In over 15 years of involvement with the Left Hand Path I have run across an idea that saddens me with decent frequency - that human beings are nothing but base, carnal animals. I think Anton LaVey was absolutely off the mark on this topic. This is not to say we are not animals or do not have animalistic traits, but rather that it is not the totality of our being. I reject the idea that any wanderer of the Stellar Tradition is a "mere animal". We certainly can be animalistic, we certainly have a beast in us, but it is not the whole of what we are. Or, at least, it doesn't have to be.
To illustrate this simply, let us take the symbol of the pentagram. A pentagram does not help us find food or water, build a shelter, mate and procreate, protect us from the elements, or anything a primitive tool may help with. An ant has no use for a pentagram, a dog has no use for a pentagram, the only arguable use a chimpanzee would have for a pentagram would be to dig or stab, which are not tied to the pentagram and can be made in a much more practical manner.
But humans, we have uses for the pentagram, as most reading this can attest. It can identify, inspire, enlighten, stir the emotions... In many cases this is more effective for initiation than other symbols, like how a shovel is better for digging than a pentagram made of sticks. To some even the material the pentagram is made of is critical, or what color it is. It's a tool for something few if any animals out there even have access to – higher consciousness and initiation.
Some people may feel this mindset is more Christian than Left Hand Path, but let's very briefly look to Genesis: Do animals run around naked or clothed? Whether you see Yahweh as totally symbolic, a demiurge, etc., his mythological desire was to create mindless base slaves, simple animals. He specifically drove us from the garden in the Torah to punish us for and keep us from becoming more divine than animal.
To demean oneself by categorizing yourself as “just an animal” is much more in line with the goals of the Solar Tradition. In Christianity this demeaning is essential – the Self is an inherently dirty and evil thing which needs external salvation. The Sumerians believed they were created as slaves to the gods and would crawl on their bellies eating dirt in the afterlife, whereas a brief look at something like the Pyramid Texts shows this was not the Stellar view at all. Many do not see it as demeaning, but simply as reality, once again mirroring the idea of Original Sin. But is it reality?
Humans are more than deterministic meat sacks going through a meaningless fleck of time. Suffice to say, there is a large chasm of difference between chimpanzees finally learning basic tool use and both the technological and metaphysical advancements of humankind.
The pentagram, like any other of the numerous symbols those reading this can be drawn to, has absolutely no use to “mere animals”. In this sense, symbolism itself helps further prove that mind is something beyond the deterministic world of material “reality”. With this comes the fact – as well as the burden – that there is a part of us which is not an animal at all, but something far removed from what we know about most life on earth and their consciousness. Every time you use a symbol it separates you and our species more and more from the rest of the cosmos.