Bureau of Lost Culture

Stephen Coates

*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast rare, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and tales from the underground. *Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation. *Listen live on London’s premier independent station Soho Radio or via all major podcast providers. The Bureau is collected at The British Library Sound Archive

  1. 2D AGO

    In + Out of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth - Part 2

    This is the second part of a conversation with Alaura O’Dell / Mistress Mix, formerly known as Paula P-Orridge. In the first part, we traced Alaura’s journey from meeting the musician and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in East London, to becoming a central actor in the underground art band Psychic TV and the occult network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY).  While public accounts often focus on TOPY’s founder, Genesis P-Orridge, we heard about Alaura's role in the organisation — not just as a participant, but as an organiser and practitioner, the one “who handled the workings”: the practical magick behind the grand metaphysical ideas.   In this episode, we rejoin Alaura and Genesis as they are in Kathmandu with their kids. Caress and Genesse. Back in Britain, the police have raided their home, prompted by unfounded accusations of moral deviance and child abuse in the media, during the infamous 'satanic panic'of the 1980s.  We hear how they embarked on a life in exile in California, finding unexpected refuge with the family of Winona Ryder and entering a new West Coast countercultural milieu that included encounters with Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. before hearing about Alaura's life after Psychic TV, TOPY and Genesis. Psychic TV, was a multimedia art and music project that blurred boundaries between performance, ritual, and experimentation in sound and imagery, imbued with a sense of magick (in both the occult and transformative senses) Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY),was  a loosely structured global network of artists, occultists, and seekers that emerged in the 1980s.  #AlauraODell #PaulaP’Orridge #GenesisP’Orridge #TempleOvPsychicYouth #Counterculture #SacredSites #PersonalReinvention #SpiritualAwakening #TraumaAndHealing #CreativeExpression #ExileAndResilience #TimothyLeary #terencemckenna #PsychicTVHistory

    57 min
  2. FEB 3

    What is a Shaman?

    Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels. In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power. Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites.  But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation. Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised.  Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss. #counterculture, #shamanism, #shaman, #tuvan, #galba, #newage, #spiritualisn, #magic, #ancestor

    57 min
5
out of 5
25 Ratings

About

*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast rare, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and tales from the underground. *Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation. *Listen live on London’s premier independent station Soho Radio or via all major podcast providers. The Bureau is collected at The British Library Sound Archive

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