Title: Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM & The Ordeal Path
Author/Publisher: Raven Kaldera
Pages: 437pp
Price: $4.99 (ebook)

Content Warning: Discussion of rape

This massive book is written primarily by Raven Kaldera but includes essays, poems, and rituals by several guest authors. It sets out to illuminate the ways in which pagans can incorporate BDSM into their spirituality as a means to practice an ordeal path. This explores some of your typical Safe-Sane-Consensual BDSM as well as Risk Aware Consensual Kink. It shows the ways in which certain myths can be interpreted and re-contextualized into modern ordeal rituals utilizing BDSM to enact physical and psychological ordeal.

In many ways it is an interesting look at alternative practices, both spiritual and sexual, and the ways in which those practices can be complimentary and even entwine. This book was the second I ever read to address sacred sexuality through the lens of BDSM, and it contributed a lot to the development of my own ritual practices. For that I owe this work quite a lot, and yet it is not a book I would feel comfortable recommending anymore.

The primary problem with this book is that it fails to explore what negotiations (either in a BDSM or ritual setting) should look like. Though negotiation is touched on, the importance of it is never stressed to the degree it should be. In a book which covers such a wide range of physically and psychologically risky practices, this is a gross oversight that could lead to new and inexperienced practitioners to inadvertently do serious harm.

For anyone who might be less familiar with healthy BDSM practices, negotiation is important to establish hard and soft boundaries (what activities are not acceptable to engage in, what are, and what might need further exploration to determine). It is also important for establishing things like safe words (to protect the bottom or submissive from being pushed too far and being injured or the top from accidentally doing that kind of harm). Establishing boundaries and safe words are vital for preventing serious injuries and accidental crossing lines of consent.

Beyond this most glaring issue, the way rape as a concept it used and treated in this book is troubling. This book clearly seeks to live in a “primal” psychological space that, in theory, might look more like that of our ancestors. We must acknowledge that our ancestors lived in a harsher world where things like rape and others forms of assault were more commonplace/generally accepted. However, this does not mean that rape should be in any way consecrated in the modern world. I’m not sure that the intent here was to consecrate rape, but in many of the ways the concept is used in rituals as well as the casual way it is repeatedly used as in analogy, the result is either a form of consecration or normalization. This is not acceptable in a modern world which broadly acknowledges that rape is a deep and violent violation that should be rejected.

Even in the context of a spiritual practice which seeks to occupy a more “primal” headspace, this does not hold up as a valid reason to engage with the concept of rape in the way this book does. There is very little in this text that truly reads as “primal” in any way — obviously the methodologies for using pain have been modernized to include BDSM gear and psychological play. Even the ways in which the gods are approached and viewed have been updated for modern practitioners and audiences (as an aside, the view of some of the deities given here are shallow to the point of being inaccurate, in particular with regard to Kali and Shiva).

In short this book reads as rather irresponsible to a more mature reader, and those who are new to either the practice of BDSM or the practice of paganism should probably steer clear from this book. For those interested in melding their BDSM and spiritual practices, reading texts on these subjects independently and then finding ways to organically grow those practices together would be a wiser and more educational option with a greater potential for personal growth in the process. 

[Tahni J. Nikitins studied Comparative Literature and Creative Writing and spent a year exploring spiritual and cultural pursuits in Sweden. Her published works include “Only a Dream” in the anthology Terror Politico, “Is It Any Wonder” published in the 2017 edition of A Beautiful Renaissance, and “A Letter to Njörðr, signed Sigyn” in the devotional Between Wind and Water. She is currently working on revisions for her first novel.]