Left and Right
An influential 1909 study argued this hand-favouring pattern is fundamentally social rather than anatomical in origin. A specific Sanskrit tantric ritual term was later imported by nineteenth-century Theosophists and given the much darker meaning of 'black magic' it now carries in Western occultism — a meaning the original Indian term did not itself carry.
Robert Hertz, 'La prééminence de la main droite' (1909)
The widespread symbolic favouring of the right hand over the left across many cultures, and the specific Indian term 'left-hand path' now used in Western occultism for transgressive or forbidden practice.
