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

had more personal magical motivations.
Just as Crowley attributed distinct magical powers to semen, as a
vivifying force of astral intelligences, he also seemed to believe that the
alchemical mingling of sperm, excrement, and the not infrequent bleeding of
the ruptured rectum during anal intercourse created a material essence in
which daemonic and elemental entities could take shape. (We would be
remiss were we not to point out that the incorporeal organism this mixture is
most likely to conjure today is called. AIDS.)
Crowley's statement that he had "driven [himself] to delight in dirt
and disgusting debauches, and to devour human excrements and human
flesh" would suggest that, like the Aghori initiate, he had to force himself to
break his own natural inclinations to perform this act so repugnant to the
majority of mankind. However, Crowley evidenced such a palpable
enthusiasm for excrement from a fairly early age that this often ignored
aspect of his religious teaching may have just as well have been simply one
of his many personal fetishes. A fascination with the erotic potential of
human waste emerges in his work as early as 1898, when the twenty-two year
old Crowley published his first book of poetry. In that volume, he was
already celebrating feces in these self-deprecatory lines:
All degradation, all sheer infamy;
Thou shalt endure. Thy head beneath the mire
and dung of worthless women shall desire
As in some hateful dream, at last to lie;
Woman must trample thee till thou respire
That deadliest fume;
This may seem at first like poetic posing in the decadent style of the time, but
Crowley practiced what he preached. His magical experiments with the
"dung of worthless women" are well-documented, especially during his
attempt to institute a "Collegium ad Spiritual Sanctum," the Abbey of
Thelema, on the island of Cefalu, Sicily. During one rite of subservience to
his Scarlet Woman of the time, Leah Hirsig, Crowley obeyed her request to
eat her shit from a silver platter as a sign of his devotion to the Whore of
Babalon incarnate. To seal the rite, she burnt her Beast's breast with a
smoldering cigarette. Crowley exulted that "'tis joy to be splashed with the
mire of her Triumph." Golden showers were also incorporated into the
couple's sadomasochistic sex-magical operations, as this Crowley-penned
paean to his Scarlet Woman illustrates: "Straddle your Beast, My Masterful
Bitch ... Now from your wide Raw cunt, the abyss / Send spouting the tide /
Of your sizzling piss / In my mouth; oh my whore / Let it pour, let it pour!"
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We have described how and why Eastern Vama Marga adepts, in
their attempt to make sacred even those aspects of physical existence that are
generally shunned, consider all rejected matter, including excrement, urine,
menstrual blood and the contemplation of corpses in the burning ground as
possible tools of liberation. Although Crowley seemed unaware of this
element of Tantric teaching, the similarities to his own fascination with
coprophilia and urolagnia bear comparison.
When one of Crowley's students, Mary Butts – a name eminently
suited for the Beast's singular approach to initiation – arrived for tutelage at
the Abbey of Thelema, her Master welcomed her with the offering of a goat's
turd on a plate. Whether Crowley presented her with this repast as a genuine
test of her commitment to the Great Work or simply as an indulgence of his
prankish schoolboy humor cannot be said with certainty. Butts was soon a
witness to one of Crowley's less successful rituals, an attempt to induce a hegoat
symbolizing the fabled Goat of Mendes to copulate with the haggard
body of his much-abused Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig. Despite all efforts to
coax the goat to perform his sacred function, the animal remained indifferent
to Babalon's allure. Falling into one of his frequent fits of rage, an