Left-Hand Paths
(Content notes: This post is about esotericism in general; it isn’t particularly about kabbalah or the path from Yesod through Hod. It is also not a practical guide to black magic. It does however give away the ending of Don’t Look Up (2021) ).
Every religion is really two religions. Every all-encompassing ideology, too. There’s the right-hand path, usually the establishment or exoteric religion. It externalizes morality, spirituality, and wisdom. There’s something wrong with you, it says. But there’s something else, outside of you, that can redeem you. And then there’s the left-hand path, the anarchist one. There’s something right about you, it says. But you need to learn to listen to it.
Here’s a right-hand way to deal with fear, for example:
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
And here’s a left-hand way:
The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Here’s why every religion is really two. If you like the imagery and stories from one path, you can always find an esoteric reading of the same text that makes it about the other path.
The easiest way to read Psalm 23 esoterically is to assume the Lord spoken of is evil. Do you find yourself rich and secure, while those around you suffer? Then you have sold yourself into immoral servitude. Your cup overflows, wastefully, while others starve. Why? So that you will accept the Lord as your shepherd, submit to being beaten by his rod and led by his staff. He leads you on “the path of righteousness for His name’s sake”—He wants you on His right-hand path, not for your benefit, nor for the world’s, but for His own. To break free, you need to accept the fear that comes from claiming only what you need. If you allow yourself to share the excess with others, to see their interests as your own, you might end up with less. Maybe even not enough, some day. But you’ll be free, because you won’t need a higher power to protect you from jealous enemies around you.
Conversely, the easiest way to read the Litany Against Fear esoterically is to assume the self is evil. The “I” spoken of is desperate to preserve its own, separate identity. It refuses to let in anything else, refuses to connect, because it knows that to do so is a kind of annihilation. Once you acknowledge just how all-encompassing that fear is, you can begin to accept that change is preferable. Better to accept the fluid nature of your own identity than to shut out the entire world, leaving only yourself, with your eye turned inward. That’s a right-handed reading of a left-handed text.
To some extent, these esoteric readings are just switching the “thou shalts” and the “thou shalt nots.” But they’re doing so in a motivated way. There’s an intended destination. If the right-hand path in the Bible says “thou shalt not kill,” there’s two choices. If you want to be a psychopath, adopt the inversion: “thou shalt kill.” If you don’t, take the converse instead, like in the Wiccan Rede: “do what you want, as long as you do no harm.” Our morality rarely disagrees entirely with the exoteric morality in our scriptures, so a motivated esoteric reading tends more toward the complex.
I like esoteric readings. It’s wasteful to throw away part of our cultural canon just because it’s wrong. Instead, esoteric readings can let us harness that energy for good.
Gnosticism: A Case Study
Gnosticism represents, by far, the largest body of work in the field of left-handed readings of the Bible. Believed to have been invented by some of the earliest Jewish Christians, Gnosticism acknowledges the fundamental weirdness of the story of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3. Yahweh tells Adam and Eve that the fruit is poisonous— “you will die within a day of eating it.” The serpent tells them that this is a lie, that the fruit will instead give them knowledge of good and evil. They eat the fruit, and do not immediately die, and do learn that apparently it’s fundamentally evil to be naked in public. So, wait, who’s supposed to be the devil in this story?
In Gnosticism, rather than explaining why this intuitive reading is wrong, you can just run with it. Yahweh is clearly not on Adam and Eve’s team. He’s some combination of evil and misguided. He’s keeping them trapped—physically in Eden, and spiritually in innocence. The serpent frees them from both—not coercively, just by giving them enough information to make an informed decision.
Yahweh, then, is not the highest god. He’s a demiurge, a word and concept taken from Plato. A demiurge, or The Demiurge, is responsible for creating or maintaining the physical world, but not the spiritual world, not the ground of all being. The Genesis story shows us that Yahweh wants us to believe that the world he controls is the only one. Maybe He’s even persuaded Himself of this. But there’s a higher realm, with higher deities, who know more, and want us to know more. They sneak in every so often to try to help us escape whatever trap the demiurge has us in. The serpent was one such helper—in traditional gnosticism, Jesus is another.
Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge (as does “knowledge”). The highest deity, or at least a higher one, in Gnosticism is sometimes named Sophia, which comes from the Greek for wisdom. It’s the religion you get when doing a left-handed reading of the Bible motivated mainly by curiosity. As such, it’s very attractive to nerds. You can see gnostic parables, intentional and unconscious, in a good chunk of all science fiction, and some fantasy. Watch for false gods who trap and deceive the audience-proxy protagonist. Then look for the messenger sneaking in to set them free.
“Yes, and” your confusion
The one weird trick for creating left-handed readings of right-handed texts is this: listen to your objections, without turning them into rejections of the text.
Our two normal modes of reading are critical and uncritical. In a critical reading, when you come across something that seems wrong, you reject the text—either you stop reading it, or you start treating it like an artifact, a window into an author or culture. In an uncritical reading, you suspend your sense of disbelief and your ordinary sense of morality. You simply don’t notice, or don’t care, when things seem wrong.
You can also do midrash or apologism. Explain why the seemingly-wrong thing is actually right. The fruit of the tree was immediately deadly, from a certain point of view—on the day you eat it, you become mortal.
Left-handed reading is a separate mode from all of these, and requires unlearning the associated habits. You treat the text as sacred, no matter what, and you treat your reaction to it as sacred. When something feels wrong, then it’s a sacred text about something wrong. So then, you ask yourself “why?” and try to answer. You’re not trying to resolve the tension. Your answer shouldn’t feel particularly satisfying, like it explains away the problem. It should feel true, but challenging. It should raise further questions.
The desired result is some kind of new text. A heresy, or fanfic, or something. A story that you, at least, can read without suspending your morality, and that gives you some of the same feels the original was going for.
Don’t Be There: A Worked Example
I liked the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up. It was written to be a climate change allegory, but thanks to timing it’s also definitely a movie about Covid. A comet threatens to wipe out all life on Earth, the issue gets politicized, everybody dies.
I also found myself doing an esoteric reading of it throughout, maybe because of how bleak the exoteric reading is. Here are a few bits where I declined to suspend my senses of morality and reasoning:
Peter Isherwell, the CEO of the tech company BASH, has a machine of death, a device that can tell you a little about how any person is going to die. It’s clearly magical, in that it correctly projects that the President will be killed by a creature currently unknown to science. But it’s also clearly fallible, as it predicts that Leo’s character will die alone, and he doesn’t.
Building an escape ship to preserve the human race when the Earth is about to be destroyed seems like a good idea? And we should probably try to fill it to capacity? But the ship is full of antagonists, with the protagonists choosing to leave their seats empty.
The Prayer for Stuff, a satirical moment where people are lead in a spontaneous prayer of thanks for material goods, sounded kinda nice. I like stuff, too.
Let’s take them in order. Isherwell has access to a magical device that can predict, with some accuracy, how people are going to die. It’s not perfect, just like his other tech—we see his other devices work about two-thirds of the time, so let’s say his machine has the same success rate.
Presumably, if it were possible to avert a prophesied demise, Isherwell would be selling it like that, as a boutique life-extension technique. Since he’s not, we can conclude that its predictions are unavoidable 2 out of 3 times, and flat-out wrong the other third.
Okay, well, almost everybody in the world is fated to die of Comet. So thanks to his machine, Isherwell probably knew about the comet before the scientists did. And he knows that any attempt to save the world is doomed to fail. At least two thirds of the world’s population is definitely going to die of Comet, no matter what.
Seen in this light, we can better understand what he was trying to do when he canceled the plan to deflect the thing. He knew that plan couldn’t possibly work. The only possible outcomes where the world was saved were ones where the comet was broken up into smaller pieces, only some of which struck the Earth, thereby killing only two thirds instead of almost everyone. That was the secret agenda in his plan to capture and mine the comet, which explains why he didn’t let scientists review it. It was designed to partially fail.
Isherwell, the movie’s exoteric villain, is therefore an esoteric hero. His sleeper ship backup plan is therefore also heroic, so that point gets resolved too. And in an esoteric reading, we’re free to just yoink any lines we like, without worrying about who’s saying them.
The Prayer for Stuff
There's dope stuff, like material stuff, like sick apartments and watches, and cars, um, and clothes and shit that could all go away and I don't wanna see that stuff go away. So I'm gonna say a prayer for that stuff. Amen.
Amen. Stuff has value! It’s a fallacy to say that human life, say, is sacred and should never be traded off against stuff. The easiest way to see that is to notice that stuff saves lives. Some cars are ambulances. I don’t wanna see ambulances go away. If you could save one person’s life, but you had to destroy all the ambulances in the world to do it…don’t go “well, ambulances are just stuff.” Even if the one life is a specific person you know, Steve, a pretty good guy. More people will die, you just won’t know in advance who they’re going to be. Statistically, some of them will probably also be named Steve and be pretty good guys. This principle generalizes more than is maybe intuitive.
The movie’s title is interesting, too. As cartoons taught us, looking up just gets you hit by the falling anvil. TV Tropes describes this as truth in television—if something is falling onto you, looking up at it isn’t going to help, and can paralyze. They cite construction workers, rock climbers, and theater tech crews as pretty universally saying “don’t look up.” Meaning, here, that you shouldn’t shout “heads up!” when you see something falling (and if someone shouts it to you, don’t look up). They recommend “don’t be there!” as an alternative. When presented with an unexpected danger, favor action over information-gathering. Run away.
Similarly, it’s a mistake to get overly invested in optimizing who gets saved. The lifeboats on the Titanic had the capacity to save about 500 more people than they did. Part of the problem here was an (I think unfounded) worry that they’d be too heavy to lower, but that could’ve been solved with a bit of ad-hoc engineering. But, also, “women and children first”. Which some of the crew interpreted as “women and children only”. Men were forced out of lifeboats at gunpoint, not to be replaced by higher-priority passengers, just out of principle.
We saw a similar dynamic during the rollout of the first Covid vaccines. In the U.S. we decided on a strict prioritization system so that the people who most needed vaccines would get it first, and legally mandated that all providers follow that order. Which meant that if the assigned person didn’t show up, the dose had to go to nobody. Once it was taken out of cooling, it had to be either immediately administered or thrown out. How many more people could’ve been saved if we hadn’t been so worried about saving the right ones?
Oh, right, but Don’t Look Up wasn’t originally intended as a Covid allegory. So let’s treat it as a climate change allegory. Don’t deny what’s happening, but also don’t stare up at the sky helplessly, it says. Don’t condemn the people trying to come up with clever solutions, just because they can’t save everybody. Get to work. Save who, and what, you can.
Left-Hand Vibes
I’ve been being pretty left-brained about the left-hand path so far. It doesn’t need to be a linear story or logical thesis, any more than the original text has to be. You can also use left-handed readings to create aesthetics. The method here is usually, as you might guess, to take what you consider good and combine it with the aesthetics that some text calls evil, like in Anton LaVey’s Satanism or The Addams Family. (This is how Servant should’ve ended, by the way).
Waste not, want not. If your favorite movie has the good guys wearing purple and the bad guys wearing green, you don’t have to stop wearing any green. Just mean something by it. Purple can represent the aspects of your outlook on life you see reflected in the movie, and green can be the aspects that aren’t there…or at least, not endorsed by the heroes.
Satanic Panic: A Cautionary Note
What happens if you flip a text twice?
Take a right-hand story—the evil devil makes a bad choice and rebels against the good God. Flip it to a left-hand story—the devil is here to teach you to be your authentic self, to shed arbitrary restrictions. Then flip it back—the devil is here to teach you to be your authentic self and shed restrictions…which is an evil trick, because your authentic self is probably a child molester or something.
You don’t quite get the original story back, when you flip it right to left to right. You get the original aesthetics back, but the signifiers change. The new text centers mistrust of others, rather than faith in some Other. Instead of a patriarchy telling you what to do, say, you get the Pharisees, worrying that Jesus is a demon and condemning him for breaking the Sabbath.
This is one of the real dangers of left-hand paths. You present those on the right-hand path with an unambiguous villain, and there’s nothing the right-hand path likes more than unambiguity. To them, you’re taking a monster of myth and making it flesh, which gives them license to be the brutal heroes of myth.
But left-hand paths are also scary, to the establishment, because of how effective they are as propaganda, especially when written respectfully. They speak the believer’s language, and acknowledge the cognitive dissonance they’re feeling. They give you a way to leave your faith without feeling like you’re losing it.
Your Homework
(An' it harm none, do what ye will. Just suggestions.)
Watch a Disney Princess movie. You’ll of course need a suspension of disbelief around magic being real, but try not to suspend your moral judgment or your sense of how real people actually behave. The simplest way in is to remember that you don’t actually believe in the divine right of kings, and that ugly people aren’t usually evil. The path typically unfolds from there. The opening sequence to Tangled, for example, shows a magical flower that grants eternal youth, being maintained and used sustainably by a wise peasant woman. Then, soldiers invade, seize the flower, and destroy it in order to prolong the life of one member of the royal family. As long as you notice that that’s what happens, the rest of the movie is necessarily transformed.
Classic Disney movies are an appealing exercise, I think, because the villains tend to have the best songs and senses of style. Mulan is an exception here—the villain doesn’t have a song at all, and also Mulan is the only Disney Princess to not be in any way a princess. But I do recommend Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior if you’re looking for esoteric readings of the original legend.
The Woman Warrior also discusses another common motivation for left-handed readings—feminism. In many bodies of literature and myth, it can be hard to find a positive female role model who does more than just avoid sin. But you can find plenty of strong, proactive women in those stories…they’re just the villains. Lilith, Adam’s insufficiently-submissive first wife in the Talmud, is a feminist icon. Feminist esoteric readings typically keep the idea that a patriarch is in charge, while rejecting the claim that that’s a good thing. So they tend naturally toward the left-hand path.
(See also original stories like Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which subvert gender norms in different ways.)
Okay, so take your pick. Either watch a Disney Princess movie, and notice class dynamics, or read some non-feminist stories, and notice gender. If you feel like it, please comment here with your left-handed retelling. Bon voyage!
