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

themselves through a complex system of bodily disciplines, including sexual
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congress. The female initiate strives to more fully become the vehicle of the
Feminine Daemonic. In effect, she is at once the priestess of shakti, the
intermediary between this sacred power and the world of visible appearances,
as well as an incarnation of the multiformed Goddess Shakti herself.
It is important to point out early in our survey that this feminine
principle exalted in the left-hand path is not the social role of woman as selfsacrificing
passive wife and fertile mother figure honored by conventional
religions. But neither does the Vama Marga comply with a contemporary
feminist model of reality that considers all women to be victimized saints and
all men to be lecherous demons. Although shakti harkens back to the now
suppressed archaic understanding of essential woman as holy warrioress,
divine huntress, and sacred whore or hierodule, the feminine principle sought
by left-hand path initiates ultimately transcends woman as a natural
phenomenon altogether, venturing into the non-natural shadow side of her
power.
3.) Initiation through the deliberate violation of deep-seated external
social and internal personal taboos, the individual separation from tribal
normative values, and the radical inversion of convention and orthodoxy
of every kind.
A traditional proverb of the Tantric Vama Marga sums this principle up
succinctly: "Through the very deed through which humans for hundreds of
millions of kalpas burn in hell, through exactly that deed is the Yogi
liberated." This left-hand path method of deliberate inversion is known as
viparit karani, or opposite-doing.
As George Orwell wrote in his 1984, "Orthodoxy means not
thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." In this sense,
the left-hand path represents deliberate heresy against the dominant culture of
the practitioner (whatever that culture maybe), a breaking of sleepwalking
orthodoxy in favor of a fully conscious state of wide awake being. Left-hand
path initiation, however, cannot be limited to a merely intellectual break with
the herd-animal man. As the proverb above makes clear, these transgressions
must be deeds, physical actions, taken in the real world to truly effect selftransformation.
It is not only what the left-hand path initiate thinks that
situates him or her in the sinister current; it is what he or she does. The lefthand
path is a way of action, not intellectual contemplation, or worse yet,
reading about action.
4.) Essentially elitist, in that it must be chosen, is not suited for all
dispositions and does not come naturally. It is directed to the individual
consciousness, unrelated to collective identity as a social creature or a
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being subject to divine or natural law. Although the modern world is
based on democratic notions of full disclosure to all, the sinister current,
wherever it has manifested, is based on the proposition that some things
can only be communicated to certain individuals, at the right time, and
under the right circumstances.
The left-hand path is closed to the common man and woman, who is
regarded as little more than a herd-animal (Sanskrit pashu). The sinister
current is considered fit only for the temperament of the heroic warrior
(Sanskrit vira) or divine (Sanskrit divya) individual. Initiation on the lefthand
path always begins with an understanding that all human beings are
born into nature as herd-animals. The ultimate left-hand path goal of
Awakening (Sanskrit Bodhana) occurs through exerting a rigorous effort
against the innate low level of consciousness, (Supta, or sleep) which is
regarded as the natural condition of the human animal.
This awakening is realized through a discipline of mental and
physical control, sexual rites, taboo-breaking and exaltation of the Feminine