---
title: "Mogg Morgan on Tantra, Tankhem, and the Left-Hand Path — Founder of Mandrake of Oxford"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/mogg-morgan-on-tantra-tankhem-and-the-left-hand-path-founder-of-mandrake-of-oxford/
date: 2025-09-02
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction In this interview Mogg Morgan author, practitioner and founder of Mandrake of Oxford, shares his experience with us, huge thanks to him for spending the time in answering my..."
categories:
  - "Eastern Traditions"
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Magic"
  - "Tantra"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Mogg.jpg
word_count: 2596
---

# Mogg Morgan on Tantra, Tankhem, and the Left-Hand Path — Founder of Mandrake of Oxford

## Introduction

In this interview Mogg Morgan author, practitioner and founder of *[Mandrake of Oxford](https://mandrake.uk.net/)*, shares his experience with us, huge thanks to him for spending the time in answering my questions. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments, and if you would like to find out more about Mogg Morgan and his teachings you can start [here](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPG4FDMW#detailBullets_feature_div) with his new Tantra Course just released as a Kindle.

[![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/81p1keDPEiL._SL1500_-189x300.jpg)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPG4FDMW#detailBullets_feature_div)Tantra Course: Module 1 

---

## Interview

**PAA: Early magical journey.**

I’ve probably talked about that enough. There’s plenty around on that subject — I’ve been around a long time. Mentors and influences: Jan Fries was an early one.

I’ve had a fair share of mentors and influences. The main people I’ve learned from are other practitioners, magicians, and friends. I’ve mentioned that in other places, but I think it is important to note: it’s nice to have a very knowledgeable teacher, but I had an ambiguous relationship with one. They had a dark side and it didn’t always end well.

But the value of a group or an affiliation is that it puts you in contact with other magicians. Usually, it’s your peer group that you learn the most from. People underestimate that. All these things help, but it’s really other people on the path.

The other thing: I’m not going to go into all of these questions in great depth. As you say, it’s just too much.

**PAA: How do you blend rigorous scholarship with hands-on practice?**

I think magicians tend to hit the books. I go to the Ancient History library in Oxford almost every week for a reading day. Even if I’m not consulting a specific work, it’s quite a good environment. It’s what I call my “house of life.”

So yes, I keep on with research. The reason I went into academia all those years ago was to improve my knowledge. So many books I read, I couldn’t make head or tail of them. You need imagination, but also a certain amount of education and study in order to make sense of this material and not get lost in it.

So really the reason I did research was because I was already a magician. That’s a common enough path.

**PAA: Core practices and evolution.** **Over the years you’ve experimented with a wide range of techniques, from divination to dream interpretation to authentic Egyptian-style horoscopes. How do these practices fit with your day-to-day work as a magician?**

Well, they are my day-to-day practice in a way. The books that I did — I keep having to rewrite my material — but my current one, *Egyptian Magick: A Spirited Guide*, has this schema of work you do over the course of a year. That ritual cycle is what holds everything together.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I do a practice every single day, or something formally recognised as magical practice. But in a sense we’re completely submerged in the tradition now — it’s just how we live. That involves manifesting our ideas in books, artworks, and rituals that come up in the cycle.

We’ve just been doing a whole month devoted to Set. But then, in the cycle, there’s also a special festival day for Ganesha. So it’s the ritual cycle that drives us forward with all these traditions.

It’s a mix of the Egyptian ritual cycle — which we had to research and create in order to do — and other influences. I say “we”: me and my partner, and then me and the wider group of people we work with. We have various affinity groups that we’re part of.

**PAA: Embracing eastern and western traditions. You say embracing the Left-Hand Path.**

At the moment my view of the Left-Hand Path — which has varied — is that it’s almost like a form of synchronicity. Researching, going to libraries, enables the spirits, or whatever you want to call them, to put things your way. Often that happens: a set of ideas I’m thinking about, those books will all be missing. It makes me think someone else is also thinking about this.

From looking at this recently: one of the original meanings of *vāma* is usually translated as “left.” But does it literally mean left, or does it have an older meaning connected with “the beautiful,” or the feminine? Maybe the left in occult ideology is associated with the feminine.

So the real meaning of Left-Hand Path is not necessarily the transgressive element, though some practices are seen that way. The deeper meaning is connection with the beautiful, the cosmically beautiful — the divine goddess. In tantric tradition it’s the magic of Śakti, the goddess. Viewed this way, much of magical tradition is actually goddess tradition. Obviously that can involve transgressive elements too, because things to do with omen and taboo often are.

That’s my approach to the Left-Hand Path.

To continue that: Crowley’s system was where I first entered into magic. It’s very ambiguous, but he does have *Liber Astarte*, named after the goddess Astarte. That text is crucial. Crowley is essentially saying magicians need to engage the feminine, the devotional and emotional side.

A lot of magical tradition — reflected in Crowley’s own words — looks technocratic, lacking emotional depth. Crowley, deliberately or not, reintroduced the devotional aspect. You see the same in biographies of magicians: spirits tell them to become less solar (analytical/scientific) and more lunar.

For example, Yeats got spirit messages. He thought, “I’ll analyse this with word association, numerology, all the usual tools.” The spirits said, “Do that, but don’t forget the lunar perspective.” In a way, that’s the Left-Hand Path: look for the feminine, the spiritual side — Śakti, whether that’s Nuit, Kali, or others. There’s a great deal of overlap between these goddess forms.

So moving in that direction is what all these signals point to.

**PAA: You talk about east–west tantric synthesis.**

This has been very important to me. Early on I went deep into Eastern religions. Crowley’s *Liber ABA* essentially begins with something like kuṇḍalinī-yoga, which comes from tantra.

So there’s a synthesis of East and West. My academic theory — not mine alone, others have said this — is that India’s magical tradition, especially folk tantra, and Egypt’s were connected in the ancient world. They were part of a shared international tradition of magic across the Near East, including India. Many techniques overlap.

Twenty years ago I wrote a manifesto for where I and our group were going. This became the book *Tankhem* — a word I made up to capture the tantric–Khemetic blend. I published it as a manifesto, then spent twenty years exploring that current, guided into mysteries within it.

But I always had a parallel interest in Indian tradition, which I studied in detail. So I found India in Egypt and Egypt in India, oscillating between the two. Recently I was asked to pivot back to tantra, to reveal more of what I’d learned.

That led me to *śava sādhana*: meditation on a corpse, or on death. A core tantric ritual, though not well known. We’ve been translating tantric texts, many over a thousand years old. In the texts, the terrifying cremation-ground rite is often described, but the crucial chapter is untranslated, or heavily euphemised.

Whether it’s literal or metaphorical, the idea of meditating on a corpse and revivifying it takes you back to Egypt — a common ground. In outward form you see it in mummification; inwardly, there’s an esoteric layer we’ve been working with. The overlap is unavoidable.

I shouldn’t assume people know all these concepts, so: tantra brings in many aspects. From the beginning I was speaking about death and meditation upon death — central to tantra in a surprising way. To explain it fully, I’d have to quote and unpack sources, which could easily fill a whole publication.

At that time, I actually got sick — nothing fatal if treated, but very unpleasant. A mini-death, really. It made me realise that lingering on one question — death — could answer many others obliquely.

*Śava* means corpse; *sādhana* means practice, not just meditation. Western occultists are familiar with “death posture” and similar ideas, but this goes further.

### Śava Sādhana and the tantric current

There are accounts of this ritual. June McDaniel has a book largely devoted to this topic and to a distinctive view of tantra. One useful distinction she makes is between folk tantra and what you might call academic or grammatical tantra.

Folk tantra is the majority: not necessarily what appears in formal books. My own tradition and tantric order have translated arcane tantric texts, while my guru, Dadaji (Śrī Gurudev Mahendranath, d. 1988), was anti-intellectual — an ordinary person. Think of the kinds of stories you hear from India: practitioners without formal education, speaking vernacular languages (Bengali or Hindi), maybe some Sanskrit. They are ordinary people who stumble into this magical path, practising devotion with various magical methods.

You could translate *tantra* as “magic,” though many assume it means “text.” It *does* mean “text,” but that overemphasises textuality and underplays the family-taught folk tradition.

The other type of tantra — more familiar in the West, especially through AMOOKOS — includes hymns to Kali and ritual texts with ambiguous language, code words, sequences of sounds, and deep philosophical significance. It can look like intellectuals reclaiming a folk stream. Historically, interesting religious work often begins among folk practitioners — trance, oracles, entheogens — rather than in purely intellectual circles. Both streams are strong; as Western practitioners, we often fit the folk model: self-initiating, “just doing it.”

McDaniel interviewed actual practitioners — no certificates, just known involvement in certain practices in Bengal, the heartland of Kali worship. They get a bad press (occult murders, etc.), compounded by a communist government hostile to religion and by other groups. So they keep their heads down, often identifying as atheist or orthodox. Much remained secret until about thirty years ago — especially around Yoginīs and related ritual practice.

### A folk practitioner’s account

A practitioner described how they entered the work: personal revelation. Accounts of *śava sādhana* stress that skulls are useful because the soul can inhabit them; the soul can predict the future and help the *sādhu*.

People speak of performing the corpse ritual while seated upon the body of a virgin girl who becomes Kali, the body coming to life and speaking. “My grandfather performed it. If you make one mistake, you die or go insane. The *sādhu* in orange who roams the burning ground did it wrongly and went insane; he may recover. I feed the skulls on the altar; they help me. I learned this from my grandfather. When fed, skulls are pacified and become protectors, strong enough to fight off evil souls who would distract or harm the *sādhu*.

“When negative spirits, *bhūtas* and priests, try to disturb meditation, the good souls fight the bad and keep the *sādhu* on the path. Helpers are common; the ritual is performed with a woman — the *uttara sādhikā*, a highly skilled female practitioner — who helps if the *sādhu* is distracted. She stands within the protective circle. Sometimes the dead guru is invited in subtle form to watch over and help.”

This is not self-invented; it’s a tradition. Thousands of tantric texts exist; most are untranslated; those that are can be hard work. Some are in Hindi; chapters on this rite are often omitted or euphemised. Accounts in folk tales can be clearer than technical scriptures.

The would-be adept performs it — how many times, who knows. It sounds ghoulish, but there’s a way to “square the circle” with it: you go to the *śmaśāna*.

### Śmaśāna and the tombs

*Śmaśāna* is usually taken as “cremation ground,” where corpses are stored overnight before cremation (and sometimes cremated there). But the original meaning is “megalithic tomb.”

India is dotted with such tombs — human burials — identical to those in Europe and possibly the Americas. Cremation hasn’t always been standard; about 1,500 years ago burial in tombs was well known. In the 1950s someone even appealed to sacred texts to be buried, citing precedent.

My academic work on Indian star maps and megalithic tombs was pragmatically useful: I needed answers and had to find them.

So when texts say “go to the cremation ground,” they may mean: go to a megalithic tomb, a place of burial. For folk practitioners, it can also literally be where corpses are kept. Anthropologists note another route: if there’s a death in a family, a tantric practitioner might quietly pay a fee to perform a ritual with the body — perhaps with prior consent.

Decapitation is frequently involved; the body is returned whole, but the head removed during the rite. However taboo, the headless one — the disembodied head — recurs across cultures.

### The ritual itself

They have the corpse. The ritual is extremely old and cross-cultural, and may involve an hallucinogenic — terrifying to contemplate. Using yantras and installing deities, the corpse is placed face-down; the initiate is supposed to sit on it — perhaps impractical, so “over” or “near,” at the head end, especially if designs are made on the back.

Some texts insist the corpse be male, or an outcaste (*untouchable*) — likely an academic conservatism. In folk practice, the corpse ends up female, because it becomes the manifestation of the goddess Kali.

Recall the Left-Hand Path’s association with the feminine. Even in odd old physiologies, left/right tracked female/male. Modern paganism and witchcraft are often devoted to Śakti, especially Kali-like goddesses. Within the tantric Left-Hand Path, the focus is primarily on the goddess.

Kali is strongly associated with *śava sādhana*. At the climax, after installing the cosmic goddess into the corpse, it briefly resurrects. Two things happen: you ask for her name — if it’s appropriate, the rite proceeds; if not, it fails. Then you ask for a boon; better to let her determine it.

### Tankhem and the synthesis of traditions

To finish: this tradition I call *Tankhem* — a combination of the tantric with the Khemetic. My main focus has been in the Egyptian stream, although technically, in terms of research, I’m well qualified in Sanskrit and the tantric tradition. That’s where I did my academic work — in Āyurvedic medicine and related fields.

I spent a long time developing this and am currently publishing, writing up, and ritualising material that I and our group have discovered. Much of it is unique.

Not so long ago, I was requested to pivot back to tantric material — not to abandon the Khemetic, but to show the tantric side. My first step back led me to this core tantric myth, because it is not peripheral but central: the mythology of the destruction of the sacrifice.

I had forgotten it is essentially a meditation upon death — taking a corpse, revivifying it for a brief moment, receiving gnosis, then letting it pass. In a sense, it takes us straight back to Egypt. What is the quintessential Egyptian myth if not meditation on a corpse? Death, reconstitution, rebirth. The systems interlock.

### Hymn to Kali and the tantric body

I don’t want to reveal too much; this is my work and retains an element of privacy, though not secrecy. One aspect is the great ritual hymn to Kali.

When you read it, assume key words carry multiple meanings. References to death or corpse can also point to a living person in a magically inactive state — tantric bodies dormant, to be activated.

The “tomb” can also mean the bed — a stone bed or table. In that sense, the tantric theatre of operation is also the bedroom. Strange for religious studies, but not strange for these older magical traditions.

We made our own version of the hymn — *We the Rap Kali* — available through [AMOOKOS](https://www.facebook.com/groups/214753100471).

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