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

lines, eschewing such traditional props as written ritual texts, and customary,
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supposedly obligatory ritual props, such as bells, candles, robes, pentagrams
and the like. In the pure magical opera of the working, the magician seeks to
keep such extraneous devices to a bare minimum, drawing on the stark
powers of the mind and body alone to effect one's magical will in the world.
The word ritual tends to imply a well-rehearsed, systematic "acting out" of
religious or metaphysical symbolism, little different than the extravagant but
empty mummery practiced by organized religions in their places of worship.
While magic can most certainly be a religious experience, in the truest sense
of the term, it should never be the kind of religious experience that merely
comforts by going through the motions of a routine. Our somewhat more
clinical use of the word "working" suggests a more unconfined manipulation
of magical energy, involving direct encounter with the numinous, as
unencumbered by habitual response or the reliance on familiar magical
crutches as possible.
Even more to be avoided than the customary orthodoxy of repetitive
ritual is ceremony, which can only imply the reenactment of proscribed rites
ordained by law, entrenched by custom, and performed according to an
unbending set of rules. The formula and recipe of ceremony are certain
death for the vitality of the left-hand path magician, who remains vigilant
through an experimental, ever-changing reinvention of magical strategy.
Most ritual and ceremonial magic is static, relying on the tried and true
instead of venturing out into new and unexplored directions. While the left
hand hand path initiate may wish to observe certain ceremonial occasions,
such as weddings, funerals, and. other rites of observance and celebration,
even these should not he the simple recitation of text enjoined by profane
society. Such rites should always be magical workings in and of themselves
that cause action and change in the self and in the outer world.
The Daemonic
We have already referred several times to the Daemonic, another word
easily misinterpreted if taken at face value. One may understandably assume
that we refer to the putative evil spirits or infernal beings that Christian
theologians and traditional demonologists so often direct their fulminations
against. Since this study scrupulously shuns the entire worldview implied by
use of the simplistic good/evil dichotomy, and the authors don't accept the
existence of evil as a force that exists outside of culturally determined value
judgments nor the existence of an inferno populated with malign bat-winged
entities, our reference to the Daemonic is something altogether on a different
plane. Yet again, we return to the original source of the word in the Greek
language, which offers a richer and thus more useful definition for the
magician than the limiting Christianized definition.
The word "Daemon", from the Greek daimon, originally carried no
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pejorative implication or connection with evil. It merely referred to a kind of
protective spirit or demi-divinity thought to be associated with each
individual. Deriving from daiomai or "I distribute", the daemon was
considered as a literal distributor of fate. Daemon has also been defined as
"replete with wisdom", and in this regard, the daemon was also deeply
connected to the Roman concept of the genius, a god that presided over
one's birth. Persons of remarkable talent or extraordinary accomplishment
were considered to be guided by a Daemon or Genius, just as the concept of
Genius loci is still used to describe the distinctive spirit of a specific place.
Perhaps the most illustrious historical example of this is Socrates, who
claimed that he heard the voice of a daemon, or genius, that guided his life.
According to R.B. Onians, in his The Origins Of European Thought, the
word "genius" was originally the Roman equivalent of the Greek psyche,
described as "the life-spirit active in procreation, disassociated from and