Origins of the Left-Hand Path: A Short History

The left-hand path has a short history under its own name and a very long one without it. As a name that practitioners in the West chose for themselves, it is about sixty years old. As a term of abuse, it is about a hundred and fifty. The ideas it gathers are older than either.

This page follows those ideas through eight stages. It is a sketch, and every stage in it has a literature of its own. It names traditions, periods, and kinds of text. Like the rest of this site, it names no persons and no organizations; the reasons are given on the Currents page.

The Name

The name comes from India. The tantric schools arose there from around the middle of the first millennium, and by its end their texts distinguished two modes of practice: dakshinachara, right-hand conduct, and vamachara, left-hand conduct. The right-hand mode kept within the rules of ritual purity. The left-hand mode deliberately did not. Its best-known rite made sacramental use of five things that orthodox law forbade or restricted: wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual union. Some of its adepts practiced in cremation grounds, among the things their society feared most.

The purpose was never indulgence. It was to pass beyond the distinction between pure and impure, on the understanding that a mind still ruled by disgust and fear is not yet free. Left-hand practice was a discipline, undertaken within a lineage, under a teacher, usually after long preparation, and its aim was liberation as those schools understood it: the realization that the practitioner and the divine are not two.

By the definition used elsewhere on this site, the aim of the tantric left hand was closer to the right-hand path than to the modern left: it sought identity with the divine, not the sovereignty of a separate self. What the modern West took from it was a name and a method, the deliberate crossing of a forbidden line for the sake of freedom. It did not take the aim, the lineage, or the teacher.

The West had its own reasons for finding the name apt. In Latin the word for "left" is sinister. In the old parable of judgment, the sheep are set on the right hand and the goats on the left. Long before anyone in Europe had heard a word of Sanskrit, the left was already the side of the suspect, the unlucky, and the condemned.

The Serpent Who Told the Truth

In the first centuries of the common era, around the eastern Mediterranean, a number of religious schools told the story of creation in a way that turned it over. These are the schools later grouped under the name Gnostic, from the Greek gnosis, knowledge. Their own books were largely lost until 1945, when a jar of buried codices was found near Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

In many of these tellings, the material world was not made by the highest god. It was made by a lesser power, a craftsman, called the demiurge, who was ignorant of everything above him and who declared himself the only god. Beneath him stood the archons, the rulers, who kept humanity asleep. And in several of these texts the serpent of the garden is not the deceiver. It is the instructor: the one who tells the first humans the truth about the tree, against the command of a jealous maker. Some of these schools were named for it by their opponents: the Ophites, from the Greek word for serpent, and the Naassenes, from the Hebrew.

These schools were not left-hand in the modern sense either. Most of them taught that the human spirit should escape the world and return to a divine fullness beyond it, which is a kind of union. But they left three ideas that the left-hand path has never put down: that the authority which forbids knowledge may itself be mistaken, that the adversary of that authority may be a benefactor, and that knowledge, not obedience, is what frees. The Order's founding text, The Shed Skin, takes the serpent of the garden as its ancestor in this sense. The Blind Maker gives the Order's reading of the demiurge.

The Toolkit of the Magicians

Most of the working methods of Western magic were assembled in the same centuries, and almost none of them by people who would have accepted the name left-hand.

The Hermetic writings, composed in Greek in Roman Egypt and attributed to a legendary thrice-great sage, described the cosmos as the living expression of a divine mind, and the human being as a small copy of the whole. One of them says that a human being on earth is a mortal god. The later maxim "as above, so below" compresses the Hermetic view into four words, and the whole system of correspondences on which ceremonial magic depends, the linking of planets, metals, plants, colors, and hours, grows from it.

The philosophical schools of the third and fourth centuries added a map of reality as a ladder, descending from a single source through many levels, and a ritual art for climbing it, which they called theurgy, "god-work." Its aim was the return of the soul to its source. That is a right-hand aim. But theurgy gave Western magic the conviction that ritual can change the one who performs it, and that the change can amount to deification.

The magical papyri of Roman Egypt, the working handbooks of practicing magicians, show a third thing. They mix the divine names of half a dozen religions without embarrassment. They include rites for acquiring a spirit as a personal assistant. And the magician in them does not only pray. He bargains, commands, and on occasion threatens the gods. The stance of the left-hand path, the refusal to approach any power on one's knees, is already there.

The Forbidden Books

From the Middle Ages onward this material circulated in Europe as grimoires, books of magic, most of them forbidden and many of them copied by hand. A handbook of astral magic, compiled in Arabic in Muslim Spain, translated into Spanish in the 1250s and into Latin soon after, taught the making of talismans under the right stars. Books attributed to the legendary wise king taught the conjuration of spirits within a circle, by the authority of divine names; one family of them cataloged the spirits by name, rank, and office, and the art of calling them came to be known as goetia. Another manuscript described a retreat of many months, spent in prayer and withdrawal, at the end of which the magician would know his guardian angel and command its opposites. In the sixteenth century a great synthesis, describing itself as an occult philosophy, arranged all of this into three worlds, the elemental, the celestial, and the intellectual, and insisted that magic was the highest part of natural knowledge.

Two things from this period shaped what came later. The first is the figure of the magician who bargains with the devil for knowledge. A German chapbook of 1587 told the story of a scholar who signed such a pact, and the legend has never since gone out of print. To this day the left-hand path's hunger to know, whatever the price, is called Faustian, sometimes as an insult and sometimes as a boast.

The second is the form the books took. Forbidden books are scarce. Scarce books are valuable, and their owners become important. Possession of the manuscript became, in itself, a kind of rank. The Order's essay Against the Locked Grimoire is an argument with a habit that begins here.

The Rebel Made Noble

For most of this history the adversary remained what the churches said he was. The change came through literature. An English epic poem of 1667 set out to justify the ways of God, and in doing so gave the rebel angel courage and eloquence. A century and more later, the Romantic poets read that poem and took the rebel's side. In their hands the fallen angel became a hero of liberty, and the fire-thief of Greek myth, chained to his rock for giving fire to mortals, became his twin.

This was poetry, not religion. No one was practicing anything. But the modern left-hand path's understanding of the adversary as an exemplar, a figure to be admired and emulated and not feared or served, comes almost entirely from here. The figures themselves are described on the page Faces of the Adversary.

The Revival and the Accusation

In the second half of the nineteenth century, magic was revived as a system. In France in the 1850s, the old grimoires were reinterpreted as a single hidden tradition, and the goat-headed figure now seen everywhere in left-hand path imagery was drawn for the first time. In 1875 a society was founded in New York that carried the vocabulary of Indian religion into the West, and in its literature the phrase "left-hand path" appears in English as the name for selfish and malevolent occultists, set against a right-hand path of altruism and self-surrender. In 1888 an order was founded in London that taught ceremonial magic through a ladder of grades, each with its own ritual, its own papers, and its own oath of secrecy.

Three consequences followed. The left-hand path acquired its name in the West as an accusation, and for decades it had no other use. The graded, oath-bound lodge became the pattern on which nearly every later occult order was built, including most of those that would eventually call themselves left-hand. And the next great system of Western magic, announced in 1904, made the individual will the whole of its law, later defined magic as the science and art of causing change in conformity with will, and still used "left-hand path" as a condemnation. In that system the adept of the left-hand path is the one who reaches the great threshold, where the self is to be given up, and refuses.

The modern left-hand path can be described as the decision to take that refusal as its goal.

The Name Reclaimed

In 1966 an organization openly dedicated to the adversary was founded in California, the first of its kind to win wide public notice. It was atheistic, theatrical, and carnal. It held that human beings are animals in an indifferent universe, that gods are human inventions, that the individual should therefore take the place once given to gods, and that ritual is a drama staged for the benefit of the one who performs it. It kept the lodge's degrees and hierarchy.

In 1975 that organization divided. Its leadership had announced that degrees would in future be given in exchange for contributions. Those who left regarded initiation as a real change in a person, which could be recognized but not sold, and they regarded the new policy as what an older vocabulary calls simony, the sale of sacred things. The body they founded was esoteric where its parent was materialist. It held the Prince of Darkness to be a real intelligence, took the Egyptian god Set as his oldest form, described the questioning intellect as his gift, and set as its goal the self's own endless becoming. Its parent had already applied the phrase "left-hand path" to itself. The new body defined the phrase with care and made it central, and the sense in which it is now generally used dates largely from this moment.

The question that divided those bodies in 1975 is the question on which the Order was founded in 2010. The Order's answer was to have no degrees at all.

Other strands were forming at the same time. In England in the late 1970s, a loose movement that came to be called chaos magic stripped ritual of its inherited theology and treated belief itself as a tool, to be taken up and put down according to results. In the 1980s a moral panic spread through several countries, alleging that secret networks were committing ritual crimes; official investigations found no evidence of the networks, and the panic collapsed, but not before innocent people had been harmed by it. And in 1989 an order was founded in Scandinavia on the image of the dragon, drawing together the dark side of several traditions into what it called the Draconian path.

The Path Today

Since the 1990s the left-hand path has become less a set of organizations than a network. The older orders continue. Around them there are now small temples that charge no fees and keep no hierarchy, independent presses that publish serious work in small and costly editions, solitary practitioners who publish decades of their own working notes, forums where thousands of people compare experiences, and businesses that sell courses in becoming a god. The Currents page describes the main tendencies.

The Order's own small part in this story begins with a correspondence in 2006. It is told in the History of the Order.

What the History Shows

The Order draws three conclusions from this history, and offers them to be tested like anything else.

The name is borrowed. The modern Western left-hand path is not tantra, and it is not Gnosticism. It took a name from one and a story from the other.
The tools came from the other path. Stillness, ritual, correspondence, the record, the idea of deification itself: nearly every method the left-hand path uses was developed by people seeking union with the divine. What distinguishes the left-hand path is not its tools. It is what the tools are used for.
The lodge is an accident. Grades, oaths, fees, and restricted papers came into the left-hand path from the nineteenth-century lodge, not from anything in the path's own aim. A path whose goal is the sovereignty of the self has no need of a structure built to make one person wait on another. The Order was founded on that conclusion.

Timeline

First to fourth centuries: The Gnostic schools, the Hermetic writings, the magical papyri, and the ritual art of theurgy take shape around the eastern Mediterranean.
From about the ninth century: The texts of the tantric schools of India distinguish right-hand from left-hand conduct.
1250s: The great Arabic handbook of astral magic is translated at a Spanish court, and soon reaches Latin. The age of the European grimoires begins.
1587: A German chapbook tells of a scholar's pact with the devil.
1667: An English epic gives the rebel angel a voice. The Romantic poets later take his side.
1850s: Ceremonial magic is revived in France, and the goat-headed figure is drawn.
1875 to 1888: "Left-hand path" enters English as an accusation. The graded magical lodge takes its modern form.
1904: A new system of magic makes the individual will its whole law.
1945: The buried Gnostic codices are found in Egypt.
1966: The first widely known organization dedicated to the adversary is founded.
1975: A schism over the sale of degrees. The new body gives "left-hand path" its present definition.
Late 1970s: Chaos magic appears in England.
1989: The Draconian path is given organized form in Scandinavia.
2010: The Order of the Serpent is founded without fees, secrets, or grades.