Sasha Grey (& THE BANANA QUESTION)

In the beginning, there was a body without myth.

She was born as *Marina Ann Hantzis* in the outer provinces of California, a territory devoid of mystery, where nothing is expected and therefore nothing is forgiven. Such places are fertile for the impossible. For sanctity does not arise from purity, but from excess—and excess demands a vessel.

Books, cinema, and the silent gravity of images formed her early catechism. She took another name, as magicians and saints do when they renounce the tyranny of origin. Thus, *Sasha Grey* was anointed—not washed clean, but deliberately marked.

At eighteen, she entered the profane sanctuary where desire is bought, observed, regulated, and denied meaning. Yet she refused denial. What the world called obscenity, she treated as knowledge through exposure. She did not offer herself as sacrifice; she crossed herself willingly into the fire. Eroticism as the affirmation of life unto death, the breaking of limits not to destroy the self, but to touch continuity. What others treated as consumption, she transformed into ritual. Her presence was intellectual, confrontational, unsanctified—an affront to moral comfort. She did not merely perform; she embodied contradiction, and for this she was crowned and condemned in equal measure. She revealed that beauty, when conscious, becomes dangerous. Desire ceased to be illusion; it became method.

In this phase, she resembled Venus rising not from sea foam, but from static and neon—a goddess born in an age of cameras and judgment. Beauty, here, was not passive. Desire was not innocent. It was conscious, armed, and self-aware.

Yet no true saint remains confined to one Gospel.

She departed before martyrdom could be imposed upon her. Cinema beyond the margins called her, and she crossed again—this time into the house of auteurs. In The Girlfriend Experience, she appeared less as actress than as icon: cool, distant, transactional, and strangely sacred. The screen did not redeem her; it revealed her. She had learned the discipline of presence.

Her devotion extended into sound. With aTelecine, she entered the domain of noise, repetition, and invocation. Industrial rhythms functioned as mantras; distortion as trance. This was not entertainment, but liturgy for the sleepless.

In writing, she offered confession without repentance. Her novels are diaries of desire and power written not to seduce, but to map the labyrinth. She spoke in interviews with the calm of one who has survived her own myth and now controls its retelling.

Here the figure of Babalon emerges fully—not the caricature of scandal, but the red goddess: sovereign of experience, bearer of the Cup, who drinks without shame and is not destroyed. Sasha does not ask for absolution. She transforms exposure into knowledge. She teaches that autonomy is a spiritual discipline.

Neither redeemed nor fallen, neither muse nor martyr. She is a modern Saint of multiplicity, canonized not by church or industry, but by persistence. Her miracles are reinventions. Her relics are recordings, texts, and nights remembered by strangers.

Not a Saint of purity—but of choice.

Not Venus untouched—but Venus aware.

Not Babalon as scandal—but Babalon as sovereign flame.

Blessed be the woman who refused 

to be only one thing.*

Iglesia del Surf del Cristo Risueño de la Costa LTD. MMXXVI ©