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What are some of the most important Jungian systems in your opinion?

io-While Jung laid down a good foundation his immediate followers created an institution which James Hillman blew wide open with his revisioning of Archetypal Psychology. Imaginal Psychology is even a bit more radical where “Imagination is Reality”, the primary way we experience all external and internal phenomena. Both of these contemporary forms of depth psychology are grounded in a polytheistic viewpoint that reverberates throughout its literature. It is a non-heroic Way of Being. It means living mythically, not living one hero’s monomyth.

Practically, like metaphysics, it can mean several things to our self-awareness and help us understand the greater stories played out in our lives.

· Understanding the value and meaning of suffering and depression. This is the alchemical Nigredo or blackness, being stuck in your own shit, so you figure out the chakra. In kabbalah it is Malkuth: “merde to merde”.

· Learning to objectively admit and dialogue with our shadow. Could also be linked to Malkuth ~ our personal portion of darkness to which we are often blind, but also our unlived potential we let others carry for us because we are lazy.

· Understanding the nature of projections in relationships and belief systems. In kabbalah, Yesod the sphere of the Moon; in alchemy the albedo or whitening through solutio - liquification, becoming emotional enough to process your “stuckness”.

· Having some kind of validation for meaningfulness in dreamlife. More moon connection with the feminine side of life and the unconscious.

· Honoring the imaginal (Anima Mundi) as the primary, phenomenological form of Reality. Recognizing the Goddess and being THAT, on the Tree of Life via the middle path Art.

· Learning to hold the tension of the opposites and embrace many viewpoints as simultaneously valid, like being the axel of a wheel, as Tiphareth (Self) is on the Tree, mediating the forces of the Left and Right Pillars. In alchemy the Royal Marriage or Coniunctio.

What is the connection these theorems have with chaos magick and the kabbalah?

Io-Jung systematically described the phenomenology of different layers of the psyche and so does kabbalah and its “bastard offshoot” magick, which draws its root metaphor from the Tree of Life.

All explore the interface of the inner and outer worlds, their common ground. The nexus point is the interface of psyche and matter; where “psyche matters”; where change can and does happen. The creative edge of chaos is the cutting edge of our personal evolution. At every choice point, virtually every breath, we choose a forking path leading us into further adventures on the quest to we know not where. Artists often reach toward the unknown when expressing themselves in new media and spontaneous performance.

Both therapy and kabbalah use visualizations or pathworking with symbolism to keep us in touch with certain well-trodden roads, certain typically illuminating experiences. These are the well-known milestones of the inner terrain which have been described by Jean Houston, Stan Grof, Ken Wilber, John Curtis Gowan, and others. Gareth Knight did a good job of it in Qabalah. The imagery is typical and somewhat predictable, if you know the iconography of the different stations and depths of the psyche.

I have no knowledge of what is formally or anarchistically (haha) now called “chaos magic” and its principles. I only know how I perceive the juxtaposition of chaos theory, process dynamics, and magick. Chaos magic, IMHO, follows the unique trajectory, guided by an unseen Strange Attractor - your inevitable future - with its unpredictable yet inexorable gravity. Your nonlinear “Angel” reaches into the past to pull you into your future.

I suppose chaos magic would have no investment philosophically in any kind of linear growth or development of personality; rather it follows nature’s nonlinear way. Any perturbation can radically alter one’s course…between turbulence and flow. Healing doesn’t occur through “work on one’s self” or causation but through contagion, ravishment, and radical change in worldview and fundamental self-image.

So just like one toxic experience can create dysfunction, one strong healing experience can eliminate it. And it can happen using metaphor, epistemogical metaphors that emerge from within, i.e. “how you know what you know” and what it is “like”. One has to let go and trust that process to let old patterns dissolve so new ones emerge creatively from the deepest level. The difference in treatment philosophy is that it is brief therapy, not endless analysis.

The imagery that emerges in this process is spontaneously healing ~ it is not different from the healing, and it is idiosyncratic, very particularized and in no way “programmable”. It cannot be “imported” into a person as in guided visualization. It emerges spontaneously from within and can be deepend further into a waking dream. This type of experiential therapy is often likened by participants to psychedelic journeys. I have written extensively on this aspect, for example in “Chaos as the Universal Solvent”.

However, kabbalah is a lived philosophy, a deeply engrained worldview you train yourself into. That is the Great Work. However, credible instructions are unavailable and you must make a pastiche from what you can glean or put yourself at the mercy of fellow lodgemembers.

Initiation means nothing more than simply a beginning ~ of a new way of being, a new lifestyle, a consolidation of a new metabeliefs and the nature of yourself, others and the world. It’s a point of view that is simultaneously aware of many dimensions at once. In this sense it is like depth psychology; there is always lots of subtle subtext ~ and the synchronicities, etc.

How do you incorporate your beliefs systems into your therapeutic practice?

Short answer is I don't, or hope I don't. My practice is evocative not introjective; that's my philosophy of treatment.

Hypnotherapy is perhaps the mostly explicitly shamanistic of the healing arts. After all, our first and virtually only requirement as practitioners is to induce an altered state in the client, to co-consciously journey with him or her to “foreign lands” as guide, companion and mentor. However, the client sets the agenda in brief therapy, so treatment of choice is determined by their own soul goals.

Though you can’t get out of it, your own Schrodinger’s box, my beliefs have nothing to do with the session. My philosophy of treatment is to enter the belief system of the other and work within that. Sometimes those beliefs change when the psyche is rototilled but that is an organically emergent not induced process. Do no harm means don’t strip away the irreplaceable blithely until something better is nigh. It undermines adaptation. As the Videru Telemahandi says, “The ecology of the soul is to recycle one’s consciousness.”

That said, I have had many Dr. Tavener-type adventures in psychotherapy, where my exposure to occulture has made a crucial difference. Even the straightest people would walk in my office door and say the same thing, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this; I’ve never told anyone, but the weirdest thing happened…” Whatever it was didn’t fit in their worldview, and they want some authoritative context from someone they feel safe with.

The objective “truth” of the account is not as important to me, as the truth of the soul it narrates. People always have different points of view, and the same is true of synchronistic or psychophysical experiences. Often there are banal explanations, such as night terrors, temporal lobe seizures, geomagnetic anomalies, etc. You can’t leap to conclusions about the supernatural. A few incidents keep their Mystery, which remains to be explored. If it is their desire, we go “into the mystic”.

Could you explain what Virtual Reality is, a summarization?

I would say there are varieties of virtualities: Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual, depending on form, content, degree of immersion, and transformative capacity.

PHYSICAL: Technological VR is a computer interface that allows a multisensory experience of an ersatz space, a simulation of a reality, some programmed, some interactive. Jaron Lanier popularized the notion in Mondo 2000 and designed body gloves and body suits for VR. Soon you will be able to essentially step into the world of your X-Box.

EMOTIONAL: A psychological kind of VR is the trances people live. They have certain preprogrammed parameters, and “rules” for their scripts, games and rackets.

MENTAL: Internet is a virtuality all it’s own. Many days my “chip” body has a far more exciting time than “I” do, sitting in my office talking with the world.

A friend just returned from a photography convention and had a 3-D scan taken. They display it in a crystal cube. Even more exciting is a project I am involved with called REAL FANTASY. It involves using fine art principles to create high end entertainment simulations - full immersion.

Siliconwood is developing a new entertainment experience of real fantasy - like Karoake for movies - where players participate in a digital adventure in a virtual theme park. Not Reality TV - Reality Movie - you get to be in the movie. Members of the audience get to be a character in a hip computer generated 3D movie at our facility and eventually in every home theatre and digital home entertainment center with broadband Internet.

We combine 3D computer animation, scripted story telling with plot, subplots and character development run by a director with real-time professional voice actors for true interaction. Our first release is an exciting political intrigue in a rich fantasy setting: think "Alias" meets "The Lord Of The Rings".

SPIRITUAL: However, I am mainly interested in the general artistic application of REAL FANTASY as a prelude to my lifelong project, VIRTUAL QABALAH - which I envision as a full immersion initiatic pathworking experience. I have a posse of production talent forming already - musicans, qabalists, animators, 3-D and gaming simulations people, even a public TV producer who is a qabalist and accomplished musician.

Remember how tarot books all say the Trumps were originally on the walls of ancient initiation chambers? Same idea 21^st Century style, using the correspondence system to create atmospheres and neuro and videofeedback to change biological parameters.

Over the course of your decades of experience, you've done many lectures attending conferences and festivals all over the world related to science, metaphysics, psychology and spirituality.Can you mention what these were?

Many, if not most, of my meetings with remarkable people were informal and/or virtual. There was Krontona in Ojai in the 60s, to Gnosticon in the 70s, Panarion, Dera in India. In the old days, we sent our scouts around to various events and reported back eagerly to one another. Its a pastiche of the Sunset Strip, Fillmore, Bowie concerts, Chateau Liberte, magickal initiations, transpersonal, hypnotherapeutic, and family work.

Psychic healer Jack Scwartz who lived here in Southern Oregon, uber-counselor Virginia Satir, Jungian Elisabeth Kubler Ross, Psychology Today editor Sam Keen, those with less publicized names. Many notables in the psychedelic intelligentsia - Clark Heinrich, DMT doctor Rick Strassman, James Arthur, the “real” Bob Dobbs, and others in the NYC Non Linear Circle Salon (nlc), the Poetry Science folks, one of which was an senior Omni editor, and those who best remain unnamed.

What were some of your more memorable meetings and what is the topic of conversation?

Ones that stand out include a private gathering in 1993 at Isis Oasis in Geyserville, California; Consciousness Technologies II in Sisters, Oregon, and Nexus 2004 in Brisbane, Australia. Each was uplifting and illuminating in a different way. Isis Oasis was a private Fall Equinox gathering of our friends in the Church of All Worlds (CAW)with our associates from Florida blotter art dealer and editor Tom Lyttle’s PSYCHEDELIC MONOGRAPHS AND ESSAYS. The focus was neo-pagan, chaos magic.

CTII was centered around consciousness exploration from psychedelics to alchemy, from hypnosis to body work, from holotropic breathwork to sacred geometry and trancedance. I spoke on neurotheology, sacred geometry and experiential psychotherapy, I think. Anyway, I know we did some groupwork. Many of our old and new friends were there.

Nexus is the infamous international conspiracy/ufo/future science zine. The speakers here are world authorities on their subjects. I’d written for them for a couple of years, mostly in future science. I am also on the editorial board of the parapsychology/biophysics Journal of Nonlocality and Remote Mental Interactions - remote viewing and distance healing. The superstar of the event was the Russian UFO “czar”, Valery Uvarov and HAARP activist Nick Begich.

Isis Oasis included some interesting guests, and others who didn’t make it just as interesting. These included Terrence McKenna and Jacque Vallee, who were friends of Diane Darling, editor of the original neo-pagan zine Green Egg at that time. We wanted to get together for our annual visit with editor Tom Lyttle of PM&E and decided on Isis Oasis. Tom invited his friends from the experimental triad group marriage Phoenix from Beverly Hills. Lyn Ehrnstein was the lawyer for Synanon, the pioneer heroine recovery program. Neo-pagan movement pioneers and The Church of All Worlds founders Tim [Otter-OZ-Oberon] and Morning Glory Zell also came for their 20th anniversary celebration. CAW was patterned after Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. Other CAW members included Anodea Judith, who wrote ‘Wheels of Life’ for Llewellyn on the chakras, her husband Richard, Sandra and Morgan Ware, CAW members there for the Eleusian Mysteries Ceremony. CAW member, Adam Walks Between Worlds, who wrote terrific articles on Jack Parsons and Robert Heinlein for Green Egg, meant to bring McKenna and Valle, but plans changed. This was the second time we failed to connect with McKenna, another being when we were at the MONDO 2000 house in Berkeley. We had his former girlfriend, the one from his book on Southeast Asia, with us. When we left, RU Sirius was literally rolling on the floor, holding his head, exclaiming “I can’t believe it!”.

Anyway, Adam instead brought underground demigod Genesis P-Orridge with him from Occidental. This was early in Gen’s banishment from Britain, before his accident in the fire at Houdini’s mansion in Hollywood. We didn’t really know who Gen was then, but Tom informed us of his cult Temple of Psychic Youth, and his current band Psychic TV not to mention his influential role in the Industrial, Rave, and Acid House Movements. What was clear was that he was a walking piece of art and possible candidate for the real vampire Lestat. Genesis was wonderfully warm and friendly and we discussed his kids, his exile, Leary, what dreamhealing and chaos magic was and wasn’t while it was congealing as a philosophy, and also what it might be. I just saw him again in Hollywood, November‘04 with PTV3. I was there with South Park animator Bob Judd and former PTV member Don Bolles, formerly of The Germs and 45 Grave. I’ve come to respect Gen’s commitment to his art tremendously. Magick happened. Synergy happened. Talk about ‘set” and “setting”. We ate, we communed, sang, there were hot tubs and absinthe, and a fine time was had by all. Loreon Vigne, formerly a San Francisco artist, is the owner of Isis Oasis, and a High Priestess of Isis. The grounds are a beautiful magical retreat center in the wine country with an Egyptian Temple, a large theatre and hall, separate redwood paneled heritage houses with Egyptian decor, exotic rescue animals, big cats, peacocks and game birds, etc. The following week Deepak Chopra came.

At CTII I saw perhaps the most amusing demonstration of stand-up shamanism possible. Arguably the world’s leading expert in the legal-high Pfalaris grass was there with a truck load of the stuff. After teaching everyone how to grow Wild Turkey in a tub on the roof being sure to mow it regularly, he proceeded to brew up a batch of DMT for 80. But there was no chemical nor alchemical gear. This guy is a downhome farmer from Montana. He had a huge metal barrel and industrial burner, a bag of lemons and a pitchfork. It was surreal like a scene somewhere between Casteneda and Cheech and Chong when he started making lemonade, boiling it and chucking in what looked like lawn clippings He was the perfect embodiment of the Trickster, as his jokes flew as fast as his pitchfork. Everyone was histerical with laughter, mesmerized, skeptical if hopeful. I didn’t ingest any of the resulting potion, being the “natural high” person. It got mixed reviews, but the show was great. Reports varied depending on what other independent bioassays each individual was conducting at the time. My Quaker friends, the Joys are very clear and reported a pleasant persistent effect. If it was placebo effect, that’s good too! You’re as high as you think you are.

This same shaman, who is a graduate transpersonal psychologist, has gone on to engage in serious Mars Mission research. He is one of the world’s leading experts on ancient and extraterrestrial geology. Last year he went to the Mars Mission camp, where you live like you are there for weeks. That was some fun e-mail with photos to match. Talk about virtualities! So, you see, all of these events, all of these meeting with people who are each Strange Attractors, leads to bifurcations in our respective pathways. We cross-pollinate and boomerang back into one another over the decades, crossing the boundaries of philosophy, metaphysics, art, ritual, music. Many of these people have a distinctive mythic quality to their lives. They are in touch with and can express both subconscious and transpersonal energies. They are what I call Uniques. Some may be Homo Lumen, while I suspect others are Homo Mutans.

Now, at the Nexus conference, it was hard to tell the human from the hybrids, the spooks from the hackers, the lightworkers from the technoshamans. The Russian government has decided UFOs are real and they are going to tell the world and appointed Valery Uvarov to do it. He’s a superstar in St. Petersburg. He claims there is another earth-sized planet on the other side of the Sun so we can never see it. He says inhabitants of this planet created an Installation in Tunguska that prevented a catastrophic collision with a meteorite by exploding it with giant plasma balls. Jim Marrs is a leading conspiracy investigative journalist. His book was the basis for Oliver Stone’s JFK movie. He spoke on 911 and alien presence. HAARP is a giant antenna array in Alaska which can heat and distort the ionosphere. The government uses it to communicate with atomic submarines through ELF frequencies, but it can change weather, scorch the earth, alter consciousness, and a variety of other heinous psychophysical effects. The main vocal opponent Nick Begich was there telling how other installations have gone up across the globe. Playing with this global electromagnetism could collapse the atmosphere. Lloyd Pye talked about his Star-child Skull and alien genetic engineering.

We all shared nearly every meal together for days, so you can imagine what the behind the scenes chat was like if that was the public talk. We got together with other participants after the event. But loose lips sink ships, eh? We are slated again for this spring in Amsterdam with Linda Moulton Howe from the Art Bell Show. Her original specialty was cattle mutilations. I can’t wait to see her grill the Russian ufologist.

Will you talk about your work on and contributions to Chaosophy and Nexus?

Chaosophy is my annual journal, and contains mostly my writings for each year which are germaine to its topic of consciousness and chaos.  That is pretty broad scope from culture to biophysics.

Nexus (nexusmagazine.com) is an edgy alt.health and alt.reality international print magazine.  You can probably grasp it best if I say it is well-suited to the Art Bell crowd.  A friend of mine was gaga about that kind of thing for years, and kept trying to get me to read it.  I found out they are sticklers about their editing, references and sources, which was a great surprise.

Finally, when Rick wanted to get back in the speaking arena in “weird science” I suggested them as publishers and wrote several articles toward that end promoting us both.  Some were scientific on Schumann Resonance and the brain and psi powers, others political on the HAARP installation in Alaska, another told of our research on the DNA hologram with Russian scientists, still others on the varieties of parallel worlds, economic and political articles.

There are more in the pipeline, with more to come. This issue is one with my electrical engineer friend Ben Lonetree on the Sedona vortex effect.  Rick and I went to the Nexus conference in Brisbane last year and are going to Amsterdam in a couple of months.  The cream of the crop in conspiracy theory and ufology are there, such as Jim Marrs and Linda Moulton Howe.  The superstar of the events is the Russian UFO czar, Valery Uvarov.

You founded many centers, lodges and organizations in your life, will talk about them and what prompted you to develop these?

They were simply collabos that came up in the natural course of events following my interest.  People are always asking me to do things with them.  I’m not really organization oriented, but I am a systems person by typology.  I like to set things up, but my mind moves on to other projects, multitasking.  However, I always complete my projects, too.  I like to collaborate with people who are equally self-motivated and expeditious.  To me, these are just extrapolated artistic media - I see the practice of therapy in the same way, as an artform.

Aside from your infamous, now x husband Richard Alan Miller, who was most influential in your life's work?

I would have to say my best girlfriend Susanna, who turned me on to Jung at a crossroads.  She was very nurturing and validating when I didn’t have many sources of that.  She “fed” me, encouraged me, and most of all believed in me.  She was also one of the few people who could “bust” me, psychologically. We basically did our training analyses on one another.  She is my personal hero(ine) and touchstone ~ my own Athena whom I adore.  Hers is probably the opinion I value most highly.

After that, Dr. Krippner the famous parapsychologist and lately Dr. Marshall Gilula, who I consider the world’s foremost distance healer, but he is also a practicing neuropsychiatrist.

Spiritually, Leary, Krishnamurti and Charan Singh.  Many others showed me graphically what NOT to do, including Crowley in the end.  Fortunately, I got to ask Tim “how do you turn it off?”  He was no help!  So here I am, a geyser of hyperdelic creativity.

In my work, there are too many to name.  I loved them all and their thought is woven into my own until it has become my fabric.  Lately, in art Digital Media Artist and photographer Gartel, animator Bob Judd, and painter Robert Pope are my mentors.

You've been friends with some of the most brilliant scientists and power occultists not to mention renowned shaman. Do you have any particular memories with them that displaying their work that were particularly mind blowing experiences and changed your life?

Haha, when you say that I get a picture of permaculturist Fukuoka whirling around a chalkboard talking rapidly in Japanese, at an interview we did at Evergreen College.  It was his essential being that was captivating - what Casteneda might call personal power.  Likewise, most of my brilliant acquaintances. 

Everyone is quite normal except occasionally, when they “blip” off the screen of normal reality for a nanosecond.  But it is not those instants that fascinate, but their essence.  One of the most brilliant was master painter Morris Graves who simply infused me, asking me to help him in his metaphysical work.

My mind was blown early, so it was like a vast open sky and unusual experiences blew past like tornados in Kansas. I grew up next to Disneyland.  Normal is a relative term. What do you say to this question when synchronicities are commonplace, and the extraordinary is the norm?  It would be unusual if the remarkable stopped happening.

In my own pursuit of the Great Work I was least concerned with Siddhas and more with a quality of being and congruence - integrity, individuation, emodying the Self.  Brilliance is in the end intellectual, even if inspiring.  Power is a test, like in the Ring trilogy - a trap best left for others.

I am most impressed by healing of the psychophysical self.  Mostly it comes from inside each individual, a triuph of human resilience and creativity.

What do you feel are some of the most powerful aphrodisiacs not just with scents but color, food, music, environment in general?

Hypnosis can, of course, be used in seduction.  How often we claim to be bewitched or enchanted or under someone’s spell. It all boils down to rapport, being the face of empathy. I wrote about enhancing sex with trance in “Hyp-Know-Sex” on Virtual Tantra.

Remember the corny line, “you fill up my senses”?  That pretty much says it.  There are 64 tantric arts that play into intensification of the experience, building anticipation. But maybe your lover doesn’t care about the flower arrangement on the buffet or feng shui, or whatever.

Remember, Crowley said, “Be strong, then can you bear more joy.”  Love is the best aphrodisiac, of course.  The Lover wants to be with The Beloved.  The arousal of desire begins in the mind.  Incorporating a mythic or spiritual dimension adds depth, even if that nuance is a strictly personal or interior experience.

Prescriptions are reliable, but I say use whatever works for you. The mind is the biggest sexual organ. Great sex is like taking psychedelics - it is a psychedelic, releasing DMT, endorphins and oxytocin. The longer you stick with it, the more chemistry you pump out. I wrote on sexual transcendence extensively in “Emotional Alchemy in Tantra”.

In any psychedelic experience, set and setting is important, though that will mean vastly different turn ons to different people.  Personally, I like heavy oriental fragrances, except in summer. My perfumer, Gail Adrian, composes perfumes from your chart. My favorite fabric palettes are rich, shimmery jewel tones that really pop.  My own room is ersatz “Arabian Nights”.  My artwork provides a window on my own personal fantasy aesthetic.  And the poetry, haha:

God entreats Goddess, becoming evermore emphatic;

Both now One, growing steadily more empathic.

Power and Light unleashed more awesome than frightening,

A spiralling energy we now know as Ball Lightning.

How do you see the progression over time with decline of the goddess religions, especially those of Babylon as with Cybelle and Attis, which have become obsolete and vilified? What happened exactly for women to have been the devine then reduced from positions of power to mere vessels of the 'gods' as with the Virgin Mary in Catholicism?

It is this exile of the free feminine WITHIN humankind that has caused this degradation and demise ... of nature and humanity.  The problem is covered clearly in the healing fiction THE DAVINCI CODE.  Scholars argue over its lack of authenticity and historicity, but the psychological truth is revealed there and that is why so many have resonated with the story.

It’s hard to say how “divinely” women were treated in practical terms, even in the era of the Goddess.  Every marriage goes through a phase of power-struggle that either makes or breaks it.  Society has been stuck in this struggle for some time, much of it the result of political and socio-economic pressures.  Of course, it served the agenda of the early church.  There is one glaring problem in modern Catholicism, since the assumption of the Virgin, which is that if Mary is elevated to Goddess status, Jesus cannot be the Son of Man - rather of a God and Goddess.

In ancient times, a ‘Virgin’ meant a woman who was complete in herself - psychologically, rather than biologically intact.  She has a lived relationship with her Spirit; she carries it for herself, rather than projecting that strength outward for some man to carry for her.  So ultimately, the battle of patriarchy is one of Spirit and Soul, which is what the alchemist sought to reunite with the body.  If you leave body out of the equation, it is just a “head trip”, and nothing will change fundamentally.

Patriarchy is linked to biological imperatives of child-rearing, and brings up the conundrums of sexual paradox.  Men want to know who their rightful offspring are in order to support them, and women want the most potent genetic material they can access, married or not.  Much of this goes on unconsciously, of course, but studies have been done on how women dress more provocatively during ovulation, and on how women engage in affairs on their bread-winner husbands to acquire “better” sperm from more virile or high-status males.  Even the sperm competes with chemical warfare in the womb.  There are whole ranks of sperm with no job other than to “nuke” any interloper.

With all that said, is it any wonder this biology jumps its domain to the social level?  Now we have DNA tests to prove paternity, but the primal drives still move us, despite the real needs of our personalities.  Freud’s id still operates below the awareness of our persona’s or social masks in most cases.

However, again - in the interest of moving forward, rather than looking back, there are some new models of gender reunion.  For the last couple of decades we have been consciously getting in touch with our inner opposites - anima for men and animus for women.  Men have learned new sensitivities and young mothers and enlightened fathers send gender-positive messages to their children.  Women find their strengths earlier, and are raised to be more independent.  On the other hand, societal pressure to couple up is still strong.

Again, artists lead the way in breaking through barriers of gender-bias.  By living beyond the pale of normal social roles, they open the old forms to new possibilities.  Genesis P-Orridge is among my favorite artists who exemplify this chaotic restructuring of our expectations about gender.  I admire him, in particular, because he is so deliberate, so insightfully articulate about his artistic direction and aware of his cultural engineering influence.  It is real commitment to put one’s body on the line in the name of art as a living embodiment of gender reunion.  As s/he implies, this archetype of the divine androgyne has been evoked by the fantasies of our age.  “Nothing short of a total gender”.

Symbolically, I would have to say this expresses a cultural yearning for a deep sense of “completion”, full-fillment, at the species level.  It is part of our nostalgia for union with self, nature, others, Spirit in whatever way we conceive it.  It is not a desire to revert to matriarchy, if it ever existed in any global sense, but to discover ‘the next-new-way-on”.

What is your interpretation of the 'Whore' of Babylon prophesized by Crowley? What attributes does she contain? How do you feel a woman's role within the magickal realm (oto or otherwise) especially the westernized world has changed in the last century? What specific events have taken place to change these?

Why do you feel mythology still must play an important role in society today?

It’s not that I feel it must; it just does.  Like the myth of the Rapture, which implies it’s OK to “use up” the planet because the human race has a shelf life anyway.  We certainly have our modern Venuses and Prometheus IT and science people, the list goes on.  Gods and goddesses are a way of discussing those dynamics which implies an eternal dimension; they become a way of “seeing through” the veneer of everyday consensus reality to deeper driving forces in a conscious way…to notice nature at work.  They are rather like colors in the spectrum, each discreet in its symbolic domain.

 What do you feel current day mythologies are that are significant to our ideals whether superficial or not?

What IS the ideal?  Myself, I am a fan of Isis ~ spell it IS-IS.  What is is and one learns to function, adapt, and deal within that dynamic environment.  We don’t live in an ideal world.  Myths?  Some widely in play include:

Sisyphus, individually.

American Dream of consumerism, sociologically.

The Emperor’s New Clothes, politically.

Your favorite fairy tale as a child can reveal a lot.  Mine was The Wizard of Oz.  So I married him, haha.  I also loved Arabian Nights and Alice in Wonderland.

Some people I know, feel that the 'mentally ill' especially schizophrenics, are not hallucinating but really seeing into other dimensions be it spiritual or time/space envelopes. Their voices have told them things about people, myself included that no one could possibly know..from my past or secrets I've kept. Even in foreseeing the future. Do you agree there is that possibility? That science or psychology is looking at mental illness as a sickness rather than someone who is 'in tune'?

I would NOT say they are in tune, rather their door is wide open.  They appear psychic, but there is no control over the delusions.  I don’t think the mentally ill are proficient at foretelling the future, or even deducing the present.  They ARE wide open to the collective unconscious and may pick up on cues not obvious to others intuitively.  Often ‘gifts’ whether of the impaired or extraordinary are both a blessing and a curse.

You also don’t see east Indians seeing Jesus in the tunnel in their near-death experiences.  The content is a distorted confabulation of the input of their lifetime.  If they could “read” you, it is because they are so close to the primal psyche - it’s bleed over, resonance on an open string. Jung wrote his first work on the occult about his schizophrenic cousin.  I had one myself, so I know how he might have felt.