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

Esau and Jacob. Is this a seemly thing or not?"' Jesus is unequivocal in his
condemnation of the practice: "This sin surpasses every sin and every
iniquity. Men of this kind will be taken immediately to the outer darkness,
and will not be returned again into this sphere."
And yet, despite this harsh pronouncement, other sources from
roughly the same time period indicate that some early Christians identified
Jesus and Mary Magdalene with exactly this specific "sinful" practice. In
The Woman Jesus Loved, the Finnish scholar Antti Marjanen even suggests
that the severity of the above passage may have been written with the public
relations motive of disassociating Christ's original disciples from the sexmagical
practices their opponents frequently accused them of teaching.
Another early Christian text comments convincingly on the
existence of a Christian sex magic tradition imbued with striking parallels to
left-hand path use of sperm and menstrual blood. The Panarion, written by
Epiphanius, documents what he defines as "libertine sects" centered around
the erotic interaction of Christ and Mary Magdalene. Epiphanius notes
apprehensively that the female principle plays an particularly crucial role in
the Gnostic circles his polemic is aimed against, pointing out with
disapproval that libertine Christians name their Gospels after the names of
women, such as Eve or Mary Magdalene. In Panarion, Epiphanius refers to
a holy book called Great Questions Of Mary, which describes how Christ
once brought Mary Magdalene to a mountain to impart a private instruction
to her which was not vouchsafed to his other students. The common
mythological device of being brought to a high mountain is a symbol of
ascending to an altered state of consciousness, entering the realm of divine
existence.
Of this cult, Epiphanius wrote:
And they too have many books. .. about the Ialdobaoth ... and in the name
of Seth ... and they have ventured to compose other Gospels in the name of
the disciples, and are not ashamed to say that our Saviour and Lord himself,
Jesus Christ, revealed this obscenity.... they suggest that he revealed it to her
after taking her aside on the mountain, praying, producing a woman from his
side, beginning to have intercourse with her, and then partaking of his
emission, if you please, to show that 'Thus we must do, that we may live.'
And when Mary was alarmed and fell to the ground, he raised her up and
said to her '0 thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?'
That Christ chooses to share this mystery with Mary alone is yet another
indication of the unique place she holds in his circle. The reference to the
"name of Seth" associated with these libertine teachings is a further
suggestion that Jesus may have been one of the magicians who invoked the
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deity Seth-Typhon, a god long associated with sexual sorcery. The practice
of ritualized copulation followed by consumption of the sexual fluids
described here is, of course, analogous to the ingestion of post-coital semen
and female amrita that we have already observed taking place within the
Vama Marga tradition. In both sinister Tantra or Gnostic libertinism, the
celebrants do not swallow the sexual elixir to integrate some physical
property contained in the fluid but to devour magical energies of which the
physical substance is only an outer form. Tantrics seek to imbibe the
essential shiva/shakti power. Gnostics believed that drinking the sperm or
menstrual blood would prevent souls from being born, delivering the unborn
beings contained in the seed to the pleroma, a spiritual realm above the
control of the Archon, the tyrannical rulers of the sphere of matter. In both
cases, the willed transformation of a natural, mortal substance into an
immortal, psychic force is essentially left-hand path.
Elsewhere in The Panarion, Epiphanius writes of the unnamed sect,
which may be the Naasenes: "They say that the flesh must perish and cannot
be raised, but belongs to the Archon, but the power in the menses and semen,