James Kirby’s magical and creative journey on the left hand path
Jessica Hall first made a film about the late James Kirby in 2017, during summer solstice. The short documentary was called Left Hand Path and it introduced Kirby as both an artist and as a priest in the Temple of Set, an esoteric occult belief system. For much of the film, Kirby is occupied with creating a scarab from silver, using the lost-wax technique. The beetle is a Setian symbol meaning “to come into being as one’s own true self.”
Shortly after the Left Hand Path was shot, Kirby learned that he had terminal cancer. Hall was able to show him the finished film before he died on Halloween, 2017. He died on his own terms: he was one of the first Yukoners to choose medically assisted induced death. His partner, Claire Strauss, says that Kirby “knew exactly how he wanted to script his final days.”
This observation is made by Strauss in Hall’s 2026 feature documentary called Beyond the Left Hand Path. A friend of Hall’s suggested that there was more to Kirby’s story than was told in the 2017 short. And so, Hall turned her focus to her friend once again.
“I wanted to give James more of a voice in the second film, to give him a chance … to share his magical journey specifically, and his art journey specifically.”
Beyond the Left Hand Path features additional footage from the 2017 film shoot, including more conversations with Kirby. Hall also conducted interviews with Strauss; Kirby’s daughter, Alicia; his brother, Kelly; his best friend, Bud Young; as well as with many other family members, friends, teachers and students. We see not only how Kirby saw the world, but also his impact on those he was close to.
The second film goes deeper into Kirby’s quest to become his “own true self.” This includes his art practice, which is marked by three phases, according to the material he was using, the first being bone, the second is stone, and the third is metal. Alongside Kirby’s creative evolution, we also learn of his initiation into the Temple of Set, which he describes as “putting yourself on a spiritual path” and “working on it for the rest of your life.”
For Kirby, his artistic and religious journeys were intertwined.
“I prefer to learn and choose my own path in Life and Art, as the two are synonymous for my Self,” Kirby wrote in an artist statement for a stone work called The Raven, which is now in the Yukon Permanent Art Collection.
“The artistic path and the magical path are essentially the same path,” echoes Don Webb, a prior High Priest of the Temple of Set, who took on Kirby’s initiation. “James started resculpting himself so he was a better human being.”
To help us understand Kirby as a Setian priest, the film takes us to his home and studio in Mary Lake, where he practised black magic. In one scene, he wears a black robe and carries a carved wooden sceptre adorned with the Egyptian god, Set.
There is a pentagram altar where he performed rituals. At one point, Kirby raises his staff and says, “Hail, Set, Prince of Darkness, and welcome to our world!”
Then he suddenly grins at the camera and says, “And welcome to this film.” It’s funny, and charming, and it breaks the intensity of the scene, even more so because he’s disappointed when Hall says she’s not going to use the moment in the film.
“People often do get afraid with what James represents,” Hall says, when I admitted that I found Kirby intimidating at times. “He fully embraces his dark side; he has no qualms about wearing the inverted pentagram.”
Kirby could be both charismatic and polemic, says Hall. But he was also kind. When interviewed in the film, his friend Nicole Bauberger provides insight into his “scary” persona, and she likens him to one of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things.
“He projected a somewhat-bristly exterior,” Bauberger says, “but before long I realized that his motivating passions were parenting and teaching, and a lot of his scariness was meant to—it seemed to me—to protect the tenderness of his heart.”
This tenderness is evident in Kirby’s love for his family and his friends. His stepdaughters, Michelle and Sabrina Williams, remember him for the food he provided to the family. He would “cook us anything we wanted,” says Michelle, while Sabrina recalls that she never “experienced that much food with anyone else.”
His daughter Alicia speaks of how her father likely took on work counselling abusive men, in response to undisclosed trauma that she had experienced in her past. There are photographs of Alicia in Kirby’s studio, where she carved ivory and stone alongside him. At one point in the film, Kirby shows a sculpture that Alicia carved in serpentine, clearly proud of his daughter’s talent.
His best friend, Bud Young, speaks to how he misses Kirby’s companionship. The two artists collaborated on several works and, after his friend’s death, Young was asked by Kirby’s family to complete some of his unfinished stone pieces.
As a partner, Strauss remembers that the one thing he asked of her was to not throw away his clothes. Kirby was “pretty good at being in his own skin,” Strauss observes. “He wasn’t shallow.”
In the film, Kirby refers to a quote by Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Kirby says that he “lives a highly examined life.” For example, the Setian belief that all living beings are sentient led him to stop using animal products in his art practice, including bone and ivory, and to instead work with stone; and later, with metal. Even then, Kirby respected his materials; for example, he salvaged pieces of serpentine from mine sites and then transformed them into sculptures. One of the most stunning examples is The Raven, an abstract stone sculpture.
“I enjoy quarrying my own materials from old mine sites, in an effort to create something beautiful out of what humans have destroyed, a way of giving something back that was unseen or considered valueless,” Kirby wrote in his artist statement for The Raven.
“All Life has value if one knows what to look for.”
Together with his artwork, perhaps one of the greatest legacies Kirby left—to his friends, family and community—was his unwavering commitment to living with integrity, truth and authenticity. He was his own self. He inspired Hall to live and create the same way, and she will sometimes check in on herself and ask, Is this how I really feel? Is this who I really am?
“I think I’m a better artist for having known James,” she says.
Beyond the Left Hand Path is premiering at the Available Light Film Festival on Sunday, Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. at Yukon Theatre. Two Yukon short films: Alexandra Knowles’s The Knitting Circle, produced by the National Film Board; and Marty O’Brien’s Back to the Sun, premiered the same day at 12 p.m. at the Yukon Arts Centre. An encore screening of Jessica Hall’s 2025 film, Saturday, will be part of shorts for young people on Feb. 14. Visit yukonfilmsociety.com/alff for more information and for tickets.
