ANTIBODY INTERVIEW

A film interview exploring the metaphysics of matter that underlies my art and sorcery.

Director: Yannick Franck
Videographer: Camille Filleux
Sound engineer: Antoine Vandendriessche

Thoughts – Gast Bouschet, Antibody Interview

“The real challenge of sorcery is there: to step out of the human to become something else. Something that exists more… in symbiosis with what surrounds us. I don’t think of harmony here because I think the world is in bad shape. I think we have to work with what we have.”

The world is in a state of conflict; the creative, the primordial, the daemonic, is in a state of strangulation and humanity blinkered from experiencing the world in symbiosis through the rationalising, mankind-first stance that has been taken for so long. “Thrown into a world of separation from life and a dictatorship of the rational, we free the instinctual and primordial beasts within through the rush of cosmogonic ecstasy” (Voudon Gnosis, David Beth, p.6). Humans are sites of conflict, and it is through a warring that the restrictions must be broken to allow for sorcerous expression, an othering and drawing on otherness.

This conflict, this jarring, is further spoken of in the Fieldpath by Heidegger: “Man in vain attempts to bring the globe in order through his plans whenever he is not in harmony with the message of the Fieldpath. The danger threatens that men of today remain hard of hearing to its language. They have ears only for the noise of the media, which they take to be almost the voice of God. So man becomes fragmented and pathless. To the fragmented the Simple seems monotonous. The monotonous becomes wearisome. Those who are weary find only uniformity. The Simple has fled. Its quiet power is exhausted.” This forced ordering, this forced structuring, is contrary to the way of existence ancient.

Sorcery to this effect is to regard the powers worked with, the Lares, the genius locii, as spirits and the present-dead worked with in a manner where there is an equal regard rather than a thirst to dominate; a welcoming into the working-devotional space, a cultivation of locational relationships, an erotic seduction of the primal.

“Something that tears away the veil that anthropocentrism has thrown over the world. We need a different world view and in order to get it, we need to proceed in a radical way.”

To live where there are communications, matings, with the daemonic where the ‘I’-dentity is destroyed is radical in a world where the focus of living is anchored in enclosing boxes and packaged concepts is Kosmic Gnosis. To Experience without rationalising, without trying to disassemble a moment down to the components to understand it, is radical; it is a full-Bodied, full-Souled way living and become-innate totality, a prehistoric and primordial existence.

It is the Erotic rush that shatters the hold of the Spirit to mate with the Soul, a primal raw communion; the individual becoming beside-oneself in terrific awe. To embrace the Present-Dead rather than to regard them as separate, elevated, apart is to ground oneself in a living where the dead are perpetually present, as within our lives as the lived moments that we experience. They are not just for special occasions but ever-present, to be consulted, welcomed, given home and hearth as though living. I refuse to relegate them to special days, to distant plots, or myself to mourning, to thinking of them as gone.

Gast Bouschet’s works destroy artistic foundations and make their home in sites of decay, of wildness, and in habitat far from the confines and structures of creative theory and comparisons to artist’s past, eschewing structure to present a wildness in creative expression that is a stark and violently resistant.

Radicalness is to be cultivated, forged, lived, embodied, drawn from the sorceror-poet, the sorceror-smith, and from the guttural, deepest recesses of the soul, forced out from beneath rigidness and imposition, expressed liberally and without shame. Beginning my embracing of this living has encouraged what was once a trickle, a thin barely-tended to stream of poetry, to force past the stones of doubt, of theory, of ‘It has to be done just like this’ self-imposed to become an ink-blood wellspring. What I craft using words into poetry may never be award-winning or may never tick the boxes of what is expected regarding stanza, verse et al. but it is mine, it is primal, and it is going to resolutely, resistantly, continue where the inspiration strikes, be it on the commute to one of my jobs where the countryside blurs by, in the early hours of the morning like when I am writing this, or drawn from amidst the shadows and gnarled tree roots of Dreaming wildness.

“…the materiality of your work, this aspect of being one with the material, of entering into it, of dialoguing with it.”

To create – be it with physical materials or with words as in writing and poetry – is to interact, to engage, to exchange. For me, when I have the chance to work on something deeply personal and inspired, creating is as though disembowelling myself and offering my entrails, my inner core, my bones. To use a quote by Sappho as inspiration, my words become my sensitive nerves, my sentences, as resilient as sinew, paragraphs as bone, and the whole creation once complete, a naked and vulnerable offering.

When using materials, there is a sense of exchange. As it is shaped by my hands, so too does it shape me in return. In the antler tines and rune discs that I am working on, there will always be not just the Saturnine storm water and Venusian energy imbued into it but also cells from my skin where I worked the sandpaper to smooth out any sharp edges, sweat where held the tine and shaft of the antler as firmly as I could while cutting it, fighting against the recoil and power of the toil used to divide it into portions, and my time and energy itself entangled with every tine, every disc, in its very production.

I enjoy the learning experience of encountering new materials. When I made a talisman for the first time, time was put aside to share space with the crow’s feet and the snakeskin, to run my hands over the material to learn how it ‘spoke’, to understand how it moved and felt when handled. Like learning the body of a new intimacy or a route newly trodden somewhere unexplored.

“Death does not bring us pleasure or happiness, and so we try to repress it. But I believe that there is no wisdom without the awareness of death. The sorcerous purpose of my work is to disintegrate into something other than death, to disintegrate into non-human continuation.”

This non-human continuation is what I feel is aptly within resonance with the following quote from ‘Of Cosmogonic Eros’ by Ludwig Klages: “The dead had for them achieved the highest order. The deceased had become the mystes, hero, even daemon, and the act of dying coincided with the apotheosis of the consummating Gamos!” (p.182). This continuation is further emphasised: “But this did not lead to the dead of prehistory gaining ‘immortality’, rather it was as if they had not died at all but were present yet transformed!” (ibid, p.184), as “…it was not the annihilation of existence but life metamorphosis” (p.184).

From ‘Anarch’ by Scarlet Imprint – https://www.bouschet-hilbert.org/
Deeply informing my inspired responses is Kosmic Gnosis – http://kosmic-gnosis.org/
> “The Kosmic Gnostic strives to re-unite the ensouled biocentric Kosmos, home of daemonic, enthusing powers, with the isolated human Life through magical conjuration and fulfilment in esoteric ecstasis. The resulting primordial Ur-experiences shatter the dominance of the spirit, reigning in the profane ‘I-dentity’, and return the seeker to the homeland of the soul. Dying to the false reality and profane cosmos, the antinomian visionary resurrects in the World of Powers, the true Kosmos and Reality. Pregnant with the World, he frees from Things and Man the incarcerated God and gives birth to a Universe at every step he takes.” — “Only from the ensuing experience of night-consciousness are born magical incantations, sorcerous words and conjurations of true power which otherwise would neither originate in nor receive feeding from the daemonic spheres. Ur-sounds resonate in the soul of the Night-visionary and are then weaved into a seducing mélange of symbolic words of magical potency which will always transcend ratio and will withstand the analytical onslaughts of the profane.”

Drawn On —
‘Of Cosmogonic Eros’ by Ludwig Klages; Theion Publishing. https://theionpublishing.com/shop/of-cosmogonic-eros/
‘Voudon Gnosis’ by David Beth; Fulgur Press.

These thoughts were drawn from the interview direct. I anticipate the writing and thoughts it holds within developing organically in response to when ANARCH is read, as is intended.

primalobscurite/Gwynevere
https://primalobscurite.wordpress.com/2023/03/28/thoughts-gast-bouchet-antibody-interview/