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

and an impostor in comparison to his ostensibly virtuous contemporary
Jesus. Orthodox texts present Christ as a self-effacing humble figure who
seeks to lead others to become one with God. Simon, however, is depicted as
striving to become God – the ultimate left-hand path goal. In point of fact, it
is quite probable that the magical operations and objectives of Simon and
Christ were not so radically different, since they seem to both have been
based on precisely the same Graeco-Egyptian Gnostic tradition. ICs ironic
that one of the great heresies of Simon is his claim that the prostitute Helene
is "the holy spirit in all her splendor", since Mary Magdalene plays such an
equivalent role in the myth of Jesus.
According to Church legend, the renown of Simon and Helene
became so great in Rome that even the Emperor Nero and his wife Poppaea
could be numbered among their adherents. This association in itself suggests
the Satanic image afforded to Simon Magus by orthodox Christians, who
hated Nero as the instigator of anti-Christian persecution, later identifying
him as the Great Beast 666 of the Apocalypse. As wicked Nero's spiritual
Master, Simon Magus may not be the Antichrist but he may well be one of
the "false teachers" referred to in the passage in I John which reads "it is the
last time: and as you have heard that anti-christ is coming, so now have
many anti-christs have arisen; whereby we know that it is the last hour."
A very common form of myth in antiquity is the Battle of the
Magicians. In such duels, the triumphant party is presumably established as
the ordained representative of a legitimate religion, whereas the loser is
confirmed to be a pretender, a magical charlatan. The contest between the
serpent-conjuring magus Moses and the court magicians of the Setian
pharaoh Ramses is an archetypal example of this sort of competition.
In The Acts Of The Apostles, the best-known mythical account of
Simon Magus, the Apostle Peter is portrayed as the Christian hero who
vanquishes the left-hand path magus at the height of his powers. Invited by
Nero to perform a miracle before the Roman masses to win them over
categorically to his cult, Simon arrogantly opts for the Forum as a suitably
grand stage for his magic. To reveal that he is indeed as powerful as God –
as a self-deified being himself – the magus vows to rise to Heaven before the
eyes of the spectators. This he easily proceeds to do, ascending high above
the Forum. Outraged at this blasphemous challenge to the powers of his
favored magus, Christ, Peter manages to defeat Simon by merely praying
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and making the sign of the cross. Simon topples to his death, defeated by
Peter, who went on to become the first Pope. It as based on legends like
these that the formerly vilified magic of Christ – which as we have seen was
originally judged to be demonic in character by the Pharisees – slowly
became a reputable and state-approved religion, while the magic of Simon
Magus was branded as the illegitimate chicanery of a scoundrel.
Despite the purportedly tidy defeat of Simon, the Simonian sect
continued to hold sway for many centuries. It decisively shaped Ophite
Gnosticism, with its celebration of the sexual lessons of the female serpent,
and contributed much to hermetic magical practice and European alchemy,
both of them suffused with cryptic references to the sexual creation of a
spiritual hermaphrodite within the physical organism. The name of Simon
Magus also lives on in one of the many sins still recognized by the Catholic
Church. The sin of simony consists of trying to buy the gift of the Holy
Spirit, one of the many spiritual offenses the Samaritan magician was
charged with perpetrating.
If Simon Magus and Helene can be considered the first coherent
figures of the black magician and his consort in the West, the first century
Gnostic mage also appears to have served as the role model for Europe's most
enduring legendary diabolist, the mysterious Doctor Faust. Simon was
commonly known during his lifetime as faustus, Latin for "the favored one" –