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

Ishtar and Astarte – manifold forms of the goddess related to the opposing
but connected poles of extreme sexual power and destructive force.
This connection with Shiva/Shakti's ghastlier visage lends the Aghori
a decidedly macabre character – they dwell in cremation grounds, which
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serve as their ritual sites and holy places, and when they are not naked, they
wear the shrouds of corpses. Their hair is deliberately disheveled, like Tara's.
They smear their bodies with the ashes of the cremated, an act of deliberate
pollution which would be strictly taboo for the Brahmin caste. Like the skullbearing
Kapalika from which they very probably descended, the Aghori beg
for food with bowls made from the craniums of human skulls. These ghoulish
begging bowls also serve as the Aghori's dinner plates – nourishment for life
taken from death.
The Aghori pursue the essential Tantric left-hand path teaching of the
absolute identity of opposites. For them, the same things condemned as
utterly impure by conventional standards are to be made sacred – taboo is
viscerally transcended and revealed to be illusory, an initiatory lesson leading
to the god-like separation and liberation from the norms restricting the pashu.
The desired result of Aghoric left-hand practice is the attainment of a
transhuman impartiality to the phenomena of Shakti's maya. The
confrontation of inner demons, fears and terrors is an important aspect of
Aghoric left-hand path initiation, which often lead the Aghori to pursue
places of solitude from human society, such as cremation grounds, caves, and
isolated jungles.
The Aghori are probably most notorious for their own singular
celebration of Panchamakara, a variant of the Five M's observance that far
surpasses in transgression the secret rite we have already described. The
matsya (fish), mamsha (meat), madya (wine), mudra (cereal), and maithuna
(ritual coitus) central to other left-hand path rites of initiation are replaced by
the Aghori with another list of prohibited "M" elements. The Aghora Tantrics
make a sacrament of ritual necrophagia by cannibalistically devouring human
rather than animal meat (mamsha), specifically the flesh of human corpses at
the cremation grounds. Although the concept of sacred cannibalism is
probably one of the most startling features of traditional left-hand practice, it
should be remembered that even the Catholic rite of Mass, with its
ceremonial consumption of the "flesh and blood" of Christ is only a symbolic
recreation of the same general idea.
Along with wine and other intoxicants, the Aghori adept drinks
human blood (medha) and human urine (meha). Coprophagia or the
consumption of human excrement (mala) rounds out a sacralised meal that is
concluded with mehana, a word that can be taken to mean penis or semen.
None of these ritual violations of taboo are motivated by the same
instincts that might inspire the contemporary profane urine, shit or blood
enthusiast to partake of his or her particular fetish. Above and beyond the
considerable release of magical energy freed by these actions, the Aghoric
goal is to overcome all sense of conditioned fear or disgust obstructing the
initiate's awareness, reaching a state of complete neutrality towards all
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manifestations of shakti-maya. In many cases, the consumption of such
traditionally impure substances as human urine, blood, feces, and flesh is
usually confined to a one-time breakthrough in consciousness; to repeatedly
break these taboos once a transcendent insight has been gained through their
ritual enactment would be senseless from an initiatory perspective. Other
Aghoris continue these practices for specific magical purposes unrelated to
the initial transgression of taboo.
One fairly common Buddhist practice in Tibet reveals an Aghori
influence. The initiate is compelled to visualize the drinking of five fluids:
excrement, brains, semen, blood, and urine, which are alchemically