The work of the left-hand path is done, for the most part, alone. But few practitioners go their whole lives without wanting company in it, and many will at some point consider joining an established order or gathering a few others into a circle of their own.
The Order of the Serpent charters no groups and has no membership to offer, so it has no interest to declare here. Most of its founders spent years inside other initiatory bodies. This page sets down what they learned there, for those who are weighing the same choice.
How Orders Are Usually Built
Most initiatory orders, whatever their doctrine, are built to the same plan, inherited from the magical lodges of the nineteenth century. It helps to know the plan before meeting an example of it.
- A head. A founder, high priest or priestess, magus, or grand master, who speaks for the order and is usually the author of its central texts.
- A council. A small governing body, often with a traditional number of seats, which in the better-run orders has the power to overrule or replace the head.
- Degrees. A ladder of grades, commonly between three and eleven, each with a title, a body of teaching, and sometimes a color or an emblem to be worn. Entry is usually by application, followed by a period of probation.
- A priesthood. The holders of the higher degrees, who represent the order, decide who advances, and carry its obligations.
- Local bodies. Lodges, temples, or working groups, under various names, in which members meet. Many now meet only by correspondence.
- Inner orders. Specialized schools within the larger body, each devoted to one tradition or one art.
- Graded papers. Texts released by degree, with the later ones withheld from the earlier members, sometimes on the ground that they would be dangerous to the unprepared.
None of this is sinister in itself. Each part exists for a reason: continuity, mentorship, the keeping of standards, the pleasure of working beside others. It is also the structure within which the locked grimoire, as the Order's essay Against the Locked Grimoire describes it, is kept, and the reader should hold both facts in mind together.
What a Group Can Give
The founders of the Order did not leave their old orders empty-handed, and it would be dishonest to pretend that a group gives nothing.
- Correction. Another person can see what you cannot: the claim that has grown in the telling, the excuse that has become a habit. A record does this slowly. A good companion does it at once.
- Constancy. It is easier to keep a discipline that others are keeping.
- Experience. Someone who has made a mistake before you can describe it, and save you a year.
- Shared work. Some workings need more than one person, and some are simply better in company.
- Company. The path can be lonely, and loneliness is not a virtue.
What a Group Tends to Take
The costs arrive more slowly than the benefits, which is why they are easy to miss.
A group takes time and usually money. It asks for deference, at first in small matters. Over years it tends to replace the practitioner's own account of their experience with the group's account: its vocabulary, its map, its explanation of what has happened to them. And where advancement is in someone else's gift, the practitioner learns, without ever deciding to, what pleases the giver. Many orders describe their degrees as recognitions of a change the initiate has made alone. The description is honest. But a recognition that can be granted can be withheld, and whoever may withhold it holds a leash.
None of this requires bad faith on anyone's part. It is what the structure does, in the hands of perfectly decent people, when it is left to run.
The Three Tolls
The Order's advice about groups is one sentence long, and it appears in several places on this site: if any group, of any tradition, asks you for money, for secrecy, or for obedience in exchange for teaching, leave it. The sentence turns on the words "in exchange for teaching," and each of its three terms needs a boundary.
Money
People who share a room may share the rent. Dividing a real cost among equals, with the accounts open to all of them, is not a toll. A toll is payment for teaching, for advancement, or for recognition: a fee for a degree, a charge for the next paper, a contribution expected before one is considered. Ask where the money goes, and whether any member may see the books.
Secrecy
The privacy of persons is not the secrecy of teaching. A group may rightly keep its members' names, its meeting place, and what its members confide to one another entirely private. A toll is teaching withheld by rank, or an oath never to reveal what one is taught. Ask whether you may read what the group teaches before you promise anything.
Obedience
Coordination is not obedience. If five people are to work together, someone must settle the hour and the order of proceedings, and the others must go along. A toll is another person deciding what you may practice, what you must believe, whom you may see, or whether you have advanced. Ask what happens to a member who says no.
Questions to Ask Before Joining
These are questions to put to any group, of any path. A sound group will answer all of them without resentment. The manner of the answer is itself an answer.
- What will this cost me in total, at every stage, and what is the money used for?
- What must I promise, and may I read the promise before I am asked to make it?
- May I read the teaching before I join? If not, why not?
- Who decides whether I advance? Can an advancement be taken away?
- How is the head of the group chosen, and how can the head be removed? Has it ever happened?
- Does anyone claim an authority that cannot be questioned: a mandate from a god, a revealed text, an unbroken lineage?
- What personal information will you hold about me? Who can see it, and what becomes of it if I leave?
- May I belong to other groups, and read whatever I wish?
- What is expected of junior members that is not expected of senior ones?
- What happens when someone leaves? Are members permitted to remain their friends?
- May I speak with people who have left?
- What has the group changed its mind about, and how did it say so?
Signs That It Is Time to Leave
Leave any group in which you find the following, and do not wait for a second instance.
- Payments that grow as you advance, or pressure to give beyond what you can afford.
- Any sexual expectation attached to membership, advancement, or ritual.
- Pressure to reduce contact with family, friends, or anyone outside the group.
- Doubt treated as a spiritual failing, and questions as disloyalty.
- A leader to whom the rules do not apply.
- Contempt for outsiders, for former members, or for other paths, expressed as a matter of course.
- A request to do anything unlawful, or to keep silent about harm done to anyone.
- The suggestion that leaving will bring misfortune, or that you are not free to leave at all.
You are always free to leave. No oath binds a person to their own harm, and no working done by anyone can change that. If you are being threatened, or if you or anyone else is in danger, the matter is no longer one for this page: go to the appropriate authorities and to qualified help.
Forming a Circle
Some practitioners will prefer to gather a few others and work together informally. The Order began in exactly this way, as a correspondence and then as a working circle. For those who want to do the same, the following is what that circle found workable.
- Keep it small. A circle in which everyone knows everyone needs very little governing.
- Have no head. Rotate the practical tasks. Whoever arranges this meeting does not arrange the next.
- Share costs and nothing else. Split what is actually spent, in the open.
- Everyone keeps their own record. A circle may keep shared notes of what it did together. It should never keep the only account of what a member experienced.
- Consent, every time. Each person agrees to each working in advance, knowing what it involves, and may stop at any moment without explanation. The Order's Statements of Position set out the standard.
- The door stays open. Anyone may leave at any time, for any reason, and remain a friend.
- Publish what you make. If the circle develops anything of use, give it away.
- Let it end. A circle exists for the work of the people in it. When the work is done, or the people have changed, let the circle close. A circle that cannot end has become an institution.
A circle formed on these lines is not a branch of the Order of the Serpent, and the Order asks, as a courtesy, that none describe itself as one. It will be something better: its members' own.
Open Workings
One form of shared practice avoids most of the difficulties described above. Some temples of the left-hand path announce a working, publish the full instructions, and invite anyone who wishes to perform it during a set period, wherever they are, and to share their records afterward if they choose. There is no application, no fee, and no membership, and when the period ends the gathering dissolves.
The Order runs no such projects, for the reason it runs nothing: every project needs someone to run it. But of all the forms of collective work it knows, this is the one nearest its own principles.
The Order's Position
The Order does not charter, list, endorse, or supervise groups, and nothing done by any group carries its authority. It recommends none. Its advice is the sentence quoted above, and it does not soften it: by that test, an order that withholds its teaching by grade is charging a toll, and many established orders do. The advice is also only advice. No one in the Order holds authority over the practice of another, and a practitioner who weighs a group, judges the price worth paying, and joins with open eyes has made a decision that is theirs to make. They remain as much a part of the Order as anyone.
The disputes that have divided occult orders, again and again, have seldom been about doctrine. They have been about who holds authority and who is paid. The Origins page describes one of them. A group that has no authority to hold and no money to hold it with has very little to fall out over.