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The Left Hand Path
Shade Oroboros
"One reaches Heaven by the very
practices which may lead to Hell."
- Tantric maxim
The use of the term Left Hand Path is
largely drawn from the circles of eastern Tantra: when worshippers
gathered for a rite of worship or Puja a clothed woman or Shakti would
sit on the right side of her partner in purely symbolic or Right Hand
ceremonies, and a naked woman on the Left in those much more uncommon
celebrations where actual physical congress took place. Such an exalted
woman is regarded as a Guru, and as the very incarnation of the Goddess
Herself. Modern westerners tend to have a wildly distorted view of
Hindu tantra as an endless sexual orgy, which hardly does justice to
the ritual and philosophical complexity of more genuine practices.
Traditional Indian society was rigidly stratified and structured, and a
devotee might spend many years of study and preparation under a teacher
before the climactic moment of such a radical and ego-shattering act as
intercourse outside the bounds of marriage and the rules of the caste
system. This was performed as a sacred initiation, given by a
wisdom-bearing Dakini or Suvasini. Often such rites took place at
midnight amid the burning corpses of the cremation ground, poised
between terror and delight. Left Hand practices have always tended
toward extremes, and although sometimes outwardly quite respectable
their devotees more often include holy men or sorcerers, outcasts or
outlaws. The Vama Marga or Left Path is also the Daksini Marga, the Way
of Women (the Yin-Tao in China), revering the Goddess or Shakti who is
the primordial energy. She is often seen as Maya, the Great Enchantress
who weaves the illusions of reality as Lila or play, and as the Fire
Snake or Kundalini Serpent who lurks coiled at the base of the spine.
This magical power can be awakened to rise through the energy centers
of the body that are called chakras, activating the Third Eye and
finally blossoming as the Thousand Petaled Lotus or crown chakra. She
appears again as the Uraeus snake upon the crowns of Egyptian royalty,
a fiery avatar of the Eye of Ra, and in the serpentine forms of primal
gods such as Heka, who personifies magick itself. In later times we
find sacred serpents in the rites of Voudon, and we must not forget
that Egypt once included parts of Africa. Tantra has become a huge
influence on western magick, but both the outward and inward forms of
these practices must mutate to be valid in a very different culture. In
Thelemic terms we find the tantric Svecchachara, or ‘path of one's own
will’. This is said to be similar to ‘riding the tiger’ or ‘walking on
the edge of a sword’.
The earliest European explorers,
gazing upon the elaborately writhing sculptures that decorated many of
the great Hindu temples, projected many of their own repressed urges
and instincts upon the colonized peoples of Asia. The rather twisted
morality of the Victorian era was easily adopted by upper class Hindus
as well, since it fit in with their own prejudices of purity and
control. Tantra had its origins in the ancient Dravidian culture of the
Indus Valley region, long before the later Vedic tradition of the Aryan
invaders. Madame Blavatsky and her cohorts also employed the phrase
Left Hand Path as a pejorative term for black magick, and the
Theosophical Society served to a large extent as the first major
infusion of eastern philosophy into western popular culture.
The West, however, has ancient left
hand practices of its own: from the sacred prostitutes or Qadeshtu of
the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world, to the rumored orgies of
underground Gnostic sects later suppressed as heretics, to the dark
sabbats of the witches. These covens seem to originally have been led
by a Lady of the Fair Folk: not the shallow gossamer-winged fairies of
fantasy, but the primordial powers of the earth, the forest, and the
sacred stone circles, the spirits of air and darkness. Her consort was
the Lord of the Wild Hunt, the shadowy Horned One who was once Shiva
and Dionysos, Cernunnos and Wodan and goat-footed Pan. We all know who
he became, however: Old Nick, the Dark One, the Distinguished
Gentleman, and the Archfiend Himself. But before he was Satan in Hell,
he was Lucifer the Lightbringer in Heaven, God's first and favorite
angel. Even the medieval mind often questioned this turn of events: was
there some secret plan involved? Who was really on the side of
humankind, the clever devil or the tyrant god?
“The devil is an angel
too.” - Miguel de Unamundo
In esoteric qabala this 'serpent' of
Eden has the same numeration as the 'messiah', and in some heretical
sects they were viewed as identical, the Devil in the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good & Evil, the Savior upon the Cross or Tree of Life
& Death, both working out the plan of humanity's salvation in the
face of the blind forces of unjust destiny. Among the hidden occult
traditions that lurked in the background of the Freemasons, the
Rosicrucians, and the Illuminati as well as the Witch-Cult, there was
often a trend toward identifying with the sinister opposition rather
than the status quo; and daring to question authority was to
immediately place oneself in the Satanic party. Since people in these
medieval and renaissance periods had no surviving pagan context to
define themselves with, the Black Mass was the only available
theological alternative, and there has always been a deeply concealed
underground of such renegade priests lurking about, drawn straight from
the ranks of the christian clergy.
In recent years this trend toward
diabolism has resurfaced in such public groups as Anton LaVey's Church
of Satan and Michael Aquino's Temple of Set, and perhaps most
occultists would think of them as the current standard bearers of the
sinister. However, Aleister Crowley's 93 Current might also be
considered rather dark by many modern white-light new-agers and pagans,
and the Typhonian O.T.O. established by his disciple Kenneth Grant has
also devoted much thought to workings upon the nightside of existence.
While some might recoil from such thoughts, there are two important
points I would like to make: like it or not, Crowley's movement is in
fact a genuinely pagan revival of the gods of Egypt, not some
watered-down form of pseudo-respectable Satanism. And like it or not,
no matter how many recent Interfaith Conferences allow a heathen
representative to sit in the back with the Buddhists, the harsh reality
is that I do not believe mainstream christianity will ever truly accept
Wicca as a legitimate religious tradition, for one very simple reason:
Wicca is devoted to an even more threatening figure than their Devil:
the Goddess Herself. And the notion of the divine as female, and
perhaps even feminist, is a terrifying threat to all their sad
delusions of social control.
As we have seen, exaltation of the
Goddess is at the very origin of the Left Hand Path. Ever since Lilith
the first wife of Adam demanded to be on top during sex and was
replaced by the somewhat more compliant Eve, the Goddess has been
written out of the history books. Her renewal in recent years has been
a rather terrible shock, which continues to ripple through contemporary
society. After all, even Satan could be considered a sort of loyal
opposition, and his worshippers still had to define themselves within
the essentially Christian framework limited to a duality of God and the
Devil. A genuine pagan revival completely sidesteps this entire
extremely lucrative judeo-christian-islamic worldview and allows
individuals to redefine themselves on their own terms. It also reveals
far too much about the sordid schizophrenia of western civilization,
ever splitting God into two opposing halves, for in other cultures the
deity retains unity and even the Wrathful and the Compassionate Buddha
are one and the same. Without acknowledging both our darkness and our
light, how can we ever become truly whole? With the resolution of
duality, or Carl Jung's embrace of the shadow, we take the wisdom and
power of the darkness into ourselves; and from there we can move on to
the more important mission: changing the world, so that illumination
and liberation can be achieved as the birthright of all beings.
In the good old days, in some parts
of Europe, left-handed people and those with red hair were burned at
the stake. As far back as ancient Rome, legitimate descent ran through
the dexter or right hand line. In medieval heraldry, the leftward bend
sinister on a shield denoted bastardy. The left side is that of the
female, the evil and unholy. The dark Yin seeks to overcome the bright
Yang. These are very old prejudices, but perhaps it is time we left
them behind. Many people are uncomfortable with negative forces,
midnight places, or uncontrollable and primal chaos. They may delude
themselves that denial makes such things go away, but they can only be
suppressed for a time, and what is denied grows stronger and eventually
bursts forth. Perhaps that is why our civilizations, which so emphasize
order and light, are continually beset by the uprisings and revolts of
chaos and a perceived darkness.
“Maybe this planet is another
planet’s Hell.” - Aldous Huxley
The left-hand path, by the magical
formula of opposition or reversal, the tantric Viparit Karani or
‘backward doing’, sees things in very a different way. Order is
tyranny, rigidity, and oppression. Chaos is anarchy, renewal, and
liberation. In truth the creative tension between the two is what makes
progress possible; and since the Church & State serve order, it is
left to outlawed and outcast traditions such as magick and witchcraft
to champion all revolutionary and individualistic causes, to question
the norm and subvert the orthodox. Those spiritual traditions that
carry the cause of liberty forward are often persecuted as heresies,
yet they are often older and truer than the later structures that seek
to supplant them. The nightmare of the tyrant is the freedom of the
people; and we are entering an era of freedom. The Left Hand Path is
the way of knowledge, while the Right Hand Path rules by faith alone.
The Sufis sometimes expressed the
power of the Negative Way or Via Sinistra with the symbol of Black
Light, and contemporary Luciferians exalt the Black Sun. Yet another of
the secret mantras of Maat is LUTIS NITRA or Black Flame, the nightside
of Tiphareth, the power of Set as the inverse reflection of Horus, the
darkness that illuminates.
