Study is the second of the Order's five disciplines. The Library on this site is small on purpose: it holds what the Order has to teach, and seven texts are not an education. Everything else a practitioner needs to read was written by someone else, and most of it was written long ago.
The instruction on the Practice page is brief: read widely, critically, and from primary sources where you can, and read those who disagree with you. This page says what that means in practice.
Why the Order Recommends No Titles
The Order publishes no reading list, and it will not. A list of recommended books becomes a canon. A canon becomes a test of belonging: the books one is expected to have read, and to speak of with respect. And the authors on it become authorities, which is the outcome the Order avoids for its own texts by leaving them unsigned.
There is also a practical reason. The reader who has been handed a list reads the list. The reader who has been told what kinds of book exist, and how to judge one, goes into a library and finds things that no list would have included. The second reader is doing the work of the path. The first is following instructions.
Seven Shelves
The following are kinds of reading, not titles. A practitioner who has read seriously on each of these shelves is better prepared than one who has read a hundred books on any single one.
1. The Myths Themselves
The garden story and the war in heaven. The creation epics with their dragons. The poems of the north, the funerary books of Egypt, the hymns to the fierce goddesses, the story of the theft of fire. Read them in full, in a good translation, before reading anyone's account of what they mean. The left-hand path is in large part a way of reading these stories, and it cannot be judged by someone who knows them only in summary.
2. The Tradition You Were Given
Whatever religion or irreligion you were raised in, read its central texts again, as an adult, and with attention. The Inventory in First Workings asks what you were taught. This asks what the sources actually say, which is often different. Many practitioners find that they had rejected a version of their tradition that its own books do not support, and that what they find there, examined, is partly theirs to keep.
3. The Ancient Schools
The allegory of the cave and the philosophy that grew from it. The Gnostic books recovered in the last century. The Hermetic dialogues. The philosophers of late antiquity who made a ritual art of the soul's ascent. These are the foundations on which nearly all of Western esotericism was built, and they are more readable than their reputation suggests. See Origins of the Left-Hand Path.
4. The Grimoires
The magical papyri, the handbooks of astral magic, the books of conjuration, and the great Renaissance synthesis. These are the primary documents of Western magic, and reading them is the surest cure for both credulity and contempt. A section below says how to approach them.
5. The Modern Currents
Each current described on the Currents page has its founding books and its practical manuals. Read at least two currents that contradict each other, and read each in its own words before reading its critics. Take note of what each asks you to accept on its author's word alone.
6. The Scholars
Historians of religion and of esotericism, anthropologists and sociologists who have studied occult groups from within and without, psychologists of belief and of the unconscious, and philosophers of ethics and of the self. The scholar has no stake in your initiation. That is precisely the scholar's value. Much of what practitioners repeat to one another about the history of their own traditions does not survive an afternoon with the scholarship.
7. The Opponents
The best arguments against the left-hand path, from the religious traditions it departs from and from secular critics who regard the whole enterprise as self-deception. The accounts of people who left occult groups, and why. The literature on how the mind deceives itself: on coincidence, on memory, on the reading of meaning into noise. A practitioner who cannot state the case against their own path, in terms its opponents would accept, does not yet understand the path.
How to Read
- With a pen. Keep reading notes in your record, dated, like any other entry. For each book, write what it claims, what evidence it offers, and what you could do to test it.
- Sources before commentary. Read the old text before the modern book about it. You will read the modern book differently.
- Two that disagree. On any question that matters to you, find two serious writers who reach opposite conclusions, and read both.
- Observation and interpretation. Apply to every author the distinction you apply to yourself. What did they actually see or do? What do they say it means? The two are seldom labeled.
- Against the charm of the forbidden. A book is not truer for having been banned, burned, or kept secret. Suppression is evidence about the suppressor. It says nothing about whether the book is right.
- Again, after a year. Reread what impressed you most, and add a dated note. The change in your reading is a measure of the change in you.
Reading a Grimoire
The old books of magic are not manuals in the modern sense, and they repay a particular kind of attention.
Read them first as documents. Ask who could have written this, for whom, and what they assumed their reader already knew. Notice what the book demands: in most cases, long preparation, fasting, prayer, ritual purity, and the invocation of the same divine names used by the religion of its day. The magician of the grimoires is rarely a rebel. He is usually a devout man doing something his church forbade, by means his church would have recognized.
Notice also what is in them that you will not do. Many grimoires call for materials that are costly, illegal, or cruel, among them the sacrifice of animals. The Order's Statements of Position are plain on the point: its practice involves no sacrifice of any kind, and it rejects any practice that requires harm to a living thing. A text can be studied without being obeyed. That, indeed, is the difference between study and discipleship.
Finally, compare editions. Grimoires were copied by hand for centuries, and every copyist altered something. There is rarely a single correct text, which is worth remembering when a seller claims to offer the true and complete version.
On Fine Editions
A reader who goes looking for books on the left-hand path today will discover a distinctive trade. Much of the most serious writing is published by small presses in limited editions: a few hundred copies, cloth or leather, stamped in foil, numbered by hand, sold out before publication, and resold afterward for several times the price. Some are offered as talismanic objects, consecrated as well as printed.
The Order's view of this has two parts. The first is respect. These presses keep in print difficult work that no large publisher would accept, including much of the scholarship and many of the translations on which the rest of this page depends. Good bookmaking is a craft, and those who practice it should be paid. Many of them also issue plain paperback and digital editions, which is to their credit.
The second part is a caution. A text that exists in three hundred copies at a high price is closed to nearly everyone, whatever its publisher intends, and the experience of owning a scarce and beautiful book is easily mistaken for the experience of understanding it. The Journal entry The Price of a Beautiful Book considers the matter at more length.
What Is Already Free
Most of the first four shelves is in the public domain. The myths, the scriptures, the ancient philosophers, some of the Hermetic and Gnostic texts in older translations, and nearly all of the classic grimoires can be read without paying anyone, and a large part of the nineteenth-century occult revival has joined them. Public and university libraries hold the scholarship, and will usually obtain what they lack.
The public library is the oldest open-access institution most people will ever use, and a library card costs nothing.
Courses, Forums, and Teachers
Beyond books, a reader will find paid courses that promise rapid ascent, forums where practitioners compare results, and individuals who offer instruction, consultation, or ritual performed on the client's behalf.
The advice the Order gives about groups applies here, and it needs one clarification, because it is not advice against buying books. An author who sells a book has made a thing and set a price on a copy of it. You may borrow that copy, lend it, or pass it on, and nothing further depends on your having paid. What the Order warns against is a toll: payment as the condition of being told the next thing, of being advanced, or of being recognized. A course that sells access by stages, with the real teaching always one purchase ahead, is the locked grimoire again.
Forums are useful for learning how varied practice is, and dangerous for the same reason any audience is dangerous. A report written to be read by others is not a record. It is shaped, before the first word, by the wish to be believed or admired. Read what others report as you would read any interpretation offered without its observations.
As for teachers: the conviction on which the Order was founded is that the most valuable thing a teacher can give a student is the means to stop needing a teacher. Any teacher can be measured against that sentence.
Study and Practice
Study is not a substitute for practice. It is possible to read for twenty years and never sit still for ten minutes, and the reader who does so has a large vocabulary and an unexamined mind. But practice without study tends to reinvent old mistakes, and to take for a private revelation what is in fact a commonplace of a tradition the practitioner has never heard of.
The Order suggests no fixed proportion. It suggests only that the record show both, and that when one of them has been missing for a month, the practitioner ask why.