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

mechanisms to allow for the more important post-coital trance to take place.
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Sinister current initiates should experiment with both modes, although the
extended full-body orgasm of the left-hand path rite is intended to greatly
increase energy and wakefulness, rather than leading to the fatigued reverie
Crowley sought to achieve. In his desire to be thoroughly and utterly
exhausted unto the brink of death by orgasm, the note of bodily mortification
and self-abnegation that runs through all of Crowley's work seems evident.
Since he obviously regards sex as an inherently "bad" activity, to be enjoyed
only in spite of itself as a religious obligation, it is not surprising that so
much psychic strain would lead to post-coital depletion rather than the
increased alertness desired by left-hand path adepts.
In complete contrast to this technique, the Beast sometimes used sex
as a muse, engaging in hours of sex to inspire his creative, rather than simply
seminal juices to flow. After one particularly strenuous tryst with a married
woman during his Mexican sojourn, Crowley was inspired to a marathon
sixty-seven hour writing session. The result was Tannhäuser, an impassioned
drama in verse inspired by Wagner's opera, which takes the form of dialogue
between the goddess of Love Venus, and the bewitched knight Tannhäuser.
Crowley, like the left-hand path initiate, sometimes used sex to rend
the veil of maya, and transcend outer appearance and inner programming. He
advised, for instance, that "One might have a liaison with an ugly old woman
until one beheld and loved the star which she is." During one New York visit,
he posed as an artist advertising for crippled, hunchbacked, or otherwise "as
ugly as possible" models – the art he had in mind was the Royal Art of sex
magick. The Vama Marga adept, as we have described earlier, uses similar
methods of awakening and consummating desire with partners customarily
repellent to one's aesthetic conditioning and natural inclination.
Crowley also used semi-public displays of sexuality to shock his
more reserved students into initiatory insight. Israel Regardie, shortly after
taking on the job of Beastly secretary, recalled witnessing his guru and the
latest Scarlet Woman "fucking like animals" on the floor in his presence,
shortly after their introduction. Regardie later took umbrage at one of his
teacher's anti-semitic remarks, but continued his exploration of orgasmic
liberation as a Reichian therapist. Crowley's more charitable admirers have
suggested that the Beast deliberately drove away his most devoted disciples
as a method of assisting them to find their true wills. This seems unlikely,
considering how urgently he needed his followers' financial support, but
cannot be ruled out altogether.
In the stead of more durable and disciplined techniques of psyche
expansion, and despite his rather erratic dabbling with yoga, Crowley was
wont to fuel his sex magick with the copious use of cocaine, opium, ether,
and hashish. His fondness for ether was such that many first-hand accounts
from those who knew the Beast describe the distinctively caustic odor of the
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drug preceding his entry to a room, and lingering long after he left. (His
addiction to heroin, which decreases the libido, cannot really be adjudged as
an aphrodisiac or consciousness-altering aid to sex magic.) The Eastern lefthand
path tradition also makes precise use of the psychoactive effects of
wine, and hemp-based THC substances, under the aegis of Shiva, the lord of
mind-manifesting potions. But it is this very precision which differentiates
left-hand path ritual intoxication from Crowley's uninterrupted and
undisciplined assault on his nervous system with a pharmacy of chemicals.
Crowley was clearly medicating himself throughout the day in an attempt to
make life more bearable; far from awakening him to see beyond the
delusions of maya, his drug use seems only to have perpetuated his selfdeceptions.
At least in his youth, Crowley balanced his prodigious drug
intake with strenuous exercise, taking on such physical challenges as