Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (8 page)

Drew:
What about the “spell of semen” reference?

Gen:
It’s obviously from me, and it’s a reference to what became the rituals of T.O.P.Y. I began experimenting with it in 1961. I was first told that I was mediumistic in 1960 by my grandmother, who had also been a medium, a professional medium. And that is when I began to focus more consciously on magical practice. I intuitively always included sexual magic in that practice.

Let’s get our hands dirty. The phrase “spell of semen” could designate a number of related practices. The most obvious is the use of semen as an ingredient in the creation of amulets and the working of sexual charms in sympathetic magic. In a number of related but distinct crosscultural folk forms found variously in medieval and early modern European occult practices,
African magic and in the hoodoo practiced in the American South at the beginning of the last century, a woman who seeks domination or mastery over a man must capture a man’s seed and either work upon it herself or take it to a conjurer, root worker or wise woman. The semen should be stained onto fabric and stored in a “mojo hand,” “root bag,” “toby” or “conjure bag,” a small, usually red, flannel bag that protects it from exposure to air and is worn close to the body, either around the neck or at the waist (Yronwode, passim). This old folkloric practice bobs to the surface in Robert Johnson’s reference to a “nation sack” in his classic blues recording “Come into My Kitchen”: “Oh ah, she’s gone I know she won’t come back / I’ve taken the last nickel out of her nation sack.” In the specific context of Genesis’s interest in the occult, the phrase “spell of semen” clearly anticipates the “sigils” that were at the heart of the social and magical network T.O.P.Y. (Temple of Psychic Youth), a global organization that radiated outward as a kind of hypertrophied fan club for Psychic TV, the band that Genesis and Sleazy created shortly after the demise of Throbbing Gristle. Taking Gen’s interest in the transformative potential of mail art much further than his initial Orton-esque experiments with shock imagery might suggest, sigils were conceived as means of linking together the community of the Temple in an ongoing, committed practice of focusing the will and effecting personal change through art, prayer and ritual. In order to join or remain an official member of the Temple, each month one had to meditate upon one’s true desire, and then after giving the matter careful thought, create a visual manifestation of that desire in the form of writing, collage or artwork, which one fashioned into a magical “sigil” by marking it with one’s blood, semen or other bodily fluid. The resulting
sigil was then mailed to the T.O.P.Y. headquarters, where it entered a vast and sticky archive of thaumaturgic souvenirs.

Inevitably sensationalized and mocked in the mainstream music press, the “sigils” in fact connect directly to the historical example set by the English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, who developed a highly idiosyncratic ritual practice of meditation upon graphic images that he termed “sigils,” talismanic emblems that allowed him to consecrate his desires in linear form. Spare pursued automatic drawing as a means of both depicting and invoking elemental spirits; his spiraling pen functioning like a Ouija board’s planchette, his hand would dance out the forms dictated by summoned entities even as he attempted to represent their shape and character (though some evidence has recently emerged to suggest that he revised and reworked certain key motifs from seventeenth-century calligraphic sources). The resulting drawings are both “by” and “of” their nonhuman subjects. Spare is also said to have practiced a form of occult onanism in which a particularly powerful wish would be meditated upon while engaged in prolonged acts of “self-love”; Spare described these states of “magical obsession” in
The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy
(1913). Though it would not be formalized in an explicit manner until the Psychic TV era, there is already a nascent connection between Spare’s magical inscriptions and obsessive masturbation and Throbbing Gristle’s hallucinatory improvisations: the doodling, the diddling and the noodling are linked. At once ritualized and antirational, “Still Walking” was constructed in sympathy with Spare’s poetics. Letting their cut-up words and distorted sounds ferment and recombine and overwhelm the listener, TG’s overdetermined scribbles of synthesis and language are consciously designed to
bypass consciousness. Songcraft becomes spellcraft through a magically motivated attack on rationality.

Drew:
So you took a group-writing exercise and then had the final say in editing it down to the text recited in the song?

Gen:
Yes. If you notice, each person says the full permutation. I was obviously influenced at that point by Brion Gysin’s work with permutation, and the idea of the magic square. You write one calligraphic spell and then you turn it, and then you write it again and you turn it, and you keep doing this so that it goes in all four directions. To do that sonically we had to have four voices; I wanted four voices to represent a magic square, because it was a magical text. All of us speak the same words.

Crowding the landscape of influence already populated by Austin Osman Spare, Gen’s reference to Brion Gysin’s occult calligraphy sets up a compelling synaesthetic analogy between the visual results that Gysin achieved by forcing competing inscriptions to overwhelm each other upon a page and the textural results that TG achieved by talking over and past each other within a mix: an overlay of multiple streams of information produces a new space that is not merely additive. The friction created by too much meaning is not simply a frustration at the sense that one is missing something, but a syncretic effect of organic complexity. Simply put, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Gysin’s description of his technique explains this effect:

As you know, if you see Japanese writing it hangs like vines, pinned at the top of the page and sort of dangling down at different lengths across, and not to my mind at that time satisfactorily employing the Occidental picture space, which
is essentially a page as a picture is a page, and when I went to Morocco I was immediately interested in the movement of Arab writing which goes, as Japanese does, from right to left, [and together they] formed a sort of gridwork which covered and integrated the picture space. . . . (Gysin,
Here to Go
, p. 53)

Such a technique could simply be parsed as modernist abstraction, the dissolution of the word into a form disconnected from its signifying power. But far from diminishing the power of language, Gysin practiced his calligraphic overlays as a means of increasing their capacity to work upon the world by stressing their radical kinship with the principles of associative binding found in folk magic practices of charm and spell-making. Gysin’s description of a charm secretly hidden in his ill-fated Tangiers restaurant, the Thousand and One Nights, redescribes sympathetic magic as sculptural assemblage and finds common ground between his own art practice and the curse of an unknown enemy:

I found a magic object, which was an amulet of sorts, a rather elaborate one with seeds, pebbles, shards of broken mirror, seven of each, and a little package in which there was a piece of writing, and the writing when deciphered by friends who didn’t even want to handle it, because of its magic qualities, when even educated Moroccans were not anxious to get in touch with, but it said something like, an appeal to one of the devils of fire, the devil of smoke—to take Brion away from this house: as the smoke leaves the chimney may Brion leave this house and never return. . . . And within a short time I indeed lost the restaurant and everything else. . . . But I realized that this was a very interesting traditional example
of the type of magic that one can read about in any study of magic where this sort of, uh—what’s the word for it?—I saw it as an example of a cabalistic square, which I then began to apply much more directly to my own painting when I returned to Paris in 1958. (Gysin, p. 54)

Gysin’s biographer John Geiger draws an interesting connection between the formal aspects of Gysin’s calligraphic grids and certain visual and perceptual phenomena experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs:

The calligraphic abstract compositions were based on the layering of Japanese script read vertically with Arabic script read horizontally, forming a grid with the magical appearance of language. Such grids, Gysin argued, had a broad application to the storage of human knowledge, from cabalistic magic to computer mathematics. There is also evidence suggesting that grids are physiologically generated by the mind under the influence of hallucinogenic substances. (Geiger, p. 124)

Anyone who has ever been suddenly arrested mid—LSD trip by the hypnotic textural richness of the vertical and horizontal weave created by overlapping individual threads within their own pair of blue jeans can vouch for the sudden, arresting impact of simple visual forms under the correct chemical conditions. Though Geiger does not cite the source of this connection between visual grids and hallucinogens, experimental studies have discovered a chemical link between hallucinogens and repetitive phenomena. As Simon Reynolds notes of MDMA in
Generation Ecstasy
, “Recent research suggests that the drug stimulates the brain’s 1b receptor, which encourages repetitive behavior” (p. 85). Reynolds suggests
that the predilection of those on hallucinogenic drugs for deeply repetitive musical forms may have a basis in brain chemistry. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain packages of contemporary sequencing and editing software refer to precisely quantized, metronomic, lockstep editing environments as “grid mode,” thus realizing at the technological level the comparison between rigidly lockstep mechanical drum patterns and visual grids already implicit in the hallucinatory, magical poetics of Brion Gysin’s calligraphy, and in the relentless pulsation of Throbbing Gristle’s “Still Walking.” The song rides the line between entrancing and annoying, but such is the cost of doing business with elemental, antirational forces. As Austin Osman Spare put it in
The Book of Pleasure
, “The time of exhaustion is the time of fulfillment” (p. 51). Amen.

I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stirs the hearts of then with drunkenness.

Aleister Crowley, “Liber AL vel Legis”

“Tanith” is an eerily empty solo piece by Gen, whose filtered bass solo sidles across a descending figure while vibes float serenely in and out of sight, with mysterious bubbles and boings occasionally punctuating the stillness. Filtered violin scrapes run up the scale, gain in intensity and then disappear. There is a slight distortion on the bass at its peak, a few tremoloed Canadian goose honks on the violin and the piece fades out of sight, stately and reticent. The overall feeling is one of enclosure in perfumed warmth.

The song is named after Gen’s dog, a German Shepherd trained to attack if a specific code word was spoken, but it has a wider resonance. The name Tanith is the North African variant of Ashtoreth, the female consort and subordinate of
Baal. Ashtoreth (also known as Astarte, Ishtar, Athtar and Nana, among other names) is an ancient Semitic mother-goddess whose cult was widespread across Phoenecia and its Mediterranean colonies, eventually spreading into Babylonia, Arabia and Abyssinia (“Ashtoreth,”
The Jewish Encyclopedia
, p. 206—7). Unlike the frigid Greek moon goddess Diana, a virgin huntress who symbolized chastity, the Phoenecian moon goddess was also the goddess of love, fertility and sexuality. Compounding “Tan” (meaning “serpent”) with the feminine ending “it,”
Tan-ith
literally means “Serpent Lady,” and the goddess is often represented symbolically with an image of two serpents coiled around a tree. At once erotic and esoteric, since antiquity the name of Tanith has resonated with pagan suggestion, and its periodic resurgences in popular culture transmit these associations unconsciously even as they undergo Christian revisionist distortion. Tanith represents carnal and spiritual temptation in Dennis Wheatley’s bestselling 1934 novel
The Devil’Rides Out
, with a plot centered on the attempts of upstanding upperclass English gentlemen Simon Aron and Rex van Ryn to rescue the beautiful and damned Tanith Carlisle from the machinations of a satanic communist cult bent on controlling her mind. In the 1968 Hammer Horror film adapation directed by Terence Fisher, Nike Arrighi plays Tanith as a pale-faced, wide-eyed ingénue with a weak spot for beaded gowns, animal sacrifice and ceremonial magic. Like the song, she’s an evasive creature.

Drew:
Is this Gen’s bass?

Chris:
That is. It’s running through a Morley Auto-wah. It’s a wah wah pedal but it had a built-in auto setting on it. . .

Drew:
Where it would cycle like an LFO and you could
control the rate. [skittering batsqueak] What’s that?

Chris:
That’s violin going through a phaser. It was through a distortion pedal and then a phaser.

Drew:
So he’s got a pickup on his violin with a line out that is going through a phaser, and he’s playing a fast run?

Chris:
And he’s going through an echo box.

Drew:
“Tanith” the song is named after the dog, but is the dog named after the sci-fi writer Tanith Lee?

Cosey:
No, the dog is named after the herb used in
Rosemary’s Baby
. Tanith root, the herb around her neck.

Chris:
Tanith is also a demon.

Cosey:
She was a lovely dog; she wasn’t a demon.

Drew:
And the legendary attack word?

Cosey:
I’m not telling you.

Drew:
It wouldn’t be a legend if you did.

This brings us to a moment of misrecognition, poetically inspired malapropism or willful fudging. The song and the dog and the goddess are called “Tanith” with a “th,” but the root, which Cosey refers to in the 1968 Roman Polanski film
Rosemary’s Baby
, is “Tannis” with an “s.” To my knowledge, none of the members of Throbbing Gristle speak with a lisp, but there may be some transatlantic slippage at work in which Ruth Gordon’s New Yawk–accented “s” resounds in English ears as a “th.” In the private mythos of TG’s misprision, the two are linked together as twin strands of occult meaning. If Tanith with a “th” named the subject of mind control in
The Devil Rides Out
, Tannis with an “s” names the agent of mind-control in
Rosemary’s Baby
. The root in question is central to the conceit of the film: this seemingly benign good luck charm is in fact “The Devil’s Pepper,” a faintly foul-smelling
fungus through which a coven of elderly Satanists in a gothic Manhattan apartment building mark their initiates, and subtly control their victims.