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

y desire "unit[ing] in explosive rapture" in an "explosive holocaust". But
Crowley also instructed his disciples to unite these forces within themselves,
through workings of esoteric Hermaphroditism.
The name hermaphrodite blends the names of the love goddess
Aphrodite and Hermes, messenger of the gods. An Hellenic legend tells us
that the son of these deities, Hermaphroditos, inspired such fervent passion in
the nymph Salmacis that she desired total union with him, a longing which
fused their bodies into one being. Crowley, product of a classical education,
would have been well aware of this myth.
As much as the Beast admired the virile, rational, athletic type, as he
described himself, he acknowledged that even he would be imperfect without
cultivating the contrary feminine traits. He was of course less convinced that
women were capable of acquiring the characteristics he understood as
masculine, such as intelligence, logic, and force of will, but he encouraged
them to try anyway. The importance of a Kundalini-like hermaphroditism in
Crowleyan thought is also indicated by his strong identification with the
bisexual god/dess of the Templars, Baphomet, who he described as "the
androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection." He sometimes
speculated that his prophesied Aeon of Horus would contrast with the
previous Aeons of Isis, the mother, and Osiris, the father, in that Horus
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represented a Dionysian androgynous child of both sexes. In this aspect of his
teaching, the Beast reflected his immersion in the alchemical and Rosicrucian
notion of the inner androgyne, a doctrine thats similarity to the left-hand path
has already been discussed.
This reconciliation of opposites, as manifested in his own spirit,
Crowley once described as "Male-female, quintessential, one, Man-being
veiled in Woman-form." On the physical plane, he made note of a
"hermaphroditism in my physical structure," which he sometimes ascribed to
his many prior reincarnations as women. Among the reincarnations Crowley
claimed to have remembered through the visionary results of sex magic was
his ancient existence as a sacred prostitute, named Astarte or Artemis, slave
of the goddess in an ancient Sicilian Temple. (The origins of the Whore of
Babylon in the goddess Astarte may well have played a part in the details of
this past life.) Like so many of the tragic previous selves Crowley recalled,
this sacred courtesan died a violent death. Whether Crowley actually believed
this tale or not is actually irrelevant to our purposes. The psychological value
of his putative recollection lays in its revelation of a key element of
Crowley's understanding of his own anima. Invariably, he envisioned the
female side of his soul as a whore deserving of punishment and even death.
Indeed, Crowley's awakening of his interior Feminine Daemonic
seemed almost entirely dedicated to subjecting "her" to his masochistic desire
for sexual chastisement. We will outline in full the practical application of
consensual erotically charged pain and submission to left-hand path selftransformation
in a later chapter. But a brief consideration of Crowley's
experiments in this neglected area of sex magic makes for a useful
introduction to these methods.
Among Crowley's many magical identities, ranging from Frater
Perdurabo, the Master Therion, and Baphomet, not the least important to him
was the feminine alter ego he transformed himself into during these
sadomasochistic rites of androgyny. He personalized his inner feminine
shadow with the name Alys. Alys, according to Crowley, was not only the
quintessence of the prostitute, she was also a "tribade", an archaic word for a
lesbian derived from the Greek tribein, to rub. In The Magical Record of
1920, Crowley carefully reported a cocaine-fueled all-night working, in
which Alys/Aleister assumed the submissive "femme" role in a rite
performed with Leah Hirsig at the Abbey of Thelema. He describes how his
Scarlet Woman "tore from me the last rag of manhood" in a "frightful ordeal