Essential Principles Of The Left-Hand Path

 

From Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left-Hand Path Sex Magic, by Nikolas Schreck and Zeena Schreck

Essential Principles Of The Left-Hand Path

1) The transformation of human consciousness to divine consciousness via the manipulation of the sexual currents of the physical and subtle bodies through erotic rites.

For the male initiate, this sexual gnosis is traditionally attained with the collaboration of a female consort-initiatrix. The female sexual initiatrix is the presiding source of the left-hand path; the motive energy of the sinister current flows directly from her. During the ritualized sexual act, something more than ordinary intercourse occurs – a magical exchange takes place, a transference of power transmitted through the subtle vehicles of desire, attraction and erotic fusion.

Together, the couple celebrates a cult of ecstasy which has no less an aim than their own self-deification. Something of the crucial importance of sexuality to the left-hand path can be gleaned from the fact that the defining difference between the left-hand path and the far more commonly practiced right-hand path is primarily the emphasis on physical sexuality found in the former, and the absence of same in the latter.

Although the left-hand path focuses much of its attention on the physical interplay of erotic polarities embodied in male and female sexuality, it is concerned with the ecstatic transcendence of all seeming opposites, including good and evil, death and life, darkness and light, flesh and spirit, the beautiful and the hideous, ad infinitum.

2) A sexual exaltation of the female principle of power in the universe, known in Sanskrit as Shakti.

This universal feminine mystique, which we will sometimes refer to in its transcultural aspect as the Feminine Daemonic, is the driving factor for both male and female initiates of the left-hand path. For male magicians, left-hand path initiation includes the attainment of this feminine power within themselves through a complex system of bodily disciplines, including sexual congress. The female initiate strives to more fully become the vehicle of the Feminine Daemonic. In effect, she is at once the priestess of shakti, the intermediary between this sacred power and the world of visible appearances, as well as an incarnation of the multiformed Goddess Shakti herself.

It is important to point out early in our survey that this feminine principle exalted in the left-hand path is not the social role of woman as self- sacrificing passive wife and fertile mother figure honored by conventional religions. But neither does the Vama Marga comply with a contemporary feminist model of reality that considers all women to be victimized saints and all men to be lecherous demons. Although shakti harkens back to the now suppressed archaic understanding of essential woman as holy warrioress, divine huntress, and sacred whore or hierodule, the feminine principle sought by left-hand path initiates ultimately transcends woman as a natural phenomenon altogether, venturing into the non-natural shadow side of her power.

3) Initiation through the deliberate violation of deep-seated external social and internal personal taboos, the individual separation from tribal normative values, and the radical inversion of convention and orthodoxy of every kind.

A traditional proverb of the Tantric Vama Marga sums this principle up succinctly: “Through the very deed through which humans for hundreds of millions of kalpas burn in hell, through exactly that deed is the Yogi liberated.” This left-hand path method of deliberate inversion is known as viparit karani, or opposite-doing.

As George Orwell wrote in his 1984, “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” In this sense, the left-hand path represents deliberate heresy against the dominant culture of the practitioner (whatever that culture maybe), a breaking of sleepwalking orthodoxy in favor of a fully conscious state of wide awake being. Left-hand path initiation, however, cannot be limited to a merely intellectual break with the herd-animal man. As the proverb above makes clear, these transgressions must be deeds, physical actions, taken in the real world to truly effect self- transformation. It is not only what the left-hand path initiate thinks that situates him or her in the sinister current; it is what he or she does. The left- hand path is a way of action, not intellectual contemplation, or worse yet, reading about action.

4) Essentially elitist, in that it must be chosen, is not suited for all dispositions and does not come naturally. It is directed to the individual consciousness, unrelated to collective identity as a social creature or a being subject to divine or natural law. Although the modern world is based on democratic notions of full disclosure to all, the sinister current, wherever it has manifested, is based on the proposition that some things can only be communicated to certain individuals, at the right time, and under the right circumstances.

The left-hand path is closed to the common man and woman, who is regarded as little more than a herd-animal (Sanskrit pashu). The sinister current is considered fit only for the temperament of the heroic warrior (Sanskrit vira) or divine (Sanskrit divya) individual. Initiation on the left- hand path always begins with an understanding that all human beings are born into nature as herd-animals. The ultimate left-hand path goal of Awakening (Sanskrit Bodhana) occurs through exerting a rigorous effort against the innate low level of consciousness, (Supta, or sleep) which is regarded as the natural condition of the human animal.

This awakening is realized through a discipline of mental and physical control, sexual rites, taboo-breaking and exaltation of the Feminine Daemonic, allowing the initiate to sunder the fetters binding the beast. Through this process the Vama Marga adept becomes heroic, that is to say, freed from the conditioning that binds the common human being and experiences reality directly. However, this sought-for coming into being as a “hero” does not mean that the left-hand path initiate seeks the approval or validation of the society he or she lives within. On the contrary, by the time the hero or heroine has crossed all boundaries binding his or her consciousness, it is very likely that those still bound by conventional morality may regard the left-hand path adept as an ignominious villain.

5) A method of initiation that actively embraces this life, this world, this physical realm, this body as the means to illumination and Awakening. The left-hand path is not a route of escapism from reality, but a confrontation with the full totality of physical and psychic existence, encompassing pleasure and joy as well as horror and mortality.

The left-hand path explicitly rejects the practice of abstinence, asceticism, self-denial and the traditional contempt for matter that typifies the majority of spiritual methods in West and East. The exclusively “otherworldly” concerns of the typical swami or maharishi known to the West in recent decades is alien to the sinister current. Although the left-handed gnosis expands human consciousness to divine states of being outside the constraints of time and nature, this is not a path that leads to some nebulous elsewhere in the great beyond.

One of the mysteries of the left-hand path is that “elsewhere” is right here in your own body. So, the sinister way aims for liberation in this lifetime and in the initiate’s current physical body, rather than in an afterlife state or via reincarnation. This sense of urgency is in marked contrast to the almost infinite time accorded and recommended by most Eastern methods of initiation.

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