I remember finding Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path by Don Webb a long time ago, and I have recently read it again with the intention of collecting practical notes for a combined practice of Satanism, paganism, and chaos magic. As I read it I became intruiged by the perspective that I was able to derive from parts of Webb’s book, bearing in mind that it is essentially a Setian text and there is a fair amount dross that comes with that. Setianism aside, I was surprised and intriguied by the insights I was able to derive, or perhaps construct, from the text. In that sense, there is indeed much that is worth discussing about the “essentials” that Don Webb discusses in his Left Hand Path. The purpose of this article is to share these insights – or perhaps they might be called perversions, depending on your point of view – as well as discuss the many problems that I encountered while reading Don Webb’s book.
We can start with the central subject of the Left Hand Path, both as Webb sees and as I would see it: personal sovereignty. There is a problematic aspect of how he frames it, however. Webb starts from the premise that humans are basically machines that have the power to become gods. I would prefer to think that we are animals that have the power to becoem gods or sovereign beings, and the idea that we are machines strikes me as simply a contemporary bias, a contemporary clockwork analogy (a la Isaac Newton) as applied to human beings. In any case, though, the question of sovereignty is divided into four categories. Webb calls these “rulership of the inner world”, rulership of the outer world”, “royal power in the outer world”, and “royal power in the inner world”. They are more or less meant to be taken as ciphers for the different layers of personal power and autonomy that the individual LHP initiate may be able to exercise in magical terms. One of the starting points in this regard is the problem of seemingly random social construction: that is, the problem that human selves are caught in a complicated mixture of randomly mingled thoughts, habits, and impulses that then condition their personalities and actions, coming from all different directions. This is understood as a hindrance to one’s personal and magical development, and the point is to find ways of overcoming that conditioning. For Webb this is the point of antinomianism: in his terms at least, it means rejecting sentimental attachment to the dominant norms and morality of culture in order to gain control of your inner world and the power to reshape yourself and the world around you to your liking.
From the inner world one progresses to the outer world, and it’s here that we come to one of the first truly unique insights I was able to derive from Webb: the sacrifice of self to self. Beneath Webb’s snide remarks about the hedonism of the 1960s (which must seem a little ironic for a late boomer) and his staid rhetoric about hard work, there is something about creative synthesis, which Webb frames as a process of play that produces both comfort and opportunity, transforming the outer world, but this process involves a certain amount of personal sacrifice. Webb interprets this sacrifice simply as the act of putting yourself in difficult situations in order to obtain magical power from them, which is meant to allow you to exercise your will upon the outer world. But if sacrifice of self to self is a magical secret, and I think there’s good grounds to concur there, there must be something deeper to it. In Norse mythology, it was the god Odin who sacrificed himself to himself in order acquire magical knowledge. From that standpoint the sacrifice of self to self is the willingness to sacrifice yourself to yourself in order to acquire knowledge, wisdom, and power. Or pehraps it is your self-sacrifice to your own desire. Or the movement of negation that Georges Bataille and his friend Maurice Blanchot talked about when describing Sadean sovereignty (a subject that we will have to revisit later as we proceed). In any case, I believe that what Webb thinks he’s getting at is something that has to really be understood as a mystical movement in order for us to appreciate the magical secret that it is, although his notion of the Acquisition of Strength is not entirely diluted by his approach. But in retrospect I might see the real import conveyed here as the initial hints of a larger mystery: the ancient mystery of death and rebirth, and from there a Satanic answer to the mystical notion of “dying to yourself”. That is something we will surely return to as we proceed further.
The discussion of “royal power in the outer world” that follows also contains the first expression of another important theme that I felt distinguished Webb’s book from certain other tendencies in the Left Hand Path: the collapse of opposites that produces something new.
To break out of our own isolation, and produce an outer world more harmonious with our desires, we find ourselves showing off, even at the risk of personal vanity. It’s not always bad thing. We often take advantage the desire to show off by finding ways showing off virtue, wisdom, or knowledge, but this itself poses a difficulty, because the internet is polluted with endless streams of people who turn a profit on a similar principle; showing off displays of intellect in various ways, and in doing so create networks of influence that ultimately harm interpersonal relationships and cultivate personal corruption. And otherwise, we often find ourselves trapped in a similar desire: the desire to prove something to others, in order to seal our truth in their minds. You can easily be manipulated by desires like these. Still, some forms of these desires are not bad, but their authenticity and sovereignty are a work of refinement. The aim here is to cultivate an endless process of refinement that itself develops a spark in yourself that can then light up other people while also inevitably refining yourself by that very act of inspiring others. In this process, “altruism” and “selfishness” become two sides of the same coin, as Friedrich Nietzsche said they once were in Beyond Good and Evil. This is where we approach the alchemical metaphor.
Webb refers to the refinement he describes as “the art of alchemy”, but of course, it’s not quite alchemy as it once was. It really is more of a metaphor, in the same way that “spiritual alchemy” is: it applies the term alchemy with a loose connection to the historical practice of alchemy onto some other concept of mystical or religious self-transformation, in a way that appears to communicate the concept of alchemy but actually has little to do with the real practice of alchemy. Nevertheless, there is a substance to this metaphor. What Webb is talking about implies the collapse of what we take to be the boundaries between two apparent opposites, which then seems to create something new. Collapsing the boundaries between altruism and egoism in the Nietzschean sense can then be seen in Webb’s terms as the means of creating personal and magical sovereignty.
The alchemical metaphor previously introduced also has certain relevance to BDSM in the way that Carnal Alchemy elaborated, and in this sense “royal power” as a phrase is a fitting, if somewhat limited, metaphor for dominants. “By initiating others, self-initiation is furthered”. Kinky sex, or more particularly BDSM, can be interpreted in ritual terms, albeit in a playful and perverse sense – what better for the Left Hand Path though! One aspect of domination in BDSM that foolish people can overlook is that the dominant must also care for and nurture the submissive. Immature dominant males might see this as the dominant male submitting to an ostensibly submissive woman, passing into female domination, but that is pure ignorance and sexual chauvinism. Instead, the power that the dominant aspires to can be considered as a process of refinement, and, moreover, it grows with the trust, care, compassion, and even restraint that you can cultivate in that relationship with the submissive. You’re not just supposed to “master” the submissive, you’re supposed to inspire them to want to give way to you. And then, the sexual “alchemy” ensues in a characteristically erotic fashion, in that it collapses the barriers between the two partners in the very sacrificial way that Bataille described, the result of which refines the dominant and the submissive – the creation of erotic sovereignty.
I had the question of whether or not one can take the Platonic or Neoplatonic theme of the division and reunification of the One in similar terms, with The One being divided through the daemonic process of prohodos, and ultimately culminating in epistrophe (the return to unity), but all of that happening through the creation of something new, in the dissolution of boundary between apparent opposites. I would be inclined to speculate that this would involve the role of the hero as a kind of daemonic link to the realm of the gods, and therefore the larger unity of The One. In this sense, then, it would be nothing like the return of the individual soul to the Pleroma. On the contrary, you would be dissolving the boundaries between gods and men by turning the soul into something basically unseen: your own heroic daemon. Unfortunately, I do not think I can attain full clarity on this theme without further studying Iamblichus’s theurgical philosophy.
In any case, another important insight is attached to the subject of royal power: “the Shadow is the Initiator”. Emotions like greed, anger, and jealously for instance are taken as starting point for the development of a self-empowerment that eventually generates the capacity for a non-sentimental love for others. The “dark side of human nature” is framed as the place where the good will come from, and in a very weird way this ultimately reflects somewhat a form of pagan mysticism just as much as it is clearly Satanism – the underworld is the place where divine inspiration, and even divine good, were sometimes thought to emerge from. At least Peter Kingsley in particular makes the interesting case that Parmenides and similar mystics brought justice from the underworld. Perhaps non-sentimental love could be cast as “love without pity” in the sense that Nietzsche and Fraternitas Saturni both meant it? Something about that makes for a more beautiful interpretation. Nietzsche said “woe to those who cannot surmount pity!”, and that all great love is above pity because it wants and to create is to be loved. But then Leslie Paul Thiele interprets this as a love more severe than romantic, which must be strong enough to carry out a harsh creative task of transformation in suffering.
Darkness soon figures into Webb’s worldview, and in his use of the term “the Great Darkness” is a way of referring to the unknown. It seems to function as a larger ground, or unground, out of which all things are manifest. Suddenly this feels a lot closer to what Claudio Kulesko was talking about, and to be perfectly honest I doubt that’s a complete coincidence. Furthermore, it seems like the underworld has the same basic theme. The third fear is the fear of wasted time, which is overcome by resourcefully using the experiences of one’s developing sovereignty and finding the right attitude to inform your present actions. The fourth and final fear is the fear of the unverifiable, which is really the fear that there is no proof to support whatever it is you believe, and which can be overcome by unlocking the darkness of the unknown. In many ways this is a theme that I can see in Kulesko’s work too: surrounding us is a darkness that constantly nags us with doubt, and then, by allowing it to shatter the image we had of the world, and plunging into the lawlessness at the core of our souls, we become able to access an infinite number of configurations of possibility. Or alternatively we’re at the idea of divine inspiration in the underworld again, or even something much broader within “Western” mysticism: Webb is clearly saying that there is a point where all the doubts and the hidden impulses, that relate to something that is inside us and yet intrudes upon us, open the way to truth.
The whole process of “royal power” ultimately implies a solar cycle. The point of “royal power” in “the inner world” is to be able to be able to “return to the inner darkness” to “brighten it with your self-created light”. This essentially conveys the process of descent, going down into the underworld, in order to experience the solar power of rebirth. In myht, the sun descends daily into the underworld, rises outwards to cast light upon the world, and descends again, completing the cycle, shining in the underworld.
In Webb’s discussion of the self, he takes a possibly problematic position, in that he seems to take the self as a matter of essence, whether that being the essence of self or the essence of the other. But it’s also interesting that here we get a Left Hand Path in which it is not only “you that acts on Essence” but also “the Essence that acts on you”. It is a mutual interaction. Something about that idea at least hints at an approach to self-deification that implies that a divine that works in and on you just as you strive to make the divine yours. Ironically, isolation as per Setian orthodoxy doesn’t really do that approach justice, yet Webb himself is ultimately no deviant from that orthodoxy given his interpretation of the god Set.
Both the self and the cosmos are defined along four distinct layers and are both subject to the effects of magical self-transformation. One of these layers brings us back to an interestingly familiar place. The surface level of the cosmos is the section that is always interacting with you at a given moment. It is very small, but still far bigger than you, and affects you in ways that are hidden from your awareness. It is also a source of energy. Webb compares the surface level of the cosmos to the exercise equipment in a gym, and you, the magician, to the customer. In other words, the metaphor is the gym. That metaphor implies another, related metaphor: the cosmos is still, the magician/self is body, and the magician/body strives to transform themselves through steel. The rest can be elaborated through Bronze Age Collapse’s essay, “Lifting the Absolute”, in Revolutionary Demonology. Steel is the ingredient in a dynamic ingredient that interacts with the self and which the self interacts upon in order to enact its own self-transformation, to ultimately elevate itself further towards what must have been taken to be divine stature in physical form. This is “the alchemy of steel” I talked about before.
A similar dynamic may be in play with the way Webb perceives the Prince of Darkness (who is for all intents and purposes to be understood as The Devil, or Satan, who the Setians identify as Set). The Prince of Darkness chooses to manifest as a finite being in order to experience individuality and derive pleasure from it, and thus chose on a cosmic level what those who wish to be like him choose to be at the human level. From this standpoint, the Prince of Darkness is an extant cosmic presence whose goals are the same as the magician, and thus there is an extent to which they all act with each other on the Satanic quest, and, perhaps, the Prince of Darkness acts upon the magician.
Webb’s notion of initiation has throughlines that can be webbed onto the process of dissolution that Claudio Kulesko talks about in his essay “Cultivating Darkness”. Initiation begins with a shock, or series of shocks, that interrupt the “ordinary” life lived amidst the world of random thought patterns thrust upon them, and continues into a series of shocks experience at different stages throughout the initiatic life. These shocks can anything that seems to knock you off the path you think you’re on in life and disrupts your sense of the world as it appears, and they can be many shocks, at a time, or they can be a cluster of events whose effects can last for any possible length of time. Something like that can be connected back to the way Kulesko talked about the fragmentation of the world. In certain moments, we are immersed in the realisation that our prevailing representation of the world is either false or limited, and so our world collpases into what it really is: a collection of fragments that form a collage. One lesson that arrives from this, however, is the absolutely possibility of another world. That lesson itself is one of the shocks Webb talks about, and it can be somewhat dangerous on its own. But from that standpoint, fragmentation is can be seen as an inescapable part of the process of initiation, because the ruptures they present open up the possibility of change and transformation at one’s own direction. I find that to be the most important value to be extracted from what is ultimately still a very rigid and quite arugably outdated approach to initiation, in which the magician is expected to go through a School (as in, a school meant to teach both magic and a systematic philosophy to go with it) in order to grow, and thus deal with the authority that is always implied by the institution.
Some of the truly interesting insights begin with the “vices” and “virtues” of initiation. It is here that we are able to encounter areas where the culturally dominant conceptions of the Left Hand Path can be challenged by the very terms Don Webb discusses. Of course, not every “vice” and “virtue” has inspired much curiosity into such possibilities, so I will focus on a few in particular.
Webb calls the first “vice” “Narcisissm”, but it seems that when Webb says “Narcissism” he really means “self-worship”, and that is where things get really interesting. Thanks in part to the prevalence of LaVeyan Satanism and similar tendencies, Satanism tends to be axiomatically defined as the worship of yourself rather than the worship of Satan, but Webb remarks that this a “sad tendency” in modern LHP movements. Why? Because for Webb not only is self-worship not the object of the Left Hand Path, he even compares it to a sculptor who, for some reason, worships the clay he works upon. This is interesting on multiple fronts. For one thing, it means that Don Webb is defining the Left Hand Path in a way that suggests that the individual self is not an object of worship, even if it is still the central subject of the Left Hand Path. For another thing, it works in a deeper level: the sculptor has no business worshipping clay, so then they might not have much business worshipping the prima materia either. That invites some important questions. There is an extent to which the Shinto religion regards chaos as the ultimate basic substance of everything, including the gods, but Shinto, as far as I know, does not worship chaos.
That being said I really don’t much care for the fact that Webb chooses the word “Narcissism” to describe what he means, which is self-worship. He should have simply called it “self-worship”. It would have been less of a mouthful, for one thing, and certainly less ableist (at this point it’s worth reminding everyone that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is something that should not be treated as a synonym for an abusive or emotionally manipulative person, and for that matter there is really no such thing as “narcissistic abuse”). I find myself intuiting something else as well, though. The individual self is not worshipped in this view of the Left Hand Path, but, it could be said that the gods are worshipped, even if the LHP practitioner might deny that it is worship – and there are many who do. Such denial is ultimately the product of a deeply ingrained attitude to worship, arising from the Christian or Christocentric conception of what worship is, and it’s here that we might even crossover into the third vice, “Forgetfulness of past orthodoxies” (clearly inherited and expanded from Anton LaVey’s “Nine Satanic Sins”). There are many LHP practitioners who spurn the concept of worship as something that disempowers themselves, even if they are pagans, and in so doing they reveal the prevailing Christocentric orthodoxy around the concept of worship. It’s worth including Jake Stratton Kent’s concept of worship in terms of goetia. He presents worship as partnership between spirit and magician, something that in no way diminishes the magician/worshipper. Worship in this sense is the recognition of a voluntary bond or partnership between the gods, or spirits, or demons and their worshippers. From a goetic, theurgical, or magical standpoint, conditioned by the pagan understandings of these terms, not only does this not diminish the individual, it also enters them into the process of the universe as a machine for the making of gods, and brings them into the cultivation of their own sovereignty, in continuity with divine power. It makes more sense than worshipping “the medial self” as it is. You are not your own god…not yet. You are trying to become your own god, and your journey is a lifelong effort, the quest for sovereignty if you will. It will be carried through your own self-willing and individual apprehension (or even assimilation) of the divine, and the gods are not really your enemies in this path.
And yet Webb is in the habit of contradicting himself when it comes to this. When discussing sigil construction in a later chapter, Webb advises that, when you are finished with your sigil, you offer it as a burnt sacrifice, and suggests that this is a sacrifice to your higher self. In other yours, you would be offering a sacrifice to your own self-potential, despite treating self-worship as a vice. I suppose this is why he had to refer to the vice as “Narcissism”. It certainly obfuscates the real issue. But, funny enough, I suggest that you can easily swap out that element for one of the gods, and you will turn it into a way of worshipping pagan gods or perhaps demons through the practice of chaos magic. You might sacrifice your sigil to a god, or a demon, if, at least, the god or demon in question is directly relevant to the aim of that sigil (for example, when you have finished with a sigil meant for attraction, you could sacrifice it as an offering to gods associated with love, sex, or even just friendship). It is interesting, though, just how easy this paradigmatic shift can be. But another contradiction occurs later when Webb recommends a divinatory invocation dedicated to “Self that I seek to become”, as in “my Self-to-be”, essentially calling upon your future self to reveal its mysteries to yourself, bless you, and support your curiosity. So, is this not a kind of worshipping yourself? Or perhaps we’re getting past the issue of self-worship by calling it “narcissism” instead. I hate to say it about Webb but it seems that there’s the case to be made where conventional language both conceals a form of bigotry and also helps to cover something up.
The problem of hubris seems to be related to the problem of “narcissism”, but it seems that the discussion of hubris also contains the first expression of a unique idea that I think separates Webb’s book from many other modern Left Hand Path tendencies: the notion that magic and self-deification in the Left Hand Path mean overcoming the isolation of the individual self precisely through individual magical cultivation. That may seem strange and incredibly ironic coming from a member of the Temple of Set, but I’m sure you’ll see where I’m going.
LHP initiates may access things that ordinary people do not, but then again the same can be said, and has been said, of basically all other magicians or occultists. In any case people in that position can be in danger of having too much faith in their actions or even the results of their magical practice and then lapsing into religious bigotry. The recommended cure for this is to associate with smart and powerful people who can show you how little you know and how much room there is to learn. But I think the flipside of that is a much deeper reality: personal isolation nurtures the problems that Webb describes, and so hubris is fed by personal isolation. It is just like the arrogant claim to sole supreme divinity made by the Christian God, or by Yaldabaoth in the Sethian sect: as far as these beings are concerned, they are alone. That’s certainly what the account of creation in Genesis would imply: God is alone, surrounded by a dark, empty, formless void, amidst which he creates the entire universe alone, by himself. And that’s ultimately just a cousin of the human position itself: as far as human beings are concerned, humanity is alone. Humans often rationally, but ignorantly, convince themselves that our species is the only intelligent life form in the entire universe, when the truth is that we don’t even have to go to outer space to find non-human intelligent life. That’s one of the things that Paganism, or at least “animism”, might have taught humans: at least, that human beings are not the only fish in the cosmic sea. But isolation is tricky problem for the LHP initiate and the Satanist, because often times we perceive ourselves as completely alone, and for good reason: few people walk our path, most people fear, mock, or despise our ways, we will not and cannot change our ways, and there’s an extent to which we accept loneliness as the price of our path. Still, with some effort, we might just succeed in creating our company, and therefore free ourselves from isolation. And that moment of liberation will be one of the most beautiful in our whole lives.
Returning for a bit to the discussion of Forgetfulness of past orthodoxies”, I think Webb’s comment that “the former Christian will come to believe in a loving Prince of Darkness” is, sad as it might be to say, good shade to throw on a lot of modern Satanism, and to some extent modern polytheism. The overriding emphasis in modern expressions of religion, especially on Tumblr, seems indistinguishable from the one impulse that so defines Christianity: the need for a loving God. That I see it with a skeptical tone tells me that there is an animus that has not left me. I don’t reject divine love as such, but I don’t have much need for a deity to love me like a mother or father should. In that sense, I’m not interested in “a loving God”, whether that be the Christian God, or your version of Satan, or even what you take to be the gods. I am a Satanist and a Pagan and to me that means I admire the gods, for the being in which they persist and the power that implies, and ultimately strive for their continuity, which to me means I wish to identify with the power and freedom of the divine and of Satan and the infernal host. I have theurgical and magical concerns that animate my interest in the gods. What else do I need?
Despair is something Webb says can stop initiation in its tracks if you’re not careful. Attachment to other people’s thoughts, obsession with magic, and servitude to one’s own emotions can all through you off in that they impede your tendency to think for yourself. In some ways, there’s room to reflect on the idea that our entire culture has us subsist in influences that lead us towards habits that take us away from the paths of initiation otherwise open to us. In some ways that’s the strength of the Left Hand Path as it was once conceived. The whole point is sovereignty. And the only real problem with the modern Left Hand Path is the follies that individual magicians have embraced, and the fact that many people seem to give in to those same follies as dogma.
Then there are the “virtues” of initiation. Hubris may be a palpable danger for the LHP magician, but pride certainly isn’t. In fact, Webb not only frames pride as a virtue in true Satanist fashion, he also connects it to a desire that exists within the social instincts of humans and often inevitably leads individuals to move away from their own isolation: the desire to be recognised. People often strive for recognition, sometimes to the point of vanity, and yet are also sometimes reluctant to give recognition out of fear that it will empower someone else at their own expense. Democracy, in fact, thrives on a currency of recognition which is taken as legitimate power (supported always by the real power of the state, which is the threat of violence), and so does the whole economy of influence that pervades our society. Nonetheless, the desire for recognition and to derive honour from it is an extremely consistent desire for the human species, probably having always existed in human societies. LHP initiates/magicians embrace this to a certain extent by speaking about their various deeds to others (although presumably not the mysteries, of which nothing can be spoken). I would use this point as a platform to posit that, at a larger level, Don Webb’s Left Hand Path presents the goal of transcending the isolation and even discontinuity of the individual, but precisely by cultivating individual magical power and cultivating the individual ascent to divinity.
There are also much simpler virtues that one can cultivate. A sense of humour, for one thing, seems mundane but for Webb it’s actually a mark of someone secure in their sense of sovereignty. The ability to laugh is interpreted as banishing obsessions and an essential part of practice. That’s actually quite good because, on a mystical level, sovereignty can be exactly what laughter might convey. It won’t be difficult to connect that theme with Nicola Masciandaro’s discussion of laughter in the film Mandy or for that matter with Peter Carroll’s discussion of the magical power of laughter. From there it’s just a matter of connecting that to the Sadean sovereignty presented by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot.
“Moderation” is a curious one in that, to my mind, it actually seems to be the weakest of the virtues. Actually, moderation might be the wrong word for it, because most of the descriptions real content addresses the error of absolutism or hubris. The position between libertinage and asceticism as extremes that distort the self presents a notion of balance integral to Webb’s notion of sovereignty, but ultimately implies a balance fallacy – the idea that a hypothesized neutral point between two hypothesized extremes is necessarily the correct position. Besides, distinction between the two might even be redundant anyway. Certain dimensions of Webb’s notion of sovereignty, understood with the help of Blanchot at least, might actually imply a different notion: rather than performing a balancing act to fulfil the role of Plato’s chariot in order to approximate divine perfection, the real sovereign self, the one that really approaches divinity, should be one that can collapse the division of the apparent opposites in the scope of its power.
That synthesis is listed as a virtue is encouraging. Syncretism would have been apt but synthesis is probably better for Webb’s intentions. It’s an admittedly dubious honour to say that Anton LaVey was ahead of his game when it comes to synthesis. Nonetheless, it’s far from inaccurate for his time. Synthesis here involves deriving aspects from all manner of sources that interest the magician, and not just from the occult world. Fiction, photography, sexology, are all listed as examples on LaVey’s part, but it could as well be anything. I think the basic point applies within the religious world as well, and that’s what I find encouraging. I think that I personally share some aspect of that, in that I am always elaborating something involving things that just happen to be personal interests, and often in the realm of fiction and popular culture. That’s not necessarily a unique case within the Left Hand Path either. And to me it seems like a hallmark of chaos magick. There’s also an extent to which it allows one to be and embrace multiple diverse things at once within one’s own individuality.
In a discussion of the nature of magic, we also get a discussion of darkness, and here things get very interesting. Don Webb defines darkness as the realm of potential existence. To me that’s very interesting because to my mind so does Claudio Kulesko, and probably the rest of Gruppo Di Nun, and so did Ernst Schertel. It seems to me that anyone going for the Left Hand Path in the context of “Western” occultism, whether consciously or not, implicitly recognises and fixes on that theme, that particular concept of darkness-as-potentiality. In Webb’s case, that potentiality is broad in that it applies to the future, the repressed, the hidden, or the forbidden – most of which often actually pertain to the past instead of the future. The point of magic according to Webb is to “pull” things from the darkness into the light. By this, we can tell that he means to translate potential into manifestation through the will, and in a way that requires contact with mysterious properties that must be experienced in order to be known. We can basically get a connection to Kenneth Grant’s definition of magic (“contact with discarnate beings”, or by extension transforming the outer world through contact with discarnate beings), and perhaps from there pagan notions of magic as well, and also perhaps a certain conception of gnosis. In many ways this notion is also applied to an almost self-helpish analysis, which in Webb’s case is not a bad way of writing: actually, it’s not even the bad kind of self-help. Dreams becoming flesh is a process of “pulling something out of the darkness”, or perhaps rather, I would prefer, “manifesting darkness”. Successfully acquiring something in the world that you lack by performing rituals is also a classic example of that process. This is also true for overcoming a long-term insecurity or neurosis, or even causing governments to reveal certain secrets. That process in a very general sense sets up new conditions for freedom, both in your own life and in the lives of many other people.
I might also be able to suggest the connection to older pagan mysticism, in that, at least for mystics such as Parmenides, the point was to descend into darkness, and similar figures apparently even derived healing and new laws from such descents. A throughline like this could be derived from the Greek Magical Papyri – for all intents and purposes, a syncretic pagan magical compilation – wherein the magician can be set in the underworld for several spells, several gods seem to become chthonic, and, through magical contact and spells, new conditions might be brought into effect, ultimately including theurgical conditions for the magician. Later, in the discussion of metacommunication, Webb emphasizes that the point of magic is to change the world around us, and ourselves, to generate more freedom and opportunities for ourselves, and that the way of the world does not support that freedom and opportunity because of its insistence on rules and order. The logical corollary to this is that the magician is always in conflict with the way of the world. Satan, in this context, and in all his forms, is a most fitting patron of the LHP magician.
I frankly do not like the way Webb frames his ideal as that of the “philosopher king”, borrowing a bit from Plato. For the moment, let’s just say that it misleads him in his appreciation of magic. Webb also likes to insist that divination, to be of use to the black magician, must reflect a sovereign viewpoint and to him this means concerning “kingship” and not things like crop-harvesting, but the problem there is that, in ancient societies, these were not irrelevant questions for kings. Of course, Webb is clearly concerned with the idea of the philosopher king when it comes to “kingship”, but the philosopher king is basically a myth; it’s just Plato’s idea of an enlightened dictator who could rule everyone else by right of his intellect. In reality, ancient kings were certainly concerned about regular harvests, along with many other mundane occurrences and regularities that might affect their ability to continue being kings. It was quite rare for monarchs to also be philosophers. Webb also asserts that the system of divination must be usable within a rational and ordered life. This is only true in a limited sense. It strikes me that Webb might just struggle to deal with the fact that divination is a non-rational channel of knowledge that simply happens to have mundane or “rational” ends for most of its history. Augury, for example, was a practice explicitly concerned with interpreting or divining the will of the gods, and determining what that meant for how people in ancient Roman society were to do or not do. This is already relevant to “ordered life” at large and not something that was ever separated from it.
The subject of the philosopher king comes up again much later, in the FAQ, and I feel it’s worth taking the time now rather than later deconstruct that ideal here. “Can’t the true Lord of the Left Hand Path do anything he or she wants?”, asks the question (assuming that’s a question someone asked and not a hypothetical question constructed by Don Webb himself). In answering this question, Webb proposes a contrast between the way of the brutes and the way of the philosopher kings. You do not know what the brute is, but how do you know the actual philosopher king is not a brute? Plato’s philosopher king in fact rules the masses of the ideal Republic like a dictator – a clever, “wise” dictator, but a dictator, and dictators rule all the same, often with a degree of brutality. Down with both the brute with and the philosopher king. You are not trying to be a philosopher king, you are trying to be your own god. I can promise you that these are not the same thing. The philosopher king is invoked as the supreme ethical contrast to the jerk and brute, but the philosopher king as an ideal contradicts the core premise of Webb’s notion of magic and magical attainment: that initiation is not about reading, it is about doing. And the philosopher king ultimately does nothing but make rules, see to their enforcement, and speculate about the nature of reality. They are not “men of action”. The brute may not read at all, but the brute does things – all the wrong things. Again, down with both the brute and the philosopher king.
The Sadean sovereign is a more interesting analogy for the goal I fixate on. The concern that interests me is a freedom or autonomy that cannot be destroyed by any worldly power, something that ultimately has nothing to do with authority. And, if we take it seriously, the manifestation of that sovereignty has to be approached as an (at least theoretical) invalidation of moral law as such: every law of karma, every commandment of God, all secular reflections of such things, these are invalidated by the presence of Sadean sovereignty. Such a thing is very obviously the ideal of the Left Hand Path even as Webb presents it, but then you are wondering, what about ethics? We always hand-wring each other about morality, but real ethics is something that has to be decided by you and for yourself. There is really nothing else to it. In order to pretend otherwise, you must prattle on about the need for positive morality in a way that betrays that you are not concerned with personal ethics but instead mere dictation – for morality as such is, ultimately, nothing but the process of dictation. But don’t worry, we will crush all the jerks beneath our feet, or drive them before us, and it will give us such irresponsible pleasure, and we will proceed without dictation.
I also do not like the way Webb seems to shy away from Satanic inversion despite being a Satanist (although he does not accept the label of Satanist, he is a Setian, and Setianism is a species of Satanism that just happens to deny the label for optics). Webb’s notion of initiatory magic includes rituals for the outer world, which for Webb includes ceremonies like graduation, weddings, and funerals. Somehow I get the sense that these are often more ostentatious than magical, although I suppose the ceremonial pomp helps. Then there is inner-directed magic practiced either alone or in groups in order to bring about a change in Perception that might be brought to bear on the microcosmic and macrocomsic levels. Webb in this light also frames initiatory magic as a “mature” approach to certain semi-stable structures of valuation that the magician inherits externally, as opposed to merely hating and inverting them. Because you know, who does that? Satanists? You see my point. The obvious disadvantage to this framing, in that it risks encouraging the magician to basically make peace with society in a way that still seems to suit an egoistic framework, all the while having already established that the LHP initiate is and must be at war with the ways of the world. Still there is some practical value that can be reduced to a simple principle the egoist might live by: take what you deem good for yourself, and throw the rest away. We can do the same to Don Webb’s work and a lot of occult material, if absolutely necessary.
On the plus side, though, I was able to detect something I considered a relevant linkage between Satanism and pagan theurgical philosophy. Webb says that The Prince of Darkness gives us the gift of individuality so that he could find companions, and it’s this idea that yet again outlines a deeper significance to Webb’s system. In this setting, The Devil might be trying to overcome isolation just as we human beings are, and The Devil is trying to give us a way of doing so that also elevates human beings beyond their merely human significance and stature. When I read the original sentence I thought, “this is essentially theurgical philosophy”. According to “Neoplatonists” such as Iamblichus and Proclus, the divine diffuses across the cosmos in the form of synthemata so that the theurgist or magician can interact and work with them, and in so doing, through the whole work of theurgy, achieve continuity with the divine. The theme of The Devil spreading out his magical influence in order to find those who would be his companions is also present in the work of Stanislaw Przybyszewski, whose Satan seeks out magicians and aristocrats of the dark arts to follow him as his companions. There’s a larger Cosmic Working in play too, suggesting something that extends beyond the scope of the individual, but which nonetheless affirms the individual. It’s the connection between the individual and this notion of the divine, or rather the Prince of Darkness, or the knowledge of that connection, which is forged through magic and its effects on others, that raises the soul to divinity (or “aids in its crystallisation”). What Webb is talking about seems to me to amount to a theurgical connection to the divine, but in Satanist terms. What Webb calls “the crystallisation of the soul” is really the divinisation of the soul, or the establishment of continuity between the soul and the divine, or rather daemonic.
One reason Webb gives for practicing magic is that it increases the unknown in the universe. This must seem strange at first blush, given that it would make more sense for it to increase the quantity of knowledge in the world, but for Webb the practice of the Left Hand Path also leads to more questions arising in the world. Webb presents the Right Hand Path as focused on “the Known” and in a world where everything is fixed and chaos is driven from the world. As odd as it seems, I think Gruppo Di Nun would probably agree with that to some extent, in that this is basically how they present the ancient Egyptian myth of Ra (in the form of a cat) chopping up the serpent Apep thus diving chaos into order. From a certain point of view, it’s as if Webb’s version of the Left Hand Path is the art either of creating chaos or creating order that is then meant to lead to more chaos. Either way such a process is meant to expand the possibilities of consciousness. Herein lies another insight that will also come into focus as we go on.
But it’s the last reason Webb gives for not only practicing but also teaching magic that allows us to hone in on the most important consideration: it frees the teacher and practitioner from the limits of society. It turns the magician into a person that, in Webb’s words, society doesn’t know what to do with. The value of this situation is that it transforms the LHP magician into a non-recuperable element, and affords them a non-recuperable sovereignty, or a sovereignty that makes them into non-recuperable beings. The Left Hand Path in this sense is the practice of making yourself beyond recuperation. That is what allows the advantage that Webb describes: that it forces you to “stay awake” and makes it easier to work your will in the world. The central focus for life in this world is that you must live to transform yourself into a non-recuperable presence, to enjoy a freedom and personal sovereignty that nothing can take away from you.
A major problem for Webb is the way he seems to define the Right Hand Path in a way that seems to include everything he doesn’t like about religion and politics. Webb understands the Right Hand Path as being based around submission, which is simply enough but the irony is that a lot of Right Hand Path magic is ultimately built on the promise of the identity between Man and the Godhead (though, in practice, that Godhead is really the Christian God). But then, you would have to submit to the authority of God anyway. But then it gets problematic, since Webb includes not only obedience to the Christian God but also “obedience to perceived historical and economic forces”, “obedience to a gender group”, and obedience to a national, racial, or ethnic group. In practice this communicates his own liberal politics, as well as a misunderstanding of Marxism and feminism (not that there aren’t versions of those that emphasize obedience to authority), although I suppose we should count our blessings that he isn’t a white nationalist (although I am rather suspicious of the way he talks about the magical properties of “physical inheritance”). Admittedly, it’s not difficult to connect Marxism, or the Hegelian dialectical philosophy that preceded it, to Christianity, or for that matter both Jewish and Christian apocalypticism. It’s just that Webb does so in a very crude and probably reactionary way.
The important thing for Webb is that the Right Hand Path is a general term for anything in religion and the occult where the Self is situated beneath Other, in that only from the Other can you derive the concept of Good. In understanding this, I believe that there is a better way to approach this attitude beyond crude libertarianism. I think that the best way to understand the position is to think of the “Right Hand Path” as being based around some kind of spiritual hierarchy where the individual is situated below society or some other entity as a subordinate constituent. The same point can be made about the relationship between Man and God, with Man being a “worm” in comparison. But then again, I tend to think this point also betrays a secret humanism. After all, it’s the stature of Man that seems to so sharply define Webb’s notion of the Right Hand Path in contrast to the Left Hand Path. What irony, then, that the Christian mystics of the Right Hand Path flatly identified the human species with the Christian God. There’s the complaint of how the Right Hand Path expects humans to realise how small, frail, and insignificant we humans are, never mind the fact that the Right Hand Path has historically argued the exact opposite, but the cold truth of the matter is if things like black holes could think they would barely even think once about human beings. By some measure, we really are small in the vastness of the cosmos, and we individually certainly seem to be very frail creatures. In fact, that’s one of the reasons humans try to make themselves strong and powerful: to overcome or even eliminate that very frailty.
But the real thing I can’t ever get over when it comes to Webb is just how frequently and severely he misunderstands Buddhism through his book. Webb seems to think that every religion he classes as “Right Hand Path” functions almost exactly the same way Christianity does, with its emphasis on obedience to holy writ, to the point that the salvation of God and the void of nirvana are outright identified with each other, which to me just seems like a very limited understanding of religion. Buddhism may have deities, but it does not believe in God, or at least certainly nothing like what we would call God or God as defined by Christianity, and most certainly does not have a Bible. Webb also frames the Right Hand Path’s notion of creation as being based on the concept of dependent origination. Dependant origination (or Paticcasamupada) is the name of one of the core concepts of Buddhism, which is that all things and all dharmas arise upon or exist because of other things or other dharmas. This means that Webb is hinging the entire Right Hand Path on a Buddhist concept. That’s funny, because you can apply it in certain iterations of the Left Hand Path as well – if your Left Hand Path affirms the principle that life comes from life, you are affirming something like Paticcasamuppada by another name, even if in a way that might not conform to the conventional exoteric form of Buddhist philosophy. In fact, so much of the violent religious imagery found in Tantric Hinduism (such as, for example, the image of the goddess Chinnamasta) reflects a truth very similar to that of paticcasamuppada: that life comes from life. But Webb really conflates the doctrine of paticcasamuppada with everything from Christianity, to the New Age movement, to mechanistic materialism. He thinks that when people say “we are all made of starstuff”, that’s the same thing as the doctrine of Paticcasamuppada, which he thinks is also the same thing as Christianity for some frankly stupid reason.
In fact, Webb shows much later that he severely misunderstands the notion of paticcasamuppada. He believes that paticcasamuppada is shared by Christianity, Marxism, and the work of B. F. Skinner (oddly specific target?), and interprets it to mean that all things follow the course of a metaphysical law that pre-exists all perceived phenomenon. That is simply not what paticcasamuppada means. It’s probably not even what Buddhist dharma means. It could refer to the underlying basis of things, or it could refer simply to the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha). But it’s not meant to be understand as something analogous to the Christian notion of divine law. Nor does it necessarily imply “oneness”. What, then, are all things “one with”? Perhaps some schools of Buddhism imply that this means an almost pantheisitc concept of “Buddha nature”. Not for Theravada Buddhism, that is not true. In Buddhism at large, everything is empty. If “oneness” is supposed to mean “to be one with emptiness”, what would that mean? Webb is again mixing together very different traditions, with different philosophies, and different patterns of meaning, in order to conflate them into a homogenous concept of what the Right Hand Path is supposed to be. The real Right Hand Path in Western esotericism is mostly just a name given to a thread of occult schools united by premises shared with Christian and “neo-Kabbalist” mysticism and similar systems, who have not much in common other than the idea that the goal of magic is to attain mastery of the elements by uniting with God, or realising the premise that the magician is identically one with God, or the Godhead (meaning, of course, the Christian God or some variation thereof). The Buddhist concept of paticcasamuppada does not imply such a premise. In fact, Buddhism rejects the notion of Godhead that I just mentioned, and, ironically, I think Buddhists would reject a certain notion of “selfhood” implied by that premise. Because remember, as far as the Right Hand Path is concerned, there actually is a self, but that self is not the individual self, and rather is actually just God or the Godhead. That idea could be taken as fairly similar to the Hindu notion of selfhood or Atman, whereas Buddhist teaching rejects the Hindu concept of Atman. Webb also treats paticcasamuppada as another way of referring to the notion of mechanistic laws in the universe, and I don’t see how that applies. Christian divine law and scientific mechanistic law doesn’t really mean the same thing. In fact, in science you might even say “law” is mostly a byword, whereas in Christian metaphysics law really does mean law. And mechanistic laws in science most certainly do not imply the premise of “oneness”, whatever that might mean.
To be honest, it’s to the point where I really don’t understand Webb’s animus towards Buddhism. He even claims that the Buddha was the “purest philosopher of the Right Hand Path”, which to me just seems like a palpably uninformed thing to say. He also claims that the Buddha observed that Being was furthered by desire and that this led to both greater permanence of the self and greater suffering for the self, and also that the Buddha’s solution to this problem was to eliminate desire and harmonise the elements of the psyche with those of the objective universe. All of that is not true. The Buddha’s argument was that the self was both an illusion and fundamentally impermanent, just as everything else is according to one of his basic teachings (that of impermanence), and that desire, or rather craving (dukkha) creates suffering, while attachment to craving (dukkha) deepens what the Buddha considered to be the illusion of the self. The Buddha did argue that desire or craving should be extinguished, but he also never argued for any active harmonisation of any aspect of your personal consciousness with the universe, rather he simply argued that all things were both fundamentally impermanent and inherently empty (sunyata), and the point of Buddhist enlightenment would be to simply realise the emptiness of all things through meditative practice. I must stress again that, although certain aspects of Buddhism can be interpreted as compatible with modern notions of the Right Hand Path, the actual Right Hand Path in Western occultism is based on something very different from the premise of Buddhism. The Right Hand Path premises itself on unity with the Godhead, which means affirming the magician’s identity with (typically) the Christian God, harmonising themselves with him in order to dominate the world. Buddhism in all its forms rejects that premise completely, even if you wouldn’t count is as an expression of the Left Hand Path.
I also think there’s something concerning about the way Webb frames the commonality of the Left Hand Path and the Right Hand Path. He says that the LHP initiate doesn’t necessarily hate the Right Hand Path, and that this is not just because they have had to break with the Right Hand Path before but also because they see the Right Hand Path as necessary for maintaining social controls. To be frank, I view this as a concession to the Right Hand Path, one that cannot be tolerated. To put it bluntly, the social controls that Webb is talking about aren’t really necessary. Social control is not really necessary for anything other than to fulfil the desires of others. The control implemented by the state is supported by violence. The desires in this case are the desires of either politicians, bureaucrats, monarchs, dictators, cops, or just whoever happens to feel safe around them or under authority. But ask yourself: how many otherwise free people must die, be brutalised, be made to live in fear of authority, and otherwise jut have the life drained from them in order for other people to have their desires fulfilled? Whether that’s the mediocre desire to live in comfortable decay, or the desire to wield authority over other people, or the desire to construct some kind of perfect order for people to live under, or the desire to accumulate profit from the labour of other people, there is no good reason to accept that your autonomy, or even your life, is fit to be sacrificed at the altar of those desires or ambitions. And to me that’s the real point of the Left Hand Path: to cultivate or realise a non-recuperable sovereignty that allows you to assert the ultimate freedom from all arrangements, in the sense that Max Stirner meant when he discussed the difference between revolution and insurrection in The Unique and Its Property (and which Saul Newman also discusssed), and to be able to fight all such arrangements, alone if need be. From that standpoint, I argue that there is no basis for the LHP initiate to accept the validity of whatever “social controls” that Webb seems to think are so valid, and therefore no reason to have any truck with the Right Hand Path.
I don’t plan on covering too much of the practical elements of the Uncle Setnakt book, but it’s from one of the practical suggestions that I am able to present a discussion on the nature of divinity. One of the practices that Webb puts forward is simply cultivating self-sufficiency. This is obviously difficult in practice, especially in modern societies, but it is worth noting that self-sufficiency was one of the main things that constituted the nature of the divine or the gods in the eyes of classical Greek polytheist philosophy. Even some early Christians adopted a Platonic argument along those lines, which they borrowed from pagan philosophers, in order to justify their (ultimately heterodox) belief that the Hebrew God and the Christian God were two separate beings and that the former was a demon and not divine while the latter was the only true god. From that standpoint, if theurgy means magically and ritually cultivating the attributes of the divine, and one of those is self-sufficiency, then you can think of theurgy as a religious mechanism for cultivating personal self-sufficiency at least in the sense of obtaining spiritual sovereignty. I suppose it’s fitting that self-sufficiency is akin to godliness, because, at least as far as Webb is concerned, it is an ethic diametrically opposed to the world around us.
While modern humans think they’re on top of things, in reality they are constantly dependent on services, permissions, and other people in general. Of course, there are certain needs that always depend on someone else. But we find ourselves living lives that are fundamentally impossible to live without complicated networks of dependence, set into motion by conditions that impose and then enmesh us in that dependency. This is the reality of life in modern capitalism hidden behind the rhetoric of the empowered capitalist subject which characterises the whole of liberal ideology and its conservative cousins. For Webb, the answer is simple: you have to teach yourself behaviours that encourage a reasonably self-sufficient life. In other words, try to do as much as you can for yourself. But I would add a political dimension to this: the movement for the abolition of capitalism, and indeed the present existing conditions, is a means of creating new conditions that support self-sufficiency for the broadest possible number of people. After all, ours is a maximalistic goal, and for that lifestyle along is invaluable but also inadequate: you have to eliminate the conditions that force the majority of people in live in almost complete dependence, and then, at least, you might open their eyes to a world in which those conditions don’t exist. If you need me to summarise what means, I’d say you’ve got an argument against capitalism, maybe even an argument for communism (although I am confident that no Setian will ever admit the possibility).
I suppose it’s also worth discussing the practice of “learning admiration” as well. By this it seems Webb simply means to make a skill of seeing good in the world. Quite clearly this is meant as a way of checking and avoiding hubris. If you only see flaws in the world, you will see yourself as being above the world in a purely psychological sense and without much effort to support it, and it may block you from perceiving the magic in the world around you. In a way, I can see this lining up very easily with Plotinus’ criticism of Gnosticism: Plotinus noted that the “Gnostics” (or “they who believe the creator is evil”, likely referring to the Sethian Gnostics) viewed the entire cosmos as being fundamentally evil and irredeemably corrupt, and that they themselves were the only spiritually aware people in the entire world, and he argued that this was a false belief that inevitably inspired hubris, since by this standard they would have seen themselves as superior to every other being in the cosmos, even the gods and the stars. It can also be seen as a way of fighting the metacommunication (propaganda) of the world, as in those messages that tell you to focus on the implacable danger of the world on the one hand, and the security that certain people claim to offer on the other. But I would be careful. Never completely dismiss pessimism at the philosophical level. The idea that how you choose to see the world changes the world around you is very close to New Age thought. From a Satanic standpoint, I would say that, if an “evil” power lay at the basis of everything, the best way to see the good in the world is to find the ways in which that good and beauty is an inseparable part of that “evil”.
The role of art in magical practice presents a possible contradiction in Webb’s thought as concerns the subject of unity. Practicing an art is regarded as a step towards cultivating magical potency. Now there’s something familiar, and definitely practical, and for this point it really doesn’t matter what that art is, as long as it’s something basically creative (music, sculpting, poetry, painting, whatever!). The artist feels at one with their instrument in a way that Webb insists is not union with the universe. To be fair, it’s probably not really union with the universe. What it is, however, is a complete state of flow comprising of identification with one’s own creative activity, and Webb describes this as acting upon the universe without the baggage of your own medial opinion. This is something Webb takes to be a divine state. But if the universe is your tool as a magician, then you will find yourself at one with the universe following that exact same principle. Still, perhaps it is useful to think of art-making in these terms.
When Webb discusses “mastery of the world wide web”, he mentions that “enlightened self-sacrifice”, alongside determination and networking, is a principle or practice that has the power to change the world around you and which can be elevated in Left Hand Path practice. Webb really doesn’t clarify what “enlightened self-sacrifice” means, but it’s interesting because it seems like the opposite to how the modern Left Hand Path, defined partly with the influence of Don Webb and others like him, radically de-emphasizes self-sacrifice in its opposition to the annihilation or subsumption of the self into the divine other. Much later, there is a ritual where the magician turns to the south, they acknowledge their lovers, to honor and cherish them, and “sacrifice my foolish ego” for their support, lessons, and love. That’s always interesting coming from the Left Hand Path. Those who loudly proclaim themselves to be of the Left Hand Path swear themselves away from “self-sacrifce” or from any negation of “the ego”. Of course, one obvious problem is that Webb doesn’t define “the ego” separately from the self. If he had, there would be much more to discuss. But what this means is that there is an extent to which Webb’s LHP initiate will sacrifice something, the “ego”, for the sake of love. Which means that there is a notion of self-sacrifice in this form of the Left Hand Path that deserves further elaboration. Unfortunately I don’t think he does. But perhaps I’m doing some of the work in interpreting that anyway.
A very long section of the book is dedicated to something Webb calls the Grand Initiation. This is basically a ritual meant to activate all of the ideas and principles already elaborated in the book, but in practice much of its content involves a series of lengthy essays. The sheer breadth of this section of the book means I find it best to try and gloss over as much as possible, but there are several insights I was able to derive or synthesize from the Grand Initiation section, so I will do my best to bring them into focus, or at least the most interesting ones.
For one, the beginning of the rite involves a further exploration on the concept of Darkness. Darkness is identical with the unmanifest, a mysterious plane of ultimate freedom, into which the magician seeks to die and be reborn as a companion of the Prince of Darkness. Several connections are easily made from here. Though I suspect Webb won’t admit it in this work – and why should a Setian admit it? – there is an obvious connection to be made with Kenneth Grant’s notion of magic as meaning contact with discarnate beings and the “Other Side” in which they dwell. There is easily a point of contact with pagan mysticism and magic, given the role of incubation and ritual katabasis in conveying descent into darkness and rebirth, hence the deifying power of the underworld, or the setting of magic in the realm of chthonic gods and the antechamber of death. One also gets a clear sense of the Black Lodge as a place where one might gain the power to re-order the world to their liking, at least according to Windom Earle anyway. And, of course, there is the darkness described by Gruppo Di Nun and more specifically Claudio Kulesko: a magmatic existential substance lodged in and around all beings, which contains infinite configurations of possibility and yet also the ultimate danger of dissolution. Going over to this plane means gaining access the ultimate powers of self-directed creation and regeneration. That’s why the Sun descends there every day in certain ancient myths. But there is an admission to be made from this perspective. No, you are not achieving oneness with God by any language, but you are experiencing your own, for lack of a better term for it, “ego death” for the purpose of your own rebirth. This is where we start to get deeper into the whole death-and-rebirth mystery we talked about earlier.
There’s an admittedly Promethean conceit involved as well, but one that also emphasizes the pre-initiated mind as socially constructed. Social construction plays an interesting role in Webb’s thought, as has been previously explored, and it just might provide a way of extricating the modern Left Hand Path away from right-wing drift and fascist creep, both of which lean into a kind of essentialism, which all right-wing political philosophy ultimately relies on. A degree of constructivism can thus be applied in Webb’s notion of the Left Hand Path in order to develop something truly radical. But of course, in many modern discourses, constructivism is used to depict the human being as constructed in a way that they cannot alter. The point for Webb is to take ownership of your own social construction, and break free of external construction. That is the chain to be broken.
But, getting back to death and rebirth, one of the most interesting parts of the Grand Initiation as that the initiate at some point declares that their Knowledge lets them die to their old life. The interesting thing here is that it effectively makes for a Satanic version of “dying to yourself”, and from here a link can be made to aspects of Georges Bataille’s analysis of eroticism. In Erotism, Bataille links “dying to yourself”, or “dying to oneself” (ironically, this is a phrase associated with Christianity), to the “little death” felt in erotic activity, and elaborates it as a form of mystic passion. Its meaning is contained in the way life is bound together with death. Life multiplies ceaselessly, but the result of this is that death heaps upon all the more. Bataille says that, in sexual acts that result in death, life persists in increasing and yet life is also lost at the same time. This, for Bataille, is the finest example of “dying to oneself”. Bataille elaborates very heavily on something that the Catholic Father Tesson said: “Man must die that he may live”. Ironically for the Left Hand Path, Tesson’s words are probably an extrapolation of the example of Jesus and his crucifixion on the cross. At the same time, in paganism as well, humans must “die” in order to live with the gods. But for Bataille, “dying to yourself” also means living for the moment without being ruled by the normative instincts for survival. It is essentially a way of approaching or even challenging death without physically dying. Dying the death of not dying is not death as such, rather it is the ultimate stage of life, living on because of it.
There’s a sense of “dying to yourself” reflected in what Webb has the magician say. Webb views humans as merely a different kind of machine. But the machinery of humans is something that can be overcome, and the knowledge gained from magical initiation is what allows people to die as machines and be reborn as a god. For a Christian, “dying to yourself” means that you “die” by being born again, in the sense that it is no longer you who lives but rather it is Jesus Christ that lives in you. For Webb, it means that you no longer live as the limited and weak “machine” you were, rather it is the divinity you become who lives. Perhaps in this sense you sacrifice yourself to yourself. Your old life cannot contain the truth you find in your initiation, and so the initiation ends that life and proceeds a new one. Knowledge is thus linked to death, just as Adam and Eve gaining knowledge also meant death. Knowledge in this sense means dying to yourself in a very un-Christian way.
That theme of dying to oneself seems to be reflected again a little later, when the magician calls to the Prince of Darkness in the form of a goddess named Shamsan Tara (presumably a form of the Tantric Hindu goddess Tara), who causes the self to pass beyond the grave into the next life. The magician says “I am dead to my past life, but have not yet Awakened to my Rebirth, where I will Love you as a goddess should be loved, and not as men think to worship the gods of their own creation”. No idea where he was going with the love part, but it’s quite an odd thing for people looking at the bluster of the modern Left Hand Path to hear LHP magicians speak of the “death” of their self in this way. Rather problematic for the narrative presented by Gruppo Di Nun too, because this idea isn’t so different from some of what they talk about in Revolutionary Demonology, apart from the fact that Webb does not propose a quasi-Christian masochistic relationship to death and darkness like Gruppo Di Nun does. Taken seriously (and I’m not sure the extent to which Webb does), the idea would be to “die to oneself”, to “die in order to live”, which in this case means to allow the self to pass into darkness and undergo rebirth. This is immediately reiterated when the magician says, “The Death of my old way of life is a Shock that awakens me, and I find myself clothed in Darkness wherein all Secrets reside”.
Ironically, for a Setian, all of this talk about death and rebirth easily brings us back to the myth of Ra merging with Osiris in the underworld. That synthesis of the divine and cadaver is exactly Bataille’s description of the “left” side of the sacred, or the “impure” sacred. This dual identity for Bataille represents the obliteration of the boundaries set between the divine and the impure as well as the sacred and the profane by social homogeneity – that is, the profane world of work. What is this means is not that the LHP initiate must turn themselves into a corpse, but rather that, in order to apprehend the divine state, they must follow the course of the sun: that is, to descend into their own rebirth. That is the mystic passion that can be gleamed from things like such talk as “The Death of my old way of life is a Shock that awakens me, and I find myself clothed in Darkness wherein all Secrets reside” or “Knowledge lets me die to my old life”. The ritual death and rebirth isn’t an oblivion of personality, it’s a process of the divine being and becoming that the LHP initiate aspires to.
An invocation in the Grand Initiation refers to four deities taken to be four names of the Prince of Darkness: Shiva, Saturn, Satan, and Set, each with their own Secrets. The “Secret of Satan” is that “if I revolt against man’s personification of the mechanistic universe, I can remake the cosmos in the shape of my Will”. Webb does not need to explain it: by implication, the personification of the mechanistic universe is God. A connection can be made to the way Kulesko discusses the concept of the Image of the World. The Image of the World is a magic circle that we impose on the world, and which divides between our world and the Outside. It is not for nothing that God is the name we give to that magic circle, because God may seem to be a cipher for that order, and without God it would have been Reason or Man or something else. Webb in this sense sketches out the rebellion represented by Satan in terms that place it beyond the mere moral defence of reason against religious tyranny. Instead, Satan’s rebellion is ultimately the rejection of order at large aiming towards the total destruction of regime itself; all arrangements of order, thus is the negation of God as such. But there’s also a harmony between this and whole notion of “dying to your old life”, which is here reflected as “dying to your old world”, or “the world dying to its old image”.
The way Webb discusses Chaos can be interesting, but also ultimately very problematic. He divides between a “mechanistic” chaos, referring to the turbulence of a mindless universe exemplified by random dynamic weather patterns, and “human” chaos, apparently referring to all the random events that human in our lives. The point is to both accept and to some extent control that chaos rather than fear or idolise it, so that the magician can access its restorative power. For Webb, those who do not try to control it end up being slaves to random movements that happen outside their control, or “leaves in the wind” (a metaphor I actually remember sharing for a long time), but Webb also says that those who fight Chaos also inevitably lose, because Chaos is also entropy and entropy is stronger than all living beings. Webb also reckons there is not enough chaos in the world, and to some extent I agree. The world is now more than ever at a point where chaos is the answer more than order will ever be, because human beings and life itself both need to assert their own autonomy and freedom, and that means creating a chaotic situation of sovereignty that cannot co-exist with the order that modern states seek to create. The modern world is an arms race for new and more insidious and sophisticated systems of control to develop and establish themselves as superior to others and win over others. Fortunately, the Prince of Darkness wants to introduce a vast amount of chaos into the cosmic system. But then in the ritual form things quickly get problematic, because the magician invokes not only Tiamat, Lotan, and Apep but also the “angry human herd” Chaos in the form of anger, patriotism, and sentiment.
Here’s the problem: sentiment itself is not “chaos” and neither is patriotism. Patriotism actually functions as a coercive ordering force of society that simply manifests as impulse as a result of long-term social conditioning, and thus simply appears as a bout of irrational fever. In other words, what Webb figures as “angry human chaos” is actually just a result of exactly what Webb describes as metacommunication (again, propaganda: what appear to be chaotic impulses are actually just impulsive expressions of social metacommunication, which in this case is itself a product of the ideological apparatus of human societies. But I suppose to whatever kind of ordered consciousness Webb seems to be getting at, patriotism would be “chaos” solely in the sense that it disturbs the rational pattern of the mind. Which might well be the issue. On the one hand, chaos in this conception seems to just be that which disturbs order from the outside. On the other hand, chaos is also so much more than that: it’s the name Webb gives to the whole order of coming into being, manifesting, and passing away, the very groundless ground that swallows up everything and yet leaves room for more creation. Thus, chaos is the mother of all. Yet those who worship chaos “lose their souls” and “become animals”. But as I already said humans are already animals, so what’s the point in saying that? None. And what exactly is the point of denying the worship of chaos while having the initiate say “Hail Lady Chaos” during the Chaos section of the rite?
That said I think that Webb’s notion of chaos is ultimately in harmony with the Sadean concept of nature, with is central emphasis on the generative power of death and destruction. That Webb’s magician also says that they do not love nature or moment, and even this might be interpreted as Sadean if you Marquis De Sade indeed “hated” nature as he said he did in Marat/Sade. But the point for Webb is to live in strife, devoted only to one’s own becoming, and in this sense creating new possibilities based on the chaos that emerges around you. It’s also worth noting how Chaos is linked to Webb’s theme of dying to your old life. The “machine” of the magician and their old self ritually sinks into Chaos, that place into which all things sink into their passing, and then emerges from it. It could also be said that this relationship between chaos and strife, undertaken voluntarily, may allow a person to support, preserve, or even extend or increase their personal vitality for as long as they are alive.
I suppose since we discussed Chaos we should also discuss Order. Webb divides Order into four aspects: the power of ordering, the limitation of ordering, the discovering of unconscious ordering, and the secret of ordering. Webb in any case takes ordering to be fundamentally necessary for initiation, which he understands as a process of self-ordering. For Webb that mostly just means choosing the right set of rules for ourselves. But ordering also limits us, puts snares upon us, makes us react in ways that align strictly with that ordering, even if the information we base it on is inaccurate. So for Webb that means we always have to challenge who we are. Unconscious ordering seems to be a way of referring to rules or patterns of ordering that the magician doesn’t already control but which nonetheless operate on the magician. By discovering these, the magician can set themselves free from them. The secret of ordering is that it comes into being for a brief instant of will and makes a great deal of energy available out of Chaos, and that you can elevate yourself by making good use of that brief instant. Webb seems to believe that you cannot survive without order or ordering, and this I think is up for questioning. By ordering and by order, Webb potentially refers to something like Stirnerian self-arranging as opposed to external arrangement, or the difference between insurrection and revolution, but then the conflation of this with “order” seems specious: other people are not ordered by how you arrange yourself. But he does see that arrangement as an order or symmetry you impose on the world around you, a plan to action laid upon the chaos of this world, which makes for a flawed metaphor.
There are important points to be made about Webb’s discussion of creation, and in this regard we can skip Webb’s discussion of the Right Hand Path’s alleged views on the subject. Webb’s version of the Left Hand Path, which we must remember is essentially Setian Satanism, posits the existence of principles that exist outside of time and space and therefore permit freedom from the mechanistic order of the world. It focuses on a definition of self-consciousness that is defined as existing outside of nature, as being “unnatural”. Such principles, and the freedom they allow, are framed as being in conflict with the world, and are thus “dark” or “forbidden”, which Webb frames as an animal reaction to the possibility of “non-animal” behaviour. There is an obvious problem with this: in practice, it’s exactly the idea of certain behaviours being “animal” that tends to be used to justify their proscription in human cultures. Moreover, normative “humanity” already sets itself up as being “non-animal”, even in the face of real human beings as animals. In my opinion, this reality problematises the way Webb frames independent self-consciousness as strictly “non-animal”. Furthermore, it comes with the assumption that the cultured behaviours of humans are somehow exclusive to humans, despite the available evidence to the contrary. In any case, however, Webb’s notion of rebellion takes on a larger significance: rebellion is the LHP magician’s struggle against time. To survive the power of time, you must create yourself. By this, we might infer that “the self” in Webb’s terms is itself something “unnatural” that has to be created, but for Webb at the same time it is a pattern or series of patterns disseminated by the Prince of Darkness. In any case, by “create yourself” Webb means that you must act in ways that aren’t predetermined by your biology, your culture, or your age, and make choices that lead you to states and activities not predetermined for you by “the world machine”.
There is, on the one hand, a clear insurrectionary meaning to this concept of rebellion. As soon you apply that to, for example, issues like gender, you can start to look at it in terms of acting against the social order of cisheteronormativity. Or beyond that, you can interpret insurrectionary self-definition in very similar terms while transferring some of the metaphysical import that Webb lays out. Another very simple but profound way to rebel against what Webb takes to be the “world machine” would be to rebel against “The Human”: the category of “humanity” is the most baseline rejection of individuality to be found in human societies, to the extent that non-conforming identities embraced by humans are policed and invalidated by other humans because they contradict the identity of humanity, as if one has committed treason to “humanity”. Rejecting your humanity in this sense means embracing freedom beyond time and space, and so that freedom should be understood as a kind of anti-humanist freedom. But, on the other hand, Webb also uses it to recommend keeping up contrarian appearances that you then have to run away from later. It’s just “do what is the opposite of any environment you’re in”, and there are situations where it really doesn’t challenge anything, or do anything other than make you look like an asshole. But, you can easily do the kind of “creative rebellion” Webb talks about not only without, say, deliberately creeping out marginalised communities, but also while actively challenging social oppression. That there really aren’t enough examples of that in this book unfortunately speaks to Webb’s lack of imagination.
Another very interesting insight concerns the subject of “world-building”. In that context, Webb again undermines the notion that the point for Satanism is that you are already your own god, with the point instead being you’re supposed to become your own god. It probably goes without saying that human beings, as they are, are not gods. Human actions are very often bound by many forces that gods would not be so binding for gods. This is one of those “common sense” suppositions on divinity that actually also necessarily hint at classical Platonist or other polytheist philosophies, in that they perceived the gods as perfectly self-sufficient in themselves and not beholden to the externalities that adversely affect humans (although the myths don’t even always express that picture when it comes to human passions, such as lust; not to mention the possibility that the gods can be influenced by magic). As I said before, that idea was also sometimes invoked by early Christians, and again that’s actually also one of the reasons why Maricon and/or the Marcionite Christians argued that the God depicted in the Old Testament could not be God or even divine. At the same time, however, Webb also proposes that world-building is a constant activity, one that we perform all the time in our actions whether we realise it or not, even in reading newspapers and socialising with others.
There is something even more interesting to be said about a small but significant detail of that discussion: Webb says that if we decide to hang out with people and avoid the phone calls of others, we are populating our world. I think that’s a pretty good reason to not socialise with Nazis or fascists. It’s not because society says it’s bad without you having thought about it, it’s because you don’t want your world to be populated with Nazis and their enablers. That’s perfectly logical, and it’s something worth shoving into the faces of any Satanist or occultnik who defends formal associations with Nazis or the far-right while whining about “cancel culture”. In a way, it also imparts a real sense of personal responsibility onto absolute freedom of association. In other words, you are free to associate with whomever you want, and that means you are responsible for ensuring you do not, through your association, create links that will harm those who you don’t want to harm. In retrospect, that lesson should have occurred to us in 2016, in regards to the Left Hand Path Consortium in Atlanta. By taking it to heart in your own terms, you can develop an active and self-aware anti-fascism in your LHP praxis.
At a certain point Webb inevitably discusses Set and the Setian concept of Xeper, and here we arrive at an emphasis that seems to contradict a key theme I have observed. It’s worth noting that Webb defines Xeper as the experience of individual self-awareness, as well as the decision to expand that self-awareness through actions in this life, and asserts that this process begins in a moment of rebellion against the status quo.. Webb emphasizes that Set is the divine origin of the word Xeper and that his name ultimately means “separator” or “isolator”. Putting aside the fact that we almost certainly don’t know what Set’s name actually means, the contradiction in play comes from the fact that the refrain towards the Setian concept of isolated intellect clashes with several of the implications of Webb’s thought and practice that we discovered earlier, which point to the individual achieving self-deification precisely by overcoming their own isolation. Another contradiction regarding isolation emerges from the explanation of Xeper. Webb asserts that Xeper is a series of moments in which we perceive ourselves as having acted as gods and did something divine, and also that all moments of Xeper isolate yourself from the cosmos. But if a moment of Xeper means that you have acted like a god, then shouldn’t that activity be interpreted as a moment in which divine continuity could be perceived? And if so, is that really a moment of isolation?
I’m actually just going to skip most of the discussion of Set in order to focus on a much more interesting argument about Xeper relevant to the notion of divine continuity. Webb sets out to refute traditional notions of unity with the divine by framing the object of that unity as a singular moment of Xeper that occurred once and cannot be returned to. If you can’t go back to a previous divine state, any more than an oak tree can go back to being an acorn, then you have to go forward into another divine state. Well, if a being can experience multiple divine states by way of proceeding into them in a linear fashion, then, putting aside any issues about linear time in relation to the divine state, that whole pathway is where Iamblichus can come in very nicely. Because in many ways Iamblichean theology allows you to do two things at once. On the one hand, its aim is clearly Platonic return, the restoration of unity with the One. At the same time, that can be understood as a forward re-establishment of continuity, but in the sense that this occurs precisely within the realm of matter into which the previous divine state has already proceeded. And then, on the other hand, you will also be able to proceed into another, a new divine state, and that might possibly be the heroic state – that is, of the Hero, whose liminal being is a link between the human and the divine. Webb’s version of this seems to involve some ideas conveyed by the Bremmer-Rhind Papyrus, in which Xepera (Khepri)’s first two children are Shu and Tefnut, who Webb interprets as “Reason” and “Peak Emotions” respectively. Shu was a primordial deity of cool and dry air, linked with divine order or Maat, while Tefnut was a primordial goddess of moisture and rain, and both deities are traditionally the offspring of Ra-Atum. Nothing suggests that Shu and Tefnut had anything to do with reason or emotion. But Webb nonetheless interprets these as human experiences that allow us to detect the presence of the divine and work with it in order to have more divine experiences.
The life of an acorn is an analogy that Webb revisits almost towards the end of his book, and is worth examining. Webb says that an acorn that falls from a tree contains all the potentials needed to grow into a great oak. But even though an acorn can rot and die while it’s still an acorn, that’s the not what the acorn is meant to do any more than a baby animal is. An acorn is meant to grow into another great oak tree that will, over time, grow its own acorns. In this analogy, the individual is an acorn, and the individual is meant to grow into something more, a greater form of itself, independently, rather than simply be reabsorbed into the universe, the root system of all individuals – that, for Webb, is unity. In my opinion, this metaphor has the effect of actually weaving Webb’s notion of apotheosis as essentially mimicking the patterns of the natural world, or demonstrating harmony with the natural world, which would be strange because it seems as if Webb does all he can to define the Left Hand Path as a course that separates the individual from nature. You are taking a course that is natural to life forms, from the standpoint that you yourself are a stage of life that must develop further.
There is a bit of a problem, though, once this ethos is extended to the subject of love. Webb says that love does not consist in being one with the soul of a lover, but instead in contemplating all the things that make the lover special and unique from themselves and the rest of the cosmos. It’s good to see the lover is appreciated as their own individual, but it also sounds like looking at them as a beautiful painting. If love is contemplation, it is active loving? Oh yes you will do a lot of emotional contemplation in love, because that’s one the essential parts of love, but love in many ways is also an active devotion to a person, one that takes place in the inner world and the outer world, and that devotion can culminate in sacrificial desire. Love, and particularly sex and eroticism, also involves the two individuals transgressing the boundaries of their own discontinuity. The way Bataille talked about it, it was as if “violating” those boundaries, destroying for a moment the discontinuity of a lover in the same terms as the victim of ritual sacrifice. “If I were at one with her, the amount of love in our private world would be halved”. Would it? Or would it re-manifest between the two selves, magnified? Actually, if you define love as a contemplative impulse, then it may just be you who has halved love.
Two interesting aspects of Webb’s understanding of the concept of religion (one of them possibly problematic) seem to come into focus in the Grand Initiation chapter. Webb treats religion as the pure product of human consciousness that exists in order to gain access to divine experiences and control the rate and nature of their occurrence, to deal with, according to Webb, the fact that divine experiences appear blindly, without pattern or reason. Of course, the other premise he works into this is that these experiences themselves were really created by humans: or at least, that’s what seems to be implied when he says “A Christian would say it was the hand of God, a Hindu would invoke karma. But we know who did it – that man or woman we face in the mirror every day.”. You can think of it as an internalisation of the outside. But this poses an obvious problem: how does a human create encounters with the gods, and such are the experiences that Webb describes? Would we even know how in our minds, even at the unconscious moment preceding the experience? At the same time, religion in Webb’s terms has to understood not as a system of creed or dogma, as in the Christocentric definition of religion, but instead something like more like the pagan definition of religion, as expounded by Cicero: a way of establishing a relationship with the divine experience and continuity. And in Webb’s terms, that has to be fully individual, because your divine experience is not Webb’s, and that’s because of the individualistic nature of Xeper. At the same time, it seems that it is this divine experience that both creates and limits you, and you have no real control over it. The divine experience is in some sense fully sovereign, and from that standpoint religion and magic can be thought of as ways of accessing that sovereignty.
Yet he still has a problematic or possibly even conflicted or self-contradicting understanding of religion. In the Birth section of the rite, Webb recommends reciting a mantra every night as you fall asleep, both to relax you as you go to sleep and to somehow bring you back on the path if you falter from it. But Webb also asserts that the Right Hand Path interprets the effect of the mantra as grace from another entity, and claims that RHP traditions deem it an unforgiveable sin to question that grace, whereas it is supposed to be seen as a strictly human phenomenon. Once again, this conveys Webb’s view that the object of religion is a strictly human mental process. For an occultist who believes in divine agency as a real thing (he believes the Prince of Darkness to be an extant being or presence and not simply an aspect of human psychology), Webb often appears unable to accept external divine agency in his system despite the fact this is already what the Prince of Darkness is in his system – to do so would undermine his version of the Left Hand Path where it says that everything is all “you”. He frames the Prince of Darkness as an external divine agency that authors individual agency, but cannot accept external divine grace or agency in this instance for some reason. But what’s funny is that even Catholic Christians don’t actually believe that doubting your own visions or your own perceiving a moment of grace is a mortal sin. So where exactly does he get this idea? He probably made it up, by extrapolating from a generalised set of attitudes towards superstition.
One of the probably most interesting insights to proceed from the Grand Initiation rite is in the Re-Creation section. According to Webb, every human creation must be periodically re-created so that it can perservere in a world where human ideas tend to degrade over time. The world seems to move against all products of mind, so that all ideas, no matter how good, will be subject to corruption, and since, in Webb’s view, all real facts are acquired through action, almost every new idea is created without facticity. This means that everything has to be re-created at some point, but humans find that difficult because of their attachment to existing ideas. The inability to re-create leads to a process of personal crystallisation, which Webb tells us is just another way of saying that someone becomes an inflexible asshole over time. Re-creation is necessary to preserve ideas, it keeps them strong and vital, and because of this the LHP initiate seeks out the facts of the world and different ways of interpreting them. Webb interprets this as an aspect of the principle of order, by which Webb’s LHP initiate ultimately abides.
In magic, what works for you often doesn’t work for others and vice versa, and once you discover what works for you, you will want to re-create it. This does not necessarily mean doing the same things over and over again. But it does mean you will need to rework whatever ceremonies you used to establish your magic. What has worked in the past can work again, but it is good to modify existing ritual forms and/or re-learn them. That goes for incorporating either, to use Webb’s examples, LaVeyan Satanist ritual forms or the rituals of late antiquity. And, at the essential level, you must ultimately rework the rituals that created you, because you know that the human species has repeatedly shaped itself. The Prince of Darkness knows that if you unleash magic into the world it eventually comes to produce what you want, and for this reason he performed the working that eventually created the human species. Of course it’s funny that now Webb chooses to invoke external divine agency, when it’s in the idea of Satan-Set creating human beings. Yet this is where something important comes into play: to own yourself, you must interact with that working by reworking the magic that formed you. If you want children, you have to be willing to make sacrifices so that they can receive education and training that allows them to “send towards the future”. You must put things in the world that increase its knowledge, acting as a Lucifer figure in your own capacity. And, you must send some of your magic into the dim past, and if something ancient is unexpectedly and seemingly fatefully presented to the magician it is a sign of something you are about to bring into being.
The overall point is that re-creation from this standpoint is a way of re-working that which has come before into your own creation. In a sense there is a way to interpret this in the Iamblichean pagan light as well, if the whole point of theurgy and magic is to rework the oneness of the cosmos, diffused but immanent in all things, into your own divine state, and that this thus becomes the nature of heroic epistrophe (return). If that is the case, divine continuity is restablished and re-created precisely by your own sovereignty and your own magical re-ordering. From that standpoint, of course it is divine continuity that this process is concerned with, because you have enacted the divine, even if in a subtle way, and by this right you have joined the company of the gods.
There is also a sense in which this principle puts a spin on. For example, the Gnostic myth of the creation of matter and the fall of Sophia. The material cosmos is created because Sophia tried to understand God by imitating the creative power of God, by reproducing a new being without a partner – or, by parthenogenesis. In so doing, you could argue that Sophia, in her own messy way, re-created the divine power of creation, albeit in a way that broke the order of the Pleroma. The only problem with that is that Sophia repented and disowned her own creation. Or for that matter, reworking, re-creating, or simply reterritorializing the mystery of death and rebirth or “dying to yourself”. The sacrifice that you make, in the way that Don Webb elaborates no less, dying to yourself serves to “re-work” or “re-create” the principle that life derives from life (jivo jivasya jivanam), not by killing yourself of course but by having something “die” to produce something new – “my old life”, your previous uninitiated existence, perhaps meaning your own discontinuity, something like that “dies” so that a new life can be born, and so you can descend into the mystery of rebirth, and into the continuity of the divine. The course of the sun perhaps encapsulates this mystery – the sun descends into the world, “dies to itself” every day, and endlessly regenerates, forever perpetuating the mystery of rebirth.
There’s a larger siginificance still that emerges when you remember Webb’s other assertion about Xeper. Remember, according to Webb, you can’t go back to the original unity of the cosmos, because that unity is really a single moment of Xeper, which means that you have to proceed into a new divine state, a new moment of Xeper. In “Neoplatonism, that unity existed at some point, was divided, and later diffused throughout the manifest cosmos. With Iamblichean theurgy, it seems less that you are going back into an earlier state of unity and more that you are re-creating the unity that is already immanent in the multiplicity of things.
One other thing I don’t like about Don Webb is his conceits regarding Satanism and diabolical imagery. Webb asserts that diabolical imagery is only useful in a culturally-bound antinomian sense, and that beyond this it is a new stasis to be discarded. There is a suitable answer to this conceit, or perhaps two. For one thing, there will probably never be a time when a culture simply accepts the demonic for what it is, warts and all. Cultural assimilation and recuperation can only go so far with the demonic, which is always reframed as a cipher for “evil”, adversity, or hostility from the point of view of culture – medial representation almost always frames demons as something to be destroyed or expelled, and then human beings refer to other human beings as demons so that they too can be destroyed. But the more important answer is simple egoism: if I do not have culturally-bound significance for it left at my disposal, then I embrace demonic imagery because I want it and I like it. Besides, there is something else it represents, something that can never lose its antinomian significance.
He also seems to treat the whole idea of praying to Satan as a necessarily “Right Hand Path” action. This is simply ludicrous, but then it depends on the larger premise that worship itself is the action of the “Right Hand Path”, which in turn would imply that nearly all of religious action is “Right Hand Path” action. I think there is an allergic habit in the Left Hand Path, wherein things like worship are reflexively and axiomatically refused on the grounds that they might demean the individual by placing them below some superior being. Of course, such a perspective can, and should, be taken seriously, if we approach it as an objection to hierarchical spirituality and hierarchical relationships with the divine. But worship in itself does not always imply hierarchy. In fact, as Jake Stratton Kent demonstrates, there is a context in which worship has nothing to do with hierarchy or submission. That might just be what disturbs people about Satanism or certain forms of paganism: that presents worship as something other than the ritual form of active obedience or submission to God, let alone as something that might actually increase one’s personal power instead of diminishing it. Don Webb’s version of the Left Hand Path can easily integrate this understanding into itself, and produce something powerful, beautiful, pagan in the highest order, and really an originally individualistic approach to religion, but at the same time Webb has this whole contradiction between that horizon and the Christocentric understanding of religion that he maintains while describing and defining the Right Hand Path in opposition to the Left Hand Path. In order for the Left Hand Path to truly flourish, and in order for Satanists to overcome the limits of modern Satanism, they must embrace a form of worship that deconstructs, overcomes, and discards that very Christian idea of worship. It is this among other things that will allow Satanists to truly break free of the “Abrahamic” religious paradigms, and perhaps bring themselves closer to pagan religious paradigms instead.
In the FAQ, Don Webb denies being a Satanist, except on certain caveats. At the same time, Webb explicitly refers to the Satanic Will of the LHP magician in the sense of being the primary focus of LHP magic. The conceit is that for “real” LHP practitioners, Satan loses his power by being “cool”. This, for me, is a shallow analysis. What is “cool”? Being popular? Then Satan is not “cool”, only the object of widespread fascination, which, by a certain right at least, cannot diminish him magically at all. And what’s this about “to simply oppose what Is, is to be chained by it”? If that’s the case, then how will you ever claim freedom from the world? The quest for sovereignty, understood honestly, inherently sets the LHP initiate against the world of human society as it exists. They are always in conflict with it. Webb says himself that the way of the world does not support the freedom and opportunity sought by the LHP magician, which means that the magician always seems to strive against the way of the world. Does that constant opposition, in itself, chain us to society or to the way of the world? If the answer is yes, why? There doesn’t seem to be any real logic to it, just some contrarian attitude, a way of distinguishing yourself as the cool and unique in opposition to the “normies” of the occult world, when in reality, if Webb were just a little more honest he would have simply admitted to being a Satanist and claimed Satanism for himself. Such a conceit, in my opinion, has always been a problem for the Temple of Set, and to Setians, all the way back to Michael Aquino himself, since that shared rationale is one of the things that supports the distinction between Setianism and the rest of Satanism, where otherwise there would be almost just Satanism in new clothes. And, to be honest, this approach has never really succeeded in enhancing or securing the relevance of the Temple of Set against other forms of Satanism. Besides, Webb says himself that you have to “stand up for the path”, and if you’re a Satanist then you can’t really do that without being willing to accept self-ownership of being a Satanist.
The last thing Webb talks about is the Temple of Set, and this time I will not bother to elaborate on the subject, since his section is practically a pamplet for explaining the views of the Temple of Set. But I will take the opportunity to note something I found curious. I noticed in that section that Don Webb is familiar with Maurice Blanchot. That would have impressed me a little, but I also get the sense that he has a shallow or limited understanding of Blanchot. It is possible that he has not read Blanchot’s analysis of Marquis De Sade, or for that matter particularly his essay “Sade and the Sovereign Man”, where Blanchot seems to locate an infinitely extending negation in the basis of Sadean sovereignty. Through both Blanchot and Bataille you can easily detect a strain of active nihilism well suited to the aspirations of the Left Hand Path. But obviously the Setian creed lacks the ability to perceive the “meaning” and value in that active nihilism and the imagination to do something original with it. Instead the Temple of Set prefers to simply reassert the Cartesian Cogito and then rename it Xeper. I suppose it makes sense that the Setians refuse active nihilism, even in Nietzschean terms, because at bottom they are both rationalists and idealists. In fact, later on, Webb describes the Setian method as comprising of “Socratic reductionism” and “formulation of correct understandings through logic”. Basically, they are just esoteric rationalists, except maybe for the use of noetic inspiration.
That point ultimately all comes down to a particular conceit the Temple of Set has: the need to affirm an inherent ontological purpose to everything. Everything with the Temple of Set seems to be about the affirmation of purpose. They insist fundamentally that intelligent existence must have a purpose, which means that they believe it has a purpose beyond its own selfish ends of self-perpetuation, and the alternative for them is “hedonistic nihilism”. Such concern coming from people who are also still hedonists in practice is quite rich. But the question remains, why are you concerned with a purpose other than your own goals and desires? And why do you need your sense of purpose to be immanent in the cosmos? True, I say with real faith that the universe is a machine for the making of gods. But it would also be fair to ask, why? For what purpose does the universe create gods? Is there one? Should there be one? Does it matter? All that matters is that it means we are able to transform ourselves into sovereign beings.
In closing I suppose I’d like to make clear for the record that I have no intentions whatsoever of joining the Temple of Set, and, as should be clear from what I have written, there are reasons why, no matter how fascinating and insightful the Setians might be, I cannot see myself ever really being a Setian. But the bottom line is I was able extract important insights relevant to an alternative perspective on the Left Hand Path in occultism. I will try to summarise them below as follows:
- The goal of the Left Hand Path is to develop a non-recuperable individual magical sovereignty.
- Worshipping the individual self is not enough.
- The Left Hand Path, applied in pagan terms, can frame worship in terms of a reciprocal, individualistic, and non-hierarchical practice, and in this way break away from the Christocentric paradigm.
- The practice of magic is to bring us out of our isolation and discontinuity and re-create divine continuity in the individual.
- Apotheosis and self-deification can mean freeing ourselves from the limits of our own discontinuous being and re-creating divine continuity in the individual.
- The rebellion we partake in and the sovereignties we create are the creation of new divine states in the world, not the reassertion of primordial unity.
- The Left Hand Path favours the collapse of apparent opposites that creates something new.
- We are always creating our own worlds, and that means worlds where fascists are not welcome.
- The mystery of death and rebirth is the mystery of apotheosis.
- The Left Hand Path is based on the heroic re-creation of the mysteries of death and rebirth and life deriving from life to create a new divine/sovereign life out of the ashes of your lot in life.
- The Left Hand Path acknowledges Darkness as the infinite negative expanse of the absolute possibility of other worlds and other lives.
- The Left Hand Path supports the insurrectionary rejection of Humanity as a creative rebellion against society.
- The sacrifice of self to self is a magical secret conveying the re-creation of death and rebirth leading to worldy knowledge and apotheosis.
- The Left Hand Path supports eroticism as a means of realising the magical act of quasi-alchemical transformation and creation and the re-creation of death and rebirth.
It’s funny, though, to be honest. There’s something quite strange about the Setians. For some reason I find they often wind up being the source of insights relevant to Satanism and the Left Hand Path that contain the potential to transcend the limits of its modern incarnations, which is very strange because the Temple of Set is altogether still a very limited and not particularly trustworthy organisation, for various reasons, and the same goes for individual Setians, or at least certain authors in particular. But I suppose that’s for another article altogether. Still, I can’t quite shake the feeling that sometimes I find something valuable from the Setian milieu sometimes, and what I’ve been able to extract from Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path is an example of that.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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