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

ejects nothing, least of all individual erotic predispositions. Nowhere in the
Tantras does one find the vilification of male or female homosexuality that
abounds in the Western magical tradition revived in the nineteenth century.
We have already described Crowley's ambiguous attitude to
homosexual magic, despite his own introduction of a homosexual grade to
the O.T.O.'s sex magick curriculum, and his own frequent use of male-tomale
buggery as a magical sacrament. Crowley's fellow Golden Dawn
alumnus, Dion Fortune, was no less damning. In her influential Sane
Occultism, she sniffs that the "unnatural vice known as homosexuality ... [is]
a very cruel form of vice, as the victims are usually boys and youths on the
threshold of life." Madame Blavatsky held much the same views on "the love
that dare not speak its name", which did nothing to stop the leading
Theosophist C. W. Leadbetter from indulging his taste for young boys, a
predilection that led to no small amount of scandal for the puritanical
Madame's sect. The homosexual sex magician who turns to the classic texts
of the occult revival for inspiration will find little more than the prejudices of
the Victorian age transmuted into esoteric language.
All of this outraged moralizing is thankfully absent from left-handed
Tantra. However, the homosexual sex magician of either gender must come
to terms with some of the basic principles of left-hand path erotic initiation
that might not be immediately apparent. It would be very easy, for instance,
to mistakenly apply the absolute liberty sought by the left-hand path adept to
modern politicized conceptions of sexuality. But just as we have urged the
reader not to confuse the left-hand path reverence for the feminine power of
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Shakti with mundane feminism, so must it be made clear that the left-hand
path does not presume that heterosexual and homosexual sexuality are
exactly the same phenomenon.
In fact, it recognizes that very distinct magical energies are released
in magical operations conducted between a man and a woman, a woman and
a woman and a man and a man. Not necessarily better or worse, but very
definitely different. This would seem to be only common sense, but for those
who would like to erase all sexual, racial and gender differences in one
undifferentiated blur of enforced equality, offense is sometimes taken at any
suggestion of drawing a distinction between disparate forms of eroticism. As
the first section of this book should have made amply clear, there is no
getting away from the fact that the traditional left-hand path is inexorably
focused on the unique qualities of sexual metaphysics evident in male-female
eroticism. The yoni and the lingam, Shiva and Shakti, semen and menstrual
blood, the lunar left and the solar right: the prevalence of all of these symbols
in the sinister current illustrate that this is primarily a magic concerned with
the mingling of sexual polarities, physical opposites incarnated most tangibly
in the coupled bodies of the male and female initiate. Its magic is essentially
the magic of bipolar electromagnetism bonding and surpassing its limitations
through sexual ecstasy.
Same-sex magic, obviously, is monopolar in character. The effects it
achieves are based on the principle of like unto like, rather than on the
transcendence of opposition manifest in heterosexual sex magic. The
traditional Tantric left-hand path teaching, while it does not condemn
homosexuality, does maintain that the sexual polarity in a homosexual's body
operates differently than in a heterosexual's physical organism, being
essentially reversed. Due to the contrary-flowing stream of bodily energy, it
is understandably thought that a male homosexual will not derive the same
magical benefit from the transmission of shakti power conferred from a
female initiatrix in left-handed sex rites. Of course, this leaves aside the
technical issue of whether a male homosexual would have any desire to
perform the traditional Vama Marga ritual with a female mudra.
Then there is the decided centrality of the Feminine Daemonic to the