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

power, even in its most extreme bharaivi force of creative destruction.
Shakti is often said, for example, to possess the force unleashed in
hurricanes, which are traditionally given women's names. This violent
quality can be understood in an archaic sense as the savage she-huntress red
of tooth and claw, or in the more up-to-date cosmic energies of devastation
witnessed in an atomic explosion. Kali, in one Tantra, is described as
"shining with the light of ten million suns, although black in color like a
fresh cloud." The Black Light sought by some Islamic heretic sects in Iran,
or the Black Flame revered by some modern left-hand path cults in the West
can be compared to the dark side of Kali-shakti – she is often described as
an all-devouring black flame.
European variants of this same bharaivi principle can be found in the
grim depictions of feminine divinity that haunt ancient Nordic religion. The
great modern scholar of Northern mythology, Hilda Ellis Davidson,
describes the Valkyries, or waelcyrge ,"the choosers of the slain", in a very
different light than the familiar Romantic vision of neatly coiffed, blondbraided
beauties sporting quaint helmets. Davidson paints a grim picture of
the wild-haired Valkyries haunting the gore-drenched battlefields after
combat "weaving on a ghastly loom composed of weapons, entrails and
skulls." The similarity to Kali is striking.
Lyn Webster Wilde, in her study On The Trail Of The Women
Warriors provides us with an astute description of Shakti from a feminine
point of view:
"Shakti ... evokes a sense of this power that is at once erotic, inexhaustible,
captivating, terrifying, sensual, annihilating – the divine female in action ...
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it is an active power, and you can see it very clearly in the figurines of the
snake-goddesses of Crete, or the dancing Parvati statues in your local Indian
restaurant. It is not the fecund, sleepy, peaceful earth-mother energy beloved
of sentimental goddess-worshippers. It is the bright, burning, vital power of
the archetypical feminine, whether expressed in divine or human form."
Related to this specific aspect of the Feminine Daemonic revered by the lefthand
path is a very common misapprehension that should be clarified early
on in our discussion. Many casual practitioners of sex magic in the West
might erroneously assume that the left-hand path's sexual rites are a remnant
of the once omnipresent magical utilization of sexual energy to increase the
fertility of the land, or of the tribe. But these fertility rites, which often took
the form of orgiastic festivals, once widespread in all pagan cultures,
actually have nothing to do with the distinctive mode of sexuality activated
in the sinister current. The primary difference is that such communal sexual
magic was ordained by religious authorities as a sacred obligation, a kind of
sacrifice of one's erotic energy for the good of the community. Eros in the
left-hand path is diverted entirely from its socially approved outlets of
breeding, perpetuating the human race, and maternity. These nature-bound
forces of reproductive generation are consciously redirected to the strictly
personal and psychic goal of individual self-initiation.
The world's religions have always sought to restrain female sexual
power to these very limited procreative purposes. Even a cult of sex-hatred
like exoteric Christianity will allow that female sexuality constrained to
baby-production is healthy, wholesome and respectable, although any other
expression of feminine eroticism is condemned as demoniacal. The
suppression and subduing of shakti energy and its neutralization through
matrimony and motherhood, is one of the many bonds that the left-hand path
deliberately breaks. Some women new to left-hand path magical practice
have trouble clearing the conditioning that would define their principal sexual
personae as wife and mother, an obstacle which stands in the way of their
cultivation of the sinister sexuality needed for Vama Marga sorcery and
initiation. The fertility goddess plays no part in the left-hand path's