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

deity Set and the left-hand path. Grant repeatedly strives to establish Set as
the hidden patron of an ancient sex magical current, which Grant terms the
Draconian, or Typhonian, tradition. For him, Set is the original essence of the
Yezidi Shaitan, the Judeo-Christian Satan, and the Great Beast 666 of
Revelations. (He seems to have based this last doubtful theory on an obscure
1916 book entitled The Two Babylons, written by Alexander Hislop, a
minister with an interest in the religions of antiquity) Accordingly, Typhon,
the Greek manifestation of Set, and an interdimensional gate known as the
"Tunnels of Set" play important roles in the Grantean interpretation of lefthand
path erotic illumination.
Unfortunately, it must be said that some of Grant's work is seriously
flawed by his penchant for indulging in subjective and unscholarly occult
fantasies, which often rival the muddled theories of Madame Blavatsky in
their dazzling flights of incoherence. For instance, the serious student of the
sinister current sex magic tradition will find little enlightenment in Grant's
hypothesis that the left-hand path as it survives in India is actually a
degenerated remnant of a cult that not only goes back to ancient Egypt,
prehistoric Africa, and the ever popular Atlantis but was originally imported
to Earth from extraterrestrial beings from "Trans-Plutonic" outer space.
According to Grant, Tantric sexual initiation is simply one of the "cults of the
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shadow" descended from this alien strain, which also survives among us
earthlings as Voodoo and Thelema. As one proof of this connection between
Egyptian magic and Indian Tantra, Grant suggests – in defiance of any
accepted Egyptian and Sanskrit etymologies – that the Sanskrit Shakti
(power) is connected to the Egyptian Sekhem, which also means "power."
To glean what may be of actual use for the practice of sinister sex
magic in Grant's writings, one must also work through surreal descriptions of
sperm-sucking Mayan squid-bats surviving in abandoned chapels, aetheric
monsters that breed in menstrual blood, and the premise that apes are the
result of prehistoric human copulation with extraterrestrials, all hung together
with obfuscatory detours into Quabalistic numerology. Your head will spin
when confronted with such typical Grantisms as "clepydral horologue",
"infra-liminal vibrations" and "sexo-somniferous magnetization."
Nevertheless, there are those sex magicians who swear by this stuff,
apparently operating on the questionable postulate that whatever is written in
a sufficiently obscure style must conceal extremely precious secret
information.
Another major aspect of Kenneth Grant's legacy is his single-handed
devotion to bringing the work of the once obscure British sex magician and
inspired artist Austin Osman Spare (1886—1956) – whom he befriended in
the last decade of his life – to prominence. Indeed, Grant's interpretation of
Spare's sex-magical theories, communicated to him first-hand, has been far
more influential than the sometimes unintelligible writings of Spare himself.
Grant specifically describes Spare as a magician of the left-hand path in his
Images And Oracles Of Austin Osman Spare.
Crowley, who briefly knew Spare in his youth, also damned the artist
as "a black brother," that is to say, a follower of the left-hand path. Primarily,
this seems to he due to Spare's magical philosophy of "self-love," which
Crowley considered to be a destructive and ego-affirming practice. A crucial
aspect of Spare's self-love was the magical creation of elementals through
masturbation.
According to Grant, Spare, who seems to have been a half-mad old hermit by
the time Grant encountered him, believed himself to be in perpetual sexmagical
congress with these autoerotically engendered astral creatures. These
entities, which Spare considered as his familiars, were supposedly born of his
semen like the succubi of old. Spare informed Grant that these esoteric
organisms "copulated among themselves, engendering offspring