A remarkable number of the people who walk the left-hand path are makers: musicians, painters, writers, and craftsmen of every kind. This is not an accident. A path that asks the self to become something it was not has an obvious kinship with the work of making something that did not exist. And the sixth of the Order's coils, the Rising, describes exactly this: the stage at which the practitioner stops working only with what others made, and makes something no teacher gave them.
This page considers creative work as a form of practice, drawing on what makers on the path say about their own work.
The Work as a Working
Musicians on the path describe writing a song as a ritual, no different in kind from standing in a circle ringing bells and speaking invocations: in both cases one focuses and puts one's energy into a thing. The method some of them describe maps closely onto the structure of a working.
- Name it first. Choose the title of the work before making it, because the title says what belongs in it. This is the statement of intent, and it does the same work: it makes everything after it answerable to something.
- Set the room. Light, candles, and incense bring on the state the work requires. This is the opening.
- Ask what it feels like and what story it tells. This is the operation, done with attention on the aim.
- Let it change. In the studio, with other players, the work departs from the plan, and the departures are often the best of it. Keep them pointed at the title.
Makers of many kinds say that the accidents and the mistakes are often the most beautiful parts of a work. A practitioner who builds a work this way should keep a record of it like any other working: the intent, what was done, what changed, and what came of it. The page Designing a Working gives the structure.
Images
Painters on the path describe their pictures in several ways. Some paint the figures they work with, and the painting becomes a focus on the altar. Some describe their paintings as doors: images made to be gazed into, much as a scryer gazes into a mirror, until something answers. Painters who make such images for others ask the person concerned first, a courtesy any maker can copy.
The Order's view of images is the same as its view of symbols. An image does no work by itself. An image made with attention, and looked at with attention, is a very good place to put the mind.
Writing
Writers on the path work in two modes, often in the same person. Some write in a state they describe as dictated, sitting at the altar in silence and writing what comes, and they say that part of the skill is knowing when to stop: the moment when the work announces that it is done. Others write in the ordinary disciplined way, a set amount every day, whether or not anything comes. Many do both: they write freely first, and then edit coldly afterward.
The record is where most practitioners first learn to write honestly, and it is a good school. A practitioner who has kept a record for a year has written a great deal, has learned to separate what happened from what they think it meant, and has learned to write on the days when there was nothing to say. Several practitioners who came to the path in recovery describe the journals they began in treatment as the beginning of everything they later made.
Sincerity and Costume
The imagery of the left-hand path has been borrowed by popular music for more than half a century. In the 1970s rock bands used devils and inverted crosses for their look. In the 1980s heavier and faster music used them for shock. Somewhere in that decade a few musicians began to mean it, and some of those who heard the difference between sincerity and gimmick decided that they wanted to make nothing else.
The distinction is one the path draws everywhere. Imagery used for effect is costume, and the introduction to the left-hand path says what an audience sees in costume. Imagery used because it means something to the maker is a different thing, even when it looks the same. Practitioners who have been on the path for decades describe a common first stage in which newcomers act out what the opposing religion says devil worship looks like, and they observe that the serious practitioners they know go to the grocery store and pay their bills like anyone else.
The Underground
Before the internet, the makers of the darker arts found one another by letter: hand-made magazines photocopied and mailed across oceans, tapes copied and traded, addresses passed from hand to hand. Those who took part describe the difficulty as a filter. Only the people who really wanted the work went to the trouble of finding it. They also describe a culture of rivalry that was mostly healthy: hearing something good and wanting to make something better, rather than tearing down the person who made it.
The Order notes the parallel with its own history, which began as a correspondence and became a library. It also notes the difference. The underground kept its work scarce, and scarcity sorted the committed from the curious. The Order publishes everything, and trusts the work itself to do the sorting.
Sober Work
Several makers on the path who once worked under the influence say the same thing about it: the work was not as good as it seemed at the time, and they believed they were getting things done when they were not. Several who later became sober report abilities they had never had: drawing, painting, poetry, discovered only after the drinking or the drugs had stopped. The page Sobriety and Recovery gives the Order's reasons for working sober, and these accounts are among the best of them.
Giving It Away
The sixth coil asks the practitioner to make something no teacher gave them, and names its sign: that the maker does not need anyone to admire the work in order to know its worth. The seventh coil, the Open Ring, asks them to give the work away.
Not every maker can give everything away, and the Order asks no one to starve. A musician who sells a record or a painter who sells a canvas has made a thing and set a price on it, which is a different thing from charging a toll for teaching. But every maker can give something: a method, a technique, an account of how the work was made, released without conditions so that others can use it. The Order's own texts carry no names and reserve no rights, and the Journal entry From the Record to the Commons gives eight practical notes on turning private work into something others can use.