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The Commons

Open Access

Why the Order of the Serpent publishes everything it writes, freely, completely, and without conditions.

The Principle

The sixth of the Order's Seven Tenets reads: Knowledge Is Not Property. An idea given away is not lost to the one who gives it, and a teaching that must be locked away to keep its value had little value to begin with.

The Order was founded in 2010 on three resolutions, set out in The Shed Skin: that it would charge no one for anything, that it would keep no secret teaching, and that no one in it would hold authority over the practice of another. Open access is what the first two resolutions look like in practice.

What Open Access Means Here

The phrase is used in many ways. For the Order, it means five specific things.

  1. Free to read. Every text is available online without payment, account, subscription, registration, or cookie.
  2. Complete. There is no inner teaching held back. What is in the Library is everything the Order has to teach.
  3. Free to reuse. Everything is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. You may do anything with it, without permission and without credit.
  4. Free of surveillance. Reading here is private. The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from any other server. See Privacy.
  5. Durable. The site is plain HTML. Every text can be saved as plain text or printed cleanly, so that it can outlast this site, and us.

Against Secrecy and Tolls

Occult teaching has been kept behind locks for most of its history: behind fees for grades, oaths of secrecy, years of probation, and the favor of whoever held the keys. Some of the reasons for this were once serious, and the essay Against the Locked Grimoire takes them seriously before it answers them.

Its conclusion, and ours, is that the lock has long protected the status, revenue, and authority of those who hold it far more than it protects the teaching or the student. The real mysteries of the left-hand path are in the experience of the practitioner, and that experience cannot be locked away because it cannot be handed over. It can only be undergone. Everything that can be written down can be shared, and so we share it.

A lock need not be an oath. A teaching that exists only in a scarce and costly edition, or that is sold by stages with the next part always one payment ahead, is closed to most of the people who might have used it. The Journal entry The Price of a Beautiful Book and the page Study consider both cases.

Why the Public Domain

Many open publishers use licenses that keep something back: a requirement to give credit, for example, or a requirement that adaptations be released on the same terms. The Order chose instead to waive every right it holds, using the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.

We did so because every condition, however small, is a gate, and the Order was founded to build no gates. A reader who must check the terms before quoting a sentence has been given something less than freedom. The Journal entry Why CC0, and Not Something Softer explains the reasoning in more detail, and the License page sets out the dedication itself.

What You May Do

With any text, image, or piece of code on this site, you may:

  • read it, save it, print it, and keep it;
  • copy it and share it with anyone, in any form;
  • quote it, in part or in whole, with or without credit;
  • translate it into any language;
  • adapt it, abridge it, expand it, or rewrite it;
  • include it in your own books, courses, websites, recordings, or works of art;
  • teach from it, in any setting;
  • print and sell copies of it, or of works that include it;
  • use the Order's sigil, the Open Ring, for any purpose.

You do not need to ask, and you do not need to tell us. There is no one to ask, and no one to tell.

What We Ask, Not Require

We ask two courtesies. Neither is a condition of the dedication, and you are legally free to ignore both.

  • If you change a text, do not present your changes as the Order's words.
  • Do not claim to speak for the Order, or to hold any rank, authority, or recognition from it.

What Open Access Does Not Mean

  • It does not mean that practitioners must publish their private lives. The Order publishes its teaching. Your record, your workings, and your personal experience are yours to keep private. The privacy of persons is not the secrecy of teaching.
  • It does not mean that the Order endorses every use of its texts. Anyone may use them, and some people will use them badly. Their use carries no endorsement.
  • It does not mean that anyone who republishes the texts holds authority. Possessing, printing, or selling a copy of an Order text confers nothing. See Statements of Position.
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