Codewhite

Feature Interview – Shannon Larratt

Most may know the back story, and some may not, but a lot of us know the name Shannon Larratt is synonymous with the Body Modification Industry and Community.  When I sent the e-mail to Shannon about the Feature Interview I was out on a total limb, but I thought that if it were something he would go for the resulting interview would be amazing; and it was.

I don’t think I could ever thank Shannon enough for allowing me to probe his mind, but having this interview with him and being able to see what he’s all about was truly an honor and a humbling experience.

I hope you all enjoy reading his views and opinions as much as I did asking these questions.

Sheri-Lynn Dupuis: Describe your modifications for me.
Shannon Larratt: On my body I have heavy black work tattoos, as well as pictorial tattoos. I perceive the black work as “part of me” but the color work as decoration. I have brandings on my chest and arm, both done in a ritual context in my late teens. I have a white work facial tattoo of a series of connected lines and circles that represent unity — the idea that we are all connected as part of a single super-entity. It was an attempt to illustrate “visions” I had in body ritual activities and psychedelic (DMT) experiences. I have facial cuttings that were done when I started eating meat — fish specifically — after years of being a vegan. The cutting is of a pair of fish swimming in a stream of tears, and it connects to my facial tattoos. In addition, I have an eye ball tattoo, a split tongue, and genital bisection work. In the past I’ve had a huge variety of piercings (some of which were pioneering) and implants, but currently I just have stretched piercings in my ears that I don’t wear jewelry in, and a dermal punch hole in the cartilage.  I also have magnetic implants in my finger tips.

SLD: What do the magnetic implants in your finger tips do exactly?
SL: The implants in my fingertips are small magnets that vibrate very slightly in response to magnetic (and moreso electromagnetic) fields. With both small fields — the electric engine in a computer’s hard drive or A/C power running through cables — or large fields such as an electric stove there’s a “buzzing” sort of feeling in the fingers. However, it doesn’t just feel like an implant buzzing under the skin. It becomes completely integrated as a new sense on a subconscious level, and I truly perceive the electromagnetic world around me and am aware of the shape, frequency, and strength of various fields as I move through them. Magnetic implants are unique among body modification in their ability to not just augment an existing sense, but to add an altogether new one.

SLD: How did you find the Church and how long were you a member?  Why did you leave?
SL: I was one of the first ministers of the Church of Body Modification. Steve Haworth introduced me to his concept — he deserves the full credit for it — and I was involved from the start, and wrote many of the original documents.
I left for two main reasons — first, my girlfriend at the time got in a dispute with Steve that spiraled out of control and the drama got the best of me. Second, my personal explorations of who I was (via body modification ritual and psychedelics) were getting more intense and I had trouble aligning my strong personal feelings with the goals of the Church at the time. The growing pains that the Church was experiencing at the time — defining a clear goal, as well as organizational and financial issues — exasperated these issues, and I regret to say that instead of helping solve these problems, that they instead acted as a wedge between me and the efforts the Church should have been making.

SLD: After the arrests of Rev. Richcreek and Rev. Truitt the allegations of mishandling donations really started to fly.  Do you feel like that was the beginning of the end in a sense?
SL: No, I don’t think so. That being said, I wish that trial/case had been more of a unifying force. It didn’t help that some members of the church chose to misrepresent what had happened, suggesting that they’d been persecuted for piercing, when it was about surgical genital modification on young women.

SLD: As the Church stands now, do you see it as something you could ever become a part of again?
SL: Absolutely, yes, but it’s complicated by my legal agreements from the sale of BME, which essentially preclude me from having an online body modification presence. Because a large part of who I am is about communicating and teaching, I think it might be hard for me to be involved with the Church without violating those agreements.

SLD: What aspect of the Church most appealed to you?
SL: I think at first I appreciated the idea of it acting as a “loophole” to offer us legal protection under the law. As I thought more and more about my own spiritual explorations, codifying those became my goal. I tried to express these ideas inside the Church but had trouble doing so, because for me these activities have always been very personal and very private.

SLD: You mentioned that at first it was about the loophole for you; there is a wiki entry that states that the reason for the creation of the Church was to allow for that loophole to be a possibility.  Is that truth or rumor?
SL: It’s 100% true (as is the rest of that wiki entry, although it’s too negatively worded). We believed that if we codified the idea that there was a spiritual basis to body modification that it would offer legal protection against discrimination (which was much more of an issue then than it is now — it turns out that the most effective tool in protecting us has been mainstreaming). I still think that’s valid, but I think it’s important to point out that using the Church as a “trick” is not OK — and I think that the case where it was brought up as a defense for the eyebrow ring was a “trick” that reflected poorly on the Church.

SLD: When did you first realize that your modifications were about more than just aesthetics?
SL: When I got involved in body modification I was a kid living on a farm in rural Canada before the body modification community existed (to the public extent it exists now). While I was aware of body modification in a cultural context — my parents had a great book on the Maasai for example — my own interest in body modification and body ritual was completely instinctual. I’ve never been a part of body modification as part of an aesthetic trend. It’s always been a personal journey for me.

SLD: In your experience, does the permanence of the ritual, i.e. Scars, jewelry and ink or the pain itself hold more importance for you?
SL: A powerful ritual is encoded in the mind as much as it is in the body. It doesn’t have to leave scars or other permanent marks to have permanent significance. But I do enjoy and appreciate having those permanent reminders when possible, in the same way as I enjoy having photos and mementos from significant experiences in my life in general.

SLD: Do you believe that there is a deeply spiritual side to our western modernized body modification?
SL: In general, I think body modification is a cultural and political movement. Whether it’s a spiritual experience is a personal matter — I don’t think the phenomena as a whole can be classed as a spiritual movement.

SLD: There are a lot of members who express a feeling of being more complete, or looking externally the way they feel internally with every mod that they add to themselves.  Do you see this as being your viewpoint as well?
SL: I don’t know about being “more complete”, but absolutely I think that a strong part of body modification is a sense of tuning ones internal image of oneself with the external reality. I think one of the things that differentiates atypical body modification from makeup, cosmetic surgery, or even recent societal acceptable or “cool” body modification trends is that they seek to realize an internal and individualistic ideal rather than a societal ideal. That is, cosmetic surgery attempts to reach the societal ideal — the ideal that others would project onto us — whereas atypical body modification attempts to reach the private ideal.

SLD: I’ve spoken with a few people who, like me, were essentially outcasts in their childhood and teens.  Most have entered into the modification World because of those experiences in early life as a way of finding oneself and expressing our true nature.  Do you feel that with the fashion trends today the idea behind expressing oneself through mods has taken a back seat to aesthetics?
SL: Continuing on what I said in the previous question, I should add that my response is in no way a diss on striving for the societal ideal — after all, the societal ideal is the “average” ideal, so it is also the private ideal of a great majority of people. But I think it’s a different journey when you strive for a destination that is your own. One of the problems with body modification becoming so mainstream and so acceptable is that it’s reduced the number of niches where that individualistic journey is possible.

SLD: Do you feel that all of your modifications hold spiritual significance?  What does spiritually modified mean to you?
SL: I don’t have “supernatural” beliefs about the universe, so for me, spirituality has to do with becoming more profoundly aware of oneself and ones place and connection with the universe around one — becoming more tuned in, becoming more alive, and becoming immersed in the wonder of life. Modifications do this as a celebration of self, as well as by fine-tuning the physical self to a more ideal state of being (and of course there are many way of achieving this — body modification is just one of many “paths up the mountain”). Ritual (including sometimes the ritual of doing a modification) does this by taking you out of your normal viewpoint and helping you to experience the universe through new eyes.
I see the majority of my modifications in this context, although there are a small number that are purely decorative.
Do you want to talk about pain at all? It’s been a big part of my life, and it played a big role in BME, and I think in ritual in general.

SLD: Do you feel that someone with little experience with modifications (i.e. a solo nose stud or belly button piercing) can claim to be just as in tune with their modification spirituality as someone who is heavily modded?
SL: Yes, with a big “but”… I think someone who has had limited experiences can certainly claim to have a spiritual motivation and a spiritual experience, but I do think there’s a scale — the farther you go down the rabbit hole the more profound and complete your experiences are going to be. So someone getting a nose stud has had just as valid an experience as someone who has done something more “extreme”, but they have not experienced as much. Can you understand orgasm by masturbating once? Sure. But it’s not the same as a lifetime of exploring tantra.

SLD: You mentioned pain and you have a blog (Blog of Pain) which speaks about and to those dealing with chronic physical pain.  How does the physical pain play into the way you exercise your modifications ritualistically?  Do you modify with the intent of pacifying your physical chronic pain?
SL: For a long time — most of the time that I ran BME, as well as before — I was in a lot of pain but didn’t know at the time it was being caused by a tumor. So, a constant mystery pain where I didn’t know whether it was psychiatric in nature or from some undiagnosed physical issue — it was a real relief when the tumor finally became large enough to be visible through the skin and the whole thing was diagnosed. In any case, the pain level was comparable to being tattooed all the time. On one hand this gave me a high pain threshold for dealing with procedures and the pain-stress of healing things like brandings, but on the other hand it made me more sensitive and aversive to pain — I was both intimately connected to the experience of pain, and very good at disconnecting myself from it as well. Teaching myself to go into trance states and teaching myself to conceptualize physical sensation and “move it around” — including outside the body — made me highly susceptible to the effects of body ritual. In addition, I sought out body ritual as a way of taking ownership of my pain and putting it under my control. I think I also used body modification in a similar way, to take control of a body that I was not entirely satisfied with because of the pain it brought me.

SLD: People continue to push the envelope, but do you see these new mods as being too brazen and potentially unsafe?
SL: I don’t have a problem with pushing the envelope, nor do I have a problem with people pushing the envelope for the sake of pushing the envelope. If it gives people satisfaction to do so, that’s fine by me, and like I said, I think that there’s something unique about being the first or part of the first wave of people to experience something. I also don’t have a problem with risk — I only have a problem with ignorance. So as long as someone understands what they’re doing, I support them.
What I worry about a lot more is that we live in a nihilist youth culture where people don’t think about their futures and hundreds of thousands of people are getting tattoos on a whim, on public skin, with only the most casual consideration for the effect or meaning on their life. I think in ten years — or less — we’re going to see an enormous backlash of people who are very unhappy with the irreversible changes they made to their bodies.