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

mountain-climbing and other athletic pursuits. But one almost never hears of
Uncle Aleister's followers tackling Mount Kilimanjaro in imitation of their
Master; they usually settle for the easier route of mimicking his wellcultivated
"dope fiend" image.
If the practices outlined above led to the fulfillment of any of the
tangible needs Crowley used his sex magick to meet, we might well
recommend his methods as viable. But from a pragmatic perspective, even if
Crowley must be counted as the most famous twentieth century sex
magician, he cannot really be rated as a particularly effective sex magician.
Despite Crowley's constant performance of sex magick and consumption of
his elixir, as documented in his magical journals, the much needed "gold" and
"victory" he incessantly petitions the gods for rarely, if ever, materialize.
Perhaps the Beast's extravagant will for self-destruction, an undeniable
component of the psychic and physical masochism so central to his being,
had more force than his temporal need. for survival and worldly success.
Magicians must be keenly aware of the deep, often hidden, needs that
motivate them rather than the superficial passions they are focused on at the
moment. Crowley, often a deft psychologist in interpreting his students,
appeared to be strangely oblivious to what made his own complicated
psychic mechanism tick.
It may also be that he simply overdid it. It has been our observation
that magicians who perform sex magical operations on an almost daily basis
– as Crowley tended to do – can burn out very rapidly. Also, Crowley's
penchant for a working-a-day left him with little room for reflection; his
frantic activity allowed nothing to develop in time. Although he gave the
very useful hit of hypothetical advice that magic should be performed
without "lust for result," in practice Crowley was impatient in the extreme for
immediate results. As soon as the last drop of his "Solar Word" has spurted
out, he is eagerly examining its taste for omens, consulting his ever-handy I
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Ching yarrow sticks, searching for Kabbalistic correspondences, or drawing
out astrological charts; all in an attempt to ascertain the prospect for results.
The importance of sperm as an agent of magical change in
Crowleyan sex magick is attested to in Crowley's Emblems And Modes Of
Use, a brief document that was once considered the greatest secret of the
Beast's ersatz 0.T.0.. Why such secrecy has been accorded to this simple
instructional text is hard to imagine, since the method of sympathetic sex
magic it recommends has been known to primitive shamans and sorcerers
around the world since the earliest times. Nevertheless, knowledge of the
mystery revealed in this paper was once inexplicably considered tantamount
to claim of a high degree of initiation among some of the competing O.T.Os
that have followed in the Great Beast's footsteps. In so many words, Crowley
advises the magician to bedaub a sigil or talismanic device with his sperm,
scooped out of his partner's vagina after coitus. The demon and elementalmagnetic
properties of the sperm will supposedly draw such beings into the
sigil, manifesting the sorcerer's desire. This is much the same age-old
principle that we have described in Chapter Three's account of the Arabic rite
in which a couple's menstrual blood and sperm are mixed on a fabric, and
then burnt, for the purpose of attracting djinn.
One of Crowley's many Quixotic get-rich-quick schemes, dating
from his wretched latter years, provides us with a pertinent example of his
bias for the male sexual principle and its physical expression in semen, over
the sinister Feminine Daemonic and its elixirs. At one desperate juncture in
his life, Crowley tried to market vials of his semen as a wonder medicine. He
appropriated the Indian left-hand. path name Amrita – the elixir of life – for
this product. Of course, in the Varna Marga, the word Amrita usually
designates the sexual secretions of the female shakti, not her male partner's
semen alone. And in Tantra, the act of consuming the combined sexual fluids