I'm a witch. Not a Wiccan, though, but an actual occultist who has learned languages to be able to peruse really old books, studied obscure and weird philosophy, practiced her butt off in the pursuit of power, knowledge, and enlightement, etc. Regardless of whether or not you believe in such stuffies, that's how it goes and that's how my life is.
All the ancient traditions, the traditions that we witches and warlocks consider to be extensions of a primordial tradition or experience, describe exactly the same metaphysical experience, distorted only by cultural noise. So those of us who are serious and meta instead of just being on this for the lulz, with meta signifying we aren't into following this or that tradition but actually trying to understand those elements all traditions share to discern what the primordial experience or tradition was like and thus move beyond the cultural noise, study all the traditions we are able to get our greedy paws into to try and discover those points they are all concordant in.
One of those elements is the so-called original schizm. The original schizm is the idea of that thingie, the original thingie, either emanating or becoming divided in two stuffies or ruling aspects that then become involved in an war that will last for as long as creation itself lasts and will involve all strata and levels of it, from the lowly microbes to the high lords, the divine aspects, and everything else that is. Every level of reality is nothing but a reflection of the one above, and given this war is the entire point of the first level of reality then in some way, shape, or form, in both consciousness and subconsiousness, be it either in philosophy, or thought, or emotion, or action, that war will be raging. Always.
Those two sides are the two hands. They have different names in different traditions, obviously: You have Yin and Yang, you have Hyle and Chaos, you have Fire and Ice (or fire and water), you have the two pillars of the temple, you have the fiery word and the wet nature, you have the symbolical salt and sulfur, you have the seelie and unseelie courts, you have Amatsukami and Kunitsukami, etc, etc, etc.
Those forces always share some basic elements, too. The right hand is related to expansion, light, creation, emanation, order, law, growth, fire, summer, etc, etc, etc. The left hand is related to contraction, darkness, destruction, absorption, chaos, power, death, water, winter, etc, etc, etc. In all traditions there is a middle path, a middle pillar, which is about trying to reach enlightment and ascencion not through allegiance with one or the other but by moving in between the two, as unmoved by either as much as all are to be unmoved by mortality and mundane worries.
Some other thingies most traditions share is number and, let's say, society: Most of the time the right hand is always more numerous, civilized, and organized than the left hand, yet individually those who follow the left hand are much more powerful than the right. This is kind of obvious, given the left hand is about competition and struggle and defying all rules and limitations, be them mortal of heavenly, so those who don't go insane, die, or fail are actually pretty nasty pieces of work. However, it all balances it out in the end, though it never reaches equilibrium: The left hand is more powerful and wise, yet they can't organize for shit and are as inclined to fight some great war to imanetize eschatons as they are to backstab each other or fall into infighting because you do not like this other guy's face. And the right hand is weaker but they have social, moral, philosophical, and ideological unity. Most of the time, at least.
The right hand also has training. There's also no way of learning the ways of the left hand, as it is about individual power and knowledge: If you can't understand yourself what is it about without guides you don't deserve neither power nor knowledge. You are weak. So there are no guides nor manuals to the left hand. You just need to study, research, deduct, and read between the lines of the manuals and guides and holy texts of the right hand to see that which is implied but never accepted nor allowed, nor pointed at. So it is also much more romantic and heroic and tragic, true maladjusted nietzchean chevaliers and, uhm, chevalierettes raging against God, against Heaven, against Hell, against Law, against, uhm, physical laws, against fate, against, uhm, the planet's orbits, and against everything that is not themselves.
Gee, kind of like KKKodex.
That's the true pull of the left hand, though. It is romantic as fuck. For example, take the traditional christian and hebrew demons, regardless of whether you see them as true entities or archetypes to inspire yourself to greatness or warn you against sin, depending on what side you are on. Let's take, like, Eligos: A demon lord who fights just because fighting is what he does, and always picks the losing side because fighting losing wars and making it to legend as he who kicked tons of tail and made entire armies fear his name is the most awesome thingie ever. A demon who rebelled against god, if we keep with christian and hebrew symbology, just because god was going to win, and he was going to make those angelic pansies pay every step with blood and tears and suffering and pain to show them what a real man was like. At the same time he's the perfect knight: Proud, beautiful, elegant, and fucking badass. And if you do something he despise, no matter how small, he's going to fuck your shit up. Why? Because he can do it, and given he can do it it is his power given right to do so. If you don't want to, get more powerful than him or accept his rules. Period.
He's fucking awesome, man! He's like Shepard and Snake Plisken and the three hundred spartans and the one hundred and eight bandits of Liangshan Marsh and, like, all of the three kingdom's heroes rolled into one. He is the patron non-saint of BADASSES.
The last thingie you have to keep in mind about the left hand, in any case, is insanity. It is something you can't help, because you are trying to become a living embodiment of primordial chaos. If you keep your mind, aren't you actually fearful of letting go of shape and identity? Aren't you scared of the little deaths that make your life? And there's also nihilism: You have to become a creature of whim and passion, unbound by everything but, like, whim and passion, as all law and all order are anathema to primordial chaos. You have to become passive before the beast and darkness, being violent when it happens and being nice when it happens, being charming when it happens and being queen bitch when it happens, without any say on it. You just flow, you just dance, and you just do shit because you can. One day you can't and then you meet the final truth of the left hand: Nothing can escape death, no matter how badass. That's it. But you accept it, because you are badass and awesome and cool. And those things beyond the threshold of death better watch themselves, because you are fucking coming and you are going to get this place straight.
That's more or less the left hand.