Animal Sacrifice in the Left-Hand Path and the Negotiations of Antinomianism and Respectability
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Since Christianity's rise to power, (antinomian) magic has been associated in the Western imagination with ritual violence signified through the condemned practice of animal sacrifice, with this conceptual matrix continuing in the general Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment critique of religious superstition (be it Christian or other). As inheritors of Enlightenment anti-religious sentiments and of other discourses of modernity, most actors within the Left-Hand Path milieu reject the practice of animal sacrifice on the grounds of humanitarianism, ecology, ritual efficacy and / or social respectability (e. g. Church of Satan, Dragon Rouge, or Michael W. Ford). However, there are some Left-Hand Path proponents (e. g. Temple of the Black Light or E.A. Koetting) who embrace it as a potent antinomian tool imbued with the power of tradition. Surveying the textual production of the main actors in the milieu, the paper aims to uncover dominant discursive strategies operating in the exclusion or acceptance of animal sacrifice and in its contested constructions as either harmful or foolish ritual act possibly de-legitimizing Left-Hand Path, or, conversely, powerful expression with the authority of history which might be essential to “dark” magical practice. |
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