On the Origins of a Solar-Phallic Landscape

S. A. von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

Someone very kindly emailed to say how intriguing and strangely affecting they found my solar-phallic landscape painted sometime in the mid-1980s and featured on a recent post [click here]. They also requested that I provide some background to the work which, as they rightly assume, wasn't merely imaginative ...

Primarily, the picture has its origins in the work of the writer and artist D. H. Lawrence, who once confessed in a letter to a friend:

"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."

This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.

Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.

The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below. 

Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...    

One of Jung's favourite stories concerned a paranoid-schizophrenic patient with suicidal tendencies named Emile Schwyzer, who had spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions; a man who believed that stars were composed of dead souls and that the Earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas.

One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.   

At the time - i.e., in the mid-1980s, when I thought Jung was a genius rather than a crank - I was happy to buy into all this, despite numerous problems with the actual details of the story and with Jung's celebrated theory (a theory that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese, as James Hillman acknowledges).

What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.       

Notes 

The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.  

(E. G. Records, 1984) 

On Masturbation as Sex in the Head

I: Opening Remarks

Whilst archetypal psychologists such as James Hillman and pagan feminists such as Starhawk may pleasure themselves and fantasise about invoking Pan or calling up doubles, D. H. Lawrence rages against masturbation as a fatal form of idealism, or what he terms sex in the head.

In fact, for Lawrence, almost nothing is as evil as jerking off. Not only, he writes, does it harm the individual, but so too is it socially destructive; perhaps the deepest and most dangerous sexual vice that society can be afflicted with in the long run.           

Ironically, Lawrence's views are ultimately rooted in the same metaphysical beliefs as those of Hillman and Starhawk - which obviously makes them just as untenable and just as fallacious - but nevertheless it's interesting to see how and where he differs from the above and why he ends up in such stark opposition ...

II: It's All That Lady of Shalott Business

There's an extraordinary scene in Women in Love between Rupert Birkin and his then girlfriend, Hermione, in which he savagely condemns the latter for her pornographic desire to see all and to know all regarding her naked animal self.

Hermione suggests that children shouldn’t be stimulated into consciousness; that to do so leaves them emotionally crippled and incapable of spontaneity. It sounds like a perfectly respectable Lawrentian viewpoint, but it infuriates Birkin who rages:

"'Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary - and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism … Passion and instincts - you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness.'"

Birkin continues - tellingly in relation to the practices advocated by Starhawk: 

"'It’s all that Lady of Shalott business … You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything.'"

Like Starhawk, Hermione thinks of herself as a woman of great sensitivity and passion, but she has exchanged real substance for shadows and falsehood:

"'Your passion is a lie … It isn’t passion at all, it is your will. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark body of sensual life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.'"

Birkin then goes on to dismiss the spontaneity claimed by Hermione and her kind:

"'You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be very deliberately spontaneous … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography - looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.'"

For Birkin, then, as for Lawrence, it is clear that genuine sensuality is an affair of the blood and belongs to the darkness; something that marks the death of our voluntary, day-time selves. Masturbation is the antithesis of this; idealistic and head-bound. A distinction can be drawn between sensual reality and being and mere sensuousness or sensationalism: the former involves letting go of what we are and what we think we are; the latter is an affair of wilful narcissism and acute self-awareness.

Sensationalists, like Hermione and Starhawk, are so conceited that "'rather than release themselves and live in another world, from another centre'", they prefer to masturbate before mirrors and fool themselves that they are working magic.


III: The Great Danger of Masturbation: Our Vice, Our Dirt, Our Disease

For Lawrence, modern man has fallen into collective insanity and a crucial aspect of this is the tendency of the individual to see himself as a little absolute. This has resulted in sexuality (whatever the mode) becoming a form of self-seeking, rather than an attempt to experience otherness:

"Heterosexual, homosexual, narcissistic … or incestuous, it is all the same thing … Every man, every woman just seeks his own self, her own self, in the sexual experience."

Lawrence encourages us to shatter the great mirror before which we all wank entranced and form new relations with the outside world and with one another. This clearly has particular pertinence to those practitioners of solo sex-magick and Lawrence cleverly reminds his readers of a famous occult image which shows a man standing, before a flat table mirror, which reflects him from waist to head. "Whatever it may mean in magic," writes Lawrence, "it means what we are today; creatures whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downwards from the mind."

This introversion of the modern individual, in which the lower centres of psycho-sexual energy and being are aroused and dynamically polarized by the spiritual upper-voluntary centres of consciousness and will, seems to be precisely what Starhawk advocates. But the result of diverting the deeper sensual life of the body upwards is, first and foremost, acute self-consciousness.

"Then", writes Lawrence, "you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self … eyes and ears want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex …"

He continues:

"The thought of actual sex connection is usually repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal act of coition. But the craving to feel, to see, to taste, to know, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience shall come through the upper channels. This is the secret of our introversion and our perversion today. Anything rather than spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our vice, our dirt, our disease."

As much as Lawrence may loathe the phenomenon of sex-in-the-head, we should be clear, however, that he is not arguing for sexual ignorance; nor a return of what he terms the dirty little secret. He wants men and woman to be able to think sex "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" - even if it is impossible for them to act sexually to their complete satisfaction. Only when we learn how to both think and act our sex in harmony, neither interfering with the other, will we, says Lawrence, get to where we want to be; a state of accomplished bliss.

For Lawrence, this is a state of grace wherein we learn how to have "a proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body’s strange experience"; neither fearing the body, nor going to the other extreme and treating it "as a sort of toy to be played with".

Lawrence, then, rejects the popular liberal line that posits masturbation as harmless, or positively a good thing for the health and well being of the individual. He writes that whilst in the young a certain amount of auto-erotic activity is inevitable, it becomes a destructive habit once formed and induces in the adult practitioner only a "secret feeling of futility and humiliation". In a particularly important passage, Lawrence argues:

"The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs … And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only a deadening. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation."

Lawrence also refutes the claim made by James Hillman and Starhawk that masturbation is a means of raising psychic energy which can then be put to creative usage:

"The only positive effect of masturbation is that it seems to release a certain mental energy, in some people. But it is mental energy which manifests itself always in the same way, in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent criticism, or else a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy ...”

We might conclude that the thing that characterizes the work of both Hillman and Starhawk is this mixture of conceit and egoism. As authors, they seem incapable of escaping from the lie of themselves and their writing is nothing more at last than an exercise in self-promotion.

Of course, some might say the same of Lawrence ...


Notes

The lines quoted from D. H. Lawrence were taken from the following works:

Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

Readers interested in James Hillman on masturbation and the invocation of Pan should click here.
Readers interested in Starhawk on the role of masturbation within the practice of sex-magick should click here.   

This post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

On Masturbation as a Form of Sex-Magick

According to Starhawk, a leading figure within the earth-based spirituality movement, esoteric teachings about sex identify a quality called polarity, the currents of which "are very powerful forces" and magical training "often focuses on learning to recognise and channel those currents".

The simplest polarity flow is between male and female principles and many Craft groups make this central to working magic. According to Starhawk, however, polarity can also be created internally within the individual via a process of magical masturbation. She writes: "If a woman creates an inner male, or a man creates an inner female, polarity can flow between the person and what we call the companion self".

Starhawk explains the procedure: Firstly, remove your clothes and stand naked before a full-length mirror. Secondly, study your reflection, taking pleasure in every part of your body; "do not diet or attempt to change the way your body looks", says Starhawk, "work on learning to love it the way it is" (for Starhawk the body is not only always beautiful, but also always innocent; a natural object outside of culture and history).
 
Finally, it's time to invoke the double by imagining one’s reflected image to be someone both to love and be loved by: "let a feeling of warmth and affection flow from you to your double", says Starhawk; "you can talk with your double, or, if you like, make love with him/her. When you are done, thank your double".

This process of amusingly courteous occult ritual and magical masturbation is taken a stage further when the double becomes a full companion self - no longer just a reflection, but a virtual other of the opposite sex. Again we are instructed to feel "affection and attraction for the person you have created in the mirror". Starhawk also suggests naming the companion self: "Have a conversation. Play. Make love."

She further advises that mutual masturbation between flesh-and-blood partners is also a valuable way of building a "deeper-than-superficial bond between lovers", before advocating a form of al fresco masturbation with plants that, apparently, enables us to get closer to the natural world. Let’s briefly examine each of these options in turn ...

Firstly, mutual masturbation between partners. Not only does Starhawk insist that a partner should be carefully chosen and preferably be someone with whom one has already established a close relationship built upon trust and affection (Starhawk doesn't approve of promiscuous, irresponsible, or anonymous sex), but she says that both parties involved should also "be familiar with the workings of polarity".

I have to say I find the latter point particularly curious. I can’t help wondering why it needs to be the case; either there’s a cosmic law of polarity that exists independently of man or there isn’t. How can knowledge or lack of knowledge of it make any difference to its working?

Anyway, let us return to our masturbating couple:

"Retire to a warm and private place. Sit opposite each other. Look into each other's eyes and call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … When you are ready, trade. Let your lover send while you receive. Lie down next to each other. Place your hands on each other’s bodies - in whatever places please both of you. Call up the current of polarity … Then you can both send and receive simultaneously. As the currents build, make sounds or movements that help them. Let the process reach its natural conclusion".

Although Starhawk doesn’t explicitly say what this natural conclusion is, we can only assume she means (in a rather banal and functional manner) orgasm. She also adds an amusing end note to the above in which she once again insists that magical masturbation works best “in a long-standing love affair or partnership”. Such curious moralizing is, alas, all too typical of many writers within the Wiccan world.

Having briefly discussed mutual masturbation in the context of sex-magick, it’s time now to examine outdoor auto-erotic activity or loving nature as Starhawk both euphemistically and all too literally puts it. Perhaps we find here elements of the invocation of Pan that archetypal psychologist James Hillman celebrates (click here). Writing in those short, often two-word non-sentences that she seems to favour, Starhawk instructs us to:

"Go outside. Find a plant (or you can do this with a tree … or some other natural object) … Call up the current you felt with your double or companion self … Let the current flow into the plant until you feel its energy radiating back. Enjoy it."

Again, rather coyly, she doesn’t actually use the word masturbate here - but what else can it be that one is encouraged to do but wank with the vegetation?

Now, let me say at this point that I have no problem with any of this; not the wanking, the floraphilia, or the elements of objectum sexuality. However, one does worry that what's being advocated here is no more than an intellectual game played with smoke and mirrors; a deliberate and wilful prostituting of the body to the mind or what Lawrence terms sex in the head. And for me, it's disappointing that pagan occultism should be complicit in exchanging the sheer intensity of libidinal pleasure for mere representation.

Disappointing, but not surprising. For as the great Gardnerian witch-queen Doreen Valiente readily admits: "Practitioners of magic have always emphasized that … in the last resort it is the mind that holds the power of magic".


See: 

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, (Beacon Press, 1982) 
Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft, (Phoenix Publishing, 1988). 

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

On Masturbation and the Invocation of Pan

According to archetypal psychologist James Hillman, masturbation is a universal practice which is legitimate as a form of sexual behaviour in its own right and not to be considered a poor substitute for coition. What's more, masturbation is not for Hillman merely a simple pleasure; it exemplifies rather the important relationship between mythology and pathology and is divinely sanctioned by the great god Pan whom it invokes and enacts within the flesh.

It would, of course, be easy to laugh at this line of thinking - a line that I know all too well and followed all too closely in my youth - but where I think Hillman is to be commended is in his insistence that masturbation is not an eruptive sexual urge and that the association with Pan is therefore not merely a means of dressing up the old idea of the uncontrollable beast in man.  

Despite the language used, Hillman's analysis is sophisticated enough to allow for the fact that both the will to masturbation and the will to inhibition which accompanies and diverts it, belong to the same instinctual matrix; i.e. that the latter is not merely socially constructed in order to frustrate a more primal desire.

Just as moralists mistakenly branded masturbation an evil because it seemed to serve no biological or social purpose, so too have sex radicals confused the shame which accompanies masturbation with an internalised authority in need of overthrowing. Hillman recognises the traditional moral standpoint to be misguided, but so too does he interrogate the attempt to liberate masturbation from the restraining prohibition which is such a crucial element of the compulsion itself. For Hillman, sex radicalism and secular humanism ultimately risk making masturbation meaningless:

"Deprived of its fantasy, shame and conflict, masturbation becomes nothing but physiology, an inborn release mechanism without significance for the soul".

In other words, in seeking to make masturbation a harmless activity, we reduce the mystery of Pan - and for Hillman this is a bad thing. For Hillman wishes to re-enchant the world via a "re-education of the citizen in relation to nature". However, he's keen to stress that this re-education "goes deeper than the nymph consciousness of awe and gentleness" and that a Romantic love of the countryside is not enough:

"The re-education of the citizen would have to begin at least partly from Pan’s point of view … But Pan’s world includes masturbation, rape, panic, convulsions, and nightmares. The re-education of the citizen in relation to nature means nothing less than a new relationship with these ‘horrors’, ‘moral depravities’, and ‘madnesses’ which are part of the instinctual life …"

Rightly or wrongly, Hillman insists that by intensifying interiority with a complex mix of joy and shame, masturbation “brings genital pleasure, fantasy, and conflict to the individual as psychic subject" and ultimately opens the way towards a neo-pagan future ...    


See: James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, (Continuum, 2000).

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.

Kidney Stones of the Soul

Thomas Hirschhorn: Resistance-Subjecter (2011) 

Gladstone Gallery, NY and Brussels

According to folk psychologist James Hillman, there are psychic crystallizations formed by material experience and memories which potentially cause blockages in the unconscious. 

I suppose we might think of these as kidney stones of the soul; equally discomforting, though perhaps far more hazardous to the health and well-being of the individual if they can't find a way to dissolve these deposits and release the energy they contain in a positive manner. 

Ultimately, if you don't learn how to piss the past away then you run the risk of ever-increased calcification; that is to say, if you obsessively keep looking back upon a life gone by, then, like Lot's wife, you'll turn into a pillar of salt - and that's never pleasant.    

All of which brings us to Thomas Hirschhorn's terrifying sculpture entitled Resistance-Subjecter (2011), in which a group of mannequins - bodies violently exploded or eaten away from within as evidenced by gaping wounds and cavities - are in a process of becoming-mineral.     

I'm aware that the politically-engaged and philosophically-informed Hirschhorn has his own very clear ideas concerning his work. As a Marxist, he's obviously concerned with what he would think of as the hard reality of things and this piece could, for example, be read in these terms. 

But, for me, this work is more than that and more than simply a rather banal reflection on the objectification and commodification of the human being within consumer capitalism as one critic suggests; more too than merely a warning about the corrosive effect of the gaze. 

Rather, it's a reminder to drink plenty of water and never allow tiny elements of the self to harden too much: love that which melts into innocence and forgetfulness; hate that which solidifies and endures.      

Notes: 

The above work by Thomas Hirschhorn can be viewed as part of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery, London (17 June - 14 September).

Thanks to Dr. Simon A. Thomas for the insight into James Hillman.