Book Recommendation Essential Left Hand Path texts?

[William66]

Thomas Karlsson - Qabalah, Qlippoth and Goetic Magick.
Ford (?) - Beginning Luciferian Magic

Haha that Thomas Karlsson is so defensive.

Lets nobody in in his group, only his close friends. Where i live many wanted to join but Can't.
What is Karlsson up to?
We live in the same country and actually he is not so far away.
Would be nice to sit with him for a cup of coffee and talk .

 

[Pyrokar]

Wintruz, you are armed to the teeth mate. Your list looks definitive enough for me.

I didn't even have to read it. My approach to the thread was just to see what will people name drop because i caught on to how
strictly people take left/right paths as if they were not the same thing.
In his first line bro went "that depends how "Left Hand Path" is defined. Increasingly and especially on the internet-"
And i was like "oh yeah he gets it." knew a banger was coming
Notice the Nietzhe - Kreia similarity

 

[Vandheer]

I didn't even have to read it. My approach to the thread was just to see what will people name drop because i caught on to how
strictly people take left/right paths as if they were not the same thing.
In his first line bro went "that depends how "Left Hand Path" is defined. Increasingly and especially on the internet-"
And i was like "oh yeah he gets it." knew a banger was coming
Notice the Nietzhe - Kreia similarity

LOL I agree. Also Ride the Tiger was recommended me from someone I respect a long, long time ago.

Kreia? She wants force gone right? Imma be honest I don't know much about him. I am more of a Darth Sidious fan especially in Dark Empire.

 

[Pyrokar]

That someone certainly respected you as well to recommend it specifically.

Yes sir, it doesn't matter above the fact that she is inspired by Nietzche, left hand af
"It is such a quiet thing... to fall. Yet it is much more terrible to admit it"
"To believe in an ideal is to be willing to betray it"

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

I greatly appreciate what information and assertions you provided @Wintruz ...

That depends how "Left Hand Path" is defined. Increasingly and especially on the internet, practices which really have no substance behind them are called "Left Hand Path" because the practitioners just like the sound of those words and the history behind them. When the symbols are stripped away, what is usually going on is something that is closer to the RHP or else a kind of fantasy game without a clear objective driving it (usually a lot of immature drama and "rivalries" though).

Exactly my point ... Many new people on LHP forums were not necessarily demonolaters, but wanted to appear strong and scary. Even myself, I can admit when I went with a good intent but bad decision regarding another party, I was (and still am) powerless and weak. Weak in general, uneducated, and not terribly good with maintaining a decent conversation exchange; powerless over life circumstances, which is why I briefly turned to the dark side. Yet still despite my LHP strivings am and was RHP.

This has happened because, in the last twenty years, the term "Left Hand Path" has become unmoored from the Eastern tantrism and Western Satanism with which it was once associated. In those contexts, it had internally coherent definitions; the Left Hand Path was about reversing the flow of universal energy in the Eastern approach and it was about individuation to the point of self-sovereignty in the Western approach. There is some crossover between these approaches.

Which is why we seek power, to become an individual, particularly with aspects of a certain amount of unusual power. To be a king/queen in our life and world.

Nothing replaces experience and a living encounter with someone further down the road so that certain qualities can be apprehended in a way which empowers those same qualities within the initiate. With that caveat, these are the books which I would say give the best overview of what's really going on in the Western Left Hand Path:

Which qualities to be apprehended? Curious and inquiring minds want to know...

• Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent by Stephen E. Flowers
• The Basic Writings of Nietzsche and The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. by Walter Kauffmann) and Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity by Karl Jaspers
• The Gurdjieff Work by Kathleen Riordan Speeth
• The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution by Peter D. Ouspensky
• Living Thelema by David Shoemaker
• Energy Magick of the Vampyre by Don Webb
• Aletheia (3 vols.) by Tapio Kotkavuori

Nietzsche is the key to everything. The distinction between the unblinking cosmos and the Master's psyche, and What the Master's psyche can transform into through self-overcoming, is the philosophical basis of the entire Western Left Hand Path. Crowley translated the "Prophet" Nietzsche ("Prophet" wasn't a title Crowley threw around lightly) through the lens of Victorian magic and orientalism. The best introduction to Thelema is Shoemaker's book. Gurdjieff recognised that "day-to-day" consciousness is the product of external environment and that war had to be declared on this robotic thinking if the Master were to surface. Ouspensky's short book is the best introduction to Gurdjieff and Speeth's book directly applies the Work. Flowers is good for an overview of the Left Hand Path by looking at the way it's surfaced in history. Vampyre is Webb's best book and shows how the Words of the Temple of Set are keys to power in one's own life. It could be substituted with the ONA's NAOS (original only, not one of the bastardised versions) if preferred. Aletheia is a memoir of a life spent inside one Left Hand Path school. It shows the relationship between theory and reality.

I'd also suggest two novels and one film. One is Oscar Wilde's aesthete novel The Picture of Dorian Gray which communicates everything noble in LaVey's movement but with far greater beauty (read Wilde's De Profundis if you want to see where it can all lead without something greater than chasing highs). The second novel is Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End which depicts the racial memory of a being that empowers magic in some and madness in others. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the loose film adaptation of this same idea and considers the weirdness of human intelligence and why it should have arisen at all.

After all of that, if you want further reading, these are cultural specific lenses and other areas of investigation:

• Northern Magic by Edred Thorsson
• Aghora: At the Left Hand of God by Robert E. Svoboda
• The Yoga of Power by Julius Evola
• Metapolitics by Peter Viereck
• The Magick of Aleister Crowley by Lon Milo Duquette
• Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom by Erynn Rowan Laurie
• On Becoming an Alchemist by Catherine MacCoun
• A Secret History of Consciousness by Gary Lachman

Much reading to seek out and digest, thank you for the list Wintruz and all.

 

[Vandheer]

Honestly I am not even sure how Demonolatry folk can call themselves LHP since most of them just rejected JCI but now they worhship demons. Thats basically chaging one master to another, and seems like missing the point (of what I think would be LHP, at least).

Wintruz' first paragraph hits home close, I have been in those situations and even one of those, admittedly.

 

[HoldAll]

If you want to educate yourself about those people:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DemonolatryPractices/comments/13d463l

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

In keeping with the general trend of the LHP, demonolatry seems like taking the 'bad guys' of a given mythology and worshipping them as the 'actual good ones' because you just have to worship someone as a good religious person - and such submissive behaviour doesn't jibe with the whole LHP self-deification thing, IMHO.

In a way, the LHP has won because we now (arguably) live in an age of extreme individualism. Nobody wants to meld with the godhead anymore, which is allegedly the main defining feature of the RHP according to the LHP guys. Almost every RHP practioner wants their own personal self-customized Path (although there still seems to be a market for cults and magical orders), I know that I do - which supposedly is another LHP thing. As for the antinomian thing... short of violating the law, there is not much left which you can perpetrate to shock the burgeois.

Demonolatry feels like an ersatz religion, you're right - there seems to be nothing liberating about it, only more close-mindedness.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

Not to be close minded, but if and only if an individuals religion of choice is true, everyone else loses. Yes or no? Could reality be binary after all?
I would say go with the recommendations listed in the replies, more than enough reading for any individual.

 

[Wintruz]

Which qualities to be apprehended? Curious and inquiring minds want to know...

This is the part that I generally avoid writing about; not for some mysterious game-playing but because it is genuinely difficult to communicate it in words, especially written words, which don't just make the obfuscation worse. It really does have to be experienced to be understood.

Those who have truly gone some way down the Path are marked by a certain Presence. In my case, my first encounter was with someone exceptionally advanced (a Master in fact) and that Presence was so powerful that simply being exposed to it was life-changing.

This change happened in two-ways. In the first, after meeting endless self-proclaimed adepts, "shamans", Rosicrucians, et al. and finding people often a good deal less divine than their hard-working, muggle neighbours, I came to a point of either writing magic off or else, on some level, deluding myself and "joining in" as a means of escapism. Then, with the student ready, I was confronted with a person who was a living embodiment of self-divinisation. Play time was over, divinity was real, intense and whatever it took, I needed it too. And that was the second "key"; encountering that Living Presence in another activates it within ourSelves and this can only happen in person to person transmission. Once it has been activated, we can choose to let it die out as a curiosity or we can choose to fan those embers. This last option is the Left Hand Path.

 

[Diluculo_DelFuego]

I get it. When the student is ready, the Master (Magus?) appears.

Post automatically merged: Nov 20, 2023

Honestly I am not even sure how Demonolatry folk can call themselves LHP since most of them just rejected JCI but now they worhship demons. Thats basically chaging one master to another, and seems like missing the point (of what I think would be LHP, at least).

Wintruz' first paragraph hits home close, I have been in those situations and even one of those, admittedly.

I never understood how choosing a patron demon on the LHP wasn't trading one owner for another, 8n a way as you put it.
That's why Wintruz has such a fair list of must reads, particularly the Will to Power per Nietsche (sp?). That and Lords of the Left Hand Path, as opposed to Lords of Light by Butler on the RHP. Many Lords of the LHP would seem to become an individual vs one of the masses.

 

[Xenophon]

Honestly I am not even sure how Demonolatry folk can call themselves LHP since most of them just rejected JCI but now they worhship demons. Thats basically chaging one master to another, and seems like missing the point (of what I think would be LHP, at least).

Wintruz' first paragraph hits home close, I have been in those situations and even one of those, admittedly.

Good point, though some of the more astute insist that evoking demons must, in time, give way to exercising newly found and developed personal magickal power. That, indeed, such is the whole point of the LHP.

Post automatically merged: Nov 20, 2023

This is the part that I generally avoid writing about; not for some mysterious game-playing but because it is genuinely difficult to communicate it in words, especially written words, which don't just make the obfuscation worse. It really does have to be experienced to be understood.

Those who have truly gone some way down the Path are marked by a certain Presence. In my case, my first encounter was with someone exceptionally advanced (a Master in fact) and that Presence was so powerful that simply being exposed to it was life-changing.

This change happened in two-ways. In the first, after meeting endless self-proclaimed adepts, "shamans", Rosicrucians, et al. and finding people often a good deal less divine than their hard-working, muggle neighbours, I came to a point of either writing magic off or else, on some level, deluding myself and "joining in" as a means of escapism. Then, with the student ready, I was confronted with a person who was a living embodiment of self-divinisation. Play time was over, divinity was real, intense and whatever it took, I needed it too. And that was the second "key"; encountering that Living Presence in another activates it within ourSelves and this can only happen in person to person transmission. Once it has been activated, we can choose to let it die out as a curiosity or we can choose to fan those embers. This last option is the Left Hand Path.

You are fortunate that way. As best I can figure out, I "let down the side" badly in a previous incarnation. So this go, I have to do things on my own dime, at least so far as actual physically present teachers are concerned (as opposed to books.) I've long preached Hammurabi's Law. So I'll not cavil at taking my own comeuppance.