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

simply the path of evil, whereas the right-hand path was characterized as the
path of good. The vast network of Tantric teaching that gave these terms
their meaning – and which oversteps the very idea of evil and good, as it
does all dualities accepted by the herd-animal – was conveniently ignored
altogether. Not surprisingly, she averred that she and her Theosophical
Society were most decidedly of the right-hand path, which she associated
with the vaguely Rosicrucian notion of a Great White Brotherhood.
According to the good Madame, anyone who didn't support Theosophy – or
was determined to prove her fakery – was of the left hand path, the Black
Brotherhood. Although many orthodox Hindus would probably agree with
her assessment of the left-hand path as "evil", it is unknown where exactly
she picked up this particular bias.
According to Blavatsky, the source of her wisdom, which she
revealed to mankind in her The Secret Doctrine, was Tibet, where she had
supposedly been initiated into an inestimably ancient esoteric teaching.
However, none of her writings indicate anything but the most superficial
knowledge of Tibetan mysticism, a fact betrayed by her ignorant
interpretation of the left-hand path. From the smattering of knowledge she
gathered in her voluminous reading of occult texts, she obviously learned
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that the left-hand path had something to do with sex, and for Blavatsky – at
least in her official writings – sex was unspeakable, a "beastly appetite
which should be starved into submission." (Like so many self-appointed
guardians of morality, Blavatsky's private sex life appears to have been
much more adventurous than her public image of rectitude would suggest).
Theosophical theology, clearly influenced by ascetic rather than libertine
Gnosticism, conveys a general distaste for the fleshly cage in which the soul
is theoretically "imprisoned." Carl Jung once perceptively described
Blavatsky's Theosophy as "pure Gnosticism in Hindu dress." Left-handed
Tantra, as an initiatory doctrine which considers the flesh not as a terrible
prison to be escaped from, but as a temple to be held sacred, could only be
conceived of as anathema by Blavatsky.
In her Theosophical Glossary, she clucks her tongue disapprovingly
at the left-hand path: "the special energy connected with sexual rites and
magical powers – the worst form of black magic or sorcery." Here we find
the first popular equation of the Eastern idea of the left-hand path with the
Western concept of black magic. This untenable synthesis of mutually
exclusive cultural catch-phrases – the former a precise description of a
method, the latter a vague moral judgment – would he embellished upon by
a quarrelsome legion of occultists throughout the twentieth century Through
this process, Blavatsky's uninformed conflation of left-hand path with black
magic would become the norm among the denizens of the occult subculture.
As part of her elaborate, well-nigh Lovecraftian science fiction
cosmogony, Blavatsky also taught that the "immoral" left-hand path was
actually a degenerate relic of a. decadent "root-race" that had originated in
the lost continent of Atlantis. This theory indicates just how far afield the
Western occult understanding of the left-hand path had strayed from the real
thing as practiced in Asia. For Blavatsky, whose esoteric theories of
evolution were both a precursor of and a direct influence on the lunatic
fringe of National Socialism, the left-hand path's depraved origins in an
antediluvian lesser branch of humanity was a damning indictment indeed.
As fanciful as it is, the Theosophical association of left-hand path sexual
magic with a supposedly inferior racial strain emulates Hindu orthodoxy,
which as we have seen, condemns the Vama Marga as a hideous sex cult
originating among the lower castes.
Arthur Avalon Almost Gets It Right
If Blavatsky was the chief Western architect of the "left-hand path = evil"
equation, her simplistic distortions were balanced by the far more accurate