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

current.
Nothing could be further from the truth; the orthodoxies and mass
religious festivals of other times – no matter how much they have fallen into
current disfavor – are as useless to the left-hand path magician's goals as the
prevailing popular religious practices of our own epoch. The left-hand path
cannot be defined as a revival of pagan practices for their own sake, as is so
commonly assumed.
Therefore, the magical application of the orgy to the sinister current
must first be approached by understanding how fundamentally the
formalized, institutional nature of the sacred orgiastic festivals of the pre-
Christian era differ from the individual needs of the left-hand path magician.
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There are, to be sure, certain facets of the ancient religious orgy that can be
applied to modern left-hand magical praxis, and a brief consideration of these
elements is worth our while before examining the significance of the magical
orgy today. Since we have already examined the orgy as it manifests in the
more extreme sects of the Tantric left-hand path, a comparison with group
sex magic in the Graeco-Roman classical world will he instructive.
The ancient orgia, for the most part, were carefully designed and
proscribed collective actions that temporarily allowed the community's erotic
desires to operate without license for a limited period of time, usually under
the patronage of a specific god or goddess. Ancient Rome hosted three of the
most famous of these great orgiastic festivals, the Saturnalia, the Lupercalia,
and the Bacchanalia. During the Saturnalia – dedicated to the agricultural god
of time Saturn – social constraints were momentarily dissolved, and
unlimited sexual activity crossing the socially defined boundaries of class and
marriage was allowed during the holiday, a promiscuous revelry fueled by
officially sanctioned intoxication. By allowing normally sober and sexually
restrained citizens this brief period of libidinous abandon, a collective
catharsis was permitted on a sacred level.
Saturnalia
The celebrants of the Saturnalia considered that they had momentarily
returned to that primordial era before Saturn had imposed the laws of time, a
period preceding the establishment of human law and morals. Only under
these special ritual conditions were they allowed to break with the civil and
religious code of the community. They were just as forcefully required to
return to those same restrictions when this period "outside time" had
terminated.
The Saturnalian orgy symbolically cleansed the minds of the
community, allowing them to return to their profane lives refreshed by a
collective blowing-off of steam thought to be a healthy and necessary release
of pent-up sexual energies. In upholding the religious tradition of the
Saturnalia, the Roman establishment was not in any sense celebrating the
individuating and liberating aspect of erotic metaphysics which are so crucial
to the sinister current. Quite the opposite; the organized civic-religious orgy
merely provided an escape valve that allowed its sated participants to
uncomplainingly return to the restraints of their ordinary existences as social
creatures after a short-lived sexual vacation from the monotonous grind of
everyday life. A modern-day equivalent might he the businessmen's
convention in which normally staid husbands and family men are expected to
temporarily indulge themselves in drunken sex-sprees with the local
prostitutes, only to return once again to their customarily regulated existence
when the convention has ended.
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There were certain disruptions of social role common to the
Saturnalia that might be deemed as being superficially relevant to the lefthand
path practice of opposite-doing. For instance, the relations between
masters and slaves, so important to Roman society, were temporarily