Friday night in front of the Frankfurt discotheque King Kamehameha. At the corner of Hanauer Landstraße, on the forecourt, people who have been thrown out, in their work suits and clothes, drunk and desperate, stagger and fall on their knees in pools of undefined liquids and vomit. Spectral beings feed on them, whirling just above their heads, draining them of multicolored pulsing spheres of life energy. The spindly creatures turn their faces to the pale moon and howl in triumph and satisfaction before merging back into the nearest wall.
I'm sitting at the bar and next to me is a being in a neon fursuit who's speaking of himself in the third person, constantly switching back and forth between neuter, feminine, and masculine personal pronouns as he talks about itself while holding my hand on her lumpy transdermal forehead implants. "I spliced the photophoric fish cells myself to my eye cells," he roars in my ear, "you just had to inject them and now I can produce luciferin and luciferase at will in my eyes, light-emitting chemicals, I'm biolumniscent now!" And while their irises twinkle in alternating red and blue stars to the rhythm of the music, the twitching bodies on the dance floor simmer and mutate in seething techno seidhr. The bass tones penetrate my body and I feel myself dissolving.
In magic it is not uncommon to "dissolve" one's own body when entering a ritual. The lines between self and other blur, limbs become fluid and the separation between body and mind collapses in on itself. The appeal of going beyond the confines of our skin is certainly not new - whether through shapeshifting shamanism, mind/less/full-fuck or the sensation of an unexpected curve on the roller coaster. We want to drive off the skin. We want to feel comfortable in our own skin. We want to slip into the skin of others.
The scratching, tattooing and piercing of the skin shows how people try to make their skin comfortable and attractive and gives a first impression of the broad cultural aspects of the psychological and magical experience of one's own skin. The blood rituals and blood sacrifices go into and under the skin, which want to open up new spaces of presence and revelation from the bloodstream itself. While neurology has always understood the skin as the cohesion of the basic parts of the personality, as a boundary, support, integration and alignment of inner and outer spaces. In other words, the skin not only serves one's own physical wholeness, but also offers space for external interjections. And without this ability of interjections there would be no concept of spaces in one's self. Conversely - according to neurology - a lack of inner space leads to confusion regarding one's own identity - attacks on one's own, the primary skin, and a "second" skin develops instead. This is described as pseudo-independence generated by the misuse of certain mental abilities or talents for the purpose of creating a substitute for the skin's natural psychic functions.
While the puking office people in the forecourt are being sucked dry, a group of people gather in the dark basement of the Hugendubel bookstore and summon a series of magical entities, candles flicker, bodies swing and suddenly the high priest shrieks in a tongue invocation. The spectral beings summoned appear and form an inner circle within the magical group. The two circles spin in opposite directions and merge into a psychedelic chaos-sphere that then beams across space and time to Venus.
Is ritual space a "second" skin? A way of opening up or restoring internal spaces by creating external spaces for fundamental parts of the personality? Whereby "fundamentally" is to be understood here in a bioevolutionary manner, access to the reptilian brain, access to the Neanderthal consciousness, access to prenatal experience. In fact, ritual and ritual space seem to encourage the experience of the numenos, which then affects one's identity. We fall backwards to jump into the future. Each invocation ritual releases me as a different person, with an ancient being within me, woven into me and my sense of identity before it has been detached, reconfigured and rebooted.
While the heavens are crying and the chaotic people are landing on another planet, the participants in some wizard-forum in the otherkin area are firing their posts at each other like projectiles. One person called "Pretty Mayfly" discusses the difficulty of hiding the wings from non-otherkins. Another person understands very well and writes about her fears that if they ever found out she was a rattlesnake, her human-identified family would kill her. On the same forum, just in a different thread, is a startling series of hateful postings by a human-identified person towards the fly-identified person, threatening to track her down and "get her some decent sex" in order to "bring her back to normal". The humane troll is unaware of the fact that the mayfly is a boy.
Otherkins identify themselves as non-human while, at the same time, identifying themselves as traditionally associated with figures of myth and legend. Otherkins have subsequently psychically left the human body and form to populate and embody a "post-human" space. In a way, a logical next step considering the dissolution and disruption of gender roles of the political transgender and feminism discussion, the promotion of a hybrid physical culture of a race and ethnology discussion, and the blurring of the distinctions between humans and machines as cyborgs - and now the otherkins who want to conquer species and identity. Otherkins radically deny the assumption that identity has its roots in body-centric racial identification. Otherkins see themselves "differently than humans". An interesting question would be, what is this "different" that is different from humans?
Maybe the meaning of this "different" lies in wings and tails? Many otherkin forums feature stories and narratives from otherkins who are struggling to settle into a human world. In a way, these complaints are reminiscent of calls for accessible zones, except that they don't mean disabled people. Some otherkin argue that the human-identified world needs to be redesigned so that those who feel wings and those who feel tails do not have to feel stigmatized and marginalized in public transport, toilets and restaurants. Here "different" is experienced as a social construction of discrimination and oppression.
Above all, however, there is no doubt that it is a transgression. There has always been lust in sin, injury, cutting, or crossing boundaries. We magicians know that all too well. For magicians, the (playful) crossing of the boundaries of the identity of humans and animals through behavior is part of the attractiveness of the work. We've long been creating magical beings, experimenting with bio-intensification of spaces and deterritorialized shapeshifting in our rituals. Seen in this way, the magicians have long since realized the "different" in the otherkin without having noticed it and possibly without ever having tried it.
Later that night - while the unwritten and strange precoital ritual requires me to give the neon furry my business card and he promises (but she doesn't keep) that it will call me - in the Goethe University lab a series of xenografted stem cells manage to reproduce themselves. The theory of hematopoietic chimerism becomes reality. An excited medical student picks up the phone and reaches his professor, who in turn informs the government and military. The future has begun...
I'm sitting at the bar and next to me is a being in a neon fursuit who's speaking of himself in the third person, constantly switching back and forth between neuter, feminine, and masculine personal pronouns as he talks about itself while holding my hand on her lumpy transdermal forehead implants. "I spliced the photophoric fish cells myself to my eye cells," he roars in my ear, "you just had to inject them and now I can produce luciferin and luciferase at will in my eyes, light-emitting chemicals, I'm biolumniscent now!" And while their irises twinkle in alternating red and blue stars to the rhythm of the music, the twitching bodies on the dance floor simmer and mutate in seething techno seidhr. The bass tones penetrate my body and I feel myself dissolving.
In magic it is not uncommon to "dissolve" one's own body when entering a ritual. The lines between self and other blur, limbs become fluid and the separation between body and mind collapses in on itself. The appeal of going beyond the confines of our skin is certainly not new - whether through shapeshifting shamanism, mind/less/full-fuck or the sensation of an unexpected curve on the roller coaster. We want to drive off the skin. We want to feel comfortable in our own skin. We want to slip into the skin of others.
The scratching, tattooing and piercing of the skin shows how people try to make their skin comfortable and attractive and gives a first impression of the broad cultural aspects of the psychological and magical experience of one's own skin. The blood rituals and blood sacrifices go into and under the skin, which want to open up new spaces of presence and revelation from the bloodstream itself. While neurology has always understood the skin as the cohesion of the basic parts of the personality, as a boundary, support, integration and alignment of inner and outer spaces. In other words, the skin not only serves one's own physical wholeness, but also offers space for external interjections. And without this ability of interjections there would be no concept of spaces in one's self. Conversely - according to neurology - a lack of inner space leads to confusion regarding one's own identity - attacks on one's own, the primary skin, and a "second" skin develops instead. This is described as pseudo-independence generated by the misuse of certain mental abilities or talents for the purpose of creating a substitute for the skin's natural psychic functions.
While the puking office people in the forecourt are being sucked dry, a group of people gather in the dark basement of the Hugendubel bookstore and summon a series of magical entities, candles flicker, bodies swing and suddenly the high priest shrieks in a tongue invocation. The spectral beings summoned appear and form an inner circle within the magical group. The two circles spin in opposite directions and merge into a psychedelic chaos-sphere that then beams across space and time to Venus.
Is ritual space a "second" skin? A way of opening up or restoring internal spaces by creating external spaces for fundamental parts of the personality? Whereby "fundamentally" is to be understood here in a bioevolutionary manner, access to the reptilian brain, access to the Neanderthal consciousness, access to prenatal experience. In fact, ritual and ritual space seem to encourage the experience of the numenos, which then affects one's identity. We fall backwards to jump into the future. Each invocation ritual releases me as a different person, with an ancient being within me, woven into me and my sense of identity before it has been detached, reconfigured and rebooted.
While the heavens are crying and the chaotic people are landing on another planet, the participants in some wizard-forum in the otherkin area are firing their posts at each other like projectiles. One person called "Pretty Mayfly" discusses the difficulty of hiding the wings from non-otherkins. Another person understands very well and writes about her fears that if they ever found out she was a rattlesnake, her human-identified family would kill her. On the same forum, just in a different thread, is a startling series of hateful postings by a human-identified person towards the fly-identified person, threatening to track her down and "get her some decent sex" in order to "bring her back to normal". The humane troll is unaware of the fact that the mayfly is a boy.
Otherkins identify themselves as non-human while, at the same time, identifying themselves as traditionally associated with figures of myth and legend. Otherkins have subsequently psychically left the human body and form to populate and embody a "post-human" space. In a way, a logical next step considering the dissolution and disruption of gender roles of the political transgender and feminism discussion, the promotion of a hybrid physical culture of a race and ethnology discussion, and the blurring of the distinctions between humans and machines as cyborgs - and now the otherkins who want to conquer species and identity. Otherkins radically deny the assumption that identity has its roots in body-centric racial identification. Otherkins see themselves "differently than humans". An interesting question would be, what is this "different" that is different from humans?
Maybe the meaning of this "different" lies in wings and tails? Many otherkin forums feature stories and narratives from otherkins who are struggling to settle into a human world. In a way, these complaints are reminiscent of calls for accessible zones, except that they don't mean disabled people. Some otherkin argue that the human-identified world needs to be redesigned so that those who feel wings and those who feel tails do not have to feel stigmatized and marginalized in public transport, toilets and restaurants. Here "different" is experienced as a social construction of discrimination and oppression.
Above all, however, there is no doubt that it is a transgression. There has always been lust in sin, injury, cutting, or crossing boundaries. We magicians know that all too well. For magicians, the (playful) crossing of the boundaries of the identity of humans and animals through behavior is part of the attractiveness of the work. We've long been creating magical beings, experimenting with bio-intensification of spaces and deterritorialized shapeshifting in our rituals. Seen in this way, the magicians have long since realized the "different" in the otherkin without having noticed it and possibly without ever having tried it.
Later that night - while the unwritten and strange precoital ritual requires me to give the neon furry my business card and he promises (but she doesn't keep) that it will call me - in the Goethe University lab a series of xenografted stem cells manage to reproduce themselves. The theory of hematopoietic chimerism becomes reality. An excited medical student picks up the phone and reaches his professor, who in turn informs the government and military. The future has begun...
