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

focus of a powerful fetish. Bataille used the grisly photograph as a
consciousness-altering meditation device, a magical springboard for
contemplation of the "perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite,
extreme horror." The author understood from his study of yoga that this
melding of contraries was a Tantric practice, and was for him sufficient to
plunge him into an inner state of rapture.
Bataille's life-long fascination with the coupling of mystical
illumination and ecstatic cruelty also led him to study the historical excesses
of the aristocratic sexual sadists Countess Erzébet Báthory of Hungary and
Baron Gilles de Rais of France. Although the crimes of these human
predators have entered into the annals of legend, Bataille was particularly
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interested in the obscure magical underpinnings that seem to have inspired
their savagery. Báthory, whose glamourized image has become the prototype
for the lesbian female vampiress of popular culture, was inspired in her
erotically tinged sadistic killings of over 600 girls by the local folk traditions
of Magyar witchery. De Rais, associated with the legend of Bluebeard,
confessed to the lust-murder of hundreds of boys in the process of
performing alchemical experiments and supposedly Satanic conjurations. In
the lives of these brutal beings, Bataille discovered objects of contemplation
allowing him to consider the mysterious thin line separating cruelty and
gnosis. As creatures who had transgressed all comprehensible boundaries of
the sacred, Báthory and de Rais had, according to Bataille, taken on that
numinous and transcendent power he called "sovereignty."
This is not to say that he in any way condoned their crimes. Rather,
Bataille's focus on such epiphanies of erotic morbidity must be understood as
analogous to the Indian left-hand path adept's immersion in the ghastly
atmosphere of the cremation ground, or the Vama Marga rite of imagining
one's lover as a decomposing corpse – a method of facing up to, and
integrating, the mingled ecstasies and terrors of the Kali Yuga age.
William Carney's 1968 novel The Real Thing, although it possesses
none of the visionary insight of Bataille, did much to inspire the now
established rites of the international sadomasochistic subculture, and also
noted the esoteric nature of dominance and submission. Carney's imagined
sadistic secret society, like so many magical orders, is composed of four
grades of initiation, the Oblates, the Purists, The Exemplars and the Perfect –
names that recall the Gnostic heresies. Like Pauline Réage before him,
Carney describes the relations between master and slave in the language of
the sacred, writing that the master is
"... devoted to the task of breaking the victim he confronts in the manner of
the priest who creases and splits the host. He contemplates his victim,
worshipping him with studied savagery; and the victim, broken, is consumed.
The lives of these uncorrupted Exemplars are oriented toward the attainment
of such singular moments of transcendence ..."
Binding the ceremonial of lust/pain more directly to the left-hand path,
Carney points out that the hierarchy of dominant and submissive is coded
through symbolism also encountered ill the Tantric tradition.
"... left side is sinister, sadist, top man, teacher, master, shepherd, S; right is
dexter, masochist, bottom man, boy, slave, mutton, M ..."
Learning The Ropes
Before turning to the actual practice of this sex magical mode, a few
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important preliminaries should be addressed. Our task in this chapter is to
provide a sound theoretical basis for pain-oriented sex magic, so that the
reader will be able to experiment with these methods with a firm grounding in
why these operations are useful to the magician, and some suggestions as to
experiments that we have seen to be useful. We do not provide the mechanics
of the arts of bondage, discipline, and pain application. Nevertheless, before