Most currents of the left-hand path center on a figure from myth: a serpent, a fallen angel, a god of the desert, a dragon of the deep. The figures differ, but most of them have one thing in common. They stood against an established order, and they were punished for it.
The Order's own emblem is the serpent, and its texts center on no figure at all. But anyone who reads in the literature of the path will meet these figures at once. This page introduces them, says where each comes from, and describes how the left-hand path has read them. The Order's position on all of them is stated in its Philosophy: they are honored as images of the questioning intellect, and no being, real or imagined, is owed obedience.
Three Ways of Reading a Figure
Practitioners relate to these figures in three broad ways, and the same person may use all three at different times.
- As a being. The figure is a real and conscious intelligence, independent of the practitioner, who can be approached, addressed, and learned from. This is the theistic reading.
- As a symbol. The figure is an image of something in human nature: the will to know, the refusal to submit, the power of desire, the fact of death. It is real in the way a poem is real. This is the symbolic reading.
- As a mask. The figure is a form the practitioner deliberately takes on for the length of a working, in order to reach a state of mind that is otherwise out of reach. Whether anything stands behind the mask is left open. This is the working reading, and it asks for no belief beyond the willingness to act as if.
The Order does not choose among these. It asks only that the practitioner know which one they are using, and write it down.
The Figures
The Serpent of the Garden
The one who told the first humans that the fruit would open their eyes, and was cursed for it. In the common reading, the deceiver. In the reading of certain ancient schools, and of the Order, the first teacher, who gave knowledge freely and asked nothing. The Order's understanding of this figure is given in full on the page The Serpent and the Open Ring.
The Light-Bearer
Lucifer is a Latin word meaning "bringer of light," and it began as a name for the morning star, the planet that rises before the sun. It entered scripture in a taunt against a fallen king, compared to the morning star cast down from heaven, and only later was it joined to the story of an angel who rebelled out of pride. The poets made that angel magnificent. To the currents that take his name he stands for illumination, for knowledge sought against prohibition, and for the pride that will not accept a subordinate place.
The Accuser
In Hebrew, satan is not at first a name. It is a role: the adversary, the accuser, the one who stands opposite. In the oldest stories he is a member of the heavenly court whose office is to test the claims of the righteous. Later tradition made him the prince of everything opposed to God. The modern currents that bear his name have gone back, knowingly or not, to something like the older sense. Their Satan is the one who says no: the opponent of every authority that asks to be taken on trust, and the advocate of the body, the world, and the self against those who would have them despised.
Set
The Egyptian god of the red desert, the storm, and the foreigner. He murdered his brother, the god of the ordered and fertile land, and fought his nephew for the throne. He was also, in the same religion, the only god strong enough to stand at the prow of the sun's boat each night and drive back the serpent of chaos. For centuries he was the honored patron of kings, and afterward he was reviled. The esoteric current takes him as the oldest form of the Prince of Darkness, and as the principle of the self that stands apart from nature and knows that it does.
Set's great enemy is a serpent. Myth is not a system, and the figures of the adversary do not always agree with one another. Anyone who tries to assemble them into a single consistent pantheon will have to leave a good deal out.
The Fire-Thief
In Greek myth, Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals, and who was chained to a rock for it, where an eagle tore at him daily. He is the adversary as benefactor, punished not for doing harm but for giving a gift that the gods had reserved to themselves. Of all the figures on this page, he stands closest to the Order's reading of the serpent.
The Dragons of the Deep
Many mythologies set a great serpent or dragon of the waters against the gods of order. Babylon had Tiamat, the salt sea, from whose divided body heaven and earth were formed. The Hebrew scriptures remember Leviathan. Egypt had Apep, who attacks the sun each night. Greece had Typhon, India had Vritra, and the north had Jormungand, the serpent that lies in the sea around the world, biting its own tail, and that will rise at the end of things.
In the stories these are the enemies of the gods. The Draconian current reads them as the power that was there before creation and that the gods of order never quite destroyed: a force of boundless possibility, sleeping under the world and under the mind, which the practitioner sets out to wake.
Lilith
She begins among the storm spirits of ancient Mesopotamia. In a medieval Jewish legend she becomes the first wife of the first man, made from the same earth as he was, who refused to lie beneath him, spoke the secret name of God, and left the garden of her own will. Tradition made her the mother of demons. The left-hand path honors her as an image of sovereignty that will not bargain, and of everything in desire that refuses to be made respectable.
Kali
The dark goddess of time and death, garlanded with severed heads, who dances in the cremation ground and destroys illusion. She stands at the center of several of the left-hand tantric schools from which the path took its name. She is also a living goddess, loved as a mother by millions of people, and in her own tradition she is in no sense an adversary. Western writers who list her among devils have misread her. She appears here because readers will meet her in those lists.
Loki
The trickster of the northern gods: shape-changer, thief, and father of the wolf, the world-serpent, and the queen of the dead. His schemes win the gods their greatest treasures and bring about their doom. He is the adversary as the principle of change, the one who will not let any order, however splendid, mistake itself for permanent.
The Lords of Below
Every pantheon has its rulers of the underworld and its keepers of thresholds: Hades, the unseen king of the Greek dead; Hecate, the torch-bearing goddess of the crossroads, who holds the keys; Ereshkigal, queen of the great below in the oldest literature of Mesopotamia. They are not rebels. They are simply the powers that govern what the living prefer not to think about, and the goetic and chthonic currents of the path go to them as one goes to the dark itself: to learn what is kept there.
The Goat of the Sabbath
Baphomet began as a word. It appears in the records of the trials of a military order in the early fourteenth century, whose members were accused of worshipping an idol by that name, and confessed to it under torture. It received its familiar form more than five hundred years later, in the 1850s, when a French occultist drew a winged, goat-headed, androgynous figure, seated, with a torch between its horns, one arm pointing up and the other down. The figure was not intended as a devil. It was a diagram of opposites joined: human and animal, male and female, above and below, with the alchemical words for dissolving and binding written on its arms. In the twentieth century the goat's head, set inside an inverted five-pointed star, became the best-known emblem of the adversary. See Symbols of the Left-Hand Path.
The Figures at a Glance
| Figure | Source | Read as |
|---|---|---|
| The Serpent | The garden story | Knowledge given freely |
| The Light-Bearer | Latin name of the morning star | Illumination and pride |
| The Accuser | Hebrew scripture | Opposition and the testing of claims |
| Set | Egyptian religion | The self that stands apart |
| The Fire-Thief | Greek myth | The gift that was forbidden |
| The Dragons | Myths of many peoples | Primordial power before order |
| Lilith | Mesopotamian and Jewish legend | Sovereignty that will not submit |
| Kali | Hindu tradition | Time, death, and the end of illusion |
| Loki | Norse myth | Change, and the limits of every order |
| The Lords of Below | Underworld myths of many peoples | What is kept in the dark |
| Baphomet | Medieval accusation, modern drawing | Opposites joined in one figure |
What the Figures Share
Set side by side, the figures of the adversary proper show a pattern. Kali and the lords of below, as noted above, stand apart from it.
- Each stands outside an order that claims to be whole. There is a garden, a heaven, a court of gods, a fertile kingdom, and there is one who does not fit in it or will not stay in it.
- Each is connected with something the order withholds. Knowledge, fire, a secret name, the truth about death.
- Each is punished. Cursed, cast down, chained, slain, or driven into the desert.
- Each was described by the other side. Nearly everything we know of these figures was written by those who honored the gods that defeated them. The left-hand path reads the old stories the way one reads the victor's account of a war: attentively, and with a question about what was left out.
Four Cautions
A figure is not a master. The whole value of these images lies in their refusal to submit. A practitioner who ends by submitting to one of them has missed the point. If anything encountered in a working demands obedience, payment, secrecy, or harm, the Order's position is plain: no being, real or imagined, is owed obedience. Close the working, record what happened, and read the chapter When to Stop in First Workings.
Some of these figures belong to living religions. They are discussed under traditions that are not ours to claim on the Currents page.
Not everything demonized deserves honor. The victors slandered a good deal that was admirable. They also, sometimes, feared things that were worth fearing. The left-hand path reverses a judgment only after examining it. To admire a figure merely because it was condemned is the error the third coil calls shedding everything: a belief rejected without examination still governs, in the opposite direction.
A collection of masks is not a face. It is easy to pass from figure to figure, acquiring names, images, and statues, and to mistake the acquisition for progress. This is the danger of the first coil, novelty mistaken for transformation. One figure studied for a year will teach more than twelve studied for a month each.
Working With a Figure
The Order prescribes no rituals and has none for any figure on this page, the serpent included. Practitioners who choose to work with one may find the following useful. It is advice, and it can be ignored.
- Read the sources first. Go to the myths themselves, in translation, before going to any modern book about them. Note what the old texts actually say, and how much of the modern figure is recent. The Study page describes how.
- Write down what the figure is to you. In one paragraph, in your record, before you begin: which reading you are using, and what you hope to learn.
- Use the ordinary structure. Preparation, opening, statement, operation, closing, record, as described on the Practice page. A figure does not need a special rite, and the more elaborate the rite, the harder it becomes to tell what the figure contributed.
- Keep observation and interpretation apart. "The serpent spoke to me" is an interpretation. What you saw, heard, felt, and thought is the observation. Write the second, and then, separately, the first.
- Close clearly, and take the mask off. Whatever you took on for the working, set it down at the end. The practitioner who cannot tell where the figure ends and they begin has met the danger of the sixth coil early.