Novelty Engine 2.0™

The Only Oracle, 2012, oil on canvas

Transcendent stargate to another world, or ultra-devastating hyperspace ray-gun? You be the judge.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago there lived among the Tukanoans a woman, the first woman of ‘creation’ who drowned men in visions. To the Tukanoans, intercourse is a visionary experience in which men are ‘drowned in visions’. The first woman became pregnant by the sun-god, who had impregnated her through the eye. The child was born in a flash of light. The woman, whose name was Yaye, cut the umbilical cord and rubbed its body with magical herbs, thus shaping its body. The child became known as Caapi, a narcotic plant, who lived to become an old man. He jealously guards his hallucinatory powers, his Caapi, which is the source from which the Tukanoan men received their semen. The myth essentially tells the story of the alchemical marriage, in which wo/man seeks union with the god-source, divine power of creation. Thus the religious experience is also always a sexual one. To quote Schultes and Hofmann: For the Indian, “the hallucinatory experience is essentially a sexual one… to make it sublime, to pass from the erotic, the sensual, to a mystical union with the mythic era, the intrauterine stage, is the ultimate goal, attained by a mere handful but coveted by all."