ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the spatial properties of extension and simultaneity in order to gain a greater understanding of the workings of religion as a focus of knowledge-power in relation to left and right. It pursues the traces of demons, witches, and magic evident in today's representations of the left hand back into mediaeval and early modern Europe. The chapter considers non-Western representations, and practices of the left in order to obtain a comparative view of the possibilities for locating religion in the left hand. In Tantrism, the centrality of the human body and its internal dualities, as both the site and means of self-realisation, knowledge, and power, is instructive for understanding more about Western religious/secular relations and their apparent lack of rootedness in human bodies. In the West, individuals are either male or female, destined for heaven or hell, religious or secular/non-religious.
