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

Baron Gilles de Rais, also ended in disaster – de Rais' fall from grace took
him from the pure vision of the warrior feminine principle incarnated by the
shamanic shakti Joan of Arc to eventual execution as a serial killer who used
the blood of children for his alchemical experiments. Cagliostro was the most
notorious occultist of the Age of Enlightenment, an alchemist, hermeticist
and dabbler in Rosicrucian Masonry, still acclaimed as a great adept by some
and dismissed as a thoroughgoing charlatan by many others. His partner in
crime was his beautiful young mistress Serafina, to whom he attributed his
powers, and can easily he understood as a Scarlet Woman figure. Both came
to a bad end, Cagliostro finding an ignominious death in prison.
An important magical lesson is concealed in Parsons' integration of
these earlier semi-mythical magical role models into his psyche. By adopting
Simon Magus, de Rais, and Cagliostro as his blueprints – individuals who he
judged to have failed at the Great Work – it must be wondered to what extent
he set into motion the mechanism of his own failure and catastrophic death, a
self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. The magician must exercise extreme
caution in selecting prototypes from myth and history lest the overlooked
self-destructive characteristics embodied in such prototypes overshadow
one's own unfolding of consciousness. Parsons ignored this methodology to
his peril, just as the magician today who unthinkingly adopts the glamorous
Parsons legend into his or her own subjective universe is embracing a very
unstable and hazardous energy. One might also mention in this regard the
countless sex magicians who proudly proclaim themselves to be
reincarnations of the Great Beast 666, never considering the built-in pattern
of self-destruction, poverty and mania imbedded in the invocation of
Crowley into one's own being.
In our estimation, Parsons is no hero to emulate, but a cautionary
example of the archetype of the Pure Fool in search of the Graal of the
Feminine Daemonic. Wise – even brilliant – in many arcane and specialized
ways, but lacking all common sense, Parsons conjured an overwhelming
force that destroyed him in very little time. Abused, robbed and exploited,
the price he paid for grounding the sinister power of the Babalon current in
our time was immense, leaving him in the end as little more than a charred
sacrifice to the Goddess he adored.
"Thou shalt become living flame before she incarnates..."
Jack Parsons conjured two of the most important protagonists in his strange
destiny, his partners in the Babalon Working, through the simple expedient of
a classified ad. After Parsons' estranged father died in 1942, the young
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scientist was surprised to learn that he had inherited a stately, European-style
mansion in a well-heeled neighborhood in conservative Pasadena. Jack
dubbed his new abode "the Parsonage," promptly commencing an experiment
in free love, drugs, and communal living that presaged the hippy lifestyle
which would not fully come into being for another twenty-five years. (Not a
few commentators have speculated that the spirit given birth by the Babalon
Working took shape in the Sixties phenomena of sexual revolution and
female emancipation that later expressed itself in such dramatic forms in
California.) To attract the kind of liberated spirits Parsons and his new
consort Betty sought as companions, and to generate the requisite income,
they placed an ad in the local paper, letting it be known that "Only atheists
and those of a Bohemian disposition" were welcome as tenants. Parsons
faithfully sent whatever extra earnings were produced from his lodgers off to
Crowley, whose earlier Abbey of Thelema surely served as a role model for
the Parsonage. Respectable scientists, engineers, and physicists mingled with
marginal magicians, artists, and well-known science fiction writers as Robert
Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt and Ray Bradbury, long before their work was
accorded serious literary status.
Alva Rogers, one of the many struggling writers who found their way