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

attempted to whitewash or otherwise downplay the genuinely subversive
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aspect of left-hand path initiation, the aspirant who takes these contrarian
teachings to heart has engaged on a course of deliberate, even methodical,
iconoclasm from which there can be no turning back.
This sacralized separation from established law and custom,
particularly sexual convention, is not to be confused merely with the empty
acts of the social rebel – it is instead a god-like disdain for the restrictions
that bind the uninitiated, a taking of supreme responsibility for one's own
actions.
Because of the freedom from strictures afforded to the sinister
current initiate, Tantric tradition is adamant that the left-hand path cannot be
the way for the common person; it demands a heroic constitution. A feeble or
unprepared mind that briefly tasted the terrifying sovereignty of a semidivine
consciousness would not be transformed by the experience – at best,
he or she might become nothing more than an everyday criminal, an
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ultimately powerless identity bound to self-destruct. The aim of the left-hand
path's contrary nature reaches to a more sublime level of being; the conscious
separation from familiar boundaries is designed to awaken transhuman
consciousness. To place this in a perhaps more familiar Western context, it
might be recalled that Lucifer does not rebel from God's tyranny to simply
become branded as an outlaw; he is determined to become God instead.
If Vama is contrariness and the Vama Marg is the elevation of
contrariness to a spiritual principle, it should be understood that the left-hand
path can never be a way for those who seek enlightenment through
tranquillity and serenity. The sinister current is conflict incarnated and its
illumination is provided by friction – and not just of a sexual kind. Part of
this spirit of conflict is the intrinsic connection of the left-hand path with the
ethos of the warrior.
The Indian left-hand path tradition exalts the black goddess Kali,
both for her all-consuming erotic power, and her destructive capacity as
warrior and destroyer of the universe. Outside of that tradition, it is no
coincidence that many deities venerated by contemporary left-hand path
magicians, among them the Egyptian Set, the Mesopotamian Ishtar/Babalon,
the Aztec Tezcatlipoca and the Nordic Odin are principally divinities of war
– the ultimate expression of contrariness. To go any further into the left-hand
path's connection with the cultus of the warrior would take us outside the
erotic parameters of this book. Still, one last point is worth making: there is a
vast difference between the good soldier who follows orders as a servant of
the state and the left-hand path Warrior, who fights for his or her own
illumination.
Another of the associations of the word Vama and leftwardness in
India that is often daintily overlooked is its correlation with excrement. In
India, the left hand is used to clean the anus and has traditionally been
connected with all that is "unclean". This notion of uncleanliness is
extremely important to the fastidious Brahmin caste in India and a deliberate
incorporation of the taboo against shit would be a powerful provocation, a
typically left-hand path exercise of contrariness in action. It also symbolizes
that the left-hand path initiate includes – and even actively embraces –
aspects of existence that orthodox spiritual teachings reject as worthless and
harmful. The generally prohibited nature of human excrement in almost
every society emphasizes that the left-hand path has often been regarded as
something loathsome throughout its history. Along these lines, the radically
left-hand path Aghora sect has long been notorious for ritual coprophagia –
the consumption of shit as a sacrament. The left-hand path works within the
realm of physical matter, seeing the transitory phenomena of "this world",
including the human body and its pleasures, as fundamentally connected to