Left Hand Path — The Philosophy of Black Magick

6. Cultural appropriation.

In truth, Western intellectuals have appropriated the nomenclature Left Hand Path and Right Hand Path—Vāmācāra and Daksinācāra in Sanskrit—from the archaic tantric tradition of Indian religions, namely Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. That said, the school of thought known as black magick today has no explicit allegiance nor relation whatsoever to the ancient faiths of India; postmodern magicians in the West have simply adopted the name Left Hand Path for their own distinct way of life. In defense against any complaint of cultural misappropriation, contemporary sorcerers have undeniably advanced the Left Hand Path into the most powerful praxeology and ingenious philosophy of magick ever known to man; furthermore societies and cultures have historically married and blended their lexicons together, it has always been the norm to freely borrow terms from each other, most especially those that pertain to religion. With history as a rock-solid precedent, Western sorcerers can feel justified in their employment of the moniker Left Hand Path in regard to their own gorgeously unique school of thought.

As an analogy: only ten percent of the human population is physically dominant in their left hand on average, as opposed to ninety percent in the right hand. Thus right-handedness has become orthodox in society, while left-handedness is heterodox. This parallel signifies the relationship between Vāmācāra and Daksinācāra in its root context. Vāmācāra means left-handed heterodoxy as an alternative to right-handed orthodoxy. Therefore, things like heresy, sorcery, atheism, anarchism, satanism and freethought all qualify as left-handed heterodoxy, known formally as the Left Hand Path. By definition, black magick belongs exclusively to the free spirits who think differently from mainstream culture. Thus in contrast to this, traditions like faith, divinity, theism, statism, and dogmatism would classify as right-handed orthodoxy, formally known as the Right Hand Path.

7. The constitution.

It is incomplete to just be different because that merely entails a reactionary position. Logic requires for a line of reasoning to permanently ground the principles of black magick in reality—a hallmark that distinguishes philosophy from religion. Hereby the syllogism: magick functionally needs three conditions to act: (1) the individual sorcerer needs to exist to act; (2) the sorcerer needs the freedom to act; (3) the sorcerer needs the power to act. Observe that none of these are arbitrary opinions, but rather empirical facts of reality. In this way, these three hard facts stand as the moral conscience or ethical constitution of the Left Hand Path, the heart and soul of its philosophy.

Moral conscience:

1. Individuality: the sorcerer needs to exist
2. Freedom: the sorcerer cannot be obstructed
3. Power: the sorcerer needs strength

A real black magician embodies these three specific virtues in the fiber of their being; champions them to the death; sacrifices for their honor, and defends their dignity. This dedication to principle is called integrity.

8. Grossest negligence

Jargon like morality, ethics, virtue, and conscience may startle and upset a foolish reader—heretofore the merest whisper of codified ethics would send sorcerers in flight to the hills for cover, as if a proven moral code violates some hidden moral code to never have a moral code. The glaring contradiction of that stupidity has escaped them entirely. And the author singles this out as the biggest failure and grossest negligence of the Left Hand Path to date. This absence of reason explains why the general population of ordinary humans and white magicians tend to equate reckless violence and careless destruction with black magick. Heretofore, the Left Hand Path has not precisely clarified its core values; instead sorcerers have bastardized the path into a motley catch-all for random scraps of garbage ideas that met their fancy. Ergo confusion abounded.

Bottom line: a bulletproof ethical constitution for the Left Hand Path horrifies those who seek to hijack it for their shallow fringe ideologies like neo-Nazism, anti-cosmic nihilism, empty chaos, and pessimistic mysticism.

9. Most egregious error.

Black magick as a school of thought is related to the most ingenious movements of Western philosophy. Nonetheless, like a spoiled rich kid, it has failed to comprehend its own remarkably sublime inheritance; instead dimwitted magicians cite the tedious dogma of absurd obsolete faiths, the worst offender being Kabbalah. This desperately needed manifesto hereby terminates and abolishes the horrendous custom of appealing to ancient, camel-riding, cave-dwelling, child-raping, desert religions for definitions and concepts of black magick. And in place of archaic faith, the Left Hand Path will rightfully claim its true inheritance as enumerated below.

10. True inheritance

Forthwith this treatise specifies the theses, antitheses, and secondary theses of the Left Hand Path in accord with the best of human genius.

Theses:

1. Postmodernism: worldview that refutes the traditional values of Church, State, and Tribe; culture of revolution against the establishment
2. Existentialism: worldview that recognizes existence itself as grounds for knowledge, morality, and beauty as opposed to religion; birthed by Friedrich Nietzsche, and expounded by Martin Heidegger in Germany and Jean-Paul Sartre in France in twentieth century
3. Egoism: identity with self; defense of Individual against the Tribe; originated with Max Stirner and expounded by Friedrich Nietzsche in nineteenth-century Germany; not to be confused with the personality trait called egotism

Antitheses:

1. Modernism: worldview grounded on traditional values of ancient institutions like Church, State, and Tribe
2. Idealism: worldview that recognizes fiction as grounds for knowledge, morality, and beauty as opposed to actual existence, e.g., religious mythology
3. Nihilism: worldview that denies existence as grounds for knowledge, morality, and beauty
4. Mysticism: worldview that denies identity with self, defines life as suffering, and fosters ascetic deprivation; pessimistic nihilism

In addition to the foundational worldviews, several secondary theses complete the Left Hand Path school of thought.
Secondary theses:

1. Supernaturalism: theory that recognizes multiple planes of existence as opposed to only the physical plane; Multiverse Theory of cosmological physics supports this premise, although causality between separate universes remains scientifically uncharted territory; synonymous with magick
2. Adversarialism: ethic of self-defense; rebellion against tyranny; combination of atheism and anarchism; also known as satanism
3. Profanism: ethic that refutes hypotheses of divinity and holiness; polemical secularism

11. The greatest sages.

A millennia-long series of legendary figures have masoned the brick and mortar of ideas that sorcerers take for granted every day. These giants of intellect risked death and exile to defend the honor of the aforementioned theses.

Sages:

• Presocratics: earliest known freethinkers in human history; founders of Western philosophy in ancient Greece circa 600 BC; the unprecedented individualism, intuition, and adversarialism of Heraclitus particularly distinguish him as the greatest precursor to the Left Hand Path; Greek philosophers frequently suffered merciless humiliation, banishment, and capital punishment for their revolutionary heresy
• Immanuel Kant: possibly the smartest human to ever live, rivaled only by Aristotle; he demolished traditional proofs of theism; logically proved secular morality; conceived a full architectonic of epistemology; and laid a critical foundation for future generations of philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre
• Young Hegelians: infamous group of controversial radicals who discussed outlawed ideas like atheism and anarchism in nineteenth-century Germany; they famously convened at popular Hippel’s Wine Bar, smoked cigars, and debated ideas raucously until sunrise. This informal club birthed many notorious ideologues: Max Stirner the egoist, Karl Marx the communist, Bruno Bauer the anti-Christian historian, Ludwig Feuerbach the atheist anthropologist, Karl Schmidt the individualist, and Edgar Bauer the anarchist—all of whom held an array of disparate views, and yet as a titanic force they helped to awaken the postmodern zeitgeist across Europe
• Friedrich Nietzsche: by far the greatest genius of the Left Hand Path—he encapsulates it near flawlessly; many judge his writing to be the benchmark of postmodernism; he championed notorious ideas like will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, egoism, and intuition; he despised every kind of idealism like Judeo-Christianity, mysticism, nationalism, tribalism, as well as both socialism and capitalism—a seemingly contradictory view that still vexes political theorists; he acted as forerunner to the following wave of existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre
• Martin Heidegger & Jean-Paul Sartre: two twentieth century intellectuals who expound parallel ontologies grounded squarely on existence itself without reference to a theology or mythology

To summarize: a sorcerer can identify a fairly clear lineage of Left Hand Path heterodoxy throughout the entire history of philosophy from ancient to post-postmodern time—from Heraclitus through Sartre to this very manifesto and into future generations of black magicians! In current day, philosophy has not fully crossed the divide into magick and supernaturalism yet, nevertheless the rainbow bridge has already been laid via the widely accepted Multiverse Theory of cosmological physics. All that remains for physicists is to determine the causality between the myriad planes or universes of existence, and thereby magick immediately becomes a concrete theory of mainstream discourse. In the meantime it stands on its own as a sort of embryonic pre-science or future-science, which resolute magicians pioneer independently in this age.

12. The Übermensch.

Dead are all the gods: now we desire the Übermensch to live.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Genius Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that a new breed of philosopher would rise in several generations from his early postmodernism of the late 1880s; presumably he prophesied the post-postmodernism of the current 2000s. He named these free spirits Übermensch—overman in English—in reference to the way they would not only transvalue the values of all previous ages, but populate the first wave of human beings born purely into a fresh culture of new values; not unlike a native-born citizen parented by foreign-born immigrants. View postmodernists as refugees who escaped the tyranny of modernism, and gave birth to post-postmodernists who know only the beauty and safety of this new homeland, but nothing of the horrific suffering their parents endured in the past. In this same manner, black magicians hardly fathom the harrowing degree of murder, torture, and abuse inflicted up their heretical ancestry, the extreme amount of sacrifice required in order to arrive at their present location in the intellectual timeline of humanity.

Hitherto all moral values had been derived from theology through the invented commandments of a mythical god; not until the series of revolutions by Kant, Nietzsche, and Sartre did humanity finally and permanently ground its ethics in profane reality or secular existence in and of itself, without appealing to the authority of a fictional deity. Nietzsche forecast that the Übermensch would materialize, and make up the first humans to inhale only the pristine air of unpolluted values, to witness not the sunset of tonight, but the sunrise of tomorrow. He nakedly titled his books after this sentiment, e.g., Twilight of the Idols and The Dawn of Day.

Dear reader: the author of this manifesto humbly declares that black magicians right now constitute the Übermensch that Friedrich Nietzsche heralded—they carry the mantle of this peculiar breed of human. For they were reared during the first time on Earth when no physical danger threatens their sorcery, their adversarialism, their free spiritedness; black magicians can peacefully participate in their praxes virtually unscathed. The existing generation of magicians scarcely know of witch hunts, burnings at the stake, and inquisitions—and certainly have never experienced it!

Friend, the Übermensch lives! Although it has surfaced under the maxim Ascent to Godhood instead.

13. Ascent to Godhood.

Thus the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God […] the permanent limit in terms of which man makes known to himself what he is. To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, On Being and Nothingness

The term god suggests a variety of definitions across cultures. It generally denotes an impossibly perfect being; the sum total of every possibility condensed into one entity. Immanuel Kant, the shrewdest epistemologist of all time, defined god as the ideal of pure reason, the highest form of conception possible, i.e., what human reason idealizes as the greatest version of itself. Kant then concludes that such a perfect being cannot logically reside in empirical reality—it is born of the imagination alone, wherefore humans then mistakenly project it onto reality as actual—what he called a transcendental error. This reveals why theologians usually claim their god resides in a void beyond existence; they need to invent a hidden location for the imaginary being because they know it cannot dwell in the empirical world.

[A deity is] a concept that we can never exhibit in concreto in its totality, and thus it is grounded on an idea which has its seat solely in reason. […] This idea of the sum total of all possibility […] refines itself to a concept thoroughly determined a priori […] and then must be called an ideal of pure reason. If we consider all possible predicates […] then we find […] a mere non-being.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Black magicians must come to terms with atheism being fundamental to the school of thought, and acknowledge that blind faith in a fictional ideal qualifies as a form of religiosity, and therefore simultaneously classifies as white magic. The hypothesis of a supreme deity carries an extremely false implication: that a divine essence exists, called divinity. Belief in this imaginary substance constitutes the central tenet of the Right Hand Path; white magicians orient all their praxes around it; their definitive praxis—gnosis—seeks union with it. All this begs the question: if the concept of god is nothing but the ideal of pure reason, then do white magicians waste their time in pursuit of divine gnosis? Categorically yes, ergo rational black magicians consider white magic utterly absurd, futile, and measurably evil in its deceptive romanticism.

The existentialist realism of the Left Hand Path demands that sorcerers concentrate on the possible as opposed to the impossible. In contrast to the Right Hand Path, sorcerers view Godhood as a grandiose atheistic metaphor, not a literal destination. The Nietzsche-like slogan become a living god means to become the greatest version of self. In no way does it contain an article of faith in a divine being. Moreover, Ascent signifies the constant journey of becoming as opposed to an inert destination of being. The Left Hand Path observes that the cosmos itself remains in a never-ending process of becoming too. As an existentialist school the Leftward Path ever preserves its roots in the ground of cosmic reality.

To become is to live. To be is to die.

14. Highest act of heresy.

Black magick is composed of the most heretical people on Earth by far. As heretics they not only annihilate the orthodox concept of god, they dance on its ashes and become their own gods instead. This solitary act—to become one’s own god—makes up the tallest, largest, and greatest heresy a human being can do. As proof of this, the reader will recall the First Commandment of Judeo-Christianity: thou shalt have no gods before me. The corrupt scribes of that tradition prioritized their dictates in that particular order for a reason. Because disbelief in their deity comprises the worst act of heresy. However black magicians take it one step further: they become gods.

For the individual to set up his own ideal and derive from it his laws […] that has perhaps been hitherto regarded as the most monstrous of all human aberrations, and as idolatry itself. […] It was in the marvelous art and capacity for creating gods—in polytheism—that this impulse was permitted to discharge itself […] To be hostile to this impulse towards the individual ideal—that was formerly the law of every morality.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Turn to yourselves rather than to your gods […] Egoism calls you to joy over yourself, to self-enjoyment […] You must obey yourselves rather than men! […] Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe you are not egoists but are called to be idealists. Shake that off! […] Seek for yourselves, become egoists, become each of you an almighty ego. Or more clearly, just recognize yourselves again, just recognize what you really are, and let go of your hypocritical endeavors, your foolish mania to be something else than you are.
—Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own 

The Ascent to Godhood does more than demoralize religious fools and white magicians; it mercilessly eviscerates their entire paradigm of fake divinity. Sorcery endangers the divine with total extinction. Islamic terrorists have openly identified sorcerers and heretics as their top threat, and alas, murder them joyously. Police forces in theocratic Islamic nations energetically search for closet witches and idolaters in order to sentence them to death. Black magicians who live in the safe spaces of the post-postmodern West often forget that the least civilized and least tolerant areas of the world still harbor the cruelest animosity toward them.

15. Satan, the anarchist antihero.

Oh, satanism… that terribly mischaracterized and slandered ethic. How many times have conspiracy theorists, Judeo-Christian-Islamists, and white magicians accused, “Satanists want to take over the world!” when in reality the exact opposite is true. Satan simply means adversary in Hebrew, therefore adversarialism constitutes the moral principle of satanism. Adversarialism merely signifies self-defense, or rebellion against tyranny. Satanists fight against authoritarian evil not unlike the eponymous tragic antihero of Christian lore—Satan. That mythical figure awoke to the totalitarian wickedness of Yahweh, raised an army, and revolted against him. Sadly, he lost the war, but his valor warrants the highest esteem.

The devil epitomizes anarchism and atheism. Satan and his legions of demons battled against the holy kingdom of Yahweh and his legions of angels. Far too many avowed satanists fail to recognize the political side of this cosmic war, and just chalk it up to a fancy fairytale. Take a moment to reflect on how the devil embodies the spirit of anarchism. He stood up to a theocratic dictator, and sacrificed his own freedom for the cause. He is a political agitator and revolutionary par excellence, who fought against god. The spine, the guts, the mettle required for an undertaking of that magnitude warrants the sincerest reverence.

Satan has no master but himself. It behooves black magicians to ingrain that code in the moral fiber of their own psychology too. To do so, desacralize existence. Desecrate holiness. Turn off idealism, and turn on realism. Expunge the divine pollution out of the cosmos forever. The notion of divinity is a toxic venom disguised as medicine. Vomit out the poison, and feel relief once and for all.

16. Gods as egregores.

If sorcerers do not believe in a god or gods, how do they account for their praxes of possession and evocation that involve gods? Quite simply: the fictional gods of religion became powerful egregores on the astral plane through millennia of worship, and sorcerers now contact those manmade spirits. The term egregore denotes a spirit of human creation. Early humans witnessed the inexplicable wonders of nature: lightning, thunder, animals, agriculture, death, etc. In order to rationalize those organic forces, primitive humans projected their ideals onto them. In other words, ancient people anthropomorphized facets of nature into imaginary superheroes. As an example, they lacked scientific knowledge of electricity which explains lightning, so they just assumed with their primitive logic that a giant angry invisible man was throwing flames down at earth from the clouds to hurt them. This sort of crude ignorance may strike a person as painfully ludicrous today, but it would seem sensible in a rudimentary way given the circumstances back then. For this reason, nobody can scorn the ancients for their stupidity, since they were innocently ignorant. However, everybody can scorn religious people right now who still hold those beliefs, since they are willfully ignorant.

17. Polytheistic bigotry.

Not only do magicians fail to recognize that the deities of religion exist as manmade egregores—they are not actual gods—but they also romanticize polytheism, as if belief in many gods is somehow more rational and morally superior to belief in just one god. They exhibit a kind of polytheistic bigotry toward monotheism. In reality, all forms of theism fall under the category of batshit insanity; a rational sorcerer does not give a free pass to a pretty ancient polytheistic religion just because their ancestors devised it, or just because the pantheon of gods seems fun and cool. Genocide, tribal warfare, child indoctrination, human sacrifices and more have occurred under the traditions of polytheism, the same as they have under monotheism. The sole difference lies in timing; people alive now only know the ugly behemoth of Judeo-Christianity and so they hate it more. Be wary of the romanticism that magicians cast upon polytheism, which stinks of fetid blood and guts too.

18. Possession as ultimate sorcery.

Despite wariness toward ancient faith, sorcerers can safely undergo possession and evocation with astral egregores of certain religions. They simply need to be cautious about which particular spirit they invite into their psyche. Peaceful, helpful, ascendant spirits do populate the astral plane, and a shrewd black magician will ally with them at their discretion.

The praxis of possession has perennially been considered an overtly dangerous act that only mad or unhinged sorcerers would pursue. Legend has it that possession can cause death, insanity, and leave the sorcerer under the unfettered dominion of a spirit for life. In full honesty, a certain truth underlies those claims. Possession by a hostile or violent spirit does pose a grave danger to a healthy human being. To protect against this specifically, the author prescribes his patented golden rule of possession: due diligence. It is incumbent on the black magician to study the personality profile of a spirit prior to any sort of alliance or union. To do this, refer to the original source religion of the spirit as opposed to any subsequent religions which may have bastardized the entity. History is littered with examples where one tribe demonizes the god of a neighboring tribe, e.g., Tribe A takes the beautiful deity of Tribe B, and inverts it into a grotesque villain in their own pantheon. To reiterate, for sake of thorough due diligence, the black magician must study the root religion of the spirit whenever possible, to unmask its root personality.

Possession holds the record for strongest sorcery, because through it the magician inherits the potency and traits of the spirit in the most immediate and intimate way. In a sense, one can define all other acts of spirit contact like evocation or sigil-gazing as inferior, lower forms of possession. Magicians falsely believe that evocation and possession are mutually exclusive. Nonetheless the human connection to the spirit opens the psyche during an evocation and allows a degree of possession temporarily. Hence, sorcerers who summon spirits also need to observe the golden rule of due diligence, lest they evoke a violent psychopath who turns against them. All of this being fully disclosed, the reader can sincerely expect a sane, happy, even sexually orgasmic experience under possession with a spirit, so long as it passes their safety clearance.

The author currently enjoys union with the old Irish god of sorcery, the Dagda.

19. Demon as racial slur.

Methinks ye would call my Übermensch—the devil! So strange are ye in your souls to all that is great, that the Übermensch would be terrible in your eyes for his goodness.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The epithet of demon classifies as a racial slur that Judeo-Christians dogmatically use toward gods that preexisted their religion. It exemplifies a classic form of demonization—which as already explained, refers to when one tribe inverts and bastardizes the deities of another tribe.

Ethos anthropos daimon—character is fate.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 119

Greek philosopher Aristotle expounded a concept called eudaimonia, which essentially signifies moral happiness. Eu means good, and daimon means spirit, so a person who abides by ethics possesses eudaimonia, that is, they are good in spirit, or good in character. Confirmation of this translation is also found in the above quotation by Heraclitus. Nonetheless, the architects of Christianity misappropriated that specific term daimon, and inverted it to mean any spirit who had evil or bad character. Due to this, Judeo-Christian mythology is replete with instances where scribes have mischaracterized the gods of other civilizations as demons or enemies of Yahweh. In summary, eudaimonia originally suggested good character, and then through demonization it morphed into an evil being.

Despite this factual etymology and history of demonization, foolish white magicians still use the blanket slur of demon toward many beautiful, noble spirits that Judeo-Christian-Islamists have slandered, e.g., Azazel, Lucifer, Lilith, and many more. When will white magicians stop drinking the Christian kool-aid and end their racism toward spirits victimized by this gross slander? It is an egregious form of victim blaming. These excellent spirits deserve much better treatment, which explains why many black magicians happily and defiantly sport the monikers of demon, devil, sinister, and diabolical as badges of honor.

20. Idolatry not worship.

Black magicians do not worship nor believe in any god in a literal sense, which qualifies them as atheists. Notwithstanding, they do idolize certain egregoric spirits from old faiths in order to inherit their powers and personality traits. It is critical to differentiate idolatry from worship. To idolize means to revere, whereas worship means to submit. A sorcerer has no master but themselves, therefore they never worship anything, they simply idolize particular spirits for their own Ascent to Godhood. In accord with this fundamental distinction, the Second Commandment of Judeo-Christianity decrees: thou shalt not make idols. Historically, idolatry and worship have been separate, and this critical difference also separates black magick from white magic.

21. Supernatural atheism.

Last but not least, the Left Hand Path forges its own unique precedent, a wholly original stance that has not existed heretofore in the milieu. The author has coined this breakthrough supernatural atheism. For a formal definition: a supernatural atheist acknowledges that multiple planes exist, but disbelieves in god.

Behold: the most enlightened position on Earth.