The Black Torch

The name

Flambeau noir is French for black torch. The image is a vessel for the Black Flame: something that can hold it, carry it, and pass it. Not a franchise. Not a church. A temporary room.

The same current appears in older language as darkness visible: Milton’s furnace that does not glare, and the Masonic instruction that the light of a Master is not blinding noon. Too much light hides the stars. The conference was built for people who work in that register.

The premise

The Left Hand Path is not one current. Luciferian, Setian, Satanic, Traditional Craft, chaos magic, daemonolatry, Typhonian work, and adjacent iconoclasts can share a weekend without a purity test. Flambeau Noir was an attempt to take the spirit of the Luciferian Research Society, a non-sectarian research hub, and give it a physical weekend, and later a virtual one.

What this archive is not

It is not an order. It is not a campus or academy. Ideas once sketched under that heading continued as the Luciferian Research Society and as Novus Ordo Luciferi, which have their own sites. It is not every later conference that used a similar model. This record covers the line Jeremy Crow founded, produced, or officially lent.

Founder’s note

Jeremy Crow produced the first International Left Hand Path Conference in Toronto in 2012 so that people from different schools could meet as peers. He later lent that identity to a 2014 gathering in Indianapolis, then renamed the line Flambeau Noir to keep it distinct. Ottawa 2017 and Portland 2018 were in-person weekends under that name. In 2021 the conference moved to cyberspace and was offered free; presenters were paid from attendee tips, divided equally.

No further conference has been produced. The work is heavy. This archive is the present form of the torch.