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

perspective, an entirely different vantage point on the nature of human
existence has been attained. Since there is no way to conclusively prove
whether this seemingly disembodied state is a subjective phantasm or an
objective fact, attempts to make any categorical conclusion on this
phenomenon must be understood as purely speculative.
The initiate of the sinister way, however, welcomes any opportunity
to view reality through unfamiliar or disturbing prisms that call the accepted
conditions of human existence into question. If extreme pain and body
modification can access such changes in consciousness, their usefulness
becomes clear. A model of existence that allows for the possibility that
consciousness can be deliberately detached from the body opens the way for
the magician to directly confront the mysteries of death and immortality:. No
dogmatic teaching can be offered on such intensely subjective subjects; the
magician must determine where he or she stands on such metaphysical
matters through direct inquiry of the self through physical experiment.
The conventional Western magician, who often tends to
overemphasize the importance of cerebral understanding to initiation, will
shrink from the very idea that physical body modification and the pain
attendant to it can open one's eyes to such fundamental questions. Those of
the left-hand path, by contrast, will welcome any technique that can ground
such fundamental existential concerns in the body, rather than in the misty
and imprecise cloud of strictly philosophical speculation.
Interestingly, many sexual adventurers with no spiritual awareness or
interest have unintentionally initiated themselves into a magical worldview
through experimentation with severe body modification. This is more than
can be said for the many would-be metaphysicians who refuse to even
consider the body's lessons of pleasure and pain as worthy of serious
consideration. Here we are faced again with the familiar battle between the
flesh and the spirit, an illusory conflict that the sex magician reconciles by
approaching the greatest mysteries of the psyche through the delights and
torments of the body itself.
Such practices as we have described harken hack to the methods
applied by some shamans and. fire-walking fakirs to heighten ordinary
awareness to visionary levels. Perhaps the best known example of this
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tradition is the Sioux Indian religious rite proscribing that the young men of
the tribe were to undergo the tribulation of being pierced and hung through
the chest area and suspended for a prolonged period until they attained a
visionary state of consciousness. This was the Sioux initiation into manhood,
and the women of the tribe were forbidden to observe this masculine mystery
– such segregation of the sexes is not in keeping with the left-hand path. But
the consciousness-altering validity of this practice can be accessed by any
magician; faith in Native American doctrine is hardly required.
The fact that many modern fetishists with no awareness of such
religious customs have felt compelled to pierce and suspend themselves in
exactly the same manner suggests that such a rite is deeply rooted in the
atavistic psychic content of the human consciousness. The mythologies of the
world are replete with accounts of magical man-gods who achieve visionary
apotheosis by the method of being painfully pierced and suspended. Odin, the
Northern lord of war, poetry, magic and holy rage was said to have received
the runes during a agonizing rite of self-sacrifice in which he was painfully
hung and suspended on the world tree for nine days and nights. The
Mesoamaerican shamanic deity and hero Quetzalcoatl acquired visionary
knowledge through a similar rite of painful suspension.
The ecstatic sufferings of the magician Jesus, repeatedly pierced,
lanced, and ultimately crucified, are clearly part of the same pattern we see
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with Odin and Quetzalcoatl. The lovingly crafted depictions of Christ's