Lords of the Left-Hand Path. A History of Spiritual Dissent.
NP [ USA ]: Privately Printed, 1992. Limited, Special Temple of Set Edition. Softcover. Large Quarto. 389pp. Bound in standard black accopress (office) report covers via three holes punched at the inner margin and secured with a metal clip. B&W diagrams, bibliography, glossary. The "Special Temple of Set edition" limited to fifty hand-numbered copies, this being copy number 42. This copy INSCRIBED & SIGNED by the author on the half title page: "For David Hohl / Who shall understand / the words of the Lords. Stephen E. Flowers. Walpurgisnacht, xxviii". This is almost certainly the David Hohl who has spent much of his life professional life in the film industry, as a script reader, etc. and whose personal interest in magic and the occult led him to write and direct "In Search of Lovecraft." As far as we can determine this "Temple of Set edition" is the true first edition of "Lords of the Left-Hand Path." In his Introduction Flowers tells that he began writing "Lords of the Left-Hand Path" at the beginning of 1989 and "for all practical purposes" it was completed by late 1992. It is a broad ranging study of those he deems "Left-hand Path practitioners," and includes his analysis of many well known in the esoteric community, including H.P. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Austin Spare, G.I. Gurdjieff, Anton LaVey etc. as well as such historical figures as Hitler, Karl Marx, the Marquis de Sade and others too numerous to mention. It was in part meant to counter the nonsense about the occult that had spewed out during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s, although ironically one of the by-products of this lunacy was a lingering mainstream wariness when it came to anything occult, and it was rejected by publishers large and small. It was presumably as a consequence of this, that the book first appeared in this private edition, with a more widely distributed second edition (with some revisions) appearing under the Runa-Raven imprint in 1997. This copy of the first edition was obtained direct from Hohl by Clive Harper, whose discreet book-label is neatly tipped in at the rear. Harper is well- known as the bibliographer of Austin Osman Spare, for updating the Aleister Crowley bibliography in the 2011 Teitan Press collection of Gerald Yorke's writings, and as someone who has lent his expertise to numerous other publications. Light wear to covers and rubbing to edges, else a tight, clean VG+ copy. Obviously very scarce. Item #66474
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