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

will consider again later, the notion that Crowley was a walker of the sinister
way has gained fairly wide currency. For instance, in their King Of The
Shadow Realm, Grant and his frequent collaborator John Symonds rather
arbitrarily interpret the phrase "Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words
and signs" from Crowley's Book Of The Law, as meaning that Crowley
believed he should abandon "ceremonial magic as taught in the Golden
Dawn, and take up sexual magic as taught by the Vamacharis or followers of
the left hand path (because their worship is with women who are lunar or of
the left)" But Crowley's sexual magic betrays very little taught by any
followers of the left-hand path we are aware of; it is actually a conglomerate
of Reussian sperm-gnosis, Randolph's orgasmic prayer and Volancia, the
Kabbalah as taught by the Golden Dawn, all melded with Crowley's own
self-created religion of Thelema.
Another poetic flourish from The Book Of The Law – "put on wings,
and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!" – has also been
deciphered as a reference to awakening of the kundalini. And yet such
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interpretations, which resemble in their subjectivity the personal readings of
Bible quotations indulged in by Christian sects, are not supported by
Crowley's own writings. Despite such imaginative exegesis, save for a few
indistinct references to Tantric concepts here and there, we find nothing in
Crowley's work that evidences a working familiarity with left-hand path
initiation.
One of Crowley's central magical practices was the consumption of
his semen combined with the female secretions (sometimes her menstrual
blood) from his partner's vagina. Several Indian Tantras describe the
ingestion of semen and menstrual blood as an act which can grant "all that
one wishes", and more than one Tibetan Vajrayana text encourages the male
adept to "lick the lotus [the vagina]" after the sexual union to gain certain
magical powers. Crowley's detailed writings demonstrate no first-hand
knowledge of left-hand path Tantras, but he may well have learned of this
practice from Arthur Avalon's books before encountering Theodor Reuss'
spermophagic O.T.O.
To his credit, Crowley was one of the first Westerners to introduce
yoga methods to Europe. However, none of the simple yogic techniques he
taught his pupils are left-hand path in nature, despite his profound interest in
sexual mysticism. Although the first two years of the twentieth century found
Crowley traveling in Tibet, Ceylon, Nepal, and northern India – all major
centers of left-hand path activity – he left no record of encounters with
Tantric circles during this journey. According to him, several Himalayan
mountaineering expeditions brought him into contact with temples previously
forbidden to Europeans, but the secret doctrine of sexual initiation does not
seem to have been conferred upon him in these visits. The major influence on
Crowley's understanding of Eastern initiation came from his friend Allan
Bennett, who abandoned Western hermetic magic for a Buddhist monastery
in Ceylon, where he became Ananada Metteya. Apparently Buddhism
endowed Bennett with powers Western sorcery had not – Crowley claimed
that his colleague had. mastered the siddhi of levitation. Crowley,
uncharacteristically, always acknowledged the debt he owed to Bennett,
whom he described as one of the few men from whom he had ever learned
anything. But whatever Crowley learned from Bennett it was not the carnal
yoga of the left-hand path – Bennett was the most conventional of Buddhist
monks, firmly dedicated to asceticism and denial of desire.
Crowley himself was quite unambiguous in placing himself firmly on
what he understood to be the right-hand path, distancing himself from the
left-hand path in no uncertain terms. The problem is that it appears unlikely
that Crowley's understanding of the paths was any more informed than the
simplistic good/bad sophism of Blavatsky, who influenced his thought far