I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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contemporary evil, a metaphysical truth, or both, there's no doubt that he<br />
drew directly on the well-established image of Inanna-Ishtar, who was once<br />
revered by her devotees as "the mother of harlots." John's description of the<br />
Scarlet Woman and the dragon Leviathan upon which she rides also echoes<br />
a Babylonian religious text addressed to Ishtar: "Like a dragon you have<br />
filled the land with venom. ... Lady mounted on a beast..."<br />
202<br />
Much like Kali, the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon is a symbol of<br />
the primordial woman of sacred chaos returning at the end of time; both<br />
goddesses incarnate the potent sexual violence that gave birth to the<br />
universe, restored to her awe-inspiring authority at the hour of dissolution.<br />
203<br />
For some European Hermeticists, who later interpreted the Bible as a veiled<br />
alchemical text, the color of the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse<br />
symbolized the phase in the alchemical work known as the Red Opus. In<br />
1584 C.E, the Elizabethan mage Dr. John Dee and his associate Edward<br />
Kelly recorded their Enochian Aires, in which a distorted version of the<br />
Scarlet Woman's name, Babalon, first makes a cryptic appearance.<br />
It was under this curious name that Inanna-Ishtar-Astarte,<br />
mankind's first documented deity of feminine sexual magic, would return,<br />
several centuries later, to take her place as the chief egregore of a modern<br />
Western sex-magical tradition.<br />
204<br />
205<br />
VI.<br />
Eastern Secrets And Satanic<br />
Pleasures<br />
<strong>The</strong> <strong>Left</strong>-<strong>Hand</strong> <strong>Path</strong><br />
And <strong>The</strong> Modern Magical Revival<br />
<strong>The</strong> Vama Marga – From East To West<br />
Almost all of the modern European magical Orders and teachers that can be<br />
said to have had a major influence on left-hand path sex magic, whether for<br />
good or for ill, have based their authority on a claimed transmission of secret<br />
Asian or Middle Eastern knowledge to the West. Among the mages we will<br />
consider in this chapter, we can count <strong>The</strong>odor Reuss's sex-magical fraternity<br />
Ordo Templi Orientis, whose very name suggests a hidden Eastern source; G.<br />
I. Gurdjieff and H. P. Blavatsky, who both cited Tibetan Buddhism as their<br />
inspiration, and P. B. Randolph, who acknowledged Syria as the root of his<br />
erotic magic. As we shall see, for the most part, such claims were nothing<br />
more than romantic myths, but these persuasive legends of a hidden Oriental<br />
sexual wisdom being revealed for the first time exerted a potent fascination<br />
on early twentieth century magicians from industrialized cultures. This<br />
tendency of would-be sages in the 19th Century West to present their<br />
knowledge in Eastern guise was also based on the historic fact that there had<br />
been an immense Eastern magical influence on Europe from the Islamic<br />
world many centuries earlier; such currents as alchemy, the Troubadour<br />
tradition, and hermetic magic had been imported through contact with Arabic<br />
savants.<br />
Western magicians seem to more easily embrace the concept of<br />
sexual initiation if it is thought to have been derived from some exotic<br />
elsewhere. We find the same phenomenon today; although the allure of a<br />
mysterious East has been considerably lessened by the advent of mass<br />
tourism, television and the World Wide Web; now the mystery-hungry more<br />
readily accept channeled revelations from sunken Atlantis or communications<br />
from extraterrestrial worlds.