Left-Hand Path Currents

The left-hand path is the umbrella for currents that treat self-deification and antinomianism, the deliberate transgression of religious norms, as the spiritual goal, in contrast to the right-hand path's submission and devotion, and the entry's first honesty is about its own name: the term derives from the Tantric left-hand practice via its adoption into Western esotericism by Theosophy, and left-hand path is a self-description by its adherents, not a neutral scholarly category, one that also contains a documented criminal edge the entry names plainly.

The currents are distinct. LaVeyan Satanism, the Church of Satan founded in San Francisco on April 30, 1966, is atheistic: Satan as symbol of the self, skepticism and indulgence and psychodrama, ritual as self-transformation rather than worship, no congregations, and its calendar centered on Walpurgisnacht, Halloween, the solstices and equinoxes, and each member's own birthday as the holiest day, a satire of devotion that became a durable institution, its bible a bestseller that defined the genre. Setianism, the Temple of Set founded in 1975 by a Church of Satan leader who resigned over the sale of priesthood degrees, is theistic: Set as a real, distinct principle who gave humans the questioning intellect, the goal self-deification through an initiatory degree system organized in local pylons, membership on the order of a few hundred. Luciferianism venerates Lucifer as liberator and light-bringer, distinct from Satan for some adherents and synonymous for others, its modern current individualist with its own witchcraft literature, and the Berlin order of 1926 the major historical precedent. The bogus Masonic-Luciferian lore of the 1890s hoax belongs in the entry as what it was, a hoax, not a lineage.

The criminal edge is the Order of Nine Angles, the 1970s British network whose literature fuses theistic Satanism with neo-Nazism, its cosmology of aeons and its rhetoric of culling and its insight roles explicitly pushing adherents toward violent extremism, the texts documented as inspiration for the 1999 London nail bombings, jailed neo-Nazi cells, and a soldier's plotted attack on his own unit, the anti-fascist monitor calling it an incubator of terrorism and prosecutors describing it as an occult-based neo-Nazi violent extremist group. Its founder's identity is alleged but never conclusively proven, the network is decentralized with no membership, and it is not formally proscribed in the United Kingdom, facts the entry states as carefully as they are known.

Access maps the currents: the Church of Satan open with paid adult registration, the Temple of Set application-based and initiatory, Luciferianism open, the Order of Nine Angles a self-directed reading network. Community sizes are unknown across the family, the Church of Satan declining to publish by policy, the others small, Western, and individualist. The library's neighbors are chaos magic, which shares the antinomian method without the identity, demonology's conjuration practice, and the Tantric entry where the term left-hand began.