visionary motifs of shamanic trance. The implication is that as a culture we may well be a little too transfixed by the preliminaries of gnosis—the "special effects"—but this at least indicates our collective orientation, teetering on the tricksy brink of genuine visionary breakthrough.

It’s fitting that Davis conducted the last interview with Terence McKenna before his untimely death. There’s no real successor to McKenna, with his unique combination of swift humour, grandiose/absurd vision and linguistic alchemy. But Davis certainly shares with McKenna a rare facility that combines the complexity and playful paradox of psychedelic perception with the accessible vividness of metaphor that arises from a constantly active, imaginal intellect. Volleying perspectives back and forth over beer with Erik was one of the more memorable and pleasurable aspects of this conference for me.

A well-earned lie-in meant I missed the first couple of speakers on the Saturday morning, though I met Graham Harvey at lunch, and was pleased to hear he had been flying the Wattsian flag of open-ended dialectics, as opposed to the pantomimic back-and-forth of dualism so much in evidence. The first talk I caught was by former Director of Strategic Innovation at Saatchi and Saatchi, Stephen Fitzpatrick, on ‘Social Dreaming: A Practise in Search of a Theory’. Fitzpatrick peppered his rapid-fire talk with quotes from key surrealists, to provide some points of reference, but, as the title asserts, the foundation for this new phenomenon is the practice. A group of people gather and, supervised by a facilitator, share their dreams. There is no therapeutic intent, so people’s past and personal (waking) lives are not directly related to. Rather, through free association, the facilitator encourages participants to weave connections between each other’s dreams. A working hypothesis is that this process provides access to "the ‘substratum’ of feelings, thoughts and emotions that are integral to all social relations and social groupings which are not readily available for considered exploration and discussion in social groups, as they are unattended and not acknowledged." In any case, Fitzpatrick testified that astonishing things seem to occur as this process deepens, with people discovering potent insights into their lives in other people’s dreams, thus exposing the (as yet unexplained) social nature of deep psychic processes. Repeated sessions tend to generate bizarre synchronicities, and leave some ill-prepared participants on the verge of breakdown (naturally this is one of the aspects that warrant a trained facilitator). I have to say that it was this talk that introduced the most fascinating new concepts to me. Just before the conference I started personal dreamwork, using techniques of analysis that treat the dream as a self-consistent whole, avoiding (initially, at least) any reference to my waking life, to interpretive theories, mythologies, or other symbol systems. This process in itself reveals the astonishing internal logic of dreams, forming a basis for associations with other dreams, and eventually "real" life that is much more faithful to the dream itself. Social Dreaming seems to be the natural and obvious (though initially perplexing) extension of this methodology into the social sphere, showing the way for potentially incredible new ways of integrating the non-rational into our collective being.

The idea of dreams as hermetic, revelatory creative expressions from the unconscious is powerful. "My God! It’s a work of art!" I thought to myself as I broke a dream of mine down as a literary critic might tease apart the deep structures of a poem. Psychologist Benny Shanon, author of The Antipodes of the Mind, a major recent study of ayahuasca experience, propounded a similar thesis regarding the ontological status of the visions induced by this jungle brew. He began with one of the burning questions that any inquiring person will bring up on surveying even a moderate number of records of ayahuasca visions: "Why are the motifs so idiosyncratic, and at the same time common to people from diverse backgrounds and cultures?" Jaguars, coloured snakes and fabulous jewelled cities are, he rightly argued, not the type of obviously universal experience that might take up residence in the Jungian "collective unconscious". So what’s the deal? Well, I can only assume Shanon addresses this issue in his book, because he managed to leave that key question wholly unresolved in his talk. His argument about the visions being imaginal artworks was interesting, but it begs that very question about thematic consistency. It should be noted, though, that he was very careful not to fall prey to the reductionist attitude. He refused the indigenous position of postulating an independent "spirit world", not out of any lack of respect for these cultures, but out of fidelity to his own, which I can respect. Further, he stressed that he had no intention to reduce the mystery—he was merely saying he thought this great mystery was in the human mind. But regarding the question he set himself at the beginning—no cigar.

Robin Matthews‘s talk on mysticism, game theory and consciousness was sparsely populated due to the (I imagine) fascinating presentation being given by Jon Atkinson on Salvia Divinorum and Piers Gibbon‘s (I imagine) fun seminar on the use of sound and song being given at the same time (we heard the raucous noises emanating from the latter!). Attention paid to Matthews was well rewarded, though, as he vocally meditated on mysticism as a "search for a meaning that exists beyond the language we use to find it", and knowledge of death as the basis for authentic life. Claudia Müller-Ebeling was a dynamic speaker, but in her presentation on aphrodisiacs she didn’t manage to fit in much that went beyond her slides of wonderful obscenely-shaped plants that serve, in the morphocentric worlds of the indigenous cultures that use them, as multi-faceted sexual stimulants. But I did love her idea of ingesting psychoactive substances as some form of somatic yoga, in that one’s anticipation of their effects forces one into a very direct focus on the here-and-now of your body’s internal sensations. Claudia’s partner Christian Rätsch then took us on a spirited trip through his ethnopharmacological experiences (he said that Shulgin defined ethnopharmacology as "taking strange drugs in strange places"). We were treated to a re-enactment of his transformation into a panther on his first acid trip, and a passionate affirmation of the value of being "a stranger in a strange land", as he evoked the transformative, often painful isolation induced by his fieldwork.

Nick Campion, a tutor from the Sophia Centre that co-organised the event, obviously felt a need to frame the appearance of the eminent astrologer Liz Greene in his introduction to this final speaker. He got some mild heckling for doing more than just saying, "Here’s Liz Greene" (perhaps from some Greene devotees eager for their guru), but his emphasis on the sky—specifically its axial Pole Star in the Northern Hemisphere—as the foundation of the western esoteric tradition, resonated strongly for me (the Pole Star is the one stellar phenomenon that I’ve ever been obsessed by), and seemed to contribute to an important current in this final day. We’d already heard Benny Shanon’s contested but admirable refusal to adopt Amazonian Indian ontology; and later, Christian Rätsch, for all his exoticism, eloquently espoused the importance of seeking our own spiritual roots, citing Odin’s drinking from the Well of Remembrance as evidence of a European tradition of divine intoxication. This was in response to a Brazilian woman’s concern over the growing popularity of ayahuasca in the West, and its possible impact on South America. It seemed important that while the conference gave due respect to the indigenous cultures whose traditions have opened up so many doors for us, we were reminded of Jung’s assertion that wholeness and healing for Western culture will only come about through recovering and integrating our own spiritual roots. Ayahuasca is the "vine of the dead", the ancestors; if we are to learn anything from it, we must look deeply back into our history.

Liz Greene‘s oddly soporific delivery may not have gone down too well with those of us flagging after this hectic few days of information overload, but it couldn’t disguise the depth of her thinking. Narrating Neptune’s cycles through the past 50 years, she offered some shrewd observations as she associated its passage through the zodiac with various cultural icons that she saw as exemplary of our collective yearning for transcendence: Elvis for Scorpio, the Maharishi for Sagittarius, Thatcher for Capricorn, Princess Di & Blair for Aquarius. Again we saw a hint of 2012: Neptune’s next 14-year residence in a zodiacal sign will commence when it enters Pisces in 2011, apparently signifying the channelling of our thirst for transcendence through the imagination. This kind of generalisation will always stink of sloppy thinking to the literal-minded, but to me Greene exuded more than enough subtlety of thought to scent these insights with a sweeter, more complex aroma.

The final panel discussion was a satisfying conclusion. Much talk of animism led to the plants that had graced the stage throughout proceedings being personally introduced, Psychotria viridis, Ipomoea violacea and Lophophora williamsii being presented as if they were special guests on the panel. Piers Gibbon was encouraged to repeat part of his seminar with the whole audience—the part that involved a round of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ being sung as a collective western icaro. And a Mexican woman in the audience offered her profound thanks to all involved for the healing experience, the encouragement to speak her mind that the conference had given her.

I was a little disappointed when the post-conference party initially seemed to be quite a mundane acid techno affair, but some great chats with new acquaintances, and the gradual emergence of funk and disco slowly woke my body up, and I was grateful to earth this information overload in drunken dancing. An obscure favourite track from my teenage years (Parliament’s ‘Come In Out Of The Rain’) got me, and everyone else left, dancing at the tail-end of the night, followed by some spontaneous balloon frolics that were a fitting foil for this mostly intellectual feast.

There was a call for the conference to become a regular event at the final panel discussion, which was met with hearty applause. I’ll second that. Roll on ‘Exploring Consciousness 2005′…

by Gyrus

That which an age feels to be evil is usually an untimely after-echo of that which was formerly felt to be good—the atavism of an older ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The following writings began as a short article written in reaction to numerous interviews I had read with ‘Satanic’ or ‘black metal’ bands (in Esoterra magazine). I got very tired of their knee-jerk social Darwinism, their philosophy of “the strong over the weak”. Metal bands will never be the best exponents of any philosophy, and Satanism shouldn’t be judged according to their interviews. Nevertheless, their simplistic view of nature’s laws (which in any case should be seen as nature’s habits) encapsulate many quibbles I have with the social Darwinist shades of Satanism, and occultism in general. There are a lot of much more enlightened strains of the ‘left-hand path’, as these writings will hint at. These strains usually attempt to transcend the left/right dualism of occult morality, a false dichotomy where self-interest and concern for others are seen to be mutually exclusive.

While I’m not a Satanist, not even strictly a practising occultist, occultural philosophies have a deep influence on my world-view and life. I read widely on these subjects, and though I love toying with ideas, maps and models for intellectual amusement, I find that I’m with Nietzsche when he says, "I do not know what purely intellectual problems are." So what began as a somewhat playful little jab at the shaky foundations of social Darwinism gradually evolved into an outpouring of the visions and intuitions that my recent experiences, research and reflection have led me to. It’s an exorcism of sorts, an attempt to externalize the insights, feelings and perceptions that I often find flooding into me, seemingly unbidden, but later seen to be exactly what I needed to shift my world-view out of a stale or narrow perspective. I find it’s only through externalizing these cascades of insight that I can make room for more to arrive.

My research is not strictly ‘scholarly’. Dreams, drugs, sex, conversations with truckers who give me lifts, synchronicity-laden trails that lead me to books I wouldn’t usually notice, trashy movies, walks in the countryside, emotional breakdowns, lazy days, playing with kids… all these play a more significant role in the evolution of my ideas than the traditional academic activities of ‘thinking’ and ‘reading’. And, when I really look at it, I can’t imagine that this is anything new. Life isn’t cut into categories in the way that the division of academia into different disciplines pretends it is. Everything influences everything else, and I think what I’m doing is just consciously recognizing this… and then writing.

That said, some of the material here is quite ‘dense’, laden with associations which might come to me, immersed as I am in it all, without much effort, but which may ask a lot more of the reader than passive word-by-word consumption. As far as this sort of writing goes, I try to tread a precarious path between making myself clear and passionately wanting to be a ‘sounding board’. I want to leave gaps, be oblique, allow space for the reader to enter into my thoughts, fuse with them to an extent, and come away with more than ‘information’. I’m not in the business of handing people complete, air-tight systems of ideas on a plate. I don’t think you can show something to someone that they haven’t already seen; but I know from my own experience that we’ve all seen a lot more than we often pretend. I want to try to help people remember this. Also, the nature of the areas dealt with here means that words can never present a view of them that is even close to being ‘complete’. All they can do is suggest, trigger, and point. Exactly what they will suggest, trigger off or point to will depend on who you are and where you are. Ideally, you’ll take more of yourself away from this than you will of me.

Many of the ideas here utterly contradict beliefs I held two years ago. I don’t doubt that two years from now I’ll be off somewhere else. As Alan Watts said, "I am not one who believes that it is any necessary virtue in the philosopher to spend his life defending a consistent position. It is surely a kind of spiritual pride to refrain from ‘thinking out loud’, and to be unwilling to let a thesis appear in print until you are prepared to champion it to the death." This doesn’t mean I don’t want people to criticize this writing. Yes, these are my present opinions, but they will change—and I only got here by having my opinions challenged, as well as ‘confirmed’ by experiences and other people. I never want this process to stop.

There are several different, but subtly related parts to these writings. I call them "meditations" because although there are clear conceptual threads weaving throughout the different sections, there is no attempt at a coherent ‘argument’. Parts of it relate to and reflect off others parts in ways I never anticipated; no doubt many of the intended resonances will fall flat. As I said before, language, being linear, just can’t accurately describe the ideas and modes of experience I’m dealing with. All I can do is spin words, my own and the sampled words of others, around these things, revealing a fragment here, a fragment there, but still leaving mere fragments. Each trying to describe the same underlying thing, each reflecting a different part of it, in the hope that a multitude of linear perspectives can come closer to representing this non-linear vision.

Firstly, there are some arguments about the philosophical underpinnings of what has come to be known as Satanism in modern occulture. This section, being the original seed-article, could stand on its own, but hopefully the reader will soon see its intimate relevance to the other meditations as they’re unravelled. Then, taking its cue from the ubiquitous urge to uncover spiritual fertility buried beneath centuries of Christian domination, there is a speculative look at the genesis of the Devil—and what lies beyond.

The Devil & The Tao

As far as the philosophical underpinnings of Satanism go, one of the best places to start is with Friedrich Nietzsche. While he had nothing (consciously) to do with Satanism, his work is frequently cited by Satanists and modern occultists, and I think more than a few Satanists see themselves as ‘Nietzschean’.

It has to be said before setting off that Nietzsche was acutely, probably painfully aware of how his ideas may be misinterpreted. He loathed the idea that people, "like plundering troops", may pick and choose titbits from his books to use for their own purposes, disregarding material contrary to their own agendas. The racist misinterpretations (far too weak a word!) of the German Nazi party are the most blatant case in point. That said, I disagree with some of his work. In the end Nietzsche was no ‘system-builder’—he erected no edifice that must be accepted entirely or fall to the ground. He was an experimentalist, and perpetually played with and revised ideas. It is in this spirit that I read Nietzsche; and here I’m looking at him with an eye to reveal a few misinterpretations less obvious than those of the half-witted anti-Semites. No doubt I’ll end up guilty of a bit of plundering myself, but I prefer judicious plunder to wilful misunderstanding.

Darwinism is the central concept to deal with. It amuses me to see ‘black metal’ bands asked in interviews if they believe in the (supposedly ‘Nietzschean’) philosophy of "the strong over the weak", "survival of the fittest"—as if this would provoke some new and interesting response! We’re talking social Darwinism here of course, but let’s look first at the biological argument.

Darwinian evolutionary theory often seems too obvious to bother arguing with, but this is precisely my problem with it. It’s too bloody obvious. The nail was whacked on the head for me when I read Arthur Koestler’s Janus: A Summing Up. Here he quotes C.H. Waddington, a critical neo-Darwinian:

Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day interpretation [1957], perpetuation as a source for future generations. That individual ‘survives’ best which leaves most offspring. Again, to speak of an animal as ‘fittest’ does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology.

Further, Ludwig von Bertalanffy acutely observes that "It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities."

The so-called rationalism of modern—usually ‘socially Darwinian’—Satanism rests on very dodgy philosophical ground, simply because when you bother to try and define the terms used in the idea of "the strong over the weak", you’re invariably left with a sense of, "Yeah, and…?" It’s like saying you believe in the philosophy of "winners beating the losers". Jello Biafra nicely undermined knee-jerk social Darwinism with his quip that "the strong prey on the weak, and the clever prey on the strong"; but in the end this just begs the question. Also, orthodox Darwinism inevitably holds that humanity is the latest in life’s progressively ‘better’ attempts at creating organisms. Surely social Darwinism would hold a similar view about contemporary culture? This doesn’t sit too well with the misanthropy, and contempt for the ‘lowering of standards’ in modern society, that is prevalent among many supposed social Darwinists. If the strong really do overpower the weak, why have we been dominated for so long by such a half-assed religion as Christianity? I think many Satanists, in claiming "strong over the weak" to be a universal principle of nature, are actually trying to say, "I’m harder than you and I could have you easily." Or at least, "I could out-stare you, mate." That’s another argument. But as for universal principles—forget it. Evolution and history are far too complex and multi-dimensional to limit themselves to the strategies of a fight in a pub.

Nietzsche was definitely not a Darwinist, and had no faith in "survival of the fittest" as an ‘explanation’. For him, his conception of the "will to power" was the driving force behind all life. It is essentially a conception of creativity, and has far more to do with creative self-mastery than power over others. Nietzsche’s notion that creation must be destructive ("Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values.") is often seen in limited terms. This is only the first step. The second step, often left out, is that the new creation itself must again be destroyed. And the steps go on… Zarathustra is quite explicit on this: "And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again…’" The famous ‘Superman’ isn’t a concept of some inevitable evolutionary goal toward which humanity is inexorably moving (i.e. it’s not Darwinian). It’s a vision of an ideal state of being, of perfect self-mastery and perpetual re-creation, which Nietzsche believed some humans—Socrates and Goethe for example—had already, to an extent, achieved. Together with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, it’s a glorification of the moment, of total involvement in the turbulent flow of immediate experience. "Not to wish to see too soon.— As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)

Comparison with Taoism is illuminating. While our cultural filters place Taoism in some ‘soft’ category, and see Nietzschean values as being essentially ‘hard’, the distinction blurs when you consider the supra-cultural state to which both aspire. Nietzsche used the word ‘hard’ many times in describing ideals, as in "all creators are hard." (Twilight of the Idols) But I don’t think we can just accept this word unquestioningly. Its modern connotations evoke more of a mindless thug than a vibrant Superman. Words are subject to mutation; but even if the words themselves remain the same, their meaning is always mutating, for words are "pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)

Before considering Taoism, I’d like to follow a little tangent about Nietzsche’s ‘hardness’. I always thought of Nietzsche (before actually reading him) as some grim Teutonic beast. He was actually vehemently opposed to the Germanic temperament, which he considered mediocre (when in a good mood). He repeatedly praised the southern European disposition, that of light-heartedness, exuberance and cheerfulness. A far cry from the fashionably serious and dreary poses of many modern ‘Nietzscheans’. A key influence on this popular misconception of Nietzsche is probably that famous portrait—the furrowed brow, the dark gaze, the amazingly bushy moustache. It doesn’t do much for his philosophy of light-heartedness. I was tempted to just put this image, of a very stern and worried-looking guy, down to his frequent bouts of illness. I recently found out that I was more justified in this temptation than I guessed. Nietzsche never grew such a moustache. These amounts of hair appeared on his upper lip only during his last ten years of life, during which he was helplessly insane. He was unable to care for himself, and this responsibility fell to his sister, who allowed the ‘tache to flourish and brought people in to do portraits. Poor Freddy had no choice. This picture of an intense mad-eyed walrus is probably not how Nietzsche would have liked to have been remembered! His sister, who managed to distort his work as well as his image, has a lot to answer for.

To return to Taoism… The Tao, usually translated as "way", is seen as that force which underpins, interpenetrates, and flows through the universe. Actually, "flows through" is misleading, as it conjures up images of ‘things’ as vessels through which the Tao passes. Taoism admits of no such duality. And the Tao’s primary characteristic is that it cannot be defined. A definition of it, such as "the process of the universe", may loosen our categories a bit in order to contemplate it, but categories ultimately have to be destroyed if that process is to be fully apprehended. I think Nietzsche was too suspicious or ignorant of ‘mysticism’ to fully admit it, but I suspect any Superhuman state would involve a similar destruction—or transcendence—of categories.

So what is this process, or Tao, that we’re trying to apprehend? In Nietzsche’s words, it is "that which must overcome itself again and again". Nietzsche’s conception of embracing this, of fully participating in the process of life, is shot through with an distinct emphasis on struggle—assertion, strife and conflict. Regarding modern occultural misinterpretations again, it is primarily in this sense that he intended his many references to war. Being anti-state and anti-political, Nietzsche in no way ‘advocated’ bloody economic and territorial battles between nations. He didn’t ‘condemn’ them either. Nietzsche was neither liberal nor fascist. He largely used the word "war" in the sense of resolutely striving for self-mastery without shrinking from—rather, embracing—the inevitable conflicts this quest entails. "I will not cease from Mental fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand…" (William Blake, Milton)

Reconciling this relentless struggle, which is obviously part of the path to self-perfection, with the supposed passive quiescence of Taoism, is itself an ongoing process. Of course, it’s ultimately a false dichotomy, and Christopher S. Hyatt seems to have summed it up best in his book The Tree of Lies:

The concept of surrender has become so distorted that many believe that "surrendering" is in opposition to power, sex and self mastery. This is one of the greatest lies. . . . self mastery is not possible without surrender. This issue cannot be overemphasized. Magic and Mysticism—The Will To Self Mastery and The Will To Surrender—are two sides of the same coin. . . . when power or love are taken to their extreme they become one.

The Tao is a struggle of perpetual self-overcoming—again and again. But as Alan Watts ceaselessly points out, it is a struggle devoid of ‘anxiety loops’. In fully surrendering to the flow of life, one surrenders one’s resistance to the rolling process of destruction and creation, ‘war’ and ‘peace’, that true life constitutes. Passivity is often part of this resistance, as much as frenetic anxiety can be.

Satanism and Taoism are alike in that they are both deeply concerned with the hard/soft, strong/weak distinctions. Satanism seems to emphasize and value ‘strength’, while Taoism seems to emphasize and value ‘weakness’. I feel that both may learn from each other. Taoists who have made the clichéd image of the quiescent oriental sage their behavioural ideal would do well to meditate on the Tao at work in an ocean whipped up by a tumultuous thunderstorm, and see how close to ‘nature’ they really are. Hardened Satanists, intent on fortifying their unbending will, would do equally well to take a sword to a piece of solid wood, and then to a pond. The wood will splinter and be destroyed. The pond will passively accept the blade, and effortlessly flow back to perfection once it is withdrawn.

I was made with a heart of stone / To be broken with one hard blow / I’ve seen the ocean break on the shore / Come together with no harm done

Perry Farrell, ‘Oceansize’

Satan’s Ancestry

Those who point the finger at Satan, reveal Satan. Those who fight Satan, give him power. Those who blame Satan, give him influence. Those who talk much of Satan, create him.

But those who worship Satan, tame Satan. Those who passively resist him, earn his respect. Those who accept him, diminish his influence.

And those who analyse him, learn his wisdom.

Lionel B. Snell, ‘The Satan Game’

The Christian devil, Satan, is an archetype. Whether one sees archetypes as creations of the human mind, genetically-rooted universal ‘templates’ of conscious experience, or fully independent spiritual entities, is irrelevant here. Even if archetypes are seen to be autonomous ‘beings’—gods, goddesses, demons or spirits—they are inevitably experienced by means of our own bodies and minds. Our experience of them is filtered through whatever biological, cultural and psychological structures we happen to find ourselves equipped with to make sense of the world. Thus, if we’re talking about the realms of human experience (and what else can we talk about in a useful way?), Satan may be seen to have a history, a mythical family line of descent. Certain universal facts of life, such as the processes of sex, birth & death, will be ever-present in most mythical figures; but the specific figures themselves evolve throughout human history to mirror the complex cultural interactions and upheavals that have ceaselessly manifested since the first time apes developed language, culture and myth—and became human.

In this speculative Satanic genealogy we shall obviously work backwards, climbing down from contemporary branches, down the trunk, and under the ground where the roots lay hidden. So to begin with, how is Satan conceived in contemporary culture?

Modern Christianity has lost much of the medieval iconographic vividness in its conception of Satan, as it is supposedly more ‘sophisticated’, and not given to simplistic anthropomorphisms (i.e. Satan as a reptilian, horned, cunning and wily beast-man dwelling ‘down there’ in his burning lair). The most significant manifestation of modern Christians’ concern with their Devil is in the phenomenon known as the ‘Satanic Abuse Myth’. ‘Satanic Abuse’, because the phenomenon centres around the conviction that the Western world is infested with invisible networks of evil Satanists, who ritually abuse and bloodily sacrifice people—usually children—in the service of their Dark Lord. ‘Myth’, because this conviction has uniformly been found, by government-commissioned investigations and independent researchers alike, to be false. Certain cases of abuse have been found where the perpetrators used the paraphernalia of occultism to terrify their victims into submission and silence. But not one case of genuine Satanists, occultists, or pagans harming children for the purposes of magickal ritual has ever been found. So we can see that these obscene Christian fantasies of blood-soaked orgies and child sacrifice are merely the modern version of the medieval equivalents, the witch-hunts (or of the Roman equivalent, where early Christians were accused of similar crimes…). The vividness of these modern scapegoating fantasies seems to have made the mythical figure of Satan himself less necessary. Who needs an image of a subterranean Devil on which to project your repressed fears and desires when you can conjure up such horrifying scenes of ‘actual’ human activity?

Often at the forefront of the cultural panic around Satanism was the self-styled leader of California’s Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey. He seemed amused as well as indignant about the latest bouts of witch-hunt scaremongering. He knew as well as any open-minded observer that more children have suffered abuse and molestation at the hands of trusted Christian priests than have even heard of the Church of Satan. And his codes of Satanic practice are there for all to read: "Do not harm little children. Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food." (from ‘The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth’)

But for Satanists as well as Christians the actual mythical image of the Devil has become less central. LaVey states that Satan is "a representational concept, accepted by each according to his or her needs." This seems mightily hazy without LaVey’s repeated reminders that ‘Satan’ roughly translates from Hebrew as ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’. Satanism is based on the principle of opposition. This is usually seen as opposition to the status quo, specifically Christian morality. Satan is an emblematic concept presiding over the practice of all those wonderful un-Christian things: free sexuality, autonomy, indulgence, harmony with (instead of dominion over) nature, and anti-authoritarianism. Many Satanists seem to slip up on this last one, and it’s here that most Satanism as it stands loses my sympathies. Just as many people forget that Nietzsche’s ‘destructive-creativity’ is meant as a perpetual process, not just a one-off revolution, Satanism can often slip from being an expedient release from Christian programming into being a dogma in itself. It seems to find it hard to challenge itself as an institution. There are many parallels here with the ‘left hand path’ of politics, Marxism. Many unsophisticated Marxists still think that their beliefs could function wonderfully as they stand once capitalism is cast to the ground once and for all, not seeing that their present beliefs are conditioned by their capitalist context. If Western capitalism is ever ‘overthrown’, I think many Marxists will follow their historical predecessors and become the new despots, or just be at a loss as to what to do without ‘the opposition’. Substitute ‘Satanists’ for ‘Marxists’, and ‘Christianity’ for ‘capitalism’, and you have a wildly simplistic, but very revealing analogy.

The influence of Chaos Magick and all its kindred philosophies on modern occulture seems to be a useful counter to this tunnel vision of simple opposition. The heart of Chaos Magick is the practical implementation of Nietzsche’s vision of life overcoming itself again and again, and provides a good antidote to any sliding towards dogma, or dependence on a static adversarial figure.

To return to Satan, we can see that despite his modern transformations, the popular conception of the Devil still bears the unmistakable hallmarks of pre-industrial Christianity’s vivid image of him. He is almost always bestial. The horns and the cloven hooves are synonymous with the Devil, and a reptilian tail is often attributed to him. Related to this is his unmistakably sexual nature, often seen as a threatening or perverse sexuality, but definitely sexual. The conception of Satan as the rebel angel Lucifer is a bit of an anomaly here, and this figure seems like a more refined, sublimated and ‘humanized’ Devil, all ferality turned into stubborn pride, and sinister sexuality emerging as cunning seductiveness.

Pre-twentieth century Satanism, exemplified by people like Phillipe the Duc D’Orleans and Sir Francis Dashwood, was the domain of rebellious and hedonic aristocrats. Their repudiation of the asceticism of Christianity often involved the kind of debauchery modern Christians are eager to pin on modern Satanists. There is evidence of child murder and ritual sacrifice. Many, however, penetrated beyond frenzied opposition to the Church and discovered the intimately related, but deeper roots of Satan in pre-Christian pagan gods. Bloody sacrifice was usually part of such old paganism, and we’ll return to this later. For now it is sufficient to see that the figure of Satan cannot be separated from the nature gods of the older religions.

Modern Satanists are often quick to deny this connection as being necessary or significant, probably eager to hang on to Satan’s supposed status as a god in his own right, independent of both Christianity and nature worship. I suppose they fear the potency of their god being quelled by his being subtly appropriated into the realm of ‘neo-paganism’, derided (in some cases accurately) by Satanists as wishy-washy. But the connections are there.

For a start, it’s plain that the Christian Satan was evolved as part of the church’s expansion into pagan or ‘heathen’ lands. This process was often complicated by unforeseen overlaps between Christianity and indigenous pagan practices, to a certain extent betraying Christianity’s pagan origins. We see this clearly in Catholicized Central and South American countries, where many natives have blended the invading cosmology into their own. A vivid example of this is the fact that indigenous Mexican mushroom cults call their fungal sacrament teonanácatl, meaning ‘flesh of the gods’. Those cults which survived the Spanish conquest could easily accept the god Jesus, who offers us his flesh to eat, and his mother Mary, who became the new bottle for the old wine of Earth-Mother goddess figures. Invading Christians spreading north over Europe consciously appropriated existing pagan festivals, and built their places of worship on ancient sacred sites to win over the populace. But they still needed to weed out the more overt paganisms. So the widespread Horned God or Goddess, who presided over pagan nature worship and fertility rites, was demonised. Through the installation of dualistic categories of good and evil, and the identification of pagan gods as evil, they gave themselves permission to trample paganism into the ground, and a lot of spiritual clout with which to terrorize natives into obedience.

The greatest insights into Christianity and Satan can be gleaned from exploring the Greek god Dionysus. He is very typical of pagan nature gods: he is horned, signifying kinship with animals (like the closely related goat-god of the Arcadian pastures, Pan, another source of Satanic iconography); he is a ‘dying-and-rising’ god, reflecting the cyclic process of the seasons in nature; and he has a strong wild and untamed aspect, again like Pan, forming a bond with pre-civilised humanity. It’s obvious how Satan, Christianity’s repressed shadow, has derived from such an archetype. In its irrational suppression of sexuality, nature, cyclicity and the body, Christianity latched on to this archetype and pushed it so far away from human experience that it became alien, and we became alienated. The already feral, ego-shattering Dionysian godform became utterly evil and terrifying, a force to be held at bay at all costs.

Now things get confusing. Did not Jesus, like Dionysus, die and rise again? Both are intimately associated with vines and wine; both have been connected to the use of psychedelic mushrooms; the flesh of both is in some way eaten as part of their worshippers’ rites; and both names, according to John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, stem etymologically from the same Sumerian root. There’s almost as much evidence connecting Dionysus with Jesus as there is with Satan.

It’s my feeling that we have here a crucial fork in the history of archetypes. Christianity appropriated the more abstract spiritual motifs of dying-and-rising nature gods (mainly supposed ‘life after death’) and up popped the mythical Jesus. The chthonic associations with the Earth, with sexuality and the body, were all repressed, compressed and demonised into Satan. In this division was lost all cyclicity, all the transformative and change-affirming power of nature’s process. We descended into truly profane time; linear time instead of rhythmic, spiralling, sacred time. Norman O. Brown has noted that "the divorce between soul and body [analogous to the Jesus/Satan split] takes the life out of the body, reducing the organism to a mechanism". Likewise, the conception of an extra-terrestrial, eternal time (Heaven) as sacred renders the Earth profane, and binds us to the linear track of uni-directional historical ‘progress’. We may see ourselves as moving towards this sacred time—but it is an ever-receding carrot-on-a-stick, and tears us away from omni-directional immersion in the moment. "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." (Jim Morrison)

In Satanism, Satan is seen as embodying the principle of division and duality, that principle without which manifestation—matter, flesh, bodies & sex—cannot occur. This is symbolized in the ‘inverted’ pentagram, where two points are directed upwards and one down. The dual realm of manifestation rules over the singular, united realm of spirit. In the ‘normal’ pentagram the spirit rules the flesh. Jesus is seen as opposing Satan, and embodies the spiritual principle of unity. So what are we to make of the actual historical beliefs and practices of the followers of these two figures? Christianity has turned out to be militantly dualistic, denying the body and ravaging the Earth, glorifying the ‘spirit’ and longing for some united heavenly kingdom. And Satanists, while obviously prioritising flesh over spirit, ego over collectivity, are inevitably involved in many practices which approach Dionysian revelry, serving to abolish individual distinction. Also, their emphasis on living for the moment instead of "spiritual pipe-dreams" could be seen to destroy the future-fixation of profane time, following Nietzsche into a whole-hearted immersion in the eternal present.

Our problems in analysing these contradictions betray our present evolutionary and cultural problems. In looking at the splitting of Dionysus, we’re seeing the mythical reflections of a phase in the development of the human species where the increase of city-dwelling and changes in agriculture & economics began to erode our bond with the rest of the biosphere. City walls are the rigidification of human ego-barriers writ large. "When Christians first distinguished themselves from pagans, the word ‘pagan’ meant ‘country-dweller’. For the first centres of Christianity in the Roman Empire were the great cities—Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome itself." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman) In our quest to urbanize our existence, to become as independent as possible from the less comfortable and benign aspects of nature, we have become lost in a mire of confusion. Witness Blake’s disgust at the industrial revolution in his phrase "dark Satanic Mills", and the fact that most of the mill owners were probably devout Christians. Protestantism has been intimately linked to the rise of capitalism by psychoanalytical historians; Satanists advocate material power. A church in Coventry recently held a service in thanks for the car industry; and Jesus advocated shunning possessions and said rich people would have a bloody hard time getting into heaven. Such confusion seems to be the price for living under the sway of false dichotomies like Jesus/Satan, spirit/matter, collective/individual, intellect/instinct.

Culture and civilization are inseparable from material technologies, and things are no less confused in the technophile/Luddite debate. The real dichotomy to be tackled here is that of harmonious/unharmonious technology. Do our tools help us achieve our desires, or do they become our desires? Do you browse the web to kill time and boredom, like TV, or use it to help you do what you want to do in the real world? Is our technology harmonious with nature? In most cases today, the answer is a painful no. We have lost the vision of the first grand tool-using age of humanity, the Neolithic, where culture, agriculture and technology were used to work with and intensify the natural environment.

Reclamation

Our Satanic genealogy has so far reached the figure of Dionysus, and if we delve further back, we find his roots in the pan-European Neolithic worship of the Great Goddess. In Greek myth, Dionysus’ mother is identified as Semele, a mortal. She was, however, sometimes equated with Ge, the Thracian form of the Earth Goddess Gaia.

The male god, the primeval Dionysus, is saturated with a meaning closely related to that of the Great Goddess in her aspect of the Virgin Nature Goddess and Vegetation Goddess. All are gods of nature’s life cycle, concerned with the problem of death and regeneration, and all were worshipped as symbols of exuberant life.

Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe

Now I shall lose the interest of yet more die-hard Satanists. I think it’s possible to trace most of Satan’s aspects and characteristics back to the Neolithic (and perhaps Palaeolithic) Great Goddess. It’s true that if you gathered all available books on Goddess worship together, the vast majority of them—in their style, typography, illustrations and attitude—would probably be… well, twee. It’s obvious why the figure of the Goddess is largely consigned to the realm of New Age Pap; but I think a serious, unromantic investigation of the religious and mythical complex termed ‘the Goddess’ will uncover something a lot more challenging, vital and useful than the trite New Age-isms we’re usually presented with.

The Neolithic Goddess, like Satan, was invariably horned; the ox was one of her most revered forms. Being associated with the Earth itself she was often a chthonic (underworld) Goddess, this aspect entering Greek mythology in the story of Demeter and Persephone. It’s worth noting that Heraclitus once said that Dionysus was another name for Hades, lord of the underworld. The whole chthonic goddess & son complex is the basis for our image of Satan ruling over a subterranean Hell.

Another strong link between the Goddess and Satan is the serpent. The serpent in Genesis’ Garden of Eden is often associated with Satan, and Christianity usually extends this association to all snakes. The snake was, along with the ox, the animal most frequently associated with the Neolithic Goddess. The spiral, often symbolizing a coiled serpent, is one of the most common Goddess symbols. Archaic serpent myths from around the world are far too numerous to detail here. However, one extremely early myth (perhaps the earliest), which detours us to an extremely bizarre connection with Christianity, is well worth going into.

In his book Blood Relations, anthropologist Chris Knight proposes that human culture was the result of early female Homo sapiens synchronizing their menstrual cycles. This collectivity, he argues, empowered them to periodically ‘sex strike’ during menstruation—females basically refused sex with their partners (but possibly had menstrual sex with male kin) until the men went hunting and brought back enough meat to feed them and their children.

The full thesis is persuasive but very complex. It is enough for now to note that the hypothesized collective act of female synchrony was achieved through tidal and lunar observances, utilizing these natural, universal cycles with which widespread groups of women could ‘phase-lock’ and harmonize their own blood cycles. In the Australian Aboriginal myths of the Rainbow Snake, and its associations with menstruation, water, the moon and women, there is widespread acknowledgement that this ‘cosmic serpent’ (often androgynous) originally gave women power. Knight’s key argument is that this power is the power to periodically unite in saying ‘no’ to sex, to initiate sexual-political change (the Snake symbolizes the united body of ‘flowing’ women). At the same time, it is the powers of shamanism and magic, which Knight sees as evolving as a result of the first ‘proto-cultural’ groups of humans in Africa dispersing inland, away from their coastal origins. The females, robbed of the tide as one of their main cyclic guides, evolved moon-scheduled ritual activities—and thus symbolic culture—to synchronize social, psychic and bodily rhythms.

Somewhere along the line, as the myths and practices of many surviving hunter-gatherer tribes testify, this power was appropriated by men. Knight sees male initiation ceremonies involving cutting the penis or arm (found among Australian Aborigines and other indigenous cultures), together with the existence of extreme menstrual taboos, as evidence for a male take-over of female ritual power. One male Aborigine, speaking of their all-male rituals, told C.H. Berndt that "all the Dreaming business came out of women—everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing; because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women." The surviving Snake myths, propagated by all-male initiation societies, portray the Snake as threatening to women. Part of this threat is derived from myths that describe the Snake swallowing women; Knight feels that this once symbolized the power of synchronized menstruation to unite women, together ‘in the belly of the Snake’. Male initiation societies utilizing the Snake mythology may see this devouring serpent as somewhat threatening, but still desire the womb-return, unity and rebirth of being swallowed. Much as Jonah is willingly cast into the sea to be swallowed, then vomited out by the "great fish" prepared for him by the Lord God.

Knight finds hard evidence of similar ‘Rainbow Snake’ myths across Africa and South America, all related closely to tides, rain, floods, menstruation and lunar cycles. The myths perpetuate these associations, but are often configured to make women see the Snake as a threat. There are some tribes, however, whose women still draw power from the Snake, and celebrate it in menstrual rites. Knight also interprets the myriad ‘dragon’ (i.e. mythical serpent-beast) legends as remnants of this archaic mythical conception of women’s culture-forming menstrual synchrony, and of the male take-over. Many dragon myths speak of many-headed beasts (the Hydra for instance), and this is possibly an echo of the menstrual Snake which comprised many women in unison. Of course the classic dragon tale, across the world, says that valiant men rescue maidens from its clutches, destroy it, and gain power. Given Knight’s theories, there could be no clearer mythical equivalent of a male usurpation of female power: overcoming a reptilian representation of their blood-unity and menstrual ritual potency.

Now, let’s have a look at the Holy Bible. Turn to Revelations 12:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:

And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

And there appeared another great wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. . . . [She gives birth to a sort of second Christ, and flees into the wilderness. Michael casts the dragon out of heaven. The dragon persecutes the woman, who is given eagle wings to escape.]

And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. [Aboriginal Rainbow Snake myths are connected with great floods in Australia's past.]

Very strange to find such a twisted distortion of what may be a primal human myth of the beginning (of culture) in the ravings of a religious visionary supposedly being granted a glimpse of the end. This vision corresponds in some way to the frequent ‘male-appropriation’ myths of modern hunter-gatherers: in depicting the dragon/serpent as threatening to a woman; and in the statement that the denizens of heaven "overcame him by the blood of the Lamb" (12:11). The Lamb is Christ, and Christ is a man who bled from his arms (and, like all Jewish men, he presumably bled from his genitals, when he was circumcised as a child). Interestingly, one New Age commentator on Revelations believes that because the many-headed dragon "has several autonomous decision-making centers, [it] is therefore the very epitome of disorganization, of centrifugal or dispersive forces." (F. Aster Barnwell, Meditations on the Apocalypse) Think back to what Knight believes the original Rainbow Serpent represents, and compare.

And who was this blood-red, water-spewing, many-headed dragon? Saint John the Divine tells us that he was "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan…". A day or so after making this Rainbow Snake-Dragon-Satan link, I started reading The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove. They take a Jungian approach to the few systematic instances of menstruating women’s dreams being recorded. Apparently, some women’s dreams at this time contain strong male figures, often threatening or sinister. Shuttle & Redgrove’s idea is that menstruation can be a time of heightened sexuality and departure from conventions for women, hence its widespread repression and extreme taboo status. They see the appearance of a compelling male figure in menstrual dreams as the appearance of the animus, a Jungian word for the masculine principle in women. Talking about the repression of menstruation leading to a "negative animus", they say: "If the woman’s menstruation is despised, that is, a deep instinctual process in her is ignored or hated, then its spirit will return with all the evolutionary power of those instinctual processes that grew us and continue to energize our physical being. You could say in this way that the Christian Devil was a representation of the animus of the menstruating woman, in so far as the Christian ethic has Satanized woman and her natural powers."

Avebury henge and surrounding monuments

I want to follow these Goddess/Serpent/Devil associations now by focusing on one specific place (which will also lead us to other areas I’m interested in): Avebury in Wiltshire, with its rich psychogeography and densely inter-related complex of Neolithic monuments.

Michael Dames has analysed the Avebury monuments, synthesizing archaeology, folklore & ethnography, to build a vision of a harmonious cycle of structures embedded in the local geography. They form a ritual landscape which reflects the cyclic narrative of the seasons and of human life. The monuments are seen to celebrate and embody the Great Goddess, conceived in the pervasive form of the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother & Crone. (Being three multiplied by itself, the number nine is frequently given a high status in Goddess-based religions. It seems no coincidence that modern Satanism has adopted this as its central number.)

The massive Avebury henge is approached from the south and west by two long, slightly winding stone avenues. Dames’ contention is that these two avenues are processional serpentine pathways by which young men and women approached the henge for marriage and consummation ceremonies. The men’s Beckhampton avenue, to the west, is largely destroyed. It seems significant, though, that the name Beckhampton derives from the Old English word meaning ‘back’. Dames relates this to the spine, and to Tantric beliefs in the raising of the Kundalini serpent energy from the base of the spine.

Much more evidence survives in relation to the partly intact West Kennet avenue, beginning at the Sanctuary (the name for the remains of a circular wooden temple at the southern foot of Waden Hill). Comparisons with contemporary Neolithic symbolism and ethnographic studies show that the Sanctuary (corresponding to the springtime Maiden) was probably a site for the initiation of young girls reaching puberty. This conjecture, along with the proposed serpentine nature of the processional avenue leading to consummation in the henge, is supported by Chris Knight’s research. Aboriginal mythology equates the Rainbow Snake with the ritual dance through which women collectively synchronize their menstrual periods (or with which men are united in blood-letting initiatory rituals). As the onset of a girl’s puberty is signalled by their first menstruation, Dames’ theories about the function of the Sanctuary and the symbolic serpentine nature of the West Kennet avenue stand on quite firm mythical ground.

At the henge, the male and female snake-avenues conjoin. Dames argues that the so-called ‘D’ feature within the southernmost of the two stone circles inside the henge is a representation of the tip of the phallic Beckhampton avenue snake entering the henge. This is ‘swallowed’ by the females’ West Kennet snake, whose gaping jaws may be seen to be symbolized by the southeast and southwest quadrants of the henge, the actual stones representing its teeth. The dual sexual symbolism of the serpent—penetrator and devourer—is not lost on Dames. He speaks of the Beckhampton avenue’s "commitment to bisexuality" as it approaches ritual sexual union in the henge; we’ll return to his androgynous Avebury Goddess later.

The vast stone standing at the point where the West Kennet avenue joins the henge is commonly known as the Devil’s Chair. Also in the Avebury area we have the Devil’s Den long barrow; and there are too many caverns and Neolithic standing stones in the British Isles named after the Devil to catalogue here. The demonisation of indigenous paganism that was such an integral part of Christianity’s conquest of these islands is prolifically demonstrated in such folkloric names.

In 634 CE a Christian church was built up against the west bank of the Avebury henge. On its twelfth-century font is depicted a bishop, armed with a spiked crozier and a Bible, fending off two serpentine dragons. However, the battle waged against the powerful chthonic forces of nature glorified in the Avebury monuments wasn’t some abstract war of symbols. In the fourteenth century most of the stones in the southwest quadrant of the henge were destroyed by Christian authorities trying to eradicate the many "superstitions and questionable practices" still connected with the stones. These bastards destroyed part of our heritage, in the name of Jesus.

Christianity, especially in rural areas with a deep pagan tradition, can never entirely purge itself of the past. In the parish church of Ilkley, West Yorkshire, there is a stone carving which is usually identified as the Romano-British goddess Verbeia (above). In her hands she holds two writhing snakes, resembling the famous Minoan snake goddess statuette found in Knossos, Crete. Verbeia is said to be goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows through Ilkley, forming the familiar goddess-serpent-water associations. However, one historian of Ilkley believes the goddess is only superficially associated with the river itself, and was once associated with the brooks flowing down from springs on the famous neighbouring moorlands. On these moors are numerous prehistoric rock carvings, stone circles, and traces of human settlement dating back to 7000 BCE; Verbeia is probably a survival of more ancient myths in the area. The historian notes the double snake symbol’s connection with healing (look at the British Medical Association’s symbol), and the long-standing reputation of the moor’s waters for healing properties, which survived into Victorian times, when a renowned healing spa was set up near the edge of the moor.

In Dames’ ritual landscape cycle we move from the henge southwards to the awe-inspiring Silbury Hill, a flat-topped conical mound of earth which stands as the largest man-made Neolithic structure in Europe. Known to have been built progressively over many years, added to each August (harvest time), it seems likely that this was the Neolithics’ vision of the pregnant Earth Goddess made flesh. Natural breast- and belly-like hills and mounds were commonly worshipped in many archaic cultures, but the emergence of agriculture signified the rising importance in human participation in nature. Silbury Hill—the Mother Goddess labouring to give birth to the year’s crops—is a monumental testament to a culture whose technology still harmonized with nature, working mythically and practically at precisely the same time.

Excavations have revealed that at the core of Silbury lies a circular wattle fence and stacked layers of turf forming an inner mound. The wattle fence has exactly the same diameter as the Sanctuary, and most projected reconstructions of the wooden temple at the Sanctuary reveal it to be identical in size and form to the inner Silbury mound. Silbury, then, is a fractal reflection of the Sanctuary, which is replicated within and then magnified eight times in the total mass of the Silbury mound. The springtime Maiden has matured into the life-giving Mother of the harvest. A careful study of Dames’ investigations into the harmonic fractal resonances within the Avebury complex (all monuments being based around natural units of measurement taken from the springs feeding into the revered River Kennet) is capable of pushing the rational mind beyond itself into a deep, awe-full respect for the powerful visionary precision of this ‘primitive’ culture.

Of course, being the most provocatively sensuous and voluptuous of all the Avebury monuments (go there!), Silbury failed to escape the demonisation of Christian folklore. There is a legend that the Devil was once on his way to attack Marlborough (just east of Avebury) by dumping an apron, or spade full of dirt on the town. The bishop of Marlborough apparently stopped him at the last minute; the Devil dropped his load, and Silbury Hill was formed.

The last monument in the cycle, before it completes a total gyration and feeds back into itself at the Sanctuary, is the West Kennet long barrow. It is located just southeast from Silbury and almost due east from the Sanctuary. This multiple burial chamber is the Goddess in winter: the Crone, the death-dealing Dark Goddess found (and so often repressed) in many religions. The barrow is constructed—like other European Neolithic burial chambers—to render yet another form of the Goddess’ body. You go in through her stone vulva, and enter a small corridor with five small adjoining womb-tomb chambers.

Despite its belief that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will automatically transport his followers to an eternal realm of happiness, love & old friends on dying, Christianity is terrified of death. Most systems of belief promoting a simplistic, personal and linear form of immortality are—they deny death. "Hell, Luther said, is not a place, but is the experience of death, and Luther’s devil is ultimately personified death." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death) Again we see that Christianity has ruptured, repressed & demonised the cyclic processes of nature. To cultures harmonized with the seasonal rounds, death precedes life just as death follows life. The Avebury cycle, where each distinct monument participates in the unified ritual landscape, suggests a culture where the principle of division has not yet been separated from the principle of unity; death is part of life.

The barrow was built around 3250 BCE, and remained open until around 2600 BCE, when a huge stone forecourt was erected, and the chambers were packed with a mass of chalk rubble, organic material, and bits of bone and pottery (resembling the chalk, soil and vegetable layering found in the core of Silbury, whose foundations are contemporary to the sealing of the barrow). During its ‘active’ time, the barrow was almost certainly used for ritual as well as burial purposes. Dames points out that "the belief that the living can find meaning and reality within putrefying chaos was once widespread", and rightly notes the possible parallels with Tantric practices.

The loving Goddess of Creation has another face. As she brings man into time and his world, she also removes him from it. So she is his destroyer as well. No-one can be a successful Tantrika unless he has faced up to this reality, and assimilated it into his image of the nature of the Goddess. There are many rituals, some of them sexual, carried out among the corpses in real (or symbolic) cremation-grounds, which bring this necessity forcibly home to the practising Tantrika. There, in the red light of funeral pyres, as jackals and crows scatter and crunch the bones, he confronts the dissolution of all he holds dear in life.

Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy

We can never know the exact nature of the rites enacted in the West Kennet long barrow, but many of skulls and thigh bones from the dead buried there were found to be absent. The obvious explanation for this is that they were used in Neolithic rituals, probably at the nearby causewayed camp on Windmill Hill, northwest from the henge, where many individual skulls were found. Dames notes that "the widespread use of skull and femur in fertility rites was maintained down to classical times, when the rotting flesh fell off to reveal the clean tools of a new sexuality, with skull acting as female container, encompassing the thigh bone-phallus." I’m also reminded of the use of skulls and thigh bones in various ‘left-hand path’ (i.e. frowned upon) cultic practices in Tibet. It’s clear that any study of Neolithic Goddess-orientated cultures will fruitfully profit from comparisons with non-mainstream Asian religious beliefs.

The Snake Goddess

A few years ago, shortly after I had become interested in paganism, but well before I began any of the above research, I had a very bizarre dream. I dreamt I was an actor in the process of making a film whose director was a very sinister and shadowy figure. There was an unnerving atmosphere on the set, and I kept finding small, partially hidden pentagrams and other similar symbols—sewn into the undersides of cushions and so on. I became convinced that the script and set were devised so that the specific motions and gestures the unwitting cast made during filming would have the equivalent effect of a ritual to evoke the Devil. In the half-dream hypnopompic state before fully waking up, I had the distinct sensation of physical pressure around my anus. Dream logic convinced me that this was in fact Satan. I was vaguely disturbed during the following day, but the dream quickly faded into the past.

Earlier this year, I was writing something about the idea that dreams and vision states are in fact the perceptual flip-side to interior bodily sensations. The two realms can be seen as two different ‘channels of perception’ conveying information about the interior processes of the human organism, from visceral energy streams to the sub-molecular goings-on in the brain. Going to sleep one night, having just finished the section on this particular subject, I had a hypnagogic experience that seemed to confirm my theory, and shed revealing light on the dream of the Devil a couple of years before.

I was in a pretty low state, and half-heartedly (pathetically actually) called on the Earth Goddess to visit me in my dreams that night. Soon after, I found myself getting up from the bed and walking across my room. I was suddenly overpowered by incredibly intense body sensations, and felt my mind ‘blacking out’ as if I was fainting. I instinctively ‘knew’ that this was the power of the Goddess overtaking me, and tried hard to surrender to it as I fell down (‘trying hard’ in these situations is a classic mistake!). I found myself lying on the floor, a huge lump obscuring my vision in my right eye. I heard the woman who lives across the hall from me trying to get in. My fall must have been loud, I thought. I took the lump on the right side of my face to be a result of the fall, and desperately tried to work out how I could get up to open the door and let the woman in. I couldn’t move, and feared that I’d really injured myself. At the same time I became aware of rattling noises in my kitchen. There was a distinctly female presence in there. Then I snapped out of it—I had been half-dreaming. I was still in my bed, and the ‘lump’ was a bit of the duvet against my face. I instantly connected the two instances of female presence, one seemingly trying to help me, with my vague plea to the Goddess.

Suddenly, immense surges of energy began to flow around my body, intense and strangely familiar streamings that pushed me into a delicious and frighteningly precarious balance between waking and dreaming. Then I felt pressure around my anus… and what followed can only really be described as being fucked by the, or at least a Goddess. A stupendous thrust of energy rushed up me, and I was immediately propelled into a highly vivid and intense lucid dream. I was flying high above a scintillatingly real landscape, a deep blue summer sky above me, a daytime sky yet dotted with stars. Part of the subsequent dream involved fishing a demonic-looking pike out of a lake—this seemed to be the culmination of a series of intense dreams I had recently had about seeing fish swimming underwater. The pike, once on land, turned into a cute brown seal.

I awoke from the dream after escaping from a very nasty situation by flying straight up through the building I was in, bursting through each floor successively and waking with a jolt on blasting out the top. It didn’t take much meditating on all the sensations and symbols to realize I had almost certainly just experienced a bizarre manifestation of the Kundalini serpent energy.

The Kundalini serpent is envisioned in traditional Tantric yoga as being a coiled-up (spiral) reservoir of normally untapped psychosomatic energy, stored in the Muladhara, or base chakra. The base chakra is located in the perineum, just in front of the anus. Kundalini is a goddess at the same time as being a spiral snake energy. Kundalini Shakti is the female principle to Shiva’s male principle in Tantra’s erotic cosmology. The goal of Tantric practice is to awaken the dormant snake Goddess through various yogic methods, causing her to surge up the body and ecstatically unite with Shiva at the highest chakra. This rising can be seen clearly at either end of my dream (and body)—both in the energy thrust up me from my perineum just before sleeping, and in the climactic flight through the floors of a building, eventually out of the top, into waking consciousness.

Many insights (and a tremendous feeling of well-being) flooded through as a result of my Kundalini dream. Firstly, there was the gnostic confirmation of my theories about Satan being (for me at least) a demonised remnant of a primal serpentine Goddess. My dream of a few years ago was undoubtedly the same Kundalini phenomenon, distorted by the Christian cosmology virus, and undeveloped. It seemed to be a ‘confirmation’, rather than being an experience induced by my research, because the Kundalini dream reflected so precisely back onto a dream I had long before any of my research began. And at the time of the second dream, although I had been looking into Goddess myths, I had not really looked at Kundalini. The fish symbolism seemed to flesh out my feeling that the Kundalini phenomenon is the prime model for looking at this experience. In Indian mythology, the fish symbolizes Kundalini’s most primitive form. Interestingly, early Christians represented Jesus (eternal opponent of the serpent Satan) with a fish symbol. Jesus opposes fish to serpents in Matthew 7:10—perhaps yet another example of divisive Christian mythologizing.

Kundalini has been connected by Gene Kieffer (a president of the Kundalini Research Institute in New York) to the UFO contact experience, after personal psychic activity that involved both phenomena. This connection and the sensations I experienced of pressure around the anus (or nearby perineum) inevitably brought to mind the infamous reports from supposed UFO ‘abductees’, who believe themselves to have been improperly probed up the arse by bug-eyed scientists from other planets. Are we looking here at spontaneous Kundalini vision states, either distorted through confusion or overlaid with a space-age clinical myth-structure?

My current belief that visions and the body’s energy processes are complementary has given me a rough rule of thumb in understanding mythology: all the most resonant and meaningful myths will reflect some aspect of biology and evolution. As Shuttle and Redgrove say in The Wise Wound, "mythology and physiology are only two sides of the same thing, which is alive." Of course, evolutionary theory and the physical sciences can be seen as yet another myth-structure; and seen in this way they should, if they are to relate to the general human experience of life, somehow echo the more primeval and recurrent mythologies and archetypes of our cultural ancestry. The idea that the Kundalini serpent, which ascends the spinal column, is the psychosomatic evolutionary force in the human body, can be seen to relate to the fact that we are vertebrates. Our common evolutionary inheritance, along with all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes, is that we have a backbone. We have all physically relived the evolutionary journey of bodily mutation as we gestated in our mother’s wombs. Human embryos, in their earliest stages of development, are successively indistinguishable from fish, reptile, bird and other mammal embryos—at one stage, recognizable gills emerge, and then atrophy.

Our individual lives begin in the amniotic ocean of the womb. Organic life on Earth began in the oceans. And humanity itself may have emerged from a partial return to the ocean. Many anthropologists believe that humans evolved on the shores of east Africa, as hominid apes returned to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This is seen to account for our hairless bodies, the layer of buoyant fat beneath our skin, and possibly our upright posture (a distinct advantage if you’re trying to keep breathing whilst wading through deep waters).

It seems quite fitting that Indian mythology should symbolize evolutionary power through the snake, the skeleton of which is basically a backbone, and the fish, the original spine, which still inhabits life’s womb.

Any form of anal stimulation contains the possibility of ecstatic spiritual experience. Phil Hine has pointed out that Ramakrishna experienced Samadhi whilst having a dump on more than one occasion, and this is interesting in relation to Martin Luther’s so-called Thurmerlebnis ("experience in the tower"), a revelation about faith that was to inaugurate Protestant theology. The ‘tower’ was where the toilet was located in Luther’s Wittenburg monastery. "This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower." (Luther) In his analysis of Protestantism in Life Against Death, Norman Brown hones in on the centrality of the Devil to Luther’s theology, and on the ‘anality’ (a Freudian term needing no explanation, for once) of the Devil. He documents Luther’s numerous associations of the Devil with ‘filth’, ‘blackness’ and foul odours, and notes his methods of counter-attack to the Devil’s assaults—at one revealing point he threatens to "throw him into my anus, where he belongs." These scraps of information, the traditional location of the base chakra, and my intuition that Satan may be related back through history to a primeval serpent goddess, seem to be no coincidence.

Many traditions, from male Aboriginal initiation ceremonies to Aleister Crowley’s magick, recognize the power of sodomy to elicit altered states of consciousness, but this is mostly ignored in our own culture due to the extreme taboo associated with anal eroticism (and with altered states themselves). This taboo is clear in homophobia, but is equally present in heterosexuality. Often, sodomy is not merely tabooed, but actually illegal—such is the continuing power of old Judeo-Christian restrictions over modern secular prohibitions. Perhaps (as far as our own culture is concerned) the strength of the taboo against sodomy, and not necessarily the physical act in itself, accounts for its potential to induce powerful spiritual experiences. Spirituality is, at heart, a breakthrough into a wider realm of consciousness, and is thus frequently associated (as in Tantra, Chaos Magick and Satanism) with breaking the conventions and laws that inevitably shape consciousness. The danger here, as ever, is that of becoming obsessed with the breaking of a single restriction. Once a restriction is overcome, new and different restrictions may fall into place. For instance, a Satanist who has endeavoured to break the traditional Christian taboo against rational self-interest and ego-gratification may find him or herself liberated in many ways. Eventually, though, this process of liberation may restrict that person from expressing spontaneous selflessness. The path of liberation has no end.

Sodomy, then, may well be a powerful step on the path of spiritual and sexual liberation, but rigid correlations and associations may eventually become obstacles. Regarding the association of the base chakra with the anus, Phil Hine has cautioned against the idea that chakras, or energy centres, have literal physical locations: "I’m working on a body-alchemy centred approach to the chakras at the moment, and the muladhra, for me, relates to one’s physical sensation of the here & now. A great deal is made of the muladhra being the ‘seat’ of Kundalini-shakti—but again, too many people have interpreted Kundalini stuff in terms of getting away from the body, towards some kind of rarified ‘spiritual’ state. My own feeling is that the Tantric perspective is less about ‘awakening kundalini’ as though it were something static, and more about ‘becoming aware’ of kundalini’s living presence in, and around us. This necessitates, of course, a change in how we perceive ourselves, and the world we are enmeshed in." (personal correspondence) Hine’s first ‘Kundalini’ experience involved an influx of energy coming down his body. This ‘contradiction’ of the traditional experience can also be seen in Reichian therapy. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of bodily ‘armour’ (rigidified musculature, seen to be arranged in sections like the head, throat, chest, etc.) corresponds well with the chakra system. But in opposition to the yogic assertion that one must work from the bottom up when opening the chakras, Reich advised therapists to work from the top down in undoing armour.

So, anal eroticism is merely one of many gateways to sexual and spiritual ecstasy. And while individual proclivities and specific cultural circumstances channel erotic bodily energy through particular pathways, any broad overview must take into account a holistic view of the body. The many ‘maps’ of the body, from the chakra system to Freud’s anal, oral and genital organizations of sexual energy, are all ultimately limited. The least limited map of bodily energy, the map under which all others may be subsumed, is that described by Freud as ‘polymorphous perversity’ and by mystics as ‘oceanic consciousness’. It is the chaotic, spontaneously self-organizing state a baby experiences before the narrower maps of its culture impose themselves on its body—and which anyone may experience in ecstatic release from cultural boundaries.

In Love’s Body, Norman Brown has pointed out that the human body, in its deepest levels, is not as linear and static as our culture’s vision of it suggests. There is a profound interconnectedness and interpenetration at work. The main component of our linear vision of the body is the divided polarity of the head and the groin, the brain and the genitals. But… "The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. [Richard] Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which the head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head." An aspect of this ancient model can be seen to derive from agricultural fertility symbolism. In corn, the seed is literally in the head of the plant.

Further, echoing our discussion of Kundalini, Brown remarks: "The classic psychoanalytical equation, head = genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The way up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital. The shape of the physical body is a mystery, the inner dynamical shape, the real centers of energy and their interrelation…" The ‘genital organization’ of sexuality, where the genitals are the prime channel for sexual energy, is seen by both Freud and Reich as the ‘healthy’, ‘normal’ mode of eroticism in humans. Neither could conceive of a culture that could withstand the dissolution of this pattern and support groups of polymorphous humans, people for whom sexuality pervades their entire body, and thus their whole lives. Evidently we’re still a long way off from such a culture, but it seems important to recognize that anything less is a limitation of our potential for generating, using and exchanging energies. Brown’s refutation of purely genital sexuality applies equally to all forms of restricted eroticism or spirituality:

Erect is the shape of the genitally organized body; the body crucified, the body dead or asleep; the stiff. The shape of the body awake, the shape of the resurrected body, is not vertical but perverse and polymorphous; not a straight line but a circle; in which the Sanctuary is in the Circumference, and every Minute Particular is Holy…

The Androgyne

Most striking, perhaps, is the sexual ambiguity of the goddess in my dream. She was definitely a feminine presence, yet the rising snake-energy nature of her conjunction with my body put her in the cock-bearing masculine role. This perception was given a bit of consensus validation when I visited a friend in Brighton, who I hadn’t related my dream experience to. He was skimming through another piece I wrote relating to the World Tree being seen as the spine up which the Kundalini serpent rises. Out of the blue, he said, "Oh yeah! I had a Kundalini thing once when I was tripping, lying on the ground at a festival. It was like being fucked by Mother Earth." (I had related the Kundalini goddess to the Earth goddess myself—I had an strange experience of energy rushing up into me from the ground at a Dreadzone gig months before my dream. Also, the base chakra, where the Kundalini serpent is traditionally seen to be coiled and dormant, is connected in the chakra system to the earth element.) On the same journey, I visited a friend who I did tell my dream to. He quickly related it to an experience he had had while on mushrooms next to a vast boulder in the place where the sarsens (local sandstones) used to build the Avebury henge were taken from. He experienced it as a bolt of energy penetrating him from below, and nicely called it "an amphetamine pessary up the psychic jaxxee."

The Goddess is an hermaphrodite.

In Neolithic thought, maleness was an aspect of the universal being, or vessel, which was regarded as female. How could it be otherwise, if she truly encompassed everything? An architectural expression of this view is often found in Indian temples, where the overall form displays the feminine creative shape, based on the womb cell which contains the Lingam or male element.

Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle

On Windmill Hill near Avebury, the oldest structure to be found is a cluster of 32 pits dug around 3700 BCE. Dames points out that this pit grouping can be seen to form the outline of a goddess figure, squatting with upturned arms in the traditional stylization of a woman in labour. The pit corresponding to the vulva is "the largest and most fully furnished of all the pits", containing pottery, worked flint flakes, hammerstones, and sarsen balls similar to others found beneath Silbury. However, if one does take the formation to be a squatting goddess, two of the central pits clearly form a penis shape. A small chalk slab, known as the Windmill Hill amulet, found in an adjacent ditch, bears a design similar to the pit goddess, and also displays lines apparently describing a phallus. Hermaphroditic motifs can be seen in two other carved chalk figurines found on the hill, and Dames also notes an androgynous Neolithic figurine found in Somerset and a Bronze Age goddess figure with a beard which was found in Denmark.

The heretical Knights Templar reputedly worshipped a ‘demon’ named Baphomet, most famously depicted by Eliphas Lévi as a goat-headed half-human deity, clearly male and yet breasted—with two intertwining snakes rising from his lap (an important image in Tantra). Baphomet was naturally taken by the Church to be Satan. The Templars were accused of Devil worship and sodomy, and in the early fourteenth century King Philip IV of France had 54 of them arrested, tortured and killed on heresy charges. Satan himself sometimes has shades of androgyny. Phil Hine has informed me that Robertson Davies, in his collection of short stories High Spirits, holds Satan to be an hermaphrodite. And the figure of the Devil in a seventeenth century drawing called Witchcraft (left), by Claude-Françoise Menestrier, clearly has big dangling breasts.

Dionysus, familiar to us here as precursor of the Jesus/Satan split and son of the Earth, was raised by women, often jeered at for his effeminate appearance, and referred to by a king in a text by Aeschylus as "man-woman". Alain Daniélou presents copious documentation, in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy, that Dionysus is almost precisely equivalent to the Indian god Shiva—from whom we may also derive another traditional aspect of Satan, the trident, which is closely associated with Shiva. One of Shiva’s principal aspects is the Ardhanarâshvara, the hermaphrodite. "The Prime Cause may be conceived as masculine or feminine, as a god or a goddess, but in both cases it is an androgynous or transexual being."

In Siberian shamanism, as in many shamanic traditions, ritual bisexuality is held to be a sign of sacred power, of dealings with other worlds. Daniélou also notes that the Etruscan prophetess wore a phallus attached to her girdle. Kucumatz (inset), the supreme god of the Quiché Indians, is androgynous, both father and mother of all creation. Jewish mysticism elaborates on the creation myth of Genesis in the idea of the primordial androgynous being, Adam Kadmon, a perfect reflection of the divine (see Genesis 1:27—"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."). S/He is split into Adam and Eve to form humans.

Androgynous figures in mythology represent a state of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity that transcends the apparent opposition of sexes and genders. They are vivid, bodily images of a recurrent spiritual impulse to unite, but not leave behind the ecstatic interplay of opposites—without which unity would be a bland mess, with no contrasts, dynamism or fun. This impulse can be seen more abstractly in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, and the coincidentia oppositorum, or union of opposites, in medieval alchemy. Referring to androgynous motifs in mythology, Mircea Éliade says that this "nostalgia for primordial completeness . . . is found almost everywhere in the archaic world."

So what does this mean for us? A recognition that, potentially at least, gender is less a barrier than a permeable membrane (to paraphrase Carol J. Clover in Men, Women & Chainsaws), and that this membrane may be a gateway to magickal consciousness. Whatever the sexual orientation involved, truly ecstatic sex (ritualized or not) can lead to a psychic intertwining and transmutation of sexual identities. Even in (or maybe especially in) the exploration of the extremities of sexual difference, this potential may emerge. As Chris Hyatt says, opposites taken to their extremes become one. Or—as in the yin-yang symbol, where at the extreme of dark yin we find light yang emerging, and vice versa—the opposites become each other.

I once went to a talk by two practising process-oriented psychotherapists (therapy based on the work of Arnold Mindell), and the woman there responded to a question about Freud by deriding his ‘oppressive’ theory of ‘penis-envy’, the idea that women are all screwed up because they haven’t got that all-important cock. Later in the talk she got round to talking about sexual experimentation, and expressed tingling excitement about the possibilities raised by strap-on dildos. Now, I think Freud was pretty ridiculous in a lot of his thinking—but not always because he was necessarily wrong, just distorted and one-sided. The pendulum’s swung right across to the other side in many feminist circles, where ‘penis-envy’ is refuted because it’s ‘oppressive’, and then men’s ‘womb-envy’ or ‘menstrual-envy’ is given as an explanation for why men are all screwed up. Hang on! Learn from the androgyne. Maybe both these ‘envies’ exist. And maybe we can ditch that word ‘envy’, and all its associations with eternal frustration. Both Freud and the fundamentalist feminists base their theories on the supposedly unchangeable biological foundation of our sex. But these immutable biological ‘envy’ theories just seem to me to be signs of a lack of imagination. Change ‘envy’ to ‘desire’ and cross-dressing or role-playing may be sufficient to transcend biology, for a time, with enough imaginative energy. Strap-on dildos for women and arses in men need a little less imagination. Still further, there are the presently available surgical techniques of transexualism. And if the permanence of this step scares you off, perhaps soon the intelligent and creative application of new technologies, such as virtual reality or nanotech biomechanics, could offer us unlimited exploration of our inherent sexual plasticity and mutability.

Flesh

It is evident that certain rites and practices of ancient Shivaism or Dionysism, such as human sacrifices, could not be contemplated nowadays. Perhaps I should have avoided mentioning them, as they could easily be used as a pretext for rejecting the whole of Shivaite concepts, but, in my opinion, it was necessary to do so because they reflect tendencies of the human being and aspects of the nature of the world, which it would be imprudent to ignore. They form part of our collective unconscious and risk being manifested in perverse ways if we are afraid to face up to them.

Alain Daniélou, The Gods of Love and Ecstasy

Going right back to where we started, let’s recall that the primary manifestation of the modern Church’s concern with the Devil is its fantasy of rampaging Satanists or pagans sacrificing animals and children to the Dark Lord. Modern human sacrifice is largely a myth; however, I see no reason for doubting that animal sacrifices occur, though not necessarily just by ‘Satanists’ (note Anton LaVey’s 10th Satanic Rule: "Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food."). Almost all religions have a deep, intrinsic history of animal sacrifice, and some still practice it. The Massai of Kenya and Tanzania, though nominally Christian, continue to practice blood sacrifice. So do followers of Santeria, a combination of African religion and Christian symbolism, in the States. They regularly ignore U.S. laws (which prohibit the killing of animals except in licensed butcheries and for animal experimentation) in order to practice their religion. The chief contemporary practitioners of ritual sacrifice seem to be Christians themselves, who slaughter and eat tens of millions of turkeys every year as part of their celebrations of the birth of their god.

Human sacrifice also has a long history. It seems to be the main element of Neolithic Goddess cultures that most modern popularisers of Goddess religions have neglected to deal with. Joseph Campbell has said that "human sacrifice is everywhere characteristic of the worship of the Goddess in the Neolithic sphere"; Avebury is no exception. Dames details many instances of human sacrifice in Neolithic Avebury: a prehistoric urn full of human bones was found in the southern inner stone circle of the henge; an adolescent male was found in the foetal position, with all bones broken, within the Sanctuary; other young men have been found buried along the West Kennet avenue. One was found with a thigh-bone jammed into his jaw—sexual/fertility symbolism which involves these sacrifices in one of the primary concerns of the Avebury monuments, the success of the crops. Dames speculates that the sacrificial victims could have actually been honoured to play this part: "For the victims, the opportunity to end their lives in physical incorporation with the Great Serpent [the West Kennet avenue] may have been regarded as an awesome privilege, an ultimate union with the godhead—son and parent united in divinity." The overwhelming holism of the surviving monuments seems to suggest that life for these people may well have been so unified, and death so deeply intertwined with life in their psyches, that young men could have felt their death to be a privilege, an opportunity to spill their life-blood into the ground and magically give life to the crops and the community—as well as return to the womb of the Earth-Mother.1

The idea of sacrifice, bloody or not, is at the heart of human religious life. Its basis is surely the food chain—the interdependence of all life on all other life, the fact that nothing lives save by another’s death. Alain Daniélou has called blood sacrifice "the sacralization of the alimentary function", that is, the ritualisation of killing and eating. "The whole universe is really only food and eater." (Brihat Aranyaka Upanishad) "The world as sacrifice; this world as food; to be is to be eaten." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body) If the world is conceived of as one divine body, the process of life is divine autophagy—self-eating. It seems that all religious sacrifices may be derived from the recognition of this fact. Most practices are distorted to a greater or lesser degree, but the original function of sacrifice was probably part of the human urge to intensify the processes of nature. Vegetarianism and veganism do not negate the fact that life thrives on death—only an unmagickal, unholistic view of life would hold that plants are not living creatures like the rest of us. And while modern technology makes vegetarianism viable for us all (and meat-eating cruel, relying as it does on modern techniques of slaughter), the symbolism of sacrifice and blood are rooted in the consumption of animal flesh.

What do we actually mean by ‘sacrifice’? The dictionary definition is "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else more important or worthy." Alan Watts says that it is an act which makes something holy (sacer-facere), arguing that "sacrifice is only accidentally associated with the cessation, death or mutilation of the offering because it was once supposed that, say, burning bulls on an altar was the only way of transporting them to heaven." (Nature, Man & Woman) This idea is used to stress that ‘sacrificing’ one’s sexuality to God does not mean chastity, because if you’re not fucking, there’s nothing there to ‘sacrifice’, or ‘make holy’.

These two definitions, ‘giving up’ and ‘making holy’, seem to be at odds—you can’t make your cake holy and eat it—until we look at Shivaite (Shiva-worshipping) practices that forbid anyone to eat any flesh that is not the result of a ritual sacrifice. "One should not eat the flesh of living beings without killing them oneself, i.e., taking a conscious part in their slaughter and making the gods a party to it, since the world which they have created and uphold is itself a perpetual sacrifice." (Daniélou) In a system where "the gods must be offered the first-fruits of the harvest, the first mouthful of all nourishment", this practice makes an offering—gives something up—as well as making the act ‘holy’. In killing for food in the name of Shiva, the sacrifice forms a ritual intensification of nature, of divine autophagy. As in Dionysian rites, the animal is seen as a manifestation of the god, with whom the worshipper communes through the act of eating. You are what you eat. The pagan origins of the Christian communion should be plain. "Eating is the form of redemption. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (Brown)

The practice of Shivaites, of only eating what you yourself ritually kill, seems diametrically opposed to the systems of hunting and eating taboos anthropologists have discovered among hunter-gatherers. Chris Knight postulates a primitive ‘own-kill’ rule: "Culture starts not only with the incest taboo, but also with its economic counterpart in the form of a rule prohibiting hunters from eating their own kills." One’s ‘own blood’, in both senses of blood lineage and totem animal blood, is forbidden. This ‘rule’, he argues, is demonstrated by the fact that their exist so many methods of getting around it. Rules are there to be broken; their boundaries, and thus the rules themselves, are defined by how they are circumscribed. The ways of getting around this rule can be seen in its application only to a man’s ‘first kill’; in tribes where you can eat your own kill provided you apologize to the animal’s spirit; and in customs where you symbolically offer your kill to someone else first, whether it’s another person or a god. Knight sees the latter as the basis of most ‘sacrifice’.

His reason for postulating this ‘rule’ is that his model of the origins of human culture sees the first proto-human apes involved in an evolving system of menstrual, sexual, hunting and economic taboos. We looked earlier at how Knight envisions culture as emerging from women synchronizing their menstrual periods. Tied up to this is the idea that the time of menstruation, the dark moon, would be immediately followed by hunting trips, as the moon waxed. Because proto-human females were more burdened by their offspring (human infants take a lot longer to mature), they needed to secure a sure supply of food for themselves and their young. In short, they needed to make damn sure the males didn’t go off hunting, scoff the lot while they’re away, and only come back with scraps (as often happens in groups of apes). Knight believes that part of the women’s menstrual ‘sex-strike’ (against procreative, ‘domestic’ sex at least) involved a growing system of associations between menstrual blood and the blood of game animals. The taboo against ‘domestic’ sex during menstruation would be psychically linked to a taboo against eating raw, bloody flesh. In Knight’s model, the women control the fire hearth, and thus it is only through presenting their kills to the women that the men can have cooked flesh, free of the tabooed blood. This way, food for the women and children is assured. Survivals of this taboo system are found in most contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. To take one example, hunters of the Urubu tribe in the Amazonian basin may not bring deer into the village. The hunter deposits his kill at the edge of the clearing, and sends a woman to get it. The Urubu believe that "a hunter who brought his own game into the village would be punished with a terrible fever and become kaù, crazy." Californian Indians even have a special verb, pi’xwaq, which means "to get sick from eating one’s own killing".

Knight’s model is interesting in that so many ecstatic nature-based religious cults directly contravene these postulated ‘primeval taboos’. "Ancient Shivaite or Dionysiac ritual does not allow the cooking of the flesh of the animal victim, which had to be captured after a chase, torn apart and eaten raw." (Daniélou) If prohibitions against eating raw meat form part of the basis of human culture, these later ritual practices may be seen as counter-cultural forces. They evolved during times when human life was beginning to be urbanized, and ‘culture’ was becoming something very alienated from nature. Shivaism and Dionysism all stand against conventional civilization, and aim to ecstatically commune with the natural forces and spirits of the land.

Humans irrevocably evolved into cultural beings in eastern Africa long ago. Some development beyond animal existence was obviously necessary for ‘culture’ to exist at all; thus the raw/cooked, nature/culture, animal/human oppositions. But when the rural/urban opposition arose, as the great cities of Europe, the Middle East and Asia formed, something was slowly lost. Evolution was turned back on itself as human culture, a profound outgrowth of nature, began to isolate and alienate itself from its source. "The Dionysiac rite takes its followers back to a primitive stage, which is the antithesis of the city cults in which the victim is eaten cooked. Here we find a very ancient contrast between the two concepts of food and its associated rites. When Dionysus is himself the victim of the Titans who put him to death and boil and roast him, his being cooked implies that Dionysus, as the god of Nature, is the victim of the gods of the city." (Daniélou)

The menstrual blood and animal blood connection also reveals the second source of sacrificial blood symbolism: menses, the blood which women shed every month as part of their bodily fertility cycles. This may be the original ‘human sacrifice’, in that menstruating women ‘give up’ their womb-lining and their unfertilised egg.

It is possible that shamanistic practises of possession by articulate and helpful spirits originally came from the upsurge of energies at the period. There are indications that these spirits were sometimes seen not only as animals, but as the spirits of unborn children. That is, the blood of the period would come instead of the pregnancy, and the blood spoke with the spirit of the unconceived child. A distressing development of this would be in the rumoured cults where children were aborted for magical purposes: there would be no need for this in a menstrual cult where the natural energies were listened to by women aware of their existence.

Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound

Throughout history, many diverse groups have been accused of child murder or ritual abortion: Dionysian cults, medieval witches, early Christians, Jews in Nazi Germany, Satanists (and non-Satanic pagans) in the modern West. The widespread repression of menstrual power seems to be a good explanation for the projected fantasies that such accusations usually are.

Throughout Aboriginal Australia, there is no other way to arouse the Rainbow Snake than by bleeding, whether this is menstrual blood or the blood of men who cut themselves. The Snake is summoned by and attracted to blood. Perhaps this archaic myth-logic is the origin of the reasoning behind the modern occult theory of blood. Talking of larvæ, or elemental spirits, Eliphas Lévi, a nineteenth century French occultist, says that "such larvæ have an aërial body formed from the vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood ["hence come the histories of vampires", he says later] and in the older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices." In connection with this, he notes that "according to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms." (Note that Paracelsus includes semen along with menses—both are in some sense ‘unborn children’, and both are highly valued in most sex-magickal traditions.) Blood is seen in such occult theory to contain the ‘life-force’ of the organism, and spilling the blood is thought to release this energy—usually to ‘feed’ a god or spirit, so that it can be manifested, or empowered to do the sorceror’s bidding. Such sacrifice is part of many voodoo traditions.

Christopher Hyatt and Jason Black, in Pacts with the Devil, concisely reveal the modern double standards surrounding the issue of animal sacrifice.

Recently, on a national new broadcast, there was a segment taped in New York. The video showed ranks of cages containing sheep and chickens, with NYPD officers standing with military solemnity in front of them. The police, the commentator informed us, had just "rescued" these animals. Not from torture or some other form of lingering abuse, but from a place where a major Santeria festival was about to be celebrated. What was to be the fate of these livestock animals? They would be killed expertly and quickly by a Santero, the blood given to the Orishas as a gift, and most likely (depending on the ritual) the animals would be cooked and eaten that same evening by the men women and children at the celebration.

They point out that we live in a society where someone could be sat at home eating a steak (from an animal cruelly, sometimes slowly killed in a slaughterhouse), spy someone living next door swiftly killing a chicken as part of a ritual, and run terrified to the phone to inform the police about this ‘Satanist’, even if the ritualist ate the chicken later for dinner. Who is more humane? Hyatt & Black also note that all ‘kosher’ meat, drained of blood while a rabbi says a blessing, is by definition ritual sacrifice; yet this is legal. Now, I’m wholly and unreservedly against any animal being killed if it isn’t eaten (unless in self-defence). When it is eaten, I think this falls into the category of personal choice. It’s not my business if people want to eat animals without cruelty. Likewise, it’s not my business if they want to use the animal’s death for spiritual purposes before they eat it. Or if they want to kill it cleanly, then rip it to shreds and eat it raw with their bare hands.

What Hyatt & Black show is the hypocrisy surrounding blood sacrifice in modern culture. I wonder how many fundamentalist Christians involved in spreading the anti-pagan ‘ritual sacrifice’ scam sit down at Christmas and happily chew the cooked flesh of poultry kept in appalling conditions and slaughtered profanely. Given the choice, I would rather the turkey’s death formed part of a Santerian ritual, and its flesh eaten afterwards by people fully conscious of its demise—and of the sacredness of life and death.

Blood

When I first read the evidence for the ‘own-kill’ taboo in hunter-gatherer tribes—which in some extreme cases extends to hunters believing that even having seen their food alive would lead to bad hunting luck—I thought immediately of the modern meat industry. Now we haven’t the slightest chance of seeing the creature we’re eating in its living state. But this modern taboo merely serves to isolate meat-eaters from the reality of death (as one would expect in a Christian-based culture). For hunter-gatherers, who still kill, even though they may not eat their own kills, the reasons are a bit more complicated, and a little less alienating.

As a general example of how the own-kill rule functions in hunter-gatherer societies, let’s look at what is commonly known as ‘totemism’. Say there are several clans of hunter-gatherers living in the same area. Each clan has a ‘totem animal’. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there’s the bear clan and the deer clan. Now, the own-kill taboo would work here by preventing the bear clan from eating bear flesh and the deer clan from eating deer flesh. Each clan would be responsible for the hunting and killing of their own totem animal, and for supplying the meat to the other clan. The own-kill rule therefore functions as part of a reciprocal gift-giving system of exchange. Such exchange systems form part of the basis for human culture and language. Sharing and swapping necessitates communication and agreed-upon behavioural guidelines; and the evolution of such guidelines and communication likewise facilitate more intricate systems of exchange. There is strong evidence that most hunter-gatherers link (or rather identify) this food taboo/exchange system—of which there are countless variations—with incest taboos. Thus, the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea equate the taboo against eating one’s own kill with the taboo against incest. When asked about incest by an anthropologist, a man from the Arapesh tribe said, "No, we don’t sleep with our sisters. We give our sisters to other men and other men give us their sisters."

Not all hunter-gatherer exchange systems are based on inter-tribal marrying that is so male-dominated, as many early anthropologists tried to claim (to vindicate current patriarchy). But whoever controls inter-marrying between tribes, matrilineal kin and totem animals are equated as being tabooed for a very simple reason: they are one’s own blood. "To speak of someone as ‘my own flesh’ means, in many languages of the world, that the person is a close relative, usually by ‘blood’." (Knight) To many tribes, whose word for ‘flesh’ is often the same or similar to their word for ‘kin’, this is more than a figure of speech. Malinowski, speaking of the Trobriand islanders, observed that when men learn that a sister has given birth, they rejoice, "for their bodies become stronger when one of their sisters or nieces has plenty of children." Likewise, a similarly concrete feeling of bodily connectedness is expressed by the Buandik of Australia when talking of totemic animals. When forced by hunger to eat such an animal, "he expresses sorrow for having to eat his Wingong (friend), or Tumung (flesh). When using the latter word, the Buandik touch their breasts to indicate close relationship, meaning almost part of themselves."

In fact, the evidence suggests a cross-cultural pattern in which totemic food avoidances [and incest taboos] are in some sense avoidances of the self. If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ‘spirit’, ‘substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ‘self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy.

Chris Knight, Blood Relations

‘Avoidance of the self’ shouldn’t be taken in the modern sense, like ‘running away from yourself’. Implied here is an avoidance of the isolated ego. The hunter-gatherers’ gift-giving and exchange systems imply a commitment to extending the unity an individual feels between hirself and hir clan or totem animal. This unity is felt so strongly that it need not ‘feed on itself’ to bind itself together—it can (and must) be shared with others. It spills over, forming reciprocal inter-tribal bonds of interchange.

Looking back to Shivaite ritual sacrifice, the eating of one’s own kill could be seen as an attempt to regain some personal identity in societies where individuality is suppressed and compromised not to maintain kinship and transcendent blood-unity, but to support an oppressive and unhealthy social structure. However, since the whole point of Shivaism is to transcend the individual, and commune with nature, perhaps new psychic structures are involved. As I said before, Shivaism is counter-cultural. Maybe as the original cultural systems became corrupted in crowded cities, the only tack available to oppose this corruption was to oppose the principles it was based on—however socially useful and healthy they may have been in the past.

I haven’t come across any information about sacrificial practices among hunter-gatherer tribes who practice the own-kill rule, and see common blood as the great unifier. But the whole idea of feeling yourself to be one with animals and other people—in a very tangible way—seems to me to have a strong bearing on blood sacrifice. Sacrifice, in the sense of "giving up something valued", would be truest if one lived with this feeling. Offering the blood (as life-force) of an animal to a spirit would mean much less if the animal involved wasn’t felt to be part of one’s own body. If this feeling was present and real, the sacrifice would truly be a sacrifice.

Following this logic, why bother with animals or other humans at all?

And as Deities demand sacrifice, one of men, another of cattle, a third of doves, let these sacrifices be replaced by the true sacrifices in thine own heart. Yet if thou must symbolize them outwardly for the hardness of thine heart, let thine own blood and no other’s, be spilt before that altar.

Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli

Crowley made exceptions to this ‘rule’ (as he had only one real rule, the often misunderstood "Do What Thou Wilt"); but the concept presented here—spilling one’s own blood as a sacrifice—has interesting resonances. It echoes the idea expressed earlier that menstruation may be the original ‘human sacrifice’. Chris Knight sees the emergence of all-male initiatory societies, involving self-mutilation and the spilling of blood, as a usurpation of female menstrual ritual power and solidarity. While we should obviously endeavour to release menstruation from the repression it has suffered—and all the evidence points to it being the most repressed and stigmatized human bodily function in history—the practice of ritual blood-letting in men today need not carry any of the associations with stealing women’s power that it may have had in the past. I can imagine many a strident feminist deriding men cutting themselves as suffering from ‘menstrual envy’. Well, we’ve already looked at this—I wouldn’t consider it ‘envy’ so much as a desire to partake of the other sex. It is some sort to equivalent of women gaining erotic pleasure and insight through using strap-ons.

It seems that the aboriginal populations who travelled across the Bering Straits from Siberia—those who were to become the native peoples of the Americas—developed the sacrifice of ritual blood-letting further. In his essay, ‘A Fashion for Ecstasy: Ancient Maya Body Modifications’, Wes Christensen details Mayan practices of tattooing, piercing, and blood self-sacrifice. As well as men mutilating their genitals, the piercing of the tongue was common, in men and in women. As Christensen says, "The psychological equation of the penis and the tongue needs little reiteration." His view is that the practice of "pulling spiny cords through holes in the tongue" may have been important for female Mayan ritualists: "If the wounding of the Male expresses the desire to own the magically fertile menstrual flow by mimicking it, the symbol seems less important than its function of linking the opposing forces of mother/father, sky/earth in one ritual practitioner. This way of looking at the rite is less male dominated, as well, as it allows for the pervasive influence of women in the ritual life of shamanistic village life. The tongue sacrifice, then, is the woman sorceror’s rite—a rite in which she symbolically imitates the male to achieve the same equilibrium."

Genesis P-Orridge, who was involved in quite extreme spontaneous self-mutilation as part of his performance art activities in the seventies, has been performing rituals for nearly twenty years, and claims that he never does one without cutting his skin. "I have to make at least one cut on myself, and it has to be a cut that will scar, no matter how small." (Re/Search: Modern Primitives) Obviously, scarification requires care, precision, and knowledge of how different parts of the body will react to incisions. But it could form part of the prime effort underlying all mysticism: overcoming subject/object dualism. Alan Watts has described this in terms of the idea, or feeling, that one is an individual ego contained in a "bag of skin". ‘I’ (the subject) am inside, and you and everything else (‘not-I’, the object) are outside. The skin is seen as the limit-point between these realms. Most people would see this as ‘common sense’. However, as Watts stresses, the skin is as much a bridge as a barrier. Many different forms of energy and matter—sweat, heat, sound vibrations—constantly cross this bridge, though we are usually unaware of it. We are inextricably bound up with the ‘outside’ world, to such an extent that we cannot exist without it. ‘Out there’ thus forms part of our identity, and our true body is the entire universe. "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)

And yet the illusion of the skin as an impassable physical and psychic barrier persists. Thus, cutting the skin could be a very powerful way of shattering this illusion. Scarification can be a form of ego-dissolution. For a start, pain is an intense physical stimulus, and can serve to heighten consciousness. Spiritual practices such as flagellation, bodily restriction, ritual scarification and piercing amply testify to the potency of pain as an intoxicant. In the practice of self-scarification, this alteration of consciousness could shift one’s perception of the wound from being some ‘symbolic’ link between the inner and outer realms to being the concrete link which both physics and primitive tribes insist that it is.

Further, this theory opens up an understanding of many bizarre and perverse phenomena in human behaviour. Schizophrenics frequently lacerate their skin, something usually associated with mere self-destructive tendencies. But if we see this as self-destructive in terms of an attempt to overcome the illusion of separate individual existence (the isolated self, or ego), the practice of spontaneous self-mutilation can be seen as part of the healing process that many radical psychiatrists claim schizophrenia actually is. The ‘split’ in schizophrenia isn’t the popular caricature of ‘split personality’ (which is found in multiple personality disorders), but the split between inner and outer, the retreat of the individual from the outside world. My own view is that this split is not an aberration found only in the ‘mentally ill’, but the standard psychic stance of ‘normal’ modern humans. Ego-dissolving catalysts like intense sex and psychedelic drugs wouldn’t be subject to the repression that they are in our culture if this wasn’t the case. Schizophrenia is thus the shock and confusion of spontaneous liberation from our aberrant ‘normality’, a descent into the depths of the psyche, an intensification of the inner/outer split through which one discovers the illusory nature of this division.

It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating. . . . Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. . . . Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego-boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment. The schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation; an "indescribable extension of inner sense"; "uncanny feelings of reference"; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a distance. . . .

Dionysus, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression; and abolishes the principium individuationis, substituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature. In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, the individual self, the boundaries disintegrating, there is, for those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or, as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it."

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

The Divine Body

‘The Goddess’, like all forms of deity, seems to me to be much more than the ‘personification’ of natural forces, or aspects of ourselves. As the previous discussion of personality and ego-consciousness shows, this is because my conception of a ‘person’ or ‘individual’ is, at root, gradually evolving beyond the atomistic and divisive conceptions I have been indoctrinated with. Our conception of divine personifications will (or should) change along with changes in our conception of personality. Since we can’t safely shift overnight to a chaotic, flux-based state of being, the traditional view of deities will still persist to an extent, as useful focuses for attention and energy; but just as any sexual channels must be subsumed under a broader polymorphic map, lest we become obsessed with any one channel, our relationship to ‘deities’ should be encompassed by a much wider conception of divinity. My brief teenage flirtation with Christianity collapsed mostly because I found the mental idea of God as an old bloke with a beard in the sky hard to get round—and very, very silly. I don’t intend to let my present relationship with the Goddess fall prey to similar abstractions. Indeed, the foundation of my interest in this area is the shattering of abstract, monolithic, other-worldly conceptions of divinity.

Much as my ideas are preoccupied with balance, my present conviction that our ‘physical’ experience is the basis of all ‘mythology’ automatically places a distinct difference, an imbalance in emphasis, between those first two all-powerful beings we encounter—our parents. The physical root of my being is the fusion of a part of my mother with a part of my father, but this explosive cellular union is followed by nine months of incredibly rapid growth and development as part of my mother’s body. Even after physical separation occurred at birth, my mother was probably more or less my ‘world’ for the first months of life, depending on circumstances. Freudianism seems to be right in saying that the primal shock of existence is separation from the mother, first physically and then psychically. I’ve no idea why this is the way things are, but such is the case, and I usually point this out to anyone whose knee jerks in dismissal as a reaction against the idea that the first human conceptions of divinity were female. Now, I think this view is overly simplistic, and should be tempered by the above discussions about androgyny and ego-consciousness, but let’s explore it a bit and see what comes up.

Our earliest level of experience of this world is the experience of being unified with our mother in the ocean of the womb. Our nutrition and blood circulation in foetal existence depends utterly on our connection with our mother’s body via the umbilical cord. We are separated at birth, the umbilical severed, but the new world we are delivered into, the ‘external’ world, is in a sense another womb. "Birth is to come out of a womb; and to go into a womb." (Brown) The idea that the material world is our mother is found in archaic Earth-Mother beliefs; in psychoanalysis, where exploration of the external world is seen as a symbolic exploration of the insides of the mother, where "Geography is geography of the mother’s body" (Brown); and in language, where the word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin mater, mother.

Tantric cosmology sees the ground of existence as the union of the male and female principles, Shiva and Shakti. The manifest world is the product of their interplay, where Shiva is the static principle of consciousness and awareness, and the female Shakti is the dynamic principle of energy and manifestation. This is very similar to the Vedic idea of maya, or illusion. The ‘material’ world is seen as an illusion weaved by the goddess Maya (incidentally, this was also the name of the Buddha’s mother), behind which lies the non-manifest reality of cosmic consciousness. We can also relate this back to the idea that Satan rules the world of manifestation—"The Devil is the lord of the world" (Luther)—and God rules the ‘non-material’ realm of the ‘spirit’. Tantra’s Shiva-Shakti cosmology is much more holistic, and does not treat the web of matter weaved by Shakti as ‘illusory’ in the sense of something to be overcome, some cosmic deception that inhibits us. It is seen as the basis of our spiritual quest, the ‘raw material’ with which we should work to transmute ourselves and the world.

We are, at present, part of the Earth. This planet doesn’t ‘stop’ at the ground we stand on—its true boundary is the outer edge of the atmosphere, and we are thus inside the Earth. And, like the human body, the Earth’s body doesn’t really ‘end’ in an absolute way at its boundary, or skin. The atmosphere, like the skin, is a bridge as well as a barrier, mediating the transmission of many forms of energy and matter—most notably light and heat—between the planet and the solar system, and the rest of the universe.

The transition from seeing our human mother as our Mother to seeing the world, or the Earth, as our Mother, is central to initiatory rites. In many tribal societies, pubescent initiates are isolated from their biological families. Mothers often grieve, seeing the initiation as a literal death of their child—and the birth of an independent adult. Many initiations take place in subterranean environments—caves or holes in the ground—from which the initiate emerges as a child of the Earth. It is from such underground wombs that mythologies involving the labyrinth as an initiatory complex emerge. In cultures where male-only initiatory societies emerged, the process often became a way of appropriating the power of the mother, and reveals another example of ritual androgyny:

"The young man is put into a hole and reborn—this time under the auspices of his male mothers." Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys "we two are friends," they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or "penis womb." The fathers are telling the sons, "leave your mother and love us, because we, too, have a vagina." Dionysus, the god of eternal youth, of initiation, and of secret societies was twice-born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, and caught the baby in his thigh, saying: "Come enter this my male womb."

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

To a certain extent, though, all this is still abstraction. The transition from a ‘biological’ to a ‘spiritual’ mother is as useless and alienating as the Christian spiritual Father concept if our cosmic parent is envisaged in terms of an abstract deity. The importance of ‘rebirth’ is in the rebirth of awareness, the emergence of a feeling that we are fused with, and part of our environment. For the foetus, the fusion with the mother is an obvious fact that is not recognized with conscious clarity, because of an undeveloped sense of awareness and the fact that no other state has been experienced. Our fall from union seems to facilitate—via contrast and separation—a heightened awareness of reality, through which subsequent re-union with the environment may be experienced with greater intensity, "For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union." (Crowley, The Book of the Law)

Since we are dealing with the relationship between human consciousness and the environment, one of the most important areas of interest here is what is commonly known as earth mysteries. This is the investigation of human interaction with the natural landscape in terms of spirituality, especially regarding sacred sites, whether these sites occur naturally or are constructed. There is usually a dualism at work in the investigation of sacred sites, with the scientific disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and ethnography on one side, and paganism, psychology and spirituality on the other. The ‘subjective’ side (pagan investigators interested in the past and present use of such sites) is necessarily full of speculation and assumptions—my own writings included—but it does hold the key to approaching an understanding of stone circles, burial complexes, standing stones and all other such sites. That is, the function of sacred sites cannot be understood without an understanding of (which must include an experience that approaches) the mind-set of the people who built them. This task is probably impossible if taken to be a ‘perfectible’ scientific project, but we have much greater access to archaic states of consciousness than we are led to believe.

In trying to convey the idea that the LSD experience can access different modes of consciousness from along the evolutionary line, Timothy Leary quotes the German anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, offering it for comparison with documented accounts of LSD sessions. Von Eickstedt is trying to describe his idea of the spiritual attitude of australopithecines, our early ancestors:

In the way of experience there is dominant, throughout, a kaleidoscopic interrelated world. Feeling and perception are hardly separated in the world of visions; space and time are just floating environmental qualities . . . Thus the border between I and not-I is only at the border of one’s own and actually experienced, perceptible world.

In other words, for pre-hominid apes, and for the earliest humans, the definition of personal identity could be expressed as: I am my experience. This obviously includes the perceptible landscape, so any sacred sites and constructions that predate the evolution of ego-psychology in human cultures should be considered in these terms. This intertwining of human identity and nature is given a more roundabout, but somewhat fuller expression by Chris Knight in Blood Relations:

In this scheme of things [that of Australian Aborigines], human and natural cycles of renewal are mutually supportive and sustainable through the same rites. The skies and the landscape are felt to beat to human rhythms. Everything natural, in other words, is conceptualised in human terms, just as everything human is thought to be governed by natural rhythms.

. . . There seems no reason to discount the Aborigines’ own belief that in their rituals they were drawing upon natural rhythms and harmonising with them to the advantage of their relationship with the world around them. It was not that man was dominating nature; but neither was it that human society stood helpless in the face of nature’s powers. Rather, human society was flexible enough and sensitive enough to attune itself finely to the rhythms of surrounding life, avoiding helplessness by replicating internally nature’s own ‘dance’. Nature was thereby humanized, while humanity yielded to this nature. If the hills felt like women’s breasts, if rocks felt like testicles, if the sunlight seemed like sexual fire and the rains felt like menstrual floods, then this was not mere ‘projection’ of a belief system onto the external world. This was how things felt—because given synchrony and therefore a shared life-pulse, this was at a deep level how they were.

Naturally, the experience of a psychedelic trip does not reproduce the actual mind-set of archaic humans. For us, a trip stands only in relation to our everyday, ‘normal’, experience of the world, and is quite different from the continuous, everyday experience of, say, a Neolithic Avebury resident, for whom such a world-view would be ‘normal’. Nevertheless, such experiences, induced by chemicals or otherwise, should stand as the cornerstone of our understanding of sacred sites—and pre-civilised culture in general. And in any case, we shouldn’t be interested in trying to replicate the mind-set of archaic humanity. Individual initiation isn’t a simple one-way ‘return to the womb’, but a more highly evolved sense of omni-directional unity that follows the experience of division. Similarly, any attempt to re-engineer our culture’s experience of the environment, inspired by prehistoric and existing ‘primitive’ cultures, should be a return to a similar point, but higher up on the evolutionary spiral. "We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but a return of the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the repressed." (Hakim Bey)

My conception of the Goddess, then, has less to do with a visualized representation of a vast cosmic woman, ox, or serpent than it has to do with my immediate, moment-to-moment experience of the world I am part of. Even in my Kundalini dream, the ‘presence’ of the Goddess was an intuited fact, not a confrontation with a manifest form. The two instances of feeling Her presence were both experiences of intense body sensations and energy rushes, accompanied by the self-evident dream-conviction that this was the Goddess. In waking life, this perception arises very much along the lines of Phil Hine’s idea that Kundalini is associated with "one’s physical sensation of the here & now". This sensation is not a narrow feeling of mundanity, not the dissipation of mystery and numinosity that is usually associated with the apt phrase "down to earth". It is exactly the opposite: a sense of the intense completeness and fullness of each moment; a paradoxical but perfectly natural feeling of being totally grounded, yet adrift in a vertiginous whirlpool of possibilities.

A related point that interests me is that investigations into the function and purpose of archaeological artifacts are nearly always governed by the sacred/profane dualism. Is this antler-pick just a common tool, or did it have ritual significance? Are these cave paintings just ‘art’ (in the modern, profane, sense of ‘representation’), or were they part of a system of hunting ‘magic’? It’s clear that somewhere the rigid distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ arose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the present situation where for most people the ‘sacred’ only exists in church on Sundays (if sacredness exists at all). According to Alan Watts, ‘profane’ didn’t always mean irreligious or blasphemous. It merely signified "an area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum). It was thus the proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates, though here again the ‘common’ is not the crude but the communal—the people living in society. By contrast, the sacred was not the merely religious but what lay outside or beyond the community, what was—again in an ancient sense—extraordinary or outside the social order." (Nature, Man & Woman)

Judging from this, the sacred/profane duality arose as a result of the increase in human populations. Beyond a certain point, it seems that the full power and mystery of existence, as felt by the earliest humans, could not be a constant fact of everyone’s experience if "social order" was to evolve. Even beyond this point, it can be seen from Watts’ argument that the sacred/profane distinction didn’t necessarily mean that everyday experience was utterly bereft of spiritual significance. This spiritual poverty, this rigid division of life into the sacred and profane (in their modern senses), has only been the norm of human experience for several hundred years, if that. And in their historical accounts, modern scientists have been projecting this division back in time for far too long. A re-vision of anthropology and archaeology is overdue, necessary and, I feel, imminent.

It seems ridiculous that anyone could assume that prehistoric humans sectioned life into neat compartments, mundane and extraordinary, profane and sacred, with anything like the rigour and inflexibility that the modern West does. Only affluent cultures, where day-to-day survival is not really a pressing issue, can even afford such a distinction. For pre-civilised (i.e. before cities) societies, where existence was dynamic and unstable, life depended on crops and crops depended on weather, among other things. For pre-agricultural societies, life depended on the gathering of food and the hunting of animals, which are subject to even more unstable factors. And these things, agriculture and hunting, were the prime focus for ‘religious’ activity. Gods and goddesses of the hunt, gods and goddesses of the Earth and crops dominated their relationship with the divine. What we consider the ‘mundane’ bits about life, like fuelling our bodies and keeping warm, were for these people projects loaded with importance and significance. In such a society, there’s nothing more significant than staying alive. Thus food, shelter, hunting, farming, communication, the sharing of knowledge and skills, all were imbued with what we would consider ‘spiritual’ significance.

The figure of the shaman, "technician of the sacred", stands as the first step in the progressive division of life into the sacred and the profane, but the first shamans could only have stood "outside the social order" in a shallow sense. Early shamans would have depended on the social order for basic support and a purpose for their path’s numerous trials, and the society would have depended on them for communication with deities and spirits, or forces of nature—more often than not for the governing and aiding ‘mundane’ projects like hunting and farming.

In short, life was a unity. Everything depended on everything else. The body was divine, and experience of the body included the environment. For ourselves, living in a culture where the dominant spiritual institutions have insisted not only on separating themselves from everyday life, but directing their spiritual aspirations outside this world, it’s evident that a new vision of spirituality more directly concerned with life, the Earth, our bodies and survival is needed. We cannot live on bread alone, but I don’t want to try to live without it. It’s no coincidence that it took an affluent society like our own, where day-to-day existence is taken for granted, to produce a device capable of utterly destroying the biosphere.

Footnotes

1. [2008] After reading Timothy Taylor’s The Buried Soul, I’m glad I couched this part in suggestive rather than definitive language. Taylor deftly exposes the naivety of many recent theorists who try to whitewash suffering in the ancient world with arguments similar to Dames’. While Taylor’s arguments are important, I still think it’s important to imagine that attitudes may be radically different in ancient societies, and to not settle on a definitive judgement either way unless evidence is blatant. [back to text]

Books Used/Sampled

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler
• William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P.H. Butter
• The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
• Pacts with the Devil by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt**
• The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey
• The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton
• The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt*
• Towards 2012 part II: Psychedelica edited by Gyrus
• Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown*
• Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown**
• Nature, Man & Woman by Alan Watts*
• The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas*
• The Avebury Cycle by Michael Dames**
• Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight**
• The White Goddess by Robert Graves
• Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy by Philip Rawson*
• The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna*
• Kundalini, Evolution & Enlightenment edited by John White
• Magick by Aleister Crowley
• The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley
• Re/Search: Modern Primitives edited by V. Vale & A. Juno**
• The Holy Bible edited by the Christian Church
• Meditations on the Apocalypse by F. Aster Barnwell
• The Supernatural by Colin Wilson
• The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove**
• Men, Women & Chainsaws by Carol. J. Clover
• Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
• Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Éliade
• Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus by Alain Daniélou*
• Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons by Manfred Lurker
• Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion by Hunbatz Men
• The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi
• The Psychedelic Reader edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Dead City Radio by William S. Burroughs (spoken word album)
• T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey (spoken word album)

* recommended in relation to the ideas discussed in this essay
** bloody essential

Related Films

• The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy
• The Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren
• Videodrome by David Cronenberg
• Crash by David Cronenberg
• Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Carrie by Brian de Palma
• Alien3 by David Fincher
• The Exorcist by William Friedkin
• The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorcese
• Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola
• The Hunger by Tony Scott
• Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Henry Levin

by Gyrus

The Voice of the Devil

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles, Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of the Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I. Divided

A split exists in us all, and we nurse it.

We have inexplicably driven a cruel wedge between the complimentary principles of creation, and pitted them against each other in a looped war of self-defeatism. Where once existed dancing opposites, constantly interweaving, combining, parting, and mutating into each other, there arose a rigid divisiveness, and a blindness to the unity which lies below. Only this shared bedrock of unity can prevent the ecstasy of perpetually parting and entwining opposites from degenerating into an ugly conflict with existence.

We may wander around the dreary, smog-choked streets of our cities, longing in the depths of our dejection for a miracle, but we are blind to the fact that our alienation and apparent corruption is itself due to the most astounding miracle of all. A miraculous mistake. How can a creature such as ourselves have evolved, where the most acute and complex apprehensions of the world become so drastically distanced from, often opposed to, the matrix of creation out of which they grew? Why have we become such a paradox, alienated from that which it should be impossible to be alienated from, our very being? How can it be that out of the rhythmic flowing dialectics of nature an animal arises bearing a vision of reality as a jagged, struggling conflict between two opposing principles, ending with the ultimate victory of one over the other?

II. The Big Lie

While our alienations and separations reach deeper than any specific set of cultural conditions, we can have a more concrete look at our situation by seeing it in terms of the prevailing myth-structure of the West—Christianity.

Any thorough investigation of this tentatively homogeneous religious structure reveals much more complexity around the issue of duality than we find in everyday ‘common’ Christianity (i.e. the beliefs and assumptions buried deep by the length of Christianity’s dominance). The popular Christian cosmology sees God, the Old Bloke With A Beard In The Sky, supreme deity and benevolent / punishing Father Figure, forever fending off the wily evils of The Devil, Satan, the red-skinned, feral monster lurking Down Below. Humans get bashed about severely between these two, but are still expected to realize that they are vile sinners, whose only hope for ‘salvation’ (i.e. being safe) is to confess this fact in as pitiful manner as possible and pledge allegiance to Jesus, God’s son and earthly manifestation, who suffered horribly a long time ago for your sake.

This may be seen as ‘everyday’ Christianity—although, if we take a look around, we can see that it isn’t everyday at all. The Christian cosmos’ hold over the collective consciousness has gradually fragmented over the twentieth century; but it still lies buried, just below the surface, invisibly influencing social relations and supposedly secular morality. For most, this cosmos only arises in consciousness with clarity when there’s not much hope left—in extreme situations like facing certain death (witness how big a hit Christ is on death row in the USA). Real everyday Christianity is no religion at all; it is a turgid lack of awareness and self-direction. It is the odd turn of phrase, unexamined moral assumptions, guilt-relieving ‘charity’ and occasional church on Sunday.

At the moment we seem far from anything like a ‘concrete’ view of our situation—all we have is an abstract, simplistic cosmology. And it is precisely this lack of concrete reality which exposes the split, and reveals the wound. All but isolated pockets of Christianity demonstrate a profound lack of connection to the physical world; to the body, to the Earth. We are conditioned into feeling ourselves as alien to the Earth, as outsiders to life. Most forms of relating to biological reality are demonized by Christianity in the most devastating way: all demons are coagulated into the Devil, and all matter is placed under his dominion. The fact that it is standard Church dogma that God made the world and it is good seems to be irrelevant. It’s all mouth and no trousers: for all the promising talk of eating Jesus’ flesh and blood, Christianity does not feel at home with the body.

It is at about this point in investigations that any frail homogeneity Christianity possesses begins to shatter, splintering into confused fragments and contradictory doctrines. It is beyond my theology to pick apart the various strands of Christian doctrine and expose the exact locations of these contradictions; all I can hope to do in the face of this deluge is detail my confusion. Even so, I suspect that no amount of theology could delineate all dimensions of this mess: the confusion itself, like all seemingly interminable messes, is probably due to the constant process of self-deception used to avoid facing a Big Lie. The Lie in this case: We are not of this world.

In the popular, generalized and barely unconscious Christianity described above, we have a fundamentalist dualism: the absolute opposition of two mutually exclusive principles. "Ladies and gentleman! In the blue corner, on the side of righteous truth, we have: God & Son, light, the spirit, men, asceticism and life! [polite applause] And over there in the red corner, on the side of evil, deceit and nastiness, we have: Satan and all his little wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death! [boo! hiss! etcetera!] The fight will be ugly, and Satan will use all the underhand tricks in the book to have his evil way. But for those who can be bothered to stick around until the Last Days, we will surely see an eternal victory… May the good side win!"

Ridiculous and cartoonish, yes; but such dualistic metaphysical assumptions infest our culture. We may be tempted, with a sigh of relief, to lay the blame for dualism at the door labelled ‘Christianity’ and forget about the whole business.

Until, that is, we encounter Gnosticism, an early form of Christianity hounded and persecuted in the Church’s infancy for the heresy of dualism. Gnostics did not view this world as good, as the creation of a good God. They view it as evil and corrupt, and therefore the creation of an evil God, a false God. Spirit is seen as encased in matter like an angel in an iron cage. It seems strange at first that such an alienated vision could flourish in a system of belief also found guilty of the utterly admirable heresy of refusing outside authority (i.e. the church’s hierarchy). Then one quickly remembers that alienation is an obvious side-effect of challenging your society’s status quo. The Gnostics saw all worldly authority as being inherently corrupt, and found in this their grounds for refusing it, turning inwards to the authority of personal experience, gnosis—thus actually becoming more faithful followers of that guy who reputedly said, "My kingdom is not of this world" and "The kingdom of heaven is within."

Much stranger, it seems to me, is that such a system of belief could form the one of roots of the Western tradition of sex-magical practices, filtering through Catharism and the Knights Templar. Perhaps the Gnostics were just the honest Christians of their time. Most Christians saw the world as the creation of their good Father in the sky, but their ascetic and generally anti-sex behaviour contradicted this. The Gnostics came out in the open and declared this world of matter and carnality as an evil creation in which we are trapped, and maybe this honesty allowed them to form a direct relationship with the world, free to an extent of the confusions implied in the ideas of an omnipotent good God and an inexplicable Fall from grace.

One may still perceive the remnants of this paradoxical mixture of alienated dualism and relatedness to the flesh in the modern heresy of occultism (although visions of matter as something ‘unclean’ are now quite rare). "The body, as born into this world is a sacred object and the essential spiritual implement of the Higher Self in the work of evolution. Like any tool, it is the prerogative of the craftsperson to modify, fine-tune and alter the tool to meet the needs of the project at hand."1 The shift from Gnosticism to the above brand of occultism is like changing your rusty, unreliable Skoda with doors that are jammed for a sleek, open-topped Porsche, and taking a course in mechanics. The ride may be less stressful, but a more radical shift in consciousness is needed if we are to escape the boxed-in separateness of being drivers, and realise that we are interrelated organisms.

The curious correspondences between ancient heresies and modern popular Christianity become clear when we reach the origins of Protestantism in Martin Luther. "The Devil is the lord of the world," said Luther, "Let him who does not know this, try it. I have had some experiences of it: but no one will believe me until he experiences it too." Again we find the co-existence of a diabolic view of the world—mundus est diablo—with the emphasis on personal experience and the rejection of hierarchical authority. Luther’s refusal of the papacy rested on the same grounds on which I have presumed the Gnostics’ rejection of orthodoxy lay: that this world is evil, and so all worldly power is corrupt. Well, Luther never got into sex magic, but he did challenge the authority of the Pope, which has to be commended. However, he bequeathed to us yet another legitimization of our mysterious alienation from the world, our revulsion at our bodies.

III. United

As I have said before, the edifice of dogma and doctrine lumped together as ‘Christianity’ may well be a vast web of self-deception and industrious lying, all bound together by the fervent desire, born of terror, to avoid facing the Big Lie; that we are not of this world. So before we thrash around too much in this web, entangle ourselves and lose sight of anything resembling reality, let us withdraw for a moment and state the obvious esoterica:

ALL IS ONE

Got that? The infinite universe, our solar system, the Earth, you and your friends, your brain, heart and spine, down to the last sub-atomic wavicle; all are part of a tremendously connected web of interweaving events and processes. All Are One. Yes, it’s a cliché, but it’s true. But then I suppose truth should remain close friends with interest—otherwise we may become bored with reality, and seek diversion in games like… pretending we’re aliens to the Earth, injected into the world, or trying to convince ourselves that death isn’t a real.

The popularization of Eastern mysticism has, among other things, done a great disservice to attempts to evolve a firmly grounded holistic spirituality in the West. What seems to have happened is that the many systems, such as Buddhism and Taoism, whose most basic cosmology is contained in the above three words, have been absorbed—but many of the assumptions and blind-spots of Western religion and culture are left unquestioned.

Luther’s view of the world as the dominion of the Devil may well have been an accurate reflection of the many hideous social realities of his time. Today, however, the vast ‘achievements’ of capitalism (the rise of which Luther saw as proof of Satan’s power here2) have allowed enormous sections of the population a measure of material luxury. We have used our superior ability to manipulate matter to try and smooth over our culture’s view of the world as corrupt. We want to avoid the Devil; we pacify and smother disease with our allopathic medicine, deny death with cryogenics and self-induced myopia, avoid filth and waste with a system that dumps our garbage on someone else’s doorstep—usually Mother Earth’s.3 Those with the spare time to drop their culture’s dominant religion and sit around pondering religions from around the world— obviously mostly from the leisured classes—can very easily forget about this process of collective denial. They can happily believe that ‘All Is One’; all the problems of the world, poverty, torture, disease and despair, all can be happily absorbed into the soft mental cocoon created by luxury… and forgotten. All Is One, and All Is Lovely. It is this view, I think, with all its offensive niceties, which has made the idea of the fundamental unity of existence an ineffectual cliché.

We need to revitalize holism by integrating the darker portions of reality. We need to remember that integration is a project that cannot afford to avoid anything. And it is ironic that we may find some of the most lucid philosophical attempts to redress the balance by going back to one of the original popularizers of Eastern mysticism, Alan Watts. In The Wisdom of Insecurity he suggests that we must realize that those things we usually feel to be ‘alien’ and ‘horrifying’ in nature—"the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean’s depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets"—are also part of ourselves. "Our feelings about the crawling world of the wasps’ nest and the snake pit are feelings about hidden aspects of our own bodies and brains, and all of their potentialities for unfamiliar creeps and shivers, for unsightly diseases, and unimaginable pains." If one truly real-izes this unity with all of our environment, feels it as a living fact of existence, one is usually jolted out of any weary dismissal of the All Is One doctrine brought about by the warm coddling of popular spirituality.

Of course, as with any attempt to redress the balances in our profoundly unbalanced culture, many overshoot the mark and become obsessed with the darker shades of reality. One may argue that this is a natural result of our cultural emphasis on security, inoffensiveness and being ‘good’, which leads to a taboo around ‘darkness’, and hence a tendency to fetishize it. One may also argue that for society as a whole to gain balance, it is necessary for some individuals to initially bear the burden of bringing the dark to light; or that overshooting the mark is necessary, in a dialectical swing between extremes as we move forwards in history.

Whatever; we need to realize that if we desire to experience this world to the full, we cannot shun any aspect of our lives or our world. Much ‘spiritual’ philosophy and practice is burdened, in the hangover of Christianity’s drunken dominion of world-hating, with the idea that there is some sort of wonderful hassle-free place or state of being beyond this world where happiness is untainted by despair, peace undisturbed by violence. We need to see that we cannot embrace holism and cling desperately to that which we experience as ‘pleasurable’.

Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love;
if you wanted one moment twice, if you ever said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return!
you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, oh that is how you loved the world,
you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time; and you say even to woe: ‘Go, but return!’ For all joy wants—eternity!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I have often felt that every pristine moment of joy in my life justifies all suffering before it, for if anything had been different, I would not be experiencing that joy. Conversely, however, every moment of razor-sharp pain and dejection pulls the rug out from under the feet of all my memories of happiness. Then there are the transcendent moments of over-view, where all this tumultuous weighing-up is resolved into a chaotic love for the process of it all.

But this monumentous embrace, this world-affirming acceptance, it will mean nothing if woe and joy are diffused into a swampy mess. Intrinsic to acceptance of reality is acceptance of paradox. The phrase ‘unity in diversity’ has become something of a slogan in liberal social activism, and the slogan’s over-use should not blind us to its profundity. Any diligent student of Eastern spirituality will have penetrated beyond the populist conception of the mystic’s ‘union with the world’ as a hazy dissolution of all oppositions and distinctions; rather, it entails a positive affirmation of differences within the holistic process of the world. The unity of the Taoist yin-yang symbol does not dissolve the complementary difference between these two entwining energies.

Buddhism, too, recognizes the reality of division. Here is the jijimuge doctrine of the Kegon School of Japanese Buddhism: "All things are one and have no life apart from it; the One is all things and is incomplete without the least of them. Yet the parts are parts within the whole, not merged in it; they are interfused with Reality while retaining the full identity of the part, and the One is no less One for the fact that it is a million-million parts."4

Dualism is not overcome by its abolition, but through its acceptance and transcendence. The paradox is that all ‘things’ are at the same time themselves and part of an indivisible continuum. Likewise, different as they may be, dark and light, pain and pleasure, may not be separated. If we wish to experience more of one, we must embrace more of the other. As Nietzsche has written in his scathing condemnation of the bourgeois Christian compulsion to reduce suffering: "How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together."5

IV. Being a Body

Let us return now to that most basic of dualisms, the root of the ‘split’ in our being: the flesh and the spirit, the dominion of ‘Satan’ and the domain of ‘God’, or Christ.

We humans are creatures whose nervous systems have evolved into wondrous structures, crowned by a brain, the size and complexity of which is the result of an unprecedented spurt of growth still mysterious to science. Indeed, as Terence McKenna has pointed out, "there is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes.".6 The brain consists of an estimated 10 billion brain cells, each of which may be related to 25,000 others, making the number of possible neural associations larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Perhaps, then, we may forgive ourselves for our tendency to be a little ‘stuck in the head’. A little harder to leave be, though, is the tendency to tear the activities of this organ (and the rest of the body) away from their origins, to wrestle thought and the ‘higher’ functions away from their connection to physiology.

We exist in a cultural climate where to believe that ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ cannot be set apart from our flesh (however complex) means automatically taking sides with ‘materialism’, ‘reductionism’, and other such dead and unmagickal views of the world. Looking beyond knee-jerk reactions to certain formations of ink on paper, we may begin to see that ‘materialism’, as is commonly understood, is merely one of many forms of reductionism. Reductionism, which is often seen as a sin unique to ‘materialists’, stores its magical explaining-away powers in language, in words like ‘just’, ‘nothing but’, and ‘merely’. Whether the ‘real and only cause’ posited is political, social, material, psychological or spiritual, reductionism removes dynamism and wonder by sweeping all phenomena under a single word-carpet.

Beyond its role in rational, conceptual discourse, reductionism is essentially an attitude to the world. It is born of a certain weariness, and a shrinking-away from parts of reality. The mechanically-minded scientist may dismiss certain ‘religious’ experiences as ‘nothing but’ the result of ‘aberrations’ in the chemical configuration of the brain—a dismissal which is an exercise in cynical narrow-mindedness, showing that the scientist in question hasn’t actually experienced the full force and mystery of those chemical configurations. If these were experienced, the scientist would then no longer be able to use the phrase ‘nothing but’ in such a dismissive way. She or he would see those chemical configurations as the truly marvellous things that they are.

Then, in another example of over-shooting in redressing the balance, some may declare that it is only the ‘spiritual’ realm which exists, mysteriously generating this cumbersome illusion we call matter. Granted, most spiritual reductionists possess a greater appreciation of sensations of wonder and mystery than their materialist counterparts, but their position often leads to a perpetuation of the flesh-hate and impractical other-worldliness of Christianity.

All reductionism uses linguistic categories to forget that reality is nothing other than our experience of the world, which embraces all phenomena, however we may want to label them. This is not a retreat to subjective isolation—do you not experience other people, other creatures, the Earth and sky, the stars and the vast oceans? A true sensitivity to what we actually experience, before we can explain away with language, reveals a flowing interconnection between your ‘self’ and everything you come into contact with.

By seeing that we are organisms, emerging from and not into this world, by feeling ourselves as bodies, not minds driving bodies, we can began to reverse our alienation from ourselves and the world. Some have proposed terms like ‘bodymind’ to express the indivisibility of our dual being. I suggest, with a little caution, that we consciously overshoot the mark as an exercise in balance. See emotions in terms of the streams of energy that enliven our viscera when we experience them; see thoughts as experiences accompanying the dense activity of the neural network; see spirit as an as yet unmeasurable force existing in mysterious sub-atomic processes.

If we accept the terms ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ as designating different perceptual categories of our total unity of being, we may say that body is a form of spirit or that spirit is a form of body. We shall come to the qualities of these differing realms of perception later, but for now I propose that we use the word ‘body’ to encompass each of our experiencing selves. In the context of scientific materialism, emphasis on ‘spirit’ may serve balance well. However, in the context of the burgeoning soul-centric New Age, it is the body that demands attention and emphasis. "The awakened, enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body." (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) "What is soul? I don’t know. Soul is… rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps." (Funkadelic) To think, feel, and live through the consequences of seeing oneself as a body and nothing else is an exercise that, like embracing the darker portions of reality, cannot fail to revitalize spiritual paths still infected with the vestiges of the Christian virus.

First, being a body means that death is real. There is no more potent antidote to the Christian illusion of a nice place to hang out with you dead friends and relatives after you die than a good, long meditation on being a body that will cease to exist one day. If you really want to go for it, try the Tantric method of meditating on death and transience in a cemetery at midnight. The whole question of ‘life after death’ is muddied by fear of the unknown. We quite simply don’t know. Death is a mystery; as is life, if we are honest. Some may feel it is best to assume there is nothing after death, and use that as a goad to action while we are alive.7 But perhaps this is just more motivation through fear (this time, not of eternal torture, but of nothingness). Some, like Colin Wilson, have seen in evidence from ‘near-death experiences’ conclusive proof of life after death. "I don’t think that there’s any possible doubt about it," he says, an amazing statement from such a rigorous thinker.8 Both positions avoid the obviously scary fact that, while it may be fun to guess, in the end we do not know.

The advocates of cryogenic preservation of our hardware (most notably Robert Anton Wilson), while obviously motivated by a true zest for life, don’t seem to have realized how closely their attempts to ‘defeat death’ align them with Christianity. Talk of abolishing death, like Christianity, alienates us from our present situation, and is demeaning to nature. I do not doubt that, given enough time free from planetary catastrophe, technology may advance sufficiently to endow the pattern of energy called Bob Wilson with something approaching immortality. I do not think, however, that death is the demonic adversary to be ‘defeated’ that we have been conditioned to see it as. Death is necessary to life, for otherwise we simply wouldn’t know what life is.

I think of David Cronenberg’s early experimental film Crimes of the Future, in which he depicts a world where women have died out due to a cosmetics disaster. "Men have to absorb the femaleness that is gone from the planet. It can’t just cease to exist because women aren’t around. It starts to bring out their own femaleness more, because that duality and balance is necessary."9 Even if we lived forever, we would still have to die.

Naturally, an exercise in re-visioning ourselves as bodies involves a deeper look at what the body actually is. It is not the particular cells, molecules, and atoms that at any instant constitute our physical being. Seven years from now, all the particles that make up your body will be somewhere else, having migrated through constant ecosystematic renewal into the biosphere, possibly into deep space. What is left to define our being is its pattern and process.

And when we begin to think in these terms, we must inevitably realize that our bodies exist only in relation to the multitude of event-processes surrounding us; everything inter-penetrates, each action is a reaction and each reaction an action. No body is an island. All sensations, sights, sounds, tastes and smells must be included in what we define as our true body, along with the rushing pleasures and aching pains felt within; and thus ‘body’ becomes synonymous with that all-embracing category, experience—that is, reality. If we were to slip once more into seeing ourselves as separate from the world, we may be tempted to say that our body is the interface between our selves and the world, perhaps a standing wave-form emerging from the interference pattern produced by our interaction with the environment. But the idea of the body being ‘ours’ can only serve to reinvoke the abstracted ‘soul’, the ghost in the machine. Concepts of possession may only be salvaged if we see everything as belonging to itself.

Such are the convolutions we are forced into by trying to understand the world with language. I suggest that you leave these words for a while, and allow all these concepts to dissolve by just becoming aware of all your internal and external sensations, all the tingles and aches in your flesh, all the sounds and patterns of light around you, concentrating on everything you are experiencing right HERE, right NOW.

V. Sensuous Satan

The previous little exercise is the basis of all meditation, and through it one may catch a glimpse of that nonverbal arena where sensuality and spirituality merge into something approaching unfettered experience. It is the Satanic heresy of accepting this world we experience, for there is no other world… until it is experienced. It is Blake’s apocalypse, wherein the apprehension of the world as "infinite and holy . . . will come to pass as an improvement of sensual enjoyment."10; it is Thoreau’s claim that "We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but rudiments of what they are destined to become."

And, turning to modern science, where matter and energy have replaced flesh and spirit, we find that Thoreau’s claim that our present senses are drastically limited (through conditioning) is borne out:

Our tactile perception of the gravitational effects of mass (e.g. a grain of sand falling onto the skin) requires a stimulus of at least 0.1 gram, say about 1020 ergs; the kinaesthetic sense (e.g. lifting a weight) is coarser still. On the other hand, the eye in rod-vision is sensitive to less than 5 quanta of radiant energy, about 10-10 ergs or rather less. In detecting energy therefore man’s perceptual apparatus is 1030 times more sensitive than it is in detecting mass. Had the perception of mass been as delicate as the perception of energy, the identity of the two would have seemed self-evident instead of paradoxical. When seeing light we should at the same time have felt the pressure or impact of the photons, and mass and energy would from the outset have been regarded as merely two different ways of perceiving the same thing…

Sir Cyril Burt in The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler

This ‘thing’ is the universe, the sum totality of all that exists. It is often seen as some form of ultimate organism, but this cannot be: "Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply?"11 It has also been envisioned as a vast machine, but this also proves false, when we see that machines are constructed, which presupposes something outside which constructs. Annoyingly enough, reality just is. And all we ever know of reality, our experience, exists in terms of the incredibly complex folds and twists in the space-time continuum we call our bodies.

I believe that a true consciousness of the body is identical with the mystics’ awareness of the eternal present, the undefinable moment called ‘now’ that we exist in all the time, which only seems illusory to the linguistics and analysis. The past and the future only exist as abstract cognitive processes, and it is always our obsession with the past and anxiety about the future that distance us from the felt presence of immediate experience, to steal McKenna’s phrase.

Of course, all our memories and future projections themselves exist only in the present moment, and as such should be accepted along with everything else as valid aspects of reality. The supposedly abstract nature of memory and forethought is no longer so abstract when we realize that all such cognitive activity is accompanied by the frenetic electrochemical activity of myriad neurons in the here-and-now of the brain, which are usually, in turn, accompanied by bodily sensations… a memory of a lover evokes a tingle in the groin… excitement about an upcoming journey sends rushes of anticipation down the spine…

If we can then value and accept out own immediate experience of the world, value and accept our bodies, we may make Nietzsche’s leap into the Yea-sayer’s love for the world, and love of our bodies. Obviously, if we value our bodies, and truly value the experiences that they consist of, we refuse to submit to any outside authority that may try to convince us we are ‘wrong’ or ‘insane’. We no longer believe what parents, politicians, scientists or ‘experts’ tell us is and is not possible or permissible in the world. It’s all there for you; the world is your guru.

We must still be wary and destroy that in us which has been planted there by those who mean to control us, but only through the monumentous act of total self-acceptance, love of the body, may we move toward a whole-hearted affirmation of existence. A rejoicing in the ever-divided, ever-united nature of creation implied in the jijimuge doctrine. Accepting suffering and death because we accept and love pleasure and life: all is necessary in nature, and thus in ourselves as organisms.

This is redemption.

The highest plateau of human development is awareness of the flesh!

Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible

VI. Dreambody

Any argument that seeing ourselves as only bodies removes the mystery, the spirit, from life falls flat on the ground if we can just take away the reductionist attitude hiding behind that little word ‘only’. This attitude betrays a denigration of the body, a refusal to accept that electrochemical events can produce utterly astounding experiences—or rather, that they are indivisible from, and are part of such experiences. The ‘only’ disappears as we embrace experience of ‘spiritual’ reality in our use of the word ‘body’. This is the true body. Yet the jijimuge doctrine, affirming dualism and unity, obviously requires that we recognize the division of flesh and spirit at the same time as knowing that these are united in one body of experience. Let us look at each of the realms of perception in turn.

When one thinks of ‘flesh’ or ‘body’, one may see a mish-mash of body images culled from visual media, mirrors and lovers. Perhaps one thinks of animal flesh, meat; or, if one is infused with a particularly strong taboo against carnality, the very word ‘flesh’ may conjure a mire of sordid sexual images, to be quickly suppressed. Our distance from our own experience of ourselves is such that relatively few people would primarily associate, not with mental imagery, but with internal feeling.

These sensations are called ‘proprioceptions’: stimuli produced and perceived within an organism. While external material perceptions are equally part of our body of experience, the heightening and deepening of our proprioceptions seems to be a prime key in unlocking true body-consciousness. Actually, this process eventually reveals the underlying unity of the internal/external, subject/object dualism. Anyone who has endeavoured to intensify the internal feelings of their body cannot have failed to notice an accompanying intensification of external perception.

Exercise: Here is a very useful meditative practice picked up from Christopher S. Hyatt’s powerful exercise regime detailed in his Undoing Yourself. It is best practised immediately following some form of physical exertion, whether it be a simple work-out, weight-training or possibly hyper-ventilation—anything which gets your body racing with energy. Lie down flat, with eyes closed, motionless, for 5-10 minutes. Concentrate on your body’s internal sensations. As an aid to this, it is helpful to vocalize any proprioceptions, e.g. "Muscle tremor in right calf", "Tingling in left arm", "Ache in lower back", etc. This helps focus, and ensures that no sensations are just ignored. Do it every day.

The most effective form of this meditation is the experience of sensory deprivation—accomplished most totally in a floatation tank (or, of course, in sleep). Sound and light are excluded, and skin surface sensations are melted away by immersion or near-immersion in water maintained at body temperature. Extensive use of float tanks leads to experiences which seem to be waking dreams, and can lead into the realm of what are commonly known as out-of-body experiences.

Out-of-body experiences seem to be the classic refutation of purely bodily existence, but if we see that what is happening in float tanks is a radical heightening of proprioceptions, we may begin to strike at the heart of the unity of flesh and spirit. Many assume that if all sensory input is excluded, nothing ‘material’ is left to be perceived. In fact, it intensifies our most immediate material experiences, as consciousness descends deeper and deeper into the body’s proprioceptions… and eventually ‘switches channels’; alters perception. What were internal bodily feelings become external scenes. ‘Out-of-body’ experiences, then, may be more elegantly modelled as into-the-body experiences.

We find confirmation for this model in Freudian dream theory: "The womb into which the sleeper withdraws is at the same time his own body. The dreamer sinks into himself . . . in dreams the whole landscape is made out of the dreamer’s body."12 Following this, we encounter the dreambody theory of Arnold Mindell’s Process Oriented Psychology. In Process therapy, one works simultaneously with bodily symptoms and dream states, and both are seen as manifestations of the ‘dreambody’ (which signifies the same totality of experience we have come to see here in the word ‘body’). In his work as a therapist, Mindell has noted how bodily processes are precisely reflected in dreams; and just as Jungian therapists may ask their patients to focus on and amplify dream symbols to unearth their core meaning for the patient’s life, Process therapy requires that one also amplifies bodily symptoms. To the allopathic approach of dulling or removing painful symptoms with drugs and surgery (while often useful) is added the homeopathic approach—bodily sensations are seen as manifestations of urgent messages arising from the ‘unconscious’, and must be intensified to release meaning. The healing process is contained within the process of the illness itself. Often the patient is asked to switch channels as they amplify proprioceptions, from physical sensation to imaginative fantasy; the symbolism of the fantasy may then reveal the message of the physical symptom, usually a violent urge to change. Similarly, a dream may bring to light previously unconscious bodily processes, either as an immediate experience or through working with the dream content and switching channels the other way.

We are moving here, through into-the-body experiences and dreams, into the realm of spirit, which we may see as the realm of perception removed from what we normally consider ‘the real world’, ‘material’ or ‘objective’ reality. Spiritual reality encompasses dreams, visions, hallucinations, astral projection, shamanic journeying, psychedelic voyages… And on all frontiers of this arena of human experience we find support for the unification of flesh and spirit found in intensified proprioception and dreambody theory. "What we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, in the body, there are Niagras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the Self, the richest part of life." (McKenna, Alien Dreamtime lecture)

John C. Lilly, during intensive experimentation with the psychedelic anaesthetic ketamine in 1974, began to contact an alien intelligence network which he called SSI (for ‘Solid State Intelligence’). It was composed of computerlike, solid state lifeforms bent on dominating biological life. This network opposed the efforts of another he had encountered, which he called ECCO (‘Earth Coincidence Control Office’); ECCO worked to order the world. In a bizarre move, echoing Allen Ginsberg’s attempt on his first psilocybin trip to phone Kennedy and Kruschev and "settle all this about the Bomb once and for all",13 Lilly went to Washington to warn politicians and the media of the impending ‘threat’ posed by SSI. He later ‘dismissed’ this period of confrontation with SSI as "just getting in touch with my bones and my teeth", realizing that we ourselves are in fact partially ‘solid state’.

And if one suspects that these explorers have merely allowed their spiritual experiences to be infected with the materialism of the culture in which they live, one may be surprised to find equivalent philosophies among the Mazatec Indian shamans of Central America. Henry Munn, an anthropologist who lived with the Indians for a long time to learn the techniques and lore surrounding their use of psychedelic mushrooms, notes in his essay ‘The Mushrooms of Language’:

There is a very definite physiological quality about the mushroom experience which leads the Indians to say that by a kind of visceral introspection they teach one the workings of the organism: it is as if the system were projected before one into a vision of the heart, the liver, lungs, genitals, and stomach.14

The biopsychiatry of Wilhelm Reich reveals a similar perception. In his paper ‘The Schizophrenic Split’,16 Reich has detailed how the schizophrenic’s perception of malign outside ‘forces’ may be seen as dissociated projections of powerful internal sensations, which he calls plasmatic streamings. Such psychotic sublimation of biophysical energy is understood in psychoanalysis as yet another method of repression. Hallucinations, visual and aural, are seen as a way of avoiding bodily reality: "The audiovisual sphere is preferred by sublimation because it preserves distance." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body)

However, if we are to learn from Nietzsche’s recognition that all dualities are twins which must "grow up together or . . . remain small together", we must follow the shamans as well as the biotherapists, and move forward with a two-pronged exploration of our bodies. Intensifying sensual fleshy feeling and navigating that hyperspatial realm of surreal inner landscapes, vistas of dreamtime, and interactive entities. Gods, goddesses, elementals, angels, demons, allies… aliens.

VII. Dionysus

Christ and Satan must be reconciled.

Robert de Grimston, Process Number Five

There are many accounts of Satan’s mythical evolution. Some refer to corruptions of the Judaic concept of an ‘adversary’; some relate the figure of Satan to evil deities from other religions, such as the Egyptian Set, or Ahriman of Zoroastrianism; some trace his lineage back to trickster figures such as Loki. None resolve the perverted Christian associations of the Devil with sex, death, flesh and nature… My own story of the origins of Satan begins with the origins of Jesus.

It is a mighty disillusionment for Christians, and a sudden view of a previously submerged pattern for the rest of us, to see that Jesus was not entirely a burst of original revelation into the religious history of humanity. Long before the followers of that wandering rabbi set about bastardizing his teachings and misinterpreting his death, humans evolved religious practices based around—what else?—their most basic perceptions of the natural environment. The sun rose, day dawned. The sun set, night began. After a while, it grew colder; trees and plants withered. Time passed, and warmth returned; vegetation regenerated miraculously in a glorious florescence. The first religious conceptions evolved from this fractal and ceaseless natural cycle. In the beginning, the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature. And so, as cultures evolved, so too evolved various godforms which represented this churning round of death and rebirth, deities commonly known as dying-and-rising gods.

Jesus, when seen with eyes that look beyond theology and into archetypes, is yet another dying-and-rising god. His ‘death and resurrection’ was latched onto and distorted by world-haters vainly grasping at the hope of a life beyond this one. In fact, his death and resurrection derived, speaking mythically, from an archetype that had grown from the natural dialectics of this world.

However, starkly missing from the figure of the Christian Jesus is the juice of this world. Intimately bound as the older dying-and-rising gods were with the seething of the biosphere—life, death, sex and regeneration—their images and attributes naturally reflected these processes. But in Jesus, all vegetal vitality is lost or neglected. He seemed to have plenty of life, storming around the Temple upsetting the proto-banks, preaching angrily against corruption and hypocrisy—but these aspects are mostly played down in conventional Christianity. He died and returned, but the underlying cyclic process is smoothed over with his ethereal flight back to Daddy.

As for sex—this is obviously a mine of controversy. But Jesus never preached celibacy, and if he had practised it, this would have been such a drastic deviation from the Jewish tradition of marriage and procreation that it should have left some trace in writings about him. No—we are asked to believe that God came to Earth and refused to take part in the act He had devised to ensure the continuance of His beloved children.17 We are left with an emasculated shell of a god, a dying-and-rising god stripped of all connection to life as we know it.

When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two. One half is an ethereal, goody-goody shell; the other a virile beast, dwelling beneath the ground we walk on and utterly evil; both at war with each other. Redemption in Christianity is a puny cop-out. Their god is a man stripped of what we feel guilty about, all sex and visceral energy thrown into a reviled scapegoat called Satan.

If the West is to begin to heal this split, we must re-fuse these elements, and rediscover the whole. And as we experience the flesh and spirit coming together in the true body, so we must experience the union of Satan and Christ in a living archetype, a true dying-and-rising god, embodying the life and death of biological existence. Let us experience…

Dionysus, the vegetation god…

The myths of the Greeks tell us that Dionysus was the only god of the Olympic pantheon to be of partly mortal parentage. Zeus, disguised as a mortal, bedded Semele, daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes. The jealous Hera advised Semele, who was already six months pregnant, to ask of her mysterious lover that he reveal his true form. Suspicion instilled, Semele did so, and on Zeus’ refusal, barred him from her sexual favours. Mightily miffed, Zeus appeared to Semele as thunder and lightning, and killed her. However, Hermes saved the unborn child from her womb, and sewed him into Zeus’ thigh, from which he was born three months later. Dionysus thus earned the cultic epithet ‘twice-born’.

But Hera had not finished with her jealousy. She ordered the Titans to seize the child and they tore him to shreds. As the pieces were boiled in a cauldron, Dionysus was rescued once more, this time by his grandmother Rhea, who reconstituted him, and he came back to life.

Such myths obviously derive from the motifs of the proto-religious traditions of shamanism: the shaman’s initiatic descent into the underworld often entails being ripped apart by spirits and reconstituted in a cauldron or furnace by some chthonic blacksmith. Dionysus’ death and resurrection, or rebirth, form the first of a series of resonances that repeatedly associate him, and at some level identify him, with the mythical Jesus. Indeed, John M. Allegro has traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian. As we shall see, Dionysus may equally be identified with Satan. We shall explore Dionysus, and his split reflection in Jesus and Satan, for their many resonances, and eventually trace their mythical lineage back to a single primal source.

Dionysus and Jesus are both intimately associated with vines. Dionysus was credited with the introduction of vine cultivation, and the invention of wine. Jesus claimed to be the "true vine" (John 15,1), is notorious for his water-into-wine sorceries, and asked his disciples to remember him by drinking wine, his blood. Another link to vegetation, and thus the cycles of nature, is the mushroom. We shall return to this later; suffice it to say that both Dionysus and Jesus have been intimately linked by scholars to hallucinogenic fungi. Allegro persuasively argues that the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory. Until microscopes were invented, the regeneration of this plant, carried out as it is through the dispersion of tiny spores, remained a veritable mystery to humans. Mushrooms simply appeared, miraculously. In the words of R. Gordon Wasson’s guide in the Sierra Mazateca, "The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why." A virgin birth indeed. There was one widespread belief among the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning, as they invariably arose from the ground after rainstorms. We may note here that Dionysus was torn from his mother’s womb after Zeus destroyed her with lightning. Mushrooms, through their apparently mysterious nativity, were thus perfect symbols of the apparently miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter.

Dionysus, the horned god…

Together with their associations with plant life, the dying-and-rising gods inevitably demonstrated their links with nature through displaying animalistic aspects. This animality apparently arose voraciously in some Dionysian rites in the hills of ancient Greece, his worshippers reportedly tearing animals (representing their god) limb from limb and eating them in ecstatic frenzy… a holy communion that contrasts in a revealing way with its reserved Christian counterpart.

A key iconic link between the old dying-and-rising gods and Christianity’s Satan is the image of horns. Dionysus was born horned, and crowned with serpents. In his mythical history, he appeared variously as a bull, a panther, and a lion, and has been variously worshipped as a bull, a stag, a ram and a goat. One of the titles of Dionysus was Melanaigis, ‘he of the black goatskin’. Close to Dionysus in his horned image, proximity to nature and wild reputation is Pan, goat-god of the Arcadian pastures. It is widely thought that it was from representations of Pan that medieval Christianity derived its image of Satan as a horned, cloven-hoofed beast.

Not only are we distanced from the life-and-death of vegetation by the religious underpinnings of our culture, we are split from our animal heritage, from our instincts for self-preservation and sexual vitality, from our origins in this world. Most nature religions and fertility cults seem to hold a horned god or goddess to be central, including the viciously persecuted witches of Europe. Christianity was obviously moved to identify the Devil with horned half-animal deities in its efforts to suppress witchcraft and paganism in particular, and ‘beastliness’ in general. In The God of the Witches Margaret Murray notes that during his reign from 668 to 690, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, fulminated against anyone who "goes about as a stag or a bull, that is, making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because this is devilish."

Dionysus, the intoxicated god…

The connection of Dionysus and Jesus with psychedelic fungi has already been noted. Allegro, in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, voluminously documents the evidence for the New Testament being a coded guide to an ancient fertility cult centred around mushroom-fuelled mystery rites. Mushrooms obviously lend themselves to a host of sexual allusions, and it is on such natural resonances of form and process that ancient fertility cults based the sympathetic magic of their rituals. Here, the mushroom is Christ; as the sky-god shoots lightning and rain into Mother Earth, producing the revelatory natural drug, so God descends and immaculately fucks Mary, producing the redemptive revelation of God-made-flesh that is Jesus.18

Though Dionysus is popularly associated with wild revels induced by wine intoxication, Robert Graves has argued that the original Dionysian rites were only partially wine-inspired. He has insisted, through his combination of sound scholarship and poetic insight, that the worship of Dionysus once also involved the ingestion of the hallucinogenic fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria.

The psychedelic mushroom, the flesh of the gods and the food of the gods, is a living holistic symbol of the unity of spirit and matter. It seems no coincidence that this plant, whose ingestion activates a maelstrom of neural activity and experience of the divine that testifies to the indivisibility of body and soul, nature and mind, lies in the roots of Dionysus and Jesus. Christ’s position as a demonstration that God is also a man, that spirit is matter, has been systematically co-opted and disfigured by anti-life lunatics. Dionysus, at once vegetal, animal, human and divine, retains a wealth of vital significance which may still be fruitfully mined.

Dionysus, the god of masks…

As befits a psychedelic god, Dionysus was given to a bewildering series of mutations and transformations. Again echoing shamanism, with its traditions of shape-shifting, Dionysus variously appeared as a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther. He was also an occasional cross-dresser, and was the god of the theatre, masks and illusion. Use of psychedelics inevitably reveals the role-playing nature of identity, and the story of Dionysus shows that we may take advantage of this shifting quality of the masks we wear to the world. The metamorphic god persistently used his transformations to conquer foes and work his way out of difficult situations.

The first modern Dionysian prophet, Nietzsche, was not able to integrate his masks, and suffered through descent into ‘insanity’. Approaching his breakdown, he began signing letters with different names: Dionysus, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Crucified… He may have escaped his plunge into an uncontrollable shifting, or loss, of identity, had he existed in a less rigidly Apollonian society; but he was too far ahead of his time. Nietzsche correctly prophesied a coming era of violent transition. His own life was evidence that Dionysus, god of this transition, must also be a god of madness— insanity being a violent disparity between individual and society, a situation obviously rife in times of great change.

Aleister Crowley, who identified Dionysus with Pan, Pan with the Devil, and the Devil with himself, was better able to ride the turbulence created by the contrast between his own temperament and the culture he existed in. Through his magickal disciplines, he was able to live out his various masks in a way Nietzsche could only dream of. "Crowley took his personal experience, magical and otherwise, and created his own enclave, beyond the boundaries of conventional morality. He deliberately sought extremes of experience, concealing, and at the same time, revealing himself through a series of colourful personalities."19

Both Nietzsche and Crowley set themselves defiantly against the Christian Church and monotheism; both in some way identified themselves as anti-Christs; both believed they were heralding a time of violent change; both—Nietzsche through Dionysus and Crowley through Pan—sought to reawaken the old nature gods. Both also, in differing ways, experienced the revelation of the mask-wearing, no-self nature of identity, a revelation only now reaching fruition in the post-modern practices of chaos magic.20

Dionysus, the dancing god…

Like most frenzied ancient religious ceremonies, the rites of Dionysus involved dancing, an ecstatic abandonment of the codes of social order that are delineated in our normally reserved bodily movements. Dancing is a bodily gnosis, a release of powerful internal stimulants and a revelling in the physical excitement these stimulants inspire. Dancing (and its partner music) is also a celebration of the experience of the true body, our immediate experience felt in all its power, which is timeless because it knows no past or future. "…the present moment—the moment in which our entire lives are lived—has the greatest value to us when we approach it as we approach the present of music… The present moment is valued not because it serves as a means to an ultimate assumed gratification, but because it is an immediate source of joy in itself."21 "The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance."22

And now, with ‘dance culture’ being the widest label that can be used to express the tendencies of modern sub-cultures, we find a spontaneous rediscovery of Dionysian values. The involvement of psychedelic substances is too widely recognized to need comment, but we can also draw attention to the popularity of shifting one’s identity around, through increasing sexual experimentation and gender ambiguity, body modification, dress style and involvement in the myriad techniques of psychic mutation. The popularity of outdoor festivals, raves and parties has also engendered a growing enthusiasm for the natural environment; and the unprecedented rise in ecological activism testifies to this being more than a passive hedonistic interest.

Techno, a musical form that has now surpassed the confines of being a singular ‘genre’, is often reviled as an inhuman bastardization of musical form. But what it has actually done, as anyone who has participated in a good rave can tell you, is to exponentially evolve the physical hedonism of rock, and reconnect many people with the most human of experiences—being a body.

Lyrics, and thus conceptual thought, are reduced to blasts of disconnected sampling, or zeroed altogether. The music itself focuses on physiologically energizing, ultra-low, pulsing bass frequencies and spiralling, neuron-tickling melodies, designed to obliterate internal chatter and leave one adrift in strobing lights and rushing proprioceptions. As Genesis P-Orridge has remarked, regarding his own musical output in the late eighties explosion of acid house, "There’s not really anything to ‘say’. Maybe I’m a moron, but I just can’t think of anything to say to people at the moment. Except that there are ways to express yourself that are non-verbal." Techno surges backwards to the percussive roots of ecstatic musical ceremonies, and forwards into a future of limitless, because unspoken, possibilities… all collapsed into a bewildering present of fleshy transcendence.

My own most profound experiences of the jijimuge doctrine have been at the end of superior raves. The night is over, and the strip lights are turned on to clear people out, revealing all resplendent in their sweat-drenched clothes and with wondrous expanded pupils. But the beats continue, no body wants to stop. And so it goes on, joyous dancing in the full glare of white light… and all bodies appear to me to be simultaneously connected, bound in a sweaty, writhing whole, and divided, each displaying their unique nature through disparate corporeal interpretations of the same thudding rhythms…

VIII. Mother

. . . and Jim kept saying over and over, kill the father, fuck the mother, and essentially it boils down to just this, kill the father means kill all of those things in yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself; they are not your own, they are alien concepts which are not yours, they must die, those are things that must die. The psychedelic revolution. Fuck the mother is very basic, and it means get back to the essence … mother-birth, real, very real, you can touch it, you can grab it, you can feel it, it’s nature, it’s real, it can’t lie to you … the end of alien concepts, the beginning of personal concepts. Get to reality, get to your own reality, get to your own in-touch-with-yourself situation…

Paul Rothchild on the Doors recording ‘The End’

If we delve further into the mysteries of Dionysus, we inevitably encounter vestiges of a powerful archaic reverence for the feminine. Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate, having been raised by nymphs on Mount Nysa. He was the god most favoured by women, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites, especially on the island of Myconos, were closely associated with the veneration of his mother…

Although Dionysus’ mother is usually given as the mortal Semele, other accounts tell us that his mother was the corn goddess Demeter, or her daughter Persephone. Also, Semele was often worshipped as divine in her own right; Apollodorus equated her with Ge, the Thracian form of Gaia. Speculation about Dionysus’ mother may then cease, if we take a broader view and realize that all candidates are Earth Goddesses. Similarly, Marija Gimbutas, in her archaeological survey of evidence for an archaic preponderance of Goddess worship in Europe, notes that "discussions about the origin of the Greek Dionysus—whether he came to Greece from Thrace, Crete or western Asian Minor—are pointless, since all these lands originally belonged to the same Mother Culture."

And if we return to the perversions of medieval Christianity, we find Satan (a demonized remnant of pagan nature gods) intimately associated with women, sex, matter and, of course, the Earth. The Mouth of Hell was often graphically associated with female genitalia.23 The underworld of shamanic traditions and their derivatives, associated with the regenerative furnaces of nature’s womb and the buried dead, has been systematically transformed by Christianity into a place of terrible, eternal torture. This fact of cosmographic distortion bears ample witness to Christian terror at the idea of death and disastrous alienation from nature. Given the widespread association of the Earth and femininity, Stuart and Jane Farrar are justified in remarking that "it is almost surprising that Satan has not been characterized as female." Despite this, Christianity pulled no punches in hating women as servants of the Lord of Darkness himself.

We should pause before going further to look at some revealing etymology. The word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin material, meaning wood, timber, or stuff, which in turn derives from mater, meaning mother. In the light of our previous attempts to earth our sense of being by stressing our material existence as bodies, this linguistic derivation hints that we are on the right track in reconciling spirit with matter through the vegetal Dionysian godform, and following his history back to Mother Earth. In our linguistic heritage, as in the roots of our culture (Gimbutas’ ‘Mother Culture’ of Old Europe), there is no split between this material world and the hyperspatial matrix (Latin, ‘womb’) of the divine Mother. I would also like to note the connotations of the word ‘matter’. It is listed in Roget’s Thesaurus as a synonym for excrement, pus and garbage, as well as its less defiled meanings. Bearing in mind the origin of the word ‘matter’, and Christianity’s replacement of a chthonic Goddess with a scatologized, flesh- and woman-ruling Devil, we can see here some of the linguistic roots of our culture’s notorious misogyny.

Dionysus, as well as being heralded by Nietzsche as the god of the violent transition period that is the twentieth century, has also been seen as part of another transition, in the historical era in which his rites were performed. In Food of the Gods, McKenna traces the ancient European Goddess culture back to the Tassili-n-Ajjer Plateau in the Sahara of around 12,000 BCE, and, via the Natufians of Palestine, through to the Neolithic city of Çatal Hüyük in central Anatolia (modern Turkey).24 Çatal Hüyük was destroyed by fire, leaving some traces of Goddess culture, mostly in the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete. Indo-European invaders overtook the mainland of Asia Minor, and brought with them a predominance of war-oriented kingship-centred cultural ideals that destroyed or scattered remains of the archaic Goddess principle of harmonious partnership between humans and nature.

McKenna’s key argument is that the defining element of Goddess culture was the sacramental use of psychedelic mushrooms; and though by no means air-tight, his book provides enough evidence for this theory to justify his search for changing use of, and attitudes towards psychoactive plants as correlates of cultural shifts. He makes much of the differing cultural styles of mushroom-fuelled Goddess societies and mead-fuelled warrior societies, in specific relation to the behavioural impact of psilocybin and alcohol respectively. Well, anyone who has witnessed the change of chemical habits and general atmospheres in dance clubs in Britain over the past ten years will have no difficulty in seeing the logic and cohesion of McKenna’s argument.

It is interesting, then, that around Dionysus, a paradoxical mixture of warrior and effeminate cross-dresser, whose rites have been shown to be intimately bound to those of his Mother, we find so much debate about whether his worshippers’ sacrament was wine or mushrooms. Most scholars who are not too bound by cultural prejudice to even consider the historical use of psychedelics conclude that Dionysus’ rites involved both intoxicants.

Astoundingly, McKenna does not pick up on this symbolic psychoactive cross-over, but clearly recognizes the importance of the figure of Dionysus as a transitional one: "Is not Dionysus, in his androgyny, in his madness, in his personification of ecstatic intoxication, the image of the spiritual crises that overcame the Minoan Archaic ideal? A male god, but softened by the androgynous values of Gaian culture, a dying god, personifying the death agony of the symbiotic relationship to vegetation that male dominance, Christianity, and the phonetic alphabet would finally overthrow." He perceives in the mystery cults of Dionysus, and in those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, "the last frail outposts in the west of a tradition of using psychoactive plants to dissolve personal boundaries…" We may also see them as the dying gasps of the Great Goddess, whose cultures across Neolithic Europe—embodying a peaceful, holistic way of life, in harmony with nature—were trampled under the feet of invading Indo-European warrior tribes and eventually forgotten under the patriarchal rule of Christianity.

Erotic Jesus lays with his Marys / Loves his Marys / Bits of puzzle, fitting each other…

Perry Farrell, ‘Three Days’

Returning now to the Dionysus / Mother Goddess path, we can follow this further and uncover what I previously hinted at as the "single primal source" of the dying-and-rising godform lineage.

The first human conception of divinity, of universal creativity and intelligence, was female. The first humans discerned no connection between the sex act and the arrival of babies, due to the length of time between conception and birth. Thus, women were seen as the sole creators of life, primitive society was matrifocal and matrilineal, and the original Creator was naturally conceived in feminine terms. This may account for the belief of many researchers that archaic Goddess cultures represented a veritable paradise of sexual freedom—if sex was not connected to birth, it was obviously related to purely as a bodily pleasure. Male Creator gods and patriarchy probably evolved as a jealous backlash once the part played by the male in conception was discovered, and sexual repression instigated as a means for men to control procreation.

The Mother Goddess, as depicted in Greek, Assyrian, Indian and Australian Aboriginal cosmology, was self-created, and She created all things. Cosmologies must inevitably account for duality, formed as they are by humans who exist only in relation to the male/female polarity, so in most myths the self-generated Mother gives birth to a Son, who becomes her Lover; thus begin the dual principles of creation. In matrifocal cultures, this Son/Lover consort of the Mother Goddess was, while necessary, subservient and secondary.

While there is no hard evidence for Dionysus ever being seen as a Motherlover, it seems reasonable to suspect that his close association with, and ancient subservience to his Goddess parent descended from this primal myth. McKenna notes Dionysus’ secondary nature in discussing the older, more Goddess-oriented Minoan cults, and we may mention that the poet Pindar called Pan the "dog of the Great Goddess." Also significant is the fact that in many Catholic cultures, particularly where Christianity has attempted to supplant an older pagan faith, the cultic worship of the Mother Mary often puts Jesus in the shade.

The male consort was usually seen as the instrument of the Goddess in the seasonal rounds of the biosphere: it is through suffering his death and bringing about his resurrection that the Mother participates in the vegetal life of the Earth. Of course, She is also seen to be the Earth, showing that the dying-and-rising Son/Lover myth, seen in the pairings of Isis and Osiris, Ishtar and Tammuz, and possibly Gaia and Dionysus, is a sophisticated gloss on the archaic pre-eminence of the Goddess.

If we see the figure of Dionysus, historically, as a final vestige of the atrophying Goddess, what does his mythical rise in the late twentieth century represent? What is the significance of the "Dionysian witches’ brew in the upheavals of modern history—in the sexology of de Sade and the politics of Hitler",25 and the subsequent rediscovery of a much older, less agonized Dionysian consciousness—in ecstatic dance ceremonies, psychedelic sacraments, the rise of feminism, and a rebirth of appreciation for the natural environment?

We could think poetically for a moment, and see import in Stanislav Grof’s research into the re-experiencing of birth during LSD therapy. He contrasts the oceanic bliss of foetal existence in the womb with the immense, volcanic ecstasy of the baby as it passes through the birth canal, and labels the rapture often felt during the reliving of this latter phase as "Dionysian". He incidentally notes that this volcanic ecstasy "can be reached in aboriginal ceremonies that involve wild dancing and loud intoxicating music, or even in their modern counterparts…"26 In this tumultuous existential struggle, the motifs of birth, life, sex and death intertwine, Eros and Thanatos locked in a tumbling embrace…

May we see the later, darker rites of Dionysus as the birth pangs and death throes of a European culture experiencing final separation from its old Mother Goddess—a traumatic birth into mechanism, patriarchy, alienation from nature, disgust for our bodies, and sexual repression? May we also see the recent rise of Dionysus as another collective birth, back to our Mother roots? Where will we land?

Perhaps in McKenna’s vision of humanity as a tool of nature used to develop communication technologies—to the extent that the Earth, through us, finally becomes a self-reflexive organism. Perhaps we are going back to make our peace with the Earth after our rape and abuse of Her, before being born as Her space-exploring child. Either way, the Goddess looks set to loom large again in human culture.

The rise of interest in the Great Goddess, in Her history and Her presence, has brought cautions from some quarters, wary of just swapping monotheisms. I hope there is something more profound at work than this.

The dualities of spirit/male, matter/female can be seen in a new light if we realize that patriarchy, through Christianity and Science, has worked with both sides, but in a mode of barren alienation. ‘Spirit’ has become an abstracted realm used to enforce repressive dogma, cut off from the gnosis of personal experience found in dream exploration, meditation and interior psychedelic journeys. ‘Matter’ has, through rigidified subject/object dualism, grown to signify a dead, lumpen world ‘out there’ which we manipulate and battle against… severed from our bodily existence, internal sensations, and ultimate quantum union with the material processes of our environment. It is the attitude with which patriarchal monotheism faces reality that distinguishes it from the Goddess cultures which it replaced—or, more precisely, it is the fact that it faces reality, in a mode of confrontation rather than integrated union.

If a revival of the Great Goddess means a return to ourselves and a return to the Earth, through the immediate experience of spiritual reality and awareness of ourselves as flesh, I’m all for it. The psychological importance of the conception of the Goddess seems to be that She is truly all-encompassing, and embraces all gods, spirits, creatures and aliens; all death, life, joy and pain. She is not a jealous, abstract deity who pretends to be good and all-loving, then reveals a violent paranoia in trying to supplant all other gods and goddesses, creates an eternal opponent/scapegoat, and withdraws from the world into an impalpable, invitation-only fortress called Heaven.

The Goddess is within and all around us, and stands for immediate experience of being and unity-in-diversity, as opposed to fundamentalist dualism, alienation, ontological insecurity, and the vicious loops of denial and negation these insidious diseases entail.

Whatever you call it, deified or not, we are an inextricable part of existence. We are bodily organisms, we are ecosystems within ecosystems, we are alive. All existence demands of us is that we affirm it, that we experience it as fully and intensely as possible in whatever ecstasies and agonies that we pass through. The streets are crammed with zombies who only have TV reminders and occasional, unasked-for jolts of harsh reality to let them know they’re living. Their fear of future death is unconscious horror at their present death, for the present is the only reality. Every instant contains the constant fact of the death of their imaginations, the death-like paralysis of their bodies.

Do you know you’re alive? Have you given in to the weight of this crawling mortification, this grey denial of real life and real death? Much better, we feel, is a surrender to the vital energy we embody, and a ceaseless effort to see, affirm, and make use of its possibilities unfolding in every moment.

Footnotes

1. Timothy O’Neill, ‘A Flame in the Holy Mountain’, in Fenris Wolf #3, edited by Carl Abrahamsson [back to text]
2. See the chapter ‘The Protestant Era’ in Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death for a fascinating psychoanalytical discussion of Luther, the Devil, scatology and capitalism. [back to text]
3. Recommended reading on this topic: ‘In Praise Of Devil Worship’ by Ramsey Dukes and ‘Nature Of The Beast’ by D.M. Mitchell in The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt [back to text]
4. Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism, p. 17 [back to text]
5. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 4, 338 [back to text]
6. Terence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime lecture [back to text]
7. See ‘You Could Be Dead Tomorrow‘ by John Eden in OV Magazine and Towards 2012 part I [back to text]
8. From an interview in Mavericks of the Mind edited by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick [back to text]
9. David Cronenberg in Cronenberg on Cronenberg edited by Chris Rodley [back to text]
10. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [back to text]
11. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3, 109 [back to text]
12. Brown, Love’s Body, ‘Nature’ [back to text]
13. See Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens, p. 208 [back to text]
14. This does not limit ‘spiritual’ experience to the overt confines of the physical form. Quantum mechanics demonstrates that when one reaches the deepest layers of material reality, a form of connection to apparently distant physical structures exists, possibly accounting for the magical feats of perception-at-a-distance reported in shamanic ‘soul-travel’. [back to text]
15. Included as a chapter in Character Analysis. [back to text]
16. Intensive use of powerful psychedelics may also lead one to merge these two worlds. From Dream Matrix Telemetry, McKenna’s rant on DMT: "I somehow shattered the membrane between myself and ordinary space. I carried the trip into the room with me… an elf hanging off each hand." Here lurks the danger of psychotic breaks with consensus reality; but here also dances the possibility of a true alchemical wedding of spirit and matter, the real-ization of the surrealist project. Many other similar reports in psychedelic literature have made clear that the duality of these domains can be paradoxically preserved. Normal space and hyperspace may be experienced simultaneously, yet still perceived as distinct. [back to text]
17. Read Wilhelm Reich’s The Murder of Christ for a vivid, if laboured, portrayal of Christ as a fully red-blooded male. [back to text]
18. The reader is asked to ponder the fact that the Mexican mushroom-cultic name for their vegetal sacrament, teonanácatl, means ‘the flesh of the gods’ (they also believed that mushrooms were born of lightning). The Spanish invaders were understandably peeved at this, as it took a bit of wind out of their attempts to convert the natives to the ‘true’ religion of Christianity, with its rites of eating the flesh and blood of God’s material manifestation. Had the true psychedelic nature of the original Christian cult caught up with them? Despite the Spanish conquest, the native mushroom cults happily blended Christianity into their ceremonies, Christ being identified with the sacred fungi. See Munn’s ‘The Mushrooms of Language’. [back to text]
19. Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos, p .16 [back to text]
20. It is interesting that the largest magical organization based around the chaos approach, the Illuminates Of Thanateros, combine in their name Freud’s notorious battling dualities of Thanatos, the death instinct, and Eros, the life instinct. This hints at the yin-yang reintegration of polarities hoped for by Norman O. Brown in the final pages of Life Against Death. [back to text]
21. Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra [back to text]
22. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, p. 105 [back to text]
23. See The Silbury Treasure by Michael Dames, p. 111. This book is also essential reading for those interested in Britain’s Great Goddess heritage. [back to text]
24. The reader is directed to the following books for further research into these areas: Merlin Stone’s The Paradise Papers, Marija Gimbutas’ The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade and �atal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia by James Mellaart (the principal archaeological investigator of the site). [back to text]
25. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 176 [back to text]
26. Stanislav Grof, The Holotropic Mind, p. 63 [back to text]

Recommended research material

• The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro. A dense work of etymology tracing the roots of Christianity back to Sumerian fertility cults, with particular focus on the possible central position of psychedelic mushrooms in mystery rites among early Christians. Valuable analysis of the sexual connotations of mushroom morphology, and of encrypted mushroom-related information in the New Testament. Allegro was one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
• Life Against Death and Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown. Life Against Death is a rare thing: a classical scholar in the fifties grappling with the depths of Freudian psychoanalysis, and its implications for the meaning of human history and culture, with a refusal to settle for either nihilism or easy answers. Fascinating material on the psychological conceptions of time, language and sexuality, and their relationship to the human body. Although Brown fails to push far enough beyond Freud’s insidious misogyny, he has the courage to shatter much psychoanalytical orthodoxy, and ends with tentative moves towards the holism of Taoist philosophy and a call for a cultivation of a polymorphous, hermaphroditic sexuality. Love’s Body is the follow-up, with Brown’s academicism breaking down under the weight of his findings into a non-linear mine of aphoristic investigations. Together these works represent some of the finest eschatological writings of the twentieth century.
• Undoing Yourself by Christopher S. Hyatt. A highly potent synthesis of yoga, Reichian bodywork and zen. A crash course in proprioception.
• Dreambody by Arnold Mindell. The author details the relationship of his conception of the dreambody and his therapeutic work to mythology, fairy tales, and various religious conceptions of subtle energies.
• Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna. Bold speculations on the role of psychedelic plants in human evolution. with special focus on prehistoric shamanism and Goddess cultures, and their collapse in neolithic times. Also, convincing arguments against the previous identification of the Amanita muscaria mushroom as one of the key ancient psychedelics.
• The Invisible Landscape by Terence & Dennis McKenna. The background to what eventually becomes a radical new model of historical time provides important scientific and philosophical refutations of the mind/body split, as the authors attempt to "understand the mechanics of the mutual interrelatedness of mind and the organic matrix at formative submolecular junctures." Plus one of the best brief discussions of shamanism, and its relationship to schizophrenia.
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. If one can read around Nietzsche’s rabid hatred of femininity, this is an important work of poetic philosophy that transcends both materialism and abstract spirituality, prefiguring Norman O. Brown’s rediscovery of ‘body mysticism’. A profound, passionate statement against contempt for the world and hatred for nature.
• The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women’s Rites by Merlin Stone. One of many excellent feminist re-visions of history, detailing the violent transition from Goddess worship to patriarchal monotheism. Includes important analyses of the Old Testament and the roots of its destructive influence on the status of women.
• The Book, Nature, Man & Woman and The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts is quite simply the most clear-headed and accessible philosopher dealing with the untenable premises of fundamentalist dualism, reductionist materialism, and all forms of the anti-nature religious impulse. He is particularly adept at teasing actual states of non-verbal perception out of the reader through the use of words. All works here are highly recommended.
• Ishtar Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Excellent survey of the resurgence of reverence for the feminine in modern culture. There is a heavy focus on the breasts in Wilson’s analysis, whereas the cunt seems to be equally important in the symbolism of historical Goddess worship (as evidenced in Tantra and palaeolithic art); his editorship at Playboy magazine may explain and perhaps forgive this imbalance.

Other texts used

• The Fenris Wolf (issues 2 & 3) edited by Carl Abrahamsson
• The New Nietzsche edited David B. Allison
• The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln
• The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece by Philippe Borgeaud
• Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis by Norman O. Brown
• William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P. H. Butter
• The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
• The Powers of Evil by Richard Cavendish
• The Holy Bible edited by The Christian Church
• The Gnostics by Tobias Churton
• Magick by Aleister Crowley
• The Silbury Treasure by Michael Dames
• Kantharos: Studies in Dionysiac and Kindred Cult by George W. Elderkin
• The Witches’ Goddess by Janet & Stewart Farrar
• The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer
• The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas
• Food for Centaurs, The Greek Myths: 1 and The White Goddess by Robert Graves
• The Holotropic Mind by Stanislav Grof
• Nietzsche’s Zarathustra by Kathleen Marie Higgins
• Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine
• The Nietzsche Reader edited by R. J. Hollingdale
• Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys
• The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
• Metamorphosis in Greek Myth by Forbes Irving
• John Lilly, so far… by Francis Jeffrey & John C. Lilly
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life by C. Kerenyi
• A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Ernest Klein
• The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler
• Nietzsche and Modern Times by Lawrence Lampert
• The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey
• The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna
• Info-Psychology by Timothy Leary
• The Dyadic Cyclone by John C. Lilly & Antonietta Lilly
• The Illusionist by Anita Mason
• The Archaic Revival, Psychedelics Before & After History (taped lecture), Alien Dreamtime (lecture with Spacetime Continuum) and Dream Matrix Telemetry (with Zuvuya) by Terence McKenna
• The God of the Witches by Margaret Murray
• ‘The Mushrooms of Language’ by Henry Munn (in Hallucinogens and Shamanism edited by Michael Harner)
• Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Dionysiac Mysteries by Martin P. Nilsson
• Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus by Rose Pfeffer
• Character Analysis, The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich
• Blissed Out by Simon Reynolds
• Cronenberg on Cronenberg edited by Chris Rodley
• The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak
• Ecstasy and the Dance Culture by Nicholas Saunders
• The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt
• ‘Game of the Gods’ by Stephen Sennitt (in Rapid Eye 3 edited by Simon Dwyer)
• Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes & Albert Hoffman
• The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism edited by Stuart F. Spicker
• The Spiral Dance by Starhawk
• Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens
• The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics compiled by Danny Sugerman
• ‘The Individual as Man/World’ by Alan Watts (in The Psychedelic Reader edited by Gunter M. Weil, Ralph Metzner & Timothy Leary)
• World Mythology edited by Roy Willis

by Gyrus

In an age where anti-flesh puritanism seems to be waning, and yet still persists in subtle manifestations, more and more extreme stimuli—both physical and conceptual—may be necessary to re-establish our relationship with our bodies. The vicious and relentless suppression of bodily awareness that is our inheritance from Pauline Christianity will not just fade away if we ask nicely. It seems that the growing popularity in the West of body modification practices, and physical forms of S/M sexuality, is indicative of the what may be necessary to reclaim our flesh and provoke ourselves into a deeper body-consciousness. And, as we shall see, our cultural myths, the imagery and conceptions that our artists generate, may also have become equally extreme in their treatment of the flesh, of necessity.

What is most relevant to us here is the phenomenon that stands as the most violent litmus test of attitudes towards the body—physical illness. I say ‘physical’ to distinguish from mental illness, and straight away we’re plunged into the arbitrary, and only sometimes useful division of existence that is embedded deep within our psyches and our language. We’re talking Cartesian dualism, of course… body = matter, mind = spirit… they’re utterly divorced, and God knows how they interact. To me, this is less a scientific observation than a philosophical rationalization of the core myth of Christianity. That is, the belief that we have been expelled from the spiritual paradise of Eden into this lumpen world of mortality, matter and disease. This world, and thus our bodies, in which our souls are supposedly encaged, is our punishment for the transgression of Adam & Eve. However, as Science gradually replaced Christianity as the West’s guiding mythology, there was a growing impatience with the whole idea of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ ("Where is it? How can we measure it?" cried the anxious minds in the laboratory). So the concept was dropped altogether as an embarrassing ghost that evaded quantification—and we arrive at materialist reductionism. All mental phenomena are seen as illusory by-products of the chemical and electrical activity of the brain. The world, and our bodies, move from being seen as corrupt to being seen as essentially meaningless. Disease is seen as just a mechanical fault, to be repaired and patched up. Patients are usually allowed to believe that their thoughts and emotions are real, but any connections and correlations made between the mental and the physical are seen as dangerous superstitions.

To set the debate rolling, let’s look at Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, perhaps the most concise, lucid and passionate statement denying a non-physical basis for physical illness. Briefly, her main argument runs along these lines…

In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was a relatively widespread terminal disease that was seen in popular folklore, and through the eyes of artists, as indicative of a certain emotional temperament. The Romantics romanticized TB, seeing it as a sign of a passionate and sensitive nature. Then science discovered the physical basis for the disease, and consequently found a cure. The mythologizing of TB rapidly faded away, to be completely superseded in our century by another disease ripe for fantasy-projections: cancer. And, as a guaranteed medical cure remains elusive, cancer remains a condition muddied by unnecessary metaphorical thinking.

Sontag’s book is very persuasive, but tends to be very glib with regard to non-orthodox medical practice. Her persuasiveness largely stems from how she plays with the belittling connotations of ‘folklore’ and the authoritative tone of ‘scientific truth’. Also, she attempts to claim that ‘illness as metaphor’ is a dominant cultural myth of the modern era, when materialist science—’illness as mechanical breakdown’—undoubtedly holds this honour.

Neglecting to mention the vested interests that drug companies have in patients being treated solely via medicine, she states that "such preposterous and dangerous views", such as the idea that illness is a manifestation of unexpressed desires or impulses, "manage to put the onus of the disease on the patient and not only weaken the patient’s ability to understand the range of plausible medical treatment, but also, implicitly, direct the patient away from such treatment."1 This is a common distortion. The idea that a psychological view of certain diseases automatically places the blame for the condition on the patient is overly simplistic. In her criticism of Wilhelm Reich ("who did more than anyone to disseminate the psychological theory of cancer"—Sontag), for instance, she entirely neglects his extensive sociological analyses. While Reich placed the blame for cancer on unexpressed emotions, he usually placed the blame for this repression on repressive social systems. Of course, when thought about deeply, this reasoning leads to a classic ‘chicken and egg’ loop—which came first, consciousness or culture? To avoid metaphysical ‘first cause’ speculations, it is obvious that the most practical model for causality here is to accept the loop; to see causality as a dynamic interplay of external and internal factors.2

Essentially, then, Sontag is reiterating the doctrine of Cartesian dualism, or Christianity in disguise: that mind is separate from body; that the body is no more part of our identity than a car is; that disease, though painful, is merely a mechanical breakdown or invasion. And, like a car, the body should be repaired from a purely physical standpoint—any reference to emotional states or character traits is romantic mythologizing at best, dangerous delusion at worst.

While posing as a radical out to scythe down the perilous weeds of mythology, she perpetuates yet another form of the mind/body split that has drastically alienated us from the world we are part of.

The films of David Cronenberg are, if nothing else, resolutely body-conscious. Although the average reaction to this consciousness is one of hysterical revulsion, and although many critics claim that Cronenberg demonstrates a puritanical disgust with the flesh, it is my view that his films can be seen as a bloody and painful—but natural—conceptual birth process. The birth, back into awareness, of our relationship with our bodies. Just as scarification or piercing may be necessary to re-invoke body-awareness on an individual scale, the visceral pain of Cronenberg’s imagery may be a good example of what is necessary to kick-start the cultural meme-pool’s body-awareness.

Cronenberg has stressed his fascination with Cartesian dualism in statements too numerous to mention. He envisions the ultimate comment on this unfathomable ‘split’ (and the basis of all horror) as being the process of physical death. "Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? … There seems to be something wrong with that. It’s very easy to see why many philosophers detach the mind from the body … But I don’t believe that."3 It is this anguish of contradiction that lies at the heart of the painful mystery in his films. Cronenberg sees an apparent split—but his intuitions deny that such a thing exists.

Martin Scorcese once said that Cronenberg doesn’t understand what his films are about.4 Cronenberg himself has admitted that he makes a film to find out why he wants to make it. It is my argument that, from film to film, his central line of questioning has revolved around the mysteries of the mind/body/disease axis; and that in recent years, he may well have started to brush against some answers.

The Brood (1979) was Cronenberg’s first film with ‘name’ actors—starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Reed plays Dr Hal Raglan, a maverick therapist who has set up a retreat to practice the controversial technique he has developed, known as Psychoplasmics. It is here, at The Soma Institute, that the film begins.

We are immediately plunged into a dark auditorium, where Raglan is giving a demonstration with a male patient. Psychoplasmics appears to be a rough parody or charicature of many of the alternative body-therapies of the seventies. Here, the patient is taunted and humiliated by Raglan, who plays the role of the dominant father, persuading him that he would have been better off as a girl—his weakness would then be more ‘acceptable’.5 The patient resists this suggestion fiercely, and as his anger wells up, Raglan encourages him. "Show me your anger!" he shouts, and the patient removes his top to reveal his torso—which has developed strange scarlet boils. With a mixture of defiance and frustration, the patient cries, "This is me, daddy!"

In line with the real-life therapies it apes, Psychoplasmics proposes that bodily dysfunctions give physical form to emotional dysfunctions—a hypothesis amplified here under the cinematic lens into a quite immediate process. This concept is neatly expressed in the title of Raglan’s book, The Shape of Rage.6 And this, in turn can be seen as a reflection of Cronenberg’s greatest contribution to cinematic expression, its visual grammar. In exploring and revealing hidden anxieties and abstracted conflicts, he has utilized the "gloop" (his word) of prosthetic special effects to give visual form to these mental phenomena. The basic model for nearly all Cronenberg’s films is to turn a violently alienated individual inside-out, to externalize their internal dynamics for the audience’s inspection—in the same way that illness, in the psychosomatic model, brings repressed conflicts to the attention of the individual.

Videodrome (1982) is probably Cronenberg’s most complex and provocative film, in both form and content. It deals with a vast constellation of issues that infest the late twentieth century: mass media landscapes, censorship, the effect of technology on humanity, loss of stable identity, violent sexuality, mind control… All these themes are woven together in the film via the body-mind of one individual, Max Renn (James Woods).

Renn runs a small cable TV station, Channel 83, which specializes in softcore sex and hardcore violence. While looking to commission a new show, he is intrigued by the latest illicit interception made by Harlan, Channel 83′s satellite broadcast pirate. Renn watches a short scene from a show called ‘Videodrome’. We see a rust-red chamber, lined with electrified clay, in which naked women are beaten and tortured by men clad in enveloping black uniforms. No plot, no dialogue, no characters, just "torture, murder, mutilation". Max tries to track the show down, encountering an intricate maze of leads, and it is revealed that what he has seen is in fact a prototype of a new TV show to be broadcast in the near future by a large, sinister defence corporation, CONSEC. He had been shown pre-recorded tapes by CONSEC plant Harlan to expose him to a signal which is transmitted together with the televisual images. The violent imagery supposedly opens up neural receptors, allowing the signal itself to sink in, and to eventually induce a tumour (or new organ) to grow in the brain—which in turn triggers bizarre hallucinations. It is also revealed that this Videodrome signal was invented by an eccentric, McLuhanesque media prophet, Brian O’Blivion, who was killed by CONSEC—they intend to utilize his creation to facilitate extensive mind control over the population.

Max’s hallucinations begin with video cassettes turning fleshy, and imagined episodes of sadistic violence against women. Never a friend of the censors, Cronenberg is confusing expectations here by following the censors’ own ‘screen violence leads to real violence’ logic. But, as in reality, things are not quite so clear-cut. On viewing some Japanese porn intended for Channel 83, Max remarks, "There’s something too soft about it. I’m looking for something that’ll break through, y’know, something… tough." Thus, before he’s even aware of Videodrome, we can see his attraction to the violent, penetrative shades of sexuality. And later, when confronted by CONSEC head Barry Convex, he comes close to having his rationalizations about Videodrome undermined. "Why would anybody watch a scum show like Videodrome?" Convex asks, "Why did you watch it, Max?" "Business reasons," is Max’s glib answer. "Sure, sure," Convex smiles. "Why deny you get your kicks out of watching torture and murder?" Convex knows Max better than he knows himself. This is precisely how CONSEC was able to lure him into being exposed to the signal, placing him under their control and giving them access to his TV station for the broadcast of Videodrome.

Then there is Masha, an ageing woman who commissions shows for Max. She can also sense Max’s hidden desires. She asks him what kind of TV show he would produce, given the chance, "for the subterranean [read: unconscious] market. Would you do… Videodrome?" Cut immediately to a scene between Max and Nikki Brand, a radio personality with a strong and guiltless penchant for scarification and masochism. Here, after Renn has frantically tried to persuade her not to ‘audition’ for Videodrome, she takes a cigarette and burns her breast.7 Previously, we have seen Max pierce her ear during sex. Nikki’s role in the film, then, is to initiate Max into the expression of his sadistic impulses.8

But the relationship is never allowed to settle into an easily categorized top/bottom, male/female one. And it is here where the role of the body becomes paramount in the revelation of Max’s unconscious dynamics. The first body-image hallucination that Max experiences involved his stomach opening up into a throbbing vaginal slit. In a startlingly literal scene of self-penetration (=self-knowledge?), he forces his handgun into his stomach, which then, inexplicably, closes up, leaving Max to search vainly for the gun. It is this slit which provides CONSEC with their control over Max. Fleshy video cassettes are inserted into his slit to ‘play’ a programme (or program) on his psychic video (or biocomputer). So Max’s body has become the site where his unacknowledged receptivity has manifested, with a vengeance. Aleister Crowley once wrote, "The act of repressing has the effect of exciting."9 Max’s repression of his passive receptivity (which seems to be more insidious than the repression of his sadistic aggression) leads to this receptive aspect emerging even more strongly? allowing CONSEC to control him with relative ease. But categories are mixed up again when Harlan tries to insert a cassette, only to have his hand ‘bitten off’ by Max’s slit. Vagina Dentata is evoked as Max (with help from O’Blivion’s daughter) turns his apparently receptive organ into a tool of assertion.

It may be time to pause here, and return to alternative therapeutic theories. In his many books on his clinical discoveries, Arnold Mindell has described his concept of the ‘dreambody’. He envisages this aspect of humans as a very fluid and pervasive version of the standard unconscious. It manifests in dreams, hallucinations and fantasies, as well as in bodily symptoms—the two areas are seen as opposite poles on the continuum of the dreambody. Mindell’s theories, developed through extensive work with ordinary patients in therapy, psychotics and the terminally ill, suggest that bodily symptoms reflect processes in the psyche which are trying to manifest. These processes are often natural developments in the individual’s evolution, stifled by various repressive mechanisms. His basic method for therapy involves ‘amplifying’ the symptoms (analogous to Jungian amplification of dream symbols) until their full intensity and meaning is experienced. Evading both Sontag’s criticism of models of illness that seem to blame the patient, as well as avoiding any absolutist mind/body split, he states: "I don’t believe that a person actually creates disease, but that his soul is expressing an important message to him through the disease."10 There is still a duality here—that of the individual ego and the unconscious, or the ‘soul’. I don’t think that many (except perhaps radical Taoists or Buddhists) will deny that this split exists; my main point is that it negates, through re-modelling, any absolute mind/matter division. Many consciousness researchers have realized that the ego/unconscious split is an imposition of our culture, and has been bridged in the past—and may well be bridged in the future, with the creative use of the many techniques of psychic integration we have at our disposal. What is important for now, though, is to recognise that the body, diseased or not, can be seen as a reflection of the unconscious—the regions of the soul, or Self, that the ego is removed from. Antero Alli describes this nicely: "The physical body is the visible manifestation of the so-called Subconscious Mind. The body is the fingerprint of the soul, a Rorschach of the Self. Nothing can be hidden. The body communicates it all."11 These last two sentences may be the motto of Cronenberg’s work—the unconscious is never as ‘un-conscious’ as we like to think.

I’d also like to briefly look at another objection to psychosomatic theory—that this view doesn’t acknowledge the effect of the external environment on a person. In fact, in all but its most extreme versions, the philosophy I’m describing here has plenty of room for this side of the equation. In his vision of a utopian state, where medical science is entirely balanced, Mindell sees a world where a doctor will sometimes prescribe drugs, sometimes operate, sometimes work on body processes, sometimes bring the whole family in for therapy. And sometimes, "the doctor might say, ‘My dear man, go home, and wait and see what happens. Your problems are coming from planetary disturbance, and there is no sense in taking your problems personally. Wait until the city government makes certain changes. Write them your dreams now."12 Given the cultural milieu of Max Renn’s world, this may be a valid way of looking at his body mutations. Indeed, in his essay on media, identity and modern sci-fi, Scott Bukatman sees the body, in Cronenberg’s films, "as the overdetermined site for the expression of profound social anxiety. The subject of the Cronenberg film is hardly human action: it is instead … the structures of external power and control to which the individual (in body and soul) is subjected." Though valid, for me this is also too one-sided. Far better to view ourselves in terms of a continuum, a focused point in an organism-environment field, in the words of Alan Watts.13 Alternatively, in Mindell’s process terminology, "The inner world and outer world dreambodies are two-way streets, and it’s impossible to place blame, for we all contribute to the body as a whole. Our dreambody is part of the entire world’s dreambody, yet the world’s dreambody is also found within us."14

To return to the film itself, we can now discern a process of psychic integration, of sorts. In the final scene, Max ends up in a derelict boat—a ‘condemned vessel’. Inside, he is informed by Nikki, or at least her televisual image (if there is any difference), that it is time for him to let his body die. His present physical form, like the boat, has outlived its usefulness. He is shown himself committing suicide on the TV—placing a gun to his temple, saying "Long live the New Flesh," and firing. The screen explodes and spews out guts and intestines. Max proceeds to carry out his suicide, and the blast of the shot echoes over a blank black screen before the credits roll.

It is unfortunate that the intended ending never made it into the final cut—not due to censorship, but to inadequate gloop.15 The original script called for a scene following Max’s apparent suicide, where Max, Nikki, and Bianca O’Blivion meet in the Videodrome chamber and engage in a polysexual union, each producing new mutated sex organs, Nikki and Bianca developing cocks to match Max’s slit, all of them physically melting into one another. The New Flesh, the New Self. The Videodrome chamber, previously the site of Max’s fantasies of violence and torture, is transformed through (ego?) death into a place for a more creative, viscerally psychedelic existence—boundary dissolution and mind manifestation in the flesh. The womb connotations of the chamber were quite consciously wrought—"Freudian rebirth imagery, pure and simple."16 The dark orange/red colour of the chamber and the rusting boat Max finds himself in blend and evoke both decay and bloody birth. Note also Nikki’s advice to Max to "go all the way through". However, Cronenberg thought the scene may not have had the intended effect, that the mutated sex organ prosthetics may have been laughable.

As it is, we are left with a taste of the tragic finality that was to characterize his films’ conclusions throughout the eighties.

It is fitting that Cronenberg’s last overt ‘disease movie’ (to date) brushes closest to the roots of the quest for meaning in bodily illness. In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a lonely, obsessive scientist who has virtually perfected the world’s first teleportation system. There is one glaring fault—it cannot teleport live, organic matter. A baboon ends up being turned inside-out by the process. "I must not know enough about the flesh myself," says Brundle after the disastrous experiment. "I’m gonna have to learn." His first lesson occurs in bed with Veronica (Geena Davies). In post-coital play, Veronica pinches Brundle’s skin. "I wanna eat you up," she says. "That’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It’s the flesh—it just makes you crazy." A flash of ‘Eureka!’ descends on Brundle, and he quickly realizes that he has to program that same ‘craziness’ for the flesh into his computer, so that it can cope with teleporting organic matter.

Another baboon is put through, this time successfully, and they agree to wait for tests on the animal to be performed before a human goes through. But Brundle gets drunk and jealous one night, believing Veronica to be with her ex, and teleports. He fails to notice a housefly in the telepod with him—the computer gets confused, and decides to splice the two genetic patterns together. Brundle emerges, apparently invigorated; but deep within him are insectile DNA patterns waiting to erupt.

Now, neuroscientists, psychonauts and tribal cultures alike know that we’ve already got some animals inside us. Evolution has built up layers of brain tissue, so that the human brain can be seen as being composed of an old reptilian brain, an overlaying mammalian brain, and the most recent and explosive development, the uniquely human neocortex. It seems that this neocortex developed so rapidly that it failed to fully integrate with the older animal brain sections, leaving a neural discrepancy that has been held by some to be responsible for humanity’s notorious inhumanity.17 And yet techniques for forcing integration of these layers have existed for many thousands of years. Frequently, researchers have come to the conclusion that the copious animal mythologies of tribal cultures around the globe, and the many pagan human/animal hybrid deities, represent an ancient awareness of our animal inheritance. And perhaps the most direct method of contacting and integrating this inheritance lies in the shamanic practice of shape-shifting.

I believe that in The Fly the genetic splicing idea and its subsequent developments represent a science-fiction model of this ancient consciousness-expansion technique, which finds its modern equivalent in Austin Osman Spare’s ‘atavistic resurgence’ (Spare’s art contains numerous shape-shifting motifs). Using various trance techniques, a state of consciousness is induced which allows total identification with a certain animal. This may be used for achieving certain effects in the world, but often it functions as a method of psychic integration—balancing. It seems clear that Brundle’s experiences propel him through an unexpected and violent process analogous to many aspects of the traditional shaman’s vocation. Aside from the shape-shifting aspect, the film also contains the following correspondences:

• What the teleporter does is what the shaman goes through during the initiatory experience—deconstruction/reconstruction, or death and resurrection. Like a shaman, Brundle (initially) becomes ‘superhuman’ as a result of this experience, incredibly strong and energetic. He says, "I’m beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and being put back together again… Why, it’s like coffee being put through a filter—it’s somehow a purifying process."
• An almost certainly unintentional, but amusing hint sneaks into the script. After seeing Brundle go through the teleporter, a woman he’s just picked up gasps, "Are you some sort of magician?"
• The shamanic initiation is reversed in the film. Brundle gets taken apart and put back together, then experiences an ‘initiatory sickness’. "I seem to be stricken by a disease with a purpose," Brundle quips, as any proto-shaman might.

You may object that what eventually happens to Brundle puts across a very negative message about the bizarre, rapid cancer he develops as he becomes more and more fly-like. And yes, we should always bear in mind while making the above connections that Cronenberg’s films are essentially morality plays—they show where the wrong paths may lead, as warnings. I feel that the tragic conclusion of The Fly is due to two main factors. First, there is the law of repression = excitation. Brundle’s initial repression of his animal nature, his relationship to his flesh, seems to be too rapidly torn away. His moment of realization in bed with Veronica is merely a conceptual lesson. His animality is yet to be unleashed through the teleportation ‘accident’, and his body, the canvas of the unconscious, reveals not only what he has repressed, but how much he has repressed it. (In a way, Brundle doesn’t escape being turned inside-out like the first baboon.) Secondly, there is the incomprehension and revulsion of others, represented here by Veronica. "I know what the disease wants," says Brundle. "It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else." "Turned into what?" Veronica asks. Although understandable, to me this attitude seems to resonate with our culture’s general fear of change, especially when it involves disturbing aspects (which it usually does). Even though The Fly manages to echo the shamanic roots of the idea of transformative illness, the impulse remains strangled by Cronenberg’s acute awareness of the dangerous stagnancy of Western society.

I mentioned at the start of this essay that I believe Cronenberg may have recently been moving towards some answers to his cinematic explorations. His (probably) unconscious connection with ancient mind/body/disease awareness is one of these tentative ‘answers’. The other came as the result of his fusion with his literary idol William S. Burroughs, in his film version of the novel Naked Lunch.

I do not have space to delve deeply into the fascinating relationship between Cronenberg’s previous treatment of disease and the ‘sickness’ of junk addiction in this film.18 My main focus is on how Cronenberg utilized Burroughs’ ‘Talking Asshole’ routine, the story of how a guy teaches his asshole to talk—and eventually gets his mouth sealed by the mutinous asshole. Though the routine appears verbally in the film, its visual influence is most interesting. The insectile typewriter that Bill Lee uses, and is given instructions by, has a ‘talking asshole’ through which it speaks. On one level, it functions as an alien intelligence using Lee as an agent; on another level, it is Lee’s unconscious mind guiding his actions.

The Talking Asshole is Burroughs himself, in the sense that it’s the part of you that you don’t want to listen to, that’s saying things that are unspeakable, that are too basic, too true, too primordial and too uncivilized and tasteless to be listened to… but are there, nonetheless. So in a sense, the mind/asshole schism, the head/mouth versus the asshole, is maybe more of a Freudian schism—the asshole’s really the unconscious and the head’s the superego. More than it being a true mind/body schism, it’s a sort of mind/mind split, I think.

David Cronenberg, Naked Making Lunch

So—for the first time, Cronenberg arrives at the previously described re-modelling of the Cartesian split. The somewhat gentler tone of his recent work may indicate a level of resolution in his mind/body dilemmas; for his own work, the visceral extremities of Videodrome and The Fly may no longer be necessary as stimuli to achieve consciousness of the body. The body is no longer separate from the mind—it is merely the physical aspect of the mind’s hidden depths. The gulf to be bridged is no longer that unfathomable metaphysical abyss between spirit and matter—these are already united. What now needs to be achieved is the dissolution of culturally sanctioned ego boundaries that make us all such fragile and illusory islands in the ocean of Self.

Whether Cronenberg is able to achieve the cinematic New Flesh he fell short of in Videodrome, and whether our culture can develop respect for our bodies’ intimate relationship to the deepest levels of our Selves, remains to be seen.

Postscript: Crash!

When I was writing Crash I did a fair amount of research, particularly from this book called Crash Injuries, a medical textbook full of the most gruesome photographs as well as a lot of extraordinary material . . . Upon viewing the photographs in Crash Injuries taken immediately after violent car crashes—all one’s pity goes out to these tragically mutilated people. After all, any of us who drive a motorcar may end up like them 5 minutes after starting the engine . . . But at the same time, one cannot help one’s imagination being touched by these people who, if at enormous price, have nonetheless broken through the skin of reality and convention around us . . . and who have in a sense achieved—become—mythological beings in a way that is only attainable through these brutal and violent acts. One can transcend the self, sadly, in ways which are in themselves rather to be avoided—say, extreme illnesses, car crashes, extreme states of being.

J.G. Ballard, Re/Search #8/9

After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body…

James Ballard, Crash

Seeing Crash (after aeons of waiting for the media-hounded censors to stop sitting on it) made me think of two things I had written two years before in Psychoplasmics. My tentative conclusion that Cronenberg’s work may become "gentler in tone", avoiding the "visceral extremities" of earlier films, turns out to be—thankfully!—a bit premature to say the least. While there’s no sign of a return to gloop, Crash is undoubtedly one of his most intense and provocative films—and easily one of the most uniquely disturbing films ever to make it onto the ‘mainstream’ cinema circuit.

The second part that struck me was my use of the driver/car analogy to look at mind/body dualism. My assertion that, in dualist thinking, the body has as little to do with our self-identity as a car does, is both revealing and flawed.

Firstly, by equating ‘body’ with ‘car’, it opens up the connection between the body and the environment. After the demise of classical physics, awareness of our physical manifestation in this world can no longer be seen in terms of strict separation. Our bodies are ultimately no more self-contained and isolated, no more in need of abstracted ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ to transcend boundaries, than atomic particles are.

The flaw in my analogy is my failure to recognize that, even in a dualist, logos-dominated and bios-denying culture, there will still be very strong bonds between self-identity and body/environment. The fact that the interdependence of these things is not consciously dealt with results in the dynamics of the relationship being driven by neurotic and destructive elements in our psyches. Eating disorders, fitness-fanaticism, brand-name fetishism, fashion, all these things are signs of how deeply body-image (body consciousness) and objects in the environment are embedded into our sense of our selves. Crash is the pathological conclusion of the neurotic body-environment relationship, and hints at the initiation of a new relationship. Just as Process-Oriented therapy seeks to intensify bodily symptoms to force their unconscious meaning into consciousness, Crash pushes our culture’s deviant eroticism and obsession with vehicles (bodies or cars) into a place where they may be transformed, and true body-environment consciousness—where no fixed divisions hold inside and outside apart—may be reborn. "The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality. Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive response to my crash." (James Ballard, Crash)

The experience of seeing the film made many threads of connection between car crashes and eroticism more tangible to me than reading the book did, however vivid and striking Ballard’s prose is. One instance was when several characters were watching a video of test crashes while rubbing each other’s crotches. The slow-motion footage of cars hurtling into each other, their windows exploding out as they shatter, brought to my mind Wilhelm Reich’s focus on the idea or feeling of bursting in his patients. Many patients felt the therapeutic attack on their bodily armour, their rigidified energy structures, as a threat to their self, their entire being. In conjunction with this element of the psyche, which identifies with the body’s armour, and fears its downfall, there are also elements that desire the dissolution of these muscular cramps, longing for the free flow of bio-energies. The patient simultaneously wishes for and dreads the very same thing. Through exploring one patient’s fantasies and experiences of armour-dissolution, Reich came to this conclusion: "The destruction of the armor, the penetration into the patient’s unconscious secrets, is unconsciously felt to be a process of being pricked open or being made to burst."19 He goes on to make clear the connections between armour-dissolution and orgasm, and between the breakdown of the sense of ‘self’ in orgasm and the dissolving of identity in the process of dying.

To the extent that we base our identity, our conception of our selves, on the tense stiffness that our bodies have developed in this body-negative society, a threat to this hardness will be sensed as a threat to us. Yet it will also be, somewhere, our greatest desire. The bursting of energetic tension in the body becomes our gravest fear, often associated with death and dying; and at the same time it will be an erotic, life-affirming fantasy. One need only note the tendency of most people to invest personal energy in their possessions, to bestow upon exterior objects (especially houses and cars) an underlying quality of "me-ness", a symbiosis with our personal essence, and the formula for the psychic logic behind Crash is self-evident—not the wild alien pathology many have seen it as.

The car has been the 20th century’s dominant ‘image of self’ provided by technology, though this dominance seems quite mute and tacit. Much has been written about the computer as a self-image (or more precisely as an image of the mind or brain), perhaps because the emergence of this technology coincided with the popularization of psychology. Cars, however, seem to have slipped into our everyday lives, and thus into the deepest levels of our psyches, without overt recognition of the extent to which we identify with them, or allow them to mediate our experience of the environment. Their hard metal shells make them perfect totems of the armoured body, the petrified self. Their mutilation, destruction and deformation in violent crashes is thus the perfect exterior analogy for the melting, bursting and dissolution of hardened bio-energies, and their release in explosive eroticism.

On the same weekend that I saw Crash there was a brilliant documentary on Channel 5(!) called Damage. It looked at the increasing number of women and girls who cut or burn themselves. This is often associated with eating disorders like bulimia, and like such disorders it’s more common in females than males (one psychiatrist astutely observed that men with similar impulses and motives often harm their bodies in less obvious ways like getting into fights and playing violent sports). Most of the girls and women interviewed had seriously scarred arms. They cut themselves whenever they felt a seething rage or unbearably intense depression overwhelming them. And most of them said that the feeling they got from the experience was one of utter release—some were blissfully nostalgic about the experiences. Of course, they suffered too. Self-recrimination for harming themselves, recrimination from loved ones for harming themselves, even medical staff scolding them for ‘trying to get attention’.

What was clear, though, was that these were not suicide attempts, not half-hearted flirtations with death with which to guilt-trip others. These people were (in my eyes) responding positively to a very negative situation. I admired some of these teenagers immensely, for staying true to their survival instincts amidst vast negative forces, however strange their method seemed. Yet the clinic featured in the programme, which specialized in self-harming, was "radical" for taking the step of not reprimanding patients for cutting themselves. For most people, all they see in someone cutting their skin is negativity and self-destructiveness. Perhaps if more people were educated about the long history of life-affirmative self-mutilation practices (the American Indian Sun Dance being a famous example), these people’s spontaneous rediscovery of them wouldn’t get caught up in the knotted tangles of guilt, shame and fear that our culture wraps around nearly every intense, direct confrontation with our bodies.

This isn’t to suggest that scarification is some cure-all for mental distress! For my purposes here, I’m just trying to get a slightly closer understanding of the obsession with wounds and scars that runs through Crash.

Our identification with the environment, at present, is usually unconscious, and often neurotic. Cars are often status symbols, emblems of power or (supposed) desirability. The characters in Crash are seeking to merge with their environment in a more urgent, erotic, bodily way. Aside from the immediate experience of physical mutilation (which, depending on whether you want it or not, can be liberating or catastrophic—sometimes both) these people are erotically fascinated by the way scars describe a history of the body’s interaction with the environment. This is conveyed explicitly in the novel. In the film, there are many scenes where people tenderly kiss and caress each other’s scars, fleshy relics of a time when the barrier between the body and the environment was literally shattered—a violent parallel to sexual union. For a while, violence destroyed the burden of being cut off from the outside, caged in a sealed shell of defences. So as well as being an exterior image of the armoured body, the car is also the place where these people try to merge with their environment. The perverse extremity of their chosen means to try and fuse with their surroundings is dictated by the extremity of their alienation from it (just as the natural sweet melting of bodily tension may evolve into a violent sensation of explosion in the chronically tense). The sad fact that their environment is overwhelmed by these metal boxes is also a factor.

A scar is at the centre of an astounding scene where Ballard fucks Gabrielle, a paraplegic crash victim. Instead of taking the usual route, he becomes transfixed by a huge gash in her thigh, and enters her here. It’s astounding in its sheer perversity, and in the fact that it wasn’t cut out; but it’s also the first time, I think, that there has been a literal equation of vagina and wound in a film (beyond degrading verbal remarks, and that slightly less obvious scene in Videodrome). For the Freudian, this equation is due to castration anxiety: boy sees that women have no cock, assumes it’s been hacked off, and fears the worst for himself. Many books have been written about horror films, particularly ‘slasher’ films like Halloween, where cuts are seen in this symbolic light.

A more solidly grounded link in the vagina/wound equation is menstruation. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove look at a few horror films as ‘fear of menstrual power’ films in their excellent book The Wise Wound. Whichever side you take, the dream-logic association of female genitalia and bleeding wounds seems to be one of the roots of the fear, excitement and attraction generated by bodily mutilation in horror films. The literal demonstration of this equation in a film, and the fact that erotic liberation and pleasure results from this odd union, is quite something. Cronenberg has already defined his own sub-genre within horror. With Crash, he makes explicit something that only psychoanalysts could dig out of other horror films, and transcends the genre completely.

As a final note, I should say that I agree with the censors on one point: Crash will make you commit irresponsible acts! As a direct result of seeing it (no, I didn’t go and cause a pile-up) I did something I had had the impulse to do many times before, but had kept in the ‘Er… Not Yet’ box in my mind. I went up on to a very beautiful, but very spooky moor near Leeds, and spent the night alone in the open. I experienced a lot of fear, but pushed through it and experienced a glorious sunrise as I chanted over a stone, soaking in the light and five minutes of rain that created a beautiful rainbow behind me.

If I had to pin it down, I would say the scene that inspired me most was where Ballard, Catherine and Vaughan encounter a car crash site. The whole sequence creates an utterly bizarre and compelling sensation that mixes fear, revulsion, excitement and fascination in a very powerful way. Our society’s secret morbidity is brought to the surface by encounters with crashes—truckers have a name for people who slow down on motorways to look at an accident on the other carriageway, ‘rubber-neckers’. This scene pushes that morbidity into the open, and transforms it into a strangely magical feeling of boundary-crossing. It may seem odd that I was inspired to spend a night on a moor by seeing some people hang out at a car crash. I would call it an imaginative response. And this is essentially what Crash is about—reacting creatively to extreme or negative situations. That it even shows signs of catalyzing the capacity for imaginative response in its audience makes it almost unique in cinemas today.

Footnotes

1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p.46 [back to text]
2. See ‘Individual as Man/World’ and The Book by Alan Watts for perhaps the most rational and accessible discussions of these issues. Describing Behaviourism’s surprising relationship with Mahayana Buddhism, he notes that " . . . the universe is a harmonious system which has no governor, . . . it is an integrated organism but nobody is in charge of it. [The] corollary is that everyone and everything is the prime mover." [back to text]
3. Chris Rodley (ed.), Cronenberg on Cronenberg, p.79 [back to text]
4. ibid., p.xxv [back to text]
5. The recurring polarities of weak/strong, female/male have been the focus for relentless feminist criticism of Cronenberg’s work. Most of this criticism merely reveals the simple-mindedness of the critics themselves. The director consistently portrays these polarities as intertwined, shifting continuums; his aggressive male leads usually turn out to be weak in their lack of self-knowledge, and seemingly victimized female characters are often the strongest in terms of knowing their own desires. As the refreshingly perceptive Carol J. Clover has noted in her book Men, Women & Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, "…what filmmakers seem to know better then film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane." [back to text]
6. Also, the ‘plasma’ of Psychoplasmics comes from the Latin meaning ‘form’ and the Greek meaning ‘shape’. Interestingly, the word ‘psychedelic’ is nearly a synonym of psychoplasmics—it literally means ‘mind-manifesting’. [back to text]
7. This shot was originally censored. The impact of the film, in fact one of its central themes, is hopelessly distorted by this, and other cuts. [back to text]
8. The casting of Debbie Harry as Nikki Brand has interesting resonances. As lead singer of Blondie, she was often criticized for using her femininity and sexuality—visually, she fitted the role of blonde rock bimbo, but her attitude as lead singer undermined the stereotype. [back to text]
9. Aleister Crowley, Magick [back to text]
10. Arnold Mindell, Working with the Dreaming Body, p.13 [back to text]
11. Antero Alli, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, p.38 [back to text]
12. ibid., p.78 [back to text]
13. See Leary, Metzner & Weil (eds), The Psychedelic Reader, pp.47-57, and Alan Watts, The Book [back to text]
14. Mindell, p.79 [back to text]
15. See Rodley, p.97 [back to text]
16. ibid., p.97 [back to text]
17. See Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler [back to text]
18. Maybe I can just mention another shamanic correspondence. When Lee’s typewriter is destroyed, Kiki takes him to get it repaired, asking if fixing the typewriter will also fix his life. Lee is led to a blacksmith’s, where the pieces of the typewriter are slung into a furnace, and re-forged into a Mugwriter – the head of a Mugwump. This represents a new stage in the evolution of Lee’s ‘assignment’ in Interzone; and it resonates clearly with the blacksmith frequently encountered in shamanic underworld journeys, where the shaman is ripped apart and then re-forged. [back to text]
19. Character Analysis, p.334 [back to text]

Bibliography

• Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley
• ‘The Wrong Body’ by Amy Taubin & ‘Interview with David Cronenberg’ by Mark Kermode, in Sight & Sound, March 1992
• Exterminate All Rational Thought, edited by Damon Wise (magazine accompanying Cronenberg/Burroughs season at the Scala Cinema, King’s Cross, London, 1992)
• Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch, edited by Ira Silverberg
• Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• Working with the Dreaming Body, by Arnold Mindell
• Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, by Antero Alli
• ‘Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle’ by Scott Bukatman, in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn
• ‘The Individual as Man/World’ by Alan Watts, in The Psychedelic Reader, edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Echoes From The Void, by Nevill Drury
• Naked Making Lunch (documentary), directed by Chris Rodley
• Crash by J.G. Ballard
• Re/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, edited by V. Vale & Andrea Juno
• Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich
• The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove

Some shitty things that have grabbed me along the way:

• Alchemy via Coil and Jodorowsky.
• Anton LaVey’s ‘Hatha Toilet Seat Meditation’ in The Devil’s Notebook. Wittily lauds the sanctity of the water closet: that lock on the door and the free expression of base functions working well as sanctuary for the individualist. Whenever I work in offices, going into a toilet cubicle always gives me the same feeling I recall from stepping off-stage when performing in theatre.
• Norman O. Brown’s chapters on Swift and Luther in Life Against Death. Surely archaic by current academic standards, this psychoanalytical rummage through satire, Protestantism and capital still shines by virtue of its clarity and persuasiveness.
• ‘In Praise Of Devil Worship’ by Ramsey Dukes and ‘Nature Of The Beast’ by D.M. Mitchell. Both essays, while dealing with more general subjects, do a good job of mapping the waste-management crossovers between ecology and occultism. I first found both in The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt. You can still find Dukes’ piece in What I Did In My Holidays.
• The History of Shit by Dominique LaPorte. Great title, but a so-so read, this gives an interesting view to counter LaVey’s individualist toiletry, detailing the ‘privatisation’ (in its loosest sense) of human waste management in France.
• PoopReport.com. Home of the Shameless Shitting Manifesto, intellectual crap, and much more poo-related stuff than you’ll really want to bother with.
• Peiro Manzoni‘s audacious, cheeky, someone-had-to-do-it art project, Merde d’artista. Basically, the guy meticulously produced 90 cans of his own shit, and sold them as art.
• The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business. A friend bought me this a few years ago, and it’s been next to my toilet ever since.

Well, this little roundup was prompted by Another World Is Here, an intelligent and wide-ranging blog worth keeping an eye on. Alex Steffen just posted a little something on waste management and sustainability, with some good general thoughts and links on the ecology of human shit.

Norman O. Brown argued that time’s relationship to money, and both of their relationships to shit, intimately binds our historical and eschatological constructs to the lowliest, most abject side of our lives. I think you’d be hard put to find an intelligent ecologist who wouldn’t agree in principle. I guess the lesson—in psychology, sociology and ecology—is: Hold your nose and turn away at your own peril. And maybe everyone else’s peril, too.

UPDATE: On a lighter, slightly smellier note, here’s a few more links direct from a fellow scatophile, Merrick:

• German Toilets. An American look at those odd "shelved" toilets.
• Poo-eating Pigs. Waste management in India, as natural and weird as it gets.
• Do You Have Demons In Your Colon? Satire’s difficult with something as batty (no pun intended) as Christianity. Just ask Martin Luther…
• For Me To Poop On! Of course, how could I forget this handy service, to have Triumph the insult comic dog go crap on a website for you.
• You’ve surely seen Rate My Poo. People take photos of their dumps, and strange people give them marks out of ten…

There was another link sent by Merrick with this bunch, but I’m not posting it here as it’s not strictly about faeces. It’s also repulsive (think "surgery", think "anal", then thank me profusely).