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Editorial Review
This is an extensive study of Left-Hand Path individuals and groups from ancient times to modern movements such as the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set - both of which have individual chapters in the book. Ancient paths include the Egyptian cult of Set, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, the Yezidis, Neoplatonists and the Greeks, the Germanics, the Slavs, the Assassins, Dualist sects, the Faustian path, the Hellfire Club, de Sade, Marx and the sinister aspects of Bolshevism.

A whole chapter is devoted to Hitler and Himmler and the occult practices of Nazism. Other modern individuals analyzed include Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Crowley, Spare, Gregorius and Gerald Gardner.

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[url=http://store.innertraditions.com/isbn/978-1-59477-467-6]Editorial Review[/url]
From black magic and Satanism to Gnostic sects and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, the left-hand path has been linked to many practices, cults, and individuals across the ages. Stephen Flowers, Ph.D., examines the methods, teachings, and historical role of the left-hand path, from its origins in Indian tantric philosophy to its underlying influence in current world affairs, and reveals which philosophers, magicians, and occult figures throughout history can truly be called “Lords of the Left-Hand Path.”

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[url=http://members.fortunecity.com/nailbunny/lhpzin.htm]Book Review[/url]
This is the most comprehensive study of the Left-Hand Path and Satanism considered from its own perspectives. Dr. Flowers has traced divergent cultural streams of antinomian tradition of antiquity and the present. Flowers defines the Lordship of the Left-Hand Path from two key concepts: antinomianism, or going against the grain of society, and self-deification.

The book surveys cultural traditions, personalities and important groups that brought light onto aspects of the Prince of Darkness and the Left-Hand Path. There will be some surprises.

Chapters and sections include ancient Egypt, Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Yezedis, and Northern European (the tradition Flowers is best known for). The development of Satan from its origins, through the Middle Ages is covered. A chapter on Nazi Occultism delves into the mysteries of Himmler and his black knights.

Modern occult schools and personalities surveyed include Crowley and his relation to the Left-Hand Path, Gurdjieff and his Work, Fraternitus Saturni, A. O. Spare.

Modern Satanism is explored through the Church of Satan and its founder Anton Szandor LaVey. The myth and magic of LaVey and his work are explored, and also the sources that LaVey utilized in his creation of a system that proclaimed Man as God. The Church of Satan is examined from its sources and the philosophies of the CoS are examined: from Satanic Ethics to Satanic Magic and Erotic Crystallization Inertia.

The survey of the Temple of Set is the most comprehensive of that shadowy institution in any public medium. Flowers charts the development of the Setian philosophy from out of its Satanic parent to the present. Major Temple concepts are covered, including the Black Flame, Life Beyond Death, Lesser and Greater Black Magic, and the Word Xeper. Several Orders within the Temple of Set are also examined, including the Order of the Vampyre and the Order of the Trapezoid.

This book is an important milestone in the history of the Left Hand Path. It is both a reliable history for researchers of magic and a valuable source book for practicing Black Magicians. This text is a torch on the dark corners of the blackest arts, and a valuable tool for the discriminating mind.

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Gurdjieff was a Left-Hand Path (LHP) Initiate. All who claim otherwise have never finished reading Beelzebub's Tales.

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Osho, Gurdjieff, and Crowley were all entirely occupied with healing the inner fragmentation of the person. To tackle this problem they, on occasion, moved deeply into exploring the Left Hand path and accordingly ended up using many approaches that addressed the repressed, shadow part of the mind.

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You might want to do some research on Michael Aquino as well. He took over Anton LaVey's Satanic church in San Francisco and founded the Temple of Set
in Marin. Interestingly, several Gurdjieff books are on that organization's reading list. Aquino was also a high ranking officer in the U.S. Navy and at least partly responsible for the abuse of children in mind control experiments at the San Francisco Presidio, which was exposed in the news in the later 1970s.

I know of at least one Gurdjieff/Subud group that is connected to an area Satanic group.

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Question: What makes the Cult of Cthulhu a unique manifestation of the Left Hand Path (LHP)? How is it different from organizations such as the Church of Satan and Temple of Set apart from the gooey, bloody aesthetic?

Answer: That is an involved question so feel free to ask me to elaborate on points I may gloss over. First, there's the Lovecraftian aesthetic. Both the Church of Satan and Temple of Set have been influenced by the Cthulhu Mythos, of course, the Cult of Cthulhu takes it to a whole other level.

Modern and/or atheistic Satanism focuses on primitive instincts. That's what Satanists gravitate towards. The Cult of Cthulhu is receptive to, and tries to be influenced by Higher Forces. So, the Cult of Cthulhu is definitely closer to the Temple of Set. From my experience, the Temple of Set acknowledges and uses Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's 4th Way. The Temple of Set is where I first learned about the 4th Way, and I decided to make that esoteric system the engine or core of our religion.

Question: You often describe the Cult of Cthulhu as a Fourth Way school in the tradition of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Please give a brief explanation of the Fourth Way and what role its teachings have in your methodology.

Answer: Gurdjieff has said that the Fourth Way teaches that when it rains the pavement gets wet. Ouspensky might describe The Work as a systematic process of reaching higher states of consciousness and conscience. Girard Haven would describe it as creating a soul. In my own words, I view the Fourth Way as the best chance for mankind to evolve into Godlike beings, which is his birthright. Their role requires me to observe myself. To be patient, disciplined, creative, active, and sly. A student (or Master) of the 4th Way must be cunning!

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Pauwels claims Karl Haushofer, the father of geopolitics whose protegee was Deputy Reich Führer Rudolf Hess, as one of the real "seekers after truth" described by Gurdjieff.

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But what is woman, says Gurdjieff, Just nothing but man's handkerchief. I need a new one every day, Let others for the washing pay.

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G. I. Gurdjieff, (architect of the Fourth Way), was fast becoming famous at a time when there was a focus on leaders around the world. He escaped the revolution in Russia when Rasputin was the Machiavellian dark figure on the scene of Russian mysticism and political intrigue. Gurdjieff later was accused of being a tsarist agent named Lamas Dordjieff as well as other rumors which had his personage as a close confidante of Karl Haushofer, the mentor of Rudolf Hess, and linking him to the creation of the Nazi party.

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“There are rumours that Hitler was acquainted with this doctrine of Gurdjieff. Essentially this idea of a man as a machine is the foundation of any totalitarian regime. Gurdjieff is the inspiration of totalitarianism. He is a guru of totalitarianism, despite the fact that he himself was not interested in politics.”

Mikushevich talks about Karl Haushofer and his geopolitical views because “he was acquainted with the experiences of Gurdjieff in Tibet. They tried to discover the true Aryan race in Tibet, and in the faces of Tibetans to find features of Nordic people.” Mikushevich refers to Haushofer, who was a member of the Thule Society, as “a student of Gurdjieff.”

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Hitler used to say: "We are often abused for being the enemies of the mind and spirit. Well, that is what we are, but in a far deeper sense than bourgeois science, in its idiotic pride, could ever imagine." This is very like what Gurdjieff said to his disciple Ouspensky after having condemned science: "My way is to develop the hidden potentialities of man; a way that is against Nature and against God." This idea of the hidden potentialities of Man is fundamental. It often leads to the rejection of science and a disdain for ordinary human beings. On this level very few men really exist. To be, means to be something different. The ordinary man, "natural" man is nothing but a worm, and the Christians' God nothing but a guardian for worms.

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Haushofer and the Vril

This secret community was founded, literally, on Bulwer Lytton's novel The Coming Race. The book describes a race of men psychically far in advance of ours. They have acquired powers over themselves and over things that make them almost godlike. For the moment they are in hiding. They live in caves in the centre of the Earth. Soon they will emerge to reign over us.

This appears to be as much as Dr. Ley could tell us. He added with a smile that the disciples believed they had secret knowledge that would enable them to change their race and become the equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the Earth. Methods of concentration, a whole system of internal gymnastics by which they would be transformed. They began their exercises by staring fixedly at an apple cut in half.... We continued our researches.

This Berlin group called itself The Luminous Lodge, or The Vril Society. The vril [the notion of the 'vril' is mentioned for the first time in the works of the French writer Jacolliot, French Consul in Calcutta under the Second Empire. ] is the enormous energy of which we only use a minute proportion in our daily life, the nerve-centre of our potential divinity. Whoever becomes master of the vril will be the master of himself, of others round him and of the world. [Reich's "orgone"...? -B:.B:.]
This should be the only object of our desires, and all our efforts should be directed to that end. All the rest belongs to official psychology, morality, and religions and is worthless.

The world will change: the Lords will emerge from the centre of the Earth. Unless we have made an alliance with them and become Lords ourselves, we shall find ourselves among the slaves, on the dung-heap that will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise. [shades of Crowley's Liber AL? -B:.B:.]

The Luminous Lodge [Silver Star, Argon Astron, L.V.X. and latter-day "Lightworkers" woven together in this Luciferian tapestry? -B:.B:.] had associations with the theosophical and Rosicrucian groups. According to Jack Fishman, author of a curious book entitled The Seven Men of Spandau, Karl Haushofer was a member of this lodge. We shall have more to say about him later, when it will be seen that his association with this Vril Society helps to explain certain things.

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Hitler's aim was neither the founding of a race of supermen, nor the conquest of the world; these were only means towards the realization of the great work he dreamed of. His real aim was to perform an act of creation, a divine operation, the goal of a biological mutation which would result in an unprecedented exaltation of the human race and the "apparition of a new race of heroes and demigods and god-men."

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We are not suggesting that the reader should study an affiliation Rosy Cross-Bulwer Lytton-Little-Mathers-Crowley- Hitler, or any similar association which would include also Mme Blavatsky and Gurdjieff. Looking for affiliations is a game, like looking for "influences" in literature; when the game is over, the problem is still there. In literature it's a question of genius; in history, of power.

The Golden Dawn is not enough to explain the Thule Group, or the Luminous Lodge, the Ahnenherbe. Naturally there are cross- currents and secret or apparent links between the various groups, which we shall not fail to point out. Like all "little" history, that is an absorbing pastime. But our concern is with "big" history.

We believe that these societies, great or small, related or unrelated, with or without ramifications, are manifestations, more or less apparent and more or less important, of a world other than the one in which we live. Let us call it the world of Evil, in Machen's sense of the word. The truth is, we know just as little about the world of Good. We are living between two worlds, and pretending that this "no-man's-land" is identical with our whole planet. The rise of Nazism was one of those rare moments in the history of our civilization, when a door was noisily and ostentatiously opened on to something " Other." What is strange is that people pretend not to have seen or heard anything apart from the sights and sounds inseparable from war and political strife.

All these movements: the modern Rosy-Cross, Golden Dawn, the German Vril Society (which will bring us to the Thule Group where we shall find Haushofer, Hess and Hitler) were more or less closely associated with the powerful and well organized Theosophical Society. Theosophy added to neo-pagan magic an oriental setting and a Hindu terminology. Or, rather, it provided a link between a certain oriental Satanism and the West.

Theosophy was the name finally given to the whole vast renaissance in the world of magic that affected many thinkers so profoundly at the beginning of the century.

In his study Le Thiosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo-religion, published in 1921, the philosopher Rene Guenon foresaw what was likely to occur. He realized the dangers lurking behind theosophy and the neo-pagan Initiatory groups that were more or less connected with Mme Blavatsky and her sect.

This is what he wrote:

"The false Messiahs we have seen so far have only performed very inferior miracles, and their disciples were probably not very difficult to convert. But who knows what the future has in store? When you reflect that these false Messiahs have never been anything but the more or less unconscious tools of those who conjured them up, and when one thinks more particularly of the series of attempts made in succession by the theosophists, one is forced to the conclusion that these were only trials, experiments as it were, which will be renewed in various forms until success is achieved, and which in the meantime invariably produce a somewhat disquieting effect. Not that we believe that the theosophists, any more than the occultists and the spiritualists, are strong enough by themselves to carry out successfully an enterprise of this nature. But might there not be, behind all these movements, something far more dangerous which their leaders perhaps know nothing about, being themselves in turn the unconscious tools of a higher power?"

Above text excerpted from:

The Dawn of Magic by Louis Pauwells & Jacques Bergier
1st published in France under the title Le Matin des Magiciens 1960 by Editions Gallimard, Paris

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J. G. Bennett was convinced that Gurdjieff's greatest influence came from a group of proto-Naqshbandis in Central Asia, a brotherhood later verified by HasanŞuşud as the Khwajagan, or Masters.

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HasanŞuşud, a rather enigmatic Sufi in Istanbul, had disguised his former affiliation with the Naqshbandiyya and with another group that referred to itself as the Nuriyya-Malamatiyya (in Turkish, Nuriyye-Melamiyye). He had revealed that he had a rather low opinion of Gurdjieff as a "thief of the tradition." It is hard to tell which tradition Şuşud was referring to, although he probably meant the Khwajagan or the malamatiyya, or both of them comingled together.

A common element that tied together Gurdjieff, the Shah family, Bennett, and Şuşud was that all of them referred to the Masters of Central Asia. All of them also posited that the Khwajagan had functioned as a rather elite group within greater Sufism; yet all of them, with the exception of Şuşud, seem to have deviated from the central teachings of Sufism, which emphasized the nothingness of human beings next to God. Instead, the followers of Gurdjieff, Bennett, and Idries Shah would all continue to promote a form of occult elitism that emphasized a hidden hierarchy in Sufism composed of superhumans who operated beyond, behind, or outside of normative Sufism and Islam. And this idea was inimical to the original teachings of the Khwajagan.

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The late Annemarie Schimmel spoke for a lot of people in the academy, amongst the Orders and the solitaries of the Sufi universe when she asserted in her MYSTICAL DIMENSIONS OF ISLAM that students of Sufism would do well to take Idries Shah (and by extension Gurdjieff and Bennett) with modest grains of salt - as neither one of these names are authentic representatives of the Tradition. JG Bennett is especially problematic since he was an agent of British intelligence (a spy for MI6) whose involvement with Idries Shah and Sufism really had more to do with Anglo-European colonialist/imperialist adventurism and geostrategic designs on Eurasia than the Tradition itself.

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However as Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi has pointed out, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism are species of the same thing.

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Amazon review
The first section discusses the impact of several men who introduced Sufi (or quasi-Sufi) ideas into the West: Hazrat Inayat Khan, Idries Shah, Gurdjieff, and John G. Bennett.

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Editorial Review
Spiritual "schools" of most any kind are nonsense; all development is self-development, and the kinds of methods used in what is left of the Gurdjieff organizations are merely self-deception and self-projection, often nearly on the scale of psychoanalysis and organized religion. If one reads between the lines in this very well-written and honest book, this becomes more than apparent in the behavior of pseudo-gurus like Stavely and Pentland - and contrary to some reports the descriptions in this book ring true, not just of those individuals but all those who set themselves up as "mystical authorities", including Gurdjieff himself. The only flaw the book has is that Kheridan never seems to realize that it isn't just his teachers that are limited, but the whole enterprise of spiritual search through dedication to such imaginary "masters".