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

personality cults, the Golden Arrow could not survive without its
charismatic founder. Reverence for their teacher was so profound that none
of the consecrated women she had trained were prepared to take over as the
Fleche D'or leader, which did not bode well for her hopes of a new
matriarchy. A short-lived successor group, Christ-Roi (Christ-King),
continued performing the Trial of Hanging, claiming to be under
Naglowska's spiritual supervision from the other world, but eventually
dispersed.
Naglowska's sex-magical approach to exaltation of Luciferian
principles has not been influential in magical circles generally. Very few
modern Satanic groups have followed her lead in using sex for spiritual
purposes, although the Trial of Hanging was adapted by one modern
Western left-hand path Order in the 1980s. Her complicated vision of
religious utopianism based on the ascent of the "wise woman" is probably
too dogmatic to be very adaptable to other magical belief systems, and her
many books and pamphlets have hardly been read outside of France in the
1930s. Naglowskan sex magic's most dramatic affect seems to have been
upon some of the many literary figures and intellectuals who were disciples
and lovers of this striking personality in Rome or Paris. In particular, three
of the men who had encountered the gnosis of the Satanic Sophia went on to
chart unexplored regions of erotic mysticism that touched directly upon the
live wire of the sinister current.
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The Naglowska Circle
One of the curious who were drawn to the Golden Masses held by the
Fleche D'Or was the French author Georges Bataille (1897-1962), whose
potent fiction and philosophical essays point the way to the sacred
pornography we mentioned in the introduction to this book. Naglowska,
with her rather wholesome approach to Satanic sex, and her desire to avoid
"perverse vibrations" would probably not have approved at all of the
direction Bataille took. In his lascivious novella The Story Of The Eye
(1928), which sometimes borders on the concerns of traditional Satanism, a
defrocked Catholic priest is initiated into the left-hand path mysteries of
eros, death, and transgression of the sacred. Ritually raped, forced into
sacrilege against a transubstantiated Eucharist host and the wine that is
Christ's blood, Bataille's priest is eventually subjected to necrophiliac
indignities by an unholy trinity of debauched adolescents.
In 1937, after his observation of de Naglowska's Golden Arrow,
Bataille formed his own small magical secret society, known as Acéphale, a
name based on a self-created artificial deity called Acephalos (Greek for
"Headless.") Although Bataille claimed to teach an "atheological" (godless)
religion, it is interesting that the name of Bataille's Acéphale group recalls a
well-known Greco-Egyptian hermetic text, popularized by the Golden Dawn
and Crowley, which invites the magus to declaim: "Thee, I invoke,
Akephalou, [the headless one]." The headlessness Bataille referred to also
indicated that his group was deliberately anarchic, without any fixed leader;
an experimental attempt to dispose of the hierarchical structure that
suppresses the freedom and spontaneity of so many magical groups. One of
Acéphale's plans, which never came to fruition, was to inspire one of its nine
initiates to voluntarily serve as a sacrifice. Their objective was to reach a
"limitless abandon", but the intensity that fueled this investigation into group
dynamics proved short-lived.
In 1938, Bataille turned his direction inward, attempting what he
called "inner experiments" which he based on a study of Tantra, yoga, and
Tibetan mysticism. He wrote that "the Tantrics use sexual pleasure not to
lose themselves in it but as a kind of springboard," enthusiastically
embracing this practice as a "black magic [which] has continued this