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

symbolism is sufficient to satisfy your aesthetic needs as a magician, we can
hardly argue with matters of personal taste; by all means, describe yourself in
whatever terms you like – only do so consciously. However, for the more
complicated pursuit of magic encouraged here, the differentiations of black
and white magic will he refrained from, to avoid unnecessary entanglement
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in needless symbolic confusion.
To illustrate the capricious and restricted nature of this black/white
business, a few examples will suffice. Although black is certainly the color
associated with evil in the post-Christian European world., its transglobal
symbolism is far more ambiguous. In ancient Egypt, for instance, black was a
symbol associated entirely with the cultural good, since it represented the
fertile black earth of the Nile. Egypt's ancient name, Kmt, means "the black
land", a designation which was translated into Arabic as al khem, and may
have given birth to the English words alchemy and chemistry, sciences long
connected to Egypt. The daemonic and culturally "evil" beings in Egyptian
religion, the foremost of these being the god Set, were colored red, the
recognized hue of cosmic malevolence. Therefore, in ancient Egypt, a
magician who practices what the modern Western world designates as "black
magic" would have chosen the color red as a symbolic subversion, Red magic
– appropriate though the phrase may be for an Egyptophile magician – might
summon up the odd image of a Marxist sorcerer in contemporary parlance.
Similarly, although the color white is accepted by Christianized
culture as the epitome of cosmic benevolence and holiness, white is quite
commonly regarded as a demonic and malefic color in many African and
Asian cultures. The poet Martin Fierro once wrote that "The White paints the
devil black/the Black paints him white." This only demonstrates the extreme
relativity of color symbolism to magical practice. Our recommendation to the
magician is to avoid adopting symbolism related to any one particular time
period or culture as much as possible, unless that symbolism is specifically
chosen for a particular magical operation. This opens up – rather than
restricts – the magician's ability to communicate his or her will to the many
levels of reality. We have personally found that the value of separating
magical activity into black and white branches is unserviceable to the
pragmatic magician's needs.
On the other hand, we have found the phrase "the Black Arts" to be
a useful short-hand term to serve as an umbrella for the panoply of magical
techniques available to the magician, especially since it emphasizes the
important artistic nature of magike tekhne. Since this phrase stands on its
own without an inbuilt comparison to an opposing "White Arts" it seems to
us to be a more potent description of the subject, free of any superfluous
moral implication. The Black Arts is also a purer term than black magic,
since its use predates the Christian branding of all magic as evil. For
instance, Ovid (43 B.0 – A.D. 18) already refers to the sorcery of the
legendary enchantresses Medea and Circe as "their black art" in his famous
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love).
However, this is not to deny the necessity of observing and
classifying some of the very real differences that do exist between various
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magical approaches. The ability of language to separate discrete opposites is
of great use to the magician in creating a more workable magical blueprint.
Of more precise benefit to our own objectives, and therefore utilized in this
study as key descriptive devices, are the Tantric terms left-hand path and
right-hand path. As opposed to black and white magic, left-hand path and
right-hand path, if properly understood, do not infer subjective moral
qualities of good and evil. They focus instead on more pragmatic aspects of
actual method and objective. To say that one is a black magician or a white
magician does not tell us anything about what the magician actually does, it