Initiatory cultures understand a thing that we in modern urban
culture have, largely, forgotten. Even in a quasi-initiatory Western
magical system, modern (maybe specifically American) sensibilities
(and fear of lawsuits) prompt warnings from higher-ups such as:
"Nobody should feel threatened, or in fear of their life
in a F.O.O. (Faithful Oblates of Ozymandias) initiation."
Nothing could be more wrong.
And this is the thing that Australian aborigines, Kalahari bushmen,
the Inuit, still understand: pain and fear
imprint transformative experience.
Nothing brands an experience into the hindbrain like the threat
of death; this is why the major puberty rites of initiatory cultures,
not to mention the initiations of their [ shamans | priests |
holy people ], involve death imagery, and the figurative
death -- either acted out in ritual, or experienced inside
the person's head through trance induction of one stripe or another
-- of the candidate to hir previous life, that s/he might be reborn
into the new life.
For some Westerners / First-Worlders, the need for these experiences
is a sort of drug. Some of these people can't even articulate
what they need, or aren't conscious of that need. Yet still, they
do things that put themselves at risk -- skydiving, motorcycling,
racing of any kind, "extreme" sports, grabbing moving
blender blades with their bare hands. Others, perhaps more cognizant
of what's going on inside their heads, engage in Modern Primitivism
and/or XYZ. [1]
Orca likes going fast, in cars or on bikes.
Orca craves adrenaline.
Orca likes endorphins.
Orca does XYZ.
It's a form of Bhakti, in a way. The same impulse that prompts the Darvish's trance dance of devotion to the Beloved, prompts such acts as taking Kavadi for Thaipusam, or even re-enacting the Crucifixion. But the object of devotion in this case is not the safe, emasculated god of some neo-Pagan traditions (sorry, just had to snipe there for a minute). It's the god who brings divine madness and frenzy, the god who's " not a tame lion" -- Shiva. Dionysos. And in the case of both the Filipinos who flog themselves insensible and the Sufis who dance themselves insensible, the object is surrender of the ego to the divine.
XYZ players know about surrender. It's the paradox of XYZ that the sub is actually liberated by hir bindings.
1. This is not to say that everybody who does those things is doing them because they need a transformative experience and don't know they need it. However, I know enough adrenaline junkies like myself to be able to say (as always, non-rigorously) that we're the majority. Nyahahahah! WE ARE EVERYWHERE!!!! *ahem* I'm alright now.