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

After her education, she became involved in a bohemian milieu of artists,
writers and occultists, swept up in the revolutionary fervor of 1905 Russia.
Like many spiritually inclined aristocratic Russian women of her generation,
she knew Rasputin, whose sex-mystical ministry seems to have influenced
some elements of her own messianic religion. (In 1931, Naglowska translated
a biography of the holy man, Raspoutine, by the Russian author Simanovitch,
into French.) Russia had long been home to many thriving Slavic Satanic
sects, and de Naglowska may also have established contact with some of
these as a prelude to her own diabolical school.
Exiled in Rome after the revolution, she became involved in the
esoteric community there, a period which included a dalliance – both spiritual
and carnal – with the Traditionalist magician Julius Evola. It was also in Italy
that Naglowska encountered a mysterious Russian teacher from the
Caucasus, who she later implied was a major source of her own sex-magical
doctrine. Making her living as a journalist, she was often suspected of
espionage, in the shady occult tradition of Dee, Reuss, Gurdjieff and Parsons.
Her travels brought her as far as Alexandria, Egypt, where she became
involved with the local branch of the Theosophical Society. Despite her
marriage to a Zionist activist, who eventually abandoned her and their three
children for Palestine, Naglowska reputedly pursued her lively sexual
appetite with enthusiasm. Notwithstanding her notoriety as a free spirit and
habitué of the international occult movement of her time, she did not really
come to prominence until her arrival in Paris between the World Wars.
If previous European Satanic circles had sought to carry on their
activities in secret, Naglowska positively courted the attention of the French
press, as well as writing several books and pamphlets which made explicit
her instructions for diabolically inspired erotic illumination. Despite her
forthright glorification for what she termed "the unspeakable happiness of
Satanic pleasure" in her 1932 Le Rite Sacré de l'Amour Magique (The Sacred
Rite Of Magical Love), it is interesting that de Naglowska aroused none of
the outraged and prurient scandal her contemporary Crowley – who had been
reduced to near-pariah status by the British press only a few years earlier –
had provoked. Indeed, one newspaper account of de Naglowska's
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consecration of sex-magically trained women at her seminary, La Fleche
d'Or (The Golden Arrow) good-naturedly characterizes it as an "interesting
religious experiment." Far from supervising a secret society, Naglowska
held fairly open rituals of Satanic sex magic, to which the interested public
were invited for initiation into the school.
In her temple, a converted hotel located in the fashionable
Montparnasse district of Paris, she regularly presided over a rite she called
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"the Golden Mass" in which as many as twenty copulating couples formed
a "magical chain" very much like the highly disciplined chakra-puja circle
orgies of Tantra. The sexual current generated by this group activation of
erotic energy was often directed to the magical destruction of enemies, but
unlike other Satanists, de Naglowska also used group "diabolical
operations" to heal ailing members of her group. The idea of sex magic
performed to the glory of Lucifer might inspire thoughts of wild,
unrestrained orgies, but Naglowska's group sex operations were actually
precisely choreographed and controlled rites. A meditative dance, similar to
eurhythmics and the movements which Gurdjieff taught his students, were a
major part of these Golden Masses, and preceded the sexual phase of the
Workings.
Naglowska's insistence that her infernal form of sex-mystical
transformation could only be communicated through the agency of ritual
copulation with "an adequately trained woman" demonstrates the
importance of the Feminine Daemonic to her discipline. This trained