The left-hand path is better known by its symbols than by its ideas. Most people have seen the inverted star and the goat's head. Few could say where either comes from, and fewer still what the people who use them mean by them.
This page describes the principal symbols of the path: the origin of each, as far as it is known, and the readings it has been given. Almost none of them was invented by the left-hand path. Most are far older, and most meant something else first.
The Left Hand
The oldest symbol of the path is its name. In most human cultures the right hand is the hand of the oath, the greeting, and the blessing, and the left is the hand of what is unclean, unlucky, or concealed. The Latin for "left" gave English the word "sinister." The parable of the last judgment sets the saved on the right and the lost on the left. In the Indian tradition from which the term was taken, the left is the side of what orthodoxy forbids.
To call a path left-hand is therefore to say, in one word, that it goes where respectable religion does not. The Order's sigil keeps the reference: the gap in the Open Ring faces left, and the Gesture of the Open Ring is traced with the left hand.
The Serpent and the Dragon
The serpent is the most widespread emblem of the adversary, and the Order's own. Its meanings, as giver of knowledge, as image of renewal, as venom and remedy, and as gathered strength, are set out on the page The Serpent and the Open Ring. The serpent biting its tail, the ouroboros, is the old sign of a cycle complete in itself.
The dragon is the serpent enlarged: winged, crowned, and associated with the sea, the storm, and the time before creation. In the oldest myths it is what the gods of order had to defeat. In the Draconian current it is the primordial power that the practitioner seeks to waken, and it is usually drawn rising, uncoiling, or encircling the world.
The Inverted Pentagram
The five-pointed star is one of the oldest drawn figures there is. Ancient geometers admired the proportions hidden in it and used it as a sign of health. Medieval Christians read it as the five wounds or the five virtues. For most of its history it had no dark meaning in either orientation.
The distinction between the two orientations dates from the occult revival of the nineteenth century. The star with one point upward was said to show spirit ruling the four elements, and the star with two points upward to show the reverse: matter over spirit, the horns of the goat raised against heaven. It was meant as a warning. The modern left-hand path adopted the inverted star for exactly the reason it had been condemned, and reads it as the affirmation of the body and the world, or as spirit descending into matter to rule there, and not fleeing upward out of it. One current sets it plain within a circle, without names or figures, and explains it by its geometry alone.
The Goat
The goat was the animal of the outcast long before it was the animal of the devil: the one set on the left hand at the judgment, and the one driven into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people. Medieval imagination gave the devil its horns and hooves.
The goat-headed figure known as Baphomet was drawn in France in the 1850s as an image of opposites reconciled, and its history is told on the page Faces of the Adversary. Later in the same century a goat's face was fitted into the inverted pentagram, its horns in the two upper points, its ears in the side points, and its beard in the lowest. In the 1960s that design, ringed with Hebrew letters spelling the name Leviathan, was adopted as the emblem of the best-known organization of the adversary, and it has been the most recognized sign of the left-hand path ever since.
The Black Flame
The Black Flame is the left-hand path's name for the thing that makes a human being capable of the path at all: the self-aware, questioning intellect, pictured as a dark fire. The image joins two older ones, the fire stolen from the gods and the divine spark that certain ancient schools believed to be buried in each person.
The currents differ about its source. For some it is the gift of the Prince of Darkness. For others it is a fragment of the chaos before creation. For others again it is simply consciousness, named in a way that honors it. The Order's texts do not use the term, but what they call the questioning intellect, and honor in the serpent, is the same thing.
The Morning Star and the Torch
The planet that rises before the sun, brightest of the wandering stars, was called the light-bearer in Latin, and gave its name to the angel of the same title. Its appearance at dawn and its disappearance in daylight were read as a rising and a fall. With the torch, which is also carried by the goddess of the crossroads and burns between the horns of the goat, it is the sign of the Luciferian current: light carried by one's own hand into a dark place.
The Tree and Its Shadow
There are two trees in the garden story, one of life and one of knowledge, and the serpent is found at the second. In the Kabbalistic tradition the tree of life became a diagram of ten spheres, describing the descent of the divine into the world and the path of return. Western ceremonial magic took it as its principal map, and the grades of the old lodges were assigned to its spheres.
The same tradition speaks of the Qliphoth, the shells or husks: what is left over from creation, the excluded and unbalanced side of each sphere. Several currents of the left-hand path have made of these a second tree, a tree of the night, and work through it as a map of descent. The Order's texts use neither tree, and practitioners are free to study both.
The Key and the Crossroads
The crossroads is where one road becomes several, where no one lives, and where, in the folklore of many countries, pacts are made and spirits met. It is the natural image of a path that begins with a choice. The key belongs to the same family of symbols: it is carried by the keepers of thresholds, and it opens what was closed.
The Order's founding text has a section called The Key. It concerns the locked book that every order keeps, and the Order's resolution to keep none.
The Inverted Cross
Popular culture treats the cross turned upside down as the sign of the adversary. Its history is otherwise. For most of two thousand years it has been a Christian emblem, recalling the apostle who is said to have asked to be crucified head downward, and it still appears in churches with that meaning.
As a sign of defiance it is recent, and the serious currents of the left-hand path make little use of it. A symbol that only negates another symbol remains dependent on it. It says "not that," and has nothing further to say. The left-hand path is concerned with what the self is to become, and a sign that merely points back at a rejected religion belongs to the first coil, not the later ones.
The Symbols at a Glance
| Symbol | Older meaning | Left-hand reading |
|---|---|---|
| The left hand | The unclean or unlucky side | The road orthodoxy does not take |
| The serpent | The tempter; renewal; healing | Knowledge freely given |
| The dragon | The chaos that the gods defeated | Primordial power to be awakened |
| The inverted pentagram | Matter set over spirit, as a warning | The world and the body affirmed |
| The goat | The outcast and the scapegoat | The condemned nature reclaimed |
| The Black Flame | Stolen fire; the buried spark | The questioning, self-aware mind |
| The morning star | The herald of the day | Light carried by one's own hand |
| The shadow tree | The husks left over from creation | A map of deliberate descent |
| The crossroads | A place of spirits and pacts | The choice that begins the path |
How to Read a Symbol
- Ask who is using it, and when. The same star has meant health, piety, protection, warning, and defiance. A symbol has no meaning apart from the people who use it, and it is a mistake to read the meaning of one century into another.
- Do not judge a person by a symbol. Most people who wear these signs intend no harm to anyone. A few people who intend harm wear them as well. The sign tells you nothing either way; conduct does.
- Distrust the claim of great antiquity. Most of the symbols on this page took their present form within the last two hundred years. This does not make them worthless. It makes them recent, and a practitioner should know the difference.
- A symbol does no work by itself. Wearing a sign is not practice, any more than owning a book is study. The Order's primer says of its own gesture that it is not a spell and protects no one. The same is true of every sign on this page.
The Signs of the Order
The Order of the Serpent has one sigil, the Open Ring, and one gesture, which traces it. Both are described elsewhere on this site, and both are in the public domain. The Order uses no pentagram, no goat, no inverted cross, and no names or letters of any sacred alphabet.
This is not a judgment on those symbols or on anyone who uses them. The Order was founded on a single image, the serpent that gave knowledge away, and it has found that one image, thoroughly understood, is enough. Practitioners are free to combine the Open Ring with any other symbol they please, as the License allows. Whatever they make will mean what they mean by it, and nothing more.