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

Fourteenth Aire in Dr. John Dee's Enochian Calls). Crowley described the
incident more vividly in his obscure homoerotic curiosity The Scented
Garden Of Abdullah The Satirist Of Shiraz:
"In the hush of the sunset, come noiseless hoofs treading the enammled turf;
and ere I know it a fierce lithe hairy body has gripped mine, and the dread
wand of magic shudders its live way into my being, so that the foundations of
the soul are shaken. The heavy breath and the rank kisses of a faun are on my
neck, and his teeth fasten in my flesh – a terrible heave flings our bodies into
mid-air with the athletic passion that unites us with the utmost God – 'hid i'
the th'middle o' matter' – and the life of my strange lover boils within my
bowels ... we fall back in ecstasy – somewhat like death – and the gasping
271
murmur Pan! Pan! Io Pan! while the marmorean splendour before us turns
into the last ray of sunlight his goodly smile upon our still and stricken
bodies."
It should be noted that Crowley's goal in this rite was not the construction of
the independent and enduring god-like consciousness we have focused on as
the ultimate goal of left-hand path sexual magic. On the contrary, he used
the orgasm "somewhat like death" to dissolve "the ego" – that imprecise and
troublesome word – into what he described as "the ocean of infinity."
Indeed, Crowley explicitly states that to "cross the Abyss" without
consciously destroying one's personality is to step irrevocably onto the lefthand
path, as the understood it.
Such a goal would have been the very opposite of his intentions,
according to Crowley's worldview, shaped as it was by Blavatsky, orthodox
Buddhism, and the cosmology of the Golden Dawn, the hermetic Order that
provided his introduction to ceremonial magic. All of these religiophilosophies
judged what they termed the left-hand path to be the decidedly
wrong path, if for very different reasons. Any attempt to reconcile
Crowleyan sex magick with the sinister current must take his own negative
understanding of the left-hand path, and his self-definition as a follower of
the right-hand path, into account. Of course, Crowley's emphasis on sexual
mysticism and erotic rites alone would exclude him from the right-hand path
in its authentic form, but these terms were already hopelessly confused in
Western magical circles, even by Crowley's time.
In any event, it was this Algerian anal epiphany that led Crowley to
name himself to the degree of (8) = [3], Magistri Templi, according to the
initiatory grade system of his own Order, the Argentinum Astrum, or Silver
Star. Further discussion of the meaning of such grades is fairly irrelevant to
our understanding of the left-hand path. However, our readers can easily
determine for themselves whether Crowley really had dissolved his ego and
personality into the ocean of impersonal nature after this pivotal sex magical
rite that made him claim the grade of Master. One need only observe the
remainder of Crowley's life after 1909, to be hit over the head with the
undeniable fact that here was a man who retained a monumental ego and
personality until his dying day.
But Crowley's blustering megalomania was always offset with an
equally powerful psychic counterweight. According to his frequent
biographer John Symonds, when the nearly forgotten Crowley crossed his
final abyss in 1947, reduced to a shabby existence in a cheap boarding
house, a witness to the Beast's demise overheard his last words. "Sometimes
I hate myself," an agitated Crowley muttered on his deathbed.
While it can be misleading to attribute too much meaning to the
272
terminal reflections of a dying man, a lifelong streak of self-loathing in
Crowley's being must be kept in view as we explore his sex magical practice.
Crowley's diaries often drop the inflated hyperbole of his public persona,
revealing a tortured soul struggling with depression, boredom, drug