Who We Are
A fraternity of seekers, bound by a Rule, in service of the Light.
The Order of the Grail is a modern esoteric and initiatic order, established at Harrowmere on the Feast of Saint Michael in the year 1987 by three Wardens who had each spent many years within the older bodies of the Western Mystery Tradition. They sought neither to replace nor to rival those bodies, but to gather what they had received into a single discipline fit for men and women living ordinary lives in a disordered age.
What is the Order of the Grail?
The Order is a fraternity of men and women who study and practise the Western Mystery Tradition under a chivalric Rule. It draws its teaching from three historic streams: the Rosicrucian, with its alchemy of the heart and its mandate to heal; the Martinist, with its doctrine of the fall and reintegration of the human being and its Way of the Heart; and the Hermetic, with its philosophy of correspondence and its science of the soul's ascent. Upon these three streams the Order lays the discipline of chivalry, by which the inner work is bound to outward conduct and tested in the world.
The Order is initiatic. Its members advance through degrees that are conferred in ritual, within a Commandery, after a period of study and service. The rituals are private, not because they contain anything shameful, but because an initiation received without preparation is a seed cast upon stone. What may be told is told freely in these pages and in the Library; what must be experienced is reserved for those who have made themselves ready.
What is the mission of the Order?
The mission of the Order is twofold, as it was for the fraternities that came before it. The inner mission is to guide each member, one by one, toward the reintegration of the soul with its source: the slow, lawful and patient work that the alchemists called the Great Work and the Martinists called the Way of Return. The outer mission is to serve humanity by example and by deed, and in particular to extend courtesy, protection and help to the stranger, the poor and the wronged, as the Twelve Articles require.
We do not promise powers. We do not sell secrets. We do not claim that our way is the only way. We claim only that it is a way, that it has been walked, and that it leads somewhere worth going.
What does the Order believe?
The Order requires of its members a sincere acknowledgement of a Supreme Principle, the source and end of all things, under whatever name the member finds true. Beyond this it imposes no creed. Members of many faiths, and members of none in the conventional sense, have kept the Rule together for nearly forty years. The symbols of the Order are drawn largely from the Christian mystical tradition in which the Grail legend arose, and from the Hermetic and alchemical tradition that grew beside it; we treat these symbols as a shared language rather than as articles of belief.
We hold that within each human being there lies a spark of the Divine, obscured but not extinguished; that the purpose of a human life is the uncovering and tending of this spark; that this work cannot be accomplished in isolation from one's fellows; and that it is proved not by visions but by conduct.
What the Order is not
It may help the enquirer to know what we are not. The Order is not a religion and is not a church, though it is friendly to both. It is not a Masonic body, and it neither requires nor rewards Masonic affiliation. It is not a social club, though friendships of great depth arise within it. It is not a school of magic in the popular sense, and it does not teach the compulsion of spirits or the manipulation of others. It is not a business. It holds no doctrine of racial or national superiority and never has.
The Order is sovereign and independent. It is subordinate to no other order, lodge, church, society or jurisdiction, and it is in formal concordat with none. It neither claims nor requires a lineage from any medieval knightly order. Its lineage is that of its Wardens, who received what they received in the older bodies of the Tradition and passed it on by the Charter of 1987.
Who may join?
Membership is open to men and women of good character who are at least twenty-one years of age, who acknowledge a Supreme Principle, who are willing to keep the Twelve Articles, and who can attend the meetings of a Commandery or Oratory, or in exceptional cases pursue the work by correspondence. The Order admits men and women on a fully equal footing and has done so from its foundation. It makes no distinction of race, nationality, faith or station.
If you wish to learn more, you are invited to read the Frequently Asked Questions, the Epistle to the Pages, and the page on Membership.