The Left-Hand Path is a family of esoteric traditions defined by a cluster of attitudes, self-deification, radical individualism, and the deliberate transgression of conventional taboo, set in conscious opposition to what is called the Right-Hand Path. The terms themselves derive from Indian Tantra, where "left-hand" (vamachara) practice ritually employs substances and acts forbidden in orthodox observance (the famous "five Ms," including meat, wine, and sexual union) as a means of transcending duality, while "right-hand" practice keeps the ordinary purity rules.
Western occultism, especially from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, borrowed and reworked the distinction into a broad self-description: where the Right-Hand Path seeks the dissolution of the self into a higher unity, God, or cosmic order through submission and purity, the Left-Hand Path seeks the strengthening and apotheosis of the individual self, treating the practitioner's own will and becoming-as-a-god as the goal, and regarding conventional moral and religious taboos as constraints to be examined and, where useful, broken. It is an umbrella term rather than a single religion, gathering currents from certain forms of Tantra to modern Satanism, Luciferianism, and Setianism. Presented neutrally, it names a genuine and self-conscious orientation within the world's esoteric traditions, one that valorizes autonomy, self-realization, and transgression as a spiritual method, and its practitioners generally distinguish this philosophical stance sharply from mere immorality or the sensational stereotypes attached to it.