On the Map
This text describes the stages through which the work of self-initiation tends to pass. We call them coils, after the serpent, whose strength lies in the way it gathers itself.
A coil is not a grade. No one can promote you into one, no one can confer one on you, and no one can verify that you are in one. You recognize a coil when you find that you are already in it. The coils are not climbed once, like the rungs of a ladder. Most practitioners pass through some of them many times, return to earlier coils after reaching later ones, and find themselves in more than one at once.
For each coil we describe three things. The task is the work that the coil asks of you. The danger is the way that work most commonly goes wrong. The sign is how you may recognize, in your own record, that the task has been accomplished. None of these descriptions is a test. They are offered so that you can locate yourself, not so that anyone else can.
The map is not the territory. If your own experience contradicts this text, trust your record over the text, and then, if you are willing, write down what you found and give it away.
IThe Hatching
Every serpent begins in an egg, inside a shell it did not choose. The first coil is the breaking of that shell: the moment a question is asked in earnest and cannot afterward be unasked. Who decided what I believe? Why do I obey what I obey? What would I be if I chose?
The task is to ask the question honestly, and to accept responsibility for answering it oneself, rather than handing it to a new authority.
The danger is mistaking novelty for transformation: trading one set of received answers for another, more exotic set, and calling the exchange awakening.
The sign is that you can no longer accept an answer only because of who gave it.
IIThe Ground
A serpent knows the ground with its whole body. The second coil is the building of discipline: the record, the practice of stillness, and study, kept day after day until they are no longer effort but habit. Nothing that follows is possible without them.
The task is consistency. Keep the record without gaps, practice stillness daily, and read with care.
The danger is ritualism: the moment the tool becomes the master, and the practitioner keeps the forms without remembering what they are for. A practitioner in this danger becomes proud of their discipline rather than changed by it.
The sign is a record kept unbroken for a full season, which you have read back, and from which you have learned something you did not expect.
IIIThe Shedding
The third coil is the examination of everything one was given before one could choose, and the release of whatever does not survive the examination. It shares its image with the Order's founding text, The Shed Skin.
The task is to name what you were given, examine each part of it honestly, and choose what you will keep. The Inventory, described in First Workings, is the Order's basic method.
The danger is shedding everything: mistaking contrarianism for freedom, and rejecting what one was given only because one was given it. A belief that you reject without examining is still governing you. It has only changed direction.
The sign is that you can name what you were given, say why you kept what you kept, and say why you released what you released.
IVThe Venom
The fourth coil is the deliberate confrontation with what one fears, forbids, and avoids in oneself. It is the coil most characteristic of the left-hand path, and the one most often misunderstood.
The task is to go, with care and in measured doses, into the places one was taught not to go within oneself: the fears that govern without being seen, the desires that were forbidden without being examined, the parts of the self that were disowned. The aim is not to indulge them, and not to destroy them, but to see them clearly and to end their unseen rule.
The danger is poisoning. It takes two forms. The first is recklessness: taking too large a dose, going too far too fast, and being overwhelmed. The second is cruelty: turning the venom outward, and mistaking harm done to others for transformation of oneself. Transgression in the Order's sense is directed at one's own conditioning, never at the rights or safety of another person.
The sign is that what you feared no longer governs you, and that you harmed no one else in learning it.
VThe Coil
The fifth coil gives this text its name. After the Shedding and the Venom, the self is often scattered: old certainties gone, new knowledge not yet joined together, the will pulled in several directions at once. The fifth coil is the gathering of all of this into a single, coherent self, at rest and ready, as a serpent gathers itself before it rises.
The task is integration. Bring what you have kept, what you have learned, and what you have recovered from the dark into a self whose parts are no longer at war.
The danger is rigidity: holding the self together by force, closing it against further change, and mistaking a fortress for a coil. A coil is gathered, not clenched.
The sign is that your actions and your stated values agree, without strain, for a sustained period, and that you can change your mind without falling apart.
VIThe Rising
A gathered serpent rises. The sixth coil is the stage of creation, in which the practitioner stops working only with what others made and begins to make things of their own: methods, rituals, insights, texts, works of art, ways of living.
The task is to make something that no teacher gave you.
The danger is inflation. Self-deification, at this coil, is easily confused with grandiosity: the belief that one has become superior to others, that one has been chosen, or that one is now fit to rule over other people's practice. The practitioner in this danger begins to gather followers, and a practitioner with followers has stopped walking the left-hand path and started building a church.
The sign is that you have made something of your own, and that you do not need anyone to admire it in order to know its worth.
VIIThe Open Ring
The seventh coil bears the name of the Order's sign. It is the stage of return, in which the practitioner releases what they have made to others, freely and without conditions, as the serpent in the garden gave its knowledge freely.
The task is to give the work away. Publish what you have learned, teach what you can teach, release what you have made into the common store, and claim nothing for it.
The danger is the temptation to keep: to put a gate around what you made, to make others earn it, to be thanked for it, or to be followed because of it. This is the old temptation of every teacher, and it is how every locked grimoire began.
The sign is that you have released what you made, and that you do not need to know what anyone does with it.
The seventh coil is not the end of the work. The ring is open so that what goes out may return, changed, from others who have walked their own coils. Many practitioners find themselves, after the Open Ring, at the Hatching again, with a new question.
On the 2022 Revision
The Seven Coils was first written in 2012. The 2022 revision rewrote the descriptions of two coils.
The earlier text described the Venom chiefly as the breaking of taboo. Over the following decade, the Keepers saw that some readers had taken this as license to harm others in the name of their own initiation. The revision states plainly that the venom is directed inward, names cruelty as one of the two forms its danger takes, and adds to its sign the condition, first stated in Venom and Remedy in 2019, that no one else was harmed. The reasoning behind this change is set out in full in that text.
The earlier text also described the Rising in terms that encouraged a kind of grandiosity, presenting it as the summit of the work. The revision names inflation as the coil's danger and places the emphasis on what the practitioner makes rather than on what they become, so that the Open Ring, and not the Rising, is understood as the completion of the circle.