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

This choice, as explained by Robert DeGrimston in his 1968 essay
"Sex – Humanity Split Four Ways", from the handsomely produced Process
magazine, was seen as inextricably linked with each individual's experience
of sexuality "Where do you belong?" asked DeGrimston, "Are you Jehovah's
man, taking the stringent road of purity and rejoicing in the harsh strength of
self-denial? Do you follow Lucifer, pursuing the ideal of perfect human love
in a blissful atmosphere of sweet self-indulgence? Is Satan your master,
leading you into dark paths of lust and licentiousness and all the intricate
pleasures of the flesh? Or do you take the road to nowhere, half-in half-out,
half-up half-down, your instincts and ideals buried in a deep morass of
hypocritical compromise and respectable mediocrity." Ominously,
DeGrimston added: "Three paths and a quagmire. And time is running out."
In the same issue of Process magazine, three Processean Advocates
make their pitches for their chosen God and His sexual path. Christopher
Fripp, a Jehovan, declares: "Sex is death. It is the incumbent of the Devil ...
sick satiation and the gluttony of a spirit insensible to light ... the perverter of
man." The Luciferian Isabel Rennie lovingly pictures the manifestation of
her God in "the joining together of two beings, male and female, man and
woman ... cast aside the barriers of fear and guilt and shame ... jealousy and
petty rivalry ... become one soul, exhilarated in its transcendence of all
human wrong ... one body, ecstatic in its exploration of strange and
wonderful delights ... stand proud beside your counterpart whom He shall
give you ... a welded unit of combined nobility. And Lucifer, the Light-
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Bearer, shall lead you to your paradise." Satan's Advocate, Mendez Castle,
includes among a long list of breathlessly described Satanic sex scenarios, a
variety of couplings "in a dingy brothel", with "an older woman, grotesquely
misshapen ... or a cripple, or perhaps a half-wit..." whores "[performing]
delicious acts of sensual depravity" including the "delicious pain" of
flagellation, "a touch of necrophilia" with prostitutes painted to appear dead,
and finally the emergence of Satan, "black and lowering" over a "naked girl,
fair haired and in the very prime of youth ... like a human sacrifice upon the
altar, snow white against the black velvet of the altar cloth."
The fourth sexual path, the "quagmire" upon which the vast majority
of mankind trudged along miserably, was the way of the "Grey Forces,"
DeGrimston's disparaging term for the middling masses against which the
Process positioned themselves. The Advocates of Jehovah, Satan and Lucifer
all had their rightful place in the Process scheme, but the faceless and lukewarm
Grey Forces were anathema, as DeGrimston spelled out:
"There is a fourth attitude to sex, which leads nowhere and is not a path to a
goal but an endless circuit of repression and frustration. It is the attitude of
the person who has sex, but always in moderation: for whom it is more
important to be respectable than to test himself in the fires of intensity; who
might like to experiment a little more, and secretly envies the experiences of
those more courageous than himself, but remains within the bounds of the
reasonable and the rational, clinging always to safety, and avoiding the
possibility of the social condemnation that is the experience of all who
follow to extremity urges they feel within them. In this attitude there is no
courage, no idealism, no purity and no true experience of self: only a tepid
and insipid limbo where the watchwords are moderation and compromise,
and the end product is spiritual sterility and hidden self contempt."
DeGrimston's exhortation to his adherents to test themselves in "the fires of
intensity" led Processeans to experiment with all imaginable excesses as a
medium of self-transformation. They formed alliances with groups at the
furthest edges of left-wing and right-wing political extremism, the Hell's
Angels and other notoriously violent biker clubs; everything and anything, so
long as it evaded and baffled the safe, linear thinking of the Grey Forces. At
a time when pacifist protest against the Vietnam conflict was at its height,