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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left-hand path practices were considerably less sensational and ill-informed<br />
than many later European descriptions, which almost universally condemned<br />
the Vama Marga as the blackest of the supposedly degraded heathen customs<br />
of a savage people. Sellon's work was an improvement over the sensational<br />
rumors Westerners had previously been exposed to, which ignorantly<br />
connected the secret rites of Tantra with human sacrifice and the murderous<br />
depredations of the Thuggee cult of stranglers.<br />
In April of 1866, having just made his curious contribution to<br />
knowledge of the left-hand path, the 48-year old Sellon shot himself to death<br />
in a London hotel. His little-known books, published only ten years before<br />
the advent of the Western magical revival, are some of the first to suggest<br />
that the very roots of all esoteric religions, mystery cults, and mystical<br />
symbolism are based on a hidden sexual gnosis thats only uninterrupted<br />
surviving tradition is the Tantric left-hand path. Sellon's ideas, although<br />
crudely presented, deserve credit as presaging the more sophisticated<br />
Western sex-magical philosophies of such later figures as Randolph, Reuss,<br />
Crowley, Parsons, Evola, and Grant.<br />
British awareness of the left-hand path, first established by a<br />
pornographer, was expanded upon by the writings of a priest. <strong>The</strong> Calcuttabased<br />
Christian missionary W. J. Wilkins, unlike many of his more zealous<br />
colleagues in conversion, did not view the teeming sects of India as so many<br />
bugs to be stamped out for the Lord. In his Hindu Mythology, Vedic And<br />
Puranic, published in London in 1882, Wilkins provided his readers with a<br />
sober, objective account of the basic Tantric philosophy and practice, not<br />
shying away from the sinister current. Inevitably, a few Europeans living in<br />
India were actually initiated into the circle of the left-hand path, but these<br />
first legitimate "white Tantrikas" did little to introduce the authentic practice<br />
they had learned to the West. As is so often the case in the history of ideas,<br />
the true popularization of the left-hand path outside the sub-continent was<br />
facilitated by individuals who barely understood the concept – in this<br />
instance, the cranky amalgamation of genuine wisdom, starry-eyed<br />
romanticism and confidence game that constituted the modern occult<br />
resurgence.<br />
208<br />
Madame Blavatsky Gets It All Wrong<br />
One of the features that characterized the culture of the ni<strong>net</strong>eenth century<br />
occult revival was the giddy appropriation of exotic metaphysical terms<br />
from non-Western cultures. <strong>The</strong> <strong>The</strong>osophical Society, co-founded in 1875<br />
by the fraudulent Russian spiritualist Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky<br />
(1831—1891), was an important agency in this process. Through the<br />
internationally embraced <strong>The</strong>osophy movement, which also first popularized<br />
that now odious expression "New Age", half-understood concepts such as<br />
karma, akashic record, mahatma, yogi, chakra, and many more became<br />
common currency among European and American occultists. Among the<br />
hoard of esoteric expressions cited by Blavatsky and her followers were<br />
"<strong>Left</strong> <strong>Hand</strong> <strong>Path</strong>" and "Right <strong>Hand</strong> <strong>Path</strong>." (<strong>The</strong> custom of capitalizing these<br />
words derives from Blavatsky, and was later imitated by Aleister Crowley)<br />
<strong>The</strong>re could hardly have been a worse interpreter of the left-hand<br />
path and right-hand path for Western audiences than Blavatsky, whose<br />
doggedly misguided explanation of the sexual and non-sexual approaches to<br />
Tantra has been the single most influential source of perplexity on the<br />
subject. As first given forth to her followers in her autocratically remitted<br />
books and magazine articles, which she cobbled together from an immense<br />
library of plagiarized sources, and subsequently twisted by others into ever<br />
more erroneous interpretations to the present day, the Blavatskyite version<br />
of the left-and right-hand path remains the most widely accepted in Western<br />
occult circles.<br />
For Blavatsky, it was all quite simple: the left-hand path was