A path that makes the self its center must sooner or later ask what becomes of the self. Every current of the left-hand path has an answer, and the answers do not agree. The Order's founding text says only that we seek to become something greater than we were, and the page Self-Deification records that the Order has no doctrine of what becomes of a self after death. It has kept to that.
This page sets out the answers others give, the images of hell and the underworld that the path has inherited, and the practices by which practitioners meet the dead and their own grief. It does not choose among them.
Four Answers
The End
The carnal current, and many practitioners of no current, hold that nothing survives. The purpose of life is to live it, and the only immortality available is the mark a person leaves on others: what they taught, what they made, the lives they changed. Those who hold it often say that what makes a person immortal is the impression they leave on those who live on. On this answer the seventh tenet, What Is Gained Is Given Back, is the whole of the afterlife.
Return
Others hold that what a person is returns at death to a larger whole and is redistributed, like water to the sea. The individual does not survive, but nothing is lost. This answer resembles teachings of several Eastern traditions, and those who hold it often say that it is all right not to know more than that.
Continuance by Achievement
The esoteric current described on the Currents page holds that the self-aware mind can be strengthened by deliberate work until it becomes a being in its own right, able to continue when the body does not. Survival on this answer is neither given nor earned from a god. It is made. Some who hold a version of this view speak of the first moments after death as a test of whether the self can keep its own shape. The Tibetan teachings on the passage between death and rebirth also describe a test, though in their account the clear light that appears at death is to be recognized and rested in, not refused.
Continuance by Relationship
Devotional practitioners hold that the dead go to the adversary, and that his realm is not a place of punishment but a kingdom: ordered, populated, and governed. Some hold that the dead may return as guides and tutors to the living who call on them. Others hold that there are many hells, and that a self too weak to keep its own will may be bound in one by a stronger power.
| Answer | What survives | What follows for the living |
|---|---|---|
| The end | Nothing but what one leaves to others | Live fully, and give what you can |
| Return | Nothing individual; everything is redistributed | Accept not knowing |
| Achievement | A self made strong enough to continue | The work of a lifetime is preparation |
| Relationship | The self, received by the adversary | Devotion now determines what comes after |
Hells
The hell of popular imagination is fiery, and it is only one of many. Tibetan Buddhism describes eight hot hells and eight cold ones. The northern peoples imagined the realm of the dead as cold and dim. A great medieval Italian poem placed at the very bottom of hell not fire but a frozen lake, with the arch-traitor locked in the ice. The biblical name for hell, Gehenna, comes from a valley outside Jerusalem, as the page On Sacrifice relates. And the grimoires, which catalog the spirits by rank, imagine hell less as a prison than as a court.
The left-hand path, almost without exception, rejects hell as a punishment for disobedience, which is the one thing it was most often used to threaten. Some practitioners read the old hells as maps of the mind: the frozen places where a self has stopped moving, the fires of a compulsion that cannot be satisfied. The reading is optional, and like everything on this page it is offered, not taught.
The Order would add one practical observation. Any group or teacher who tells a practitioner that leaving will bring a bad death, or a bad afterlife, is using the oldest threat of the religions the path left behind, and the page Working With Others lists it among the signs that it is time to go.
The Cremation Ground
Some adepts of the left-hand tantric schools, from which the path took its name, practiced in the cremation grounds of India, among the things their society most feared. Ascetics in that tradition still do. Western accounts of them are frequently lurid, and the facts are more modest: they live and meditate among the dead in order to look steadily at what the mind most wants to avoid, until it no longer rules them.
The same purpose appears in gentler forms in nearly every contemplative tradition: the meditation on one's own death, on the certainty that it will come and the uncertainty of when. Those who practice it report that it ends, after the fear, in something unexpected, a sharpened sense of being alive at all. The second working in First Workings, the Descent, is built on the same principle at a smaller dose.
If thoughts of death become thoughts of dying
Contemplating mortality is not the same as wishing to die. If a practice of this kind turns into thoughts of ending your own life, stop the practice at once and speak to someone qualified to help, today. No working, and no teaching on this site, is a substitute for that.
The Dead
Many practitioners keep a relationship with the dead. Some keep the names and pictures of their own dead on an altar. Some study their family histories, and find in them local spirits and powers they had not known were theirs. Many speak to the dead at a fire on the night of Samhain, described on the page Festivals of the Left-Hand Path. The goetic and chthonic currents go further, and some of their practitioners work with the dead as a necromancer would, to question them.
The Order takes no position on whether the dead hear. A practitioner who speaks to them should record what they said, what they heard, and what they felt, in that order, and keep the record honest. Practitioners who have attended seances sometimes say, years later, that they still cannot tell whether what they saw was real or staged, which is the right answer to give when one does not know.
Dreams of the Dead
Dreams of those who have died are among the most affecting entries any record contains. Practitioners who have kept their night pages for years report patterns that recur: the dream of an unfinished conversation, the dream in which the dead person will not meet the dreamer's eyes, and the dream of a farewell, after which the person does not appear again. These patterns are well known outside the left-hand path as well.
Record them as The Nightside Record asks: at once, in the present tense, with the dream set down as it was and any interpretation kept separate. Hold the interpretation loosely. A dream of the dead may be a visit. It is certainly a part of grief, and it deserves to be written down either way.
Grief
Practitioners who have been through great losses tend to say the same few things, and they are worth repeating. Grief comes from love, and is its measure. Mourning isolates a person even among people who love them, and hearing others speak of their own losses helps. Practice can hold grief: a working of farewell, a letter written to the dead and burned, an evening kept for them. But it does not replace care, and several practitioners who came through the worst of it credit a counselor alongside their practice. Their advice is to give counseling time, to keep looking until the right counselor is found, and, where possible, to find one who respects the practitioner's path.
One caution needs to be stated plainly. A loss, whether of a pregnancy, a parent, a home, or a friend, has causes in the world. Any person who tells the bereaved that the loss was caused by a curse adds a second wound to the first, and should not be listened to.
Legacy
Whatever becomes of the self, something remains of every practitioner: what they made, what they taught, and what they gave away. The seventh coil, the Open Ring, asks the practitioner to give their work away while they live, without needing to know what anyone does with it. The Order's own texts carry no names, and their authors' legacy is exactly that: work in the hands of people who will never know who did it.
Several older practitioners speak of a last stage of the path in which they withdraw from public life, return to quiet places, and set their affairs in order. Some tell their families plainly to sell whatever they collected, since they will have no further use for it. The Order commends the spirit of that instruction.
Where the Order Stands
The Order has no doctrine of death or of what follows it, and it does not intend to acquire one. Practitioners of the Order hold every answer on this page, and some hold none. The Order asks only two things. The first is that the question never be used to frighten anyone into obedience, payment, or silence. The second is that it be asked in the record, where the answer can be written down, read back after a year, and changed. The serpent sheds its skin many times. Whether it sheds the last one, no one has come back to report.