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

islands. The same sexual activities accorded sacred status in that region are
strictly criminalised in the West. In most Muslim countries, the drinking of
alcohol is taboo, while hashish, outlawed in many Western nations, is readily
available. Dietary taboos are some of the strongest. In several Asian lands,
human consumption of dogs is considered a delicacy, although few Westerners
would break this taboo. Lest the reader get too self-righteous about this one, it
should be remembered that the Western habit of consuming cows is regarded
as equally offensive by many Hindus, for whom the cow is a sacred animal.
The once Papally ordained Catholic prohibition against eating meat on Fridays
in symbolic honor of the dead meat of Christ's body probably wouldn't work up
much useful energy these days but it typifies religious/social restrictions on
diet.
Menstruating women are subject to taboo and tribal shunning in many parts of
the world, and even in the "civilized" West, a fairly prevalent unspoken taboo
discourages many men from having sex with a menstruating woman. Indeed,
ritual consumption of menstrual blood plays its part among many left-handed
Tantric sects. Vedic Hindus of the so-called pashu disposition are traditionally
only allowed to have sex – even with their spouse(s) – once a month, from the
fourth or fifth to the fifteenth day after the menses. Otherwise, they are
expected to refrain from sex altogether. The vira of the left-hand path is
permitted to break this taboo, having ritually broken with convention and
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seeking to reconstitute himself as a divine being operating outside the laws
and restrictions of man.
Death is fraught with a myriad of culturally variant taboos. In some
religious traditions, displaying a photograph of the deceased for a proscribed
time period after the death is the gravest of taboos. The presence of a corpse
in an unembalmed state is a taboo in Occidental culture; the West prefers to
confront the physical reality of death at the safe remove allowed by sanitized
preparation at a mortuary.
In this brief survey of taboo, we have yet to mention the so-called
sexual "perversions" and "deviations" that are welcome pleasures for some
but would cause unspeakable revulsion for others. Not only is there no such
thing as normal sexuality, definitions of normality are almost always
confined by a local cultural bias that blocks out facts uncomfortable to
territorial reality. For instance, most Westerners would probably consider
monogamy to be the normal state of sexual relations. In fact, anthropologist
Melvin Konner tells us in The Tangled Wing that monogamy is the norm in
only 16 percent of the approximately 849 human societies known to
ethnography. Polygamy is much more common, being the customary mode in
83 percent of societies. (Polyandry, the marriage of one woman to more than
one man, is represented in only the remaining 1 percent of the 849 societies.)
All over the world, among poor families living in one-room
dwellings, it's entirely commonplace for couples to have sexual relations in
the presence of their parents, siblings and children. Among the Western
Euro-American middle-class, however, sex in such a communal environment
would be considered an unthinkable taboo, as Freud's absurd theory that
children accidentally viewing their parents fucking inevitably leads to a
"primal trauma" makes evident.
Particularly when it comes to the left-hand path violation of erotic
taboo in the modern West, the vast diversity of "normal" sexual behavior
accepted makes it impossible to specify any particular regimen of taboobreaking.
You must be self-aware enough to know how far you must go in
what areas to transcend your present state of being. Ultimately, as with the
deliberate inversion of Viparit Karani, each individual magician must target
his or her own taboo threshold to go beyond. As with all of the above
examples of taboo, it is never the taboo itself that possesses magical power.
Rather, it's the individual psychological significance such a transgression