FALLEN ANGELS & RED STRINGS: The Left-Hand Path

After the Red String is wound around the tomb, it is endowed with mystical powers. The Red String is then cut into pieces and worn on the left hand’s wrist. The left hand is considered by Kabbalah to be the receiving side for the body and soul. By wearing The Red String on our left wrist, we can receive a vital connection to the protective energies surrounding the tomb of Rachel. It also allows us to take Rachel’s powerful protective energy with us and draw from it anytime.

"The woman was plainly dead. Nevertheless, Barrett sent immediately for a doctor and Dr. Timothy Robert Killeen of 68 Brick Lane arrived in George Yard at about 5:30 am. His hurried examination of the body revealed for the first time the awful extent of the woman’s injuries. She had been stabbed no less than thirty-nine times!! "

Kabbalists believe that by seeking the Light of holy persons, such as Rachel, we can use their powerful influence to assist us. According to Kabbalah, Rachel represents the physical world in which we live. Her greatest desire is to protect and defend all of her children from evil. When we tie the Red String to our left wrist, while reciting the powerful Ana Be’Koach prayer, we seal her powerful protective energy within as it intercepts negative influences intended to cause us harm….

We are still pursuing a nameless killer whose series of horrible murders in 1888 continue to fascinate and appall. The revelation of the Ripper’s identity, which would remove him from the realm of myth, as so far continued to perplex. Few fail-safe clues are available.From the time of the Ripper killings until right up to the present day, it has often been suggested the Jack the Ripper was left-handed, engaging esoterically, in the left path, a means to attain redemption through sin.

Left-handers are different, not so much in the ways they use their hands as in the distressing way they use, or fail to use- their heads. They are mavericks. Unpredictable. And possibly a little more interesting than 90 percent of the population. Any group that includes Paul McCartney, Barrack Obama, Chaplin, Hendrix, Leonardo da Vinci, Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler must be select, if not elite.

Baseball players have traditionally recognized the essential difference; a long history in which the game and its inherent esoteric structure are carefully organized within a mystical tradition in which the left hand plays a significant role. Casey Stengel, a southpaw, even explained it, “Left-handers have much more enthusiasm for life. They sleep on the wrong side of the bed, and their heads become stagnant on that side.”

Others have been equally sensitive to the psychological vagaries of left handers, and there is some statistical evidence to back them up: usually more creative and more introverted. But even the trained eye can always pinpoint a left hander. A certain frowziness may be involved- a vagrant cowlick, a missing button, an unfocused gaze, inarticulateness, a tendency to mumble. Some aspects of the left-handed psyche are universal. For example, left-handers tend to be painfully slow and inaccurate readers. They have a habit of transposing numbers and flopping letters and even turning whole words around. Allied to this affliction is poor spelling, jumbling letters and in severe cases, dyslexia, from which a lot of left handers tend to suffer mildly from it.

---Moreover, as in so many other spiritual systems (such as Taoism, for example) the Left side is associated with the dark, intuitive qualities of the archetypal feminine of the collective unconscious, while the right side is associated with the less-dark, rational qualities of the archetypal masculine. (This may have something to do with the bicameral division between the right and left hemispheres of the brain in which the right hemisphere (which directs our intuitive, "mystical" functions) is in control of the left side of the body; and the left hemisphere (which directs our linear "rational" functions) is in control of the right side of the body.)---

…”Well, his assertion seems to be based on two things: the direction of the knife wounds and the location of the facial and throatal bruising. Llewellyn asserted that the knife wounds ran from left to right. Now this was the case with all the canonical victims, except possibly Kelly, who was so comprehensively carved up that it does not appear to have been noted which direction the neck wound (or wounds) ran in. Whether or not left to right knife wounds indicate sinistrality, however, depends on where the Ripper stood, bent or squatted as he inflicted the wounds.” ( Stawell Heard )…

Not surprisingly, left handers are prone to puns and word play, which are, after all, only organized versions of dyslexia. Lewis Carroll is said to have been left handed, and “Through the Looking Glass” is perhaps the most left-handed book ever written. The world behind the mirrors is opposite in every way from Alice’s right handed real world- corkscrews turn the wrong way, queens stand on the wrong side of kings- and of course there is “Jabberwocky” , Carrol’s great masterpiece of word play.

"Mei Trow used modern police forensic techniques, including psychological and geographical profiling, to identify Robert Mann, a morgue attendant, as the killer. His theory, the result of two years intensive research, is explored in a Discovery Channel documentary, Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed. Trow’s research is rooted in information from a 1988 FBI examination of the Ripper case, which had worked up a comprehensive criminal personality profile. The portrait drawn up of Jack was as a

e male from the lower social classes, most likely the product of a broken home."...

…But why plump for a left-handed killer? Christopher Frayling has shown how commentators on the Ripper case have had a tendency to blame the murders on minority groups. In the case of Dr Llewellyn. I would suggest that left-handers were the chosen minority. But why? What was the association in Dr Llewellyn’s mind between murder and left- handedness? The answer is that there is an extremely long association in popular tradition between evil and the left ‘ hand. The Latin word for ‘left’ is ‘sinister’. The Italian word for ‘left’ is ‘mancini’, which also means ‘evil’ or ‘deceitful’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘left-handed’ as in part meaning ‘doubtful’, ‘questionable’, ‘ill-omened’ and ‘characterised by underhand dealings’. there is an ‘illicit’ sexual connotation: a left-handed wife’ is a mistress; a ‘left-handed marriage’ is a morganatic marriage, or a sexual liason outside marriage. In the Bible, evil usually comes from the left side, good from the right. The Devil was seen as left-handed, and is often portrayed as such in visual representations. there is an association with witchcraft: in the Black Mass, for instance, witches would hail the Queen of the Sabbath with the left hand. Talon marks, blemishes or moles found on the left side were thought to indicate sorcery, as was left-handedness itself.

The enigma of the killer’s identity may be compounded by an interesting quirk of left-handers: a maddening habit of thinking in ellipses rather than straight lines. Their train of thought is apt to meander through the whole alphabet on the way from A to B. Left-handed thinking is inelegant, tortuous, and graceless. Of course, a mind that makes odd associations can be marvelously inventive; Leonardo’s friends all knew man would never fly, yet by putting ideas together in his own way he designed a rig that apparently could have flown.

"Paula Marantz Cohen has had the inspired idea to turn America’s second-most famous James gang—novelist Henry, proto-psychologist William, and lifelong invalid Alice—into a crime-solving trio, and since you’d have to go a long way to find a group with greater brain-wattage, she’s given them the greatest of all whodunnits to unravel: the mystery of Jack the Ripper."

Whilst most educated people might not think they make an association between left hand and evil, the potency of long-held traditions dictates otherwise. Indeed, the more recent discipline of criminology has demonstrated its own (sometimes pseudo-) scientific tendencies of stigmatising left-handers by seening us as tending towards the criminal. Lombroso believed left-handers were three times more likely to be criminal, and noted: “The percentage of left-handedness is much higher in the abnormal class of people, eg: mental defective. insane, incorrigibles, criminals, etc.” It was thought, indeed that left-handers were wilfully rebelling against the right-handed ‘norm’, that left-handedness was psychologically determined, and that it therefore indicated a rebellious or non-conformist nature.

…This all points to the fact that her assailant was right handed whereas Jack the Ripper was clearly left handed. It has been suggested that Jack the Ripper was an ambidexter, however there is no real evidence to support this theory – whilst most ambidexters can hold with both hands, they still generally favour one or the other, leading to one hand being stronger than the other, and it must be asked if an ambidexter’s weaker hand would have had enough strength to cut through Stride’s cartiliganious wind pipe. Dr Phillips did not describe the cut as being ragged, so we can assume that the hand used was very strong, and therefore not an ambidexter.

ADDENDUM:

The Left-Hand Path. It should come as no surprise to any student of mysticism that there is a “left-hand path” — a path of darkness and even sexuality — in most mystical traditions. Hinduism and Buddhism both have their Tantric teachings, and even early Christianity practiced dark, sexual rituals among the Libertines (“Liberated Ones”) who claimed to have learned them directly from Jesus. Professor Morton Smith of Columbia University even goes so far as to suggest that Jesus may have introduced certain homosexual rituals (perhaps even “baptism” by semen) into the pre-Pauline Church.

Jewish mysticism also had and retains a distinctly “dark” and sometimes “sexual” nature which it relates to the “left-hand emanation” being discussed by R. HaKohain. For example the Zohar states: “Cain, coming from the [left-hand] side of the angel of death should kill his brother. He also adhered to his own [left] side, and from him originate all the evil habitations and demons and goblins and evil spirits in the world . . .[Cain] being from the side of the Left.”(Zohar 1:54a-54b)

It is to these same “fallen angels” from the “left emanation” that Jung also alludes when he writes:

“God . . . wants to become man and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness — the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels. The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.” Thus, we see a strong antinomianism associated with the “left-hand path” of the continuing incarnation Jung discusses — a preference for the “creaturely man filled with darkness” who “learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels” of the “Left Emanation,” with which Sabbatai Zevi was to become highly associated. ( Donmeh West )

…………….

Amelia Hill: Jack the Ripper was not a serial sexual killer but an occultist called Robert Donston Stephenson who terrorised London’s East End while indulging in a sadistic form of Satanic worship. According to a new book that claims to prove conclusively the identity of the mass murderer, the Ripper’s true motive was to kill four prostitutes as the occult decreed and, in so doing, profane the Christian cross.

…But in Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals, author Ivor Edwards claims that despite being repeatedly overlooked by Ripperologists, Stephenson, alias Roslyn D’Onston, was the killer. ..’One avenue, which was never explored by the police of the day, mainly due to their ignorance, was occult ritual murder, including the doctrine that certain organs should be removed from murdered prostitutes, killed at pre-arranged sites, which were to be located at the four points of the compass.’

During his research Edwards realised that the victims were carefully laid facing north, east, south and west. ‘How do you calculate the probability of finding four bodies randomly distributed in a city so that they form the precise points of a cross?’ he asked. He then did what no other researcher has done before: measure the distances from victim to victim and take compass bearings to discover if there was a pattern between the sites where the women were murdered. ‘I found that by joining some of the sites together, you created two equilateral triangles; a sacred symbol which, in occult doctrine, Satan devised to be used in worship of him,’ Edwards said. By joining the sites in a different way, a Christian cross was formed. By murdering his victims and leaving their bodies in that way, the killer intended a tribute to Satan….In 1904 Stephenson published a book, The Patristic Gospels, which continued to explore his obsession with the world of black magic, but after that he was never heard of again. No record of his death has been found.

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