In Swami Anand Nisarg’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita he has this to say about gurus and spiritual masters:

31. One’s own spiritual nature must also be considered. You should never hesitate, for to your spiritual nature, there is nothing that suits you better than being a warrior. It is your destiny to be a warrior. You have no other choice.

32. When it naturally occurs, conflict such as this can open the doors to higher consciousness. For those who are kings, this is a very fortuitous event.

How is it possible that a horrific war can be a great opportunity? It is because a conflict like this is a crisis. Human beings only have the chance to connect to that which is beyond themselves, to get out of their comfortable routines, when there is a spiritual crisis pushing them to it. That is why the Guru’s task is to create spiritual Crisis in his students.

The concept of needing to find a spiritual master is not stressed much in the Western Left-Hand Path. If anything, Western LHPers are likely to have an allergic reaction to the very idea. As much as Theistic Satanism tends to take its ceremonial cues from Catholicism, philosophically speaking it tends to align more with the foundations of Protestantism. Each individual is their own high priest and final interpretive authority. The idea of total intellectual surrender to an external guru is an anathema to the individualistic ethos of the LHP.

I have called attention to the above verses and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, however, because Diabolists do have a spiritual Master. We call him Satan—amongst other names and titles—and invoke him for spiritual empowerment and instruction. In the Brethren of the Morningstar we make this relationship explicit. Consider our prayer Gloria:

Glory to the infernal Lord and Lady, and on Earth life and strength to their disciples. We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we give thanks to you for your great glory. Prince of Darkness and Mother of Daemons who replenish the world with pleasure and make us whole. You alone are our god and goddess. You alone are our Master and Mistress.

Just as Arjuna has Krishna to initiate and instruct him, we have Lucifer, who with equal aplomb leads us to the battlefield to teach us the yoga of intellect and action. Unlike more orthodox forms of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, however, we do not see our external teachers as embodiments of the divine teacher, or as avatars of our god himself. We are not encouraged to surrender to external individuals as a means of yoking ourselves to the divine. One of the more common practices in Vajrayana Buddhism is to meditate on the image and actions of one’s spiritual teacher, seeing them as the living embodiment of Buddhahood. To quote Wikipedia, guru yoga is “a tantric devotional practice in which the practitioner unites their mindstream with the mindstream of the body, speech, and mind of their guru.” In this practice the teacher and the teaching are seen as one and the same. To conform yourself more with the image of the former is embody the latter.

True Diabolists would recoil at the suggestion of a practice like this. I say true because there are plenty of self-identifying Satanists whose guru yoga can be seen in their shaved heads and goatees, or their incessant Crowley cosplaying.

No, the Diabolist’s Master dwells within them, because Lilith births a seed of his presence into our very soul. She births it into the very soul of the world, in fact. When we learn to recognize Satan’s voice both inside and outside ourselves we have Lilith to thank, for she is our High Priestess, mediating the presence of our Lord.

Note that our Lord’s voice is present both within and without us. For as much as Diabolists are not called to give their will over entirely to another person, neither are they called to renounce the external world. On the contrary, Satan wants us to stoop ever more deeply into its dark depths. For the world is Lilith’s glorious body, and our Lord, who bestows upon us our eternal spirit, desires most of all to become entangled in her limbs.

But just because Diabolists are not directed to cast their crowns at the feet of human gurus, that doesn’t mean we won’t have flesh-and-blood teachers or masters in our life. Brethren should consider the Devil’s statement, “I sway the development of the creatures of the earth. I influence the affairs of all who are under my hand” (“Apocalypsis Satanae”). Lucifer will absolutely put people in our path whom we are meant to learn from. They will be our initiators and instructors, inducting us further into his mysteries.

These student-master relationships will sometimes be explicit. For example, when we enroll in a course to learn a specific skill. In these situations, we are surrendering a portion of our time and will in order to come under a teacher’s guidance to learn. We should never give complete control of ourselves over to another, of course, but being a student requires respecting the authority of another.

Most of the masters we seek to learn from in life will likely not be occultists. Diabolism is primarily a solitary path, so some Diabolists may have little to no interaction with others on the path at all. But even an entirely solitary Diabolist is going to have teachers through books and other media. Some Diabolists will participate in groupwork, however. Perhaps not always in a full-blown coven, but they will have a more experienced Diabolist or LHPer whose instruction they seek.