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

is also the preferred time in which to begin the Khlysti orgy The circle of the
Indian chakra puja orgy is recalled in the frenzied circular dance that begins
the Khlysti rite. Similar to some Dervish dance rituals, the whirling Khlysti
dance was used as a means of altering consciousness, and at its frenetic
zenith, the participants flagellated each other's bodies to heighten their
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ecstatic states. When the somatic energy had been brought to the desired
level, the gathered couples spontaneously undressed and paired off to
celebrate the prolonged orgiastic phase of the Working. And as in the chakra
puja, one of the female Khlysti served as the temporary avatar of feminine
power. One of the orgiasts was selected to be the incarnation of the Virgin
Mary, and was venerated in her ritual nakedness. The pre-Christian origin of
the sect is made obvious in the fact that the "Virgin" is also considered to be
"Mother Earth"; the Feminine Daemonic Shakti power that clearly places the
orgy under the aegis of the left. Rasputin has been reported as telling his
disciples that he first learned the "blessed secret" of "sanctification through
sin" through some sort of tutelary communication conveyed through the
voice of "holy Mother Earth."
The starets taught his congregation, which at first consisted of
gypsies and peasants in his native Siberia – but from 1903—1916, extended
to the society ladies of St. Petersburg and Moscow – that to he truly
redeemed of sin, one must sin thoroughly. To this end, Rasputin led his
refined adherents in modified recreations of the Khlysti orgiastic revels that
have since taken on mythological proportions. The surviving evidence seems
to indicate that Rasputin's prolonged bouts of frenetic dance and sexual
abandon were also intended to create a unique heightened state of
consciousness, a mystical apotheosis of initiatory death through orgasm that
is similar to Vama Marga practice. Crowley's attempts to sexually exhaust
himself and his lovers into a death-like state of visionary "eroto-comatose
lucidity" seems comparable.
This Rasputinesque use of extreme sexual ecstasy was primarily a
means of provoking inner death of the false persona and rebirth into a more
illuminated psychic condition However, the women who submitted to
Rasputin's erotic spell often reported relinquishing consciousness altogether
during the trance of repeated orgasm, which would seem to he the opposite of
the increased Awakening of the psyche usually aimed for in left-hand path
rites. Rasputin's aim of inverting established religious norms through sexual
taboo-breaking and proclaiming the sinful to be sacred is a clear
manifestation of the sinister current, another of those atavistic resurgences of
the hidden left-hand path of Christianity. Ironically, despite the nominally
Christian essence of Rasputin's approach to erotic initiation, the only
manifestation of Western sex magic he seems to have affected was the
Luciferian sex magician Maria de Naglowska.
Maria de Naglowska – A Satanic Sophia
Despite the centrality of the female sexual initiatrix – whether she be known
as Shakti or Sophia – to left-hand path erotic awakening, it was not until the
twentieth century that a female sex-magical teacher openly emerged in the
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West. Her teaching, which she clearly identified as being Satanic in nature,
reveals definite parallels with the authentic left-hand path. Almost unknown
in the Anglo-Saxon world, she was the Russian-born Maria de Naglowska
(1883—1936), who established a flourishing school of Satanic sex magic in
the Paris of the 1930s. As a sex-magical teaching that has no connection at all
to the lineage of O.T.O. and Crowleyan practices familiar to Englishspeaking
magicians, the unique approach to erotic initiation devised by this
remarkable adventuress has been unjustly ignored.
De Naglowska, the daughter of a high-ranking Tsarist military officer
who was assassinated by a nihilist anarchist, was orphaned at an early age.