The Sky is a Gateway, Not a Ceiling. Blood, Sex, Death, Magic and Transformation

Essays and Articles by Charlotte Rodgers. Art by Roberto Migliussi. 

Getting Hands on with Blood, Bones and Fur. 

Interview with Ron Athey.

Sabbatical: Bridget Jones of the Left Hand Path.

The Face in the Mirror: A Quest for Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel.

 Limited edition, 2014. Published by Roberto Migliussi.

The Bloody Sacrifice 

Charlotte Rodgers is a non denominational magical practitioner and an animist, and The Bloody Sacrifice is the story of her work with blood. It chronicles her use of road kill and blood in art, ritualized scarification and tattoo work, and the use of venous and menstrual blood in magic. Also included are Charlotte’s interviews with tattoo artists; priests from belief systems which utilize blood sacrifice; artists who use their own HIV positive blood as a medium; and those who use mortifications and body modification to effect changes in consciousness and self.

A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead

I was musing on Singapore in all its affluent glory still having shrines for the dead on every street corner during ‘The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts’. Then I was musing on how the socially mobile of modern western society eschew death rites and grieving in the name of ‘holding it together’ and being progressive. I thought of which civilizations are falling and which are rising again, and wondered whether acknowledging death and the ancestors is a vital part of a maintaining personal identity and our place in society. I remember how my grieving father mourned for all the information he had relied on his deceased wife remembering; information which was now lost. I recalled Michael Crichton’s words ‘If you don’t know (your family’s) history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.

P is for Prostitution

P is for Prostitution is a primer unlike any you will have read before, the ABC approach far from simplistic. Through various episodes the author charts her own insights into addiction and the kind of existence that inevitably goes with this. Each letter marks a step on a journey into the lowest circles of hell in which the “author’s creativity and intellect is misdirected towards a chaotic, nihilistic and devastating existence” (reader’s foreword). There are moments of black comedy, sexual horror, and final, uneasy redemption in which the author reclaims the trajectory of her life.

“. . . the life you lived . . . represents the era you grew up in and the position of women in society and the rules they were expected to live by and the consequences of breaking these rules. Women are often regarded as objects, possessions and are expected to be submissive.” (Jane Hunt)