The next, and most difficult relationship type, is the sadomasochistic relationship. Difficult, because it has so many forms and expressions that many people do not recognize it for what it is.
In one form or another, this type of relationship seems to permeate the interrelationships of men and women.
The archetypal dynamics that generate and lead to this type of relationship were detailed in our study of the Garden of Eden myth, which is a reflection of the distortions born during the transition to the patriarchy.
The resulting dynamics are that a permeating guilt leads to atonement or anger, dominance and submission, along with roles and feelings of inferiority and superiority.
Within these dynamics is the implicit teaching that flesh is antagonistic to spirit, and that suffering is a prerequisite for any real growth or gain to occur.
In a masochistic pathology, there will always be three thought patterns that permeate the subconscious of such individuals:
I deserve pain, punishment, crisis, suffering, humiliation (enforced humility), and denial, and I do not know why. In addition, the dynamic of denial/avoidance expresses itself as a suppression of the truth that is causing this to occur in such a way as to make excuses that will always sound like rational reasons in order to justify such conditions. And within this, the related thought: there must be something wrong with me.
For my needs to be met, I must hurt, suffer, or sacrifice first.
I am essentially worthless, while intellectually knowing better.
In essence, a masochistic orientation to reality will create a circumstantial reality that is defined by personal crucifixion - to compulsively sacrifice oneself in a myriad of ways.
When atonement is linked with guilt, the behavioral manifestation can only lead to pain and crisis. Self-sacrificial behavior, pain, and the creation of crisis produces self-knowledge.
In effect, a masochistic type can only learn about oneself through the creation of crisis and the analysis of self that this will produce.
Crisis also has the effect of removing the psychology of denial and avoidance of the truth because of the repetitive nature of crisis formation in the masochist.
At some point, the masochist will simply become totally exhausted from the cycle of crisis and desire to change. When this occurs, the blinders of excuse-making will come off, reality will set in, and they can change.
In relationships, the masochist compulsively attracts one of two types of people.
One type is what I call the “emotional wounded birds” of this world. This type needs excessive emotional and psychological healing or repair. They are quite typically very narcissistic and have no real capacity to acknowledge the needs of their masochistic partner. Consequently, the masochistic partner is left feeling totally misunderstood and invalidated. In this situation, the masochistic partner does almost all the giving, and is constantly putting out all the fires that the ‘wounded bird’ is creating.
The other type that the masochist will attract is what I call the “silver-tongue-devil” type. This is the type that knows how to present themselves, they know what to say to “hook” the masochist. Yet, once the masochist bites on the hook and makes the decision to be in the relationship, the actual emotional and psychological agenda or reality of the sadistic partner becomes revealed-and this reality has nothing to do with their original presentation of themselves. [This is another narcissistic type.]
At this point, the masochist becomes totally disillusioned, and another crisis is at hand. The “silver-tongue-devil” will then often adopt an air of great concern and sincerity, and promise to change in order to re-secure the relationship. Yet once it is re-secured, they revert to the old patterns, And, of course, these two types that the masochist can attract can be combined in the same person.
The masochistic person reflects a natural kind of innocence that creates naivete and gullibility. They see the spirit of potential in an individual, and then expect the person to either be the potential that they perceive, or to actualize what their spirit reflects. Rarely, if ever, will their partners do either. Then disillusionment sets in, and more crisis.
Masochists have a need to be needed - they live for it.
[This is the rescuer position on the triangle.]
In the sadist, anger is linked with guilt instead of atonement. This pathology will also make excuses sounding like rational reasons as a way of avoiding/denying the truth of what is actually happening.
As a result, the subconscious messages or thought patterns become these:
I have been made to feel guilty and I am angry because of it, so I want to hurt others and make them feel as guilty or as bad as I do. And I will hurt others first, before I myself get hurt.
I want to make others atone for their mistakes or sins. I want to humiliate others so that I will humiliate myself.
By punishing others for their imperfections, mistakes, or sins, I am punishing myself.
These three thought patterns will create a circumstantial reality that is defined, in essence, by dominance/submission, master/slave, superior/inferior, and victor/vanquished orientations to reality.
In men, this dynamic is projected upon women, due to an underlying or latent fear called the “castration complex.”
For women, who can also be sadistic, the castration complex also applies. This complex is psychological, not literal.
The essence of this complex is the fear or feeling that the opposite gender will disempower, undermine, capture, enslave, or in some undefined way destroy you.
Consequently, the sadistic person will desire to hurt another first, to attack first, to destroy first, to “get even” first, before it allows itself to get hurt.
For individuals who are defined by this sadistic pathology, there is always an underlying feeling that someone or somebody is out to get them, to attack them, to hurt them, and to victimize them.
And instead of feeling that they deserve this, as the masochist does, they will feel victimized.
The masochist also feels victimized, but the masochist feels that they deserve to be a victim. The sadist feels only anger because of feeling victimized in this way, and this anger can only be used to destroy or hurt others. They are compelled to punish others for the underlying guilt that resides in their own psyche or subconscious.
In some people, the sadistic and masochistic pathology operate together-the manifestations of each pathology depend on specific circumstances. In classical psychology, this is known as the passive/aggressive type.
The sadomasochistic relationship type has a wide range of behavioral applications. This dynamic is easily recognized by any of us.
The most overt forms, of course, are the classical forms of sadomasochistic sexual practices that most people have some awareness of the whips and chains, the leather costumes, the spiked heels, all the equipment that creates sexual/emotional torture, and so on.
The operative psychological/emotional dynamic in such overt forms is intense pain, and the release from such pain. Intense suffering leads to a sense of freedom when the release from the suffering occurs.
In recent modern history, the most gross, yet most recognizable, person who embodied the darkest and most distorted dimensions of this archetype was the Marquis de Sade.
In his time, the sadomasochistic archetype was actually given a fancy philosophical name by the “noble” class that practiced it. It was called the “libertinage” philosophy. The implied teaching of this philosophy was “In order to be free, to liberate, one must suffer.”
The first premise in this philosophy was that God is inherently evil, and that to do God’s work one must consent to embrace evil and “to confound the laws of nature, to turn the laws of nature upside down.”
As ridiculous as this may sound, try to understand that such distorted thinking directly emanates from the equally distorted religious thought embodied in the Garden of Eden myth - that flesh is in conflict with spirit.
The implied guilt linked with flesh thus distorts the life of the flesh or senses because of suppression via religious injunction. The effect of this teaching existed long before de Sade - for example, the self-flagellation of so many pious monastic Christians during the 1400s and 1500s, which is still seen today among some of those in the Islamic world.
During the Crusades, it was a common practice, under the banner of the cross, to sexually torture and mutilate men and women (mostly women in unspeakable ways in an effort to extract confessions about their “immoral” life practices, and to force them to turn in other people who were also living “immorally.”
The sadomasochistic dynamic also emerges among Jewish teachings, where to be especially “chosen” or favored by God requires persecution by others.
It also exists in other races. For example, certain American Indian tribes perform the Sun Dance in which metal is pierced into the nipples of an individual, and the metal is attached to ropes tied to a pole.
The Sun Dancer will progressively suspend himself so that the body is only held up by the metal attached to the ropes. The pain and suffering experienced is meant to induce visions from on high.
The point that I am making is that this sadomasochistic archetype permeates the collective psyche of millions of people living today, and most do not know it. Yes, the most overt forms can be recognized by almost all of us.
And in this recognition, we recoil in shock and horror - ”How could anybody be like that, do such things, allow oneself to be such a way” - and so on. In our times, this dynamic is most easily understood by us as the battered wife syndrome, the abused child syndrome, and the like.
All we have to do is turn on the television set and observe the next set of people on the increasingly popular talk shows discussing their childhood abuse to understand how extensively this S&M archetype permeates society. But how many of us can recognize the less overt forms of this archetype? And what are these less overt forms?
Again, can it not be seen in the man and woman doing the same job and the woman makes less?
Can it not be seen in a man or a woman who withholds their emotional or sexual attention from their partner as a form of punishment?
Can it not be seen in various forms of perpetual criticism from one partner to another? (This form can also be linked with “teasing” when it has the motive of humiliation.)
Can it not be seen in the man who expects the woman to be merely a vicarious extension of his reality, whose only purpose is to serve his needs?
The thought that the woman is inferior to him—a second-class citizen at best—is this not a form of the dynamic of dominance and submission?
And why is it that when a woman wants to fully actualize herself that she is considered, consciously or unconsciously, as wanting to be “like a man”?
From a man’s point of view, is this not an example of the castration complex?
And why is it culturally acceptable in every society for a man to flaunt his sexuality, to brag about his conquest, to talk about women in the crudest terms, but not OK for a woman to do exactly the same?
Is this not traceable to the original archetype of the Garden of Eden myth wherein man is now “getting back” at women for the original temptation?
Here is the root of the unconscious rationale for the rape of a woman - an act of power and rage linked with the castration complex generated in the Edenic myth.
More commonly, we have the situation of a man who can be emotional and placating to the woman in order to have sex with her, and then, when the act of sex is over, he is suddenly emotionally remote or disdainful of the woman-sometimes even angry at her. Why? Because he has given in to the temptation.
If you can understand this, then you will understand why so many women feel that they must be pure for their men—the unconscious desire to atone for their responsibility for the “Original Sin.”
It is very difficult to overstate the degree to which this archetype permeates the minds of millions of people.
Just as the nature of the seed that is planted in the ground determines the shape and form of the plant that we can see, so too does this seed of the Garden of Eden myth, residing in the collective unconscious, determine the shape and form of the interrelationships between people - particularly between men and women-and, by way of extension, to how human beings interrelate with the rest of Nature.
Astrologically, the sadomasochistic archetype correlates with the signs of Virgo and Pisces. For 2000+ years, we have been living in the Pisces Age.
Many years ago, for example, I did a research study of people who consciously defined themselves as masochistic or sadistic. This was done in the context of a specialized group of people who were members of an S&M “church.” Of all the people studied, ninety percent had an emphasized Twelfth or Sixth Houses, a stellium of planets in Pisces or Virgo, and or the South and North Nodes of the Moon in the Sixth or Twelfth Houses.
This should not be surprising when we consider the birth chart of Jesus of Nazareth, who ushered in the Pisces Age for Western peoples.
The chart that I use, the one that makes most sense to me, was a chart that was rectified by the theologian/astrologer Donald Jacobs. In this chart, Pluto is conjunct Mars in Virgo (which are both retrograde in the Ninth House), and in opposition to the Sun, Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Uranus and Saturn in Pisces within the Third House.
Neptune, the ruler of Pisces, is conjunct the South Node in Scorpio. In essence, the life of Jesus was a lite of “suffering for our sins,” of trying to absolve our guilt through absorbing our karma through the act of sacrificing his own life, of “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and also of an attendant guilt based in imperfection which is reflected in his own words: “Father, take this cup from me.” This means: “Lord, I am weak and not perfect enough for the job that you have given to me; please let me go.”
The implication here is that if one is pure enough, perfect enough, good enough, then that which we are given to do will simply occur.
But perfection, in this context, can only be linked with a God that is conceived as perfect, and the human being is something less than is because of temptation that was succumbed to in the Garden of Eden - the commission of original sin.
So human beings in general, and women in particular, are never good enough, never perfect enough, to do what is given to one to do. This archetypically conditioned psychology thus sustains and perpetuates guilt relative to the God that is conceived as perfect.
The bottom line in all of this is that the sadomasochistic archetype will be sustained until and unless the Christian and Islamic doctrines that conceive God in this way are changed.
As an example, these doctrines state that what is called God is the origin of all things. If so, then wherein lies the origin of imperfection?
Wherein lies the origin of evolution?
Wherein lies the origin of anger? Guilt? Sexuality?
The list goes on and on.
If we can confront these questions, then we can see that what is called God is also an evolving force seeking to perfect itself.
If God is understood in this way, love and compassion will replace guilt, and the self-hate and anger that guilt generates.
Natural law will become that by which the human being understands life, not manmade laws that distort natural law. It is only in this way that the sadomasochistic archetype will no longer exist.
Until this occurs, the sadomasochistic acts, on a large scale, such as the Holocaust against the Jews and Gypsies that Hitler fomented, the “ethnic cleansing” insanity that now engulfs what was once Yugoslavia as of this writing, or the dark forces of Russia who wish to return Russia to a state of domination via purging non-Russians from its borders, etc., will continue.
As we move toward the Aquarian Age, the transition necessary that will allow an embracing of natural law as opposed to manmade law is under way.
The intention of Pluto in Scorpio, relative to Neptune and Uranus being in Capricorn, is to accelerate this transition. This acceleration will only increase as Pluto moves into Sagittarius (a fire sign) and Neptune and Uranus move into Aquarius (an air sign. The last time this occurred, the transition to Humanism began during the Renaissance in the West.
Astrologically speaking, we all have the signs Virgo and Pisces in our horoscope somewhere. The question becomes this: Where and how is this archetype of sadomasochism operating in your life?
The house positions of those signs and planets associated with them reveals exactly where you are most susceptible to this archetype via the impact of the Garden of Eden myth, and its permeation into the collective unconscious - the seed in the ground!