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

earlier ideas are illuminating. Writing of the left-hand path doctrine in
which the liberated adept of the Vira and Divya level of initiation is said to
have risen above good and evil (Dharma and Adharma), Avalon observes
that such initiates are called Svechacari "whose way is Svechacara or `do
as you will—. He notes that "Similar doctrine and practices in Europe are
there called Antinomianism." However, Avalon carefully explains why
Antinomianism is an inaccurate description of the left-hand path's
overcoming of social conditioning, commenting that
"I spoke of Antinomian Doctrine and Practice, and of some Shakta theories
and rituals which have been supposed to be instances of it. This word,
however, requires explanation, or it may (I have since thought) lead to error
in the present connection. There is always danger in applying Western terms
to facts of Eastern life. Antinomianism is the name for heretical theories and
practices which have arisen in Christian Europe. In short, the term, as
generally understood, has a meaning in reference to Christianity, namely,
contrary or opposed to Law, which here is the Judaic law as adopted and
modified by that religion."
In his insistence on using words with mantric precision, rather than
according to arbitrary intellectual fads and fashions, Avalon's pioneering
scholarship on the Vama Marga still stands head and shoulders above many
modern attempts to make the mysteries of the left-hand path intelligible.
P. B. Randolph – Forgotten Father Of Modern Sex Magic
Although the books of Sellon, Wilkins, Blavatsky, and Avalon provided the
West with its first inklings of understanding (and misunderstanding)
concerning the left-hand path system of sexual illumination, it took many
decades before the actual methods of left-handed Tantra were practiced in
Europe. Long before the 1960s counterculture's interest in Eastern
mysticism collided with the sexual revolution – a cross-pollination that
brought some aspects of the Vama Marga to youthful seekers – a separate
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stream of sex magic began to form in the West. The origins of this variation
of the sinister current could not be traced back to the ancient goddess cult of
Mother India, but to the combustible energies of post-Civil War America.
By far the most important nineteenth century sex magician, and
perhaps the first to describe himself with that term, was the American occult
utopian, Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825—1875). Plagued by depression all
his life, he committed suicide at the age of fifty in the same year that
Madame Blavatsky founded her Theosophical Society, and in which Aleister
Crowley was born. According to the Russian Satanist Maria de Naglowska,
who later became entwined in Randolph's teachings, the true cause of
Randolph's death was a curse placed on him by Madame Blavatsky herself,
Naglowska, a sex magician herself, claimed that Blavatsky was angered at
Randolph for breaking the unspoken law that forbids revealing the secrets of
sex magic to the profane. This tale typifies the kind of melodramatic rumors
that swirl around the known facts of Randolph's existence.
His occult writings, and perhaps unwritten methods that were never
put to paper, had a decisive influence on Blavatsky, Reuss, Crowley and the
German magician Franz Bardon alike. Randolph's ideas, especially his
utterly unique claim to be the possessor of a hidden body of knowledge he
called the "Anseiratic Mysteries", also seem to have been adapted without
credit by the spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. So we can say that this now
largely forgotten magician originated many of the key concepts later
publicized by the most significant figures of the Western occult revival.
Here, we will concern ourselves largely with Randolph's sex-magical
practices, which exhibit more than a passing resemblance to some left-hand
path principles.
The son of a wealthy Virginian medical doctor and a mulatto
woman who may (or may not) have been of French-Malagasay descent,