domingo, 5 de octubre de 2008

ORRYELLE DEFENESTRATE BASCULE (Interview)

ORRYELLE DEFENESTRATE BASCULE
By
Kerval
‘Orryelle’ is a variant spelling of ‘oriel’: a projecting bay window corbelled or cantilevered out from a wall. ‘Defenestrate’ means to throw a person or a thing out of a window. According to Webster’s dictionary, ‘Bascule’ is an apparatus or structure (as a drawbridge) in which one end is counterbalanced by the other on the principle of the see-saw, or by weights.
If you add to these words a probable origin of the ‘Orryelle’ spelling, the name becomes a clear description of both mage and Magick. An orrery is an apparatus showing the relative positions and motions of bodies in the solar system by balls moved by wheelwork.
The one who created and wears this name is an Australian person of many parts, arts and hearts who enjoys a life of Initiations, receiving and bestowing them as he goes. As a window, Orryelle transmits light (and shadow) through drawing, writing, performance art, body- mind- and spirit- modification, extreme travels, music, and the ability to attract and work with kindred spirits around the world.
Also as a window, Orryelle’s magick can help those who meet him to be launched up and out into new realizations and manifestations, thrown out of the window of common knowledge and common sense and into new ways of seeing. The Bascule part assists the window part as a matter of operational balance through counterweights. Magick requires engineering skills to build sets and props for ritual theater, both in a designated performance space as well as astrally.
Among the influences on Orryelle’s magick are the Magickal Children of Austin Osman Spare, especially Chaos Magick, sigil-making and the shamanic services of bringing back visions and their wisdom to the tribe in dance, or chant, or symbol. Another major facet of this succession from Spare is the descent of the Silver Dusk, a lunar, arachnean, artistic and intuitive response and counterpoint to the more solar and structured magick of the Golden Dawn and their heirs.
He is his own Materia Magicka, his physical body a palimpsest of his workings traced in tattoos, piercings, and, in one set of photos, a pair of wings. Orryelle has manifested his anima physically through hormone elixirs and body modification and has held an Alchemical Marriage with hirself, making a charming couple indeed. The instruments of Orryelle’s arts and magicks include, but aren’t limited to: The Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Company, which presents public rituals aiming to transform rather than merely entertain the audiences; the ever-expanding digital archives and galleries of The Mutation Parlour; and the The HermAphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk, a global multicultural and multisubcultural blend of tradition and innovation.
Orryelle co-developed with other ChaOrder initiates The Choronzon Machine, a Ritual Opera and musickal-mechanical-magickal device for generating analogue fractals; is a co-coordinator of iNSPiRALink. Multimedia Press; is editor of this IMPress’s SilKMilK MagiZain, and creator of The BOOK of KAOS Tarot Deck.
In the last eight years or so Orryelle has been extensively involved in The Horus-Maat Lodge, channeling several double- current Libers such as Pennae-Ultim-Atum and The Book of Going Back by Night. Other affiliations and initiations include the AdiNath tantric tradition, the EOD, the SSS and the I:.I:. He is also the Australian ambassador of The Dionysian (Down-)Underground.
Orryelle knows what he’s doing and he does it well. Spending time and practice with his works is a good investment, in my opinion. I had the pleasure of holding a rite with him and a colleague at the Serpent Mound in Ohio a few years ago as part of his visiting holy/power places worldwide. His words and actions were appropriate and well-chosen, the power rose without delay, and the charge was sent strongly and cleanly.
I’ve adopted his use of chanting a note for each of the major Chakras to a western scale, ascending and descending depending on which direction one’s heading at the time. The Chakra-tone chant works well for banishments, astral transportation, and attunements of various kinds. (Like musicians, magickians don’t steal from each other; they only borrow.)
Copyright © Nema/Maggie Ingalls, Horus-Maat Lodge, 2007Written for Fulgur and reproduced with kind permission
To continue... this long informative conversation we have with Orryelle months ago,just explore the different masks of this skilled arachnean spirit,always moving into all directions!!

Orryelle, let’s just start with this (dis)infor.ma.tive conjunction of visions, expressions, knowing: In which way was born the idea to develop your internal & external magickal experimentations through METAMORPHIC RITUAL THEATRE performances?
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre is one of the primary expressions on the outer of the magick of the HermAphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk. Theatre is a socially-acceptable kind of ritual in the modern west and as such is a means of reaching people who may not otherwise consciously engage with magick or mythos. So it is a way of opening the gates to the public. Many will perceive it merely as entertainment, but there are usually at least a few who pick up the symbolic keys offered and realize there is much more to it than that.
Although theatre is intrinsically ritualistic and has its roots in religious and theatrical ceremonial catharthis in Ancient Greece, most theatre groups or productions don’t acknowledge its magickal aspects and so fail to fully realize its potential for transformation or metamorphosis as well as entertainment.
It was from the conscious acknowledgement of these roots and potentials that Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co. was spawned.

Does the use of sorcery symbolism, archetypal transformations, and imagery offer a perfect gate to audience to enter the artistic magickal labyrinths you want to express in each performance?
It works for a lot of people. Archetypes and ancient symbols have a particularly powerful effect in that they speak to the subconscious or deep mind. Audience members may not consciously know what a particular symbol or archetype is but it may still make an impression by triggering their mythic memory or DNA resonance, opening their psyche to further mutation or at least contemplation.
Sometimes we have created actual physical labyrinths to house these labyrinths of archetypes and symbols, and these I feel have been some of our most effective ritual performances as rather than being spectators ‘audience’ have to physically enter and engage with an immersive environment, therefore they are more likely to engage more deeply with it on other levels also.

And entering the labyrinths, people can explore deeply within the dark realms of unconsciousness through a reality based on abrasive, suggestive visions focused in the visual and audio performances developed by you as artist?
I don’t know about abrasive. I guess in some cases some of our imagery may seem abrasive to some people, if it threatens their conceptions of reality, but it is not our intention (usually) to be abrasive. Rather we intend to seduce our audience, to lure them into another world from which they can be affected more progressively. But of course to
people unfamiliar with some of our more extreme imagery and sounds or ideas expressed through them, this can be challenging.
With Metamorphic Ritual Theatre not all of the artistic impetus comes from myself. While I co-ordinate and seed our productions, they are often developed further as a group, so several people involved contribute on an artistic level. I’m rarely one for presenting to other performers a finished script with specific lines and everything- it’s a more organic process than that.

The ambitious project “Loom Of Lila” was a convergence of time and space, conjunction & dissolution, creation & destruction, microcosm & macrocosm, death & rebirth, but with the characteristic animism given by Arachnean Kali as principal archetype?
Yes. She summarizes so much to me –and I think to the deep minds of many- as a deity that can represent Fate, Time, creation and destruction, yes, all of those things. So she is a primal essence whose image will conjure for many their deepest fears of death, inevitability (destiny) etc. and thus hopefully help them process and overcome these kinds of intrinsic phobias or obstacles to evolution.
Loom of Lila also explored the very nature of Deity itself, as egregore of collective belief, as Fate co-created by its individual components. Empowerment of self as a recognized constituent of divinity was the goal.

It is known “The Choronzon Machine” has a high connection with Tarot trumps. Is this ritual opera a path to reality; I mean concrete qliphotic forces developed through unconscious mutations regarding the dark nature of Choronzonic energies?
The Choronzon Machine is a reflection of reality, a microcosmic mechanism designed to echo macrocosmic currents. Our apprehension of Choronzon was perhaps an unusual one however, as we perceived Him as being not necessarily malevolent, depending on one’s approach and perspective. The nature of most so-called ‘demons’ or dark forces are dependent of course on how one relates to them.
And how do you relate “the Choronzon Machine” to your ‘Book of Kaos’ tarot, knowing chaos is a dynamic fluidic force latent in the universe. And tell us more about the Kaos Tarot’s vessels generated by your arachnean manifestation?
Well Order is as much a component of my tarot as is Chaos, since a Book (or a tarot deck) is a means of ordering or structuring information or phenomena. In The Choronzon Machine ritual opera the tarot was more of a means of organizing or ordering the more chaotic energies in the production, of harnessing Choronzon for example to pull the Chariot along our path of Intention. The pairing of reflective tarot trumps in each scene gave us a structure with which to order the creative flux of ideas the machine was generating once we activated it.

This same kind of structure or system –since it concerns connections or correspondences between one thing and another- can also be related to Arachne’s web. The Book of Kaos Tarot draws together diverse strands of different mythologies, esoteric models, cultural paradigms and religious pantheons into the umbrella of the Tarot to weave a syncretic system of inter-relationship that as well as creating conceptual links is also practically useful for divinatory and even conjurational purposes.

Do you think art is Magick, causing expressions of change according to our will? Art + magick =generation of a dynamic mutation within your own concepts of an abstract reality expressed through sculpture, paint, animation, video, photography, theatre, musick?
I think all Art is inherently Magickal, but am disappointed at how few modern artists will acknowledge this or explore it more purposefully. As a channel for the subconscious, Art retains and even propagates mystery where Science is dedicated to the removal of mystique in the light of logic and reason. Thus art is more likely to explore fresh territory rather than just attempt to understand or define existing territory. Magick’s association with mystery thus affiliates it closely with Art, and the major purpose of The HermAphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk is to explore this connection deliberately. To me, Artwork of any medium (and I find they tend to cross-pollinate each other wonderfully) is the prime menstruum or outlet for magickal expression, the transition from abstraction, yes, to manifest reality.

Are your works in astral magick, shamanic trips through atavistic states of trance, principal basis for the very creative expressionism, developed by each one of your artistical expressions?
One of the primary foundations of my Artistic expression, yes; but also I like to create at times not from some pre-envisioned astral or shamanic experience, but directly from the subconscious so that I myself don’t know what is going to come out onto the page/computer/canvas/recording-device, etc. except even as it is emerging…

It will be interesting to know more in-depth information about the mysterious connection between you and Kali, which ended with the writing of ‘The Book of the Spider’ (a channelled transmission included in ‘A Brief HIRStory of TimEmiT fo yrotSRIH feirB A’)?
I’m sure that’s not the end- in fact my relationship with Kali has deepened considerably since then, especially in the recent (Oct/Nov 07) journeys I had in India; but certainly that transmission was a culminative peak. I do not actually see Arachne (Who seems to be the primary ‘author’ of the Book of the Spider, in at least one of her forms) as being the same thing as Kali; I just see many links and correlations between them.

I think it is a potentially dangerous aspect of ‘Chaos Magick’ to directly equate a deity of one pantheon with a similar one of another, as their differences are as important as their similarities. However, I do find it valid in this ‘Information Age’ of cross-cultural pollination –itself a thing which relates to the Hindu concept of the Kali Yuga or Age of Chaos- to speak of hybrid deities which pertain to certain aspects of different deities. One such energy I have worked with intimately is ‘Kali-Arachne’ but I still distinguish this from Kali per se, Who in Herself has many different forms and attributes in different streams of Vedic tradition. One of these forms I have especially gone deeply with recently is Smashan-Kali or Kali of the Cremation Grounds, an extantly terrifying aspect of the dark Goddess Who presides over such places. I spent quite a bit of time at the Tarapith sacred Smashan in North-East India recently and it was intensely transformative. The horrific physical reality of watching bodies burning up close –I won’t go into the gory details here!- and accompanying *experiential* realization of the mortality of the flesh, eventually gives way upon meditation to an enlightening reminder of the immortality of the soul. Similarly Kali’s outer form with protruding tongue, necklace of skulls, belt of human hands etc. is a mask which veils the ultimately nurturing reality of Vishvamata, the ‘Mother of the Universe’ Who draws all unto Her starry bosom…

In a similar way many are afraid (often illogically) of spiders or arachnids, and this is one of the parallels drawn in ‘The Book of the Spider’. Female spiders devour their mates, but this can be ecstatic rather than a struggle if we surrender like Shiva to the Goddess’ embrace. All metaphorical images, but the essence of The Book of the Spider seems to be about facing and therefore alleviating our fears, whether in relation to death, sex, inevitability (/’Fate’ ), surrender of control or any combination thereof…

Is Arachnean energy a fluid, dynamic convergence of you as magician in astral worlds?
Aside from the aspects I just touched upon –and as a magickian I seem to often confront people with such undeniable aspects of reality- I see pretty much all magic as spider magick of a sort, since magic is all about drawing (or becoming aware of) threads or webs of connection between one thing and another. So it is an archetype I often adopt, astrally and otherwise, in this great wyrd weaving. But as well as a personal aspect of my anima, the Spider-Mother seems intrinsically related to those I work and play with, and so I find myself a part of a ‘Spider Clan’ of sorts, in which context She goes beyond a personal avatar into some kind of tribal overseer or guardian. Then there is of course the Great Mother Kali who presides over all life (and death), so there are many layers to the relationship…

Why the necessity in your life to reflect your astral meetings, in this existential plane?
Otherwise I wouldn’t really be doing Magick, except in an armchair sense, at least not in relation to anyone else. As long as we have physical bodies it is I think vital to earth our experiences on the physical plane, for the sake of Art, beauty and surrealism, and also to create access-points for others to experience these astral realities.

Could we relate Kali-Arachne to a black hole with 8 rays, a symbol of Typhonian magick, a gateway to Universe B, in which the Hermaphroditic Chaorder of the Silver Dusk was built, according to the works of A.O. Spare and Andrew Chumbley? Whoa, that’s some convergence of different magickal paradigms you’ve got happening there! Certainly there is overlap, but to my knowledge (which is by no means complete of course) neither AOS nor Chumbley really wrote directly about any of those things, at least not in those terms although they of course touched similar currents, which is I guess what you’re getting at. I think Kenneth Grant has drawn threads between those terms, but the works of Spare I don’t think mention the concept of Universe B or the Typhonian current, though I’m not sure about Chumbley because he was affiliated with TOTO for a while and created the Ku Sebitu (sp?) in conjunction with Grant.
Universe B works for me as a basic concept of ‘the Other’ and I like Grant Morrison’s take on it as including ‘fictional’ or other such artist-created realities which may refract into the physical world of Universe A. But what about Universe C, D, E or X? Anyway, the ChAOrder was ‘built’ i.e. actually constructed here on the physical plane, well it’s still under construction; but certainly elements of inspiration in this building came from elsewhere, Universe B or some-such!
Typhonian Magick seems primal, animistic, and Typhon is herself intrinsically female (perhaps ‘feminine’ might be an inappropriate term at least in the light of social gender conceptions, although these are rapidly changing!) so yes Kali-Arachne seems to relate to this current. She is the Mother of our Clan, and will swallow us all ultimately back into her great mouth/womb from which we sprung.
So, in a roundabout way- yes!


How do you introduce your own mental transformation into dynamic structure as the hermaphroditic chaorder…? And what’s the main purpose from a magickal platform? Perhaps the manifestation of True Will, having the central doctrine of Self-love; Pure Love under Will?
That works for me. The ChAOrder is a collective expression of True Will, a resonance and communications web of magickal-artistic co-development for those who have found their own individual True Wills- well I would hope most of us have, it seems so.
Spare’s doctrine of Self-love is indeed ultimately intrinsically linked with True Will, since when True Will is fully discovered, self-love is almost inevitable, and/or when self-love is really attained (not just on a superficial level) it is hard to avoid or deny one’s True Will. So that is a most astute observation, Kerval!

You say: ‘Chaos is all around us, within us and without us. Chaos destroys and creates. Chaos is the spontaneous unpredictable movement of the universe.’ So, from such statements could we affirm that “there is no creation without destruction” and vice versa?
To understand chaos we must create and destroy ourselves, I mean to experiment with the dynamism of our essence, to die and rebirth all time again, and again, magickally-speaking?
Yes. As Crowley said, ‘Die daily’. Not, I think, a reference to his heroin habit- since that soon becomes more like a permanent death of the soul without resurrection! –but to the magickal reality of constantly surrendering your conceptions of what you and your reality are, and allowing them to be reborn constantly, with a refreshed perspective. Though ‘chaos magickians’ seem to often have a tendency to overdo this personal death-rebirth thing, creating a kind of entropy which becomes the equivalent of stasis in that the belief-paradigm is so regularly shattered there is no chance to earth anything!
The trick I think is to die and be reborn fairly regularly yet still retain something from the ‘previous birth’ –whether we are talking on a scale of actual incarnate life-times here, or abyss-plumbing, annual overhauls of self and reality, or even ‘daily death’ –thereby building on what we have achieved already, while still re-evaluating and breaking-down what is no longer relevant or useful.

It is known you developed some rituals which included estrogen intake. Were such rituals and use of estrogen a way to increase a hermaphroditic mutation as an alchemic process to awaken the latent feminine energies in each one of us?
It was a personal journey, aimed at transforming myself rather than anyone else, but that’s where all magick has to really start –with the self- so if others were sufficiently inspired or otherwise affected by my journey then perhaps it has helped awaken the latent feminism in other males also?
My Alchymic Wedding was also an actual physical wedding ceremony as it culminated the nine-month journey I took with hermAphroditic reification. The Alchymic Marriage is usually a metaphor, a spiritual rather than physical journey to unveil and unite with the female within the male or the male within the female. I decided to physicalize this process also, as a magickal experiment.
Of course, taking estrogen and the other physical aspects of the process ultimately affected my whole being rather than just my body, so it was a thorough exploration of anima –a true mutation indeed.

How has this physical/mental transformation, helped you to work more into Hermaphroditic Magick? Referring to this, it is known you will write a book revealing aspects of Hermaphroditic Magick. Tell us more about such upcoming book?
Well that book is not something I’m actively specifically working on at the moment as other projects have taken precedence, but as so much of my magickal/artistic work relates to hermaphroditism- actual or symbolic- there is always a lot of potential material for such a work. The idea is that eventually I will compile all of my relevant writing and drawing into some kind of definitive tome on the (broad) subject.

Let’s talk about a few of your activities in: The Horus-Maat Lodge, SilKMilK MagiZain? And also your initiation in the sacred Adinath tantric tradition?
Adinath was the first Tantric lineage I was formally initiated into, so a powerful experiential link with Vedic traditions and mythologies I had begun to explore. The ceremony was immediately surrounded –both forward and drawkcab in timEmit- with omens and magickal phenomena of a most transformative nature. Interestingly as my initiator was ‘Hermeticusnath’ (interviewed elsewhere in this journal under his other magickal name of Aion) – his name itself a play on his equal interest in eastern and western magic- there were also many correlations and magickal links from that initiation with other systems and pantheons such as Ancient Egyptian. My own ongoing work in the Horus-Maat Lodge as well as Hermeticusnath’s (being one of the Lodge’s founders) probably helped divulge such associations.
Since Adinath I have had two other Tantric initiations- Shaktipat into the Muktananda lineage which has proliferated in the west primarily through the ‘Siddhayoga Foundation’ –this was not so magickal in terms of omens, catalysts and such synchronistic phenomena, but was energetically intense as it seemed to help facilitate a further awakening of Kundalini (that was certainly already writhing) for me.
Just recently my third Tantric initiation was the first actually received in India from an Indian Guru- an induction into the extreme path of Aghora. The meditations upon burning corpses I mentioned earlier were a part of this ‘fast path’ to awakening.


My direct involvement with the Horus-Maat Lodge has lessened in the last few years as I have become increasingly involved with the eastern Tantric traditions, and also with establishing the HermAphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk as a global dis/organization. However I feel the double current of Horus and Maat will always be a strong underpinning foundation for any of my magickal activities. Even before I consciously knew of Nema’s work or The Horus-Maat Lodge I resonated with the idea of an Aeonic double current – that although Crowley’s ‘force and fire’ makes sense for this Age it is only part of the picture, and we can’t just replace the Father with the Son or we’ll end up with another patriarchy.

So a gender-balanced (and since aeonically this is only a metaphor, generally balanced) aeon of Son and Daughter simultaneously makes more sense for our current paradigm –although it could equally well be represented by hermaphroditic deities such as Baphomet as convergences or unions of these twinned currents.
Ultimately of course such gender images are only representative of polarities within the self, so I am not of course advocating a ‘heterosexual age’ or something. Quite to the contrary, the full realization of all ‘genders’ within the self allows any kind of sexual expression free reign.
The Horus-Maat Lodge is a wonderful group of mages many of whose enthusiasm and creativity seem to allow greater development as a loose network of kindred souls than many much more ‘organized’ magickal orders whose activities remain static or repetitive.

SilKMilK MagiZain has taken a back seat for a few years while I’ve been focused on other more personal projects such as my forthcoming graphic grimmoire ‘Conjunctio’ (to be published by Fulgur Limited), but will be revived at some point. It is the primary publishing vehicle of the HermAphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk and our affiliates, edited and produced by myself but containing works by many which demonstrate the diversity of Magickal Art –in musickal (a full-length audio CD accompanies each print magazine) and textual as well as visual media- produced (primarily) by members of the ChAOrder.
The second and third issues are still available:
http://www.crossroads.wild.net.au/silkmilk.htm

For you are spirals, webs, Arachnean archetypes graphic symbology which represent a definite language designed to increase the communication with the subliminal psychic world developed through the Hermaphroditic ChAOrder of the Silver Dusk?
Yes!
Well said, to the extent that I don’t know what else to add to that summary that I haven’t already covered…

Do you think there is a connection between the Hermaphroditic Chaorder of the Silver Dusk astral temple and Sabbatic Typhonian currents, by the fact of working with qliphotic energies; or is it more a kind of experimentation with different levels of magick?
I’m not sure why you are referring to the astral temple here, being unfamiliar with it (it is only used by initiates of the ChAOrder); so I will take the question in a more general sense in relation to the Silver Dusk as a ChAOrder and Magickal Art Movement: There is definitely a strong element of Sabbatic witchcraft in the Silver Dusk, in terms of sexual gnosis and astral conclaves; and our relat
ionship with primal Typhonian currents I have already touched upon.
The Silver Dusk is not concerned exclusively or even primarily with Qliphotic energies, although exploration of the Nightside of the Tree- especially in relation to the subconscious mind and its revelation and reification via magickal Art- is certainly an important aspect of our work/play. So it is experimentation with different levels of magick, yes, and the connection you suggested with Sabbatic and Typhonian currents is but a strand (or two?) of a vast web of different avenues of exploration, albeit quite large and multi-textured strand/s…

Orryelle, thanx for your interesting answers. Just hope to have the second part of this conversation next time…your last words and remember….Void awaits you!!! 111 Awaits me?
I’m already in the void, I just have trouble perceiving it sometimes since it’s …Not there!
…and all this other interesting magickal stuff IS -emanations there from which seem even more miraculous each timemit I do seem to manage to dip into void-space-(non-)awareness and re-turn to the wondrous world of form… Thank you Kerval.