VD In your travels, do you find that some places have more … that word energy is a really trite one to use, but—

GBP Definitely, every summer before we left England we’d rent an old Volkswagen bus and take my two daughters all over Britain to stone circles and prehistoric sites. There was one site in particular up in Dartmoor built on a great bed of quartz granite. In the center were these two vertical stones—a portal to another dimension, according to local legend. Whenever you stood between these stones, even if there was a raging wind, it was completely still, as if there were some unusual interface happening.

VD It’s interesting that a microclimate feels spiritual, in a way.

GBP Back in the ’80s when we were doing Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY) we met these people living in Glastonbury. They were called the English Kabbalah and were obsessed with Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. To them it was actually a coded message transferring English letters to Kabbalistic symbols, so they were retranslating it. Through English Heritage, an organization that supervises historic sites in Britain, they got permission to spend 24 hours in Stonehenge to do the ritual of the Silver Star. They invited me and a few others from TOPY to go along. It was a great opportunity because at that time nobody was being allowed into Stonehenge.

VD What are the origins of the ritual?

GBP The group said that for Crowley it was an ancient ritual to create a priestess, a direct representative of the goddess power of this universe. A woman in the English Kabbalah group would be the female who’d be empowered, and we were the plebs in the congregation. We were all chanting—naked, of course—and sending earth energy to her by thrusting our genitals into the ground until we went into a trance state. Being somewhat skeptical, my mind started drifting. Suddenly I had this vision: the vertical stones were the thighs of a primal female goddess and the lintels across were her pelvis. We were within a circle of female energy, a huge vagina.

VD The womb.

GBP Exactly. As I looked up from inside this circle all the stars started to go out until the sky within the circle was totally black. We had the sense of it being a pathway that would connect us to another place. A kind of psychic wormhole. It was very powerful. For once we’d had no drugs, so it was actually a pure experience from this trance situation.

It’s interesting: Computers are using silica to store information, when all the quartz beds where these stone circles are could just as easily be storing information. Maybe sacred spaces are a millennial recording device.

VD Same with tarot cards, which are also a device to track time. I’ve gone to many caves in France and Spain, and also visited a few of the prehistoric and Neolithic sites in England. I once spent a day in Salisbury, where there are standing stones right in the middle of the village green. It’s very beautiful, like a lot of other places in that area. In town there are these Georgian houses, and what’s right over each door but a radiating sun. You know, the half-circle window above the door. That’s got to come from eons prior to that, when the sun rising over a heel stone was an important calendrical event. It amazes me that it shows up in architecture 2,000 years later. Prehistory and pagan belief pop up in England so frequently!

GBP Why do you think we have this fascination with stones? All through my childhood I would balance stones on each other and make dams and circles of stones, obsessively.

VD I’ve read a little bit about your Christian upbringing. Were you devout?

GBP I guess so. I got confirmed when I was about 11. Then when puberty hit, I started to be interested in what I wasn’t being told.

VD Did you think of yourself as in a tribe?

GBP I’ve always looked for the rest of my self-chosen family, my tribe. I bumped into one of my cousins when I was doing a workshop in Santería at Lancaster University, in England. She said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet you because at all the family reunions this name would be whispered: Genesis. You were the black sheep.” (laughter) But what about tarot—I want to know more about that.

VD Arthur Corwin, a sculptor, taught me a long time ago. He was a man of fabulous oral memory for fables, folk tales, and myths. He was deep into the tarot with other people in the ’80s, although it goes back probably to the ’60s and ’70s when astronomy was being brought to bear on archaeology. You’ve got astronomers seeing artifacts as remnants of the scientific culture of earlier times. Most of these artifacts concern keeping track of time, of planetary and lunar movement as the only way to organize a society. How do you get involved in any kind of ritual if you can’t keep track of time?

GBP And understanding the seasons is essential for knowing the availability of food, of course.

VD It can be a very bad idea to procreate at certain times of the year, particularly in an ice age, when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the mortality rate for an infant born in September would be far higher than one born in April (hence the popularity of June weddings). Knowledge of time telling, that is to say, of astronomy, was coveted, concealed, and the “ace in the hole” of the priestly caste. Knowing what day the solstice would occur gave power to those who held astronomical knowledge. The tarot, with its 78 cards, can be used as an incredibly accurate calendar that needs adjustment only every 2,200 years. As you know, a regular deck of cards is also an annual calendar, with its 52 cards, one for each week of the year, and four suits, one for each season. Each suit has 13 cards representing the year’s 13 full moons, one for each month or, more appropriately, moonth of a lunar year. The two jokers do what the jokers always do, provide the irrational by occupying, in the form of leap days, those days necessary to balance a calendar. That’s essentially an annual calendar concealed in a deck of cards.

When asked by authorities, people would say it was simply a game or, in the case of tarot, an implausible fortune-telling tool. Both the secret knowledge and the deck of cards can be passed down from generation to generation. When you add in the additional cards of the tarot, the 22 major arcana cards, the calendar then represents big years, the entire procession of the equinoxes, the grand earth in its wobble. The axis points to every sign in the zodiac as it goes around in one complete wobble, which takes 25,800 years. That’s called a great year in many ancient myths, like in the Mayan calendar. This takes the history of scientific culture back to prehistory, to metaphors, myths, stories with their math intact transmitted over eons through oral traditions of folklore, religion, and superstitions. All rich in numbers related to astronomy, to regimented ways of keeping track of time that are still with us today.

GBP We had a phrase back in the ’60s that came to mind: “It’s all a matter of time.” We saw that as meaning “it’s all a consideration of time,” but also that time can be equivalent to concrete matter, that matter comes with time. And time is not just a measurement but also energy, like light and sound and so on. It still haunts me. Even the most recent song I wrote begins with this phrase.

VD You are so much about the future, whereas I’m always going back in time. Sometimes I find that the further back I go, the more I pop up in the future. Like my paintings about floods, which seem inevitable down the line. So what about the time travel? Have you visited places in the distant past or in the future?

GBP There was one occasion. Lady Jaye was into psychedelics when we met. She had discovered DMT, the active part of ayahuasca. It only lasts ten minutes but it puts you in a whole different framework of time. I’d met Terence McKenna in California—

VD Oh, did you?

GBP I was living near Occidental and his kids went to the same school as my kids, so I’d see him at PTA meetings. Once I said to Terence, “Well, what’s it like, DMT?” He was into proselytizing DMT and said it turns the universe inside out. He offered it to me but I wasn’t ready to try it at that time. A couple of years later Jaye persuaded me to check it out, so I did. I basically saw the entire history of two galaxies: One was being formed, and then eventually there were civilizations and wars between planets. Another one had all this huge drama and sagas and families. Then all of a sudden I was back in this room in the East Village, with Jaye sitting there semitransparent. Then she solidified. All in ten minutes. I thought, Whoa, weird stuff, there’s no way of knowing what is solid anymore.

VD There’s a legal herb called Salvia divinorum that people smoke. Apparently it is very concentrated DMT and lasts only about two minutes. You travel very far, for what feels like years even, and then come back. It is very curious. I saw these videos on YouTube called “Gardening on Salvia,” and “Driving on Salvia”—a man says he is going to smoke salvia and then, say, garden or drive. He gets his gardening spade ready to plant, takes a couple of hits from a bong, and within seconds rolls over and passes out for a couple minutes, twitching a bit. Then he comes back, is fairly normal, and proceeds to plant his potted sprig, or to start his car and drive away. I must admit it scared me, being partial to my physical body and uneager to abandon my motor functions. Not for me—the body as baggage left behind on the earth while the mind is traveling doing all these things. (laughter)

GBP Lady Jaye used to say that the body was a cheap suitcase. We both were sickly children. She spent lots of time in the hospital since she had curvature of the spine and severe asthma. And about three or four months of the year I was off school also with severe asthma, hay fever, and so on. Physical limitation was forced upon us by ailments, but at the same time it also liberated us into our fantasy worlds. We both read lots of books, wrote things down, daydreamed of other places, other lives.

We both had this very ambivalent relationship with the body that carried on into adulthood. She went into nursing; she loved to see the mechanics of the body, just meat and bones. Then her other job was as a dominatrix—finding the limitations of the body and the different ways that people fetishize either erotic pleasure or simply pain. With me, my rituals were very much about sensory deprivation and using bondage to force me to travel outside the body the way you were saying you found uncomfortable. In the ’80s I did an experiment with sensory deprivation: I was wrapped in wolf skins inside a coffin suspended on chains. I’d had eight hits of ecstasy before I was put inside. I was in there about eight hours apparently. My first words when I was let out were, “Now I understand time!”

VD We were talking about the end of time the Mayan calendar popularized recently. Perhaps I should get with this apocalyptic thinking, foolish though it is. After all, anything that facilitates an evolution of human consciousness on a huge scale should be encouraged. So what if we walk out of the cave the day after looking foolish.

GBP We would agree with that. The dream of it being within our grasp to facilitate change has been a great quest for me: How do we change human behavior? I came up with a slogan this year: “Change the world one kiss at a time.” The strategy can’t be anger, friction, greed, violence, or fear of that which is different. Those are symptoms of our primitiveness as a species, and the tools of those who would control us. Our strategy has to be about embracing the qualities that give you that sense of purpose, and belonging, and being loved.

VD You’re a sentimental old fool!

GBP Definitely—an old hippie.

VD I am too. I keep thinking about sentimentality and how disparaged it is in contemporary culture, especially in terms of the avant-garde. It’s time to revive it, because at its core it’s indicative of an appreciation of life.

GBP I love people’s idiosyncrasies. We’ve always thought that everybody has a “genius factor.” Everybody has something within them just bubbling near the surface that they secretly want to do or dreamed of being. The only way change can come, as Brion Gysin used to say, is “by the touching of hands.”

VD Speaking of geniuses. I understand that you had long conversations with him. When you spoke at the New Museum, I really appreciated how you kept the focus on Gysin, even when people were asking about you, about Throbbing Gristle, about Warhol, and so on.

GBP Brion Gysin has affected my whole life. It’s our duty to tell people where the influences that trigger our ideas have come from and to share our sources of inspiration. This is an ongoing lineage, a wave of people sharing ideas, resources, materials, opportunities—that’s the one true TOPY tribe.

Something great happened just recently. In the ’80s, whenever I had enough money, I’d go over to Paris and rent a video camera, one of those old big ones, and a cassette recorder—then I’d talk to Brion all day, for hours, and record as much as I could.