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

inverted. The master was seen to serve the slave, and was even obliged to
tolerate being beaten by his servant as long as the festival lasted.
The Saturnalia was celebrated during the same time of year during
which the modern Western world celebrates its Christmas holiday. If one
ignores the barely acknowledged overlay of Christian myth that surrounds the
Yule season today, one can still recognize an extremely watered down
continuance of the Saturnalian tradition at the contemporary secular
Christmas party, with its official toleration of seasonal drunkenness,
mandatory smooching under the mistletoe (a plant strongly associated with
the disobedient trickster Loki of Nordic lore), temporary indulgence of
adulterous sexuality, and general mood of relative erotic license. Again, one
notes that this temporary sexual freedom is actually a manifestation of social
control, briefly freeing its grip before clamping down for the rest of the year.
The left-hand path magician, by contrast, has stepped permanently
outside of the social stream, and does not operate in the mandatory and
obligatory nature of the ancient orgiastic festivals, or the contemporary
Christianized holidays that perform a similar function. The magic of Eros that
can be so energetically channeled through the orgy of the sinister current is
not directed to making restraint and routine more bearable; it is applied
instead to deeply personal ends, utterly separated from the demands of social
control.
Lupercalia
Just as many familiar elements of the Saturnalia orgy live on in the Christmas
celebration, a dim echo of the savagely sadomasochistic Roman Lupercalia
festival – observed in ancient Rome and her colonies on February 14 – can
still be detected in the modern world's rather more benign St. Valentine's
Day. For the Romans, February was designated as a month of purification, a
religious concept closely connected to the Greek "purge". It must be
understood that the ancient concept of purification has little to do with the
more recent Christian idea of casting out sin. It was instead intended to
magically invigorate the carnal sphere of existence which can so easily
become enfeebled.
During the Lupercalia, the practically naked boys and young men of
the town were given license to roam the streets dressed in wolf skins
(alternately goat skins, in some regions of the empire), brandishing leather
straps. Essentially, the celebrants took on the predatory nature of the wolf,
hunting the girls of the town, who had to submit by exposing their flesh to be
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flagellated by the leather thongs. Despite the violent nature of this festival,
this mock hunt was apparently regarded as a pleasant diversion; the Roman
historian Livy described the Lupercalia as being conducted "per ludum et
lasciviam" (for fun and in a lascivious manner).
The exact origin of the name Lupercalia is lost in the ancient pre-
Roman Etruscan genesis of the rites. It's generally presumed that there is a
connection to the patroness of the Roman state, the she-wolf Lupa, honored
as the goddess Luperca Dea who suckled the heroic founders of Rome,
Romulus and Remus. Considering the role that sacred whoredom plays in the
left-hand path veneration of the Feminine Daemonic, it is interesting that the
Sabine word lupa was also used to affectionately describe the harlots of
Rome.
According to the erudite werewolf expert Robert Eisler, in his
essential 1948 study Man Into Wolf, Luperca is connected to the Greek word
meaning "who acts as a wolf", or a werewolf. Eisler also explains that the
word lup-erca is related to the Greek word ergon (action), and thus to the
"meaning 'act', cf. orgia for the ritual actions in the mysteries." It would seem
that the lycanthropic goddess Lupa, with her association with harlotry,
predation and the orgy is an ideal divinity to invoke or evoke during magical
workings that draw on such energies. For female magicians especially, Lupa