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

in her earlier, purer forms of Innana, Ishtar and Astarte – those awe-inspiring
deities of sacred war and holy lust – it becomes obvious how grossly
diminished and deformed is the Crowleyan concept of Babalon that has
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become popularized in occult circles. If there is anything that the left-hand
path adept working with the Babalon current learns, is that this proud
Warrioress never submits to another's power. In fact, the ancient
mythologies of manna and Ishtar attest to her independence from the
servitude of any other being – she is the chaotic, disobedient spirit of
freedom incarnate, on both the sexual and psychic levels.
The contrast between Crowley's everyday disregard for living
women and his idealized vision of the Goddesses distantly revered in his
Thelemic pantheon is striking. For example, he bestowed his own daughter
with the bombastic name Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith,
even while maintaining that females could never aspire to be much more
than convenient apertures to satiate the lusts they aroused in men. (When his
many-named child died at an early age, Crowley remarked that the cause of
her death was "acute nomenclature.")
Complicating the picture of Crowley as constitutionally gynophobic
is his fervent desire to he sexually degraded and enslaved by his Scarlet
Women during acts of sex magic. But even this masochistic impulse is an
expression of his loathing of the feminine; by submitting to a woman, that
lowliest of creatures, Crowley believed he was humbling himself to a gutter
of shame even more debased than his mistress's own position in the cosmic
scheme of things. We'll return to Crowley's application of sadomasochism to
initiation, as well as his own conflicted understanding of the feminine side of
his being.
One can easily get the false impression that the archetypal Thelemic
couple of Scarlet Woman and Beast is a Western form of the Shakti/Shiva
polarity. Later renegade Thelemites, breaking from Crowleyan orthodoxy,
did take steps to enact these iconic sexual god-forms in a more liberatory lefthand
path mode. The Scarlet Woman archetype has since developed its own
momentum among magicians, independent of Thelemic doctrine. But
Crowley himself defined the Scarlet Woman merely as "any Woman that
receives and transmits my Solar Word and Being." At her best, his female
sexual partner could only hope to be a pale and passive moon reflecting the
greater glory of her Master's solar rays – the oblation of his seed.
The Ins And Outs Of Crowleyan Sex Magick
Crowley's "Solar Word" was his Logos, as manifested in the Beast's holy
semen, a divine gift the Scarlet Women were counted most fortunate to
receive. Should she become impregnated by the Beast, the more profound
were her blessings. Ironically, any contemporary fundamentalist Christian
could heartily agree with Crowley's views on woman's proper and natureordained
place as mother. Similarly, the Beast's zealous religious conviction
that contraception and abortion were morally unacceptable would find favor
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with His Holiness the Pope. Underlying these "pro-life" aspects of the
Crowleyan sexual teaching – which completely contradict the Thelemic
endorsement of each individual's freedom to do what she will with her own
body – is a belief that sperm is the sacred substance.
Reading some of Crowley's commentary, it's apparent that he
considered spermophagia – semen eating – to be nothing less than the key to
immortality, as well as a boon to mystical Understanding. He understood
semen to be the alchemist's "Blood of the Red Lion," the primordial matter
containing the essence of all material and spiritual forms. Released from the
Athanor, Crowley's alchemical code for the penis, into the retort (the vulva),
semen becomes the elixir of life itself. Consume sperm, Crowley taught his
inner circle, especially his sperm, and you consume the all and everything of