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

left-hand path Shakti puja. He states that "all force and powers arise from the
womanhood of God."
Considering all this, can we recognize in Paschal Beverly Randolph
an adept of the sinister current? His "soul-sexivism" does bear many of the
universal marks of the left-hand path: the divine nature of the feminine
power; a bipolar positive/negative sexual energy transmitted by the male and
female organisms; the attainment of maya-transforming magical siddhis
through enhanced orgasm. His open practice of sex magic in the
conservative, strait-laced culture of nineteenth century Boston was certainly a
bold, even dangerous, defiance of orthodoxy. However, on closer analysis,
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Randolph's worldview – at least as expressed in his public writings – is far
too accepting of social conventions and the norms of pashu morality to
partake of the heroic, transgressive qualities that determine Vama Marga
initiation in its highest mode of expression.
For all of his daring, Randolph communicates an unmistakable
puritanism in many of his sex-magical instructions that is not suited to the
left-hand path's transcendence of social programming. For instance, he warns
the couple that they must never experience "lust or pleasure" (luring the
"sexive prayer", declaring that any "carnal passion" felt during ejaculation
will be "suicide" for the male sex magician. This is rather reminiscent of the
seventeenth-century Catholic injunction bidding copulating couples to
procreate without "any sort of desire or pleasure" and makes for an unlikely
recipe for the kind of extreme ecstasy required for magical consciousness
alteration. And for all of the resemblance of Randolph's "womanhood of
God" to the Shakti principle, he only reserves such reverence for those
women who obey the dictates of conventional morality.
"Success," Randolph wrote, "requires the adjuvancy of a superior
woman. THIS IS THE LAW! A harlot or low woman is useless for all such
lofty and holy purposes, and just so is a bad, impure, passion-driven apology
for a man. The woman shall not be one who accepts rewards for compliance;
nor a virgin; or under eighteen years of age; or another's wife."
Contrast this with the previously described left-hand veneration of
Shakti in all of her guises, including whore, adulterer, and virgin, all of
whom are considered ideal sexual consorts for Vama Marga rites. Randolph's
legacy to the Western sinister current is mixed; although he was a trailblazer
in bringing the formerly secretive practice of sex magic out into the open, his
initiation was incomplete. Randolph stopped short of confronting the night
side of the sinister current. Many of his techniques were adopted into the
latter-day cult of the Scarlet Woman, hut his vision lacked the chaotic power
of the Whore of Babylon that is the driving force of the left-hand path in the
West.
There is a final puzzle piece to consider among the many that make
up the life of P. R. Randolph. In 1931 a book entitled Magia Sexualis,
attributed to Paschal Beverly Randolph, was published in Paris. Credited as
having translated the work from English into French is Maria De Naglowska,
the previously mentioned Satanic sex magician. Most of what is known of
Randolph's sex-magical teaching derives from this work, and a translation of
it into English printed almost forty years later in the United States. However,
it is not at all clear whether Madame de Naglowska can truly be said to have
merely translated Randolph's most famous book, or if she is in fact the actual
authoress of the book. She may have written it under Randolph's name, based
on her interpretation of some of his obscure pamphlets and documents from
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his Brotherhood of Eulis, interweaving her own theories into the text.
The distinct possibility that the American pioneer sex magician's
principal work was actually written in French decades after his death by a
female Russian Satanist is only one of many of the peculiar mysteries the