I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

purposes.
The Demonization Of The Great Whore
The invincible goddess, known as Manna, Ishtar, Astarte and Ashtoreth, had
been victorious in so many battles before. But she finally fell victim to the rise
of the three monotheistic faiths that emerged in the Middle East. As with so
many of the great gods of antiquity, it was Inanna-Ishtar's fate to eventually be
toppled from her throne and forced into service as a grossly simplified Judeo-
Christian demon. Like other pre-Christian deities, this was not a simple
transference of her attributes into one new entity; Ishtar was split into two
disparate beings – a minor figure in the Old Testament, and a far more
substantial presence in the New Testament.
The sexual rites of Ishtar were especially loathsome to the Levite
priests, worshippers of the "jealous and wrathful" male god Yahweh. The very
idea of a powerful female priesthood dedicated to sexual worship was
abominable to a faith that envisioned womankind as the cause for man's
expulsion from paradise. In Canaan, the erotic sacrament was enshrined in the
bodies of the temple courtesans of Ashtoreth, the consort of Baal. The Old
Testament quotes Samuel as warning Israel to "put away the strange gods and
Ashtoreths from among you and prepare your hearts for the Lord". Elsewhere,
we read that the Israelites "forsook the Lord and worshipped Baal and
Ashtoreth."
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The Levite hatred of Ashtoreth and her prostitute-priestesses was
shared by the later ascetic strain of Christianity that took root in Rome. The
Roman Emperor Constantine, the first Caesar to adopt the Christian religion,
personally ordered the destruction of one of the last temples of Ashtoreth at
Aphaca, Caanan in 300 CE, declaring the ancient temple to be "immoral."
Constantine's fateful conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of the
West's slide into the abyss, and marks a turning point in the desecration of the
feminine principle from its former power.
The name Ashtoreth, removed from any historical context, eventually
found its way into Christian demonology. The Goetic magicians of the Christian
era summoned Ashtoreth as the first of the demonological hierarchy of
Thrones. The radiant goddess Ishtar was reduced from her former status as the
personification of lust to a rather shabby demon, who merely "tempts men
with idleness and sloth." When the notorious Madame Montespan, mistress of
the French King Louis XIV, performed her famous black masses in the 1670s
to cast a lust spell on the monarch's straying heart, the demon Astaroth was
invoked – it is doubtful that Montespan knew that she was really calling on the
Great Whore herself for this enchantment. The nineteenth century
demonologist Collin de Plancy drew Astaroth as a repulsive spider-bodied
entity sporting the heads of a cat, a lugubrious king, and a frog; a far cry
from the majestic deity from which the petty demon derived. A much more
powerful survival of Inanna-Ishtar plays a major role in the New Testament's
visionary Book Of Revelation, the Apocalypse written by John of Patmos in
approximately 95 C.E. In Revelation 17: 3-6, John writes:
"I saw the Scarlet Woman sitting on a Beast with seven heads and ten horns,
covered with blasphemous names. The woman was clothed in purple and
scarlet, and gilded with gold and precious stones and pearls, with a golden
cup in her hand filled with the abominations and the unclean things of her
fornications. On her forehead a name had been written, a mystery: Babylon
the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the Earth. I saw
the woman was drunk from the blood of the Saints, and from the blood of
the martyrs of Jesus. Seeing her, I wondered greatly."
Countless interpreters of the Bible, running the gamut from the scholarly to
the demented, have attempted to decode this awesome apparition of the end
times. But whether John intended Babylon the Great to signify some