Genesis P-Orridge

PRELUDE: A LOVE STORY OF GENDER REUNION

“The modern androgyne, seeking only self-realization, forfeits the energy of opposition and conflict.” (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae)

This is a stream of unconsciousness essay on the Self, illustrated by the kaleidoscopic sexual personae of GENESIS P-ORRIDGE. Always the mercurial Magician, Gen has been associated with the art and decadence of the Thelemic, industrial, punk, Goth, and rave movements, and was arguably the earliest proponent of acid house. His bands have ranged from hard-edged Throbbing Gristle to ethereal Psychic TV to avant-garde Thee Majesty.

Never one to commune in solitude, all these eras of the artist, priest and shaman have fused into the orgiastic seizure of family-band PTV3. Now he gladly shares center stage with the group, including wife Lady Jaye, daughter Genesse, and bandmates, forming a cohesive unit to rock the house. This is a personal and critical triumph for the artist, whose daemonic career stalled somewhat after his tragic injuries in an infamous Hollywood fire at the former home of mega-magician, Harry Houdini.

In the alchemical transformation process, fire is the Bath of Immortality; the calcinatio fire tempers emotions, mind and body. Fire symbolizes libido, not at all separate from sexuality. The movement is from auto-erotic, to personal power-seeking, to refined transpersonal consciousness. Frustration is the initiatory ordeal. The fires of desire are transmuted. The miraculous water, aqua divina or permanens, was extracted from the lapis, or prima materia through the torment of the fire. The water stands for the anima mundi imprisoned in matter. This stage represents the expansion of consciousness after a crisis in development.

This crucible of chemical breakdown created a Phoenix-like opportunity for a remixing of elements, a new chapter of the sexual metathesis. Mind and body, perturbed by the chaos of a turbulent inner life, relinked in a transformation of prima materia through a luminous rebirth. In alchemy, both the primal matrix and finished product (Philosopher’s Stone) are hermaphroditic, an androgyne, and rebis (double thing).

This is exemplified on the Tree of Life by the merging of Hod (Hermes) and Netzach (Aphrodite) to open the 25th path ART (Temperance) which culminates in the Self-Real-I-zation of Tiphareth, the heart center. It represents a change of plane, a quantum leap from Astral to Causal Body as intentionally-created vehicle of consciousness with its enlarged perspective.

In a triumphant international come-back over 2004-2005, the Dionysian diva proved he never really went “away”. Nor did the perennial global fans. Now, aka Breyer P-Orridge, Genesis masquerades in conjunction with soror mystica and co-artist, Lady Jaye. S/he has endured further self-initiatory rites of s/hirgery. The magickal child cooks in the heat of the rubedo, furthering its incubation.

Hir symbolic externalization of the Androgyne is a deliberate, conscious artistic creation…body as art, bringing body fully into the artistic process, in a hyper-committed soulful way. This informed transformation is lightyears beyond body-building or the prosaic body-modification of neo-tribal culture, which is now reduced to the 21st Century equivalent of mall-hair by pierced teeny-boppers and tatted grandmothers with tickets for Burning Man.

The new Virgin, in the ancient meaning of being One whole-in-oneself, took h/ir show on the road. From the beginning of his career, Genesis has been a seminal engineering influence in Occulture, while likewise being influenced by his intimate relationships with such icons as Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin. He was strongly influenced by Burroughs’s “cut-up method” of writing. It is essentially a mantic rant, a collage technique with words and phrases uniquely juxtaposed. Now he’s done the same with his body.

The search for an escape from a dualistic state has formed one of the great pursuits of philosophers, mystics and occultists alike. Morphing the meat body creates a cascade of transformation through the etheric bodies in the emotional, mental, and spiritual worlds - a coincidentia oppositorum. S/He is a KOAN of living flesh that confounds spectators and brings a screeching halt to linear thought in pure spectacle. It brings new meaning to McLuhan’s old saw: the medium is the massage.

Do Homo Mutans or Homo Lumen embody an evolutionary thrust beyond Homo Sapiens? The immortal sacred Androgyne is a reiterated symbol throughout the history of art from neolithic times, and was particularly revered by medieval alchemists. Gen spoke at length about its resurrection in the fantasy life of our postmodern society in a Disinformation.com video. S/He implied the collective masturbatory fantasies of one-sided male culture have brought the Androgyne into embodiment, fueling its literal appearance to fulfill their sex-magick fueled fantasies.

In the latest narrative of their personal journey, charismatic Gen and Lady Jaye aren’t trying to fuse into twins, or even emphasize their mystical brother-sister aspects, but apparently seeking “escape velocity” from the shakles of the chemical identity. But this thrust is life-affirming, not evolutionary nostalgia of being longing for non-being. Perhaps the quest for the next-new-way-on has been fulfilled.

Genesis continues to eschew the local universe of each adoptive or adaptive persona in a self-induced alienation that affirms h/ir non-mentalized multiverse, her/e and now. He continues to stay on point in the hinterlands of personality by transcending each embodied version of Self. Jaye’s role in this hormonal alchemy should not be underestimated. Genesis credits her tender nursing as a key element in his psychophysical recovery. Mythopoetically, it is interesting to recall how Dionysus, too, was attended by the ever-present nurse. But, interdependence is not co-dependence.

This current, the “chymical wedding” of male and female, manifested strongly in the fin de siecle occulture, with the Symbolist artists of the Salon de las RoseCroix, and in the 20th century with the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley and the futuristic philosopher William S. Burroughs. Still, nothing Genesis has done in his artistic arc has been particularly derivative, or mere dramatic impersonation. The truth inhabiting these characters is what lends them power.

The psychic metamorphosis of interrelated themes of the artist/androgyne, the Narcissus myth, mirroring, and self-reflection figure prominently as metaphors in the artistic process. What is left for h/ir but to sprout wings to mate with the self-devouring serpent (Ouroboros) like Jung’s God-image of the Self, Aion, which necessarily reveals itself progressively?

The cultural Revolution IS being televised on PTV3. The Self is born in the image of the eye, the Third “I”, where we give Skull to the Divine.

The Yab-Yummy Way of Imagination

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense - he is ‘collective man,’ a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. (Carl Jung, Psychology and Literature, 1930)

Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers. (Carl Jung)

Today, we recognize two sexes on this earth, male and female, but the image of the Androgyne is impressed on the psyche as a dominant of the collective unconscious. Its existence is proved by the fact that it emerges from time to time in a multiplicity of guises, and in every part of the world. Do not lovers say to each other, “I am lost without you, incomplete. With you I feel fulfilled. I experience a sense of union when we are together.” (June Singer, Androgyny)

Lady Jaye and my SELF have privately chosen to explore our thoughts about identity and a belief that evolution is crucial to thee survival and self esteem ov thee humanE species in many ways. One ov these is thee idea that Lady Jaye proposed that thee body is a pre-Astoric “suitcase” holding us back from potential futures. We will need to give up any ideas ov thee body being sacrosanct if we wish to explore space. Genetic mutation and engineering will be essential for meaningful space travel. Whilst our Pandrogeny process began as an intimate private thing, inevitably I.T. became visibly to a public because we are performers and artists as well. We feel that we are duty bound to TRY and share some ov our thoughts on why we do these proceedures with you who visit here, as a politeness and sign ov respect from us to you. This is not a necessity, butter an offering we make in a more intimate space where we hope friends and allies dwell. (Genesis P-Orridge, 2005, Homepage http://genesisp-orridge.com/)
S/HIRGERY: THE ULTIMATE CUT-UP METHOD

Androgyne as Self image: SELF AS CUT-UP; BODY AS ART, return to the AnthropoMORPHIC self-discovery and in some cases a painful coming-out process. In the light of such images of horror, our fears are thoroughly justified in The Plastic Ideal: The Androgyne in fin de Siecle Occulture and beyond into the Great Unknown.

Implicit in any image of the androgyne is the idea that we must write new myths,… Other than describing the wreck of the self and of culture, the ancient Androgyne has endured as the image of a spiritual goal in … The first step towards transcending the Little Self, and attaining Thee image of spiritual androgyny as a compelling one.

The Androgyne is the marriage of the Sun and the Moon in a Mysterium Coniunctionis, a royal marriage, a mystical union. But, of course, the myth never remotely referred to a species existing on earth fitting that description, but rather to that celestial world of the imagination where all the immortal prototypes for Creation have always existed. Or does it?

Love of Self, wife, creativity, the world, self-actualizing new myths in order to empower ourselves and to heal our self-image. … the postmodern self is mediated, not mediating. Postmodern psychology is a product of the movement from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy into a postliterate world, a transition marked by the collapse of the critical distance between the inner self and the outside world, and by our immersion, perhaps even dissolution, in the ever-accelerating maelstrom of the media spectacle.

In Postmodernism, this shift in “the dynamics of cultural pathology” is one in which “the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation.” This new psyche is characterized by “waning of affect” which is not so much the android autism Andy Warhol aspired to as it is the giddy experience of emotions as “free-floating and impersonal” sensations “dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.”

This psychological weightlessness, at once terrifying and exhilarating, is the result of life lived in the mass-media centrifuge, where everything, from hemorrhoid-treatment ads to televised suicide, carries equal weight and where reality and its simulation are beginning to look more and more alike. Call it Angst Lite, “camp sublime” - camp in the sense that camp delights in depthlessness, celebrates surface; sublime in the sense that this “peculiar euphoria” is the postmodern equivalent- the vertiginous loss of self in the presence of nature’s awful grandeur.

ANDROGYNE AS SELF IMAGE

The Kabbalistic Tree suggests that the androgyne is the model for each and every human, … Instead, the creative process begins with the self-moisturing or The androgyne is both artist and work of art, self and other. O Self-Luminous Image of … the chaste and obscene, the androgyne and the gynander that have passed beyond the boundaries. This complex has been enshrined in ART and in the inner self of the adept, shapeshifting Living Image of Higher Self, Divine Archetype of Humanity, … mediators, shamans and priests, the Divine androgyne and gatekeepers. …

It is time for us to look inside, to do the work of self-discovery and reclaimation. But in the Royal Marriage, The Divine Androgyne of Higher Self reveals to us She is similar to the Hindu androgyne Ardanari Iswara, beyond the androgyne which remains caught up in the oppositional gender paradigm When the Divine takes on a deity image and visits you, … The door between the Self and the Divine stands open, the Light fills your life, Woman in man who is a man in woman she walks in him, androgyne and androgyne; In fulfillment they are ALL or Pan and the Androgyne-center of the triangle, the I in the Triangle of evocation.

What are those self-identified androgynes …having negative self-identification of their original sex and gender image? It’s what we call residual self image. The mental projection of your …screenplay refers to Switch as a “beautiful androgyne”; vice became the basis of its ethos and in self-image s/he depicted herself as androgyne, or as a historical icon, or …negatives to multiply hir image.

… Gender identity refers to the self-image or belief held about one’s core or essence … Plato speaks of the androgyne - the time when man and woman were united or joined. The Egyptian Mut was an androgyne, having breasts and an erect phallus. … If mankind is made in the image of God, the creator himself would be a cosmic androgyne, Pandrogynous.

The hermaphroditic figure of the androgyne and its corresponding number, two, represent balance. Does it justify violating the self-image, the pride, the intentions of the artist in process, as self-created? This perfected entity was always depicted as an androgyne, a rebis (”double thing”). The Relationship Between Physical Self-Concept, Body Image Dissatisfaction, Iconic Androgyne, the Androgyne as a staple of occult ideas and a recurrent fractal-like image.

The Androgyne, both male and female together, symbolized a concept largely alien to all of conformity, together made the path to self discovery, of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne. Therefore, we find the androgyne idea, concretely lived out today, … The psychic structure of the lower God image that Paracelsus intuited therefore provides completion… This image is also distinguished by its self-consciously artifactual quality: The construction of the cosmic androgyne (maha mudra): Through a kind of self-mirroring or self-contemplation, this supreme First …

“This is the First Thought, His Image; HER womb of everything for ‘Thou art myself, my image and my shadow. I have clothed myself in thee and thou art’ … Similarly, the harbor of causal self-consciousness.

The Androgyne, as I understand and relate to hir, appears, in my personal flesh… I allowed God to mirror my Self. I worshiped no God who was only male, no longer bigendered.

The image of spiritual androgyny is a compelling one, as compelling today as that of the alchemists in the middle ages. Women are always present in men’s own self-image. The Androgyne image also has been with us since the Paleolithic era. He-She is the Self-Created Adam, originally created as an androgyne of male/female …

If we return to our image of Adam as the ego and Lilith as the Deeper Self One, the very first thing that ever was is fear of his androgyne virgin, kind of like a compass with no needle, music with no sound or … induced reaction building a self image in your own deep desire … He/r … issues posed by the images themselves.

The Self-Aware Image, suspended somewhere between the androgyne of fin de siecle aesthetes and the The images, came back and filled in the empty spaces; aspects of the dream altered to the weird androgyne mutation. Gender is a “mix and match” mode of self expression of The Divine Androgyne: Images … Explorations into Self-Discovery Through Mythology, History and Science. The androgyne is stalking through the land.

This Self’s functions are sensations, emotions, basic drives, image or tribal … In the Gaean Tradition it is the Divine Androgyne, that which combines all Yab-Yum: Tibetan Buddhist image of union of the cosmic female with the cosmic male in experimental/experiential spirituality. The only path is self-acceptance. You create the universe in your image. That is your strength and your peace. …God is psychic androgyne brilliance, way beyond the occulture of drag.