Pulling yourself into a new existence.

Thanks to a friend of mine, who dragged me into this with enthusiasm and conviction, and the wonderful people at Wings of Desire. I had a new experience yesterday, and I can't quite use my academic training to quantify it. This is nothing new, it happens to a lot of people, and I dare say more and more people consciously seek it out.

Have you ever taken a look at commercials from way back? I mean a real look and not just looked at the way women are portrayed as servants, but how so many of them were about selling modernity as well as a specific product. Sleek modernist design, machinery, science and urbanity were selling points in the year after the second world war. There was an air of progress, safety and techno optimism after the dark irrational forces of fascism had been vanquished. Take a look at the beatiful schematics of the washing machine here for instance. Nothing mystical about it. Nowhere, no how.

Compare this to how we sell shampoo today. It's all about emotions, and ethereal unquantifiable orgasmic experiences. Interesting huh?

Unless you're blind and stupid you've probably noticed a few social trends that fit in this very context: getting married is back, the catholic church is growing in protestant countries, along with new age, occultism, buddhism, hinduism and islam, and television shows are increasingly concerned with mystic experience, parapsychology and alternative religions - in a positive way.

Yesterday I was suspended by two hooks lodged in my back. I'm not a member of some Amazonian tribe where things like this is done to prove manhood, nor am I particularly masochistic - and yet I chose voluntarily to have my skin stretched and chance all my weight on two steel hooks and a small patch of skin.

Though I like to see myself as an individualist and not some follower of trends it would be naive not to notice a pattern here. Especially considering my other interests: ritualism, occultism, buddhism, symbology, mythology and so forth ad nauseam.

Traditionally something like this would have been a rite of passage, in the Arnold Van Gennep school of thought, and he makes some very interesting points. Rites de passages is highly readable today and perhaps one of the few books on ritualism that has really stood the test of time. His theory of course concerns moving from one type of existence into a new one - or crossing of thresholds.

This is not necessarily evident though, and I actually think modern ritualism (in this particular context) is both a result of and a continuation of a fragmentation of traditional ritualism. By result I mean antithesis: modernity has rationalized society to the point where people lack content for their lives. We are born, we live, we die, we rot and if there's anything in between that puzzles us we turn to psychiatrists with chemical explanations - and for some reason we don't feel fulfilled by this. Like there is something missing. For this reason many of us crave entry into a world of irrational thought. Perhaps even initiatory experiences (though I feel a need to point out that this initiatory experience and use of traditional ritualism should not be likened to the rather outdated "sect" called traditionalism).

Personally I am an academic, scientifically minded person who prefers Houdini's open minded debunking to Blavatsky's fraudulent bullshit when mysticism is involved, and still I find a great deal of meaning in this kind of ritualism.

And ritualism it certainly is. Structurally it even parallels the classical outline of Golden Dawn rituals. You start with a cleansing, followed by an invocation of inner strength, you perform the act, and end it with a new cleansing. (While many occultists are moving away from this somewhat rigid pattern I personally prefer it, and it works well.)

There's a reason why rituals are constructed this way - and you'll notice the very same structure even in a boring protestant church - by singing songs and playing the pipe organ. The first ritual sets the stage and clears it for the content of the main ceremony. This is done by creating a barrier between the profane and the profound. (In Jewish temples this is physically underlined by the famous veil, which separates the two spheres.) By doing this we signal that we are in a deeper and more spiritual mode, and receptive. After the main body of the ritual we need to return to the profane world, and we use more rituals to signal that we're no longer talking to the gods and our souls, and that we're once again primarily concerned with the material world. It would be anticlimactic and maybe even exhausting not to be allowed to come down after the spiritual journey you've been on.

So this is how we frame the ritual, but what do rituals contain? The answer is of course pure myth. These rituals, while being traditional types of rituals, they have been appropriated, recontextualized and cleansed of content - to the point where you can fill them with personal experience (which is why I say it's a continuation of the modernist experience). Where they were primarily initiatory experiences pre-modernity they have now become primarily personal experiences. Of course, the initiatory aspect is still present: by doing this you pass a threshold into a new understanding of yourself. You're building personal myth so to speak. It's an experience you'll always remember, and the growth you experience is something you carry with you. (Additionally there is of course the subcultural element and the obvious initiatory aspects of that, but I'll leave that alone. This is a fairly superficial blog after all...)

I feel personally enriched by the experience, in a very different way than from my earlier experiences in the field of body modification. I have a tattoo, it was great fun, doing it again. I have a scarification, even more fun, not doing it again though. I've pierced myself a jillion times, great fun, got bored, took them all out after walking around with a mask for 15 years. But this was a different camel altogether. It was the proverbial leap of faith actually.

I hoisted myself up, and the moment I let my feet off the ground was like stepping out of a reality and into a new one. The resolve I needed to muster came from somewhere very deep. While there was hardly any pain involved the mind just doesn't want to trust that this is in fact safe. Despite having seen other people do it. After that it was all about flying.

It's a completely irrational experience, and I loved it. Doing it again. Definitely doing it again. Thank you Anette. :)

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wings of desire