Episode Two: THE GODS ARE NOT DEAD. THEY'VE GOT A SOUNDBOX
What if the modern West did not become less ritualistic when it became secular? Perhaps we simply became embarrassed about admitting how much we still need ritual.
1. Lovisa Lager, the rising curve model for an ongoing series inspired by subversive Japanese artists Namio Harukawa and Nobuyoshi Araki by Rémi Lamandé, Dazed Magazine 2022
2/3 Joanne Leah, Acid Mass from art exhibition 'Then She Did' At Plaxall Gallery LIC featured in Ravelin Magazine / Cliches don’t die in the future by Joanne Leah artwork via Archer Magazine Issue #14, 2021 the GROWING UP Issue
We go to concerts and sing with thousands of strangers. We queue for hours to see celebrities. We dress up for festivals. We repeat gestures in stadiums. We light candles. We meditate. We dance until dawn. We fall in love with images of people we've never met.
We build online communities around desires we once considered unspeakable. And, increasingly, we photograph all of it. The gods of sexuality don't necessarily need marble temples anymore.
4/5 Universal-Symbol-For-Something by Joanne Leah via Archer Magazine Issue #14, 2021 the GROWING UP Issue / This One’s For The Machine by Joanne Leah artwork via Archer Magazine Issue #14, 2021 the GROWING UP Issue
They have magazines, screens, galleries, clubs and algorithms. Their priests may be photographers. Their icons may be porn stars.
Their temples may be warehouses in Berlin or Milan, a Tokyo club, a fetish night, an underground party or a bedroom illuminated by a laptop.
Their rituals may involve photography, fantasy, music, touch, repetition or simply the act of looking. None of this makes modern sexuality secretly religious.
6/7 A Copy With No Original by Joanne Leah via Archer Magazine Issue #14, 2021 the GROWING UP Issue / Fernanda Liberti (@libertife) art via TheCurvy Magazine
But it does suggest that the old human hunger for transcendence has not vanished with modernity. It has migrated into popular culture.
When does an erotic image become a ritual object? And what happens when the ritual leaves the bedroom and joins a crowd?
8/9 Promotional campaign for BACCH ANAL, an unholy communion-themed club event presented by Nark and Massive in Seattle, WA byPhotos @happydevilboy @loudermilkvia Tixr / Veropet from the series Ecce Homo, famous and controversial 1998 photograph Sermon on the mount by Élisabeth Ohlson Wallin via Svensk Kultur
That is where we are going next. Because if Episode One has taken us from the darkroom to the dance floor, Episode Two has to go further back — before photography, before pornography, before the modern category of “sexuality” itself — to the older relationship between the erotic, the sacred and the Goddess...
So WHAT IS THE MAGIC? SEX, SACRED POWER&THE SEDUCTION OF THE RITUAL
Perhaps, after all this, “magic” is not such a ridiculous word. Not because we need to believe that sexual exhaustion summons supernatural beings, or that a techno DJ is literally channelling ancient gods.
10/11 Kembra&Samoa, 2001 Polaroïd transfer on Arches paper by Annie Sprinkle via Artsy / Evan Rachel Wood and the rape and alleged sexual abuse of women by Marilyn Manson
Those are questions of personal belief, and the historical sources behind sex magick contain plenty of claims that belong to their particular occult systems rather than to established fact.
The more interesting magic is psychological and cultural. Human beings have always discovered ways to transform consciousness through rhythm, repetition, sexuality, imagery, community and fantasy.
Sometimes those techniques were called ritual. Sometimes religion. Sometimes art. Sometimes pornography. Sometimes entertainment.
12/13 Rihanna’s X-Rated Nun Photoshoot Blasted As Religious Mockery / Photo @happydevilboy @loudermilk for BACCH ANAL, an unholy communion-themed club event presented by Nark and Massive in Seattle, Washington via Tixr
We began with the camera looking at the body. We moved through art, postcards, pin-ups, fetish, magazines and pornography, watching the erotic image become increasingly sophisticated at producing fantasy.
Now the erotic becomes experiential. Music, drugs, ritual, photography, fantasy, bodies and technology begin to overlap. The private viewer becomes part of a crowd. The photograph becomes part of a club culture. The fetish becomes a community. The occult becomes searchable. The sacred becomes DIY.
14/15 Tatjana,Valentino, L.A., 1988 Archival Pigment Print by Herb Ritts via Artsy / Helmut Newton for French Vogue, Paris, 1996 Credits Taschen Collection
The darkroom has not disappeared. It has simply expanded. It now includes the bedroom, the porn site, the fetish party, the rave, the gallery and the phone screen. Sex has never been merely about sex. It has been one of the great metaphors through which human beings imagine creation itself.
The attraction between bodies offered an obvious image for the generation of life. Male and female principles appeared in countless cosmologies, sometimes as literal gods and goddesses, sometimes as complementary forces, sometimes as symbolic polarities.
16/17 Promotional campaign for BACCH ANAL, an unholy communion-themed club event presented by Nark and Massive in Seattle, Washington / Break The Internet pictorial Minaj À Trois (Paper Magazine) Nicki Minaj — the Queen of Hip-Hop, a cultural icon pictorial 2017
Creation could be imagined as a cosmic union, a marriage, a hierogamy — sacred marriage — in which the sexual act was not simply reproductive but cosmological.
And once sex is imagined as a force capable of creating life, changing consciousness or connecting the human with the divine, the next question almost inevitably follows: Can it be used? That is where sex magick enters the story.
Continue reading in Premium and
Click HERE for the first episode 1 of MAGIC (OF) SEX MAGICK or HERE for the first volume of the PHOTOGRAPHY OR PORNOGRAPHY? -series
Let us know your thought about this article in the comment below...!!