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

is his hidden initiatrix, the female power who grants him his magical
abilities. Mary Magdalene stands below the cross when he endures initiatory
death; it is she who goes to his tomb to perform the rite of anointing the
corpse, and she is also the first disciple to discover that his body has
vanished. Finally, of all his disciples, Christ chooses to reveal his
resurrection to her. If we read this tale as the fragmentary remnant of a
carefully conceived initiatory myth encoded with magical symbolism – rather
than as a historical chronicle of "true" events – Mary Magdalene's prominent
position in the allegory becomes clear.
If the well-established, sanitized icon of Christ as glorified goodytwo
shoes and holy wimp can temporarily be blotted out, a more realistic
image of Jesus the left-hand path heretic may emerge. Viewed from this
perspective, Christ clearly manifests every one of the essential principles of
the left-hand path as enumerated in the first chapter of this book.
Even the Bible, carefully edited to present a respectable image of
Christ, cannot fail to communicate something of his sinister side. Here was a
magician who scandalized tribal elders by violently repudiating all the laws
of orthodoxy and declaring himself a god. He teaches his followers that "the
kingdom of heaven is within you", and consorts with outcast elements of
society. He claims to be self-deified and instructs his students that they can
also become as gods – much like the Tantric bodhisattva.
Although much is now made of Christ's message of love, he also
displays a great deal of divisive and antagonistic behavior, stirring up
trouble in true left-hand path fashion. The harsh tone of the left-hand path
warrior, the force of creative conflict, rings out when he warns "think not
that I am come to send peace upon the earth: I came not to send peace but a
sword. For l am come to set a man at variance against his father." Within the
rigid family-based society of his time, such iconoclasm can be compared to
the Indian left-hand path adept's breaking of caste and Hindu taboo.
John Whiteside Parsons, a twentieth century sex magician who can
be counted among the few pioneers of a genuine Western left-hand path,
recognized in Jesus a "dangerous" kindred spirit. In his 1950 essay Freedom
Is A Two-Edged Sword, Parsons wrote of Christ: "He denied the church,
preaching the personal and interior nature of the kingdom of heaven. He
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denied the authority of the state and the home, preaching the higher
allegiance to individual conscience. Had his philosophy succeeded, it would
have overthrown the Jewish religion and the Roman state. To circumvent
him, it was first necessary to kill him ... and afterwards to subvert his
teachings into another do-as-you-are-told soothing syrup."
Jesus is associated in the Biblical Gospels with several deities that
would have been viewed as "evil" by the Judaic religion he opposes, further
ostracizing him from the clan in the classic left-hand path tradition. Indeed,
the religious authorities specifically charge him with effecting his
thaumaturgy with the demonic aid of Beelzebub, a demonized form of the
Canaanite storm god Baal, often compared to the Egyptian Set. Christ begins
the final phase of his initiatory journey entering Jerusalem mounted on a
stolen jackass, a notoriously stubborn beast commonly interpreted as the
therionthropic symbol of the malevolent deity Seth-Typhon. Seth-Typhon, a
latter-day Hellenic derivation of Egypt's Set, was frequently appealed to by
the magi of the time in their rituals. Many surviving magical papyri reveal
that Seth-Typhon was equated with the Semitic storm god IAO, or Yahweh,
whom Christ is said to have claimed as his "father". Fully in keeping with
the magical practice of his era, Jesus speaks mysterious "mantras" to effect
feats of sorcery. And he maintains a very special – if vaguely defined –
relationship with a woman condemned as a "sinner".
Affirming the importance of Mary Magdalene's prostitution to the
Christ myth, contemporary accounts of Jesus, far from suggesting that he