It's my first ritual hook-pull and I am scared shitless.
I am one of 15 men who have gathered at Alchemy, a dungeon space in SoMa with exposed brick walls and a skylight. I've been to Alchemy several times before, for kinkster play parties and a commitment ceremony. But this time is different: the group — ranging in age from their 20s up to their 60s — will be pierced, hooked, and pulled by none other than Fakir Musafar, the 84-year-old founder of the Modern Primitives movement and a hero to the temporary body-piercing community.
Standing in a circle, mostly naked except for our boots and jock straps, we chant, introduce ourselves, and share with each other our respective levels of experience. To get the endorphins flowing, some people, myself included, get strapped to a St. Andrew's cross for a light flogging to our backs and shoulders.
Then it is time. I refuse to watch anyone else until it's my turn. It reminds me of the day I went hang-gliding and insisted I be the first to run off the cliff for fear I'd chicken out if I had to see anybody else do it.
Hook-pulls (or energy pulls) are not new. Native American Plains tribes and certain groups in Polynesia, Indonesia, and elsewhere have been practicing them for centuries. (Some Hindu cultures have been doing them for nearly 3,000 years.) The ritual — an insertion of metal hooks into the skin for a prolonged period — may mark a person's entry into adulthood or other major life transition. Sometimes it's an annual rite. For practitioners in 21st-century California, the ritual often involves participants connecting themselves with the hooks to create tension through the entire group; other practitioners may suspend themselves from a ceiling for hours at a time, held up by nothing more than two stainless steel hooks attached to their chest or back. Some have spears put through their cheeks. Not only does this keep them silent, it looks really badass.
A few weeks after my maiden hook-pull, I speak by phone with Fakir, who is known among the piercing community by his first name. Born Roland Loomis in Aberdeen, S.D., in 1930, he grew up a Lutheran on an Indian reservation. There, he observed the Lakota perform three- and four-day pulling rituals and vision-seeking ceremonies at a time when even performing a Sun Dance could land indigenous people in prison for up to 20 years.
"I was hooked on this and rejected all the Christian teachings when I was about 12 years old," Fakir says. "I was supposed to be a Lutheran minister or something. I was the bright kid who knew all the answers but I didn't believe a word of it." He soon dedicated his life to searching for rituals that would help expand his consciousness, although "not the rituals of devotion like the Catholic Church or some of the Hindu things," he says. "There are many paths up the mountain, as my friend Ram Dass used to say, but the view at the top is the same."
In the decades since his youthful crisis of faith, Fakir has transformed a once-obscure practice into a burgeoning movement of people seeking spiritual transcendence through pain. After training as an electrical engineer and moving to the Bay Area to pursue an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University, he ran an ad agency and taught ballroom dancing. It was in 1977, at the International Tattoo Convention in Reno, that Roland Loomis came out as Fakir Musafar.
The combination of alternative spirituality and body modification that is a hook-pull was almost unheard of in Western culture until the 1970 Hollywood film A Man Called Horse, starring Richard Harris as a white man who participates in a Native American piercing initiation. Within 15 years, Fakir had appeared in the seminal 1985 documentary Dances Sacred and Profane and later the first comprehensive book on body modification, Modern Primitives, which took its title from a term Fakir coined. He's since made numerous TV and media appearances and assembled the book Spirit + Flesh, a 296-page photographic retrospective of his body-play adventures.
As piercing and tattooing have become mainstream to the point of triteness, hook-pulls have mushroomed in popularity. Today, Fakir regularly works with 50 or 100 people at a time, and several groups of that size now meet at least once a year in spots across the United States. In the Bay Area, where interest in a once-languishing BDSM subculture has exploded in recent years, the two communities have overlapped. After I had been invited to a session last year, my curiosity eventually overcame my terror and I said yes this time.
At its most basic, the hook-pull is a healing practice. "We're always doing this particular ritual with the heart chakra; that's the one that's blocked and most screwed up in our culture," Fakir says. "We have all this grief and pain and garbage that we take into our heart chakra, and we're not able to function fully and get into a broadminded, altruistic view."
The growing awareness of that late-capitalist malaise has led people to look for wisdom elsewhere. "One of the purposes [of the ritual] was to loosen up or open the heart chakra so you could respond to the chakras above that — through speech and song, through writing and the intellect, all of which are blocked if your heart chakra isn't functioning."
Fakir has taken this "body-first approach" to spirituality around the world since the 1990s, training protégés, and experiencing the bittersweet triumph of former pupils who have told him his services as a facilitator are no longer needed. By the turn of the millennium, hook-pulls had become, for some groups, almost like an extreme sporting event or a competitive exercise, sometimes called "trucking." And then there was the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, whose eponymous leader drove nails through his nose at Lollapalooza music festivals alongside the Lizardman and the world's fattest contortionist. When I ask Fakir if he believes all this has cheapened the ritual in some way, his answer surprises me. "It obscures what you get by doing it in a traditional way," he says, but he expresses no irritation with groups that have taken his techniques and turned them into the equivalent of bungee-jumping.
One thing Fakir is adamant about is keeping things aboveboard. "I run the only school in the country that teaches body piercers. We've been running the school for 24 years," he says. "We had to go through quite a few hoops." He cites California law AB 300, which governs tattooing, body piercing, and permanent makeup. "We were bringing in people from all over the world and training them. As part of their training, we have competency testing. We're not going to let them go out in the world and not be sure they know what the hell they're doing," he says. Even more stringent licensing requirements have made it difficult to train new people in states such as Oregon, where it's now nearly impossible to hold a hook-pull.
In a way, regulations placed on ritual pulling, borne of caution from the AIDS crisis years, have almost come full circle. Whether stamping out indigenous practices because the shamans represented a threat to the Christian order, or adjudicating consensual adults' non-procreative sexual proclivities, the state has always been suspicious. And that's a shame, especially as the scene I participated in pales next to some of the more elaborate practices. Fakir has undergone "fasting and severe preparations" for ceremonies that involve being suspended by hooks for hours, and he claims to have had three transformative experiences. He once met his God-self — who told him, "I'm as close to God as you're ever going to be" — and on another occasion, in Sundance, Wyo., says he "not only met my higher self but went out to the cosmos to meet all the bright lights and great energy that run and govern and control the universe."
Back down on earth, in the Alchemy dungeon, the piercing is fairly simple. My chest is disinfected and two stainless steel autoclave hooks are inserted into the pectorals, just below the skin. They are brought back out again, corked for safety and stability, and connected by rope. Because there is a little blood and serosanguineous fluid — or a lot, in my case — no one is supposed to touch the actual hooks, only the rope. (The piercers place a high priority on initial sterilization and on avoiding any possible contamination afterward, and make a point of inculcating this in newbies' heads.) The 11-gauge hooks are about the size used in an average septum piercing, or about one-tenth of an inch in diameter. Although treated with reverence, the hooks are actually basic fishing gear, manufactured by a now-defunct company in Elko, Nev., and later cleaned up and made very smooth.
When the hook pierces my skin, it hurts a bit more than my septum ring did. But by remaining calm and breathing exactly as I am told, it's bearable. My boyfriend is holding my hand, and another friend's head is steadying my knee — possibly unnecessarily, but it's a sweet gesture. During the process, I grimace and perspire, but I'm proud to say that I neither yelp nor flinch. (Again, my real anxiety was chickening out halfway through.) I'm relieved when the second hook doesn't hurt any more than the first. For good measure, I get a Third Eye — a thin needle inserted vertically through my lower forehead. Yossie (a Fakir protégé who prefers not to share his surname) says it adds "just a bit of sparkle around the edges," and at that point I figure one more piercing makes almost no difference. I have four permanent piercings already; for a couple of hours, I will have seven.
After a few manic minutes of grinning and preening in front of a mirror as if I've just gotten a dramatic hairstyle change, I signal to my eager boyfriend that it's okay for him to start tugging at me. The initial sensitivity decreases quickly, but even the tiniest change in pressure is palpable — so much so that even when relaxing his pull, he has to do it very slowly because the sensation is overwhelming. Within 10 minutes, I am completely lost in it.
Even the passive act of standing in place getting pulled is exceptional. Lying on a bench with a makeshift blindfold over my eyes for some sensory deprivation is even better. Someone shows me a technique for guiding myself around the room by my own rope, which confuses the nervous system into making you wonder whether you're leading or following. You become like a possessed Ouija planchette moving of its own accord.
Given the surroundings, it is undeniably a sexual experience, but few men, if any, appear to be aroused. Some of the veteran players are engaged in more advanced techniques, sitting opposite one another on the floor with the soles of their feet touching, and pulling each other's ropes. I don't consider myself a spiritual person, but I like new experiences as much as anyone, and the difference between people's approaches to the universe often comes down to a matter of vocabulary. I don't see God or leave my body behind, but I do go on a trip. Since comparisons between subjective experiences are more or less impossible, one person's spiritual transcendence is going to be another's momentary ecstasy in the here and now, and that's all right.
"It's a chance to go within," Mark Galipeau, one of my fellow participants, later tells me. "I don't use drugs as a gateway to spirituality, so I think the hook-pull takes me to a deep spiritual place. I don't do a lot of deep, reflective meditative practice in my daily life, and I find these moments give me a chance to go with an intention and be open to spirit and clarity, and find some answers to whatever it is I'm working on."
An elementary school teacher from Sonoma, Galipeau began attending hook-pulls every year after he watched a suspension at Saratoga Springs, a retreat center in Lake County. "I thought, 'Wow, this is wild,'" he says. "There was an opportunity to do a pull in a safe, small community."
Eventually, Yossie declared Galipeau fit to try a suspension at another event in Mendocino County. "We did one on our back under a beautiful oak tree for about 45 minutes," Galipeau says. "Some people do triathlons. Others do rock-climbing. I think it speaks to people who like to push extremes."
There are no suspensions today at Alchemy. When the time comes to remove my own hooks, the sensation is barely perceptible, and the initial giddiness had long since mellowed. In the end, I am almost chagrined that the experience has been a junior-grade session compared to some of the advanced workshops, although Yossie assures me this is not the case.
I'm open to the likelihood that my fairly militant atheism might be a hurdle on the path to getting the most out of the hook-pull experience, just as my self-conscious ungainliness keeps me from attaining certain yoga poses. But no one is policing anyone's ideological purity. (Still, I can't help but bike away to the Eagle beer bust to show off the little holes in my chest and evangelize on their behalf.)
Anecdotally, it seems as though extreme sexual practices are roaring back in San Francisco. I've seen T-shirts around town that say, "Fisting is the new oral." I ask Yossie if he thinks piercing is the new fisting. He shakes his head. "It's an outlier. Fisting is a sexual activity," he says. "Historically, piercing and the piercing ritual are much more of a spiritual activity. One could argue that they're not dissimilar," he adds, but quickly points out that those who have practiced the tradition historically "don't claim it as an ecstatic experience — they claim it as a religious experience."
Again, differences in vocabulary will inevitably cloud adequate description. But there's one word that occurred to me during the two hours I was pierced, and which both Fakir and Yossie use as well. That word is "aliveness," and it has connotations to the religion I've long since bid goodbye to. But there's no denying that a hook-pull is a form of communion, and a very fulfilling one at that.
For sure, I'll be doing it again this year.
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