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

circumstances for a chosen elite of initiates thought capable to exercise
discipline, some branches of Gnostic Christianity did allow for advanced.
adepts to perform sexual rites. The best known of these was the Sacrament
of the Bridal Chamber, an operation of erotic mysticism in which the
ecstatic love of Sophia was enjoyed within the physical vehicles of a
couple's sexually united bodies. However, impregnation had to be avoided at
all costs, lest more unwary souls be trapped in the flesh. This very often led
the Gnostic couple to perform coitus interruptus, as well as anal or oral sex,
to prevent semen from being ejaculated into the vagina. (A much later
Gnostic sect, the Bogomils, operating in Eastern Europe, were particularly
associated with anal intercourse – the word "buggery" is a distorted form of
"Bogomil.") How ironic then that Christians today should base their identity
so firmly in the spawning of families and the condemnation of "unnatural"
sex practices – the polar opposite of the original Gnostic strain of
Christianity.
Such non-procreative practices led the later ascetic branches of
Christianity to condemn the libertine Gnostic sects as perverse debauchees,
sexual criminals who broke the natural law decreeing that sexual energy
should only be applied to the edict commanding men and women to "be
fruitful and multiply" Whenever we find erotic power channeled from the
natural, mortal world into the daemonic, immortal plane of being, we are
dealing with the sinister current. The eminent Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels,
describing the Sacrament of the Bridal Chamber in her essay "Adam and
Eve, Christ and the Church; A Survey of Second Century Controversies
Concerning Marriage" writes that those "who have experienced the 'mystery
of the syzygies' are enjoined to enact marital intercourse in ways that
express their spiritual, psychic and bodily integration, celebrating the act as
a symbol of the divine pleromic harmony. But those who remain uninitiated
are to refrain from sexual intercourse."
If Pagels is correct, Gnostic Christianity may well have experienced
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an eventual schism between a small, initiated core that practiced sexual rites
for self-deification and a larger, uninitiated mainstream that were celibate
and ascetic – the left-hand path and right-hand of Christianity. Obviously,
right-hand path Christianity has flourished in the form of the sin-obsessed
exoteric face of the religion. The esoteric sinister current of Christ's teaching
must be actively searched for by initiates, possibly resurfacing historically
now and again in such streams as the Templar heresy and the Grail Quest.
In their desire to avoid ejaculation and its consequences, it appears
that Gnostic Christian sex magicians also developed semen retention
techniques. Just as Indian left-hand path adepts refer to the reversal of semen
to the magical act of "causing the sacred river Ganges to flow backwards",
Middle Eastern Gnostics cryptically described the science of "reversing the
mighty river Jordan." (The Jordan, like the Ganges, was regarded as a holy
body of water.)
This practice bears some resemblance to the later Tantric methods,
although the motivation was quite different. Nevertheless, it can be
presumed that the physiological result of such exertions must have created
the same ecstatic altered states of consciousness that left-hand path Tantrikas
experience through extended, non-ejaculatory full-body orgasm. Whatever
the outward form of the religious/cultural motivation for these sexual
modifications, the result – a prolonged state of neurophysical bliss allowing
for transcendent awareness – is simply an inbuilt biological phenomenon
evident in all time periods. Another left-hand path phenomenon at work here
is the disruption of the normal, natural flow of vital erotic energy outwards
from the penis, where it is dissipated in transient organic processes. By
deliberately willing this creative energy upwards towards the brain, sexual
power becomes a tool of "supernatural" self-transformation rather than