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

they say; is soul 'which we gather and eat ...' and when Christ said, 'Except ye
cat my flesh and drink my blood,' and the disciples were disturbed and
replied, 'Who can hear this?' they say the statement was about the dirt [a
euphemism for semen]." According to Epiphanius, the libertine Gnostics
interpreted the Eucharist of Christ's "flesh and blood" literally. He describes
one of the followers of Christ asking his menstruating bride to have sex with
another brother of the sect during a communal gathering. Upon climax, the
male withdraws his penis, and the copulating couple receive the semen on
their own hands rather than allowing it to flow into the vagina, as a sacrificial
offering made to Jesus. "Whenever they go wild for themselves," Epiphanius
reports, "they soil their own hands with their own ejaculated dirt [semen], get
up and pray stark naked with their hands defiled."
We offer this gift, the body of Christ," they intone, referring to the
sacrificed semen. The female's menstrual blood is offered with the words,
"This is the blood of Christ." After these sacrificial prayers, the fluid is
consumed by the couple. This recalls the Tantric left-hand path concept of
ejaculation into the shakti as a sacrifice, and the need to return the spilled
essence back into the body where it serves a psychic function. The
sanctification of menstrual blood is another striking similarity between
Tantric and Gnostic Christian left-hand path practice. The taboo against
menstrual blood, symbol of the dangerous lunar power of the feminine force,
was every bit as pronounced in the Hellenized Middle Eastern areas in which
Gnostic Christianity flourished as it was in the Indian regions where the
Vama Marga celebrated comparable rites. Beneath this Gnostic Christian
sacrificial meal of semen and menstrual blood is surely a variation of a much
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earlier custom of human and animal sacrifice for magical purposes, also
reflected in the literal sacrifice of Christ's body on the cross. Epiphanius
further interprets the coded sexual references in the Gnostic Gospels, which
appear to be written in the same sort of left-hand path "twilight language"
(Sanskrit sandhya-bhasa) used later in the Tantras:
"By 'the outgoing of water' and, 'that will bring forth his fruit,' means the
emission at climax. And its leaf shall not fall off' means 'We do not allow it
[semen] to fall to the ground, but eat it ourselves.... and I am going to omit
most of their proof-texts, lest I do more harm than good by making them
public ... When it says that Rahab put a scarlet thread in her window, this was
not scarlet thread, they tell us, but the female organs, and the scarlet thread
means the menstrual blood., and 'Drink water from your cisterns' means the
same."
Like the Mary Magdalene described in the New Testament, the Old
Testament's Rahab is also a prostitute, suggesting another connection
between the Gnostic tradition of sex magic and sacred prostitution. If
Epiphanius is correct in associating the color scarlet with the vulva of a
magical whore/consort, this symbolism may also come into play in the much
later Apocalyptic description of the "Scarlet Woman ... the mother of
harlots."
Although few occultists are aware of Epiphanius's Penarion, this
obscure early Christian text has actually exerted a strong, if circuitous,
impact on the development of contemporary Western erotic initiation. The
French author Clement de Saint-Marcq specifically cited. The Penarion in
his 1906 essay, The Eucharist, which argues that the true power once
underlying Christianity has been lost due to the organized Church's
replacement of the original Gnostic sexual Mass with the symbolic rite of
wine and wafer. According to de Saint-Marcq: "Saint Epiphanius provides a
complete description of the Eucharist ceremony, but attributes it solely to the
Gnostics, carefully representing it as an aberration abhorrent to all true
Christians. In their gatherings, he said, men and women ate human
reproductive seed, turning to the altar, and saying (to the All Mighty)