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

some aspects of Tantra. His highly recommended works on Tantricism,
which are at their best when describing the way of the left-hand path, are
authoritative enough to have been published in India, something which rarely
occurs with Western authors. It is difficult to say whether Evola was merely a
brilliant esoteric theoretician and scholar or an actual practicing magus. Like
Bataille, a key to Evola's thought is the attainment of a heroic sovereignty,
the recreation of one's self as a "Kingly man," in the language of Naglowska's
doctrine of the Third Term. Ultimately, Evola's austere hermetic approach to
initiation is worlds apart from the somewhat romantic Luciferian sexuality of
Naglowska, but the brief romance of these Western adepts of the sinister
current is a fascinating footnote in the modern development of the left-hand
path.
One of the writers who came into Maria de Naglowska's orbit was the
American journalist, author and erotic explorer William Seabrook. Of lesser
intellectual stature than Evola and Bataille, Seabrook's specialty was the
writing of rather sensational exposés of occult subjects. His better known
books include The Magic Island, a pioneering study of Haitian Voodoo and
the cult of the zombie, a subject which Naglowska has also studied, and
Witchcraft: Its Power In The World Today, which provided pre-World War II
Americans with some of the only knowledge of contemporary magical
practice available. The prolific pornographic author Frank Harris introduced
Seabrook to Aleister Crowley, who engaged Seabrook's wife as one of his
sex-magical partners – with her husband's blessings. Seabrook shared with
Crowley an absorbing interest in the use of bondage and sexual slavery as a
magical technique. According to one of Crowley's final interviews, Seabrook
"always traveled with a case-load of chains, being a masochist as well as a
sadist."
Upon seeking out the celebrated Naglowska's Satanic temple as a
potentially juicy subject for one of his journalistic pieces, Seabrook
discovered that some of his best liked fetishes – sexual suspension and erotic
autoasphyxia – had been incorporated into the Sophiale's religious
celebration of the Mystery of Hanging. Overall, however, one gets the
impression that Seabrook was something of a dilettante, who ingratiated
himself into magical circles in search of colorful copy, and whatever erotic
diversion he might find along the way. Crowley acknowledged that
Seabrook possessed "genius" but ultimately dismissed him as having "a
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journalist's mind."
Fraternitas Saturni – Satana And Her Gnosis
Naglowska's Fraternity of the Golden Arrow was not the only European
Order in the 1920s and 1930s to fuse a form of sinister current sex magic
and an idiosyncratic vision of Lucifer and Satan in its doctrine. Before we
look into the impact of the far more well-known German sex magical school
known as the O.T.O., a contemplation of its obscure semi-associate,
Fraternitas Saturni, or Brotherhood of Saturn, will provide us with an
intriguing example of how some of the sexual initiatory teachings of the
Pastern Vama Marga were adapted by Western magicians. In the case of the
Fraternitas Saturni, we have a uniquely Teutonic initiatory school thats
influence has never successfully been transplanted into Anglo-American
culture.
Since the nineteenth century, there had been a thoroughgoing
fascination with all things Indian prevalent among the German intelligentsia.
German and Austrian Indologists looked to India as the forgotten source of
Teutonic civilization. For post-Nietzschean German intellectuals seeking to
break with the Judaeo-Christian heritage they interpreted as an alien doctrine
imposed by force upon Europe, the recently rediscovered Aryan mythology
of India was enthusiastically embraced as the West's true spiritual
fountainhead. This thread became a powerful impetus for German