I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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trembling of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the various<br />
ceremonies that center around the sacred object."<br />
In the same vein, Réage comments on the hieratic elements of the<br />
sadomasochistic relationship described in <strong>The</strong> Image, describing "the<br />
hierarchy of postures ... the rituals, the churchlike setting, the fetishism<br />
attached to certain objects." <strong>The</strong> sexual slave, according to Réage, is the<br />
"divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only<br />
joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of<br />
herself."<br />
This description, irrespective of the submissive's gender, serves<br />
equally well to characterize the left-hand path initiate, whose deliberate<br />
transformations of self have much in common with the guided<br />
metamorphoses intrinsic to S&M praxis. For those unfamiliar with the<br />
dynamics of sadomasochism, the notion that the slave takes on a god-like<br />
status may seem puzzling. Yet, it is very often the case that the submissive is<br />
the center of the rite, while the master is frequently the servant. Certainly,<br />
the master or mistress can also be said to undergo a process of selfdeification<br />
appropriate to left-hand path practice but the shifting polarities<br />
that inform all sexual magic are especially ambiguous in sadomasochistic<br />
relations.<br />
It should not be surprising that Auly/Réage placed her Story <strong>Of</strong> 0 and<br />
her other fictional celebrations of S&M into a magico-religious context. Her<br />
infamous novel originally began as a series of love letters to Jean Paulhan, a<br />
participant in the school of Satanic sex magic established by Marie de<br />
Naglowska in the years between the World Wars. It's also probably not<br />
coincidental that one of the first serious reviews of the novel came from the<br />
433<br />
pen of Georges Bataille, Paulhan's fellow alumnus of the de Naglowska<br />
circle.<br />
Describing Réage's submissive title character 0, who places herself at<br />
the sexual mercy of a secret society to please her master, Bataille elucidates<br />
his mystical vision of surrender to ecstasy as an initiatory death and rebirth.<br />
"<strong>The</strong> paradox of 0," he writes "is that of the visionary who dies but does not<br />
die." Within the diabolic quasi-Tantric sexual rites taught by de Naglowska,<br />
Bataille would have encountered a similar comparison of orgasm to death<br />
and resurgence. Getting at the heart of the mystical urge to dominate and<br />
submit, Bataille noted that "the executioner is the victim's accomplice." <strong>The</strong><br />
excesses of Bataille's own texts of visionary pornography have caused him to<br />
be described as the de Sade of the twentieth century.<br />
<strong>The</strong> obscure rites of such European left-hand path orders as de<br />
Naglowska's La Fleche d'Or and Bataille's own Acephale indicates an<br />
intriguing cross-current flowing between genuine sex-magical activity and<br />
the French neo-Sadean erotica that so defined the modern aesthetics of S&M.<br />
No wonder, with such a lineage, that the Chateau Roissy – the fictional Order<br />
of aristocratic sadists central to the narrative of <strong>The</strong> Story <strong>Of</strong> 0 – has inspired<br />
any number of fantasists in the occult and S&M subcultures to spuriously<br />
claim to he the real thing.<br />
In Bataille's final work, 1959's <strong>The</strong> Tears <strong>Of</strong> Eros, he presented the<br />
ultimate refinement of his theory postulating a "fundamental connection<br />
between religious ecstasy and eroticism – and in particular sadism." For<br />
Bataille, "between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy" lay a mysterious<br />
union, physically exemplified in a photograph taken in 1905 depicting the<br />
excruciating death by torture of a Chinese assassin. <strong>The</strong> photograph records<br />
the terminal agonies of the dying man as he is physically dismembered by his<br />
executioners, whose facial expression, according to Bataille, revealed a<br />
mystical joy even in the face of unendurable pain.<br />
"I have never stopped being obsessed by the image of this pain, at<br />
once ecstatic and intolerable," he wrote of this cruel icon that became the