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

little comfort for his aspirants.
Gregorius used his bookshop to give lectures to the public on such
then-taboo topics as Vampirism and Blood Magic, and the esoteric
significance of homosexuality. Even in the "anything goes" atmosphere of
Weimar Berlin in the 1920s, all this led to the adhesion of a sinister, wild,
and Satanic reputation to the FS. The Fraternitas Saturni had been
conceived as a secret society, and for decades all that was publicly known of
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its rituals and beliefs was based on sensational rumor, centering especially
on orgies, the ritual use of blood, and experimentation with hallucinogens
for consciousness alteration.
Despite the official position of secrecy maintained by the FS, the
local newspaper Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe revealed something of
the controversial magical experiments of Gregor Gregorius in an October
1929 article. Unwelcome scandal was generated when a female initiate of
the FS was involved in a bus accident while under the influence of cocaine.
If such shenanigans shocked the non-magical public, Gregorius's Fraternity
was also viewed as anathema by the majority of German occultists, due to
the friendly ties Gregorius sustained with Aleister Crowley, who was almost
universally reviled among holier-than-thou esoteric circles in Germany.
Although the FS technically adopted Crowley's Law of Thelema, the group's
actual philosophy and practice in fact reflects very little Crowleyan
influence. Crowley himself barely took interest in the activities of Gregorius,
who was too independent to be the kind of idolatrous disciple the Great
Beast preferred. Frau Martha Küntzel, Crowley's most devoted German
acolyte, whose dream was to bring the message of Crowley's The Book Of
The Law to her other great hero, Adolf Hitler, did not approve of Gregorius
either. She condemned Gregorius as a "Black Brother" – Crowleyan jargon
for an evil walker of the left-hand path. In its very early days, the FS formed
a magical axis with The Adonist Society, a sex magic study group that
eventually went its own way to obscurity.
The veil of secrecy under which Gregorius operated was not easily
penetrated. What is known of the actual formal rituals and magical practices
celebrated by the FS in the 1920s derives almost completely from the
publication of private internal documents purchased from a Grand Master of
the FS in the 1960s, and subsequently published in Germany in 1971 by Dr.
Adolf Hemberger under the unwieldy title Organisationsformen, Rituale,
Lehren Und Magische Thematik Der Freimauerischen Und
Freimauerartigen Bünde In Deutschen Sprachraum Mitteleuropas. Teil I:
Der Mystisch-Magische Orden Fraternitas Saturni. These documents, which
we recommend to those interested in a more detailed understanding of the
FS, reveal that the Fraternitas Saturni is, in many ways, the twentieth
century Western Order most attuned to the left-hand path as we have defined
it.
A system of Tantric viparit-karani, or opposite-doing, is
demonstrated in the FS requirements that the initiate must push severely
against his or her natural inclinations to cultivate those aspects of the self that
instinct has left undeveloped. For instance, a born poet or artist would be
compelled to pursue the scientific, rational side of herself, just as an engineer
would need to discover the unexpressed romantic element of his psyche.
Not the least aspect of this balancing of the light with the hidden dark
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side of one's being is the FS glorification of the figures of Lucifer and Satan,
divine intelligences who informed Gregorius' applied sexual mysticism. The
popular vulgarization of these concepts today might easily cause the
contemporary reader to misinterpret Gregorius's Satanic teaching as simply
the crude reversal of Judeo-Christianity that one encounters in post-1960s
Satanism. But to paraphrase a comment once made by Gregorius' one-time