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

sisters of Agape.
Crowley installed Parsons as the acting master of the Lodge, despite
the Beast's accurate observation that he was "very young and easily swayed
by passing influences." Complicating this accession to power over the Lodge
was Parsons' tenacious devotion to his excommunicated predecessor Smith,
whom Crowley had pronounced persona non grata. Parson's young wife
Betty apparently despised Smith, which must have exacerbated the already
existing tensions considerably.
Parson's early interest in Satanism and the darker expressions of the
divine had always separated him from the more conventionally benevolent
magicians in the Lodge. Now he began to develop an ominous reputation,
enhanced by his fascination with the evocation of demonic entities via
Voodoo and the more malevolent manifestations of witchcraft, practices
almost entirely unknown to Americans in the 1940s. Agape Lodge members
wrote to Crowley in England to complain that their new leader's experiments
were creating a sinister atmosphere in the communal house where meetings
were held. Parsons seemed uninterested in undertaking the duties of the
Lodge, as his focus shifted away increasingly from the performance of
orthodox Crowleyan rituals in favor of more personal sex-magical
adventures.
He even dared to reprimand Crowley himself, complaining that the
Beast's rather sadistic treatment of the disgraced Wilfred Smith was unfair.
As protest, Parsons resigned from the O.T.O. in 1943, an event Crowley
recorded in his diary, with a typically misogynist snipe at Parsons' wife:
"Letter of resignation from puppy Jack; his snout glued to the rump of an
alley-cat." Despite his anger at this insubordination, the Beast persuaded
Parsons to remain in the fold, which tells us something of the admiration he
must have held for his promising if refractory student, who many still
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considered a likely successor to the Thelemic throne. Although he remained
the nominal head of the Lodge until as late as 1946, Parsons' growing
fascination – one might even say obsession – with the seductive feminine
mystery of Babalon was to lead him to a heresy that would finally cause him
to characterize the O.T.O. as "an excellent training school for Adepts, but
hardly an appropriate order for the manifestation of Thelema." As must
happen with any true magician, Parsons graduated from apprenticeship in a
dogmatic school to remanifestation as his own independent entity.
And as is the mark of the left-hand path initiate, it was the
fascination exerted upon him by a woman who led him gloriously astray. Not
just any woman, but Inanna, the Great Whore of Babylon, her ancient allure
risen again in a desert far from the sands of Iraq.
Dangers Of The Babalon Working
Certainly the best-known aspect of Jack Parsons' meteoric passage through
life is the calling forth of a feminine elemental he and an associate performed
between January 4 – March 4, 1946, a sex-magical operation he termed the
Babalon Working. In its form and methodology, this Working is really
nothing extraordinary; Parsons and his magical colleague followed the basic
conventions of Hermetic ritual as they had been practiced since the
Elizabethan period, albeit with the inclusion of sex magical techniques
derived from the O.T.O. Its significance to the left-hand path magician lays
primarily in the fact that few Western magicians have left such an instructive
record of contact with the Shakti force, an adhesion between man and deity
thats violent ripples in space and time can still be felt today.
Sinister current sex magic is not merely a matter of harnessing the
energy unleashed by physical sex with a partner for initiatory objectives. One
of the least analyzed manifestations of erotic initiation is the summoning of a
sex partner of either sex in physical form for a specific magical goal. In
practical terms, the Babalon Working demonstrates to the left-hand path