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

eings informed him that "it is not certain that you will survive, but if you
survive you will attain your true will, and manifest the Antichrist." During
this initiatory ordeal – which Parsons called the Black Pilgrimage – he took
the oath of a Master of the Temple from his old Lodge master Wilfred Smith.
Assuming his self-appointed office of Antichrist, he vowed, among other
things, to end the lying hypocrisy of Christianity" with its repressive sexual
"prudery and shame ... guilt and sin." Never before or since has there been
such a total spiritual repudiation of the anti-sexual tyranny of the Church,
based on a theurgic identification with the apocalyptic contrasexual figures
of Antichrist and the Great Whore, whose physical manifestation he
predicted would become evident in 1955.
The reader today, accustomed to the crude anti-Christian fulminations of
modern Satanism, may suppose that Parsons' ideas can be considered a
forerunner to the ignorant church-burning "devil worship" of our era. This is
not true; his magical war is clearly targeted primarily at the sexual shame
fostered by what he called "formal Christianity" In Parsons' brief The Gnostic
Doctrine, the magician reveals his immersion in esoteric left-hand path
Gnostic Christianity, acknowledging that "the Holy Ghost is the feminine
counterpart of Christ – the Sophia." Furthermore, the self-proclaimed
Antichrist declares that "In the teachings of [the original] Christ there are no
prohibitions of the enjoyment of life and of the world ... and sexual love."
Here again, Parsons stands firmly in the Gnostic tradition of Simon Magus
and his whore of wisdom. Only a few years after the discovery of the sexual
mysticism of the Nag Hammadi library, Parsons observed in his fragmentary
notes for a magical curriculum that "Books of the old and new testament that
contained the sexual doctrines and revolutionary ethics of all true religion
were thrown out bodily, and in some cases totally obliterated."
This curriculum, which was never completed or published in his
lifetime, Parsons intended as the course of instruction for his own proposed
sex-magical school, known only as the Witchcraft. In notes written for the
Witchcraft, Parsons explicitly identifies himself and his students as "Helpers
on the Left Hand Side," an explicit reference to his own increasing
understanding that his application of the Babalon current was a manifestation
of the left-hand path – in contradiction to Crowley's identification of
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Thelema with the right-hand path. This is made clear in his explanation of
"the universe as an interplay between the yin and the yang, or the Lingam and
the Yoni." The congruence of Parsons' developing post-O.T.O. philosophy
with the universal sinister current is made evident by his passionate
description of Babalon in these papers, a Western Tantra alive with his vision
of the Feminine Daemonic:
"For is not BABALON the whole of Nature – and is not the cup she beareth
That in which all things are conceived? ... It was she who sat at the temple
gate by the waters of Babylon and gave herself to a stranger. Not to one man
did she give herself in that rite, but to all men, and therefore to God ... Look
upon her now in her nakedness, this glorious whore called woman. Behold
her chanting a war cry, riding a steed of the Sagas – Semiramis, Vicingetorix
– Brunhild. Is she not admirable? behold her in the chambers of the night, her
cheeks flushed, her eyes large, her mouth moist with honey and sweet with
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fire, giving the ecstasy and anguish of her body utterly in love. Is she not
magnificent! ... Call to her – fear her not – for is she not woman – tendermysteriousalluring?
She is the essence of woman – raised to her own power,
set loose in herself."
But Parsons' left-hand path teaching was never to come into its full maturity,
leaving others to carry on the work of Babalon. In June of 1952, while
Cameron and he were hastily packing for a suddenly conceived move to
Mexico, Parsons was rapidly clearing out his makeshift laboratory, in