I officially became a member of TOPY on March 21, 2006. Over the past few days I’ve been going through old journals and looking at the TOPY related materials I have, and I have to say I don’t think I fully realized just how much the Temple Ov Psychick Youth actually meant to me until right now.
First a tiny disclaimer: I was not, am not, and will likely never be a fan of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, or Coil. As a matter of fact I had little to no idea who Genesis P-Orridge even was when I sent in my first sigil. This was not a “fan club” type of thing for me.
I’d seen an interview on an internet forum with a member of the american TOPY, and he described it at some point as “the punk rock movement in witchcraft”. I liked that idea, read up, and joined.
It’s no deep, dark secret that the The Sigil Ov 3 Liquids is “a thing that happened within TOPY”. I remember being at an OTO event a few years ago and somebody mentioned I had been a member of TOPY, and the guy said “those people that beat off on pictures and mail it to their ‘headquarters’?” I found it interesting that a member of the OTO seemed to find that odd, while my reply was simply “Yep.”
Anyway, within TOPY I found a very diverse group of people, with varying interests, from different backgrounds. I’ve never met a single one of them in person (yet) and still count many of them as some of my best friends and extended family. I dont think I’m an oath breaker by telling the reader that we had a “members only” internet forum and that there was a spot on said forum where you could post your address. That was a fantastic thing to do, because if you did, that’s when the mail would start showing up.
I was told by someone that the internet had been a two edged sword for TOPY, because back in the early days information sharing had been a big thing within the network. You can imagine how the net kind of changed that.
However, I got gems in the mail, man. Going to the mailbox was an adventure. Pen pals were a thing. Random gifts were too. It was great.
The thing that really struck me about the Individual’s of the Temple Ov Psychick Youth, though, was that they WERE Magic(k). By that, I mean it wasn’t something they simply did. It was a part of everything they did. The artist’s…their art was their sigils. The musician’s…their concerts and recordings were their rituals. Magic(k) was not a seperate “thing” from anything else.
