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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<strong>Of</strong> course, this exercise in logical deduction deliberately ignores the<br />
psychological and symbolic dimensions of the question, those ephemeral<br />
qualities that provide personal meaning to any magical experience. <strong>The</strong><br />
intangible aesthetic and poetic interpretation of the S&M experience is just as<br />
invaluable to the magician as the physiological release of endorphins. <strong>The</strong><br />
factor of who is applying the pain, and under what circumstances, are<br />
essential ingredients in any working of this nature. <strong>The</strong> conscious awareness<br />
and. manipulation of the entirety of somatic and symbolic information<br />
accessed through pleasure/pain, culminating in the direction of this<br />
complicated mixture toward magical aims are the factors that separate the<br />
magician from the simple fetishist, although the border between the two roles<br />
is admittedly fluid.<br />
For many sex magicians, using strictly pleasurable sexual interaction<br />
for magical purposes is deemed to be "normal" and dignified, while those<br />
who incorporate dominance and submission, bondage, erotic torture and<br />
other pain-oriented techniques into magic are automatically condemned as<br />
"sick and perverted", utterly beyond the pale of the "respectable" sex<br />
magician (is there such a thing?). As biased as this view may be, it must also<br />
442<br />
be said that there are many sex magicians who exclusively utilize S&M<br />
procedures in their magic but who smugly dismiss sexual pe<strong>net</strong>ration as<br />
"vanilla sex", with the implication that such practices are tediously<br />
unimaginative and boring. In our view, both prejudices are limited, tending<br />
to restrict rather than expand the spectrum of techniques available to the<br />
sinister current sex magician.<br />
Whether S&M seems detestable or attractive to you, experimenting<br />
with its methods can add much to your magical arsenal, shedding light on<br />
undiscovered regions of self that can only be accessed through these means.<br />
While many traditional magicians are loath to explore this domain, the<br />
illuminated libertine will not hesitate to integrate any useful technique into<br />
his or her corpus of knowledge.<br />
Algolagnia<br />
Before we examine the basic techniques available to the sex magician<br />
experimenting with the agony and the ecstasy of pain manipulation, some<br />
reference to the nomenclature surrounding the subject is not inappropriate.<br />
Thus far, simply to facilitate general ease of comprehension, we have utilized<br />
the terms sadomasochism or its popular abbreviation S&M. For several<br />
reasons, we find this term magically unsuitable for the task at hand. Taking<br />
into account the elementary mantric principle that names have a power of<br />
their own which can significantly distort or clarify that which they signify,<br />
the diagnostic phrase "sadomasochism" is particularly loaded with distracting<br />
and misleading associations.<br />
<strong>The</strong> words sadism and masochism were originally coined by the<br />
German neurologist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840—1902) in his<br />
famous Psychopathia Sexualis, an encylopaedic record of sexual practices<br />
designated by the good Herr Doktor as psychotic aberrations. Since<br />
illuminated libertines do not consider that the conscious and consensual<br />
erotic manipulation of pain, or any other fetish for that matter, can be<br />
characterized as a psychological condition requiring cure, we must reject<br />
Krafft-Ebing's clinical description as irrelevant to the sex magician.<br />
In this, we would agree with Aleister Crowley, who in reading the<br />
accounts of "perversion" in Psychopathia Sexualis as a young man, concluded<br />
that these supposed depravities could all be understood from an initiatic<br />
perspective as "magical affirmations of perfectly intelligible points of view."<br />
<strong>Of</strong> course, as we have seen, a major part of Crowley's sex-magical initiation<br />
was exercised through the most extreme rites of sexual submission and<br />
degradation.<br />
Many a dull-witted brute or compulsive serial killer can he classified