Latest / Why We Do What We Do / Left-Hand Path Magic
Transcript
- 0:20Welcome to Why We Do what we do. I am your Esoteric Coast Abraham,
- 0:24and I am your Hiding in the Desert with a Cult host Shane.
- 0:28I guess wow. I'm excited to learn more about that psychology podcast. So,
- 0:33if you're joining us for the first time, welcome. We're in Halloween
- 0:36season. We made it. We made it spooky time. Yeah, And
- 0:39so if you're joining us for the first time, didn't just know that we
- 0:42are about to do a series of spooky episodes, which we do every October
- 0:47to celebrate the spooky season. So get your pumpkin spice, get your I
- 0:52guess circus peanuts if you like that kind of candy for trick or treating.
- 0:55I don't know what you like, but whatever you get to snack on as
- 0:58you listen to the series, we hope that you enjoy it and have a
- 1:00lot of fun with this. This is our sixth year. This is our
- 1:03fourth year doing Halloween themed episodes. So for most of the time we've been
- 1:07a podcast in October, we have celebrated the spooky themed type topics, and
- 1:14this year we're doing something even a little bit more directly themed than we have
- 1:18in the past, which is In previous years we've taken on various topics zombies
- 1:23and witches and things like that that are Halloween related, voodoo, vampires,
- 1:29like anthropy, like clinical like anthropy and all that. Yeah, all kinds
- 1:33of fun stuff. Yeah, and the history of Halloween I think at one
- 1:34point. Yeah, and this year we kind of accidentally went Satan themed for
- 1:41everything. So yes, this will be not only spooky season, but specifically
- 1:47Satan spooky season. Yeah, saw Wayne or whatever, you know, like
- 1:51it's it's all Saturdayalia, all the fun stuff. Yeah, we are talking
- 1:53about I'm gonna just drop all those like weird like strange like kind of occultist
- 1:59words and here just to see which one lands. Vamachara, similacra, you
- 2:02know, all of the fun stuff. So no, we are we are
- 2:05diving into a Satanic theme, both real world and a little bit less real
- 2:10world. So we're gonna have some fun on this one, I think absolutely.
- 2:14And if you like with you here today, then you can support us
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- 2:28amount of credit for that or something, and that would be cool too.
- 2:30But I'll talk more about the ways that you can support us at the end
- 2:32of this discussion. If you are listening to this on the day that the
- 2:37episode comes out, then I would like to just wish you a National Cinnamon
- 2:42Roll Day. Yes, it's also National Taco Day, so it's a good
- 2:46food day. I think nice. It's International Walk to School Day. It's
- 2:51also international well it's not international, but it is a day. It's Kindness
- 2:54to Animals Day. I love that National Kale Day. Have you ever massaged
- 3:00kale? Yes, you have to massage it because like you have to like
- 3:04break up the fibers or else it's too fibrous to eat. Yeah, I
- 3:07mean you can't eat it, but it tastes much better when it's massaged.
- 3:09It's really yeah. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got
- 3:12a massage a little bit. It's also National Pumpkin Seed Day. Big fan
- 3:15of that. MM. In addition to a being Kindness to Animal Day,
- 3:19it's also World Animal Day. I'm supported of that right. Also, there
- 3:23are several weeks that we're going to acknowledge. One of them is active Aging
- 3:25Week as opposed to passive aging Week. I guess that's right. Yeah,
- 3:30instead of aging happening to it, you do it on purpose. Yeah.
- 3:34Yeah, so cool. Animal Welfare Week. I love all this, All
- 3:38of this like love for animals. This is great. Yeah, it all
- 3:42aligns really well. It's also great Books Week, so you know, I
- 3:46think this is a really good time to start reading some spooky books. If
- 3:49you're a Stephen King fan, go grab some. That is a very good
- 3:52point. Yeah, you're right. This should be Stephen King book week or
- 3:55month. Maybe. Yeah. It is Mental Illness Awareness Week, so that's
- 4:01a very important one that is near and dear to our hearts for sure.
- 4:04Yes, and it is also as far as months ago. It is Hispanic
- 4:09Heritage Month, so please go celebrate yay. National Down Syndrome Awareness Month as
- 4:15well, which is great. Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month, so really
- 4:19important to get some education around that absolutely, and Spina Bifida Awareness Month as
- 4:25well. Yeah, there's a lot going on in October, but the most
- 4:28important day of all of these days is International Abraham Day. So please welcome
- 4:34me in celebrating our good friend, host of the show creator brain stormer of
- 4:42the show Abraham happy birthday, my friend. Oh thank you those so much
- 4:47fanfare. Thank you, I appreciate it. You're the reason we're all here.
- 4:51Indeed, well, thank you. And yes it is. It is
- 4:55my birthday and that's fun. So even more big things for people who are,
- 5:00you know, listening in on my birthday. Yeah good, you know
- 5:03it's so great. This isn't gonna happen very often. So so go eat
- 5:06a cinnamon roll for Abraham's birthday. Yeah, and gove be kind of animals
- 5:11that that too, Yeah, all the good stuff. Yeah, all right,
- 5:14Well, let's let's get to our topic at hand. As we said,
- 5:15we're into spooky month now, which is great. I love having my
- 5:19birthday in October for this reason because Halloween is one of my absolute favorite holidays.
- 5:25Yeah. It's just fun, you know, it's fun, it's silly,
- 5:27it's kind of weird, and you just get all these really interesting things
- 5:30to unpack in the side of these topics, and we always fight more and
- 5:33more. Our list now spans multiple years of things we like to talk about
- 5:38in Halloween, and then oftentimes we'll come up with even more when we get
- 5:41into Halloween season. So we've got we've got fodder, is what I'm saying.
- 5:45Yeah, you're gonna be with us for a long time. Yes,
- 5:47And today we're talking about my left hand, well not my left hand,
- 5:51but left hands generally, and not really left hands, but the direction that
- 5:56they go, which is left. Yes, today we are covering left hand
- 6:00path magic, or as we will discover throughout this episode, another phrase for
- 6:04it is black magic. Ooh. And this episode we're going to learn what
- 6:10Christmas, Jupiter, mustaches, and cod pieces all have in common, which
- 6:15is something. Oh my word, it is gonna be a wild time.
- 6:21I put together these notes and I'm actually kind of surprised at which is didn't
- 6:25come up, but which is our common thing tied to black magic and left
- 6:29hand path magic and all that fun stuff. But fair point point, I
- 6:31think we need a little bit of background on this. We got to start
- 6:34somewhere, and the place to start is this strange scholarly study of Western esotericism
- 6:43or esotericism however you want to say it. Yeah, yeah, I've heard
- 6:46it both ways, as they'd say on Psyche. Yeah, which is like
- 6:49an show that's been off the air for years now. Yeah, it's a
- 6:53good show though. Yeah, So to start this discussion around this, we
- 6:56got to understand what esoterroristism is, and Western esoterism is a concept that incorporates
- 7:00a variety of ideas that include scholarly studies of gnosticism, which is basically gnostic
- 7:06is a term for knowledge, a Greek term for knowledge, her meticism,
- 7:11and the New Age movement, which you might go none of those things are
- 7:15related. But what does any of this mean. Nobody knows. Nobody can
- 7:17agree on what esotericism actually means. Yes, and this is actually not uncommon
- 7:24in the space of general sort of this occult and Satanic orientation and all that.
- 7:29There's a lot of unique schisms and splits in there. But besides the
- 7:33fact that no one can agree, there is some agreement that esotericism refers to
- 7:38these idea of inner traditions quote unquote, inner traditions that primarily focus on quote
- 7:44a universal spiritual dimension of reality, as opposed to the merely external religious institutions
- 7:49and dogmatic systems of established religions end quote. So basically, the way I
- 7:56read this is what we understand about current religion is not correct. So let's
- 7:59explain or other ways to look at the world that doesn't involve science, and
- 8:03so that's kind of what you'll discover as we go forward, is that a
- 8:07lot of the New Age movement, like when you talk about like astrology and
- 8:09all of those things that comes up in this space, and that'll start to
- 8:13make more sense as we kind of like dive into those little elements. But
- 8:18a lot of what you find in esotericism is that there are discussions around this
- 8:24idea of secret spiritual teachings, and these secret spiritual teachings are reserved for elite
- 8:28practitioners. And you find many practices embedded in small isolated groups or cults,
- 8:33so it's not specifically reserved for those on that particular fringe. Some people might
- 8:37subscribe to the idea of nature, which we'll talk about, and things like
- 8:41astrology and kind of have their own unique mythos around that. But the ideas
- 8:45these there are these secret spiritual teachings that are often reserved for those elite folks
- 8:50or like those folks that are in the inner circles. Not uncommon to try
- 8:56and recruit. It's almost like a marketing strategy. How to get people to
- 9:01your cause is to say we've got these this is a it's only reserved for
- 9:05an elite group of people, the VIPs. So if you want to know,
- 9:09you've got to join our ranks. Scientology kind of operates in a similar
- 9:13way. Yeah, Yeah, you could say scientology operates in that space.
- 9:16You could say multi level marketing kind of operates in that space. Yeah,
- 9:20there's a lot of kind of things like that. And like, if you
- 9:22want success and riches and fame and treasures and all the things that go along
- 9:26with it, you've got to get into the inner circle to be able to
- 9:31access that inner knowledge or that universal that that secret knowledge of the world.
- 9:35Yeah, there are three primary views of esotericism that we should talk about esotericism
- 9:41as an enchanted worldview as one, as higher knowledge as two, and as
- 9:46rejected knowledge as three. So let's unpack each of those individually. The enchanted
- 9:50worldview perspective of esotericism basically says that everything in the universe is interrelated and that
- 9:58there is no need for understanding causal chains or relations. And they also argue
- 10:03that the disenchanted worldview is that of the scientific community. I was gonna say
- 10:07this kind of rings explicitly. I hear this, I'm like, oh,
- 10:11this isn't just really not a far off from US scientific philosophy in general.
- 10:13Yeah. So so basically they're saying that everything's interrelated, there's no need to
- 10:18understand the world or phenomenon, and then the discchanted world just says that,
- 10:22oh, you actually believe in science. So there's like a little bit of
- 10:24a schism here and a weird thing where they just go, you know,
- 10:26it's it's very much so the world according to the dude, it's like it's
- 10:31cool man everything, Like, it's very like that that like kind of stereotypical
- 10:35hippie definitely subscribes that enchanted worldview. It's all cool man at all. It's
- 10:39all related, We're all one. That's very much so that worldview that distilled
- 10:43down groovy groovy is right. I was, you know, inspired in the
- 10:48moment to choose that as my response. So from this worldview, there are
- 10:52six essential characteristics. I'm just listening real quick, and then we'll unpack each
- 10:56of those. So we're still in the enchanted worldview. We've got Correspondence is
- 11:00living nature, imagination and mediations, experience of transmutation, practice of concordance and
- 11:07transmission. So in correspondence, the idea here is that there's correspondence between all
- 11:13living things and direct relations between the macrocosms and microcosms as above so below,
- 11:20So you might say that and this is sort of where astrology comes from.
- 11:22Yeah, basically, like everything is related, and that's why the planets affect
- 11:26your behavior, so thank you. That's where Jupiter comes in, right,
- 11:28Sure, Jupiter makes you mad about stuff, and also mercury makes it so
- 11:33that your computers don't work. But that's what correspondence is, essentially, say.
- 11:35Another part of this is the idea of living nature, and the idea
- 11:39of living nature is that the natural universe has its own life force, and
- 11:43because it has its own life force, the universe itself is a living kind
- 11:46of entity that influences everything that exists within it. Almost like how our body
- 11:52has a bunch of small unique cells that do a lot of different things.
- 11:56But for our cells, our body is their universe. And that's kind of
- 12:00what this is arguing. We're all just on the shell of a giant cosmic
- 12:05turtle, I know, matura. The next part, as I mentioned,
- 12:09imagination and mediation, so this is rituals, symbolic images, Mandala's spirits,
- 12:15etc. These are all tools to foster imagination and to help access varying levels
- 12:22of reality. I could not have said it any other way. I really
- 12:24tried to. I've tried to like break it down. It's like, I
- 12:26don't know how to say this other than somebody is trying to get elevated.
- 12:31Word now, experience of transmutation essentially says that practice of whatever spiritual practice you're
- 12:37looking at transforms the person on a spiritual level and not figuratively, literally transforms
- 12:43that person on a spiritual level, all towards the path of to gain nosis
- 12:48or to gain knowledge. So basically, everything you're doing is designed to transform
- 12:52you as a person so that you can reach this higher level of knowledge.
- 12:58Okay, there is practice of coordance. This is all religious and spiritual practices
- 13:03emerged from the same root systems, and as such, we can bring them
- 13:07all together in some sort of unity. Yes, so esotericisms that basically says
- 13:13we can unite the world religions and spiritual practices by understanding that they all start
- 13:16from the same place and they all have the same goal. That's essentially what
- 13:20that's up. Yeah, they've got common ground somewhere that allows them to work
- 13:24together. Yeah, which is like a nice thought, I think. Yeah.
- 13:28And then transmission is that information that is gained and any sort of higher
- 13:33teaching should be transferred from master to disciple. So anything that the master learns
- 13:37needs to be transmitted to and taught to those folks that follow them. Okay,
- 13:41so we just unpacked the enchanted worldview, the six characteristics being correspondence,
- 13:46living nature, imagination and mediations, experience of transmutation, practice of concordance,
- 13:52and transmission. The next one we mentioned was higher knowledge, but first we
- 13:58have lower knowledge in the form of ads. Okay, so we're back from
- 14:09that what could only be described as anti agnosticism, and we're going to move
- 14:13on to talking about the next of the three world primary views of esotericism,
- 14:18which is as higher knowledge. Yes, so underneath higher knowledge. This is
- 14:22essentially an alternative or really the opposite of the enchanted world perspective. And I
- 14:28can actually kind of get on board this idea. The idea behind this is
- 14:31that to some degree, let me let me clarify to some degree, because
- 14:33when it gets when we get to end of it, you're gonna be like,
- 14:35oh no, no, no, that's bad. Yeah, all of
- 14:37it's a little weird somewhere. Yeah, all of it's a little weird.
- 14:41It's it's you can't subscribe to all of it. I don't think some people
- 14:43can. I guess Alice or Crowley can. The idea behind this is that
- 14:48study and practice within esotericism should lead to scholarly analysis and usage. I really
- 14:52like that. Right, you're practicing something, you should analyze it, you
- 14:56should understand it, you should go through that that space. But since esotericism
- 15:00applies that there's a higher knowledge beyond what we know and beyond levels of reality,
- 15:05practices focus on moving towards gainings at higher knowledge. So that's everything they're
- 15:09doing, is like, everything that that person is doing is trying to move
- 15:11towards having a better understanding of these multiple levels of the universe. Scholarly analysis,
- 15:18like a trigger word gets me all excited. I know, that's what
- 15:20I did, And I was like, oh, I like that, and
- 15:24then yes, And then it takes a bit of a turn because where you
- 15:26might think, oh, this does sound very scientific, where this immediately breaks
- 15:31off from what might be considered as a scientific path, arguably whose primary goal
- 15:37is to communicate that science out to the world to help people into further our
- 15:41knowledge as a species, and this version of this and this view and as
- 15:45higher knowledge, this is to be kept secret instead. So we're now off
- 15:48the path of science, which we kind of were barely on it to be
- 15:52in with. But so despite their being access to higher knowledge, the masses
- 15:58must not know. So this sounds real scientological. If you ask us what
- 16:06we think about, this certainly seems to land on that version of things.
- 16:11And honestly, this to me also aligns more with conspiratorial thinking, which looks
- 16:17at the A lot of it is like i start on the outside looking in,
- 16:22and now I'm on the inside where all of the real knowledges that's being
- 16:26kept from people by the forces that be. You see what I mean.
- 16:29Like, it's not exactly the same, but I see some overlap though,
- 16:30the same sort of magical thinking. And for those of you who have not
- 16:33listened to our Scientology episode, something that is really important to know is that
- 16:37a lot of the basis of scientology is based in this exact thing, is
- 16:42that higher knowledge is only attained through the inner circle. Yeah, and so
- 16:48this idea of higher knowledge is a core tenet of scientological practices. You can
- 16:53see the parallel. It's like looking in a mirror, except that they just
- 16:56use aliens instead of magic. Yeah, through theegins and emeters that sort of
- 17:02thing. Oh, all the fun stuff, all right. So the last
- 17:04little bit of esotericism is the idea of rejected knowledge. And basically this few
- 17:08posits that everything within esotericism is just what has been thrown away by modern society
- 17:14and academia. Basically, it's saying that like what you're studying and what we
- 17:17know, what, all of our knowledge, it's just stuff that's been discarded
- 17:19by the masses because they don't understand it. And that's kind of the equivalent
- 17:23of just going you just don't get it. And this is where flat earthers
- 17:27an astrologists to unite. This is this is the intersection, yeah, where
- 17:32they go, oh no, no, no, we don't follow consensus.
- 17:33But this, this idea of kind of the rejected taking the rejected knowledge is
- 17:38going to play a big role in some of the ways that we look at
- 17:44how like satanism shows up too, not entirely, but a little bit that
- 17:48kind of like value is there. This is even more aligned with conspiratorial thinking.
- 17:52And I mean it's right there, it's flat earthers it's astrologists. Yeah,
- 17:56I imagine that this is the birds are not real. Thing that makes
- 18:00a lot of sense is the idea that like this is all legitimate knowledge.
- 18:04I think actually a lot of what you've been hearing in the news lately about
- 18:07aliens and UAPs and the government hearings and talks on this, Like the evidence
- 18:12they're presenting is the same evidence they've had for the last seventy years, which
- 18:17is to say, things that are on the fringe low resolution, low information
- 18:21zones. But they're like that's the stuff that's being hidden and they're rejecting it.
- 18:25But it's still like it's very useful, it's critically relevant information as opposed
- 18:30to it just being not right, you know what I mean, right exactly.
- 18:33And that's kind of the thing here is you're gonna find this in any
- 18:37sort of I guess. And I don't want to apply this term to the
- 18:41entirety of I don't want to overgeneralize this term for folks that like practice in
- 18:47this space. But there is this kind of contrarian view that comes up where
- 18:51it's like, even though there is consensus around this particular scientific evidence or something
- 18:56like that, they go no, no, no, no, no,
- 18:57or they're the folks that go, well, sure, but what if this
- 19:00wasn't actually true, and here's blah blah blah bah blah. When it's like,
- 19:03no, vaccines definitely don't cause autism, we know that, right,
- 19:07And then they're the kind of folks that will go, well, but what
- 19:08if what if it did? And it's like, no, but it doesn't,
- 19:11so we know that. And it's kind of that contrarianist viewpoint that I
- 19:15think you'll find, which is the the annoying part of all this, right,
- 19:19Like if people who were in touch with nature or people who want to
- 19:22believe the planet's a like influence your behavior whatever, most of the time that's
- 19:26not that harmful. But those folks that kind of reject it and pursue it
- 19:30and teach it as like an alternative view or alternative fact, that's when it
- 19:36becomes a problem. You know. I generally want to support the idea of
- 19:38someone who wants to oppose something they see as being fundamentally wrong. And I
- 19:45think you can look at like where science was during the Dark Ages, and
- 19:48in the European the Dark Ages is like that was people who were in the
- 19:52minority shouting against the blending majority of saying this is crazy, what you guys
- 19:57are doing is wrong. So the idea of rebelling against the authority and saying
- 20:03that's wrong, where we support that is where the person who's doing that comes
- 20:07from a place of I have actual evidence, I have actual reason to believe
- 20:12this, versus I'm doing this because I don't have evidence, which is my
- 20:17evidence. Because I don't have anything that any reason to actually believe this,
- 20:22that's my reason for belief. And it's like that's where we differ from on
- 20:26the idea of like the fact that they're rejecting it is because you're rejecting on
- 20:30the grounds that you don't have an evidence, that's your evidence, versus you're
- 20:33rejecting on the grounds that you do have evidence and that's your evidence. Right,
- 20:37exactly, That's exactly my point. Okay, we're talking about all the
- 20:41esotericism because it's in service of understanding what is left hand path magic, or
- 20:47you might also talk about this as understanding why is it left versus right?
- 20:52Vamachara versus decks and chara. I think I said that about right, which
- 20:57is sort of related to these say and script words in Eastern traditions if you
- 21:02will. So, right hand path magic, left hand path magic. What
- 21:06is anything that we're talking about to do with hands and limbs and walkways?
- 21:07We're going to tell you so. Esotericism is a space where all of the
- 21:12rough shot and discarded ideas of the universe have been left to die, essentially,
- 21:17and it's kind of like an island of misfit ideas. But one of
- 21:19those ideas is magic. And yes, we're talking about legit magic, and
- 21:23we're not talking about like the idea of like David Copperfields and David Blaine's and
- 21:30Chris Angels. We're not talking about that type of magic Penn and Tellers.
- 21:33Yeah, the Penn and Tellers. We're not talking about that kind of fun.
- 21:36We were talking about like actual ritualistic, ceremonial magic that people believe it,
- 21:41not that we actually think the magic is real, right, right,
- 21:44right. And then David Copperfields of scholarly study would have you believe that magic
- 21:48never went away, rather magic or you might see it spelled with a C
- 21:51K at the end, which I might just call it magic because it's fun
- 21:55magic. Their idea is that this is alive and well and real, but
- 22:00only exists at small corners of the world among esoteric practitioners. David Blaine too
- 22:06mainstream, Yeah, no way, he's not part of that higher knowledge crowd
- 22:11he's got he's too personable. Yeah, even though he's not really that personal.
- 22:15He's weird, dude. Now, magic includes rituals, spiritual divinations,
- 22:19all those things. They're designed to either invoke, manipulate, or manifest some
- 22:23type of supernatural force, some being, or some empty from the natural world.
- 22:27This is going to be really important that we talk about this. If
- 22:30esotericism is talking about the universe being a having its own life force and being
- 22:36a naturally occurring universe, then what essentially is happening within magic is that magic
- 22:41tries to use that, tries to pull from the natural world and use that
- 22:47and manipulate it in ways that are different than maybe what we understand from a
- 22:51scientific community. You know, this is totally decide, but it kind of
- 22:53occurs to me. This seems to be sort of the logic that superheroes operate
- 22:57in. I kind of like I get the sense of like superheroes basically they're
- 23:03in our real universe, but they're pulling in features of the universe that are
- 23:07like not readily available to most people to give them additional powers. I don't
- 23:12know if the people who rose Superhero comics ever had that directly in mind,
- 23:17at least when they were sort of found in those ideas. But I see
- 23:18a lot like I'm immediately imagining, like Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch and all
- 23:26those characters that are essentially meant to drive from the real world these supernatural abilities,
- 23:33if you will. Yeah, specifically Scarlet Witch, like what she's known
- 23:36to do in comics is used something called chaos magic. Which chaos magic is
- 23:40absolutely something that exists in our real world when they talk about like as a
- 23:44concept or a principle within this space. So chaos magic is a thing that
- 23:48gets talked about within the left hand Path magic space. And absolutely Scarlett which
- 23:52like that's exactly what her her magic power is. It's not just magic,
- 23:56it's chaos magic. So and that's why it's so like unpredictable and harmful.
- 24:00Didn't think Marvel Comics was going to make an appearance today, Yeah, exactly.
- 24:06I love. I love when that happens. It's all related. We're
- 24:10in a living universe. See, it all comes it just comes right back
- 24:14together. And speaking of which, this is where right hand and left hand
- 24:18path magic come in. So these are opposing views on magic and most often
- 24:22used with an occult and ceremonial magic writings. And you also, I think
- 24:26I've seen this described as like white magic and black magic as sort of helps.
- 24:32You've seen it also seen it aligned right, So right hand path magic
- 24:36is considered the more benevolent and aligned with the idea of white magic, or
- 24:38it's typically used for selfless purposes. So people who practice right hand path magic,
- 24:44or typically what they describe as good those practice are usually wise men and
- 24:48women, healers, white witches and wizards. So like Gandoff, the White
- 24:51would be an example of somebody who practices right hand path magic for the good
- 24:55of others in a selfless way. And maybe Dumbledore probably her mind, Yeah,
- 25:00exactly, Voldemort not so much. He's the left hand path magic or
- 25:03which we'll get to, which is, as you've likely guessed, then left
- 25:07hand path magic is more aligned with malicious black mystics of the world. The
- 25:11view is used for selfish or evil purposes, once again breaking the world into
- 25:17dichotomies of literal black and white. More black as bad and white as good.
- 25:22Yeah, you can see the problem a problem. Yeah, yeah,
- 25:25yeah, you can see why it's a problem. It's you know, Luke
- 25:26Skywalker is the right hand without a right hand, Darth Vader is the left
- 25:30hand with no left hand because he's had all of them's cut off, and
- 25:33then Ahsoka is like right in the middle. So it's a it's a whole
- 25:37thing if you like Star Wars. But within this practice of left hand path
- 25:41magic, there are seven artists prohibit a or prohibited arts that Johanna's Heart leap
- 25:47canonized into magic law. That's a sentence that I never thought I would say.
- 25:51It's a thing that exists. It came out in the fourteen hundreds,
- 25:55but it is a thing. But before we get into these arts, here
- 25:57are some other things that are prohibited. But somehow they've made it here some
- 26:02ads. All right, So we were talking about the unforgivable curses, cruciatis
- 26:15cadaver. Oh sorry, now we're talking about the other prohibited arts. So
- 26:18we've got nigromancy, and this is demonic magic, usually performed by someone in
- 26:23possession of a grimoire, which maybe you've heard of, which is a text
- 26:29book of magic of sorts. Uh huh. And for people who don't understand
- 26:32science. Science text books are essentially grimoires for them. They're like, whoa,
- 26:37look, I can make fire dirn colors by adding chemicals. Us.
- 26:41Who's yeah, that's it. There's also geomancy, which is magic that utilizes
- 26:45or controls stones and and dirt. And what they do is they don't like
- 26:48necessarily they're not like earth beenders. Just to be clear, they're not like
- 26:52making like earthquakes and doing like that. What they're doing is they use rituals.
- 26:56They use stones, dacy, and dirt and rituals, and it's used
- 27:00to either read or interpret knowledge from other levels of existence. So setting up
- 27:03runs, setting up all these things to be able to kind of pull information
- 27:07from esoteric planes. Is this like where crystals come in. People use crystals
- 27:12to clean their g Yeah, exactly. Hydromancy and this, as you might
- 27:18guess from the title, is magic using water used in scrying. When this
- 27:22allows practitioners to see pictures or visions. I'm imagining the pensive from Harry Potter
- 27:30right now. But otherwise, yeah, using using matter water is your crystal
- 27:33ball. You'll see this in like places where people are using dividing pools or
- 27:37like those types of things where people will get into a pool of water and
- 27:40like meditate and stuff like that. I mean, arguably, I guess you
- 27:42could say, like a seclusion tanks, the isolation tanks, yeah, yeah,
- 27:47the sensory deprivation tanks. Yeah, yeah, you're floating in water.
- 27:49I guess it's part. That's part of the hydromancy. Part of that too
- 27:52cool, So I guess you could say that, Yeah, there's also aeromancy.
- 27:56What you would imagine it has to do with air, except for what
- 27:59happened here is divination includes throwing sand, dirt, seeds into the air and
- 28:03analyzing those patterns, but also includes interpreting things like thunder comets, falling stars,
- 28:07and clouds. So cloud gazing is erromancy, So don't look at clouds
- 28:11anymore. What I imagine when you were describing this as someone like throwing things
- 28:18in the air and then they comes down their eyes and whatever they then can
- 28:21see when their eyes are behind dust and other particles is like their vision.
- 28:27Yeah, your world is painful and cloudy. I can't make out of any
- 28:30tails. It's the equivalent of when they try to spread Donnie's ashes and big
- 28:34Lebowski. That's what Erromancy is second big Lebowski reference. Nice. Yeah,
- 28:41you didn't think he was going to show up? Huh, I did not,
- 28:42you know, I was expecting cloud pieces and we haven't gotten there yet.
- 28:48Oh we're going to oh man, Okay. The next one is pyromancy,
- 28:53which again pretty immediately relevant, and the title of this has to do
- 28:56with fire. Nah, So throw some materials to fire, see what comes
- 29:00up. I think we've seen this a lot represented in movies. They burned
- 29:03something and they left, look at the flames, but also using fire to
- 29:07make sacrifices to the gods or deities, also to interpret omens. I think
- 29:12of the burnt offerings of like Greek texts and also some of the religious texts
- 29:18and that sort of thing. Yeah, as we go forward, I think
- 29:21it's important to note that again they're not controlling fire or water or anything like
- 29:25that, which is so disappointing when you talk about magic. Like if you
- 29:27talk about magic, like shouldn't be able to throw a fireball? Yeah,
- 29:30I can't throw a fireball, So it's not really pyromancy, but you would
- 29:33assume that it would be. Maybe it's pyromancy in the world of warcraft.
- 29:36But there's also chiromancy, which is palm reading, and so palm reading again
- 29:40into the chat here. It's used to interpret good omens and directly linked to
- 29:44astrology. So palm reading has a direct link in line to astrology. But
- 29:48in other practices like in voodoo and stuff like that, it's going to have
- 29:51a different interpretation as well. So but that's palm reading and reading hand lines
- 29:56and all that is called chiromancy. Got it, And I'll ask, is
- 30:00scalpelomancy scapula mancy some of that nature. This is magic interpreting breaks and cracks
- 30:07in the scapulas, so read the future breaks in the scapula would come from
- 30:11heating the bone with hot coals. I also think we've seen sort of versions
- 30:14of this and some like movies and TV shows a little bit yeah, but
- 30:18a little less common. But yeah, the idea of sort of you know,
- 30:19animal bones specifically scapula. Right, So now left hand path magic has
- 30:25stone, magic has water, magic, fire, magic, air magic,
- 30:30bone magic, hand magic. It's there's a lot of stuff going on here
- 30:33with our power as unite, we summoned Captain planets. Yeah, it's like
- 30:37a weird it's that weird Captain planet that like keeps talking to you about other
- 30:41planes of existence and you're like, I can't know. There's pollution. I
- 30:44need to deal with that here today and on this plane of existence. Did
- 30:47you see the down cheetle Captain Planet short, Yeah, everyone is bliss.
- 30:53Trees is like trees, trees, trees just like turning people in the trees.
- 30:59That was pretty funny, so good. So as we talk about this
- 31:00idea of left hand path magic, we did an episode on voodoo. Go
- 31:03listen to it. It's super interesting and it is worth diving into that if
- 31:07you want to know more about that specific topic. But the reason comes up
- 31:11here is that voodoo often gets associated with left hand path magic because of palm
- 31:15reading, because of some of the things that come up, some of the
- 31:17different rituals and practices and healing and all that. But there are distinct interpretations
- 31:22within voodoo versus black and white magic, and voodoo is very much so its
- 31:27own thing. Voodoo practitioners and voodoo practitioners, they make it very clear that
- 31:32they are not left hand path magic practitioners, like they definitely like distinguish themselves
- 31:37from that space. And if you listen to episode, you can kind of
- 31:38hear the distinction between that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, Now
- 31:44a little bit of cross over here. We have, As I said,
- 31:45we're doing sort of satan themed ish episodes this year, and Satanism Luciferianism are
- 31:52often labeled as left hand path practices. So let's go ahead and unpack that
- 31:56a little bit. Yes, so if we hold the idea that left hand
- 32:00path magic is about self serving individualism, then some tenants of Satanism like kind
- 32:05of the maybe some current iterations of Satanism, they don't really align. So
- 32:09what we need to do is go and spend a little bit of time looking
- 32:12at the Satanic temples seven tenants. They call them the fundamental Tenants. Now,
- 32:15the Satanic Temple is its own organization with This is not an endorsement of
- 32:19the Satanic Temple, but because of their own, their own stuff, they
- 32:22got, they got some of their own stuff going on, and I'll leave
- 32:25it at that. But these tenants are kind of like the core belief systems,
- 32:30almost like the ten commandments in the Bible. And somebody's gonna be so
- 32:32mad that I just compared the Satanic Temple to the Bible. But hear me
- 32:37out, it's a set of rules. Both of these are a set of
- 32:39rules, and so the first tenant, the first of these seven tenants is
- 32:44one should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with
- 32:47reason. The next is the struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit
- 32:52that should prevail over laws and institutions. The next one is one's body is
- 32:58inviolable, subject to one's own will alone, which is why Satanists tend to
- 33:04support abortion rights. Yes, and then before freedoms of others should be respected,
- 33:07including the freedom to offend to willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of
- 33:13another, is to forego one's own interesting beliefs should conform to one's best scientific
- 33:19understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to
- 33:23fit one's beliefs. Number six, people are fallible. If one makes a
- 33:28mistake, one should do one's best to rectify and resolve any harm that might
- 33:30be caused. And then finally number seven, Every tenant is a guiding principle
- 33:35designed to inspire nobility and action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom,
- 33:38and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word. So,
- 33:44in conclusion, did we just become Satanists. I think the more you learn
- 33:51about Satanism, the more appealing it might sound to your average reasonable person in
- 33:55a way. That's how he gets you. That's right, that's how they
- 33:59get you. And will unpack a lot of this more when we start talking
- 34:01about this. But one thing that struck me just now just reading through these
- 34:05is I don't know if it's ironic or coincidental or intentional or what it was
- 34:09that the seven tends to be sort of a sacred number and Christianity regarded often
- 34:14as being holy and having to do with holy things. Sure, and then
- 34:16there are seven seven tenants of the Satanic Temple and that makes me chuckle a
- 34:21little bit. Yeah. Yeah, you'll find that people in this space tend
- 34:24to be very tongue in cheek, and I can almost guarantee that that is
- 34:29that was intentional. Probably. Yeah. Well, you go on their donations,
- 34:31like you get like they set it up, is like the automatic donation
- 34:35is like sixty six and stuff like that. So yeah, they do.
- 34:37They do all kinds of stuff like that. So if you ask us current
- 34:40iterations of Satanism, according to the Satanic temple specifically don't really align with selfish
- 34:46acts per se. We'll note this is difference than the Church of Satan,
- 34:50which has a different view on Satanic practices, as well as many other Satanic
- 34:54groups that have previously existed and do currently exist that also have different philosophies.
- 35:00But this is just pulling from the Satanic temples specifically, right, And we'll
- 35:04unpack all of that stuff as we go into some like Satanism, and some
- 35:07of that stuff too as we go into some of our episodes. But exactly
- 35:12we are talking about left hand path magic, and it's worth talking about when
- 35:15black magic goes bad, okay, and so left hand path magic is often
- 35:21viewed as an individualistic practice if you talk about the ideas of black magic or
- 35:25anything like that. What they are talking about specifically is selfish, malicious practices
- 35:30that benefit the user and the user's followers. Right. It's not necessarily selfless
- 35:35acts, and so many practitioners engage in rituals for self serving means. That's
- 35:39kind of what the idea is behind this. So moving into this next section,
- 35:43a few things to remember. Some argue that right hand versus left hand
- 35:47path magic is not inherently good or bad. Rather, they're just two sides
- 35:52of the same coin with similar aims to seek, specifically that of seeking higher
- 35:58knowledge. The pursuit of that knowledge and its eventual use is where you might
- 36:02then apply what you maybe call a value of good or bad, and where
- 36:07that discussion comes in, because whether you're using it to help other people or
- 36:09help yourself, and presumably something is more selfish if it's at the expense of
- 36:15others versus at just being helpful to yourself. You know what I mean,
- 36:20right, absolutely So, when we talk about kind of the harms that have
- 36:22happened in the pursuit of higher knowledge through this left hand path magic type of
- 36:27philosophy, the best place to start is a man named Alistair Crowley. So
- 36:34you may be familiar with this person. You may have heard his name.
- 36:36It's sometimes pronounced Crowley or Crowley. I've heard both of them. But he
- 36:39is widely known as the quote wickedest man in the world. He was known
- 36:45for extreme practices around left hand path rituals. A lot of times he was
- 36:49trying to open portals to other dimensions and bring demons into the world through sex
- 36:52magic and all this stuff. There's a lot of there's a lot of kind
- 36:55of things happening there. But without going into a full biography on the man,
- 37:00there's plenty of stuff to go out there. If you want to know
- 37:01about this guy, go Less Know True Crime podcast, Go Less Do It
- 37:05Occult podcast. I promise you there is ample information about this that's going to
- 37:09be far more graphic than we're going to share here as well. But here
- 37:13are a few things you need to know first. This guy wrote forty five
- 37:15separate works on ritualistic magic and practice. He also wrote nineteen poetry books,
- 37:21none of them are good, all right. He often advocated for sexual freedom,
- 37:25but was reportedly a staunch massochist, sexist, and racist. He would
- 37:30often use these rituals as a means to abuse and hurt his disciples, in
- 37:36part abuses on members of the public, then generally do things that again worth
- 37:40the cost and expensive other people and caused harm to others. Just as an
- 37:45example, one thing that he would do is he would bring people into is
- 37:47like desert compound when he was living in Egypt practicing this type of magic,
- 37:52and he would make them eat these cakes that included blood, seamen, and
- 37:57feces as part of like ritualistic magic. So yeah, not really the nice
- 38:02He's not like a good friend, That's what I'm saying. So apparently he
- 38:06earned the nickname wickedest man in the world because he was open about sexual freedom
- 38:09within ritual sex magic. And to sum that up, he tried to summon
- 38:15demons through butt sex. That is a real thing. Yes, I mean,
- 38:19it's a reductionist way to look at it, but also is exactly what
- 38:22he was doing. Yeah, so there's that in thinking about this though,
- 38:27I mean, you've got you've got a lot of heavy contenders for the wickedest
- 38:30man in the world. There's been a lot of people who I think have
- 38:32caused significantly more harm than he was able to. He was obviously very malicious
- 38:37about it, but I mean, Hitler tends to occur to me as the
- 38:40person who's like the best archetype of doing horrible, horrible, terrible things to
- 38:46people. Funny, you should mention that he's coming up so Ants Olivey is
- 38:52somebody who's also known in the Satanist the circles around that. He's the founder
- 38:57of the church in Satan. He got the nickname Evilist Man in the world.
- 39:00These nicknames are so stupid. He was also considered highly charismatic. People
- 39:04tend to like, we're able to like. He was extremely personable. People
- 39:07would go talk to him. He helped the mass a small following around the
- 39:10church, the Church of Satan, which still exists today. But he was
- 39:13supposedly involved in a plot to assassinate Ted Kennedy, which doesn't feel very satanic
- 39:19when you think about the tenets of Satanism. Yeah, but it's also I
- 39:22guess if you interpret Satanism another way, that does feel satanic. It's all
- 39:27very confusing, Yeah, to wrap your head around. If you grew up
- 39:30in a Christian society, it's all very confusing to kind of figure out.
- 39:32And he said, we'll talk a little bit more about him, and we
- 39:35talk about Satanism. But but just as you said, like if you watch
- 39:37videos of him, he's kind of quiet. He wasn't very loud or outspoken.
- 39:40He sort of spoke slowly and softly and very measured, very measured.
- 39:45He was fairly I want to say, dear in exactly, but he sort
- 39:51of spoke in a way that I thrink really invite. He really listens to
- 39:53people, and he really sort of not unlike Joe Rogan, you know,
- 39:57yeah, in that way, they were both ball too. Yeah. Yeah,
- 40:00he listened and then invited them to sort of take part in it,
- 40:04and then he kind of just, I don't know anyway, moving on,
- 40:07as you mentioned, we've got a Hitler is also on the list here.
- 40:10Uh huh. Yes, I sort of jumped out of the gun on that,
- 40:14but here we are. His nickname was the worst ever. It's just
- 40:17a weird, weird dude for so many reasons. But he was obsessed with
- 40:21the occult and spirituality to the point that he had specific divisions of his army,
- 40:24of his entire group seeking out magic relics. He was actively practicing black
- 40:30left hand magic black magic while in the throes of World War two and being
- 40:35his dictator self, so he specifically sought the Holy Grail and the Ghent Altarpiece.
- 40:40The Ghent Altarpiece was a magic artifact that supposedly had was on it was
- 40:45encoded a map to other world treasures, basically how to travel into other dimensions,
- 40:53other planes of existence to find treasures and weaponry that would help him win
- 40:57the war. He spent time and resources and efforts during World War two doing
- 41:04all the horrible things he was doing also seeking this stuff. So this is
- 41:07again an example of like how selfish, malicious left hand path magic black magic
- 41:12can bring in people like Hitler. That's where the mustaches come in. By
- 41:15the way, there is a non zero number of movies that have reference to
- 41:21this as a plotline, even Captain America. You know, the idea of
- 41:23Red School and Hydra, like it's actually like, although he didn't, there
- 41:28wasn't actually a Red School in Hydra that was based on the reality of what
- 41:32Hitler was trying to do. I think similar and how like Wonder Woman also
- 41:37had some of that going on. Indiana Jones Indiana Jones was the next one.
- 41:39I was gonna call them, all of them. Yes, they were
- 41:44all like trying to look for the ark of the Covenants and all of that.
- 41:46So it was inspired by the fact that that was really going on among
- 41:50the Nazis. Yeah, like literally every Indiana Jones movie the villain and all
- 41:53of them is Nazis except for Temple. Do I mean Nazis are easy to
- 41:57use as a villain. I gotta say, yeah, yeah, I mean
- 42:00I agree. All right, Well, we do have some other fun interesting
- 42:02tidbits and some takeome points, but how about some uninteresting tidbits and some forget
- 42:07points and those are ads. Well, let's get a little bit of science
- 42:17before we get to some interesting tidboints, tidbits, tid points, tid points.
- 42:22I love tid points and take on bits that the takeome bits and tid
- 42:27points. Those are my spoonerisms for the day. There's been some publications in
- 42:31peer review about this, so we have Vaughan Struck Rad two thousand and five.
- 42:37This calls for multiple fields of practice work together to up interpret Western esotericism.
- 42:42But shocker problem is nobody has a good definition for what any of this
- 42:45is, so the scientific inquiry is quite difficult to actually carry out. Yeah,
- 42:51so that was in two thousand and five. In my search for articles
- 42:53on science and black magic or left hand path magic, there was nothing,
- 42:59but they did find some super interesting things. So Grandholm in two thousand and
- 43:02nine found that despite left hand path magic practitioners often having a right wing political
- 43:07view. So that's also something to consider as well, is that a lot
- 43:12of times people who like consider themselves left hand path practitioners tend to be right
- 43:15wing, which is it makes sense what you can't think about it. But
- 43:20there are some groups like the Temple of Set or Dragon Rouge that actually have
- 43:23advocacy work around fostering animal rights and protecting animals, So that was kind of
- 43:30an interesting thing to find. Yeah, again, people are complex, It's
- 43:32weird. Yeah. We have kun Amlani and ren Sick in two thousand and
- 43:37eight aims to elevate the cognitive processes related to observing magicians perform illusions, not
- 43:44tricks, not illusions. They set a call to action to investigate processes related
- 43:51to attention control because a lot of when talking about magic and illusions, it
- 43:53has to do primarily with grabbing your attention to one thing and none another.
- 43:58It's perception distortion and influencing your choices through subtle manipulations. None of this article
- 44:02is related to left hand path magic at all, which was kind of disappointing,
- 44:07but it does speak to the idea of magic and what looks like magic,
- 44:10which has a lot more to do with basically manipulating your audience. Yeah.
- 44:16Absolutely, so, I mean that really concludes what we understand of left
- 44:22hand path magic in terms of like the study of it and definitions of it.
- 44:27But there are some fun tid dates The first thing is supposedly David Bowie
- 44:31was obsessed with left hand Path magic. And this is where the cod pieces
- 44:36come in, because if everybody remembers Labyrinth, I don't know where he got
- 44:39that outfit or why they put him in that fun That's all I'm saying.
- 44:43That's where the copies come. But he was he was obsessed, like he
- 44:45would incorporate a lot of the imagery and a lot of the languaging into some
- 44:49of his art and some of his stuff. He would read a lot of
- 44:52occultist books and stuff. But I mean also people would assume that he was
- 44:55into kind of black magic because he was so subversive to like culture norms too
- 45:00interesting interesting. Maybe he saw his work on Labyrinths that being more of a
- 45:05documentary than like, yeah, the film Williams Burrows cursed Truman Capodi using black
- 45:13magic and then Capodi got arrested, so it apparently worked. I'm just kidding.
- 45:16Yeah, I mean, the cause of fact relations there that I think
- 45:22is spurious non existent, But who knows if it actually worked except us it
- 45:28didn't because magic is not real, right. And then also if you read
- 45:30william S Burrows, if you read Naked lunch. Then you know, he
- 45:32probably just like threw out a curse in the throes of like a heroin nod,
- 45:36So he probably wasn't wasn't really all there when he tried to curse Truman
- 45:39Capodi. I would imagine, like that's a whole different, whole different set
- 45:44of circumstances. Fair, all right. Christopher Lee, who is Sarim on
- 45:49the White in Lord of the Rings, had supposedly the largest collection of occult
- 45:52books on the planet in his library. He also played guitar and wrote a
- 45:57Christmas EP with the song jingle Hell On, which you can actively currently listen
- 46:00to on Spotify. So that's where Christmas comes in. Man, I love
- 46:05Christopher Lee. The guy's fantastic. Yeah, wild, so wild. All
- 46:08right, So we got our cod piece, we got our Christmas relation.
- 46:12Let's see we mentioned Jupiter. Have we gotten a mustaches yet? Is that
- 46:15still coming up? Yeah? Hitler was the mustaches thing. Uh, that's
- 46:17right, Okay, got you. And none of the research did we find
- 46:22anything about alcamy or necromancy, which is you know, a shame. I
- 46:25you know what little I did find on some of the looking up. In
- 46:29addition to what we've already looked at here was there. I saw these like
- 46:31four central tenants of the ideal left hand magic, which had to do with
- 46:36I'll just listening really quickly because I think it's false, sort of an interesting
- 46:38tidbits or tidboys if you will, section take on bits, yeah, take
- 46:45on bits, just just crumbs. But anyway, it was individualism, individual
- 46:52deification, the anti and normally I'm I'm saying this wrong has to do with
- 47:00the rejection of cultural norms. And then one of them is this idea of
- 47:02like being in the here and now being in the end sort of the present,
- 47:06and that I think what I saw on a lot of all of this
- 47:08had to do with individualism, and sometimes individualism in a selfish way, meaning
- 47:14like you know, focus all of your tension onto yourself, right, do
- 47:17only things that are good for you, and to the detriment, like if
- 47:20it's the detriment of others, so be it. But I also saw that
- 47:23in a good way of like, you know, respect yourself, strive towards
- 47:28self improvement, and those I also saw a sort of being related to this,
- 47:31and then like the individual deification sort of spoke to this idea of looking
- 47:36into occultism not as a warship of magic, but as a means to an
- 47:42end for like a lot of it. When you think of the warship of
- 47:45magic or demons or other you know, magical beings and that sort of thing
- 47:49is not that you worship them as some kind of benevolent authority, but that
- 47:52you you are forming a relationship with them in the service of self improvement.
- 47:58Yeah, which obviously differs from other ways that people orientce to different religious traditions.
- 48:02So just some sort of interesting things I found in there. There's a
- 48:06lot to unpack, and it's a lot of people writing about it from I
- 48:09mean, I think it's the equivalent of like people kind of waxing scientific about
- 48:14stuff in terms of like, well this is what I think, here's my
- 48:16theory of blah blah blah blah, but like coming up with like random hypotheses
- 48:20that can never be tested. And there's also just no science in any of
- 48:22this. So yes, non science. It's very non science, nonsense,
- 48:27non science. I have a thesis on them. Okay, we're gonna go
- 48:30over a couple of points in our take home bits. So first, left
- 48:35hand path magic sounds really scary when you talk about it. Black magic sounds
- 48:37scary. There's satan, there's cults, there's hidden knowledge of the universe,
- 48:42So of course it sounds like a big scary thing. But when you really
- 48:44look into it and you look at the people that are involved in it,
- 48:46sounds like a lot of dorks are really into this. Yeah, and then
- 48:51as you mentioned the idea of this, these sort of epithets that are attached
- 48:53to these historical figures. The wickedest man in the world is a stupid superlative,
- 48:59Like why, Yeah, it's just it's showmanship, is what that is.
- 49:02People have done some terrible things in the name of ritualistic magic. There's
- 49:06a lot of examples of that in different spaces, but this isn't really any
- 49:09different than using the Bible or the Koran to enact harm on people. So,
- 49:13like, I feel like that is a thing to remember that harms are
- 49:17harms, whether it's in service of God or Satan or some other dimension or
- 49:22butthole demons. I mean, they could be any number of things. It's
- 49:25still harm. So using some tool or some knowledge for harm is a bad
- 49:30thing. Yes, practicing black magic makes for really great subject matter in metal
- 49:34bands and the imagery is very cool, and I think that's probably what attracts
- 49:37a certain amount of people to it, is this very starkly contrasted imagery against
- 49:45what you will find it most contemporary architecture and fashion, and like artistic aesthetic,
- 49:52the sort of black magic aesthetics that are included are very unique in standout
- 49:57and like allow for chimeras and all kinds of fun shapes and patterns and that
- 50:01sort of thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then my final take
- 50:06on BIT is that Christopher Lee is still a wildly interesting person even though he's
- 50:10passed away, and you should go watch Lord of the Rings or Gremlins too,
- 50:15or literally anything he's in. Some of his stories and some of his
- 50:17life is just so wildly interesting to me, So I don't know, he's
- 50:22worth checking out. That's great. I really like your commitment to the take
- 50:25of BIT. I'm glad you liked that all right. Well, if you're
- 50:30new to us, then we have one final last segment that we do at
- 50:34the end of every episode, which is where we give some recommendations. If
- 50:37you've been with us for a while, then hey, you get to look
- 50:38forward to our continuing, ongoing Segond with the Witch's recommendations. These are sometimes
- 50:44related to our topic, but usually not, and today we've got a split.
- 50:46But before I do that, I would like to think the people that
- 50:49help make the show possible. These are the people who support us on Patreon,
- 50:52who are amazing, wonderful people, without whom we could not continue to
- 50:55do this work. You guys are the best, and those bests in It's
- 51:00Mike, m Megan and Layla, Mike t, Justin, Kim, Joshua,
- 51:04Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, Brian and Ashley. Thank you all again
- 51:07and again and again and forever for being awesome, amazing people. Yes,
- 51:12we love you so much. Alison need to thank my team. Thank you
- 51:15so much Shane for putting together the notes on today's topic and for recording with
- 51:19me today my pleasure. Thank you Justin who does all of our audio engineering
- 51:22and production anything. And thank you Emma Wilson who was our social media coordinator
- 51:28and correspondent in a way. So that is my team again, without whom
- 51:30this I could not continue to do this podcast. And of course thank you
- 51:35listeners, because if I didn't have you then it would just be me talking
- 51:37to avoid which it started out that way, you know. Yeah, it
- 51:42was kind of like that. We have an audience now, and that's great.
- 51:44We appreciate you. It's so nice. All right. Other things add
- 51:46really quick. If you'd like to support us, as I said, you
- 51:47can pick up some merch. We've got some mugs and hats and beanies and
- 51:51sweaters and shirts and stickers and all kinds of things over there. You can
- 51:53leave us a rating and review, you can subscribe, you can join us
- 51:55on Patreon, where you can access to bonus content. Like all those members
- 51:59that I listed, I'm including early access to episodes at three episodes, that
- 52:02sort of thing. I think that is all that I have. Am I
- 52:06missing anything? No? I think that covers it perfect. Let's get to
- 52:08our fun last segment, which is our recommendations for this week, Yay recommendations.
- 52:22Since we're talking about super scary dark things and magic and all that,
- 52:28and I mentioned metal, I went back into my metal catalog and I've remembered
- 52:30that there is an album called Left Hand Path by a band called Entombed.
- 52:36So my recommendation is go go listen to Entombed Left hand Path, which is
- 52:39a just really good example of like late eighties, early nineties metal, not
- 52:45like the Metallica metal, but like actual metal. And so, you know,
- 52:49it's twelve songs. It's a pretty decent length. It's forty seven minutes
- 52:52for twelve songs. So it's a good it's a good listen, and you
- 52:54know, it's got the common songs like Left Hand Path, revel in Flesh,
- 53:00I've Normally Deceased, you know, all the ridiculous, over the top
- 53:05nineties kind of feel to metal at the time. It's a great listen if
- 53:09you like that sort of thing. So I thought it was like a fun
- 53:13a fun kind of related related bonus that's delightful. So the band is Entombed.
- 53:17The band is called Entombed, and they're they're like their most famous album
- 53:22is called Left Hand Path. Left Hand Path by Entombed. You can check
- 53:24it out on Spotify or where probably wherever you stream music. I haven't verified
- 53:29that, but it's assume. Yeah. Well, I am kind of lazy.
- 53:30I don't really like to cook or do things in the kitchen, but
- 53:34nevertheless I enjoy these like cooking shows and baking shows and YouTube channels and that
- 53:38sort of thing. And one of the actual best, in my opinion,
- 53:43is one called young Man Cooking. He's got a YouTube channel, he's got
- 53:45a website, he's got a couple of books out, and his recipes are
- 53:50just always so flawlessly good, Like even if you don't get it exactly right,
- 53:54it's still going to be either pretty good or absolutely fantastic. Okay,
- 54:00some of them more complex than others, like someone take more prep, but
- 54:02you can choose. You can go through and find like which one is easy
- 54:05and sounds good. I mean, he's got just probably hundreds of them at
- 54:08this point. His YouTube videos are super easy to follow. He does a
- 54:12great job. Like one of the things that most people if you go into
- 54:15like recipes, there's like this person's life story for five hundred pages and then
- 54:20you get to the recipe at the very end. He is very straightforward.
- 54:22He's like, here's the overall description of this dish, and then just goes
- 54:27through step by step here's how you make it. And it's really fast.
- 54:29It's like, does is how much oil? This is, how much salt,
- 54:31this is how much whatever? Cook it this way, I chop it
- 54:34this way, I put it in here, while that's doing that, do
- 54:36this, and it's just like you just boom, moves through it pretty efficiently,
- 54:37Like I think most of his videos are like fifteen ish minutes long.
- 54:42That's great. Yeah, strong recommend well. I made a couple of his
- 54:45dishes this week and they were both fantastic, and I went back for like
- 54:47seconds on all of them, so nice. I strongly recommend for young Man
- 54:51Cooking spelled y e U nng this YouTube channel and then a website, youngman
- 54:55Cooking dot com. Cool, very good. I love it all right.
- 54:59If you have cooking you YouTube channels you'd like to recommend, or some eighties
- 55:01nineties metal bands that are on your mind, or you are a practitioner of
- 55:05left hand magic or scholar of left hand magic or black magic or occultism or
- 55:09anything we've talked about in here today and we'd like to reach out to us.
- 55:13We love hearing from everybody. You should join us on Patreon and send
- 55:16us an email directly at info WWDWWD podcast dot com. You can also reach
- 55:22out to us on the social media platforms where you will speak with us or
- 55:24maybe with Emma, and we'll look forward to hearing from you there. Yeah,
- 55:28anything I'm listening or anything you'd like to add before we close out Shane.
- 55:30No, I think that covers it. Be safe, Be Safe,
- 55:32Happy Halloween Month. And this is Abraham, this is Shane. We're out.
- 55:37See Yeah, you've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
- 55:40You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot
- 55:46com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day