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

only vaguely tells us how his or her practices are viewed within an abstract
moral code of dubious value. Left-hand and right-hand, if used precisely
rather than poetically, can tell us exactly what a magician's procedure and
techniques actually are.
Theurgy
Antiquity also provides us with other descriptions of specific branches of the
magical art that are still useful today, although they must be applied with
care. The Greeks spoke of a form of magic known as theourgia, a
combination of the words theos = god and ergon = working. Theurgy, then
and now, is thus the working of magic that brings the magician into contact
with divine beings. Theurgy presupposes that the magician possesses some
sort of theological philosophy concerning the existence of divine or
praeterhuman intelligences and entities. Therefore, those magicians whose
theology is basically atheistic could not be said to be theurgists. In essence,
whenever the magician performs magic that invokes or evokes a god of any
kind, he or she is technically practicing theurgy. Invocation, traced to its
Latin origins, is literally to call in or on a deity (in = in vocare = call), while
evocation is to call forth, or to summon. In the Middle Ages and during the
magical revival of the nineteenth century, theurgy was deemed to be "greater
magic", more acceptable than the so-called "lesser magic" that dealt with
demonic beings in the sense that contact was sought with the higher (thus
greater) order of divine beings.
No matter what deity is summoned during such operations, the
theurgist is performing the sacerdotal function of priest or priestess of the
deity, forming a human conduit to the divine realm. Of course, if no such
contact is made, we arc merely speaking of delusion, a common enough
occupational hazard of all magicians. Considering that the majority of
readers of this book will be concerned with evocation and invocation of
deities often condemned by other religions as daemonic (another loaded
word calling for later contextual definition), such differentiations as
greater/higher and lesser/lower are fairly irrelevant to our objectives.
Additional confusion on this point has been caused by the use among some
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initiatory schools of the phrases "lesser black magic" and "greater black
magic", which rather arbitrarily and ahistorically assign new meanings to the
traditional definitions of lesser/greater forms of magic known for centuries.
As we are determined to create lesser rather than greater bewilderment, we
have avoided incorporating phrases that tend to be obstacles to clarity, or
that are particularly associated with any one modern sectarian view or the
other. It's for this reason that we also prefer the traditional word "magic" to
the currently popular "magick", with its specifically Crowleyan
connotations.
We consider that the sex magician is practicing theurgy whenever he
or she invokes or evokes any non-human entity during the performance of
erotic-magical operations. Examples of erotic theurgy include the seeking of
initiatory understanding through ritual sexual intercourse with a chosen
divine intelligence, astral sex with succubi or incubi, or using an excess of
sexual ecstasy or its aftermath to temporarily become a certain deity, among
an infinite number of other options. It is the task of each individual magician
to determine whether those phenomena that seem to function as deities or
demons are independent beings existing free of human thought, or if they are
manifestations of one's own mind. It is the way of the right-hand path, with
its emphasis on bhakti or devotion, to insist that its initiates accept a religious
vision of a given deity out of blind faith alone. The left-hand path approach
to theurgy is far more concerned with awakening the divine aspect of the
magician him/herself.
The rites of the traditional Vama Marga are theurgic in that they are
almost always focused on the sexual interplay between Shiva, the male