Lords of the left-hand path Quotes

“For the history of left-hand-path ideas, the all-important figure of Odin underwent a radical, yet predictable, splitting of image. He was—like all the other gods—portrayed as the epitome of evil. In parts of Germany, the speaking of his name was forbidden. It is for this reason that the modern German name for the day of the week usually called after him was renamed Mittwoch, “Mid-Week,” while Thor (German Donar) keeps his weekday name, Donnerstag. The original name survives in some German dialects as Wodenestag or Godensdach.28 However, even after Christian conversion he still retained his patronage over the ruling elite. All the Anglo-Saxon kings continued to claim descent from Woden,29 and in the English language he retains his weekday name, Wednesday (Woden’s day).”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“The equation of the Western left-hand path with Satanism is inaccurate insofar as the practice of the left-hand path predates the imposition of the Judeo-Christian ideology in Europe. There was - and still is - the practice of the left-hand path philosophy in a purely pagan or heathen (i.e. pre-Christian) context, which does not need to refer to Satan or Lucifer to be intelligible.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the left-hand path: A history of spiritual dissent

“Things could be regarded in a much more detached, “scientific” way.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“The God of the Bible and church is manifestly wicked and villainous. But in this Age of Reason, this conclusion did not necessarily lead to the idea that the enemy of God, Satan, must be a hero. The whole Judeo-Christian tradition tended to be rejected as superstitious nonsense.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Ouspensky clearly indicates that all real initiation is self-initiation: “Systems and schools can indicate methods and ways, but no system or school whatever can do for a man the work he must do himself. Inner growth—a change of being—depends entirely upon the work a man must do on himself.”117”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“The classical devil is the human spirit exercising its freedom and rationality,”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Numerous are the legends built up around the personalities of men who defied the taboos of their times and sought to probe the unknown nature of man and the universe. Their strength lay in their “magic,” their power over the “right” word; their weakness lay in their isolation, which invited distrust and condemnation.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Ironically, and perhaps unfortunately, the vast storehouse of western European imagery relating to “devil worship,” witchcraft, and “Satanism” is for the most part the invention of the church and witch-hunters.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Even in ancient, pre-Christian times, Odin had a somewhat “sinister” or dangerous reputation. This is due to a whole complex of issues, but the most essential principle underlying this reputation appears to be that he is immersed in things—universal order, mysteries, inspiration, death—that humans rarely understand and hence often fear and dread.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“The whole subject of the various mystery systems—their origins, interrelationships, and especially the exact nature of what they taught and how they taught it—remains, as one might expect, mysterious.4 The initiatory function of the concept “mystery” (Gk. mysterion) is powerful and pervasive in many systems of religion, magic, and initiation, but its full significance is yet to be discovered.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“This pure will is characterized as being naked, transcendent, capable of self-determination, beyond all antithetical values and all pairs of opposites. In the practice of icchashuddhi, the following eight bonds or fetters must be broken systematically: daya (sympathy), moha (delusion), lajja (shame or the idea of sin), bhaya (fear), ghrina (disgust), kula (family, kinship, clan), varna (caste), and sila (customary rites and precepts).46 As each of these bonds or fetters is broken, the vira becomes progressively more liberated.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“The left-hand path would have existed in Europe without the advent of Christianity (as was, and still is, the case in India). But when Christianity did arrive, it labeled not only the indigenous left-hand-path practices of the heathens as diabolical, but the right-hand-path ones as well. It was, however, only the left-hand-path practitioners who were insightful enough (and perhaps courageous enough) to identify in some degree their ways with those of the adversary of the right-hand-path Christians.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“In this way, the Prince of Darkness can be seen as an independent sentient being in the objective universe because this is the very principle of that quality in the universe. Humanity is the only species we know of which shares that quality.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Magical systems and the occult traditions have become consumer goods marketed to the masses right along with the latest soap or automobile. Of course, here we are again speaking only in terms of appearances. In reality, no matter how secrets are sold, they cannot be possessed now in any other way than they were at any time in the past—through hard individual work. Anything to the contrary is an illusion. The current practitioners of the left-hand path seem to have grasped this reality, and it usually forms a part of their philosophies.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Black magic is not evil magic, it is simply magic that works on others unconsciously.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“This is because the world is now largely operating under a left-hand-path paradigm. It is clear that the motivations for most modern and postmodern individuals revolve around the extension of life, independence, freedom, knowledge, power, and pleasure. We live in a Faustian or Mephistophelean Age. The sooner the true character of this Faustian Age is recognized, the sooner those who live in it will be able to move about with some sense of confidence.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Plato or Pythagoras would have told Marx that any deification must be based on individuality. It is perhaps this truth that Lenin and Stalin realized in their final stages of personal development. “Collective perfection” is a notion inherited from Judaic and perhaps Iranian ideology.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“From a left-hand-path perspective, there are essentially two kinds of political structures. One is the tyrannical structure in which the leader is virtually deified (or demonized) and worshipped. In such a structure, the only possible practitioner of the left-hand path would be the leader himself or herself; all others would have to practice the right-hand-path value system of self-annihilation before the will of the leader. The second left-hand-path political structure involves the relative deification of a variety of individuals in various spheres of influence, with each individual epicenter of consciousness on the perimeter of other surrounding spheres.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“there is little in the world of French Decadence of the late nineteenth century that can be seen as furthering the philosophical aims of left-hand-path philosophies. Because they tended to hang onto medieval imagery—conditioned by their thoroughly Catholic cultural milieu—the French Satanists (of fact and fiction) actually seem to have retarded the renewal of the philosophy of the transcendental branch of the left-hand path in the West.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“To some extent, Goethe revolutionizes the left-hand path in the West. But was he himself a lord of the left-hand path? The answer, given our criteria, must be a reluctant “no.” On the one side, the overriding implications of his great work, Faust, would seem to indicate a left-hand-path orientation. However, his unequivocal philosophical position on the role of man in nature and his decidedly ambiguous stance vis-à-vis the imagery of culturally traditional “evil,” show him to be a manifestation of one of the “doubting angels” who took neither side in the battle between Lucifer and the Trinity.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“This is the function of Mephisto. The demon is the contrary, the adversary, to whatever is posited—the antithesis to Faust’s thesis.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Libertines, who consciously develop their fantasies and who set about to realize them. It is this third category, the libertines, which Sade saw as the apex of humanity. By active use of the imagination, libertines transform themselves through acts of will, in accordance with Nature.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“Had man been formed wholly good, man should never have been able to do evil, and only then would the work be worthy of God. To allow man to choose was to tempt him; and God’s infinite powers very well advised him what would be the result. Immediately the being was created, it was hence to pleasure that God doomed the creature he had himself formed.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“It would not be until the twentieth century that the spiritual baggage of the Middle Ages could be dispensed with completely. But even now the medieval period casts a shadow that can be seen in the shapes ranging from modern-day witch-hunters to TV evangelists. Nothing that has made an impact on the course of human culture ever seems to disappear totally. Indeed, the spirituality of the Middle Ages is alive and well, and can be seen on American cable television on a regular basis.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“The great problem in this is that from the right-hand-path viewpoint, it is usually understood as precisely that: a battle between good (= the right-hand path) and evil (= the left-hand path).”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“It is often tempting to be drawn into discussions of the Judeo-Christian models of evil when exploring the left-hand-path philosophy in the West. It must be continually remembered, however, that in the “West,” as in the “East,” the right-hand path and the left-hand path are models of spiritual working or action, not models of “good” versus “evil.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“A tendency of human groups to “diabolize” the gods of their neighbors seems to be a constant theme throughout history and a cause for continuing difficulties to historians of religious ideas.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“True lords and ladies of the left-hand path will have the spiritual courage to identify themselves with the cultural norms of “evil.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“From a certain enlightened perspective, both paths are perfectly good, it is just a matter of the conscious exercise of the will to follow one of these paths in an aware state without self-delusion.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies

“By accepting the internal, known reality of human consciousness, an eternally dynamic—ever moving, ever changing—existence is embraced; by rejecting it and embracing an external, unknown reality of God/Nature, an eternally static—ever still and permanent—existence is accepted.”
― Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies