From Carl Abrahamsson, musician with White Stains and Cotton Ferox, news of an upcoming exhibition of his photos documenting the Folsom Street Fair of fetishism and sexual flamboyance in San Francisco. The exhibition is at the Museum of Porn In Art in Zurich, and is from 20th April to 17th May 2007. Click on the above flyer for a larger version.

I always loved Carl’s old occult journal, Fenris Wolf, which introduced me to Lionel Snell‘s writing. And I like Carl’s slogan on his website: “In the end, nothing really matters. But until then, some things do.”

I recently read Stanislav Grof’s Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. It’s basically a summary of his life’s work: from LSD psychotherapy in Prague during the fallout from World War II, to Holotropic breathwork in the States, taking in psychosomatic traumas, psychedelic mysticism, spontaneous psychic crises, death & dying… all revolving around Grof’s fascination with the information about intra-uterine experience that seems to sprout from all these arenas.

This isn’t the place for a detailed exposition of his theories. Suffice it to say that his basic premise—that the foetus registers the experience of the womb and birth, and that bringing these deep impressions into consciousness can reveal their potent role in shaping our lives—remains both convincing to anyone with an open mind prepared to read his evidence, and radically unaccepted by mainstream psychology and popular opinion.

He can seem reductionist; this was always my main point of contention with his theories. Perhaps in this summing-up he’s aware of that, and takes pains to stress that he’s merely trying to bring another dimension into our map of the psyche. I’ve a lot of sympathy for people in this position. When your discoveries are so curiously neglected by the mainstream, the act of shouting louder to get yourself heard often forces you to be more strident and reductionist than you might otherwise have been. Wilhelm Reich‘s brilliant theories suffered greatly on this account; Grof seems to have kept his balance admirably.

His model of “COEX systems” (systems of COndensed EXperience) is, to my mind, his best guard against reductionism. He sees various intense experiences—reaching through adulthood and childhood traumas and joys, back through birth and the womb, and beyond into the transpersonal realm of past lives and karma—as all hanging together, grouped by common resonance into a single multi-faceted system. Any reductionism here seems to be a necessary relic of linear time, where birth necessarily precedes life; but linear time, of course, loses some of its monolithic grip when your means of investigation are altered states (what Grof calls “holotropic consciousness”, i.e. consciousness moving towards wholeness).

The most persuasive case study presented in this book is that of Joan, a middle-aged woman dying from stomach cancer. Her description of her LSD experiences, as part of the project at Spring Grove in Baltimore that Grof headed with Walter Pahnke in 1971, are moving in the extreme. There are very good cases to be made for psychedelic therapy in any number of situations. But, as Grof notes, the idea that it’s still difficult to license it for terminal patients who are deemed beyond medical help, is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows clearly that our culture’s problem with the issue has little to do with the idea that psychedelics might mess people’s lives up in some way, and much more to do with an unwillingness to do what Joan and people like her want to do: face death consciously.

Regarding Grof’s theories on the crucial role that womb experience has to play in shaping our lives, it was interesting to read a couple of related news stories today.

There’s the catchy headline ‘Womb experience makes men gay’, reporting on a study that seems to show a correlation between male homosexuality and being the younger of several brothers. I’d not heard about this one, but apparently there is a correlation; and what’s more, it doesn’t seem to hold if the brothers are adopted step-siblings. The theory from this is an intriguing and blatantly charged one: “A woman’s body may see a male foetus as ‘foreign’ [...] prompting an immune reaction which may grow progressively stronger with each male child. The antibodies created may affect the developing male brain.” Talk about sex war!

Then there’s a report on the rise of obesity in the developing world. The theory here is that an infant gestating in the womb of a woman in rural India will be primed, through its connection to the mother’s metabolism, for a certain type of diet—certain foods, certain patterns of eating or, crucially, not eating. If this child grows up and “makes good”, moves to the city, gets an office job and a good salary, their relative inactivity and rich diet can play havoc with their womb-inspired metabolic habits, and leave them with a big ass of lard.

Both stories are notable, in relation to Grof’s work, in that they are wholly materialist, biochemical theories about the role of womb experience. Naturally this aspect is highly important, and Grof would be the first person to acknowledge that. But this can only be the thin end of the wedge for science. With the cognitive sciences amassing more and more evidence for the psyche’s profoundly deep relationship to the body, purely biochemical theories will have to rely more and more on dogma and ignorance to keep psychological elements at bay.

In the refusal to embrace evidence for pre- and perinatal psychological experience, science betrays itself. I think we’re dealing here with the same issue that is revealed in the curious fact that even though Darwinian evolution sees humans as part of a continuum with animals, science habitually carries on the sharp Christian-Cartesian distinction between self-aware human agents and ‘mere animals’ (although there’s evidence of movement in that situation). Similarly, it’s habitual to believe that the roots of consciousness only extend out, to the social sphere in which we’re enmeshed, and not in or down to the inarticulate world of the womb. Or rather, the downward roots are seen to be beyond the pale for consciousness itself, anchored to genetic realms that we can only contact via the abstractions and instrumentations of experimental science. This habitual view may be a self-justifying avoidance of conscious access to these roots as much as it is a rational methodology.

In the face of the evidence from neuropsychology and holotropic research, these habits must wither. All I can say is we had better reflect on the abortion debate in light of this. “Pro-lifers” aren’t, at root, killing abortion doctors to defend inarticulate life because of a belief in the reality of womb experiences. No; they kill in the name of the atomistic personal soul, a wholly inorganic and abstract notion. Such simple-minded concepts need to be killed, but, in the face of extensive evidence from Grof and others, without sacrificing the probability that there is a form of foetal consciousness.

There’s the danger that the work of people like Grof may be held up as evidence—presumably against his will—for the “pro-life” position. We must be clear that yes, some form of experience is going on in the womb; but no, this doesn’t detract in the slightest from the conscious choice that should be given to women about what happens to their bodies. The clarity of the bottom line here shouldn’t detract from the complexity of the issue, nor vice versa.

Avebury tree – photo by Gyrus

by Mogg Morgan

"Divided for Love’s Sake—for the Chance of Union"

I was first introduced to the connection between eroticism and the sacred landscape many years ago during the course of a short but intense relationship with a well-known visionary artist, who, for the sake of this article, I will call Dakini Devi. My first attempt to record some of these experiences formed the basis of the chapter ‘The Erotic Landscape’ that appeared in my book Sexual Magick. This chapter discussed the way in which certain magical trance states help the magician develop a connection between their inner world and the physical landscape that surrounds them. Through sexuality the magician develops a special gaze in which he or she is able to see places of power in the landscape.

As my senses became more tuned in and I could see the remains of sacred landscapes and even create new ones—I remember Dakini saying to me one day that I was beginning to develop the gaze. It’s almost as if you begin to see the sensual flesh of the land—as for example at the ‘manger’ below Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. The technique in itself is stupidly simple: merely go to a sacred site, stay there for a while, get to know it, mellow out there, sleep there, etc. etc. This way the landscape becomes embedded in your brain; it begins to live there. At peak moments, such as during lovemaking, the landscape may choose to come to life, either in your head, your partner’s head, or sometimes both at once.

Together we went to the ancient stone-age ritual complex at Avebury in Wiltshire. Dakini, who knew almost everything there was to know about this place, initiated me into its mysteries. It is a place that has been close to my heart ever since. Dakini taught me how to connect with the nameless divine beings of the site; these forces would later erupt into our consciousness, as we made love within the sacred space of our temple room. Intuitively it seemed that the Avebury ritual site had an erotic component, and this seemed yet another example of the mindset found also in Tantrism and in even in the more earthy, shamanic byways of Egyptian magick. These ideas took root, and as I moved towards the task of creating my own magical system or synthesis, these experiences formed part of the process. This system I call Tankhem—which traces the tantrik doctrines of the Hindu intellectual tradition back to their Egyptian origins and forms a bridge to the nameless or primeval beings of the predynastic and neolithic times.

I’m often asked, why this obsession with ancient philosophy? I suppose the attraction of ancient thought is that by some strange twist of fate, ancient ideas often become modern ones. As we as a species develop and grow, we are able again to understand how our ancestors thought. This is a fairly familiar idea in academic philosophy, as the following example might help to illustrate. The pagan philosopher Plato continues to dominate the modern mind. Plato developed the techniques of Greek drama into a powerful way of exteriorising ideas through the use of dialogue. He wrote dialogues in which import-ant mystical themes were played out. However, some of these dialogues have only really been fully understood within the last one hundred years, when our own minds have begun to move in a similar direction. There are long passages in Plato dealing with the nature of the body and what makes it sick or healthy, which have been largely ignored until in recent years we, as a culture, have begun looking for alternatives to the modern clinical model. Our understanding of the ancient mind is something that can only come about when our own minds begin to tread the same pathways, to speak the same dialogues.

Egyptian magick attracted me because it is so old yet so subtle. Since the closure of all pagan temples by the Christian despot Theodosius, its secrets became really secret—even the language of the writing was forgotten, and its magical landscapes and temples buried beneath the surface of the desert. As the lights on the sanctuary were extinguished, the doctrine of the magi survived outside of the Christian sphere of influence in practices such as Tantrism. Even the driest academic book acknowledges this fact, and I give several examples of this in my own book. Tantrism is one of the most liberating of ancient ideas. If ancient thought were all like tantrism then we would have to say that the ancients definitely knew something that we moderns do not, and that they knew things that we desperately need to re-learn. Primarily, the sacred and mystical nature of our own bodies and the wonderful capacity of the sexual act to change the structures of our brain as it did for our ancient ancestors—the first tantriks.

When it comes to understanding the magick of ‘preliterate’ times before the coming of the dynasties, the task seems hopeless; the gods of places such as Avebury seem destined to remain forever veiled. Some might say that we can never really know how the ancient magicians thought or did things—but I do not share this pessimism. Magick and ritual has its own archaeology; if there is space in a stone circle or temple to move around and dance, it may well be that it was used in such a way by our ancestors. The site ‘teaches’ us how it can or could be used; we try out these techniques and learn even more about the site. Eventually we are perhaps acting as the ancient masters did, and there is a saying, if you repeat the actions of the master, then you become the master. Perhaps as we use the ancient techniques of the magi, we can become them, and they will begin to speak to us over the long intervening silence.

Correspondence between body and temple in an architectural floor plan of a Hindu temple

Over the last few years I began researching further into the nature of the temple. A magical temple can, in itself, be viewed as an idealised sacred landscape. Temples are also stylised representation of the human body (see Sexual Magick). I feel that the idea of the temple is so familiar that we are in danger of overlooking its mystery, the creation of sacred space. In the texts that have survived from ancient Egypt, it is possible to perceive the archaeology of gnosis—the texts contain many layers of meaning—nothing seems to be wasted. In other words, you have to mentally move around and use the temple using visioning techniques, in order to really learn what the landscape is trying to teach you. Even though these insights, for what they are worth, are inspired by my magical work with the Tankhem system, I know that some might find it easier to accept if they had some independent corroboration. Intuitively I felt that the position of a sacred text in the temple, whether it be in the outer court or in the inner sanctuary, would somehow be relevant to its meaning. And I discovered that a similar theory had indeed been advanced by the German archaeologist Siegfried Schott in the 1950s.

The earliest temples and sacred landscapes have hardly survived. The Pyramid Texts, so called because they were carved on the walls of the pyramids of the 5th and 6th dynasty Kings (c. 2500 BCE) record spells such as "The bricks are removed for thee from the great tomb".1 This text is carved on a stone building but talks of brick—the scribe is quoting from an even older text, when sacred architecture was made of brick. It is quoting from ‘books’ even older than the time of the Pyramids! The earlier sacred buildings were of brick and before that they were of natural organic materials such as wood and reed, with perhaps the occasional use of megalithic stones, as the following article in a recent edition of Nature indicates:

Megaliths and Neolithic astronomy in southern Egypt

The Sahara west of the Nile in southern Egypt was hyperarid and unoccupied during most of the Late Pleistocene epoch. About 11,000 years ago the summer monsoons of central Africa moved into Egypt, and temporary lakes or playas were formed. The Nabta Playa depression, which is one of the largest in southern Egypt, is a kidney-shaped basin of roughly 10km by 7km in area. The authors report the discovery of megalithic alignments and stone circles next to locations of Middle and Late Neolithic communities at Nabta, which suggest the early development of a complex society. The southward shift of the monsoons in the Late Neolithic age rendered the area once again hyperarid and uninhabitable some 4,800 radiocarbon years before the present (years BP). This well-determined date establishes that the ceremonial complex of Nabta, which has alignments to cardinal and solstitial directions, was a very early megalithic expression of ideology and astronomy. Five megalithic alignments within the playa deposits radiate outwards from megalithic structures, which may have been funerary structures. The organization of the megaliths suggests a symbolic geometry that integrated death, water, and the Sun. An exodus from the Nubian Desert at 4,800 years BP may have stimulated social differentiation and cultural complexity in predynastic Upper Egypt.

J.M. Malville, F. Wendorf, A.A. Mazar & R. Schild, ‘Megaliths and Neolithic astronomy in southern Egypt’ (Letters to Nature) in Nature 392, 488 (1998)

Other texts describe these very first sacred landscapes, describing buildings that, even for the ancient Egyptian, were a fading and distant memory. They did not even know the names of the gods that roamed during those days of yore, but referred to them cryptically in books such as the ‘Book of the Primeval Old Ones’ as the nameless gods.

The non-magician tends to focus overly on the surface exterior form of ceremony and ritual, for the non-initiate has very little understanding of the inner states implied by these techniques. I like to interpret them using a psychological model.

‘The Book of the Primeval Old Ones’ (a pukka book, not a Grantian creation) tells us that in the primeval times the surface of the planet was covered with water. Below the surface of the water lay the remains of one or perhaps more than one previous creations. The divine entities were without form but not without power. The ancient sages or shamans call out to these beings, using words of power that they had but recently learned. There are said to be seven sages or shamans, and this is a motif that seems to crop up all over the place. I have found references to them in Egyptian, Hindu and even Chinese mythology, where they are connected with the constellation the Plough or Great Bear. Apart from an astrological significance, they seem to me to be real personality types, perhaps members of the tribe whose trance awareness is slightly more advanced than the others, and are thus able to say, "That is a special place, we should build a temple here."

At the word of the seven shamans, the power quickened and the first cosmic island rose from the waters. On this island, those shamans or seers built the first sacred temple. Perhaps it was these visionaries whose consciousness first emerged randomly from the past. (Interestingly, it was another visionary, Imhotep, who was later to be credited with the creation of the first temple hewn from stone, and subsequently deified for his efforts.)

These are very suggestive images—I feel they have something to do with the moment in which our early
predator mentality emerged from its instinctual fog and became self-aware. The divine forces take on form where previously they had none—they are still nameless but now they are represented in two of the most ancient hieroglyphs: the hand and the yoni or phallus (see Lascaux). These ‘hieroglyphs’ are very ancient indeed, perhaps even the oldest representations of the divine. These same pictograms can be seen in the cave paintings of the palaeolithic—for example at Pech Merle, Lot, France (c. 24,000 BCE), where the scribe has left the imprint of his or her own hand on the sacred ‘pictographic’ text.

Palaeolithic cave paintings from Pech Merle, France.

The cave paintings are revealed, not as pictures in the sense of art history, but as sacred texts—whose true meaning is only now emerging. My editor reminds me that magick is full of dream and trance meditations using the human hand as a focus (see Jan Fries’ Seidways, Mandrake of Oxford, 1997, for an interesting exploration of some of these wyrd byways of magick).

What do these two pictograms mean—the hand and the phallus? Psychologically I feel they are pointing to the catalyst that enabled our consciousness to mutate and become self-aware. Is it not obvious that what most distinguishes us from other beasts of creation is our sexuality—what other animal has a sexuality quite like ours? We look at other animals and try to recognise a rudimentary sexuality, e.g. love-play in dolphins and non-reproductive homosexuality in various other animals. Perhaps some animals are closer to our end of the sexual spectrum than others, but I still feel that strictly speaking, animals reproduce, they do not have sex.

The ancient Egyptians seem to be telling us that it was in the sexual act itself that the ancients first found the way to become human. It was sexuality that generated the power necessary to raise the primal mound from the waters, where it had subsided after some primeval battle. Why should this have been a once and for all time process? Could not the same catalyst work over and over again? Two principles become divided from each other in order to become self-aware and then experience the real transforming joy of union.

The two gods—hand and genitals—are later assimilated into the predynastic cult of the phallic god Min2 and his ‘cousin’ Amon-Ra—whose rites in dynastic times included some form of sexual magick—in which the phallus of the god was stimulated and a magical, transformative elixir sprang forth. The mythology of dynastic times fully explores all the mysteries of sacred sexuality, starting with masturbation. A mythology that gives such a central role to an act of masturbation is a very mysterious one. Perhaps they knew something we do not or have forgotten. They seem to be saying that masturbation is good for the body, good for the land and good for the whole topocosm. It is also one of the first mysteries of life, when we first reach out and touch ourselves.

On the face of it touching ourselves seems unnecessary, for we are already touching ‘inside’. Somehow the system, by some accident of physiology, finds this one of the first magical arts—perhaps this is why the later religions sought to suppress and demonise the process? We most of us have residual conditioning concerning masturbation—but the ancients knew, as we now know, that masturbation is a natural part of the healthy functioning of mind, body, spirit—the works.

Paradoxically, the way you learn and practice masturbation affects your ability to really experience sacred sex with another person. Look at how many of the current problems of dysfunctional sex stem from ineffective masturbation. For example, for men the problem can be an addiction to furtive and rapid relief, whilst for women it is an ignorance due to lack of exploration and experimentation with self-love.

Beginning with masturbation, or self-love, and embracing the whole range of joyous sexuality, the magician can reprogram his or her whole biosystem so that it becomes fully in tune with the erotic landscape. It is said that we contain the whole of our evolution in our genes—that when a human develops from embryo to adult, they go through all the phases of millions of years of evolution, from fish to reptile to mammal. If this be true for the physical, may it not also be true for consciousness itself? Gyrus says that this reprogramming involves retracing the development of consciousness, union to division to union etc., and back again, and I agree with that. For men and women, the first step might be work on developing your orgasm, so that it become a total body experience that literally ‘fucks your brains out’, a useful condition to be in when exploring some of the better trance states.

I am particularly fond of Margot Anand’s book Art of Sexual Magick,3 were she gives graded exercises for exploring your orgasmic response. This can be done alone or with a trusted partner. Even if your sexual partner is present, the ideal is still to explore your individual sexual response first, the partner helping to stimulate and explore the secret workings of your body at your
pleasure.

The idea is to enter your ritual space without any particular goal in mind, just enjoy the full bodily sensations as he or she caresses and strokes your body. Being pleasured by your partner in this way is, in many ways, more intimate that actual intercourse. Don’t worry about coming, just become very pacific and let the sensations stream around your body. Your partner will naturally vary the rhythm, making the approach to climax slower and more erratic.

If you feel yourself approaching the point of ‘no return’, maybe ask your partner to pause, and make any adjustments necessary to prevent ejaculation or climax (for a man, pressing on the prostate or muladhara chakra can often help this). As the urge for ejaculation or release subsides, you may feel the warm sexual glow spreading throughout your whole pelvic region, opening out other energy centres sometimes called chakras. When you’re ready your partner begins again, exploring all your erogenous zones, or places of power, until you reach another peak.

The first time you try this exercise, you might be happier coming off now, but if you are more experienced, you might want to go for another and another pre-orgasmic peak. A strange thing happens: you become like an erotic landscape, a sea of sensation. Try to regard the time you have spent in this ‘build up’ to ejaculation as part of the orgasm. Viewed this way, perhaps you can see that an orgasm, for both men and women, is actually a lot more intense than those few moments of ejaculation or climax.

Perhaps you are happy to just stop when you’ve had enough, although you might find that when you do come in the conventional sense, the orgasm is ultra-physical and polymorphous. In other words, it forms a field all over your body. There are at least two distinct sexual trance states here, one ‘pre-orgasmic’ the other ‘post-orgasmic’. Both can be moments in which ancestral memories, dreams, meditations and archaic god forms can break through into your sensitized body. That is sexual magick.

Locked away in our brains are the first moments during which we emerged as humans from the cosmic waters, becoming self-aware and preserving that moment in the form of sacred landscapes—temples, reed enclosures and circles. Perhaps you will remember that first moment when, as an ancient hunter-gatherer, you made love or stimulated your partner, and something in the way you thought about the world around you changed utterly. Maybe you were that naked man in a cave at Lascaux, staring at the bison and rhinoceros—and as you look down you see your erection. Later you paint your experience on the walls of the cave.

The Tankhem magical system works like this—combining a primeval sexuality with a re-membering of the first temple—that we can live again as our ancestors did—in other words—we can turn our brains back on. One hint as to the accomplishment of this task lies in the understanding and reclaiming of our sexuality and the connections it has always had to the external and erotic landscape.

Further research

• Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving by Betty Dodson (Crown Trade Paperbacks, NY 1996).
• Readers interested in male pleasuring are referred to More Joy: An Advanced Guide to Solo Sex by Dr. Harold Litten (Factor Press, 1996), ISBN 0962653187, and Joseph Kramer’s Erotic Massage instructional videos. Also, The Multi Orgasmic Man by Mantak Chia & Douglas Abrams Avara (HarperCollins, 2002).

BURN YOUR KARMA IN THE FLAMES OF SPIRITUAL POLYFIDELITY!

In August 1994 I attended PEPCON’s 8th annual conference at Harbin Hot Springs, California. PEP stands for Polyfidelitous Educational Productions and their conference was subtitled "Loving More: Transforming Relationships". Transforming relationships from monogamy and an often toxic family environment, to polyfidelity, which they propose offers "more love, more growth, more intimacy, more commitment".

Ryam Nearing of PEP has written: "Monogamy may be a valid choice for some people at some times, but we also need other legitimate options for intimacy and family life. Our goal is new kinds of relationships based on unconditional love, continuing spiritual growth, respect for our diversity, equality among partners, telling the truth about our deepest desires, and accepting personal responsibility … together we explore the total transformation of love, sex, and the family".

I had been exploring responsible non-monogamy for a while and wanted to meet others living this in their communities. The term "non-monogamy" is prefaced here by "responsible" to distance it from swinging. Honesty, communication and consciousness were obviously very much prized by those I met, and it seemed that many attendees had experienced living in an extended sexual family of some kind. There were a number of people from well known group-living projects such as Kerista (now defunct) and ZEGG (of which more later). We attended workshops on cross-cultural and sociobiological precedents for poly living; gender balancing; how to build a polyfidelitous family; queers in family; relationships as a vehicle for personal/spiritual growth; techniques to facilitate a transparency of communication (the need for honesty); financial options in group marriage; tribal Tantra; "coming out" as poly, and much, much more. It was enlightening.

Poly Philosophy

The basic premise of polyfidelity propagandists seems to be that most humans feel attraction to a number of people and that to bring this to its logical conclusion of being sexually intimate with more than one person, and have them all get on as a family, has the potential to clear many blocks in the individuals’ paths to growth (many issues will have to be dealt with for it to work!), and also to build intimate, caring and therefore strong communities. Strong communities are also developed by those who share an interest in this way of living as we come together to share our experience and practice the technologies for growth often deemed necessary to this kind of relating. One of these technologies would be meditation/self knowledge. Dr. Deborah Anapol states in Love Without Limits: The Quest for Sustainable Intimate Relationships that she sees some kind of energy practice like Tantra as most necessary in dealing with both the emotional and physical aspects of multi-partner sexual relating. A spiritual practice, especially one that focuses on conscious relating and channelling sexual energy (such as Tantra, Taoist sexual alchemy or the Native American Quodoushka) will also increase overall health, stamina, equilibrium and happiness; hopefully bringing greater trust and acceptance of yourself and others.

Ryam Nearing’s polyfidelity primer Loving More states that studies are steadily shattering the myth of monogamy. "The number of mammal species believed to be monogamous is now down to 2%". Birds do it, elk do it…. Monogamy is going the way of the nuclear family in that it was held to be the norm, but in fact is the exception. Strictly speaking monogamy means one sex partner for life; which is manifestly uncommon. What most people do is serial monogamy—or what Deborah Anapol calls serial non-monogamy (lots of partners separated by linear time).

One of Deborah’s most powerful quotes is "We have as a people grown afraid to love when the Spirit moves us". While many people profess to monogamy, a very large number do have intimate and/or sexual relations outside of their primary relationship—and then lie about it! The clinched possessive partner does not allow their partner to have close friends, of any sex, because of their pathological jealousy. Most of us recognise that this is more than a little warped. The overwhelming characteristic of monogamy is dependancy/ ownership/ limitation/ repression of self and partner—often enforced by threats of abandonment and/or violence.

Modern "love" often proves to be an addiction, and one which bolsters the economy to boot. The relationship between sexual repression and authoritarian conditioning is clearly delineated in The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Dr. Wilhelm Reich (it’s no accident that communard groups like MOVE and the Diggers, and free love sects like the Adamites and Brethren of the Free Spirit have been ruthlessly, violently suppressed). Responsible non-monogamy demands that we recognise our profound connection to other people and truly honour it. To be able to do so we must heal ourselves. Shared loving accelerates this healing and close bonding of individuals. If we are to contribute to the planet’s clean-up, as we must to survive, this can only be an advantage.

It is natural to regard cultural conditioning as natural—however, that does not make it true. First off, we must realise that monogamy is not "natural". Over half the world’s population practice polygamy or other non-monogamous forms. The enlightened view might be that monogamy was enforced by men to keep track of "their" offspring; that it stems from patriarchal control processes instituted after male priestcraft had cracked the feminine mystery of conception (á la Riane Eisler’s The Chalice & Blade). It can also be regarded as a control process by the church and state, designed to contain the naturally chaotic energies of Eros. Other cultures enjoy different norms which work for them—for example the famous Eskimo tradition of offering hospitality sex to visitors, or the less well known Greek version of this custom which involved the husband orally stimulating visitors in anticipation of the wife’s delights. So, we can’t really be expected to take seriously the mantra that monogamy is normal.

Multi-partner sex appears to make good genetic sense too. It has become a pop psychology truism that many men rear children not their own, and that women are more likely to seek out "adulterous" liaisons when they are ovulating and most likely to conceive. On the surface it may appear that monogamy serves the cause of social cohesion, but surely it would be a better society that could accept the reality of our capricious freewill and freeform pleasures.

Communal Sexuality

Many people interested in multi-partner relationships choose to live together and have pioneered experiments in shared property and wealth to the great advantage of others—monogamous or otherwise—interested in living together. The variety of arrangements is limited only by the imagination. At PEPCON I learned of a journal devoted exclusively to sharing the results of experimental finance/property arrangements so that experience is pooled and mistakes don’t have to be repeated! Communal living usually differs from whatever the alternative is called by promoting shared resources as opposed to private ownership. Responsible non-monogamy is in continuum with this aim. While direct experience must be regarded as having the greatest content, there remain valuable lessons to be learnt from the experiences of others. Not everyone will wish to explore this avenue personally, but for those who want to find out more resources are listed on these pages.

There is a wealth of data here which is not easy to come by so I will limit myself to providing a brief summary of a few of the larger polyfidelitous communities.

The nineteenth century Oneida community (1848-1881) in America is an example of a commune devoted to the practice of non-possessive love styles. Believing marriage to be oppressive and sex liberating, exclusive pair bonding was here forbidden in favour of sexual freedom. Children lived in a Children’s House and exclusive attachment to their biological parents was strongly discouraged (as in the early Israeli Kibbutzim). Housework and other work was collectivised and performed equally by both genders. "[T]he Oneida Community … practised the interchange of husbands and wives as a magickal practice, to give a greater unity and spiritual strength to the entire community group. This was excellent magick. The climax was forbidden in these "agape unions" to avoid offspring complications. Because this congress was held under both the rules of communal love and religious aspiration, there was no resultant frustration because of the absence of climax." (Louis T. Culling, Sex Magic). By the time Oneida closed they had two hundred and eighty-eight members and ran a highly successful business.

That sex and other intimate behaviour is a powerful bonding mechanism is recognised by the profusion of centres dedicated to training people in the tradition of Osho (a.k.a. Bagwan Shree Rajneesh). Here the ideal is to create a therapeutic and loving environment where rejection and jealousy are easily handled or cease to become an issue. This is because; first, one is given the space and emotional freedom to fully express and work through any considerations that do come up and second; one can bond deeply to such a number of people that the temporary "loss" of a lover is no great hardship.

The above is a vision of an erotic community dedicated to self knowledge and self expression. This model is also used by the "Actions-Analytical Organisation for conscious life praxis" or AAO who defined themselves thus: "an important social experiment with common property, free sexuality, common economy, direct democracy, collective children and spontaneous emotional self expression. The AAO is not a utopian vision of an ideal society, it is an existing model for a new social life praxis. The AAO is the practical proof that it is possible to live together without aggression and the use of violence, without sexual repression. the AAO has been in existence for 8 years and at the present [1977] 500 people live in the 12 AAO groups in western europe and the states" (The AAO Model).

One of the AAO’s slogans was "death to pairbonding!". Of course, even the AAO are not free of value judgements and ideology. They were (in 1977 at least) self-consciously identified with Reich and took on board much of his Marxist ideology. They also exhibit a degree of homophobia in some of their literature. However, in their prime the AAO were a radical and exemplary experimental community. Like the Oneida Community, the AAO were eventually shut down due to outside pressure, ostensibly relating to their policies of sexual freedom for children (see ‘The Night Before Charisma’ in HEAD 7 for more in-depth details of the AAO’s imprisoned founder, Otto Muehl).

If everything is to be put into question, this everything will include childhood, where much programming/ imprinting occurs, and sexuality, which is often a vehicle for programming, and concern for a society which can only envisage child sexuality in terms of abuse should not necessarily prevent this. Equally, we should not be surprised by society’s predictable response. Humans are sexual beings, be they babies, children, adolescents or adults. This is obviously a contentious area—however, we should never forget that each individual is to be regarded as their own supreme sovereign and sole authority over their own bodymind—a concept trampled on by knee jerk moralists and abusers alike.

The positive pioneering communard aspect of the above ventures is presently being vigorously expressed in Germany and elsewhere in the shape of ZEGG (Centre for Experimental Cultural Design). ZEGG is a commune of 88 adults and 12 children that has been developing for the past 15 years. "We need to find the main causes of fear and violence between people, understand them, and develop a way of living together on a new basis. At ZEGG, living together itself is a process of research and development, where new social structures are put to the test. Anything can be tried that might make life more interesting, more lively, more sensual.

"There cannot be peace between nations as long as there is war between the sexes. We are not free, and no society is free as long as love and sexuality are surrounded by so much pretence, phoniness, silence, and lies. No one is free as long as our greatest longing is permanently linked to our greatest fear. A person is free when he or she is able to love and allowed to love freely. In fact. there can be no such thing as ‘unfree’ love. Love is always free and everything else is a misunderstanding."

An American project which has developed out of ZEGG is called Balthiel, "named after the angel Balthiel from the Testament of Solomon; the only angel of the 7 planetary angels to overcome the entanglements of the evil genius of Jealousy" and ZEGG have named their newsletter "compersion" after the word coined by the Kerista community meaning the opposite of jealousy.

As well as focusing on issues of personal growth, transparent communication, open sexuality and innovative community building, they research areas of energy physics; healing; resonance technology; they have designed their own non-polluting heating system; water treatment facility using marsh plants; and a "non-chemical self-powered antennae swimming pool cleaning system". They keep an organic garden and have a dolphin research ship which explores human-whale-dolphin communication off the west coast of Africa. Thus ZEGG is not a "single issue" concern in the way some places of sexual healing/experimentation are; unless that single issue be wholism.

ZEGG provides an excellent model of free sexuality working harmoniously in a community, itself developing and at the same time providing energy and incentive for development of other related areas of human experience. In this way free sexuality can be a powerful source of individual and group empowerment.

The energy of the 1970′s may have led to groups like the AAO being quite pushy, as in the Osho commune’s extensive use of catharsis and highly confrontational encounter therapy. Most Osho centres (especially at the commune in Poona, India; less so at the Holland & UK Multiversities) now concentrate on energy work and meditation. It remains to be seen whether we have got over the absurd inadequacies that led people into authoritarian structures like guru worshipping.

Of course, the situations we are most likely to encounter will probably not be in communes dedicated to sexual freedom, but between a small number of voluntary acquaintances. I really think that before we can get on with others with less of the trips, ego and unconscious programmes, we need to have a sense of not NEEDING them; which comes down to self reliance and self knowledge. I suspect that groupings of people where things go badly "wrong" are groupings of people who are afraid of and fleeing self knowledge. Personally, I’m less into organised communities and more into an organic/ fractal/ chaotic model which accepts that what happens happens (although functional communities may form therefrom). Where ideologies and interpretative frameworks are dropped as far as possible in favour of direct experience. Where beLIEf, morals, expectations etc. are recognised as occasional operational necessities to be pared down to the minimum so we can come as close as possible to what is.

However, whether polyfidelity is practised in an organised group or amongst more disparate individuals; whether it is followed as a lifestyle choice or as one option out of a range of lovestyles which are adopted as and when appropriate; responsible non-monogamy can empower us as individuals and communities, promoting a sense of love, security and personal empowerment.

Personal Experiences

Living this lifestyle has brought much learning, pleasure, healing and ecstatic sex. Like any life path it has also brought a fair deal of pain and disappointment.

I find social conditioning & the monogamy virus strong in myself. But when I try to live monogamously I notice my reality shrinking. I become defensive and insecure, I lose my self-reliance and become unhappy and despondent—even tho’ I may think monogamy is what I want. I don’t think I’m reducing everything to a sexual level, because it’s more than that for me. Feeling open and relating sexually can be present without necessarily manifesting physically. Feeling sexually open to other people is, for me, a metaphor of feeling open in other ways, of feeling free to be myself without limits on how that openness may manifest; just as for the possessive partner, non-sexual intimacy can trigger their feelings of sexual jealousy. I see these levels of intimacy mirroring each other.

Sometimes when I’m seeing more than one person sexually I feel jealous, anxious and/or guilty. The only way I know of dealing with this is by focusing on my here & now experience of what’s happening, as opposed to mind-fucking about possible outcomes which may never happen (but which I could manifest by obsessively worrying and giving them energy!). Jealousy can be a reality, but there’s no reason to make it all-important and give it power over one’s life. I do have a fear of abandonment and have to push through that to be myself; a constant process which ebbs and flows like the tides. I can usually keep sight of the fact that it’s better for someone to "leave" me than for me to make myself miserable by limiting and sacrificing myself to fit in with what they want or my interpretation of their expectations—which could be misinterpretations anyway.

People often seem very attached to their limitations and/or pain, and would rather avoid responsibility for this by blaming others. So if their partner/lover performs actions that remind them of their hurt (i.e. fear of abandonment), they blame the other person for "hurting them" and often avoid dealing with the flipside of why it hurts. While it may be true that the other person has some responsibility, it’s also likely that the present situation is resonating with something inside/in the past, the resolution of which could be profoundly healing. Sometimes I see myself & others avoiding these hidden treasures by forming (usually unspoken) agreements based on denial, to avoid anything which brings up pain. A truly partial approach. In my experience things work best when I’m willing to risk losing everything for the sake of being honest. Especially to risk losing the picture I have of myself, and the expectations I’ve built up of someone else and the reactions I think they’ll have to things I say or do.

I like to see pain, like jealousy, as a wake up call showing where to bring more consciousness-awareness. Where it hurts is where it needs healing. For example, a disappointment can lead to identifying the unspoken expectations that led to that specific hurt. Being involved with multiple partners means there’s more intensity so, with honesty and awareness, problems surface quickly and can be quickly cleared. This path can be hard work, and it’s definitely worth it. Deal with it, innit. If I’m not dealing with it; if I’m using relationship(s) to avoid myself, it doesn’t work. Which is how it should be, methinks. I get the feeling that I’m articulating the obvious, but these are things I keep having to remember and relearn.

I don’t really want to say all monogamy is bad (do I?). If we choose monogamy consciously sometime, it should be fine, of course. The key issue for me is choice. Are we really choosing our sex lives, or are we being run by programmes as usual? How much choice can we create? If jealousy or fear is running your or my life—why? I like to raise these questions for myself by experimenting and seeing what comes up. After all… I have little idea of who I am, what I want, where I’m going etc. Might as well play!

"People doing it say ‘There is something magical about this lifestyle to me…because it is living an alternative, it’s living a contradiction to all the standard programming and the way that everyone expects you to be. Whenever you are doing something that is different from the norm, there is a magic to it, a freedom and a sense of power. I always have a feeling that if we can do this thing that is so delicate and complicated, even for a few years, we can do anything.’" (from Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer).

Happy lovin’ now!

Books: Essential Reading!

• The AAO Model, trans. Brooke Skopik (AA verlag, Nurenberg: 1977). See also Ottoismus in Holland by William Levy @ The Invisible Language Society, Fokke Simonszstraat 28-1, 1017 TH Amsterdam, Holland. An updated version appears in HEAD 7.
• Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett (Habitat/10 Speed Press; 1989). £23 from: Head, BM Uplift, London, WC1N 3XX.
• The Devil & The Goddess: Meditations on Blood, Serpents and Androgyny, Gyrus (Norlonto; 2000).
• Diggers & Dreamers: The Guide to Co-operative Living 96/97, Ed. by C. Coates, J. How, L. Jones, W. Morris and A. Wood (D&D; 1995) £10.50 from: Edge of Time Ltd, PO Box 1808, Winslow, Buckingham, NK18 3RN.
• The Irrational in Politics: Sexual Repression & Authoritarian Conditioning, Maurice Brinton (See Sharp Press, AZ; 1993) $6 from PO Box 1731, Tucson, AZ 85702-1731; or £4.95 from: AK Distribution, PO Box 12766, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9YE. Tel# 0131-555-5165.
• Love Without Limits: The Quest for Sustainable Intimate Relationships—Responsible Non-Monogamy, Dr. Deborah Anapol (Intinet Resource Centre, CA: 1992). $16 from I.R.C, above; or £12.95 from The Private Case, POB 23, Royston, Herts, SG8 8DT, U.K.
• Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer, Ryam Nearing (PEP Publishing, Captain Cook: 1992). $12. Contact: PEP (see listings).
• ‘Pasiphae: The Woman Who Fucked Bulls’, Will Tracy in Ritual Sex (RhinocEros: NY, 1997), ed. by T. Taormino & D. A. Clark.
• Sex Magic, Louis T. Culling (Llewellyn, MN: 1988) £8 from: Head, BM Uplift, London, WC1N 3XX.
• Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture Of The Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology And Celebrating Life, Dolores LaChapelle (Kivaki Press, CO: 1988). $25 from/ enquires to: Kivaki Press, 585 east 31st Street, Durango, CO 81301, USA.
• Safer Planet Sex: The Handbook, massive listing of everything to do with sex, in Britain & worldwide. Directions, playing, travelling, shopping, performing, looking, reaching, talking. £8 from Tuppy Owens, PO Box 4ZB, London, W1A 4ZB.

An Interview with Dave Lee

by Gyrus

Starting out

Gyrus: What were your early experiences that led you into magick?

Dave: The older I get, and the more experienced in magick I get, the more experiences there seem to be in the past. It’s as if history comes into focus. I think the things that precipitated me into a magickal universe, with no doubt that it was happening, were early psychedelic experiences in my late teens. When I took on a magickal paradigm later in life, in my twenties, I did start to remember things from childhood that were magickal experiences. But at the time, as a child, they didn’t take me off the path of rational thought, and attraction to science, which was also one of my main things from childhood.

Gyrus: You studied science as a degree?

Dave: Yes, I did a science degree.

Gyrus: Were you bringing science and magick together back then in your thinking?

Dave: Towards the end of my undergraduate years I did start to look into the philosophy behind science, the philosophy underpinning science, and realized it was far more flimsy than I’d previously assumed. And that it was built upon an abyss of ignorance, and that there were ways of apprehending reality other than science. I took up some magickal practices, meditation and so forth, starting to explore what the mind could do.

Gyrus: What were the magickal traditions and writers inspired you early on?

Dave: Well, when I first got into magick as a subject, actually read about it, there were early experiences I had with the I Ching. I found myself in possession of a copy of the I Ching when I was about 18 or 19, and when I used it, it had a peculiar sense of rightness about it. I must say I didn’t really use it in any rigorous sense for divination like I would now. It was more for general advice about life. It was the beginning, obviously, of an acceptance of synchronicity, an acceptance of the connectedness of things which goes beyond ordinary materialist reductionism—this is implied in using the I Ching.

But the first actual magickal writers I got into… well one of the main ones of course was Crowley. In the late 70′s there wasn’t much else around that was as wide-ranging and genuinely exploratory—and, at its best, non-dogmatic.

Gyrus: I suppose the fact that he tried to combine science and magick in one framework appealed to you.

Dave: Yes, there’s an element of that. His writing is often very overblown and pompous, and quite difficult to get any sense out of, but as I say it was more or less the only thing that was around. It wasn’t very long before I collided with the emerging current that later became called Chaos Magick—Pete Carroll’s first book Liber Null came out in the late seventies.

Gyrus: What did you feel around that time—that it was a condensation of something that had been welling up in magick for a while, or that it was quite a surprise emergence?

Dave: There was a refreshing sense about that book, Liber Null, like a breeze blowing through things. A sense of "Yes! I’m glad somebody’s saying this!". Of course it was written by somebody who had a far more systematic experience of magick than I had; therefore I didn’t understand everything in it, because you can only understand magick by looking at experience of magick. Having said that, the bits I did understand had a certain sense of familiarity about them, as if I was waiting for a magickal philosophy of that kind—and a rigorous approach to practical magick.

Gyrus: Did you follow any one tradition, and train yourself rigorously in that before the idea of combining traditions, picking and choosing, came along?

Dave: When I first decided to do some practical magickal work, within a tradition, it was because I’d met two guys who were really into Qabala. They taught me a few of the basics, the Golden Dawn and post-Golden Dawn, Crowley/Dion Fortune, styles of Qabalistic work—the Middle Pillar meditation, the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, that kind of thing. I started doing pathworkings, where you work from the bottom of the Tree of Life upwards, climbing through the different symbolic levels, and having sometimes unremarkable experiences, and sometimes very vivid and intense experiences, with a real degree of mythic seizure in there. There’s no sorcery in that system, but there’s a lot of good self-transformational magick. So I learnt basic Qabala, I learnt my way round the Tree of Life and the paths on it—that is, the kind of Qabala that is mediated by the Golden Dawn, which is obviously very different from the Qabala of the rabbinical tradition. But what was called the Western Esoteric tradition, which has a lot of Qabala in it, that was the first system and tradition that I studied.

Then, being introduced to Chaos Magick, I studied bits of other systems; but I didn’t really educate myself in other systems until much later.

Gyrus: So was Chaos Magick an impetus to look at other systems, like the runes? And did you feel in Qabalism a lack of relevance to where you were living, the culture you were living in, and that culture’s history?

Dave: I think my eventual disappointment with Golden Dawn-style Qabala was the fact that you can’t really do sorcery with it. It’s all about self-transformational magick. Of course you can do sorcery with it, but it doesn’t encourage it, it’s not easy to get sorcery out of it. For instance, in the four-levels Qabala that the Golden Dawn taught, the lower-level spirits are the ones that actually go out and do the business. But you have to address them through the angels, and address them through the archangels, and address them through the gods. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that system, it’s just that it isn’t designed for doing results magick, for doing sorcery?

Gyrus: A bit bureaucratic…

Dave: It is a bit bureaucratic! The Northern Tradition, of course, is very different; it’s applicable in a very vivid way, both for self-transformational magick and for sorcery, but it wasn’t until much later that I got into that. I think Chaos Magick initially stimulated me to be a bit of a squirrel, running around gathering bits from all sorts of different traditions, from whatever attracted me. I had some successes, and also got into some blind alleys; when you’re investigating any subject that tends to happen. I learned a little bit about Voudon, a little bit about everything, really… No, a little bit about a few things, to be fair. It wasn’t until rather later that I got into the Northern Mysteries; and to me that became a much more complete paradigm. It wasn’t that Chaos Magick pushed me in that direction; it was that for me Chaos Magick was the exploration of a lot of different directions. And eventually the one that I stuck with the longest was the Northern Tradition.

So there isn’t some sort of equinamity towards all traditions—Chaos Magick is a way of loosening up and exploring traditions you might not have thought about normally.

There’s no reason why people should study the tradition of the country they live in, or study any tradition for any specific reason—other than that they’re truly attracted to it, or other than that they’re investigating it to find out how attracted to it they are. For the purpose of doing basic sorcery, you can more or less start anywhere. Or, of course, you can take the more purist approach that Chaos Magick started off as, which is taking the Austin Spare-type approach, where you devise your own system. Very few people actually consciously and deliberately do that, very few magickians. But a lot of magickians have learnt a tremendous amount from Spare’s notion of throwing out tradition, and looking at the essentials of what the magickal process is. And, of course, if you read Spare in the original rather than just in context, you realise there’s mystical elements to him as well. But there’s a very strong practical current, and that is one of things that coloured Chaos Magick, and it’s one of the things that Chaos Magick has brought back into focus—and influenced other magickal traditions thereby.

Sorcery, class & religion

Gyrus: Sorcery is very stigmatised in a lot of magickal traditions, even if it’s just by down-playing it. What do you think sorcery essentially is, and why has it’s gained this reputation?

Dave: Well sorcery can mean a lot of different things, of course—most words can—but sorcery is a word that is used very differently by different people. In this context, I’m generally meaning ‘results magick’. I’m meaning magick that has some effect on consensus reality, rather than a purely internal, psychological effect, or some more subtle spiritual kind of effect.

As to why it’s been stigmatised or anathematised, I think that’s got a lot to do with Christianity, and the way that Christianity itself has influenced magick. Oddly enough, even though many people still think of Aleister Crowley as "the Wickedest Man in the World", he, in many respects, was very much a Right-Hand Path magickian—or at least he liked to think he was. He said things like, "Any magick that isn’t done with the intention of attaining Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is black magick." Maybe from some perspectives that’s true—but what does he mean by black magick? And so forth. But phrases like that certainly put a lot of people off doing sorcery. You can hardly overestimate how influential the man was, and his writings were in this century’s occultism. Similarly, Dion Fortune seemed to have the attitude that it was a bit ‘naughty’ to do results magick. A lot of magickal organisations that have evolved either from Dion Fortune or Aleister Crowley do still have those attitudes. And a lot of the magickal tradition of the western world comes through those very organisations, and through that very influence.

Gyrus: There must be a misconception about sorcery or results magick that it’s bad because it’s about gaining worldly things, and is an ‘unenlightened’ short-cut to ‘mere hedonism’. But presumably after most people practice results magick for a while they realise it’s not quite as simple as that!

Dave: If it was just about hedonism, you could see how the Right-Hand Path and religious people would object to it. But really it’s got a lot to do with money; it’s got a lot to do with the fact that both Crowley and Fortune were wealthy people. Well, Fortune I’m not so sure about, but Crowley was very wealthy—he got rid of his fortune of course. He basically was brought up with the sense of always having enough. Fortune I’m not so sure about; she certainly wasn’t working class, she certainly never experienced poverty for very long, and wasn’t brought up in that condition. Objections to sorcery, practical magick, are almost invariably made by people who are materially very secure.

Gyrus: So you think there’s a class element to it?

Dave: Not universally; but it seems that there has been in the history of British occultism, certainly. Let me think of another example where that might not be the case… Perhaps in India, where the Right-Hand Path saddhus don’t like magick very much, it’s a distraction from the path of ‘illumination’. But I don’t know, maybe they’re Brahmins—maybe that’s worth looking into, as to what the objections are. Of course I don’t necessarily mean that all Left-Hand Path sorcerors are from a lower caste or class. I very much doubt that that’s the case, in fact, because they tend to be highly educated people as well. But there is a basic attitude that the universe is provided for you, a basic trust in the universe in the Right-Hand Path philosophy. Whereas the Left-Hand Path philosophy is a sense of basic trust in your own will, your "might and mane", as they used to say in the northern lands.

Gyrus: Referring to your comment about the influence of Christianity, it must especially be Protestantism that has influenced attitudes to sorcery. It’s based on the idea that nothing you do in this world will lead you towards a state of grace or salvation; it’s purely an internal, intangible exercise of faith. Besides Christianity’s basic prejudice against magick, that’s a huge prejudice against part of the spiritual path being in this world, and your interactions with it.

Dave: There is this curious connection of sorcery with Catholicism of course. For instance the artworks of a chap I know, Snakes—’Automatic Prayer Machines and Divinity Selectors’—strange bits of post-technological art that contain in them numerous tiny things from the Spanish religion and sorcery industry, Santiago, where he found places where you can buy all sorts of spell-kits, essentially, for using in the church. And this has been going on for centuries. People are allowed to do sorcery, as long as it’s thought of as ‘prayer’.

I suppose a lot of the Middle and South American traditions containing sorcery, which managed to graft with invading Catholicism to an extent, to form various syncretist religions, may have had a harder time of holding onto fragments of their traditions if they were invaded by Protestants…

Out & about

Gyrus: In its connection to the everyday world, Chaos Magick popularly, if that’s the right word, has a very ‘urban’ feel to it. Well I know you’ve done quite a few treks into nature to do magick—what are your experiences of that?

Dave: The second Chaos Magick group that I was ever in, which was the group that became known after it had ended as the Circle of Chaos, for want of a better name—it was ‘The Group’ at the time—was in West Yorkshire in the mid-eighties. We worked eight rituals a year, on the old festivals—the quarters and the cross-quarters, the Celtic festivals. We worked seven or all eight of them each year out of doors. We sometimes worked Yule indoors because it seemed like an indoors kind of thing. But the rest we worked out of doors. And I loved it. Putting a certain amount of effort into certain types of magick enhances it—prolonged concentration, prolonged focus. Walking for, say, a mile through woods at night, in silence, with no torches—because it’s actually easier to walk at night without torches in the woods than it is with them, you get selectively blinded if you’ve got a source of light. We used to do it in silence, and just thread along in a chain—or otherwise we’d go in smaller groups of two or three, and meet up somewhere. You’d have to actually find other people in the woods, at certain sites where we’d meet. And then maybe build a fire in silence. And with the awesomeness of the night, after the couple of hours that it took to get all this together, you’d be in an interesting and wonderful altered state.

Gyrus: I heard that in one of Yorkshire’s witch covens, one of their initiations was to walk around very craggy, dangerous wooded areas at night with no lighting. It’s a very intense way of extending your sensitivity towards what’s around you, in a practical as well as magickal sense.

Dave: One rite we did involved splitting up and all going off in different directions to explore the moor top, at least over from Sunnydale up to Ilkley Moor, those miles of bleak moorland. Obviously we were doing it in the summer, but it was still very much a survival night. That was very intense. ‘Stalking Power’, we called it.

Gyrus: Did what’s known as ‘earth mysteries’ feed into the stuff you were doing outdoors?

Dave: For me it did. I’ve always had a real fondness for the study of earth mysteries, and for some of the people who write about them, their work. I must say that most people I know on the Chaos Magick scene don’t really get that far into that sort of stuff, but I love it. I’ve had some extraordinary experiences at Avebury, for instance. Around there the energies to me are really amazing for particular types of deep transformational magick. Ilkley Moor is another example—that’s a very different type of current. Other places, too. I’m deeply curious about the way that people lived in these landscapes that nowadays are often bleak and uninviting, like Rombald’s Moor, the Ilkley Moor complex…

Gyrus: It was covered in trees…

Dave: Exactly, it was more wooded at the time. And the carvings that are left up there on Rombald’s Moor, the Badger Stone and the Swastika Stone for instance—who knows how old these things are? There are theories about it, but they could be completely wrong, they could be much older. There’s a sense of the tracks of a people who were maybe only just settling down from nomadism, or maybe still nomadic. We have a very old phenomena here, some very old magick. I went to a talk by a chap called Brian Larkman back in the old Leeds University Union Occult Society days, back in the early to mid-eighties. He showed slides of cup-and-ring marks, and noted how the swirling concentric patterns, and looped joins between them, are very similar to those that were found on Aboriginal initiatory shields, which young men carved after, I believe, they’d had their particular major Dreamtime experiences. And these things appeared to be maps of the landscape, from a subjective point of view, a magickal point view. I wonder whether there was a culture rather similar to that living on Rombald’s Moor at one time.

Gyrus: Did any of these ideas feed into your ‘Stalking Power’ experiences?

Dave: They did for me. I found myself, on that particular night I was referring to, walking miles up the moor top, bright moonlight… kind of looking for a line of connection between things. I never found it, actually, but had some very interesting experiences. I was looking for a way of walking up to one of the stone circles up there; intuitively that was the way I wanted to go. So it did feed in, yeah.

Gyrus: From what I know, it seems that the Aboriginal mythical maps of their landscape are all bound together with songs. Obviously, the lyrics would change from tribe to tribe, through different languages; but the rhythm and the melody would be the same right the way across the continent. The ‘texture’ of the music actually describes the nature of the land, so you can use songs as a navigational tool. If you’re walking a certain distance along a ‘songline’ joining sacred sites, you can sing the song as you go, and you’d know through the structure of the song where certain landmarks are.

Dave: That makes so much sense, for a nomadic or semi-nomadic people to have an oral tradition which is intimately concerned with knowledge of the landscape.

Gyrus: Did you do any vocal experiments during the time you’re talking about?

Dave: No, I didn’t actually. Not that I remember, no.

Gyrus: But you’re quite into that now—vocal techniques, chanting and so on?

Dave: Yes. I’ve not used them much at specific sites, for particularly connecting in to landscape energies or whatever. But I do a lot of magickal work with what’s called galdr, a northern tradition which basically means both ‘sorcery’ and ‘song’, ‘magick’ and ‘song’. It involves the chanting of runic formulas as a means of sorcery and divination.

Psychedelics & magick vs. mysticism

Gyrus: Not many magickal writers seem to go into psychedelics much, and vice versa; all the big psychedelic writers brush past magick. Again it’s this mysticism/magick duality. Was it natural for you, when you came across both, to put them together?

Dave: Absolutely. As I said, much of my direct experience of being immersed in a magickal universe came from early psychedelic experiences. At the time, most of the stuff written about psychedelics, back in the late ’60s, early ’70s, was by people who were heavily influenced by Oriental mysticism. I’m not knocking that, that’s fine; but it was very one-sided. Much of the writings carried over the contempt for, or fear of, practical magick and sorcery. Perhaps Casteneda was the exception. I did find his work quite intriguing, but it seemed to relate to a tradition that was very hard to come to terms with in urban UK at that time.

Essentially, for me what’s happened is that I’ve had to grow up enough to write my own manuals, that I wish I’d had when I was 19; to write the fusion of magick and psychedelics that is my own experience. I suppose some people who do psychedelics do end up being attracted to a path which is essentially Right-Hand Path, because it’s to do with the annihilation of the personal self—eventually. It’s to do with dissolution. Whereas the Left-Hand Path is to do with individuation, and the emulation of godhood. I think that’s intimately connected to psychedelics, but I can see how—maybe it’s a cultural thing—there’s this separation between magick and psychedelia, inasmuchas the manuals for the connection weren’t written a couple of decades ago. Or maybe it’s to do with the fact that different people are normally attracted to each of those approaches. I happen to be one of those strange people who’s attracted to both!

Gyrus: It’s curious, because from what we know of existing primitive tribes, much aboriginal use of psychedelics was part-and-parcel of the ‘sorceric’ aspects of shamanism—using psychedelic trips to look for animals to hunt, to find lost objects. It’s odd that as both sorcery and psychedelics were repressed by monotheism, they diverged into ‘magick’ and ‘mysticism’.

Dave: Psychedelics, in their recent reincarnation since the ’50s, either developed a kind of ‘high culture’ position, like Aldous Huxley, which is essentially non-magickal and mystical—he’s very intriguing, his writings are great; very, very good in my opinion—Leary’s a little bit like that, although there’s more Left-Hand Path elements in Leary—or they went in the Ken Kesey ‘pop’ acid direction, which was almost Christian.

Gyrus: Like the Jesus Army?!

Dave: Oh, I don’t know about them! I wouldn’t even like to speak the names of Kesey and the hippies and the Jesus Army in the same breath! Terrifying…

Gyrus: I just had this image of Kesey’s brightly coloured bus and those Jesus Army buses! A totally fanciful connection…

Dave: No, that’s horrible! But there’s a tendency that is pretty near to Christianity in a lot of Kesey’s philosophy. It influenced an enormous number of people who became known as hippies. That’s pretty much a Right-Hand Path philosophy.

Gyrus: What exactly is the connection you see between that sort of promotion of psychedelics and Christianity?

Dave: I think people who take a really staggeringly large amount of psychedelics—even, it might be fair to say, a little too much—get to a kind of state which is sometimes known in the trade as ‘gnostic burn-out’; where really, what they want to do most is come down. Some people developed actual paradigms for ‘coming down’. And I think one of them was Kesey’s notion of going ‘beyond acid’; which, for him, didn’t mean getting into magick—which was what it meant for me, getting into the Left-Hand Path of magick—what it meant for him was getting back into the Earth, and community… doing things together collectively, being a good neighbour… all those good things which are to do with the building of communities. But they’re just half the story, they’re part of the ‘way of the household’. Even then, it’s not the full way of the household, if the householder is truly a magickian. The person who is a strong and significant member of the community may be on a path that is Left-Hand Path also. Like in Voudon, they talk about "serving with both hands". Which means that you both serve the community and you serve yourself. Whereas there was a complete repudiation of any magickal exploration in much of what Kesey said and wrote. This is as an example; I’m not particularly trying to pick on Kesey, I think he was splendid in many ways. But he’s an extraordinarily influential man; he was responsible for most of hippiedom. Leary was far more ‘high culture’. Leary was far more at the sci-fi end of it, rather than at the ‘nice country people giving each other peace signs’ end of it.

I think the fact that all that needed to come down into something is the connection. Fourth Circuit, basically… it’s to do with having your mind blown out into the Eighth Circuit. It seems that where Kesey landed was Fourth—which is essentially to do with morality, and pair-bonding, and the tunnel-vision of any given society.

Left hand, right hand

Gyrus: I was thinking there of the traditional idea of the Left-Hand Path being the eschewing of the Right-Hand Path’s ‘steady progression’. It’s a ‘short-cut’, not meant with any negative connotation. Some people took psychedelics as a short-cut, and went so far out that they elastically ‘snapped back’, to channel it all into Earth-bound community-building. But your opposition to that seems to be to do with an on-going integration of far-out states into a balance, serving with both hands.

Dave: There’s a spectrum here. The kind of example I’m using is an almost ideal example, of the community priests of Voudon, the houngans, who are very powerful members of the local community—businessmen, farmers, whatever—professional people. A lot of people—rather like an extended family, the village or part thereof, like an extended kinship grouping—a lot of people depend on that person. They’re very much in the position of being a leader, a spiritual and business leader of that community. They will do the birth and marriage ceremonies, they will put on all the very expensive events that require the hiring of places, paying drummers, all that stuff.

The reason I’m using Voudon as an example is that there isn’t really an equivalent in England, or in Europe—there’s no precise equivalent of that type of integration into the community of magickal service with magickal selfishness, the importance of one’s own development. At the extreme of the Left-Hand Path is the kind of sorceror who’s become an outlaw; either because he’s a bit out of order and has been rejected, or because the community does naturally reject sorcerors, which is usually the case anyway. In the old northern lands there were people who became outlaws who were sorcerors, who lived by their own might and mane. There were also priests of Odin, who were members of the local community, and were probably only a priest as far as their own extended kinship group was concerned—again, rather like the houngans. But of course these men and women would also be serving their own ends, they would also be evolving along the lonely path of the Left-Hand Path.

By the way, it’s interesting too that you mentioned the notion that the Left-Hand Path is the short but dangerous one, all that. This is something that I came across way back at the beginning of my magickal career, maybe even earlier. I think some Indian writers, or yogic writers, have it that way—I’ve heard that in a lot of different ways. And I think it is a particular bit of nonsense. It’s absolutely nothing to do with speed of development—although of course you do go a lot faster on the Left-Hand Path because it is development truly into magickal individuation, whereas the Right-Hand Path is not.

It might appear that a priest who is serving with both hands is a jolly good chap who’s on the Right-Hand Path. But we must remember the Norse myth of Tir, who has his hand bitten off by the wolf. He sacrifices his hand in defence of the community, against forces of chaos and night. But in so doing, he himself is on a very lonely journey. There’s a lot of connections between leadership, the myth of Tir, and the notion of serving with both hands—interestingly enough in this instance for a god who’s only got one. The appearance from the outside might be that he leads, that he gives to his community, and serves, and is therefore on the Right-Hand Path; but in his own heart, he’s on the Left-Hand Path.

Gyrus: I’ve never thought about the connection before, but there seems to be some similarity between Tir and Odin, who loses one eye; there’s the idea that he has one eye pointing out to the world, and the ‘missing’ eye points inwards. There’s that same balance.

Chemical tools, chemical intent

Gyrus: How do you relate to the different psychedelics? A lot of people have preferences, and very different conceptions of, especially, man-made and natural psychedelics.

Dave: It’s a complex question. I tilt slightly in favour of natural psychedelics; but I do make an exception for acid, which I think is an extremely valuable substance. Some of the other synthetic psychedelics I’m not as interested in.

Gyrus: Do your preferences relate to how you find them suitable for magickal work?

Dave: Well in my experience, LSD is very valuable for healing. In the right hands, of course, under the right conditions, the right guidance. For self-healing or healing of others, it can be an extraordinary catalyst.

I’ve never known anybody find a use for DMT. DMT is a thing in itself. Enough said!

Gyrus: Obviously you’re talking in terms of smoking synthetic DMT?

Dave: Yes—well, it might not be synthetic, but yes, in terms of the usual administration of it in this culture, which of course is smoked. Mushroom is in some ways the vastest and weirdest of them all. You can control it quite easily sometimes, other times it completely takes you over. Sometimes you can use it for sorcery, sometimes it’s much more mystical. That’s perhaps the most challenging.

Gyrus: What do you think about different attitudes towards intention and psychedelics? John Lilly once said that the absolute worst thing you can do when taking acid is go in with preconceptions or intentions. But of course magick is more about control and having very clear intentions. Do you have a general principle between these two approaches, or do you use one sometimes and the other at other times?

Dave: I think with Lilly you do have bear very, very strongly in mind that with a lot of the things reported as being said about acid, he was in fact talking about ketamine. At the time he wasn’t allowed by his publishers to mention ketamine, for some reason. I’m not sure why—maybe they just didn’t want to start people thinking about yet another drug that sends you crazy, with the LSD scare on. But apparently during that era he was completely wiped out on ketamine all the time. I think on a high dose of ketamine, particularly in sensory isolation, it’s absolutely impossible to do anything, in terms of guidance of the experience. I’ve very limited experienced in this area, but I’m astonished that Lilly has got so many brain cells left if he used that much, frankly. I don’t think it’s a particularly benign substance.

Having said that, I think I agree with him that it’s not a good idea to go in with any preconceptions; but I think it’s a very good idea to go in with intentions, even if they’re broad ones, and totally mystical. It doesn’t have to be sorcery—you don’t have to go, "Right! I’m gonna do this acid and do a spell to get myself a new job!" I think that’d actually be rather silly. But if you say, "Right, I’m gonna do some LSD and heal a particular aspect of myself, confront a particular demon and sort it out…" Under the right conditions of course—don’t do this at home, kids! Your unconscious will give you all the experiences you require to lock into that intention. But of course you have to flow with the details. It’s not a good idea to have preconceptions about the actual details of what will happen. You will be taken on a journey, and you’ll find yourself coming out the other end of it with a good result. You can’t force each stage of the journey, but you can put an overall intention in there. In fact, I would say that a lot of time, the problems people have with psychedelics are to do with the fact that they don’t have any intention at all. That doesn’t matter with low doses, recreational doses. But when you take a high dose, a truly psychedelic dose, if you don’t have any intention whatsoever, you can get locked into confusion until your psyche actually goes to a deep enough, sometimes dark enough level to find an intention. The intention might be as general as to have a good time, it might be as general as to feel a taste of oceanic bliss.

London

Gyrus: What attracts you to London, in a magickal sense?

Dave: I love this town. My present phase is spending more time and creative energy in writing, not just technical magickal stuff but fiction as well. London is a great city, it’s full of stories. Since I’ve been down here I’ve plugged right back into it, so many stories are happening.

It’s very much a place for reinventing yourself, a place for finding yourself in the right social scene, or the right creative environment, to move on a stage—that’s what it’s been for me.

Gyrus: How do you relate to the city magickally? Are there any tinges of adapting ideas about landscape and the environment in nature? Do you go for any of the urban psychogeography?

Dave: Yeah, I think London is absolutely thick with power-places, extraordinary power-places. I think that’s why it’s such a sprawling city, and so much of it’s a bit of a mess, and overpopulated, and all the other problems we associate with it. People have come here because it’s magickal. It is an extraordinary bit of land, for various reasons—the practical always links with the impractical in these things. I always have a personal, mythic sense of where I live. I’ve developed that over the years, and enjoy it. I like to find out about where I live. Just the other day I bought a second-hand copy of the London Encyclopaedia; I look places up, and learn a little bit about them—very gratifying. It’s part of the layers of my magickal world. One of the stories I’m currently working on is provisionally entitled ‘The London Web’, and it has some reflections on the power of London in it… the way that people’s lives get entangled in this city.

Gyrus: Do you do much venturing out from here, or do you find London sufficient in itself?

Dave: No, I really love the area around Avebury—the Ridgeway, bits of the southwest, which is like my ancestral home, as it were. I love to get out to Avebury, West Kennet, a couple of times a year at least. I go up north and visit friends up there. I’d like to get around more, really.

Healing currents

Gyrus: Healing, especially interpersonal healing, seems to be neglected in the Chaos current. I was trying to think of a reason for this, and the strong association of healing with the New Age movement sprang to mind.

Dave: I think you may be partially right. There’s this tendency for people who think of themselves as ‘hard sorcerors’ to think of healing as… puff’s magick!

Gyrus: Perhaps it’s renamed and thought of as ‘self-transformation’…

Dave: I think there’s a lot of credulous people on the New Age healing fringes who are punters for various techniques, that may sometimes work, but are often expressed in ways which are really to do with dragging more credulous punters in. So some magickians might turn their noses up at perfectly valid techniques that have got that particular marketing surrounding them.

I think that the techniques of healing are a little bit different to the other techniques of magick. In some ways there are more techniques of healing than there are techniques of magick. You can cast a sigil for healing, like you can cast a sigil to get more money, or find a lover, or to defend yourself against someone, or whatever. All the basic sorcery techniques apply to healing as they do to other areas. But there’s also a sense in which healing is a very special kind of magick that’s actually easier to do. There’s more ways of doing healing. In some ways it’s an easier type of magick to do. I think it’s a cliché, but it’s probably true that everybody has the ability because I suspect that everybody heals themselves anyway. As long as one actually makes it out of infancy, there’s probably some ability to heal oneself. And I think all healing is ultimately self-healing; and a healer is someone who tricks you into healing yourself.

Gyrus: I was thinking that the neglect of healing in the Left-Hand Path is odd, what with its emphasis on results in the material world. But then healing is probably on the borderlines; most healing traditions take some sort of psychosomatic approach to illness, so it’s on that borderline between inner and outer work.

Dave: It’s one of the things that people most often want when they come to some form of occult practitioner—a fringe practitioner, or sorceror, or shaman or whatever in the tribe. Healing is one of the things they most commonly want.

It’s an ingress point into magick for a lot of people, I think, if they get successfully healed. In a sense what you’ve got is an internal environment that you’re acting upon; it’s an environment that can be objectively studied, the human body, to some extent. But it’s internal, it actually belongs to you; you’re in it, and you can do things within it. So you’ve potentially got far more power over it than you’ve got over many things in life. Which is why healing, in a certain respect, is a lot easier. And as I said, it’s also an ingress point for a lot of people because of that feature of it. I’ve had, and seen, some of the most spectacular results of any magick I’ve done, in the area of healing—so-called incurable diseases healed, things like that. Quite extraordinary, massive, rapid changes in people under magickal conditions; crises averted; lives saved, I believe. I think it’s a tremendously heartening aspect of magick, getting such good results.

The other thing is the fact that if you actually set yourself up as a healer, you’re going to have a lot of people knocking at your door. And if you’re not comfortable about mixing your wyrd up with strangers, mixing the threads of your life up with those of strangers, or even those of people you don’t know very well, then healing, professionally, is just not an option. Because it does mix up your wyrd with that of other people, it connects you with other people. It was quite late in my career that I discovered I was quite good at healing; it was because a friend of mine that I worked with magickally insisted that I do healing on him. I discovered I could; it worked. But I’m just not prepared to tangle the threads of my life up with those of loads of strangers, at that kind of intimate level. Maybe other magickians feel that in some way, either clearly or vaguely, as well.

But the techniques of healing are enormously valuable; and even if you only use them on your nearest and dearest, they should be a very important part of any magickian’s bag of tricks.

Sex magick

Gyrus: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about sexual magick, and what do you think are the most important things about it?

Dave: I think that sex is so intrinsically enjoyable that in a lot of instances, people, even magickians, just enjoy it and don’t do much with it. Once you start to have the frame of mind where you’re doing something with the energies of sex, that’s not always appropriate to the relationship you’re in; it may very well be appropriate, it may very well not be. I think, for instance, that in a lot of cases, regular couples who have been together for years, very happy with each other—relatively happy, anyway—that’s not usually the best type of relationship for doing the most wonderful forms of sex magick in. So much of the energy of sex seems to go towards the maintenance of the relationship itself, whereas sometimes the explosive energy of a new relationship, or a relationship that doesn’t actually last very long but is incredibly intense, can be an amazing source of energy.

I don’t like using sexual magick for what I would think of as relatively trivial or unconnected ends. For instance, I would never use sexual magick in any aggressive or cursing mode, because I don’t want to mix up that aspect of my psyche with my sexuality. Similarly, anything that didn’t feel right, on a gut level, as a spell, I wouldn’t do using a sexual gnosis. That still leaves plenty of stuff that does work, though. Some sexual magick is best done on your own—because you don’t have to concentrate on anything else, except your own arousal and focus of consciousness.

What Crowley said about sex magick, in some respects, still stands. He essentially wrote about two gnostic states: energised enthusiasm and eroto-comatose lucidity. Energised enthusiasm is just what it says, that wonderful state of energised bliss, which is nonetheless highly conscious and has a good deal of focus—potentially, or actually—that can be used for sorcery, or for self-transformation. Eroto-comatose lucidity is the state of translucency that’s produced by sexual exhaustion, where the more divinatory and passive forms of magick can be undertaken. (Tape pauses for a roll-up break) …you just mentioned Katon Shual talking about the emotional side of the relationship being more important than the magickal side or whatever—is that roughly it?

Gyrus: I think he was talking about preconceptions, probably arising from Crowley’s accounts of just using women for his magickal purposes. I know there’s an aspect of that in traditional Tantra, where the goddess is revered in the form of a woman. But it’s sometimes subtly repressive towards women, because she’s just a vessel for the tantrika’s magick.

Dave: I don’t think that technique in itself is necessarily repressive. In the context of some patriarchal, male-dominated magickal organisation it could be, certainly. But the technique of objectification is one which occurs right across the sexual spectrum. In some instances, sex is better when the other person’s objectified; in other dimensions it isn’t. I think emotional closeness is enormously important; but in the course of sexual play, it’s sometimes desirable to achieve a state where the other person is the vessel of female or male sexuality—the sexuality that you’re attracted to. A pure, impersonal vessel, of that force. That in itself is something of a cosmic vision.

Basically, I don’t actually do very much sexual magick, in terms of sexual sorcery, because it doesn’t always fit in with my actual enjoyment of sex. Sometimes magickal operations fit perfectly; not many, though… I’ve gone back on what I was saying earlier in a sense, when I said that there were still plenty of magickal operations which I would use sex magick for. But there actually aren’t that many, when I think about it. A lot of the time, sex creates a loop of ecstasy, which does all sorts of transformative things that I allow to happen, but don’t direct very much with my will. I might have an overall intention at the beginning, but it’s not like I think sex is better if you draw sigils all over your partner and gaze at them.

I think there are two types of sexual arousal in any case. There’s sexual arousal which is aiming towards fairly rapid gratification, what I’ve called in my book Chaotopia! ‘the quickie orgasm’. This is the kind of thing the Crowley was doing, by and large, with prostitutes in New York—the basis of Rex De Arte Regia and his other notes on sex magick. With Crowley of course, things are rather different, because he was actually doing some sorcery, for a change. He didn’t actually do very much sorcery. But in terms of the quality of the sexual relationship, obviously it was pretty minimal… a fun kind of thing I suppose, but there are deeper forms of sex that rely on the generation of the ‘internal bliss-wave’, as it’s been known. What I think of as Fifth Circuit consciousness, or higher. That does involve opening up to the partner a good deal more, and taking more time over it.

Gyrus: So you think sex is often ‘useless’, in terms of magick, in the same way that DMT is, but for different reasons?

Dave: An interesting analogy!

Gyrus: It’s not that you’re too far out, it’s just that there are so many other things going on, particularly emotionally, that it’s just not applicable.

Dave: Yeah. Sex, to me, is just one of the best things in life, and I don’t want to necessarily always force it into the Procrustean bed of practical sorcery. Sometimes I’d rather just let it be sex. Which nonetheless, at its best, can sometimes go into a kind of mysticism. As the sex gets better, you reach higher and higher states of consciousness, and you find that you’re in a state which is rather like sex—but not as we know it, Captain! That’s another game entirely from the quickie orgasm; it’s another game entirely from practical sorcery.

Millennial culture

Gyrus: When I was talking to Amodali [of Mother Destruction], I realized for the first time—I suppose entering the final year of the decade has something to do with it—that the 90′s is the first decade in the last half of this century not to have thrown up some sort of distinctive youth movement. What do you think is going on here? Is culture now too chaotic for anything like rave or punk to just spring up?

Dave: I think we’re in the afterglow of the rave subculture…

Gyrus: It’s lasted so long though!

Dave: It has lasted so long; I think it’s been a particularly successful subculture. And that’s why it’s gone on for 10 years! I knew little about it in ’87, when most people date it from; it’s more of a ’90s thing from my experience. Being a bit older, I missed out on some of the rawest and newest aspects of youth subcultures as they came along. A lot has come out of the rave culture. To me it’s been the most significant youth culture since the 60′s. My 90′s has been coloured by a sense that here is a bunch of young people, dancing and doing MDMA and so forth, and then getting a bit more sophisticated, some of them going into psychedelics and into magick. And in parallel with a load of older people like myself who remember the late 60′s, early 70′s, before it became that completely commercialised glitz of 70′s culture, which was then smashed by punk. The late 60′s thing was so naïve and primitive, compared to the sophistication of the rave culture generation. Of course that generation built upon earlier experience, which is why I think it’s stabilised, as a subculture, more than most. It’s had a longer shelf life, even though of course it did become commercial. In terms of music styles, everybody thinks techno’s old hat now. There doesn’t seem to be any youth culture accompanying the most advanced forms of dance music now. Basically I suppose drum and bass and hip-hop are the cutting edge of dance culture now. That doesn’t have the same youth culture, doesn’t have a revolutionary youth culture attached to it; it has more of a clubby, hedonistic…

Gyrus: There have been musical revolutions, but they’ve kept within the bounds of music, and the culture that surrounds that, rather than any wider social culture.

Dave: I really don’t know where it’s going next. Lionell Snell always had interesting notions about micro-aeonics. I’ve got my own theories, but his were more prediction-based than mine. He was actually trying to use astrological, or quasi-astrological models to predict the next stages of mass fashion. I think his cycle was Science, Religion, Art and Magick. I think when he was talking in ’93 he was talking about us going into a Religion phase—or was it coming out of a Religious phase? I can’t remember now. I don’t know his astrological gnosis well enough to be able to comment and add it to my own notion of micro-aeonics.

Gyrus: Was it anything to do with solar cycles?

Dave: Pete Carroll’s very much into the sunspot cycles… Was it a 19-year cycle or was it 11 years?

Gyrus: I came across the 11-year sunspot cycle in Iain Spence’s article in Towards 2012 part III. He related this cycle to the Transactional Analysis grid, relating youth subcultures to the four ‘personality types’. I think he pinned the hippies to ’66, punk to ’77, rave to ’88, and of course ’99 was the next big one.

Dave: Ah, well it’s all been warped by the millennium, hasn’t it? We’ve got a massive cultural log-jam happening which is called the millennium! After the millennium, when people sober up around January 30th or something next year, they’re going to realise of course that nothing in itself has changed, unless they want it to change. The economy might well take a bit of a dip, after all the partying, until new things take hold. I’m inclined to think that the 2012 concept will actually go mass after the millennium. When people get disappointed by the millennium, they’ll be looking for the next ‘millennial’ change; and 12 years is a nice sort of period. I think there’ll be something of a mass culture to do with the 2012 phenomenon.

Gyrus: I’d never considered that…

Dave: Yeah, look out for that late next year, or by next summer perhaps.

Gyrus: I think I have a blind-spot past the millennium. Obviously it’s like a big New Year, and I have this every winter, coming up towards Christmas and New Year. You have all your Yule plans laid out, and you probably have plans for January, but they don’t seem as ‘real’ as plans for a month or two ahead do normally. It’s a big version of that. A psychological block, I suppose.

Dave: When I was a youth, I would have laughed at the notion that I would have survived this long! So it’s like free time in a way, it’s great!

I think there may be an increase in the sort of ‘whizz-bang’ technology factor… or perhaps ‘gee whizz’ technology factor would be a better expression. An absolute awe of technology, almost a kind of religion of hi-tech. But we are developing an increasingly fragmented society in some ways; although there’s a lot of communication, there’s a lot of little subcultures going on, even the youth subculture. Maybe because it’s lasted so long since rave, a lot of the rave generation have said, well, what’s happened is that loads of people from different scenes used to dance together—now they dance in different clubs. Totally different scenes, taking different substances to enhance their evenings, and they have different subcultural values. Maybe that will continue, maybe new forms of that will come along. But a mass youth culture… I wouldn’t like to predict one, but I think the 2012 thing is going to be part of it.

Gyrus: What do you think are the drives behind the human yearnings for, and fears of, apocalypse? I’ve thought of it as collective coming to terms with personal death; then there’s Immanuel Velikovsky’s ideas of race memories of vast catastrophes, comets impacting in prehistory. Like the Celts who told the Romans that the only thing they feared was the sky falling…

Dave: ‘Cos it’d happened to their ancestors! Yeah, it really had, in my belief. And I think that quite a few mainstreamers are beginning to accept certain aspects of Velikovsky’s notions. Maybe not exactly as phrased; but the idea of there being cyclic catastrophes that have wiped out whole civilisations, I think is highly probable. I think the conventional, old-fashioned notion of history as being a continual rise of civilisation from people walking around with clubs a few tens of thousands of years ago, up to the present marvellous things we’ve got, is probably nonsense. I very much doubt that there’s been a civilisation that has had our sort of technology before, but I think there have been civilisations before where people lived in cities, had very highly organised and stratified social systems, and a class which was able to enjoy the best of everything that was produced—a leisured aristocratic class, what we normally call ‘civilisation’. I do think that there probably are race memories of great catastrophes. This is becoming a theme in sci-fi, I’ve noticed, probably because of the gradual bleed-through of Velikovskian kind of notions into popular culture. And also because of the millennium—even though people don’t pay much attention to Christianity these days, by and large, we still have that culture within us. The very fact that our calendar is constructed in this way tends to make us think that something bloody amazing, or awful is gonna happen—maybe not this year, but maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time. There’s the general sense that in our lifetime something big might happen. And it could be an asteroid crashing into the Earth; it’s improbable that that’s going to happen in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I think another level of it is simply that people want to tidy their lives up, want to see life in a more simple fashion than it is. Fundamentalist Christians are an obvious example. They love the apocalypse, because it means that all the people they disagree with are gonna get murdered by God, and that they’re going to live forever in a sort of suburban paradise. This is an extreme example of the way that people use the notion of apocalypse to tidy up life, which is a messy and intricate system, a set of interlocking systems that can’t be reduced to a single truth.

Gyrus: There’s obviously a lot of cynicism about the year 2000 because it can be seen as just an arbitrary date on the calendar. But do you think there’s a leftover yearning from cultures that had cyclic calendars which scaled time up from years to aeons? A leftover need for large-scale renewal festivals or phases, in spite of the millennium being used by corrupt systems like the State and the Church to glossily ‘renew’ their waning powers?

Dave: I think there is, actually. I think it helps when there are people in a culture with a much vaster sense of timespans operating. I do try to avoid politics most of the time, but the way that politics works is incredibly short-sighted. It just makes me tear my hair out if I look at it too closely. The whole short-term fix, the whole mentality of politics… it’s probably no different to what it’s always been, but there’s no sense of the larger picture, no sense of the important features of what makes human life. Culture absolutely needs much longer-term perspectives embedded within it. Usually those are provided by religion. Hopefully we’re moving out of the large scale of the excesses of religion, and there might be a fairly mass-scale wisdom about larger timescales evolving. I’d like to hope so.

Ad astra

Gyrus: Do you think you’ll see affordable space travel in your lifetime?

Dave: Within my lifetime and my income bracket, those two things? I think that’s a great question, a fun question! Well, as to whether it’ll come within my lifetime and my income bracket depends on one of the parts of the old Leary S.M.I².L.E. formula, Life Extension. I could be dead tonight or I could live another 200 years! But I think it’s highly probable that we will see people going on holiday on Earth orbits, as a sort of jaunt; and maybe a bit further into the future going to the Lunar Hilton. Or an orbital space station might be more likely as a first stage. I mean the Japanese have commercial space station projects on the go, I think some of the Japanese companies have got…

Gyrus: People are paid up?

Dave: I think part of their long-term corporate strategies is to get a proper decent space station up there that people can go and visit. I think it’s definitely going to happen.

Gyrus: Has space travel ever obsessed you?

Dave: When I was a kid it did—I wanted to go into space when I was a kid, absolutely!

Gyrus: It’s strange that for a lot of kids growing up after World War II it was an obsession—"What do you want to be?" "I want to be an astronaut!" But it seemed fade out after the space programs didn’t progress as fast as we thought they would. And now it’s resurging because the idea of adults being able to consider going on holidays in space has come over the horizon. It’s finally gonna happen within the next 30 years or so.

Dave: Well like the invention of the printing press, it’s not something that happens overnight. There was a steady linear increase in the number of people who could read and the number of books in homes, or even in libraries for that matter. But it did mean that after decades, centuries there was noticeable change. We’re now in a zone of more rapid change, but there’s still gonna be ups and downs in space exploration, I think.

Gyrus: How do you think magick will function in terms of living in space? Magick originated in nature-based paganism, and now thrives in cities—as it’s probably done in the past, but more noticeably now. Perhaps the whole idea of cities is preparation for leaving the Earth, to learn to build mythologies and so on, totally separate from the land?

Dave: Skyscrapers look like rocket ships… What will happen is that if you’ve got an ecologically self-sustaining space station, what you would have is a capsule of what Earth was about—a semi-stable ecological system, a little capsule of Earth-life in our space stations. And no doubt people would not only use that to grow fruit and vegetables, but they would also go and sit in there with the trees, because part of our genes is tuned in to all that, it’s very much part of us. If we didn’t have that, it would drive us a little bit mad, I think—it would be difficult. If you thought you were never going to see green growing things again, it’d be very difficult.

Of course there are other levels of nature which are out there. You can think in terms of being inside the body of the star goddess Nuit; you’ve got the primal fire of suns as tiny points within the body of the goddess. There’ll be mysticisms and religions based upon the experience of space travel; and there necessarily will have to be, because space is such an uncomfortable… you can’t just go there without a capsule to be in, because it’s nearly absolute zero, it’s fucking freezing. There’s no life as we know it out there. It seems like a very hostile place, so we’d have to develop new myths to deal with living in space. But we’ll also have to take with us encapsulated forms of the old Earth mythos.

Gyrus: I’ve just read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. He presents a really bleak view of space travel, or colonising other worlds. The colonists on Mars live in tiny communities in a very barren, poisonous landscape that they’re in the slow process of terraforming. What they do to cope with this is they have what I suppose are doll’s houses, with a version of Barbie and Ken living in them. They chew this hallucinogen, and all the women are transported into the female doll, all the men into the male doll. It’s seen in very religious terms by the colonists. But instead of having far-out psychedelic trips, what they do is just ‘commune’ with this doll’s environment, this microcosm of Earth life, just going around doing everyday things, like going for a drive to the beach. I suppose it’s like people escaping from their lives on a Friday night by getting pissed or doing an E, but in a very powerful, focused way. It’s quite a melancholy view of nostalgia for Earth.

Dave: Imagine if you’re living in a very small community, maybe there’s only a few hundred of you in an expeditionary community on Mars or something, terraforming it. It’s gonna be ages before you get any results. You’d all get really fed up with each other! You’d have to live in virtual universes to be able to bear such an environment, I think. You wouldn’t be able to get away from other humans very easily. It wouldn’t be like there’s a city you can go out and party in from time to time, to get that sort of release of meeting new people and being put in different situations. You would need some form of virtual reality, like that story, which would probably be based on, certainly for the first generations, on Earth. It sounds like a soap opera, that!

Gyrus: It is portrayed as being like plugging into a soap opera.

Dave: An interactive VR soap opera!

Gyrus: Just to get a taste of ‘back home’…

Dave: It seems like a reasonable kind of direction.

Gyrus: Maybe the cultures that arose from the first colonists would have a Garden of Eden-type myth about Earth?

Dave: There’ll be a Golden Age thing somewhere in the past, there always is.

Gyrus: Do you think that’ll persist wherever we spread, or will there be opportunities for ‘clean breaks’ in space?

Dave: I think it will persist, because people do need a sense of continuity and race memory; so that’s naturally going to produce nostalgias for other conditions. Which, particularly in moments of hardship in your present life, will always seem to be superior. Maybe there was a community… this book [From Ashes To Angels by Andrew Collins] argues there was a very advanced community up in the hills of Kurdistan, 10,500 years ago, which was Eden. An excellent book, actually.

Gyrus: Is it related to any of McKenna’s theories about an African Eden?

Dave: Not really. But on another level, we’re remembering oceanic consciousness in the womb. If you take Stanislav Grof’s model of consciousness, the perinatal matrix of oceanic consciousness, the part of your nervous system that was programmed in the womb, picks up a whole gestalt of related feelings and myths that occur to you throughout your life—as you become conscious, as you become mythically aware, as you become culturally aware, and as you have various accidents and incidents in the course of your childhood and adult life. Those certain types of myth and experience will aggregate at that first perinatal matrix, which is to do with oceanic bliss, and the disturbance thereof. Being forced out of Eden, all that. So there’s a lot of levels on which this might work; and I’m inclined to think that it will continue, this sense of a Golden Age.

The word

Gyrus: What are your current obsessions?

Dave: One of the areas that I’m getting into with magick at the moment is story-telling as magick. The authorship of stories, or the telling of them as a magickal act. I’ve enjoyed writing short stories for a while, but I’d never done much with them until recently. One of the things that’s stopped me short from writing stories before is that I’ve always been intensely aware of my degree of identification with protagonists in stories, and having to be very, very careful of what I make happen to the protagonist. Because I really feel like I’m writing my own life-script. I did at a certain point start to realise that I was doing this, and writing other people’s life-scripts. That responsibility implies power, and power implies responsibility. I’m fascinated at the moment by fiction as a tool of magick, both of sorcery and of self-transformation; and the way that a story can be a complex series of enchantments which produces new truths for me as a writer, and produces new objective circumstances around me.

Gyrus: There’s a lot of mythology around writing in terms of ‘telling it as it is’. Perhaps I’m thinking of Burroughs’ bit in Naked Lunch saying that a writer can only write about what is happening at the moment of writing. Obviously this wasn’t literally meant, but he seemed to be eschewing the idea of ‘artistically imposed’ structure and meaning. But then his cut-up ideas often cross the border from prophecy to sorcery…

Dave: Well one of my main influences over the course of my years in magick has been William Burroughs’ work. He didn’t declare himself upfront, most of the time, as a magickian, but he wrote as such. His notions of the magick of writing are very profound, I think. I bet that thing about the writer being a ‘passive recorder’ was an exploration, with a certain degree of irony, of that position. What is the writer writing down as he apparently passively records? He’s actually writing down his own thought-stream. He may tweak it, and maybe even cut it up and rearrange it later, to make it serve his purposes of communication. But Burroughs wasn’t a camera. He was a living consciousness, selecting certain aspects of the reality in which he found himself, and applying enormous skill, and experience, and concentration, to put them in a certain order. He wasn’t just a ‘mere recorder’ of what’s happening. He was shaping reality by selecting bits of it—very vividly so.

I’m going to be doing a talk at the World Rune Gild meeting in November, hopefully, in the States, on story-telling and magick—that’s my theme for this year—and I’m going to read bits of stuff there. It fits perfectly with my Norse paradigm, because Odin is very much a god of story-telling; he’s a god of pure intelligence that manipulates… he’s the arch-manipulator, he’s the arch-control freak, and does it by creating reality. He’s the arch-magickian, because magickians are control freaks; that’s another level of the whole difference between magickians and mystics, and between magickians and people who’ve—up until now anyway—been into psychedelics. Magickians sometimes have a real problem in letting go. I’ve had to work on that—bodywork has been one of the ways through for me, Vivation breathing and so forth. To actually learn to let go sufficiently to achieve integration. There’s a point beyond which magickians, people of the Left-Hand Path don’t want to let go, because you don’t want to let go into annihilation, ultimately. So you train yourself to resist annihilation. But on the other hand, to let go into the deeper levels of trance is what seidr is about, as opposed to galdr, which is more intellectual and focused—willed.

Gyrus: So galdr isn’t just the vocal tradition, it was a whole?

Dave: It meant ‘magick’, to a large extent, it meant the magick that was acceptable. The thing is, Germanic magick goes back into the mists of time, but we know most about the Viking age because there’s a lot of literature from there—these people were great story-tellers—and a lot of artifacts have survived to give us an idea of what the culture was like. It was only a particular phase of northwest European culture; it was probably very different a few centuries before that. But that particular political and cultural phase produced a society in which galdr was kind of acceptable, but seidr was a bit naughty. Seidr practitioners are always accused of y’know, taking it up the arse, being unmanly, being dirty and all this kind of thing—it’s there in the Norse literature. There was a sense that galdr was masculine magick, and seidr was feminine magick. Seidr was supposed to have been taught to Odin by Freya. She was the Vanic witch, the sorceress of the old Earth cults of the Vanir, whereas Odin represented the Aesir—in a sense, more of an intellectual tradition.

Gyrus: Warrior-based.

Dave: Later, I think, yes; not necessarily earlier. The roots of the name ‘Odin’, or ‘Woden’, seem to be to do with ecstasy. So it goes into an almost shamanic mode. Again, the form of the story-teller as an ecstatic intelligence applied to the creation of reality—that’s what the story-teller was doing around some campfire half a million years ago!

An Interview with ManWoman

by Gyrus

Gyrus: How did the swastika come into your life?

ManWoman: I had no idea that the swastika was sacred. Some of my Polish relatives were in Auschwitz so I had the usual conditioning against it. In 1965 I had a series of spontaneous trance visions in which my soul flew up into the inner source of everything—a radiant light that was extremely ecstatic. It blessed me, it healed me in a profound way. In some of the visions it was a vortex of power. After this the swastika appeared in my dreams and in one very powerful moment a wise old man told me, "Take this symbol as your own and redeem it so that it will strike love in all hearts that behold it." I choked and he marked my throat with a white swastika (which I later had tattooed) using his finger.

Gyrus: I suppose you’re aware of American Indian myths connecting creation with the swastika and the throat. One myth tells of a god who took a bird and whirled it around until it got dizzy and hallucinated everything into existence! And gorgets (worn on the throat) showing four birds emanating from the Centre have been found at Spiro Mound in Oklahoma.

Swastika gorgets found in Oklahoma

Do you connect the swastika with the throat, in terms of the voice, poetry and creation?

ManWoman: The thing that I love is that I wasn’t aware of any of these myths at the time. This stuff all poured out from my depths unlooked for. That story of the bird hallucinating everything into existence makes more sense to me than the Adam and Eve bit. In the Kundalini yogic system the throat is the centre of creativity and self-expression. In my dream the swastika on my throat was to help me speak out for the swastika and to give me courage. The prime quality of the swastika seems to be creativity. In a recent dream I saw the nature of existence as a burning white octopus with a lightbulb of creative idea over his head. On the end of each of his many arms was a being like a dog, a cat, a woman, a man, a gorilla, a bird, a snake, etc. The notion of separation is an illusion as there is only one consciousness creating all the play of this world. And when we see this clearly we can co-create and influence the direction this world takes. If you can get past the prison of your own face, life is swimming molecules waiting to dance with you. My throat was marked with the swastika in about 1968. Now thirty years later I see kids walking around with swastika tattoos. Did I help to create this by my focussed intentions or was I just picking up on an inevitable occurrence with my artist’s visionary antennae?

Gyrus: What are some of the more extreme reactions you’ve got from people in the street? Has there been anyone who just hasn’t been able to see what you’re trying to do in redeeming the swastika symbol?

ManWoman: Sometimes I feel eyes burning into my arms and I look up to see looks of great fear, anger and revulsion on faces. It’s hard to explain yourself to passing strangers in ten words or less so I have to live with this. Although my life is much easier now because the word is spreading—so many of the Swastika Friends are out there now helping me. One time an old man approached me on the street threatening to whack me with his cane and calling me a fascist. I began telling him about the history of the swastika and soon he was using his cane to keep me away as if I was truly crazy. Another time I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker coming back from LA. She looked desperate for a ride but she leapt out of my van screaming, "Nazi, Nazi!" as if she had sat on an electric wire.

One time I was in Fort Worth, Texas and there was a convention of B-52 bomber pilots in the hotel. My wife wanted us to sneak in the back door but I walked boldly into the lobby and by the end of the weekend they were all having their pictures taken with me to prove it to the folks back at home.

The worst episode was on Muscle Beach in Venice, California, when three angry Jewish body builders surrounded me and started screaming. One shoved his gold Hebrew good luck charm in my face and said, "What about my symbol?" I had to do some fast talking. They were surprised when I said I wasn’t anti-semitic. I knew that they wouldn’t believe that the swastika was an ancient Jewish symbol found in synagogues (this is true) so I told them it was a Buddhist symbol and they slowly cooled down. My other Swastika Friends who were with me were amazed when I actually parted friends with the Jews because I was totally candid with them and they believed me. They were only reacting to their conditioning (my charm and my third eye tattoo helped). Soon I will be able to put my book Gentle Swastika into peoples’ hands when these situations come up. At the New York City Tattoo Convention last spring a woman approached me on the street. She said, "You’re awfully brave to be showing your arms in this town. It’s owned by Jews." But what can I do? I’m following the directions of my dreams which have given me quite the adventure in this lifetime. If I don’t speak out, who will?

But there is another side to this. Sometimes people get really ecstatic when we meet and do handstands in the street because they thought they were alone, the only one in the world to be fascinated by the "evil" swastika, and then suddenly they see this defiant guy tattooed with 200 swastikas and a third eye and the light goes on. That’s why Friends of the Swastika is growing so fast—it’s like discovering your lost tribe, like discovering that you aren’t the ugly duckling, a misfit, but a swan, a different more spiritual creature altogether!

Gyrus: Have you tried starting dialogue with representatives of the Jewish community about your work?

ManWoman: Not officially. I met a rabbi in San Francisco who was very intrigued. Quite a few Jews have signed the declaration of independence of the swastika that I started a couple of years ago. One said, "Don’t tell my mother," because he was breaking the chain of conditioning that has perpetuated the hatred of an innocent symbol wrongfully defamed. This was a brave act. And of course I have a lot of Jewish friends who have been challenged during our friendship and now see beyond their tragic past. I haven’t emailed the Jewish Defense League. No point in provoking people. I’m out to re-educate not to be intentionally a shit-disturber. However last fall in Calgary Alberta I had a show and one of the paintings contained a swastika representing the mystical source. Outraged citizens phoned the local JDL president who came over to meet me. He walked into the gallery, looked at the painting and said, "Now that looks more like the old Hindu swastika to me," and I knew right then I could have a dialogue with this man. He told me to call him if anyone gave me static about it. All I ask of Jews is to look at the thousands of years of sacred history of the swastika and to say okay the swastika has another life independent of the second world war. Not everyone using a swastika is anti-semitic. Over half the world’s population still honors it as a sacred sign.

Gyrus: Give us a thumbnail sketch of swastika history.

ManWoman: Okay. It was used for centuries as a symbol of good luck by Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vikings, Christians, Jews, Africans, Mayans, Aztecs, Chinese, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Tibetans, Hopi, Cree, and wandering neolithic tribes. To Hell with Hitler!

Gyrus: You held a convention in the town of Swastika in Ontario. How did this town get its name, and what attitude do the citizens have now to the symbol, and what you’re doing?

ManWoman: Two brothers, the Dusty brothers, found gold on that location—tons and tons of gold! One of their girlfriends wore a swastika good luck charm on a pendant around her neck. They named the mine Swastika Mine because of their good fortune. Two years later another gold mine was found and they called it Lucky Cross Mine. Lucky Cross is what the Indians called the swastika. When the town grew up around these mines it was called Swastika, Ontario in 1911. They fought a hard battle during the Second World War because the Canadian government wanted to rename the town Winston to honor Churchill. The towns folk sneaked out at night and changed the signs back to Swastika. They have fought criticism from many people over the years but have kept the name. They made one concession—they did not display the symbol on their store fronts as they did in the past. The citizens like what I’m doing because it takes the heat off them. Many people in Canada have heard my message now and the word is spreading. The town of Swastika has recently started using the swastika symbol on the buttons they wear during their winter games festival.

Gyrus: Some of your artwork is outrageously sexual! Also, you described your initial visionary experiences as being ‘gang-banged by holiness’. A lot of people must have a whole series of cultural barriers to leap before they appreciate your work!

Elvis the Pelvis by ManWoman

ManWoman: Yes, that was a series where I was trying to exorcise the Catholic nineteen fifties sexual hang-ups I inherited and had dragged behind me for years. You can leave church but does it leave you? I called it Smut Therapy where the paintings were the therapy. I was raised on a bully god who was pleased if you were dead from the neck down. He created you imperfect and then was pissed off when you acted imperfect—go figure!

My visionary experiences were of a sweet bride soul ascending up into the ecstatic light—burning up, freed of ego and melting into oneness. But the other aspect, unspoken at the time, was that this plunge of my soul into the void of pure pleasure was just like the plunge of my penis into a juicy vagina and the explosion of my sperm up into the womb of the sacred. Free at last! Whole at last! I knew nothing of the Tantric and was slightly disturbed by the parallel because of all the "god hates sex" I had been taught. Now I could say I’m having sex with god. The whole universe is nothing but fucking, endless cycles of birth, becoming, bliss—billions of vaginas popping out new life. People have sex, animals have sex, plants have sex—and love is at the centre of all. I had to dream up an new incarnation for god. God needs a facelift! Perhaps the audience for my work is still unborn but every generation loves it more than the last.

Gyrus: What are your immediate plans for the Friends of the Swastika network—where do you see it going?

ManWoman: I don’t know. It is growing so fast, I’ll just see where it takes me. I started by myself thirty years ago. Twenty years ago I met Carolyn O’Neil from Swastika, Ontario. Ten years ago there were four of us. Then, after the interview in Modern Primitives by Re/Search of San Francisco in 1989, it built into about fifty friends around the world by snail mail, pen-pal style. Now only six months after putting Friends of the Swastika online I’ve got hundreds of friends all over the world. Some have suggested a membership fee and newsletter. I like it as a grass-roots movement without a lot of organization or control. I’m getting photos and info from all parts of the world such as I did from you when you sent me the photos of the famous Swastika Stone on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire. It’s a friendship of kindred souls and now that we have a guest book we can all interconnect. I’m not quite sure where it’s going but plenty of enthusiasts are asking to get involved even if that means getting a swastika tattoo or just spreading the word to others. It’s a place where major ignorance needs to be overcome and there’s a certain safety in numbers. I’m not asking anyone to be a martyr. The swastika has a tremendous stigma attached to it. You, yourself, are aiding this cause by interviewing me and I thank you for that.

I just did another interview for the July issue of International Tattoo Art magazine. The Swastika is re-emerging in the alternative pop culture much to the shock of those who are still thinking in the old idiom: in the punk rock world, in the flying saucer cults, in the street gangs, in the renaissance of tattooing that is happening—tribal tattoos like Celtic knots, Maori spirals, the Buddhist seal of perfection. The Declaration of Independence of the Swastika has been signed by many famous artists, poets, tattooers; cool people including Lyle Tuttle, Leo Zulueta, Hanky Panky of Amsterdam, Billy Shire, Charles Gatewood, Spider Webb, Robert Delford Brown, Clayton Patterson, Joe Coleman, Bob Roberts, Steve Bonge, Chris Pfouts, Jonathan Shaw, Jack Rudy and Paul Jeffries. I’m very excited about it! Especially looking back on the dream I had about redeeming the swastika thirty years ago. The time is ripe!

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

In the tide of irrational hatred that men have felt and expressed towards women, we find the deepest insights in the unseen undercurrents. In the violent disgust underlying the perception of physiological difference.

Even beyond the suppression of representations of the female genitals (curiously not quite as stringent as the censorship of male genitals, though) cunts are often mysterious to men. They are folded and soft, the pleasure centre is concealed, and they are openings. The cock is a dry display of protrusion. The cunt is a concealment of depth and self-generated wetness.

The cunt is denigrated through language. Although "dick" and "cock" can be used as insults, they are almost frivolous, gaining venom only through intonation. But "cunt" is an insult surrounded by the greatest taboo: for men, because it feels so vicious; for women, obviously, because the viciousness that patriarchal society has imbued this word with cuttingly reminds them of the strength of the hatred which this society feels for their sex. And "pussy", almost invariably used as an insult by men on men, equates femininity with the most negative forms of passivity and weakness. I use "cunt" habitually now; having learned its linguistic origins in words denoting ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’, I want to reclaim it. A gradual shift of perspective has led to it becoming a word that can be used affectionately, lustfully, and lovingly to refer to the female genitals. And its use as an insult becomes, to me, more and more an unwitting admission on the user’s part to crassness and misogyny. They are offensive now, not the word. And there’s no call for ‘Political Correctness’ here. More repression is no answer.

But most importantly, the cunt is denigrated through associational folklore. The two most common myths of disgust are the idea of teeth lining the vaginal walls (Vagina Dentata), and the idea that the cunt is something filthy. Both are seen condensed together in the perversions of medieval Christian theology, where the Mouth of Hell (lined with teeth) is often graphically depicted to resemble female genitals; and Satan’s realm is seen to be one of shit, filth and ‘uncleanliness’.

There may be whole library shelves full of psychoanalytical analyses of these distortions, but here I only need one Freudian tool—the concept of psychological projection—to unearth what I think is a key model for the two ‘myths of disgust’.

What is the cunt? It is an orifice. What are the two major orifices in men? The mouth and the arse. As far as genital sexuality goes, an opening is feminine, and this is what men most fear. Being open… being vulnerable… being penetrable… Yet they can never be completely closed-off—they have two other orifices to remind them. It seems it is men’s fear of their own openings, and their sexual associations in the unconscious, which is projected onto women, into the cunt. The arse leads to: "It’s filthy down there!" The mouth leads to: "There are teeth in there!". The subliminal idea that cunts are dirty may persist beyond experience of them, centuries of misogyny subtly conditioning perception of the rich musky scents and tastes. Even vagina dentata may survive beyond the actual sensation of warm, slippery snugness.

So this runs deep. Men, if you’re afraid of or repelled by the cunt… look into your own depths, realize and come to terms with your own openings and vulnerabilities.

Email spam has pretty much bludgeoned the image of Viagra into a sleazy, ignorable part of my worldview, so seeing some less commercially-minded information on the subject is refreshing, reminding me that Viagra spam is just the crass, visible end of a phenomena that, at least, shows that people want to be more sex-positive—even if as a society we still struggle. There are concise run-downs on each of the major sex-enhancing substances, together with some advice on buying that I guess would help scythe through the overgrown, confusing marketplace for these things.

There’s also, on the Mavericks of the Mind site, a brief background piece on chemo-eroticism. Conversely, the Sex and Drugs site hosts a few interviews with leaders in the fields of smart drugs, neurochemistry, longevity and chemical therapies. Watch out for forthcoming Sex and Drugs book by David and Annie, too…