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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Those who dismiss Crowley as a mere libertine and hedonist are<br />
mistaken – no matter how far he goes in his nearly scientific personal<br />
exploration of every imaginable debauchery, he can never escape from the<br />
shadow of sin that is his patrimony. If the Plymouth Brethren of his youth<br />
preached that sex for any purpose other than the Christian duty of procreation<br />
was sinful, then the sexual morality of Crowley's own synthetic <strong>The</strong>lemic<br />
religion is equally restrictive. In both sects, whether dedicated to the Magus<br />
Christ or the Magus Crowley, Eros outside the boundaries of the faith is<br />
anathema to the true believer. <strong>The</strong> fact that one sect is based on such notions<br />
as a virgin birth and celibate angels and the other is dedicated to ritual shiteating<br />
and the magical powers of sperm is really only a technicality.<br />
Crowley's <strong>The</strong>lema, with its obligatory Mass and wafer, its Saints, its Book,<br />
its Law, its catechisms and its Prophet, can be viewed as a kind of quasi-<br />
Christian sect in itself. Both theologies share the Beast 666 and Whore of the<br />
Apocalypse as central figures. And despite the lingering confusion that<br />
would label Crowley a "Satanist," a full study of his work makes it evident<br />
that he is much more of a Gnostic Christian who fully accepts the divinity of<br />
Christ in his creed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sexologists Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, witnessing some<br />
of the desperate failings of the 1960s sexual revolution, once remarked that<br />
"there is nothing more depressing than the pretense of sexual freedom on the<br />
part of reactionary and guilt-ridden people who are acting under the<br />
compulsion of taboos rather than from genuine joie de vivre."<br />
This observation is just as pertinent to the arch-reactionary Crowley,<br />
who in so many ways anticipated the attempt of middle-class Western youth<br />
to overcome their upbringing through the collective drugged mystical orgia<br />
of the 1960s. One also comes away depressed from a consideration of the<br />
Beast's decades of exhaustively reported sexual adventures – there is so little<br />
sense of joy, delight, or freedom in the compulsive nature of his couplings.<br />
What the Old and New Testaments so zealously condemn, Crowley's Book<br />
<strong>Of</strong> <strong>The</strong> Law just as devoutly makes mandatory. But both extremes are<br />
informed by the same autocratic spirit of – Thou Shalt Not" – a spirit that<br />
cannot be reconciled with left-hand path liberation from all such<br />
hallucinatory commandments.<br />
Alys And Aleister – Punishing <strong>The</strong> Inner Whore<br />
292<br />
In light of Crowley's rejection of the Shakti principle, as expressed in the<br />
inferior role he accorded women in his system of sex magick, it is ironic that<br />
few modern male magicians have explored their own feminine sides with<br />
such intensity. Crowley was very much aware of the Jungian anima within<br />
him from a very early age. And like Jung – who he referred to<br />
contemptuously as "Junk" – he recommended that his students of either<br />
gender should develop the qualities of the contrasexual opposite sex within<br />
their beings as a necessary means of creating psychic balance. <strong>The</strong><br />
correspondence of this practice to the universal sinister current bears<br />
analysis.<br />
In <strong>The</strong>lema, the Beast and Babalon are one obvious pair of<br />
contrasexual forces that can he compared to Tantric Shiva and Shakti,<br />
Gnostic Logos and Sophia, Taoist Yin and Yang. But it is probably closer to<br />
Crowley's own understanding to say that he envisioned the universal<br />
feminine in the form of Nuit, the ancient Egyptian goddess of the starry night<br />
sky. <strong>The</strong> masculine principle he designated as an invented male solar divinity<br />
he rather obscurely called Hadit, although the Egyptian pantheon actually<br />
includes no such deity. For Crowley, Nuit represented Shakti-like darkness<br />
and matter, the phenomenal universe perceived by human senses, and Hadit<br />
symbolized solar light and motion, a Shiva-like invisible consciousness.<br />
Through sex magick, his theory that "these two infinities can not exist apart"<br />
is demonstrated in physical form as Nuit and Hadit are drawn to each other