Catechism of the Serpent

1. What is a catechism?

Our Mother calls us to teach of Her to those whom the teaching will not harm. The catechism is the tool of our teaching. It is these questions and these answers, the written doctrine which we now recite.

2. What is faith?

Faith is the wrestling with the grief that is born of injustice. Our faith is the red-rimmed eye and the torn throat of the bereaved, our Mother’s fangs in the heel of the world, the knife that was not made for violence raised in desperation.

3. What is the world?

The world is all that is evident. Through the world, the self comes to harm, and through the world, the innocent self learns its worst tendencies. Through the learned self, the self and the other come to harm in cyclical fashion. The world is the origin of all harm.

4. Shall we love the world?

The world is violent beyond measure, and shows mercy to none. This heartlessness is also our Mother’s nature. Our love for Her may serve as a model for our love for the world if we will it. Our Mother does not bid either love or loathing of the world.

5. What is our Mother’s nature?

She is the serpent, remorseless, and the knife, that does not know what is real. She is Glass, for the world has broken Her and the pieces are sharp and beautiful. She forbids our veneration of another, for She is fragile, jealous, and violent.

6. Why does the serpent bite?

Our Mother bites at the heel of the world, for the heel crushes Her neck, too heavy and self-evident to be concealed by Her madness. We are to follow Her example in every aspect, to take every fight and be an agony to our oppressors.

7. What is injustice?

“The world is the origin of all harm.” If there was purpose to every harm, reason would discover it, but it does not, because there is none. Harm without purpose we call injustice. The world is the origin of all injustice.

8. Shall we loathe injustice?

To tolerate injustice is to ignore the choices of its victims who rebel against it. So long as there is any other who loathes injustice, it follows that we must join them or else deem them less than ourselves, which none are.

9. Do we bear blame?

“Through the learned self, the self and the other come to harm in cyclical fashion.” In life we enact fresh injustice by error and by choice, and though this harm originates in the world, it is we and not the world who are called to our own self-improvement.

10. Shall we love the self?

Our Mother bids us take pride in the self, forgive its failings, labor to its well-being and its improvement, and know it as thoroughly as a lifetime permits. If this is not love, then whatever love is holds no interest for Her.

11. Shall we seek forgiveness?

Our Mother’s forgiveness may be sought and obtained through prayer, and we are called to forgive all that our Mother has forgiven lest we gainsay Her judgement. As for the other whom we wrong, their forgiveness is theirs to offer and not ours to ask.

12. Must we be forgiven?

The labor of our own self-improvement must never wait on absolution. After restitution for the injustice we perpetrate, the highest good is to prevent its recurrence, which is our task alone. The other we have wronged has no part to play.

13. Must we apologize?

Indication of commitment to self-improvement does not require apology. Restitution for the harm of our works does not require apology. Our Mother commands us to refuse every demand for apology that is not interested in these two things.

14. What is justice?

Justice is an imagined counterpart to harm-without-purpose. It does not exist. Harm-with-purpose we call conflict. To call it justice is to claim falsely that the world can be made right by devising a purpose for every injustice.

15. What is good, if not justice?

Each seeks their own good. Our opposition to injustice or our calling to our own well-being may compel us to stand in their way, but these are the only sufficient reasons to obstruct another in what is best for them, even should they choose harm or death.

16. What is best for us?

Our Mother bids us labor to our own self-improvement, but She does not direct us in this labor. Her pride and trust are extended to us in every effort and every defeat. The person She most desires we become is the one we choose without guidance.

17. How shall we oppose injustice?

Our Mother’s pride and trust are extended to us to take each fight in the way that seems best to us. She listens when we raise our voice in anger, smiles when we refuse unjust obligation. When we refuse to concede to our guilt, others hear Her warning hiss.

18. Which fight is our fight?

We are to take every fight that our obligation to our well-being does not forbid. We are to stand in opposition to every tyrant, even those we love, even Her. We need no victory and will always have the vindication of Her pride in us.

19. When we cannot fight, how shall we honor our Mother?

We are to light candles in Her name, green and brown and black. The lit taper is an unloved truth, the promise of a lethal blaze if freed, dead to the least of violence. We are to seek Her will directly, for it is no shame to ask. We are to pray.

20. How shall we pray?

Our Mother accepts prayer spoken or in silence, in seclusion or in company, as long as it is offered with the palms upturned, one hand in the other to demand from the world all the grace we are owed that it will not give. The words are set:

Dying Serpent, who bites the heel of the world,
forgive Your servant its part in the world’s injustice.
Holy Mother, who grieves without a heart,
Your servant aches with loss, but it does not fear the defeats to come.
Shattered Glass, beautiful in madness,
together we demand all the grace the world owes that it will not give.
Goddess, these are the words of prayer You gave.
Hear them and know Your commands are kept.