Nearly every working involves speech. The intent is spoken aloud at the opening, and the closing is marked with a sentence. Many practitioners say far more: prayers, invocations, litanies of names, words in languages they learned for the purpose. The left-hand path has a complicated relation to all of this, because the commonest form of religious speech, the prayer of a creature to its maker, is exactly the posture the path refuses.
This page considers the kinds of ritual speech, the uses the path has found for them, and the Order's own very short list of formulas.
Four Kinds of Speech
Ritual speech takes four broad forms, and much confusion comes from not distinguishing them.
| Kind | What it does | Example of its form |
|---|---|---|
| Petition | Asks a power for something | "Grant me..." |
| Address | Speaks to a figure: praise, thanks, conversation | "I thank you for..." |
| Invocation | Calls a figure or a quality into the speaker | "I take on..." |
| Declaration | States the speaker's own will | "I examine what I was given." |
The first two assume a listener. The third assumes something that can be taken on, whether a being or a state of mind. The fourth assumes nothing but the speaker, and it is the only kind the Order's own texts use.
Prayer on the Left-Hand Path
The site's introduction to the left-hand path says that worship, in the sense of submission to a superior being, runs against the path's central aim. It would be easy to conclude that the path has no prayer. It would also be wrong. Practitioners of the devotional current pray daily, often morning and evening, and many of them insist that prayer is not submission. They describe it as conversation, as the maintenance of a relationship, or as a form of magic in its own right. Many of them counsel simplicity: a prayer need not be eloquent, and a few true words spoken from the heart are better than a long recitation spoken from a book.
They also counsel against a particular misuse. Some report that a long period of solitary practice taught them to stop asking for things they could do themselves. A god, real or imagined, is not a bank. The carnal current reaches the same conclusion by another road, holding that the whole of a rite is directed at the one who performs it, and that a petition is simply a dramatic way of telling oneself what one wants.
Words of Power
The magical papyri of Roman Egypt are full of words that belong to no language: strings of vowels, names compounded from half a dozen religions, syllables chosen for their sound. The grimoires that followed kept the habit, and spoke of barbarous names whose power lay partly in their not being understood. The most famous survivor is a word now said by stage conjurers.
Many practitioners still use a ritual language: Latin, an ancient language of the Near East, an invented script or tongue, or a few words of power drawn from the old texts. Two explanations are offered. On the spirit model the names are addresses, and they reach what they name. On the psychological model a language set apart from daily use carries the mind with it, out of the ordinary and into the time of the working, in the way that a uniform carries a soldier into a role. Both readings can be held at once.
Practitioners who compose prayers in old languages give practical advice that applies under either model. Choose a language that flows in your mouth. A few words are enough; there is no need for whole sentences. Mispronunciation is not failure. And learn what the words mean before you say them, for the reason given on the page Designing a Working.
Composing Your Own
Most of what is spoken in a working can be written by the practitioner, and most practitioners who have done it for years prefer their own words. Write the words in the record before the working. Keep them short. Read them aloud beforehand, so that the working is not the first time you hear them. Say only what you mean, and change the words when they stop being true. The page Designing a Working places the spoken statement within the structure of a working.
Inversion
A distinctive form of left-hand ritual speech is the inversion: a prayer of the religion one left, recited backward or with its terms reversed, so that it asks to be led into temptation and delivered from piety; an acclamation of the old god turned to the adversary; the Mass said toward the altar of hell. The inverted mass is known chiefly from accusations and from fiction, and was described many times before it was widely performed, but it is performed now.
Inversion has a real use. To say aloud what one was taught was unsayable is one of the small, private transgressions that Venom and Remedy describes, and it can show a practitioner how much of the old religion is still at work in them. It also has a limit. A liturgy that only inverts stays defined by what it inverts, as the Symbols page says of the inverted cross. And some inversions go further than reversal. One litany in use today proceeds by turning each virtue into its opposite, so that where there was love there is to be hatred. Inverting a virtue does not produce a virtue, and a practitioner who recites such a litany should ask what it is training them to become.
Some liturgies in current use also call down wrath upon enemies, or upon other religions and their adherents. The Order's texts contain no curses, and its Statements of Position reject any use of its work to promote contempt for any people. A practitioner who has taken a liturgy from another source should read it through, line by line, before saying it, and leave out what they would not say in daylight.
Charging the Words
Some teachers consecrate a lesson before giving it, asking a power to bless the words so that the hearers take them in. The custom is a reminder that speech in a working is meant to be different from speech elsewhere. The Order holds that words are charged by being meant, and that a sentence spoken with full attention and full honesty has all the charge it needs.
Silence
Speech in a working should be followed by silence. Many practitioners, after the spoken part of a rite or a passage of study, close the book, breathe, and listen for a while before closing. Those who pray describe this as the part of prayer in which they receive. Those who do not pray describe it as the part in which the mind settles and they notice what is actually there. The record does not need to decide between these.
There are also long silences, seasons in which a practitioner who has been used to feeling answered feels nothing. The page The Long Work considers them.
Words Outside the Working
Practitioners who take ritual speech seriously tend to take ordinary speech seriously too. Some warn against speaking ill predictions about other people, even in jest. Others describe an old trick of the swindler: tell someone they are cursed, wait for them to believe it, and then charge to lift it. Whatever one thinks of curses, expectation alone can make a person feel unwell, and that effect is well documented. It is reason enough never to tell anyone that they are cursed, and never to say aloud, of anyone, what one would not want to come true.
The Order's Formulas
The Order's texts contain very few spoken words. At the opening of every working the practitioner states the intent in a single sentence of their own. At the close they say, "What was gathered is released." The workings in First Workings add three more: "I examine what I was given," "I go down to meet what I avoid," and the working name, for those who take one. The Blind Maker adds a fourth: "I ask what I cannot see." Every one of these is a declaration, spoken by the practitioner about the practitioner. Even the one that asks is addressed to no one but the speaker.
That is not a rule for practitioners, who are free to pray, invoke, and address whatever they choose. It is a description of what the Order has found necessary, which is very little.