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

he claimed was met with success, although he rebuked himself for "showing
cowardice when He appeared." Parsons' apparently sincere acceptance of the
Devil as a literal being with whom man can communicate differed sharply
from Crowley's relative disinterest in the Satanic mythos. The modern reader,
accustomed to the prevalence of superficial, trendy youthful Satanic
posturing in our time must keep in mind how unspoken a thing Satanism was
in the America of the 1920s. That the adolescent Parsons would have
explored such arcane realms without the encouragement of the kind of
mercantile occult subculture that exists today clarifies just how far from the
norm he was, even at the beginning of his initiation.
The literary agent Forrest J Ackerman, who included L. Ron
Hubbard among the many authors he represented, knew Parsons in the 1940s
from their mutual membership in the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.
Ackerman described Parsons to us as "a Howard Hughes type, tall, slender,
dark, good-looking." Along with his wife Helen, also an aspirant to the
O.T.O, the young, attractive couple injected some gladly received new blood
to the sex magickal circle.
With his vigorous intelligence, natural inclination for magic, and
scientific approach to initiation, the rocketeer appeared to be the potential
leader that Crowley and the failing O.T.O. had long sought. But from the
first, Parsons showed an independent streak ill-suited to the hierarchical and
doctrinaire structure of Crowley's O.T.O.. Although he accepted Thelema
unreservedly as the foundation of his religion, and. admired Crowley as his
"beloved father," Parsons took a far more creative, forward-looking view
than his Lodge fellows, who went strictly by the book (of the Law).
Odd though it may seem considering Crowley's own unrestrained
sexual appetite, the reportedly charismatic Smith's tendency to seduce almost
every willing female member of the Lodge particularly rankled the Beast.
One of the sisters of the Lodge whom Smith took as his mistress was Helen
Parsons. This affair, true to the Thelemic injunction that "there shall be no
property in human flesh" was engaged in with John Parsons' knowledge and
agreement. The younger man viewed Smith as a paternal mentor – even as
the "Avatar of a God" – and was loath to interfere with his True Will, even if
his own marriage were to suffer as a consequence. This cultivated
overcoming of societal conditioned sexual jealousy was part of Parsons'
effort to liberate himself with the mores of his time and upbringing, and
remained a central aspect of his approach to sex magic. But his tendency to
be vulnerable to exploitation in this regard would prove to be a perilous
theme in his abbreviated life. In any event, Parsons turned his amorous
attentions to his wife's younger sister, Sara Northrup, known as Betty, who
also joined the O.T.O.
Parsons later interpreted this incident as a turning point in his erotic
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initiation, writing of himself in Analysis By A Master from the distance of the
third person: "Betty served to effect a transference from Helen at a critical
period. Had this not occurred your repressed homosexual element could have
caused a serious disorder. Your passion for Betty also gave you the magical
force you needed at the time, and the act of adultery tinged with incest,
served as your magical confirmation in the Law of Thelema."
Crowley, struggling for survival in dire war-time London, was less
forgiving when he heard of these far away Californications, which he felt
reduced the ideal of sexual initiation to a banal soap opera. In one of many
scolding letters to Smith, Crowley accused him of providing the O.T.O with
"the reputation of being that slimy abomination, a 'love cult.— Since Crowley
had been accused of much the same thing for the past twenty years, we must
imagine that this sudden outbreak of puritanism in his old age was merely a
ploy to depose Smith, whose increasingly authoritarian guidance of the
Lodge was inspiring sedition among the already feud-riven brothers and