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

match them in their whorishness in his Alys persona. In this sense, Crowley's
understanding of Babalon is similar to the left-hand path dual manifestation
of the Feminine Daemonic as the male adept's external sexual partner and his
inner shakti. In his solemnly consecrated Oath Of The Beast, a promise to his
Lady Babalon, he vowed to "freely prostitute my body to the lusts of every
Living Creature that shall desire it," a promiscuous promise that echoes his
earlier The Vision And The Voice, which exults, "beautiful art thou 0
BABALON, and desirable, for thou hast given Thyself to everything that
liveth...'
It's easy enough to interpret this sacred pledge as nothing more than a
quasi-religious justification for Crowley's already well-established habit of
fucking everything that moved. But to leave it at that would be to ignore the
real power of regularly evoking and invoking so potent a force as the Whore
of Babylon. The issue of whether such divine forces can be said to
objectively exist as independent beings outside the mind of man occupied
Crowley throughout his life; he never reached a conclusive answer. But
whether this is true or not, Crowley's decades-long exaltation of Babalon
unquestionably tapped into an ancient psychogone that could be traced back
as far as the Great Whore goddesses of eldest pre-Christian antiquity,
Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte, the patronesses of the lost spiritual discipline of sacred
prostitution.
Crowley's understanding of the shakti he called Babalon was
surprisingly limited; he barely looked beyond the Bible scare story in
Revelations that had so transfixed him as a youth. Much of what he taught his
followers about Babalon was simply wrong, subjective, or rooted in fantasy,
and these errors persist today in some quarters of the Thelemic community.
But a magical oath taken in the name of such an entity, even when it is based
on incomplete and distorted information, will have its effect. If Crowley
accomplished nothing else, he set the wheels in motion for a revival of the
forgotten tradition of Inanna-Ishtar-Astarte, the cult of the Scarlet Woman,
that is one of the most viable approaches for Westerners to the sinister
current. Who is to say that Crowley's oath to prostitute his body to all who
desired it – despite the Beast's vulgarity – was not the first step in restoring
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the principles of a true erotic initiation once conveyed through the mystery of
temple prostitution?
When Cecil Frederick Russell, a young Thelemite discharged from
the Navy for use of cocaine, turned up at the Abbey for spiritual training,
Crowley unleashed his inner sacred whore on him in an attempt to fulfill his
licentious Oath. Here's Crowley planning the working in his diary: "Now I'll
shave and make up my face like the lowest kind of whore, and rub on
perfume and go after Genesthai [Russell's magical name] like a drunken twobit
prick-pit in old New Orleans." As it turns out, the ailing, strung-out Beast
was not particularly appealing; the aphrodisiac assistance of the Scarlet
Woman was needed. "Operation, very lengthy. Alostrael had to masturbate
Genesthai to effect erection, and her hand introduced his penis into my anus."
Replying cattily to his long-dead former teacher, Russell remarked in his own
1970 autobiography Znus Is Znees: "What really happened, my dear Master
Therion, in this case, your Circean enchantment didn't give me a bone-on".
Russell, after the inevitable break from Crowley that all but a few
were compelled to make, went on to found the Choronzon Club, an
influential but forgotten American sex magic society that was actually far
more successful in its time than Crowley's O.T.O. The Choronzon Club,
centered in Chicago, eventually became the G.B.G. or Great Brotherhood of
God. This group was eventually revived in the late 1950s by the American
Louis Culling, an alumnus of a small `40s era Los-Angeles based branch of
the O.T.O.. Out of this distant Californian outpost of the Beast's scattered
ministry, known as the Agape Lodge, the Babalon Current would