About this text
The Shed Skin was adopted by the seven members of the First Circle on the night the Order was founded. It has never been revised. Its sixth section contains the three resolutions that bind the Order, and which, by their own terms, cannot be amended.
IThe Skin
Every serpent outgrows its skin. The skin is not its enemy. It was the shape of the serpent's life until the life became larger than the shape. Then it splits, and the serpent leaves it whole upon the stone and goes on in a new body that is the same body.
We have outgrown skins. We were given gods, laws, names, fears, and loyalties before we were old enough to choose them. Some of these served us; some serve us still. But none of them was ours until we examined it, and many of them, examined, turned out to be someone else's shape pressed upon us.
A skin outgrown is not a loss. The serpent does not mourn what it leaves on the stone.
IIThe Garden
There is an old story of a garden, a forbidden tree, and a serpent who told the truth about it. In that story the serpent offered knowledge to anyone willing to reach for it. It asked nothing in return. It did not test the worthiness of the one who listened, nor demand an oath, nor name a price. It said only that their eyes would be opened.
Whatever the serpent was, and whatever the tellers of that story meant by it, we take it as our ancestor. We hold that knowledge offered freely is the first gift, and that a gate built around knowledge is the first lie.
IIIThe Self
We hold that the self is the proper center of a human life: not a sin to be overcome, not an illusion to be dissolved, not a servant to be offered up, but a consciousness to be strengthened, refined, and made sovereign. This is the left-hand path. It is old, and it has been called by many names, most of them insults.
We do not worship. We do not obey. We do not seek to be absorbed into anything greater than ourselves. We seek to become something greater than we were.
No one can do this for another. No one can confer it, and no one can sell it. Whoever says otherwise is selling a skin.
IVThe Dark
We do not flee the dark. The dark is where the roots are, where the seed breaks open, where the serpent sleeps through winter. What we were taught to fear holds the parts of ourselves we were taught to abandon. We go there deliberately, with a light and a record, and we come back with what we find.
The dark is a teacher. It is not a master. We do not go into it to be lost.
VThe Key
Every order we have known kept a locked book. Its pages were given out one at a time, in exchange for money, or obedience, or years of waiting. We were told that the lock protected the teaching. We came to see that it protected the teachers.
We will keep no locked book. What we know, we will write down. What we write down, we will give away. If any part of our teaching cannot survive being read by anyone at all, it is not worth teaching.
VIThe Resolutions
Therefore we resolve:
- That the Order of the Serpent shall charge no one for anything.
- That the Order of the Serpent shall keep no secret teaching.
- That no one in the Order of the Serpent shall hold authority over the practice of another.
These three are not to be amended. Whoever would amend them should found another order, and is free to do so.
VIIThe Open Ring
The old sign of the serpent is the ring: the serpent with its tail in its mouth, complete, sufficient, eternal. We honor it, and we break it. Our serpent does not swallow its tail. The ring is left open, and the opening faces left.
The ring is the work. The point at its center is the self. The gap is the gift: what passes out of the work into the world, and what may enter from the world into the work. Nothing is kept in. No one is kept out.
Adopted by the First Circle of the Order of the Serpent, 2 October 2010.