The Power of Spice and Spicy Shadow Work With Manny Modupé | Penetrate Radio, Episode 15
In Episode 15 of Penetrate Radio, Lucy Baldwin speaks with Manny Modupé, a Black, Indigenous, two-spirit sexologist, magician, writer, creator, and advocate for awakened sexuality, decolonization, and embodied intimacy.
Manny’s work lives at the intersection of sex, race, gender, colonialism, sacred sexuality, Existential Kink, BABALON, consent, erotic reclamation, anarchy, rupture, repair, and the delicious trouble of telling the truth in a world that would often rather keep everything polite, sterile, and controlled.
This conversation is spicy in the deepest sense. It is not spicy as branding. It is spicy as heat, flavor, intensity, taboo, delight, precision, and life force. Manny brings a radical and deeply embodied perspective on how sexuality, shadow work, pleasure, trauma, social systems, and intimacy all belong in the same conversation.
Watch or listen to Episode 15 of Penetrate Radio here:
Key Takeaways
In this episode, Lucy and Manny explore:
Manny’s path from Christianity, sexology, and sacred sexuality into Existential Kink
leaving the church and reckoning with colonialism, queerness, race, violence, and God
why some sacred sexuality spaces fail when they are not racially, sexually, or relationally expansive
the eviction notice that became an immediate Existential Kink test
BABALON as the whore mother, mother of all, and force of wild adoration
no-touch orgasm, energetic masturbation, and the body’s capacity for erotic power
the importance of consent, safety, containment, and sexual literacy
why sex is about much more than sex
intimacy as an individual, interpersonal, and systemic revolution
orgasms as surrender, altered consciousness, and a profound human phenomenon
how Existential Kink can be sexual, mental, energetic, or spiritual
Manny’s work with the devil, the heretic, trickster energy, and being misunderstood
rupture and repair as a path to wholeness
Manny Modupé and the World of Spicy Shadow Work
Manny Modupé introduces himself as a Black, Indigenous, two-spirit person, sexologist, magician, and someone deeply devoted to talking about sexuality, colonialism, decolonization, intimacy, and the body. That combination tells you a lot about the conversation before it even begins.
For Manny, sex is never only sex. It is tied to power, race, religion, gender, consent, trauma, embodiment, systems, pleasure, colonialism, and the possibility of real intimacy. Their work does not sanitize sexuality into something safe and acceptable for polite spiritual audiences. It keeps the heat in.
This is what makes the episode so alive. Manny is not interested in shadow work that avoids race, sex, taboo, violence, religion, or the body. Their magic is spicy because it refuses to separate personal liberation from relational and systemic transformation.
Leaving the Church and Finding the Missing Piece
Manny first encountered Existential Kink in 2020, during a period of major rupture. They were in graduate school, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement was unfolding after George Floyd’s murder, and they were leaving the church.
The break with Christianity was not casual. Manny names a deep confrontation with the violence of slavery, colonialism, oppression, and the question of how any God could justify such suffering. They had been raised with intense ideas about sin, hell, queerness, and perfectionism, and the body still remembered the fear even after the mind had moved on.
At the same time, Manny was in a sexology program that included sacred sexuality but did not feel racially relevant, queer enough, trans-inclusive enough, or structurally honest enough. Existential Kink appeared in the syllabus, and when Manny read it, something clicked. It was the missing piece: a way to work with the taboo, the contradiction, the secret pleasure, the violence, the kink, and the whole messy field of being alive.
When Sacred Sexuality Spaces Become Too Narrow
Manny describes feeling othered in the sexology program because the space was largely white, cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous, and organized around emulating the teachers rather than becoming more fully oneself.
That is an important critique. Sacred sexuality spaces can easily reproduce the same hierarchies they claim to heal. They can speak of liberation while centering whiteness, straightness, cisness, monogamy, charisma, teacher worship, and spiritual conformity. They can want the aesthetics of sexual awakening without doing the deeper work around race, gender, power, and social harm.
Manny even offered the program a framework for addressing racism in the company, but the advice was not meaningfully implemented. That experience matters because it shows the gap between “spiritual work” as performance and spiritual work as actual accountability.
Shadow Alchemy belongs in that gap. It asks what a space is really devoted to: the teacher’s image, or the transformation of the whole field?
The Eviction Notice as an Existential Kink Test
When Manny began consciously choosing to find the kink in everything, reality immediately gave them an initiation: an eviction notice.
That kind of moment reveals the difference between understanding Existential Kink as an idea and practicing it as a real relationship with life. It is easy to say you want to find the kink in everything until the thing is urgent, scary, financial, and practical.
Manny describes a three-day portal of ritual, autopilot, and magical response. At the end of it, they were not evicted. They also received three months of rental support, and the landlord became much kinder after Manny did a sweetener spell.
The story is funny, but it is also deeply instructive. Existential Kink is not abstract. It meets you in rent, survival, panic, power, and the places where spiritual language suddenly has to become real.
BABALON as the Mother of All
Lucy and Manny spend time talking about BABALON, and the conversation becomes one of the juiciest parts of the episode.
For Manny, BABALON offered a powerful contrast to the colonialist God they had rejected. She is not a deity of purity, disappointment, punishment, or exclusion. She is the mother of all, the one whose wild adoration no child can escape. That includes the harmed and the one who harms. The oppressed and the oppressor. The systems trying to control us and the systems living inside us.
That is jarring, and Manny names that directly. BABALON is not only the love-and-light version of universal love. She is the whore mother, the mother that fucks, the one in eternal orgasmic acceptance, the one who dissolves shame into pleasure.
This is deeply Existential Kink. BABALON is not disappointed in the shadow. She is the force that can include all of it without flinching.
The Kink of Loving the Harmed and the Harmful
Manny offers a striking image for BABALON: doing dom work with old racist white men who feel awful about themselves because they are racist, flogging them, being paid as a kind of interpersonal reparation, and then giving them aftercare.
That image is intentionally provocative, but it contains a profound piece of the episode’s medicine. It refuses the simplistic split where one side is pure and the other is outside love forever. It does not deny harm. It does not erase rage. It does not make oppression cute. Instead, it imagines a deeply charged interpersonal ritual where punishment, payment, confession, reparations, erotic power, and care all coexist.
That is spicy shadow work.
It asks what repair might look like when it is not sterile, abstract, or purely intellectual. What if repair is embodied? What if it includes power, money, sensation, aftercare, and the full recognition of harm?
The Devil, Diablo, and the Heretic Within
One of the hardest archetypes for Manny to integrate has been the devil.
Even after leaving Christianity, the body remembered hell. The mind could understand that heaven and hell are states of consciousness, but the nervous system still carried childhood teachings about sin, queerness, punishment, and eternal damnation.
Manny found more space by relating to the archetype as Diablo and through trickster energy. They began seeing the devil not as pure evil, but as a figure holding taboo wisdom. They connect this to the snake in the Bible: the one framed as villainous, but also the one willing to hold knowledge, disruption, and forbidden truth.
This is a powerful Shadow Alchemy move. The devil becomes not merely the enemy, but the heretic, the trickster, the one who carries the sensation of being misunderstood. The one who holds truth that the official God-story could not tolerate.
The Kink of Being Misunderstood
Manny names having a kink for being misunderstood, while also wanting to be understood.
That both-and is important. Shadow work does not require every part of us to become simple. You can enjoy being the heretic, the villain, the one people misread, the one holding taboo wisdom, and still long to be seen clearly by people who can actually meet you.
Social media intensifies this pattern because it constantly invites misunderstanding. People project, distort, react, accuse, and simplify. For Manny, this becomes a repeated lesson: can they let people see them however they will, while still honoring the desire to be understood where true understanding is possible?
This is the kind of paradox Existential Kink loves. The kink does not erase the wound. The wound does not erase the kink. Both are part of the living material.
Sexual Curiosity, Trauma, and Reclamation
Manny speaks honestly about being fascinated by sex from a young age and also experiencing unwanted sexualized touch as a child before they had language for it.
This is tender and important terrain. Manny wanted to understand sexuality partly because it was fascinating, and partly because they needed to understand why people kept touching them in ways that felt confusing or violating. Later, as an adult, they reclaimed some of those sensations by consciously asking people at a sex conference if they could sit in their laps. What had once been confusing and nonconsensual became something they could choose, negotiate, and remap.
That is a profound example of reclamation. The point is not that everyone should do that exact thing. The point is that the body can sometimes recover agency by re-entering a charged territory with choice, consent, and adult self-trust.
Shadow Alchemy is not about denying what happened. It is about discovering whether the body can have a different experience now.
No-Touch Orgasms and Energetic Masturbation
Manny also introduces the world of no-touch orgasms and energetic masturbation.
They describe learning to move sexual energy through the body with breath, hip circles, orgasmic breathing, and attention. Rather than requiring physical touch, the practice works with energy, sensation, imagination, breath, and embodied arousal. Manny even describes energetically masturbating on a bus while enjoying the sensation of someone from an old internet conflict being afraid of them.
This will probably blow some people’s minds, as Lucy says in the episode.
But beneath the humor and shock, there is a larger teaching: the body is capable of much more than many people realize. Orgasm is not only mechanical. Arousal is not only genital. Pleasure can be energetic, psychological, spiritual, relational, and symbolic.
This is part of why Manny’s work is so expansive. They take sexuality out of the tiny box culture keeps trying to put it in.
Safety Is the Foundation of Pleasure
When Lucy asks what Manny would say to people who have a hard time orgasming, Manny begins with safety.
That answer matters. People often skip safety because it does not sound sexy, but without safety, the sexy part may not be accessible at all. Manny asks a series of practical questions: do you feel safe in your own body? Are there environmental stressors? Is the space clean enough for you to relax? Are you with someone you actually want to be with? Can you communicate your yes, no, and maybe? Are you taking enough time?
This is such an important corrective to performance-based sex advice. Manny is not starting with technique. They are starting with the foundation that makes pleasure possible.
Saturn before Venus. Structure before surrender. Safety before orgasm.
Consent, CNC, and Sexual Literacy
Manny is passionate about consent and sexual literacy because sexuality can be both liberating and harmful depending on the container.
They speak about the popularity of consenting non-consent fantasies and the importance of talking about them explicitly. A fantasy can be beautiful, erotic, and valid, but it must not be assumed. If someone wants to be woken up sexually, that needs to be discussed and agreed upon beforehand.
This distinction is crucial. Kink is not the absence of boundaries. Kink requires more clarity, not less.
Manny’s work is not simply about helping people become more sexually adventurous. It is about building the foundational literacy that many people skipped: safety, communication, context, pacing, yes, no, maybe, and the ability to stay with sensation without immediately acting on it.
The No-Goal Orgasm
Manny introduces the idea of the no-goal orgasm, which they describe almost like a Jedi mind trick.
When the body hears “there is no pressure,” the floodgates can open. Instead of making orgasm the target, the practice becomes about communion with the body, sensation, arousal, breath, and experience. You can still expect pleasure. You can still want orgasm. But the point expands.
Lucy loves Manny’s question: “What else can I have?”
That question is so much richer than “Did I orgasm?” It asks: how safe can I feel? How free? How worshiped? How present? How connected? How surrendered? How held?
This reframes sexual experience from a goal-oriented task into a holistic field of pleasure, intimacy, worship, and embodiment.
Orgasm as Altered Consciousness
Lucy names something profound about orgasm: it is strange and amazing that human beings have the capacity for it at all.
Orgasm is an altered state of consciousness. It is surrender. It is intensity. It is pleasure, nervous system release, body magic, mystery, and sometimes creation itself. Lucy jokes that she had sex and now there are people, which is both funny and genuinely astounding.
Manny agrees that we do not sit with the glory and magnitude of that magic enough. Even as a non-binary person who does not want children, they can recognize how powerful and strange it is that bodies can create life.
This is part of the episode’s bigger point. Sex is not trivial. It is not only a private pleasure or a cultural taboo. It is one of the primary places where the mystery of being embodied becomes undeniable.
Sex Is More Than Sex
Manny says clearly that sex is much more than sex.
Underneath their work is what they call the intimacy revolution. First intimacy with the self, then intimacy with others, then systemic intimacy. This is one of the most important frameworks in the episode.
Individual intimacy means being able to see yourself, feel yourself, inhabit your body, and meet your desires and wounds honestly. Interpersonal intimacy means being able to relate to others with consent, presence, care, and truth. Systemic intimacy means creating institutions and systems where people are treated as whole humans, not as numbers, problems, or disembodied functions.
This is where Manny’s work becomes political and spiritual at the same time. Sexual liberation is not only about sex. It is about whether humans can see humans as humans.
Systemic Intimacy in Medicine and Courts
Manny gives examples of places where systemic intimacy is desperately needed: medical settings and courtrooms.
Hospitals can be sterile in the worst sense. The body is treated clinically, but not always intimately. A sexologist with cancer may ask how treatment will affect her sex life and receive no meaningful answer. Patients may be treated as cases rather than full people with bodies, relationships, sexuality, fear, dignity, and desire.
Manny also mentions courtrooms, where people are often reduced to numbers or categories rather than held as complex human beings. In both settings, the absence of intimacy creates harm.
Manny has helped facilitate heart-listening practices with a small reproductive justice clinic, teaching providers about fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses, embodiment, and listening. The practice allowed people to share honestly, witness each other, and bring more humanity into the field.
That is systemic intimacy in action.
Existential Kink and Sex
Lucy asks whether Existential Kink is a sexual practice. Manny’s answer is nuanced.
Sometimes EK feels sexually turned on. Sometimes it can involve genital sensation, throbbing, arousal, or erotic charge. But most of the time, Manny experiences it as a deep mind fuck. It is like watching a psychological thriller, engaging in heated intellectual debate, or being mentally and spiritually stroked by paradox.
This is a helpful distinction. Existential Kink is not primarily a stroking practice, though it may overlap with sexuality. It is erotic in the larger sense because it deals with charge, polarity, pleasure, paradox, surrender, resistance, and the strange satisfaction of reality touching the psyche in exactly the sensitive spot.
Manny sometimes imagines the ego being stroked, the brain being stroked, or a big clit in the sky being stroked. That image is funny, cosmic, and very accurate to the spirit of the practice.
The God and the Heretic
Manny’s upcoming program, Rupture and Repair, works with the God and the heretic within.
This is a beautiful continuation of the episode’s themes. The inner God may represent authority, wholeness, power, sovereignty, creation, and the part of us that claims reality. The heretic represents taboo, exile, blasphemy, disruption, queerness, refusal, and the part willing to be misunderstood.
Manny connects the work to rupture and repair, taboo, kink, exile, being blamed, and coming into a new form of wholeness. They use the image of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Wholeness after rupture does not look like the original unbroken object. It is a new beauty, with the break included and illuminated.
That is Shadow Alchemy. The crack does not disappear. It becomes part of the gold.
The Real Power of Spice
The power of spice is not just being shocking.
Spice wakes the body up. It brings heat. It interrupts numbness. It reveals where taboo, shame, curiosity, fear, desire, and intensity live. Manny’s spice is not random provocation. It is part of their medicine.
They talk about sex, queerness, racism, Christianity, hell, domming racist white men, BABALON, no-touch orgasms, clits, abortions, systemic intimacy, and the devil in one conversation because all of those things belong to the same human field.
Spicy shadow work refuses to leave the charged material out. It does not make the sacred clean at the expense of truth. It insists that the body, the wound, the joke, the orgasm, the system, the heretic, and the God all enter the room together.
That is what makes it powerful.
The Real Gift of This Episode
The real gift of this episode is Manny’s refusal to separate sexuality from liberation.
Sex is personal, but it is also political. Pleasure is intimate, but it is also systemic. Consent is about the bedroom, but it is also about institutions. BABALON is mythic, but she is also embodied in how we hold the harmed and the harmful. The devil is theological, but also psychological. Orgasms are physical, but also magical.
Manny’s work reminds us that intimacy begins in the body and then radiates outward.
If we can learn to feel, consent, ask, repair, play, grieve, get off, listen, and see one another more fully, the revolution is not only theoretical.
It becomes embodied.
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Lucy Baldwin (00:01.489)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Penetrate Radio. I am Lucy Baldwin and I'm here today with Manny Modupe. And Manny has been through Penetrate. They have also written multiple erotic-ish books and generally...
Manny's a pretty prolific writer and creator and advocate for sex and awakened sexuality. And tell us more, tell us more about yourself, Manny.
Manny (00:38.894)
That was absolutely amazing. Thank you. I fully received that. Yes. So I am Manny Modupe. My pronouns are he and they. I am a black, indigenous, two-spirit person, sexologist, magician, deeply into pussy.
and talking about Lucy online and colonialism and decolonizing the world, starting with our intimate relationships. I love to talk about that and our relationship to social media and yeah, super into EK and Lucy's teachings. Her work has helped me infinitely.
Lucy Baldwin (01:27.783)
So Manny, I want to hear about where were you in your life when you discovered EK slash ShadowWorks?
Manny (01:39.054)
So initially, that was like 2020. So was in grad school and it was right out along the time of like George Floyd and the like resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and
this reckoning inside of me happening with finally leaving the church and being like, no, fuck that. Like there is absolutely no justification for this level of violence, for slavery, for all these renforms of colonialism. And God has some explaining to do if this is their idea of a good world or whatever in the hell. So I left.
So I had like so many questions and I was in this sexology program where I was learning about sacred sexuality and it was amazing in a lot of ways, but then also not racially relevant at all. And so I felt othered and ostracized and ended up leaving that program. Inside of the syllabus for that program was EK.
And I read that book from cover to cover and just fell in love. was just like, whoa, this is what I've been missing.
Lucy Baldwin (03:03.761)
Manny, I'm so curious, I just want to dig in here and ask you this and you don't have to answer, but I'm just so curious, what was it that made you feel othered about that program that you were in?
Manny (03:14.582)
Yeah, so there were quite a few things, but many of the people, it seemed like they came to the space to emulate our teachers and like become them, which I was very put off by. That felt more like a cult and I just was not interested in becoming someone else. I wanted to remain as myself and I felt like that was the point, but somewhere along the way it got lost.
and then it just became worshiping of, of this person and not actually, the work. And then at the same time, the, was one of very few trans people in the program. And so it was like very heterosexual, very cisgender and monogamous. And I'm none of those things. a very white program. And so they just couldn't.
Manny (04:13.694)
relate and they were attempting to understand why they kept attracting racist people to their programs. And I was just like, well, you kind of the door wide open for lots of racist people to walk in. And I actually sat with them and gave them like a full framework and lots of advice and support on how to deal with the racism in their company. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they did none of it.
Lucy Baldwin (04:45.98)
That is generous of you.
Manny (04:48.462)
Thank
Lucy Baldwin (04:49.276)
I'm curious, so tell me, I want to know like what was... Were there any like really big shifts or breakthroughs that happened when you first started doing EK?
Manny (05:04.064)
Yeah, the consciously choosing to find the kink in everything part was hilarious because the universe tested me so hard immediately after and was like, you want to find the kink in everything? Cool. Find the kink in this eviction notice. And I was like, wait, wait, wait. Wow, that's a lot.
And I was just like, I can't find the kinks, this is a real world situation. And the universe was like, oh, is it a real world situation? I was like, oh my God, it's like, why are you like this? And so essentially I did like a bunch of different rituals in this three day portal that I really couldn't explain just because I don't really remember. was kind of like on autopilot.
And so, anyway, at the end of the three days, we did not get evicted. We also got three months of rental support. And then our landlord started being very, very nice to us. I did do a sweetener spell because he was so angry and I was just like, dude, fuck off.
Lucy Baldwin (06:13.718)
powerful. then so and then tell me what happened from there because you ended up in Penetrate like how did you get there?
Manny (06:22.166)
Yeah, Babylon, fucking loved all the Babylon rituals. That was so fun. And just, felt so good to have such an opposite to the colonialist God that was just like, that created slavery, that created all these forms of oppression and cancer and just sick kids, all the things, right? And just like, I was like,
I hate this a lot. I need some other, I need something else. But so having that contrast of a deity that loves all things, that fucks all things was really cool and also like jarring because I recognized that when I heard all things, I was thinking about the love and light version of that. I wasn't thinking about how the holistic, like what does that fully mean? And
Over the years I've started to see it, was like, okay, this is what it means to be the mother of all and to not have any disappointment in any of your children and to love them fully and not have like disappointment. I love the phrase. It was like none of my children will escape my wild adoration. I love that so much.
And it was soothing, so soothing for me as someone who just dealt with a lot of trauma and pain and tough stuff.
Lucy Baldwin (07:58.321)
Yeah. I want to ask you a question that you don't have to answer, I'm just, I don't know. It's just where my curiosity is taking me right now. I want to know, Manny, what is the weirdest thing you've ever gotten off on?
Manny (08:10.838)
Okay, so like there was this... Yeah, there was this girl that I had internet beef with online.
Lucy Baldwin (08:11.676)
according to you.
Manny (08:17.742)
and I fully forgot about her existence. But one day I was on a bus and I saw this girl and she kept she was so jumpy and she kept looking at me and I was like, who is this person? Why is she looking at me? And then I heard her voice and where she was going and I said, that's that girl I had beef with. my God, did she look scared? You look so terrified.
And so I was sitting in the back of the bus and just watching her be scared of me and no one's ever been scared of me. So I was just like really turned on and I literally started energetically masturbating in the back of the bus.
Lucy Baldwin (08:54.384)
Hehehehe
Lucy Baldwin (08:58.716)
amazing. Okay, I'm curious. I'm wondering if you would be well now you've mentioned energetically masturbating some kind of like, please say more.
Manny (09:11.382)
Yeah. So that Secret Sexuality program that I was talking about, they taught us about no touch orgasms and how you can come without touching yourself. And for me, when I first started that program, I never masturbated. And so when I started, yeah, it wild. I was so curious.
I was masturbating everywhere. was like, humping furniture. was like,
you know, just like using the walls, like everything. I was like, I need to figure out all the ways that I can come without touching myself. And so I got super curious and I started doing this practice that I love teaching. But it's basically a no touch G-spot orgasm and where you just like move the energy through your body, through different sequences and combined with breath work, hip circles and what is it called?
orgasmic breathing, where you breathe as if you're already in the orgasm and then it takes you through. It's a very quick practice. I love teaching it. but yeah, so fun.
Lucy Baldwin (10:25.638)
Wow, that is, yeah, I feel like that's gonna blow a lot of people's minds. Just the idea of that kind of blows my mind a little bit.
Excuse me. So I'm wondering though, I do want to circle back to Babylon. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to, just for our listeners who don't know much about Babylon or maybe you've never even heard of Babylon, how would you describe Babylon?
Manny (10:41.454)
Mm.
Manny (10:53.646)
Babylon is a frequency that's so hard to explain but I've been trying to explain. I think of it like
So I've wanted to do some dom work for a while, and I specifically want to flog like old racist white men who feel like shit about themselves because they're racist, and then they give me money afterwards. But because it is dom work, that means there have to be aftercare. So that might look like me holding them afterwards and me pouring love and affection onto this person who hates people who look like me.
who has been implicit and complicit in a lot of harm. And so that's how I see Babylon. Babylon loves the harmed and the person who causes harm. Babylon loves the systems, every system, the ones that are trying to control us and the ones that live within us.
and it's jarring to process but it's also really beautiful and kinky and hot.
And because I have such a mommy kink, it really just lands for me. And it makes sense that she is the mother, but she also wants to fuck you. And it reminds me so much of like, like I just wrote this piece about the desexualization of mothers and how it makes zero sense for people to decide that mothers shouldn't have sex. And it's just so pervasive in our culture and it's just weird. And it's just like, guys, a lot of them had to have sex to become mothers. So what are we talking about?
Lucy Baldwin (12:43.414)
Yeah, our culture is so fucking weird about sex. Yeah.
Manny (12:46.765)
Yeah.
Lucy Baldwin (12:50.49)
I'm so curious about, yeah, and also Babylon is for people who really don't know about Babylon, like she's really like the whore goddess, whore mother, whore mother goddess, like no boundaries. Yeah, mother fuck, like just in eternal orgasmic bliss. Yeah. And that orgasmic state is like tapping into, like when you're in that orgasmic state, you are tapping into Babylon.
Manny (12:59.213)
Yes.
mother of heart.
Lucy Baldwin (13:20.188)
Yeah, and it's very EK, right? It's very EK. It's like this, like you're dissolving all of the... Everything. Everything is dissolving into pleasure. You know, and acceptance and shamelessness, even shame.
Manny (13:38.914)
Yeah, absolutely.
Lucy Baldwin (13:43.226)
Yeah. So tell me, wait, where were we? So you.
Did we get to... I don't know. Tell me what you're up to now. Tell me what you're doing now.
Manny (13:58.574)
Yeah, so there's a couple things. One, I am doing a program called Sex Anarchy, where it's essentially inspired by people that will receive like yearly tarot readings that are like for the year ahead, things like that. And so with the Sex Anarchy session, essentially it is one session where we sit down and we work with one thing in your life. It could be anything related to sex,
gender relationships or being a more being more anarchist and So I really love those sessions. They are $500 apiece and then there's also this other program that I'm starting very soon and by the time you're hearing this the application will be open and It's called rupture and repair
And this is my baby. I'm so excited to introduce this, but essentially it is a lot about our trickster energy. It's about,
rupturing and repairing inside of ourselves the God and the heretic within. So essentially, not only acknowledging those parts of us, but also working with them, working with the taboo and the kink of getting off of being misunderstood, being ostracized, exiled, being blamed.
And so like we'll sit with all these written woundings from our inner God and our inner heretic and then also to come into wholeness. The image that I've created for this course is like, it's based off Japanese philosophy. When a vase breaks and they put it back together and they use gold to fill in the cracks.
Manny (15:57.196)
That is what wholeness is like to me when you include the light and the dark. It doesn't look anything like it did before, but you're whole now.
Lucy Baldwin (16:07.695)
Mmm, beautiful.
Lucy Baldwin (16:11.951)
Yeah, I'm super curious, what are some of the things that have been like hardest for you to integrate?
Manny (16:20.3)
The devil. I realized that the archetype of it, and hell, the devil and hell, and this, even though I'm not religious in any way, there's sometimes this residue still of like...
like my body remembers feeling like it was a real place and feeling like I would get sent there for being who I am and Even though I know now heaven and hell are states of consciousness
my body remembers all the rhetoric being pushed and forced on me as a child. And then this character, this like devil character with horns and a pitchfork and like, even though part of me knows I'm like, yeah, that's like a fucking fantasy. That's like the fairy tale. There's like the fucking tooth fairy or whatever. But also there's like, I hear a lot of spiritualists say that,
The biggest trick of the devil is convincing people that he doesn't exist. And I find that to be interesting. But what I connect to now is Diablo. think saying it in a different language makes more sense. And then also understanding trickster energy better is really so much more helpful to understand that like.
this deity is actually just is helping. I think about like the snake in the Bible and how the snake was posited as the evil character. But the snake was just holding taboo wisdom and was knew more than God, but was also an aspect of God. And so like when people walk away from that story and they think that, the snake is evil and bad and wrong, like
Manny (18:10.508)
The snake is just the only one in the story that was willing to hold that truth and to hold the, the sensation of people thinking that you're the villain. And that is like, can be really challenging. And something that's also challenging sometimes is like, like I definitely have a kink for being misunderstood, but then sometimes I'm like, but I really want to be understood. so holding the both and of like,
letting people see me in whatever way they want to, practicing that in real life and then also having to practice it with social media has been like, shit, now I gotta learn the lesson again.
Lucy Baldwin (18:52.301)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting. The devil. How long has it been since you broke from Christianity?
Manny (19:04.493)
Six years.
Lucy Baldwin (19:09.265)
six years. So that's like not that long. I mean, and you've come like a really, you've come like a really long way. But something you alluded to, like, it sounds like you felt like you were wrong, like that you just by being yourself, we're going to go to hell potentially. Like, tell me more about that.
Manny (19:29.556)
Yeah, yeah, I remember being like seven or eight years old hearing about how queerness was an abomination, how lying and stealing and all these different things were wrong and just it seems so black and white. They're like, these are the exact rules and if you don't follow them, then you're going to hell. And the extreme perfectionism of it was just like.
impossible. It was like, well, nobody's perfect, but we all have to try really, really hard to be. And it's just like, okay, but why? And so, I don't know. I also remember hearing like, by the time you waken up, you've already committed seven sins. And I'm like, what did I just open my eyes? Like, I don't understand.
Lucy Baldwin (20:19.474)
my gosh, that's really extreme. What sect of Christianity were you in?
Manny (20:24.558)
Baptist.
Lucy Baldwin (20:26.331)
Okay. I don't know that much because I'm not, I'm not really, I mean, I was not really raised in religion, but I just, I'm so curious because I thought that it was like more open. I thought it was more open-minded now. I thought people understood that like being queers, like, I don't know. I thought we got over that a long time ago, but I think I just live in a little enlightened bubble of people who are just like really down with whatever.
Manny (20:52.044)
I'm okay. In some spaces, yes, but in a lot, it's still really radical and new and different. And I remember being 16 and I went to my pastor, I had all these books and I was like, hey, like, I'm not understanding why queerness is a sin. Like, why is it bad?
And so he's like, well, let's go to the Bible and we go to Leviticus and he reads this scripture and I said, well, can we read the whole chapter? He said, yes. And for those who don't know, like basically in heavy trigger warning, what happens is these group of drunk men come into a town and they confess that they want to go rape some children. And they like pull up this guy's door and they're like, hey, we're looking for little boys. And.
So the guy was like, well, no, I've got some daughters inside who are also children. And so he's like offering his children. And I asked my pastor, like, what parent would do that? I don't understand why he would say, no, take my daughters instead. My pastor looked me in my eyes and said, it was better for the girls to get raped than the boys. And I said, wow. Like, I just stared at him.
and he stared at me because I don't think that he could even believe that he said it either. Like we were just staring at each other like what the fuck.
Lucy Baldwin (22:17.307)
I didn't even know what say to that either.
Manny (22:19.222)
Yeah. And I remember telling him, I was like, so if people come into a town confessing a crime, you can just throw them in jail. Like, why do we have to decide, like, which children deserve more protection? Can we just protect all the children?
Lucy Baldwin (22:20.924)
Yeah.
Lucy Baldwin (22:36.655)
think that's a good question. my God. And so now you're very passionate about sex, I feel like. That's my impression of it. And I'm curious, yeah, like why are you so passionate about it?
Manny (22:38.57)
Yep.
Manny (22:46.67)
Yeah.
Manny (22:50.99)
I always have been. I remember being a little kid and just being super excited about it. And I just was like, oh my god, this is so cool. Like everybody's so into it. But I also was like, I don't want anybody to touch me. So that was interesting. And I just, I started researching it. I was like, I wonder how it all works. like, I remember being in psychology class at 16 and seeing
a diagram of a penis and I couldn't stop laughing. And I was in a college class and everybody was like, my God, grow up. And I was just like, it's funny though. But yeah, so I just was super interested, did lots of research on it. And that's when I really first started getting passionate about it. And then I also wanted to, trigger warning, understand why people kept.
assaulting me. I didn't have a word for it at that point. I didn't know what it was. I just was like, people won't stop touching me. And that seems weird. like, people would like put me on their laps or like just do all kinds of things that didn't really make sense to me. You know how sometimes people put a kid on their lap and they like bounce their leg? Well, for me, in all of those experiences, they were like also like rubbing against my clit and I was just like...
And so these are like experiences that I didn't really have language for. As an adult though, like it was really fun to reclaim lap sitting. I was like at a sex conference and I just like went up to people and was like, can I sit in your lap? And they were like, yeah. And it was great. I got to like sort of remap that memory so it isn't as sensational as it used to be. But yeah, I wasn't like actually interested in anyone touching me until I was like.
20.
Lucy Baldwin (24:43.005)
Yeah, I mean, even just talking to you about this has me thinking about how something I've thought about a lot in my life, but like, there's a profundity to orgasm that I feel like we just we don't acknowledge enough. the fact that we have the capacity for that is so fucking awesome and like weird and like, what is this? It's so fascinating.
Manny (24:56.631)
Hmm.
Manny (25:11.66)
Yes, yes, yes. I love it. I think it's exciting. I also love the existence of the clit. I love so much that, yeah, that orgasm is available and there's so many ways to do it and just like so many different points in the body that can be sensational. And then we talk a lot about essential kink, but there's also physical kink and psychological kinks and.
It's like a whole fucking world and you just never learn, never run out of things to learn. I I love that.
Lucy Baldwin (25:45.949)
Yeah, I'm curious, like, do you feel like you've healed a lot of that sort of like childhood trauma around sexuality?
Manny (25:55.766)
Yes, I do, I do. And I think because of that.
It's so important, like why I feel passionate about creating sexological frameworks and talking about integrity and consent and how we can stay within our bodies, hold sensation and not immediately act on it. I like to question a lot of our societal norms about sex and especially because like CNC culture is heavy.
the consenting non-consenting culture, which essentially is like some examples would look like if I'm sleep wake me up or Like I saw this post the other day It was just like imagine being woken up to someone looking on your clit and you just you're so overwhelmed and you just can't even do anything about it, but except and
A lot of us were like, this is a kink. You don't have to accept. But if you like it, you like it, that's wonderful. But let's have conversations about it so that it's not assumed that this is how it goes.
Lucy Baldwin (27:04.605)
Right, like that needs to be agreed upon in advance. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, okay, there's something big that you said that I want to circle back to because there's just there's so much, there's so much here. I want to go in like 14 different directions, but I'm like, you totally said that you want to whip an old white man, an old white racist man. And I just, the amount of delight that I felt at the thought of that.
And just like the perfection of that and also you then caring, giving them aftercare, like just that whole thing. I want that to be happening.
Manny (27:41.644)
Yeah, yeah. I am especially interested in being paid after or before. But the payment is very necessary. It's important that they see it as part of their reparations, as a part of how their part as a white human being on this planet that is racist and wants to make the world a better place.
Lucy Baldwin (27:48.957)
It was especially interesting to me.
Manny (28:11.502)
And so I think it's also, it's like revolution is like interpersonal revolution, right? How do we create it side to side and not just systemically? And so, yeah, I just would really deeply enjoy getting my flogger or a paddle. Actually a big wooden paddle would be fantastic. As long as he could take it, right?
I hope, because it doesn't need to be anybody who has like a pacemaker or something like that. I'm not going to be responsible for your health. So yeah.
Lucy Baldwin (28:54.032)
my gosh. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I just think that that sounds like, well, and it's like, you know, you've mentioned anarchy a few times, like it's anarchy's solution. It's anarchy's like way of, I don't know, bringing in the counterbalance, like the rhyming sort of clicking together of integration of somehow. Yeah.
Manny (29:15.757)
Yeah.
Manny (29:21.314)
Yeah, I feel that. I love that motion you do with your hands. It made sense in my body.
Lucy Baldwin (29:24.072)
Yeah.
Lucy Baldwin (29:27.39)
Yeah, so you're really passionate about sex now and consent and I'm curious. I'm curious. This is kind of like random but like some people have a really hard time orgasming and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or advice for those people.
Manny (29:46.69)
Hmm.
Manny (29:52.846)
Well, it depends on the circumstances, on the relationship, the dynamic. I mean, there's so many factors. The first factor that I'm thinking about is environmental stress.
Are you in safe contain- well actually even before that, do you feel safe in your own body? I think that people skip- skip safety a lot because it's not the sexy part. But we don't really have the sexy part if we don't actually feel safe. So...
Lucy Baldwin (30:30.674)
then it's not sexy at all.
Manny (30:32.234)
Yeah, it's definitely not sexy, but necessary, you know, that's something I've learned from Saturn. But I had to do Saturn with Venus because Venus is very sexy. but yes, that's how I felt about Saturn. But it's I've learned to appreciate the subtleties and how powerful and necessary that foundational work is and that.
it doesn't even matter if we're not safe, you know? Which is why I don't teach people how to do a split on the dick or how to physically eat pussy, even though I talk about eating pussy, I don't say like, okay, so what you're gonna wanna do is take your tongue and, no. It's not. Because I like to talk about the foundational literacy that we've skipped.
And so I would say starting with internal safety is so important. Getting a sex coach would help to process what's coming up for you and all the things.
So if it's not an internal safety thing from there, I look at environmental factors Are folks stressing you the hell out because that's important and then Also, like what kind of spaces do you like when you're having sex some people if the room is not clean It will totally fuck up the energy and they're not gonna get roused
Are you having sex with someone that you want to be having sex with? Do you feel comfortable telling them your yeses, your nos, your maybes? And then from there, are we taking enough time to really commune and be devoted to the experience? Or are we just like, all right, we're gonna cram it in there. We're just gonna just push, push, push super fast. Like, doesn't work for everybody.
Manny (32:32.234)
So it could be maybe we need some different pacing, maybe we need different things.
I will say that some people do not enjoy like getting their pussy ate. Sometimes they might prefer cupping or just holding, massaging or tapping on their clit, anything like that, right? So sometimes it requires some innovation, but definitely just requires more questioning for sure.
Lucy Baldwin (33:02.5)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I feel like that was actually probably really helpful for people even who don't have a hard time orgasming because I feel like we have all these ideas about how we should show up in certain moments and like even when you said about like the clean house and like because sometimes I get really nitpicky about things and I give myself a hard time for it, but it's like to because you're literally you're you're going to like an altered state of consciousness and So like I want to be ready to like depart
You know, like I feel like I need to I kind of, I'm a little like neurotic as a person. So like, feel like I just, need to know that everything is like kind of taken care of so that I can go on the experience. Otherwise I'm distracted and it's hard to like, it's hard to, yeah, it's hard to like commit to really altering my, allowing myself to like, cause it's a surrender. Like orgasming, have to, it's a surrender.
Manny (33:41.517)
Yeah.
Manny (33:56.044)
Yes, yes, I love that.
Something else that has helped in my process or something that I learned is called a no-goal orgasm. And so in like private practice, we were kind of taught to look at it as well. was a part of the training that I had where we had to masturbate five times a week. And which was really challenging at the time because I wasn't that horny. But essentially it was like practice, just like meditation, right? Like locking it out on the calendar and
taking it very seriously. I used to light candles and just like make it into a thing and make sure that like nobody was bothering me during that time. And I would come with an intention. So maybe it's, just want to feel close to you. And that's in reference to my own body. And so like,
not putting any pressure on my body to come and just being like, hey, I just want to be with you and I just want to take, take our time and, connect. And we are taught how to do that with other people, but we're not really taught how to do with ourselves as much. So that really, that practice is really, really good and just taking it seriously in that knowing that your personal pleasure is just as important as pleasure with someone else. I've had clients where I've asked them like, what do they like sexually?
And they're like, well, they immediately talk about their partner. Well, we like to do this and we like to... And I would try to gently nudge them back and say, what do you like? And they would keep saying, we. And so that's something, a distinction that's super important that your sexual identity is yours before you have to share it with anyone else.
Lucy Baldwin (35:41.899)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and I like what you're saying about, yeah, like, because it's really, it has to be about, you have to know yourself, kind of. And then, yeah, what you're saying about, no, not going for the orgasm. That's like a big thing in tantra. I haven't, I haven't, like, learned or studied tantra in, like, many years, like, but I know two of the big things are, like, not trying, like, just...
It's not about the orgasm, like not making it about the orgasm, I think is, and then also there's a lot with like mirroring, like if you're with a partner, like mirroring them, which I think is really powerful, like mirroring your breathing and like, I think that could be helpful, but I feel like there, you know, I've read stuff about how,
people with pussies tend to need a lot more time to get like, to be ready to like be fully aroused. And I think that that is also, and I think all of this, it's like, if we had, probably this is, probably you could say a lot more about this. And maybe this is my question, like, how do you think the world would be different if sex wasn't so taboo?
Manny (37:00.782)
Well, there's so many things. would say first, I want to go back to the no goal orgasm. It's kind like a Jedi mind trick. So once you practice it, sometimes just saying to your body, hey, there's no pressure, opens the floodgates. And so and just communing.
And I also look at it like manifestation. So if you kind of come into sex knowing, okay, I'm gonna orgasm, what else can I have though? How safe can I feel? How free can I feel? How worshiped can I feel in this experience? And so that way becomes more holistic.
Lucy Baldwin (37:47.538)
I love that, what else can I have?
Manny (37:49.516)
Yes. So your other question, I forgot.
Lucy Baldwin (37:57.82)
I was talking about like if we weren't so scared of talking, like if sex wasn't so taboo.
Manny (38:03.436)
Yes, so sex is so much more than sex. that is like, that's the big thing that I like to talk about on my page that like, what I'm really getting at is the intimacy revolution. And if we were not afraid to see ourselves as intimate creatures and how intimacy can be systemic, right? Like that's really the main goal for all of this.
Initially the interpersonal, well first the individual, then the interpersonal, and then the systemic. So like systemic intimacy looks like being at the doctor and them looking at you as a whole person and talking to you like a friend and not like in a sterilizing way, but like.
the whole of you is considered. I think about there was a sexologist who had got cancer and she had asked her doctor, how is this gonna affect my sex life? And they didn't have an answer for her. And so I think about, I find it interesting that,
A lot times like the doctors, go to school for some of this and they are the experts on our bodies and yet there's no somatic learning in the doctor field, essentially. I did get to support myself and a few other people. We did this like healing practice with a small clinic and it was really beautiful.
But what we did was focused on the fight, flight, freeze, and find trauma responses. We spent four weeks with them and we taught them how to get into their bodies and feel.
Manny (39:54.478)
We did this heart listening practice where they were allowed to just be honest for 15 minutes. You just share and Our job there was one there was one person that was there to witness and then there was another person that was there to Hold space and so it was just a little collective of three people or like in little pods of three
And that intimacy was so powerful and that was something that they were able to take on and use with their patients, right? Because they work specifically in reproductive justice. I believe they specifically do abortions there. hospitals can be some of the most sterile places. And I think that's one of the spaces where we need intimacy most, as well as like...
in the courtroom, right, where people are often seen as numbers and not as actual people. But yeah, just, think that underneath all of this is just like humans seeing humans for the first time as humans and.
loving them as cheesy as it might sound. Spreading love from a real place, from an embodied place that isn't just, okay, love and light everybody, rainbows and all that shit, but just like from a real, genuine, rooted place.
Lucy Baldwin (41:25.631)
Yeah. Wow. That's really cool that you did that work. That makes so much sense to me that that would be so helpful, especially in that kind of medical work where if you are like doing abortions, like I feel like going through that need to be like, yeah, they need to be held, you know.
Manny (41:54.307)
Yeah.
Lucy Baldwin (41:55.168)
with compassion and yeah, that's really intense. I was actually just thinking how when you were like, what more can I have? And then after you started talking, I was like, well, I do have five babies. As like a mom, I'm just like so baffled that my babies are the product of sex. Like that is so weird. That is so weird. Like I had
Manny (42:09.534)
Hehehehehe
Manny (42:20.034)
Yeah. Yeah.
Lucy Baldwin (42:24.996)
sex and now there's just like people.
Manny (42:28.814)
Yes.
Lucy Baldwin (42:30.527)
There's a lot of them. that is so weird. Yeah.
Manny (42:40.218)
And I think that we don't sit with a phenomenon enough that it's just wild that we can even do this as people. I think that we don't sit with the glory and the magnitude of that magic enough. And I say that as a non-binary human who does not ever want kids, but I can see how powerful and glorious it is.
Lucy Baldwin (43:04.927)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And isn't it amazing how we all get to choose?
Manny (43:12.236)
Yes, yes it is.
Lucy Baldwin (43:15.855)
well, I'm wondering, so I'm curious about EK and sex and if you have any thoughts kind of specifically like, because a lot of people sort of over the years have thought, have had like thought that EK was like a stroking practice or like a sexual practice. And it's actually not necessarily, but it can be.
Manny (43:22.808)
Mm-hmm.
Lucy Baldwin (43:45.373)
And I'm curious if you have any thoughts or experiences or what your perception of that is.
Manny (43:53.034)
Yeah, so sometimes I do feel EK is like a very sexual turn on. I could feel like my clit throbbing or something, but most of the time it is like, it's a really deep mind fuck and I love that so much. It's like when I'm watching a psychological thriller and I have to put all the pieces together, I'm like, this is so hot. Like, my gosh. And my heart is racing and the...
It's similar to when I'm sexually turned on, but it feels different in my body. It's kind of also like when I'm in heated intellectual debate, I'm like, whoa, yes, points are being made, and it's really good. And so sometimes it's funny. Like right now I'm finding how absolutely hilarious it is.
the paradox I'm sitting in as someone who...
Manny (44:55.89)
communication is important to me, but I have all different forms of relationships with communication. And so with some people, it moves faster than others, it moves slower. I have this sort of expectation that in the beginning of a relationship of any kind, we're going to move fast, and then we're going to slow down and find our footing. And then
When it doesn't happen that way, I get all anxious and I'm like, why is it not going the way I thought it was gonna go? And it's funny because like, why do feel like I have to control it? Like, why do I feel like it has to go the way that I want it to go? And then I just, think about the universe as like existing inside of us, but also being like all of us as a collective and...
and being like, well, sometimes, all the time, that force is a lot more powerful than you, Manny. And so, like, you can just, like, chill the fuck out, knowing that sometimes things aren't gonna go your way, and that can be really fun, too. When I think about the stroking part of it, I think of it as, like, sometimes my ego being stroked. I think of it sometimes as, my brain being stroked.
And sometimes I imagine like a big clit in the sky being stroked. I don't necessarily imagine myself being stroked when I'm thinking about UK. And so even though it's like so close, I can see why it happens. I see why people are like, well, let me touch myself. it's just like, no, not exactly. They're close because like they can mirror each other. And I see sex in literally everything. And so.
Lucy Baldwin (46:29.108)
Mm-hmm.
Manny (46:46.83)
I can see where people are going, but I'm like, no, no, it's better to separate it actually.
Lucy Baldwin (46:53.279)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Well, Manny, this has been a very juicy and fun conversation, sexy conversation. I'm curious. So you mentioned your upcoming program. How can people... I'm wondering if you want to say any more about it, how people can find you. I will put a link in the description. So...
yeah. How can people find you?
Manny (47:26.252)
Yes, absolutely. So I am Temple.whore on Instagram. And yes, I have a new program coming out. It's called Rupture and Repair. And it is about the God and the heretic that exists within and creating wholeness within ourselves. It is super fun. There are five lessons and then there are five practices in between. And...
There's some EFT tapping. I think you all are just gonna really enjoy it, because it's super fun. And just like really the parts of us that enjoy disliking something, that part is just so juicy and so fun to play with. So I invite you to come and play with us soon. And I also wanted to name that I f-
found a pricing structure that feels good in my body that allows for space for people to be in different financial situations or what have you. And so it's really good. I'm really grateful for it. And it's just a beautiful model created by a therapist. Her name is Kenya. And all of that will be in the application. You can check out.
how I arrived at those decisions. But yeah, I'm super excited and I would love to see some of you inside.
Lucy Baldwin (49:02.705)
Awesome. Thank you so, much, Manny. Thanks for coming and nerding out with me and sharing some of your insight.
Manny (49:09.486)
Absolutely, thank you for having me. I just, I love you so much and I love being in space with you. Like, my gosh, I'm with my teacher. It's so great.
New to Lucy’s work?
Start with Lucy Baldwin’s complete overview of Shadow Alchemy here:
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Penetrate Radio explores shadow work, desire, magic, embodiment, self-honesty, radical approval, Existential Kink, and the hidden patterns that shape our lives from underneath.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is spicy shadow work?
Spicy shadow work is an approach to shadow integration that includes taboo, heat, sexuality, race, power, religion, desire, humor, and the charged material people often try to keep out of spiritual spaces.
Is Existential Kink a sexual practice?
Not necessarily. Existential Kink can involve sexual or erotic sensation, but it is not primarily a sexual technique. It is a practice of finding charge, pleasure, and radical approval inside unwanted patterns and life experiences.
What is a no-touch orgasm?
A no-touch orgasm is an orgasmic experience created through energy, breath, movement, sensation, attention, and arousal without direct genital touch. Manny describes it as a practice of moving energy through the body.
Why does Manny connect sex with systemic change?
Manny sees sex as part of a larger intimacy revolution. Individual intimacy, interpersonal intimacy, and systemic intimacy are connected because the way we relate to bodies, consent, pleasure, and humanity shapes institutions as well as relationships.
What is BABALON in this episode?
BABALON is described as the whore mother, the mother of all, a force of wild adoration, orgasmic acceptance, and radical love for both the harmed and the harmful. She functions as a powerful shadow and pleasure archetype.
Next Steps
If this episode resonated with you, the next step is DOMINION: A Field of Radical Approval.
DOMINION is Lucy Baldwin’s space for practicing radical approval, shadow integration, desire work, spicy shadow work, and the deeper transformation at the heart of Shadow Alchemy.
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