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

adept one of the more dramatic historical examples of the conjuration of the
sex-magical mate. In Carl Jung's theory positing a contrasexual being that
lays undeveloped in every human psyche – the female anima for the male, the
male animus for the female – these opposite gendered entities are understood
to be unrealized aspects of the self. For the sinister current initiate, bringing
forth a suitable magical consort of the opposite sex is realized literally in the
flesh through beings independent of the adept, not merely on the psychic
plane. To find such a companion is exceedingly rare. It is only fair to say that
the majority of magicians will never truly encounter his/her perfect alter ego,
the one who also finds the outer manifestation of his/her inner anima/animus
in you. But when this does occur, as Jack Parsons at least sincerely appeared
to believe had happened for him as the result of his Babalon Working, each
partner's power as a magician is enhanced tremendously
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Parsons had clearly given a great deal of thought to the concept of
the magical couple, the bipolar representation of the mystical androgyne. In
1948, two years after the Babalon Working, he wrote in The Book Of
Antichrist of a vision he experienced:
"And one heavily robed and veiled showed me the sign, and told me to look,
and behold, I saw flash before me four past lives wherein I had failed in my
object. And I beheld the life of Simon Magus, preaching the Whore Helena
as the Sophia, and I saw that my failure was in Hubris, the pride of the spirit.
And I saw my life as Gilles de Retz, wherein I attempted to raise Jehanne
D'Arc to be Queen of the Witchcraft, and failed through her stupidity, and
again my pride... And again as Count Cagliostro, failing because I failed to
comprehend the nature of women in my Seraphina."
Here we have the common occult phenomenon of the magician who believes
he or she was once this or that illustrious adept of the past, a conception so
subjective that it must be of little value to any objective observer. More
important to us, however, is Parsons' sense of continuity with the Western
tradition of male magus and female initiatrix, a legacy most recently
manifested in the modern cult of the Scarlet Woman. The first magical
couple he mentions, Simon Magus and Helena, are of course directly tied into
the Babalon current. The sex-magical powers unique to the Tyrean prostitute
Helene, who may well have been an initiate of Astarte's temple of sacred
harlotry in Phoenicia, was a major inspiration in Parsons' conception of
Babalon, always more historically correct than Crowley's despite the younger
magician's fatal indulgence in romanticism. Don Webb, in his The Seven
Faces Of Darkness, proposes that Simon Magus was himself carrying on a
much more ancient teaching of female mysteries, which he sees flowing from
Simon's teacher Dositheous, a fellow Samaritan Gnostic. Webb describes
Dositheous as "the author of the great Sethian gospel known as the Three
Steles Of Seth... [who] likely introduced – or revealed from older sources –
the myth of the Scarlet Woman." This provides us with yet another
interesting connection between Babalon and the god Set, a link in the chain
from the ancient Egyptian myth of Astarte and Set's sexual coupling to the
effects of the Babalon Working on the modern-day revival of the Temple of
Set.
Parsons was evidently intensely conscious that his seeking of a
Scarlet Woman connected him to a tradition that stretched back into
antiquity, an historical bond he believed was a recurring theme in his former
reincarnations. It is also notable that he was also very much aware of the
potential dangers inherent in the evocation of the Feminine Daemonic in
human form that he had undertaken. Simon Magus, at least according to
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myth, had been destroyed by the Christian cult despite the protective magic
of his deified Whore Helene, the spirit of Gnostic wisdom embodied. in
human flesh. The second "past life" as a magician Parsons recalled, that of