Rose ceremony

What is a rose ceremony?

A rose ceremony is a BDSM ritual in which a Dominant and a submissive bind themselves to each other with two roses: she holds a white rose that is not yet fully open, he a red one that nearly is. A thorn pricks a finger from each, and two drops of blood are mixed on the white petals. In English it is called the ceremony of the roses.

How the ceremony goes

In fixed steps, and usually in a living room.

The Dutch description most often reused has been on BDSMforyou.nl since September 2016, written by Meesteres Moriah. It runs like this:

1. The submissive holds the white rose, the Dominant the red.
2. He takes off her collar, passes it through a candle flame and puts it back on, with the promise to protect her.
3. With a thorn from his red rose he pricks her middle finger and lets two drops of blood fall on the white petals; then he pricks his own finger and lets two drops fall on top of hers.
4. The fingers are held together while both speak a vow.
5. A witness quickly passes the chain through the fire and wraps it around the couple.
6. The roses are pressed together and exchanged; the chain goes into the cupboard, wrapped.
7. The next morning the petals are plucked and kept in a small box.

The symbolism is set out in the same text: the white stands for a surrender not yet fully open, the red for passion and a willingness to protect, the chain for the events the couple came through together, and the mixed blood for two people of one flesh.

Where the rose ceremony really comes from

Not from the Netherlands, and probably not from a distant past either.

The Dutch text is a nearly line-faithful rendering of an English-language piece called The Ceremony of the Roses. That piece was already on a British lifestyle site in February 2008, eight years before the Dutch version, with the same white rose that is “not quite in full bloom”, the same two drops of blood, and the same chain through the flame. In March 2009 an American blog about collaring already referred to it as a known source.

The text says of itself that the ritual is “steeped in symbolism and mystique that dates back for centuries”. For those centuries no evidence can be found anywhere: no dictionary, no reference work, and no study names it, and the oldest source I could trace is that page from 2008. So the most honest description is that this is a modern scene ritual in an old costume, passed from website to website.

That does not make it worth less. It only makes the little line about the centuries a decoration.

Why people want this

Because it fixes something for which no official exists.

A collaring marks a step in a D/s relationship; the rose ceremony does the same, but with more weight and more theater. For anyone who wants that, the pull sits precisely in the elaborateness: there are witnesses, there are objects, something is promised out loud, and something tangible is left of it in a box.

• For you as the submissive, the payoff usually lies in being spoken aloud. What existed between the lines for months becomes, in one evening, a sentence someone else has heard.
• For your Dominant, the promise does the same in the other direction: he says out loud what he stands for, in front of witnesses he knows.
• For the two of you together, it produces a date. Relationships without a legal form rarely have an anniversary, and this gives one.

A ritual mends nothing. Moriah’s own text mentions using the ceremony to renew a relationship after a hard period, and that is exactly the situation in which an evening of candles can stand in for the conversation that really needed having. What you cannot arrange in plain words, you do not arrange with a rose either.

The blood is not symbolism

Here the ritual stops and medicine begins.

Two people who open each other’s finger with the same thorn and let the blood mix do exactly what the RIVM’s hepatitis B guideline (LCI) describes as a transmission route: blood-to-blood contact. That same guideline names shared toothbrushes, nail scissors, and razors in the same breath, and notes that the hepatitis B virus can survive up to seven days outside the body and stays infectious in that time. For the box of petals that is a less romantic detail than it seems.

If it does go wrong, time is the deciding factor. The RIVM’s needlestick-accident guideline (LCI) exists to assess the risk of hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV after a prick, cut, or bite, and whether protective measures are needed depends, besides that risk, on how much time sits between the accident and the consultation. So you call the same evening, not next week.

What I see myself

I am Victor, trained as a psychotherapist and more than twenty-five years into this world. I have rarely come across the rose ceremony in practice, and far more often in the conversations of people who had read about it.

The question is almost never about the roses. It is about whether the other person means it seriously. That is a fine question, but it is not answered by a ceremony; it is answered by what happens in the six months after.

My advice, then, is to turn the order around. First write down what you expect of each other, and only once that is on paper, work out how you want to celebrate it.

What you do if you want this

• Write the agreements down first. A contract, or just a list, puts in black and white what the ceremony only speaks aloud.
• Leave out the blood part, or do it safely. Each with their own, unused lancet and no shared thorn; that is the only part with a medical consequence.
• Get vaccinated against hepatitis B beforehand if you want the blood part anyway, and discuss that with your GP.
• Choose witnesses you both know and whom you would still dare to call in a year if it goes wrong.
• Agree on what happens if it ends. Who keeps the chain, what happens to the box, and how you end this. Every promise should have an exit.
• Do not put a date on it under pressure. A ritual that “just has to happen now” is a conversation being skipped.

More reading on rituals like this

• Collaring describes the shorter and far more common ritual that the rose ceremony is an elaborate variant of.
• Collar of consideration explains the phase before it, in which two people are still exploring each other.
• The RIVM’s needlestick-accident guideline (LCI) is free to read and shows exactly how a blood incident is assessed.

Where this fits on this site

A rose ceremony is something between you and your own partner; I do not perform it. What I do help with is the conversation underneath it: what you want to agree on and what you want to be able to take back. How such a preliminary talk goes is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• The Ceremony of the Roses. Seekers, archived by the Internet Archive on 25 February 2008. An English-language community source. It provides the fact that the Dutch text is a rendering of an older English-language piece: the same white rose “not quite in full bloom”, the same red rose “opened almost fully”, the same two drops of blood, the same collar through the flame, and the same chain; plus the line in which the text describes itself as “steeped in symbolism and mystique that dates back for centuries”, for which no other source can be found.
• LCI-richtlijn Hepatitis B. National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), National Coordination Centre for Communicable Disease Control. A national professional guideline. From it: that transmission within a household is possible through, among other things, shared toothbrushes, nail scissors, or razors and through other situations of blood-to-blood or blood-to-mucous-membrane contact, and that the hepatitis B virus can survive up to seven days on surfaces outside the body and stay potentially infectious in that time.
• LCI-richtlijn Prikaccidenten. National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), National Coordination Centre for Communicable Disease Control. A national professional guideline. From it: that the guideline serves to assess, in a structured way after a prick, splash, cut, or bite, the risk of infection with hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV, and that measures for protection or early detection are advised depending on that risk and on the time interval between the accident and the consultation.

Related terms

A rose ceremony is an elaborate variant of collaring, the ritual in which a collar is put on and accepted.

• Collar of consideration. The provisional phase that precedes such a ceremony.
• Collar. The object that goes through the flame halfway through this ceremony.
• Contract. The agreement on paper, which says what a ritual only speaks aloud.
• M/s. The relationship whose start date such an evening marks.
• Bloodplay. The wider subject the pricking part falls under, hygiene included.
• Consent. The consent that stays revocable even after an eternal promise.