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

men. Sodomy was thus a religious duty with the Turk; at any moment his
passion might be used to bring about the millennium; so with the Christian it
became heresy, and was punished as such."
As always, Crowley's primary intention is to shock any Christian who
may have inadvertently stumbled upon his writings. His claim that "sodomy
was a religious duty" is wishful thinking that would find little agreement
among scholars of Islam, despite the prevalent British slang word "Turking"
to describe anal intercourse. Almost forty years later, a diary entry recording
a waking nightmare reveals that the Beast's always cloacal imagination is still
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gripped by the concept: "A most frightful semi-dream (between two normal
motions) of giving birth to a foetus per anum. It was a mass of blood and
slime. The nastiest Qliphotic experience I can remember."
Through the eyes of the Vama Marga initiate, who experiences the
entire human body as the Temple of the Nine Gates, Crowley's religious
fixation on this orifice is no stranger than the more traditional left-hand path
veneration of yoni and lingam. If we are to give Crowley the benefit of the
doubt, and assume that his anal mania, like his coprophilia, is based on
something other than personal fetishism, it must be admitted that all religious
ideas – even anus worship – can only be interpreted subjectively. And yet,
throughout his magical diaries, Crowley repeatedly notes that this or that
magical working was performed per vas nefandum, "by the unmentionable
vessel" – his favored Latin euphemism for anal intercourse. Even if in jest,
his constant use of such a disparaging term for an activity to which he
supposedly accords sacred status seems contradictory, if not simply puerile.
One comes away with the impression that Crowley's preference for the
inverse opening is based as much on the social stigma then commonly
associated with its enjoyment as any more mystical rationale.
Compulsory Sin
One of the glaring weaknesses in Crowley's practice of sex magic is his
apparent inability to transcend his need to be a very bad boy. Breaking taboos
is of course important to left-hand path initiation, but the Beast, for all his
talk of liberation, seemed stuck in the futile recreation of the initial
transgression of taboo, which is only a preliminary step in self-deification.
He didn't make the necessary progression to truly transcending the
conditioning that grants any taboo its power in the first place. Crowley once
wrote ambitiously to his follower Norman Mudd: "my whole plan is to clean
all germs out of the sexual wound ... My object is not merely to disgust but to
root out ruthlessly the sense of sin." But without the sensation of vice or
perversity to goad him on, Crowley seemed uninspired – it is doubtful that he
ever erased the "sense of sin" he inherited from his puritanical Plymouth
Brethren family, despite his Herculean efforts to do so. This is not so much a
criticism of Crowley as an indictment of the lasting psychic injuries such sexnegative
creeds can inflict on their young victims.
How deeply the sense of sin was imbedded in Crowley's
psychosexual programming – despite all outward appearances – can be
ascertained by the curious fact that he maintained that sex performed for any
other reasons than the Great Work of initiation was immoral. Despite his
seemingly sincere conviction that homosexual anal sex allowed for the zenith
of magical attainment, he wrote reprovingly in his Magical Record Of The
Beast that "homosexuality is an infirmity" Elsewhere, he condemned any act
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of male-to-male sodomy dedicated not to magic but for pleasure alone as
"abominable." These stern admonishments of erotic pleasure for its own
sake, and many more besides, were recorded in his private writings. So we
must assume that they reflect Crowley's actual beliefs, and are not simply
propaganda designed to make his sex magick appear more acceptable to the
public.