Dr Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Paganism, Shamanism and all things occult.
Today is a special episode because I have a guest here on the channel and we will be talking about BDSM and religion and also Esotericism and Magick
Our guest today is Dr Alison Robertson. She is a research associate at the Open University. She has recently published a monograph based on her doctoral research exploring BDSM as a lived form of religion. She is interested in the places where the lines commonly drawn between categories such as religious and non-religious become blurred or ambiguous and in how such blurring affects the way people look at the world. Her research interests, other than kink, include lived and personal religious edge-work and self-inflicted or positive experiences of pain. As always you will find the contact details and her book in the infobox.
And before we dive into the interview, I’d like to remind you that this project can only exist thanks to your support. So if you have the means and you want to support the free delivery of academic scholarship on topics such as Magick, Esotericism and the Occult here on YouTube, please consider sending a one-off PayPal donation, joining Memberships or my Inner Symposium on Patreon where you will get access to our Discord server, monthly lectures and lots of other perks, depending on your chosen tier.
So please help me in welcoming Dr Robertson.
Hello Alison, thank you for coming here on Angela’s Symposium.
Dr Alison Robertson AR: You’re very welcome. I wish I really had come there and was in Naples with you, to be honest. Much nicer than rainy Reading.
AP: Yeah, that would be nice. Perhaps one day. But yeah, for my audience, I actually met Alison in person at my very first academic conference at the University of Chester a few years ago and I was in the first year of my PhD and Alison was super nice and I also, of course, love her research. That’s why I asked her to come over and be interviewed.
AR: I’m not sure I’ve ever been called super nice before. Thank you, you’re making me blush.
AP: But yeah I’m very fascinated by, I’ve always been, you know and I also read your PhD thesis because you research BDSM in relation to religion and Religious Studies and I think that is quite valuable in that it allows us to better understand religion, in general, and also, of course, BDSM and lived religions because I think that lived religions don’t get enough attention and enough research.
AR: I would certainly agree with you on that and I hope it does, I hope it helps shed some light on both sides of both aspects of things I researched, I suppose. Yeah, it’s two different areas that have a lot of crossovers and it’s not really appreciated, so.
AP: Yeah, absolutely. So the first question, of course, is what is BDSM for those who don’t know? I would imagine that most people know but…
AR: Well, as I mentioned to you earlier, I was having exactly this conversation with a friend of mine just a few days ago as to whether most people know or not. His experience is that most people do. My experience is that most people don’t, so let’s make sure we’re all, you know, on the same page with this. So BDSM is a compound acronym and it doesn’t have one absolutely definite set of things it stands for. It’s most commonly given as standing for Bondage, Domination, Submission, and Masochism but you could also put Discipline under the D, you could put submission under the S. Some people make the M and S Master and Slaves, so you get Bondage and Discipline, Master and Slave. It can stand for a lot of things but it’s basically talking about all the practices that come around using pain and power and relationship in an exploratory way, often sexual, not always sexual. Saying Bondage, Discipline, Submission, and Masochism would be the easiest way to encapsulate it.
AP: And how, you know, what kind of research did you conduct in BDSM in relation to religion?
AR: Well, it was an interesting process really. So my fieldwork was all in the form of conversational interviews very much like this conversation, actually, in that, I had a sort of set of core questions that I wanted to deal with but they came up in the conversation as and when they came up. They didn’t have a ‘hard and fast we’re going to go through this in this way.’ I had a standard first question and a standard last question and everything else sort of flowed around that. But it was an interesting process because to get my ethical approval from the University, they didn’t want me going to any kink places with my sort of University hat on, you know, it had to be neutral spaces. Which was interesting because not everybody wanted to invite me into their homes for obvious reasons. And obviously, I didn’t want to invite people into my home because that would create power issues. So I had some interviews in some, perhaps, unexpected places for people talking about kink. I don’t know, pubs and cafés, John Lewis café – good place if you want a private conversation. And so I had these conversational interviews with people and then I analysed the results that came out in a broadly interpretive, phenomenological, analytic kind of way. So I was looking at the things people said and how that came up in conversation. So I wasn’t trying to pretend that I didn’t bring anything to the conversation because obviously, I did. And I mentioned that because one of the things that was interesting to me is how I moved in the course of my research from going, well my personal interests in this have nothing to do with it, I’m just interested in what other people say, to a sort of realization like that I can’t bracket that off. Because a lot of the conversations, a lot of my participants wanted to talk to me about what I understood these experiences to be like and where I was coming from with it. So it really was a co-constructive thing. It was a two-way conversation and I felt like I had to acknowledge that in the research, in the end; so there’s an element of auto-ethnography as well in the final work as it were. But that’s not what I set out to do originally. It’s not primarily autoethnographic but it turned out that, but I couldn’t cut that out altogether.
AP: And why and how do you argue that BDSM is religion or not ‘a’ religion? And also if you can explain the difference between them?
AR: Well, I really I don’t like saying it’s ‘a’ religion. I mean you could, I suppose, but a religion carries all sorts of implications about dogma and structure and doctrine and it very much buys into the ‘world religions paradigm’ which, to me, is an assumption that you stick a label on something and then everything that falls under that label fits certain essential criteria and if it doesn’t fit those criteria you leave it out of the category altogether. I think that’s a problematic way to look at anything to do with human beings, actually because I think you always get these blurry spaces. We go, well I could put this in this category and if I do I learn these things and that’s interesting and valuable but because you say this category is this, I can’t put it in this category and that means I’m leaving out relevant and important stuff, so I don’t. Getting rid of the ‘a’ before religion just seems like a really useful thing to me, even if you are talking about unnamed world religion actually. It’s still religion, it’s still broad, it’s still ambiguous, it still has blurred edges, it still has people who put themselves within it, that other people don’t think they have the right to do that or they should do that and people who leave themselves out of it that you could just as easily look and go, well I think you do go in there actually. And I think we get far too hung up on policing the edges of categories at the expense of actually understanding what’s going on in the concept we set out to study in the first place.
So I think religion is far broader than categorizing it into these ‘a religion’ things can tell us and I think if we don’t accept that we miss out on some interesting stuff. So religion to me, I don’t have an essentialist view of religion, I don’t have an absolute definition of religion. I think you can study anything that does any of the things that organized religion does as if it was religion and I think you can learn interesting stuff that way. So I would call religion a process of living and a process of meaning-making and a process of world-making. And that’s why I think ‘lived religion’ is a really useful way to study it. Because I think we’re all engaged in making sense of the worlds that we find ourselves in. We’re all constructing meaning and constructing personal stories and building worlds and relationships and tribes and communities, we’re all doing that because that’s part of what it means to be human and just because the ways we have doing that don’t necessarily sit in a named religious tradition doesn’t make them fundamentally a different thing to what those named traditions are doing. If that makes any sense at all?
AP: Yes and how do you relate BDSM to religion?
AR: The very simplest answer to that is that BDSM is a means, not for everyone, but for a lot of people who do it, of creating that meaning, of creating that self-understanding, of building those worlds, and creating those stories and exploring reality and different kinds of reality as well as yourself, within those realities, which is, to my mind, that is a process of religioning that is, that’s living religion, whether you call it that or not, you’re doing that thing.
AP: And is it because of the idea that BDSM can bring you to an altered state of consciousness?
AR: Well, I mean yes but not entirely so. BDSM is understudied in any context: Psychology, Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology. There’s a lot of work to be done on what it is, what it can be, what people use it for. I chose to do the work I did from a starting point of those altered states of consciousness as an area of interest. That said, look here’s some really substantial overlap with religious practice, this bears further investigation. So that was my starting point and they are, the subspace experiences, they are significant, they are important for the people who have them but one of the things that my research indicated quite strongly is that the things that characterise altered consciousness, so things like; a change in the sense of time passing, a loss of awareness of the space around you, difficulty in forming sequential memories, that whole list of things they’re present in any successful BDSM scene regardless of whether or not the participants would say, yes, I spaced during that scene, even if they didn’t space, they still achieved an altered state. So there’s a complication there in the simplistic way of saying oh, BDSM can create altered states for some people boom it’s a form of mysticism. It’s not as simple as that, it can be a form of mysticism and it can create transcendence but it’s altering the reality that you find yourself in, even if it doesn’t create transcendence. So, for me, it became about more than those, sort of, peak altered states, if you like, it became more about exploring reality by creating a new reality. So for the time that the scene is in place you’ve created another world, effectively, that is real while you’re in it and this is one of the things that I feel very strongly. People often talk about BDSM as role play and I understand that, I understand why they call it that but one thing, I would say, all my participants agreed on is when you’re in the space, when you’re doing it, you’re not playing a role, it’s not acting. When you’re in that space, it’s a real space, it’s a real-world, the power differential is real. Certainly, any pain that’s created is real because what’s the point, otherwise. You’re not pretending to beat somebody, you are beating somebody and the fact that you’re doing it consensually, it doesn’t alter that experience in an objective way. So you’re exploring realities in a really quite fundamental way that is different to the sort of mystical, I was in another realm, I left my body behind. It’s more putting mind and body together more emphatically, perhaps, a lot of the time.
AP: Yeah. that’s quite interesting.
AR: One of the other interesting things that come out around that so pretty much, I mean there again, there isn’t much but pretty much all the work before my own, on those p-culted(?) consciousness states, those spacing states, assumes that it only happens to the bottom participant, the one who is being beaten or being tied up or whatever else is being done.
AP: The submissive?
Yes. That would commonly be called the submissive, I used bottom as a more general term because submission implies a power exchange that isn’t necessarily there but you know, ignore that doesn’t matter. So yeah, the submissive partner, if that’s clearer, so there’s an assumption that they are the only ones who can alter their consciousness and the term ‘subspace’ is far better known, even in the scene, than any alternatives like ‘topspace’ or ‘domspace’ but that’s because of a perception of what altered consciousness must be. Because if you talk to tops about their peak experiences they do have an alteration in consciousness but instead of losing themselves, in the way that a sub might, they’re becoming more aware of themselves. And so a couple of them spoke to me about things like you reach a state where you feel like you just think something’s going to happen and it happens. Because everything is revolving around what you’re doing and you have such power over the space and you have this pin-sharp awareness of everything within your space, the tiniest thing, within your space, is visible to you and you’re conscious of it and you know what it’s doing but anything outside of that space you lose awareness of entirely. So it’s still altered consciousness it’s just a different quality of altered consciousness. Because you can’t lose your sense of self and be responsible for someone else’s well-being while you’re hitting them but you can lose sense of other things. So I think one of the things that my work did, well I hope it did, was complicate and perhaps queered people’s understanding of what it means to space in a scene. Because it isn’t one person drifting off into the ether while the other person gets left behind absolutely not that.
AP: And does this produce a change even outside of the play, like…
AR: Yeah, I think it can. I think one of the things that would mark, for me, the difference between BDSM as a religioning process and BDSM just because it’s fun and you enjoy, it is that sort of reflection afterwards, that what did this mean, what did I learn from this, what did I get from this, and that turning it over and perhaps producing long-lasting change with it. I certainly spoke to a lot of people who talked about knowing themselves better and understanding themselves better, about gaining confidence and strength from those experiences and also about those experiences, constructing relationships and creating bonds between people because, as I said, it’s not, it’s not a place where you go on your own. If someone puts me into subspace then they are there with me and they have to be or it would be a terrifying experience. They are the only thing in the world for me at that point and that really does create some intense emotional connections and some potentially quite powerful exchanges of energy and certainly a lot of things to think about afterwards. Because you haven’t got any control over what you show someone else of yourself in that circumstance. They are seeing whatever there is of you that’s there in that moment, so you’re very vulnerable in a lot of ways and of course, that has a power to it and an implication to it as well.
AP: So you said that in some cases BDSM is used for pleasure and in other cases for religioning. So the difference then is to have the kind of self-reflection afterwards or to intentionally….
AR: I think that’s one of the differences. I mean I don’t think it’s an either-or. I certainly didn’t meet anybody who only used their BDSM for ritual or spiritual purposes and didn’t have the pleasure aspect of it. I didn’t meet anyone who made that separation and I’m not aware in any of the literature, even the stuff that comes out from within the scene, I’m not aware of anyone who would make that absolute exception. I am aware of people who would do different things. So where they find their pleasure would be a different form of play than where they’re doing their ritual stuff perhaps, well certainly. But I didn’t come across anyone who would only ever use BDSM for ritual purposes and I think there’s an interesting thing to explore there that I haven’t explored yet. As to where the differences would be, in that instance, between someone who’s only doing it because the ritual demands of their tradition, whatever it is, as Gardnerian Wicca, doesn’t it have a flagellation practice? And I wonder how many people are doing that purely because it is a religious requirement and not because they get any pleasure out of it. Perhaps getting pleasure out of it’s a problem, I don’t know. But I didn’t meet any of those people.
What I met were people who, got pleasure out of it and they enjoyed it and that was part then of the religioning process because they enjoyed it and because it becomes fundamental. You start to build it into your identity and I think people do this with anything that they really enjoy. So, you know, if you’re a football fan you start to build that into your identity and that can become a source of religioning. That would be the classic example, I suppose. It doesn’t have to but it can. So I think from pretty much all of the people that I spoke to the pleasure aspect of it, the enjoyment aspect of it was the first thing and then they started to find it more and more important to them as a thing in its own right. So it wasn’t just about the physical pleasure, it was that I’m getting something out of this that is beyond the physical pleasure, that’s beyond any of the obvious enjoyments of it. I call that a ‘Gestalt’ in my work. And I think a lot of things become Gestalts if you can take out all of the reasons why you do something and well I do for this reason and that leaves me with these and then I’ll take out this one and I’ve still got these. I think you can break it down you can take out every possible reason why you might do it and if you’ve still got something left at the end, you’re going, well I know there’s still enough that’s not it, that’s not the whole story.
Then you start to be talking about religioning because you start to talk about meaning-making and yeah, reflection is a part of that, absolutely, reflection and self-development and self-exploration, pushing limits, just transgressing norms I mean that’s a very powerful thing, for some people, all that stuff.
AP: Can you expand more on your use of Gestalt?
AR: Probably. So when I started, the word I was using with my participants was ‘meaningfulness.’ That’s the conversations that we had originally, so the conversation would always come round to, why is this important to you? So she had only two criteria to be a participant in my research she had to have done something in real life. So there is interesting work to be done on people who just play virtually or online, I think. That’s not where my interest was, I wanted people who had done something in real life and who considered their kink to be an important part of who they were. And so from that, we got into conversations about meaningfulness and whether it was just sex, would be the obvious one, because most work that’s been done on BDSM presumes that it’s fundamentally about sex. And there are problems with some work that’s done back there are also problems with the assumption. But it’s one of the things I asked all of my participants, is this sex for you? Are they synonyms? And the answer was no for all of them. They aren’t synonyms, although they are connected. So then we started to talk a bit more about what else they might be and all of these other things started to come out.
But what also came out was a sense and a lot of them and I find this fascinating, a lot of them apologized for this, was a sense that there’s something about it that you can’t pin down in words, that is more than the words, that is more than the obvious things; this is part of who I am, this is fundamental to me, this is really important to me. I would suffer if you took it away from me but what the loss is that I would suffer? I haven’t really got a name for that for you. And I was having this conversation with one of my participants and he actually brought up the word Gestalt in the context of that conversation and we had a sort of, a subsidiary chat around why the choice of that word. Of course, what it literally means is ‘something that’s greater than the sum of its parts’ and it was a bit of a eureka moment for me. Like yeah, that’s absolutely, that is what this is for me. What is my kink for me? It is Gestalt, it’s greater than any of the things that I put into it because it’s more than that. And the more reading I did around subcultures, in general, which is something else that interests me, the more it seemed to me that that was what a lot of them were talking about too. That, you know, it’s not just about the look and the camaraderie and the story and it there’s always this greater than the sum of its parts, it’s emergent like consciousness is emergent and that was what made me use that term, in the end, because it literally says what it is that I’m trying to pin down.
So one of my supervisors wanted me to use ‘transcendence’ far more than I actually do in my work and my argument against that was that transcendence has a very definite, religious meaning for most people and I was looking for something that doesn’t have that because I’m looking, I felt, I was looking at something more fundamental than any of those things. So I think an organized religious community can be a Gestalt being but I don’t think it has to be. So I’m talking about experiential aspects of religion and religioning rather than doctrinal or observational or any of those other things, you can only know if something is a Gestalt by talking to the person who’s doing it and seeing what it means to them. But I don’t think that makes it a non-useful concept to use. I think most people have Gestalts of some kind in the various things that they do in their lives and I think that’s an interesting thing to look at in the context of religion and spirituality. I hope that made some vague sort of sense.
AP: Yeah yeah, I was just, you know, it’s quite it’s a lot of very interesting information from kind of processing. Yeah, I was thinking, I guess I was thinking of how this concept could be applied to my research as well. That’s what I was thinking of.
AR: If you don’t mind me saying so, when I was saying it I was thinking about your Goth aesthetic, which I share to a great extent and the Goth subculture and I think for a lot of people being a Goth is a Gestalt. Because you know the idea and you can see it in like, you know, corporate Goth fashion advice, for example, how to be Goth and fit in at the office. There’s acres of that stuff out there because being Goth is still important enough that you want to have elements of it and I mean, obviously, we’re in a different kind of world but it’s still important enough to that you want to have elements of it going into the office. Why? Why is it that important to you? It’s the Gestalt. So that was the example that occurred to me when we were talking because I think, for a lot of people who embrace the Goth aesthetic as completely as you do, it’s a Gestalt.
AP Yeah, it is for me and when I tried to give it up I felt like I was not being myself. You know, for some people it’s something very superficial but for other people, it’s like it’s integral to who they are.
AR: Yeah I’ve recently started to get really interested in this. The importance of these visual signals of who you are because I was having a conversation with someone about fetishes, specifically and so he has a foot fetish, which is very specific for him. It involves toes with sheer nylon stockings over them in open-toed shoes. And my reaction to that is Good God no! Never! Open-toed shoes, yes, no problem. Stockings, yes, no problem. Together, no! I would rather shoot myself through the head. And he did not understand how I could have quite such a strong reaction against this and it was exactly what you just said, it’s like that would just not be me. It would not be me, I wouldn’t feel like me, I would feel like I was an imposter somewhere, pretending to be somebody else I would feel awful. I had a similar, I had a kink experience once with a dom who wanted me to wear makeup. I don’t wear makeup, I don’t like the way it feels on my skin and I don’t feel like I look like me with makeup on. And I did, I did do it for him in the end and it was one of the very few scenes I’ve ever had that I couldn’t turn into any kind of pleasure afterwards. It felt like being assaulted. It was horrible because it wasn’t me and so it is, like you say, for some people it doesn’t matter, it’s just an aesthetic, it’s just a look but for other people, it’s an expression of something else that’s far deeper than that, it’s a Gestalt.
Yeah, that’s brilliant. I, yeah, I really love that. And what about Paganism? You know, you already mentioned the fact that in Gardnerian Wicca there is some component of whipping, which is included in the ritual but have you come across anything with regards to specifically BDSM and Paganism?
AR: Yes.
AP: For instance, is there a prevalence of Pagans within the BDSM community?
AR: Yes.
AP: And is BDSM considered to be important in the Pagan practice?
AR: There’s a lot, there’s a lot around this that’s fascinating. So I didn’t, as I said, I didn’t ask for my participants to be practitioners of any religion in particular or of any religion at all. But I asked them all, as part of my conversation with them, whether they did consider themselves either religious or spiritual and if they did whether they attached themselves to a tradition. And while the majority of them said they did not, of the ones that did, Paganism was the majority. So, but of those who attached that kind of label to themselves they were more Pagans than anything else and they were all using BDSM as part of their practice in different ways. But what I would also say is there were a lot of people, a lot of people and I think the kink scene perhaps attracts them more than some other subcultural scenes. A lot of people had issues with labels of any kind and I’ve written a paper around this, around the issue of labels. So everyone was able to tell me, for example, what their kink label would be if they had to give one and almost everybody immediately qualified that by saying but, of course, I don’t like labels and it doesn’t mean for me what it might mean for somebody else and here’s what it means for me, was a standard part of the conversation. And I think that expanded out beyond just their kink labels, I think it expanded to religious labels, other identity labels of all kinds. So again I wasn’t looking for people who blurred gender identities or blurred gender boundaries, for example, but I spoke to a number of them anyway. Likewise, ethnic identity and I was gonna, no, not racial, it would be ethnic, it would be a better term. Those kinds of tribal identities where your roots are how much they matter. There are a lot of people challenging all those kinds of labels. So I would say there were a number of people in there who, if you were going to objectively go, well this is what a Pagan is, who on this list of people does those things, I would say there were a fair number you could put in the pagan pot, in that sense, who didn’t claim the label. So there are, sort of, two tiers of it, if you like.
AP: And how would they use BDSM in their pagan practice?
AR: So, the ones, going with the ones who explicitly identified as Pagan and who used their BDSM in their practice. So they were an interesting mix of people. So two of them would have described themselves as Wiccans or possibly eclectic Wiccans or generally eclectic Pagans and one of them was very definitely a Shaman within a Native American tradition, which is the Heyoka Path Sacred Clowns, had some very interesting stuff to tell me about that. I didn’t know a great deal about it before that conversation but so for them, he had a number of aspects to that. So he had done, for example, hook-suspension rituals. So you know you have hooks in the muscles, of the muscles of your chest usually, sometimes in your back which he described as being his blood sacrifice for his tribe. And he talked about blessing artefacts for members of his tribe with his blood and his pain. And interestingly he said that he’s not a masochist at all and when he plays for pleasure it wouldn’t involve that kind of pain. And he had some very interesting things to say about the reactions you get from people who know that you’ve done hook-suspensions when you tell them you’re not into pain and the difference that it being in a religious space made to that, for him, was very interesting. But he also talked about using his pleasurable kink, the stuff that he enjoyed. He also talked about using that in this sacred, clowning way. So he talked about mixing up expectations and disrupting what people think is gonna happen and the potential for that kink has. So, you know, you can dress in a particular way that isn’t expected for the role that you’re playing within the BDSM scene that you are and you can do things that aren’t expected and you can disrupt and confuse and that’s as having spiritual potential. And he also talked, so he identifies the switch, so he would take both top and bottom roles but he also spoke, as actually that they all did in differing degrees, of regardless of your personal preference within a scene when you’re using ritual or energy creating for a purpose, especially if you’re working with deity, how you always have to be conscious of your own submission to something higher than you even if you are dominant in the scene that you’re playing.
So some interesting stuff there around human power relations and human and other-than-human power relations, I suppose and they all had something to say around that in differing degrees. And then one of them described themselves to me as a sacred-prostitute Priestess. So drawing on, mainly, the Babylonian traditions of prostitutes in the temple. But they’re an educator so they saw their mission or part of their mission in life as being to educate people to understand their bodies better, to embrace the potential of their bodies further and BDSM has been one of the ways in which they did that. So they absolutely acquainted BDSM and sexuality very strongly but at the same time, they also talked about rituals that they organized that didn’t involve sex. So they told me, for example, about doing a sort of mass hunter-prey kind of ritual. So obviously the dom, the top, the person would be the hunter and the bottom the prey. And what you then do with that, obviously, is going to vary a great deal between the different people who played. The way they described it, they had, you know, eight or nine couples each acting out this role in different ways. Some of that would involve using the prey in a sexual way and some of it wouldn’t. But they were talking about the different power-dynamic of prey-predator as opposed to master-slave or, you know, whatever other pairings(?) you get in the BDSM scene. And they did play for pleasure, absolutely, but they said they were always very conscious of their spiritual path and they didn’t distinguish the two perhaps as clearly as the first one did.
And then the other one who springs to mind was definitely Wiccan. They describe themselves as being in training to be Wiccan Clergy. They weren’t in the UK, that would be an odd thing to be in the UK. Clergy, very specifically, refers to the church to the Christian church, as I understand it in the UK. But I suspect they were talking more about, you know, kind of prison Chaplaincy and school and college Chaplaincy and being a Pagan within that sort of area, is what I think they were talking about. But they also said some really interesting stuff around being the property of the deities that you choose to work with and one of the things they kept on their altar was a collar that they would with handcuffs, I think, that they would specifically put on if they were going to be working with their deities even if they weren’t going to be being the submissive role in the ritual. They would still collar themselves because they were submitted to the deity that they were working with, the deity that they’re working. So some very interesting stuff around that I think.
AP: And have you encountered anything in your research with regards to using BDSM intentionally for Magick or other esoteric purposes?
AR: Yes, it’s interesting because the literature that exists would and certainly, within the Gardnerian Wicca tradition of things, would associate it very much with, sort of, initiation. We didn’t really come across any of that. Far more about using it to create, to raise energy for various magickal purposes, also for therapeutic purposes and kind of cleansing or spiritual rebirth kind of purposes. Those are probably the most prevalent. I think it’s interesting because I think the assumption is very much to do with, sort of, penance and purification and punishment and I don’t think there is a great deal of that in spiritual BDSM. I think there’s some of it and obviously, you can use it for that but I think that’s quite a Christian-ascetic association if I can use that broad distinction. So I think if you think about ascetic practices, you can think of them as sort of world-denying, penitential, the flesh, the evil, known as punishment. Or you can think of it as world-affirming; I want to put my body and mind together, I want to heal that split, I want to understand my place in the world and I think most spiritual kink falls on that side of things. It’s far more about healing splits and understanding where they’ve come from and it’s rebirth, for sure, spiritual cleansing if you like but not in a penitential sense, not in an I’m intrinsically sinful and I must deal with that way, more in an I have to go past this, I have to go through this to get to the next thing. You can also therapeutically and there is some work within psychology on this but I think it overlaps with the spiritual, is people using it to re-frame trauma. So people re-enacting actual, real-world trauma like rape, for example, in an attempt to try and re-frame that and come out on the more powerful side of that equation. To reclaim their body after what happened to it and there is some literature around that and some experiences around that from a couple of people that I spoke to which is, again, it’s an intentional, it’s that I’m going to raise energy to do this and I’m going to use it this way afterwards.
So I think there’s a lot of intention. What I didn’t find is people starting from the I want to do Magick, how can I raise energy? I know I’ll get someone to beat me. It was the other way around so it was like you know I’m doing BDSM, I’m doing kink and I felt these amazing things and I’ve realized I can use them in my spiritual practice. So what I found was it all started with the kink and developed out there rather than starting with the Magick and developing into the kink, if that makes sense?
AP: That’s interesting.
AR: Yeah, it is interesting I mean I wonder if… we have such an absolute connection in our society and I’ve written a paper on this, co-wrote a paper on this with Theo Wildcroft, we have such an absolute connection between pain and negativity and the idea that you can get positives out of pain and indeed I have, in the other things, because, of course, BDSM doesn’t have to involve pain, it can involve various, emotional senses, it can involve humiliation, it can involve service, can involve all sorts of things but generally speaking, they are things that, as a society, we go oh that’s not a nice thing and you should avoid that thing and I wonder if perhaps that prevents you from identifying it as a spiritual tool unless you already know that the reality is other than social expectations say it is. So if you already know that the line between pleasure and pain isn’t absolute and there are various ways of getting pleasure out of pain. If you already know that and you’re looking for a way to raise powerful energy you might be more likely to put those two things together and if you’re looking for a way to raise powerful energy but all your experiences with pain are negative and unpleasant. I don’t know, that’s not something I’ve investigated specifically but I wonder if there’s an element of that in it.
AP: Yeah that’s true. We tend to think of pain as something that is inherently negative but pain is something inherent to life. So it is an integral part of life and similar to, you know, both pleasure and pain are part of our life and our experience.
AR: And we also, we think we know what it is. I mean we talk about it like it’s very obvious what pain and what isn’t and one of the things that kink experience certainly has taught me, I mean other things as well, but kink experience specifically has taught me is there are some things that I can’t put on either side of that binary. I can’t tell you if it’s pleasure or pain. It could be either, it could be both. It’s something or it’s something else entirely. So I think it helps and one of the reasons why kink is helpful for magical thinking, I think, is that it helps you move away from some of these absolute binaries. Like that, you know, there’s pleasure and there’s pain and there’s no space in between well actually there is and I’ve experienced it and that I think that has to be useful for magical thinking, doesn’t it, because you’re starting to deal with things that don’t make sense in the objective binary thinking kind of way. So it’s useful to have experiences that don’t fit into those categories as well, perhaps.
AP: Yeah, that’s a good point because in Magick there is a component of going beyond certain binaries and going beyond certain boundaries and going beyond the, you know, the usual, the common understanding and experience of reality.
AR: Yeah, you have to be able to let go of certain things don’t you? Because if you hold on to them too tightly then you’re automatically ensuring that whatever Magick it is you’re trying to do won’t work because you’re holding on to something that will stop it. And yeah, I think kink is good for that. I think it encourages you not to invest too strongly in those binaries because one of the things it’s about, is about playing with them and exploring them and seeing how much truth there actually is in them.
AP: Yeah absolutely. Now I’m gonna ask you a few questions from my Patrons. I was really absorbed by the conversation. Yeah, there are lots of things to think about definitely.
AR: We can do a follow-up.
AP: Yes, and also hopefully we will meet in person at some point.
AR: Hopefully, hopefully, we’ll be allowed out of the house again at some point.
AP: Yeah, so the first question is from Edward, Edward Iglesias who asks; is there a perceived goal in a BDSM / Magical context? And then he says that there are initiatory elements that are found in many esoteric traditions such as trials, set and setting, ritual performance and so on but in all traditions. He knows there is intention on the part of the seeker/submissive to progress down a path to gain knowledge or gnosis. Yeah, so I guess I guess that he’s asking whether there is an intentional component?
AR: Yeah, this is interesting and I think I have kind of have touched on it a little already. I don’t think, I mean, I don’t think you could do kink of the kind my research participants were talking about, by accident. So everyone I spoke to was doing more than, you know, tying their partners with silk scarves as foreplay, so there has to be an intentional aspect to the kink. And for those who are using it in a magical context, they sort of have a two-fold intention. But one of the things I found really interesting… So the Shaman, that I spoke about earlier, he talked quite a lot about accidentally creating magical spaces with his long-term partner because they’re so in tune with each other and their energy resonates on such a similar level because they do magical working together. So sometimes they can be playing just because it’s fun and they want to and they’ll feel the energy building. So they had the intention to do the BDSM, they had the intention to play, they didn’t have the intention to do Magick and I think he said, I’m trying to represent what he said now. I think he said something about having developed a practice whereby they offer that energy, they just offer that energy back to the universe and let it go, rather than trying to do anything else with it because they haven’t created it with an intention of doing anything, it’s just what’s happened between them. And I also, and this is something else people like to apologise a lot for saying and a lot of people talk to me about building up energy and exchanging energy and creating energy and then going, I’m sorry, you know obviously it’s not energy, I’m a scientist and I know it’s not really energy but I don’t know how else to put it. So I think, you know, within a tradition and you have to have a degree of intention don’t you? There’s a degree of responsibility about dealing with what you’ve created if indeed you have created something but I think the potentials of a lot of kink practices are such. But I think you can find that potential by accident. I think you can create that kind of energy without necessarily intending to create it and I think it’s telling that a number of people who didn’t consider themselves really, just not spiritual at all, nevertheless described to me the creation of energy, that kind of energy through their play. So I don’t think you have to have intention, I think you have some intention to play. I don’t think you have to have intention to do spiritual things or magickal things. I think you can create that space by accident.
Intentionality and accidents I think. yeah, I think there’s something really interesting there in that we have an assumption again I think possibly a social-cultural assumption that things don’t happen if you don’t mean them to or things that happen by accident aren’t worth anything, perhaps. And it’s built into a lot of religious paths as well. I mean I’m thinking about Islam where you have to have intention for prayer and you have to have intention to go on Hajj and intention to fast and it’s built-in as this fundamental thing. But I think a lot of human history and a lot of human discovery is about serendipity and it’s about accident and seizing on the accident and building it. You find it a lot in conversation about art, you know, if you read the kind of stuff that says, so you don’t think you’re artistic. Of course, you are and it will say things like, you know, there are no mistakes, just see what happens and see what you can do with what happens. Somehow, we only talk about it in the context of art; I don’t really know why that is. So I wonder, I wonder if discovering the kind of practices that will enable you to raise energy or that will enable you to feel like your mind and body are more closely aligned than perhaps you felt otherwise, Discovering those kinds of practices, why shouldn’t you discover them by accident and then use them because you’ve discovered them by accident. I don’t think you have, I don’t think they’re only worth it if you had the intention to do it, I think the accident, the accidental discovery can be a valuable thing. And I definitely want to think about that more.
AP: Yeah definitely. I think that in the realm of Magick, you know, Magick practising traditions there’s a lot of importance given to intentionality which makes sense, obviously but perhaps, even the unintentional acts can bear a certain value.
AR: Yeah, even from a magickal point of view and again from the magical point of view you have to wonder. I mean perhaps it’s tapping into an unconscious intentionality. If you’re you know creating something that you needed that you didn’t necessarily know that you needed, that doesn’t mean you you didn’t need it. I remember, in fact, it might even have been at that conference that we met, I remember doing some yoga with Theo, who I mentioned earlier and we were very, very simple it didn’t look like yoga at all but it was about connecting breath with body movements. I have arthritis type pain in my hands. It’s fibromyalgia really, it’s not arthritis, it feels like arthritis and we’ve done some of these exercises and about half an hour later I suddenly had this revelation. It was just like a slap in the face. Like, my god, my hands don’t hurt, they don’t hurt. And he says well, you know, you should try and do some stuff every morning just see what happens, see what your body wants. And the next morning I did I got up and I did some yoga, just a little bit of yoga and I had this absolutely overwhelming… so I’m going to call it grief, I don’t know what else to call it, overwhelming flood of emotion. I ended up crying in a heap on the floor for about half an hour after this. And I went to Theo and I said, okay so I did this and it felt good and then suddenly I was just this weeping mess on the floor and said yeah well obviously he said your body’s going thank god she’s finally listening to me. And that really made sense to me because it seems like a lot of the pain, that I was just putting up with and dialling down and ignoring, is my body trying to tell me something that I hadn’t registered. It was trying to tell me and then, by deciding to do the yoga, my intention was just to see, all right, I’ll see if this is going to help the aches but the effect was that whatever parts of my body are saying for Christ’s sake, do something, went ah, at last! So I didn’t have the intention to create the effect I created but that doesn’t mean the effect wasn’t powerful and right and appropriate.
AP: yeah absolutely.
AR: And I think that you know, the same can be true of Magick. I think you could probably do quite a lot of Magick accidentally, actually. Perhaps it’s less obvious in some cases than it would be with a kink scene but yeah, intention’s important isn’t it because you don’t want to do any damage because you didn’t know what you’re doing but I think you can do it by accident.
AP: Then I have another question from Andrew. He is asking; non-cis-normative sexual behaviour, for instance, Fetishism tends to be pathologised, even after legal restraints have been expunged, with removal from the DSM occurring only very recently. Is this the case with BDSM and has this helped or hindered interested people within the community in adopting Paganism and/or Magical Practice? Andrew is from New Zealand, by the way, so in that sense.
AR: So, I mean the simple answer is yes, absolutely, it is still pathologised. I mean it’s not unequivocally removed from the DSM which, is if anyone is unaware that’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that’s used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illness and disorders. It is the best, it’s the most used one, it’s the best-known one, it’s not the only one. So the latest iteration of that, it did remove fetishes it did remove paraphilias, in general, but what it didn’t remove was sadism and masochism. You can still be diagnosed with a disorder for either of those. It puts in the proviso that it has to cause you distress, which was a compromise between taking it out entirely and leaving it in as it was. So I would have to go to a psychiatrist and be distressed at my own masochism to be diagnosed with that particular disorder. But it is still present on the DSM and that is a source of some anger in the kink community because of this link, that Andrew has picked up on, between BDSM, all kinds of BDSM and pathology. And yeah, it’s still l really prevalent, it’s still really prevalent. Popular culture is full of it, so, you know, you count up the number of things that have you crazed serial killer interested in kink in one kind or another and it’s, you know, it’s most of them. And A it’s not necessarily true that all serial killers are into kink and B it’s certainly not true that all kinky people are serial killers or there’ll be a lot more dead people in the world. So it is a very strong connection, very strong and it certainly affected and continues to affect how willing people, within the scene, are to talk to researchers about what they do and how they do it. And from what I’ve, from what I’ve come across in this area, I would say it does interact with Pagans finding kink as a tool, finding it useful as a tool. I think, even within Gardnerian Wicca, I think a sort of discussion about what that involves and why it might work and where that comes from is quite often, sort of, glossed over quite a lot. It’s sort of mentioned in passing, you know, these which these crazy Witches they do this and then you move on. And I think that’s true about a lot of things to do with kink. Some crazy people do this and we don’t want to talk about it which I think comes from the pathologisation of it and the, specifically, the connection of it with particularly unpleasant forms of crime and violence against unwilling participants. So yeah, I do think it’s a problem, I do. Although I say it’s a problem, I mean some kinky people enjoy being part of a transgressive subculture and don’t really want to normalize it and also you can argue there are risks in over-normalizing it in some of the more extreme things like hook-suspensions, for example. You really shouldn’t be trying if you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t have access to someone who really knows what they’re doing and if you over normalize things then perhaps you risk people trying things they shouldn’t be trying. But there’s always circles you can go around with these things aren’t there. But I think I think the balance is the wrong way at the moment. I think the assumption that there must be something wrong with you if you enjoy BDSM is, perhaps not as strong as it was 20 years ago, but still probably stronger than it should be.
AP: I agree. Then we have one last question from Marcus who asks; Is there a relationship between the transmutation of physical pain into ecstasy in subspace and the transmutation of emotional pain into serenity in various spiritual traditions, for instance, Samadhi, Spiritual Alchemy, and so on?
AR: I mean yeah, there’s absolutely a parallel and so, I mean I had two or three participants describing spacing to me and exactly those terms, actually Buddhist terms, usually. But exactly that this idea of transcending something, of achieving a peak state like Samadhi. But I also think, I think you have to be careful as indeed you do, if you’re just studying it in the context of Buddhism or Hinduism, you have to be careful about oversimplifying that. So subspace, well again it would depend on who you ask. For me, subspace isn’t about transmuting pain there is no pain in subspace the pain comes before, possibly, but then again perhaps it doesn’t because what pain is and isn’t is going to vary a great deal between people. So there are things that would look painful to an observer that I would experience as pleasure, directly as pleasure as in I don’t I categorise it as pain I go, no this is a nice sensation and there are other things that I would categorise as pain but I like the pain and then there are other things that are absolutely pain and I’m turning the pain into something else and doing something with the pain. So any of those things are possible and any of those things can take you to subspace. But none of those words have any meaning once you are in subspace and I think for me that’s where the parallel with the state like Samadhi comes in. It’s that state beyond words once you’re there. None of the words you might use to describe other states apply because it’s different, because it’s so different and that’s why you give it this shorthand name that’s why you would call it subspace. But for other people, I’ve certainly had people describe subspace to me in exactly those terms as the transcendence of pain into ecstasy and that works for them, perhaps. One of the things that makes it unique for me though and where I’m not aware of any parallels in established religious traditions is in a BDSM context. In the BDSM context that I researched because I didn’t talk to anyone who was a solo practitioner and it is possible to be a single practitioner of kink. But all the people I spoke to were doing it with other people, one or more other people and the uniqueness of the spacing states is that you’re not in it on your own. Whereas Samadhi and comparative states of enlightenment is about you and how you get there. You might get there using teachings from somebody else but you aren’t travelling there with somebody else, you aren’t pulling each other up the mountain, step by step, whereas when you space in a kink sense, I and most of my research participants would agree, you are co-creating that state, you’re both contributing to it, you’re both helping the other one to get there and it wouldn’t exist without the other person. So that I think is unique or certainly unusual in altered states.
AP: So this is it for today’s video. What do you think about what we talked about? Let me know in the comment section and if you did like this video don’t forget to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me and as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
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CONTACT DETAILS
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REFERENCE (Article mentioned)
Robertson, A. & Wildcroft, T. (2016). Sacrifices at the Altar of Self-Knowledge. Body and Religion, 1, 88-109
First uploaded 17 Dec 2021