A Game of Widdershins

[Smaragd]

Pick a mythological creature, or a mythologized role, a mask, a being you feel drawn towards or towards which you carry some sort of hostility. Now, write down the negative traits and powers, the threatening qualities and interpret them as embodiments of powers of a Left-Hand Path adept.

[Nefastos]

A very nice game. Let's give it a spin.

I have always hated spiders. Like some of my favourite authors (Dostoevsky and Tolkien), I see them as an apt symbol and concretization for many things which are very badly wrong in the world. So, in the game of widdershins:

DRINKING OF LIFE-FLUIDS
Drinking the other being's life fluids can be seen as a redemptionary act, cf. Christian eucharist. Taking into oneself the essence of the other is to partake to its karma.

MONSTROUS APPEARANCE
An appearance quite unlike any other life form familiar to us can be seen equally monstrous and fascinating, like most likely all the Left Hand Path aspirants know. The fact that something is different can be seen as an asset as much as it can be felt as frightful. This is also how evolution works: the rare appearance can bring unforeseen fantastic results in a new world situation. Eight eyes and eight legs is like a whole quaternary of beings (4 x 2 eyes & legs), which therefore could be seen as the wholeness of Tetragrammaton God, who is made up of four angelic Living Beings.

PATIENCE
Ability to simply wait on the spot is a yogic act I am very bad at. Yet it is one of the most applauded yogic accomplishments. (Dharana > Dhyana > Samadhi.)

WEB-WEAVING
To bring forth from oneself a subtle substance in the form of the web is to spin Maya, that is, the substance of magic. (White, Red or Black astrals.) Web-weaving is spell-weaving, or very close to it.

[Smaragd]

DRINKING OF LIFE-FLUIDS
Drinking the other being's life fluids can be seen as a redemptionary act, cf. Christian eucharist. Taking into oneself the essence of the other is to partake to its karma.

A fine angle to a difficult subject. I had vampires as one of the creatures in mind when starting this topic, and my interpretation on drinking of life-fluids stayed quite dark still. I was thinking an invisible Master whose mere gaze sucks the life out of you when you try to approach something in a foolish way. Alternatively the ”vampire master’s” student’s powers could be seen reduced to minimum when there’s a trial that needs to be overcome by another way than a sheer force of power and vitality. The first mentioned ability could also be applied to an adepts abilities in harsher environments where you could strike a serious presence to the atmosphere, as if sucking the life out of the air, when some foolishness is going to a really harmful direction. An emergency brake of sorts. If you have not made yourself or happened to become numb to things, it is ofcourse quite obvious when similar things actually occur, the atmosphere changes, like your blood would "freeze" when things turn serious or harmful. In the Finnish language there is a word "verenseisauttaja", which refers to one of the most common magical powers of healers and mages to stop the bleeding or perhaps inwardly having such a profound impact on the atmosphere that even the blood stops flowing for a second.


Because I have personal problems and antipathy towards witches, I will try to play the game with trying to see to the powers of an archetypal Witch, and try and mend my troublesome attitude towards this area.

Working magic sunken within the premises of the illusory world, dealing with illusions of perpetual cycles of cause and effect.
A LHP adept has one’s foot firmly on the concrete problems and does not dodge away to the abstract, but rather works through the low to the high according to a kind of tantrism. Thus the magic is not sunken blind, but finds its way to the lofty ideals and deeds through immanence.

Aiding people to meet their goals disregarding all consequences/ethics.
Truly knows and is able to lean to the idea how every soul needs to find their own path and make their own mistakes to arrive. Guidance can be given, but the individual Will has to arrive to the words of guidance by itself to get there truly. The virtue of patience is present here in a extraordinary form, made possible by keeping a respectful distance to the individuals and their paths. This distance could be in some cases also seen as the larger cycles of pratyeka buddhas – the abandoners of the planet.

The blindness and mediumism within the ecstacy of witches’ flight.
An adept is able to go through these states consciously. Like finding the proper dance movement to a song, an adept is familiar with all the spirits and is able to consciously visit a certain mental position of a spirit without loosing control. Again, like a dancer knows how a certain rhythm and melody wants to move the body, he can go there but he is also able to alter the movement to one’s own will, to move in to a different direction than the rhythm of certain song/spirit would in itself demand.

The flight has a purpose and the ecstacy has a purpose in the work of an adept, who is able to call them through the sacrifice within the Work and general devotion rather than mediumist’s short cut sacrifice of one’s self-control and the connection to the Self.

External, often unethically gathered, tools/ingredients to create phenomenas (often basing on astralism).
Certain kinds of tragic circumstances may ask for deeds that does not seem nice or clean by the lenses of orthodoxy or dogma, yet the LHP adept is not dependent of such forms at all and works accordingly to the circumstances. So if we’d take the classic terrible example of using baby fat as flying ointment, it would not be for astral kicks it would be used for because the adept is well able to go these places without such external aids. An example comes to mind where a witch’s wife has died with their undeveloped child in her womb, and the wife has had terribly demonic problems regarding the fetus in her belly to the extent that she has asked to remove the fetus from her as her last wish. Thus it could be seen ading if the witch would bury them side by side rather than leave the fetus in the womb that was left in to a extremely difficult demonic state in the time of death. The substance of the fetus that would be operated within the removal of the fetus from the womb would then be mentally worked to a loftier atmopshere, freeing it from the demonic atmosphere of the womb. Thus the lifting and flight is a direction given and returned to the substance, as is natural to it, rather than taken for oneself. Again, the adept is able to reach the state of the primordial substance of Mercury within themselves without needing external approximations to symbolize it.


This was quite a difficult excercise. It felt much more easy to point these qualities as those only Satan is allowed to possess, not an adept. Thus the Witch, to me, is most naturally an archetypal image depicting aspects of Satan. The adversary alone has the place and right to challenge beyond the ethical limits. Human beings, adepts included, have the duty to rise above these downward traps. A similar difficulty appeared in my interpretation of the vampire, which wasn’t so much an image of a human adept, but vaporized almost completely to the invisibility of Master Satan itself.

Failing to make the difference between Satan and a human adept results in trappings where evil is justified by the chosen/destined (Left-Hand Path) emphasis.

[Medeia]

a being you feel drawn towards

Dragons.

or towards which you carry some sort of hostility.

Undead in general, lets say zombies.
-Beyond/between life and death.
-Beyond intellect and emotions, personal needs and wants, good and evil, etc., carrying out nothing but the most fundamental Will (or in case of animated corpses the Masters Will) without need for rest.
On sidenote in a show called Midnight Gospel (which I highly recommend, its on Netflix) there is awesome plot twist to the trope that being a zombie is actually really nice and enlightened state and zombies are only trying to help the living by turning them to zombies too