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

era, transmogrified into Vrowe Hulda of medieval Germany, a tangle-haired
sexual demoness sharing many of the grislier attributes of the Indian Kali or
the Mesopotamian Lilith.
Kundalini's ascent to open the third eye at the crown chakra has been
compared in a Western context to the dazzling emerald that falls from
Lucifer's crown during his mythical War in Heaven. According to von
Eschenbach's telling of the Parsifal legend, Lucifer's fallen emerald was
eventually fashioned into the Graal sought by Western adepts. The Holy
Grail, cup of never-ending plenty, wisdom and eternal youth quested for by
European initiates for centuries, is clearly a desexualized emblem of Shakti's
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yoni. The Grail legend of Parsifal underscores a common mythical
symbolism that links European and Indo-Iranian magical veneration of the
vagina. The initiatic regaining of Lucifer's crown jewel in the form of the
Graal – that enigmatic symbol of boundless feminine wisdom – can be
understood as an analogue of the Kundalini experience.
Contemporary New Age distortions of Kundalini have often
degenerated into banal methods of simply increasing normal levels of energy
or alertness; a harmless diversion for wearied housewives with time to kill.
This is all well and good. But such simplified Westernized derivations, like
so many latter-day versions of left-hand path techniques, miss the point. The
awakening of Kundalini, whether through sexual rites or otherwise, is at its
most profound level, a world-shattering initiatory experience.
Kundalini-like ideas circulate throughout the world's esoteric
traditions, indicating that Tantricism is but the local recognition of a
universal phenomenon. Intimations of the kundalini phenomenon were
recorded in Western hermetic literature long before knowledge of the Indian
left-hand path had reached Europe. The Caduceus serpent is a well-known
symbol of serpentine sexual power in hermeticism and alchemy. More
specifically, Gichtel, a disciple of the German mystic Jakob Böhme, wrote in
his 1696 occult treatise Theosophia Practica of an illuminating "serpentine
fire" located at the base of the spine. Such specific European references to a
snakelike consciousness-expanding anomaly located in the human body
reveal that experience with kundalini extended far beyond the borders of
India. Gichtel described this spinal fire as taking the form of a mighty
dragon. The dragon as guardian of hidden feminine wisdom is a mythic
symbol that can be traced beyond European folklore into the Mesopotamian
legend of the goddess Tiamat, which later developed into the Biblical shedragon
Leviathan, the Beast of Revelations.
Tantric symbolism envisions Kundalini as a feminine serpent
revealing secret, potentially dangerous knowledge. The same symbolism is
also apparent in the heretical Gnostic interpretation of the myth of the snake
in the garden of Eden. The serpent thought to be the Devil by orthodox
Christians was understood by some Gnostics as the divine Sophia taking on
the form of a serpent to bestow immortality and the ability "to be like gods"
upon mankind. Part of the female serpent's teaching is that gnosis can be
attained through non-procreative sexual ecstasy – the forbidden fruit of the
perennial left-hand path.
The vertebral bone above the pelvis where the kundalini fire
serpent is thought to lay coiled is still known in English as the sacrum,
which derives from the Latin os sacra, or sacred bone. Exoterically,
the sacrum's proximity to the genital organs is generally thought to be
the reason for its sacred status. However, a knowledge in pre-Roman
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culture of the sacrum as the seat of some power approximating that of
kundalini cannot be ruled out.
In ancient Egypt's cult of Set – a violently dissident outsider god