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

Western sex magician of the past century – who spent decades energetically
reacting to the sexual repressions of his upbringing in an extreme Christian
sect, never completely deprogrammed himself. Even in his sixties, one gets
the impression he was still "being a bad boy", doing everything he could to
outrage his long-dead puritan parents. The Eastern Vama Marga adept
transgresses the sexual taboos of Hinduism in the beginning phase of
initiation only to progress to a deified realm of being far beyond any cultural
boundaries. The transgressions are not an end in themselves; they merely
mark the bare beginning of the journey of self-creation as an individuated
being. Likewise, the sinister current magician breaking with Judaeo-Christian
programming must be careful not to be trapped in a limited reactionary role.
In the West, the ancient left-hand path principle of Viparit-Karani is evident
to a degree in the commonly observed practice of inversion that emerges in
the historical Satanic tradition in such sexual rites as the Black Mass.
However, once inversion is institutionalized through repetition it can become
its own stifling orthodoxy, and has little if any transformative power. A
Black Mass every Friday at midnight is as useless to the radical left-hand
path process of self-transformation as church every Sunday morning.
For instance, if a disaffected Christian teenager living in a small
religious town first wears an inverted crucifix, lie is pushing against the flow
of local socioreligious convention, making a healthy attempt at selfindividuation.
In rare cases, the deliberate estrangement from familial and
religious restrictions might provide enough of a shock to be useful for actual
initiation. But every shock wears off eventually. If our theoretical Satanic
rebel wins the approval of his friends for this small defiance, the "evil"
emblem becomes a status symbol, defeating the purpose of opposite-doing.
Once that inverted crucifix is reduced to a permanent fixture of self-image,
then it becomes just another comforting convention to overcome.
The fatal schism between sex and spirit, Eros and Psyche, has so
contaminated Western culture that even non-Christian magicians have
unthinkingly adopted the organized faith's revulsion for the body and for
sexuality. This can be observed in the surprisingly common condemnation of
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sex magic of any kind by the many Western magicians who display a distinct
discomfort with orgasmic sorcery. For them, any form of erotic initiation is a
deviation from the "higher" powers of the mind to the "lower" sexual center.
At best, they might dismiss the left-hand path as a silly distraction from the
strictly cerebral concerns they deem to be more meaningful. At worst, they
might consider sex-magical operations to be a destructive dead-end.
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Despite the universality of the left-hand path, by whatever name, the
aspiring left-hand path sex magician will discover that one of the advantages
of first studying the original Eastern model of the Vama Marga is that its
uniquely tolerant approach to seemingly heretical or dissident ideas has
allowed the Indian left-hand path to evolve there in an atmosphere of relative
freedom.
The same cannot be said for less permissive environments, which
have consistently persecuted and even murdered those who have been
suspected of experimenting with erotic self-initiation. Particularly in those
countries that have fallen to Judaeo-Christianity, Islam, or the many other
Eros-denying faiths of self-renunciation, sex magic has until recently been
performed under a noxious cloud of religiously inspired sin and shame. The
sex-obsessed hysteria of the virulent witch-burning epidemic which scarred
Europe for centuries is only the most dramatic episode in the West's attempt
to exorcise the demons of the flesh. The few written records of Western sexmagical
experiment that exist before the twentieth century reflect the sexually
ambivalent cultural atmosphere in which they were written.
As we shall see, this has lent a stunted, fugitive quality to Western