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

and made myself a morality more severe than any other in the world if only
by virtue of its absolute freedom from any code of conduct."
The overcoming of inner and external boundaries, the reconstruction of the
self through trespass and inversion, the integration and acceptance of the
horrifying aspects of maya; all of these Crowleyan methods would be
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immediately familiar to the more radical practitioners of the left-hand path,
such as the Aghori. Just as the Indian left-hand path Kapalikas deliberately
dishonored themselves in the eyes of legitimate Brahmin society as a tool of
transcendence, one could make a case for Crowley's deliberate provocation
of the acceptable standards of his time as a pure expression of one of the
sinister current's most important methods.
The remanifestation of a rich, respectable, Cambridge-educated
scion of a devout Christian family into the "Wickedest Man in the World", a
destitute junkie expelled from several countries and calumnied as the foulest
of perverts in the international press may have been Aleister Crowley's most
effective magical act. Thus transformed into "the Wanderer of the Wastes"
as he styled himself, Crowley could no more return to the polite British
society that bred him than could the Tantrika who had shattered the Hindu
taboos connected to sex, diet and death return to his or her allotted place in
the caste system. But once separated from convention and social
conditioning, the adept must take the next more difficult step of recreating
him/herself as a sovereign entity.
Earlier, we cited Philip Rawson's observations that the most extreme
Vama Marga adept forces "himself to [commit] acts which destroy any
vestiges of social status and self-esteem," a course of initiation which gladly
accepts the role of "scandalous outcast" as a necessary prelude to divinity.
Crowley, for all of his seemingly pertinent emphasis on sexual magic, departs
from the essential principles of the left-hand path in several vital ways. But in
the art of opposite-doing, of consciously going against the grain of self and
society to individuate and self-deify, while paradoxically doing one's will,
Crowley, a "scandalous outcast" by any standard, conies very close to the
sinister current.
That being said, it must be noted that a would-be adept of the lefthand
path in the twentieth century has absolutely nothing to gain by merely
aping Crowley's studied excesses, as all too many of his followers have
senselessly done. Crowley had his own programmed training to transcend,
just as you most certainly have yours. In 1920, there were relatively few
well-brought up Englishmen exploring the dark corners of their psyche that
Crowley systematically sought out. But since 1967, when Crowley's
appearance on the cover of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band propelled him to pop icon status twenty years after his death, most
modern magicians probably need to overcome the very ubiquity of Crowley
in occult culture rather than emulate him.
Although Crowley's law of Do What Thou Wilt did not originate with
him, the seriousness with which he promulgated the concept cannot he
denied. Associated with the discovery of the True Will that Crowley posited
as the central purpose of each human incarnation was his dictum that "Every
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Man and Woman is a Star" – according to Thelemic doctrine, each selfrealized
individual must follow his or her own course in the ordering of the
universe, just as a star is separate from all other stars. Here we find another of
the many traces of Gnosticism that inform Crowleyan thought; the Gnostics
also maintained that the spark of divinity trapped in the human body was
once a celestial body of light, and through the gnosis of Sophia, it was
thought that men and women could return to their pristine existence as
incorporeal stars.
If he made large claims in the religious sphere, Crowley was just as