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

old in literature, comparing himself to Shakespeare among poets, and
ranking himself as one of the greatest mountaineers of all time. Despite the
pomposity of these pretensions, one gets the sneaking suspicion that much of
the Croweyan bluster may just be an elaborate practical joke, an expression
of the derision in which he appears to have held even his most devoted
followers. If Crowley, was, as we tend to believe, little more than an erudite
and sometimes even brilliant conman who enjoyed assuming the airs of a
holy guru, he was at least partially honest about his real motivations. In the
same Book Of Lies that had supposedly revealed the sex-magical secret
guarded by the O.T.O., the Beast exposed an even more pertinent illustration
of his methods:
Teach us your secret, Master ! yap my Yahoos.
Then for the hardness of their hearts, and for
the softness of their heads, l taught them Magick.
But ... alas!
Teach us your real secret, Master! how to become
invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all,
how to make gold.
But how much gold will you give me for the Secret
of Infinite Riches?
Then said the foremost and most foolish; Master, it
is nothing; but here is an hundred thousand pounds.
This did I design lo accept, and whispered in his ear
this secret:
A SUCKER IS BORN EVERY MINUTE.
Other authors have already chronicled Crowley's life and magical teachings
in exhaustive depth, regarding him from such extremes as the pious reverence
of the true believer to the lurid character assassination of the yellow
journalist. For Crowley himself, such judgments were probably of no
consequence; like Oscar Wilde, he seems to have lived by the credo that "the
only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about." Our
interest here will largely preclude determining if the Great Beast was a saint
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or a demon, a visionary or a madman. We have already established that a lefthand
path adept may well appear to be insane or demonic by the non-initiated
pashu's standards. And as Crowley himself rightly pointed out, true initiation
is "incompatible with bourgeois morality." To judge him according to
standards which he willfully abandoned early in his career would be
meaningless. Rather than grapple with the ethical questions Crowley's
excesses must raise, we will narrow our focus to placing his actual sexmagical
practice into context with the left-hand path tradition, in an effort to
ascertain what relation Crowley ultimately has to the sinister current.
Crowley And The Vama Marga
Many modem-day Crowleyans have characterized their master's teaching as a
"Western Tantra". Even a few respected Tantric authorities, such as the
Australian Jonn Mumford, have attempted to place Crowleyan sex magick in
line with the Vama Marga. Some adherents of the various O.T.Os that have
mushroomed since Crowley's death, accepting on faith Reuss's fabrications
concerning Carl Kellner's supposed Eastern left-hand path initiation,
naturally tend to see Crowley continuing this Tantric tradition. Indeed, some
Crowleyans maintain that Crowley was actually inducted into Vama Marga
rites by a Madras-based Guru, one Subhappaty Swami. But based on the lack
of authentic Tantric concepts in his teaching, we suspect that this is as
insubstantial a claim as the earlier legend of Kellner's supposed left-hand
path instruction dreamed up by Reuss.
The prolific and controversial British Thelemite author, Kenneth
Grant, leader of the Typhonian O.T.O, has especially linked the Crowleyan
93 Current with the Eastern left-hand path. Based on his writings, which we