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

of the normally despised female to a role of initiatory power is viewed as
nothing less than sacrilege. This is especially true in a society that most
revered religious scriptures allow women only the most subservient of
capacities, as meek help-mate and breeding device.
Tantric teaching was the first to condemn the rite of Sati, in which
widows were religiously obliged to burn themselves upon the death of their
husbands, because they had supposedly been "polluted". In opposition to
Vedic tradition and Hindu orthodoxy, the Mahanirvana Tantra states that "a
wife should not be burnt with her dead husband. Every woman is thy image.
Thou residest concealed in the forms of all women in this world. That woman
who in her delusion ascends the funeral pyre of her lord (husband) shall go to
hell." Also, only the Tantras, of all Indian religious texts, allows for a woman
to be a spiritual teacher or guru. As one astonished medieval Islamic author
noted of Tantra, the teaching "favors both sexes equally, and makes no
distinction between men and women ... this sect calls women shaktis
(powers) and to ill-treat a shakti – that is, a woman – is held to be a crime."
This authentic left-hand path veneration of the female, though
understandably constricted by the overwhelmingly female-negative bias of
Eastern culture, stands in direct opposition to the frequent phenomenon of
misogyny observed among many male Western sex magicians, even those
who call themselves "left-hand path".
The Right And Left Sides Of The Body
The double meaning of Vama Marga, as both left-hand path and the
path of woman is further reinforced in the Tantric understanding that the
left side of the human body is inherently feminine. There is a standard
explanation offered in most sources for the meaning of the right- and lefthand
paths. In right-hand path ritual, a clothed woman symbolically honored
as the goddess power Shakti is seated to the right of the male initiate. During
left-hand path erotic rites a partially naked woman venerated sexually as
Shakti is seated to the left of the male initiate. This is true, as far as it goes,
but there is much more to the terminology than this oft-cited detail.
Tantra also recognizes the existence of a non-physical subtle body
within the physical body, which is said to be driven by the flow of life force
through three vertical energy channels, the central Susumna, flanked by Ida,
on the left side of the body and Pingala to the right. Ida is also known as the
moon channel, just as Pingala is the sun channel, reflecting very ancient
traditional associations of the left with the feminine power of the moon and
the right with the masculine energy of the sun. The left-sided Ida is red, the
40
right-sided Pingala is white, an important color symbolism in the Indian lefthand
path which resurfaces again in the ritual intermixture of white semen
and red menstrual blood in Tantric sexual alchemy.
There is one significant factor here relevant to the essence of the
Vama Marga. Tantric teaching states that the energy enters the body through
the lunar left-channel – the feminine, sinister current – and exits the body
through the right-solar channel. Traditional left-hand path adepts seek to
reverse this natural flow though breath control and the strength of their wills.
The sinister current of dark lunar femininity is considered to be the negative
polarity (—) while the dexter current of solar masculinity is regarded as the
positive polarity (+). The sexual rites of the left-hand path are traditionally
performed in accordance with certain phases of the female partner's lunar
cycle, based on observation of the relation between menstruation and sexual
sensitivity.
The right-hand path initiate is content to preserve the harmony of
nature. The initiate of the sinister current deliberately causes this river of
energy to stream in the opposite direction – a god-like action that takes
control of universal laws and bends them to his or her volition. The body is
magically understood as the microcosm; by altering the normative course of