Left-Hand Path, Right-Hand Path: someone being wrong on the internet

Good versus evil is not a universal religious or moral framing

I have a wide range of interests, many of them historical. One of the YouYube channels I have watched regularly is Dr Jackson Crawford’s channel on old Norse culture: serious scholarship delivered congenially in (generally) bite-sized pieces.

I have also listened to several of Tom Rowsell’s offerings from his Survive the Jive channel. He is mainly interested in matters Indo-European, but he ranges more widely, and some of his videos can be charming, such as this one on Hinduism in Bali. His material seems to be accurate (I have not spotted a significant error yet) and is engagingly presented.

Which brings me to Arith Harger’s channel. I listened to his video on What is the Left Hand Path? My interest in these matters is entirely historical and intellectual, but he gets SO much wrong in this video. Rather than give a detailed critique, I will cover the same ground based on available scholarship.

The first section of the video is actually quite a good discussion of the difference between Right-Hand Path and Left-Hand Path. He is correct in arguing that it does not neatly line up with good and evil. Even though, for Star Wars fans, the Right-Hand Path seems a bit Jedi-like and the Left-Hand Path rather Sith-like. It is when Harger tries to put the matter in a larger context that he goes seriously wrong.

The original source of the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is from India. Specifically, from Yogic and Tantric traditions.

There is an excellent introduction to this distinction, and its likely cultural and historical origins, in Thomas McEvilley’s classic essay The Archaeology of Yoga. This is available on Jstor here and on Scribd here. The essay is, in part, a precursor to McEvilley’s masterpiece The Shape of Ancient Thought in which he examines the history of Greek and Indian philosophy and their interactions.

McEvilley argues that the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is driven by the interaction between the patrilineal (and patricentric) culture of the invading Indo-European pastoralists and that of the matrilineal (and matricentric) culture of the resident farming population. To use slightly old-fashioned scholarly language, Aryans versus Dravidians.

Whether the culture was patrilineal or matrilineal matters because, in a patrilineal culture, a child without a father lacked a crucial element of social identity. Patrilineal cultures tend to be particularly restrictive of female sexuality for that reason. Conversely, in a culture where a child gets their social identity from their mother, not having a designated father is likely to be less of an issue. Especially if uncles can readily substitute as protective male relatives.

So, mystical and occult traditions in patrilineal cultures are likely to be sex-restrictive, to be ascetic. Conversely, mystical and occult traditions in matrilineal cultures are more likely to be sex-permissive. The former naturally inclines towards the development of spirit-focused disciplines, where ascetic denial of indulgence and the body is the seen as the path to self-development. The latter naturally inclines to the development of self-capacity-and-bodily-focused disciplines.

There is no direct connection in this to any good-versus-evil dichotomy. But, outside the monotheistic traditions, good-versus-evil is not the normal religious dichotomy. In religions in the animist-polytheist spectrum, the more normal distinction is order-versus-chaos. This is particularly true in agrarian societies, where a bad harvest presages disease, death and, if there is a sequence of such harvests, disaster. This concern for order can be seen in the ancient Egyptian concept of maat. How to construct and maintain social order is a central concern of Chinese philosophy while to seek the Tao (or Dao) is seek to be in accordance with the natural order of the universe.

Ascetic, sex-restrictive disciplines tend to be more orderly than than more sex-permissive disciplines. Especially if, as is the case in various forms of Left-Hand-Path, the deliberate breaking of conventions and restrictions is seen as a technique to develop one’s capacities. The highly patrilineal Indian elite would clearly tend to see the mother-right vestiges of Dravidian mysticism and occult practices as very much other. So, the Left-Hand-Path would be seen as more chaotic (because it was) and therefore negatively.

Arith Harger does not seem to be aware of any of this background. Of course, admitting the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is originally Indian does rather get in the way of presenting it as Old Pagan Wisdom. Though somewhat similar, though less developed, patterns of patrilineal pastoralist Indo-European overlay interacting with matrilineal farming-religion survivals can also be traced in European cultures and their pre-Christian religious and occult traditions.

Where Harger gets particularly confused is over the good-versus-evil distinction. This is not remotely an originally European idea. The pre-Christian religious traditions of Europe fairly clearly follow the normal order-versus-chaos division. Thus, in Norse mythology, various monsters of chaos threaten the order upheld by the Aesir in a pattern that recurs across mythologies.

The good-versus-evil distinction is essentially (as far as we can tell) an invention of Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster). It fits nicely in with monotheism — with a Creator God who creates both the material and the moral order. Opposition to such a God is not merely chaotic and disorderly, it is anti-moral and destructive.

Hence the original Jewish understanding of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was that they were cities that were systematically anti-moral, preying on the weak and vulnerable and refusing to respect others. (Which makes way more sense than the later interpretation of the key sin of the cities of the plain being unnatural sex: see Chapter Four of Michael Carden’s Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth.)

Norman Cohn’s book Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come is a good introduction to the hugely important shift in moral perspectives from order-versus-chaos to good-versus-evil. A shift in moral perspectives that explains much of the antipathy between the Romans (who were mostly definitely all about order, including in ways that seem wildly immoral, or even evil, to us) and the Jews and later the Christians. If one is going to truly embrace a pagan perspective, good-versus-evil has to go.

So, the Right-Hand Path/Left-Hand Path distinction does not map to good-versus-evil. As it originally arose in the intermixing of cultures on the animist-polytheist spectrum, that is not surprising.

The Right-Hand Path/Left-Hand Path is originally an Indian distinction, but as patrilineal pastoralist Indo-European overlay over the culture and religious perspectives of resident matrilineal agrarians we see in India also occurred in Europe, the distinction has a relatively easy path into European pagan traditions, even revived ones.

But surely it is better to get the history correct, rather than hopelessly confused.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Warrant for Genocide (2)

This is the second part of my review of Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy And the Protocols of the Elders Of Zion. It concludes the review begun in my previous post.


As to who created the Protocols, a trial in Berne in Switzerland in 1934-5 brought to light various bits of evidence. Cohn argues that Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, the head of the Okhrana outside Russia, as the likely originator, taking us on a journey through secret police activities and connections with occultist circles (Pp84ff).

In Russia, the Protocols were the tools of the pogromshchik, the instigator and organisers of pogroms who organised into the Black Hundreds, of whom Tsarist statesman Sergei Count Witte wrote:

… this party can instigate the most frightful pogroms and convulsions, but it is incapable of anything positive. It embodies a wild, nihilistic patriotism which thrives on lies, slanders and deceit, it is a party of wild and cowardly despair but has no room for courageous, far-sighted, creative thinking. The bulk of its membership comes from the wild, ignorant masses, its leaders are political villains, it has secret sympathizers in court circles and amongst nobles with all kinds of titles – people who seek their salvation in lawlessness … (p.121)

A description that would apply with minimal adjustment to the Nazi Party. Cohn’s comment that:

These people were in fact the true precursors of the Nazis. Words such as ‘proto-Fascist’ have been so monstrously misused that one hesitates to use them at all – yet there is no denying that the Black Hundreds mark an important stage in the transition from reactionary politics as they were understood in the nineteenth century to the right-wing totalitarianism of the Nazis (p.122)

looking back to the past in their throne-and-altar ideals but to the future in their violent agitprop and mass organising methods seems entirely apt.

The utility of the Protocols in Russian politics was undermined when Nicholas II, after at first taking them seriously, became convinced they were a forgery and turned against them (Pp125-6). After his overthrow, and with the shock and traumas of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power and the Russian Civil War, the Protocols were released to wreak their poisonous havoc on the world stage.
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A copy of The Great and the Small was found to the one of three books (along with War and Peace and the Bible) founded in the effects of the Empress when White forces temporarily captured the house where the Imperial family had been murdered, along with a swastika she had drawn on the window (p.127). There were prominent Jews in the revolutionary forces: rather than seeing this as a natural consequence of Tsarism’s oppression of the Jews (which had intensified under Alexander III and Nicholas II) it was seen as “proof” of the perfidy of the Jews. The pogromshchik avidly exploited the conjunction, using the Protocols was a weapon to inspire massacres of Jews until the rout of the White forces in 1920, along with further supporting forgeries. (Pp127ff).

The blaming of Jews in general was double nonsense: most Jews were deeply religious and tended to be small shop-keepers and self-employed artisans. The Bolshevik Revolution was a disaster for them twice over (Pp132ff). But anti-Semitism has never been about the truth about Jews: so the Black Hundreds propagated their slogan; Save Russia, kill the Jews (p.134). About 100,000 Jews were killed, many more wounded and maimed (Pp134ff).

Outside Russia
Meanwhile, the Protocols travelled West, being circulated among delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference, Cabinet ministers and other influential folk. The aim seems to have been to encourage intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia’s Civil War (Pp138-9). Two Russian émigrés, who had settled in Berlin, worked to get the Protocols published in the West. (As an aside, Russian émigrés became an important conduit for the funding of the Nazi Party: there was a “cat’s cradle” of anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik, anti-liberal, mystical-occultist linkages that are important both in the history of the Protocols and in the rise of the Nazi Party.)

As a country in turmoil, Germany was ripe for the Protocols. (Though Cohn missteps in regarding anti-Semitism as being stronger in Germany than France.) Their publication was delayed since the plan was to have them published simultaneously in Germany and Britain: finding a German publisher turned out to be rather easier than finding a British one. One was found, and royalist circles in the now Republic of Germany actively promoted it. The Protocols were an instant hit, become best-sellers and promoting study groups and discussion circles. (As noted above, after initial credence, they were rapidly discredited in Britain, which was rather poor ground for them anyway: given it was a victorious Power with an expanding empire and deeply entrenched liberal politics.) In Germany, anti-Semitic forgeries, no matter how bizarre, flourished and were taken seriously by highly educated people (Pp139ff).

The assassination of Walter Rathenau was, in part, motivated by the Protocols—indeed, that he was an “Elder of Zion” (Pp156ff). The reaction to his murder took some of the impetus out of the career of the Protocols in Germany, particularly after a law for the defence of the Republic made certain types of what we would now call “hate-speech” illegal (Pp162-3). Not that this interlude was to last.

But the Protocols" were off on their world career. Notions of Jewish conspiracies and the largely Jewish nature of the Bolsheviks were taken seriously in Britain, including in the Foreign Office, until doubts and misgivings were confirmed by the Times report identifying the source of much of the Protocols in an anti-Napoleon III pamphlet (Pp164ff). In the US, the Protocols never reached the level of credence they (briefly) achieved in Britain but had a rather longer, if more limited career, particularly due to Henry Ford’s support for anti-Semitism and “radio priest” Father Coughlin’s turn to anti-Semitism (Pp172ff, 257ff).

In Poland and France—countries with deeply entrenched anti-Semitism—the Protocols were well received (Pp180ff). Again and again, Russian émigrés played crucial roles in disseminating the Protocols (Pp184-6).

But it was, of course, Germany where the Protocols, whose capacity to inspire mass murder had already been established in their Russia, had their most fateful career. The key context there was not the beleaguered Orthodox autocracy of Russia, but a German nationalism that had been forged in opposition to the Enlightenment forces of Revolutionary-and-Napoleonic France. German nationalism therefore acquired a backward character that intensified as Germany struggled with the changes of industrialisation. The anti-figures for this archaic (indeed atavistic) vision were the liberal individualist and, even more, the Jew (Pp87ff). Against the atomising uncertainty of modernity, such nationalism had an ideal of returning to a unity of volk and soil, a unity in which the Jew had no place and so was an enemy of.

Where older nationalists postulated that an assimilated Jew, by entirely abandoning their Jewishness (and thus their separateness), could become part of this unity, the new “scientific” racism saw Jewishness as an inherent, and thus ineradicable, characteristic (Pp189ff). Volkisch nationalism had particular appeal to peasants and middle class, since they tended to have the strongest status issues (Pp190-1).

It was a curious feature that the strongest adherents of volkisch ideology tended to be found in the educated (often highly educated) middle class:

It had the enormous advantage that it made any German who accepted it feel not only important but enormously, supremely important. For men with some pretensions to education but irked by their political impotence and social insignificance it had great attractions. To feel oneself the bearer of a divine mission, a paladin in the vast struggle of ‘German spirituality’ against the dark forces of ‘Jewish materialism’ – this was a most gratifying experience, especially as it carried with it no concrete political responsibilities whatsoever (Pp193-4).

Change volkisch ideology to environmentalism and Jewish materialism to neoliberalism and one has a perfect description of the appeal of the contemporary appeal of progressivist environmentalism to the moral middle class. Modern progressivism is, after all, increasingly based on Counter-Enlightenment concerns of ‘authenticity’, ‘identity’, ‘natural values’ etc.

Volkisch ideology had even stronger appeal among Austrian-Germans, confronted by their minority status in “their” Danubian monarchy (p.194). What had been a minor strain in politics before 1914 became far stronger in the shock of defeat (Pp194ff). The Nazi leadership, and Hitler specifically, in public and private pronouncements accepted the notion of a Jewish world-conspiracy as proclaimed by the Protocols, a ubiquitous explanation of the travails of the volk. For Hitler, history was an endless decline from an authentic hierarchical society. The Jew was the eternal enemy of the natural order that was the only source of “true principles”, a polluting virus whose victory would be the death of humanity. Given the absoluteness of Jewish evil and the Jewish “threat”, what Hitler talked over in a private letter in 1919 as “the removal” of the Jews (surely the minimum “necessary” act) became, in 1939, in an infamous speech to the Reichstag:

Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe (p.209).

The theme of Jewish annihilation being something Hitler returned to in both his public and his private utterances.

Cohn argues that Hitler saw any block to his plans as being another manifestation of Jewish evil, that his world-view was genuinely saturated in notions of a Jewish-world conspiracy and that the program of domination in the Protocols had such fascination for him since it was his own program: the creation of an empire based on a regimented master-people (Pp211ff). That certainly gives his dramatic opposing of Jew to Aryan sense and resonance.

From its beginnings in 1920 to its end in 1945, the Protocols were a staple of Nazi propaganda. Alfred Rosenberg, an émigré from the Baltic provinces of the old Russian empire, the official ideologist of the Nazi Party, provided a link between émigré Russian politics and the politics of the Black Hundreds and Nazism. He was an avid pusher of the Protocols and analysis of Bolshevism as a Jewish phenomenon (Pp214ff).

Cohn cautions against over-estimating the role of anti-Semitism in the Nazi electoral success, or even the extent and intensity of anti-Semitism amongst the Party membership (Pp218ff). The leadership was a somewhat different matter. Indeed, as the massacres of Jews (and others) proceeded to their climax late in the War, Nazi propaganda and speeches increasingly referred to extermination of the Jews without even though public reference to mass executions and gassings were strictly forbidden:

It was a curious manoeuvre, as though the Nazi leaders were trying to involve the whole German people in their own guilt, yet without ever really admitting their guilt (p.226).

The Nazi leadership was also enamoured of the idea that Anglo-American morale could be undermined by propaganda about the Jewish world-conspiracy, to the extent that anti-Semitic themes overwhelmingly dominated foreign broadcasts (Pp227-8).

As the War turned against Nazi Germany, anti-Semitic propaganda about what a “Jewish” victory would mean—the annihilation of Germans and Germany—was used to stiffen German will to fight. This while attempts to annihilate Jews and Jewry were increasing. Such Nazi propaganda:

… was something else as well: a barely disguised description of what Germans were at that moment doing to Jews (p.229).

Indeed, were applying more and more resources to as the War situation was becoming more and more desperate, as if to ensure this one “victory” the “most essential of all” could still be won with anti-Semitic propaganda against “Jewish world-domination” continuing to the last gasp of the regime (p.230). And beyond, Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem claimed that Nazi failure was due to Hitler himself being a puppet of Satanic international finance (p.230).

Studies of the effect of all this propaganda suggest that it had little success in increasing hatred of the Jews: what it was successful at was increasing the level of utter indifference to the Jews and their fate (Pp232-3). The Jews may not have been turned into figures of mass hate but they had been successfully moved outside the moral community of many Germans.

And it continues …
From early in its career, the Nazi Party saw anti-Semitism as a way to get allies abroad. The Protocols was central to this effort. Once the Nazi Party achieved power, the Weltdeinst (Worldservice) organised the publication of the Protocols around the globe (Pp238ff). The Weltdeinst was involved in the Berne trial of 1934-5 (to which Cohn devotes a chapter). The trial exposed much of the curious history of the Protocols.

His last chapter, The Anti-Semitic International explores the Nazi efforts to globally promote the Protocols, particularly in the US and Latin America. There was even a Japanese effort that achieved some success. Given the near total absence of Jews in Japan, that may seem startling. On the other hand, it does reveal how unconnected to actual flesh-and-blood Jews the anti-Semitic exercise is and was.

It is outside the scope of Cohn’s book, which was originally published in 1967, but the Protocols have had their greatest contemporary surge in Islam, whether it is feeding into the founding charter of Hamas or being serialised on Egyptian TV. The power of the Protocols in the Muslim world is hardly surprising, since there are many similarities between the situation of newly-industrialising autocratic Orthodox autocratic Russia in which the Protocols arose and much of contemporary Islam, with the unsettling changes of modernisation affecting societies which orient themselves according to religious framings and ruled by various flavours of autocracy.

This is why the Islamic analogues of fascism are also so strong. Comparing the Nazis and the jihadis, they have in common their atavism, their glorification of violence and heroic ethos, their status-anxiety, their program of domination. All of which makes them twins in Jew-hatred.

A mindset that the Protocols appeal to powerfully. After all, if one has a program of domination oneself, it is easy to ascribe a similar program to others.

There are also historical links: Bernard Lewis noted the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in the Middle East before 1945. The original leader of the Palestinian cause was a strong supporter of Hitler and a co-collaborator in the Holocaust. Lewis also points out (p.228,n25) that a prominent Nazi propagandist Johann von Leers, author of The Criminal Nature of the Jew, fled to Egypt, converted to Islam and worked for Nasser as a propagandist: one of a range of Nazi officials who found refuge in Egypt after the War.

That the Protocols has had such a career in Islam is not a minor point, given its demonstrated capacity to inspire mass murder. To be—as Cohn’s title and last words proclaim—a warrant for genocide.

More broadly, the history of the Protocols, particularly in Germany, shows how a delusion can take hold of masses of people, including highly educated folk in a modern society, if what is being pushed matches the will to believe. Cohn’s lucid, revealing work of scholarship, done with a very effective light touch, has continuing lessons for us all.

Prometheus Rising

Some people are synthesisers of ideas. They take notions from all over the place and work them into a coherent picture, or something close to it. Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising is the work of such a synthesiser, and one not afraid to openly consult occult perspectives in building a picture of us and our of place in the world.

Which is not as silly as it seems, since whatever else they do, occultists build pictures of us and our place in the world. For good and ill. The career of Hitler makes more sense once one realises his perceptive use of occult images and ideas to build his political movement. And Wilson has no problem saying 95% of what occultists write is rubbish (p.220).

There is nothing, as far as I am aware, particularly original in the details of Prometheus Rising, the originality lies more in the taking ideas from all over and pointing out their resonances. Wilson is trying to reconcile mysticism with neuroscience.

Trouble is, it is hard for a layperson to judge how well he covers the neuroscience. Though his understanding of psychological, occult and mystical systems does seem to be sound: and he does produce a schema that ties a lot of such systems into identifiable patterns.

I found Wilson’s cheery optimism (indeed, over-optimism) very engaging. Given his notions of emerging human potential, the writers of Stargate and Stargate: Atlantis with their notions of ascension may have read Wilson. (Or they may be role-players.)

And, like Camille Paglia, the Archwizard and the Wizard of Footscray, Wilson wants to rescue the good 1960s from (to use Wilson’s language) the dogmatic Rationalists who hi-jacked it. He also has the elementary sense to see that the Marxist “cure” is worse than the capitalist disease (p.55), which puts him way ahead of many putatively clever folk.
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Wilson shows a genial open-mindedness that is quite refreshing, though he does have some trendy lapses. For example, the “age of Aquarius” generation did not end the Vietnam War (p.117), the Hanoi regime’s military victory did. While the military-industrial complex does not consume 72% of US tax dollars (p.139). In 1960, Defense outlays were (pdf) 9.3% of US GDP and 52% of federal outlays, in 1980 4.9% and 28% respectively, in 2006 4% and 20% respectively. And Federal outlays do not including state and local taxes – $US1trn in taxes in 2004 (pdf), compared to US federal revenues (pdf) that year of $US1.9trn. There are also some irritating lapses into people who agree with me politically are more advanced rhetoric.

On the other hand, his attack on Rationalists (Pp 104, 174) is amusing.

Wilson starts off with the notion that what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves: i.e. that something believed in strongly enough will be “proved” to the satisfaction of the believer. But he talks as if, in so satisfying themselves, they do so prove. This sad modern tendency to waddle between patterns of belief and actual epistemic success is vastly irritating. The perennial problem of epistemic success words (refuted, proved, disproved … etc) is that they imply that this is what has actually been done (i.e. is objectively so) but can also be used to refer to the belief that is what has actually been done (is subjectively so) or, worse, to wander back and forth between the two usages as Wilson does. The last is more or less inevitable with the subjective use because the words inherently have the objective implication – that’s why they are success words. (And I have no patience for "they actually change the world" claims since as such claims simply cannot be maintained consistently.)

On the other hand, Wilson's point that people box themselves into Reality tunnels as he calls them has merit. And his various suggested psychological exercises at the end of each chapter would certainly encourage mental openness.

Does Wilson tap into how things are in any deep way? Not convinced. Still, it is a fun and thought-provoking (and above all cheery) read: he does provide a schema for seeing underlying similarities in a lot of psychological and occult systems. And I have a soft spot for folk who are prepared to think boldly.

It also occurs to me that if you take his and the book’s initials you get RAW PR. Which would no doubt amuse him.