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

from the restrictions of Judaeo-Christianity or atheism only to prostrate
him/herself at the feet of an equally prohibitive Eastern guru. This can hardly
be accounted as progress; it's merely trading one set of pre-packaged
regulations for a less familiar oppression.
Rather than opting for this route, we outline the essential sex-magical
principles of the left-hand path and apply them to conditions in the urban
transglobal world, instead of fetishistically recreating the provincial world of
India's past, in which the left-hand path originally developed. Left-hand path
sex magic as we illustrate it here can be effectively applied to any cultural
background – it is most expressly not an exercise in nostalgia for an idealized
antiquity in a distant land. We take it as a given that the specific symbolism
that worked for a left hand path initiate in a small village in the tightly
controlled, caste-ridden Bengal of the seventeenth century cannot be
completely applicable to the work of a left-hand path adept operating in the
chaotic anti-culture of the twenty-first century. Therefore, we provide a
detailed introduction to the historic left-hand path teachings but with the
understanding that the contemporary sex magician can – and should – shape
these methods to suit his or her own present day desires and circumstances.
Actually, this universal approach coincides with traditional left-hand
path practice. One of the tenets of the Tantric left-hand path states that the
teaching is suited for all initiated creatures of the Kali Yuga in every culture
and is not limited to its Eastern places of origin.
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But, to our experience, the left-hand path, in its traditional Eastern
conception, as transmitted through a lineage of initiated teachers and
students, is not well-suited for the neurotic psychosexual conditions that
fracture the Western mind. The mystical psychologist Carl Jung, himself a
clandestine practitioner of sex-magical practices, studied the breadth and
depth of Eastern spiritual teachings. Jung concluded that if the average
Westerner were to adopt the Oriental disciplines of self-transformation, he or
she would risk bringing on a psychotic break. While we would not go that
far, it is clear that the Eastern left-hand path does call out for adaptation, if it
is to be truly effective in a Western sex magician's initiation.
This approach will strike some traditional Tantric gurus as nothing
less than heresy, but since the left-hand path is a heresy to begin with, we
consider this to be a logical progression. The left-hand path's art of sexual
initiation is not a body of static ceremonial from the past, to be faithfully
recreated without change, but a living tradition. Like any living tradition, it is
the innovations and adaptations of its current practitioners, rather than the
culture-specific and time-bound restrictions of former times, that must
determine its viability.
Because this section of the book adheres closely to the traditional
left-hand path teachings in their original form, the contemporary sex
magician will be struck by several limiting factors. Most glaringly, despite
the Eastern Vama Marga's reverence for the Feminine Daemonic, female sex
magicians will notice that relatively little instruction is actually offered to the
female partner in left-hand path rites. The Tantras speak almost entirely to a
presumed male initiate, a one-sided perspective we must expect in a tradition
that was largely recorded in medieval India and Tibet. Obviously, the
contemporary female practitioner of the left-hand path is free to apply these
methods to her course of self-transformation in very different circumstances
than prevailed in the Eastern world of centuries ago.
So, in tracing some of the most important aspects of the Eastern
Vama Marga in this chapter, it is not intended that the modern Western sex
magician should blindly obey the ancient ways of the left-hand path. To
devoutly follow tradition in such a doctrinaire manner would be deadening
and sleep-inducing, running counter to the eternally transformative and
remanifesting essence of the left-hand path itself. Even if it were possible to