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

external to the conscious self that is centered in the chest." Significantly, for
the most advanced stages of left-hand path initiation, the genius of an
individual was believed to be a subtle element of the human being that could
survive the death of his or her physical mechanism.
The genius of the Romans, said to possess the procreative power of
sexuality that survives death, has much in common with the ancient
Egyptian khabit, or shadow, one of the eight powers that make up the human
life-force. In his essay "Egyptian Anthropology", the magician Don Webb
has described the shadow as being "of extreme importance" since
"It is the source of one's power of mobility, and one's reproductive power.
The shadow can be stolen when one sleeps, causing the object of the theft to
die. Certain powerful sorcerers can detach their shadows and send them on
missions of harm or espionage. The shadow follows the dead into the Tuat,
thus assuring his or her mobility there."
Of relevance to the sex magician is Webb's statement that the shadow held
the sexuality of the being, and to the extent one's sexuality survived death it
was through the shadow."
Thus, the Demons Of The Flesh evoked in the title of this work are
the unique and inimitable spiritual forces – the daemon, genius, shadow or
psyche – connected with each self-realized sex magician of the left-hand
path, the individual daemonic intelligences that can be best accessed through
magical operations. Communication with these daemons – beings
interpreted by some as manifestations of unknown aspects of "the higher
sell", and by others as literal non-human entities – allows the magician to
more completely control one's self-created destiny. The inner genius or
daemon inhabiting the body was inextricably linked with an individual's
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luck in the world.
In a slightly different sense, we use the Daemonic as a synonym for
the spiritual and metaphysical realm of human consciousness, that realm
where much of the magician's most enduring work is performed. It is in the
Daemonic stratum of being that the magician encounters and interacts with
the eternal and cosmic principles, transcending the transitory and strictly
human-defined sphere of magical activity. One of these Daemonic eternal
principles of particular bearing to the left-hand path sex magician is the
Feminine Daemonic, the living essence of the dark feminine principle.
Old school occultists will perhaps understand the Daemonic sphere
of consciousness as akin to "the astral plane" or as the region where the
"akashic record" can be encountered. If the human magician can indeed
create a part of himself or herself that is immortal, as some left-hand path
schools claim, it is on the Daemonic level. If the magician seeks to
experience a semi-divine state of consciousness during a magical working,
he or she must first attain the Daemonic perspective before doing so. When
the magician transmits his will into the universe to effect more than just the
human lifestream, he or she does so from the Daemonic station. It must be
stressed that the word "Daemon", in and of itself, is morally neutral,
originally possessing none of the implication of evil later attached to it by
Christianity. For the Greeks, a benevolent daemon was designated as an
eudaemon and a maleficent one was known as a cacodaemon.
The Psyche
Defining the Daemonic leads us to consider the corresponding, and equally
hard to grasp concept of the soul, alternately the Greek psyche or the Latin
anima. As the classical philologist Georg Luck writes in his Magie Und
Andere Geheimlehren In Der Antike: "in a certain sense the soul is a
daemon". If we understand the Daemon or soul/psyche/anima to be words
that describe an ultimately nameless indwelling metaphysical essence that
occupies the physical body – an essence that is the core of what makes you
an independent being – Luck's description is comprehended more clearly.