I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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exasperated Crowley slit the goat's throat, and was soaked with the creature's<br />
spraying blood.<br />
"What shall I do now?" asked a flustered Crowley.<br />
"I'd have a bath if I were you," Butts responded, with aplomb.<br />
One of the explanations Crowley gave for his archaic spelling of<br />
magick with a k, was that the k symbolized kteis, Greek for the female<br />
genitals. And yet even this apparent left-hand path reverence for the yoni as<br />
matrix of maya is not demonstrated in practice. <strong>The</strong> female genitals – not to<br />
mention the female magician those genitals are attached to – are accorded an<br />
extremely inferior role in Crowley's <strong>The</strong>lemic sex magick. Without doubt,<br />
this subordinate status of the female sexual partner and her vulva in the<br />
Crowleyan system is in keeping with Crowley's innate disdain for the<br />
feminine. But it's also rooted in the Great Beast's personal preference for an<br />
orifice he found infinitely more fascinating than the vagina. <strong>The</strong> cynical may<br />
be of the opinion that <strong>The</strong>lemic sex magick is a religion dedicated to<br />
worshipping an asshole – one Aleister Crowley by name. But it is a fact that<br />
one of the key doctrines of Crowleyan sex magick is a worship of the anus,<br />
and all of its functions.<br />
Translating his predilection into ancient Egyptian terms, one ardent<br />
bout of anal sex once moved the Beast to jot in his diary: "Oh, how superior<br />
is the Eye of Horus to the Mouth of Isis!" Here, Crowley is not only<br />
identifying the anus with the god Horus, who was anally violated by his<br />
uncle Set; he is also praising the superiority of his self-proclaimed Aeon of<br />
Horus, the child, over the earlier Aeon of Isis, the Mother. <strong>The</strong> Mouth of Isis<br />
289<br />
was a common archaism for the vulva.<br />
Elsewhere in his magical journals, Crowley expressed the same<br />
thought in the arcane symbolism of the O.T.O., "I am inclined to believe that<br />
the XIth degree is better than the IXth degree." <strong>The</strong> XI° is the highest degree<br />
of Crowley's version of O.T.O. sex magick, signifying anal sex, usually of a<br />
homosexual nature. <strong>The</strong> addition of anal congress to Reuss's pre-existing<br />
O.T.O. repertoire was one of Crowley's major innovations to the Order. <strong>The</strong><br />
IX°, as we have mentioned, was the grade of male-female genital sex magic,<br />
which Crowley consistently believed to he of far less magical power than his<br />
beloved buggery. In his Liber CXCIV, a once secret O.T.O. document<br />
prepared by Crowley in 1919, he hints at the exalted place which the<br />
mysteries of the anus held in his magical scheme: "<strong>Of</strong> the Eleventh Degree,<br />
its powers, privileges, and qualifications, nothing whatever is said in any<br />
grade. It has no relation to the general plan of the Order, is inscrutable, and<br />
dwells in its own palace."<br />
Another aspect of Crowley's magical understanding of the XI° in his<br />
sex magick is the theme of anal birth, an abstruse theme he returns to several<br />
times in his writings. <strong>The</strong> sex-magical creation of demonic/elemental entities<br />
by mingling secretions in the anus – as opposed to the more common concept<br />
of the vaginal generation of such beings – is an important facet of the Beast's<br />
practice. Although Crowley also provided his students with traditional<br />
instructions for the birth of a homunculus or "moonchild" to be conceived<br />
heterosexually, he believed a daemonic creature spawned through anal sex<br />
magick would he of a much higher order, a "Spirit ... partaking of both<br />
natures, yet boundless and impersonal because it is a bodiless creation of a<br />
wholly divine nature"<br />
Crowley was intrigued with the Middle Eastern sex-magical tradition<br />
dating back to ancient Egypt which posits the breeding of psychic<br />
intelligences via male homosexual union. He writes in his privately printed<br />
1910 paean to buggery, <strong>The</strong> Scented Garden <strong>Of</strong> Abdullah <strong>The</strong> Satirist <strong>Of</strong><br />
Shiraz: "When the power of the Crescent menaced that of the Cross, sodomy<br />
was put down with Draconian rigour because the Turks believed that the<br />
Messiah (a reincarnation of Jesus) would be born of the love between two