What does magick mean to you?
It’s the sum total of my life.
“Gen’s most provocative work was unconditional love” – David Jay.
Brion Gyson’s Dream Machine spins and Genesis P-Orridge begins to narrate a life…
Genesis P-Orridge is dying. She (we) they is/are undergoing daily doing oxygen treatments. For Neil Andrew Megson that’s nothing new. A sickly child Megson legally died at the age of seventeen and was told that death could happen at any time. Chronic asthma. They made the decision that being an artist was a pursuit worth devoting whatever life they might have. What was the worst thing that could happen?
Moving away from a repressive post War British upbringing into the 1960s and collective living. Forming loose connections with various bohemian art groups who were into magick and anarchist philosophy. Poring through a magazine Genesis found the address of William S. Burroughs and found a mission of a kind – to change the frequency of consciousness. To cut through identity – to become the interpolator of selves. To redefine the divine.
Anyone who decides they can rewrite consciousness itself through ecstatic and erotic means is dangerous to someone. More threatening than the nihilism of punk is belief in new realities. To be an iconoclast one needs to recognise there are icons.
Genesis imagined Cosmosis. For Genesis it was about finding a partner to transfer into: to become the We not I. The first intense connection was with Christine Newby in Hull. Soon to be christened by Genesis as Cosey Fan Tutti. Coum Transmissions was a visual and performance art collective conducted by Genesis. Taking cues from the cut-up techniques of the Dadaists and the unconscious accidents of Brion Gyson, the occultism of Crowley, and the surrealists; COUM would stage a transgressive show at the ICA called ‘Prostitution.’ It was also the genesis (pun intended) for P-Orridge’s musical career – the notion that music was the conductor.
Throbbing Gristle is Yorkshire slang for an erection. It is also the name of the band Genesis created with Cosey, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (later a member of Coil), and Chris Carter. The musical collective worked with the same ideas as the art collective but in many ways were more experimental because like ‘punk’ bands of the era they were learning to play as they went along. Unlike punk bands they weren’t interested in nihilism but used transgression (political, sexual, religious) to form new incarnations and incantations. As David J of Bauhaus points out, they were the beginning of Industrial music. They also burned out spectacularly as a band because of P-Orridge’s well known megalomania.
The documentary essentially becomes a travel log of Genesis forming new bands (Psychic TV), getting into trouble with the law for obscenity, picking up and dropping people, including a wife and two daughters (the latter came to forgive P-Orridge and feature in the documentary). Mystical rites, cups of tea in warm jumpers. A child on their lap. Metaphysics for breakfast, ritual sex for lunch, a dungeon visit for dinner.
P-Orrdige was seen as a corrupting force via the Temple of Psychic Youth and although they did capture the zeitgeist of disaffected outsiders it isn’t hard to imagine why authorities saw P-Orridge and Paula (their wife at the time) as leading a cult. In effect they were – but not one which forced people to do anything against their will (as is the law of magick) – or at least that is what the documentary suggests. Genesis claimed to be frustrated that they were seen as the leader yet did little to shatter the illusion.
P-Orridge spent the rest of their life essentially in exile from the UK after they were charged with sexual abuse of minors (the charges never made it to trial and were eventually found to be spurious). However, it gave P-Orridge the impetus and new freedom to meet up with American creatives and counter-culture people such as Timothy Leary and live with Winona Ryder’s family.
P-Orridge’s peripatetic life continued as they dipped into shamanism and BDSM performance, travelling to Asia and finding themselves finally with their ‘soul mate’ – the true cosmosis in their life. Lady Jaye Beyer, a dominatrix at a Manhattan club P-Orridge frequented became their everything. Not just a lover but a self – the ultimate merger between frequencies. In 1993 they began the Pandrogeny Project where Lady Jaye and Genesis made surgical adjustment to their bodies to become the one entity: Breyer P-Orridge.
Dillon Petrillo and David Charles Rodrigues’ documentary charts a life that is hard to define because the protagonist is elusive. For some Genesis was just Dad (their daughters Caresse and Genesse who feature and have provided archival footage). For others who are seen but not particularly heard Genesis was something darker. Cosey and Paula have both spoken out about Genesis’ behaviour but the documentary glosses over it because it is essentially a hagiography. How ironic that Genesis P-Orridge becomes a saint. Then again, how fitting for the ‘esoterroism’ icon(oclast) to be forgiven through multiple regenerations of self.
S/He is (Still) Her/e is a fascinating document of a human who tried to be a vessel for something more than human but remained fundamentally human driven by a desire to find transcendent love in physical and psychic form. David Charles Rodrigues allows P-Orridge to tell their stories and any storyteller who believes in the cult of their selves will ultimately fabricate a version of their life which is not entirely honest even if it is authentic. Their never-ending grief over the loss of Lady Jaye is perhaps the most affecting part of the piece. In that, P-Orridge never wavers.
A queer icon, a music/art innovator, a trickster, a fool, a grifter, a human filled with radical and base honesty about desire. A parent, a friend, a supporter, an abuser. A human on the margins who desired to reach beyond the margins to find a universal frequency. In every way P-Orridge was the light and dark. A tarot card placed on the table right side up and inverted depending on the moment.
How does one “read” P-Orridge? How does one “read” William Burroughs? A grand master of transgressive art, the creator of the Interzone, a man who shot his wife William Tell style after a little too much ‘bug powder’ (excuse the casualness – but such is the state of those who are now mythologically incarnated by devotees) and perhaps would never have written his first novel without the crime as the impetus. Do we forget that Aleister Crowley, the ‘Great Magician’ made things up in a patchwork manner which was essentially to keep people in his thrall. That’s not to suggest that neo-pagans, Thelamites, adherents to The Golden Dawn, and ritual sex magick were not intelligent: Majorie Cameron, Kenneth Anger, Jack Parsons, Rosaleen Norton, and Curtis Harrington all drew from Crowley. Just as P-Orridge inspired legions of artists including Trent Reznor, Coil, and industrial music in general.
Somewhere between saint, sinner, genius and fool is where P-Orridge sat. They are not interested in your moral judgements, but they also require them. The decadents and symbolists would say, “Oh, how passe – these are dreams we dreamt in wormwood green” before we tried to shoot our lovers (Verlaine and Rimbaud). Wilgefortis looks down from her crucifix and smiles through her beard. Mountebank or magus? Both and neither. Opium smokers breathe P-Orridge in and exhale sigils and patent leather collars. Hallucinogenic dreams of domination and submission end in a human who had already died in the west midlands and went on to live as ‘thou wilst’ in a period where they were simultaneously shocking, and an echo of frequencies set in place long before them. Here are the lotus eaters. Here are the slaves to the poppy. Here is the mescaline illusion. Here is the la petit mort. Here is Jane Bowles shrugging off Paul and falling in love with women in Morocco. Here is Osman Spare’s Grimoire. Here is the The Wormwood Star. À rebours, Odilon Redon, Mallarmé, anesthesia, lysergic acid, the twin. Fame is an ART GOD.
“The body is a cheap suitcase, it carries around memories,” says P-Orridge as their body declines. As the Pandrogyne their breasts are soft with age and exhaustion – tattoos and scars blend. Each has significance like a stamp on a passport or a shipping sticker on international luggage. “This is where I/We s/he was/were.”
A portrait is being painted by Clarity Haynes of he/r torso in 2019. Another portrait is being painted by Alice Genese, “Gen was not easy to deal with, but we loved he/r”. Another by Paul ‘Bee’ Hampshire “I needed Genesis to survive – I was radically accepted.” Another yet again by Gen’s children. And then there are those who cannot speak John Balance and Peter Christopherson both beyond this mortal coil now.
Who was/is Genesis P-Orridge? S/He is (Still) Her/e is only a sample. To be finite would be an insult to P-Orridge who was a collage and cut up of the past and projecting it into the ether of the present and future. No one work can capture a being who was multiple works – whose body was a document but whose mind was something ineffable. Pull at a thread and there will be others tangled in it. David Charles Rodrigues’ documentary is one thread… do what thou wilst with it. In this moment it is (a) Genesis.
S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary screens at Revelation Perth International Film Festival on 8 July & 13 July 2025. Tickets are available via RevelationFilmFest.org.
Director: David Charles Rodrigues
Featuring: Genesis P-Orridge, Lady Jaye Breyer P'Orridge, William S. Burroughs
Writer: Dillon Petrillo
Producers: Bud Johnston, Jai Love, David Charles Rodrigues
Cinematographer: Carlos Cardona
Editor: Dillon Petrillo