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

trembling of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the various
ceremonies that center around the sacred object."
In the same vein, Réage comments on the hieratic elements of the
sadomasochistic relationship described in The Image, describing "the
hierarchy of postures ... the rituals, the churchlike setting, the fetishism
attached to certain objects." The sexual slave, according to Réage, is the
"divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only
joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of
herself."
This description, irrespective of the submissive's gender, serves
equally well to characterize the left-hand path initiate, whose deliberate
transformations of self have much in common with the guided
metamorphoses intrinsic to S&M praxis. For those unfamiliar with the
dynamics of sadomasochism, the notion that the slave takes on a god-like
status may seem puzzling. Yet, it is very often the case that the submissive is
the center of the rite, while the master is frequently the servant. Certainly,
the master or mistress can also be said to undergo a process of selfdeification
appropriate to left-hand path practice but the shifting polarities
that inform all sexual magic are especially ambiguous in sadomasochistic
relations.
It should not be surprising that Auly/Réage placed her Story Of 0 and
her other fictional celebrations of S&M into a magico-religious context. Her
infamous novel originally began as a series of love letters to Jean Paulhan, a
participant in the school of Satanic sex magic established by Marie de
Naglowska in the years between the World Wars. It's also probably not
coincidental that one of the first serious reviews of the novel came from the
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pen of Georges Bataille, Paulhan's fellow alumnus of the de Naglowska
circle.
Describing Réage's submissive title character 0, who places herself at
the sexual mercy of a secret society to please her master, Bataille elucidates
his mystical vision of surrender to ecstasy as an initiatory death and rebirth.
"The paradox of 0," he writes "is that of the visionary who dies but does not
die." Within the diabolic quasi-Tantric sexual rites taught by de Naglowska,
Bataille would have encountered a similar comparison of orgasm to death
and resurgence. Getting at the heart of the mystical urge to dominate and
submit, Bataille noted that "the executioner is the victim's accomplice." The
excesses of Bataille's own texts of visionary pornography have caused him to
be described as the de Sade of the twentieth century.
The obscure rites of such European left-hand path orders as de
Naglowska's La Fleche d'Or and Bataille's own Acephale indicates an
intriguing cross-current flowing between genuine sex-magical activity and
the French neo-Sadean erotica that so defined the modern aesthetics of S&M.
No wonder, with such a lineage, that the Chateau Roissy – the fictional Order
of aristocratic sadists central to the narrative of The Story Of 0 – has inspired
any number of fantasists in the occult and S&M subcultures to spuriously
claim to he the real thing.
In Bataille's final work, 1959's The Tears Of Eros, he presented the
ultimate refinement of his theory postulating a "fundamental connection
between religious ecstasy and eroticism – and in particular sadism." For
Bataille, "between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy" lay a mysterious
union, physically exemplified in a photograph taken in 1905 depicting the
excruciating death by torture of a Chinese assassin. The photograph records
the terminal agonies of the dying man as he is physically dismembered by his
executioners, whose facial expression, according to Bataille, revealed a
mystical joy even in the face of unendurable pain.
"I have never stopped being obsessed by the image of this pain, at
once ecstatic and intolerable," he wrote of this cruel icon that became the