The Crooked Path
Masterclass in Foundational Magical Arte
Eight months. Eight Gates. One unbroken thread of initiatory training for the practitioner who is ready to stop collecting techniques and start building something that will last.
Choose your path
Both options give you full access to all eight Gates.
Single payment for the full eight months.
Save $120 compared to the monthly option.
Eight monthly payments.
$600 total. Begin for less and spread the cost across the course.
You have read the books. You have the tools. You have followed the online courses, watched the videos, practised the spells. And yet something is still missing — a coherence, a rootedness, a sense that everything you do is drawing from the same deep source rather than scattered across a dozen traditions that don’t quite speak to each other.
This is simply a gap in your foundation.
Most people who come to the Crooked Path are already practicing in some way. Not all of them have received the foundational training that turns a collection of practices into a living magical path. Not because they weren’t dedicated — but because that training was never offered to them. Usually because they picked up their practice from people promising the world without the bother to train them properly.
I walk on the back of the Serpent. The path behind me coils, and ahead of me it rises and falls and undulates, but beneath my feet the path is straight and true. — The Temple of the Horned Serpent
Three kinds of seeker
The Curious Newcomer
You have felt the pull of this path for some time. You want to begin properly, but not with a single tradition’s bias, not with a fragmented YouTube education, but with a genuine foundation that will serve you for the rest of your life. You want to start at the root.
The Self-Taught Practitioner
You have been walking this path for years. You are capable and knowledgeable. But you have always known there are gaps — places where your self-directed study left you without context, without a coherent framework, without the transmitted understanding that comes from a lineage. This course fills those gaps.
The Experienced Occultist
You have gone deep into one or more traditions — ceremonial magic, chaos magic, Wicca, Traditional Witchcraft, Thelema. You are looking for the layer beneath all of it: the foundational principles and practices that all serious magical development rests upon, presented without dogma and without dilution.
Eight Gates.
One unbroken path.
The Crooked Path Masterclass is structured around eight sequential Gates, each building on the last. At its spine is a progressive awakening of the energy centres from third eye to root to crown — a developmental architecture that gives the course its internal logic and ensures that by the time you reach Gate VIII, you are not the same practitioner who entered Gate I.
The Crooked Path: Foundations of the Arte
Daily practice, protection and the art of seeing clearly
Before anything else is built, the ground must be secured. We begin with the philosophy and cosmology of the path — the Omnil, the Daimonic worldview, the three Selves and the three Worlds — and establish the three pillars of daily practice that will underpin everything that follows. Protection is introduced not as emergency response but as ongoing energetic hygiene, and the first divination tools are placed in your hands so you can begin testing and checking from the very beginning.
The Lunar Current and the Inner Eye
Moon, memory, the beloved dead — and the third eye awakening
The second Gate opens two currents simultaneously. The lunar practices — Deipnon, Noumenion, Agathos Daimon — bring you into relationship with cyclical time, the household spirits, and the Beloved Dead. And the third eye work begins: trataka candle gazing, the kalesvara mudra, and alternate nostril breathing train you to see differently, in multiple registers. These two currents are not separate — both are about developing the capacity to perceive what is ordinarily invisible. Sigil magic is introduced as the technology of the unconscious.
The Compass and the Gods: Entering the Mythic Landscape
Sacred space, the deities of the path, tools and the root centre
Before you can stand in the Compass Round and call the four Gates, you must be rooted. That means being connected to the Land, anchored in the body, the Red Serpent of the earth flowing up through your foundation. The root centre practices are taught here as the necessary preparation for working within sacred space. Then the Compass Round itself opens: its cosmology, the four Gates with their paired deities, the Elemental Kings as Watchtowers, and the meaning behind the tools you will carry. This is the Gate that makes the Crooked Path distinct from any other approach to witchcraft.
The Red Current: Sacral Centre and the Elemental World
Elemental magic, the Watchtower journeys and the sacral awakening
The sacral centre is the first major barrier on the path — the reservoir of the collective unconscious, where everything you have stored away without examining begins to surface. We move through it with the sacral practices and simultaneously open the elemental world: the theory and history of the Elements, and four guided journeys to meet the Elemental Kings in their own realms. These journeys through the Watchtowers, to King Paralda, King Djinn, King Nixsa and King Ghob, are some of the most experientially significant practices in the entire course.
The Forge Fire: Navel Centre, Will and the Magical Arte
Working with the elements in the body, candle magic and the fire of manifestation
The navel centre is where magical will lives, This is the seat of dynamism, action and the fire that drives all manifestation. The work here becomes tangible and immediate: pore breathing, elemental saturation of the body, and the step-by-step process of directing elemental force into objects and intentions. This is the foundational technology behind most practical magic. Candle magic is taught as the natural expression of fire and focused will working together. At the midpoint of the course, the Witch Father current is deepened through the mythological and theological context of the Horned God.
The Beating Heart: Union, the Fetch Beast and Poppet Magic
Heart centre, the Fetch, sympathetic magic and the Hekate current
The heart is where the two currents of upper and lower, Fetch Mate and Fetch Beast, begin their union. This is the most emotionally resonant Gate of the course. The journey to meet your Fetch Beast and the union exercise that follows are the experiential centrepiece of this month, and they mark a genuine threshold in the practitioner’s development. Poppet magic is taught alongside the heart work because sympathetic magic is fundamentally about connection and resonance — the same quality that animates the heart centre. The Hekate current is deepened for those ready to go further with the primary Goddess of the path.
The Mirror and the Voice: Throat Centre and the Shadow
Purification, shadow work and the art of honest seeing
The throat centre is the seat of purification and higher discrimination — the capacity to tell truth from illusion, genuine contact from self-deception. It is the right place for shadow work, and here we use Franz Bardon’s black and white mirrors of the soul: a rigorous, sustained self-examination that is not therapy and not navel-gazing but genuine magical preparation. The Mirror Box ritual extends this into practical space. Doreen Valiente’s work on the history of Witchcraft is introduced to give the path its roots, reminding the practitioner that they are part of something ancient and continuous.
The Crown and the Dragon: Bindu, the Toltec Current and What Comes Next
The source of creation, riding the Dragon, and the threshold of Second Degree
The final Gate brings everything into convergence. The bindu — the dimensionless point that is the seat of all creation, the All-Nothing located within the microcosm — circles back to the Omnil introduced in Gate I, completing the arc of the course. Nada yoga, the practice of following inner sound into increasing subtlety, is the meditative culmination. By Gate VIII you are standing at the threshold of Second Degree with eight months of lived, grounded, progressive practice behind you.
Where this teaching comes from
This curriculum was developed from the foundational training of the Temple of the Horned Serpent — a living magical tradition rooted in British Traditional Witchcraft, the Daimonic philosophy of the ancient Greeks, and the energetic technologies of the Hindu Tantric and Toltec paths. It is being offered outward here as a living transmission for the first time.
The material you will receive in The Crooked Path Masterclass was previously available only to members of the Temple. It has not been simplified, softened or adapted for for this format. What you receive here is the actual training — the same practices, the same cosmology, the same initiatory sequence that forms the foundation of everything the Temple teaches.
The Masterclass format means you receive something that no subscription course or pre-recorded programme can offer: the living presence of a teacher, two hours of direct instruction each month, and the space to ask the questions that actually arise when you work with this material in your own life.
The structure of the course
What you’ll read alongside the teaching
Each Gate is accompanied by a carefully chosen text that deepens and contextualises the teaching. These are not summaries, they are full books by serious practitioners, recommended because they extend what the course covers into territory worth exploring on your own terms.
- Protection and Reversal Magick Gate I
- Practical Sigil Magic Gate II
- The Witch Compass Gate III
- Practical Elemental Magick Gate IV
- The Horned God of the Witches Gate V
- Hekate Liminal Rites Gate VI
- The Rebirth of Witchcraft Gate VII
- On the Toltec Path Gate VIII
Lee W Johnson
Magician · Founder of the Temple of the Horned Serpent · TeacherLee W Johnson has been walking the Crooked Path for decades. He is the founder of the Temple of the Horned Serpent and the developer of its foundational First Degree curriculum — the material that forms the backbone of this Masterclass.
His teaching draws from British Traditional Witchcraft, Kabbalah, Chaos Magick, Modern Daemonolatry, Tantric and Yogic energetic technologies, and Castaneda’s Toltec warrior path. He does not separate these streams, having spent years finding the common ground beneath all of them, and that common ground is what he teaches.
This Masterclass represents the first time that training has been offered beyond the Temple’s own initiatory structure — brought outward as a living transmission for practitioners who are ready to receive it.
The path has always
been waiting for you
Eight months of initiatory training. Eight Gates. One unbroken thread from foundation to threshold.
Go to payment options