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

the male, allowing him to remanifest on a higher level of evolution.
The anonymous author of the tale of Gilgamesh also tells us that the
savage Enkidu is transfigured into a being "like unto a god" through the
shakti-power emanated via Samhat's "art of the woman." An important part
of this rite is the courtesan's "anointing Enkidu with fragrant oil." 2,500 years
before the Christian era began, we see a prefiguration of the sacred prostitute
Mary Magdalene's anointing of the god-man Christ with consecrated oil, a
sexual laying on of hands that causes the power of the feminine holy spirit,
the Sophia, to descend into the body of the magus. Like Samhat, the earliest
known representative of their sorority, the whores of Babylon and Sumer laid
claim to a similar initiatory ability.
The importance of sacred prostitution to Babylon can be attributed to
the fact that Mesopotamian culture's eldest and most prominent female
divinity, the Queen of Heaven, was worshipped as the patroness of all
prostitutes, both sacred and profane, female and male. This complex deity,
known to the Sumerians as manna, and the Babylonians as Ishtar, was also
venerated in other cultures as Astarte, among countless other regional
variations. As a shakti conducive to workings of the sinister current, this
goddess, still potent among Western left-hand path magicians today after
thousands of years, has few peers.
In a very early writing, a priestess known as Enheduanna refers to manna as
the mother of harlots. In hymns sung in her honor, Ishtar describes her temple
as a "tavern"; then, as now, the traditional hunting ground for whores. Some
images portray her as a prostitute leaning out of a window looking for
customers. Her temple priestesses were known as the ishtaritu, in honor of
her, and as an indication that they were charged to embody her in the sexual
rites of sacrament celebrated in her temples.
Inanna is the erotic goddess par excellence, the wild, unrestrained
side of female sexual power as a divine force in and of itself. Despite the
adoration in which she was held by all quarters of Sumerian society, a culture
characterized by the strict rule of law, and dominated by the importance of
the family and the marriage contract, Innana is very much a divinity outside
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the established societal standards. In none of her myths is she depicted as a
mother or a wife; the intensity of this manifestation of Shakti exceeds the
ownership of another or acquiescence to the social niceties such roles would
entail. "Like the demons," Volkert Haas has written of Ishtar in his study of
Hittite magic, "she has no mother, husband or children." In this regard, she is
the hypostasis of extramarital sex, prostitution and all acts of lust occurring
outside the rule of law. Diane Wolkstein, a contemporary translator of the
myths of Inanna-Ishtar, has described the goddess as "the place where not all
energies have been tamed or ordered."
And yet, every year, the kings of Sumer, and later of Babylon, were
obliged to assure the vigor of their royal authority and of the fertility of the
land by engaging in a publicly celebrated act of sexual magic with a priestess
representing this wild sexual entity. The High Priestess of the ishtaritu would
climb the zigurrat as the incarnation of the goddess; an altar-bed, "the bed of
kingship and queenship", awaited her in a specially appointed chamber.
There, she took the sovereign into the liminal realm of what has been
described as "the holy loins" or "her wondrous vulva", magically bestowing
the power of the Queen of Heaven upon the King of Earth in a hieros gamos,
a sacred wedding.
In another public religious ceremony dedicated to Inanna, we see the
symbolism of the left-hand path expressed in an hermaphroditic rite. Women
devotees in these processions wore masculine attire on the right side of their
bodies, while men wore feminine garb on their left sides, reflecting a pre-
Tantric association of gender with the energies of right and left. This ritual