Thelema NOW! guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Sep 2009

Sep 30, 2009
Musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge talks about using magick to make the world a better place, challenging the status quo and the power of the cut-up style of art.

1. youtube upload
2. transcript with timestamps

Transcript

0:01
[Music]

0:14
Welcome to Thelema Now. A podcast about Aleister Crowley, Ritual and Magic.
Our Guest today is musician and artist Genesis P-Orridge.
And now here is your host: Frater Puck [Music]

0:34
Do without Wilt shall be the whole of the law. Thank you for joining us Genesis. How you doing?

00:39
Um. fine except for being hot and sticky.

00:43
Well, yeah. New York is pretty hot and sticky

00:45
Yeah and I've been running back and forth. We've got um, an art opening: this gallery called Invisible Exports in the Lower East Side. It's called "30 Years of Being Cut Up".

0:57
And so I've been dashing backwards and forwards into Manhattan in this worst possible weather, hanging the show and doing interviews with different magazines and so on but it's looking beautiful. I was there today it's nearly all up. And I'm actually excited.

1:13
You know, after I heard things from the past it's sort of, a little bit of a sort of lackadaisical struggle. yeah but I did that 30 years ago so yeah

1:21
right

01:23
well this. This actually really does cover the earliest collages um '69 to '72 when I was in a lot of male art stuff with the FLUXUS type people and Ray Johnston and so on. Um but it goes right through to the present day.

1:38
so it also goes through a whole phase in the 80s where most of the work was sigils - which obviously is where this program is you know, relevant - Um and then from the sigils it moves into the most recent era which is pandrogyny.
So it's also a journey and it's also very intimate and it's actually really it's my Sketchbooks. My, my visual Diary of all the different projects.
And yeah we've been lucky. Someone has volunteered to finance a book, um a five and I said about seven by five inch like a post big postcard size book. With full color illustrations of 200 collages.

2:23
So that's going to be it available during the exhibition which is up until October the 20th.

02:29
October the 20th. Okay.

2:31
Um. It's gonna look beautiful. I've looked at the photos and it's really stunning.

02:36
Yeah it sounds exciting. The uh the main focus of, of your work now you'd say is pandrogyny?

02:44
Yes. Pandrogyny is the sort of the summation of the previous 45 years of insanity. Insanity and research and uh fascination with the mysteries of what we often call life, or we assume is life.

03:02
Right. Challenging gender, challenging sexual, challenging all those boundaries.

03:09
And believing that what people tell me or tell any of us is an inverted commas reality. We've nicknamed it nonsense this reality instead of consensus reality that that doesn't really hold up very well.

3:23
Even nowadays if you look at mathematics and particle physics and quantum theories, the - the language even - reads more like a magical manuscript than it does a scientific tract.
And of course we all know that science is the bastard son of alchemy.

3:43
and Alchemy is a serious very important part of the magical view of the universes. So in a way we're returning in this massive, long somewhat unnecessary Loop where we went through a phase called "rational" that back to the "deliriously irrational" but far more accurate magical view of things.

4:05
sure

4:06
and that's that's very that's why we're in a very very um very important era very important time. And that's why we think pandrogyny is is so important because it ultimately deals with the human species taking uh initiative in terms of the evolution of the species and its relationship with the planet and other planets and stars

4:28
and hopefully other dimensions.

04:30
Sure

04:32
How about that?!

4:36
So are we over-ruling DNA? or is the or are we just a mode for DNA? is it a challenge (sp?) or is it we're just taking the reins now?

04:46
Well, here's how it.. You probably know the basic story but for people listening who might not.
The whole thing really - even during Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth in the 80s when that was still active - we began towards the end uh, discussing the ratios of male and female in terms of different people's personalities. Their characters.

05:09
Right.

05:10
And so as what some of the exercises we would say that the left-hand side was female on the right was male. So if somebody was being over macho or over testosterone then we would emphasize things to do with their left or with softness and so on. And we would very consciously try and redesign the balance between the two ideas of male female as stereotypes.

5:34
but when we met lady J, it became a much more serious exploration. First triggered by that sensation of having found one's other half.

05:44
sure

05:45
The, the the missing piece of the jigsaw that makes you complete and whole. So it was very much um an ultra loving expo.. exploration. We wanted to literally just be absorbed into each other.

05:58
Right.

05:59
I actually had a very a very profound um Visionary experience. We were at our apartment with Timothy Wiley who used to work with John Lillian on Dolphin Intelligence Research and um, an altered state and some other people. And Lady Jane myself was sitting there we were all talking. And then all of a sudden she and myself both sat bolt upright and stared at each other. And we said to each other almost at the same time "can you see what I see?"

6:31
And then I said: "Don't tell me. Don't tell me. Write it down and I'll write down what I'm seeing."
So we both wrote down that we could see each other with one body but both our heads.

6:42
Wow.

06:44
And we had friends there as witnesses that we didn't cheat.

06:46
Right laughs