The Oldest Adversary
Few images are as old, or as widespread, as the serpent. It appears in the myths of nearly every culture, and it almost never appears as an ordinary animal.
The serpent is the giver of forbidden knowledge in the old story of the garden, the one who tells the first humans that their eyes will be opened. It is the chaos-serpent of the deep, the great coiled power that ordering gods must defeat before the world can be made. It is the world-serpent that encircles the earth, the serpent that guards the tree and the treasure, the serpent that sheds its skin and appears to be reborn, and the serpent whose venom kills and whose venom, in the right measure, heals.
In most of these stories the serpent stands against an established order. It questions, tempts, resists, or simply refuses to stay where it was put. That is why it has been feared, and that is why the left-hand path has always found in it an image of itself. The serpent's relatives in myth, from the light-bearer to the dragons of the deep, are introduced on the page Faces of the Adversary.
The Serpent Elsewhere
The serpent is not everywhere an adversary, and a reader who knows it only from the garden knows it by one story. Elsewhere it is a healer, a guardian, and a power within the body.
- The coiled power. The tantric traditions of India describe a force that lies coiled at the base of the spine, pictured as a sleeping serpent, which the adept wakes and raises through the body. Its name, kundalini, means "the coiled one." The Order teaches no practice of this kind and claims no connection with those traditions. It notes only the likeness to its own image of gathered strength.
- The healer. In Greek tradition the staff of Asclepius, the god of medicine, is wound with a single serpent, and it is still the emblem of the physician. In the Hebrew scriptures a serpent of bronze, lifted on a pole, heals those who look at it. The serpent that kills and the serpent that cures are the same serpent.
- The guardian. The rearing cobra on the brow of the Egyptian kings was their protector. In the traditions of India, serpent beings keep treasures and teachings in trust until the world is ready for them.
- The feathered serpent. The peoples of ancient Mexico honored a plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, as a god of wind and of learning, and as the giver of the arts.
- The instructor. Certain schools of the first centuries read the garden story much as the Order reads it, with the serpent as the teacher of the first humans. Their opponents named them for it. See Origins of the Left-Hand Path.
- The dragon. The serpent grown vast, winged, and primordial is the emblem of the Draconian current, which is described on the Currents page. The Order shares the animal with that current, but not its cosmology.
These are different serpents, from different peoples, and the Order does not claim that they are secretly one. It observes only that wherever human beings have thought about knowledge, renewal, danger, and healing, they have tended to think with the same animal.
Four Lessons of the Serpent
The Order takes four lessons from the serpent. Each of them recurs throughout the texts in the Library.
The Gift
In the garden, the serpent offered knowledge to anyone willing to reach for it. It asked nothing in return, tested no one's worthiness, and demanded no oath. Whatever its tellers intended by the story, the Order reads it as the first act of open access, and takes it as a charter. This is the root of the sixth tenet: Knowledge Is Not Property.
The Skin
A serpent grows by outgrowing its skin. When the old skin no longer fits, it splits, and the serpent leaves it whole and goes on in a body that is new and yet the same. The Order takes this as the model of initiation: not the acquisition of something foreign, but the release of a shape that has become too small. The founding text of the Order is named for it: The Shed Skin.
The Venom
The same venom that kills can, in the right dose, become the basis of a remedy. The ancient Greek word pharmakon meant both poison and cure. The Order takes this as the model of transgression: a dangerous substance that can transform when it is measured, and destroy when it is not. See Venom and Remedy.
The Coil
A coiled serpent is at rest, but it is not idle. Its strength is gathered, and it can rise or strike in an instant. The Order takes this as the image of a self that has been brought together: integrated, composed, and ready. It gives its name to the Seven Coils.
The Sigil: The Open Ring
The ancient sign of the serpent with its tail in its mouth, the ouroboros, is a closed circle. It stands for self-sufficiency, eternity, and the cycle that feeds on itself and is complete.
The Order honors that sign, and breaks it. In the Open Ring the serpent forms a circle but does not swallow its tail. The ring is left open, and the opening faces left. The serpent's head and tail face one another across the gap, close but not joined. At the center of the ring is a single point.
The ring is the work. The point at its center is the self. The gap is the gift: what passes out of the work into the world, and what may enter from the world into the work. Nothing is kept in. No one is kept out.
From The Shed Skin, section VII
The Order's motto is drawn from the last two sentences of this passage. The gap faces left because the Order walks the left-hand path. The circle is open because a closed circle keeps something in and keeps everyone else out, which is exactly what the Order was founded to refuse. And the seventh of the Seven Coils, the stage at which the practitioner gives their work away, bears the sigil's name.
Using the Sigil
Like everything else the Order publishes, the Open Ring is in the public domain. Anyone may draw it, print it, wear it, carve it, paint it, or adapt it, for any purpose, without asking.
Because anyone may use it, its use means nothing about authority or affiliation. No one who displays the Open Ring speaks for the Order because of it, and no object bearing it has been blessed, charged, or authorized by the Order. The Order does not sell the sigil in any form, and it does not license anyone else to sell it on the Order's behalf.
The Open Ring is the only sign the Order uses. The other symbols of the path, and the reasons the Order has adopted none of them, are described on the page Symbols of the Left-Hand Path.