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

Of course, this exercise in logical deduction deliberately ignores the
psychological and symbolic dimensions of the question, those ephemeral
qualities that provide personal meaning to any magical experience. The
intangible aesthetic and poetic interpretation of the S&M experience is just as
invaluable to the magician as the physiological release of endorphins. The
factor of who is applying the pain, and under what circumstances, are
essential ingredients in any working of this nature. The conscious awareness
and. manipulation of the entirety of somatic and symbolic information
accessed through pleasure/pain, culminating in the direction of this
complicated mixture toward magical aims are the factors that separate the
magician from the simple fetishist, although the border between the two roles
is admittedly fluid.
For many sex magicians, using strictly pleasurable sexual interaction
for magical purposes is deemed to be "normal" and dignified, while those
who incorporate dominance and submission, bondage, erotic torture and
other pain-oriented techniques into magic are automatically condemned as
"sick and perverted", utterly beyond the pale of the "respectable" sex
magician (is there such a thing?). As biased as this view may be, it must also
442
be said that there are many sex magicians who exclusively utilize S&M
procedures in their magic but who smugly dismiss sexual penetration as
"vanilla sex", with the implication that such practices are tediously
unimaginative and boring. In our view, both prejudices are limited, tending
to restrict rather than expand the spectrum of techniques available to the
sinister current sex magician.
Whether S&M seems detestable or attractive to you, experimenting
with its methods can add much to your magical arsenal, shedding light on
undiscovered regions of self that can only be accessed through these means.
While many traditional magicians are loath to explore this domain, the
illuminated libertine will not hesitate to integrate any useful technique into
his or her corpus of knowledge.
Algolagnia
Before we examine the basic techniques available to the sex magician
experimenting with the agony and the ecstasy of pain manipulation, some
reference to the nomenclature surrounding the subject is not inappropriate.
Thus far, simply to facilitate general ease of comprehension, we have utilized
the terms sadomasochism or its popular abbreviation S&M. For several
reasons, we find this term magically unsuitable for the task at hand. Taking
into account the elementary mantric principle that names have a power of
their own which can significantly distort or clarify that which they signify,
the diagnostic phrase "sadomasochism" is particularly loaded with distracting
and misleading associations.
The words sadism and masochism were originally coined by the
German neurologist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840—1902) in his
famous Psychopathia Sexualis, an encylopaedic record of sexual practices
designated by the good Herr Doktor as psychotic aberrations. Since
illuminated libertines do not consider that the conscious and consensual
erotic manipulation of pain, or any other fetish for that matter, can be
characterized as a psychological condition requiring cure, we must reject
Krafft-Ebing's clinical description as irrelevant to the sex magician.
In this, we would agree with Aleister Crowley, who in reading the
accounts of "perversion" in Psychopathia Sexualis as a young man, concluded
that these supposed depravities could all be understood from an initiatic
perspective as "magical affirmations of perfectly intelligible points of view."
Of course, as we have seen, a major part of Crowley's sex-magical initiation
was exercised through the most extreme rites of sexual submission and
degradation.
Many a dull-witted brute or compulsive serial killer can he classified