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

contemporary evil, a metaphysical truth, or both, there's no doubt that he
drew directly on the well-established image of Inanna-Ishtar, who was once
revered by her devotees as "the mother of harlots." John's description of the
Scarlet Woman and the dragon Leviathan upon which she rides also echoes
a Babylonian religious text addressed to Ishtar: "Like a dragon you have
filled the land with venom. ... Lady mounted on a beast..."
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Much like Kali, the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon is a symbol of
the primordial woman of sacred chaos returning at the end of time; both
goddesses incarnate the potent sexual violence that gave birth to the
universe, restored to her awe-inspiring authority at the hour of dissolution.
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For some European Hermeticists, who later interpreted the Bible as a veiled
alchemical text, the color of the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse
symbolized the phase in the alchemical work known as the Red Opus. In
1584 C.E, the Elizabethan mage Dr. John Dee and his associate Edward
Kelly recorded their Enochian Aires, in which a distorted version of the
Scarlet Woman's name, Babalon, first makes a cryptic appearance.
It was under this curious name that Inanna-Ishtar-Astarte,
mankind's first documented deity of feminine sexual magic, would return,
several centuries later, to take her place as the chief egregore of a modern
Western sex-magical tradition.
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VI.
Eastern Secrets And Satanic
Pleasures
The Left-Hand Path
And The Modern Magical Revival
The Vama Marga – From East To West
Almost all of the modern European magical Orders and teachers that can be
said to have had a major influence on left-hand path sex magic, whether for
good or for ill, have based their authority on a claimed transmission of secret
Asian or Middle Eastern knowledge to the West. Among the mages we will
consider in this chapter, we can count Theodor Reuss's sex-magical fraternity
Ordo Templi Orientis, whose very name suggests a hidden Eastern source; G.
I. Gurdjieff and H. P. Blavatsky, who both cited Tibetan Buddhism as their
inspiration, and P. B. Randolph, who acknowledged Syria as the root of his
erotic magic. As we shall see, for the most part, such claims were nothing
more than romantic myths, but these persuasive legends of a hidden Oriental
sexual wisdom being revealed for the first time exerted a potent fascination
on early twentieth century magicians from industrialized cultures. This
tendency of would-be sages in the 19th Century West to present their
knowledge in Eastern guise was also based on the historic fact that there had
been an immense Eastern magical influence on Europe from the Islamic
world many centuries earlier; such currents as alchemy, the Troubadour
tradition, and hermetic magic had been imported through contact with Arabic
savants.
Western magicians seem to more easily embrace the concept of
sexual initiation if it is thought to have been derived from some exotic
elsewhere. We find the same phenomenon today; although the allure of a
mysterious East has been considerably lessened by the advent of mass
tourism, television and the World Wide Web; now the mystery-hungry more
readily accept channeled revelations from sunken Atlantis or communications
from extraterrestrial worlds.