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

Those who dismiss Crowley as a mere libertine and hedonist are
mistaken – no matter how far he goes in his nearly scientific personal
exploration of every imaginable debauchery, he can never escape from the
shadow of sin that is his patrimony. If the Plymouth Brethren of his youth
preached that sex for any purpose other than the Christian duty of procreation
was sinful, then the sexual morality of Crowley's own synthetic Thelemic
religion is equally restrictive. In both sects, whether dedicated to the Magus
Christ or the Magus Crowley, Eros outside the boundaries of the faith is
anathema to the true believer. The fact that one sect is based on such notions
as a virgin birth and celibate angels and the other is dedicated to ritual shiteating
and the magical powers of sperm is really only a technicality.
Crowley's Thelema, with its obligatory Mass and wafer, its Saints, its Book,
its Law, its catechisms and its Prophet, can be viewed as a kind of quasi-
Christian sect in itself. Both theologies share the Beast 666 and Whore of the
Apocalypse as central figures. And despite the lingering confusion that
would label Crowley a "Satanist," a full study of his work makes it evident
that he is much more of a Gnostic Christian who fully accepts the divinity of
Christ in his creed.
The sexologists Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, witnessing some
of the desperate failings of the 1960s sexual revolution, once remarked that
"there is nothing more depressing than the pretense of sexual freedom on the
part of reactionary and guilt-ridden people who are acting under the
compulsion of taboos rather than from genuine joie de vivre."
This observation is just as pertinent to the arch-reactionary Crowley,
who in so many ways anticipated the attempt of middle-class Western youth
to overcome their upbringing through the collective drugged mystical orgia
of the 1960s. One also comes away depressed from a consideration of the
Beast's decades of exhaustively reported sexual adventures – there is so little
sense of joy, delight, or freedom in the compulsive nature of his couplings.
What the Old and New Testaments so zealously condemn, Crowley's Book
Of The Law just as devoutly makes mandatory. But both extremes are
informed by the same autocratic spirit of – Thou Shalt Not" – a spirit that
cannot be reconciled with left-hand path liberation from all such
hallucinatory commandments.
Alys And Aleister – Punishing The Inner Whore
292
In light of Crowley's rejection of the Shakti principle, as expressed in the
inferior role he accorded women in his system of sex magick, it is ironic that
few modern male magicians have explored their own feminine sides with
such intensity. Crowley was very much aware of the Jungian anima within
him from a very early age. And like Jung – who he referred to
contemptuously as "Junk" – he recommended that his students of either
gender should develop the qualities of the contrasexual opposite sex within
their beings as a necessary means of creating psychic balance. The
correspondence of this practice to the universal sinister current bears
analysis.
In Thelema, the Beast and Babalon are one obvious pair of
contrasexual forces that can he compared to Tantric Shiva and Shakti,
Gnostic Logos and Sophia, Taoist Yin and Yang. But it is probably closer to
Crowley's own understanding to say that he envisioned the universal
feminine in the form of Nuit, the ancient Egyptian goddess of the starry night
sky. The masculine principle he designated as an invented male solar divinity
he rather obscurely called Hadit, although the Egyptian pantheon actually
includes no such deity. For Crowley, Nuit represented Shakti-like darkness
and matter, the phenomenal universe perceived by human senses, and Hadit
symbolized solar light and motion, a Shiva-like invisible consciousness.
Through sex magick, his theory that "these two infinities can not exist apart"
is demonstrated in physical form as Nuit and Hadit are drawn to each other