I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net
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Ishtar and Astarte – manifold forms of the goddess related to the opposing<br />
but connected poles of extreme sexual power and destructive force.<br />
This connection with Shiva/Shakti's ghastlier visage lends the Aghori<br />
a decidedly macabre character – they dwell in cremation grounds, which<br />
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serve as their ritual sites and holy places, and when they are not naked, they<br />
wear the shrouds of corpses. <strong>The</strong>ir hair is deliberately disheveled, like Tara's.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y smear their bodies with the ashes of the cremated, an act of deliberate<br />
pollution which would be strictly taboo for the Brahmin caste. Like the skullbearing<br />
Kapalika from which they very probably descended, the Aghori beg<br />
for food with bowls made from the craniums of human skulls. <strong>The</strong>se ghoulish<br />
begging bowls also serve as the Aghori's dinner plates – nourishment for life<br />
taken from death.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Aghori pursue the essential Tantric left-hand path teaching of the<br />
absolute identity of opposites. For them, the same things condemned as<br />
utterly impure by conventional standards are to be made sacred – taboo is<br />
viscerally transcended and revealed to be illusory, an initiatory lesson leading<br />
to the god-like separation and liberation from the norms restricting the pashu.<br />
<strong>The</strong> desired result of Aghoric left-hand practice is the attainment of a<br />
transhuman impartiality to the phenomena of Shakti's maya. <strong>The</strong><br />
confrontation of inner demons, fears and terrors is an important aspect of<br />
Aghoric left-hand path initiation, which often lead the Aghori to pursue<br />
places of solitude from human society, such as cremation grounds, caves, and<br />
isolated jungles.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Aghori are probably most notorious for their own singular<br />
celebration of Panchamakara, a variant of the Five M's observance that far<br />
surpasses in transgression the secret rite we have already described. <strong>The</strong><br />
matsya (fish), mamsha (meat), madya (wine), mudra (cereal), and maithuna<br />
(ritual coitus) central to other left-hand path rites of initiation are replaced by<br />
the Aghori with another list of prohibited "M" elements. <strong>The</strong> Aghora Tantrics<br />
make a sacrament of ritual necrophagia by cannibalistically devouring human<br />
rather than animal meat (mamsha), specifically the flesh of human corpses at<br />
the cremation grounds. Although the concept of sacred cannibalism is<br />
probably one of the most startling features of traditional left-hand practice, it<br />
should be remembered that even the Catholic rite of Mass, with its<br />
ceremonial consumption of the "flesh and blood" of Christ is only a symbolic<br />
recreation of the same general idea.<br />
Along with wine and other intoxicants, the Aghori adept drinks<br />
human blood (medha) and human urine (meha). Coprophagia or the<br />
consumption of human excrement (mala) rounds out a sacralised meal that is<br />
concluded with mehana, a word that can be taken to mean penis or semen.<br />
None of these ritual violations of taboo are motivated by the same<br />
instincts that might inspire the contemporary profane urine, shit or blood<br />
enthusiast to partake of his or her particular fetish. Above and beyond the<br />
considerable release of magical energy freed by these actions, the Aghoric<br />
goal is to overcome all sense of conditioned fear or disgust obstructing the<br />
initiate's awareness, reaching a state of complete neutrality towards all<br />
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manifestations of shakti-maya. In many cases, the consumption of such<br />
traditionally impure substances as human urine, blood, feces, and flesh is<br />
usually confined to a one-time breakthrough in consciousness; to repeatedly<br />
break these taboos once a transcendent insight has been gained through their<br />
ritual enactment would be senseless from an initiatory perspective. Other<br />
Aghoris continue these practices for specific magical purposes unrelated to<br />
the initial transgression of taboo.<br />
One fairly common Buddhist practice in Tibet reveals an Aghori<br />
influence. <strong>The</strong> initiate is compelled to visualize the drinking of five fluids:<br />
excrement, brains, semen, blood, and urine, which are alchemically