with the soul
What does our species, with its computers and space walks, get from the ancient ritual of branding, asks Charl Blignaut
`Can I watch?” asks the tall skinny boy with a bullring through his lower lip and a friendly sneer along the upper.
“Sure,” I reply.
“Nervous?” he asks.
The photographer adjusts a light and mutters into her bag of equipment. I reply that yes, indeed, I am a little nervous.
“The pain’s not so bad,” he says. “It’s quite nice.”
I believe him. His name is Andrew, he’s 21, and earlier he had lowered his trousers and pointed out the three branding strikes across the top of his right buttock, all in a row, neat as a caning.
Two months ago, Andrew made the 8 o’clock news for a metal ring insertion beneath the skin below the collarbone on his chest.
Next month Andrew will have the skin of his back pierced by 20 hooks and will, like seekers before him, be suspended from a gleaming metal rack in a Johannesburg nightclub.
Which is, of course, not nearly one of the strangest pain rituals going down in the world’s edgier night clubs right now. In New York I saw an extremely fetching dominatrix named Otter do a show called Vampire Wanking. When a car crash ended in dental surgery, she decided to get permanent fangs and now on stage she drinks her own blood from a martini glass.
In Sydney some of the new performance artists are doing surgical fisting – having parts of their intestines removed by hand on stage and then replaced again.
And it’s just as weird on your TV screen. Rap stars are being crucified on prime- time; Michael Jackson all but changed his race before our eyes; aliens are dissecting us daily. Hey, it’s 1999. Some of your best friends have tongue piercings.
There does exist, of course, a rich cross- cultural history to underscore all of this body play – a particular history both primitive and modern, of fashion and ritual, but even a thorough reading of this history doesn’t entirely explain why I want to be branded – and yes, suspended too – at this stage in my life. Nor does it explain why, 2 000 years since we began to urbanise, youth culture is taking a turn back towards the ancients.
You’d think that a species such as ours, as it hurtles towards a civilisation hooked to various machines and laden with the potential to reshape the body and harness the mind, would have less and less need for such manifestations of blood and guts. For inner-city communal mud rituals and mass attendance at public executions in Afghanistan, for suicidal Web cults. “Cultist drank doomsday leader’s blood!”
Branding itself doesn’t offer as glamorous a history as other acts of body modification might. Nipple rings, for example, were popularised as a fashion accessory in the 14th century by Queen Isabella of Bavaria, who had, according to Hans Peter Duerr, introduced a style of dress that opened the neckline to the navel. “This fashion led to the application of rouge to displayed nipples, to placing diamond studded rings on caps on them, even to piercing them and passing gold chains through them.”
Doug Malloy writes that Roman centurions wore nipple rings as a sign of virility and as an accessory to hold their short capes in place. Prince Albert is today more famous for his willy than his bounteous reign. In 1842, at the age of 25, he installed a dressing ring in his penis to keep the protrusion to one side in order to cope with the trend of the day: crotch- cutting pants.
In primitive terms, branding is old, but only as old as metallurgy. A more telling history is that of scarification – decorating the body with welts formed by deliberately inflicted wounds, a look not dissimilar to the brand.
While firm evidence dates scarification to 4160BC, it has frequently been suggested that the true origin of the form can be traced 10 millennia back, to 8000BC. The portrayals of scarification from this time were generally associated with fertility or spirituality – as they are today among the Nuba and Bopoto of Central Africa.
Film-maker Leni Riefenstahl suggests that the numerous Nuba rites of passage involving scarification are more an act of medicine than a response to the gods. Wounds force the body to repair. They build up natural immunity sorely needed for childbirth in a difficult climate. Nuba women with many scars are considered a fine choice of wife as they will be strong enough to bear many children.
Body art has always been about sex, death and exhibitionism – from the men of the Karamajong tribes, who scarified notches onto their shoulders to mark the number of enemies they had killed, right through to the ancient Chinese art of inserting beads beneath the skin of the penis for sexual enhancement.
The other big function of ritual has always been to mark transitions in age, rites of passage, often coinciding with a gathering of the clans. Etching time on the body, like the voodoo priestesses of Togo who mark major events in the holy forest with the application of new scars.
The thing is that none of this explains the late-20th-century resurgence of these acts of religion and vanity. Even Fakir Musafar, the man who coined the term “modern primitive” in the late 1970s, can’t put his finger on our need to sustain “the primal urge” of acts such as branding.
“Whatever the reason,” he writes on the Internet, “the customs of branding and scarification persist in human culture. In a time of computers, television and space walks, it seems paradoxical that such a `barbaric’ practice would be of significance. But it is, to increasing numbers of modern primitives the world over.”
“It’s a kind of grand nostalgia,” says Rod Suskin – Cape Town’s resident metaphysician and the only person I know who might have some real answers. “It’s typical Pisces.”
Martyrs, passives, crucifixion complexes. “South African cultures only settled as communities about 2 000 years ago. They are Piscean cultures, all of them. They all find themselves in the age of Pisces. Pisces forges the essence of Greco-Roman culture; the basis of the urban culture that we have now. This is where you trace the [local] roots of scarification and branding. They are Piscean acts. Jesus Christ suspended on the cross. The fish god. A very Piscean idea, to sacrifice the self for others to be saved.”
In Suskin’s reading of the stars, then, modern primitives find themselves firmly embedded in the vast, 500-odd year cusp between Pisces and Aquarius.
In Suskin’s view, aspects of modern primitive ritual will indeed influence what is to come, but as a spiritual movement it is more of a final fling than a new big thing. After all, nothing , not even the pope, will survive the Aquarian fusion of human consciousness with technology. Already we have DNA computers and quantum computers and brain-wave computers. The new gods, says Suskin, will be more likely to come from technology and outer space than the primitive earth.
Which is where I find myself now, squirming in the dentist’s chair as the tall skinny boy settles against the wall like a charmed anthropologist. I’m thinking – as I nearly always do in these situations – that I hadn’t really considered the practicalities of, say, getting branded until now. I’m wondering about the pain. How to work with it and open things up. It’s different to getting shot or being a cow; this way you control it.
Well, actually, it’s Eddie who controls it. Thwack. Rubber gloves. Eddie Graham, owner of the Wicked piercing studios, steps into the light and offers a sweet little smile while cleaning the patch of skin I have chosen. He would like to show us the machine now.
Last month, the New York Post ran a story on the city’s branding guru, Keith Alexander, on how the demand for brandings has increased and he’s performed about 75 in the past year at his Gauntlet studio alone.
Graham tut-tuts when I tell him that the story, like almost all personal accounts of branding I have read, starts with the predictable bravado of the blowtorch spitting into life and the metal being heated. Graham is not that kind of body doctor. He spends more time working on the Web than he does sticking holes in the navels of Johannesburg’s furious supply of blonde rave bunnies. When he started branding, he found the blowtorch pass and designed what has to be one of the world’s first compact branding machines.
I am Wicked’s fourth branding. To produce the design I have requested, Graham will have to perform three strikes to my flesh. The photographer clicks and whirrs and Graham inserts the first part of the metal design into a clamp at the end of a length of wire attached to the little metal box. He flicks a switch and the first piece of metal glows red within seconds. Ksss.
For Graham, the ancient art of body modification is also very much about the future. It belongs in the same sentence with plastic surgery and genetic engineering. If you can inject microscopic silicon chips into the bloodstream, why not decorate the zeitgeist?
When my three strikes are done – brisk and euphoric – I hit that high, that perfect moment thingie that’s too complex and personal to get too deep about. I feel like I belong in my body. Like I just bought a pair of new shoes. I feel like I can heal myself. A few days later, I get the flu.
Lying in bed, I call Suskin up again. I want to defend my primitive urges and also talk more about religions on the cusp. I tell him how, right now, ritual Ayahuasca churches are sweeping Europe.
Extracted from a South American root, Ayahuasca also comes in chemical form as dimethyl ditriptomine and is readily available in a big city near you. Not dissimilar to the Peyote cactus, Ayahuasca (pronounced aya-was-ka) induces full-colour hallucinations so fine they seem computer- generated and played off on the finest lead crystal display screen you ever dreamed of. It has been the loco-weed of choice for the shamanic priests of several jungle tribes for several thousand years.
Suskin knows Ayahuasca. “The bottom line,” he says, “is that these are new, hybrid, cusp religions. The orthodox religions are over. At this stage of the millennium, the churches have taken spirituality away from the people. They have become mediators. `You don’t need to touch God, we’ll do it for you,’ they say. The result is that spirituality has become abstract and theoretical. We are finding our own connections again.”
In parting, I tell Suskin that now that I’m watching for it, I’m picking up nostalgic Piscean branding all over my television. Dracula clutches at a cross to ward off its moral might and it sizzles into his flesh. Tarzan picks up a metal spear tip and it is magically transformed, glowing hot and branding his palm. Only when the evil has been overcome will Tarzan’s brand disappear. In the early Hollywood depictions of slaves and Nazis, pirates and cowboys, branding was a torture or a sentence, a sign of slavery and ownership, exclusion from the group.
Back in the primitive days, of course, it was about the opposite: communal bonding and the status quo. Then again, as veteran travel writer Norman Lewis once remarked: “Primitive people are so much nicer than us.”