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

iped, both species were regarded equally as pests to the Great Beast.
Amateur psychology is one of the more odious afflictions of our
age. Still, we find it hard to believe that Crowley's loudly expressed
revulsion for his own mother – by his own account, a narrow-minded
religious fanatic and "ignorant bigot" – was not a major impact on this
crippling limitation in his psyche when it came to women. One look at
Crowley's private diaries, and it becomes clear that his gynophobia was not
merely an abstract philosophical affectation adopted to shock the genteel.
His own description of his daily life is a grueling account of drunken,
drugged rows, in which the Beast proudly portrays himself as endlessly
battering and belittling, kicking and punching his luckless female
companions. Not infrequently, he gloats over the beatings he has delivered
to his paramours, much as he exults about his mindless torture of animals.
Lest one romanticize the dreary situation, it must be made plain that the
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violence Crowley visited upon his magical and mundane mistresses was
rarely the conscious and consensual practice of sex-magical dominance and
submission that we will explore in the final chapter of this book. Rather,
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Crowley's sadism is a petty bullying of the weak, a grotesque parody of the
pseudo-Nietzschean message of strength preached in his Book Of The Law.
Crowley's abuse of women is one of the most glaring examples of
behavior causing one to doubt his claimed attainment of higher states of
consciousness. Naturally, the Master presented his thrashings of women as
initiatory lessons designed to help his victim/students overcome their
limitations. In fact, they appear to he merely out-of-control temper tantrums.
In comparison to the heroic self-containment ideally sought by left-hand
path initiation, Crowley's outbursts indicate a total lack of mental dominion
over pashu instinct. Even more evidently, Crowley's compulsive brutality
towards females contradicts an essential observation of Tantra made by a
Muslim cited in the first section of this book: "this sect calls women shaktis
(powers) and to ill-treat a shakti – that is, a woman – is held to be a crime."
The tangible results of Crowleyan pedagogy speak for themselves;
the two women who officially married him both became alcoholics, and died
in insane asylums at an early age. The string of sad creatures whom Crowley
lifted to the position of "Scarlet Woman" fared little better. In abstract
theory, on paper, Crowley extolled the sacred nature of his Scarlet Women
in the most extravagant purple prose, written in a style approximating
Swinburne channeling the Old Testament: "Blessed be She, ay, blessed unto
the Ages be our Lady Babalon, that plieth Her Scourge upon me ... that hath
filled Her cup with every Drop of my Blood ... Behold, how she is drunken
theron, and staggereth about the Heavens, wallowing in joy ... Is not She thy
true Mother among the Stars, o my son, and hast not thou embraced Her in
the Madness of Incest and Adultery?"
No doubt this sort of thing was impressive, and even flattering, to
the psychically vulnerable women Crowley tended to vampirize. But in
practice, Crowley pressed his Scarlet Women into conditions of medieval
servitude, true to his observation that "a woman is only tolerable in one's life
if she is trained to help the man in his work without the slightest reference to
any other interests." If that was the humble fate the Beast deemed best for
human women, we should not be surprised that his vision of even such a
commanding force of the Feminine Daemonic as Babalon was equally
limited by his misogyny. In Magick, Crowley makes it clear that exalted
being though She may be, even the Goddess has no more important task than
"to help the man in his work." He wrote "And for this is Babalon under the
power of the magician, that she hath submitted herself unto the work; and
she guardeth the Abyss."
When we think of the tremendous power once attributed to Babalon,