© Winter Beaumont 2023     
 

Henosis
2022
participatory performance, ~30 minutes per session
exhibited at Chaos Magic, Nottingham 2022
Henosis is a one-to-one role playing excercise in which members of the public are invited to enter into a conversation designed to provoke a mystical experience within the participant.

“I am met with an ethereal creature, horns and white outfit/mask, kind eyes and voice, I sit at a table with my guide . . . I speak as this part of self, each time exploring the role played by it being a part of this whole self I inhabit” – Rachel Parry, participant

Henosis is a classical Greek word referring to mystical “oneness” and “union” with the Source, the One, the Monad, “God”, the All, the Universe.

There are many ways in which a person may experience mystical oneness with the All, including but not limited to: meditation, the consumption of entheogenic plants or synthetic hallucinogens, and sensory deprivation. However, it may also be experienced through simply thinking certain thoughts in a certain order. A person may be encouraged to think these thoughts by being prompted by a set of specially designed questions, and thus experience a mystical sense of oneness with the universe; What if feels like to be God

Henosis was adapted and elaborated upon by the artist for performance from an exercise shared by occultist Denis Poisson for his YouTube Channel: Foolish Fish, which was in turn an adaptation of a technique developed by American Zen mystic Dennis Merzel.