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

That sort of thing is useless, not to say an insult to the intelligence of
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the budding magician. Dogmatic instructions, to our experience, cannot
make for great magicians – they only prove that the reader can obediently
follow commands. Such short cuts and simplifications provide none of the
necessary friction for the student of the left-hand path, without which none
of the abrasive effort required to initiate one's self can be sparked. Demons
Of The Flesh, which we are immodest enough to classify as a Tantra for the
twenty-first century, is constructed to provide this friction, rather than to
distill the left-hand path into an easy-to-swallow mother's milk for the
suckling. For this reason, although practical methods of procedure are
suggested, this is not so much a "how-to" book – it's focus is on "why-to." In
our opinion, one mark of the true left-hand path magician is an ability to
integrate complex symbolic systems, synthesize them with personal
experience, and create from this synthesis his or her own unique direction on
the left-hand path.
One commonly held, but erroneous, belief about sex magic, left-hand
path or otherwise, is that its practice consists of nothing more than making a
strong wish focused upon during orgasm. If that were the case, one would
hardly need an entire book about the subject – that last sentence would
suffice for one's complete sex-magical education. This is actually only one of
the least sophisticated of sex-sorcerous methods, and while the left-hand path
magician may experiment with it as a means of testing the insubstantiality of
all mental phenomena, it cannot compare to the far more essential left-hand
path methods of sexual illumination, such as Kundalini, that reshape
consciousness to supernal levels of realization that entirely transcend the
puerile "wishing well" model of popular sex magic.
Perhaps the prevalence of this idea, even among those who should
know better, is based on the fact that so much has been written about Aleister
Crowley's "sex magick", which in his own everyday practice did indeed
consist of little more than coordinating wishing and coming. But Crowley,
despite his posthumous ascendance as the most recognizable "brand name" in
the field of Western sex magic, is not the be-all and end-all of sex magic. The
idea of the magical orgasm did not simply spontaneously burst forth from
Crowley's loins one day. In fact, as we will show, the now obscure pseudo-
Rosicrucian precursors of Crowley, such as the African-American sex
magician P.B. Randolph and the German spermophage Theodor Reuss
originated many of the ideas the Great Beast 666 is commonly thought to
have "discovered", just as several of his contemporaries and antecedents
developed those same ideas in more pertinent directions than the Master
himself. We shall also attempt to resolve the thorny question of whether
Crowley is indeed a magus of the left-hand path at all.
In this last regard, it must be said that the practice of sex magic alone
does not qualify a magician for the left-hand path. Every occult nutcase who
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ever proclaimed his or her orgasm to be a magical event of the first order is
not necessarily an initiate of the left-hand path. Likewise, the absence of
sexuality in one's magical practice is a sure sign that one is no longer dealing
with the left-hand path in its classical sense.
We place left-hand sex magic in a historical context by analyzing
some of the colorful historical figures who have practiced orgasmic
thaumaturgy in the modern West. But we must make clear that it is not our
intention to inspire our readers to emulate the lives and legends of these
individuals. The left-hand path is firmly focused on self-deification – the
fannish idolization and hero worship inculcated by so much occult literature
for the "all-stars" of yesteryear is wholly out of place with the goals of the
left-hand path. If there is an appropriate left-hand path attitude to be taken
with the famous and infamous sex-magical teachers of the past, it is surely