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

more markedly than has been generally realized.
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So, despite the fact that some of his latter-day disciples are convinced
that Crowley was the epitome of a left-hand path adept, and he himself
categorically stated that he was not, he lays today in something of a limbo
between the two paths. The fact is that many aspects of his magical practice,
as we know them from his own voluminous writings and diaries, do fit the
criteria of the universal sinister current as we defined them in Chapter One,
just as others seem to argue strongly against such an identification.
This characteristic confusion in his makeup, which some would no doubt
interpret as a sign of genius, was ably described to Jean Overton Fuller by
the Baroness Vittoria Cremers, a one-time associate and later foe of the
Beast: "He wasn't White, He wasn't Black. Half-way in everything Crowley.
He had enough knowledge to raise a current he couldn't control. Couldn't get
it up, couldn't get it down, so it went round and round. It drove him mad. He
wasn't a magician, he was a maniac." Even allowing for the subjective
nature of such personal animosity, a study of Crowley's life and work bears
out many of Cremers' impressions. (Although a plethora of accounts would
testify to the fact that the satyr-like Crowley didn't usually have any
difficulty getting it up.)
Crowley's Definition Of The Left-Hand Path And Modern Neo-
Satanism
Crowley's uneducated adoption of Blavatsky's mistaken equation of the lefthand
path with black magic and the ill-defined "Black Brotherhood" would
have unforeseen consequences. 1934 saw the publication of The Devil Rides
Out, the first of many Satanic potboilers penned by the British occult hack
novelist Dennis Wheatley. The Devil Rides Out tells the talc of a Satanic
secret society led by a charismatic magician based on Crowley. In fact,
Wheatley, whose knowledge of magic was nearly nil, had obtained
Crowley's help as an occult adviser during the research stage of his novel's
composition. It was directly from Crowley that Wheatley picked up the
specious idea that the way of Good was the right-hand path and the way of
Evil was the left-hand path. Knowing none the better, and obviously having
no familiarity with the true meaning of the phrase as a sexual method of
initiation, Wheatley went on to describe the fictional Satanists in his novel
as practitioners of the "Left Hand Path," although they are nothing of the
kind. From this precarious source, some latter-day Satanists, unfamiliar with
Eastern methods, began to capriciously utilize the phrase "left-hand path" as
a synonym for Satanism and black magic.
In particular, some of the writings of Anton LaVey (1930—1997),
proprietor of the 1960s' personality cult, the Church of Satan, brought
Dennis Wheatley's Crowley-derived association of Satanism with the lefthand
path to a youthful and uninformed audience. That a fictional source
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such as Wheatley would be adopted by the LaVeyist interpretation of
Satanism is not surprising. The Church of Satan's illusive ruling body, The
Council of Nine, was named after a minor adventure novel by Talbot
Mundy, The Nine Unknown; its newsletter, The Cloven Hoof, borrowed its
name from a fictional periodical mentioned in a Robert E. Howard short
story. LaVey also plundered the work of such fantasists as H. P. Lovecraft,
Frank Belknap Long and H. G. Wells to find material for his rituals. He
based significant areas of his life on William Lindsay Gresham's novel
Nightmare Alley, the tale of a carnival conman who sets up his own religion.
LaVeyism, an atheistic, materialistic and misogynistic creed,
expressed no interest in the spiritual expansion of consciousness through
sexual contact with the Feminine Daemonic (or any other means) and can
certainly not accurately be labeled left-hand path. This error was, in turn,
appropriated by some of LaVey's admirers, and now it seems that every