I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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Esau and Jacob. Is this a seemly thing or not?"' Jesus is unequivocal in his<br />
condemnation of the practice: "This sin surpasses every sin and every<br />
iniquity. Men of this kind will be taken immediately to the outer darkness,<br />
and will not be returned again into this sphere."<br />
And yet, despite this harsh pronouncement, other sources from<br />
roughly the same time period indicate that some early Christians identified<br />
Jesus and Mary Magdalene with exactly this specific "sinful" practice. In<br />
<strong>The</strong> Woman Jesus Loved, the Finnish scholar Antti Marjanen even suggests<br />
that the severity of the above passage may have been written with the public<br />
relations motive of disassociating Christ's original disciples from the sexmagical<br />
practices their opponents frequently accused them of teaching.<br />
Another early Christian text comments convincingly on the<br />
existence of a Christian sex magic tradition imbued with striking parallels to<br />
left-hand path use of sperm and menstrual blood. <strong>The</strong> Panarion, written by<br />
Epiphanius, documents what he defines as "libertine sects" centered around<br />
the erotic interaction of Christ and Mary Magdalene. Epiphanius notes<br />
apprehensively that the female principle plays an particularly crucial role in<br />
the Gnostic circles his polemic is aimed against, pointing out with<br />
disapproval that libertine Christians name their Gospels after the names of<br />
women, such as Eve or Mary Magdalene. In Panarion, Epiphanius refers to<br />
a holy book called Great Questions <strong>Of</strong> Mary, which describes how Christ<br />
once brought Mary Magdalene to a mountain to impart a private instruction<br />
to her which was not vouchsafed to his other students. <strong>The</strong> common<br />
mythological device of being brought to a high mountain is a symbol of<br />
ascending to an altered state of consciousness, entering the realm of divine<br />
existence.<br />
<strong>Of</strong> this cult, Epiphanius wrote:<br />
And they too have many books. .. about the Ialdobaoth ... and in the name<br />
of Seth ... and they have ventured to compose other Gospels in the name of<br />
the disciples, and are not ashamed to say that our Saviour and Lord himself,<br />
Jesus Christ, revealed this obscenity.... they suggest that he revealed it to her<br />
after taking her aside on the mountain, praying, producing a woman from his<br />
side, beginning to have intercourse with her, and then partaking of his<br />
emission, if you please, to show that 'Thus we must do, that we may live.'<br />
And when Mary was alarmed and fell to the ground, he raised her up and<br />
said to her '0 thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?'<br />
That Christ chooses to share this mystery with Mary alone is yet another<br />
indication of the unique place she holds in his circle. <strong>The</strong> reference to the<br />
"name of Seth" associated with these libertine teachings is a further<br />
suggestion that Jesus may have been one of the magicians who invoked the<br />
188<br />
deity Seth-Typhon, a god long associated with sexual sorcery. <strong>The</strong> practice<br />
of ritualized copulation followed by consumption of the sexual fluids<br />
described here is, of course, analogous to the ingestion of post-coital semen<br />
and female amrita that we have already observed taking place within the<br />
Vama Marga tradition. In both sinister Tantra or Gnostic libertinism, the<br />
celebrants do not swallow the sexual elixir to integrate some physical<br />
property contained in the fluid but to devour magical energies of which the<br />
physical substance is only an outer form. Tantrics seek to imbibe the<br />
essential shiva/shakti power. Gnostics believed that drinking the sperm or<br />
menstrual blood would prevent souls from being born, delivering the unborn<br />
beings contained in the seed to the pleroma, a spiritual realm above the<br />
control of the Archon, the tyrannical rulers of the sphere of matter. In both<br />
cases, the willed transformation of a natural, mortal substance into an<br />
immortal, psychic force is essentially left-hand path.<br />
Elsewhere in <strong>The</strong> Panarion, Epiphanius writes of the unnamed sect,<br />
which may be the Naasenes: "<strong>The</strong>y say that the flesh must perish and cannot<br />
be raised, but belongs to the Archon, but the power in the menses and semen,