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

as a sadist. For the most part, these torn souls have no choice in the matter –
they are often driven by powerful psychic compulsions. The mindless cruelty
of such individuals' actions bears no relation at all to In both cases, those
443
typically described as sadists or masochists usually lack control, and control
is one of the essential factors of the left-hand path. Also, there is not
necessarily an erotic component to the actions of the sadist or the masochist,
and without eroticism we are no longer speaking of the left-hand path.
Sigmund Freud, who condemned all magical impulses as "neuroses", was the
first to place Krafft- Ebing's coinages together, seeing sadism and masochism
as shades of a continuum he dubbed "sadomasochism" in 1938.
Then there is the matter of the historical personages whose names
were combined to form the word: the infamous French philosophe Donatien
Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade (1740—1814) and the lesser known
Austrian literary figure Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1835—1895), the
author of Venus In Furs. While certainly each writer's works are interesting in
their own light, much of what they wrote is simply irrelevant to the sinister
current sex magician.
444
It is easy to misinterpret the Sadean oeuvre as a conscious celebration
of Satanism, a romantic concept which has been inspired more by de Sade's
posthumous legend than anything the man actually wrote in his voluminous
novels. De Sade was a thoroughgoing atheist who clearly recognized no
spiritual force in the universe other than man, an attitude quite typical of the
so-called Age of Enlightenment. He avidly considered Nature to be the
highest good, the arbitrator of unbreakable laws that men should ideally
surrender to. De Sade's exaltation of Nature has much in common with Jean-
Jacques Rousseau; both men preached in favor of a naive return to an
imagined utopia when man was presumably a "noble savage".
This philosophy, despite de Sade's undeserved Satanic reputation,
could not be less in keeping with the metaphysical orientation of the left-hand
path, whose magicians deliberately work against the predictable flow of
nature to realize their objectives. Nor does the Divine Marquis' obsessively
articulated hatred of Christianity qualify him as an advocate of the left-hand
path, despite popular misunderstandings of this point. Although the Marquis
de Sade's elaborate erotic fantasies may serve as fuel for the imagination of
the sex magician, his basic philosophy and approach to existence seeks above
all to attune mankind with Nature, understood as an impersonal force that
inspires all of man's desires, including his love of torture and murder.
One has to admire the audacity of his vision, a yearning "to attack the
sun, to expunge it from the universe, or to use it to set the world ablaze –
these would be crimes indeed!" Although such savage declarations are
superficially transgressive of societal and sacred taboo, they seem ultimately
hollow. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the Divine Marquis, who spent
much of his life in prison, never actually had the freedom to explore the
extravagant erotic fantasies he wrote about. This lack of any basis in reality
weighs De Sade's novels down with a monotonous sterility, and the flights of
his fantastic imagination never really leave the page.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, actually the more gifted writer of the
two, demonstrated a greater magical understanding of erotic pain but the
regrettable reduction of his name to a negative psychological diagnosis
reduces its suitability for the sex magician. Nevertheless, Sacher-Masoch's
Venus In Furs is an evocative study of a thinly disguised Sacher-Masoch's
exaltation of a savage archetype of the atavistic huntress, the cruel Feminine
Daemonic in human form, an impassioned submission to shakti power
bordering on the sacred.
For the specific purposes of this study, we prefer to classify activities
centered on the erotic application of physical or psychological pain with the