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

However, the first inklings of the Eastern sinister current went
Westwards in a more prosaic fashion. An unlikely group of messengers first
brought actual knowledge of the real left-hand path tradition from India to
England, from whence it slowly spread throughout Europe and the New
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World, sometimes mutating into wholly unexpected hybrid strains. In the
mid-nineteenth century, the British colonial rulers of India were working
with a cabal of Christian missionaries to implement legislation criminalizing
the practice of Tantra, and especially its "barbaric" left-hand path sexual
branch. Vigorously supporting this anti-Tantric prohibition movement were
many puritanical Indian representatives of the high-born Brahmin caste, who
had long regarded the caste-defiant and heretical methods of left-handed
Tantra as a disgusting profanation of Vedic law. Faced with such pressure,
the struggling Vama Marga circles were forced to celebrate their rites under
even more secretive conditions than had previously been the case.
Into this environment came Edward Sellon (1818-1866), a young
British Army officer, amateur pornographer and fairly notorious connoisseur
of recondite sexuality. Stationed in India since the age of sixteen, Sellon was
intrigued by the rumors of the kaula midnight orgies, and of the sacred
celebration of wine and woman in the secret rite of the five Ms. With the help
of a local civil servant, Sellon managed to earn the confidence of one kaula
chakra, and observe what he described with a typically Victorian mixture of
prurience and moralism as the "very licentious" circle orgies of the Shakti
cult. Some commentators have suggested that young Sellon's first experience
of sex took place within the context of the left-hand path ritual, but so little
biographical information exists on this elusive character that this must be
ascribed to conjecture.
Sellon's work, despite its obscurity, was instrumental in bringing
awareness of the left-hand path to the West. Judging from these writings, it is
apparent that he certainly had a first-hand knowledge of Tantric erotic
initiation. However, it was not until twenty years after Sellon's return to
England that he first revealed something of what he had learned of the sexual
power of the goddess whose name he spelled as "Sacti". In 1865, he released
a peculiar work of eccentric scholarship entitled Annotations On The Sacred
Writings Of The Hindus. This booklet puts forth his theory that the sexual
rites still observed by the Shakti cult are a living continuation of a onceuniversal
tradition of sexual initiation that was celebrated by the ancient
Egyptians, pre-monotheistic Israelites and Assyrians. Although he dismisses
some of the Tantric sex practices as superstition, he concludes that the lefthand
path's methods of awakening are the survival of a tradition that "two
thousand. years before the Christian era ... was, as at the present day, in full
force; the Gnosticism of India." Seeking to connect a hidden sexual mystery
underscoring all ancient religions, Sellon interprets the phallic lingam and
vulval yoni of India as identical with the genital symbolism of Isis and Osiris,
among other contrasexual mythologies. In the orgia of the chakra puja,
Sellon sees a distant survival of the rites of the ancient Greek Dionysian
revels.
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Sellon explains how the universal mind, Brahma, split itself into a
left-sided female and a right-sided male whose androgynous copulation
created the manifest world of appearances. With something of the lecherous
zeal with which he wrote his pornographic tales, he lovingly describes the
youthful beauty of the naked female sexual consorts representing the Shakti
force, who he accurately refers to as the dutis. In an 1866 autobiography of
his adventures, The Ups And Downs Of Life, Memoirs Read Before the
Anthropological Society Of London, Sellon noted that the duti was selected
regardless of her caste, and although a temple dancer was preferred, she
could be a pariah, slave, or courtesan. These pioneering Western accounts of