Self-deification is the phrase by which the left-hand path most often names its aim, and it is the phrase most likely to be misunderstood, by those who hear it and by those who use it. It can mean something sober and difficult. It can also mean something grandiose and false. The two are easily confused, and telling them apart is a large part of the work.
The Claim
Most religious and mystical traditions agree on the direction of the spiritual life, whatever else divides them. The self is to be given up: surrendered to a god, merged with an absolute, or seen through as an illusion. The left-hand path proposes the opposite direction. The self is to be kept, strengthened, clarified, and made the governing power of its own existence. Where the other paths end in union, this one ends in a self that is more distinct than it was at the beginning.
To call this self-deification is to say that the qualities religions have reserved for gods, among them sovereignty, self-knowledge, creative power, and freedom from any law not of one's own making, are qualities a human being may properly seek. The first of the Order's Seven Tenets puts the matter without the theological word: the self is a consciousness to be strengthened, refined, and made sovereign.
Four Readings
Practitioners mean at least four different things by the phrase. They are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same, and a good deal of confusion comes from sliding between them.
The Carnal Reading
There are no gods. Human beings invented them, as enlarged portraits of themselves, and then knelt to the portraits. To deify oneself is to take the portrait down and stand where it stood: to become one's own highest value, the judge of one's own conduct, and the one responsible for one's own satisfactions and one's own mistakes. On this reading the phrase is deliberately ironic. One becomes a god in the only sense in which there ever were any.
The Psychological Reading
The gods are real as powers of the mind. To deify the self is to become whole: to recover what was disowned, to bring the unconscious under the eye of consciousness, and to become a person whose parts are no longer at war. On this reading self-deification is another name for the completion of a human being, and the left-hand path differs from a course of therapy chiefly in its methods, its imagery, and its refusal to treat adjustment to the world as the goal.
The Metaphysical Reading
The self-aware mind is something nature cannot fully account for. It can be strengthened by deliberate work until it becomes a being in its own right, able to continue when the body does not. Immortality on this reading is neither a gift nor a birthright. It is an achievement, open to those who do the work and to no one else. The esoteric current described on the Currents page holds this view, and names the process with an Egyptian verb, kheper: to come into being.
The Magical Reading
To become a god is to acquire a god's powers: to change the world by will. This is the reading most often advertised and least often demonstrated. The Order does not dismiss it. It observes that claims of this kind are the easiest of all to believe about oneself, and it refers them to the record. See On Magic.
The Order has had Keepers who held each of these readings, and it prefers none. What matters is that a practitioner can say which one they mean, and notices when it changes.
Becoming, Not Arriving
On every one of these readings, self-deification is a direction and not a destination. No tradition of the left-hand path that deserves attention claims that anyone has finished. The serious ones describe the aim with verbs: becoming, coming into being, remaking. A practitioner who announces that they have arrived has, by that announcement, shown that they have not.
This is why The Seven Coils insists that its stages are not the rungs of a ladder, and why its 2022 revision removed the language that had presented the sixth coil, the Rising, as a summit. The coils are passed through many times.
The Error That Shadows the Aim
Every aim has a characteristic way of going wrong, and the more exalted the aim, the worse the error. The error that shadows self-deification is inflation: the self does not grow, it swells. The practitioner comes to believe that they are already superior, already chosen, already beyond the judgment of others, and from that point on every experience is taken as confirmation.
An old myth describes this condition exactly. It tells of a maker who looked at the world he had fashioned, saw nothing above himself, and declared, "I am god, and there is no other." He was not wicked. He was blind, and the name the myth gives him says so. The uncomfortable fact for the left-hand path is that this figure is a caricature of its own ideal, close enough to be mistaken for it. The Order's text The Blind Maker is devoted to the difference.
A sovereign self knows that it has a horizon, and that there is more beyond it: other selves, facts it has not met, and its own future corrections. An inflated self takes its horizon for the edge of the world. The first can be contradicted and remain standing. The second cannot bear contradiction at all, which is why it so often surrounds itself with followers.
The signs of inflation recur throughout the Order's texts: the belief that one has been chosen or set above others, contempt for those who do not share one's practice, the need to be admired, and the gathering of people who agree. A god who requires worshippers is not sovereign. He is dependent on the least reliable thing there is.
Other Selves
The oldest objection to the left-hand path is that a philosophy of the sovereign self must end in the abuse of everyone else. The objection deserves a direct answer, and Venom and Remedy gives it.
If the self is of supreme value, then selves are of supreme value, and there is more than one of them. A path that honors only the practitioner's own sovereignty has not understood its first principle. Other people are sovereign selves in their own right, exactly as the practitioner is trying to become. They are not material, not audience, and not rungs. The measure of a self that has grown, as against one that has merely swollen, is that it has more regard for the reality of other people than it had before, not less.
The Order's Understanding
The founding text of the Order says: we seek to become something greater than we were. It does not say greater than others, and it does not say how great. The Order has never added to that sentence, and it has no doctrine of what a deified self is or what becomes of it after death.
What the Order does add is the seventh tenet. In the old stories a god is known by what it gives: light, fire, a world, a law, a name. Whatever else deification may mean, the Order holds that it is not complete while everything the self has gained is still held inside it. The seventh coil is not a renunciation of the sovereign self. It is what a sovereign self does. The ring is the work, the point at its center is the self, and the gap is the gift.
Questions for the Record
The following questions are offered for the practitioner's own notebook. There are no correct answers to them, and the answers will change. That they change is the point of asking.
- When I say that I seek to become my own god, which of the four readings do I mean? Which do I actually act on?
- What, specifically, would be different about my conduct tomorrow if I had made progress?
- Who is still able to tell me that I am wrong? When did I last change my mind because of them?
- Can I be ordinary for a day, unremarked and unadmired, without distress?
- Has my regard for other people grown or shrunk since I began?
- What have I made that I have given away?