Spiritual Transformation through BDSM; Stories and Submissions from Fellow Travelers

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It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene

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SCENEprofiles Interview with Patrick Califia

It is a commonplace among gay men that much religious art is, well, sexy: think of paintings of St. Sebastian dressed only in loincloth, torso pierced with arrows, and other (mostly naked) martyrs awaiting their salvation. Occasionally, even Jesus upon the cross would look more at home in a Mapplethorpe print than above an altar. From the metaphysical poets Richard Crashaw and John Donne to Bernini's famous sculpture of St. Theresa to Andres Serrano's controversial photograph Piss Christ, Richard Rambuss examines how sexual desire is often intertwined with religious iconography. While many art historians have argued that what we consider highly sexualized imagery resulted simply from artistic conventions of a more "innocent" time, Closet Devotions postulates that religious art was the only "safe" medium through which many forms of sexual desire could be expressed. Rambuss is wide-ranging in his references, which include such "profane" texts as 18th-century manuals of piety, the erotic novels of Georges Bataille, Stephen King's Carrie, contemporary slasher movies, and ACT UP posters. He brings them all together to make a convincing, fascinating, illuminating, and at times brilliant argument about sex, desire, religion, and rapture. --Michael Bronski (From Amazon.com)

*This is a classic text 

Read David Steinberg's review of Dark Eros

SCENEprofiles Interview with Mathew Styranka

[this is a book of Fakir's radical BDSM photography - not for the fainthearted]

SCENEprofiles Interview with Fakir Musafar

Read an excerpt from this book

SCENEprofiles Interview with Raven Kaldera

Read Sadie's Review

*This has a section of essays on BDSM & spirituality

Read the SCENEprofiles Interview with Mark Thompson, on Geoff Mains’ Urban Aboriginals

SCENEprofiles Interview with Joseph Bean

Excerpt from Leathersex Q&A

Pagan BDSM: Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path
By Raven Kaldera

Review of Raven Kaldera's excellent book: Pagan BDSM: Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path (review by Sadie)

*Not so much about BDSM but excellent profiles of Sexual adventurers like Marco Vassi

*Very much a personal journey type book. Well written by these giants in the BDSM writing world.

*Mostly about Wicca & Paganism but has a nice section on BDSM. Very cleanly written.

Fiction stories of Spirituality and Transcendence in Dominance and Submission

Read a story from this collection:
Come For Me, Dark Man By Anne Tourney

From Publishers Weekly
Why do mystics and devout laypeople in many different religious traditions glorify physical pain, some going so far as to ritually mutilate themselves in the name of the divine? In this erudite and wide-ranging study, Glucklich, a professor of theology at Georgetown University, offers a compelling explanation. Drawing on the fields of psychology, neurophysiology and religious studies, he observes that pain "the most familiar and universal aspect of all human experiences" affects both the body and the mind. Pain triggers an altered state of consciousness in which one's sense of self is diminished, creating an absence that can make way for a new and affirming presence. "The task of sacred pain," Glucklich writes, "is to transform destructive or disintegrative suffering into a positive religious-psychological mechanism for reintegration within a more deeply valued level of reality than individual existence." Although this state of transcendence exists across cultures, the way in which the experience is interpreted is culturally specific. To demonstrate this, Glucklich draws upon a wide range of examples, from the tortures of the Inquisition to Native American trials of endurance. He concludes by exploring what we may have lost with the development of medical anesthetics. This fascinating, closely argued study suggests that, in religion as in sports, there is no gain without pain.

SCENEprofiles Interview with Justin Tanis

Read Sadie's Article/Review on Urban Aboriginals

Read an excerpt from the book

Read the SCENEprofiles Interview with BDSM legend Mark Thompson, on Geoff Mains’ Urban Aboriginals

This additional list of books on BDSM & Spirituality comes from Westom.com:

Bound to be Free: The SM Experience by Charles Moser and J. J. Madeson (Continuum Publishing Company, 1996)

Extreme Space: The Domination and Submission Handbook, by F.R.R. Mallory (Unbound Books, Rohnert Park CA, 1998)

Has the chapters "Space" (with "Sub Space", "Dominant Space", "How to Access Sub-Space", "Moving Within Space", "Q&A" and "Altered Mental States") and "The Threshold of Flight" (with "The Threshold of Flight", "Blended Space" and "Lost in Space")

Gay Body: A Journey Through Shadow to Self, by Mark Thompson (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997)

"Although it's primarily an autobiography, because Mark is a spiritually focused leatherman, there is a lot of profoundly moving material about his experiences integrating spirituality and SM."

Masochism: The Art of Power by Nick Mansfield (Praeger Publishers, 1997)

Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists, edited by Winston Leyland (Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, 1998)

"The chapter entitled Zen in Black Leather by Vajra Karuna."

Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul by Ariel Glucklich (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Sacred Sexuality: Living the Vision of the Erotic Spirit by Georg Feuerstein (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee Books, 1993)