Geogamicas
Last year I began a MA program in Fine Art at the Liverpool School of Art and Design. I decided to start documenting some of the techniques I use in my magical practice with some experiments in short film making as part of my course work.
The piece below is part of a series of works entitled ‘Geogamicas’ (Latin: Earth Marriage) which investigate how the body can be used to communicate with non-human sentience and atomic infinities. It documents a scrying technique I discovered in 1988 during a ritual dedicated to Babalon. I have continued to experiment with this technique and will discuss my findings in a forthcoming book. In the meanwhile, this film is an attempt to capture some of the synaesthetic, altered states of consciousness one can induce by rubbing quartz crystals onto the body. The practice has some specific relationships with embodied practices I use to work with Babalon and Enochian magic. Between 1583-1587, the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee and the clairvoyant Edward Kelley used a collection of crystals, mirrors or ‘shew stones’ to view the spirit world, communicate with angels and uncover the secrets of nature. Chirzpa, the name for the sixty-first ‘part of earth’ is used as a key that facilitates exploration of modalities of ‘biognostic’ communion with one’s environment. Rather than looking into crystals, the stones are used as tools to cultivate ASCs which enable one to see into the body and sense multi-dimensional layers of reality. The glitchy, fragmented textures in the scenes evoke how the boundaries of the body break down when immersed in trance states, as the barriers between the body and its surrounding environment become blurred. The skin becomes a screen which reveals the hidden realities of matter and spirit.
This ongoing project is concerned with developing innovative models of feminine, esoteric embodiment that resonate both with the work of present-day feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz, and the predictions of the feminine spirits in Dee and Kelley’s Enochian corpus.