Missing Witches - MW Genesis P-Orridge - Try To Altar Everything

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00:00:49.780 Genesis P. Orridge isn't easy to write about.

00:00:53.440 An extremely prolific, variously-pronowned transmedia artist and philosopher who, by design, changed course at will, projects expanding, contracting, abandoned when they got too popular.

00:01:07.440 It's hard to boil down a life like Jen's, and I think that that's what Jen would have wanted.

00:01:12.660 To exit the cheap flesh suitcase of the material world, and leave as legacy an undefinable life that defies catchphrase-worthy descriptions. 0.95

00:01:23.440 maintaining, in life and death, what Jen called a state of flux.

00:01:30.660 In 1976, though, Genesis Peorage was given a label that might stick.

00:01:37.560 Conservative member of Parliament, Nicholas Fairbam, called Jen and the other members of their Coombe Transmissions Collective

00:01:45.740 Wreckers of Civilization.

00:01:49.200 Genesis was self-admittedly a big mouth and a fanatic by nature, 1.00

00:01:53.700 so even at the time, without the benefit of the icon status that Jen would achieve later,

00:01:59.580 this was taken as a compliment.

00:02:02.400 We were so proud, Jen told The Guardian many years later.

00:02:07.140 We had a flyer with that on it the very next day.

00:02:10.640 The irony of it was that Sir Nicholas Fairbame, the Tory MP who called us that,

00:02:15.520 was involved in various sex scandals,

00:02:18.320 and his mistress, a House of Commons secretary,

00:02:21.740 tried to hang herself outside his office. 0.98

00:02:24.400 It was classic British hypocrisy. 0.99

00:02:26.800 Everything we were against. 1.00

00:02:29.300 But Jen didn't want to just wreck society. 1.00

00:02:32.340 Jen wanted to cut it up, rearrange it, 1.00

00:02:34.920 expand and evolve past post-war British civility 1.00

00:02:38.760 to uncover the power of ritual and protest

00:02:42.980 disguised as music.

00:02:45.520 and art. Genesis describes much of their performance work not as shows or gigs, but as

00:02:52.020 happenings. Approached in Coombe's early days by an art critic, Jen told him,

00:02:57.140 it's not art, it's just what we do. When the critic told Jen that he might be able to get

00:03:02.260 the Coombe Collective an arts grant, something like £200, Jen was like, okay, it is performance

00:03:08.840 art. This wasn't because Jen was a sellout, quite the opposite. So compelled to fuck with

00:03:15.160 the status quo, be self-expressive and confrontational, Jen had never had a straight job. 0.99

00:03:22.600 Right up until death, Jen never once had a regular job. But this lack of straight-laced 1.00

00:03:27.980 employment didn't mean that Jen didn't work and it wasn't because Jen was lazy. Again, 1.00

00:03:33.120 quite the opposite. One of the tenets of the Temple of Psychic Youth, a project that took

00:03:40.520 place between 1981 and 1991, in their The Psychic Bible, states,

00:03:47.760 The Temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline, to focus the will

00:03:54.160 on one's true desires.

00:03:57.480 Jen was brilliant from youth, earning scholarships to top schools, but rejected the violently

00:04:03.160 homogenous, abusive, militaristic environment of post-war British institutions.

00:04:09.960 Jen dropped out of school and out of polite society,

00:04:13.120 living in squats and getting the surname P. Orridge 0.96

00:04:15.780 when one drunken housemate dubbingly declared,

00:04:18.920 That's all I ever see you eat, is porridge.

00:04:22.140 P. Orridge.

00:04:24.760 That, coupled with a party game from Jen's school days

00:04:27.520 where a group of friends ascribed a book of the Bible to each one of them.

00:04:31.900 Thus, Neil Megson, born 1950, died.

00:04:36.720 And Genesis P. Orridge was born.

00:04:39.660 Jen eventually legalized the name, but it was not the last time their name would change.

00:04:44.220 When Jen met the great love of their life, Lady J. Briar,

00:04:47.980 the two both changed their names to Briar Peorich.

00:04:51.540 This gesture was only the beginning of their exploration into a shared identity.

00:04:56.440 Jen wrote,

00:04:56.940 I think changing names is a really potent form of magic.

00:05:01.300 It's a technique for shedding a nostalgic connection.

00:05:04.200 The question of whether it was possible to change a person's innate, established behaviours,

00:05:10.880 once the neural pathways had been reinforced by societal pressures, was a conundrum that obsessed me.

00:05:17.400 I was always seeking, and occasionally seeming to find, methods to rid a self of atrophied habits,

00:05:24.520 redundant behaviours, and boundaries imposed from outside.

00:05:29.980 A critical part of Jen's journey wasn't just the death in name of Neil Megson,

00:05:35.020 but also an actual clinical mortal death.

00:05:38.500 In their memoir, Non-Binary, which I should add tragically by my reading

00:05:43.780 wasn't exactly finished when Jen died, again, for real this time of leukemia in 2020.

00:05:50.120 But luckily for us and our rabbit hole, it seems like Jen said yes to every interview.

00:05:55.020 So there are hundreds of hours to fall through on YouTube and across the web.

00:05:59.840 Jen wrote,

00:06:01.020 In 1967, I died.

00:06:04.160 I'd been on cortisone for about 10 years by then for asthma.

00:06:07.440 As my teen years wore on, I began to feel I was managing my asthma better.

00:06:12.540 Then when I was 17, my doctor said,

00:06:14.480 You've not had an asthma attack for a couple years, you don't need to take cortisone anymore.

00:06:18.440 I went, Oh great, because I thought I was going to be trapped into having to take these pills forever,

00:06:22.660 which limited any fantasies of living on a desert island or in the middle of nowhere.

00:06:28.220 I stopped taking the pills on a Friday.

00:06:30.660 On Monday, my mother and sister heard a big thump, found me on the floor turning blue.

00:06:36.820 I had gone into a coma.

00:06:39.580 So at 17 years old, Jen was rushed to hospital and brought back from the brink of non-existence.

00:06:46.180 The doctor said,

00:06:47.020 You could live a normal-length life or you could drop dead any day.

00:06:51.240 We just don't know. 0.81

00:06:52.660 Jen wrote,

00:07:22.660 time. That was the moment when I made the choice to do the things that I thought were really

00:07:27.500 important first, rather than doing anything to suit someone else. It was the final trigger,

00:07:34.740 the final motivation. It made all the decisions so much easier thereafter.

00:07:41.520 Does this move me toward my dream self or not? If it didn't, I didn't need it.

00:07:48.460 Jen concludes the story by remarking 0.98

00:07:51.380 There would be no Genesis Peorage

00:07:54.120 Without the death of Neil Andrew Megson

00:07:57.260 And I should probably mention before we get too far

00:08:01.160 That Genesis, along with Coombe member

00:08:03.320 And throbbing Gristle bandmate 0.80

00:08:05.860 Cozy Fanny Tootie 0.64

00:08:07.240 Invented industrial music

00:08:10.720 To this day, by the likes of Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor

00:08:16.100 They are called the godparents of industrial music.

00:08:21.140 Elephant in the room, Cozy claims that Jen was violent with her at times. 0.82

00:08:25.780 Threw a concrete brick at her head but missed.

00:08:28.840 Threatened her with a knife when she said they were breaking up.

00:08:32.680 Jen denied this. 0.90

00:08:34.300 I don't know the capital T truth, but Jen's whole drive was to take things too far, so I believe Cozy.

00:08:41.160 I can say for sure that in their memoir, Non-Binary, Jen was super dismissive of Cozy's creative contribution to their projects.

00:08:50.600 So much so that instead of discussing Cozy here, I'm going to dedicate a full episode to her and her work next year.

00:08:57.540 Stay tuned for Missing Witches Season 7, where we'll read Cozy's memoir, Art, Sex, Magic, search for details, and give Cozy her due. 0.99

00:09:07.760 I can say that violence was par for the course in Jen's young life. 1.00

00:09:12.700 Jen was beat up constantly in school and in the street.

00:09:15.680 I can say that my high school friends were regularly attacked by carloads of jocks, 0.74

00:09:20.500 out punk hunting on weekends.

00:09:23.060 Changes you.

00:09:24.360 But with Jen, it brings me to a bigger question.

00:09:27.260 One that I struggle with in my own life.

00:09:30.100 When I read these stories.

00:09:32.280 When I think about my family.

00:09:33.940 At what point does the trauma we endured stop excusing the choices we make?

00:09:41.520 When we look for these stories, it always hurts when we find what we call rot among the ancestors' bones.

00:09:48.440 But it helps to remember that we aren't searching for perfect beings.

00:09:52.540 We aren't searching for deities or gurus to follow, but muses to inspire us.

00:09:59.500 Ideas that are bigger than mistakes.

00:10:03.540 How many people can we name who experimented their way into an entirely new genre of music?

00:10:09.700 Can you imagine such wild, creative, and magical beings capable of such a feat?

00:10:15.440 Well, we here at Missing Witches don't have to imagine.

00:10:17.620 We can add Jen and Cozy to our pantheon of real, magical people who actually existed and honestly changed the world through a combination of magic and art.

00:10:28.820 And as tempting as it may be for me to turn this episode into an episode of music history, 0.94

00:10:35.620 Throbbing Gristle is fucking mind-blowing. 0.78

00:10:38.020 Jen's band Psychic TV is one of my all-time favourites. 0.89

00:10:41.520 But we're looking for witch history, so I'll do my best to focus on Jen's works of magic, the occult, ritual, and ceremony. 0.63

00:10:49.760 Though there is, of course, a ton of overlap.

00:10:52.800 because everything for Genesis was a ritual, a ceremony, a vision quest, a psychic seeking,

00:11:00.760 especially music and art. Jen said, it has always been my belief that creation,

00:11:07.420 the making of art in any medium or combination of mediums, is a holy act. To be an artist is

00:11:14.640 as much a calling from and to the divine service as becoming a physician, nurse, priest, shaman,

00:11:21.260 or healer. Jen also wrote, if we don't end the idea of separation between everyday life and

00:11:29.200 magical work, then we're going to be at the mercy of those who wish to control us.

00:11:35.340 So for us, it's very much a political thing. Though Genesis P. Orridge may be remembered as

00:11:43.200 an artist, a singer-songwriter, if Google is anything to go by, Jen is so much more than that.

00:11:49.420 A cultural engineer, occult thinker, and magical seeker who I believe could someday surpass names like Alistair Crowley, and go down in history as a preeminent occultist of the 20th century.

00:12:04.060 Ad break!

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00:13:25.740 Oh, yeah.

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00:14:20.820 Jen picked up a question from William Burroughs

00:14:26.200 when the two met

00:14:27.100 that would become a centerpiece of Jen's life 1.00

00:14:29.880 How do we short-circuit control?

00:14:33.400 Jen had been a long-time fan of Burroughs

00:14:36.060 and Brian Gyson's cut-up philosophy

00:14:38.200 slash technique of creating literature

00:14:40.680 and applied it to visual art, music, daily life 0.88

00:14:43.920 and eventually, Jen's own body

00:14:46.260 Burroughs was a magician too

00:14:48.080 and I don't want to pass him by

00:14:49.540 without retelling one of his spells.

00:14:52.140 He had a problem with a local business,

00:14:55.020 so Burroughs took his portable tape recorder

00:14:56.960 and walked up and down the street in front of the business,

00:14:59.940 recording the ambient sounds.

00:15:02.300 He took those tape recordings home

00:15:03.760 and ritually mixed them with violent noise.

00:15:06.560 Then he returned to the street and continued his pacing

00:15:09.600 while playing his sound hex creation.

00:15:13.460 The rumor goes that the business closed,

00:15:15.400 but even if it didn't,

00:15:16.460 I just wanted you to have this idea of homemade spells and using what you're into,

00:15:21.980 tape recorders or flowers, knitting or rocks, and implementing that into your conjuration.

00:15:29.540 I can picture Burroughs grumbling angrily to himself as his heels scuffed on the sidewalk,

00:15:34.680 and I want it for all of us. 0.98

00:15:39.220 Another central praxis for Jen was one picked up in a communal squat hippie collective called 1.00

00:15:45.320 The Exploding Galaxy. The group's main focus was to disrupt the brainwashing of habits by 0.95

00:15:51.360 unsettling everyday routines. Members weren't allowed to sleep in the same bed on consecutive

00:15:56.760 nights or wear the same clothes on consecutive days. All the clothes were piled in a trunk and

00:16:02.260 worn on a first-come, first-dressed basis. Every action or proposal was met with the group

00:16:08.780 persisting. Why? Why? Why? Many people, likely myself included, couldn't handle this kind of

00:16:16.740 constant scrutiny, but Jen thrived. It was the challenge that Jen was seeking and would inform

00:16:22.820 much of their life. Almost inevitably, though, as we find with so many gurus,

00:16:28.320 and why we have to question those who tell us what to do, Jen left the commune after a few months, 0.88

00:16:34.600 when it was discovered that the rules about sleeping arrangements

00:16:37.600 and collective agreements regarding the community coffer

00:16:41.340 applied to everyone but the exploding galaxy's leader and his girlfriend.

00:16:47.520 In the Psychic Bible, Jen wrote,

00:16:49.400 If our self-image is primarily based on the faulty, biased, prejudiced,

00:16:55.700 and highly edited memory recordings of other people

00:16:59.160 with their own agenda of who we are intended to become,

00:17:03.100 As defined by this perceptual process of unnatural selection, then ways and tools that allow us to seize the means of perception become vital to our fight to construct a self, a character, an identity that is truly and independently our own.

00:17:23.720 I got stuck on this for a hot minute.

00:17:26.080 Seize the means of perception.

00:17:28.840 Of course, we witches are often familiar with Marx,

00:17:31.600 encouraging the workers to seize the means of production,

00:17:34.640 or Marxist feminists, 0.98

00:17:37.040 applying this idea to bodily autonomy and proclaiming seize the means of reproduction.

00:17:42.780 But what does it mean to seize the means of perception?

00:17:46.560 Let's break it down together.

00:17:48.240 Perception, the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

00:17:53.020 Also, and perhaps more useful to our question,

00:17:56.420 a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something.

00:18:03.140 So perception is not just seeing or hearing, but also understanding

00:18:07.060 how we process and internalize what we sense.

00:18:11.960 And means facilities and resources.

00:18:16.140 So, if we reframe the question, it might sound like this.

00:18:19.520 How do we take control of the resources that inform our understanding of ourselves

00:18:25.880 and the world. I think the first step is critical thinking, critical awareness,

00:18:31.180 an exploding galaxy of questions beginning with why, knowing that the answer we often get,

00:18:37.000 because this is how we've always done it, is neither sufficient nor true. When we examine

00:18:42.460 our witches, we find that there have always been iconoclasts, people who transgressed against the 0.99

00:18:49.620 mythical norm. World changers. In the Psychic Bible, Jen wrote, accept nothing. Assume nothing. 0.99

00:19:00.520 Always look further. Be open-eyed as well as open-minded. And don't kid yourself.

00:19:07.260 The Temple of Psychic Youth, Topey for short, was a network. A massive undertaking that began,

00:19:13.180 as all things do, as an idea. There's an adorable video clip of Jen holding up their first record to 0.61

00:19:21.140 the camera saying, this is what happens to ideas sometimes. And I paused the video and looked

00:19:28.040 around and maybe for the first time I recognized that every single thing I saw, my books, my house,

00:19:35.620 my records, my furniture, my technology, my clothes, my food, every single thing began as an

00:19:42.760 idea. Everything that was ever made by humans began as a spark of imagination. Ideas and

00:19:49.780 imagination are epic currency, one that Jen spent freely. In the 1960s, a friend's mom asked what

00:19:56.940 Jen's future plans were, and Jen replied, with an admitted teen arrogance, I am going to take my

00:20:03.860 daydreams very seriously. Topi was founded in the 80s without the internet, when networks were hard

00:20:11.620 fought. The Underground lived inside mail order, zines, independent record stores fueled almost

00:20:18.480 entirely by word of mouth. To put a fine point on it, I remember going to the bank in the early

00:20:24.120 90s to buy a money order to send away for a Velvet Underground t-shirt from a black and white

00:20:28.700 Xeroxed catalog that was making the rounds among my friends. I took the go train into the big city

00:20:34.200 when I heard there was a store that sold Manic Panic hair dye. Before that, I used Jell-O powder.

00:20:41.000 Being weird, finding people who were weird like you, was hard work back then,

00:20:45.940 and Jen just wanted to make it easier.

00:20:48.580 Carl Abramson was one of those weirdos seeking weirdos when he subscribed to the Topi newsletter.

00:20:54.600 He would eventually set up a Scandinavian branch, what Topi called access points.

00:21:00.680 TopiScan, which begat Topi Europe.

00:21:03.820 In his book, O Culture, Carl wrote,

00:21:06.360 I immediately realized that Topi was something brand new. Everything I had read about magic and

00:21:12.820 occultism always dealt with something old and arcane, systematically symbolic, and quite dusty.

00:21:19.720 Not so with Topi. The core was one of sacralized free will, and an experimental technology was

00:21:27.640 presented to root out bad habits, whether imposed by others or simply one's own, and generate change

00:21:33.960 through, quite often, artistic means. In Genesis Peorage and the Rise of Industrial Paganism,

00:21:41.000 Christopher Partridge wrote, Peorage's interest was always less in the lure and romance of medieval

00:21:47.920 magicians cloaked in robes and waving wands, and more in the apparent changing ability the human

00:21:55.220 mind and activities actually have. Again, it is unsurprising to learn that Peorage is not a 0.51

00:22:01.840 follower of particular occult traditions or particular pagan paths. Their concern was always

00:22:09.280 to challenge tradition. Question-received ways of thinking unravel established moralities and

00:22:16.160 subvert political and religious hegemonies. This paganism is free-thinking, hard-headed,

00:22:22.780 esoterrorism. As esoterrorist, Peoridge offers listeners an excavation of the heathen earth, 0.98

00:22:31.340 an unveiling of a dark hinterland in which people are manipulated and deceived.

00:22:37.680 Under the Topi banner, Carl and the many others, 10,000 active members at one count,

00:22:43.700 in the network produced albums and books and films while also reissuing out-of-print titles,

00:22:49.460 organizing protests, happenings, workshops and lectures, film screenings, group rituals and

00:22:55.880 magical workshops. Jen wrote,

00:22:58.440 Our desire is to inspire

00:23:00.020 a new underground we all

00:23:01.820 know exists. A new

00:23:04.180 generation of non-conformists. 1.00

00:23:07.460 I want to take

00:23:08.080 a little tangent here.

00:23:09.860 In season 9 of RuPaul's Drag Race,

00:23:12.500 Aja is given the role of 0.97

00:23:14.080 Grandria Zuckerwoman in the

00:23:15.940 parody skit 9021 Ho. 0.95

00:23:18.660 Aja doesn't like the casting 0.84

00:23:20.040 and protests. Alexis 0.61

00:23:22.000 Michelle tells Aja,

00:23:23.600 You just gotta grow up and accept the challenge.

00:23:26.620 Aja replies, I don't have to.

00:23:33.500 And though Aja comes off as a bit of a spoiled brat,

00:23:37.360 I love the cadence of this delivery, and I love the message even more.

00:23:41.960 When society tells you what you have to do, it's fair to question,

00:23:46.040 Do I, though?

00:23:47.800 Seize the means of your own perception and create a reality that fits you.

00:23:52.460 When society says to me,

00:23:53.760 You have to hate yourself because you're not ambitious, pretty, thin, rich, smart, young, normal enough.

00:24:02.120 You have to buy these ideas and these products to fit in.

00:24:06.180 I can say, I don't have to.

00:24:10.400 And it's like Jen was told, you gotta finish school, get a job, and grind,

00:24:14.080 upholding the state of affairs until, if you're lucky, you retire at 65,

00:24:18.120 possibly enjoy your life for 5 or 10 years, if you have any energy left for your passions, and then die.

00:24:23.280 having successfully left the boat unrocked.

00:24:27.460 And it's like Jen replied,

00:24:29.600 I don't have to, but there is a price.

00:24:33.720 Spoiler alert, Aja went home that week.

00:24:36.600 Genesis lived without running water for like a lot of their life.

00:24:40.300 Comfort was a sacrifice made by choice.

00:24:43.200 What would we do with more money, Jen once asked.

00:24:45.900 We'd just use it to make more art.

00:24:47.960 But like many witches,

00:24:49.460 is, Genesis was also hunted by the great protectors of the status quo and in 1975 was arrested and

00:24:57.540 stood trial for obscenity. The crime involved collage art postcards that Jen had made and

00:25:03.400 mailed to some friends, part of a process that Jen and others called correspondence art. Genesis

00:25:09.200 went to court and was found not guilty, due in part, they say, to a voodoo doll which had been

00:25:14.220 given to them by a practitioner friend who instructed Jen to place it under the jury box.

00:25:18.860 In 1992, Scotland Yard raided Jen's family home and seized two tons of archived material,

00:25:26.720 claiming that Jen had participated in satanic abuse. For the record, there was no truth in this.

00:25:32.780 No actual charges were laid. Amid the satanic panic, a friend of Jen's had made a film that

00:25:39.640 was deemed satanic, so that provided another great excuse to hunt a witch. While Jen was in

00:25:45.840 Katmandu, using their life savings to help Tibetan monks build a well, for real, that's what Jen was

00:25:53.120 doing at the time, using their life savings to help Tibetan monks build a well, all of Jen's

00:25:58.640 possessions, including their entire archive, was seized by Scotland Yard, never to be returned.

00:26:05.140 It's worth noting that less than 20 years later in 2009, Tate Britain acquired Jen's rebuilt archives.

00:26:14.060 Less than 20 years passed between Jen's possessions being labelled criminal and them being labelled important art history.

00:26:22.320 And this is exactly why we need to question the status quo.

00:26:27.540 Harriet Tubman went from outlaw to American hero. 0.66

00:26:30.860 Genesis went from obscene to important.

00:26:34.140 They themselves did not change, their stories remained the same, but what has changed is the means of perception.

00:26:41.680 What changed was how polite society perceived Harriet, and Jen, and pretty much every single witch we've profiled on the pod. 0.98

00:26:50.060 But Jen did have some run-ins with conventionality.

00:26:54.060 Jen married a woman named Paula, and they had two daughters, Caress and Jeanness,

00:26:58.440 who appear on many PTV records, audio and video,

00:27:03.260 and continue to carry on the legacy of their mystical departed parent.

00:27:07.380 Jeunesse still runs Jen's now posthumous Instagram account,

00:27:10.660 which you can follow, at Pandragyne.

00:27:13.780 So, the Pandragyne Project.

00:27:16.240 In August of 1993, Genesis Peorich met Lady J. Breyer.

00:27:21.680 And according to Jen, it was love at first sight.

00:27:24.980 Not just love, devotion, awareness, a message from the universe,

00:27:29.800 a psychic knowledge that this woman would change Jen's life forever.

00:27:34.700 And it's almost funny that Jen's life of non-conformity and wrecking of civilization 0.96

00:27:38.940 would bring them to, of all places, a love story. 1.00

00:27:43.360 Lady J was a nurse and a dominatrix in New York, 1.00

00:27:47.300 and referred to her body as a cheap suitcase, 1.00

00:27:50.080 sometimes a flesh suitcase, that her spirit felt trapped in.

00:27:53.640 Jen was a lifelong occultist and had grown up with terrible asthma,

00:27:57.440 so they too had a hypersense of the limitations of the human body.

00:28:02.160 Jen wrote,

00:28:02.940 A trans person might feel like a man trapped in a woman's body,

00:28:06.140 or a woman trapped in a man's body. 0.95

00:28:08.000 The pandrogyne just feels trapped in a body. 0.85

00:28:11.440 We don't believe in any either-or maps of reality or behavior.

00:28:15.960 Never have.

00:28:17.300 Improvising, exploration, pressing one's own limits.

00:28:21.180 That's how we discover what might really be going on.

00:28:24.080 Cut up everything.

00:28:25.540 Body, mind, flesh, identity, relentlessly break and short-circuit any form of control you can reveal or locate.

00:28:34.300 So Jen and Jay were in love.

00:28:36.780 They combined their lives and their names, started using the pronoun we.

00:28:41.640 They dressed in each other's clothes and made tons of art together.

00:28:46.760 But that wasn't far enough for the likes of Jen and Jay.

00:28:50.540 The Briar P. Orages had their first pandrogyne surgeries in 2003.

00:28:55.260 The idea was to become one in every sense they could imagine. 0.93

00:28:59.780 So the two began altering their faces and bodies to resemble each other,

00:29:04.120 like rhinoplasty and, for Jen, breast implants.

00:29:07.600 Jen wrote,

00:29:08.300 Pandrogyny, we've felt ever since the mid-1980s, is inevitable.

00:29:13.920 It's part of the evolution of human species, and it's not finished.

00:29:18.300 Evolution is a long-term process that keeps going.

00:29:22.480 Mutations happen, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly.

00:29:26.820 A pressure to a sudden, radical evolutionary mutation is building.

00:29:31.000 The aging old guard are resisting with ever more blatant strategies culled from shameful, internecine conflicts of their past.

00:29:41.040 Thousands of years of slaughter in war.

00:29:44.340 Oppression of anything other.

00:29:46.460 At the expense of the thinkers, proponents of change, philosophers, artists, and of course, radical, ethnic, religious, and sexual variants, they say, deviants.

00:30:02.420 Jen and Jay continued making art and music, becoming one, falling deeper in love.

00:30:08.900 Then, in 2007, Lady Jay suffered an acute heart arrhythmia, and she died in Jen's arms.

00:30:16.180 The New York Times reported her death left Genesis alone,

00:30:20.220 one half of an art project that no longer had a second half.

00:30:24.380 Jen grieved, like any of us might,

00:30:27.300 but with the comfort of knowing that a spiritual life awaited them both.

00:30:31.860 And in Jen's grief, a friend suggested that they take a trip to Benin,

00:30:35.320 which became the documentary Bite of the Twin.

00:30:38.960 Okay, side note here, I read a reference to this doc,

00:30:41.640 so naturally I went looking for it.

00:30:43.600 The only place you can stream this doc is, for real, the Satanic Temple TV network. 0.90

00:30:50.040 So I thought, awesome!

00:30:52.280 It's well worth a one-month subscription to watch this film and check out what the other video offerings Satanic Temple TV might hold.

00:31:00.480 So I signed up, and I'll be damned, but I couldn't get their player to work.

00:31:05.480 I ended up exchanging a few emails with a lovely staff member and got a refund, but I've still never seen the film.

00:31:12.340 So I'll share with you some of the text from the film's webpage, but if any of you out there have access to this doc, please help a witch out.

00:31:21.940 I still really want to see it.

00:31:24.540 Bite of the Twin tells the story of Genesis Briar Peorage and the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Hazel Hill McCarthy III's journey to Ouida in Benin to explore the origins of the Vodan religion.

00:31:38.520 Transcending assumptions of what it means to be gendered, Genesis Briar P. Orridge and late

00:31:44.480 wife Lady J underwent a series of surgical procedures to become physically identical to

00:31:49.220 one another, seeking to perfect a gender-neutral state through a process they termed pandrogyny. 0.92

00:31:56.640 In 2007, J unexpectedly died. Genesis has maintained the concept of the pandrogyne and

00:32:04.820 continues to self-reference in the plural, we. As Genesis puts it, since Lady J dropped her body,

00:32:12.360 she is the half of the pandergyne in the immaterial world, with Genesis being the half 0.91

00:32:18.000 in the material world, still connected, making a whole. This path is both a brutal and loving one 0.94

00:32:25.480 for Genesis, and they are constantly battling the hardship, grief, and pitfalls of devoting

00:32:30.940 one's life to art and love in such a drastic way. Hazel Hill McCarthy, the third, longtime friend

00:32:37.200 and collaborator in hopes of keeping Genesis positive and active, suggests a trip to Wieda

00:32:42.080 Benin, the birthplace of Wodan, to work on a project together, exploring the relationship

00:32:46.880 between Wodan and Western performance art. Upon their arrival, they discover a radical connection

00:32:53.680 between Genesis's life and artistic practice, and one of the world's oldest religions.

00:32:59.920 Benin has the highest national average of twins per birth in the world.

00:33:05.620 So it's not surprising that twins carry a sacred meaning.

00:33:08.740 Twins there are venerated as gods.

00:33:11.560 And we learn through the film's many twin stories,

00:33:14.100 when one twin passes away, the living twin remembers its spirit

00:33:17.600 by carrying around a small carved replica of their dead brother or sister, called a jumeau.

00:33:24.280 In Benin, it is never said that a twin dies.

00:33:27.420 Rather, it is said that they have gone to the forest to look for wood.

00:33:33.200 Beginning as an investigation, the nature of the project changes drastically

00:33:38.120 when Genesis is serendipitously initiated into the twin fetish,

00:33:43.740 a ritual in which there is an activation of a dead twin spirit

00:33:48.000 in order to allow for the living one to remain connected with the one who has passed,

00:33:53.460 emerging back to a whole.

00:33:55.360 Genesis, through this ancient religion, sees a way to reconnect with the spirit of their deceased wife, and dives in. 0.56

00:34:04.280 As the film progresses, we begin to see the link between pandrogyny and the twin fetish.

00:34:09.860 Ultimately, during shooting, the nature of the film changed from simply being a catalyst for audiences to gain a wider understanding and acceptance of Wodan,

00:34:19.440 to being itself Vodan, an object that has been activated by creation.

00:34:27.640 And I like to think of this as a spiritual gift from the mystical universe to Genesis,

00:34:34.540 to unwittingly, coincidentally travel halfway around the world

00:34:38.980 to find a culture and a practice that could reunite them with their great love. 0.89

00:34:45.740 One of Jen's final shows was 2016's Try to Alter Everything. 0.75

00:34:51.960 That's alter, like ceremonial sacred space, A-L-T-A-R. 1.00

00:34:57.880 Alter everything. 1.00

00:34:59.580 Jen told Dazed Magazine,

00:35:01.140 It really does sum up a lot of what we do.

00:35:04.020 Taking things that are already around and reassembling them,

00:35:07.440 to inject them with something special,

00:35:09.760 an energy or resonance that speaks to you in a way you wouldn't expect.

00:35:13.440 This is the way we witches, I think.

00:35:15.740 can seize the means of perception by trying to alter everything, 0.75

00:35:21.920 recognize the ideas behind objects and behaviors,

00:35:25.580 create non-conformist networks that recognize the sacred energy of all things. 0.69

00:35:31.400 Jen went to the forest to look for wood and found leukemia.

00:35:36.960 They dropped their cheap suitcase and rejoined Lady J in 2020.

00:35:42.500 As we witches head into our holiday season, into this season of death,

00:35:47.360 let's borrow a mission statement from Genesis P. Orridge to ponder as the leaves and empires fall around us.

00:35:57.420 Our mission is to fall through the cracks of stale tradition every hour of life,

00:36:03.760 to find the places and sounds no one has dared think of,

00:36:08.300 To have real faith in oneself in an age when the white noise of conformity has never been

00:36:15.500 turned up higher is no easy task, but everyone has the potential to do it. 0.62

00:36:21.060 Discard all inherited value systems and social conditioning, end gender, break sex, destroy

00:36:27.560 the control of DNA and the expected. 0.87

00:36:30.720 Our daily mission is to subvert, seeking and fighting to answer Burroughs' challenge,

00:36:35.960 How do we short-circuit control? 0.99

00:36:38.720 Please, go out and try to change the fucking world. 0.99

00:36:43.620 Try to alter everything. 1.00

00:36:53.640 You must be a witch.

00:36:59.040 Season 6 of the Missing Witches podcast is sponsored, in part, by Foxglove Farm.

00:37:04.480 Go to Foxglove Farm, that's farm with a P-H, like pharmacy, dot com, and use offer code

00:37:11.100 MISSINGWITCHES when you sign up for your monthly subscription box of witchy delights.

00:37:18.180 And, sponsored by listeners like you.

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00:37:26.100 You who buy our book, recommend it to your friends, and review it online.

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00:37:32.080 And if you love this episode, tip us at paypal.me slash missingwitches.

Missing Witches - October 10, 2021

MW Genesis P-Orridge - Try To Altar Everything

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