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

abusive sexual situations, using their bodies as the only means of sheer
survival available to them. Quite apart from the practice of sacred prostitution
and those who freely choose to work as prostitutes, there is the far more
prevalent practice of sexual exploitation by pimps, and the literal sexual
slavery forced upon deceived immigrants. Child pornography is a booming
business, and child molestation is an ugly open secret of the Catholic Church
and an alarming number of families. Overpopulation in impoverished
countries is a veritable plague produced by sex, not to speak of the literal
plague of AIDS and other venereal diseases that may be released by the
ephemeral satiation of desire.
All of these ruinous phenomena are produced by the thoughtless use
of the very same blind force of sexual desire that the left-hand path initiate
consciously harnesses to transcendent initiatory objectives. The actions of
the irresponsible have distorted and created a biased public opinion about
those who are open and responsible about their use of sexual magic. Eros,
which can potentially be a bridge to self-deification, has much more
frequently been a descent into sub-human states of being. To close one's
eyes and pretend that Eros is an entirely benign power is simply foolish – it
was not simply a poetic flourish that inspired the authors of the Tantras to
describe the work of the left-hand path initiate as "walking on the edge of a
sword".
Criminologists and law enforcement personnel have long been aware
that one of the quintessential side-effects of sexuality is the so-called crime of
passion, that most common of homicides. While many fear the unknown
assailant, it's actually the person you've known the most intimately that could
most likely be your murderer. The annals of crime offer abundant evidence
that some of the most savage and excessively cruel slayings visited on the
human body have been the handiwork of the victim's lover.
This fact alone speaks to the dark power of Eros, whose chthonic
ecstasies can lead the human heart to bliss or to bloodshed with equal ardor.
The deep connection between Eros and Thanatos is as ancient as our species
itself. The increasing prevalence in the industrialized West of the sexual
serial killer, once a relatively rare aberration but now a banal staple of the
daily news, clearly demonstrates how strong the synergy between carnal
desire and destruction can be.
Left-hand path sex magicians must come to terms with this concealed
element of Eros if they are to fully appreciate the terrible power inherent in
erotic desire and how to best master that desire. Writing of the sexually
rapacious aspect of the god Pan in his introduction to Pan And The
Nightmare, the psychologist James Hillman observed that "Pan the raper is a
potential within every sexual impulse. Every erection may release him,
implying a need for psychic deflowering." And as confronting such sinister
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goddesses as Kali and Babalon will make clear, the female of the species is
just as prone to the darker, more destructive potentialities awakened by Eros
as the male.
When the sex magician invokes the demons of the flesh, he or she
should realize that the bestial atavisms that lay just beneath the surface of
socialized, civilized sexuality are never far from consciousness. Taking a
hard look in the mirror of the psyche to analyze these atavisms in the
magician's own being is an often overlooked necessity of erotic initiation.
This contemplation is the beginning of reprogramming the mental circuitry
that creates the primitive pashu instincts of jealousy and sexual ownership
that must be nullified before left-hand path initiation can get very far.
The Sexual Cosmonaut
In a letter of paternal advice to the magician Charles Stansfeld Jones, Aleister
Crowley once wrote: "I think that sexual knowledge should be based broadly
on intercourse with, say, 1,000 women chosen from, say, 80 to 100 races and