Currents of the Left-Hand Path

The left-hand path is not one tradition. It is a set of currents that share an aim, disagree about nearly everything else, and borrow from one another constantly. A practitioner who knows only one of them knows the path about as well as a traveler who has seen one city knows a country.

This page describes the principal currents of the present day: what each holds, how each tends to work, and where the Order of the Serpent agrees and differs. The descriptions are broad. Within every current there are practitioners who would dispute them, and most practitioners draw on more than one.

What the Currents Share

Students of religion who have examined these groups from outside tend to find the same three features in all of them: an ideology of individualism, a goal of self-deification, and an antinomian stance toward received religious and moral norms. The introduction to the left-hand path adds two more that practitioners themselves would recognize: an understanding of the path as initiatory, and a deliberate turn toward the nightside.

The currents differ on three questions above all. Is the adversary a real being, or a symbol? Is the self to be perfected within this world, beyond it, or against it? And how should practitioners be organized, if at all?

The Carnal Current

The most widely known current of the modern left-hand path is atheistic, and is usually called rationalist or atheistic Satanism. It holds that there are no gods, that humanity invented them all, and that human beings are animals living in a universe indifferent to their existence. It takes the adversary as a symbol of pride, liberty, and individualism, the qualities that religions of obedience call evil, and it concludes that the individual should occupy the place those religions gave to a god. Its adherents describe themselves, in a precise and limited sense, as their own gods: their own highest value, and the sole judges of their own lives.

Ritual in this current is understood as psychodrama: a theater of the emotions, performed for its effect on the performer. Its ethics are worldly and unsentimental, built on self-interest, responsibility to the responsible, and justice in place of mercy. Its organizations are typically hierarchical, with registered membership and degrees, and they hold their texts under copyright.

Where the Order stands. The Order shares this current's refusal to kneel and its insistence on evidence. It does not share its certainty that the question of the gods is closed, its lack of interest in initiation as an inner transformation, or its view of teaching as property.

The Esoteric Current

A second current holds that the adversary is real: a conscious intelligence, older than the names the religions gave it, and the source of the thing that makes human beings unlike other animals. It calls that thing the Black Flame, or the gift: the questioning, self-aware intellect, which nature did not need and cannot account for. Observers call this current esoteric or theistic Satanism, though many of its adherents decline the word. In its best-known form it identifies the giver with Set, the Egyptian god of the desert and the storm, and understands him as a teacher and an example. He is honored. He is not worshipped.

The aim of this current is self-deification in the fullest sense: the strengthening of the individual psyche until it becomes a permanent and self-sustaining being. Its central term is an Egyptian verb, usually given as kheper, meaning to come into being or to become. It distinguishes the objective universe, the world of nature and shared meaning, from the subjective universe of each individual, and it holds that the highest magic is the kind that changes the second. Its organizations are built on the model of the old magical lodge: degrees, a priesthood, a governing council, local chapters, specialized sub-orders, and a body of teaching released by grade. The degrees are described as recognitions of a change the initiate has already made alone.

Where the Order stands. This is the current from which the Order learned the most, and with which it disagrees most exactly. It agrees that initiation is self-initiation and can only be recognized, never conferred. It concludes that if this is so, recognition belongs to the initiate too, and that a teaching withheld by grade is a locked grimoire whatever the reason given. On the reality of the giver, the Order takes no position.

The Luciferian Current

The Luciferian current takes as its center the light-bearer: the morning star, the angel who would not serve, the one who brings illumination against prohibition. Where the carnal current emphasizes the body and the esoteric current the isolate self, the Luciferian emphasizes knowledge: the pursuit of wisdom, the refinement of the mind, and mastery of oneself. It often draws on the old legend of the fallen angels who descended and taught humanity the forbidden arts.

It exists in both theistic and symbolic forms, and many of its practitioners work with a range of figures as masks or aspects of a single power, from the radiant bringer of light to the prince of darkness. It tends to be less antinomian in tone than its neighbors, and more concerned with balance: light and dark held together in one disciplined self.

Where the Order stands. The Order's reading of the serpent as the giver of knowledge is Luciferian in everything but name. The Order differs in centering no figure at all, and in holding that knowledge once gained must be given away.

The Draconian Current

The Draconian current takes the dragon or serpent as the image of a primordial power that is older than the gods of order and present in the depths of every human being. It holds that the myths of every people preserve the same memory, of dark and serpentine forces that give humanity access to illumination, and it sets out to wake that force deliberately. Its methods are drawn from several sources at once: the Qliphoth, the shadow side of the Kabbalistic tree, worked as a map of descent; the serpent power of the tantric body; the symbolism of alchemy; and the night side of the northern myths, with their giants, their wolf, and their world-serpent.

This current has produced two quite different kinds of organization. One is the initiatory order in the classical sense, with applications, grades tied to the stages of its map, and working groups in several countries. The other is the open temple, which charges no fees, keeps no hierarchy, and runs open workings that anyone may join for a season without becoming a member of anything.

Where the Order stands. By its emblem the Order is this current's nearest relative, and readers often take it for a Draconian body. It is not one. The Order has no cosmology of the dragon and teaches no system of spheres or tunnels. Its serpent is an emblem and a set of lessons, described on the page The Serpent and the Open Ring. It has more in common with the open temple, which also charges nothing and keeps no hierarchy.

The Anticosmic Current

The most severe current holds that the ordered universe is itself the prison. Drawing on the Gnostic myth of a flawed maker, it regards the cosmos as the work of a tyrant, the adversarial gods as liberators, and the spark within the practitioner as a fragment of the boundless chaos that existed before creation and will exist after it. Its aim is not sovereignty within the world but release from it.

Some observers question whether this belongs to the left-hand path at all, since a path that ends in the dissolution of everything, the self included, has arrived by a dark road at something very like the right-hand goal.

Where the Order stands. The Order takes no position on how the world was made. It does not share this current's conclusion: it does not hold that the world is a prison or that existence is an error, and it regards contempt for the world as a poison. Its own reading of the Gnostic myth, and its reasons, are set out in The Blind Maker.

The Goetic Current

A large and varied current works directly with spirits: the daemons cataloged in the old grimoires, the dead, and the powers of particular places. Its practitioners differ sharply over how. The older method, taken from the grimoires themselves, commands the spirit from within a protective circle by the authority of divine names. A newer devotional approach reverses this and treats the same spirits as patrons to be honored. A third approach, growing in recent years, rejects both command and devotion in favor of relationship: slow, reciprocal, bodily familiarity with spirits understood as genuinely other.

This current, which is also called chthonic for its concern with the dead and the underworld, overlaps with traditional witchcraft and with necromancy, and it is the one most closely tied to the scholarly recovery of old texts.

Where the Order stands. The Order's texts contain no spirit work, and the Order takes no position on what spirits are. Practitioners who undertake such work are asked to hold it to the same standards as any other: the record, the separation of observation from interpretation, and the rule that no being is owed obedience. See On Magic.

Chaos Magic

Chaos magic is not, strictly, a left-hand path current, but almost every contemporary practitioner has been shaped by it. It holds that the effective part of magic is technique, not doctrine: that belief is a tool to be adopted for the length of a working and then set down, that any symbol system will serve if it is used with full commitment, and that the test of a method is its results. Its best-known technique is the sigil, a wish reduced to an abstract mark and then deliberately forgotten.

Where the Order stands. The Order shares its empiricism and its indifference to pedigree. It is more cautious about results, which are easy to count generously, and it holds that a practitioner who changes beliefs like coats may end by not knowing which beliefs are theirs. The fifth coil, integration, exists for that reason.

The Philosophical Current

Some people hold the principles of the left-hand path, the sovereignty of the individual, the examination of all received values, the making of oneself, with no ritual or devotional practice whatever. They find their sources in the philosophers of self-overcoming and of radical individualism, and they regard the mythology as decoration.

Where the Order stands. The Order regards them as fellow travelers. Nothing in its practice requires belief in anything beyond what the practitioner can test. It would only add that an examined life needs some method of examination, and that the record, stillness, and the Inventory described in First Workings ask for no metaphysics at all.

Traditions That Are Not Ours to Claim

Several living religions are regularly filed under the left-hand path by outsiders. The tantric schools of South Asia, from which the name was taken, continue under their own teachers and vows. Certain Afro-Brazilian traditions speak of working with spirits of "the left." The popular devotion to a saint of death in Mexico has a dark aspect that is sought out for protection and for harm. The fierce goddesses of India appear in Western lists of dark deities, beside figures they have nothing to do with.

These are community religions, with priesthoods, obligations, and histories of their own, and many of them were formed under conditions of persecution that no Western occultist has shared. Some of their practitioners accept the label of the left hand. Many do not. The Order mentions them only to say that they are not the modern Western left-hand path, that they are not raw material for it, and that anyone drawn to them should go to the people whose traditions they are.

The Currents Compared

The table simplifies. It is offered as a way of holding the differences in mind, not as a description any practitioner is bound to accept.

Where the Order Stands

The Order of the Serpent belongs to none of these currents and has learned from all of them. Most of its founders came out of other initiatory orders, as the History of the Order relates. What it kept from them is on this site. What it refused is stated in the three resolutions of The Shed Skin.

On the first of the three questions, whether the adversary is real, the Order takes no position and is open to practitioners who answer it either way. On the second, it holds that the self is to be made sovereign in this world, among other selves who are owed the same regard. On the third, it holds that practitioners need no organization at all, and that any organization they do form should charge nothing, hide nothing, and command no one.

A reader who finds that another current answers these questions better should follow it. The page Working With Others offers some questions worth asking first.