The library that has stood at orderoftheserpent.org since 2016 has been rebuilt. Nothing has been removed from it, and no text has changed in substance. What has changed is how the texts are presented, and how easy they are to take away.
What Is New
- A page for every text. Each text in the Library now has its own permanent address, with a table of contents for the longer ones, so that a text can be linked, cited, and returned to directly.
- Plain text downloads. Every text and every Journal entry has a button that saves it as a plain text file. Plain text can be read on any device, by any program, and will remain readable long after the formats of today have been forgotten.
- Clean printing. Pages now print without the site's navigation, in black on white, so that any text can be printed and bound at home.
- A new introduction. The Left-Hand Path replaces the much shorter overview that stood on the old site.
- An expanded glossary. The Glossary now covers the principal terms used throughout the Library, with a filter for finding them quickly.
- A start page and a site map. Start Here suggests a reading order for newcomers, and the Site Map lists every page on the site.
What Has Not Changed
The site still sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from any other server: no fonts, no scripts, no images, no embedded media. The Privacy page says so in full. It still requires no account and asks for nothing. And everything on it, including the design and the code, remains dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal.
The site is built from plain HTML, a single stylesheet, and a single small script. Every page can be read, navigated, and printed without the script, and the site works on old devices and slow connections. We chose this deliberately. A library that depends on a complicated platform is a library that can be locked by whoever controls the platform.
Old Addresses
Some addresses from the old site no longer exist. If a link you have kept no longer works, the Site Map lists everything that is here now. Every text that was on the old site is on this one.