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

principle, and Shakti, the female principle. However, exaltation of female
divinity in the world and in one's self (regardless of gender) is the true focus
of the left-hand. path, perhaps expressed most dramatically in kundalini, the
awakening of Shakti within one's own body. We view these exercises as
means to the greater objective of personal attainment of an independent godlike
consciousness in this lifetime, the act of self-deification.
Sorcery
We shall also frequently refer to the magician as a sorcerer or sorceress, one
who practices the art of sorcery. These words – which have come to be
interchangeable with magician or magic – derive from the Latin sortiarius,
one who throws or declares a lot, originally for purposes of divination.
However, through modem usage of the word, the practice of sorcery can be
understood as a more specific type of magic. For our purposes, sorcery is
understood to center on the stratagem of orchestrating a pre-determined
transformation in the world apparently outside of the magician's psyche by
making use of physical objects, words, thought patterns, to effect that change.
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In the case of erotic sorcery, the manipulation of sexual energy obviously
constitutes the principal means of effecting the desired alteration of reality.
One exemplar of sorcery would he the utilization of magic to cast a
spell on another human being. Since we will be concentrating on sexual
sorcery in this volume, perhaps the simplest and most obvious basic instance
of this technique would be the magically inspired creation of a magical
surrogate that represents the object of your lust, a form of sympathetic magic.
The sorcerer performs a magical operation in which willed concentration,
altered state of consciousness and powerful imagination are focused on the
object that serves as a substitute for the person you desire. You essentially
convince yourself, through the controlled and temporary suspension of
ordinary brain function, that the symbolic representation is the individual you
are lusting after. By changing that object and bringing it under the control of
your magically heightened consciousness you are changing – or at least
greatly influencing – the actual person you long for. The advanced sorcerer
can far exceed such simple mechanics in both subtlety and method but the
underlying principle of sorcery is the same no matter how sophisticated the
application.
Since, depending on one's point of view, certain mechanical aspects
of the mind itself may be considered an object outside of the magician's core
self, it may well be that sorcery can include the transformation of the
sorcerer's own mental processes. Granting that truly precise definition can be
blurred through such fine points, we prefer to classify the kind of magic that
aims to change the inner self rather than the outer world – as interconnected
as these may be – as being of an initiatory (rather than a sorcerous)
character.
The ancients generally understood most other forms of magic to fall
under the category of thamatourgia or "wonder-working" from the Greek
thauma = wonder + ergon = work. When the sex magician creates changes
in the inner or outer world that seem to defy the known laws of cause and
effect by transforming the body and psyche through any deliberate alteration
of consciousness, the results must surely seem wondrous and even
miraculous to the non-magician. Thus, thaumaturgy can be used to describe
almost any form of magical operation.
Initiation
Just as we consign magical actions focused on altering the seemingly
external universe as the work of the sorcerer, we designate the more difficult
work of self-modification as initiation, the work of the initiate. Initiation, a
word derived from the Latin initiare, which simply means to enter upon or
to begin, is a word fraught with many unfortunate cultural associations that
need to be dispelled before proceeding. One immediately thinks of being