Barbelith Underground > Temple

The thing about transgressive acts is the buzz that you get from performing them.

In the past when i used to steal for example i would gradually increase the worth of what i stole or the difficulty or the sheer brashness of the act to increase this buzz. I wasn't aware of it at the time but with hindsight i can see that i needed to keep that buzz alive.

I have read one author i forget the name whom compared transgressive acts to kundalini, i do not think i would go with that at all. While the buzz may be a very physical sensation, a kind of hyper stimulation as you perform the act which slowly levels out until you make the realisation that you have succeeded in the act so it peaks again.

Its a odd feeling, but its also a feeling that a group of people can share if memory serves me correctly, which is an experience i have had when people describe certain psychedelic drug stories, a common knowing and a re experience of some of the buzz.

The part that worries me is the need to up the transgressive act, i found with all the transgressive acts i have ever been involved with, that over a period of time one activity, unless it becomes more challenging loses its buzz, its level of pleasurable feedback.

The whole transgression thing seems to me like a fast way to become desensitised to just actually living. I think its a lot more difficult to live and learn to appreciate the beauty and pleasure when life moves at a pace without conscious over stimulation of the mind or senses.

Whether magical acts are transgressive in and of themselves is very arguable, from what i can see a majority of magical acts have there roots in religious precepts of one kind of another or appear as very similar structures with a changing of content. The different modes of magical expression in a sense tend to hijack orthodox method.

Drug taking and homosexuality are common to certain forms of magical/spiritual expression as is to a degree murder within the context of history, at one point or another either as inter group relations one group has legitimised actions against or with another group through the use of spiritual precepts.

I do not think a spiritual dimension is needed to legitimise so called transgressive acts because they do not seem to me to warrant the use of the term transgressive, transgressive implies a certain kind of base morality, that is a truism in a cultural climate with one dominating cultural environment but is not so the case in the world i inhabit today. A collision of differing value structures seem to exist from a wide range of differing cultures.

So while homosexuality or drug taking maybe transgressive for some from a certain cultural view point for others it is the baseline value of the culture they belong too.

But there does seem to be a common value to for example acts like murder or theft, but as Ember Leo pointed out even they can become tokens of cultural acceptance and trust within certain communities.

The idea of transgression is perhaps a relative one to cultural context.

Pyrite