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

depiction of sinister Tantra provided in the work of Sir John Woodroffe
(1865—1936). Not an occultist or magician from the outer fringes of
society, Woodroffe was a thoroughly respectable high-ranking Justice living
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in Calcutta at the end of the nineteenth century, who developed a personal
fascination with Tantric thought and practice.
With his lawyer's zeal for defense and meticulous explication,
Woodroffe took pen to paper under the mystical Celtic pseudonym of Arthur
Avalon, and produced a series of groundbreaking works that explained.
Tantra as a legitimate spiritual discipline. The Avalon books not only served
to remove some of Tantra's stigma in the minds of his European readers.
Many English-speaking Indians also regarded the left-hand path as a
shameful relic of a supposedly savage heritage they would just as soon have
forgotten in their desire to become a modern Westernized nation. Avalon's
work introduced a wide native Indian readership to the value of practices
that had previously been clouded with secrecy. Earlier Indian works in
English concerning Tantra had offered a heavily censored, whitewashed
version of the Tantric teachings, usually from the derisive and biased
perspective of the Brahmin caste authors who wrote them. Strangely, it took
a European to make Tantra into at least a partially acceptable subject of
study in India.
For all of the great benefit of Avalon's books in keeping an
imperiled tradition alive, and the pioneering scholarship with which they
were written, he also succeeded in promulgating a long-lasting
misinterpretation of the left-hand path. If Blavatsky painted the Vama
Marga in the most fiendish black, Avalon just as zealously whitewashed the
subject, ignoring and evading the more socially taboo aspects of the secret
rites. Woodroffe went overboard in his eagerness to simultaneously justify
and downplay the notorious erotic aspects of Tantricism's left-hand path.
Avalon stresses the dangers and grave consequences incurred by an adept
who undergoes sacred sex without totally extinguishing every last trace of
carnal enjoyment and biological lust from the act. Sir John did his best to
explain the spiritual philosophy underpinning Tantra's sexual form of
illumination, but his arguments come across as defensive, reflecting his own
rather prudish prejudices.
Considering the hysterical Victorian attitudes prevailing at the time,
and Woodroofe/Avalon's objective of preventing Tantra from being declared
against the law, his reticence is perfectly understandable. Unfortunately,
many other authors unexposed to more primary sources and teachers have
unwittingly taken up this misleading and strait-laced approach directly from
Avalon's writings. The result has been that it's now practically become an
article of faith among Westerners that the serious Tantric initiate must strive
manfully (or womanfully) to resist all sensations of carnal delight during the
sexual rite. This priggish attitude can be illustrated in his remark that "Many
years ago Edward Sellon, with the aid of a learned Orientalist of the Madras
Civil Service, attempted to learn [the secret rite's] mysteries, but for reasons,
which I need not here discuss, did not view them from the right standpoint."
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The "right" standpoint, we must imagine, can only be the anti-hedonic
interpretation of sexual illumination favored by Avalon, whose sensibilities
were offended by Sellon's more lustful approach to the subject.
Nevertheless, Avalon's books are essential reading due to their wealth of
objectively conveyed knowledge concerning the principles and methods of
Tantra.
Avalon is also notable as the first author to consider the possibility
of left-hand path methods of sexual taboo-breaking as being "Antinomian"
in character. In light of the recent connection of some Western schools of
the nominal left-hand path with the antinomian concept, Avalon's much