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

"patriarchal" the male king's magical power to rule is traditionally bestowed
by a supernatural female being, a universal manifestation of shakti. The
Celtic tale of the mysterious Lady of the Lake who provides King Arthur
with Excalibur, the sword of sovereignty, is one familiar example of the
magical female power behind the throne. Other Celtic myths are less
ambiguous about the sexual nature of the power exchange – many a
legendary Irish king is compelled to have sex with a local feminine
elemental or goddess who grants the royal right to rule the land only through
erotic transmission. Like any contact with suprahuman entities, these sexual
coronation rites were often presented as a possibly dangerous ordeal which
only the destined king could survive. This shakti archetype is also embodied
in a less supernatural form in Arthur's mortal queen Guiniviere, whose
sexual abandonment of the king in favor of the knight Lancelot heralds the
spiritual and physical downfall of his kingdom, Camelot. Arthur's magical
advisor, the immortal wizard Merlin, also has his own shakti in the guise of
his half-sister, the demi-human sorceress Morgan La Faye. The elusive
object for which Arthur's knights so ardently seek – the Grail – is yet
another icon of the shakti- yoni, symbolized as a bottomless cup from which
flows hidden wisdom.
An understanding of a masculinity thats strength is expressed
through stillness and contemplation and a violently active femininity clashes
so dramatically with Western stereotypes of the aggressive male and the
submissive female that this has often proven to be one of the most difficult
left-hand path tenets for Westerners to grasp. The male principle as
understood in the sinister current – and actualized during the sexual rite –
draws its power from the containment of inner force, embodied in the
demonstrable control of both the biological and psychic mechanisms. The
common left-hand path practice of restraining the ejaculation during orgasm
is perhaps the clearest example of masculine stillness and self-containment.
Masculine control over the self is an expression of order in the universe.
This order is a static, immovable energy complemented by the female's
dynamic, sinuous display of ceaseless movement, a demonstration of
Shakti's vital chaotic energy.
In the later manifestation of Tantricism in the Buddhist Mahayana
school, these polarities are reversed; the male is the active, while the female
is quiescent. Our application of the left-hand path tends to favor the older
Hindu model. Those familiar with Taoist Chinese metaphysics will see the
resemblance of this dual Godhead to female, dark yin and male, light yang,
polarities eternally different but magnetically drawn to each other. By
whatever name, these are the energies that left-hand path sex magicians work
with.
This sinister current desire to bring the opposites of male and
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female together into magical fusion, thus creating a third god-like entity, is
also touched upon within a non-Tantric context in the Symposium of Plato.
In that work, Aristophanes relates the legend that women and men are
actually separated halves of what were originally wholes in some primordial
epoch. These hermaphroditic early humans rebelled against the rulership of
the father god Zeus, and were punished for their hubris by being split into
two genders. This bisection created the never entirely fulfilled longing of
man and woman to return to the original condition through sexual congress
with his or her lost other half. It has been speculated that many of Plato's
symbolic tales, which were clearly intended to convey esoteric truths rather
than actual history, were learned from the mystery cults of Ancient Greece.
The sexual fusion of opposites symbolized in the erotic opposites of
Shiva and Shakti is not only realized through sexual rites; as we shall see
later, the techniques of kundalini seek to create this fusion within the
individual adept's body.