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

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His stylized signature was marked by the distinctly phallic "A" in Aleister,
which he inscribed as a cartoon cock and balls. When performing his
homosexual XI° grade of O.T.O anal sex magick, he sometimes envisioned
himself as a deified penis discharging numinous seed. If his actions caused
many to view him as something of a prick, Crowley would have gladly
agreed.
Crowley once observed that "women don't count, they only exist
insofar as they seduce or otherwise destroy men." Mind you, millions of men
in Crowley's era expressed an equally low opinion of the fairer sex, but such
simplistic assessments of one half of the human sexual equation coming from
a man who claimed to have transcended all profane mental restrictions must
give one pause. More importantly, Crowley's philosophy of woman as a
"temporary expedient" completely contradicts the centrality of the Feminine
Daemonic to left-hand path liberation. In this respect, Crowley seems never
to have advanced from the traditional Judaeo-Christian view of the female as
"Adam's rib", God's secondary botched creation who tempted man from
Eden. This view of womankind, like so much in his worldview, he would
have learned in the Plymouth Brethren, the religious sect in which he was
reared as a boy.
It was during the constant Bible study in his childhood that Crowley
first encountered the icon of the Scarlet Woman – our old friend
lnanna/lshtar – in the form of the Whore of Babylon, that awesome
harbinger of Apokalypis, mounted on the Great Beast 666 of Revelations,
whose cryptic number "is the number of a man." From this Christian
distortion of a Mesopotamian myth, Crowley borrowed the central religious
figure in his own personal cosmology. His mother, or so he claimed, was so
scandalized by his adolescent dalliance with the family maid that she dubbed
him the Beast, endowing him with his first and probably best known magical
name. And what is the Beast without his mystery Whore, the Scarlet
Woman?
"O Blessed Beast, and thou Scarlet Woman of his desire," wrote
Crowley, transfiguring the Biblical monstrosities into the holy contrasexual
duality of Thelema with a stroke of his pen. In keeping with his sometimes
eccentric interpretation of Kabbalistic numerology, Crowley spelled the
Scarlet Woman's name as Babalon, a singular form he borrowed from John
Dee's Enochian Aires. The number of Babalon, in Crowley's view, was 156,
which he explained as symbolizing "constant copulation or samadhi on
everything." This much is at least in keeping with Inanna's legendary carnal
appetite, illustrated in Akkadian and Sumerian tales that describe her
blissfully engaging in sex that lasts for "long days" until she is sated.
For Thelemites, one of the primary symbols of Babalon is a vivid
scarlet rose, its color suggesting the "blood of the saints" that fills the Cup of
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Fornications held aloft by the Whore of Babylon in Revelations. This
vaginal rose is equated by Crowley with the symbol of the Rosy Cross so
central to Rosicrucianism. (The crimson rose of Babalon also recalls the
importance of the yoni-like scarlet hibiscus flower in the secret rite of the
Vama Marga.) For Crowley, the saints whose blood had seeped into the
flower were not the Christian martyrs. They were the Masters of the Temple,
like himself, who had supposedly crossed the abyss by pouring every last
drop of their Selves into the Universal Oneness, symbolized as blood/semen
ejaculated into the Whore's vulva.
Considering the importance of Beast and Babalon to his religion, it
is curious that Crowley barely looked into the origins of these mythic
beings. If he had, he would have learned that just as the Whore was
lnanna/Ishtar/Astarte, the Beast 666 was also originally a feminine deity, the
she-dragon Leviathan, derived from pre-Christian Sumerian lore concerning