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

left-hand path practices were considerably less sensational and ill-informed
than many later European descriptions, which almost universally condemned
the Vama Marga as the blackest of the supposedly degraded heathen customs
of a savage people. Sellon's work was an improvement over the sensational
rumors Westerners had previously been exposed to, which ignorantly
connected the secret rites of Tantra with human sacrifice and the murderous
depredations of the Thuggee cult of stranglers.
In April of 1866, having just made his curious contribution to
knowledge of the left-hand path, the 48-year old Sellon shot himself to death
in a London hotel. His little-known books, published only ten years before
the advent of the Western magical revival, are some of the first to suggest
that the very roots of all esoteric religions, mystery cults, and mystical
symbolism are based on a hidden sexual gnosis thats only uninterrupted
surviving tradition is the Tantric left-hand path. Sellon's ideas, although
crudely presented, deserve credit as presaging the more sophisticated
Western sex-magical philosophies of such later figures as Randolph, Reuss,
Crowley, Parsons, Evola, and Grant.
British awareness of the left-hand path, first established by a
pornographer, was expanded upon by the writings of a priest. The Calcuttabased
Christian missionary W. J. Wilkins, unlike many of his more zealous
colleagues in conversion, did not view the teeming sects of India as so many
bugs to be stamped out for the Lord. In his Hindu Mythology, Vedic And
Puranic, published in London in 1882, Wilkins provided his readers with a
sober, objective account of the basic Tantric philosophy and practice, not
shying away from the sinister current. Inevitably, a few Europeans living in
India were actually initiated into the circle of the left-hand path, but these
first legitimate "white Tantrikas" did little to introduce the authentic practice
they had learned to the West. As is so often the case in the history of ideas,
the true popularization of the left-hand path outside the sub-continent was
facilitated by individuals who barely understood the concept – in this
instance, the cranky amalgamation of genuine wisdom, starry-eyed
romanticism and confidence game that constituted the modern occult
resurgence.
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Madame Blavatsky Gets It All Wrong
One of the features that characterized the culture of the nineteenth century
occult revival was the giddy appropriation of exotic metaphysical terms
from non-Western cultures. The Theosophical Society, co-founded in 1875
by the fraudulent Russian spiritualist Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
(1831—1891), was an important agency in this process. Through the
internationally embraced Theosophy movement, which also first popularized
that now odious expression "New Age", half-understood concepts such as
karma, akashic record, mahatma, yogi, chakra, and many more became
common currency among European and American occultists. Among the
hoard of esoteric expressions cited by Blavatsky and her followers were
"Left Hand Path" and "Right Hand Path." (The custom of capitalizing these
words derives from Blavatsky, and was later imitated by Aleister Crowley)
There could hardly have been a worse interpreter of the left-hand
path and right-hand path for Western audiences than Blavatsky, whose
doggedly misguided explanation of the sexual and non-sexual approaches to
Tantra has been the single most influential source of perplexity on the
subject. As first given forth to her followers in her autocratically remitted
books and magazine articles, which she cobbled together from an immense
library of plagiarized sources, and subsequently twisted by others into ever
more erroneous interpretations to the present day, the Blavatskyite version
of the left-and right-hand path remains the most widely accepted in Western
occult circles.
For Blavatsky, it was all quite simple: the left-hand path was