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

of cruelty and defilement." The grand finale of this extended act of gendertransformative
slavery was the previously described forced feeding on his
mistress's feces as a "Host ... of excrement, that I can consume in awe and
adoration."
Like so many components of the Beast's sex-magical methodology,
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even his histrionically expressed passion for "bleed[ing] under the whip's
lash" can he traced to his strict religious upbringing among the Plymouth
Brethren. While attending the sect's rigorously disciplined school, the often
disobedient young Crowley acquired a life-long taste for being flogged with
the birch – a predilection the French have long since labeled the vice anglais.
It should be noted that despite his masochistic tendencies, Crowley most
commonly assumed the role of the dominant in his sexual opera – his desire
to hurt and be hurt were part of a continuum. And like many masochists, he
was always really in charge of these ritual humiliations, despite his seeming
subservience to the Scarlet Woman/dominatrix. Crowley's comment that "I
drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe
should lie beneath Her feet, Her slave..." makes it evident that his acts of
sexual submission were partly designed to illustrate the superiority of his
state of being, if only by contrast with his temporary reduction to abject
slavery. Even non-magical rites of dominance and submission are rarely as
clear-cut as they may seem at first; when magic is brought into play, the
power dynamics involved are even more complex.
Elsewhere, Crowley declares his submissive devotion to Babalon,
longing "to abase my Godhead before my lady I want my crown crushed by
Her feet; I want my face fouled by Her spittle. I want my heart torn by Her
boot-heel ... my soul to be her privy" In another diary entry, Crowley
addresses his "Holy Guardian Angel" Aiwass, the unknown superior who
dictated The Book Of The Law, in similar terms, assuming the persona of a
debased prostitute: "I am to Thee the harlot, crowned with poison and gold,
my garment many-coloured, soiled with shame and smeared with blood, who
for no price but of wantonness have prostituted myself to all that lusted after
me ... I have made my flesh rotten, my blood venomous, my brain hagridden,
I have infected the round world with corruption."
Crowley's self-identification with the archetype of the prostitute as
contagious carrier of "the venomous blood" of venereal disease was a fairly
common artistic theme among the Decadent writers and artists of the 1890s.
But the Beast developed this syphilitic fin de siècle aesthetic to an apotheosis
even the likes of Baudelaire would not have imagined. In his youth, he
acquired syphilis from a Scottish whore, an experience which caused him to
recommend the clap as a positive medicinal benefit for great minds like
himself. Crowley theorized that "it would be salutary for every male to be
impregnated with the genus of this virus in order to facilitate the culture of
individual genius". When his young, sheltered American student Israel
Regardie came to sit at the Master's feet in 1920s Paris, the Beast promptly
sent him to one of the local filles de joie for an evening's pleasure. When
Regardie reported that he had acquired syphilis during the encounter,
Crowley pronounced that a major turning point in his disciple's initiation had
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occurred. For Crowley, "the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honor
as such." Depending on one's point of view, Crowley's pro-syphilis stance
could have been a deliberate provocation of bourgeois morality, stated with
tongue in cheek, or a mystical comment on the hidden holiness of every
phenomenon, a perception in keeping with left-hand path transcendence of
duality. No interpretation of Crowleyan thought should be made without
taking the Beastly sense of black humor well into account.
Just as he worshipped the indiscriminate and infectious promiscuity
of the Whore of Babylon as enacted by his Scarlet Women, he sought to