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

god's entourage, who joined in with the orgiastic celebration. These furious
orgies, held nocturnally in the wilderness on the outskirts of towns and cities,
resemble much later accounts of the licentious witch's sabbath that haunted
the imagination of later European history with such murderous results.
The archetype of the "wild woman" so powerfully embodied by the
maenad is almost entirely neglected by modern female magicians,
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conditioned as they are to more restrained models of female behavior.
Nevertheless, the maenad offers an undeniable power for female magicians
to tap into, a dark and forbidden aspect of the Feminine Daemonic that
connects to an atavistic source of initiation of especial application to the
sinister current. Women interested in experimenting with the Dionysian
mysteries should note that the female participants in these orgia traditionally
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abstained from sex for nine
days before the rites began, so
that their frenzy would he all
the greater once they entered
into ritual intercourse.
Drawing from the
ferocity of the maenads – also
known in antiquity as "the
bitches of the Dionysia" – has
been found particularly useful
for the modern sexual
domina, especially in the
consensual ritual "rape" of
male or female submissives.
The ecstatic dance –
sometimes leading to acts of
divination or prophecy – was
an almost universal
characteristic of the maenad,
a physical expression that can
still be used to create a state
of trance for the modern
magician. Of equal use to the
male sex magician is the icon
of the eternally erect satyrs
that followed in the
Bacchanalian train, and
Dionysus himself, whose
magical origins we have
already discussed in our
inquiry into Kundalini.
Although the
Bacchanalian orgia were eyed
with some suspicion by the
Romans as a
"foreign cult", they were at
first officially authorized in
southern Italy, despite their
excesses. It would appear that
the Roman Bacchanalia
became an even more violent
affair than the Greek
Dionysia. By the time these
orgiastic mysteries reached