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

would seem a far likelier diagnosis.
Whether one interprets The Book Of The Law as a transmission from
a god-like being, or merely as an eruption of Crowley's unconscious mind, it
is significant that its reception was anticipated by Crowley's wife, the illfated
Rose. She is said to have fallen into a light trance and announced to her
husband that the Gods had a message for him, detailing the time and place at
which they would communicate. Many of the visions, oracles, and astral
messages that were such an important part of Crowley's magical practice
were in fact spoken to him by his female sexual partners, who invariably
served as his intermediaries to "the astral." For the most part, these visions
were inspired by an excess of drinking, ether, opium, and flicking, which
allowed his exhausted consorts to fall into a post-coital trance of what
Crowley termed "eroto-comataose lucidity"
In this altered state, Crowley's female companion served as his
"skryer," an Old English word for a medium, or "seer." In this sense, the
specific left-turning properties of the Feminine Daemonic were a major
influence on Crowley – he consistently relied on erotically charged women
to he his guides to the daemonic realm. However, he refused to accept that
female magicians could serve as much more than mindless empty vessels,
radios of flesh picking up stray signals from the beyond. For Crowley,
Woman was merely a desirable animal, whose natural propensity for
visionary experience in a state of erotic arousal made her a useful beast of
burden for his forays into the higher planes of consciousness. But he utterly
denied her the dignity of a left-hand path shakti; he once dismissed woman
in general by writing that "She has no individuality." The sinister current sex
magician, in considering what useful methods Crowley's legacy may
contain, must keep his withering scorn for the feminine in mind.
Crowley put forth that Aiwass was one of the "Secret Chiefs" or
"Unknown Superiors" said to preside over this planet, similar to the
mahatmas popularized in the West by Theosophical teachings, or the
bodhisattvas of the Buddhist left-hand path. Perhaps Crowley's least
ambiguous statement concerning such entities is his remark that his
"observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of
intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive
of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous
structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to
advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings." For
262
Crowleyans, and perhaps for Crowley himself, The Book ()f The Law is a
testament of such contact between man and these higher intelligences.
Through the message of Aiwass, Crowley declared that he had become the
prophet of the Aeon of Horus, the long-awaited new age that would sweep
away the religions of the past. (The Aeonic concept, based on Crowley's
misconception of the Gnostic Aion, which he first learned of from the
magician and actress Florence Farr, reveals the substantial impact of
Gnosücism on Thelema.)
Thus ordained to the sacrosanct office of World Teacher, Crowley
presented himself as a religious figure comparable to Christ, Lao Tzu,
Buddha and Mohammed – the most recent in a lineage of sages who have
been charged with the spiritual supervision of the planet. Crowley's messianic
goals, directed to "all" rather than to a few heroic beings prepared to break
from mass consciousness, cannot be reconciled with the left-hand path's
elitist and individual approach to initiation. But clearly such a lofty sense of
identity is consonant with sinister current objectives of self-deification.
Just as Gautama Siddartha, the Buddha, had condensed his teaching
in the Word Anatta, and the Christ had proclaimed Agape (Love), Crowley
had uttered Thelema – Greek for "Will." In 1915, Crowley named himself as
the Magus of Thelema, in a rite of initiation that was marked by the