Left Hand Path practitioners include Luciferians, Satanists, people practicing Setian philosophy, etc... The question I'd like to explore in this article is whether these individuals are evil or not. Before we can tackle that we need to understand what it means to actually be evil.
What Does It Mean to be Evil?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word evil means:
a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked an evil impulse
b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct a person of evil reputation
I think it's clear that you cannot define evil without having some sort of moral standard to judge a behaviour against. In other words, whether something is evil or not is context specific and dependent on the eye of the beholder. What is evil to one society or individual may be perfectly acceptable to another. If you travel to another part of the world, you may accidentally do something that is considered unacceptable, disturbing or even illegal whereas that exact same behaviour is considered perfectly acceptable and commonplace in your home territory. Even in the same physical area, what is considered acceptable or not can change dramatically over time. Different clubs, groups or cliques within the same general area will often have their own set of standards that differ from those held by other groups.
With that in mind, whether certain behaviours are evil or not is determined collectively. You can be a kind hearted and compassionate individual but still be considered evil if your personal code of behaviour clashes with the culture of the people you are interacting with. To create a really easy example, let's say you find yourself in a place where slavery is accepted as normal and even protected by law. If you were to go and free someone's slave, you could be considered evil for theft of the slave owner's property and all the consequences that result from that (perhaps the slave owner was relying on the labour of that slave to harvest food crops, which then rot on the vine.) Your actions are noble when judged against your own personal code of standards, but the greater society you are interacting with will consider it an evil act.
So Are Luciferians and Satanists Evil or Not?
The short answer is Yes!
Let me explain that. To be on the Left Hand Path means you are seeking to define yourself as an individual as opposed to being a member of a collective. The work of a LHP practitioner will therefore include research, soul searching and experimentation to determine which values you agree with and which ones you are at odds with. You will progressively forge your own set of personal standards. This personal code of conduct will evolve over time as you gain greater experience, encounter new information and as you develop greater wisdom. Inevitably you will discover that you disagree with certain values common in the society you find yourself surrounded by. In fact you may find certain elements of the larger society downright repugnant! As you exercise your growing independence, you are sure to evoke similar feelings in others who observe you disregarding their deeply held opinions of what is right and wrong. Your rebellion against the social norms of society, you will be branded as an evil person.
The very act of exerting your individuality is transgressive and therefore will be viewed as evil by the common man.
That being said, there are definitely going to be several common values you happen to strongly agree with. The idea here isn't simply to be a rebel without a cause. Many of your personal values will be shared by the vast majority of people, especially those from the culture you were raised in, however you will hold these values because you have investigated them thoroughly and found them to be valuable. Contrast this to the common man who will have simply adopted their values through repeated exposure or indoctrination and once a point has been accepted as Truth, it is never challenged by that individual again.
What do you think? Is Evil a necessary part of the Left Hand Path? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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"Faith is a surrender to reason, not a reason to surrender."
Another great post. :)
Thank you very much! Love the quote.
Hi, I‘m really interested to know what you think about my introduceyourself post
Regards
Very good post
I hope to give u one of these days a good post too
I’m working on a philosophical and anthropological theory that could reverse good and evil in a blink
Good life and peace, hierophant.
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for the resteem. I look forward to seeing your posts here.
I like your Blog. Following you Now.
Thanks! I appreciate that, @shrazi
You also have to distinguish between hereditary satanist who are loathsome creatures who rape their kids, torture animals. ect Or the fun people of the church of satan who are an entirely different breed and most likely who you are referring to in your article. I am fine with Leveyans ect. but those hereditary people need to be hit by meteors.
I'm not convinced what you refer to as "hereditary satanists" actually exist. A lot was said about these types during the Satanic Panic of the 1980's but there were never any arrests and no evidence. Several of the people making claims were shown to be frauds. But if they do exist, then yeah, they need to go extinct like the dinosaurs.
Actually there was a confirmed case in Bavaria/Germany when I was kid and the father and uncle were arrested and the kids were taken by the state. And I have heard stuff from reliable people that at least some exist in the U.S In sick way they are the reverse baptists of satanism. They reference stuff they do not understand, instead worshiping they rebel against a god who is most likely made up and they do horrible things in the name of an entity from a book that is mostly fiction. What they have in common with their Christian counterparts is that the ones being discussed are usually bourgeois middle class who have a lot of the same sensibilities and tastes. I imagine it is the same crowd as swingers who imagine themselves so interesting and wild but just aren't. The problem is that while unimaginative torturing animals and kids is unacceptable. So I am rooting for meteors and while we are at it they can hit some of the christian ass hats as well ...
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How I understand what you said, but let me answer you that I’m quite neutral, I practice both left and right hand. You could understand me when you will read my introduttive post.
Regards and resteemed
Thanks for the comment and resteem. I wouldn't mind reading a post explaining your definition of LHP and RHP. To me, saying you practice both is like saying you're driving to two different destinations at the same time. Either you're working towards individuation or you're working to become one with the collective. You can't really do both at once. At least that's how I see it. I would be interested to understand what you mean when you say you do both.
I think it's possible to do both in different time, for exemple.
When you help an old woman to pass a street or do shop at market you're on good path, and when you pray that a criminal have punishment, perhaps harder that he need, for his behavior you use selfishness, in effect.
Universe give life and death equally, so Universe uses both. Understanding when to use one or other is the question. Diabolos mean accuser, prosecutor, it's no mean evil, it's mean Satan is the judge you wait from long time, and the judgment could be sad and painful for really evil person, egoistic and privileged ones, and fair at the perfect eyes of Universe.
They teach that you have to think to neighbor and not to you, only because they don't want to think to you, in the while they think to themselves only. So thinking to others is good and to ourselves is bad.... I think it's wrong. The sacred way is the intelligent way: to do everything good for both, ourselves and others, like I said in my introducemyself, like professor C. M. Cipolla said:
They want to make us helpless, in the while they are bandits, in the best case, or stupid at all, in the worst. I hope I explained at best. I hope to reach as many people as possible to change false vision you have for good and evil, a single patriarchal path hidden in false worths and religions, that will bring this world to the waste.
Follow both ways could be also search to join collectivity, preserving our personality, our dreams and ideas, so to enrich collectivity itself.
Sorry for the english my human has sometimes...
Have good time, good mortal ;)
I haven't answered a part of your question because I would to treat it in a particular post, but I can spoiler a little.
Left hand: to Know - to Want - to Dare - to Keep
Right hand: to Study - to Think - to Experience - to Spread
IMHO
Having known and still knowing several lefthanded people including my own mother, I can tell that lefthanded people are not inherently evil.
The stance that I'm taking in this article is to understand the literal definition of the word evil and then determine if it applies to Left Hand Path occultists and philosophers. I'm not talking about people who favor their left hand when writing or manipulating objects. I mean the esoteric philosophy generally referred to as Left Hand Path. This philosophy requires the practitioner to set their own moral code, which is technically evil if you look at the definition of the word. However, as I say in the article, that has nothing to do with whether you are a kind, compassionate individual. You can treat people very well and still be evil by the technical definition of the term. Really I'm just playing with words and worldviews in order to convey a concept.
Yes, It is very interesting.
This is interesting and well exposed, but I want to make a reflection: how could you have your own personal ideas and moral code if we are only and always a little little part of Universe itself, and we could not to be not it??
From what I know about the left hand path a lot of it comes from Kenneth Grant and his offshoots like the TOTO, and its successors like Dragon Rouge, OTO Antiqua (Gnostic Voudon), and Temple of Ascending Flame. All of these are Grantian groups.
Whereas the church of Satan, Temple of Set, etc are from a kind of different group. Typhon/Apophis is an adversary in Golden Dawn magic so it's a similar concept.