His body was a stage for ‘intense sensation’ — and swords
Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, suspension, corseting and other outré practices that he would come to call “body play.” After years of conducting these activities in secret, he changed his professional name and became a performance artist and bodyplay advocate.
Musafar’s efforts helped create the modern primitive movement, whose name he claimed to have coined in an article he wrote in the late 1970s. He shared modern primitivism with the world by performing, publishing a magazine devoted to it and teaching classes on branding and piercing until shortly before his death on Aug. 1 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 87.
The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, who is professionally known as Cléo Dubois, a former dominatrix.
Musafar saw body modification as a transcendent experience, not a tawdry thrill, and viewed himself as a shaman and teacher. Dubois said that his motto might best be summarized as “The body is the door to the spirit.”
“I don’t do this for shock and awe, or for showbiz,” Musafar told the San Francisco Chronicle last year.
Regardless, Musafar employed extreme methods. He pierced different body parts, enlarged the piercings until they could accommodate large objects like swords, then dangled weights from the piercings or attached chains to them. He suspended himself from hooks embedded in his chest or back. He strapped on a corset so tight that it changed the shape of his body into an hourglass.
Calling such experiences painful, he contended, was a mistake.
“There is no pain,” he told the Vancouver Province in 2005. “There is only intense sensation.”
He added that the main difference between pain and intensity was readiness.
“When you get up from bed and stub your toe, you didn’t ask for it, you didn’t expect it, and it hurts. That’s pain. When you push needles through your cheeks, you experience an intense sensation.”
Body piercings and tattoos once considered shocking are now unremarkable. But when Musafar began experimenting with body modification, there was no telling how neighbours, or the police, might react. He said he sought support from the gay and bondage communities.
“We were all excluded from regular society, so we had something in common,” he said in a documentary for French television. “We were fighting for a common goal, and that was to be let alone, to be able to do what we wanted to do, not be thrown into mental institutions, harassed, bothered by authorities.”
Musafar understood that the best way to make modern primitivism palatable was to familiarize people with it. He wrote about the movement in magazines, gave interviews for books like Modern Primitives (1989), showed his photographs of body modification in art galleries and online, and appeared in television news segments and documentary films.
One of these documentaries, Mark and Dan Jury’s Dances Sacred and Profane (1985), showed Musafar dangling from a tree by metal hooks in his chest as part of a re-enactment of a Native American ritual, and walking while wearing a weighted contraption that pressed dozens of minute skewers into his upper body.
In the 1990s, Musafar published a magazine, Body Play and Modern Primitives. In more recent years, he ran classes to teach branding and piercing “in a shamanic way,” he said; “that is, to do this so that something happens besides what you see in the physical body.”
Musafar said that he found it sad that Western society had largely abandoned the catharsis and insight to be gained from body modification. “Most people go through life and their awareness of reality is very small,” he said in the French television documentary.
“Throwing caution to the wind, and flirting with death and doing these kinds of things that I did, makes reality much larger.”