Vamacara: The True Meaning & Origin Of The Left Hand Path In Shakti Tantra

I shall not enter into final nirvana before all beings have been liberated. I must lead all beings to liberation. I will stay here till the end, even for the sake of one living soul.
—Bodhisattva, Lankavatara Sutra, 4th century CE

The Indus River Goddess — Mother of the Indus Valley Civilization a.k.a. India

RELIGIOUS HISTORIANS designate Hinduism as the earliest major religion, Rigveda as its oldest text, and Sanskrit as one of the earliest languages. Furthermore, Hinduism, also called The Eternal Way (Sanatana Dharma), perhaps also ranks as the most complex religion in terms of taxonomy. That is to say, its internal classification spans a labyrinth of currents, seats, paths, traditions, regional sub-traditions, and tribal micro-traditions that nest like Russian dolls inside one another. Rather than viewing Hinduism as a monolithic religion, it helps to see it as a subcontinental meta-religion that features an array of mini-religions instead. Moreover, the meta-religion acknowledges as many as 33 crore or 330 million deities (1 crore=10 million). Technically, Hinduism classifies as a form of henotheism, that is, many Hindus believe in one unitary supreme deity, genderized as either male, female, bigender, or genderless according to their respective tradition. Millions of goddesses, gods, god-forms, god-aspects, alter egos, godlings, demigods, heroes, and gurus emerge out of, and resorb back into, this unitary meta-deity known by many names, such as Brahma, Siva, Sakti, Visnu, and more. The meta-religion contains such a diversity of contrasting doctrines from city to city, that a rational person can only conclude that all these religions are Hindu in name only, and that no one true Hinduism exists, as much as they dispute that. Hence, to remain sane, consider Hinduism a flag by which myriad traditions co-identify even though they share little in common, and at times directly contradict each other.

To emphasize this point, the two main antagonistic currents of Hinduism, namely, Veda and Tantra, advocate separate doctrines, perform separate rituals, worship separate deities, and originated from separate migratory and linguistic ethnic stocks. Alas, at what point do they become acknowledged as separate religions entirely? Over millennia and still today, the orthodox Vedic Brahmins have demonized and outlawed the “black magic” of heterodox tantrikas, slandering their goddesses as “demons,” their yogic rituals as “demonic possession,” and their worshipers as “witches.”

Hindu derives from sindhu in Sanskrit, which means “river” in reference to the Indus River that crosses the subcontinent vertically like a natural western border. Greeks and Persians used Hindu and Indu to designate the people and land located east of the Indus River. In the 1800s, the term Hinduism was coined to name the religion, Brahmanism, of the male ruling class, Brahmins, who worship the supreme male deity, Brahma, and his essence, Brahman.

Note: The mother earth goddess rules water in her form as the river goddess, thus the name “Hindu” deriving from the Indus River connotes “religion of the goddess”—an obvious but overlooked theological connection.

Tantra derives from tantram and means “loom” in Sanskrit, in reference to an apparatus that weaves fabric together, and derives from root tan, which means “to stretch.” In a religious sense, Tantra refers to a literary tradition that contains knowledge of yoga, predominantly of the goddess Sakti, with an emphasis on sex magic, rooted in ancient fertility rites of the earth goddess.

Gynolatry: The Mother Earth Goddess — The Sexual Origin of Left Hand Path Tantra

In the earliest, Neolithic, agricultural, religious tradition of India, the Dravidian and Austroasiatic groups both viewed women, specifically their vaginas, as a seat of magic power and gateway to the “other side.” Factually, a baby enters the physical plane through a tube-shaped vagina, ergo ancients concluded that it must constitute a tunnel or gateway to a hidden, divine, life-giving plane. Similarly, the earth also provides life to animals, plants, and shelter, thereby allowing humans to survival postnatally. (1) As such, these agriculturalists saw a sympathetic parallel between earthly fertility and human fertility, thus identifying the planet as a mother goddess (Matrka), human women as incarnations of her, and the genitals as a convergence point where the goddess descends into physicality. (2) They saw a second parallel between river water irrigating their fields and vaginal fluid lubricating their sexual intercourse, thus identifying rivers as a second form of the earth goddess, a.k.a. river goddess, with river water seen as the vaginal fluid of the goddess. (3) Lastly, they discovered a third parallel between the length of moon and menstrual cycles, each cycling approximately every four weeks, called months. Of course, they identified the moon as a third goddess-form, i.e., the lunar goddess. Under the rubric of this gynotheism or gynolatry, the tribe exalted acts of sexual intercourse as the highest physical expression of fertility and virility, and ritualized group sex into ceremony. This prototype of sex magic allowed the tribe to remain in sympathetic equanimity with the highly libidinous earth goddess, in order to receive her perennial blessings of crop abundance, maternal pregnancy, and semen virility in men.

In summary, three beliefs defined the Neolithic religion of India:

• The mother goddess as supreme, i.e., matriarchy
• Both female and male biology as divine, i.e., body-positivity
• Sexual organs and intercourse as magical, i.e., sex-positivity

The restrictive anti-erotic laws infringing on sexual freedom and reproductive rights that originated in caste- and class-based patriarchal religions like Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, did not exist in these class-free matriarchal tribes. The name “matriarchy” is partially a misnomer; it gives a false impression that women lorded over men in the same manner that men dominated women in a patriarchy; quite the opposite, it entailed a prototype of equal-rights democracy grounded in community landownership and farming. Modern, rigid, patriarchal codes enforcing premarital celibacy, lifelong spousal monogamy, hetero-reproductive-only sex, and patrilineal inheritance did not exist. To the contrary, the tribe fostered a laissez-faire spirituality around sexual expression. They measured public health and wellness in proportion to fulfilling the bottomless libido of the mother earth goddess through daily rituals and seasonal festivals that required group sex. Imagine a community who encourage you to have as many magical orgasms with your neighbors as possible; it inverts the sex-phobic, anti-magical values of oppressive monotheistic faiths. When unplanned pregnancy occurred, it ultimately did not matter who fathered the child, because the tribe parented and reared children as a community, thereby providing a floorboard to their survival. Moreover, patrilineal inheritance did not exist, as the tribe mutually owned and labored the farmland, therefore there was no landed estate to bequeath from father to son through primogeniture. Legal traditions and taboos common to Abrahamic matrimony and divorce did not exist; polyandry was normal and marriages dissolved without shame.

Gynolatry, gynotheism, matritheism, menstruotheism, or menstruolatry entails belief in the mother goddess as supreme deity (often in an earth-river-moon triarchy); sexual intercourse as the most sacred ritual; emission and transaction of sexual and menstrual fluid as highest sacrament; and genitals as divine talismans of fertility and virility.

Note: I have coined these neologisms. To my surprise, none existed in any available dictionaries. Also, do not confuse ancient matritheism with modern “femitheism,” which refers to a fringe, extremist, pseudo-feminist ideology that explicitly advocates male genocide. Matriarchy does not imply hatred of men; it simply reveres a goddess as top deity.

Menstruation derives from mensis and means “month” in Latin; it derives from mene and means “moon” in Greek.

Note: Both lunar and menstrual cycles last approximately four weeks; due to this, ancient astrologers identified the moon as a form of the goddess, and believed that she regulated menstruation and fertility.

The Earth-River-Moon Triarchy

Neolithic, agricultural, river valley civilizations generally believed in a common earth-river-moon goddess triarchy, e.g., India (Indus River), Egypt (Nile River), Mesopotamia (Tigres & Euphrates Rivers), China (Yellow River). As mentioned earlier, the Greeks named India after the Indus River, and also named Mesopotamia similarly, meaning “between two rivers.” Regarding ancient India in particular, the people viewed major aspects of farming and nature as bio-cosmic functions of the supreme unitary mother goddess, an early prototype of Sakti, whose name means “power” and “energy” in Sanskrit. Furthermore, these earthly goddess-forms gave birth to numerous autochthonous cults that evolved into ensembles and schools of Tantra in the future.

1. Earth Goddess: Agriculture as pregnancy and childbirth

1a. Naga Cult: Deification of snakes, a.k.a. ophiolatry, specifically the cobra, evolves into Kundalini yoga in Sakti Tantra millennia in the future; according to biological classification, the genus of cobra is Naja, deriving from Naga. Serpents hibernate underground within the earth goddess, and also shed their skin, connoting transcendence, immortality, and liberation. The magical connection between the goddess and serpent is one of the oldest in history, and clarifies why subsequent patriarchal religions like Christianity and Islam mercilessly demonize reptiles as devils, portraying snakes and dragons as their apocalyptic adversaries. This demonization premise lingers today through Christian and New Age conspiracy theorists claiming that Satanic reptile-people rule the flat earth.

1b. Yaksa Cult: Tree and plant worship; priests believed that the goddess lived in sacred trees. As one of the world’s most thickly forested countries, the Yaksa became a ubiquitous cult in ancient India. Fruits, vegetables, plants, and trees sprout right out of the ground directly from mother earth to nurse her human children with natural food and medicine.

1c. Yogini Cult: Worship of the winged-goddess, a.k.a. aviolatry, who appears in a clan (kula) of 64 blood-thirsty protector goddesses; the cult of the flying, erotically dancing Yoginis rose to prominence across the subcontinent, and became a critical icon of medieval Sakti Tantra. Sacred art portrays them as a circle (cakra) of 64 Yoginis or Saktinis surrounding Sakti in the center, who is either seated on a lotus or in sexual union with Siva (maithuna). Moreover, the scattered regional tribal Yogini cults evolved into a centralized Yogini Kaula tradition as pioneered by guru Matsyendra Natha circa 900 CE, which formed the Kula tradition of modern Sakti Tantra that still exists in 2020 CE.

1d. Ancestor Cults: The earth breeds life, but also exterminates it, fostering the full circle of life. Natural disasters, dangerous climates, violent weather, and viral disease can cause entire tribes and species of plants and animals to go extinct. Their corpses and carcasses decay back into the earth goddess, alas fertilizing rebirth of new life. As such, the goddess personifies life and death equally, which explains why the goddess often embodies a warrior and death aspect to her divinity. As one of the oldest, most definitive icons of transformation, the serpent became synonymous with death too, hence the warrior goddess, Durga, wields a weapon consisting of a serpent shaped into a noose, called a nagapasa. In addition, primitive tribes erected aniconic monoliths to honor their dead ancestors, typically linga (phallus) stones and poles relating back to sexuality as the force behind the circle of life.

2. River Goddess: Irrigation as menstruation and lubricative vaginal fluid

2a. Naga Cult 2: Primitive people extended the serpent cult into water as a fish cult, calling fish “water snakes.” The seemingly eternal cyclical nature of sea tides and waves, and recurring seasonal irrigation of fertile land by rivers, caused ancients to identify water as a basic form of the goddess, and the fish who reside in the water as “geniuses of the water.”

3. Moon & Star Goddess: Lunar cycles and phases as menstrual clock

3a. Lunar Cult: Both lunar and menstrual cycles last approximately four weeks; due to this, ancient astrologers identified the moon as a form of the goddess, and believed that she regulated menstruation and fertility in women. Priests, in particular women, would perform lunar fertility rites to become pregnant

3b. Naga Cult 3: In the context of ophiolatry again, a snake appears to live above ground, then disappears in hibernation underground, then re-appears again above ground in a seemingly infinite loop in and out of the earth goddess. This cycle of visibility and invisibility parallels the lunar phases of waxing and waning, wherefore the cobra and the moon became a pair of icons together. Additionally, the rebirth of a snake through skin-shedding reflects the rebirth of the moon too from full moon to new moon in a recurrent cycle.

3c. Tara Cult: Tara means “savior” and taraka means “star” in Sanskrit, and Mahayana Buddhism crowned this star goddess as the mother-savior deity of their pantheon. The Cult of Tara crossed faiths, becoming prominent in Hinduism during the 6th century goddess revival, precisely in the form of Sakta Tara, a precursor to the future supreme goddess Sakti.

3d. Kapalika Cult: Kapala means “skull” in Sanskrit, hence this group denotes the Cult of the Skull. The most extreme and first ever left-hand sect by name, these psychopathic ascetics worshiped Bhairava, a terrible form of Siva, known as the Bearer-of-Skulls and Lord of Destruction, while adhering to the Doctrine of Soma (moon deity), invoking the female principle of lunar fertility. These tantrikas radicalized the sex and death cults of the goddess, performing literal human sacrifice, having sex on the corpses, then cremating their victims and wearing their ashes, while drinking consecrated liquors out of human skulls (kapalas). The Kapalikas outright advocated the highest crime in Brahmanism, murdering a Brahmin (brahma-hatya), by bragging that their god cut off the head of Brahma. This “trollish” antagonism instigated skirmishes between Kapalikas and Brahmins. Future respected gurus, like Abhinavagupta circa 1000 CE, who penned seminal exegeses on Sakti Tantra, deemed these sadistic hardcore rituals “left hand” in contrast to peaceful softcore “right hand” rituals in Tantra. Regardless, even softcore “right hand” rituals of Tantra still often require sexual and sanguinary rites, further emphasizing the extremism and misanthropy of the Skull Cult.

The Goddess Dethroned — The Aryans, Sanskrit, the Vedas & Brahmanism

The coeval Austroasiatic and Dravidian agricultural societies suffered permanent disruption around 1500 BCE when a northern Aryan invasion conquered their land, and razed their irrigation technology. From 1500-500 BCE, the Aryans founded a proto-capitalist pastoral economy, occupying themselves with animal husbandry, cattle trading, and aggressive accumulation of capital—giving rise to the first class divisions and wealth inequality in India. Simultaneously, Aryan priests declared Sanskrit the “language of the gods,” authored the Rigveda and other Vedas in the new imperial tongue, and canonized this burgeoning Vedic tradition as the revealed Word (Vac). With their godhead, Brahma, seated on the cosmic throne in place of the goddess, the male priest class or patriarchy, called Brahmins, architected and enforced a cruel caste system with themselves in first class.

Brahmanic Hinduism — Devolution into a Triple-Patriarchy

This male-only priesthood permitted male-only worship of a male deity, outright prohibiting women of menstrual age (10-55 years old) from entering some temples, deeming their previously-exalted menstruation as filthy and impure. Adding insult to injury, they enforced lifelong celibacy on ascetics, utterly castrating sexuality from top to bottom. The reader can see obviously how far Brahmanism strayed from the earlier goddess cults who had revered the female principle as divine and human sexuality as magical. Culture in general switched from sex-positive to sex-negative, and from menstrophiliac to menstrophobic. In a landmark legal battle in 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled that an annual pilgrimage destination (seat or pitha), the Sabarimala temple, must permit equal access to women, marking a long overdue evolution away from antiquated Brahminic social prejudices. Conservative Hindus protested the ruling, calling it an assault on their religious freedom to discriminate by gender.

I have coined the term triple-patriarchy to name this anti-goddess, anti-magical, anti-sexual zeitgeist that emerged across Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and more in the first millennium of the Common Era. This gender-exclusive ideology surfaced as a symptom of monotheism, and infected civilizations virally like a plague. The Catholic Church, for example, enforces a male-only hierarchy and officially refer to bishops by the title “Patriarch” and priests as “Father.” Men exclusively rule the people at three levels under classical monotheism:

• God: Rule by supreme male deity
• Nation & Church: Rule by male theocrats
• Family: Rule by male parent, or eldest son in absence of father

This disenthronement of the goddess demoted women in general to an underclass with draconian regulations on their sexual freedom and reproductive rights. Women devolved from incarnations of the goddess to childbearing livestock, and from independent entities to dependents of their husbands. As glorified sex chattel, the virginity and fertility of girls became premium commodities on a human capital market. Prepubescent females were trafficked and forced into arranged marriages—the traders and consumers of the fertility commodity demanded their products in mint condition, so to speak. The wave of monotheistic Abrahamic religions rose to the foreground concurrently with Brahmanic dominance in India, and these same strict requirements on virginity and celibacy carried over to their social codes. Needless to say, modern patriarchal faiths strictly prohibit sex magic and worship of the goddess in principle, deeming it sexually perverse witchcraft.

Frankly, Brahmanic Hinduism constitutes one of the most regressive ideologies found anywhere on earth, on par with Abrahamic faiths. Although social democracy finally popularized in India last century, the Vedic tradition dominates mainstream culture and still shapes their national discourse in present day. For an example, this quasi-fascism rears its ugly head through Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist ideology championed by sitting Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who chairs the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party). Hindutva is basically a Hindu similitude of evangelical Christianity in the United States; they fervently believe that their god personally chose their favorite politicians to save their country, i.e., savior syndrome or white knight complex.

Aryan means “pure” and “noble” in Sanskrit.

Veda means “sacred knowledge” in Sanskrit.

Sanskrit means “perfected” in Sanskrit, and implies superiority over other languages.

Brahman means “the absolute” in Sanskrit.

Cattle and chattel derive from capital, from kaput in Proto-Indo-European, meaning “head.” Perhaps the ancient Aryan cattle-economy classifies as an embryonic form of proto-capitalism.

The Goddess Rethroned — The Unification & Revolution of the Undesirables

When an exogenous tribe conquers an indigenous tribe, the victor needs to carefully propagandize the victim to accept their new rulership and worship their pantheon of gods. Two main forms of indoctrination existed historically.

• Deify & Regulate: Deify the indigenous gods into the exogenous pantheon and mythology, albeit as an underclass, and allow the natives to worship them in the context of the exogenous religion.
• Demonize & Prohibit: Demonize the indigenous gods in the exogenous pantheon and mythology as dangerous enemies, and use force to prohibit natives from worshiping them.

The Aryans absorbed and sanctioned the earth goddess cults that preexisted their invasion, because geographical barriers like thick forests rendered it impossible to fully eradicate the female principle in remote regions. From 500 BCE to 500 CE, the Brahmins portrayed the goddess as a consort, i.e., wife and childbearer to their supreme male deity. For example, Visnu and Prthivi, and Siva and Durga, appeared together in the Mahabharata, and king Kaniska stamped Siva and Uma, and Siva and Nana, on coins. The goddess-as-secondary or goddess-as-dependent motif, juxtaposed with the goddess-as-primary or goddess-as-independent motif seen in the previous age, mirrored the Aryan treatment of women as second class citizens in their hypermasculine pastoral society.

While the Vedic current has remained theologically and politically dominant in an uninterrupted guru lineage from 1500 BCE to present day, the undying zealotry of ancient Naga, Yaksa, and Yogini goddess cults—for example, in the state Orissa located on the Bay of Bengal, now known as Odisha—in synergy with strengthening loyalty toward this new stream of Vedic goddesses, let the genie out of the bottle, figuratively speaking, causing an irreversible paradigmatic resurgence of the female principle. The Goddess found herself renthroned, albeit a rebel throne, as the iconoclastic protectress of an emerging populist counter-revolution uniting together a subcontinent of alienated, low-caste, non-Aryans, i.e., the poor descendants of disemployed agriculturalists who never found respect in the Aryan, caste-based, cattle-shepherding civilization. From these ashes rose a phoenix called Tantra in the form of a supreme goddess called Sakti.

Sakti Tantra — Doctrine of the Supreme Goddess

As the Roman Empire imploded in the 5th century, the Aryan-majority lineage of empires in Northern India lost its wealthiest trade partner, causing the Northern economy to implode too, while the Southern economy prospered as normal with its unrestricted access to trade routes via the Indian Ocean. The Brahmanic dominance withered due to this, liberating the South to come out of the closet with their goddess worship full strength. In this power vacuum, the theological landscape of India transformed radically. Buddhism, hitherto a solitary ascetic religion, gave birth to a new missionary tradition, referred to as Mahayana, exporting their faith to China and Tibet; this new generation of monks aspired to become earthly Bodhisattvas, not only cosmic Buddhas, and worshiped a pantheon of deities reigned by a primordial matriarchal savior-goddess, Tara, revered as the “mother of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.” Tara embodied an accumulation of coexisting and preexisting female deities unified altogether in one meta-deity, super-deity, trans-deity, or omni-deity. This all-in-one, centralized, goddess stream crossed into Hinduism as Sakta Tara, which evolved into Sakta Devi, thus picking up and carrying the torch of the ancient magical goddess current from where it had left off two millennia earlier prior to forced Aryanization, Sanskritization, and Vedicization.

During this evolutionary “merger and acquisition” phase of goddess theology, the Vedic male supreme deities Brahma, Visnu, and Siva, similarly amalgamated into a triple deity, the Trimurti. Furthermore, the expanding Sakti current, a.k.a. Tantra, annexed the ancient Yogini cults that had survived in the interim, rendering a multi-level pantheon featuring Sakti encircled by a clan of blood-thirsty erotic dancers, Yoginis or Saktinis. By the by, the signature erotic dancing of the Yoginis entails a remnant from their birdlike power of flight; they evolved magically from airborne protector-predators to dancers who escort sadhakas through Tantric sexual ritual. Regarding the macabre nature of the Yoginis, also called the Seven Divine Mothers (Saptamatrkas), a Gangadhar stone inscription demonizes their temple as:

…a terrible abode of corpse-devouring female demons, the presiding deity of which is represented by an over-excited band of goddesses whose tremendous power is fed on magic rites performed in accordance with the Tantras.

Sakti eternalized her crown by incorporating into herself ultra-powerful, demon-slaying, “terrible and wild,” sex and death goddesses like Durga and Kali, instilling both fear and awe in her Brahmanic enemies. As the reader has seen, orthodox Brahmins slandered the indigenous Naga, Yaksa, and Yogini cults as black magic, their worshipers as witches, and their goddesses as demons. Ergo, when the Sakti current absorbed these “demon-slayers,” it came full circle and finally portrayed itself as a “positive” force for “good” in a relative sense. In other words, how could these women be demons if they fight demons? At this point in Hindu history, the two main antagonistic currents, Veda and Tantra, became rivals of comparable standing and popularity. Kings, queens, and royalty patronized Tantric priests, funding the construction of regional temples to receive her boons (blessings) of abundance, and conversely, out of deathly fear that if they neglected her needs, the wrathful aspects of the goddess would ruin their empire. To this point, the fertility magic from the Neolithic agricultural age translated into “wealth magic” in the eyes of medieval kings, who would hire a group of local tantrikas to perform sex rituals guaranteeing longevity and riches to their kingdoms. That’s right: Tantric priests performed ritual for hire, as do numerous black magicians in this compendium.

Buddha means “awakened” in Pali, and descends from bodhati meaning “awake” in Sanskrit. It shares a close etymology with Bodhisattva, and both stand as an epistemological moniker given to one with “perfect knowledge,” for example, Siddhartha Gautama, founder of Buddhism.

Bodhisattva means “essence of perfect knowledge” in Sanskrit, derives from Mahayana Buddhism, and denotes a “Buddha-to-be” insofar as they have abstained from nirvana in order to remain on earth and wake the human race from the “sleep of ignorance” through as many reincarnations as necessary. In the Lankavatara Sutra, the Bodhisattva vows, “I shall not enter into final nirvana before all beings have been liberated. I must lead all beings to liberation. I will stay here till the end, even for the sake of one living soul.”

Mandala means “circle” in Sanskrit. It entails the most common shape in Tantra, as it resembles the shape of an open yoni (vagina), thus relating to the goddess who fuels the circle of life. In ritual, the Yoginis dance around Sakti in a circle, within a circular-shaped temple.

Tara means “savior” and taraka means “star” in Sanskrit. Tara also means “earth” in a Dravidian language. It refers to a medieval form of the mother goddess in Buddhism and Hinduism during the goddess revival circa 500 CE.

Sakti means “power” and “energy” in Sanskrit, and denotes the primordial supreme goddess of Tantra, explicitly anthropomorphized as a body-positive, sex-positive, cosmic mother of life and death—body-positive insofar as she resides in the yogic body as Kundalini; sex-positive insofar as a yogi can harness her magical power through sexual intercourse; and mother of life and death insofar as she fuels the circle of life in eternal recurrence. She deifies the “will to power” à la philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Devi means “goddess” in Sanskrit. It derives from deva, which means “god,” and comes from div, meaning “to shine” in reference to the stars, moon, and planets in the sky.

Kali means “the black one” and derives from kalah in a Dravidian language. It shares a second etymology with kala in Sanskrit, which means “time.” Originally an indigenous mountain goddess, Kali rules time and fuels the eternally rotating wheel of change that births and kills life simultaneously. Due to her likeness, she merged into an aspect of Sakti, and emphasizes the destructive phase of change, thereby becoming known as a goddess of death and mother of the abyss and night, hence her black or dark blue appearance.

The New Yoga of Self-Deification — The Nativity of the Left Hand Path

To consummate this avant-garde goddess current, priests pioneered a revolutionary yoga tradition that featured a radical ambition of gnosis through self-deification. This breakthrough yoga revived the sex magic of ancient fertility rites and sacred prostitution; revealed the anatomy of the Sakti body (energy body), nesting her as a Naga serpent (Kundalini) in its root (Muladhara); utilized mandalas, mantras, and nyasas; and most transgressively, it overthrew the Aryan caste system with rites that explicitly require participation by female priests and low-caste people. All in all, this seminal yoga truly affected human spirituality forever.

For example, a common ritual might entail numerous hours of extremely precise yoga every day: 50-point deity visualizations, japas of 1,000+ mantra recitations, and exact nyasas that insert miniature deity bodies and Sanskrit letters from mantras anatomically in nodes (cakras) and vessels (nadis) of the yogic body (energy body). Altogether, this self-deifying yoga liberates Kundalini (Sakti as a Naga cobra) to rise up the central vessel (Susumna) and merge with the Crown of Siva (Sahasrara). This microcosmic coitus of Sakti and Siva in the yogic body reflects the primordial macrocosmic coitus of Sakti and Siva that caused cosmogenesis.

Tantric magicians exalted both the vagina (yoni) and penis (linga) as biological talismans of life-giving, sorcerous power (prakrti). For example, male priests would drink sexual and menstrual fluid right out of a female priest’s orgasming vagina, while priestesses (yoginis) erotically danced around the couple in a circle (mandala), slapping their own thighs and genitals to heighten their physical arousal, causing their own genitals to swell and emit fluid, which male priests would drink during their time in the circle. Tantrikas believed that these orgiastic sexual transactions fueled them with fierce goddess-power, thus sublimating them into ecstatic spirit possession, liberating them from their limited human identity, and rebirthing them as gods in the flesh.

The basic line of inquiry, “What defines Tantra?” or “How would I identify a book or ritual as Tantric?” has become a bugaboo among Tantric historians, as the Tantras never explicitly provided clear cut prerequisites, and books occasionally contradict themselves. In fairness, disagreements within a cumulative lineage of doctrine are inescapable in any tradition that existed prior to global technology like the internet, where authors lived at a distance from one another and in separate eras. With that preface, these commonly found precepts define Tantra in general:

• Gynolatry: a tendency to worship the goddess as the supreme deity, and while male-supremacist traditions exist too, such as Vaisnavism and Sivaism, they still deify the goddess as either a consort or a co-equal. The most prominent icons of the religion entail symbols of the goddess and the yoni: raised cobras, lotuses, the eye on a peacock tailfeather, crescent moon, fish, and simple shapes like a circle or intersecting triangles.
• Self-Deification: an ambition to become a god or goddess through identification with the supreme goddess, often with elaborate, precise visualizations of deities (nyasas) implanted inside the anatomy of the yogic body. Tantric lore references humans becoming deities.
• Moksha: a mystical ambition to experience liberation through self-deification, to escape the wheel of rebirth and unite the soul with the supreme goddess.
• Magic-Positive: a belief that performing ritual awakens natural magical powers, allowing the priest to become dominant over maya.
• Sex-Positive: the exaltation of sexual organs as divine talismans and intercourse as the most sacred form of magical worship. Sexual expression, erotic dancing, and fluid transactions are normal and occasionally required parts of rituology (maithuna).
• Body-Positive: a belief that the goddess resides in the yogic body of humans as Kundalini and other cakra deities, i.e., “your body is her temple.”

After knowing the Sakti originated in the body, one becomes united with her.
—Matsyendra, The Kaulajnananirnaya, Patala XX, 20-21

• Nyasa, Mantra, Mudra, Yantra & Mandala: an array of deity visualizations, sounds, gestures, and symmetrical, triangular, and circular diagrams that allow unity with the supreme goddess and other deities.
• Anti-Caste Ethos: a disregard of restrictive social codes and class divisions.

Yoga means “union” in Sanskrit. It entails a human uniting with a deity through self-identifying as that deity. In Sakti Tantra, yoga obviously entails self-deification as Sakti or one of her aspects. In black magick, this act is called possession or gnosis.

Kundalini means female “coiled snaked” in Sanskrit. The supreme goddess Sakti assumes this form and resides in the Muladhara of the yogic body. The archetype of a cobra hibernating and awakening derives from the cobra cults of the earth goddess, i.e., Naga Cults.

Muladhara means “root and basis of existence” in Sanskrit. This root cakra houses Kundalini, a form of Sakti, the basis of existence.

Sahasrara means “thousand-petaled” in Sanskrit, and denotes the crown cakra, sometimes deified by Siva, with whom Sakti as Kundalini fornicates when she raises to her apex in the yogic body.

Maithuna means “sexual union” in Sanskrit, and refers to a ritual of sexual intercourse in worship of the goddess.

Left vs. Right = Hardcore vs. Softcore — A Taxonomy of Tantra by Abhinavagupta

The aforementioned Neolithic sex and serpent cults of the goddess constitute the true origin of the Left Hand Path as known by black magicians today. Indigenous cultists did not self-identify with prejudiced designations like “left” and “black” back when they lived. Tantric historian, David White, attests that the ubiquitous “left hand path” (vamacara) and “right hand path” (daksinacara) terminology first entered the lexicon under seminal guru and commentator, Abhinavagupta, circa 1000 CE, to distinguish between hardcore and softcore rituals as performed by the Kaula sect. They had inherited the vestiges of a psychopathic sacrificial cult, called the Kapalikas, and evolved the rituology into a less violent but equally powerful worship of Sakti. According to Abhinavagupta, “left hand” denotes rituals of a hardcore transgressive nature, and “right hand” denotes rituals of a softcore peaceful visualization nature. This classification system became necessary, because both the Kapalikas and the Kaula to a lesser extent, had become known for performing extremely transgressive rites that subverted Vedic social codes, such as: group orgy on top of corpses from human sacrifices in crematoria (Kapalika only); sexual intercourse with “undesirable” sub-caste prostitutes; consuming cocktails of semen, vaginal fluid, and blood; transgenderism by male priests dressed in makeup and women’s clothes to emulate goddesses (yoginis); and drinking large quantities of consecrated liquor out of human skulls from sacrificial victims (Kapalika only)—to name a few. Needless to say, these left-handed, hardcore subversions of puritanical Brahmanism horrified the lifelong celibate ascetics of the Vedic current.

As an aside, it seems necessary to clarify that these hardcore transgressive rites occupied only a small fraction of Tantric yoga; it did not constitute the main, daily, softcore rituology of any lasting tradition, but rather an occasional ecstatic ritual to further exalt their sense of liberation. Despite this, a “bad boy” mystique arose around tantrikas, and mainstream Indian culture today still tends to see the current through a bigoted but not entirely inaccurate lens of “black magic.” In fact, while under the rule of the British Raj from 1858-1947, politically powerful Brahmins tried to outlaw the Tantra altogether, calling it “perverse, impure, and sorcery.” A modern parallel would be Christian commentators calling participants in a Burning Man event or a LGBT pride parade “crazy people” because they dance naked once a year—these monotheistic pundits have overlooked the transgressive principle that underlies the ecstatic ritual altogether. The sense of freedom experienced through the “craziness” is literally the point.

In summary, the left-right dichotomy constituted an internal classification within Tantra itself originally, i.e., an intra-Tantra classification. Identifying a ritual as left or right did not mean that a priest was or was not Tantric; it simply meant that they performed a hardcore or softcore ritual. It did not critique their theology, but rather designated their style of pathworking (sadhana); whether left or right, their ambition remained the same: liberation through self-deification with the goddess. Over time, this classification system extrapolated globally outside the context of Hinduism, and evolved into a distinction between heterodox and orthodox in general.

Tantric knowledge migrated into Western religious studies and occultism in the late 1800s mainly due to Indian-born British scholars like, as only one example, Sir John Woodroffe, under pen name Arthur Avalon, who provided the first English translations of seminal Tantric books (agamas), for instance, Sat Cakra Nirupana, a priceless treasure that definitively outlines the anatomy of the yogic body (energy body). Theosophists reference their founder, Helena Blavatsky, as also helping to normalize the terms “left hand” and “right hand” in Western occultism, and while true, she was not a primary source, and simply appropriated it into her doctrine.

As I have elucidated in previous forewords in this Nine Demonic Gatekeepers saga, the basic taxonomy of left versus right has ubiquitously arisen in almost every major ancient civilization from India in Southern Asia to Ireland in Western Europe. Human beings are born with intuition of directionality in their cognitive faculty, always using an intersectional quadrant of “up and down, left and right” to plot ideas on linear spectrums. No one ideology possesses an exclusive monopoly on use of these general classifiers, nevertheless, it has evolved most prominently into the de facto name of contemporary black magick, i.e., the Left Hand Path, through a strong generation of pioneering authors, including but not limited to: E.A. Koetting, Asenath Mason, Michael Ford, Edgar Kerval, and more—many of whom appear in these Nine Demonic Gatekeeper compendia. In the context of modern magick, Left Hand Path and Right Hand Path identify separate doctrines, aspirations, and spirit alliances altogether, and more closely resembles the higher-level difference between Tantrism and Vedism.

Two Doctrines of Freedom — Dvaita vs. Advaita, or Dualism vs. Nondualism

Two doctrines of freedom exist across both the Vedic and Tantric currents, called dvaita (dualism) and advaita (nondualism). Both doctrines view scripture as divine knowledge revealed by a supreme deity, called the Word. Their general ambitions resemble each other superficially, insofar as they strive to experience liberation or emancipation (moksha or mukti) from “fetters of the world” caused by ignorance of the salvific truth that reality is only a magical illusion (maya) enslaving the human soul (jiva). Both paths seek freedom through transcension (nirvana) as their shared aspiration, however they contradict each other radically in their ontology, or belief on the nature of being, ergo they springboard toward entirely separate destinations.

Dvaita Muktasiva — The Mystical Sainthood of Theistic Dualists

Under the ontology of dualism, the godhead (brahman) exists separately from the soul (jiva) and cosmos (maya) in their essential substances and locational levels of existence. Thus, this belief has become known as theistic dualism (dvaita). Ascetic priests who espouse this doctrine, common to schools called Samkhya and Vedanta, perform rituals to annihilate their self-identity (ego) to reach perfect sainthood or sivahood (sivata), preferably in their present lifetime (muktasiva), thereby escaping transmigratory reincarnation upon death. However, regardless of their immaculate sainthood, they will never become truly divine due to the separate essence of their soul, hence the name dualism. This doctrine exemplifies the most classic stereotype of mysticism: transcension through self-annihilation.

Advaita Jivanmukti — The Magical Godhood of Theistic Nondualists

Nondualists, also known as monists, believe the godhead, soul, and cosmos share the same thoroughgoing essential substance, ergo the name monism, which derives from monos in Greek, meaning “one” or “alone.” Tantrikas perform rituals of self-deification whereby they self-identify as the supreme goddess Sakti, her consort Siva, the Yoginis, and other divinities, in order to become living gods and goddesses while under ecstatic possession (avesa) of their tutelary deity. Ultimately, through perfect deification, tantrikas will experience liberation (jivanmukti), exit the wheel of rebirth, and reunite with their godhead on the god-plane. In the meantime, prior to jivanmukti, the tantrikas awaken their magical powers (siddhi), allowing them to dominate the physical world magically while alive on the earth. Thus, the doctrine of nondualism combines mysticism and magic together cohesively; unlike dualism, the tantrika aspires to self-deify, not self-annihilate.

In summary, dvaita-dualism says, “You cannot become a god.” Whereas, advaita-nondualism says, “You already are a god but need to awaken.” Obviously, the doctrine of advaita most closely mirrors the Left Hand Path of black magick.

The Original Children of Darkness — Matsyendra & the Kaula: Pioneers of Kundalini Yoga

In 10th century CE, a historic Mahasiddha and Tantric guru, named Matsyendra, syncretized the landscape of scattered proto-Sakti and Yogini cults into a common lineage, the Yogini Kaula or Kaula. Matsyendra penned seminal masterpieces, e.g., Discussion of the Knowledge Pertaining to the Kaula Tradition or Kaulajnananirnaya. The Kaula or Kula (clan), or Kalikula (clan of Kali), pioneered the lasting current of magical, sexual, nondualist goddess-supremacy that defines Saktism as a religion. Matsyendra and his cohorts principally innovated Kundalini-Sakti yoga, a remnant of the ancient snake-worshiping Naga Cult. Due to his critical innovations, he is also recognized as a founder of the future Hatha yoga tradition, whose “energy body” anatomy has been appropriated and whitewashed into “yoga bunny” spirituality of New Agers in the West. As the vanguard of Sakti Tantra, the Kaula performed self-deifying rituals to raise and unite Kundalini-Sakti through the cakras—each cakra housing a form of the goddess: Sakini in the Muladhara, Lakini in the Manipura, Rakini in the Anahata, Dakini in the Visuddha, Kamini in the Svadhisthana, Hakini in the Ajna, and Sakti meeting her source at the Sahasrara.

Siddhi refers to “magical powers,” and means “attainment” in Sanskrit. A siddha refers to a tantrika who has awakened their magical powers through union with the goddess. Mahasiddha denotes the highest class of siddha; maha means “great,” and therefore altogether it means “great siddha,” or “perfected yogi.”

Guru means “guide” in Sanskrit, and “dispeller of darkness.”

Matsyendra combines Matsya and Indra. Matsya means “fish,” and Indra refers to a supreme male deity in the Vedas. Conjoined, Matsyendra means “divine fish” or “lord of fish,” and derives from the ancient Naga cult of the earth goddess who worshipped fish. Tantric historians recognize Matsyendra as the pioneer of the Yogini Kaula lineage, a main tradition of Sakti Tantra. Hence, the title “lord of fish” suggests Matsyendra channeled divine knowledge of the goddess in his Tantras.

Above all, the reader must recall that the so-called “energy body,” as white “yogis” generically refer to it, is the abode of the supreme goddess Sakti, where she hibernates as Kundalini in the Muladhara cakra like a cobra hibernating in mother earth. The mother goddess is the root (mother) and base (power) of the cosmos, therefore she sleeps in the root and base cakra. The serpent awakening ingeminates the primordial cycle of cosmogenesis—a cycle of destruction and reconstruction that recurs at the macrocosmic level in yugas (ages), and at the microcosmic level in every moment. This basic knowledge brings the antique tradition of the mother earth goddess back to life in modern Saktism; as if uninterrupted and as relevant as ever, the goddess has come full circle from beatification under matriarchy, to demonization under patriarchy, and back again under an ensemble of transmissions that carry on in West Bengal, Kashmir, and Odisha today.

A black magician who sincerely wishes to reconnect with their roots, so to speak, needs to study Sakti Tantra. Note that Saktism is often classified as a sub-category of Saivism, a taxonomy with which I disagree, but I digress. As supreme goddess of the abyss, ruler of time, and creative-destructive aspect of Sakti, Kali’s children, the Kalikula, are truly the original Children of Darkness and Children of the Night. The name Kaula alone provides a cornucopia of study to last a lifetime. I have personally concentrated on the Left Hand Path for half my life, comparing and contrasting world religions and philosophies from across the span of approximately 100,000 years of extant human thought; and in my critique, Saktism most closely resembles the self-deifying, anti-authoritarian, magic-positive, sex-positive, and body-positive zeitgeist of today’s Left Hand Path of black magick.

The Doctrine of the Abyss — Self-Deifying Nihilism: Godhood out of Chaos

Abyss means “bottomless,” and derives from abyssos in Greek.

Chaos means “emptiness,” and derives from khaos in Greek.

Zero means “absence of quantity,” a cognate of cipher, both derive from cifra in Latin, which comes from cifr in Arabic, and earlier from sunya in Sanskrit.

Void means “empty space, vacuum” and derives from vocivos meaning “unoccupied” and vacare meaning “to be empty” in Latin.

Nihilism means “belief in nothing, disbelief in absolutes” and derives from nihil in Greek which means “nothing.”

This summary dissertation demands a postscript to clarify that black magick and Tantra do not espouse exactly identical doctrines. Identifying as a black magician does not convert a person to Hinduism. To this point, rarely do self-identified black magicians comprehend the true ontology of black magick with precision, nor could they stomach it.

In terms of ontology, black magick advocates the doctrine of the abyss. In the philosophy, firstly, the highest belief is in a form of non-being or absence of being, a plane of nothingness, eponymously called the abyss, chaos, or zero. In and out of the abyss, reality reconfigures itself forever through an infinity of permutations. This chronic reshuffling of the cosmic deck renders it an impossibility for a permanent, perfect, or absolute form of being to exist. Secondly, this mirage of continuous change accommodates magick to the extent that a black magician performs rituals to harness the chaos for ascent. That is to say, they ride the cosmic waves of change and navigate to their preferred destination. Thirdly, in the void of an absolute being, in the absence of a godhead, no absolute morality exists, thus elevating the black magician to commander-in-chief of their individual cosmos. Herein, they declare self-rule and self-determination, mandating a morality unto themselves. In this sense, they have ascended to godhood. I have named this philosophy: self-deifying nihilism, optimistic nihilism, self-determinant nihilism, or autonomous nihilism. It entails the final frontier of human freedom. No freer or more empowering ideology can exist by definition. It annihilates the extraneous, restrictive godhead in order to maximize the free individual, or group of consenting individuals, instead.

The reader will find a simple overview of the three main ontologies below:

• Dualism (2): A perfect godhead created and powers the cosmos, and they each contain separate essences of absolute being.
• Monism (1): A perfect godhead created and powers the cosmos, and they each contain a single shared essence of absolute being.
• Nihilism (0): A self-generated unreality changes constantly within a plane of nothingness, and no essence of absolute being exists. Note: prominent atheistic physicists espouse a version of this theory currently, e.g., the “multiverse” and “universe from nothing” theories, although they do not refer to it as nihilism.

No Gods, No Masters — Mutual Godhood: Laws unto Ourselves

The self-deification precept resembles the “master-slave” morality of Friedrich Nietzsche inasmuch as black magicians become masters unto themselves; they do not resentfully obey the morals of a god as dictated by a priest or king. In a social context, the only form of civilization that accommodates a self-empowered citizenry of gods and goddesses is a class-free direct democracy whereby individuals enforce their preferences immediately upon their civilization free from interference by an extraneous hierarchy of ruling classes. In this sense, the Left Hand Path advocates anarchism, i.e., gods mandating laws unto themselves in consensual democratic units, a.k.a. a union of gods. Do not confuse the self-deifying nihilism of the Left Hand Path as a justification for imperial fascism or authoritarian communism. Gods cannot be ruled by others, nor do they seek to rule others. To remain consistent, a god extends the principle of autonomy to other gods universally, permitting them to self-rule as they do. The civilization needs to remain class-free to remain free in general. The reader will recall that Sakti Tantra abolishes the Aryan caste system altogether. Over a thousand years ago, tantrikas knew from first-hand experience that restrictive castes interfere with both individual and collective ascent.

The Unreligion — Radical Negativity as Grounds for Radical Positivity

Contradictory Natures—If god is perfect, then it cannot change, because any change would ruin its perfection, and then it would no longer be a god. If a god created the cosmos, then the cosmos must be perfect too, and therefore cannot change either, because any change would ruin its perfection also. However, the cosmos changes constantly, thus it cannot be perfect, and thus cannot be created by a perfect being. In conclusion, the cosmos cannot have been created by a god.

Like the demolition of a skyscraper, theism implodes and drops into its footprint under its first belief: that a perfect being exists in its final form. The cosmos, which constantly changes, cannot have come from a final being, as their natures contradict. Theism suffers an abortion and never leaves the womb alive. It tries to open with a radical positive therefrom immediately contradicted by its second belief.

The Left Hand Path does not suffer such an obvious error, because it opens with the safest premise possible in the form of a radical negative: that perfect fixed being does not exist—and then reverse engineers from there. Furthermore, it extends this nihility to its consistent second belief: that the cosmos constantly changes—thereby validating the first premise. Only a radical negative can allow a radical positive to self-generate infinitely.

Occam’s Razor — The Worst Blasphemy with the Fewest Assumptions

This one-two punch confuses theists because it requires counter-intuition. Religious people believe that only a perfect being could have created this infinitely complex cosmos—but they have it backwards. To fill a space, that space must first be empty. An eternally self-changing cosmos could only fit inside a plane of infinite nothingness. Through eternity, the cosmos will reconfigure itself into every permutation, and it needs an infinitely empty abyss to accommodate that.

The doctrine of the Left Hand Path in summary:

• The Abyss: a plane of infinite nothingness, a.k.a. chaos
• The Cosmos: a self-generating multiverse changes eternally
• Magick: rituals that harness the chaotic power of the cosmos
• Godhood: maximal self-rule and self-determination
• Pantheon: a consensual union of gods and goddesses

The doctrine of the Left Hand Path constitutes the worst possible blasphemy, because it radically inverts classical theism, from a perfect being to no being, from worshiping a god to becoming a god. A black magician needs to deindoctrinate the toxicity of theism to heal their psyche, finally experience freedom, and tap into their infinite power.