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

tradition until the present day" Through these Tantra-based experiments, he
realized what he described as "the identity of these perfect contraries, divine
ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror." Here we have a mystical crisis that
the Aghori in the cremation grounds of India would have understood.
In his essay Erotisme, Bataille states that "eroticism opens one to
death; death opens up the negation of individual duration." This awareness
of the initiatory power of the "little death" of orgasm can be likened to Vama
Marga ritual juxtaposition of the macabre and the sexual. In Bataille's work,
234
we frequently find an obsession with themes that we have already
encountered in our explication of the more extreme frontiers of the Eastern
left-hand path. He was fascinated with the etymology of the word "sacred"
or sacer, which means defiled and holy at the same time; the importance of
transgression and taboo-breaking in his work reflects the deliberate reversal
of rites celebrated in the Vama Marga. Like the left-hand path adept,
Bataille sought those numinous levels of consciousness he called "states of
sovereignty" through delving into forbidden and rejected phenomena. "What
I teach," Bataille declared, "is a drunkenness: I am not a philosopher, but a
saint, perhaps a madman." One is reminded of Naglowska's claim that her
sex magical procedures aimed to produce the "sublime madman of the secret
doctrines."
Bataille's utilization of matter and the physical body as a medium of
illumination also seems influenced by his pursuit of Tantra's left-hand path.
His statement that "it is possible to identify as a leitmotif of gnosis the
conception of matter as an active principle," is attuned to the Tantric concept
of the Shakti force – which is the visible world – as the active energy in the
universe.
Bataille's mystical appreciation of the Feminine Daemonic often
focused on a fascination with the whore as sacred icon, a theme he held in
common with the cult of the Scarlet Woman, from its roots in Sumerian
sacred prostitution to the modern magical veneration of Babalon. Always
eager to cast a deliberate pall of irreverence on his work, he once described
his method of philosophy as being akin to the leasing art of a prostitute
undressing. In his erotic tale Madame Edwarda, Bataille describes a drunken
male patron of a bordello who is forcefully confronted with shakti power.
Madame Edwarda reveals her vulva to him "so you can see that I am God."
When she compels him to perform cunnilingus on her, Bataille's character
confesses reverently: "I then knew – once every trace of drunkenness in me
had worn off – that She had not lied, that She was God." This is essentially a
modernized restatement of the yoni-puja of the left-hand path secret rite.
The influential Italian Traditionalist magician and philosopher, Baron
Julius Evola (1898—1974), had an affair with de Naglowska during her
sojourn in Rome in the early days of the Mussolini period of the 1920s, and
she translated a book of his poetry into French, Poéme Á Qualre Voix, in
1921. Commenting on Naglowska's teachings many years after her death, in
his Melaphysics Of Sex, he made an interesting remark on one aspect of her
theory of sexual enlightenment. According to Evola, the ritual copulation
taught by Naglowska was celebrated "not in order to enter into the realm of
death and becoming, but in order to leave that realm and maintain awareness
of his own being instead of dissolving." Although he later rejected the
Satanic aspect of her writings as a "deliberate intention to scandalize the
235
reader," Evola did suggest that that de Naglowska may have developed her
magical practice from contact with authentic "secret teachings."
Evola maintained a life-long interest in sex magic, which seems to
have been initiated by contact with an associate who was the only Italian
student of Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in the 1920s. He formed his
own magical circle in Rome, the Group of Ur, which experimented with