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

path magician, however, penetrates deeper than these outer appearances,
pursuing the direct apprehension of the interior significance of the traditional
symbolism of all mythologies. From the initiatic point of view, transcendent
of time, the Kali Yuga of dissolution and the earlier Golden Age of
perfection are understood as symbolic forms representing levels of initiatory
being, rather than actual periods located within time. This is true of all of the
Aeonic eras posited by the world's mythologies.
In the Apocalypse of Christian tradition, for example, we find a time
much like the Kali Yuga, which is said to be ruled by chaos, discord, and the
breaking of divine law. Just as Kali is the presiding divinity of the Tantric
Aeon, the Whore of Babylon, another nightside symbol of the Feminine
Daemonic, is said to reign over the Apocalypse, or apokolypis (time of
revelation). Primitive, literal-minded Christian sects have been awaiting the
prophesied end times – with its foretold advent of the Whore and the
Antichrist – for thousands of years, failing to understand that exactly like the
Kali Yuga, the end of the world they so fearfully anticipate is an initiatory
state of mind.
Other mythologies provide us with analogous ages of darkness and
destruction, accepted as historical incidents by the literal-minded, but
fathomed as inner transformations by initiates. The Ragnarok or Fatal
Destiny, of Nordic tradition – perhaps more commonly known as the
Gotterdämmerung, or Twilight of the Gods – tells of a time when the dread
Fenris Wolf will be unleashed by the sinister Loki to swallow the sun, thus
destroying the world of men and gods, who await their fated doom with
horror. Like the Kali Yuga, the Ragnarok is described as a time when men
break all bonds of honor, brother fights with brother, and the time-honored
spiritual laws of troth are neglected. Just as Kali and other wrathful and
terrifying deities achieve their fullest power in the Kali Yuga, so does
Ragnarok free the fettered monstrous brood of the disobedient trickster Loki
to subvert the established order of the gods.
Similarly, the Aztec priests of Mexico taught that in the fearful time
of the Fifth Sun, the cosmos itself would be exterminated. From an esoteric
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left-hand path vantage point, all of these seemingly external periods of
desolation are welcomed, and even enthusiastically brought about, as they
are recognized as internal processes of extreme self-metamorphosis,
destroying established realities to willfully create new states of being.
The Sanskrit word Yuga, like the Greek word Aion, used within the
Gnostic tradition, can superficially be understood as an era of time. Even
more fundamentally, it is a psychic phenomenon, an eternal state that
actually exists outside of time. Aleister Crowley's Aeon of Horus,
proclaimed by him in 1904 CE, has created some confusion on this point in
Western magical circles, since Crowley literally – and incorrectly –
understood an Aeon to be a chronological era, a particular juncture in linear
time.
Furthermore, to accept the notion of the Kali Yuga as an objective
event hardly seems supported by history. Humanity appears to have been
equally dead set on its own destruction in all periods of time – and no
evidence of a wondrous Satya Yuga, or Golden Age, seems to present itself.
The good old days never happened – any study of humanity's relatively brief
transit on this planet will reveal that homo sapiens is no more spiritually
ignorant, violent, insane or chaotic in this current period than in all of the
bloodstained pages of history that have preceded us. Therefore, when the lefthand
path magician acknowledges that he or she is living in the Iron Age of
Kali Yuga, and that the left-hand path is the most appropriate means of
initiation for this Aeon, this must be understood as esoteric truth, transmitted
in the language of mythological symbolism, rather than the kind of "truth"
one might read in the morning newspaper. Something more profound than