None of Your Business
Gender Identity and The Left Hand Path
Today is Nonbinary Awareness Day, and I never thought I would find myself writing a post observing such an occasion. Even when I wrote I, Voidpunk less than a week ago, with the Voidpunk subculture arguably fitting in as a specific subset of the nonbinary gender identity, I didn’t realize Nonbinary Awareness Week was coming right up. It all just kind of flowed nicely that way, and I was pleasantly surprised when I learned about it from a Facebook Page, Nonbinary Memes & More.
It must be admitted: This kind of ignorance has been a streak running through most of my work, and in some ways, it has played out in my favor; I stumble into phenomena or ideas that are associated with fully fleshed-out ideologies or belief systems, and at least on a personal level, such experiences then lend validity to said ideas. I experience things first, then read about them later, even as someone who probably “should” have read about them if I had been doing thorough research like many if not most of my peers. Voidpunk is just the latest example, and I will be writing about another instance of this in my next chapter of The Inner Tarot Revolution, because it happens quite a bit in my esoteric work.
As I mentioned in I, Voidpunk, my learning of the subculture was intrinsically linked with my introductory post in Cancel Culture Crusader Order being shot down (I still don’t understand why they didn’t just go whole-hog and kick me out; doesn’t it stand to reason that if you’re rejecting my introductory post, you’re rejecting me? Of course, maybe I was being given an opportunity for dialogue that I turned my nose up at). The purpose of this post is to explore some of the reasons I think that might have been, because I am pretty sure ignorance was at the root of it.
This is because, if you understand the Left Hand Path properly, you realize that if you hold any kind of marginalized identity—including one that falls under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella—the Left Hand Path is your friend! The particular organizations that fall under the LHP heading, and their specific practices, are another story, but we’ll get to that in due time.
At this point, I need to be ridiculously explicit about a couple of things, because I know how these Cancel Culture types are in their (unwarranted) pedantry:
I got no feedback (and admittedly did not seek it) as to the reason for the post’s rejection, so anything I say about it here is pure speculation, and I could be wrong.
There are several mods for the group, and I don’t know which one was responsible for the decision (lest anything I write here be construed as a direct personal attack on Veya).
However, because the name of the group is literally “Cancel Culture Crusader Order,” my assumptions are going to center on examining cancel culture itself, and I am going to heavily assume the rejection was rooted in cancel culture ideology. I think this is a safe assumption to make and if I’m wrong about it, well…Veya pretty much asked for it by deciding to literally name a group after such nonsense, even if, as Veya claims, it began as a joke.
I love that the colors of the Voidpunk flag are also Joker’s colors.
The Left Hand Path and Social Justice
One thing must be acknowledged from the outset: The lenses of cancel culture and social justice are inherently political ones, and this complicates things because it means that I have no choice in this post but to compare apples and oranges. Left Hand Path ideology is rooted in esotericism, which is a radically different perspective than that of politics. There is unavoidable overlap between the two, and in this case, things get really tangled in that zone where the one crosses over into the other. I happen to think this zone of overlap is important, and most of my work inhabits that zone even if I have thus far avoided getting too involved in explicitly exploring much of its nuance.
What makes this even more difficult to discuss or write about is the fact that the two perspectives—the political and the esoteric—are in many ways diametrically opposed. In short, anyone who has an interest in both politics and esoteric work has a lot of “translation” to do when applying political theory.
In general, political science is a secular viewpoint that in no way prioritizes a spiritual worldview. In fact, it specifically goes out of its way to “cleanse” itself of spiritual influences. From the viewpoint of the political scientist, and most especially the modern progressive political theorist, there is in fact a concerted effort to strip spirituality of whatever privilege it once held in these discussions, because there is a recognition that, for much of human history, politics has been subservient to various spiritual perspectives and this has usually resulted in the oppression of some group or another, which is an inherent problem that the modern progressive political theorist is trying to solve.
I cannot fault that logic. I’m all for it, in fact. I hold the view that, yes, our spiritual worldviews should be challenged in the light of things like logic and rationalism.
Due to certain aspects of Left Hand Path ideology and history that are indeed, through this lens, “problematic,” most people who identify as political activists, especially those on the left (ironically), don’t realize just how much of the modern Left Hand Path (LHP) community would, in fact, agree with them. I am certain that in the case of my experience in Cancel Culture Crusader Order, the extent to which these aims overlap was not appreciated.
But yes, much of the apparent conflict between modern political ideology and Left Hand Path philosophy stems from this difference in the way spirituality is viewed: Those whose perspective puts the political before the spiritual are most likely to view spirituality itself as a contaminant in these discussions, whereas those (like me) who prioritize the esoteric perspective over the secular perspective will make allowances for the spiritual that secular political theorists would rather seek to prevent or eliminate.
This means that a robust and comprehensive consensus on such matters is, in a nutshell, impossible. And that results in inherent conflicts when attempting to synthesize a Left Hand Path worldview with a modern political one—especially on the political left—because the fight for social justice is essentially consensus-driven, and this is, in many regards, antithetical to the Left Hand Path perspective.
This stuff is highly nuanced; understanding the full ramifications of this nexus from the political viewpoint would require years of study and contemplation. Understanding it from a fully-matured LHP perspective also requires years of study and contemplation. It thus follows that even beginning to understand how the two perspectives relate to one another and forging a working synthesis of the two viewpoints is a fucking tall order. I don’t even think I’m qualified for it myself, and yet I am doing the best I can at the moment because this is the work that makes my heart sing.
What Is The Left Hand Path?
I don’t like this answer to the above question, but the unfortunate reality is that, due to the LHP’s intrinsic nature, there are no two ways about it: From the purely political perspective, the Left Hand Path is a problem.
The quickest and dirtiest definition of the LHP is this: The Left Hand Path is a spiritual path founded on the sovereignty (a word with quite a bit of inherent “charge” in any political discussion) of the individual. As compared with any other spiritual path, it places the Self and its very growth and development at the center. It’s about finding one’s own way in the world, even and especially where this means parting ways from the herd, or going against the conventions of the wider society.
So, from the very start, if your worldview is a secular, consensus-driven one, you might superficially view the entire idea of the LHP as a potential threat to your aims, because someone who walks the LHP is someone you can’t argue with; if they disagree with you, they won’t see the pressures of social cohesion as a good enough reason to listen to you. They might tell you to get bent on principle, without even hearing your position out. This kind of stubborn individualism is something that the political left often tries to suppress and eliminate because it is perceived as fertile ground for hateful ideologies to take root and spread (which is not an off-base perspective). Generally speaking, so-called “SJWs” will do their best to draw others into the ongoing social “discussion” and press folks to validate their individual viewpoints with well-reasoned argument. Anyone who decides to bypass that process entirely, and who instead tells you to fuck off with your social agenda, is viewed with a modicum of suspicion right off the bat.
The fact of the matter is that there are many on the Left Hand Path who are so firmly-rooted in the individual perspective that they don’t want to discuss or even hear about politics at all, and I know it’s become such a fixture of leftist ideology as to be a full-on talking point that anyone who says they want nothing to do with politics is probably holding that view because they want to protect their personal prejudices from scrutiny.
This is a consequence of the extent of political polarization that prevails these days. I kinda get it. I was much more sympathetic to this view even a couple of years ago, but now I see it as somewhat hypervigilant. I think a lot of these political lefties are too goddamn uptight, and as far as the prerogatives of individual freedom are concerned, there’s a fine line where consensus goes from creating more room for it to completely overwhelming it.
The modern progressive political worldview tries to politicize everything. There are good-hearted, noble motives in such a perspective, but people who hold such political views also very easily forget that not everything is subject to the lens of politics. There are places where it simply doesn’t apply the way political activists want it to, and I think it’s possible that one of them could be the reason my post in Cancel Culture Crusader Order (CCCO) was rejected; at the very least, it does fit in with one of the more common points of contention for political leftists: Cultural appropriation.
Eastern Origins
Contemporary Left Hand Path ideology is basically inseparable from the work of two men in particular who, from the leftist political perspective so prevalent in this discussion, have been branded with that heavy-handed label, “problematic:” Aleister Crowley and Anton Szandor LaVey (more so the latter; casual readers probably would not think of Crowley in association with the LHP, but those who have studied it more deeply will recognize how much of LaVey’s work depended on Crowley’s).
The term “Left Hand Path” is ultimately drawn from the Sanskrit term “vama marga,” or “vāmācāra,” which means it has its roots in ancient India. From the leftist political perspective, this, in and of itself, is highly problematic because, if you know anything about Satanism, you know just how incompatible LaVey’s ideology was with the actual vāmācāra. The original Left Hand Path is an inherently spiritual worldview, and LaVey’s philosophy was (so the consensus goes, anyway—there is some disagreement on this point) just about as secular as is modern political theory. In other words, the irony is that LaVey was just about as resistant to thinking of things in spiritual (or at least “religious”) terms as most modern political scholars are.
Secondly, whatever religious overtones are applicable to Satanism were drawn from Christianity, not from Eastern spirituality; Satan is the Christian Devil, and so the religious symbolism used in Satanism is basically “inverted Christianity” that has nothing at all to do with the roots of the term “Left Hand Path.”
From the leftist political viewpoint, this is pretty much the definition of “cultural appropriation,” which is basically a sin in their worldview.
Of course, someone who walks the Left Hand Path does not care what you call “sinful.” That’s not a good enough reason to steer clear of it. And, as I have already covered, this alone is reason enough for political leftists to see the term “Left Hand Path” and immediately skip over any further rational thought and opt, both immediately and reflexively, for canceling anyone professing such ideas at all.
This is where the difference between the secular worldview and the spiritual worldview held by most esotericists becomes all-important.
The lens of political science is inherently secular. In these modern times, we’ve been “enlightened” by the advent of science and all it can explain that was previously only interpreted through a spiritual lens. This perspective generally holds philosophical materialism/physicalism as the default assumption about reality in any discussion deemed legitimate.
This means that, in all matters that even brush up against spirituality, different spiritual ideas are viewed from the lens of cultural relativism: All spiritual beliefs are regarded as just that: Beliefs, and nothing more. In this view, religion = culture, and as such, certain ideas are regarded almost as the “intellectual property” of their cultures of origin.
So, for example, if you are talking about reincarnation at all, you are referencing Hinduism or Buddhism, and if you are discussing the idea outside of either of those domains and applying them elsewhere, you are “appropriating a cultural idea.” From this viewpoint, if you are not an accepted member of a faith that fits into the above guidelines, yet you are discussing the idea and applying it outside of its native cultural context, you’re doing something that is inherently unethical because of how it threatens to erase the culture of origin.
And, from the strictly political/secular perspective, I would have to agree (somewhat) with that reasoning…and even as someone who holds spirituality to be fully valid, I agree that it’s important to be sensitive to these cultural issues from an ethical standpoint (though not every esotericist does the same).
All of this, of course, due to its rootedness in a secular viewpoint, overlooks an important possibility:
What if reincarnation is real?
Now I’m going to explain why the above secular viewpoint doesn’t fly in this particular case (and this one is rather unique in terms of how it plays out on this particular philosophical battleground).
Within its culture of origin, the Left Hand Path, or vāmācāra, is culturally taboo. The vāmācāra, like the modern Left Hand Path, is really more a subculture than it is a culture in its own right; it was a particular subset of practice within a wider religious context, and one that turned many of the host religion’s tenets on their heads. For example, in the broader context of Hinduism in which the vāmācāra arose, it’s forbidden to eat beef, drink wine, or engage in certain sexual practices; and as such, the initiation rites for formally setting upon the vāmācāra involved eating beef, drinking wine, and having sex with strangers and relatives, in direct defiance of the prevailing norms they were attempting to break.
Eastern cultures are generally more rooted in collectivism, whereas individualistic cultures are mostly Western ones. There are exceptions to the rule, but from a historical and anthropological viewpoint, these are the basic trends. This matters because while the breaking of certain specific taboos is a traditional part of the practice of vāmācāra, on a more fundamental level, the true “sin” in that context, was, in fact, the prioritizing of the individual over the family and social community. The indulgence in individualism was, more formally, the essential “sin.” The breaking of the other specific taboos was simply the particular method for furthering that “sinful” goal of putting oneself first. In this sense, the rites serve a functional purpose that leaves the initiate in a different state of mind from the one they held prior to breaking those taboos.
At this point, we’re not just talking about cultures anymore. We’re talking human psychology and the way our minds work; we’re talking about what makes people tick on a fundamental level.
It is due to that similarity and unity of essence that, although the cultural myth employed in Satanism is a Christian one and LaVey’s philosophy was largely secular, it was nonetheless spiritually very appropriate for him to use the label of Left Hand Path.
Ironically, the reason this is considered such a “foul” in modern leftist political ideology ends up coming full circle to the term’s origins: People who harp on cultural appropriation are taking an essentially collectivist stance in prioritizing the preservation of minority cultures over the freedoms of individuals to adopt, employ, work with, and refer to specific cultural ideas and practices.
The lens of politics, by its very nature, does the same in holding the impact on a collective level as privileged over the freedoms and prerogatives of the individual; the science of politics is inherently collectivist.
As such, many on the LHP would regard this entire post as a pointless and fruitless effort, and would consider the synthesis toward which I am driving to be utterly preposterous.
But since I walk the LHP, I’m doing my own thang here. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to read it. As it happens, this makes the perfect segue into the rest of my discussion, where I’ll address some of the other reasons those bozos in CCCO may have decided to cancel me.
Cancel Culture Is Stupid
I don’t (solely) mean the above as an insult; I mean it in the most literal sense possible: The end result of cancel culture can only be increased stupidity.
It’s not that I don’t empathize at all with the reasons for it; it’s that I recognize most of those reasons as essentially driven by emotion, and I know from hard experience that emotion is not the best driver.
Cancel culture is essentially “inverted censorship.” Censorship is the top-down erasure or elimination of certain ideas, usually for the sake of enforcing some agenda; and usually, that agenda is an oppressive one. Top-down censorship seeks to stamp out ideas that threaten the hegemony of those who employ it as a tool, and this usually involves the suppression of ideas that lead to greater freedom, in contradiction to the ideology that is being enforced by the censorship.
Cancel culture is literally the same process, only (in theory) inverted: Cancel culture is essentially the boycotting of certain ideas on a collective basis, executed from the bottom up as opposed to censorship’s top-down mode of employment. Generally speaking, its thrust is well-intended, as it is typically oppressive, divisive, and harmful ideologies that are being attacked thereby. In other words, people who do this shit have their hearts in the right place, even if they aren’t really using their heads at all.
In keeping with its inherently collectivist mode of action, cancel culture is most commonly deployed against individuals, or individual/monolithic ideologies and/or institutions.
And like I said: I sympathize with the basic impulse behind it, in a way. If someone’s using a platform to oppress others, there’s merit in taking that platform away from them so they can’t do that anymore; if someone’s message or platform is directly harmful to you and your very existence, it’s often one of the only tools you have at your disposal.
But there’s an obvious downside, and it’s one that anyone who walks the Left Hand Path would object to:
It dilutes independent thought and encourages mob action. There’s a slippery slope that starts somewhere sensible and then eventually leads to these unfortunate outcomes, but the end result is ultimately worse for the prospects of individual freedom, almost invariably.
Typically, the ones who first issue the call to “cancel” a given figure, ideology, or institution, are well-informed as to the viewpoints they are opposing. They will, in many cases, appreciate the true nuance that people are complex beings and no one is “all good” or “all bad,” especially in light of the fact that we don’t all agree on what is “good” and what is “bad.” Nonetheless, the decision is ultimately made that, on balance, the “cancelee” is regarded as being “mostly bad,” so let’s just totally ignore them and pretend they never existed, because we risk doing more harm by even acknowledging their good than we do in canceling their bad.
What ends up happening on the back end of this, however, is that the mobs who are receptive to cancel culture will often simply go along with these edicts without really looking into the situation themselves. So, for example, someone will say, “H.P. Lovecraft was racist; here’s an example [and they quote some racist bullshit Lovecraft did, in fact, write], so you should erase him because he said a racist thing.” And the majority of people who believe in cancel culture will follow suit, resolving never to read a Lovecraft book.
Which is kind of sad, because then maybe that entire swathe of people never come upon the concept of “strange geometries” that, Lovecraft’s racist views notwithstanding, might hold not only cultural value but even demonstrate some intuitions about the world around us that prove applicable on a scientific level (the book Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, and the kinds of ideas that made that realm of scientific inquiry possible, can be traced back to Lovecraft’s thinking).
The kind of thinking that seeks to combat oppression and hatred by unilaterally erasing those perceived to be their source is thinking that inherently mistrusts the ability of a wider audience to be capable of distinguishing a person’s harmful ideas from their less harmful, and maybe even useful, ones. It demonstrates an inherent lack of faith in the decency of humanity to prevail and for individuals to use discernment. It says, “We need to completely discard this person’s entire corpus because some of their ideas were dangerous,” without considering that intelligent people actually have the ability to make this distinction for themselves.
It is inherently damaging to independent thought.
It comes from the same cowardly place as top-down censorship and only convinces itself otherwise through an impressive feat of bullshit rationalization.
It is just as inimical to personal independence as 1984-style Newspeak.
What are some other reasons my post might have been rejected for leaning so much on LHP philosophy?
Anton LaVey was problematic. In many ways, he was a douchebag. He was sexist. He was arguably racist, if not overtly so, then at least in the sense that many of his ideas were largely culturally chauvinistic. In particular, his use of Ragnar Redbeard’s ideology that is directly rooted in social Darwinism, leans too far, in my estimation, in the direction of individualism to truly serve the deeper end of individual freedom (because no one is really free if we are professing the “rightness” of winning out through sheer brute force).
Anton LaVey left such a bad taste in my mouth that I ignored his work entirely for years. I took a handful of facts that I knew about him and decided I never needed to read any of his books.
What most outsiders fail to realize is that Left Hand Path philosophy has evolved beyond LaVey’s thought. This is likely because, even to this day, his particular brand of Satanism is still much more visible to the world at large than its ideological descendants. Maybe people never look deeply enough into the LHP to realize that Michael Aquino even existed, or that he went on to found an organization called Temple of Set that looks at things very differently from the way LaVey did, even as it leans so heavily on LaVey’s legacy. This prevents them from seeing how much things have changed since LaVey’s heyday. It prevents them from realizing that as things stand now, prominent members of Temple of Set can’t stand LaVey at all (see the article My Lack of Respect for Anton LaVey as a Person, which finds its home on a prominent LHP-themed blog), but still acknowledges the place he holds historically and ideologically in making our present circumstances possible.
Of course, there are people who have looked more deeply into this, who know about how LaVey and his Church of Satan gave way to Aquino and Temple of Set, and still think Aquino was “problematic,” too, but this is just extending the journey before still arriving at the hasty conclusion of “let’s just cancel these white guys because we disagree with some of their ideas.”
I say all of this because I myself would never have heard of Michael Aquino if I hadn’t read books by Don Webb, who came after both Aquino and LaVey. I made the personal decision to discard LaVey’s thought entirely until I read a take on him that came from someone twice-removed from his work, and now I have The Satanic Bible sitting on my shelf because reading Don Webb’s work enlightened me to some of LaVey’s better ideas that I didn’t realize were his because I refused to even take a gander in his direction.
In Overthrowing the Old Gods, Webb largely does the same service with regard to the work of another privileged white guy that secular leftists like to cancel nowadays: Aleister Crowley. He’s another guy whose more shitty attitudes I have a hard time digesting. By reading about him in this book by a third party, I came to learn just how much I owe to this guy I otherwise disagree with.
It’s ironic that some of the very freedoms taken for granted by the same people trying to cancel these guys, are also a direct result of the work these guys did. We have them to thank for a lot of cultural freedoms that we now take for granted.
For example, Crowley may have been a sexist, chauvinistic fuck, but the entire LGBTQIA+ community also owes a lot of their culturally-derived sexual freedom from the cultural barriers he helped break down. The same holds true for LaVey.
We don’t get to learn about this stuff while we’re being self-righteous dingbats and issuing ideological fatwas from our moral pulpits.
Cancellation. Destroys. Thought.
Now I have a copy of Gems From The Equinox sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to study it with my own eyes.
And I will do so, in order to help make the case for freedom of identity for which so many people under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella are crying out at present.
Why do I want to talk about Anton LaVey, Aleister Crowley, and other privileged white dudes with questionable agendas?
Because freedom begins with freedom of individual thought. Because strong individuals are the backbone of independent societies, and the Left Hand Path is, in my estimation, one of the most fertile remaining breeding grounds for strong individuals. Because, no matter how well-meaning it might be, even if it is aimed at combating oppression, cancel culture will only harm the cause of freedom in the end by dictating what others think and by diluting rigorous intellectual discourse.
We never win by letting cultural crusaders set the parameters of our discussions for us by determining who should and should not be heard. We do not grow more independent by letting them do our thinking for us.
Happy Nonbinary People’s Awareness Day.