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

genesis truly lays in the mind of an obscure African-American writer
operating in the prosaic USA. Proof, yet again, that the facts are far stranger
than the exotic legends occultists sprinkle like fairy dust in their wake.
Whatever the truth may be, Reuss allowed it to be known that some
of the closely guarded arcana supposedly revealed to Kellner on his Eastern
journey concerned the long-suspected but never definitively proven nature of
the sex-magical practices of the Knights Templar. From his enigmatic
teachers, Kellner had allegedly learned that the Templars had acquired a
system of what amounts to left-hand path illumination. Reuss concluded that
the entire Masonic tradition that the Templars had subsequently inspired was
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informed by a secret doctrine of Eastern sexual magic, the key to which
Kellner had been granted in India. Many Central European Freemasonic
Orders claimed – with vivid imagination but little historical basis – to be the
authentic heirs of the martyred Templars, guardians of the secret wisdom of
Baphomet. What exactly this wisdom consisted of had been open to dispute.
Reuss's innovation was to brazenly identify the Templar legacy supposedly
inherited by the Freemasons as a system of sexual magic.
Seen through this newly provided initiatic vantage point, many of the
infamous accusations leveled against the Templars took on a new
significance. The Knights had not been Satanic debauchees, as the Church
had concluded. Rather, they were the martyred bearers of a hidden
knowledge of erotic initiation communicated to them while stationed in
Eastern lands.
The documents from the Templar trial, for instance, disclose that
each new Templar was accepted only after presenting his naked body to
receive a three-fold kiss on mouth, abdomen and the base of the spine from
the perceptor of the Order. Hearing of this, the Christian magistrates could
only have concluded that this rite of initiation was a celebration of the
Satanic osculum obscaenum – the obscene kiss reported to have been
witnessed performed upon the Devil himself at Black Sabbaths. However,
viewed from the pseudo-Tantric perspective Reuss had now adopted, this kiss
may well have been a transmission of prana – the vital magical life-force – to
three important chakras or power points in the body. The kiss at the base of
the spine may well have been intended to activate kundalini. The charge that
the new initiate sometimes submitted to ritual fellation or anal sex could have
been the sealing of this initiatory exchange of sexual power.
And what of Baphomet, the baffling androgynous deity the
Templars supposedly worshipped? Might this half-male, half-female being
not he a anthropomorphized figure symbolizing the hermaphroditic inner
state created by sexual union? Reuss, and Crowley after him, was to make
Baphomet an important part of his reconstituted Order of Templars.
In the decades before the O.T.O's founding, interest in Baphomet
had recently been revived through the writings of the French mage Eliphas
Levi. It is important to understand that the O.T.O's mixture of esoteric
themes was very much a reflection of concerns circulating throughout the
occult world of the time. For example, Reuss would surely have been
familiar with the work of Baron Joseph von Ham mer-Pürgstall, an author
deeply immersed in the study of Eastern mysticism. It was Hammer-
Pürgstall who first theorized that the name of Baphomet had been derived
from the Greek Baphe Metis, "the baptism of wisdom." Harmer-Pürgstall's
fascination with Baphomet led him to translate the cryptic words engraved
on an ancient Templar chest discovered in Burgundy: "Let Baphomet be
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exalted, who causes things to bud and blossom! he is our root; it is one and
seven; abjure the faith and abandon thyself to all pleasure." Hammer-
Pürgstall also speculated that the homosexual rites attributed to the original
Templars were the survival of a cult of phallic worship.