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

student Levi declares to Peter that, "He loved her more than us."
Peter, addressing Mary in the Gospel Of Mary asserts: "Sister, we
183
know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of women."
And in the Gospel Of Philip, Mary Magdalene is dubbed the
"companion of the Saviour."
Only Mary, among all the disciples, is ever called Christ's
"companion", a fact that has perplexed many scholars of these texts, creating
decades of debate on the precise inference. This dispute has been sparked
because the particular Greek word for "companion" used by the anonymous
author of the Gospel Of Philip was commonly used to describe a male's
adulterous sexual partner. Adultery, in the ancient world, consisted of any
sexual relationship outside of wedlock; this original Gnostic notion of Mary
as Christ's adulterous "companion" might have given way to the much later
idea of her as an adulterous prostitute.
Interpreters eager to steer clear of the possibility of a sexually active
Christ have argued that surely Mary was strictly his spiritual companion,
perhaps a poetic metaphor for the Gnostic union of the initiate with the
divine female wisdom, Sophia. This is possible, but as we've observed in so
many left-hand path Tantric texts, the metaphor of the metaphysical union of
spiritual opposites is frequently combined with the physical union of male
and female in sexual rites. Just as dead Shiva, the embodiment of
consciousness, gains his power from copulation with the active Shakti, so
may the early Christians have seen Mary Magdalene "the companion of the
saviour" as the animating female power of the dead, but resurrected, Christ.
Another famously controversial fragment of a quotation in the
Gnostic Gospels concerning Mary's relations with Christ tells us a bit more
about the nature of their companionship: "The saviour loved her more than
all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth."
It is true that among early Christians there existed a ritual kiss
intended to confer spiritual power from one initiate to another, which may
be what is being described here. On the other hand, "kissing" was a
frequently used euphemism for copulation in other texts of that time, just as
"mouth" was a common euphemism for vagina in the religious writings of
antiquity.
These evocative textual allusions that Mary Magdalene may indeed
have been the sex-magical consort of Christ are given further weight by the
historical existence of a Gnostic Christian tradition of sexual ritual. Gnostic
Christians generally encouraged initiates to abstain from sex because it
could lead to the creation of unwanted physical matter in the form of
children. They believed that laldobaoth, a malevolent god thought to have
created the dark world of matter, kept potentially immortal souls imprisoned
through sexual breeding and its perpetuation of human bodies. Ialdabaoth,
the Gnostic "devil", is the same divinity now worshipped as the one, true
God by Christians. Gnostics sought to liberate these trapped souls through
184
the gnosis of Sophia, a liberation with more than a passing resemblance to
the later left-hand path adept's liberation from the cycle of reincarnation
through the jnana (knowledge) of the Great Goddess, Shakti.
The Gnostic Christian's abhorrence of matter is obviously a very
different approach to the body than we have seen in the Indian Vama Marga,
which unreservedly embraces the physical world as a gateway to initiation.
However, despite this significant philosophical discrepancy, the actual
physical practice of Gnostic Christian sex magic is very similar to what we
have already examined in the left-hand path. If the magician Christ's
teaching condemned procreation, like other Gnostic sects, it seems that it did
not forbid sex for spiritual purposes.
Just as the Indian Vama Marga would later allow special sexual