The Way of Whips and Chains

The Way of Whips and Chains:

BDSM as a Life Path

Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in - whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no - is what we mean by having a religion.

George Santayana, Reason in Religion

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Love and Other Difficulties

For Mistress Carol:

My sexual imagination has leaned toward servitude, bondage and corporal punishment since the age of seven or eight, as far back as I remember having sexual thoughts at all. Growing up in New York City, BDSM erotica and professional Dom(me)s were readily available; and I had my first real-life experiences in the Scene while I was in my twenties, long before microcomputers and the Internet had made it easy for people of our interest to find each other. I was married, became a father, became interested in martial arts and oriental philosophy, then in religious thought and philosophy in general; but for most of that time my sexual inclination remained a secret vice, well insulated from the rest of my life. It was not till I was in my forties that I began to notice parallels between these secret leanings and my readings in myth, anthropology, and comparative religion, and only then that I began to feel that my sexual fantasies both demanded and deserved to be taken seriously. Gradually, I ceased to be ashamed of them. By equal steps, as I opened up about them - to myself, to my second wife, and to my closest friends - I began to understand them in a new and positive light. This essay is the result: what I think I've learned over the years about the BDSM as a religious and spiritual life path.

1. Context

The linking of sex and pain with spirituality is not peculiar to BDSM. The Christian imagination, beginning with the image of crucified Jesus, is shot through with it, for example. But, in our game (or lifestyle) this three-way association is surely the central mystery. A brisk spanking across my lady's knee is not just foreplay-not just a way of commencing, embellishing and prolonging our love-making. It was hardly ever been taken to a level that would be truly punishing; and when she was really angry with me, my lady found other ways to make me feel it. More than sex-play and not true punishment, a D/s spanking or flogging feels different from either: some kind of profane ritual with sexual and religious overtones. In the nature of ritual, it cannot be explained in words, but is communicated only in its own terms. Yet explanations are needed - to make our rituals intelligible to ourselves, to intimate friends outside the Scene who know what we are into, and to the world at large. The choice is either to give some public account of our cult, defend our sexual/spiritual activities and risk the consequences of coming out, or else to stay "in the closet." There is no question but that the former is healthier.

My project then is to discuss BDSM as a "variety of religious experience." I will argue that the most satisfying of our scenes play a role in our lives comparable to that of religious ritual and meditation, and to a kind of sexual magic. An act of worship is performed: men and women attempt some connection to divinity and to the sacred in a systematic and reliable way. What this actually means needs explanation though, because all these concepts - religion, ritual, magic, worship, divinity and the sacred - are anything but clear. Between the efforts of established churches to monopolize such words, and those of materialists and positivists to abolish them, it is not easy for modern-minded people to use them without embarrassment. As we'll see, however, beneath the turbulence of religious politics each has a fairly precise meaning.

The stumbling block is to recognize and concede that divinity is a category of the human psyche and experience, not some lurking Ghost behind the fabric of the universe. This single issue has caused more intellectual confusion, more cruelty and more waste of life than any I can think of. Nor is any consensus in sight. So I must take pains here to explain just what I mean in speaking of BDSM as a religion, and must ask my reader to put her own convictions aside for a moment, and try to follow me: What I am suggesting here is that all our gods and goddesses are human projections onto life, nature and the universe, but not less "real" or important to us for being so. They do not exist in the same sense that stars are seen to exist, but in the sense that constellations do. There is nothing superstitious about seeing or pointing out Orion or the Dipper, so long as we own them as our own constructions.[1]

From that starting point, what I will offer is a discussion of BDSM's theology for those who can accept that such discussion is neither meaningless, nor blasphemous, nor yet a form of research into the 'real' nature of things. Theology - defined by my Oxford dictionary as "the rational analysis of a religious faith" - is a legitimate discipline and a profound one, but the word 'faith' now, needs to be carefully understood. It does not mean belief in the literal truth and facticity of some religious doctrine. Nor is it mere clinging (in Mark Twain's delicious phrase) "to what you know damned well ain't so." Faith is best understood as a cognitive ability or tendency or commitment: the ability to see things in a certain way, and the tendency or commitment to do so. There is an act of faith even in taking the time to read this page: some trust that you will find interesting meanings in the ink marks, that may prove helpful when you lay the page aside and get on with your life.

A comparable act of faith is involved when we project the categories of human sexuality and thought onto the natural world, seeing a Goddess behind its fertility, nurturance and cruelty or a God behind its order, logic, and law. Here too we find meanings; and we can scarcely help but rely on these (or other) systems of meaning, because without them, the choices of everyday life would be impossible. We cannot get ourselves across the street without some animal trust that familiar things will behave in predictable ways, that our actions will have predictable consequences and, above all, that our values are somehow anchored in and relevant to the natural order of things.

Just here we find the gap that science leaves to myth and religion: Science tells us more than religion ever did about the behaviour of objects and about the consequences of our actions, but nothing helpful about our values. Specifically, it does not help us compose ourselves to face nature or other people without fear or shame or disgust. It augments political and economic power, but gives no guidance at all on how this power should be distributed and used amongst the individuals of a society. In sum then, being value-neutral, science and technology can increase our options but cannot tell us how to choose among them. They leave us at loose ends, uncertain what to do with ourselves. The further they advance, the more divisive and paralyzing this uncertainty becomes.

Here some form of faith takes over (possibly, 'scientism' - as distinct from authentic science), to supply the values without which knowledge and skill are useless. Faith comes in many varieties, and tends to bring people together in groups, while dividing such groups from one another. It needs to be nurtured and cultivated, and comes easiest when it is shared. Thus it is entirely possible - in fact, necessary - for rational people to find some form of faith, to give them a sense of direction, a sense of purpose, a source of value to make their lives worth living. At this level, faith and love are almost the same thing. What we put faith in, we can scarcely help but love; and to love something or someone, involves a certain faith that our love will be requited, or at least not abused or betrayed. For most of us, one of the readiest forms of love is sexual love; one of the most accessible sources of love is our sexuality. This brings us back to BDSM, which I propose to discuss here as a faith or cult (i.e. culture) of sexuality - a cult that I discovered for myself as quite a young boy. Along with the cult of ideas and books and letters that I absorbed from my father, and the cult of aikido, a Japanese martial art that I fell into as a young adult, that of BDSM has sustained me all my life; and I at last feel able to discuss it alongside of, and on terms of equal dignity with the others.

In doing so, I'll be referring and drawing comparisons to several more respectable traditions of spiritual practice and religious thought:

• to the Christian tradition whose hostility to sexuality BDSM dissents from, and attempts to overcome;

• to the revived (or re-invented) Wiccan tradition which, like our own cult, recognizes and seeks to integrate the Dark Side, and understands Sex as the sacred energy of Nature;

• to the tradition of Yoga, on the whole also sympathetic to sexuality, which rejects the dualist conception of mind and body, offering comprehensive and sophisticated methods for their integration;

• to the Zen Buddhist tradition, from which I borrow the central notion of this essay - liberation, enlightenment (or whatever you like to call it).

My project is to locate our cult with reference to these four traditions. For convenience, and because it is my own situation, I write about a male submissive being worked and trained by a female Dominant, but this is only a convention, to avoid awkwardness with pronouns. Almost nothing I will say would have to be altered for some different combination - a male Dom with a female sub, or a gay or lesbian couple.

A final introductory note: The words "spirit" and "spiritual" have acquired so much superstitious freight as to be almost useless now for serious discussion. I mean them quite simply, however, in the sense we use in speaking of a spirited musical performance, or a spirited horse. Spiritual work, as I understand it, aims at integrating mind and body ("not two," as a Japanese proverb reminds us). It aims at increasing vital energy, at raising, clarifying and purifying consciousness, at healing and transcending one's own personal history and the human condition in general, to the extent that this is possible. Please forget any associations you have with religious emblems and rituals, with practices of self-denial and self-abnegation, with crystals, feathers, sticks of incense, or holy chants. At best, these are tools of a spiritual technology: a means to distract, compose or focus the mind while something else is going on. The risk of using them, as with any technology, is that they readily become mere toys and fetish objects: ends and entertainments in themselves. The whips and chains of BDSM represent a very powerful technology of this kind. The risk of mistaking means for ends in our own cult is proportionately even greater.

Since I don't believe in ghosts, for me the words "spirit" or "soul" correspond roughly to the region of overlap between the body's vitality (its drives, desires and passions) and the mind's representations, dreams and intentions - our breath-rhythms and glandular secretions somehow linking these zones. The varied activities of BDSM all seem to play in this region; the Scene as a whole is one of the most direct and powerful means I know for exploring it. For that very reason, it is also one of the most difficult to teach or follow as a coherent Path - being extraordinarily demanding and threatening, on one hand, while collapsing readily into mere obscenity and self-indulgence. The person wishing to use our thing as a vehicle of spiritual development must find a sane balance in the midst of and pulled around by emotional forces that can be overwhelming.

2. Precedents and Distinctions

A man is strung up naked by the wrists while a woman stripes his back with a flogger. What is going on?

It depends on context, obviously. It could be the torture of a prisoner for information. It could be torture voluntarily accepted as a test of will and endurance, in what I'd call an athletics of pain. In the ante-bellum South, it could have been punishment of a delinquent slave by his mistress. Even today, in some places, it could be the legally sanctioned punishment of an offender. Or it could be punishment consensually endured by a submissive who has granted his mistress the right to discipline him in this fashion. Or it could be sex play by the Mistress - also (preferably) with the free consent of her victim. It could be a very intense, stress-relieving massage, or a sensual experience enjoyed for its own sake, without much cognitive baggage. But finally, it could be some form of religious ritual, performed collaboratively by Domme and sub. We are concerned with the last of these possibilities.

If it is not safe, sane and above all, freely consensual it is (by definition) not BDSM but some different thing that we want no part of. If it is for sexual or recreational purposes alone, it is perfectly legitimate on its own terms and lots of fun for those (like myself) whose tastes run that way, but it is not what interests me here. If it is consensual punishment within a BDSM relationship it is likewise outside my scope. There are all kinds of reasons why two individuals may define their relationship in terms of "power exchange," but most of these are not my concern here. Nor am I concerned with the purely "psychedelic" uses of flagellation (or BDSM techniques in general), though these come nearer the mark. My sole concern here is with BDSM practised consciously as what the Buddhists call a Vehicle, to lead the soul through a change of state.

The goal of this change has different names in different traditions, all seeming to refer to roughly the same experience. Buddhists call it Enlightenment or Liberation. Christians call it Grace, or Redemption or Salvation, or being Born Again. In Montreal, I once knew a Zen master from a Calvinist background who despised all these words, and liked that to say that meditation was for getting to Massachusetts. For BDSM people, escape from the dungeon would seem the appropriate metaphor; and this figure has a respectable pedigree from Plato's Republic, where the soul's condition is likened to that of a prisoner, chained in a cave in dim torch light, seeing only the flickering shadows on the wall before him. The great question is: What would one see who found some way to break his shackles, and escape his soul's prison into the full light of day?

I am writing, then, about BDSM practised as a way to 'enlightenment,' or Massachusetts, or out of the dungeon, whatever exactly this means. By any name, the experience is full of paradox. It is said to be wonderful but, also nothing very special. It changes everything, but leaves everything the same. You must work hard for it, but must finally be given it: Nothing you do can earn it. The work is to prepare yourself to recognize and receive the gift when it comes.

Now, the use and voluntary acceptance of spanking, whipping, bondage and related practices, not just as retribution but from religious, spiritual, therapeutic or reconciliatory motives is very ancient. In fact, the intimate connections between sexuality and aggression, between sexual surrender and submission, between voluptuousness and pain, are certainly older than our species itself. Students of animal behaviour report intricate courtship rituals involving aggressive gestures, bracketed with signs that declare: "I'm only kidding; this is play". In the throes of sexual passion, many creatures will accept and seem to relish a degree of mauling that would otherwise be painful. Primate species are known to use presenting and mounting behaviour as an appeasement ritual - with social status and conflict resolution, rather than sexual expression, as the issue. When a baboon decides to resign an intimidation contest with a more dominant adversary, he turns round, drops his head and shoulders, and presents his bright pink arse. The winner usually responds by mounting the offered bottom, and asserting his sexual rights with a few perfunctory thrusts. Combat is averted through a very clear suggestion: "Make love, not war!". Or, in plainer English: "I will not resist; you may screw me as you please!"

When we come to the human animal, anthropologists and cultural historians report a bewildering variety of flagellation rituals for purposes of initiation, sacrifice, consciousness raising, fertility magic, healing and atonement. Nor are these purposes necessarily distinct. For example, the theme of sacrifice to the gods might well be present in rites directed at fertility or healing or the purification of warriors; A girl's menarche ceremonies might involve ritual flagellation conceived as fertility magic. The psychedelic effects of ritual pain would be present almost regardless of its application, so long as it was basically consensual. Thus, it seems likely that modern BDSM, in its religious aspect, is a re-appearance of very old shamanic practices, themselves employed for purposes not always clear, or clearly distinguishable.

For a religious purpose, the sexual dimension of BDSM must be recognized and discounted. Good sex is itself a psychedelic experience; yet there is much more to peak experience than sexual arousal and climax. Sex is one aspect of BDSM. But there can be much more to BDSM than sex.

Today, as always, sex is a source of tremendous psychic energy for every form of magic aimed at "psyching people up" for work or war or buying sprees or anything else. But, for that very reason, if not properly channelled, it can represent a formidable threat to the established social order - especially to a pre-modern order, where kinship ties are paramount. Accordingly, flagellation rites have often been distinctly counter-cultural. Authorities tend to fear enthusiasm 'whipped up' (sic) among the masses.

Not enough is known to reconstruct the history of such rites with certainty, and I am not a scholar in any case. All I claim here is that there appear to be strong continuities between those ancient practices and our modern "way of whips and chains". If this is so, then BDSM as we know it is heir to a vexed religious heritage involving "pagan" nature worship on the Female side (so to speak), and monotheist word-and-law worship on the Male side. It has been head magic against belly magic, in Camille Paglia's language: the fertile mind against the fertile womb. Thus we find ritual flagellation used in old pagan and neo-pagan ceremonies to kindle fire in the flesh. But we also find it used by hermits and monks to mortify the flesh, and by penitents to atone for fleshly sins. And we find it used on young people of both sexes in rites of passage and initiation, to underscore the meaning, duties and value of their new status, as something suffered and dearly paid for.

In theological terms, modern BDSM should probably be seen as part of the contemporary neo-pagan revolt against a Christian order that was itself an uneasy synthesis of disparate monotheist and pagan traditions. One aspect of this neo-pagan revolt is a rejection of body-mind dualism. We know too much now about neurophysiology and the endocrine system to be happy with a theory of body, mind and soul as disparate substances.

3. Stages of Practice