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

notorious for his insatiable sexuality and his occasional transformation into
feminine form – we find that the back, especially the spinal column, is
thought to be under Set's control. The mystical Egyptologist Isha de Lubicz
described "Sethian power" as an "active power of the fire whose channel is
the vertebral column ... That is why the back is said to belong to Seth."
Similarly, the uraeus serpent depicted uncoiling from the god-like Egyptian
pharaoh's double crown is practically indistinguishable from much later
Indian drawings of the awakened Kundalini fire serpent rising from the
initiate's crown chakra.
These Egyptian hints of an awareness of Kundalini on the African
continent are supported by magical activities of the present-day !Kung, a
tribe of the Kalahari Desert. (The ! in !Kung is pronounced as a click of the
tongue.) The !Kung hunter-gatherers describe a mechanism of ecstatic trance
experience achieved primarily though ritual dance that conforms strikingly
with the Indian Tantric model of kundalini, although there has never been
any known exchange between the two cultures.
In ancient Greece, the orgiastic cult of the wine god Dionysus, which
actually originated in Crete, is rich with Kundalini-like symbolism, providing
us with evidence of a once vibrant tradition of the Feminine Daemonic in
pre-Christian Europe. The deity of the mostly female Dionysian cult was a
divine androgyne. Dionysus, born within nature as a boy, is transformed
through a non-natural magical process into a female, finally becoming a god
integrating both genders – a narrative that mirrors the phases of Kundalini.
Born with the auspicious female signs of horns on his head (symbolising the
shape of the womb and the feminine crescent moon but later demonized into
the Devil's horns) and depicted with a crown of archetypically Kundalinic
serpents, the child Dionysus was torn apart by the monstrous Titans, and
boiled in a cauldron.
The goddess Rhea, sometimes depicted as a Kundalinic dragon,
reassembles him, and he is raised as a girl. This provides him with the
serpentine shakti power of femininity, although he is sexually irresistible to
his raving cult of maenads. The destruction of Dionysus and his recreation as
a borderline androgynous entity is reminiscent of kundalini, in which the
initiate tears himself apart psychically only to remanifest as a goddess, just as
it resembles the initiatory ordeal of the shaman who magically "dies" to be
reborn as a woman to gain feminine magical power. The followers of
Dionysus were primarily women, transported into an atavastic state of being
through sexual excess. In the genuinely patriarchal culture of classical
Greece, such behavior on the part of women was generally regarded as an
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anti-social violation of woman's established role as obedient household
prisoner.
Rhea, who supernaturally transforms Dionysus from male to female,
is a form of the goddess Cybele of Asia Minor, the sinister-lunar goddess
whose male followers ritually castrated themselves during altered states of
consciousness in ecstatic initiatory rites. This drastic measure served the
same purpose as kundalini, the awakening of female magical power in the
male votary. The rite of self-castration was a mandatory phase of initiation
into the priesthood of Cybele; once mutilated, Cybele's priests donned female
clothing and adopted female hair length as outer symbols of their inner
metamorphosis.
Such extreme procedures may shock modern sensibilities. But even
the celibacy of the Catholic clergy is in effect a form of initiatory castration,
allowing them to perform their magical rites of transubstantiation, just as the
sexually ambiguous clothing worn by Catholic priests after their ordination
echoes the age-old shamanic adoption of feminine magical power. Even
though these Catholic recognitions of the Feminine Daemonic are based on
severely sublimating the same sexual energies that the left-hand path