How do you reconcile or get used to the dark macabre imagery often seen on the Left Hand Path?
I can enjoy death metal, but I’m just not into seeing grim reapers, underworld demons, and skeletal dragons and such death metal imagery. I understand the artistic metaphors and that eyes, teeth, and fangs and such represent something fantastic, and I don’t need to see love and light, celestial Greek God statues, I’m just trying to make sense of it. It’s just not my aesthetic and it turns me off a bit. I got into the Ahrimanic current and there’s multi-headed dragons galore LOL
I’d rather not work with any imagery at all. I suppose I am adapting by reimagining images that I found to be grotesque by making them more cute and corporate looking like mixing the Black Philip/Baphomet image with the Playboy Bunny logo as seen in my avatar. My art is intended to be campy and satirical but anyway…
I’d like to know what others think and how they go about seeing the grotesque, macabre, death metal imagery if they weren’t used to it or drawn to it originally.
I’m goth, I absolutely love all that imagery, but I don’t see it as having anything to do with magick. Romantic fiction is not magick. Music is not magick.
I have no interest at the moment in draconian currents but when I do work with these I don’t see them as dark anyway. I don’t consider lhp dark at all. I don’t consider rhp light either, I think these terms are oversimplifications.
So in my mind there’s a difference between aesthetic, which can be anything you like, and the magick. If you don’t like an image your magick will not be lessened by simply not using it and switching in imagery you do like.
A lot of the imagery and aesthetic on the Left Hand Path is mostly taken from the fantasy genre and leads to the stereotype of a black magician always wearing black and decked out in pentagrams like they are portrayed in the old Hammer horror movies of the 60’s and 70’s.
In one of his books, EA talks about holding a workshop and people expecting him to look like a typical “black magician” but he came in wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, looking like your average Joe.
I love horror movies and stories, and while I don’t mind fantasy monster art, it’s not my aesthetic and I tend to enjoy it because it’s art, not specifically because it’s monsters.
As Mulberry said, there’s a big difference between the aesthetic, and the magick. You don’t need the art to work the magick.
Honestly it begins to change, and we all go through many cycles. I love classic beauty in art but also love sinister and disturbing art, partly because magick as an art begins to impact your perception of art. If you practice sinister magick you appreciate the sinister vibe, like the art of Christos Beest and his musick. But if you don’t go that path, you will have different influences.
Magick as art is an influence on artistic sensibility, it’s as simple as that.
Dark imagery plays an essential role in my ritual workings. It serves as what LaVey in the satanic bible calls an intellectual decompression chamber. The dark imagery symbolizes the so-called evil within me and it is the same with demons. I work with Goetia only because I feel the spirits in the way they manifest is the evil and ugly side of me. It is the Shadow and I believe being in contact with the shadow is important especially when you are on the path to self-deification. Outside of the ritual chamber I have no connection to anything goth. People will never believe or imagine that I,m a Satanist. I,m innocent average Joe.
Ghehehe, it’s the other way around for me. I’ve been into horror movies since I was waaaay too young to be watching those, discovering metal in my early teens only made it worse ^^. So you might say imagery like that makes me feel comfortable on some level. It’s probably also a small part of what attracts me to the LHP.
Imagery is just imagery, make it as you wish. It’s about your own associations anyway. I don’t see how it would be necessary. (Other than maybe the occasional spirit making you confront the part that might fear that imagery) Honestly, my temple space is pretty light, pleasant and void of dark imagery. Apart from a big reversed pentagram on my wall and a human skull (synthetic) on my altar. Other than that it’s not really representative of all the very dark shit I do in there ^^
Apart from it being a little edgy and perhaps even a little cringe at times, My take on the whole imagery and why it is so prevalent is, black magic or LHP in general is in it’s core is dealing with and mastering of the dark and fearful. Wether it is internal, such as confronting and exploring your own negative emotions or the hidden beasts in your subconscious. Or wether it is working with external energies or entities that “normal” people would consider frightful, dangerous and all together best to be ignored. The imagery is just an expression of that. But it’s just that, like said before, an expression and not the thing itself.