|
|
|
cauldronfarm@hotmail.com
http://baphomet.genderrage.com
Slave Joshua: josh@cauldronfarm.com
Read Raven's
article Don't Break the Spirit; Slave
Training in an Animistic Pagan World
Read Raven's
article The Ordeal
Path: Introduction to Neo-Pagan BDSM
Read
an excerpt from Hermaphrodeities, Baphomet
- Sacred Perversion The Myth
By Raven Kaldera
Raven
Kaldera is a well known author, shaman, FTM transgendered intersexual
activist, and minister. Kaldera’s books include The Urban Primitive:
Paganism in the Concrete Jungle; Handfasting and Wedding Ritual:
Inviting Hera’s Blessing, MythAstrology; Lies And Scars; Darkness
Bound: Beyond Bondage and Discipline, and Hermaphrodeities: The
Transgender Spirituality Workbook, as well as countless short works of
erotica, religion, and sometimes the two combined. ‘Tis an ill wind
that blows no minds.
“I owe three people for my coming-out process. The first was someone
whose real name I never knew; I walked into a workshop on sacred
androgyny at a gathering and a large heavyset, hairy woman with a body
like mine (and five o’clock shadow like mine, only mine was blond and
didn’t show) got up and told everyone that s/he was an intersexual,
and how s/he’d found a spiritual calling in hir condition. I sat
stunned, my tongue frozen in my mouth. I’d always believed that it was
something to hide; a shameful annoying thing. The husband and lover who
each flanked me didn’t even know what I was, I’d hidden it that
well. And here was something like me, someone saying that this was a
gift from the gods? I walked out shaking all over. It took me a year to
get the courage to tell anyone (and only after divesting myself of both
my husband and my lover) but I owe it to that one brave mythical beast,
my sister/brother. S/he called hirself Siren; I never saw hir again, but
someday I’m going to find hir and buy hir dinner to thank hir for my
freedom.
~ Raven Kaldera, “Do It on the Dotted Line,” Fireweed, 69
SADIE: You’ve written that, “I have always had a strong
psychological need to own someone completely, and he has always had a
similar need to be completely owned.” From this I see that you take
BDSM to a high degree, and in fact is something that many consider to be
the highest form of the lifestyle. Do you agree with this?
RAVEN KALDERA: “Highest? Hardly. Unless you’d consider being a monk
or nun the highest form of Catholicism or Buddhism. My boy Joshua has
often referred to his path as a spiritual slave as ‘the monastic path
of BDSM’. Like being a monastic, it’s not for everyone, nor is it a
‘higher’ calling, just a more intense one. We do try to live our
chosen lifestyle as consciously as possible, striving to make it
something that aids both of us in our spiritual paths, but one could do
that with a totally vanilla relationship too, if one was into that sort
of thing.”
Sadie: You have a poly relationship with your wife Bella and your
slave Joshua. I think this is something that is commonly fantasized
about but rarely succeeded in. Can you tell me a little bit about how
you have created a working relationship?
Raven: “Like all relationships, it’s an ongoing work in progress.
All three of us are old hands at polyamory, so that’s not the hardest
part - it just requires a lot of ongoing negotiation and compromise and
checking in on everyone’s feelings. The power dynamic is the more
difficult thing to deal with....my relationship with Joshua is so very
different from my relationship with Bella that it’s hard to treat them
‘equally,’ as it were. But I *like* the fact that they’re
different. I like having an opposite-sex, equal-power-dynamic
relationship side by side with a same-sex unequal-power-dynamic
relationship. It covers all my bases, so to speak.
Sadie: You are quoted quite often as an activist for the transgender
and intersex communities. In fact, I first read some of your words in
Justin Tanis’ book Transgendered: Theology Ministry and Communities
of Faith, where you described the first time you attended a workshop
on sacred androgynes (see quote above). How did you get started on this
journey of validating your own, and others transgendered identities?
What are you doing now?
Raven: “I was born with an intersex condition, and I was raised female
- and thankfully not mutilated genitally like so many of the IS folks I
know. I transitioned over to male during my twenties, which makes me
transgendered as well. However, when people ask me why I got a sex
change, I usually tell them about the medical reasons - testosterone
makes me less depressed, raises my immune system, stops my lethal
hemorrhaging, etc - or I tell them about body dysphoria and how I always
wanted a male body. What I don’t generally tell them is the third
reason. I would have ignored all those other very good reasons, and I
did, even to the point of nearly dying, except that the Goddess who owns
my ass ordered me to do this, to get on with it already. When I
protested, she told me that she was sending me where I was needed most.
“(Why did I protest? I’d been raised by a feminist mother who fed me
stuff about how anything male was evil and inferior, and I went from
there to the women’s community, where I got more of the same. I got
over it, fortunately.)
“So, since this was clearly going to be a spiritual as well as a
lifestyle path, I went to sources of myth and history in order to find
out about how it was done in other times and cultures. I discovered the
gender-transgressing deities and mythic figures - Agdistis, Shiva,
Dionysos, Lilith, Athena, Baphomet, and all the rest of them - and each
one revealed a lesson to me about our nature, and what we are here to
do. That’s why I wrote ‘Hermaphrodeities;’ it was a gift to
my tribe. We who are neither quite male nor quite female need to know
that ours is a sacred path and not an aberration, and that we are
necessary to the evolution of humanity.”
Sadie: Your wife Bella is a male-to-female transsexual and your slave
Joshua is a female-to-male like yourself. Clearly your transsexual
identity is not just within yourself, but also reflected in the lovers
you choose. What is it about this particular attribute that you find so
important in those close to you?
Raven: “Ah, a friend referred to me as a ‘third gender
homosexual.’ Except that I do mess around with girls and boys
occasionally. I like women, I like men, but I like my own kind best. It
burns me that we are the only sexual minority who are discouraged from
dating each other - because you’re not a ‘real’ whatever unless
you can attract a ‘real’ whatever. But I’ve always been drawn to
other transfolk, and not just because you don’t have to explain your
gender shit to them.
Sadie: You also write what you call “positive transgendered porn”
which you feel helps dissipate the confusion about relating to
transsexuals. Can you tell me more about this?
Raven: “When you get a sex change, you automatically put yourself in a
space where most people are not going to want to have sex with you. Part
of this is homophobia, of course (or biphobia, to be literal about it),
but part of it is also that people have no models for how to have sex
with us, or why we’re sexy. This is especially true for FTMs. There is
some awful she-male porn out there, but there’s almost nothing about
FTMs. This is partly because many people don’t even know that we exist
(we pass and blend in so well), but it’s partly because in this
culture, penises are fetishized, and so is femininity, and someone with
both has at least some sexual value, but someone with neither is a big
fat zero in the modern sexual market. And the stuff about MTFs isn’t
made by them, it doesn’t show them as they’d like to be shown;
it’s someone else putting them on display like a freak show.
“So one of my big missions is to create and distribute as much good
trans erotica, by actual transpeople, about actual transpeople, as
possible. That’s why Hanne Blank and I co-edited ‘Best Transgender
Erotica’ together - she’s the significant other of an intersexual,
and we both decried the way that transfolk were depicted sexually. I
want people to read about actual transfolk with real anatomy, all the
different ways that we can be, and all the ways that we actually like to
have sex, and be turned on, to say, ‘Wow! I could get into that!’ I
think that if people actually have contexts for us, the braver ones
might actually want to have sex with us. So my ultimate goal is to get
more of us laid, and laid well.
“However, there’s still a lot of resistance. I put together an
anthology of my own trans porn, called ‘Lies and Scars’, and
marketed it to several queer-oriented publishers, and they rejected it,
because they felt it didn’t have enough of a market. In other words,
they don’t believe there’s as many of us out there as we say, or
that ‘ordinary’ single-gendered people would want to read anything
like that. I finally got it up on line as an e-book on Renaissance
E-Books (along with my anthology of sick fuck BDSM porn), and we’ll
see how it does from there.”
Sadie: There’s an assumption that, as you say, “since gender is
all tied up with sex, then cross-gender dressing must be sexual in
nature, so why dress up like that unless you wanted to be the opposite
sex in bed?” In other words, many people assume that a male cross
dresser, for example, must be gay. What is your approach to helping
people see that it’s not all about sex?
Raven: “Oh, my. You wouldn’t believe the gender combinations I’ve
seen, honey. I know FTM transsexuals who go from female to male, and
then become fetishistic cross-dressers, beating off in the lacy panties
that they couldn’t stand when they were forced to be girls. I know MTF
transsexuals who identify as butch dykes and can’t use their penises
unless they put on a harness and pretend they’re strap-ons. I know
people who have sex as several different genders. There are also folks
who cross-dress for entirely nonsexual reasons and never have sex in
anything but their ‘normal’ gender.
“I generally try to explain it to people with the idea that you have a
sexual preference continuum - the Kinsey scale, if you like - and you
also have a gender preference continuum, which has nothing to do with
who you want to fuck, it’s about who you want to be while fucking (or
taking out the garbage), and you can plot them together like an X-Y axis
diagram, and that means a whole lot more points than most people might
think.”
Sadie: In much of the contemporary writing about spirituality and
sexuality being sacred, the approach is to cleanse it so that regular
(vanilla) people can make the leap from our cultural norm of
spirituality VERSUS sexuality, to something that is palatable. You,
however, took a very different tack. Can you tell me about why you wrote
to speak your truth in a way that most certainly alienates a fair number
of readers?
Raven: “Ah, I am blessed with the wonderful quality of totally not
giving a shit what people think of me! And that helps. I’m quite
arrogant. Just ask my boyfriend.
“Beyond that, I’m spiritually required to ‘speak my truth’, as
you put it. I’m not allowed to euphemize it by the Powers that Own My
Ass. And sure, it alienates some people. Everything alienates some
people. So they hit the delete key and get on with their lives.
“The bottom of it is that lies turn my stomach.....and I know from
experience that I’m never the only one with the awful truth. If other
people hadn’t come out and said, ‘This is what’s true for me,’ I
would have sat there thinking, ‘I’m the only one with this terrible
secret!’ forever. Instead, they spoke up, and I said, ‘You too? Me
too!’ and I was freed. And every time I can do that for someone else,
it’s worth it.
“And I am what I am. I’m a sick fuck. My fantasies are violent and
bloody. My urges are dark. I decided a long time ago, when all attempts
to ‘cleanse’ myself of these tendencies failed, that I would place
them in the service of my spirituality. If I can do it, so can someone
else, but maybe they need someone to tell them how it might be done, or
they’ll wander around clueless for a long time, like I did.”
Sadie: That being said, can you give me the short version of your
approach to spirituality as it manifests in your BDSM practice?
Raven: “My spirituality manifests in everything I do, so of course it
would appear here. To start with, I’m a sadist, and one thing that
I’ve done is to use that in ritual SM, to help people as part of an
ordeal. I’m a dom, and I use that to embody whatever underworld
challenger people need to face them down during these rites of passage.
These traits can be used as tolls, in the service of aiding people in
working with their own internal monsters. I’m a master and a
slaveowner, and I see that as (among other things) me giving someone
else a chance to perfect a path of service in a context that is
fulfilling for them. And I’m a masochist, and I use that for magical
and spiritual work, to open me up to whatever wants to come through
me.”
Sadie: There are a rather large group of scene players who would
describe themselves as Pagan. What parts of this religion do you find
are particularly in alignment with the BDSM lifestyle?
Raven: “Well, there is the ‘all acts of love and pleasure are Her
rituals’ ideal, and the fact that it is a sex-positive religion, a
faith that doesn’t see sexuality as dirty and profane, or even as a
distraction to grow beyond, as many transcendent faiths do. Paganism
sees the earthly realm and the body as just as sacred as any
‘otherworld’. So that’s a start....you don’t have to feel guilty
about sex, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone.”
Sadie: You’ve commented that people are horrified at the idea of
mixing BDSM with being a neo-pagan shaman. Is it more of the pagans, or
more of the BDSMers who say this? What do you think they are thinking
that is limiting their world view so much?
Raven: “The big problem that the neo-pagan community has with BDSM is
really one of politics and aesthetics. First, politics: a sizeable
portion of the pagan community aligns itself with the radical feminist
and nonviolence communities, and they have been suspicious of BDSM for a
very long time, because they basically don’t trust people to be able
to control themselves. Under it all, they really believe that most
people are too screwed up to be capable of meaningful consent, and that
nearly everyone needs to be protected from their own brainwashing, and
so of course they see BDSM as the product of sick, brainwashed minds,
because the trappings are similar. There’s also the political issue
that many pagans want desperately for our faith to be accepted by
non-pagans, and they worry that the presence of members who do BDSM as
part of their spiritual practice will make the whole community look bad.
It’s bad enough that some of us talk about sacred sex, they say; but
it had better be harmless fluffy sex if we don’t want to be attacked
by the peasants with the pitchforks and torches.
“There’s also the problem of aesthetics. Much of the neo-pagan
community got their sense of community aesthetic from the 1960’s
hippie peace movements, and the New Age movement that grew out of that.
There’s a lot of pseudo-agricultural utopianism (as an actual farmer,
I can call it that, because I know most of these folks wax rapturous
about a bucolic country lifestyle, but would faint when it comes to
emptying a half-ton of manure out of a barn), and peace-love-white-light
stuff. Elves and strawberries, we call it, where the priestesses all
dress like Galadriel.
“Problem is that most neo-pagans are actually urban or suburban, and
you see a lot of the younger generation of pagans - the 14-22 set -
embracing an entirely different aesthetic. It’s modern primitive -
tribal tattoos and piercings, ‘cybershamanic’ looks, that sort of
thing. Instead of sweet, gentle rites of passage, they want ordeals.
They want something hard, so that they can say afterwards, ‘Damn, I
must be strong, I got through that alive!’ They are drawn to piercing,
cutting, hook suspensions, drumming and dancing until you drop in a
trance. Where their folks did their blind searching by dropping acid and
having lots of indiscriminate vanilla sex, they are drawn to this
stuff....the stuff I was doing in the pagan community (and getting
ostracized for) back when they were in diapers. That’s why I wrote
‘Urban Primitive’, although it doesn’t deal with BDSM per se;
Llewellyn Press would never have touched it. But I do deal with that
clash of culture. For instance, for me my leather jacket is both organic
armor and shaman’s skins. This clashes with the elves and strawberries
aesthetic, and frightens people, because it’s dark and challenging,
it’s underworld stuff. It’s the path of the Dark God and the Goddess
of Death, not the Maiden and the Bright Guy.”
Sadie: You write about your sort of paganism which you describe as
“strongly bound up with animism - the idea that inanimate objects can
have souls, can have a spirit and a character of their own.” Can you
expand on this? How is this tied into BDSM?
Raven: “On a simple level, it means that I believe in the indwelling
spirit in all things, including sex toys. On a deeper level, it means
that I do not see a submissive as an inert thing, ever, because I
don’t see valuable things as inert. So I don’t fool myself into
believing that I can obliterate and replace their soul.”
Sadie: You live at Cauldron Farm with your slave Joshua as well as a
nice variety of farm animals, organic herbs, and alternative energy. It
sounds bit like you are doing the Scott Nearing thing of self
sufficiency and group living. What is your mission at the farm, and how
does your BDSM lifestyle link into that?
Raven: “Bella and I have actually joked that we are the weird, kinky
version of Helen and Scott Nearing - sort of Helen and Scott crossed
with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Yes, we are striving for
self-sufficiency, although we have a long way to go. What does this have
to do with BDSM? Nothing, although I often think that it would be cool
if people brought their disobedient slaves here to do a few days or
weeks as a farm slave or draft pony, and learn about hard work and
useful service, not just masturbatory pretend labor. Besides, Joshua
would love to be Chris Parker (evil chuckle). It’d be kind of like the
Farm stories....let ‘em see what it’s really like. On a more
realistic note, we do host a lot of gatherings, including Dark Moon
Rising, which is a pagan BDSM weekend hosted by the magical Order of
that name, and we have the Temple of Baphomet up on some weekends, which
is the BDSM tent. It’s nice to have a whole lot of land, so you can
have rough sex and make loud noises and no one will come and bother
you.”
Sadie: In another interview you described your typical morning as,
“Get up, throw some breakfast down my throat that my wife has cooked
on our big Victorian wood cookstove, haul my ass out to the barn and
milk the goats, feed the sheep, strain the milk through a coffee filter
to get the goat hair out of it. Do my email while the milk filters, and
then start another batch of goat cheese to curdle overnight,
transferring yesterday’s curds to the cheese molds and yesterday’s
raw cheeses to a plate of herbs and salt, and then into freezer bags.”
I imagine that a lot of readers, knowing of your edgy approach to BDSM
might have you whipping a few slaves into a bloody mess before your corn
flakes. What do you see as the reality to living BDSM on a day to day
level?
Raven: “Joshua and I are in a contractual service relationship,
24/7/365, and that means that our power dynamic is implicit at all
times. With this in place, it doesn’t have to be *explicit.* He is not
deferential to me all the time; he’s allowed to mouth off, and even
criticize me, although he can’t refuse direct orders. This is
sometimes seen as him being ‘not very slavey.’ The key word here,
however, is *allowed.* I allow him to be this way, because I find it
useful. Generally we all have our assigned chores, but he can’t decide
that he doesn’t feel like doing X or Y today. So one of his jobs is
farm boy or houseboy. Another one is shaman’s boy, where he assists me
in readying myself for ritual work, keeps my ritual stuff in order,
makes me special food if needed, and does my aftercare if I’m wiped
out. (Not many submissives have to learn Reiki, runes, ritual food
preparation, embroidery, sex magick, speaking to land-spirits, working
around dead people, and charging magical implements as part of their
service training! Not to mention milking goats and slopping sheep.) I am
also a slave - to my patron deity - and I am very aware that this is a
chain of command, where my treatment of him is reflected in my own
treatment by Her. Do we get to much actual SM? Not as much as we’d
like, because the demands of this lifestyle tend to leave you rather
exhausted. I suppose we just need more slaves....(grin).”
Sadie: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Raven: “If you’re drawn to the Ordeal Path, be proud of that. It’s
not an easy path. It’s like the myth of Inanna, who was the Queen of
Heaven, but went to the Underworld where she was stripped, dehumanized,
and hung on a hook above Ereshkigal’s throne....and she emerged in
triumph, eventually (with the help of a couple of third gender people).
She did it because she was seeking the deeper experience. Or there’s
the myth of Odin, the Norse, warrior-god-king, who stepped off his
throne and went wandering in the wilderness as a beggar, lived as a
woman while learning women’s magic, traded an eye, and was crucified
on the World Tree, all in order to gain wisdom. We do this because we
are drawn to this place of death and resurrection. If you’re doing
BDSM in a spiritually conscious manner - meaning that you are
consciously evaluating what effect each activity has on your personal
cathartic evolution - it doesn’t matter what the trappings are. The
trappings are just tools to get into your psyche. It can be full pagan
ritual, or a tribal hook suspension, or someone chanting the Hail Mary
while flogging you, or an entirely secular Mommy’s Little Boy
worshipping her high heels. You do what works for you, not what others
tell you ought to work, and don’t let anyone make you ashamed of
it.”
Sadie: Thank you very much!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sensuous Sadie is the author of It's Not About the Whip: Love,
Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene (http://www.trafford.com/robots/03-0551.html).
She is the founder and leader (1999 - 2001) of Rose & Thorn,
Vermont's first BDSM group. Comments, compliments and complaints, as
well as requests for reprinting can be addressed to her at SensuousSadie@aol.com
or visit her website at www.sensuoussadie.com. Sadie believes the universe is abundant, and that sharing information
freely is part of this abundance, so she allows reprints of her writing
in most venues.
Copyright 2003 Sadie Sez Publications
|
|
|
